The social selling series continues, click here to view previous content:
You need to know these three things about your company’s overseas social platform marketing layout
Overseas Leads Generation Industry: Big Industry Opportunities for China’s Global Expansion Group
SocialSelling Social Selling 1+5+1 Methodology Series: What is the Value of Social Selling?
SocialSelling Social Selling 1+5+1 Methodology Series: Basic Thinking of Social Selling
SocialSelling Social Selling 1+5+1 Methodology Series: Selling Personal IP
The core meaning of social selling is to promote products and attract traffic. To do this well is actually to dig out more sales intelligence through social media search and social media listening.
01 Social media shows rich personal portraits
Hidden on social media are real individuals, and what social media accounts present is also the true status of users. This lays the premise for collecting customer intelligence.
- First, social media accounts are real accounts, and users will share a lot of personal and real information and thoughts.
- Second, users will share more work-related information on LinkedIn and Twitter, which creates good communication opportunities for many B2B businesses.
- Third, users will also tend to post more personal life information on Facebook and Instagram.
- Fourth, just as domestic users rely on WeChat for communication, more overseas users also tend to use WhatsApp as a daily communication tool. WhatsApp has become an important communication platform for B2B business.
- Fifth, B2C users in emerging countries have also become accustomed to purchasing goods and services through WhatsApp.
All social media personal information can become valuable sales intelligence. Combined with keyword searches or business opportunity triggering mechanisms, you can gain a more comprehensive and detailed understanding of the customer's true situation and seize transaction opportunities in a timely manner.
02Social media search: proactively explore business opportunities
In the sales intelligence process, there are two key processes: social media search and social media listening. Searching is an active behavior, combining keywords and other information to quickly collect and filter out interested customers.
The value of social media search includes:
- Through Boolean instructions, search the target homepage, target community, Marketplace, etc. This is the most common form of lead collection. In SocialEpochLeadsEpoch Inquiry Bao, there is such an intuitive function that can quickly tap a group of potential customers.
- KOC/KOL information can also be mined. For many B2C brands, the distribution profit sharing mechanism of KOC can be used to create an ant army-style distribution growth system and develop customers in batches.
- Another important value of social media search is market insight. After a large amount of information data is collected, organized and analyzed, it can be transformed into target market research and competitive analysis results with reference value, providing feedback for later operational decisions.
03The necessity of social media listening
The entire social media platform is also a platform for users to express themselves and share their thoughts and feelings, which means that there are a large number of customer voices within the platform. Here, listening first and then communicating makes more sense than direct mindless communication.
It's like when we face 100 potential customers in a room, what sales should do at this time is not to sell immediately, but to listen and understand their situation first. Social selling has such conditions. In different ecological channels of various social media platforms, listen from different dimensions to understand the customer's situation, and then interact in a targeted manner based on the customer's situation to provide appropriate products and services.
There are also methods for social media listening. There are so many types of customers and needs, and listeners need to listen in different ecosystems on each platform. For example, on the Facebook platform, they need to listen in various channels such as groups, homepages, and posts. In addition to listening, you also need to set up a trigger mechanism (Trigger) so that when customers trigger relevant keywords or behaviors, sales can learn about it immediately and follow up in a timely manner.
04 Seize business opportunities through social media search + listening
By combining social media search and listening, social media business opportunities can be perfectly connected from scratch to conversion. As shown in the figure below, first conduct a social media search, understand the target users, industry market and competition through social media search, and determine the listening goals.
After determining the target, you can set keywords and trigger mechanisms, listen to target-related homepages, groups, posts and other channels or content, continue to listen to multiple targets + multiple keywords + multiple channels + multiple platforms, and seize business opportunities in a drag-net manner.
At this stage, the trigger mechanism (Trigger) is the key. When customer behavior or content triggers the relevant mechanism, it will provide sales reminders as soon as possible, thereby enabling sales to follow up with customers in need in a timely manner and provide customers with targeted products and services. Back and forth, customers will be less disturbed, sales will save time and energy, and the opportunity to close the deal will be more suitable.
In the entire social sales 1+5+1 system, customer discovery is the top priority. Using a workflow such as social media search + social media listening + triggering mechanism can help sales find the right customers at the right time and scenario.
For marketers who are overwhelmed by social media marketing, the combination of social media search and listening is a differentiated marketing customer acquisition method. Compared with the money-throwing method of advertising and the wait-and-wait-and-wait-for-the-pie method of main account marketing, it is more targeted and proactive. Combining the capabilities of RPA (robotic process automation) and AI, this will be an essential social marketing capability for enterprises.
