A wise person once told me if you want to reach people you need to go to the places they are.
This is a key principle in digital marketing for all websites and works well for eCommerce. So if your business is eCommerce you need to be where your customers and potential customers are rather than just waiting for them to come to you.
This is one of the reasons social media has developed into such an important tool for digital marketing.
Where else can you so easily find connected groups of people keen to like, share and talk about their interests and opinions?
Yet despite what appears to be a perfect situation I have found many eCommerce sites and brands struggle to get to grips with the art of using social media effectively.
So I created this series of articles to help outline some of the basics you need start to master social media marketing.
To start with let’s look at the foundations to successful social media marketing for eCommerce.
Know What You Want
Too often businesses jump into using social media without thinking want they really want to achieve.
Before you start think about your business objectives and goals these could include:
Increase sales from new customers
Improve customer loyalty and repeat sales
Increase brand awareness
Grow email subscribers
Promote new product
Generate positive reviews
Be clear and specific about what you want to get out of your social media.
Know Your Audience
It’s a topic I bang on about a lot, but you need to know who your audience is and for this it’s worth investing time to create detailed customer personas.
You can create personas using data from your analytics, talking to your team, talking to your customers and doing research including customer surveys.
Once you know more about your audience you can start to understand the sort of messages and content that will appeal and work in harmony with your objectives and goals.
Pay close attention to what’s important to your customers and any objections they could have. Also consider their hobbies and interests as all this data will feed directly into the content you create for and share on social media.
Select the Right Networks
It’s at this point you should start to select which social networks you want to use. Using a network just because you think you should or your competitors use it isn’t enough.
Do consider the following:
- Used by target audience
- Used by industry influencers
- Can manage with resources available
- Ease of use and available features
- Good performance data available
You need networks that work well and can be used efficiently and effectively.
Warning: Don’t ever treat social networks as a one post fits all. You need to tailor your posts to your networks with content, links and images, what works for Twitter will need to be adjusted for Facebook. Take this into account when considering resource available.
These three points will give you a solid foundation to your social media marketing. In the next article we will look at Social Media for eCommerce – Content Planning.
Is your social media marketing working for you?
If not we can help, including strategy planning, creative content and winning campaigns.
Contact Us Today +44(0)1227 68 68 98
