Steel on Sales

Building Your Brand with Social Media

Many people that wanted to make a name for themselves turned to social media so their brands can attract the most attention at a very low cost. Some people even manage to build brands successfully without spending a single cent. The whole social media business buzz finally allows smaller and emerging brands to gain recognition without relying on those pricey advertising methods that bigger brands continue to rely on.

In fact, these big brands are moving towards social media to make sure that their fanbase continues to grow. As a result, many brands are growing at a fast rate so you have to dive into the social media business as well to build your brand. Creating a page within the most popular social networking site should be your first goal.

Fortunately, popular social networking sites like Facebook make it extremely easy to get started. All you really need is a high resolution copy of your brand logo and make it the profile picture so anyone that views the page can already see the identity of your social media business page. Explore all the customization options of your brand page and try to populate it with as much information as possible. When it comes to descriptions, keeping it short and concise is good so viewers have some time to read any other important information found in other fields.

When it comes to general marketing, you should focus on your target market so you get the best response with minimal effort. But you are marketing a social media business page and quality matters a bit more. Early on, you should play the numbers game by advertising your page to all of your friends and acquaintances.

The idea is to get people to subscribe to your page. Facebook displays how many people “liked” the page and several Facebook users would judge a page based on how popular it is. Have a large amount of subscribers too so your brand is trustworthy and has huge potential in serving the needs of everyone.

But bear in mind that people can unsubscribe to the page at any moment and there is a possibility that people will if they find that the brand is too weak or lacks potential. You can prove these people wrong by making sure your page is updated every now and then. If you are attaching a brand to some products or services, try to make some updates that are related to these products and services. You can announce something new or you can post a major milestone or testimonial by a fellow fan. These are the things that keep your fanbase in check.

Your brand might be so good to the point that your subscribers will be spreading the word. This is one of the things that you will enjoy after you spent a lot of time building your social media business page. Your brand will grow even more just because your fans are happy. Now that your brand building is a bit more automated, create another business page in another social networking site so you can capture the attention of more groups of people.

Understanding Social Media Sales Funnel

Social media marketing has had spontaneous impact for many businesses over the years since its inception, but in order to harness the opportunities that come with it, one has to learn how to effectively manipulate the social media sales funnel.

If your social media strategies are not generating the much needed leads, then you have not yet fully grasped the social media marketing concept, and hence, you should start by identifying where your links are loosening and form a strong social media sales funnel to give you leverage, to grow stronger and achieve immense success within a short period of time.

Social media sales funnel allows most B2B marketers to effectively promote their products for maximum impact, and there is absolute transparency of sales along each step of the funnel.

Main Social Media Sales Funnel Stages

Many companies share the sole objective of using social media marketing to increase sales. For one to start exploring on the opportunities brought about by using social media as a vital marketing tool, you need to learn the common stages of social media sales funnel. This article will show you what needs to be done if you want to embark on the social media sales path:

Creating Awareness

Start by identify the best social media suitable for your target audience, and make your company visible by showing them that you exist and directing them where you go. Spend time online to relate, converse and educate consumers.

Getting Prospects

Once you have gotten the prospects in the funnel, then you can start by building trust by dialoging with potential customers in a much subtle tone. Provide more information about the products and services to build trust and make more people want to join the club of other customers.

Interests and Forming Leads

Once you have increased on audience numbers and formed quality relationships, then they became your lead after they have developed an interest in your products or services. The key is to effectively communicate by actively listening to the audience and constantly engaging in their conversations to gain much insight. Then form a link to your e-commerce site to lead them to your path.

Remaining Loyal to Your Current Customers

Any successful company knows that new prospectuses will increase your profit margin but if you lose your current customers, the profits drop drastically. The trick is to still maintain your current customers because they are still promoting your brand to others, ensure that their needs are catered for by continuing to communicate with them.

Effective Social Media Sales Funnel

Social media marketing is not an easy task especially because there is so much planning involved and time consumed. Your effort will not be rewarded in a day but requires absolute patience in order to start reaping the fruits.

This is just a highlight of what needs to be incorporated in social media marketing, but you can learn so much more if you subscribe to this site as we give you the latest, practical, workable and effective strategies in Social Media Sales Funnel.

