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HOW TO USE CONTENT TO EXCEL AT SOCIAL SELLING

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EXCEL AT SOCIAL SELLING

HOW TO USE CONTENT TO



As a social seller, one of the most powerful techniques you can utilize to guarantee success is the creation and promotion of content.

Engaging, relevant content that is tailored to and targeted at specific audience segments holds several key advantages:

• It can establish you as an industry thought leader: Creating and sharing content that anticipates the needs and interests of your target audience will establish you as a credible source of information that potential and existing customers will trust.

• It can generate quality leads: It could be a gated ebook that captures contact details, or a request to email for more information at the end of a blog article. Whatever the Call To Action, if it’s precise and compelling, it can transform an informative piece of content into a lead gen catalyst.

• It can nurture valuable, lasting customer relationships: Through content, you can anticipate and accommodate the needs and preferences of both potential and existing customers, which will demonstrate both your value and commitment to finding solutions for their problems.



85% of customers regularly seek trusted content to inform their decision making process.

http://www.paulsen.ag/thinking/articles/why-content-is-king/



It can accelerate revenue: The average buyer consumes 11 pieces of content before making a purchase decision. If you align content to each stage of the sales funnel, you can nurture leads more effectively and accelerate revenue as a result.

The evolution of digital tools and technologies has empowered buyers. They are more self-sufficient, and have more choice. According to CEB Global, 77% of B2B buyers say they don’t talk with a sales rep until after they perform independent research. Moreover, SiriusDecisions claim that 67% of the buyer’s journey is now done digitally.

This means that it’s more important than ever to not only differentiate yourself from your competitors, but adopt a customer-centric selling approach to establish relationships as soon as possible.Thoughtfully-created content gives social sellers the opportunity to provide potential customers with the information they want, in the format they want, when they want it. Yet despite the positive results that content can generate, there is often reluctance among sellers to adopt the approach, and this presents a barrier to success.



Why aren’t sales professionals incorporating content into their social selling strategy?

On average, only 20% of sales professionals in tech companies are sharing content, and this lack of adoption has filtered into other industries too. There are several possible explanations as to why this unwillingness exists:

• There is a lack of understanding around the benefits of sharing content: 70% of customers prefer getting to know a company via articles as opposed to brand campaigns or ads. If sales people aren’t sufficiently educated, either through skills training or the consumption of informative content, they won’t be able to execute on a truly optimized social selling strategy.

• Sellers don’t have enough time or resources to create content to share: When you’re focused on making target, one of the biggest obstacles you have to overcome is finding time to do anything other than close leads. Content creation can often be viewed as a demanding process, so if a seller doesn’t feel they have time to write an article, or the marketing department doesn’t have the capacity to create something bespoke, content can often be overlooked entirely.

http://www.salesforlife.com/blog/only-20-of-salespeople-engage-buyers-with-content

https://digitalmarketinginstitute.com/students/courses/professional-diploma-in-digital-selling



• There is a discrepancy between sales and marketing: There is an increasing coalescence between sales and marketing functions. Both are undergoing a digital transformation because the buyer has transformed. Yet their goals for content can often be misaligned. Sellers need to communicate and collaborate with their marketing department in order to benefit from their organization’s content production efforts.



Using content to excel at social selling is easier than you might think. By now you may be convinced that you can build a personal brand and empower yourself by using content as a social selling technique. But what if you don’t know where to begin?

Before they became pioneers in their field, even the most prominent social sellers had to start somewhere. In this ebook, we will explore the three key steps that will help you to use content for social selling to your greatest advantage!

Step One: Create your own content

The step that sellers often fear the most is actually just as easy to navigate as the rest. It doesn’t matter how much time you have available to dedicate to content creation; all you need to do is commit yourself to a volume and regularity of content that works best for you.

If you place too much pressure on yourself, i.e. try to create more content than your schedule will allow, it’s likely that you will fall victim to that overriding hesitancy to create anything at all. Start small, and if you find that you have the time to increase production, you can do so gradually.

We’ve outlined some important content formats that you can get the most out of, depending on your resources and overall goals.



Blog articles: Creating unique content on your own blog is a sure-fire way to enhance your personal brand and confirm your credibility with both peers and prospects alike.

• It’s important that your blog articles cover the content topics that your target audience are interested in or need to know about. You can ascertain this by using a social listening tool such as Buzzsumo to find out the top trending content in your industry, as well as the content types and topics that perform best for your competitors. You can also join industry-specific groups on LinkedIn and check out trending tweets on Twitter for a deeper insight into the content that resonates most with your audience.

