One of the key principles of social selling, is to position yourself as THE expert in your field, through developing and sharing useful content.
Social Selling: the process of developing and building long term relationships as part of the sales process.
Social media is a great platform for social selling and can be used to position yourself as THE expert in your field. It enables you to reach your target audience.
But where do you start and what do you say?
Let’s go back to basics.
To be successful at producing your own content, you really need to understand 1. who your ideal customer is and 2. what problems you help them to solve.
Then you need a methodical approach to developing your social selling content.
Unless you have a big team, that can prove overwhelming.
Social selling – content strategy
Thankfully most of the content you share is likely to be someone else’s. That is one of the great things about social selling.
The general rule of social selling is 20% is content creation (the content you need to create yourself) and 80% is content curation (the sharing and citing of other people’s content).
If you are looking for ideas on how to find and share the 80% of content curation, read our Social Media Tools blog.
We know how busy you are. Rest assured you don’t have to do that much to start getting noticed as an influencer and expert in your field.
One of the added bonuses of social media is that it is reciprocal. By mentioning other people’s content, they are more likely to mention yours.
How to position yourself as the expert
You have to keep in mind that most of your target customers are really busy. They most likely do NOT have the time to go searching for content themselves.
If you can solve that problem, you will quickly position yourself as someone who is to be followed!
By giving your target customer quick access to USEFUL information, you position yourself as THE expert, knowledgeable in your field and a person that shares useful information on things that interest them.
Let me give you an example.
Let’s say your target customers are building contractors. They are likely to be interested in the following information:
- Preparing competitive bids
- Dealing with labour issues
- Recruiting qualified apprentices
- New building techniques
- Eco-friendly products and practices
- Product recalls
- Managing a fleet of vehicles
- Cutting cost on materials
- Fire and safety codes
- Staying up to date with ever-changing government legislation
- Trends on interior design and lighting
- Dispatch and scheduling efficiencies
- Economic data (such as construction figures and new housing stats)
If you regularly post useful content on these areas directed at building contractors – they will love you.
They don’t have time to look up the information for themselves.
Yes, it’s all out there, but it isn’t curated. They would have to go and find it – which many people are too busy to do!
For more information about the inbound marketing process, read about our COG™ System.