Digital Marketing - Study Notes:
What is social selling?
Social selling is building and maintaining relationships through social networks. It involves using social media to form, develop, and nurture business relationships that may lead to new opportunities.
As such, LinkedIn is particularly suited to ‘social selling’ for B2B companies because this is where the target customer base spends their time. LinkedIn enables marketers and sales professionals to social sell - gathering insights, and getting a deeper understanding of their prospects.
LinkedIn can also help users understand more about companies that they follow, the decision makers within the companies, and insights. This can help with knowing when it’s the right time to approach a prospect.
Benefits of social selling on LinkedIn
Because LinkedIn is a business-focused social media platform, it is ideal for social selling.
There are a number of benefits of social selling via LinkedIn.
- You can gain insights and recognize opportunities with your prospects. This can help with shaping your approach and conversation. With these insights, you can intelligently approach prospects in a timely manner when there is a potential opportunity.
- You can get to know your prospects and make ‘warm’ introductions. Social selling involves leveraging your existing network of contacts by establishing mutual connections between you and your prospects. The idea is that your mutual connection will provide you with an introduction, the mutual connection is a trusted source to the prospect, and therefore, the lead is more open to a conversation. Social selling can help yield better results compared to cold calling and other sales methods, where there are no mutual connections or insights.
- You can inspire trust with potential leads by developing your online presence. By leveraging connections and insights from social selling, you can create a sense of trust with prospects by showing a genuine interest and understanding of the company, and them as an individual.
- And finally, you can use your LinkedIn presence to develop a reputation as a thought leader by demonstrating your expertise through your content.
Remember, one of the key strengths of LinkedIn is that it enables individuals and companies to carve out a specific area to develop thought leadership and enhance their reputation, and to become known as the ‘go-to expert’ in their field.
Example: PA Consulting
PA Consulting, a business consultancy and professional services provider, wanted to use LinkedIn to build on its existing client relationships, and also cultivate new clients.
They were able to use LinkedIn insights to help them better understand their clients’ needs and identify opportunities to initiate conversations. They monitored what people were posting about, what challenges they were facing, and how they could best position PA Consulting as a solution to those problems.
This approach enabled PA Consulting to uncover 1 million new referral opportunities within a year. And it closed 30% larger deals. They were able to make direct connections with key decision-makers in many target organizations.
Back to TopLuan Wise
Luan Wise is a chartered marketer and fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing (FCIM) with over 20 years’ experience in agency, client-side and consultancy roles working across sectors including b2b and b2c professional services, higher education, manufacturing, learning & development and more.
A specialist in social media, Luan has trained thousands of business professionals across the world via open social media training courses and in-house programmes. She is a course instructor for LinkedIn Learning and an accredited lead trainer for Facebook and Instagram.
Luan is author of the award-winning book ‘Relax! It’s Only Social Media’ (published 2016), best-selling book, ‘Planning for Success: A practical guide to setting and achieving your social media marketing goals (published 2023). Luan is currently working on a new title for Bloomsbury Business to be published in September 2024.
