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The traditional transactional sales model is no longer appealing to modern day consumers. The modern day consumer wants to feel seen, heard and acknowledged. Some don't even want to interact with sales and avoid cold emails that haven't been personalized.
To help modern sales teams build relationships with customers, a social sales strategy has become increasingly important in B2B. Social selling is a lead generation strategy that involves social media marketing. It evolves around a strong personal brand and focus on building relationships. It helps the modern day seller adapt to the change in modern day consumer behavior and move away from a transactional relationship with their customer in order to form a long term business relationship with them. In this blog post, we share five examples of social media outreach strategies and their best practices.
Looking to streamline your social media outreach efforts? folk CRM helps you manage contacts, automate follow-ups, and track engagement, all from a single platform.
What is social media outreach?
Social media outreach is the process of using social media platforms to engage with potential clients, partners, or influencers to build relationships, increase visibility, and drive business growth.
Social media outreach involves reaching out to individuals or groups on platforms with personalized messages to foster meaningful connections. It’s a key strategy for growing your network, increasing brand awareness, and driving engagement by targeting the right audience in a direct, authentic manner. Whether through direct messages, comments, or shares, the goal is to create valuable interactions that contribute to long-term business success.
Which social media strategy is ideal for you? Take the test!
5 outreach strategy examples
Your social media outreach strategy plays a crucial role in your ability to adapt to the change in modern day consumer behavior. Below are five examples of social media outreach strategies you should consider for your marketing campaigns.
1. Influencer collaboration
Influencer collaboration is a strategic partnership where brands work with individuals who have a significant following on social media platforms to promote their products, services, or brand message. These influencers can range from celebrities and well-known public figures to niche content creators and micro-influencers. Making it more of a community outreach strategy. Partnering with influencers who align with your brand can help you reach a wider and more targeted audience.
There are a few types of influencer collaborations including:
- Sponsored posts: This is where brands pay influencers to create and share posts featuring their products or services. It helps brands reach a higher and more target audience while giving them credible endorsement.
- Product reviews: This is where influencers review your product, sharing authentic feedback to their audience helping your brand build trust. An example could be a well known tech figure reviewing your SaaS product and posting a detailed review on YouTube.
- Affiliate marketing: This is where influencers promote products and earn a commission on sales generated through their unique affiliate links. It's performance-based, can help you scale and has a measurable ROI. An example could be you giving a trackable link to a well known figure in your industry. They'll get a small commission whenever someone from their audience signs up using that link.
- Brand ambassadors: This is in the form of a long-term partnership with an influencer who represents your brand over an extended period of time instead of a one-off post.
- Social media takeovers: This is where someone temporarily takes over a brand's social media account to create and share agreed content. It's more of a cross-promotion and increases engagement.
Working with influencers has proven to be a great outreach marketing strategy. In fact, 70% of Youtube users have made a purchase from a brand after seeing a product video.
2. User generated content (UGC)
User generated content is unpaid or unsponsored content your customers create related to your brand. According to Sprout, this means it's real, authentic and good for your credibility.
There are a few types of UGC including:
- Customer reviews and testimonials: This is when a customer showcases their love for your brand through their posts and stories.
- Photos: This is when a customer posts a photo of your product to their audience.
- Videos: This is when your customer posts videos about your product or service.
- Blogs: This is when a customer shares their experience about your product or service in their blog.
- Comments: This is when you take a screenshot of a customer's comment about your product or service
UGC is a great way to stay front of mind and is a space for your brand to get original content. But don't forget to ask permission and credit the creators.
3. Creating reports with original statistics
Original research positions your brand as an authority in your industry. It's also a great way to engage with existing and potential customers.
Although it might require a few tweaks in the messaging, you can easily repurpose the content you get from original research to gear it towards the right communication channel. This means one piece of content can benefit your LinkedIn outreach and email outreach campaigns, as well as sales outreach.
