TOP FIVE GOALS E-COMMERCE BRANDS MUST SET TO AMPLIFY SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING EFFORTS AND INCREASE SALES
Consumers live on social media, and e-commerce stores have greater success when they communicate with customers where they spend most of their time. Social media is becoming an increasingly popular avenue for online shopping with features like social commerce, chatbots, and more benefits than traditional marketing techniques.
In such a competitive market, a robust social media presence puts shops in front of new audiences, essentially increasing sales. The biggest advantage e-commerce storefronts have is being virtually accessible to shoppers everywhere. Social media can be the cherry on top, coating irresistible product offerings with organic connections and community.
Top Five E-Commerce Social Media Marketing Goals and How to Reach Them
Only some platforms will be the right fit and offer enough benefits to outweigh the cost of content creation. E-commerce shops can optimize efforts by prioritizing the platforms that host their target audiences to provide the best return on investment (ROI).
Before creating social profiles, e-commerce stores must ensure that they optimize their websites for mobile and that their landing pages are easily navigable with clear call-to-actions (CTAs). Users will lose interest and click out if a brand’s website isn’t fully functional.
Driving traffic, building community, fulfilling customer needs, increasing sales, and building brand awareness should be e-commerce brands’ primary goals. Each goal works in synchronicity with the others to create a strong yet effective social media strategy.
Build Community
Social media is the best avenue for e-commerce shops to build community, credibility, and customer loyalty. Purchasers are more likely to buy from brands they trust, especially if their friends also trust them. Users who feel satisfied with a brand may post social content about its products to their feeds, exposing the brand to their own followers.
On Facebook, e-commerce stores can create groups where customers discuss topics related to their brands and connect with like-minded people. The larger the online community, the more impact a brand has on potential purchasers.
Build Brand Awareness
When e-commerce brands have strong supportive communities, brand awareness skyrockets. On social media, brands must build awareness through brand recognition, consistent communication, and collaboration. When shoppers recognize and trust a brand, they know exactly where to go when they are ready to purchase. Using genuine content to communicate allows brands to stand out to customers scrolling through their feeds full of e-commerce posts. Employing the help of influencers and creators or collaborating with other brands will produce a broader audience.
Address Customer Needs
Before making a purchase, customers need to know that they can rely on the brand for support throughout the process. Brands can promise quick response time and good customer service, but most shoppers must see it to believe it. Responding to order inquiries through comments and messages on social media establishes accountability and trust with current and potential customers.
Many e-commerce businesses utilize Twitter to tackle customer inquiries because of the platform’s quick-response culture. Activating automatic responses or chatbots also optimizes response time. By investing in a qualified customer service team, social media will stay genuine.
Drive Traffic to Online Storefront
In a world full of distractions, brands must quickly and directly guide customers to their storefronts. When used effectively, social media can be an additional avenue of traffic for stores. Brands can ensure customers know where to purchase their products by placing the storefront uniform resource locator (URL) in all social profile descriptions. Including a strong CTA in a profile description above the URL can entice page viewers to take action. An effective CTA must do one of the following:
- Ask a compelling question
- Use a statement that invokes curiosity
- Promise value
Increase Sales
While social media is a great traffic funnel, there are additional tools to help e-commerce businesses drive traffic and increase sales. The newest tactic, social selling, involves selling products directly on social media. Meta allows e-commerce businesses to display products on their Facebook and Instagram profile pages through the platforms’ new online shopping interface, Shops. Both platforms’ shopping interfaces elevate sales rates significantly.
E-commerce stores should also take advantage of optimizing content for sales. According to Hootsuite, “Video has quickly become the most popular — and influential — content type of social media.”
On Instagram and TikTok, many e-commerce companies go viral from one video post, causing potential overnight sellouts. Idea Pins on Pinterest are another avenue for posting short-form content. E-commerce stores can create boards for product collections and show examples of how to use or style their products.
As with most marketing goals, increasing sales depends on an organized, user-friendly online storefront. An e-commerce brand’s foundational goal must be to create a seamless shopping experience from the landing page through checkout.
Tracking the Success of Social Media Marketing Goals
Tracking and analyzing results is most beneficial for optimizing social media campaigns. Most platforms have built-in analytics systems that will report changes in audience demographics, engagement rates, and conversions.
While quantitative data is always beneficial, there are additional tactics brands can use to measure success. A/B testing is often employed to discover what types of graphic visual content or social copy perform best. Brands can also survey social media mentions to assess the quality of awareness and community — this is called social listening. If organic social media isn’t producing the desired results, brands should incorporate paid ads into their marketing strategy.
Call in a Professional
POLA Marketing’s data-driven methods can relieve e-commerce business owners from the time-consuming work of building a social media presence. Our team can create an individualized approach that increases customers’ experiences and online sales for the furtherance of any e-commerce store.
For more information, contact us at (https://polamarketing.com/contact/).
