Competition is high in the digital marketing space, which is why brands are doing all they can to differentiate themselves from competitors and increase social media sales and revenue. How can these efforts be improved?
Social media can take your sales strategy to the next level because social media allows for more personal communication with your consumers and other stakeholders. In an age of greater audience engagement and higher expectations of brand interaction, social media is the most exciting sales landscape. Let’s look at how to make it work for you.
1. Create online branding
Having online branding in place is the first step to leveraging your internet presence for more sales. Specifically, you need to have a distinct goal and mission for your online presence. You need to do online market research, create a dedicated style guide, and create and design your website. Choose the most appropriate social media platforms, offer a good user experience through excellent content, and interact with your online audience.
These steps will assist in your overall marketing strategy, improve your brand recognition online and generate added value.
2. Avoid a constant sales pitch
We know that social media can help increase your sales and customer numbers, but constantly asking audiences to buy your products or services will burn them out.
People are on social media to have fun, learn and be inspired, including by brands. For this reason, a “buy, buy, buy” mentality will come across as spammy and will turn audiences off. It’s not the correct behavior.
In fact, the beauty of social media is that you can interact with your audience in multiple and unique ways. Leveraging this is the true secret to social success.
3. Be personal with your audience
Social media is the perfect tool to build a community of people that wants to keep up with your brand. This means understanding what your audience wants, appealing to their emotions and learning how to communicate with them via these social media platforms rather than via sales strategies.
Some effective suggestions include welcoming your followers personally, replying to comments and starting conversations with an audience. Creating entertaining or useful content that solves their problems will encourage them to share their stories. You can also show that you are open to feedback and follow up on comments, complaints or shares.
In short, building a community on social media is crucial for any online brand. It can help you reach the right people, improve engagement with your consumers and generate leads that you can convert into sales.
4. Learn the characteristics of social media platforms
Each social channel has a specific algorithm, audience, tone and peculiarities that you need to master to help you improve your presence and reach more of your target audience. For instance, LinkedIn was born as a networking platform for businesspeople, Facebook was conceived as a way to connect with friends, and Instagram is primarily a platform to share pictures.
Brands can be successful on any social media channel if they know how to create a specific strategy for each one. The common mistake is to create content that is shared, unchanged, across all social platforms. Rather, it should appeal to what each audience is seeking. A frivolous or personal post may not work on LinkedIn, but could have more impact on Facebook.
5. Use calls to action to drive social media sales
Being present on social media means little to your sales strategy if you don’t also encourage your audience to visit your website, check out your products or other targeted actions.
Brand awareness is certainly important, but you can also leverage it to improve your sales. That’s why using CTAs – calls to action – is crucial to persuade your audience to act on, as well as enjoy, your content.
The key is to maintain a balance between good content and sales messaging. It’s important to adapt your language to the social media platform of choice. Rather than “Buy now!” you might say “Take advantage of this limited offer!”
6. Learn from your competition
Almost every brand is present on social media nowadays, which means it’s easy to spy on your competitors and learn from them if they are doing something effective that you’re not doing. You may discover new trends, features or updates to use in your social media and sales strategy. Of course, the ideal situation is when they’re stealing from you because you have such great content!
Also, remember that social media can be used for networking and generating new business opportunities with other brands, further expanding your brand community. Maybe somebody else produces a complementary product or service that your customers already use or would be interested to learn about.
Although each platform is different, social media can definitely complement your sales strategy and strengthen it. So if you’re not already optimizing your social media activity, now is certainly the time.
Do you have any questions about social media sales? Feel free to reach out and let us know!
How can I create an online branding?
As with any branding strategy, you need to determine your mission, vision, goals and values, as well as your target audience and style guide, but applied to an online setting. For this reason, you also need to take into account digital media strategies and aspects such as email marketing, social media, content marketing and UX design.
How can I drive sales with social media?
Social media is perfect to build a community and engage your current and potential customers. By adapting your language and content to each social media platform, you can inform audiences about your products or services, drive consumers to your website and maintain communication with them.