You can easily generate leads by offering the full report in exchange for contact information (such as email addresses) and use the data as a basis to follow-up. This can have a more positive impact than a cold outreach such as a cold email or cold calling because the content is already more targeted towards your ideal customer.
4. Host webinars
Hosting webinars or online workshops is a great way to increase your engagement and reach across different channels. The sign up process is a great boost for outreach efforts as the right topic already helps you appeal to a potential customer. You can then capture their information in the sign up process and use this to create an email outreach campaign after the webinar to follow-up. Bonus points if you invite industry experts to co-host as a guest speaker. This builds your brand's authority and trust.
5. Personalized email marketing campaigns
Once you've captured the contact information from the regular engagement you get on a channel, you can create a contact list in your CRM to tailor your email content to this audience segment based on their interactions with your content. The insight you get from the way someone interacts with your content is a great way to personalize your email outreach. But pay attention to your subject line – Gartner reported that B2B consumers are more likely to mark your email as spam based on subject line alone. Proving that having the right email subject line is crucial.
What are the key aspects of an outreach marketing strategy?
Social media outreach strategies are crucial for engaging with your audience, building brand awareness, and growing your community. Below are some key aspects you need to know to build effective outreach strategies.
- Engagement: Social media outreach doesn't work if you don't interact with your audience. This means responding to comments, mentions from users, messages, interacting with other people in your community and more.
- Content sharing: It's not enough to just post something generated by AI – your content needs to have substance in order to help you build brand authority and trust. The key here is posting original content that resonates with your audience. This could be statistics from a survey, or thought leadership on a trending topic.
- Knowing your campaign objectives: You can't build an effective outreach strategy without measuring its impact. Before the start of your social campaigns, make sure you understand its goals and the metrics you need to review.
As you build your own outreach plan, don't forget to pay attention to the social selling trends of 2024.
Benefits of social media outreach campaign
Even though crafting your outreach marketing campaign can be time consuming, it can be rewarding. A strong outreach program can help you:
- Increase brand awareness: By expanding your reach and making more people aware of your brand.
- Increase engagement: By encouraging more interactions with your content, community and industry.
- Build better customer relationships: By helping you build stronger, more personal connections with your audience.
- Improve customer insights: More interactions with your audience naturally leads to valuable feedback and insights.
- Increase conversion rates: By driving more traffic to your website or product pages, potentially leading to increased sales.
How to measure your outreach program efforts
To make sure you're on the right track to reach your outreach goals, don't forget to keep an eye on the right metrics so you know what's going well and what needs improving. The metrics you look at will depend on your particular social media channel and outreach goals.
Below are some common metrics you should know.
- Comments: This is a great reflection on the level of interaction and engagement your content generates.
- Reach: This is the number of unique users who see your content. It measures the breadth of your audience exposure.
- Impressions: This is the total number of times your content is displayed. It indicates how often your content is being shown in someone's newsfeed.
- Follower count/demographic: Your follower count tracks the growth of your audience over time, and the demographic helps tailor your content to suit your audience.
- Click Through Rate (CTR): This is the percentage of people who click your links compared to the number of impressions. It indicates the effectiveness of your content in driving traffic.
- Conversion rate: This is the percentage of social media interactions that resulted in a desired action such as a sign-up or purchase.
If you're just getting started with your social media outreach, you can't expect results right away. The key is to know your industry standard, stay consistent and review your social performance over an ample time frame. This is usually three months.
Conclusion
Implementing effective social media outreach strategies can significantly enhance your B2B marketing efforts by helping you build stronger connections, increase brand awareness and dive engagement with the right people. But it's important to have clear goals. By leveraging these 5 strategies, you can create strong relationships with existing and potential customers. As you refine your outreach efforts, remember to monitor key metrics to assess performance and adapt your strategies to meet the evolving needs of your audience.
More resources
- 20 social selling statistics for 2024
- How to leverage social selling on LinkedIn to drive new business
- 3 easy ways to download LinkedIn contacts and build your own CRM system
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