Landing your first sale is a landmark achievement, but what if you have a limited marketing budget to hit that milestone?
There are tons of online marketing strategies out there, like pay-per-click advertising, social media marketing, and video marketing, but they can take a lot of time, money, and experience to pull off.
It can be difficult for new entrepreneurs to start selling products fast with these strategies. Enter social selling, a marketing tactic that helps you target potential customers, build rapport, and land your first sales.
This article gets into what social selling is, how it works, and best practices for success.
What Is Social Selling?
Social selling is a marketing and sales tactic used to find and engage potential customers on social media. By providing value and developing strategic relationships, store owners can nurture potential customers while gently marketing for ecommerce sales.
Social selling is an art, not a science. It's all about relationships.
You tend to see social selling in business-to-business (B2B) settings, where relationships are key to landing large vendor contracts. However, as a small ecommerce business, you can use social selling to kickstart your sales.
With the rise of social networks like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Pinterest, social selling is now a vital aspect of every online business' marketing efforts.
Let's look at a couple of examples of social selling from So Worth Loving. Here you can see how the brand goes out of its way to personally connect with an X (formerly Twitter) follower.
The business is incredibly attentive and communicative with its followers and potential customers. It creates interest, rapport, and trust among its followers, edging them closer to converting to paying customers over time.
What Makes Social Selling Different From Other Network-Based Strategies?
Is social selling the same as internet marketing strategies like social media marketing social commerce? Not really. There are several differentiating factors.
To start with, social selling doesn't require financial investment, whereas advertising tends to cost at least a bit of cash. Social selling is all about developing strategic, one-on-one sales relationships across social media channels, as opposed to building a direct sales pipeline and storefront on social platforms.
While social selling can be part of social media marketing, it doesn’t take into account all the strategies used to engage users, grow a following, and promote your products to a wider audience.
Social selling is concerned only with developing more intimate personal relationships in an effort to make individual sales. It's much closer to word of mouth marketing.
Lastly, social selling isn't customer service. Although social networks are great places to provide customer service, social selling is about developing strategic personal relationships prior to sales, not after.
Why Should You Use Social Selling?
Social selling can be very effective.
In fact, 78 percent of salespeople that use social selling outsell their competition who haven't yet joined the party. Successful businesses are built on relationships. And more and more people are using social networks to connect and form relationships, even with brands.
Many social media users actually welcome interactions with businesses they’re interested in.
While this presents a massive opportunity, it’s important to remember that social selling is a completely manual process. You can't scale it like Facebook advertising, so it can be time consuming.
However, it does provide ample opportunity to learn about your target market's preferences, needs, and desires, and how you can better meet them.
So, how can you use social selling to get your first sale?
How to Get Your First Sale With Social Selling
We've broken down the steps you need to take to succeed with social selling. Each step has action items and examples to learn from, so follow along until the end to land your first sale.
Set Up and Optimize Your Ecommerce Store
If you haven't already, you need to set up your ecommerce store and get some products to sell.
Then, once you're set up, you need to make your store appear more trustworthy. As a new business, purchasing from your store may feel a risk to some customers. Why should people take a chance on an unproven, unheard-of store?
You need to counteract this problem as much as possible.
To start, choose a professional-looking Shopify theme, write compelling product descriptions, and proofread your website for little mistakes that will diminish trust.
Next, go out of your way to get some positive reviews. Reviews they play on the psychological phenomenon known as social proof. You can create more social proof and promote your dedication to security by including the logos of trusted payment solutions.
Finally, look for ways to instill trust, and reduce the risk for shoppers. One of the best ways to do this is to offer a generous return policy.
Optimize Your Social Media Profiles
Social selling takes place on social networks. So, you also need to optimize your social media profiles to inspire trust among potential customers.
If you haven't yet created social media profiles for your business, get started with Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, or X (formerly Twitter).
Or if you're keen to get moving fast, you could keep things simple and just stick to Instagram for now.
Remember to look at your profiles from your potential customer's point of view. Does your business appear credible and professional?
Temporary tattoo store Tattly has done a great job of optimizing its Instagram profile, using every opportunity to connect and engage its target market.
