Blog More To Sell More

86% of customers say they would engage with vendors if they provided insights or knowledge about their industry, states LinkedIn. Blogging is an excellent selling strategy and platform to provide these insights.

You are in charge of your personal brand and your sales success. You don’t have to be an expert content marketer. You don’t have to be a social selling savant. You just have to take ownership and find a way to connect with your customer on their terms. You are in charge of your destiny.

You Are In Charge Of Your Sales Destiny

When I was young, my dad told me when I didn’t get picked for the basketball team or didn’t start in a game that I was in charge of my destiny. He said, “You are the only person that can get it done for you.” He was right, when it came to playing basketball. I only ‘got so good’ by relying on after-school practices yet was only going to get so far. Yes, I made the team, but never started a game, which quickly got very old. One day I decided to take charge and not rely solely on my support structure. I practiced more, learned more and differentiated myself. I learned how to shoot with my left hand and dribble behind my back. I took charge of my destiny. I turned my results around – finally starting and then making all-star teams for 9 years straight.

Use Content and Blogging To Differentiate Your Selling Efforts

This same advice and set of results applies to today’s sales organizations and your own efforts. whether or not you use social selling techniques. You need to do what it takes to get it done. And, blogging is one key tool to help your personal strategy.

Hubspot states that B2B companies who blog generate 67% more leads per month than those who do not blog. This statistic alone should motivate sales teams to take control of their lead development strategy by introducing blogging. They also state that 82% see a positive return on blogging efforts.

Can you imagine walking into a sales appointment or bumping into a client at a trade show and have them reference a great blog post you wrote? A blog post that addresses deeper customer issues and information. A blog post that does not sell.  THIS social selling moment is nirvana … and will lead to a deeper relationship and a greater chance to help frame and close a more lucrative sale.

A Social Selling Guide To Blogging

Where do you find blogging ideas if you are a sales representative? Just look in your email inbox or your most recent customer conversations. TMG Custom Media reports 78% of consumers believe that organizations providing custom content are interested in building good relationships. A sales representative-generated blog post is a great step toward generating custom content. Consider these five sources of content marketing for your social selling strategy:

1. Questions your clients are asking. Have you been asked the same question again and again by your customers and prospects? For example, “Why is cloud computing important to a non-profit company?” When a question is asked more than three times, it’s time to write a blog post to answer it – backing it up with personal experience and research. This content destination can become your 24-7 relationship builder. TIP: Make a list of the 10 most popular questions you receive from customers and write ten 300-500 word posts to answer them.

2. Questions your clients should be asking. Many customers don’t know what they don’t know. When you can present the questions they should be asking, then you have a consultative approach and are out to help them vs. just sell to them. This approach will hep position you as a solver vs. a seller. Pass on this type of blog content before you meet a client, or follow up for when you leave the appointment. TIP: Make a list of questions that support the benefit statements for the products or services you sell.

“Don’t get me wrong, sharing content is a great thing. When you begin social selling, it’s one of the first things you’ll want to do to stand out,” says Amar Sheth on the Sales for Life blog. “But at some point you must create your own content. The power of your own thoughts on a subject matter are vital to your building a personal brand. In my mind, these two are inseparable.”

3. Current industry research customers should consider. Read your email, review your Feedly feeds, or pull a statistic from the Wall Street Journal and develop 300-word blog post on why this statistic is important to your client or their industry. When you leverage secondary research, you build your credibility through explaining why someone else’s statistics is relevant to your customer. TIP: A 300-word post takes no more effort than a well-crafted email.

4. Current trends in the industry or category. Current trends are always a great conversation starter, and many times customer are not paying attention to them or keeping up with them. Take the time to understand the current trends, identified in trade publications or via thought leaders, to map them to the needs of your customers. TIP: Create a Twitter list of thought leaders or trade publications to quickly follow real-time trends.

5. Explaining complex issues in an easy-to-understand way. Explaining a complex issue, like cloud or big data, with a story or an easy-to-understand way is a gift that can keep on giving for you. If you take the complex and make it consumable with a simple blog post, then you can become a go-to resource which will move you into the circle of trust. TIP: Explain your POV to your significant other, your kids or your grandmother to see if THEY understand it. If they do, then write it down.

These five buckets are only a starting point. Do you have other content sources you have used for your social selling strategy? If so, please share below. Or, reach out to me on LinkedIn,Twitter or Google+. You can also contact me on MarketingThink.com.

