When talking to potential clients about the impact of social media on their sales and marketing efforts, I often find myself addressing the question, "how does social media fit into the sales funnel?"
Social media brings transparency to the sales process along each step of the funnel:
AWARENESS
Your company can join the conversation already happening about your brand or industry online to relate to and educate consumers. You can make recommendations to people looking for more information, thank happy customers, and rectify the situation with unhappy customers all within the public platforms where people already spend time.
Your company can also use tools to monitor the conversation and reach out to potential prospects. Through this, you can make prospects aware of the product and/or service your company offers to help them meet their goals.
PROSPECTS
After the prospect is in your funnel, the company can build trust by providing information about products and services.
The prospect may also be able to witness your company's dialogue with existing customers, as the company demonstrates its service and response to current clients.
The idea is that you want to make people want to join the "club" of other customers and clients of your organization. Take the Mini for example. The Mini's Facebook page has almost 661,000 fans as of today. They post photos and videos of Mini's in landscape shots, "dressed up" for a night out, and other photos drawing thousands of likes on each post. Mini also created an extranet for customers called the Mini's Owners' Lounge where people share and communicate with each other. All these efforts make Mini owners feel like part of a select group and provide access to other owners and the brand.
LEADS
Once your company has formed a relationship with a prospect and they become a lead, you can listen to what is going on in their lives and in their companies through social media. For example, you can aggregate all your leads into one Twitter list to make it easy to keep up on what they are talking about. A Twitter list also makes it easy to participate in the conversations the lead cares about, keeping you and your company top-of-mind.
CURRENT CUSTOMERS
Easily sharable social media tools are a great way to continue to make your current clients feel special and use their experience with your company to demonstrate value to new leads and prospects.
In short, social media brings personality and authenticity to humanize big corporations while at the same time giving small and medium sized companies the opportunity to amplify their presence in a genuine way. These are important details in an increasingly competitive marketplace.