SocialMedia.org's Brands-Only Summit is an annual event featuring 16 peer-to-peer collaborative workshops, 12 how-to classes, 12 real-world case studies, 3 brilliant authors, and 2 amazing keynotes. To learn more, visit socialmedia.org/summit/. To download the slide presentation in this video, visit http://wom.us/1n58mAd. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- In his presentation, AutoTrader.com's Senior Product Manager of Social Media, Ryan Dickerson, teaches a class on how to use social media to drive sales online, at retail, and face-to-face. Ryan talks about how sales are a byproduct of a comprehensive social media strategy and how you can only start selling once you've established your brand in the social space. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Below is live coverage of this session: — Ryan: Some claim you can’t sell through social media. Obviously, this statement is far from true for every brand. — Ryan: Selling with social isn’t new. Remember “F-commerce stores?” Remember “In-Feed stores?” How about video annotations? Current idea is “Rich Pins” on Pinterest. — Ryan: Strategy and tact are everything when selling on social media. You need to listen, make clear goals, and measurable KPIs — these are all essential for any social sales strategy. — Ryan says to ask questions like, “What does success look like for your brand?” and “How will you measure those achievements?” and “When will you know if you’ve succeeded?” — Ryan: Sales are a byproduct of comprehensive social media strategy. You’ve got to have inspiration content, enabled analytics, community management, social listening, real-time engagement, social traffic and leads, for example. You cannot just start with selling. — Ryan: We need to leverage what’s available from the platforms. We don’t all have the budget for all the tools. Consider social advertising for your marketing mix or make user-generated reviews a cornerstone of your strategy. — Ryan: Leverage the basics. Marketers have a lot of tools at their disposal to boost and track social ROI. For example: meta tags, inbound traffic, UV attribution, rich content (pins, cards, videos), native platform analytics. — Ryan: Get friendly with your data. Know what to look for and how to show attribution from referral domains, session duration, site activity (i.e. add to cart/checkout, click events, shopper pairing). — Ryan: Social ads have come a long way. We now have better segmentation “clusters,” better attribution tools, 1st and 3rd party data integration, and industry demand for accountability. –- Ryan: User-generated content is your digital reputation. Rating and reviews drive sales and have now become synonymous with online shopping. — Some tactics for social media and retail sales: Know your social path to purchase, know that inspiration drives sales (engage with your compelling content), and use check-ins for an easy attribution tool (even though it might seem passé, this is extremely valuable data that we cannot ignore). — Ryan: Social incentives are not about the deal. It’s about driving brand awareness. Social incentive campaigns build stickiness and helps to drive brand awareness, gain deeper shopper insights, and build long-term attribution models. — Sales area long-tail game. You must put your due diligence it and do the foundational work. Leverage the basic industry tools (e.g. Twitter Cards, Rich Pins, YouTube Annotations, Google Analytics, and check-in data), know when your channel strengths lie, and be inspirational! — Ryan: Don’t be a brand who’s always asking for likes, loves, follows, and pins. Have tact. Maintain balance and trust to make sure your sales-focused content isn’t entirely too overt. Q & A: Q: How often do you meet with your sales leadership team to talk about performance? A: Ryan: We meet almost bi-weekly to keep them in the loop on our initiatives. Constant communication is key to stay ahead of industry trends. Q: How is your team linked with the sales team? A: Ryan says that he is the liaison between the groups, mainly because he can channel things out to his team. It is helpful to have one person to own the relationship between teams. Q: I am from a B2B company and struggle with lead generation from social media. How can we drive this and encourage our people to get more leads? Any tips or tricks? A: Ryan: The best advice is simply to make it easy for your people. Make it part of the process. Don’t make it difficult or tedious because if you do, they won’t do it.

• published: 14 May 2014
• views: 53