social media | Jazzboo

Becoming a social selling ninja is all about making yourself more relevant with clients and prospects. It’s giving them what they need, when and where they want it.

To start down the path towards full ninja status, you need a strong sales blog filled with valuable content. Your blog should act as a repository of meaningful content so customers can evaluate your product, keep up-to-date on events and new releases, and find answers to questions on demand.

Once you have some good content up on your blog, it’s time to start talking it up. Add it to your email signature. Share it on our social networks. Mention it at the end of meetings as a supplemental resource prospects can visit. These are important steps to increase readership and engagement, but if you want to extend your reach and derive the full potential from your sales blog, you will also want to amplify your content through your preferred social channels, like LinkedIn or Twitter.

What is Amplification?

Short and sweet, amplification is the process of taking a positive interaction with your content and promoting it farther than its original reach. It can be as simple as retweeting a tweet, liking a post, or sharing a positive review. Or you can take it further with enhanced amplification techniques like promoting content on Facebook, starting a hashtag campaign, integrating trending content, embedding tweets on your site, or using an amplification service. Most successful amplification campaigns use a mix of the above actions to create a strong narrative across multiple platforms.

Why Use an Amplification Service?

To get the most out of your valuable content, working with a respected amplification service can help you measurably extend the reach of your tweet, post, or other good news. Hootsuite and Gaggle Amp are two established services with the capabilities to successfully amplify your Jazzboo content according to your objectives.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite gives you the ability to promote your blog and its content, helping to increase readership and lead generation. With Hootsuite, you can share your content on the social networks of your choosing. All you have to do is preload your profiles into the Hootsuite dashboard and you’re ready to go. You can also obtain analytics on the reach of any individual post and the performance of overall campaigns.

GaggleAMP

GaggleAMP has similar capabilities to Hootsuite, though it is more targeted towards large enterprises. GaggleAMP offers a robust dashboard and strong analytics options. But what is most unique about this service is their “gaggle” structure, a method of pooling your employees, customers, partners, and supporters so they can easily share your messaging through their respective social channels.

Whether you choose to amplify on your own or bring in the experts, getting your message out to the broadest audience in the forums they prefer is a key part of achieving the revered status of social selling ninja.

Guest Post by Anthony Lobosco, Cisco Systems

The cold call and follow-up email, a long-time weapon in the arsenal of a salesperson, is very inefficient at recruiting leads when compared to the more modern method of social selling. Instead of slamming my customers with emails about local events, product webinars, and Cisco resources, I have found it much more efficient to direct my leads to a one-stop, online spot for my customers to get company-related updates and information in the form of a high-powered sales blog.

This blog simplifies communication, giving me the ability to create more targeted email campaigns by including links to relevant content. It’s a great way to be proactive with clients and circumvent the “take me off your list” response. With a Jazzboo Sales Blog, I have a concrete reason to reach out via phone, rather than calling out of nowhere, giving me an in to discuss the email I just sent.

Now let me tell you why social selling works. While I may not be connected with every client on LinkedIn and Twitter, there are three clear benefits to reaching out via social.

I can invite clients to connect through social channels. It’s less aggressive and I’m more likely to get a platform to communicate with them then through a cold all.
It increases my thought leadership and relevance to the folks with whom I am connected (partners, clients, former clients, etc.)
The best part – these connections create a ripple effect where my messaging reaches people I didn’t directly intend to contact.

So is the cold call dead? No, but with so many better options through social selling, it might be needing life support pretty soon.