Making Social Sell
By Jeff Molander
About Jeff
If you're a business owner or marketing executive who wants insightful, jargon-free tips on making social media work for your business—FAST—you're in the right place. Jeff Molander is the authority on making social media sell. He's an international speaker, publisher, adjunct digital marketing faculty at Loyola University and an entrepreneur who co-founded the Google Affiliate Network. His book, "Off the Hook Marketing: How to Make Social Media Sell for You," is first to show how fans, readers and followers can be converted to leads, subscribers and sales. Make Social Sell is your practical resource on making social media produce leads and sales.
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The truth is your target market probably has five big objections you must overcome to win them over—to earn a new customer relationship or grow an account. If you're a smart marketer (and I know you are) you've got to ask yourself: How will this new "big data" trend help me overcome these objections and sell more, more often?
Can big data help you get the job done? Should you invest in it with this expectation?
I've been the biggest social media skeptic I know. Yet, I'm living proof: Social media has the power to help a B-to-B brand create leads and sales like few other sales or marketing tools can—even better than big data which, at its core, amounts to educated guessing. I dare say the rush toward big data sometimes feels like another solution looking for a problem!
Social Rocks at Overcoming Objections of Customers
At risk of bursting your big data bubble ... your customers likely have the below objections and your butt is on the line to get more prospects past them. Your prospective customer does not:
- Understand your thing (product or service)
- Want to value your thing
- Believe YOU—that your thing will do what you claim
- Think they can actually DO what you want them to take action on (use your thing to create the needed result)
- Feel like they can afford it
What's the common element that could solve the above problem? What's the killer ingredient that changes everything for your prospect?
Confidence.
Confidence + Trust = Leads
The key to effective B-to-B selling has always been helping customers believe, not in the product, but in themselves—so much that they pull the trigger and buy. Social marketing offers powerful tools to:
- create irresistible curiosity in your product or service;
- help customers get confident—help them feel like they CAN get what they want, on time, without any heads rolling and even with a sense of joy and accomplishment.
Even more exciting, once customers believe in themselves, they trust the source of that confidence. That source can and should be you.
This is where a social selling expert not only shines but brings home the bacon!
Hire Social Selling Experts
Bottom line: What's being called big data is a lot of hype, in my opinion. We've seen it before in the rise of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), for instance. The mad rush into ERP investment has been a huge bust for many businesses. The rush toward big data is dangerously similar. B-to-B marketers have many big data challenges to overcome—from privacy to the idea itself being proven out more substantially.
So you've got to ask yourself, "Where should we be investing precious budget dollars?"
If you're a social media or content marketing believer like me, it's probably time to do battle with big data. How?
Focus on leads and sales. Hire and/or become a social selling expert. Prove that combining LinkedIn with blogging, Facebook with blogging or YouTube with email can create that needed confidence, break down those barriers to selling stuff and identify precisely when and where customers need help in their lives—better than the unproven idea of big data can!
Realize and take action on how social media enables that critical transference of confidence that helps your target:
- understand your product or service with total clarity;
- develop meaningful appreciation for your thing through what you prove to them BEFORE they buy it;
- trust you—that your product will do what you claim if they buy.
That's what being a social selling expert is all about. What do you think? Are you a social selling expert?
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