A Guest Post by Andi Croft
Did you know that there are approximately 2.3 billion social media users in the world? The richness of its audience has become the primary driver of traffic to e-commerce stores. Social media these days are more effective than more traditional media. With that being said, it creates a fantastic opportunity to drive traffic for conversions.
However, social media can also be a challenging landscape to be in, as anyone can skip and ignore your content. So how do you increase your brand visibility? How can you target the right audience, engage them, and which will eventually lead them right into your ecommerce website?
For your social media strategy to be effective, we’ve gathered these social selling tips that you can utilize to leverage your e-commerce business and gain a steady amount of traffic in the long run.
Here are the essential things that you must do and actionable tactics the get the momentum going:
User-generated content
User-generated content (UGC) play a pivotal role in breaking barriers, such as your audience’s distrust when it comes to buying your products. UGCs are centered around people they trust, which creates more authenticity and validation in your products and services. For instance, if your products are seen by your audience being praised by their peers, it will strengthen their belief that the praise is genuine. As a result, they head to your store, to check out what the buzz is all about.
UGC is a leading player in the marketing world, and it’s so successful because it puts the customer upfront ? at the center of the campaign. People are more likely to trust a recommendation coming from another person, instead of brands and marketers. In today’s world, customers wanted to be related to on a human level, that’s why being authentic is so important. Viewers are no longer listening to passive ads and billboards. Instead, they are choosing what they want to see, hear, buy and don’t want to buy from.
Work with influencers
Influencers, unlike celebrities, they can be anywhere, and they can be anyone. They are influential because they have a massive following online and on social media. They can be a revered marketing expert on LinkedIn or your favorite travel blogger on Instagram.
Influencers are easily recognized by their hundreds of thousands of followers, if not millions. Chances are, they have followers are the target audience that you’re looking for. So, it’s essential to find these people in your industry. Then, start a campaign that will be a collaboration with your brand and these influencers.
Strategic targeting
The purpose of paid ads is to strategically place you out there, all for your target audience to see. These are the paid content on social media sites that allow you to run promotional campaigns in front of a massive audience. As long as it’s well-targeted, then no doubt that it will drive traffic to your site.
Powerful Tips to Strategic Targeting
Putting up paid social ads can be quite daunting, but here’s how you can start running these ads on popular social media sites:
Facebook: Facebook advertising has different formats that you can utilize, ranging from videos, slideshows, carousels, photos, and canvas. You can begin by explicitly targeting your audience based on their age, gender, language, and location. Afterward, you can dig more in-depth with the demographics, and behaviors.
Twitter: Twitter ads are usually categorized into Promoted Tweets, Promoted Accounts, and Promoted Trends. Your content will usually appear depending on your target audience.
Instagram: Instagram is similar to Facebook’s ad types (carousel, photo, video.) It offers the same kind of targeting offered by Facebook ads (mostly because Facebook owns Instagram.)
Social media contests
If you’re a business owner or marketer, then you’ve probably stumbled upon social media contests several times. Social media contests, if done correctly and effectively, gives many benefits to your brand or business by giving it a much-needed boost when it comes to enhancing your brand visibility, as well as to connect with a large number of audiences.
It’s a fantastic way to build a community by creating a strong following, building awareness, and incentivizing people to follow your social media accounts.
Aside from that, it increases subscribers and drives engagement. When that happens, naturally, it converts leads to valuable customers which is excellent in growing sales.
Share social videos and quality photos
Social media is becoming increasingly more visual. A lot of social networking sites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest are placing a significant emphasis on compelling imagery.
In other words, sharing highly engaging, attractive and high-quality images will boost your presence online. That’s why images with quotes, memes, and infographics are becoming increasingly popular. They have the power to grab an audience’s attention, in an increasingly competitive social media landscape.
Viral content
Viral marketing is another powerful tool for boosting your business. All you need to do is to craft a viral social media campaign. You also need to consider several things such as mastering your target audience, choosing the right social media platform to share your content, focus on crafting content that increases engagement, and boost its visibility through ads. You also need to measure your performance to improve your future campaigns and provide clear CTAs.
Although it might be challenging at first, remember that your content must uniquely speak to your audience.
Social search engine optimization
Do you know that social media sites can be search engines as well? People don’t just look things up on Google or Bing. They’re also utilizing social media to find what they are looking for. So, one of your goals should be to stay at the very top of the page results.
Practical tips to optimize your social media profile:
- When describing your social media profile, use more common words.
- Look for the most popular terms that can be potentially associated with your store.
- Try to integrate them into your products and posts.
- Utilize hashtags that are relevant. Social network giants like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram make use of hashtags to improve post visibility.
Social groups
Join community groups are essential in driving traffic to your site. When joining groups in your specific niche, you will find people who will have the same interests, those that are potentially interested in your products and services. Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest and YouTube have their community groups that you can join to help you connect with others, and improve your brand visibility.
Social bio
Last but certainly not least, you must create an attractive social bio. What matters most is how you present your brand so that you can target a large number of people. There are a lot of social media profiles that don’t have their website link in their respective bios. So never miss a chance ? directly link your site below your profile bio. It’s a great idea to include current promotions on your bio as well. That way, your target can easily see enticing deals, freebies, and discounts.
In Conclusion
Online retailers and marketers face the challenge to keep up with the newest algorithms and the advancement of different social media platforms. Also, with the ever-changing interests of its users. By applying these tactics in your social media strategy, you have the power to influence, connect and engage with your target audience that could bring in traffic, and sales in no time.
Also published on Medium.
