Social Media Success for eCommerce Sites
Nicole Craig
By

Social Media Success for eCommerce Sites

Social media is like gold dust for any eCommerce store and, if you’re not reaching your social potential, you’re missing out on the magic.

We hate to break it to you, but a half-baked attempt doesn’t work anymore. Your posts will get lost, deep in the jungle of posts from other retailers. You’ll be hidden beneath branches and foliage, and you’ll be shaded from your customers.

You need to create a strong social media presence. Once your accounts are in place, set-up with your branded images, logo and company name, you need commitment to the cause. Crafting regular, engaging posts is just one way to build brand awareness, drive traffic and make sales.

How hard can it be? Take Hamlet the Piggy for example, who has racked up no less than 327,000 followers on Instagram. If a pig can do it, so can you.

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@Hamlet_the_piggy

Are You Using Social Media to its Full Capacity?

Social media is still a major driver of traffic to eCommerce sites, second only to search traffic. Research by Social Media Today estimates that 90% of all businesses will be using social media for customer service by 2020.

A considerable chunk of your customers would rather use social channels to connect with you, if it saves them picking up the phone or writing an email.

You should be using social media marketing for your eCommerce site, otherwise you’re handing customers over to your competition. There are two primary ways to use social media for eCommerce. They are;

  1. To drive traffic to your website
  2. To make sales

Both are connected, but let’s talk about them one-by-one.

Part 1: Using Social Media to Drive Website Traffic

The core of your strategy should be based around the 3 things that defines social; engagement, relationships and connections. Follow these tips to find out how.

#01 – Interact with customers

When users experience a positive interaction with your brand, they’re 3x more likely to recommend you to a friend, or - even better – to big you up social media.

With that thought in mind, you should never leave customer complaints or questions unanswered. If you do, those customers are 88% less likely to buy from you in the future.

#02 – Create regular content

Use engaging content to send traffic to your site. Images, videos and valuable written content that are relevant to your audience will all work to get their attention and send them to your money-maker.

Accompany them with links and you should receive an influx of customers that are already engaged with and interested in your store, where you’ll be ready to welcome them with open arms.

#03 – Spend on Facebook

Investing in paid ads on Facebook is a quicker, easier way to drive traffic. Yes – organic content can work, but it gets lost in that Facebook jungle much more easily. 94% of companies are already paying for ads, so you can bet they will get priority on news feeds over your organic content.

In summary, you’ll have to pay to play. There are few freebies in the world of social media marketing, but if you’re using optimal marketing strategies, your ROI could be off-the-scale. Your social marketing is over twice as likely to be effective for your business if you’re paying for ads.

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Expect to pay to play for optimal results

#04 – Keep up with changes

Social media is developing all the time – from Instagram’s embedded Boomerang feature to live streaming on Facebook and Instagram. Modern companies need to be able to keep up. While some features are likely to be trends that don’t offer value for companies, others should be utilised.

Instagram stories, for example, are taking off. They offer an authentic connection to your customers to see what goes on behind-the-scenes at your eCommerce store. They are fast becoming one of the best ways to increase visibility and engagement, with features like polls and the “swipe up” option.

With 20% of business’ Instagram stories leading to a direct message, this is one of the easiest ways you can reach more customers, even on a very low budget.

More and more brands are making use of the feature. Why? Because they’re right at the top of the platform and around 300 million people use stories on a daily basis.

Live streaming is getting some attention right now, too. It takes guts to publish content as it happens – with no room for edits – but it’s more exciting than regular video and customers love it. 82% of people would rather watch a live video than interact with any other type of social media content.

Create an enhanced customer experience and reward viewers with immediacy.

Part 2: Using Social Media to Make Sales

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Prefer to use social media for pure hard sales, rather than to create brand awareness?

That’s fine too, but you’ll have to work on building a foundation of relationships before you get there. It’s a known fact that the constant hard sell doesn’t work. Here are our tips to making more of an income from social media marketing for your eCommerce store.

#01 – Don’t just sell, sell, sell

In fact, only 20% of your content should be product promotion. The other 80% should revolve around sharing valuable advice, industry news or entertaining posts. Your customer has to be in the “I want to buy” stage before the selling tactic will work. Use the advice from part 1 to try to move customers towards this stage.

You need to use social media to increase engagement and build brand loyalty, before you can move customers down the funnel.

Facebook recently updated its algorithm so that posts from companies take a backseat, and family and friends’ content gets the spotlight. This meant that paying for Facebook ads became a whole lot more important.

#02 – Send traffic to the right place

The spot you’re sending traffic to is one of the biggest deciders in whether or not your strategy converts. Create clever landing pages that complete those sales for you. A good landing page needs to have:

  • A clear, tempting call-to-action that’s distinct, centralised and attention-grabbing
  • Some sort of offer conveyed with a sense of urgency
  • A simple design with content that stays focused on the point
  • A list of 2-5 very important attributes, including features, benefits and pain points
  • An effective headline that clearly displays what you do
  • Attractive visuals that don’t take away from your CTA

Only when you execute a successful landing page will your visitors buy from you.

#03 – Remarket to interested customers

A remarketing campaign is another way to make money for your eCommerce site. Imagine you own a store that sells umbrellas. A customer might show a particular interest in a neon green umbrella with a frog design. Melbourne winter is on its way, after all.

You can target that customer over and over again by having the neon green frog umbrella follow them across multiple platforms. It works, too. Remarketing increases conversion rates – more ad impressions are more likely to tempt a customer to buy.

#04 – Make life easier for customers

Make things easier for your customers to complete a sale, by creating “in-app” shopping carts that don’t require the customer to leave the social platform.

Customers can now buy things on Instagram using Instagram Shopping. If you’ve seen the little dot hovering across products you like, you can click on that dot and buy it there and then. Since 80% of Instagram users follow businesses, those businesses can finally capitalise on that.

Perfect for capturing impulse buyers.

You can achieve the same thing on Pinterest with the “Buy it” button, and on Facebook by installing apps that set up shopping carts on your page.

#05 – Influencer marketing is here to stay

 Don’t rule out the influencers. Influencer marketing provides an average of 7x ROI.

40% of Twitter users said they have made a purchase purely because of a tweet from an influencer.

The majority of the social media community trusts influencers, provided their posts come across as genuine. Only work with an influencer that’s relevant to your industry. For example, have a recognised author promote your publishing business.

Selecting a D-list celebrity at random to preach to their followers about something they’ve previously shown no interest in can cause an influencer campaign to fall flat.

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What’s to Come?

Social media marketing services only work when businesses stay on top of changes. It can be hard to imagine, but we think social media is going to become even more integrated in our lives as the months go on. Think chatbots, more in-app purchasing, new social platforms and even more advanced advertising tools.

As an increasingly powerful sales tool, businesses are seeing incredible benefits in social media for their eCommerce sites, whether their goal is brand awareness, more traffic or profit.

Partner with a social media marketing agency like Impress!ve. Social media and marketing updates are part of our daily lives, so we’re some of the first to find out when there’s a change on the market.

Using our know-how and experience, we can craft a social media strategy for your eCommerce store that does it all. Experience more brand exposure, traffic and a continuous increase in sales.

Give us a call for free strategic advice: 1300 191 943

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