What is social media marketing?
Put simply, social media marketing is where marketers and businesses utilise social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn to market, to a ready-made audience.
Social media marketing is effective for just about any business, but success, whether that be in brand awareness, an increase of followers/subscribers or sales, does not come overnight. In fact, it takes strategizing, time and a lot of patience and social media marketing for eCommerce is no different. Not only do these businesses need to convince users to buy their products, but they also need to vie for the attention of users, over their competition. This can be hard, but with the right tools and knowledge, it can be made easier. Before we start you will need your social media platforms of choice and your eCommerce site all ready to go. Still looking for the perfect place to build your eCommerce site? Check out Piesync to find the Best eCommerce platform for your business. If you’ve already got your website sorted, fantastic, let’s get your social media marketing plan on its way.
Things to keep in mind.
Before we delve into the big stuff, there are a few basics that you will need to consider in order for your social media marketing to be effective.
Set goals – Think about what you want to get out of your SM marketing strategy, there is no point in implementing a plan if you haven’t got a vision. Things you might want to consider are:
- Number and types of posts in ratio to your amount of engagement.
- How much traffic do you want to receive from your social media platforms?
- How many followers and subscribers do you aim to reach?
- What is your ideal ratio of visitors to conversions?
- What is your ideal ratio of audience engagement and growth to sales?
Once you have the answers to these you’ll have a clearer vision for putting your plan into action.
Be a voice, not a business – The tricky thing about using social media for marketing is that other users are not using social media platforms with the intention of shopping, so the key to SM marketing is not sounding like you are selling your products but simply, sharing them. This is where you need to build a relationship with users so that they might become potential customers and eventually when you have built up enough trust with them, they are likely to make a sale. So think about how you can use your voice to talk about your business, rather than selling your products.
Customer Curated Content – It’s easy to get sucked into writing any old content and sharing the same content to every platform for the sake of consistency, but everything you post should be purposeful and the best way to find purpose for your content is to find out what kind of content your customers want to see and what they want to know about your business. Since each platform has a different audience, you should set polls on Facebook, Twitter & Instagram, etc, to capture data from each site and curate content that is targeted for specific platforms.
Get familiar with your data
Analytics are really useful tools in leveraging data such as visitors, engagement, views, and sales. You will also be able to dive into the specifics of what days and times your content did best to form a trend in the data and inform your strategy. You should keep an eye on this data in order to track your progress and ascertain whether your marketing plan is working, build reports and adjust your existing strategy to better serve your goals.
Your Social Media Plan
Using social media to market your business comes with a wide range of tools and methods, if you’re a total novice, we recommend choosing a few of these methods that complement each other and tracking your progress, after all, it’s better to do a few things well, than everything in mediocrity.
Engage – Are you guilty of posting and dashing? Engaging with your followers is important, it means you are present which comes across as reliable and that is ultimately what users need to trust your business. Make sure you reply to comments and messages and engage in what your followers are doing.
Optimise your posts – As with your website, keywords are important, content that you post anywhere online should be enriched with relevant keywords that will help others easily find you.
Use Hashtags – Because of certain algorithms, users say that hashtags are ineffective, but this isn’t entirely true. Hashtags can help categorise your posts so users looking for particular kinds of brands can find them. Some say there is a sweet spot, but really, it’s a matter of trial and error.
Utilise existing reviews – Got some reviews on other platforms and your website? Get them out there! The key to SM marketing is building trust, building relationships, so that audiences will make that first sale! If you have rave reviews from previous customers, share them on your social media feeds and show potential customers what they are missing out on.
Focus on the visual – Social media moves fast, so fast that most users won’t sit and read long captions, strong visuals and a snappy concise caption will keep your users engaged and interested in what to say.
Add a shop feature – Platforms like Facebook and Instagram now offer businesses the option to create a shop on their Facebook and Instagram accounts, this is linked to their website which will take their followers straight to the relevant product page. Cutting out the time wasted on navigating through their website and getting straight to the important part – making that sale!
Optimise your website – Make sure your website is social media ready by sharing social buttons on every product page. Include a blog that talks about subjects related to your business (eg. if you use sustainable fabrics, you might talk about fast fashion) and don’t forget to add Tweetable snippets to your posts so your visitors can share your work.
Set a budget for paid ads – Whether you’re just starting out or have a sizable pot of money to invest in ads, it’s worth budgeting some paid ads into your marketing expenses. Using your leveraged data, you can create targeted ads to hone in on the audiences that are most likely to engage with a business through advertisement. You can narrow down your ads by location, gender, age, interests and much more.
Tap into the influencer market – An influencer is (usually a non-celebrity) with a generally large social media following that works with brands to market their products by “influencing” their following to buy those products. The cost of working with an influencer varies depending on their following size and engagement rates so it’s worth doing some research on the brackets of influencers you could budget for.
