How to post content that converts likes on social media into sales, Tim Hughes

The other day I was talking to a senior leader in a business, they have a tool (as well as other Sales Enablement tools) that finds articles that you can share on social media.

He uses this to post on social media, as you would expect.

This leader was saying, that while he gets little engagement, he gets lots of views.

What is a view?

I showed him what a view is on LinkedIn. If you don't know, if you go to your LinkedIn timeline and scroll and scroll, each article that you whizzes past on your timeline will be registered as a view.

You can have a lot of views, but that doesn't really mean much, you want a person to see your article and take action. They like your article or comment on your article or they look at your profile. Why, because these next actions will enable you to start a conversation.

Conversations create sales.

Social selling demo

The next thing I did was take him through his timeline on LinkedIn, which looked like this.

You can do this yourself, go though your own posts or other people's posts.

Let me take you through his posts

Non company post - no engagement
A re-share of a company post - No engagement
Non company post - No engagement
Non company post - No engagement
Company post - 5 likes, they are all people who work for the same company.

Can you see where this is going? Each time you post and don't get any next actions (a like, a comment or somebody looking at your LinkedIn profile) you lose the ability to have conversations. It's conversations that drive sales.

Next I showed him the timeline of one of the people we have trained and coached, to be pedantic, they haven't actually finished the training and coaching yet, but they make a great example.

She has asked a question of her contacts - 14 likes and 2 comments
A personal post - 35 likes and 18 comments
A personal post - 80 likes 15 comments
A personal post - 20 likes and one comment
Company post as a question - 31 likes and one comment
Personal post - 35 likes and 10 comments

Each of these like and comments are not just with people she works with, but people in her network and outside of her network. Either way, she has the opportunity and (choices) to contact all of this engagement and start conversations with these people. As we know, conversations, create sales.

It's worth saying that I could have made this all up, but I have used actual people and take the figures direct from LinkedIn. If you don't believe me, get in touch and I'll do the demo for you.

Your only unique selling point USP is you

In a busy, noisey world, everybody, yes everybody goes to market with the same message "buy from us, because we are great", this is not differentiated and means you are all part of the sameness.

The only unique selling point (USP) a company has today, is it's people and the way a company will win from a branding, lead generation and closing deals point of view is by empowering your teams to talk in social in their own voice.

Two things that will be driven from our social selling and influence course is that you will get "on-brand" posts, one of the many things we teach people is to how to post in an authentic way. You shouldn't also just restrict this to sales and marketing people. You should empower all of your team(s) too talk on social authentically.

In case you still don't believe me, here is some research that proves that people come to social, to be social and not read endless brochures and brochureware.

The two questions you need to answer about social selling

Whatever you do on social it's all great, but there are two questions you need to answer.

1. How many meetings / leads / conversations is each post getting me?

2. How much revenue are we driving with our activity on social?

Social selling is not about posting and hoping, social selling is and has always been about posting and getting commercial activity.

In our social selling and influence coarse and coaching we help salespeople and business drive revenue and EBITDA from social activity.

So who's social selling?

In case you missed it, the Bank of America’s Merrill Lynch have banned cold calling and have moved all their people to social selling. This isn't some trendy tech company that might have decided to do this on a whim, this is a very conservative financial services company that has made a decision based on data.

But surely cold calling has a better ROI than social selling? Not according to Merrill Lynch.

"They will also be encouraged to contact prospects over LinkedIn, which has a higher hit rate than cold calling"

The CRO (chief revenue officer), Richard Eltham of Namos Solutions, of one of clients posted a comment on LinkedIn about social selling. See here.

“Social selling is not an option now it is the way of the world and you either learn and execute it or fear getting left behind”

Kevin Murray who is the Head of Sales at MacArtney Underwater Technology recently posted about his success with social selling here and wrote an article about the transformation that has happened in sales here.

I don't believe you Tim!

If you check out this video of Chris Mason CEO at Oracle reseller Namos, fast forward to 19 minutes 55 seconds. Chris talks about a $2.6 million win from being on social, after completing the DLA Ignite social selling and influence course.

Here at DLA Ignite we don't do "hints and tips sessions" we don't want you to waste your money. Our social selling and influence methodology will provide your sales team with the stable platform for growth. It is also the only social selling program based on 70:20:10 change management principles which gives your business the mindset change and habit change they need in this digital world.

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Your content should be attractive to get people’s attention. This can be achieved by having eye-catching visuals in your content. Another way to do it is by crafting a show-stopping headline that will make them stop scrolling and click.

https://socialmarketingsolutions.com/2019/02/03/contentmarketing101/