Social Media Marketing
Feb 25, 2021
Natasha Gingles
International Project Director
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Social Selling Tools: optimize your strategy

Home > Social Media Marketing > Social Selling Tools: optimize your strategy
Social media takes up more and more space in our lives and brands have noticed this. It’s the moment to take advantage of all of its potential to design a strategy that will benefit us.

At this point, we aren’t revealing anything if we say that social media is an important channel of communication in our lives. For many people, it’s the main tool they use to see the world and find out about news, trends, and opportunities. According to the data collected by Statista, there’s estimated to be a total of 3.78 billion social media users around the world in 2021. In the next few years, when the less digitally developed countries reach a higher level of infrastructure, this number will grow up to 4.41 billion in 2025, according to the predictions. Because of this, marketing and sales in social media are so important: the public is there, and they’re waiting for us. Brands have realized the enormous potential of social media and have used it, integrating it in their Marketing 360º strategies to get closer to possible buyers. 

Platforms, in fact, have adapted to this phenomenon and have updated some of their apps to facilitate the shopping process. Instagram is the best example: in 2018, the Instagram Shopping feature was activated so companies can add price tags to images that are uploaded and make it easy for users to buy their products through the app. The swipe up feature has also caused a small revolution in the platform: the possibility to include links in stories has opened the door for brands and influencers to drive traffic to their websites and increase the sales of their products. 

Social Selling Tools Source: Creative Market
 

Social media is a high-value marketing tool. 2021 social media trends are telling us that nostalgia marketing will be successful once again. But the question is, do you know how to use it?

 

Social Media Selling: advice to optimize your strategy 

A social media strategy requires previous planning to achieve the best results. You should know who you’re talking to, create goals, and make a plan so that the ROI of your Social Media Marketing strategy grows. Don’t forget that your users like to receive value-added content that surprises them, not 'self-promotion' or a direct and aggressive sale of your products or services.

It’s important to know how to choose which social networks we are on. The strategy of “get them all” doesn’t usually work; each network has its nuances, its majority audiences, and different uses. Finding out where your audience is is part of Social Selling: for example, LinkedIn is perfect for B2B businesses and Instagram for fashion companies, especially for younger audiences. 

It’s very important to be up to date on received comments and opinions, both negative and positive. If users feel that a real relationship exists between the two, you’ll win. Contribute to the conversations that exist about your brand; practice active listening on the Internet, interact and learn to redirect the conversation to a positive place, with the management of the critiques and complaints. 

So that all of your work online makes sense, evaluate the results of your strategy, analyze the data, and extract insights that allow you to reorient and improve your current actions. Look at quantitative elements (likes, comments, quotes, retweets) and also the qualitative elements: your brand’s perception online, who follows it, who you are reaching, and who you still aren’t reaching.

In order to encourage conversion through social media, having a cultivated image in each of them is key, but it’s even more important to know what objective we want to achieve. As we mentioned previously, Instagram Shopping will help us bring web traffic to our site and increase the sales of products or services, showing in a very visual and attractive way the price and related articles, which favors cross-selling. If your target audience is found on this social network, you can’t miss this tool in your social selling strategy. 

Instagram Shopping and how to optimize your social selling strategy 

To be able to manage and analyze your social media well, you will need Social Media tools and especially Social Selling tools that will help you and make the task easier. We want to recommend some that will be very useful:

 

Social Media tools for business

There are all kinds of tools to manage your social media, but here we want to point out some that can be useful for your Social Selling and help you answer this question: how can you increase your social media sales? 

  • LinkedIn Sales Navigator. The tool linked to LinkedIn to target companies and potential buyers, improve the interaction with them, and receive information 

  • FollowerWonk. This Twitter tool allows you to find the key influencers by topic, search the market, and compare different accounts and their performances

  • Hootsuite. One of the best tools to manage social media. Hootsuite manages all kinds of profiles on one platform and allows you to monitor your competition and refine your target. 

  • GetProspect. This tool is a little outside the social network environment, but it is still useful. It helps you find exact email addresses to expand your database. 

  • Coobis. Leading Branded Content & Influencer Marketing Platform in Spain. It lets you contact mediums and influencers that can give more visibility to your brand. 

  • Buffer. Buffer is a tool to administer and plan the content that you publish. It offers you statistics about all of the accounts that you manage from the platform. 

  • Canva & Bitly. Canva is perfect for designing creative images for your posts, it’s easy to use and intuitive. Bitly allows you to shorten the URLs and measure the impact of your content.

  • SproutSocial. Integrally manages your social media, monitors profiles, keywords, and locations thanks to SproutSocial. You can link up to 20 profiles in the Premium version. 

 

Social media selling strategy and the use of influencers

Another factor we can’t skip over within social media marketing and Social Selling is influencers. Taking them into account within your digital strategy is fundamental due to their increased growth year after year, as they not only serve to show a product or service but are now helping to connect with the brand, better show apps and uses, and portray a real experience. In fact, according to a study completed by eMarketer, 72.5% of brands will use influencer marketing in their 2022 social media strategies. 

2021 use of influencer marketing: social media selling 
Beyond brand awareness or an attractive campaign to get more sales, the use of people as references also becomes a mirror of the brand and the values or attributes that it wants to transmit. It is, in a certain way, a reflection of the target audience, like the actors that appear in cologne ads, like Brad Pitt for Chanel Nº5 saying “It's not a journey... every journey ends”.

Therefore, the choice of influencers when it comes to promoting a brand is key to getting the brand-target link right, as well as the social networks where it will happen.

On the other hand, it’s always important to measure Social Selling actions to know if they have helped reach the business goals that we are after. This can be done by creating UTMs that influencers put in the link they are promoting: for example, through the swipe up tool. And remember to always shorten it with tools like bitly, we don’t want to scare anyone with long URLs! 

When we are talking about a promotional action in which the user gets a discount or a gift, always doing it through a personalized code allows us to know how many people bought something thanks to the diffusion of this influencer. In brand awareness actions that don’t have a URL or a promotional code, measuring it is more complicated, which is why it’s recommended to use one of these elements to correctly track it. 

Social selling is a tool of the future (and the present) with which we can get closer to our audience from another angle, much closer to their consumption habits. Social media is a part of our lives, so it’s time for us to be present on it and take advantage of it to create brand awareness, seduce, and convince our audience with the best message. Are you up for the challenge? 

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