• Make sure you start your article with a succinct, compelling title. This will be the first thing that people read, so you need to make sure that it piques their curiosity so you can maintain their attention. Again, note the kind of titles your top-performing competitors are using if you’re in need of a little inspiration. You can also use CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer tool to help your blog article gain a little more traction in terms of social shares, website traffic or search ranking.

Tim Hughes, a former Business

Development director for Oracle,

is listed as one of Forbes’ Top

100 Global Social Sellers. His blog

on the Social Selling Network

is a perfect example of how to

combine industry statistics and

information with a unique angle

that will seize readers’ attention.

http://www.buzzsumo.com

http://coschedule.com/headline-analyzer

https://thesocialsellingnetwork.com/blog/



• Try to remember that your blog shouldn’t be a platform for overt sales pitches. You need to focus on informing and supporting your potential customers, not subjecting them to an onslaught of self-serving Calls To Action. If it makes sense to reference your product or service subtly within an article, then of course you should take the opportunity. However, always avoid making it the main focus of your content.

• Find a word count and publishing schedule that you feel comfortable with. While you don’t want your blog posts to be so short they don’t add any value, they don’t have to be time-consuming epic monologues either! Aim for around 800-1000 words in length, and even if you can’t commit to a weekly article, publish your content regularly, so your readers know when they can expect fresh insights from you, be it once every fortnight or once a month.



Video: Did you know that 1/3 of all online activity is spent watching video? Or that 92% of mobile video consumers share content they’ve enjoyed with others? Video marketing can cultivate a powerful virality that has the potential to significantly extend the reach of your sales message. It also allows for a level of personalization that can help you to nurture meaningful relationships with potential and existing customers.

It may seem like an expensive option, but whether you hire a production crew, or use a High Definition webcam and some simple editing software, you can still enjoy the benefits that video can bring to your social selling strategy.

• Include video within your customer emails. This can lead to a 200-300% increase in Click-through Rate, which can be particularly useful if you want your customer to continue their journey and progress to a particular product page, for example. Make sure that the video content is tailored to your customer’s specific needs and interests; it could be an informative “how-to” video, a series of relevant tips or tricks, a product demonstration, or something a little more entertaining.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2ac7CDXFGM

Jill Rowley is a social selling

evangelist and advisor to

companies including HubSpot,

TrackMaven and Affinio. A

proponent of leveraging video

content for social selling, she

demonstrates its versatility and

ability to engage users in a way

that long-form blog articles can

struggle to do.

http://www.insivia.com/50-must-know-stats-about-video-marketing-2016/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2ac7CDXFGM

http://www.hubspot.com

http://www.trackmaven.com

http://www.affinio.com/



• Add video content to your social media channels. You could run a Facebook Page for your business, or maintain an optimized LinkedIn profile as a B2B seller. Whatever your chosen channel, you can instantly humanize your brand, promote your products and set yourself apart from the competition by including some useful, amusing video.

• Much like blog articles, you can provide maximum value for your target audience by keeping video content succinct and to the point. It’s interesting to note that 5% of viewers will stop watching after 1 minute, and 60% will stop after 2 minutes. Avoid going over the 2 minute mark where possible, and remember that most auto-play functions for social media feeds on mobile don’t automatically play sound, so sub-titled content can enhance engagement and reinforce your messaging.

SlideShare: Known as the “Quiet Giant” of content marketing with a notable 60 million visitors per month, SlideShare can help drive traffic to your website, grow your email subscriber list, build brand awareness and ultimately improve your social selling strategy. It’s another valuable platform for visual content that can establish your thought leadership and foster a strong sense of customer trust. • Remember to keyword optimize your presentations. Any text on

your slides is crawled and indexed by Google, just like any other web page, and because of this, SlideShare can be an important referrer of traffic to your website.



• You can use SlideShare to repurpose existing content into a new format, and extend its lifespan. If you’ve spent time and effort writing a compelling blog article, or creating an instructional video, why not distil that content into a set of slides? It’s a simple, structured format on a platform that can expose your already well-performing content to an entirely new audience.

• Generate the best results by incorporating explicit Calls To Action and links. On your final slide, you can include social share buttons, a link to your website, and your contact details. If a viewer was captivated enough by your presentation to finish it, they’ll likely complete a follow-up action and you’ll be one step closer to conversion!

