5 Ways Social Marketing Can Improve Your Ecommerce Efforts

5 Ways Social Marketing Can Improve Your Ecommerce Efforts Work
5 Ways Social Marketing Can Improve Your Ecommerce Efforts Affect
5 Ways Social Marketing Can Improve Your Ecommerce Efforts Often
5 Ways Social Marketing Can Improve Your Ecommerce Efforts Aimed

Let’s take a look at three ways social media can improve overall healthcare marketing efforts: 1. Engage with patients in real-time. One of the benefits of social media marketing in healthcare is enabling deeper, and more meaningful discussions that address patient questions, concerns, and interests in real time. In short, taking the time to make a schedule does double duty of keeping your social media presence organized while also maximizing your contents’ reach. Automate the Right Way. Automation is all the rage in marketing right now, and for good reason. However, you can’t expect to successfully put your social presence on autopilot and walk.

Small businesses around the world know that social media is here to stay, but that doesn’t mean you’ve yet had the chance to put in the time or effort necessary to cultivate a proper presence on the right networks.

But even if you haven't optimized your social media presence, there is still time, and the benefits will be well worth the effort. There are many advantages to cultivating your brand on social media, including that it can help you improve your customer service, allow you to communicate with customers and prospects on a new level, help you engage your audience and reach new audiences, help you build authority, and drive traffic to your website.

In short, a solid social media strategy can drive growth for your business by fostering lasting and loyal relationships with customers and prospects.

1. Choose the Right Networks

Social media has exploded since Facebook went public back in 2012, and there are thousands of networks out there dedicated to anything from connecting old classmates to social activism and everything else under the sun.

So with all these options out there, how does a business hone in on the right ones? The advice from most experts is to join four of the most popular, and choosing the right ones comes down to your audience (and where they are) and your goals. Here's some information to help guide you:

Facebook: the largest platform, has 2 billion-plus active monthly users, and the site is ideal for businesses that want to generate leads and build relationships
LinkedIn: the platform for business networking can be used by both B2B and B2C businesses to create trust, build authority, and engage audiences
Twitter:whose platform is immediacy, is perfect for businesses whose major audience is under 50 and who need to stay apprised of time-sensitive information like breaking news, announcements, and trending topics
Pinterest:the photo sharing site, is a fantastic platform for businesses with visual appeal (think restaurants, fashion, art, travel, and weddings), and it’s great for driving sales because so many users look to the site to plan purchases
Snapchat: the expiring content platform, is one of the fastest growing social networking sites, and businesses can leverage it by offering promotions, providing personalized content, giving exclusive access, and building relationships with influencers in order to drive brand recognition and loyalty

2. Set a Goal

Being active on social media has a number of benefits for business, and there are many things you can accomplish with your social presence, such as performing customer service, engaging customers, generating leads, expanding your audience, driving sales, increasing web traffic, gaining valuable insights and feedback, and much more.

But in order to achieve these with any measure of success, you must have a goal in mind that you can work toward because you'll need to create a strategy to get there. Your techniques for driving sales, for instance, will be different than your approach if you wanted to improve your customer service offering, so it’s important to know what you want to accomplish.

3. Come up with a Strategy

Having a goal for improving your social media presence is great, but it’s only the beginning. Once you know what you want to achieve, you have to come up with a plan to help you get there.

Start by designating the person or people who will be part of the social media team, and break up their roles and responsibilities clearly so everybody knows what's expected and when.

You should also decide on your posting frequency, and create a content calendar that will help you plan posts and make sure you don’t miss days. The content calendar is a big part of your strategy because it should lay out:

Who your audience is
What topics and subjects your audience is interested in
The usable content you already have
What kind of content you still need to create or curate
When and on what platforms content will be published

4. Make a Content Creation or Curation Plan with Your Audience in Mind

Knowing your audience is critical when it comes to finding success with social media engagement because the interests and needs of your audience will determine the type of content you should be sharing and the way you engage your followers.

For instance, if you were a coffee roastery, your target audience might be interested in recipes for fancy coffee drinks, brewing tips and techniques, and other Java-related articles. Some of the important things you should know about your audience include age, location, gender, goals, likes, needs, behaviors, challenges, and pain points.

