The million-dollar question: How to sell on social media with Kirstie Smith
Table of Contents
Kirstie has lived in the social media, agency leader and e-com space for most of her career. She has a great understanding of how to build a marketing strategy that allows you to grow audiences and connections that ultimately turn into paying customers.
With all this experience, we set Kirstie a big challenge, asking her to answer the million-dollar question – “how do you sell on social media?”
That’s a big question. And really one without nuance, there is B2B, B2C, DTC after all… And yet – the amazing Kirstie shared some wonderful strategic points, and then provided some tactical tips, too.
In this webinar Kirstie shares some of the secrets of effective selling on social media. Here are the takeaways:
A bit of theory – Old social vs Social media today
Social media used to be about creating great content and posting it to the feed. Social media today is way more complex – it’s community management, it’s advertising, it’s influencers and creators, and… and… and…
But don’t worry at its heart it’s still the same. It still comes back to sharing great content – that still remains the most important thing.
It also bears reminding that really social media isn’t there to be a business growth and sales tool – it’s there for social purposes: for when people have had a tough day and want to spend some time scrolling through their feeds to decompress.
Social commerce
With social commerce, the entire shopping experience from product discovery and research takes place on the social media platform. It’ll be a £2.6 trillion market by 2026.
Social Selling
Social selling is a process of building relationships via social media with an idea that one day this could convert to a sale and make a transaction offline elsewhere.
With social selling – we can apply a good old funnel to split how we might use the respective media types to show the variety of ways we can go about selling on social.
How to social sell in action
Lay your foundation
What are your objectives?
Set an OKR – your objective and key results. The objective is a qualitative statement that tells you what you would like to improve. The key results are quantitative and define how you’ll know if you have achieved your objective.
Kirstie gave the example of an objective of ‘standing out in a commoditised market’. The key results could be generating a single lead tool as a lead magnet, approaching 100 new people and delivering 10 talks at industry events.
Who are you going to talk to?
Think of ‘fry, tuna, and whales’. Do you need 50 small fry, or one big whale? Most likely – you’re looking for a tuna. Someone who is not too big or small – just right for you.
7 touch points
So you know what you want to achieve and who you want to speak to. So now is the time to head to Linkedin and drop them a message, right?
Kirstie says not. It’s time to put yourself in your customer’s shoes. They’re not expecting you to get in touch with them about a sale – so it’s time to build rapport, aiming for 7 touch points.
Kirstie has two approaches – Account Based Marketing and a broader approach. You probably should be doing both! Here’s how Kirstie broke down the two…
And so to sum up… what are the rules of social marketing?
There is an answer you won’t like here. That is that social media isn’t really for selling. But, there are ways to make it work better for you. They are:
- Develop your personas!
- Map your distinctive selling points by your audience
- Create a messaging strategy based on the funnel
- Design creative that is tied into your campaigns
- Implement, test, refine, and test again