Personal selling gets modern with Social Media

There was a time when personal selling through sales person and cold calls were the money-spinning tricks of the day. However, they lost their charm mid-way. People were annoyed with constant nagging and insistence on how we need a product or service and how they can get it to us at half price.

Fast forward to 21^st century! Enter Facebook, Twitter, Blogs and Forums, and marketing as we knew it changed for ever (and for good too!). No one first anticipated the power social media would hold as a business driver, but modern marketing is testament to the fact that social media is as indispensible to sales leads as water is to plants. It is inarguably the best way for a brand to reach out to a set of people and engage with them in way that a conversation develops between them. It is this conversation, the voluntarily inflicted affiliation to a brand, which causes prospects to turn into customers, without the brand coming across a pushy and annoying.

Opting for social media marketing is a four-step process: Getting attention, Igniting interest, creating desire and inflicting action. Benefits, however, are three fold. One, their capital investment in the channel is practically nil. The only investment social media marketing calls for is that of time. Two, the choice of platform makes them comes across as anything but annoying like a sales person. This is because social media, by some stroke genius, is home to more than 60% of world population.  This means that people love being on social media, particularly networking sites, and find interactions on the same as more meaningful and appealing. Lastly, social media facilitates brand advocacy. This is best explained by considering that you are a brand with an active fan base, and interact with your audiences on a regular basis through a Facebook page, Twitter account or Blog. When audiences are proactively interacting, it signals that they like the brand, enjoy talking about it, and are genuinely interested in what it has to offer. When audiences start filtering brand’s identity in candied overtones, they are more inclined to refer the brand to someone else, and these people, on having similar experiences, are likely to set off the cycle again. It’s like word of mouth; only digitized.

So, bottom line remains that social media marketing, perhaps coined with a little dose of search engine optimization and PPC advertising, is the best way to reach out to you audiences and convert them into customers. Cold calls are better left to the 90s.