February 13, 2024 by Emily Hauber, C&SM Vice President
Sales & Marketing’s Joint Venture into Social Media Dominance
While it may feel like there is a stigma of sales and marketing’s struggle to work together, that traditional line separating these two forces has become blended in the digital world we live in today.
The sales team can physically visit a prospect and obtain real-time feedback.
The marketing department can create the research and strategy for those sales interactions.
Now, more importantly than ever, the digital world has changed the way we do business. Every cultural shift has been predicated on communication. Efficient business communication has recently shifted to social media channels and personal branding. Now is the time for sales and marketing to put away their differences and focus on how they can work together to reach even more people in a digital world.
If you can create value for a particular audience (think customers, prospects, or potential employees), the digital world is a way to reach those thousands or millions of people within seconds. In the past, the major media networks and agencies dictated what was shown on television, the radio and newspapers. They told us what television shows were going to air and who was the next hottest musician. Now anyone with talent or a vision can create a following of their own and can become known without signing with an agency or spending an arm and leg to get that 30 second Superbowl ad.
Navigating the digital world
The digital world has become the land of opportunities. To create those opportunities, it takes commitment and focus. In business, if you are not willing to adapt to how the world is changing, eventually you could become irrelevant.
The fastest way to adapt is to start producing content especially on platforms such as LinkedIn, aimed to help business professionals. LinkedIn started as a place for job seekers but it too evolved.
LinkedIn has gone from people posting resumes and connecting with professionals already in their network to now people have started reaching out and connecting with others that they do not know and has become a faster way to meet and connect with more new people.
A marathon, not a sprint
Everyone knows that if you want to have six-pack abs, it takes commitment and focus from the gym and to the kitchen. More importantly, we know that following this philosophy for one day, or one week, does not show immediate results. If you put all of your focus into the gym and fail to eat appropriately, it just slows down your progress.
The same goes for using LinkedIn as a sales and marketing tool. Staying committed and patient to both the gym and kitchen is just as essential for a successful branding campaign online. Creating a strategy and framework for communicating a message (marketing), and executing on the delivery of the message to the right people at the right time (sales).
The first steps to a successful marathon
Understand yourself
There are so many people out there that are working a job they are not passionate about. In today’s society, if you do not love your job, of course it is going to be hard to stay committed and put in the time that is necessary for success. Start with understanding yourself and find something you are passionate for. Self-awareness is the foundation to future success.
Put in the time and the work
If you are not producing content around yourself and your business you are vulnerable. By being vulnerable, you could lose the leverage of your market while another person in a similar space will produce content and will continue to gain leverage with their brand. It is that simple. There are no shortcuts. Put in the time to understand your audience’s needs and reverse engineer your process so that all of your content brings value to those particular audience’s needs.
Go All In
The current organic reach on LinkedIn has been compared to what Facebook’s reach was several years ago. Now that Facebook is a mature platform, the cost and organic reach has declined. It is time to go all in on a platform that is evolving around user experience such as with LinkedIn. We all know the importance of what Facebook’s reach created during its prime. Now is the time to go all in on LinkedIn content whether is it the written word, audio, video, graphics, etc.
Learn and make mistakes
By going all in, you have to understand that you will make mistakes, but it is important to not be paralyzed by them. Trying to make the perfect piece of content every time is unrealistic. Everything happens for a reason. There are things in life you can control and there are things you can’t. If you really want to make something happen, then you find the time to make it happen. The sooner you realize that there is no such thing as a perfect piece of content, the better you will be.
Hold yourself and your team accountable
Building your brand online is not a one-time, one-project act. It is the sum of all of the marketing you do for your business, all of the interactions your business has with anyone day-in and day-out. In order to maximize your exposure, holding yourself, and your team accountable to taking action, on a consistent basis is key. Keeping a tight rein on producing content consistently, is valuable to your brand recognition in the long-run.
It takes a team
A lot of people will not like the process it takes to be noticed online, by the right people, because there are no short cuts. Creating opportunities for yourself and your business in the mass digital age is a complete marathon. The recipe in creating any great marathon runner is training and most importantly, support. The gym has to be supported in the kitchen. Sales has to be supported by marketing. It takes a perfect blend. Create the marketing strategy, and allow sales to execute it.
Marketing and sales and traditionally have a stigma of competing with each other to get the same results. Who gets credit for the big sale? Was it marketing’s strategic content that drew them in or was it the in-person relationship that was built by the sale’s representative. Instead of battling against one another, it is more important to utilize each other’s strengths.
With this cultural shift to the digital world, there are billions of messages being thrown at our ideal prospects and the only way to be heard is to come together to use the quick sales feedback AND the market research to come up with a strategic branding campaign that benefits both sales and marketing. There is only one way to make a statement and to be heard above the noise, and that takes teamwork, patience, and one cohesive unit.
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