Social selling can turn into a 24/7 lead generation machine for your financial brand – if you know how to do it right. After taking the time to review how to get started with social selling, the next step is to work on making meaningful connections.
This can be intimidating when you’re first getting started.
How do you balance the line between building relationships and generating sales? What should you look for in your first connections? And how can you start to create consistent and engaging content? Continue reading below to find the answers to these questions and more.
As you start to build your brand on social media and clarify your positioning, it’s time to start thinking about making your first connections. Your goals for your social media accounts can be many, but most generally include the following:
- Generate sales leads
- Increase brand awareness
- Grow and strengthen relationships with customers
How well you achieve these benchmarks often determine the return on investment that you realize from your efforts. Keep these tips in mind when creating social content for your new accounts.
Find Compelling Reasons to Connect
No matter what type of niche, location, or type of customer you specialize in, chances are you aren’t the first to market. Even if you are, you still have to answer the first question of online interactions: why should your target market make connections with you? Another way of saying this is what value are you providing them? How is your work making their life easier or solving the problem?
For many in the financial services industry, the answer is two-fold: customer service and (more importantly) financial education. You can build trust quickly with your followers by providing free resources on this second topic in particular.
For example, if you are a loan officer aiming to build a list of clients, try targeting first-time home buyers. Provide an incentive for them to contact you by providing educational tips on the home buying process – and how you can help.
Pro Tip
Be patient and trust the process. It may take a few weeks or months before you begin to see the return from your efforts, but it could provide more value to you over the long run.
See How Social Assurance Helped TrustTexas Bank Improve their Social Content. Learn more.
Launch Awareness Campaigns
Remember the fundamentals of the marketing funnel? It’s broken down into these three stages:
- Awareness
- Consideration
- Conversion
This first, or upper-most, section of the marketing funnel is the most important for optimizing first. Awareness is the stage where your target market learns of you and your brand.
The seeds of trust are sown by whether customers are interested enough to keep learning about you and your products.
Thought leadership plays a critical role here. Developing social campaigns, webinars, emails, presentations, brochures, and blogs can help increase your customer touchpoints and demonstrate your value.
Launching a targeted awareness campaign around a core topic can help you quickly identify what pieces of content to work on first and refine your initiatives down the road. Try to capture your target market’s interest with a compelling hook and provide quick links for them to learn more about you and your services.
Remember, work on this stage of the marketing funnel first. Without a steady flow of leads, your efforts in the consideration and conversion stage may go to waste.
Pro Tip
Try paid social promotions to boost your online reach. Organic growth is down, and boosting your content can help you reach more people faster. Check out some of our previous resources on paid advertising to learn how to achieve these accelerated results.
Share Company Content
Ultimately, effective social selling campaigns share valuable content with their followers regularly. These experienced marketers know what type of content engages best with their audience and continuously experiment with different formats for maximum effectiveness. Their sales funnels are established, and the critical focus turns to increasing conversions rather than generating leads.
If you’re starting out with social selling, don’t you have to be there on the first day. Remember, our focus here is to create our first remarkable connections. A great way to get started on building the marketing habits that get you to that point is to share company news on your accounts.
Focus on news that celebrates achievements in the community, the success stories of fellow employees or customers, and upcoming trends/events that your community should pay attention to.
Experiment with different content topics over time to see which generates the most engagement and builds on your efforts from there.
Pro Tip
If in doubt on what to focus on, make meaningful connections online by providing information on local events in your community. It’s a great way to demonstrate that you care and carve a unique niche for you in the market.
Social selling has worked for others in the financial services industry, and it can work for you too! Continue to follow the steps we advise in this blog series, and be sure to look out for our upcoming posts in the future.
In the meantime, be sure to download our annual Marketing and Compliance Report to learn more about key trends affecting the financial industry and what it means for your social selling efforts.
Download Social Assurance’s Free Marketing and Compliance Report. Download.
