According to a report by welovesocial, at the start of 2023, there were approximately 25.80 million social media users in South Africa. With this number in mind, setting up a sales playbook to help your salespeople to do better social selling is a must. Let’s look at how we can set up a social selling playbook for your SME.
STEP 1: Create a company overview
Give a short history of who you are as a company as well as answering the following questions:
- What does your company do?
- Which industry do you operate in and how do you fit in there?
- What are your company’s mission and values?
- What is your company’s long-term goal or vision?
STEP 2: Write out a customer persona
Before we can sell to someone, we need to know who we are selling to. We need to identify the demographics of our customers. This is the age, gender, location, occupation and any data you need to know about your customer. Then we need to look at the psychographics of the customer. These are their likes or dislikes, their inspirations, their worries, their desires, and what content they like to consume. Knowing this information about your customer will help you to create content which resonates with them and position you as an influencer in your customer’s realm.
STEP 3: Choose your social media platform
There are a wide variety of social media platforms. It is important to identify which ones are used by your ideal buyer persona and ensure you are present on them. If your buyer personas use more than one social media platform, then consider growing the most popular one first before moving on to the secondary platform.
STEP 4: Create content guidelines
Even though your salespeople may add their flavour to your business you need to ensure that the basics are the same so that your audience can build trust with your brand. By setting up a style guide on how certain words specific to your business are written and which colours should feature in a post you can ensure you have a uniform feel across the various touchpoints. You can also advise your salespeople on where they can get content to share. You may want to share industry trends or customer successes on your social platforms.
Next, you need to ensure that when your salespeople like or re-share content that this content is in line with the beliefs and values of your brand.
STEP 5: Use social listening tools
You have created your content and you know who you want to speak to but how do you know they are speaking about you? By using social listening tools, you can get alerts for your brand name, keywords and branded hashtags. With this information, you can see what is being said and either like, re-share or comment on the post. By listening well, you can always be in the conversation.
Some social listening tools to consider are:
- Google Alerts
- Twitter advanced search
- Instagram hashtags: You can look up branded hashtags that you may have created and follow them.
It is important to remember that the social selling playbook you create for your brand is a living document and will change as social selling changes and needs to be adapted accordingly.
Now that we have set up our playbook you may still be wondering what social selling is.
Social selling is the use of social media platforms to build a relationship with potential leads and customers through sharing, commenting, and liking their posts. With these relationship-building tactics, you will build trust and familiarity with your brand and hopefully, when the customer requires your product you will be top of mind.
It is critical to understand that a hard sale in social selling will probably backfire. You need to make a genuine connection with your customer through the social media platform by authentically interacting with your audience.
By creating a social selling playbook, you will guide your salespeople to positively influence your audience and increase your sales.
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