Social media as a marketing channel has already been creating buzz across industries. According to Statista, 91% of businesses in the United States have adopted social media marketing.
If we talk about e-commerce industry, 90% of businesses are estimated to use social media for customer service.
Social media demonstrates a high yielding tool for marketing and promotion and even selling. It helps e-commerce businesses identify customers, engage with them, build trust, gain sales opportunities, and deliver quick support.
Social media is also a tool for establishing and maintaining brand identity.
With social ads, you can show your ads to those who fit into the definition of your buyers and increase the chances of sales.
If you are an e-commerce business, and you are convinced with the power of social media, it is time to gather a team of professionals and weave a social media marketing strategy to get started. Let us learn some of the effective ways social marketing helps e-commerce establishments with –
Boost to your search engine optimisation –
Social media and search engine optimization go hand in hand. That both complement each other would not be an overstatement. Your search engine ranking depends majorly on your social media activities. Both are interconnected.
Sends more traffic to your website –
One of the goals of social media marketing is to increase user traffic on your website. You can encourage your followers to click on the link in your post, which takes them to your website.
Improves leads conversion –
With high-quality text and visual content and strong calls to action (CTAs), your updates work no less than an ad campaign for your brand. Use high-res pictures/videos with keyword-rich text to increase your leads and leads conversion rate.
Increased engagement –
Social media allows e-commerce to connect with their customers in real time. The moment you receive a query via inbox or comment, you can create an awesome first impression. This helps in building trust and winning an opportunity to sell/resell.
Up-level customer service –
Social media gives you a chance to resolve negative feedbacks on a positive node. You can please your unsatisfied and dissatisfied customers directly in the comments sections and gain more attention from your prospects.
Cost-effective –
Social media is a free tool. All you have to do is to invest your time and creativity to create and post compelling updates. Check the performance of your updates is also free on most social networking sites.
However, if you are considering delving into social ads – or if you are looking to advertise your brand on social network – you will need to be ready to pay on per click basis.
How your e-commerce business can make the most of social media marketing –
From offering quick customer service to social listening, widening reach and recognition, and selling – there are many ways social media helps e-Commerce businesses. The following subsections elaborate how marketers should use social media marketing to support their e-Commerce process –
Provide value
Social media is the new way people socialize. And when you socialize, you don’t always need to sell. If each of your post sells something, it is taking you nowhere.
Use your social network to offer something of value to your audience – something that helps them, eases their life and fixes the problems they are facing.
Even if you have managed to gain attention and grow your follower base, but if you post just marketing or promotional stuff, users will gradually lose interest and eventually stop engaging on your page.
Identify the right platform
Choosing the right social network for your brand is the key. Not every platform can be right for your brand.
If your social marketing is doing well on Facebook, it might not be a hit on LinkedIn or Twitter. Reason – they work differently and are for different purposes.
Take iCustomLabel for example. It is an e-commerce business that designs and delivers personalized labels and stickers to industries and individuals.
Since industries and individuals both are their customers, best social network for their business are: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube.
So, figure out which are the right platforms for your business and most importantly, have a separate strategy for each platform.
Use scheduling & management tool
It takes hours to create content for social media. You have to come up with high-quality content (that includes text and visual content) for each platform every day – in order to appeal, impress or offer something new to your audience.
Engaging actively with your audience is also a part of your social media strategy.
Is it really possible to do it all in a systematic and timely manner? No, it is not.
You can consider deploying a social media scheduling tool like SocialPilot to save your time and efforts. Not only can you schedule your updates, but also manage your followers, notifications, mentions, and direct messages on a single window with an effective social media scheduling and management application.
Keyword rich text –
When on social media, using keyword-rich or hashtags (#) is a strategic essentiality. It boosts the performance of each of your post. Trending topics and keywords give your updates a huge visibility quickly in a short period.
Hashtags have their relevance on almost all social networks. These are the terms using which users find information on social network. So, use hashtags wisely.
But refrain from spamming hashtags and using them irrelevantly and out of context.
Website optimisation –
Just like your social networks send people to your website, your website should be optimized to send your visitors to your social networks.
Make design optimizations to have social media buttons on your website, preferably on every webpage. Social media icons can be added either on header bar or footer, whichever looks great and is convenient.
Analyze your performance –
Every platform has its own analytics tool. But, for a marketer, it is time-consuming and mind-boggling to assess the trends and analytics on each platform.
You could use a powerful social media analytics tool to save your day. These tools allow marketers to gauge the performance of each update through insightful reports and charts.
You can see which type of posts is gaining user attention. With that, analytics tools allow you to alter your content strategy and produce content that your audience likes to engage with.
Bottom line
The first step to make an effective use of social media for your e-commerce marketing is to develop a strategy. You need to identify the right platforms and the right audience for your e-commerce business and equip yourself with tools that provide ease of scheduling, management and performance analysis.
Being flexible with your strategy should be a part of your social media strategy. If A does not work, B would. If B does not, C would.
If your strategies don’t work or don’t deliver expected outcomes, be ready to change them analyzing the trends and performance of your activities on social media.
