Social selling and sales enablement go hand-in-hand to increase profits, drive brand awareness, and put your company’s best foot forward. While platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter help promote a product or service, one social media outlet that showcases the entire company and its values. If you’re not effectively using LinkedIn, you’re missing out on potential leads and profits.
Many believe that LinkedIn is only an effective tool for job seekers. However, the social media giant produces incredible advantages and benefits for companies in any growth stage. Use the outlet to create branded employee LinkedIn profiles that align with your organization’s message as part of your sales enablement strategy.
Optimizing your individual team members’ profiles and aligning them with your company can produce stellar results, including:
- Companies gain more visibility on social media;
- Reinforces your brand’s image;
- Builds trust with prospects and clients; and
- Raises social engagement as you hire new employees.
Since LinkedIn is a network for professionals, new recruits are eager to exclaim their excitement about beginning a new position. With customized profiles, they instantly become an ambassador for your brand, which seamlessly integrates social selling into your sales enablement strategy.
What is Social Selling?
Social selling is a strategic method for sellers to network and form relationships with prospects via social media. The emerging strategy uses sites like LinkedIn to post engaging content, develop and nurture customer relations, and build sales leads before ultimately turning their efforts into sales.
Using technology to communicate with potential customers in B2B and B2C markets replaces dated sales tactics like cold calling or pressuring someone into a sale. Social selling adds a personal connection for consumers during the buying process. Find out how to include the promising technique into your sales enablement strategy to finalize sales and improve the buyer’s experience.
Optimize Your Team’s LinkedIn Profiles
Your company’s LinkedIn profile is often the first point of contact between you and your customers, and it can set you up for success in social selling. As they often say, “You’ll never get a second chance to make a first impression.” Unfortunately, in today’s digital world, you won’t even realize that your first impression was a deal breaker, as a potential client can breeze past your profile and settle for a competitor if your online presence doesn’t meet their needs.
This is why it’s so crucial that your entire team’s LinkedIn profiles are aligned and optimized to showcase your brand, its values and answer any questions.
Social media experts on Hootsuite suggest that companies with complete profiles receive up to twice the amount of profile views as those without. Some tips to increase your brand’s awareness and drive more engagement on the LinkedIn platform include:
- Uploading an appealing profile image and banner.
- Write an engaging “About Us” section with relevant keywords.
- Regularly posting to your company’s page.
- For staff, including updated photographs, professional achievements, contact information, and an “About Me” section for individual profiles.
Optimizing your entire team’s social media presence can take time and effort. That’s why we offer a comprehensive package to overhaul and align your company’s LinkedIn profiles to bring more attention to your brand.
Identify and Engage with Your Target Audience
After performing a company-wide overhaul on your LinkedIn profiles, you can educate your team on using the platform to reach your target audience effectively. The social media platform is a powerful tool if you take advantage of its advanced search features. Use relevant keywords, job titles, industries, and locations when searching for your target audience.
You can also use LinkedIn Groups and other communities related to your market to find and engage with potential customers, share valuable content, and establish yourself as a thought leader. Leveraging these tools will help you navigate the LinkedIn network and connect with an ideal audience that can boost your social selling efforts.
Leverage LinkedIn Sales Navigator
While LinkedIn offers numerous ways to organically grow your audience, for a reasonable fee, you can connect with a broader network of potential customers. LinkedIn Sales Navigator makes it possible to keep track of consumers and receive updates about their activities.
The paid subscription helps users create personalized InMail messages to demonstrate their expertise and build relationships with a warm welcome to clients. With the news and insights features, you will also stay informed about industry trends, allowing you to create custom content that maximizes your social selling strategy while establishing a strong presence within the LinkedIn network.
Provide Valuable Content
After identifying your target audience, distributing valuable content is key to enticing and retaining a customer base. You must understand the consumer pain points, challenges, and insights. Develop your content to offer solutions to problems and watch your profits increase.
Make sure to mix it up when your sales and marketing teams are creating content. For instance, providing practical tips, advice, or insightful posts with concise text can be helpful, but visual aids like videos, infographics, and charts will move mountains. Waves Media says viewers retain 95 percent more of a video’s message than just ten percent when only reading text.
Once you have released your content, encourage your audience to interact with comments and share posts with their network. Try to reply to as many questions or feedback you receive to build relationships and nurture leads. Use relevant keywords and hashtags throughout your posts to dominate your SEO performance and reach a more comprehensive engagement ranking.
Measure and Optimize
Your sales enablement and social selling strategies require consistent measuring and optimization if you want your LinkedIn performance to convert. Here are a few ways to get started.
- Set Your Goals: Define your objectives for social selling on LinkedIn. Ask yourself if you want to generate leads, build brand awareness, establish thought leadership, or nurture relationships.
- Monitor Analytics: Periodically monitor your profile’s engagement for actions, including likes, comments, and shares. LinkedIn also offers a built-in analytics report to discover valuable information about your audience demographics, content engagement, and follower growth.
- Review and Refine: Review your content to find which posts get the most attention. While it’s a good idea to experiment with different formats, headlines, call-to-actions, and visuals. Remember to follow a similar formula once you discover something that draws engagement.
Start Winning on LinkedIn Today
LinkedIn has evolved into a game-changing social selling platform, revolutionizing how sales professionals connect and engage with potential buyers. You can make an unforgettable first impression by optimizing your team’s social profiles, creating enticing content, and engaging your target audience.
If you’re ready to leverage the platform’s features to become an industry authority or to generate more valuable leads and engagement, we can help align your sales and marketing teams with proven strategies. Contact us for more information about how we can build your brand awareness and help you Win on LinkedIn today.