The first CIM/NBS Marketing Club Event of 2020 - Social Selling

Marketing students and professionals came together for a workshop with Simon Badman, a partner and trainer at SocialB for the last 7 years. Simon is a specialist in coaching organisations of all sizes and business models from non-profit to large corporations and he used all his skills to educate and engage with us throughout the workshop.

Marketing students and professionals alike met with food and drinks to network and socialise together before our host Simon started the workshop. Simon began by involving us in the workshop by asking what we thought social selling was. We replied using a hashtag #cimsocialsell and Simon used this to show that we were all uninformed on the topic at hand. He then went on to contrast social selling verses traditional selling, highlighting the key feature of social selling as building a two-way relationship with your consumer.

We were then taken through examples of analytics tools such as Google analytics, Facebook insights and Twitter analytics as Simon highlighted the importance of consumers as consultants for the company through research and innovative suggestions. We were once again invited to give our thoughts by tweeting again, this time to share our social selling plan. We were tasked with creating this plan based on any product we could think of, there was even a mention of Pink Ponies!

Simon then took us through advertising through social media platforms, highlighting some successful examples and different approaches such as Aldi’s “one page” Instagram design. Rather humorously we also explored some less successful campaigns, notably British Airways reposting a Virgin holidays city break deal, not recommended for any social media account managers out there.

Overall Simon engaged everyone brilliantly in the room and provided a scintillating educational experience for every attendee. Feedback was overwhelmingly positive and rightly so. As well as learning from Simon he also provided an excellent sense of humour to keep everyone engaged and entertained. We look forward to seeing many of the attendees from this event at the next event coming soon.

By-line: Michael Holloway, UEA