AI plays an important role in social selling. Discover the details of social selling and all it’s components.
Many brands often confuse digital selling with social selling. To understand the difference between the two, look at the bigger picture.
A detailed digital selling strategy brings together digital tools, social platforms, and various communication channels and techniques for boosting sales. Social selling is part of your digital selling plan.
A digital selling strategy allows you to identify customer needs, problems, and expectations. It helps you build a well-rounded digital presence and provide customers with on-brand and consistent experiences.
Before you start building your digital selling strategy, here are a few essentials to keep in mind.
- Create an Optimized Digital Sales Funnel
That term describes customer journeys from the awareness stage to the point of purchase.
Say you are a B2B business selling CPR manikins. Most of your customers google “cpr manikins” and click on your website. They check your offer, reviews, and price ranges and compare them with other brands. They also use multiple channels to consume your content and communicate with your brand. Finally, they decide whether they will purchase from you.
Analyzing and designing your company’s sales funnel is crucial for building a successful digital selling strategy. It tells you how your target customers interact with your brand and make shopping decisions.
Now, moving prospects down your sale funnel includes multiple steps:
- Informing and engaging them
- Converting them into leads
- Finalizing a sale
- Keeping them engaged and encouraging them to come back
Digital sellers and marketers need to map customer journeys. Their main task is to keep a prospects’ attention through the sales funnel and boost brand awareness. Keeping customers aligned with your brand helps you build meaningful relationships and drive sales.
- Create Content that Aligns with your Sales Funnel
In 2021, customers do not expect one-size-fits-all content that states the features of the product. They want to know how your brand and product match their lifestyles and help them.
Statistics back me up on that. The average customer engages with 3-5 pieces of content before talking to a sales rep.
Therefore, the goal is to align your digital content with a customer’s position in your sales funnel. For starters, determine which content types resonate with each customer group.
For example, in the discovery phase, leads are still not interested in purchasing your products. Your goal is to grab their attention. That is where social ads, landing pages, infographics, and video content can help.
Next, in the consideration phase, a customer compares your product with other brands and decides whether it meets their needs. Your goal is to engage them via blog posts, social media content, webinars, email marketing campaigns, case studies, whitepapers, etc.
Finally, at the bottom of the sales funnel, a customer wants to convert. That is when you should offer testimonials, competitive comparisons, free trials, and promo codes to accelerate their decision-making process.
- Analyze Data to Make Informed Selling Decisions
In digital selling, there is no room for guesswork. You need to rely on actionable data. With digital analytics tools, evaluating the effectiveness of your digital selling campaigns has never been simpler.
Do not let this data sit useless on your servers. Use it to make informed digital selling decisions.
Invest in the Right Sales CRM Software
Sales analytics software analyzes your CRM data. It provides invaluable sales insights and forecasts your sales tactics’ future performance. The best thing about these tools is that they capture your sales and marketing data from multiple sources and centralize it under a single platform.
You can use these tools to gain visibility into your digital sales and marketing strategies, identify high- or under-performing products, and analyze customer communications.
Some of the most reliable sales CRM tools to use in your digital selling strategy are:
- HubSpot Sales Hub
- Xari
- InsightSquared
- Einstein Analytics
- ActiveCampaign
Rely on AI-Driven Predictive Analytics
With the rise of artificial intelligence and machine learning, this process is even simpler.
Over the past few years, predictive analytics has gained momentum in the world of digital marketing and sales. It uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to analyze large datasets. It relies on contextual, historical, and current sales and marketing data to predict future trends and events that would otherwise go unnoticed.
Machine learning and artificial intelligence reduce manual data entry and eliminate the risk of human error. Most importantly, it makes the digital selling process “smarter” and ensures more precise sales predictions.
Now, predictive analytics can boost your digital selling strategy in multiple ways. They optimize lead scoring, streamline the sales cycle, identify upselling and cross-selling opportunities, and provide timely insights into the sales process.
While these tools are often referred to as predictive sales analytics or predictive marketing analytics, they can be of great value for both teams.
Here are a few predictive analytics tools that will boost your digital sales strategy:
- XANT Playbooks helps sales teams build an efficient and closeable pipeline. It uses the Neuralytics AI platform to target the customers that are more likely to convert. Using data analytics, salespeople can engage each prospect in a personalized way. Most importantly, it syncs the data with your CRM tool.
- Crayon is an AI-driven system that analyzes data from multiple sources and provides predictions about what works and what does not. It also offers thorough insights into customer data and helps you understand customer preferences and industry trends.
- EverString is an AI solution for B2B companies. It is ideal for sales and marketing departments, helping them boost pipeline growth, expand to new markets, and close new customers. It offers a wide range of features, including AI demand generation, AI sales prospecting, AI intent, predictive scoring, and predictive demand generation.
Ready to Build a Digital Selling Strategy?
Any profitable digital selling strategy starts with solid research. You need to identify your customers and understand their needs, desires, problems, and purchasing behaviors.
Create a detailed online sales funnel and know what your customers want at each of its stages.
Finally, utilize data analytics to track the effectiveness of your digital selling strategy and optimize it.
That is the only way to engage your prospective buyers and transform them into paying customers.
What are your thoughts on digital selling? Is there anything you would like to add? Please, share your thoughts in the comments!
