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Social Selling: How to Get Started

By February 12, 20214 min read

Social media is a valuable medium for financial brands to grow their audience, increase their customer, and generate sales. If you’re just starting out with social selling, we’re putting together this content series to help you craft winning social campaigns from the start. Here, we break down the initial steps and analysis your financial brand should undertake when beginning this process. For more resources on how to empower, ignite, and enable your financial brand to be remarkable, subscribe to our blog newsletter and receive our latest insights straight to your inbox.

More information is available about financial brands online than ever before. Access to information about a brand’s reviews, products, customer service, and more is readily available. Plus, consumers today conduct more search on brands and people before engaging in business with them. In fact, 81% of buyers are more likely to engage with a brand that have a strong and professional social media presence. This alone shows why it’s necessary for your financial brand to create and establish its position online.

But building a social media presence isn’t only useful for brand awareness. It can also be utilized as a sales and lead generation platform. Crafting effective and unique social selling campaigns can help expand your reach and increase your revenue. But, in order to start, it’s important to review a few unique elements of social media sales campaigns.

Why Social Selling?

Social selling is one of the best ways to cultivate leads and drive sales. It’s because social media sites are a unique blend of three distinct features: customers spend increasingly more time on these sites (up, on average, to two hours a day), they provide information about your brand, products, and offers, and offer insightful analytics and data to help you measure and refine your campaigns. In short, it offers a one-stop-shop for both consumers and businesses. Plus, as digital trends increasingly indicate a more digital future, establishing sales campaigns on these sites could prove a more valuable investment than more traditional options.

Pro Tip

Track data for your efforts. This not only helps to calculate the ROI on your investment, but also measure and improve campaigns moving forward.

Learn How Social Assurance Helped TrustTexas Bank Create Remarkable Social Content. Access here.

Choose the Right Platform

There are the big five platforms when it comes to advertising on social media: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. Determining which site is best for you to start social selling campaigns depends on two factors: your target audience and content creation abilities. While the distinctions between social media platforms grows increasingly blurred, doing preliminary research on where you target audience is online could help you narrow down this option. Facebook or Twitter could help you quickly create and promote your upcoming events, or showcase your effort in the community, to your target audience better than LinkedIn or YouTube. Further, keep your content producing abilities in mind. For example, if you don’t have the skills or software to professionally edit video, stay away from social selling on YouTube. If you’re better at producing graphic designs or eye-catching photography, Instagram would be the platform for you.

Pro Tip

Remember, quality content prevails over quantity of content every day. Start social selling on the platform where you could best create your own content.

Focus on Value

The number one mistakes financial brands make launching their first social selling campaigns is that they start to sell too early. Social media is all about relationship building. Demonstrate your trustworthiness to your community by providing value to them for free. This may take a while before you begin to see results, but you’ll benefit from creating long-lasting relationships with your customers over time.

Pro Tip

Studying your followers. What concerns or problems can you remedy for them? Remember, sales isn’t about generating money, but solving problems for your customers.

Starting with social selling campaigns takes time, patience, and critical thinking – but the results can be worthwhile. In our next social selling series, we’ll go over beginning tactics and strategies to help you gain your first lead. For more information about how to craft a remarkable online customer experience, checkout our webinar below.