A marketing leader has many marketing activities to choose from. How do you know which are the most effective at reaching new customers? Do they respond to your emails? Probably not. We’ve noticed a consistent decline in response rates. So what’s a marketer to do? Which tactic can you deploy to give you the greatest chance for success? And which is most likely to result in an appointment for your sales team?
The answer lies in social selling. Today’s marketers must be fluent in how to use this modern prospecting tool. According to our research, you are 4.2x more likely to get an appointment if there is a personal connection with a buyer. Is your team spending time building relationships with prospective buyers? And once you’ve built these relationships, how to turn them into appointments?
Download our Marketer’s Guide to Social Selling to start generating more new customer opportunities.
For this to work, marketers must first build a quality network. Here are a few easy ways to get started.
Build a World Class Profile
What is the first impression you are giving the world? We know buyers today research their problems and possible solutions on the web. But they’re also looking at the people who can help them solve their problem. Does your profile properly represent who you are professionally?
Expand your Reach
By now you should know who your buyer personas are. How many of these are in your network? Your team’s networks? Marketers must be focused on filling their networks with their buying personas.
Become a “Go-to” Resource
Provide content that your network truly cares about. Be outward-in in your social behavior and become the “go-to” person with the great posts, tweets, etc.
After these tips, what’s next? To generate appointments, marketing leaders need to take it a step further. There are social tactics to use to make your job easier. This is where the Marketer’s Guide to Social Selling comes in. The first step is outlined below. Download the tool to get the whole list.
Identify Key Job Changes
Chances are one of your buyers has recently left his job. Most likely, the buyer has accepted a similar role at a new company. That new company may be an ideal prospect for your marketers to go after. The question is, did you know that your buyer left in the first place? This is much easier to do using the social tools available, such as the LinkedIn Advanced Search capability. In this case, you would follow these quick steps to get notifications of job changes such as these.
- Create an Advanced Search
- Criteria should include key buying persona identifiers
- Use the “Past” Company feature, and select your client companies
- Set the search to report at your desired frequency
- LI will send search results with people who have updated their profile to fit that criteria. Essentially, you will receive a list of those that leave their role at your clients.
- Monitor those on the list to determine if their new company is a good fit for your services.
The natural next step is to reconnect and help them in their new role. Remember, appointments are 4.2x more likely to happen if you have a personal connection with the prospect. Paying attention to job changes is an easy way to accomplish this.
Download this tool to learn more about using social selling to become a more effective marketer. By doing so, you will increase your opportunities and ultimately acquire new customers.
Social selling, which is a recognition of how sales and marketing have been blending as customers are increasingly proactive on their own behalf, recognizes new realities. Earning the right to have conversations, through persona development, problem-solving, timely and relevant content provision, and relationship building, is the reward of a more contemporary approach to being an active, and valued part of the customer’s/prospect’s decision-making process.