Time to read: 3 minutes. If you’re busy engaging with customers on Facebook or using LinkedIn for sales prospecting listen up. Being known, liked and trusted enough to earn the investment of fickle customers demands giving them the confidence they need to buy. Everything else is just wasting precious time. This is what the psychology of selling teaches us. Making social media sell for your business means focusing less on merely engaging with prospects and more on doing these 3 things—right now.
Whether you’re a business-to-consumer (b2c) or business-to-business (b2b) marketer your business is probably engaging customers on social media. It’s what “the experts” say to do, after all. Social media marketing and using LinkedIn for sales prospecting is a “must do.” But what if all that tweeting, posting, updating is just a chronic waste of time? Well, for most business owners simply engaging customers IS a waste of time. Are you one of them?
In your rush to “just do social media marketing” are you taking eyes off of the goal—selling?
Or do you think it’s not possible to sell on Facebook… or that using LinkedIn for sales prospecting is unrealistic?
Proof This Stuff Works
What if I introduced you to a one-woman marketing team named Amanda Kinsella who’s selling DOZENS of heating and air conditioning systems and service contracts each month on Facebook? Or a one-man marketing team named Marcus Sheridan of River Pools & Spas who’s selling more pools and spas than anyone in North America—all using his blog?
A handful of small businesses are creating sales with social marketing campaigns by using it to create confidence in customers. They’re literally offering prospects results in advance. By that I mean they’re either giving customers a “mini taste” of actual success or solving a problem for them that relates to their ultimate goal. In some cases they’re dramatizing the exceptional results of their service—the emotional end result of what it is they get paid to do for customers.
Focus on Giving Customers Confidence
There is power in making the buyer feel confident. Think: “yeah, I can have this in my life… I can have this situation go in a direction that gives me a promotion or won’t get me fired!” Or “I can get to that goal I want and get some help doing it the right way, on time and it without emptying my bank account.”
The opportunity is to take advantage of this power using social media in ways that get leads and sales—not re-tweets, follows or Likes!
Giving customers a sense of confidence is the best way to earn deeper levels of trust. Your business can give customers that kind of confidence using LinkedIn, blogs, Facebook or YouTube videos. How? It’s mainly about exploiting the remarkably good experiences your product, account or customers service team provides. And that takes a plan, a process.
Trust: The Outcome of a Process
In Marcus Sheridan’s case, Virginia-based River Pools & Spas is showcasing their ability to make all of those fears and doubts vanish from customers’ minds. Think about the fears involved in a typical in-ground, fiberglass pool installation involving bulldozers and tens of thousands of dollars. Marcus uses blogs, YouTube videos and ebooks to remove those fears and create confidence—first in the idea itself, not in his company per se.
This way the customer often asks YOU for the sale. How so? Because the customer feels so “invested in” that the idea of parting with their money is less about a sales transaction and more of a “next step” in a journey they’ve been exploring.
Hence, the process is all about solving customers problems in many cases… in ways that create confidence.
The 3 Success Principles
Whenever you’re using social media marketing keep these success principles in mind. Focus on:
- Solving customers’ problems and/or showcasing the emotional end result (in ways that create confidence)
- Designing social marketing to sell (create response from customers)
- Translating customers’ needs (in ways that make it easy for you to know what problems to solve!)
Ask yourself now: What can you do to capitalize on the success created in your existing customers’ lives? How can you package up this success and use it to knock down barriers to selling to other people who need your service using social media?
Likewise, what problems do your customers need solved? Make the time to publish as a blog post—so as to have them discover while Googling’ around the Web. My FREE sales training course helps you do exactly that!
 Photo credit: I.. C.. U..