social media engagement for sales

Social media is one of the most significant forces reshaping  the facets  of business and management. Considering that the basic function of management is to empower people to be more productive, this can be assimilated in social media through social crm. If harnessed through customer relations management (CRM), social media can produce financial benefits for businesses. When applying social customer relations management, brand teams need to alter the mindsets they have on social media as well as the traditional brand planning methodologies. In addition, IT resource infrastructure also needs to be developed. Statistics show that about 76% of businesses are using social media for business objectives.

Social customer relations management transforms businesses in the following ways;

Empowers employees to engage customers
Social business empowers employees including B2B sales professionals to act on behave of a company through different social channels. Today, for instance, Dell has pioneered a response analysis, which identifies issues with their brand and products. This enables them solve customer issues proactively. As noted by the Dell’s Chief Listener Susan Beebe, “We have 10,000 Dell employees trained as social media professionals.” Furthermore, Dell has established a social media university and it aims to see all of its employees trained in social media as Beebe further reiterates “…we want a lot more people at Dell trained to be brand ambassadors.”

Models out customers into brand advocates
Building relationship with customers on social media can easily convert these fans into brand and products advocates. They will talk about the brand name and its features to their peers. This helps in enhancing the reputation of a brand. It also helps in building confidence among potential consumers and these can be easily be groomed to become new clients. Through social media, a company’s social program team identifies industry influencers and nurtures them to reach out to the social community with a deep sense and touch of their minds. This manipulates their perceptions about a company and chances their buying behavior. One of the benefits of creating a brand advocacy is that it helps customers sell a company’s product through word of mouth.

Increases company’s sales data
In the rich data markets, profile data that is provided by customers through social media interactions and lead generation processes is segmented based on needs, value, and psychographics to predict the ability of the customers to buy products and services. Social crm integrates both social data and social concepts to engage the customer in a collaborative conversation. A company can collect data about the fans lives, interactions and the social profile information that is available on the social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Social concepts entail advanced thinking about aspects such as online engagement and influence. This also is touched on in the ROI of social selling webinar.

Increases returns on investments
Businesses are swiftly applying social media CRM to develop virtual social communities and create social commerce programs by enhancing customer care and improving consumer research. A Survey done by Nucleus Research has depicted that CRM decision makers were able to establish that organizations can tremendously increased returns on investment by incorporating mobile and social capabilities that can be applied by sales persons.

Social CRM helps sales professionals to be more productive by intertwining social media networking to customer relations management. By monitoring comments made about brands and products, this can give insights on how consumers feel about the products and what improvements they suggest. This helps in product research and formulation.

In essence, the aim of social business is to create and fortify customer relations. Customers are seeking for tangible value, something that businesses are likely to confuse and this means that entities need to intuitively engage the social communities and understand what they really want in a brand. Nonetheless, the bottom-line is that social media when complimented with social crm brings forth great potential where companies can get closer to their customers. This enables businesses to increase revenue, improve on efficiencies and reduce costs.