How Can Cold Outreach Boost Your Social Selling Strategy

By Georgi Todorov

In today’s modern, competitive online selling world, what is your social selling strategy to get more traffic and turn it into higher conversion rates? Social selling and cold outreach are two key sales tactics that work very well together and complement each other substantially. Therefore, they can drive the best results when used in combination. If you know how to employ them strategically, they can bring you more marketing leads, resulting in higher conversion rates and better social media ROI at the end. 

Therefore, in this post, we will take a closer look at what social selling really is? And how it can work for you. Furthermore, we will learn together more about cold outreach and how it can boost your social selling efforts. Then if you are curious about the answers, join me, and let’s start. 

What Is Social Selling?

Social selling is about utilizing social media platforms to find the right prospects, develop trusted relationships, and finally, achieve your sales goals. In other words, social selling is the process of creating demand and generating leads through social media to increase your sales and earn more revenue.

The positive impact of social media on sales is hard to deny. According to statistics, social selling increases company revenue by 16%. Moreover, 82% of buyers believe a company is more reliable when it is active on social media. Also, the social selling leaders generate 45% more sales opportunities than their peers. Additionally, 78.6% of sellers who used social media outperformed their non-social media competitors. So, in short, there is tremendous potential for sales development with social selling. 

How to Make Social Selling Work for You? 

For the successful and effective integration of social selling into your sales process, pay attention to the following:   

1. Pick the Right Social Media Platform for Your Social Selling

First of all, identify the best social media platforms that provide the best access to your target audience. For example, if most of your competitors have focused on LinkedIn, but you know exactly that your target audience is also very active on Instagram, choose the latter one. Sometimes, joining a less competitive network can help you build a better social selling process without fighting for the audience. 

In choosing a social media platform, focus on where your ideal customers spend most of their time. You have to be active where your targets are. As such, the other crucial step is to know and identify your targets. 

2. Know Your Targets

You should identify your target audience who are more likely to be interested in your content, product, or service. Remember that your target audience is not “everyone.” Hence, you have to discover those who are more likely to care about your messages and will be intrigued by your offering. Developing a clear understanding of your social media target audience is one of the most important things you do in social media marketing. Because your target audience will inform all aspects of your social selling strategy, including creating relevant content, messaging, or advertisement campaigns.

How to Find Your Social Media Target Audience? 

Social media audience research will allow you to get a deeper understanding of your potential prospects. It is mainly about narrowing your focus while expanding your reach. Therefore, successful social selling starts with thorough research. Start with the people already buying from you, following you, and engaging with your posts. Try to gather information concerning their age, location, interests, behaviors, and so on. 

In addition, there are many social selling tools available for finding a range of ideal leads. For example, LinkedIn Sales Navigator or Hootsuite can be helpful in supporting your social selling efforts. 

3. Establish Your Presence on the Chosen Social Media Platform 

Once you have chosen your social media platform and identified your target audience, the next step is to establish your personal brand. In addition to optimizing your social media page and content according to your audience’s needs and expectations, you should also find some practical ways that get more targeted, relevant people to follow you. Joining niche-relevant forums and systematically engaging with other prospects is a good way to expand your social network and improve your social selling strategy. Or you may hear in a forum or post about a prospect's dissatisfaction with your competitor or their desire to find another solution. It is a perfect buying signal for you to introduce your product or service to them, establishing your presence more on social media. 

Also, do not underestimate the impact of Influencers on social media for expanding your outreach. For instance, if you have decided on Instagram for laying out your social selling strategy, you should collaborate with the right and relevant influencers to reach your niche audience and create brand awareness. There are different types of Influencers, each with varying numbers of followers and engagement rates. You can get help from an influencer marketing agency for booking influencers and start collaborating with them to significantly boost your social selling strategy.

Moreover, you should actively develop strategies to increase your following count on the platform. There are various methods and tactics like getting help from a robust Instagram growth service to gain followers on Instagram. Or you can hire an Instagram manager and let the person handle everyday activities needed for Instagram growth. Whatever you prefer, make sure you pay special attention to growing your account followers.

4. Have a Consistent and Well-Designed Content Strategy 

To attract more visitors to your page, keep them engaged, win their trust, and finally convert them into loyal buyers, you should have a consistent and high-quality content strategy. Your content should have a consistent and uniform voice, tone, and style. Moreover, the time and amount of publishing content are also integral to any successful and effective social selling strategy. Developing and sticking to a content plan can help you create a better customer experience and build meaningful relationships. 

5. Employ Other Sales Tactics to Boost Your Social Selling Strategy

Social selling works best in combination with other sales tactics, such as cold outreach, content marketing, influencer marketing, affiliate marketing, MMS and SMS marketing, online advertising, etc. A successful and effective social selling strategy is always a mix of various and compatible tactics and methods that work very well together to help you reach your primary target – i.e., close more sales and generate more revenue. Therefore, you should not depend on a single sales tactic to run your business. Instead, you have to learn how to implement proven sales tactics that work well together.

