With the world population sitting at approximately eight billion and four billion of that population currently active on social media, there’s hardly a better place to sell your products. Work with a social media marketing and advertising expert today. Social media can be the bridge between your ecommerce business and matchless success.
It is not a coincidence that every big company in every big industry, including eCommerce, is actively using the power of social media marketing to help showcase products, improve website traffic, boost brand loyalty and increase sales. The statistics are just too enticing to miss.
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The thought of creating and managing social media pages for a business while running it at the same time might come off as frivolous, even hectic. However, there’s no denying that social media is unsurpassed as an avenue for reaching billions across the world, and for acquiring new leads.
E-commerce businesses that know how to utilize social platforms get the long end of the stick in terms of attracting new customers and building loyalty, which of course lead to increased conversion and sales.
Regardless of how large or small your e-commerce business may be, it’s important to have a good strategy in place and a goal to strive towards. On the other hand, knowing how to harness the power of social media will give your brand the headstart it needs to accomplish said objectives.
Here are a few tips on how.
1. Identify Your Audience
After laying out social media goals for your online store the next step is to get acquainted with your online audience. Being able to tell your target audience apart from random social media users is crucial as this will help you discover the best ways to capture their interest.
Social media becomes a highly effective tool once you’re able to identify your audience as this will assist you in steering them to your website and ultimately turn them into customers.
To connect with your target customers, these are some questions you need to ask yourself:
- Who are the ideal buyers for your product?
- What age range do the online customers belong to?
- Is your product intended for a specific gender?
- What is their income level?
The easiest way to narrow down your potential customers is by simply considering their interests, hobbies, and personal characteristics. Using this method as a guide will certainly make your social media approach all the more effective.
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Once you’re able to identify your potential customers, the next step is to choose a social media channel that can help stimulate business growth. While it’s all too easy to pick any option from the numerous social media channels available today, certain factors should influence your decision.
For instance, it’s quite obvious that Facebook is the leading social media platform. However, it’s not enough to go on size alone when deciding on where to build an online presence for your business. Many social media sites are huge but do not house your target audience.
The size of the platform can indeed be instrumental in reaching a wide pool of people. However, there’s no guarantee that you’ll find your target audience on that particular platform. That said, you might have to consider being on multiple channels and some other equally important factors before creating your company’s social media account, some of which are:
- Choosing a social media channel with the most people equals greater competition for customer attention.
- You need to have a certain level of certainty that the customers you’re in search of are in that specific social network, instead of going on popularity alone.
- How well does the social network in question match with your ideal customer demographic?
Although you can still decide based on what kind of content you hope to create, each of the standards above should serve as a guideline for joining any specific network,
For instance, if your brand needs to use images and videos to convey information, then you should consider going for Instagram, Pinterest, Tiktok, or Facebook. But if you’re interested in creating business development content in form of articles, then LinkedIn or Twitter would make a splendid choice.
3. Know the Competitor
A good understanding of customer demographics often leads to rational and more intelligent decisions as far as online shopping is concerned. But have you considered the fact that having even a little knowledge about your competitors can give you a competitive advantage?
To tilt the scales to your favor, you need to know who exactly your competitors are and how they work, to outperform them. A good place to start is by taking a look at some of their social media posts. However, this is not nearly enough, you still need to analyze any of such information carefully and find out the reasons for such practices if you’re to make any headway.
Competitive social media analysis can help provide meaningful insights to help you know what areas of your business need improvement and other ways to improve customer experience.
The two simple steps below will guide you in analyzing your competitors’ social media strategies to help you improve your marketing strategies and social media efforts.
A. Identify Your Competitors’ Strong Points
Try searching the same keywords your target audience is most likely to browse for online and take note of the company names that show up on top after the search. Next, click on each of the highest-ranked results and see if they have official social media accounts.
Remember to only keep an eye out for your competitors. Now, focus on the ones that show some level of activity on their social media accounts, and be sure to use them as a tool for propelling your business.
B. Compare
Try finding out what your competitors do differently and how your business fares by comparison. For instance, let’s say one of your competitors has a Twitter page. Begin by observing basic things like the number of likes they have and their total following.
If they can be considered impressive, move on to their tabs and page features especially highlighted content, or even if there’s something on their page that might be trending and could probably offer a boost to your business if adopted.
The same thing applies to other social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and the likes. You can also examine their hashtags and top posts and see if the data you acquire can help improve your strategy.
