A Quick Guide For Social Media For E-Commerce

Using Social Media For Your E-Commerce Business

One of the very first steps to figuring out how to leverage social media for your e-commerce business is to figure out which channels are most important. If you don’t know, here are some key steps that you can use to craft an optimal plan. Before going into the article you might want to see what digital marketing agencies you have near you to get in contact with for advice. For instance if you are looking for help with LinkedIn marketing, just type into Google something like ‘LinkedIn marketing agency‘.

Figure Out Where Your Customers Are Spending The Most Time

The first thing you need to do is figure out where the majority of your customers are spending the most time online. Build your ideal customer persona. Figure out what demographic they are and where they spend the majority of their time online. Which social media platform are they on? For instance, if you are aiming to reach younger customers, you’re going to want to focus a lot of your energy on channels like TikTok. It’s a platform that is geared towards the younger generation and it can be a great place to reach a lot of a younger audience.

Look At Your Competition

One of the easiest ways to figure out where you should be spending a lot of your time, energy, and resources is by looking at and examining your competition. Figure out where they are making a lot of waves. Once you figure out where they are spending a lot of their budget, you can do the same. Chances are, they spent a lot of time and energy doing the same thing. You can use them as a shortcut. However, you still want to verify they are targeting the right channels yourself.

As soon as you have spent the time listening and learnings, it’s time to get much more granular with the content you produce.

Researchers like Peter Field and Les Binet have recommended that you craft your content strategy to be a balance between sales activation and brand building.

Brand Building Content:

This is the content that you will be creating which is meant to push your brand narrative forward. It’s meant to deliver the cover messaging to your audience. You want the content to showcase what your brand is about and to cast a wide net to ensure that everyone knows what your company does. A brand that is particularly good at this is Outdoor Voices. They do a very good job of building out their brand’s image and selling their products with the same content.

Set Goals:

Now that you have a very good idea of where your customers are spending the majority of their time and what your competition is focusing on, you will want to craft some attainable goals for your business. You need goals to measure the success of your campaigns. For instance, if you selected Facebook and Instagram as the primary social media channels to focus on you’ll want to come up with realistic goals for them. Think about what success looks like for your business. Keep in mind, if the channels are brand new, you won’t generate a lot of sales as you begin building a base on the platform. Thus, you want to use the engagement and follower metrics rather than creating unrealistic sales goals.

Social Media Marketing Strategies

As soon as you’ve come up with the right channels for your business, you are going to want to develop and formulate an optimised social media marketing strategy for it.

While you could potentially craft content and just hope it sticks, that wouldn’t be viable nor recommended. Instead, you need to figure out what type of content your target market is looking for. You also need to personalise your content to ensure you are getting it seen and that your audience is engaging with it.

To deliver personalised content to your audience, you will want to leverage a few proven tactics. Here are some of the best.

Listen

The very first thing you need to do is listen to your audience. They will tell you what they want. They will also tell you what they are looking for in the content you produce. You can see what they are saying about your brand, your competition, and more.

Learn

If you are tracking what people are saying about your brand and business and your competition, you will be able to make data-driven decisions. This can help to ensure you aren’t just making decisions off gut feelings.

Respond

This is typically one of the most forgotten aspects of marketing with social media. However, it also happens to be one of the most important. You need to use social media to drive conversations with your audience. You want to respond to them and make their voices feel heard.

Sales Activation Content

You need to produce and distribute content that is prompting your audience to take action. You want them to make purchasing decisions. Your content needs to be geared towards them taking action and generating conversions. This is the best content for hot leads. Storytelling is a very effective way to deliver sales-activated content that converts at a high rate.