This presentation, initially

created by PGi, was incorporated

into a HubSpot blog article,

demonstrating how shareable

Slideshare content can be.

http://www.slideshare.net/PGi/10-rules-of-social-sales

http://blog.hubspot.com/sales/the-rules-of-social-selling-slideshare#sm.0000syq8nb1d2gcnxqitvadzywd3n



Step Two: Curate influencers’ content

Developing your personal brand and establishing thought leadership requires a continuous, consistent online presence. Because of this, creating a new piece of content fortnightly or monthly isn’t a sufficient approach on its own. Thankfully, this doesn’t mean that you’ll be required to try and produce more content, which we’ve already acknowledged can be a challenging feat.

Instead, you can leverage the benefits of content curation, which involves compiling relevant content that has been created by industry influencers and sharing it with your own followers, customarily through social media. This means you can still strengthen your reputation as a thought leader by aligning yourself with a prominent industry figure, without having to increase your workload!

Content curation is so demonstrably effective, 80% of marketers share 3rd-party content in order to improve brand visibility and engagement. You can develop and execute a successful content curation strategy in several simple steps:



Identify influencers: Arguably the most important element of content curation is finding credible influencers with well-created content. Before sharing a blog article or video on your social media channels, you need to be confident that the source of that content is one with whom you would be happy to associate your brand.

• Use social listening tools to identify the top influencers in your industry. Buzzsumo has a feature that enables you to find the most significant writers and bloggers in your industry, whilst Social Mention allows you to assess the strength and reach of individuals and brands so you can decide whether or not their content is worth sharing.

• If you search for keywords or titles that are relevant to your industry or organization in LinkedIn, you will be able to find a selection of appropriate users. You can drill down into their profiles to find out if they produce their own content, be it on a company blog or on LinkedIn’s own publishing platform, Pulse.

• Similarly, you can use Twitter’s advanced search function and enter any keywords, be they a job title, industry, or specific terminology to find the content and Twitter users related to them.

• Set up an RSS feed so you can stay up to date with who is producing the latest compelling industry content. An app like Feedly is the easiest and most efficient way to organize and read articles from popular online publications, and it will even make recommendations for blogs you should follow based on your interests.

http://www.socialmention.com/

http://www.feedly.com



Schedule content: You can very easily maximize audience engagement and extend the reach of your curated content. All you have to do is decide how regularly and when you should post content. Creating a calendar, or schedule of content is an integral component of any content curation strategy.

It’s particularly useful when resources are limited, as you don’t have to remember to post manually throughout the day, and it enhances your personal brand as your target audience will see you sharing fresh content on a regular basis, which keeps you at the forefront of their minds.

• Carry out some research into the optimal times for posting on the social media channels you choose to use. LinkedIn, for example, state that 20 posts a month will help you to reach 60% of your unique audience, and their busiest usage times are morning and midday, Monday to Friday. Whatever your channel, it’s always important to test different posting times to find out what works best for you.



• Use a social media scheduling tool such as Buffer, which will let you schedule posting in advance for a range of social media accounts, including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and Instagram. You can cross-post across all platforms, (saving you time) or edit posts for specific sites. It also automatically shortens links (saving you precious Tweet characters) and lets you add images to ensure your posts make more of an impact.

• Monitor the performance of your scheduled posts and use the data to decide what content you should curate based on the interests of your target audience and the topics with which they interact most. Most social media scheduling tools (Buffer included) will provide analytics reports that will give you in insight into your best and worst performing posts.

Add your own insight: Although sharing an influencer’s Facebook post or retweeting them may maximize their visibility among your social media following, it won’t do anything to reinforce your own social selling efforts. The only reason to curate somebody else’s content is so you can use it as a vehicle for showcasing your own knowledge and insights. In this way, you can make the original content more interesting and shareable, and associate it better with your personal brand.

• If you’re sharing a link to a piece of content on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn, ensure that it’s accompanied by your own perceptive commentary. It could be your personal opinion on a certain aspect of the article, or a humorous remark; whatever you decide, use the post as an opportunity to illustrate your distinct personality and outlook.



• Curate to create. You can easily build a blog article or video upon the insights and content of others. Often called “roundups”, they involve aggregating the insights of industry influencers on a particular topic and publishing them, providing your audience with a variety of expertise in one convenient location that will drive traffic back to your website, blog or social media channel.

• You can also crowdsource content by posing questions to your social media followers and collating their answers, along with curated influencer insights, into a unique piece of content. Much like roundups, it will significantly shorten the creation process, and incentivize your followers to share it, as they’ll be more personally invested in the content. This method also demonstrates your relationship with your followers and customers, and further establishes a sense of trust that could eventually help you to convert.

