Look at your friend’s, spouse’s, or child’s phone and you are most likely going to see several different social medias apps such as Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, and Instagram. Over 70% of people in America have a social media account and over 2 billion people worldwide are all connected to each other through social media.
Not using these amazing platforms to boost your small business revenue would be a huge mistake. The statistics behind social media and business are too blatant to ignore. 50% of people on Pinterest have created a board purely based around a future purchase decision they were thinking about, 41% of people make impulse purchases when they come across something on social media that gets their attention, 56% of Facebook users like business Pages to learn about future products and services and almost 60% of twitter users like to keep up with what’s happening with their favorite brands. The numbers simply do not lie when it comes to the amount of additional traffic you can leverage for profits and revenue through social media channels.
There are 4 sure fire tactics that you can implement immediately to start turning a bigger profit with your Ecommerce business on social media.
Increase Traffic Through Content
Most ecommerce businesses do not use social media as a direct selling platform. Rather it is used to engage, entertain, and intrigue current and future customers through interaction. Very useful leads can be generated through social media, but you must make sure that your social media pages are full of quality content that will give you a status of being a trusted expert in your niche. You need to be blogging, sharing those blogs on social media, creating memes, discussions that get your customers interacting with each other, but always relate your content and what you are posting to your website or product. Create a call to action with every post whether it be linking back to a product on your webpage, signing up for your email list, or visiting your other social media pages.
The more useful or engaging your content is, the more followers you will create. What is so great about these social media platforms is that they are the most effective tool for free marketing that there’s ever been. Every time you put a post out that has high quality and interesting information, chances are, that post is going to be shared a thousand times over. With 90% of consumers trusting recommendations from friends and family, and another 67% willing to spend money online after those recommendations, your social media presence and engagement with your followers can be crucial to getting more traffic to your website. The number one reason businesses cite as to what generated more traffic to their website is blogging, followed closely be search engine optimized content. You can’t increase revenue without increasing traffic!
Use Social Media to Create Brand Loyalty
Customers love to feel like they are a part of something exclusive and they definitely value incentives. Using your social media platforms to provide online deals that can only be found on your various social media pages will increase the frequency that your customers are making purchases. Offer a coupon code that can only be found on your Facebook Page, offer contests for your Twitter Followers, preview the newest product through Instagram first. Make sure to use call to action buttons such as “like us on Facebook for an exclusive coupon code” that links them direct to your page and likes it automatically.
Another way to create brand loyalty through social media is by getting the real people behind the business active on your business’s social media page. Interact with your customers by providing customer service and support through Facebook, respond to reviews, if you have a staff working for you, have them post articles or start discussions on the pages. Customers that have a sense of loyalty to your businesses are more likely to share and like your pages, retweet you, create boards on Pinterest with your products and visit your website to make purchases.
Using Social Media Advertising
We’ve already discussed the power in free marketing, but on social media, you’re relying on your existing customers to spread the word and create new leads for you. This is an effective tactic, but it is also very important to target your specific demographic yourself and social media paid advertising can boost your revenue and gives you the technology to follow trends, keywords, and all the other analytics involved in your marketing plan.
Sites such as Facebook and Pinterest offer advertising services based on a cost per click, CPC, method. These are a favorite for small businesses because you are only paying for the advertisement, which costs from fraction of a cent to a few cents, when someone clicks on that advertisement. For small businesses that are just starting out, this is a great way to monitor and gauge your customers likes and dislikes, what is trending and how affective your ads are without having to spend a ton of money. On Facebook, you can also pay to have your posts boosted instead of creating an advertisement. This is great for businesses that are focusing on outreach through content and building their email lists, which both will increase traffic and revenue as well.
One of the best features of paid social media advertisements is how specific or broad your reach can be. You can target specific demographics based on what your intentions are such as just beginning to target your market to get your business going, to retargeting an existing customer base that has been churched out, to reaching new customers that are relatable to customers that have clicked on your ads before. You can break down your audience by age, gender, education, geography, and place of employment also.
Account Creation Through Social Media
On your website, you most likely offer your customers a chance to create an account when they check out. If you don’t do this, you need to. Once this is in place, you can allow your customers to create their accounts by directly linking to their social media pages. This is highly effective because customer’s do not have to fill out numerous fields of personal information which is very time consuming, and they don’t have to create a pass word that they will need to remember in the future. Linking to social media is done through one click and then one more confirmation click to verify the information. The fields of personal information are autogenerated based on their social media information. Because their account on your website is linked to their social media account, they will also never have to enter a password to access their members account on your site (unless they are signed out of their social media account).
Not only does this create ease for the customer and leads to less shopping cart abandonment due to lengthy checkout procedures, the process capture information vital to your marketing campaign such as their email address and demographic information that you can then use in your paid social media advertisements.
This article was originally published at Stepsofsuccess.com.
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