What is Social Selling: Learn How Apps can Accelerate Your Social Media

Social Selling is what industry pros call leveraging social media to build credibility, generate leads and build lasting relationships with customers. Social Selling is all about developing your social media as a way of establishing your brand’s dominance. These modern digital methods are often compared to traditional sales techniques, they are widely considered superior in both the quality and quantity of the leads that they generate. Social Selling is highly encouraged because of how heavily integrated the internet has grown into modern society.

Traditional Methods

Traditional methods such as call centers, physical advertisements and fliers are quickly growing less favorable. They are seen as being overly generalized, too heavily scripted and often unwarranted. Information must be relevant to the needs of the customer and more importantly clearly communicated. Traditional marketing lacks the sort of engagement and presentation that you would require to persuade a customer. Traditional marketing has smaller reach, poor capture rates and is a worse medium for communication.

Today's understanding of Social Selling involves not only social media but apps that improve your website's functionality. The reality is that the basic website often lacks the tools necessary to deliver a socially interactive experience. Proper tools are necessary to build a strong community and third-party integrations are commonly used for the job.

Benefits of Social Selling

1. Cumulative Interactions

When someone follows, comments or recommends your business. These interactions accumulate over time and aid in establishing your brand's legitimacy and influence. They reflect on your history and paint expectations.

2. Fully Automated

When you use social selling strategies, there is a high degree of automation. Your website and social media is active 24/7 and works to drive leads to your business outside of your operating hours. This is true with all the apps that you may use to support your strategy.

3. Builds Credibility

Reviews, ratings and followers all suggest reliability. Potential customers all ways search for the best value for their money and in a competitive environment this could mean your brand elevates above the competition. The substance of all your cumulative reviews can be enough to demonstrate the market leader. The market leader is the best choice for any reasonable shopper.

4. Manageable Data

The data that you collect is your primary source of insight into consumer sentiment. The information you derive from your social selling strategy will give the sort of orientation you need to improve your marketing strategy and product development. This is particularly important for an entrepreneur that is constantly searching for the next niche or planning a pivot move.

5. Discoverability

Discoverability is a major advantage with social selling. With nearly 4 billion Google searches every day, your potential to reach new customers is incomparable. The number of leads that social selling generates is much higher than limited traditional methods. Multi-channeling is another way to bring your business to an even higher level of esteem, which involves using multiple social media platforms to widen your reach.

6. Quality of Leads

Every Google search has a relevance and produces a search result based on intent. When someone finds your website through product search, they are routed to the best available options for each SERP. Cold calls are often out of the blue and generally fail due to the nature of those leads. While searches are rooted in specific intent. Having a developed social media presence can separate your brand from competitors. Leads generated through Social Selling have higher conversion rates on average and produce more opportunities.

7. Direct Communication

With every follower or subscriber you have a direct line of communication to a large collection of interested parties. You can communicate directly to an engaged and willing customer every time you wish to announce a sales promotion or any news regarding your product. These followers have already established your product and are more than likely familiar with your services. The quality of these followers are far superior to any random visitor to your several  marketing channels.

8. Builds Resilient Customers

There is no better way of establishing and building a foundation than through Community Building. With the support of an extensive community you can see just how persuasive your business is and how well received it is by the market. One of the most Important objectives set by any business in the ecommerce space is focusing on community and their attitude towards your business, which only brings in more business.

How do we build a Strong Community?

The internet is a very social place, in fact connections is what makes the internet so special. We have to understand how the person on the other side of the screen thinks. When we’re starting off any new project we face this sort of blindness. Our intuition may suggest a correct course of action but there is no way to know whether this path forward will end up losing you a lot of money or is lucrative. In this respect, without real understanding of customer sentiment our strategy is effectively blind. Building an engaged community is how we identify the gaps in our knowledge and adapt our strategy to fit the market.

By focusing on social selling and community building, we are both increasing our stores' interactivity and gathering valuable insight as managers. Customer centric business is a well understood strategy which can help promote your business and its public appeal. The ability for our business to engage a dedicated community and to grow that community is fundamental to scaling any business. There is no greater assurance than having a committed group of people that support you and their thoughts on your product. How do we begin this process of accumulating followers, are there any tools available to us that can help us?

What are the modern tools for Social Selling?

App integrations are the easiest and most effective way of increasing your store Social Selling potential. They require no coding, they come specialized and are very affordable to use. Growave is an all in one marketing solution that can supercharge Shopify's social selling abilities from one easy to use platform. It takes the hassle away from having to manage several different apps by combining them into one effective platform. Growave is all you need to start your business or scale your growing one.

1. Rewards

With Growave you can reward customers for taking actions at your store. These points can be redeemed for any number of rewards. With Growave Rewards you can motivate customers to follow you on social media, leave reviews or register to your loyalty program. Rewards accelerate the rate of interactions and improve your conversions.

2. Loyalty

Loyalty tiers are built around rewards that get more advantageous as your customers continue to shop at your store. This involves a database that tracks your customers registration and shopping history. This can help you build your relationship with customers by giving back.

3. Reviews

Growave has the ability to encourage customer reviews with add features like widget and rewards. Reviews can be used to encourage consumer trust but what makes these reviews so special is how easy it is to encourage reviews with rewards and how easily accessible they are. You can even reward reviews across your social media by rewarding them at your store.

4. Social Login

Accumulating customers is one part product value, one ease of use and one part incentive. With Growave’s social login, you make the process of registration to your store easy and rewarding. Once these customers simply click login with their Google or Facebook accounts, they are inducted into your loyalty program and can be communicated with freely with automated emails.

5. Referrals

One of the highest converting sales channels are recommendations and referrals, that drive high quality leads to your store. Each referral is motivated with duel rewards for both the sender and receiver and can be a reliable source of consistent traffic.

6. Wishlist

A wishlist is a composition of favorite items that you want to share with others via social media or email. Growave has a special widget that can be installed into your store that collects favorite items that can be shared over any social media with the shoppers favorite items. This advertises your store while also driving social interaction.

7. Email Campaigns

Never lose a customer again with automated emails. You can include review requests, rewards and news about your catalogs with previous customers. This turns your store into a two way street that keeps gaining value over the long term from customers and loyalty program members. This is a great way to increase the lifetime value of your customers.

8. Social Media

With Growave you can turn your Instagram into a fully functioning store with easy checkout options for your Instagram page and Instagram Catalogs in your store. Rewards can be a great way to accumulate follows across your Instagram or any other social media you want!

9. Giftcards

Gift Cards are an amazing way to bring in new traffic to your store with easy conversion traffic. Any new visitors to your store have a major incentive in shopping at your store because they already have a discount available. This gift card also comes from a trusted person so it's a major win-win for the shopper.

In Concluson

The Internet is place for connecting to new people and finding new opportunities but unless our plans focused on these two things the journey maybe more difficult. Social Selling is the modern method used by countless business to establish their brand and for good reason. The end reward maybe surprising to find and so it is best to take the modern approach to digital marketing and optimizing your stores ability to sell through Social Media. One of the best ways to do so is the many apps and integrations available for ecommerce.