Aishwarya Sarath Menon

Aishwarya Sarath Menon

Digital Marketing ServicesSocial Media

The Whys and Hows of Social Selling on LinkedIn

LinkedIn

If social selling is the Batman of the marketing world today, LinkedIn is the Batmobile. In addition to driving your social media image, it is an incredible platform to create and showcase your brand, its appeal, and what you can do for prospective clients.

While social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram provide a view of the likes and interests of a business that you’re trying to acquire, LinkedIn offers direct leads to new businesses. Therefore, it’s an important tool in your marketing arsenal, and can assist the effective selling of your brand, by following a few simple steps.

Robust Self-image

“Personal branding is distinctively marketing your uniqueness.” — Bernard Kelvin Clive, Personal Branding Coach

Create a brand image that will lead you to prospective clients, and also guide them to you. The most effective and least obvious way to do this is by highlighting your past successes. Here are a few tips to hone your brand image on LinkedIn:

  • Your profile picture is key. When you are being evaluated for a future business, your picture brings a certain level of trust and helps save you from being classified as spam.
  • Keep your headline crisp. You are ‘x’, and you help ‘y’ using strategy ‘z’. That’s your first impression, and it sticks.
  • Give your evaluators an overview of the kind of work that you do and the passion with which you do it, in your (short) summary. They want to know you, but may not have the time to read something too detailed.
  • Mention your accomplishments (keep it crisp and impressive) in your role description. This can help build trust, and your emails can avoid your future clientele’s dreaded spam folder.

All about the Moves

“Leverage social selling to build relationships with your buyers early-on; create trust and value before you have a dialogue about price.”  — Koka Sexton, Social Selling Leader

Effective social selling in a nutshell, as explained by Koka Sexton, is offered by LinkedIn through a simple, plausible, two-step process.

1. ‘Listen’ socially, and identify your clientele

Social listening does not mean just tracking specific words about your brand via an analytics tool, or answering brand-related queries. It is also the use of devices to recommend leads that fit your client profile. LinkedIn’s LinkedIn Sales Navigator provides the algorithm to do just that!

This standalone tool and its powerful set of search capabilities give you better visibility into your network of prospects, and help find secondary and tertiary clientele.

2. Approach your clientele effectively

Before you make your first move with a potential client, share relevant industry content. LinkedIn makes this process easy. And if sharing written content wasn’t good enough, LinkedIn Video is now a great way to broaden your reach.

Industry experts recommend sharing relevant brand and other information via LinkedIn Video. You can then focus on the needs of prospective clients based on your research, and make initial contact via this dynamic social platform. The next step would be to take the conversation offline, before diverting to your brand or initiating business.

LinkedIn Social Media Marketing

Social Selling Index (SSI)

Now, what’s step 2? Assess whether social selling has worked for you. LinkedIn brings you the SSI – a tool that checks your LinkedIn activities and scores you on a scale of 0-100. You are marked by weighing your social media image, your focus on approaching clientele, and the business relationships built.

You build relationships on LinkedIn with the hope of translating prospects into clientele. It does not merely broaden your search for business, but helps your brand reach the right kind of audience. Gone are the days when LinkedIn was a platform to exchange resumes. Its wide visibility and reach make it one the most efficient social networking sites of today.