Savvy sales staff can now use social media as an additional tool to hook, educate, communicate with and nurture prospective buyers. This can potentially accelerate the sales cycle and provide customers with more confidence that they are buying the right product from the right company for the right reasons.
But is this the only thing social media can do for your organisation and sales teams? What about using social media before the selling even starts?
Buyers, at all levels and across all industries, are increasingly leveraging social media to do their research, and find out about new solutions and companies. So this is where the first opportunity lies: you can influence these buyers before they’ve even thought about buying your products or contacting your organisation. And here’s the best bit: you don’t just have to do it on your own; you can also use other people’s contacts and networks too.
Consider the potential reach of your sales employees and channel partners, distributors, resellers, retailers, dealers, brokers and advisers, whatever you call them. These people are spending a lot of their time networking, via social or face to face, and collecting contacts, friends and followers.
Imagine empowering them with your social media content – the rich content which you as an organisation are spending money and using resources to create, but possibly finding difficult to distribute.
Using social media amplification and syndication platforms, such as our leading socialondemand® solution, brands share content with third parties, their own sales teams and/or external channel partners, and let these parties re-post the content, as if it was their own, on their own social networks.
You can influence buyers before they’ve even thought about buying your products
The benefits are clear and multiple. For brands, amplification via advocates means that brand messages will reach new audiences previously inaccessible – the social audiences of all their third parties, across the globe and in real time too. It also means the interactions created by
this content happen at the right place, between the potential buyers and the sellers – your sales staff or your channel partners – hence shortening and enhancing the sales cycle.
For advocates, amplification means they finally have content they can share. Your sales staff and partners are not always good at marketing. Handing them fresh, original content they can easily repost as their own, will turn them into active social heroes. If you share great content, and by that I mean content that goes beyond product news, such as thought leadership, market research and success stories, then amplification will also help your advocates become your trusted advisers and ensure they are more closely engaged with your brand.
How do we know all this? We do it every day – and it really works. Companies such as Microsoft, Adobe, McAfee, Norton, Xerox, Avnet, Trend Micro and Mountain Hardwear, part of Columbia Sports, are just a few of our clients using social media amplification through socialondemand®. They are empowering their employees, partners and advocates with great content, collectively reaching a staggering 70 million new contacts every month.
As Chris Harges, director of global marketing at Mountain Hardwear, confirms: “Seeing a definable return on investment is obviously key and returns for us include partner engagement, positive consumer behaviour as well as the content distribution. socialondemand® has delivered on every key performance indicator we monitored and is now an integral part of our marketing strategy.”
It’s certainly worth considering. Visit www.purechannelapps.com for more information or to request a demo.