Nurturing Success in your Sales Force

A sales team operates as one cohesive unit. Together, they can achieve the toughest of goals; divided, they fall apart and ruin the company’s profitability.

Now, for the sales team to operate as one forceful, profitable unit that easily achieves its goals, every team member must be personally and professionally happy. This is where the sales manager comes in – he must motivate and keep his team happy and ensure that they together make for a successful sales force. He can do this by playing psychologist and making each member focus on the positive side of his work and life.

A team member who is depressed because of personal or professional problems does not perform efficiently at work. And, when one team member does not perform, he drags down the entire sales team’s targets. No team wants that to happen. Here are some techniques that will help you motivate your team and turn them into a lean and mean successful sales force:

1. Create a daily achievement list. Enter every little achievement, per member, in it on a daily basis and keep the list of achievements open for viewing. A few words of encouragement or even a pat on the back can motivate a team member. These tactics may not seem substantial, but have the power to motivate. When team members see their colleagues achieving milestones and getting praised for achieving them, they too will do their best.

2. Backup your motivation and encouragement with rewards. You cannot pay rewards out of your own pocket, so lay down realistic goals and set up a sound incentive scheme with the management.

3. Successful communication can build a successful sales force. Effective communication delivered precisely and with a sense of humor can bind the team together. The sales team knows exactly what is expected from them and work together to achieve team goals. Efficient communication also kills the gossipy grapevine.

4. You must encourage risk taking and set up special incentives when risks pay off. Team members who take risks and fail must be told not to worry because they learned a valuable lesson. People who fail are the ones who go on to create a winning formula.

5. Be seen both as a friend and as a manager. A successful manager is one who keeps his team in good humor and extracts the best out of them. Your team members are human – treat them as you would like to be treated by the management.

6. Make continuous training a part of routine. Send team members to bootcamps, organize in-house training sessions, have them attend conferences, and more. Training will increase your sales team’s skills and enable them to achieve tougher goals.

7. Always be transparent and fair just like you expect others to be.

8. Finally, do not leave your gut feel and emotions out. Use these to your complete advantage.

This is how you can galvanize your sales team into a successful sales force. Be very observant and fair, and in return you will get loyalty, respect and the desired profitability.

Hiring the Best Salespeople

Hiring salespeople who are talented and true team players can boost a company’s profitability. Such salesmen easily connect with customers and convince them to buy the company’s product. The good news is that the recession's still on and many bright and talented sales are actively looking for jobs. Such availability makes hiring salespeople easier for companies. The tough news is that these talented people want employment in an organization that reconciles job satisfaction with money, among other employment factors.

So, how will you hire the best brains in the sales industry? Here’s what you need to do:

Reconcile money with job satisfaction

Money is important, and so is job satisfaction. There are enough studies that establish that placing the right guy in the wrong job leads to loss of morale, motivation and productivity. So, when it comes to hiring salespeople, you must ensure that the people you hire understand your products and your line of business, are passionate about the business, and can explain the product’s USP in plain English. That takes care of job satisfaction. On money, you must offer slightly more than or equal to your competitors’ package. You must also build in an attractive incentive scheme that handsomely rewards your sales team when they attain goals. Hiring salespeople will become easy if you take care of these two major issues.

Be creative while interviewing candidates

You must be in a position to tell if the candidate qualifies for the job immediately after the interview is over. Creative interviewing requires creative thinking, people skills, and going beyond the obvious. You must check each candidate’s personality, appearance, hygiene, confidence levels, knowledge and experience. Carefully evaluate each characteristic using an evaluation sheet, which will help you in making the right decision.

Technology and the workplace

Every candidate wants to get experience working on the latest hardware and software. The world is advancing very rapidly and so is technology obsolescence. Providing the latest technological tools to your sales team will help in quickly hiring salespeople who are smart, knowledgeable and enthusiastic.

Workplace and reputation

If you want to retain and nurture talent, your workplace must be cheery, bright and collaborative. That said, all workplaces depend on the business and therefore you must judge workplace conditions for yourself and improve these if required. Your business must maintain a clean reputation as well.

Leadership

You want to recruit people who will go on to become managers. So watch out for any dynamic leadership qualities in candidates.

