What is social selling and how can it help you sell more?

The experience of eCommerce businesses has demonstrated that this strategy allows companies to achieve a greater number of leads by directing the message to a very specific audience. Transparency and honesty should be the basis of this commercial relationship with your customers. Openly inform them of your prices and active promotions to generate greater trust and encourage them to make a purchase. In addition, we recommend following the tips we share below to optimise your eCommerce sales through social selling.

1. Identify the relevant social networks for your eCommerce business. 

Before contacting your potential customers, it’s necessary for you to design an action plan for the social networks and identify what websites you should have a presence on since not all are directed at the same target audience. For this, you need to have perfect knowledge of your clients and need to have the different buyer personas of your brand well identified. For example, eCommerce businesses with products for teenagers or young people should have a profile on Instagram and TikTok while BTB companies should be mainly present on Twitter and LinkedIn. 

2. Strengthen your relationship with your prospects.

Given that the objective of social selling is sales, beyond the engagement that can also be built through social media, you should focus on encouraging conversation with your prospects, those potential customers that have already shown interest in your brand or have provided their contact information. You can contact them via direct message, depending on the size of the company and the capacity of the marketing team, or attract their attention through different types of posts on your profile page.

Exclusive contests for your followers are a good tool for achieving this. Our main recommendation in this sense is to target users that already know and follow the eCommerce page. The prize for this should be something related to the brand, a product or service that stands out in your catalogue and is of value to your customers. 

3. Participate in the conversation about your brand. 

Users will be more willing to purchase if they see that there are real people behind the brand, a community manager that interacts with them. You can start by ‘liking’ or reacting to the comments left by your followers and responding to their online questions. The next step will be to participate in the conversion, even with other brands, and use the trending topics on Twitter to achieve greater visibility. You can also ask questions to create a conversation among your followers and gather information about their needs and interests. 

4. Share quality content.

The most effective way to generate a conversation that leads customers to purchase is to post quality content related to your products or services on a very regular basis, such as a ranking of items or a post with seasonal recommendations. Combine your content with links to other sources that will provide value to your followers, such as medical or health advice. Always verify that all of the information is truthful and reliable because spreading hoaxes or questionable information can have the opposite effect.

You’ll begin to see the results of social selling, over the medium and long term, in the solid relationships you build with your customers. This tactic can be combined with additional, more immediate marketing strategies whenever you need to increase your revenue quickly or boost the sales of certain products. This will largely depend on the market conditions and on the prices of the competition. So, start by gathering quality information to draw up the best action plan.