Business Growth Blog

Online networking can open the door to countless opportunities. A single person, even someone you barely know, can change the trajectory of your career or life.

These 7 basic steps can help you launch an effective social media strategy to increase brand recognition, website visitors, and sales leads.

This story is a great showcase of how social media can lead directly to sales. My daughter, Kaylee, is 19 and owns a tattoo shop. She's also a teen mom with a 3-year-old daughter, Ari, so she has some good, interesting content to start with. Yesterday, she created a super awesome video on TikTok that blew up quickly to over 200K views. People were FREAKING OUT that she "gave" her daughter a tattoo. It generated a ton of comments.

Having a strong social media presence is essential for sales and marketing success. Infrequently sharing a couple of memes or blog articles won’t get the job done. It requires planning and commitment. Quite often, when working with new clients, we find this is a gap in their marketing efforts. Unreasonable expectations in the speed at which new social media marketing methods show results are also typical. In this article, I will share the ingredients that guide our social media planning strategy.

Many people have doubts about whether or not social media can help drive sales. They think that “their prospects” aren’t using it, that people don’t pay attention to things being posted there, or that it’s all about “what someone had for lunch.” The truth is that the Internet is full - almost too full - of awesome information. My daughter says that if it’s not on the Internet, it must not exist! She truly believes that.

Putting together a social media strategy that gets a return on investment can be a real challenge. With never-ending ideas and strategies out there, it may seem like every ‘expert’ you talk to has a different opinion.

While it’s difficult to say exactly what strategies will work best for you without understanding your business goals and objectives, there are 4 tactics I often see companies use that may be holding them back from their full potential. If they look familiar to you, start digging deeper into your strategy: you may need a course correction.

LinkedIn can be a powerful sales tool. But in order to get results, you have to use it consistently.

Create a New Sales Habit

If you’re in sales (or any job, really!) your day is already jam packed. How can you make time for LinkedIn?

Learning something new can be a drag at first. It takes time to learn new systems and develop new habits. It also takes a commitment to stay with it long enough to develop a level of proficiency that will get you a return on your investment.

So, to answer the question “How can you make time for LinkedIn?” -- you simply must schedule time to focus on it if you feel strongly enough about the ROI in the long run. And, just like anything else, it’ll get easier as you begin to incorporate it into your daily activities.

If you’re ready to jump in, here are six activities you can do to start creating good LinkedIn habits.

Take advantage of a great networking and relationship management tool, LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a very powerful tool when used correctly. But just “being” on LinkedIn is not enough. Having a profile on LinkedIn will get you about the same thing as going to a party and standing in the corner. Someone might come up to you, but you can’t expect any results. If you want to get results you have to learn to utilize the tool to interact and commit to doing it.

It’s undeniable that social media has risen in use in previous years, but is it really relevant to your business? The short answer is yes, social media is important in some way to every single business and target audience. But exactly how impactful can social media be for your business when considering your specific audience? Discover the most recent statistics across all user types before you invest time and money into your social media efforts.

Salespeople are swamped. They usually have all kinds of required quotas so management can track their progress -- phone calls, meetings, presentations, proposals, etc. The response I hear from salespeople is that they seriously do not have time to learn and use social media for sales.

However, top sellers do use LinkedIn -- and very successfully. According to a survey of over 3000 salespeople done by Jill Konrath, top sellers spend over six hours on LinkedIn per week.

That same six hours could potentially be 50-100 phone calls if you’re dialing for dollars. But on the flip side, it can easily take 50 phone calls to secure one appointment. (On a side note -- what’s your phone call to appointment ratio? Check out the comments Fresh Sales Strategies LinkedIn group question I started to hear what other salespeople have to say.)

So here’s the main question: Where should you be spending your time for maximum impact? Hitting the phones or networking on LinkedIn?