You may be asking yourself, what is social selling? Is it a meaningful process that will actually help your brand? Social Selling for food and beverage brands is a valuable process that allows you to make use of your social media channels to connect and interact with audiences who meet your customer profile, and who are interested in your products.

1. Food and Beverage Brands are competing in a
market that is constantly changing – if your
brand isn’t ready to get involved and make an
impact, your product could end up falling aside
in favour of a better promoted one.
Social Selling is one technique that your brand
can use to reach people who are going to be
interested in your product and make those
all-important connections.
Social Selling and
Your F&B Brand –
What You Need to Know

2. Simply defined – if you’re interacting with
your customers on social media, you’re
engaging in social selling.
It 's a process that lets you cultivate and
expand your relationship with your
audience – turning them from interested
visitors into paying customers.
It’s different from Social Media Marketing
in that the point of the plan is to
specifically garner sales. Social Media
Management looks at your company
image, expanding your brand identity and
awareness – Social Media Management
focuses on customers, Social Selling
focuses on getting sales from those
customers.
You need both marketing streams to be
optimised and working together to really
get ahead of your competition.
What is Social Selling?

3. What Are the Benefits of Social
Selling to Your Brand?
Many Food and Beverage brands market their
products on two fronts – directly to paying
customers, and to other businesses who are
interested in stocking and reselling their
goods.
Social Selling allows you to target both these
groups. You need to have different strategies
in place for dealing directly with customers
and with other businesses to effectively
market your brand and products.
Narrowing your focus to ensure you are
connecting with significant contacts with
optimal Social Media Marketing will then allow
Social Selling techniques to truly shine and
increase your sales.

4. Social selling isn’t about wasting time sending unfocused tweets and messages or
attempting to connect with everyone regardless of their interest in your products. It’s
about establishing who your target audience are, knowing where to find them – and then
getting involved with them in the most effective manner.
Understanding your audience has become a lot easier with Social Media giving you access
to their likes, dislikes, hobbies, interests, habits and general demographic. The social
platforms you use will largely depend on who you’re targeting, and what channels they
frequent.
How to Make Social Selling Work for
Your Brand Needs

5. To be successful with social selling, it is
essential that your brand is honest and
genuine – potential customers are put off by
people and organisations that appear to be
fake or are caught lying;
by not putting time and effort into building
up connections and affinity with your visitors,
you can do your business lasting damage –
and reputation is not as easy to build or
repair as it is to destroy.
It is important that you remember the ‘social’
part of social media – a brand that doesn’t
connect or seem to care about their friends
and followers will lose them.
What You Need to Know to Execute
Your Social Selling Strategy

6. When you have an optimised Social Selling
strategy in place, you must maintain it –
you can’t expect your customers to keep
coming back to you if you’re not giving
them reasons to do so.
Your social posts need to be regular, and
comments answered quickly. If you don’t
have this minimum level of consistency,
the time, effort and budget you’ve invested
into developing networks, cultivating
followers and friends, and establishing
business connections is going to be
wasted.
Taking the time to properly use your social
media networks will give your brand
increased visibility, a wider range of
customers – and more product sales.
If you invest in connecting with your
customers, they’ll invest in you.

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