How to Create an Effective Social Selling Strategy in 5 Steps

If you’re a booming business, chances are you’ve stumbled upon thousands of success stories relating to social selling and marketing. In fact, over 200 million businesses are seeing new heights in their growth through Facebook and other social media apps. Be that as it may, jumping headlong towards social media without a clue can cut your venture short.

So, if you feel like you’re beating a dead horse while trying to cook up a better social selling strategy to promote your business, here are a few tips on how to do it right.

1. Focus on Great Content for social selling

Don’t sell too early! Effective social selling is all about connecting with your audience and nurturing sales by leveraging great quality content.

Whenever you’re creating content, make sure to add a pinch of reliability and fun. Sometimes a text-based update might be suitable depending on your audience, but who doesn’t like an enticing picture, GIF or a video here and there?

Even better, subtly squeeze a link to your store among your content and utilize Facebook stories and Facebook Watch Parties to gather your customers. Likewise, add a question at the end of your posts to garner more engagement.

If you have a hunch that you’re receiving less engagement, keep tabs on your analytics or use the Facebook poll features to pull out some insights on what your audience really wants to see.

2. Offer Discounts and Promotions

Getting our hands on the favourite things we’d like to buy with a good ol’ discount or promotion is the icing on the top. This strategy can certainly guarantee a spike in engagement and more sales.

When it comes to social media, using Facebook to create offers and discounts is a piece of cake. There are 3 types of offers and discounts that are beneficial for brick-and-mortar stores, for online businessmen to lead customers to their website, and a combination of in-store and online offers.

According to Facebook, discounts over 20% are famous for skyrocketing page engagement. You can include these special posts by holding contests and games while throwing in some appealing visuals.

3. Promote Your Store

Your business going viral organically is almost a fairy tale. In fact, the average organic reach for a Facebook post is only around 5%. With that said, at some point, you will probably want to wrap your head around facebook ads ecommerce.

With ads, your top-notch content will reach the right audience with precise tweaking of age, interests, location, gender, etc. You can even combine Facebook and Instagram campaigns to broaden your reach.

Here are a few tips for creating a winning Facebook advertising campaign:

• Your offer is everything! Make sure you give your prospects a clear reason for wanting to purchase from you. This doesn’t necessarily mean always having to discount your products. Think outside the box and create value-added promotions, perhaps by bundling products together or by offering a free gift or a sample with every purchase.
• Use social proof to boost your brand and drive sales. Social proof refers to any public engagement that other users can see, such as reviews (from real customers), post likes and comments. When implemented well, social proof can be a very powerful sales tool.
• Measure your results. Understanding your results after you’ve run a Facebook or Instagram campaign is the key to improving the performance of your ads. You should always be tracking sales and revenue whenever possible instead of just vanity metrics such as likes and shares. Once you start understanding which types of ads and audiences are driving revenue, you can optimistic further by doing more of what works!

You won’t have to invest a lot; just start small, monitor the results and double down on your winning campaigns. Of course, if you’re busy running your business and don’t have time to learn how to do ads, you could put your campaigns in the hands of reliable professionals by hiring a Facebook Ads agency.

4. Deliver Excellent Customer Service

Consumers today shop socially. The appeal of social media shopping lies in being able to communicate directly with sellers via messaging apps and SMS messages supervised by an SMS gateway API. The key takeaway here is to not just provide “good” customer service but to go above and beyond and wow your customers in order to turn more inquiries into sales and ultimately boost your revenue.

Besides messaging apps, social media also offers an opportunity to offer exceptional customer service through quick and helpful replies to comments, updates on your products and tending to customers’ issues ASAP.

This will not only accommodate a friendlier space between you and your customer but also will establish trust and authenticity towards your business.

5. Make It Easy for Customers to Pay You

Bank transfer has long been a popular form of handling payments for social transactions. But this also tends to be cumbersome since the customer needs to conduct the transaction on another platform. For the merchant this also introduces an additional step of checking their bank account to ensure the transfer has been received.

You can make things more convenient for your customers and yourself by allowing customers to pay via their credit card or an e-wallet. In order to accept online payments, however, you will need to implement a payment gateway.

The downside is that most Thailand payment gateway providers require you to have a website before you can use their service.

Luckily, collecting online payments is getting easier. Ksher, a cross-border payments aggregator, offers a service called Link Pay, which allows merchants to accept credit card and e-wallet payments even without a website. Sellers can simply create a payment link and send it to the customer via chat, SMS or email.

When the customer clicks on the payment link, it will take them to a secure checkout page for entering their payment details, and the merchant will receive an instant notification when the transaction is complete.

Social Selling Wrapping Up

Your customers are already using social media, and brands and individual sellers embracing it are reaping the benefits.

Creating great content for the right audience, offering on-time discounts, using ads, and avoid showing indifference towards your customers are all crucial pieces of the puzzle. Creating a successful social selling strategy takes a lot of hard work and patience, but more often than not, the benefits outweigh the challenges.