Social media has become an integral part of doing business. If you’re running a business in this error, you know you cannot compete effectively without a social media presence. Up to 53.6% of the global population spends their time on social media, and you can only reach them if you promote your shop there.
You need to establish an online store if you want complete control over your customers’ shopping experience. But building a successful online shop isn’t that easy. One way to make this successful is to put yourself in the shoes of your customers.
Take a look at the following tips to help you promote your online shop on social media.
Build an Email List
You need to utilize and keep a strong email marketing strategy to promote your shop. Before launching your online brand, collect many emails from your customers, prospective customers, and people interested in your event. Then, when launching, make an online presence by sending emails to all those people.
Try to be nice when sending emails. You can even offer a promotion to people who are on your list. Make a huge social media presence by giving out referral discounts to your customers.
With an email, you have effective digital marketing tools that can help you build your e-commerce store. So ensure you collect as many email addresses as possible on your site. Then, maintain a steady flow of communication with your email list.
A regular email cadence that includes promotions, new social media content, and product launching will help promote your online store. This is because customers will have the reason for visiting your website.
Consider Sending Free Samples to Top Influencers
The internet is full of influential bloggers, entrepreneurs, journalists, and vloggers from different industries and niches. Use this to your advantage. Find the right influencers that can help you promote your online store.
Many of these influencers have great followings on social media, with loyal audience flooding their websites. Ensure you send a sample of your brand to influencers within your niche. This will allow you to show your appreciation to these influencers.
You can accompany your appreciation with a gift and mention one of their sites. This way, you’ll gain more traffic and social media followers. Ensure you have a seal of approval from industry experts.
Be Mobile-Friendly
Today, many people spend more time accessing social media through mobile devices than desktop devices. People also use mobile devices to share social media content twice as much as those using desktop devices. With this trend, it’s important to have mobile-friendly social media content.
Social media content is generally shorter in length. This enables people to view your online shop using their mobile devices easily.
Start Blogging for Your Online Shop
Do you have a running blog for your online store? If you don’t have, you’re missing a lot, especially the limitless potential of content marketing. So how do you tend to keep people informed if you don’t have a running blog?
Ensure you produce free and valuable content, as this will create trust in your brand and keep people informed. With blogs, you have an opportunity to share your content on social media and get a ranking on search engines. To start a blog post, consider all the starting-point questions people will have about your brand and industry.
Your blog should help you answer these questions as individual articles. Further, use your blog to offer tutorials, tips, and resources related to your products and the lifestyle around your products. Remember that you’ll only see how content marketing works through your social media shares and search engines.
Try to Sponsor an Event
Sponsoring an event can work wonders that you can never imagine, but only if you use the right approach. Begin with selecting the event to sponsor. Look for events where the attendees will be interested in your product, then find out the number of consumers in attendance.
After that, start sorting them by cost. Do not send a convoy of marketers to set up a table and give out flyers. Instead, try to be more creative to build your relationships, especially if the potential customers will be attending.
Engage people by demonstrating some of your interesting products. Tell a story, and remember to provide on-the-spot rewards like free stickers and coupons. This will help you get email list subscriptions and gain more social media followers.
Be Consistent and Concise With Your Postings
In this digital age, a slight mistake of forgetting to post anything on your social channel will make customers forget you. Therefore, you have to be consistent and concise with your postings. With the trending digital era, all businesses and influencers are effectively engaging in an attention economy.
The best way to reach and engage effectively for the sake of your online store, is to post regularly. This will help you generate meaningful traffic and sales from your social media marketing. The best way to ensure consistency and conciseness is to create a social content calendar.
Optimize Your Site for SEO
Search engine optimizations and optimizing your social media platform can move you to greater heights. To create the best SEO, place yourself in the shoes of your audience. How is your target audience talking about your brand, and what do they want to know?
Focus much on on-page content. On-page content refers to product titles, images, descriptions, blogs, and any other content that you might have. You need to ensure that the content uses natural language that your customers might use while searching for related products.
You can also use Meta tags. These are the headlines for a search engine as they enable search engines to figure out each page’s content. Ensure each page of your site has its unique title tag.
Meta tags summarize each of your pages, which means that when your site appears on the search engine results page, users will be able to see your title tag. Your users will also see Meta description before anything else.
Use Social Media Platforms to Advertise Your Online Shop
If you want to get more insights into becoming successful with your social media marketing, join social media discussions. Social forums and groups are great places to get industrial tips, advice, answer questions, and get customers.
The best places you can find these active forums and groups can be on Facebook and Google. You can also find your niche discussion groups on Twitter chats and Discord. Ensure you don’t break any rules when promoting your brand on these platforms.
Know the limits and restrictions of the forum and stick to them. You can also use your forum avatar, signature, and profile page to promote your product. However, avoid constant promotion and many links on your website as they’ll only make you look spammy.
Keep things simple by posting something that can make people notice your activity without constituting spam.
Go Visual with Social Media Platforms
With the emerging social platforms, you can take a different approach to engage with your customers. Think of social media platforms such as Instagram, Pinterest, and the most recent one, TikTok. With these platforms, you can perfectly present what goes on in your business behind the scenes more creatively and with a lot of passion.
You can take your customers through the manufacturing process, show them your products and use images to tell a story. But, remember that getting more Instagram views doesn’t come easily without great visual appeal.
But before settling for a social media platform, know where your audience spends most of their time. If it’s on Instagram, then focus your spending on Instagram. Also, use photos and videos in your ads, sticking to the ideal video dimensions and formats of the platform.
Start small and simple by engaging imagery of your product in use. Then, ensure you adjust your tactics based on how well your brand performs in the first couple of days.
Create an Offline Store
If you have a brick-and-mortar business, then you’re good to go, especially if you have excellent name recognition and a loyal following. Use your offline store influence to drive more traffic to your new online store. Also, it doesn’t mean that you’ll run an online store forever if you have an online shop.
At one point, you’ll need to open a pop-up e-commerce store to compliment your online presence. However, do not mistake a pop-up store with a brick-and-mortar business. Brick and mortar is an already established business, while a pop-up store is temporary and costs less.
Pop-up stores focus more on location. You open a pop-up store in places where people frequently visit, like galleries, shopping malls, farmers markets, and art fairs. Ensure you set up a pop-up store in a visible location and where your target audience will be wandering.
A pop-up store acts as a great offline marketing tool. For example, an offline store is the best place to give out coupons used in your online store. You can also collect email addresses from social media followers from an offline store.
Work Smart to Boost Your Online Shop
Social media is a perfect place to make your online shop a giant. If you have the right approach, you’ll only need a handful of social media marketing strategies to convert your followers to more sales.
If you already have your store active and running on social media, you can still use other effective insights on this site. We’re here to see you run your business online and offline and become a successful entrepreneur. So don’t leave this site.