Writing content mapped to each of these buckets not only helps you help the customer but also trains you to be a master of your craft. Working on clearly articulating your POV and expertise will elevate you to a social selling winners circle. Take control of your own destiny and be an all-star on your sales team.

This article originally appeared on MarketingThink.com

The post Blog More To Sell More appeared first on B2B Marketing Insider.

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Why Email Marketing Trumps Social Media

To acquire customers, does your marketing focus more on social media than email? Consider this: Email is 40 times more effective than social media.

Social media tends to suck all the oxygen out of the room. Long after email marketing was a staple of most marketer’s toolkits, social media as a marketing tactic burst on to the scene and continues to dominate the attention of marketers.

And with good reason. Social media has transformed how people interact with each other. It has changed how organizations and even governments behave. Social media is always changing and improving. And social media companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter garner a lot of media attention.

Because of this, social media as a marketing tactic tends to get more attention. Like a shiny object. And that’s too bad, because it distracts some marketers from giving more priority to other tactics, particularly email marketing.

Social media is an excellent way to share your content and extend your reach, but it’s generally only going to be seen when your fans and followers are engaged in social media and happen to see it in the passing parade.

But email can break through to every subscriber.

Compared to social media, many people think of email marketing as old news. And worse, email marketing brings to mind email spammers. You know, those princes of darkness who buy email lists scraped from the Internet and then blast them out, with most of their messages ending up in spam folders.

But the truth is that email marketing is enormously effective. And popular.

Facts And Figures About Email Marketing

1. There are more than 3.8 billion email accounts today.
2. Ninety-five percent of online consumers use email; 91 percent check email at least once a day.
3. Email has a longer lifespan than social media.
4. Seventy-seven percent of consumers prefer email for marketing communications.
5. Email lets you be highly personal.
6. Email marketing has an ROI of 4300 percent.
7. Seventy-six percent of marketers use email more than three years ago

Source: Radicati (1) Exact Target (2) Direct Marketing Association (4,6,7)

McKinsey reports that email is about 40 times better at customer acquisition than social media.

Why is email so much better at customer acquisition than social media? Because smart marketers are using it effectively. Instead of spamming everyone on their list with batch-and-blast generic messages, they are guiding customers along their buying journey with helpful, personalized communication.

Email marketing is the connective tissue of Internet marketing. Here’s why:

1. Email Drives Increased Website Visitors

People enjoy sharing content they like. You see it on social media all the time, but the original “share” was email being forwarded. When you segment your email addresses and then send them relevant, interesting content, they are more likely to forward that to their friends and colleagues. That is how you can reach a completely new audience, driving more visitors to your website.

2. Email Helps Convert Website Visitors Into Leads

When a lead forwards your email to someone, you gain the power of social proof. People trust people they know. They want to hear from their friends before they want to hear from your company. So when you encourage referrals from existing leads, it helps you generate new ones.

3. Email Helps Nurture Leads Into Customers

This is where you send emails to leads that, over time, guide them toward an informed purchase and, hopefully, become a customer. But it’s all about sending the right email to the right audience. When you segment and then tailor emails to each lead, they will be more engaged. It becomes more of a one-on-one conversation than an email blast.

But the key word is “nurture.” Use email to build a relationship with leads by providing useful information that helps them do their job better. That will make them more open to speaking with your sales team at some point in the future.

4. Email Helps Deepen Your Relationship With Customers

Have you ever heard it’s less expensive to keep a customer than to get a new one? It’s true. Unfortunately, many companies ignore their customers once the sale is closed.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Use email to check in with your customers and provide helpful resources, special customer-only extras and basically show your appreciation for them being a customer. You’ll find that this strengthens relationships and enables you to upsell other products and services, and reduce customer churn.

Conclusion

The relationship between email marketing and social media is like the relatoinship between a freezer and a microwave. They are both appliances, but very different. However, they work beautifully together. The same is true with email marketing and social media. But before investing a lot of time and money in building a social media program, first make sure you’re getting the most of your email marketing efforts.

This article originally appeared on The Artillery B2B Marketing Blog [Photo Credit: greaterlansingcvb via photopin cc]

The post Why Email Marketing Trumps Social Media appeared first on B2B Marketing Insider.

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