Today’s social consumer openly discusses brands across their social networks and polls their friends and followers for recommendations pre-purchase. For example, a user on Twitter might ask their followers about pricing information for your product or service. Another might inquire about customer reviews of your company. One user might just ask what your company does. How do you locate these brand mentions in the first place? Which users should you reach out to, which ones should you just listen to?
The attention span of buyers can be a fairly brief window of opportunity; you want to make sure qualified prospects know you’re listening and understand their pain. As a marketer, reaching out to prospects early on, grabbing their attention and cutting down on some of the ‘prospecting’ work for your sales team can help ease the sales process.
4 Steps to Using Social Media for Sales Enablement
1. Monitor. Regularly monitor the social channels that matter to your business for mentions of your brand, products and/or services. Set up alerts for your company’s Twitter handle, your brand name, relevant hashtags and your branded product names. Many third-party Twitter clients that are available for free across the Web provide this monitoring feature, not to mention Twitter itself has this feature built into their Twitter.com site. (Check out our blog post for a list of 10 free tools for monitoring social media). Additionally, become an administrator of your Facebook Page in order to receive email and notifications within your Facebook account about comments on your brand’s page.
2. Evaluate. Is your product or service actually what this person’s looking for? For example, it wouldn’t be worth trying to sell a person a pair of shoes when they’re actually looking for a gym membership. Make sure your product/service actually aligns with what they’re looking for. Is the user interested in making a purchase at some point in the near future? The best course of action might be to do nothing. Just because a user is talking about your brand doesn’t mean they’re ready for you to reach out to them. Try to follow what sparked this user’s comment and the thread of conversation if there is one. Read through their past tweets to try to get an idea of what stage they might be at within the purchase cycle.
3. Prospecting. Now that you’ve determined your company’s the right fit for this person, think about whether they’re a good match for you. Does this person fit your target customer criteria? As a marketer, you can do some of the sales team’s work for them ahead of time. Check their Twitter account for a link to their website and find out what their business does. Look them up on LinkedIn. Try to assess whether this prospect actually fits within the requirements of your desired customer profile.
4. Respond. You’ve only got a few shots at roping this prospect in; make sure you’re aligning with their actual purchasing intent. Cater your response to their specific interests and send a helpful, targeted message that keeps them engaged and ensures a positive experience with your brand. Especially on social networks, users expect quick responses from the brands they’re choosing to engage with. Make sure to respond quickly. If possible, keep your response within the medium of communication where the prospect first mentioned your brand. For example, if a person leaves a comment on your Facebook Wall, reply to their comment directly from your Page’s Wall. By responding to the user within the same social network where they started off the conversation betters your chances of getting an actual response and avoids the risks of an emailed response falling through the cracks.
Share Your Own Best Practices
There are numerous ways to take advantage of the real time insight social networks afford marketers about prospective customers. Above are just a few best practices, but there are countless other methods. How have you used social media to help with your sales process? Share your experiences with us!
For more information on Optify’s social media monitoring solution, check out our latest release notes.
