World Islamic Economic Forum (WIEF) Foundation, through its WIEF Businesswomen Network (WBN), successfully held the WIEF #iEmPOWER series workshop on 25 March 2021 at 11:00 am, entitled ‘Developing a Digital Mind Map for Selling’. 56 participants from eight countries attended the event, held via Zoom platform. The event was also broadcasted live in WIEF Foundation Facebook page.
Trainer, Andrea Chow, founder of Global Circles Academy, started the session with an introduction of online selling and the relation with human brain activities. ‘In a traditional business, owners pay attention to different queues, such as ambient, architectural and artefactual elements to attract customers. The utilisation of music, smell and a good sales person will make a huge difference in sales numbers.’ Andrea added, ‘the question is, how do you bring all this into online business?’
Andrea encourages business owners to pay attention to social proofing their businesses, by paying attention to reviews, testimonies and recommendations, as they will increase the credibility of a business or service provider, online. ‘There are many ways to collect recommendations. Business owners need to be creative in getting positive recommendations, by experimenting with all kinds of formats such as video, voice or text format.’ Andrea advised.
The term social selling has become popular in the past three years, with books and articles written about the subject. It basically means creating contents in social media platforms, for free. Contents need to be short and precise. Andrea advises business owners to divide their content into small bite size portions, for customers to digest faster and ultimately making it easier for them to decide on buying. Apart from that, business owners need to create a sense of urgency, without appearing pushy.
The 80:20 rule in marketing indicates that it takes 80 per cent of a company’s marketing budget to attract new customer, as oppose to only 20 per cent of the same budget to turn a first-time customer into a serial buyer. With the abundance of relevant complimentary applications, expanding a business is effortless and faster.
A participant, Santi Puspayanti from Indonesia said, ‘the webinar was very interesting and useful, especially the part when Andrea touched about ways to connect new leads with social media and online platforms.’
A question and answer session at the end of the one-hour webinar allowed participants to get answers to matters related to their online businesses.
Andrea Answers Some Questions
How to get started with virtual selling?
Start by creating small little nuggets of content to educate customers about your products and services. Then, choose the e-platform on which you want to sell such as Facebook.
How do you get customers to buy without seeming to be pushing your products?
Through education-based selling that communicates to customers on what your products can do for them and make their life better.
How to target the right market through posts on social media?
Understand your customer segmentation and that includes their habits, what they like, income level, marital status, rural or city folk. Only then will you be able to predict what they want and where they congregate online, to be able to exploit the platform to sell your product at optimum level.
Is it effective to use an influencer on social media to market your product or stick to direct message such as email?
There are not many people checking emails constantly. It’s best to have multiple ways of connecting to customers.
How to keep up to date on the changing algorithms of social media such as hashtags?
It’s constant work. There are no shortcuts. Which means, you need to be on your toes and keep checking on what’s happening on social media in terms of hashtags, trends and more. So, while online platforms save quote a bit of marketing cost, it requires a lot of investment in terms of time.
What is the selling strategy of the bias market during this pandemic?
It’s a dialogue and conversation of two different parties in one particular process. It’s where someone is going to give away your money in exchange for a solution when you talk about bias market.
How to market products to a country facing an economic downfall?
Find that niche market that’s able to afford you.
For more information, contact Faizah Jaafar at +6019 399 7746 (faizah@wief.org) or follow WIEF Foundation on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter for regular updates on future events and happenings. Visit us at www.wief.org.