Sell more with social selling

Some years ago, when you wanted to sell a product or a service, a small banner ad on a website was a good idea. In fact, it was the only possible solution to be visible on the internet.

Through display advertising and Google AdWords, you were able to reach thousands of people who were potential buyers of your products. Segmentation wasn’t really something marketers were worried about. If you wanted to take advertising to the next level, setting up an e-mail marketing campaign connected to your own customer data system (CRM) was the ideal solution… Until the rise of social media. Suddenly, targeting became much more powerful and the accuracy level of segmentation became much higher.

Micro marketing for the win

One of the most obvious examples is Facebook advertising. Facebook gained a lot of market share lately when it comes to digital advertising. And the reason is obvious: by adapting advertisement in such a way that you reach the audience that is right for your product or service, the click rate is higher and the number of leads increases. Whereas “classic” digital media had a broad advertising spectrum – 1 ad for the whole audience-, nowadays micro marketing is taking over. The audience is divided in smaller groups and these groups are more and more fine-tuned according to the information and click rates collected for these ads.

In search of the ideal customer

The advantage of this new way of advertising via social media, is that the setup can be done fast, in just a few days. This includes the roll-out of e.g. a Facebook lead advertisement campaign. Back in the old days, you had to book advertisement space on a website of your choice. The result is that you had to know what you were going to show at least one month before the start of the campaign.Another advantage of social media advertising is that you can see an instant result. Thanks to this real-time info, campaigns can be adapted on the fly.

Because of this advertisement agility, it is possible to easily do some testing. The feedback of the sales team is very important. It will give an indication of the numbers and allows you to adapt the campaign to this info. You can keep fine-tuning until you have found the perfect customer for your product. Once you have a detailed profile of this customer type, you just have to include everyone that fits in. Social media, such as Facebook also allow LinkedIn style profiling, where you can select profession, sector, expertise, etc.

For sale: everything

Social media campaigns can be used for any kind of product or service. Whether you want to sell cars or apartments, once you have found the perfect profile that matches your product, you can be sure that leads will come in. For the car industry, there are examples of advertisement to book test drives with a new car model. You can also directly link to a product on a web shop, this is called drive-to-e-shop. The buying process is kept as short as possible, as it is proven that many buyers lose interest when this process is too long.

Let’s talk advantages

Why should you consider social selling to increase sales? First of all, the initial setup is quite easy. You should however keep in mind that you still need to fine-tune when the campaign is already up and running. Don’t be afraid if you don’t get the leads you want at the first shot, every campaign is a matter of learning and discovering what customers want. On the other hand, you will always keep a perfect overview of the marketing budget. Many digital marketing agencies will work with a ‘No cure no pay’ formula. If you don’t receive any leads, you won’t have to pay them. This means you can be sure that you will only pay when getting results. These results also will be visible rapidly.

As social media are fast moving, you will gain greater visibility with the right target group.Social media advertising isn’t an aggressive way of advertising neither. Users of these media will see the ads when they want and how they want. If they are interested, they can click on it. This is a big difference with e-mail marketing, where you need to take actions if you don’t want to see any mails anymore or annoying ‘banner remarketing’.On top of that, social media popularity still increases and the number of users is still growing, meaning that your segment groups will only get larger.

In the beginning of social media, mostly only youngsters were to be found on them. Now we see that profiles of all ages appear. Everyone is getting used to work with social media.Last but not least, social media ads are an ideal tool for the sales department, as they can gain insights in the definition of the right target groups. It would not be the first time that a marketing director invested a lot of his yearly budget on the wrong profiles. Thanks to this micro targeting, you can have a clear view on the conversion rates. And in the end, that is all that matters.