How To Develop A Social Selling Strategy
A successful strategy will help you plan out, launch, and grow your approach to social selling—here are the steps.
1. Choose What You Will Sell
Social selling can be used by any brand, but is a great choice for:
When selling your brand, remember to sell the fundamental components of your brand first. Take Duolingo, for example. This brand sells itself on TikTok by making tongue-in-cheek jokes and doing trends in their signature owl suit.
While many of their videos have nothing to do with language learning, they sell the brand as fun, approachable and relatable – all of which speak to their product.
By focusing on selling your brand, you avoid situations where you feel compelled to always put out advertising messages to cover every product and service you offer.
It also helps to create content pillars, 2-5 topics that you can consistently post about as part of your brand. You can read more about content pillars here.
2. Identify The Platforms You Will Use
Success with social selling requires a product-content-platform match.
For example, a beauty product might do well via Instagram, while a self-organizer guide with checklists might do well via Pinterest.
You can see how a fashion-focused brand like SKIMS thrives on Instagram, especially considering its founder Kim Kardashian is one of the most successful Instagram creators.
To pick the platform(s) that work for your brand, think about:
-
What suits your product or service;
-
What platforms do your core audience and ideal customers use;
-
How you can best showcase your offering; and
-
Your brand style.
This will often help you find your primary platform. From there, think about repurposing—for example, a video made for TikTok can often be reposted as both Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts.
3. Set Your Campaign Goals And Metrics
While social selling is about building your brand online, you’ll want to set some goals and that means having analytics set up.
Some of the metrics you’ll want to track include:
4. Find Influencer And Creator Partners
The right influencer partner can amplify your social selling efforts if they have a relevant audience and the content they share aligns with your product or service’s benefits.
To put it simply: It has to make sense for them to be promoting your products, or else their audience either won’t engage or might look negatively on your brand.
But with the right brand ambassadors, influencer marketing can take your brand to new heights (and new levels of revenue).
This is where tools like Influence can help. Not only does the platform help you find influencers but you can also manage communications, contracts, and payments in a single platform.
5. Plan And Launch Your Campaign
Planning and launching a social media campaign – or an influencer marketing campaign – takes work, but that work is always worth it.
First, identify how often you will share certain types of content from your content pillars AKA the different types of content you’ll focus on.
Second, finalize all collaborations with influencers. This might include:
-
Nailing down the core campaign message;
-
Adding supporting messages;
-
Finalizing content aesthetic; and
-
Identifying who is responsible for content creation and posting.
Once the content is ready, pick your launch date and go! Don’t forget to respond to comments, join conversations, and jump on Stories to stay top-of-mind beyond posting.
6. Review And Iterate
Social selling is an ongoing process of building relationships, growing brand awareness, and profiting off your results.
Just like any marketing strategy, it requires constant attention and adaptation. Regularly review your social selling tactics and tools to identify what’s bringing in the results you want and what needs improvement.
Of course, this is a simple overview of what can be a complex process. ’s award-winning Services team has the smarts to help you develop and scale your influencer marketing or social media program – learn more about Services here or book a call below.