While some sales tactics appear to be incompatible, they often yield the best results when used in combination. This is particularly true for social selling and cold outreach. Although they seem to be directly opposite, the two sales tactics complement each other on so many levels. Thus, let's explore what cold outreach is and how you can utilize it for your social selling strategy. 

What Is Cold Outreach? 

Cold outreach is the process of reaching out to potential clients, or the target audience, without their foreknowledge or prior consent, to offer your products, services or ask for cooperation. The fact that you do not already have an established relationship or interaction with leads makes cold outreach more difficult. That is also why this tactic is often criticized as too aggressive or intrusive. Nevertheless, cold outreach is an efficient, affordable way of attracting and bringing more customers into your business.

Through cold outreach, you bang your business drum to get more customers. In the past, it used to be calling people to ask them if they wanted to buy your product or not. Later, email was employed to reach out to potential prospects. But most recently, social media has become an integral cold outreach channel. In general, today's cold outreach (also known as sales engagement) differs greatly from its traditional form. Engaging with your audience before making a call (or sending an email) does minimize the “cold” side of outreach. Then, social media outreach offers you an effective way to warm up your prospects before contacting them directly.

Four Ways Cold Outreach Can Boost Your Social Selling Strategy

Cold (or direct) outreach on social media can be a worthwhile addition to your social selling strategy if done correctly. When you employ cold outreach strategically on social media, it will bring you more potential prospects. Otherwise, your cold outreach messages will be ignored or end up in the spam folder. In this case, you will fail to acquire new potential customers and achieve your sales goals. Thus, in the following, we will explore some ways that cold outreach can dramatically supercharge your social selling efforts.

1. Build More Touchpoints with Prospects

After identifying the right audience and creating a qualified prospect list, you should build more touchpoints with them. Sending a custom, tailored, and individualized message to your target prospects on social media can help you establish deeper connections with them. Reaching out to potential leads personally will help you build online visibility, increase brand awareness and drive more sales. Instead of sending one default automatic message to all you have on your list, you should optimize your messages so that they can get more favorable reactions from your recipients.

Sending a relevant, individualized message on social media as a follow-up to your cold email (or vice versa) is a proven strategy for increasing sales engagement. Remember your cold outreach message doesn't have to be sales-related or aimed at making a sale. Don't forget that people like to buy, but no one likes to be sold. Thus, you can begin with creating surveys, sharing helpful articles, conducting polls, asking for feedback, and so on. By adding more value to your outreach, you will be seen as an expert or a consultant, not just a salesperson. That is what builds trust in the long term.

2. Apply Foot In The Door Technique 

Foot in the door technique is a powerful persuasion technique that can be useful for social media cold outreach. The main idea behind the method is that someone who has agreed to a small request is more likely to comply with a larger request later. Then, if you want something, just ask, and give them the freedom to accept or reject your request. Once someone has accepted it, he or she is more likely to say yes again to subsequent larger requests. You can apply this technique to your cold outreach content to grab the prospect’s attention, gradually guide them towards the target request, and increase the chance of getting the desired response from them. So try to be more persuasive whenever you have the chance to talk directly to your audience and drive them to a call to action.

3. Boost Your Visibility 

Reaching out to potential prospects individually and building more touchpoints with them through personalized and persuasive messages can help you increase your online visibility and build brand awareness. Then, with the help of social media cold outreach and establishing strong relationships with potential prospects, it will become easier to achieve online visibility and establish your personal brand in this highly competitive market.  

4. Utilize Cold Outreach Together With Other Sales Tactics

While cold outreach can bring more traffic to your social media channel, it has to be supported with other tactics such as content marketing or referral marketing to be more effective. Otherwise, you will get nowhere with the cold outreach strategy alone. And potential customers will finally leave your website or social media channel if they are not satisfied. In other words, having a lot of traffic coming to your page through a successful and effective cold outreach strategy is useless if it doesn't result in higher conversion rates. The problem with that is if they leave as fast as they come in, not only your social selling profitability but also your reputation will suffer. That is why you need to care for your potential customers and pay more attention to other marketing tactics in turning potential prospects into loyal buyers.

Adding more value or sharing content that your prospect might be interested in or suggesting a specific solution to their expressed problems are just some ways direct outreach can help you build rapport with your target audience.

Conclusion 

If you want to build a successful business in today's digital world, you need a variety of sales tactics that work very well together for one purpose – attract more loyal customers and generate more revenue. Here, we focused on the social selling strategy and how it can improve with the help of cold (or direct) outreach if used strategically. 

Cold outreach can bring you more potential prospects and help you build new, genuine, and mutually beneficial relationships on social media. Nevertheless, it has to be combined and supported with other sales tactics to work well and turn the traffic into higher conversion rates. Therefore, for a successful social selling strategy, you had better take a comprehensive and holistic approach. You need to use appropriate and compatible sales tactics and methods next to each other -like the pieces of a puzzle- to achieve your ideal intended vision in this highly competitive and challenging market.

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