Step Three: Distribute Your Content

You’ve allocated time and resources in order to create content you’re proud to put your name to. However, if you really want to maximize the impact it has on your social selling strategy, you also need to place a strong focus on distribution.Creating compelling content isn’t enough. Buyers are 70% along their journey before they reach out to or engage with a brand or person. This means that you need to take the initiative and reach the largest possible audience with the content that will demonstrate your value and expertise as early as possible.

http://www.pardot.com/buyer-journey/



A blog: If your organization’s website doesn’t have a blog, Content Management Systems such as Wordpress or Blogger make it simple for you to create one of your own. Much like ESPs you can choose from a selection of pre-designed templates to ensure your site has a professional aesthetic.

While adding a blog article to your CMS, you can optimize it for search engines to improve your organic ranking. Include a few keywords in your article headline and the main body of the text. You can also add a meta-description, and alt text for images. Your CMS will guide you through these various fields.

Once you’ve established your blog, you can invite influencers to write guest articles and in turn offer to write guest articles for them. This will open your content up to a wider audience and you can also provide a link back to your website in your author bio which will help you to drive more traffic.

Email: According to iContact, customers who receive email newsletters typically spend 82% more money. You can use an Email Service Provider and its professionally designed, pre-created templates to reach out to your target audience, either with blog or embedded video content, a special offer or discount, or a combination of both. It may take time to build a subscriber list, but it is possible and a highly successful channel.

Make sure to measure the effectiveness of any email content via your Email Service Provider. ESPs, from Mailchimp to Campaign Monitor, will have a native analytics platform. You can use it to A/B test your subject lines and check email open rates. You can also find out how many clicks your emails acquire, which is particularly useful if you’re trying to direct readers to your blog or specific page on your website!

http://www.wordpress.com

http://www.blogger.com



Facebook: Facebook is an incredibly powerful source of traffic and sales. The ecommerce platform Shopify states that nearly two thirds of all social media visits to online stores that use their software come from Facebook. Better yet, 85% of all online orders from social media come from Facebook! As with any social media channel, it’s important to post engaging, high-quality content and include appropriate imagery to make a strong visual impact.

If your budget allows, it can be beneficial to enhance your social media distribution with some paid advertising. This will help to maximize the reach of your posts, as well as your audience’s engagement with them. Promoting posts on Facebook is a simple way of maximizing their visibility, and it’s a tactic that can be adopted for any social media channel you choose to use. You can find out how to achieve paid advertising success regardless of your budget by clicking here.

https://www.shopify.co.uk/blog/12731545-which-social-media-platforms-drive-the-most-sales-infographic

https://digitalmarketinginstitute.com/blog/2016-02-09-3-essential-methods-paid-advertising-success



Twitter: 50% of technology companies have acquired a customer through Twitter, while 74% of people follow businesses on Twitter to get product updates. This means that the potential to drive sales by distributing content on Twitter is immense! When scheduling your daily tweets, make sure that they’re well-balanced between your own unique content, curated content, and more promotional tweets. With the exception of curated third party content, you should always try to link back to your organization’s website, be it a blog, campaign landing page or product page. Once users hit your owned media, it’s much more likely that you’ll be able to convert them!

LinkedIn: With over 400 million LinkedIn users across 200 countries and territories. It’s not surprising that this is another significant platform for social selling. There are a number of way through which you can distribute content. Join relevant LinkedIn groups to share content, advice and engage in dialogue. You can present yourself as a trusted source of information and facilitate warm conversations with prospects in the process! Aim to update your status approximately three times a day (either at the beginning or end of the working day) in order to maximize your social presence, but make sure that whatever you share adds value.



Finally, Pulse, LinkedIn’s publishing platform is another powerful method to expand your reach and accelerate engagement. When you publish a post on Pulse, your network will automatically receive a notification alerting them to the article and its title, so as with your status updates, make sure your headlines incentivize users to click!

If your network is compelled to like or share your content, this will allow you to infiltrate their own connections, and if those connections like what you write, and decide to follow you, your network has the potential to grow exponentially.

In addition to this, articles posted on Pulse are searchable both on and off LinkedIn, which extends your reach that little bit further!



Are you ready to become a social selling superstar?

By investing in a digital selling course that is tailored to your specific needs and interests, you can significantly enhance your marketing capabilities with a highly analytical, strategic digital skillset.

If you’re interested in finding out how the Digital Marketing Institute can help you achieve your goals and take your social selling to the next level, email [email protected].

mailto:https://digitalmarketinginstitute.com/students/courses/professional-diploma-in-digital-selling?subject=

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