Is your Social Selling strategy focused on generating activity or building sustainable equity for your social profile? Are you satisfied that your social selling activity and content is scattered across a variety of feeds, buried in timelines, and locked up in emails?
The Basics: What is Social Selling?
Social Selling gives you the ability to dive into social profiles to better understand your prospect’s professional and personal context and engage him/her using a variety of less-intrusive methods.
Social Selling is awesome, yet many are still not achieving maximum impact:
- Many LinkedIn profiles are still focused on job searching rather than prospect engagement
- Sales reps still use social media as a stalking tool only to interrupt prospects with phone and email outreach
- Activity-based social engagement can be a superficial and fleeting activity. Too much liking and sharing generates noise in the feed…not sustainable value
10X sales pros, like Brad Miller, have moved beyond just working the social channels with low impact sharing and liking. Brad has evolved to a problem-solver and spends more time generating helpful content and publishing. Brad has been highly successful in securing spots in important industry publications. This has given him instant credibility with his prospects in a hyper-competitive market.
For those of you just getting started, focus your efforts on publishing to your LinkedIn profile. It’s easy. Just click on the small pencil icon in your search bar and share useful problem-solving content.
The best way to organize your publishing efforts is to embrace a Personal Content Marketing strategy. You will achieve maximum sustainable impact and build social profile equity.
Build Social Profile Equity with Personal Content Marketing
Adopt a Personal Content Marketing strategy for your personal brand and you will have a well-documented series of problem-solving-content that more rapidly builds trust with prospects — thereby accelerating your deal flow. “Great sales people don’t have to sell, they just solve problems”, according to Jill Konrath in Agile Selling. Strategically documenting your approach to problem-solving takes you to the next level of sales rockstar.
First, what is Content Marketing?
Content Marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience—with the objective of driving profitable customer action. (source: Content Marketing Institute)
I am in sales. How does this marketing strategy relate to me?
A content-rich social profile on LinkedIn that showcases YOUR expertise and contains YOUR personal approach to solving customer problems will more rapidly build trust and credibility with your best prospects. The social activity you generate will be more meaningful because it’s guided by a consistent strategy and supported by real substance.
How do I get started?
Pick a destination for your content, most likely your LinkedIn profile. Don’t bother setting up your own blog site.
Next, let’s start with the foundation of content marketing:
- Persona development: Personas help you better understand the behaviors and motivations of your prospect. All content you publish should strictly target your primary persona (prospect). Ardath Albee has an awesome online persona development tool you should check out.
- Buyer’s journey: Plot your persona’s buying process to better understand his/her stages of consideration. Structure your content to support his/her progression through the buying process.
- Story first: Find your story or hook. Think about the emails you send that answer the same question over and over again. That’s your hook.
Now that you understand your target audience and have a story, below is a framework to help you get started writing. Just follow the SCOPE framework to make it easier than starting with a blank screen.
SCOPE Framework
- Situation
- Consequences
- Obstacles
- Preferences
- Expected Results
Create Maximum Impact
Activity in sales is critical. Leading with strategy and impact will greatly improve your effectiveness and productivity. Your best path to publishing is to embrace a Personal Content Marketing strategy. For additional insight into the impact content marketing can have on your growth plan, listen to the CMI’s podcast Content, Inc.
You are an expert in your field. Take the time to document your knowledge. You’ll be amazed by the results.
Don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions or would like to know how these apply to your business. Stop searching for the knowledge and have it delivered directly to you by Subscribing to Read the Review & Save a Few [News Letter], your weekly debriefing to all the Sales Acceleration Software News, Reviews, & How-to’s!
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