Social media is tricky no matter how you look at it. Leave aside all the various controversies that get stirred up on an hourly basis. Just learning how to navigate social media strictly for business purposes is more than a little complicated. Just managing a Twitter account for a business is hard. You need posts to keep engagement up, but what kind of posts? What do you tweet about?
Boosting Your Sales (and Margins!)
Of course, the primary goal of any sort of social media engagement is to boost sales, which would naturally mean interacting with potential clients and hopefully closing the deal with some new ones. Naturally, you can’t just go around asking everyone if they would like to buy your product. For one, people tend to get a little upset when you just cold pitch them in a private message. Unfortunately, that sort of thing can happen when your average salesperson gets put in charge of drumming up business through Facebook or some other app.
Why is that? The salesperson traditionally starts with someone who has come to them. There is a customer with a need, and they already have it in their head that you can probably fill it. The salesperson doesn’t have to get the client interested in the product. That job is already done. The salesperson has to draw the client over the edge and into the sales column. And hopefully, work in an upsell or two at the same time. In the world of social media, you’re trying to build a relationship and generate interest, often from zero. What that means is that a traditional sales approach doesn’t work. Half the job isn’t already done when making first contact via YouTube comments.
In the brick and mortar world (or the iron and alloy world as the case may be), the people who do that first part of the job, getting the customer into the door or on the phone, aren’t in sales. They are in marketing. The marketing people make the ads, the commercials, and the billboards that get someone into a given store for the first time. Think of them as professional icebreakers. And icebreakers are precisely what you need for your social media sales efforts.
Identify the Pain Points and Connect!
That comes through the work of advertising your foundry’s products and services through social media to generate that interest in the first place. Treat it like advertising in a trade journal, just one that is interactive. You can also look for businesses that are posting needs that have to be filled. That approach is particularly relevant in the present moment with a variety of supply chain disruptions, disruptions that are expected to continue well into 2022 at the least. Keep a lookout for any potential client complaining of a lack of parts or materials you and your foundry could provide. This could happen through their own social media posts, local media articles, or simply by watching the data on who is producing what. If you see an opening, it might be time to send a message. If there is an open complaint, it would be worth getting right to the point and offering the specific services you think would help the client. If you suspect an opening from watching the data, jumping in with a sales pitch would not be wise. Instead, this is a situation that is best handled by the icebreakers who can build a rapport before letting the salespeople do their thing.
Naturally, there are various things to keep in mind; the nature of the particular industry, the nature of the media, and of course, whatever laws are applicable in your state or that of the potential client. It’s actually illegal in some states to cold pitch someone through private messages.
So do your homework and don’t forget that no matter the avenue, traditional contacts, or social media, you have to do the whole job, generate interest, build a relationship, and finally close the sale.