To sum up

If you pay the right price to the right guy, provide robust working conditions, and judge him well during the interview, there’s no reason why hiring salespeople should pose a problem. Keep the job papers ready and sign on right candidates without giving them the chance to walk out of your office right into the competitor’s arms. Good luck.

Social Media in the Workplace

Several businesses provide limited Internet access to their employees to ensure that they work collectively in the network and do important things like checking emails without succumbing to distractions like social networking sites. Since there are not so many popular social networking sites, blocking these social media business sites using software or the router interface is very simple. You can simply block access to Facebook and Twitter and that may be enough for people to fully focus.

But with the way social media is evolving every year, you might be wondering if these businesses should really block these sites. The answer really depends on the main objectives of the business and the roles of every employee in the business. Any ambitious business needs to have marketing because they need loyal consumers to stay competitive.

It is usually the job of marketing teams to spread brand recognition and make others aware of any products and services being offered by the company. If you login and browse through the posts made in your social networking site, you will likely notice some advertisements here and there. These companies are adopting the social media business model where social media should indeed be a part of the workplace.

At the very least, giving the marketing team full Internet access can be highly beneficial to a business that is struggling to get noticed. Some of the most effective advertising methods are costly and there is still some risk involved because competitors invest heavily into paid advertising. In short, you should either spend a lot or forget about spending at all until you come up with a solid campaign.

Creating a social media business page only costs time to do with minimal skill so any idle employees can help out. This means that you should give more people within the workspace access to these social networking sites. Companies that do not have web design teams can create a social media website without much hassle.

Many of these sites have some kind of blogging functionality where you can post updates to subscribers. While the marketing team gets busy convincing people around the social network to subscribe, other people can update the social media business page.

If you do not believe in the potential of social media, you should take a look at all of those online-based services that have no headquarters. There are many small startups that are formed by a group of ambitious individuals where they work at home and rely solely on social media to connect with their target market as well as their fellow coworkers.

Traditional methods of running and promoting a business are still around and still have nice advantages over completely online-based companies. But your business should embrace the way social media is growing because all of the top companies and even celebrities are hopping onboard. Anybody that logs in a popular social networking site like Facebook will be exposed to a ton of information and it isn’t just information posted by friends. Social networks have become a viable and inexpensive place to advertise. The distraction elements will always remain but with proper training, you can teach employees how to use their favorite websites in a productive manner.

Why Social Media

Back in the late 90s, the Internet was all about checking email, chatting with other people and searching online for information or news. Right now, millions of people still do this today and there are smartphones and tablets that allow people to do this easily. However, several of the sites in Alexa’s top 20 most visited sites globally are social media sites. This shows that social media is the new trend and it has influenced businesspeople to get into social media for business ventures.

You might be wondering why social media for business is something worth exploring if you can just have one business website that has all the information consumers need. You only need to advertise one website too and that should theoretically make it easier for marketers to spread awareness.

What you need to know is that social media is a tool that assists in spreading business awareness. Not everyone knows how to make their own websites and even fewer people have the budget to hire professional Web developers and designers to make an attractive and interactive website. It is much easier to create an account in a social networking site and then use the available tools to make an informative page.

The top social media sites let you create pages that plug right into the network so existing users of the social networking site can subscribe for updates. You are in charge of posting updates that can come in the form of text, images, audio and video so subscribed users can see them immediately.

Thanks to the messaging tools, it is much easier to use social media for business for reaching out to your target market. Many social networking users spend time making their profiles very detailed so it is easy to see if a person falls within the target market.

Other forms of marketing still work like email but more people nowadays spend more time in social media sites. It is their source for seeing what their friends and loved ones are up to and it is a place to share information. Millions of users are active in these types of sites so it is a no brainer for Internet marketers to close in on these areas.

The biggest companies and corporations even went as far as creating their own business pages and that helped them significantly in making announcements. Before, these companies would ask their loyal customers to check out their websites every now and then for updates or subscribe to a mailing list. Now, these customers can login to their favorite social networking sites and see these updates immediately.

Social media in general isn’t going away and that means social media for business is here to stay. The top social networking sites continue to evolve and open up new ways for businesses to communicate with fellow customers. When the whole social media buzz started a couple years back, those businesses that hopped on early have massive fanbases. It is only logical for these businesses to get more serious in social media than any other form because it is growing at a rapid rate.

