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Selling from the Page Is the New Social Media Marketing Behavior

Guest post by: Leanne Hoagland-Smith

Article Overview: Most people do not like to be sold from the stage. Yet social media has redefined selling from the stage to selling from the page.

Selling from the Page Is the New Social Media Marketing Behavior

One of the most fatal marketing mistakes to make is to sell from the state. Small business owners, professional salespersons, entrepreneurs to C Level executives have experienced this faux pas if not at least one time to dozen of times.

For example, you attend a conference or similar event and in many cases you have exchanged your profits or your disposable income with the hope or better yet the goal to walk away with:

• New way to think
• An idea to increase sales
• Strategy to improve productivity

You sit in your comfortable or probably more uncomfortable seat to listen to what you believe are some gems of wisdom to take you from where you are now to where you want to be. Suddenly your ears pick up and you hear the last thing you want to hear that dreaded sales pitch.

Now sometimes this fatal marketing faux pas comes half way through the presentation or at the end. Regardless of where this appeal is made, your eyebrows and possibly even hackles have been raised. What then happens is you become suspicious of all future events even those offered by different organizations or individuals because no one wants to be sold from the stage.

Now with the expansion of social media this poisoned marketing action has now evolved to selling from the page. Read the Tweets, Facebook wall writing or LinkedIn discussion posts and instantly any small business owner, salesperson, entrepreneur or C Level executive can quickly see the plethora of selling from the page. Many of those engaged in this first phase of the sales process where they attempt to gain attention and to build the relationship just skip right over it. They immediately jump into spewing the 3Ps virus of product, price or proposal or what Jeb Blount in his book People Buy You as pump and dump.

Individuals who do deliver such messages are engaged in the traditional sales or product based marketing instead of education based. Their goal is not to educate and create value, but rather to overwhelm their potential customers (a.k.a. prospects) with what they know about their products or services. In many cases, these salesperson disguised as marketers are truly clueless about the value their products or services deliver.

So how does one determine if someone is selling from the page or not? One way is to see if the URL within the message takes you to a squeeze page where you are immediately asked to buy something. This page may be a very long and well-written sales letter.

Another way to determine is if you go to the page, attempt to leave and then receive a message are you sure you want to leave? If the words (copy) on the page truly provided value, why must there be such a message?

Many authentic salespersons will write articles, leave thoughtful words such as the quotes of others or even pose a great discussion questions. Their goal is to share and educate not to sell. By proving their expertise by not selling, they have enhanced their credibility and have begun to build that necessary relationship.

Social media may have changed the marketing platform, but this one thing does not change. People will buy from people they know and trust.

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Article Tags: education based marketing, media marketing, selling from the stage, social media



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