Is your social selling strategy focused on generating activity or building sustainable equity for your social profile? Are you sharing your knowledge in a transactional or enduring way? Are your brightest insights buried in the timeline and lost deep in feeds? Are your tweets and shares building your Platform?
One strategy to build your Platform and Social Profile Equity, is to invest the time to document your knowledge with a focus on solving your customer’s most common problems. Publish a consolidated series of content in a prominent place that can be easily found. This (content marketing) approach will elevate your profile as an expert in your field and can make you more productive in the long run.
5 Steps to Build Social Profile Equity
The Content Marketing Institute is helping enterprise brands become less dependent on advertising — transactional interruption that evaporates– and more focused on solving problems and building customer engagement. See the similarity? You too can adopt this useful strategy on a personal level by starting with the high-level framework below. (Note: we’re just scratching the surface. Check out this resource for sales people for more details.)
- Stay True to a Persona. Develop a profile of your typical prospect or ideal client beyond their title and industry. Understand what motivates and excites them and use this additional insight to develop your voice and your content. Your voice should resonate with the persona every time you publish.
- Buyer’s Journey. Develop an understanding of the important points in your persona’s decision making process. What information can help them along the path? Who must they collaborate with to get the job done?
- Story First! Brainstorm 3-5 storylines or concepts that resonate with your persona. Align the concepts to critical points in the buyer’s journey. Focus on ways to break the status quo at each stage. Please DO NOT mention your products/services as a solution. The best sales people are problem-solvers and no longer just parrots of company/product value propositions.
- Channel Selection. While it must be consistent with your persona, choose a destination where your helpful content can be prominently displayed in a consolidated way on your social profile. Your best bet is to publish a post on LinkedIn. If you’re up to it, build a YouTube channel. Otherwise, Twitter and Facebook are not great at sustaining your personal brand platform. Twitter is best for real-time engagement and distribution — it’s the ultimate transactional tool. Facebook? Too many worlds collide…especially if you’re in B2B selling.
- Be Consistent. Commit to a publishing schedule and stick to it. Even if you publish one post per month, in 6 months you’ll have a great foundation of problem-solving content built.
Publishing for Impact
Building Social Profile Equity takes an investment in time and resources. However, the returns do compound over time. Think about how many times you’ve crafted the same email answering the same questions to different prospects? If the answer lives on a post in your LinkedIn social profile, your validated expertise will enable you to accelerate the conversation. A focus on enduring content will pay more dividends than a series of sharing “transactions.”
Sources
The content above was synthesized from a number of phenomenal thought-leaders across the sales and marketing landscape. Here are some of their resources you’ll want to check out.
- Joe Pulizzi has a great new podcast called Content, Inc.
- Jill Konrath’s book Agile Selling
- Ardath Albee’s persona generating tool