4 Tips to Digitally Transform Your Business

Is your business digitally up to date? If your answer is no, or, more likely ‘what exactly does digitally up to date mean?’, you’re already behind. It’s time to rummage through that drawer marked ‘Technological Things That Seem Too Hard So We’ve Just Ignored Them’ and change the way you do business. Luckily for you, there are four simple things you can implement right now that will transform your business digitally – making life easier for you and your employees and, most importantly, making you more competitive. 

Social Selling

The key to boosting your business is sell, sell, sell, right? Even on social media? Wrong. 

If your social media marketing strategy involves a spray-and-pray approach such as randomly sharing a recent marketing initiative to Facebook whenever your admin team gets a moment to spare, you’re missing a golden opportunity (that your more digitally savvy competitors aren’t). That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use social media for marketing. Done right, social selling is a lead generation system that will boost your social media marketing efforts, replace cold calling, and can even reduce your advertising spend. It tells those who need to know: What you’re good at, why you’re the authority on it and gives you greater exposure to the right audience. 

But wait – isn’t social selling the same thing as social media marketing? What about social media advertising? Wrong again. Social selling is neither a sales pitch nor a paid marketing strategy. It’s also not forcing employees to ‘like and share’ all company posts which is at best easily ignored, or at worst, ultimately breaks rapport with audiences.  Instead, it’s a way to zero in on potential business by generating leads with a carefully curated target audience you build over time – organically. 

Hot take: 78% of businesses that use social selling OUTSELL those that don’t.

LinkedIn, for example, is a powerful professional tool designed to help you make connections and prove your thought leadership by sharing your knowledge and engaging with a like-minded community. Keyword: Engaging. Rather than just another way to make a sleazy sales pitch, LinkedIn is all about building relationships, establishing rapport, and bringing your business’s solution to the people who can benefit from it. 

Still confused? Here are the dos and don’ts of social selling: 

Don’ts of social selling: 

• Bombard people with unsolicited messages. That’s spam. Everyone hates that.
• Add anyone and everyone to your contacts. Also spam. A waste of your time and theirs.
• Be inconsistent, post nothing but generalized content, or ‘set it and forget it’. 
• Create a fake persona (95% of B2B buyers want to interact specifically with the person responsible for the thought leadership they’ve read on your social media profiles).

Do’s of social selling: 

• Be strategic about your connections and who you target.
• Offer genuine insights, knowledge, and information to those who will benefit.
• Build rapport by being non-salesy and instead be helpful and informative. 
• Present your brand as a solution to a problem and outline how you can solve that problem.
• Share conversation-starting content and ENGAGE with your audience when they interact with it. 

Social selling IS the new selling. The majority of your buyers are already more than halfway to their buying decision before they get in touch with you. And LinkedIn, for B2B professionals especially is the right place to build your case for your expertise. If your brand isn’t social selling and your competitors are, that decision is going to be made in their favor – not yours. 

Content Management Systems such as HubSpot, WordPress, and Mailchimp 

Another day of posting social content, another day of squeezing it in before you head out the door. Sharing your carefully curated social media marketing strategy is time-consuming, it can be the exhausting end of completing a content project and it’s can end up being the last thing on your mind when you’ve got a million things to do. But it needn’t be. 

Did you know that there are CMS platforms that allow you to schedule your social content ahead of time? That’s right. No more last-minute posting of that blog article to LinkedIn. No more forgetting to send out that newsletter to your mailing list and missing the deadline for a promotion you’re offering.  Simply make a content marketing plan, figure out the best time to schedule (there are tools for that too!) and BADA BING – your handy CMS will send off that blog article, LinkedIn post, or email for you at the designated time. With tools like HubSpot, WordPress, and Mailchimp, you can schedule your content days, weeks, or months in advance. 

Pro tip: Remember, don’t set and forget your social content.

Sending a beautifully worded post to the world is one thing. But it’s all for naught if you’re not reading the comments and getting involved in the conversation.

Boost your social media presence and simplify your social media marketing strategy with these three CMS platforms today. Don’t know where to start? Don’t even HAVE a social media marketing strategy? You need some help from Little Bird Marketing. But more about that later. 

Communications 

On average, how often do you get a call from an employee that doesn’t have the document they need to complete the project they’re working on? If you’re not already using the latest in communications tools, the answer is probably, more often than not. Thankfully, there are tools for that too! 

We know this is what your mini celebration looks like.

With the likes of Google Suite, Zoom, Trello, Dropbox and Slack, you can interact in real-time with team members in your meetings to share a document, keep a list of handy files for future reference, or instant message the answers to questions as they pop up. These communications tools take the running-around-like-a-chicken-with-it’s-head-cut-off out of sharing information with your team. Nice. 

Project Management Systems 

Taking communications one (giant) step further are project management systems like Trello and Monday.com. These digital systems allow you and your team to access projects, files, data, and deadlines while tapping into conversations from anywhere. No more hard-cover binders left on the bus. 

Say goodbye to ‘the dog ate my homework excuse.
Sayonara to the ‘just let me find the right document’ shuffle. 

Digital tools like Trello allow you to:

• Assign projects to appropriate team members
• Set deadlines and those all-important reminders
• Share documents and information for quick access 
• Upload content for projects and share links to outside sources like Google Docs, Zoom meeting links, and more
• Keep remote workers tuned in to the projects they’re working on, from anywhere 

These four tips will digitally transform your business – and your life. That’s not hyperbole. With these tools, you’ll save time, streamline workflow, increase productivity, and lighten your bag once you’ve ditched that old-school planner. But there’s so much more! Digital transformation of your business means super-charging your marketing efforts, broadening your reach, enhancing your brand’s profile and authority, and increasing sales. 

What are you waiting for? If you haven’t incorporated even one of the tools we’ve mentioned into your business, it’s time to jump online and get started. We create and execute marketing plans that are strategic, organized, accountable, and repeatable. 

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