It's no secret that social media is a great way to engage and connect with customers, but how can you take that to the next level? Some brands are essentially leaving money on the table by not responding to customers' inquiries on social that could in turn influence purchasing decisions. How can you prepare and be ready to leverage your social conversations into revenue? Here are a few tips to consider.
Don't Alienate Your Customers
Before you get too excited about using social to generate revenue, make sure you are not doing it in a way that alienates your customers. The first thing to recognize is that the social web is a shared place where voices can be switched on and off at will. Social media and the Internet in general, can be manipulated very easily both by the brand and the user. This means that in order to not alienate your customer and not render yourself mute it's a marketer's job to be truly helpful and to have a two-way conversation
There is a major difference between inundating customers' inboxes and social feeds with information they aren't interested in and being there when they have specific questions for your brand and offering assistance. The latter is received much better than the first and is essential in not alienating your customers. Social media should not be used as a broadcast tool.
Prioritize, Prioritize and Prioritize!
To use social media for sales you need to develop the ability to identify and prioritize buying signals. You need to be able to pick out conversations where participation from your social media manager would be helpful and would ultimately lead to a sale. A great example of this would be to flag conversations starting with, "I'm looking for___" or "How much does this product cost?" Next, you need to develop the ability to respond not only with sales offers but, with assistance and information. Involve your experts and tailor responses to the specific needs of your customers.
Make a Plan
Planning for social media sales is extremely similar to planning for social customer care: list the specific terms and phrases you believe indicate a sales opportunity and organize a team that can respond with appropriate information. The biggest plan or perhaps policy to address is that for appropriate engagement. This means each company representative should know when (and when not to) respond. They should also strictly abide to the rules of each specific forum or social channel. It's a short step from well-intentioned sales information to why is this person spamming me? Being labeled as a spammer can be catastrophic- blacklists are real!
Measure Your Success
Like any other effort on social channels, define your success metrics prior to launching the program. For sales in a social context, specify how you will tag, track and evaluate the contribution of leads discovered on the social web. Explicitly tagging initial posts is as essential as noting the source of the lead when it is transferred into your CRM tools. With those metrics in place, evaluating social sales is best done in terms of incremental revenue and ROI, just as with any other sales effort.
Assisting customers with sales questions and asking for ideas that lead to innovation are examples of what savvy businesses are already doing now.