Every day numerous articles are written in social media blogs, where their authors try to explain why companies should not focus on sales, when they carry out communication and marketing actions in social networks. It seems that all social media professionals are defensive when asked about the impact on sales, that the actions on social networks will be obtained.
Some authors are very orderly in their presentations about the process of social media strategies, but even so they do not make clear the process that will be used to achieve conversions (sales). You can see the article”Strategies in social media do not work” by Tristan Elosegui where, despite the clearness of the content, the point of sales is explained well above, without taking the bull by the horns.
Whether people talk about our products or ask for them to generate sales is not enough for companies today. We must be clearer at that point. A formula could be the use of “content advertising” as the fundamental process to achieve conversions in social networks. There are other methods, but all of them focus on being useful or improving experiences.
Before defining any sales process on social networks, it is necessary that the members of our online community have been correctly chosen. The profile of the members we want in our community will depend on the objectives initially set and these may be: demand generation (sales), brand development, supply improvement (objective market study), customer service or management of talent. In any of these cases, the people we need to interact with will not be the same. If we are wrong at this point and for example choose as a community member a profile for brand development, the sales process will not work.
It is clear that smaller companies are focused on increasing their sales and for this we need to build a community to generate demand. From here, we can propose a sales process and for this it is necessary to determine the experience that we are going to improve those that will help us generate demand (community) and the structure of the contents.
To finish I’ll leave you a brief example, a company selling food and pet grooming products, decides to use social networks to increase their sales. The goal is clear, so we should not go around the bush. The fact that they talk about the brand or its products will not help improve sales. The proposed process should be as follows. We need to improve the experience of the members of the chosen community. For this we will generate two types of content, one focused on generating demand (content advertising) and another that helps improve the experience only. The first will be about care in the feeding of pets and grooming (at birth, in the first months, when they recover from diseases, antiparasitic, regular cleaning, etc).
As we have seen in the example, the contents to generate demand are focused on awakening the desire of the owners, to feed and properly clean (or as professionals say) their pets. Effectively I have not explained the process of creating the community necessary for these purposes, but that is a different process where the factors that define the strategy of an online community and the way to involve members in it are analyzed.