What are Hootsuite's Social Selling Secrets?
Yesterday morning, instead of getting anything done, I elected to listen to a webinar put on by Koka Sexton of Hootsuite on "Social Selling Secrets." Although I was skeptical that this information would be helpful to me and I suspected it would be more of a pitch for upgrading my Hootsuite account than anything, it was actually pretty informative and I enjoyed the lecture. Aside from Koka, who basically popularized the social selling movement, there was Jason Everitt from LinkedIn and Rob Bonsall from The Penn Mutual Life Insurance Company.
Here's what I learned:
-Social Selling is basically a balance between marketing and sales, where marketing is one-to-the-many and sales is one-to-one;
-The Maturity Model and what kind of clients to invest your time in;
-Omnipresence across social networks;
-Tips on content creation and curation;
-Taking relationships from online to offline;
-The pros and cons of marketing automation software;
-Coordinated engagement, joint targeting, and shared understanding of buyers; and
-Steps to Social Success (Rob's guide).
The Balance
If you're in marketing, you care about maximum reach and brand awareness. You want as many people as possible to show interest in what you've got and engage with your sales team. If you're in sales, you want to convince people to purchase your product or employ your services; this is usually on a one-on-one basis. In a large corporation, there's usually a marketing team and a sales team, and unfortunately they aren't always on the same page when it comes to engaging potential clients.
For people like me - people who's services are selling marketing materials and managing campaigns - our jobs are to be both teams. Pretty much the whole point was the follow through - be consistent!
Maturity Model
Koka broke down clients into three groups - those who don't want to incorporate online marketing, the "moveable middle", and the experts. Personally, I would invest the most time into the "moveable middle". These are clients who are ready to get their business online but aren't quite sure how. They require a significant amount of guidance, and will likely hire a social media manager to run they're accounts and do all of the content creation (yay for money!). The experts are clients who are already there - just hand them the tools and let them run with it. Not in the way children run with scissors, but more like Batman with a utility belt.
Omnipresence
As literally every marketer will say, "visibility creates opportunity." This slogan is what justifies the onslaught of tired content on every single platform... but it's not wrong. Koka's main points were privacy settings, profile optimization, and updates. Obviously, you don't want all of your content hidden behind privacy settings, you want everyone to be able to share your branded content for as large a reach as possible. Regarding profile optimization, he knocked it out of the park. Keep your head shot updated, your bio accurate, and your content fresh to death. I may be guilty of using an outdated head shot... But head shots are expensive! Updates should be frequent and consistent, but not overbearing or oversharing.
Content
There are a million articles on content creation. I would know, I've read about a million. And they all say the same thing - research, analyze, distribute. Boom, done.
Online vs. Offline
There are four steps for this chunk o' info:
1) Identify consumer interest
2) Make contact with the consumer
3) Build social capital
4) Take it offline
These steps are fairly self-explanatory, but I'm going to go through them anyway. Identifying consumer interest is merely market research. I deal mostly with real estate and mortgage lenders, so I check the MLS and ask my lender homie for rate updates. Making contact with potential clients is as simple as putting out engaging content (KEYWORD: ENGAGING). That's the initial contact step. Then, you work on building social capital - add value in excess of what you want in return. You want your potential clients to feel like they're getting something more than what their time is worth. If they spend ten minutes reading your blog post (hi, reader!), they should feel like they're getting more than ten minutes of information (this webinar was over an hour long... you're welcome!). From there, take the relationship offline. Ask them for a phone meeting. Or a lunch meeting. Or a coffee date - just kidding, don't do that.
The Pros and Cons of Marketing Automation Software
Pros - you can reach a ridiculous amount of people and almost make it seem personal, thanks to CRM tools such as mail merge and autofill.
Cons - it still doesn't seem personal and you will not be able to judge the interest of the potential client as well.
That was pretty much it. There was a lengthy anecdote.
The Three Biggies
Coordinated engagement, joint targeting, and shared understanding of buyers. Basically this is just consistency between the marketing team and the sales team. In my case, I'm both, so hopefully there's no disconnect in client treatment.
Steps to Social Success
I call this the Rob Method.
1) Form a working team of stakeholders. Also known as a marketing team.
2) Select the right tools. This includes software such as Hootsuite, Canva, Photoshop, Illustrator, but also guidelines for content creation.
3) Provide awesome content. Duh.
4) Act on the metrics you have available. This was an important one - each network has its own metrics. Since I use different software in addition to the platforms, I have an overabundance of data and have to sort through what is extraneous.
5) Create a comprehensive training strategy. This really lines up with your mission statement, business plan, service philosophy, and all that good motivational stuff. This is also where you teach your content guidelines.
6) Don't drop the ball - take the ball and run with it. There was some kind of rugby metaphor that I did not understand at all. I also don't know much about rugby.
A lot of this information wasn't really pertinent to my small business, nor my clients' small businesses BUT some of it could be applied - especially anything dealing with content creation/distribution. This is the area I have the most difficulty with, as it's easy to get burnt out writing blogs and creating graphics all day every day.
The real takeaway here is to take the time to listen to these webinars. Even if not all of the information is applicable to you, there will be something important hidden in there.
Sharing is Caring
If you have any thoughts or feedback or extra knowledge, share it in the comments. The whole point of this blog is to help each other figure it all out!