Build Your Social Media Strategy

Social media started off as a fresh new online channel where everyone has a voice. It lifted the boundaries of communication and should spell some potential for marketers to make an impact on their customers. However, not everyone was liking the idea of giving people the freedom to do what they like. The lack of control intimidates these PR individuals but that is not the case for everyone. There are people that come up with solid strategies to bend the platform towards their favor.

If you see that the potential is there and you do not know what strategy to embrace, have a good look at your team first and see if there are people with some available resources that can make it happen. Collaborate these people and take a good look at your current marketing situation right now. Identify the message you are currently trying to send to consumers and see if you have a branding policy in place. In the jump to social media, you may need to refine your brand identity.

All the major social networks have millions of registered users belonging to various niches so impressing the majority of your target market will always be a challenge. This is where you have to approach your brand in various fronts and make the necessary changes that make your identity more resonating to the public.

Making an impact to social networking users is more than just slapping a shiny new logo on the profile page. You also need to figure out what messages you want to send to the people viewing your social media page. The technique is to not make things look too scripted or too professional. Remember, you are dealing with ordinary people and these are not the type of people that are willing to read press releases that are more than 10 paragraphs long.

It is better to give the team a good idea on how you want your target market to react. As long as the facts are always contained in the message, the team members should find out their own creative ways in conveying the message. This makes social networking posts look a lot more natural, personal and convincing.

Being personal makes your representatives and brand more approachable but the professional aspect shouldn’t be completely lost. A set of corporate guidelines can help so you can restrict your team from discussing the company using personal profiles.

This is why the team should have access to a centralized business page where all business matters take place there. If there will be lots of people working on that page, give them all common identities so people can recognize that they are linked to this brand.

To address the “lack of control” situation, simply give a set of guidelines to encourage other social media users to comment constructively. There will always be people giving negative feedback of various forms. Your strategy can be to simply state that you have the right to remove any vulgar comments. At the same time, address constructive criticism nicely and you will keep your fans on board. In fact, giving good support to people viewing your social media page can possibly cause these people to talk about your brand more through word of mouth and that is where the real potential of social media begins.

Should you Create a Business Page on Google+?

Google shocked the world when they decided to take on Facebook with their own unique social networking service. Google introduces some fresh twists to the original social networking formula like the ability to create friend circles. Although it has tight integration with other Google services, it continues to lag behind Facebook. When Google+ first launched, there was no way you can create a Google+ business page.

Back in November 2011, Google+ launched branded pages so businesses finally have the opportunity to spread awareness within the Google+ community. However, many businesses have worked very hard in the past to promote their Facebook pages. Creating a Google+ business page may seem like a waste of time especially since statistics show that people are spending less time with Google+.

That doesn’t mean that you should avoid ignore Google’s hot new feature because creating a page in Google+ is just as simple as making a Facebook page. Plus, you only have to do it once and when you are done, the page is ready for the public to see. So to answer the question, you should make a business page in Google+ whenever you have time.

This is a Google product after all so you can bet that this page will likely show up in the Google search results when people type in keywords related to the name of your business. If you are advertising a website or blog, having a business page opens up another gateway to that site.

The Google+ business page rides on the circles concept which is actually pretty nice because you can mix friends and pages in circles. If more people get into Google+, they might find it easier to track updates from your Google+ business page since they can add the page to any of their existing circles for easy tracking. For instance, someone can make a circle called “Favorite Businesses” and add a couple of business pages including your business page. Clicking on the “Favorite Businesses” page will display all of the posts including any posts that your business page makes. Unlike the cluttered news feed in Facebook, it is less likely to miss page updates.

Based on Google’s newly launched Google Play, it looks like Google will continue their aggressive stance in social network dominance. Google+ is behind for the meantime but their integration advantage may encourage people to finally take Google+ a bit more seriously. Google+ is still young and Google might have some things cooking behind the scenes.

The Google+ branded pages feature is new as well and Facebook responded by giving business pages the timeline treatment. At least Facebook knows that they have to be more competitive and that will only cause Google to figure out ways to bring more innovation too.

