A social media eCommerce strategy can assist you in increasing brand awareness, communicating with customers, and increasing sales for your online store.
Social media and eCommerce are a perfect match.
Marketers have been using social media to connect with eCommerce customers for quite some time. For good reason: an increasing number of internet users shop online and use social media to research brands.
4 Process To Help e-Commerce Business When Using Social Media Marketing
Get an expert to help you with a holistic approach to planning, strategizing & implementing your eCommerce marketing campaigns. They should understand that your products are unique to your company and should be treated accordingly.
Here are the best social media marketing strategies so far to help you in your eCommerce Business;
1. Assigned an Account Manager, SMM Manager & Project Manager
An onboarding process, where your e-Commerce business will dive deep into your existing data, sales funnel and missed opportunities. This multi-channel opportunity analysis includes an overall view of your business, goal planning & setting, as well as a complete strategy and action plan specific to your goals.
With research gathered from the onboarding research process, this is able to develop a multi-channel eCommerce strategy that is as unique as the relationship between your business and audience.
2. Multi-Channel Campaign Creation
This point will narrow down several opportunities your business has to boost sales. It should be able to focus on your greatest opportunities across the various platforms to increase sales & decrease risks. Identifying which products offer the largest ROI in the shortest time possible.
With a multi-channel approach to social media marketing, mitigate the risk of algorithm updates, or audience targeting issues. Our only goal is to help work towards your greatest avenue for success.
Our plug-and-play eCommerce marketing team will handle strategy, execution, project management, design, and more.
3. Optimization & Scaling
Once our eCommerce marketing team sets your plan into motion, we will work together to dynamically improve your campaigns by implementing lessons learned from previous initiatives and the latest eCommerce marketing strategies.
It is our mission to take your business’ eCommerce sales to the next level and ensure you stay ahead of the competition through constant growth and improvement of your eCommerce marketing strategy. We ensure that our internal team is tracking all spend, purchases, add to carts, initiate checkout & determine the most effective route for audience re-engagement.
As we’re able to digest & interpret the data, our team has one goal.. establish success benchmarks and scale campaigns.
4. Monitoring, Analyzing & Reporting
With the ongoing testing, we analyze the results and adjust your campaign to achieve the lowest; most efficient campaign possible.
On a bi-monthly, monthly & quarterly basis, we will provide detailed reporting of your campaign. We want to make sure that our clients aren’t left in the dark about their campaigns.
You will receive custom reports tailored to the KPI’s that we’ve identified during the onboarding phase of our new clients.
We’ll also hop on a call with you to discuss any changes to the account, changes in your business & to discuss any new specials, products, or services that your business is offering in order to ensure that you are always reaching new customers.
Best social media platforms for eCommerce
1. Facebook
Facebook is, without question, the world’s most used social media platform. The sheer scale of the Facebook audience makes focusing on this platform key to driving potential customers to your e-commerce site.
Unlike some of the social media sites we’ll look at, Facebook is not as focused on creating a shopping experience within Facebook itself. The real area it excels is targeted advertising, and this has seen it become an essential part of many e-commerce customer acquisition strategies.
With a vast array of age, gender, interest and location data available, virtually any business can find new potential customers by building custom audiences and retargeting existing website visitors, or leverage their existing customer data to find lookalike audiences i.e. new visitors who are similar to their best customers.
2. Instagram
Instagram (also owned by Facebook) offers e-commerce marketers an attractive way of marketing products due to its highly visual nature. It also allows users to tag businesses in their own posts to help promote products they find relevant. With around 104.7 million users, the Instagram audience is nothing to be sniffed at, and the site has some of the most advanced social commerce features among the leading social platforms. Two of the most important are Instagram Shopping and Instagram Checkout.
Instagram Shopping (or Shopping on Instagram as the platform calls it) give e-commerce brands the ability to ‘create an immersive storefront’ to help Instagram users explore products with a single tap. Brands can share products through their own posts and stories, creating a clickable tag that takes curious visitors to a product description page featuring further information.
Take a look at the example below from M&S (one of the first UK brands to test Instagram Shopping) to get an idea of the customer journey from Instagram to the M&S e-commerce site:
Instagram Shopping is now available across a wide range of markets globally and is a great way for retailers and travel brands to showcase their products to an engaged audience.
The other feature from Instagram worth mentioning is Instagram Checkout – launched in 2019 it’s still in beta phase, but seeks to bring the shopping experience to the Instagram platform without the need for users to leave for another site.
3. Pinterest
Pinterest may not be one of the top three social media platforms. However, it certainly ranks among the best platforms for those with an e-commerce agenda. Known for its wide range of creative, aspirational and product-based posts, Pinterest has aligned itself well with the customer journey. And although it has slightly fewer users than other platforms (around 250 monthly active users), it more than makes up for that with its ability to link social media and e-commerce, with 93% of this audience using the platform to plan their purchases.
One feature that Pinterest offers that is particularly interesting for e-commerce brands is rich pins. Pinterest rich pins provide users with links, references, and product recommendations for achieving certain looks, décor objectives, recipes and project designs.
For those who are looking to target the Pinterest audience, specifically women aged 18 through 49, Pinterest makes for an ideal social media platform. And when you look at the proportion of referrals that Pinterest drives compared to other platforms, Pinterest e-commerce doesn’t yet get the credit it deserves for the influence it has over consumers.
Conclusion:
As an ecommerce retailer, your goal is to get more sales every day. And while there are many digital marketing channels that can help you reach this goal, social media is the only one that promises to deliver both new and repeat customers.
At Blue Water Marketing, our social media team has years of experience creating effective campaigns for ecommerce retailers, and we’d love to do the same for you.