No matter who your audience is, however, the conten you share should always be high quality and relevant, and you should prioritize video, images, and other types of visual content as often as possible because these are popular among all demographics and all audiences.

5. Select Tools to Schedule and Automate Posts

Staying active and present on social media takes time and dedication, but there are plenty of automation tools available you can use to automatically publish posts and schedule posts up to a month in advance.

These tools, which include Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Buffer, MeetEdgar, and BuzzSumo, can save you time by allowing you to plan and schedule batches of posts at once, but they also make it easier to monitor your networks and respond to messages quickly.

6. Actively Engage Your Audience in Relevant Ways

Although content is supremely important on social media, it’s not enough to just post your content and walk away. Social media is also about connection and engagement, and that’s the only way you can foster the relationships you want to build and gain the trust of your audience.

There are many ways you can engage with your audiences, and they include:

Commenting on posts
Starting and participating in conversations
Sharing relevant information
Sharing user-generated content
Posing and answering questions
Addressing complaints and criticisms
Showing appreciation for customers

7. Minimize the Time You Spend Promoting

Even though the practice of social selling is becoming increasingly popular among salespeople and marketers, the actual process of using social networks to drive growth is much different from what most people are used to. Rather than using social as an active promotional platform, it’s best to use it as a tool for engagement and communication.

In fact, it’s recommended that businesses keep their promotional content to 20%, while the lion’s share of content should be dedicated to meeting the needs of your audience.

8. Maintain a Constant Presence

Social media isn't a one and done deal, and it takes time and patience to cultivate a reliable presence. With the right automation tools, you can minimize the time you'll have to dedicate to social media, but even still it will require at least 15 minutes a day to monitor your channels and respond to questions and conversations. In terms of posting frequency, the right number really depends on the platform you're using.

For LinkedIn and Facebook, don’t post more than once a day, and limit posts to five times a week. Twitter, on the other hand, changes so quickly that the more you post, the better. With Pinterest, 11 pins a day seems to be the magic number.

9. Present Audiences with a Consistent Voice

Social media is ideal for brand building and recognition, so it’s crucial that every post you make is in line with your brand and image. This can become problematic if you have multiple people assigned to the task of social, because everybody will bring their own personality to their posts.

For this reason, it’s best to limit the number of people responsible for posting, and make sure everybody is on the same page in terms of the voice and image you want to present.

10. Watch the Right Metrics to Monitor Your Progress

Social media use is growing all the time, and every month there are more active users than the one before, especially on the top sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Snapchat. It’s not necessary to have a presence on every social network out there, and it’s a much better strategy to define your goals, locate your audience, and pick the sites that are right for you based on those factors.

Social media relationship building has a number of benefits to confer on your business, but it’s important to put in the time cultivating your presence if you want to take advantage of them all.

Conclusion

Your social media goals will determine the metrics that matter to you, and it’s important to measure these to ensure you're on the right track with your strategy. For instance, if you wanted to increase traffic to your site, then you'd want to pay attention to the amount of referral traffic coming from your social networks.

There are many resources you can rely on for metrics, including Google Analytics, Facebook Analytics and page insights, Sprout Social, LinkedIn company pages report, Keyhole, Twitter analytics and keyword reports, Buffer, and BuzzSumo.

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You cannot successfully market your eCommerce store today without using social media. The benefits of social media marketing are enormous, and the best part is that it doesn’t even take a huge commitment of your time or resources to pull it off! In short, social media marketing is tailor-made for small online businesses that need to use their resources wisely.

As a small online business, you don’t have a big ad budget—that’s just a fact. You also don’t have unlimited man hours to advertise your business because you rightly have to worry about making sure your startup runs smoothly. When you factor in the extra work that small business owners always have to do anyway, the time and effort commitment to marketing seems daunting.

Again, that’s where social media can come to the rescue for your eCommerce store! All it takes is a few hours every week, an active account on big social networks like Facebook and Instagram, knowing who your target audience is, and a very small ad budget.

Here are some of the benefits of social media marketing.