By making a Google+ business page, your business will be ready to adopt any new features that launch. You can also advertise both your Facebook and Google+ pages so you can cater to more people. Best of all, there is really no disadvantage of making a Google+ branded page after you set aside some time to make one.

Build Your Network

Many people turn to networking in times of need such as when looking for a job, a reference for a job, a person who may be able to help you with a particular problem you are facing and so forth but they wait until the need is there instead of working on building their network consistently all along.  It is important to invest time and effort into building and nurturing your network and relationships long before you find yourself desperately looking around for the answers and help that you need.  By spending time cultivating relationships simply for the sake of having and enjoying them rather than for what they can do for you in the short term, you will more than likely find that you will find that you have a diverse, rich network.  These people also have their own network of people and soon you could find that someone who knows someone else may be just the very person who can land you that job interview, point you to someone who can fix your air conditioner for next to nothing or help you get started in social networking with your new business and much more. 

If you have not spent time developing relationships in your network it may be quite uncomfortable when you try talking to someone you have drifted from and the first thing you bring up is asking them if they can either be a reference for your job application or know of any job openings.  In fact in some cases it may go beyond being uncomfortable to the point of being rude and that relationship may completely dissolve (if it hadn't already.)  It would be like someone calling you out of the clear blue sky and you just know that they are going to try to "pitch you" on their latest home-based business opportunity and really don't care to find out about you, how you are doing, or anything other than to try to "sign you up."

I have seen this happen in social networking sites a lot.  It happens when someone posts about their business on your personal Facebook wall which is a huge turn-off by the way! or when they only comment on your post when it has something to do with their business they want you in, or also trying to act like they are interested in you and you can just almost feel that at any moment they are going to type out a link to check out and "just let me know what you liked about this."  Has it happened to you?  Annoying isn't it?!  Now I am pausing to think how often I may have done that without intentionally trying to "pitch" someone and how that must have felt. 

If you have been spending time working on building and cultivating your network, not for what you can get out of it but for what you can give as well, when the time comes and you either need someone for something or vice versa, you will find that you will have quite a group of people who may be more than willing to help you out or point you in the right direction.  It just goes back to the very, very basic principle of treating others how you would like to be treated.

 

Facebook Advertising 101

Since Facebook has millions upon millions of registered users that are logging on at practically any time on any given day or night, this is one social media site where you will indeed want to do some serious advertising.  Facebook's advertising platform is a tool you will want to have that allows you to place small advertisements on the right-hand side of Facebook's pages and profiles.  Some would argue that these are not nearly as effective as using something like Google Adwords' campaigns but it is really not the same type of medium and at least for now you will not find Adwords in Facebook. 

If you are going to be doing advertising on Facebook you will want to be focused on targeting just who will be seeing your ads.  Facebook allows you to target using quite a number of variables such as targeting by age, gender, geography, keywords, level of education, relationship status and even someone's place of work.  One key thing to remember is to increase your keywords to the place it needs to be at to successfully reach a large enough audience to reach your advertising goals.

Once you have your target audience pretty well narrowed down, you need to decide where to have them directed to such as your Facebook event, fan page, group or perhaps you want them sent directly to your website.  One thing that is rather nice about using ads to promote your fan page or your event is that Facebook incorporates a button right inside your ad that when clicked, lets that person immediately either RSVP to the event or even better, to become one of your fans.  They have made it pretty simple in that these people do not even have to stop by your page.  When someone goes ahead and RSVP's to your event, all of their followers will see that activity being taken place out on the main wall and can trigger even more activity. 

Advertising on Facebook is somewhat like Adwords in that you will be bidding on specific, targeted keywords and competing to get your advertisements shown.  How successful you are at this will depend on the competitiveness of your selected keywords.  You will need to decide if you would rather do a CPC (cost per click) where you will only pay for actual clicks or a CPM (cost per thousand model) where you will pay per one thousand ad views.   It appears as if the cost per click model is a bit more effective according to some statistics.  To begin your advertising campaign you must determine your bid per click and your daily budget allowance.  Just starting out you will be testing the waters so set your bid per click right around the amount that Facebook will suggest, and a daily budget that you can afford, and about fifty dollars (or more) is what I came across when researching that amount.  That seems on the high side to me so just use common sense and you can always adjust that amount to suit your advertising needs.  Remember you're still testing the waters in the beginning.