9 Ways Social Media Marketing Can Help Sales

1. Provide One-to-One Contact - The biggest thing social media marketing can do for sales is help create one-on-one relationships between customers and potential customers and the company. With the social web, people can reach out directly to people inside the company with questions and problems.
2. Increase Referrals – People are more likely to trust colleagues or peers over a company for purchasing recommendations. The social web puts people into contact with others who have already experienced a product or service. By facilitating these connections, marketing can make it easier for people to get feedback directly from other customers, increasing the chances for referrals, which usually have a higher rate of purchasing from you.
3. Increase Awareness – The first problem for sales and having customers even be aware of your products. There’s nothing worse than cold-calling a potential customer and not have them even be aware of you. Besides, we know that cold calling isn’t very effective without some sort of pre-qualification process. While generating awareness is certainly marketing’s first job, the social web makes this easier because it’s easier for people outside of the company to talk about you to each other.
4. Increase Demand – Related to increasing awareness, social media marketing can help increase demand for your products which really makes the whole sales process so much easier. If people understand what your products are and how they can help, they’re more likely to want them.
5. Educate Buyers – Educated buyers are usually much further down the sales funnel. The social web helps marketing reach out to potential customers to answer their questions and help them understand how your company can help them (and how you’re different from your competitors), making the entire sales process much easier.
6. Build Relationships – The social web helps people within your company build relationships with potential customers, as well as maintain relationships with existing customers. It’s much easier to approach a sales call if the person is already familiar with people in your company. They feel like they’re doing business with someone they know instead of a stranger. Relationships also help salespeople understand the needs of the potential customers, which makes the sales process more effective.
7. Generate Leads – One of the most difficult parts of the sales process is generating leads for new business. While this has always been one of the major jobs of marketing, the social web makes it easier to reach a larger audience than other channels. Social media marketing can also provide a lot of direct calls to action to generate leads.
8. Pre-Quality Leads – If done properly, social media marketing can help you engage with the right audience with the right messages and conversations. With a little work, more can be known about leads so that sales knows which are more likely to purchase.
9. Provide Insight on Customer Needs – By listening and building relationships on the social web, not only can marketing provide insight in general about customer needs, they often can provide needs for specific customers. This means that salespeople aren’t going into sales calls cold. When you know something about the specific needs of the customer, you can tailor your sales call around those needs, making it more useful for everyone involved.

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