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With clearly laid out business goals, a suitable social media platform, and information concerning your competitors, the next step you need to take as a business owner is to create content for your social media marketing strategy.
Content marketing is basically a form of marketing strategy that involves creating relevant information for your target market. A good social media content strategy ensures that your audience will be able to access any kind of information they might need concerning your product.
You can create content in the form of short write-ups, articles, or blogs, so long as you get the point across to your audience and can receive feedback that will guide your business positively.
5. Allocate Your Budget Properly
There’s no cost attached to being on social media sites but charges can occur in form of payment for targeted ads and for individuals you put in charge of your company accounts.
The propensity for your social media marketing to generate results depends mostly on the resources you invest and your ability to capitalize on them for achieving online success. There’s no specific approach for allocating social media budget, which means you can experiment with adverts for a price of $50.
You should be able to hire a professional to create a marketing strategy that befits your e-commerce business at a fair price. What you get in return is a whole marketing agency to craft and run your online marketing campaign.
6. Assign a Team to Manage
There is no point in having a social media account if it’s going to be left dormant. It’s crucial to assign an individual or a team of experts to manage its affairs. There should be people who can create content, proofread and post the content, provide solutions to queries and reply to comments.
Your team should be able to stay on top of trends and work consistently in increasing traffic for your website by creating interest for your site.
When forming a social media marketing team, ensure that everyone you bring in is:
- Creative
- Collaborative
- Curious
- Detail-oriented
- Social
Your social marketing team should comprise the following roles:
A social media manager is the person in charge of developing marketing strategies and overseeing the entire operations of the social media channel. This individual has to monitor communications and is responsible for deciding who has access to account passwords, editing, and publishings.
B. Analytics Person
The person who runs analytics must lookout for both positive and negative trends in the company’s social presence and therefore make behind-the-scenes adjustments to the company’s business profile and visual content.
The job description also involves testing the message phrasings of each blog post, trending hashtags, media content, and choosing what time of the day to publish content.
C. Content Creator
For your business to achieve sterling results on social media you’ll need someone who can produce and develop outstanding content and social media texts.
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7. Maximize User Experience
Actively publishing content on your social media marketing platform helps in building brand awareness and reaching target audiences, but when doing so always consider how your customers might feel about each post. While you do your best to create awareness about your business, you should as well use this avenue to maximize user experience to the fullest.
Nothing could be more detrimental to small businesses than being over-promotional, as this is the quickest route to unfollows and dislikes. To keep people interested in your website, you should consider what your audience expects to see, in other words, their sole reason for following you.
Aside from occasional promotional messages, take some time to showcase your company’s culture and make your customers feel it’s alright to express their viewpoints.
Social media is a very useful tool for building a relationship with your audience, but still, your service to them should not be limited to only what you have to say or offer because the fact is you’re dealing with actual people who have concerns and personal opinions.
When addressing your audience, make sure to show that you’re invested in their affairs as individuals rather than as an organization. Try interacting with them now and then with current events and life-based scenarios.
Also give them the opportunity to express themselves and respond to their comments accordingly, as this will foster a sense of trust between your business and your customers and also strengthen your brand.
9. Respond to Customer Feedback
Nothing trumps well-crafted, customer-oriented feedback. Listen to whatever your audience has to say and reply with the utmost respect for each individual’s opinion. Think of it as an opportunity to connect better with your audience and build a relationship that can help you earn user-generated content. This helps to improve business growth. Remember – the quicker you respond to your audience, the better.
10. Build your Brand’s Visibility by Advertising on Multiple Platforms
Away from the business angle, how many social media accounts do you have personally? Probably over two, right? Well, this is the same case for the majority of your audience.
Twitter users who follow your marketing channel are most likely to be on other social channels like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Snapchat to say the least. This is a call to action, to not limit your brand’s personality to one particular social media site.
For instance, if you run a homegrown pastry shop that engages with its target customer through Pinterest, there’s no reason why you can’t have a Facebook page on the side for posting video content like baking tutorials.
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Final words
An effective social media strategy can serve as a very powerful marketing tool for building brand recognition and showcasing brand personality. However, the fact remains that social commerce is quite similar to any other growth-oriented business strategy since success won’t occur in an instant. Rather, it will come about subsequently as time progresses, but the results will be well worth it.
While you develop a killer strategy, remember to also create a highly mobile-friendly website. Mobile-friendly people spend the highest on online products and to be honest, every buyer is on the lookout for an e-commerce site that makes the buying process as seamless as possible for them.
