10 Ways to Leverage Social Media To Increase eCommerce Sales: Part 1

The harsh reality with today’s society is that avoiding social media simply just isn’t an option if you want your store to compete online. The eCommerce world is driven by website traffic, however, attracting consumers to your site through social media is easier said than done. Everyone out there is trying to do the same thing and just like you. They’re competing against tons of companies offering the same products.

 
Achieving ongoing success requires more than just tactics. It takes a social media marketing strategy that takes into consideration things such as: setting goals, understanding customer content needs, leveraging data, sharing, not selling, and tracking progress.
Before you even thinking about tackling specific tactics, you need to set benchmarks for what success will look like. Try to be as precise as possible by setting measurable objectives that include the following:

• Amount of traffic you want to receive from social media
• Number of fans and followers
• Ratio of visitors to conversions
• Number and type of posts compared to the amount of engagement
• Ratio of audience growth and engagement to sales

Before you can start posting content, you have to know what your prospects and customers are looking for, other wise you could be missing your target market. A great way to do that is to get insight by asking customers what they want to learn about and monitor your target audience’s interactions.
Your website’s analytics provide a wealth of information on customer behavior, including where your social media traffic comes from, which types of content receive the most views, and when visitors engage with the content. A great tip before creating your social media strategy is to look back at your old content performances to see what was the most effective and then combine that with the new content to get the most engagement.
Social media is about being social and building a relationship with your customer first and then selling them on your product. To do this, you need to focus on sharing helpful information and establishing trust before you even try to make a sale.
As you develop your social media strategy, you’ll want to define how you will go about tracking progress and changing behavior, such as creating reports, revising your plan, and communicating updates to team members every month. Trends change frequently and your social media strategy has to be able to adapt.

 
Once you’ve developed your strategy, use these ten social media marketing tactics to boost traffic and grow your eCommerce business:

1. Optimize Social Media Posts

Using high-conversion keywords in your posts will increase their visibility in search and thereby enable you to reach an even larger audience than just your direct followers. Perform keyword research to find the best terms your consumers are typing into the search bar. Then, strategically incorporate them into your posts. It’s also a great idea to add a visual element to your posts to help grab the attention of your busy, scanning readers.

2. Share The Right Content

Sales pitches are a sure-fire way to turn away customers. Who really likes to look at an Instagram page that is ALL sales pitches? If your content isn’t social, interactive or contextual, then your customers won’t want to stay on your page. Use your posts to tell customer stories, share news, and provide helpful tips. Balance promotional posts with ones that educate, inform, entertain, and put customer needs above your own.

3. Use Your Reviews

Let your satisfied, loyal customers do your social media marketing for you by sharing their reviews of your products. Reviews are powerful tools because potential customers are more likely to be open to a product assessment when it comes from an objective third party, aka your loyal customers. People will trust online reviews just as much as they would personal recommendations!

4. Add Social Sharing Buttons In Strategic Places

Adding sharing widgets like Facebook’s “Like” button to all of your product pages can be very useful for attracting customers who are further along in the buying process. You may also consider placing sharing buttons in prominent areas in your website’s design! For example, enable your customers to share their review of a product with their Twitter followers or Facebook friends. You could even allow them to share a sales offer or a sales confirmation email. Be creative with it!

5. Use Visual Content

Image-based content is naturally more engaging that just text-based posts. Using images is a very important tactic for optimizing social media posts. Make your product images sharable on sites that favor image-driven marketing, such as Instagram and Pinterest. Something that a lot of people forget to add are alt-image words. This allows SEO to pick up on your images name and put you in the running for a great keyword match.

6. Interact With Followers

Social media is the perfect platform for interacting directly with your potentials and your customers. You must monitor their posts and engage with them on a daily basis to ask questions, respond to their comments, thank them for sharing your content, and participate in discussions. It’s the best way to show that you truly care about your customers and are interested in serving their needs, which can go a long way towards building that trust and relationship I mentioned before. Two ways you can promote engagement is by joining groups and building relationships.

• Join Groups: Participating in groups is a great way to keep tabs on keywords, hashtags, and conversation topics. You can go through posts and retweet, share or repost articles, videos, photos and other interesting content that can persuade prospects and customers to return the favor. It’s a good way to establish a rapport online.

• Build Relationships With Influencers: People who have a strong amount of followers online can give a huge boost to a brand’s reach and trust factor.

7. Be Consistent

Posting content on a regular basis is critical to improve customer engagement and drive more traffic to your site. The frequency in which you post will vary upon your market, but consistency, nonetheless, is key. To make this process easier and save time, use a marketing automation tool such as Around.io so you can schedule posts in advance.

8. Start a Blog

Not having a steady stream of new content is a common complaint of many eCommerce businesses. One of the best ways to remedy this, is to maintain an active blog with educational an inspirational content. A blog post can showcase your company’s unique perspective or expertise. This can lead to producing dozens of social media posts that engage followers and compel them to click-through to your website.

9. Use Hashtags

Hashtags are a great tool to use on social media. Hashtags help your content get discovered more frequently on all social media platforms. They organize content, expand the reach of your posts, and promote interaction. However, you do want to avoid using too many hashtags in one social media update, limiting them five hashtags, at most, per post.

10. Be Short And Sweet

Concise and compelling updates attract more engagement on social media than longer posts. Your followers are much more likely to share your short visual posts since they can quickly be digested and passed along. For example, tease a blog post with an engaging image and an intriguing headline.