Here are some guides on how to optimize each of your social media accounts:
- Facebook Business Page: How to Create One in 5 Easy Steps
- How to Optimize Your Instagram Profile to Skyrocket Growth
- The Ultimate Guide to Using Twitter for Business Success
Be Transparent and Personal
Don't try to appear like something you're not. If you try to present your business as successful and established when it's not, consumers will know instantly. Inauthentic brands tend to turn potential customers away.
Instead, be transparent. Mention the fact that you're a new business on a mission to provide incredible products and service to your customers.
Get personal. Tell users your name and be open and relatable. Your unique personality and story are vital aspects of your brand when starting out. This way, instead of appearing like an online scam with no proven reputation, you become a real person that others can trust and relate to.
Have a Compelling Offer
Even if you're personal and relatable, buying from your store is still a gamble for shoppers because you're still unproven and unknown.
Again, why should they buy your products instead of from an established brand? This is why you need a compelling offer.
One method is to create an extra incentive that makes up for the fact that you don't have a proven reputation. It needs to be compelling enough to make it worth taking a risk and buying from your store.
Apparel company Chubbies incentivizes shoppers with a free gift for purchases over $99.
In another example, jewelry brand Biko has run promotions where it gives a $15 discount to new customers if they join the mailing list.
This has the added benefit of allowing the business to follow up with email marketing.
Now that you have your foundations in place, let's find some potential customers.
Define Your Target Market
Every successful business has a defined target audience. This target market is the ideal customer the business aims to serve with its products or services. Crafting a winning strategy as an ecommerce brand means carefully defining your target market and offering something superior to competitors within that niche.
The more you know about your target market, the easier it is to find them and cater to their needs and desires. If you know and understand your potential customers well enough, the product or service may end up selling itself.
Understand Social Listening
Social listening is the process of monitoring conversations on social networks to understand what consumers are saying about a brand or product.
Done right, social listening will tell you everything you need to make your business a success.
For example, say that you sell phone holders and cases. You can use social listening to identify opportunities and see what consumers are saying about your competitors' phone holders. There may be a ton of chatter on new trending products that you could sell or an idea you could incorporate.
Look for pain points, recommendations, and requests, any opportunity to meet demand.
Find Potential Customers
After you've done some research, you can start using social listening to find potential customers.
For example, say that you sell women's clothing. It only takes a few seconds to search the hashtag #neednewclothes on X to find a long list of potential customers. Sellers have been doing this successfully for decades already.
You don't just have to search hashtags either. You could search Facebook groups or the comments left on your competitors' Facebook ads.
Ideally, you might have a personal connection to your client base. One or two mutual connections on a social channel can go a long way to adding credibility to your attempts to connect.
Create Lists of Potential Customers
Once you've identified some potential customers, you can create lists of profiles to monitor and engage with. You could simply follow their accounts, subscribe to their updates, or even create private lists on X and other social networks. It’s usually easy to find “Lists” in your settings, and from there you can start to build custom market segments.
Focus on Relationships, Not Sales
The key to social selling is the “social” part, rather than “selling.” People buy from brands they like and trust.
The golden rule of selling is to give before you ask. To put it another way, think of social selling a bit like forming a romantic relationship. You don’t go straight to “will you marry me?” unless you’re in the top 1% of confidence and love risk.
You have to establish rapport, trust, and connection first. So, forget about the sale for now and focus on developing a genuine connection. If you do this enough times, the sales will follow.
Establish Ways to Provide Value
There are tons of ways that you can provide value to your target market. You could contribute to existing conversations in niche Facebook groups, respond to questions on Quora, do an “Ask Me Anything” on Reddit, or create content.
For example, say you sell travel gear to digital nomads. You can join digital nomad groups across several social channels, contribute to discussions, and create useful content that actually helps people in these communities.
This will establish a relationship and expose your store to your target audience.
Plus, when a user gains value from one of your comments, all they have to do is click through to your account to see a link to your store.
Notice that none of these methods are pushy or salesy. It's all about giving before you get.
Connect with Your Potential Sales Leads
When you provide value to your target market, people will begin to interact with your comments and posts. At this point, you should aim to deepen relationships with individuals who engage you online and continue to provide value.
For example, you might write:
“Thanks for your reply! I'm really glad you found my comment helpful. Do you have any other questions about being a digital nomad? I'm starting a business to help people live the digital nomad life and I'm keen to help in any way I can.”