Much better brand loyalty from your customers due to the benefits of social media marketing

The thing about social media is that it’s a way to directly connect with your eCommerce customers. The more you connect with them because of your social-media presence, the more highly they will think of your brand.

As soon as your customers interact with your brand more and form a better impression of you, other good things happen! For example, according to Convince and Convert, 53% of people who follow a brand on social media end up being more loyal to that brand. There you have it! When social media is a facilitator between brands and customers, it is a surefire way to strengthen brand loyalty as well.

Here is the key, though: you can’t expect to have brand loyalty suddenly appear out of the blue. If you only curate your social media channel infrequently and don’t personally address or reply to your customers, then your brand loyalty is going to be pretty weak, even if you are using social media.

So remember that more brand loyalty is indeed one of the benefits of social media marketing, but only if you share valuable content with your customers regularly.

More traffic to your website

Your eCommerce site is where your conversions and sales happen. Social media is only one of your inbound marketing tools to get your leads and customers to your site for conversions and sales, and it works very well.

On every social network — whether that’s Facebook, Instagram or Twitter — your eCommerce store will always have a backlink to your online store right on your brand’s account page. This is how your leads and visitors will find your site through social media…if your content is excellent.

Generally, you want to send more traffic to your site by using the 80/20 rule of social media, which states that you should share 80% high-quality content and resources for your customers in your industry while only sharing self-promotional content 20% of the time.

There’s also another beneficial reason behind more traffic coming to your site. The more social shares your content gets, the higher your eCommerce store is actually going to rank for its keyword in search engine results pages (SERPs). And the higher any individual page on your site or blog ranks in the SERPs, the more people will see it, click on it, and visit your online store!

Newsjacking for extra attention; another of the benefits of social media marketing

Newsjacking is essentially when you align your social media activity with a very hot, trending topic on social media. Newsjacking works because you amplify your own marketing message by referencing and riding on the coattails of a news story that many people outside your industry are already paying attention to on social media.

Simply look at the trending stories on Facebook or Twitter. You’ll always be able to easily jump on a particularly hot story, provided that you can somehow work it into an angle for your eCommerce business.

The only word of caution is that you’ll have to be quick to successfully align your social media content with a trending story! After all, the lifecycle of any news story is only usually very short, lasting a day or two, so it’s in the best interest of your online store if you jump on the news story near the beginning of its news cycle.

If you do this technique right, you’ll be able to capitalize on the heightened interest of said news story that you’ll see in the form of extra traffic to your online store.

It never hurts to think of clever ways to capitalize on a hot news story and find an angle for your brand — and then share it on social media!

Give a boost to your SEO efforts

These days, SEO isn’t just about optimizing your site, individual pages, and blog. Social media has become an important signal that plays a role in either positively or negatively affecting your SEO rankings, according to none other than Google’s Matt Cutts. In other words, according to your social media activity for your online store, you are being graded by Google on whether or not you’re a trustworthy source on the Internet!

Therefore, since social signals are so valued in Google’s algorithms, having an active and regularly curated social account on Facebook and Instagram can noticeably help your SEO rankings. Why wouldn’t you want to use social media for this purpose since the investment is very small to begin with?

Your online store occupies just one tiny corner on the huge, vast web. If your social media posts and shares help get your store more attention to people on search engines, then it’s a no-brainer.

The benefits are many, and the effort is relatively little

We get it. You’re a small eCommerce business owner. Your budget isn’t big, so you have to be smart and discerning with what you spend money on. You can’t spend a lot for ads, and you definitely don’t have the money to hire people to run elaborate marketing campaigns for you! Your solution is social media marketing. The benefits of marketing for ecommerce via social media are real and very promising. All it takes is a small commitment.

As we’ve shown you, using social media to market your online store isn’t complicated. Nor does it take a lot of time and money. If you can understand the basics involving newsjacking, social signals, and regular curation, you are already a step ahead of other small business owners.

To sum up, here are the benefits again:

More loyal customers for your store
More traffic to your site
The ability to newsjack and gain extra brand attention
Higher SEO rankings

Don’t wait for someone else to do it. Hire yourself and start calling the shots.

Want to learn more?

Is there anything else you’d like to know more about and wish was included in this article? Let us know in the comments below!

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