How SMM can give 10x Growth to your eCommerce Business?
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For any business in today’s world, social media presence is a must. Similarly, for eCommerce businesses too, social media plays a vital role in connecting the brands with their customers.
How do companies communicate with their customers? Well, there are a lot of conventional ways like emails, text messages, etc. These might be effective in conveying a message to the customers but does not fulfill the essence of communicating with them. These mediums do not let customers interact with the firm or the other customers and mostly result in one-way communication. On the other hand, social media platforms of companies let customers interact with business enterprises, let customers put forward their feedback and reviews, let customers talk to each other, and build a community. Such communications result in building a stronger relationship with customers and save efforts and resources on customer retention.
eCommerce businesses are heavily dependent on internet-based customer attraction and conversion. Their digital marketing campaigns are run on various channels of the internet. And the two most significant of such channels are search engines and social media. And when we speak of social media, platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Pinterest, TikTok, etc. are being extensively used for social media marketing (SMM).
In this article, we shall delve into how marketing efforts via social media platforms can help eCommerce businesses achieve growth.
Establishing customer relationship
Customers these days do not buy anything without doing research or reading reviews. They value good product/service ratings and reviews. Social media platforms give businesses a chance to interact with customers and solve their queries and problems quickly. For instance, a customer having warranty-covered problems with his new mobile phone which he purchased online can get his phone repaired or replaced with just one tweet giving him a better satisfaction level. This encourages customers to share their experience, reviews and ratings on related online platforms. In the present context, customer relationships and customer experiences are essential for businesses to create a difference and stand out from their competitors.
Insights about customer behavior
Using social media campaigns help businesses better understand customer behavior and their tastes and preferences. How audiences respond to advertisements on social media can indicate a lot about how the content went down with them. Better audience response in terms of views, clicks, shares, comments, conversions, etc. gives an indication of the performance of a social media campaign. This can also bring forward ideas for improvements in products/services.
Better SEO
As we know, using social media helps in building a brand image and the better the social media presence is for your brand, the better results you get on the organic searches done by the customers. Search engines’ algorithms consider social media presence as a ranking factor and look at different metrics such as the number of visitors, comments, and interactions, etc. on social media pages.
Different strategies to leverage the power of SMM
Organic SMM
As the name itself suggests, organic SMM includes the activities which are unpaid. This strategy involves a lot of content marketing. Content on products and services are created and posted on various social media handles. Because this strategy is organic and not promoted and the target audience cannot be selected, content relevance and creativity play a crucial role. Visibility is the toughest challenge here. Businesses keep coming up with innovative ways to
To quickly gain traction amongst its social media audience, some businesses create give-away campaigns or contests (see image below).
These contests often succeed at grabbing customers’ attention and encouraging further action resulting in increased activities in a company’s social media handles. Organic social media marketing is helpful for eCommerce businesses with a lean digital marketing budget or big brands with a mass following.
Promoted SMM
Promoted SMM is basically developing campaigns on different social media platforms and promoting those campaigns to reach out to the target customers or audiences. Different objectives for paid SMM include aggressively pushing for brand awareness, getting leads, more conversions, etc.
Paid SMM provides access to premium features. Varying from platform to platform, paid or promoted SMM provides better insights in terms of traffic statistics, audience activities, geographical locations, time spent, taps, etc. creating enhanced scope for campaign improvisations. eCommerce businesses can use these premium features to better incorporate their digital marketing strategies and objectives in their SMM campaigns.
The image above shows an example of CTA (Call to Action). These advertisements are targeted only to men within a specific age group who might use these razors.
SMM using Influencers (Influencer Marketing)
Influencer marketing is a form of paid advertising where brands collaborate with social media celebrities for product endorsement. These influencers include models, actors, sports persons, celebrities, etc. who have a massive following on their respective social media handles.
Influencer marketing campaigns are very popular on Instagram. These public figures usually have a massive following. So, whenever they make a post it is likely to be viewed by a large audience. This provides a tremendous window for businesses to showcase their products and services by collaborating with such social media stars. Now there is no assurance that it will surely result in increased purchases but then that is why the word ‘influence’ appears. The visibility alone a brand gets is huge and that too with a single post. The bigger the star in social media, the bigger the brand seeking collaboration is.
Choosing the right person as an influencer is also an important aspect of influencer marketing. The value proposition of a brand must resonate with the personality of the influencer selected.
User-generated SMM
User-generated content marketing is when people use your product and then post about their experiences of social media platforms. These shared expressions of experiences can range between positive and negative but these need to be acknowledged by the eCommerce businesses so that customers feel that they are being heard even after a bad experience with a product or service. eCommerce businesses must take these as feedback for improvement. Even when people share their good experiences, these need to be appreciated otherwise it might reflect ignorance.
eCommerce brands can also ask people (organic route) to use their products and share their experiences by using given hashtags on social media. This will increase the social media activities of a brand in terms of digital traffic. If done right, organic strategies in social media marketing can lead to better ROI in digital marketing.
Summing Up
With an ever-increasing dominance of social media platforms in the lives of common people, social media marketing has become a necessity for eCommerce businesses.
Social media marketing can fulfill three important objectives of eCommerce businesses:
- Develop customer relationship with two-way communication
- Get better insights on customer behavior with data analytics
- Improve customer experience based on the above two factors
Even though strategic creativity has no boundary, still certain standard strategies have worked well for eCommerce businesses. Some of these are paid while others are organic. But the basic considerations are choosing the right platforms, achieving the maximum visibility, and achieving higher conversions.
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