Show up and engage.
Deepen Relationships
Rome wasn't built in a day, and relationships aren't built with a single DM.
So, make sure to always respond to every relevant comment or message. Constantly look for opportunities to provide value and connect with potential customers.
Done properly, it's at this point that you should hopefully land your first sale!
Use Social Tools and AI
Managing your social presence manually can eat up a ton of time if you're not careful. Smart entrepreneurs leverage technology to streamline their workflow and maximize results.
Consider implementing these helpful resources:
- Automated chatbots. Deploy AI-powered chat assistants to handle common questions around the clock. While you can't be online constantly, these tools can field inquiries whenever they arise.
- Platform integrations. Link your social accounts with your online store backend to manage inventory, orders, and customer data from a single dashboard.
- Content planning software. Schedule your posts in advance using dedicated tools that identify optimal posting times based on when your followers are most active.
Bonus: Still No Sales? Collaborate with Influencers to Get Traffic
If you've completed the steps above properly and are still struggling to land your first sale, there's a chance that you might have chosen a bad product.
However, don't give up just yet.
Before you throw in the towel and choose another product, run a small influencer campaign to drive traffic to your social media accounts and ecommerce store.
To start, identify some influencers in your niche with around 25k to 50k followers. Look for accounts that have a high amount of engagement, likes, and comments. If your product isn't too expensive, you can give samples to influencers in return for a shoutout on social media.
Then, use the template below to reach out and ask for a shoutout.
Hopefully, this will generate enough traffic and social proof to land your first sale!
Summary: Social Selling
Social selling is all about relationships. It enables you to develop strategic relationships on social networks, where you can gently lead potential customers to make a purchase.
To summarize, here are the steps you need to take to land your first sale with social selling:
- Set the foundations: Optimize your store and social media accounts for trust.
- Be transparent: Avoid appearing like an online scam by being personal and relatable.
- Create a compelling offer: Incentivize buyers to take a chance on your new store.
- Define your target market: Get clear on the customers that you want to connect with.
- Find potential customers: Use social listening to research and connect with your target market.
- Follow potential customers: Create lists of potential customers that you can engage with over time.
- Focus on relationships, not sales: Don't be pushy. People buy from people they like and trust.
- Give before you get: Find ways to contribute value to your target market.
- Connect with your potential customers: Connect, engage, and build rapport with people in your target market.
- Deepen relationships: Continue to deepen and nurture relationships by providing value.
- Leverage technology: Use automation tools and AI assistants to work more efficiently.
Social Selling FAQ
What Is Social Selling?
Social selling is when you use social media to find and engage with potential customers directly. Ecommerce entrepreneurs can nurture customer relationships by providing value and being authentic, gently nudging people to make purchases as opposed to serving ads or selling aggressively.
Is Social Selling Effective?
Social Selling can be a very effective way to connect with the right customers and create lasting buyer relationships. Many salespeople who use social selling tactics outsell their competition, and many businesses consider relationships the bedrock of their success. Many social media users even welcome interactions with businesses they’re interested in.
What Makes Social Selling So Effective?
Social selling stands out as a chance to speak one-on-one with people in your target market and connect authentically and on a deeper level. As opposed to anonymous advertising and other tactics to cast a wider net, social selling converts potential advocates one at a time, helping you grow your brand’s community of returning, happy customers.
What Technologies Can You Use for Social Selling?
Smart entrepreneurs leverage technology to streamline their workflow and maximize results, including AI-powered chat assistants for handling common questions around the clock, platform integrations to link social accounts to online store backends, and content planning software to schedule outreach in advance that works better for the people receiving the messaging.
What Are the Key Steps to Social Selling?
Social selling can be quite personal, but you can follow this basic playbook for making your first sales:
- Optimize your store and social media accounts for trust.
- Avoid appearing like an online scam by being personal and relatable.
- Incentivize buyers to take a chance on your new store.
- Get clear on the customers that you want to connect with.
- Use social listening to research and connect with your target market.
- Create lists of potential customers that you can engage with over time.
- Don't be pushy. People buy from people they like and trust.
- Find ways to contribute value to your target market.
- Connect, engage, and build rapport with people in your target market.
- Continue to deepen and nurture relationships by providing value.
- Use automation tools and AI assistants to work more efficiently.