Tag: social media

How to Improve Online Sales Using Social Media

Written by Chris Wood on 10/03/2021. Posted in Digital Marketing, Social Media.

If you have an online shop, the question of how to improve your online sales is never far from your thoughts. As well as working out how to reach your target audience, strengthen your USP and improve your sales funnel, there’s the problem of cart abandonment. World shopping cart abandonment rates for retailers in March 2020 were 88.05% .

If your cart abandonment could be improved by even 5% it could make a big difference to your sales. Social media is an invaluable tool for online retailers. Below we’ve included our tips on how to use it to help improve your online sales.

Plan Your Social Media Content

Your brand is probably already using social media, but are you planning your content? Make sure you are using social media to raise awareness of your brand and products. Don’t just taking the hard sell approach.

Plan your posts carefully, particularly in the lead up to key seasonal sales periods. Highlight your popular products: mention their key features, benefits and endorsements. To avoid disappointment don’t forget to keep your customers well informed across all of your social media platforms regarding the last postage days for last minute orders.

To find out more, check out our social media content ideas for businesses here.

How to Improve Online Sales Using Social Media

Build Trust on Social Media

As well as raising awareness of your brand and products, use social media to build trust. If you want people to hand over credit card information on your website, your brand must feel authentic and trustworthy. People will often head over to social media to see what people are saying about your brand before buying. Make sure your social media accounts are linked to your website. You also need to build in a strategy for customer engagement and loyalty. Peer to peer reviews are becoming the main source of brand advocacy, so ensure you are doing everything you can to encourage good reviews and feedback. This will help to build trust with your target market.

Optimise Social Media Advertising

Social Media advertising is a great way to reach beyond your existing audience and increase web visitors and sales. You can do detailed targeting on both Twitter and Facebook/Instagram. For example, narrowing down your audience by location, age, interests and job titles. If you already run ad campaigns it is worth reviewing the setup of your Ad campaigns to avoid wasting money. Optimise your settings to pay by Ad clicks rather than Ad views and ensure the set-up matches your target audience. Location targeting should be set up correctly to concentrate your efforts where your products sell best, particularly if you have a limited budget.

Use Remarketing to Bring Back Potential Customers

To reach out to people who visited your site and left before completing a target activity (e.g. completing a purchase or filling out a contact form), it’s possible to target them using remarketing ads. These are image based ads which can be set up on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. They work by appearing to customers who have visited your website as they browse the web. Since you only pay each time someone clicks on your ad they’re a great way to remind people of your business whilst they are still in the decision making process. Facebook also has a big advantage over Google when it comes to remarketing, since there is no minimum audience required before your ads kick in.

For High-Level Targeting Try Dynamic Ads

Even more targeted than remarketing are dynamic ads. If someone abandons their cart mid sale whilst logged into Facebook, it’s possible to target them with an ad showing the exact product they were looking at, reminding them to finish their purchase. You can even offer a discount code or free shipping to tempt them back. This is a highly effective way of increasing conversion rates and bringing back customers. Maybe they left your site to compare product shipping times or prices with another provider and then forgot who you were!

Promote Flash Sales

If you have a glut of products at the end of a season or line, a flash sale is a great way to shift them quickly. Social media is the ideal way to quickly share your sale. Create a Facebook offer and share using audience targeting. Base this on location and interests or behaviours (e.g. people who have interacted with your Facebook page recently).

We hope you found these tips on how to use social media to improve your online sales helpful. We specialise in helping online retailers increase their revenue, so get in touch to find out how we can help.

How your Business can Adapt to Social Media Trends in 2020

Written by Chris Wood on 03/01/2020. Posted in Digital Marketing, Social Media. No Comments on How your Business can Adapt to Social Media Trends in 2020

It’s the start of a new year and a great time to re-evaluate your current marketing strategy. To help you in your planning, in this blog post we cover some of the main social media trends for 2020 and suggest how your business can adapt to them. Social media changes fast, so to make sure your business thrives in 2020 you need to stay ahead of the game!

1. Strike a balance between public and private engagement

Private messaging is on the rise and more and more people are shifting their time and focus to private channels such as Messenger and Whatsapp. Instagram has launched Threads, a camera-first messaging app, and LinkedIn is rolling out its new Teamates feature.

However, this doesn’t mean that the future is purely private social, so hang onto your Facebook page! The rise of private behaviors like messaging has not diminished the importance of public social media feeds, which remain a critical space for brand discovery and customer acquisition.

The key for brands is creating a seamless experience across both worlds, while balancing automation and human connection to build deeper customer relationships at scale. When it comes to private channels you can automate the easy stuff, taking advantage of messaging bots, but make sure you don’t lose the human touch.

2. Employers take centre stage in a divided world

Pessimism among consumers is growing with the rise of populism, divisive politics, and global mistrust of traditional institutions. As our world becomes increasingly divided, employees are looking to their organisations to make things right.

Progressive organisations should take advantage of this new role, building strong internal cultures, amplifying their company purpose with employee and customer advocacy, and putting to work the inextricable link between employee and customer experience.

Don’t underestimate the strength of employee advocates – they can help amplify bold sentiments and goodwill from your organisation. Try creating staff ambassadors on social media, and develop a positive social media culture within your organisation.

3. TikTok shakes up the status quo

Have you heard of TikTok? This social media app had explosive growth last year and is shaking up the social media landscape. Users share short, addictive video clips, reshaping how music is both made and marketed.

The question is, as with all new social media platforms, will it last? Whilst the platform may or may not last, it is certainly bringing valuable insight into the future of social culture, content, and collaboration. In response, Instagram has released Reels, allowing Instagram users to set 15-second video clips to music, share them as Stories, and potentially see them go viral on the new Top Reels section of the Explore tab.

It is only really worth investing time and resources into TikTok as a brand if you are aiming at the youth market. Aside from that, it’s worth noting the trend of short, authentic, raw and fun video as you develop your social media strategy for 2020.

4. Social marketing and performance marketing collide

Brand building has long been the primary use case for businesses on social media, but with the continuing decline of organic reach and increasing demand for return on investment, there’s been a rise in social performance marketing (using social ads to achieve a specific conversion such as a sale, lead, or click). Social marketers must expand the scope of their skill sets to fulfill the dual brand requirements of community building and performance marketing.

Successful organisations need to balance both driving short-term conversions and creating long-term strategies to build brand equity, customer happiness, and differentiation. Take a full funnel approach when it comes to social advertising campaigns – remember that ads aren’t just for performance marketing, they can also be just as effective for brand awareness. Don’t try to do too much with one ad either – use smart, targeted ads to move customers along the purchase path.

5. The social proof gap closes

ROI and measurement will continue to be persistent challenges this year despite attribution models now being built into social ad platforms. Successful organisations need to unite social data with other data for a holistic view (e.g. with Google Analytics data and CRM data) and don’t just look at social data in isolation.

They also need to have an integrated customer engagement approach between social media and other digital and traditional channels leads (e.g integrating a social ad strategy with email marketing, PR activities and advocacy programs).

Smart organisations should invest in both skills and tools to understand social ROI. Simply owning clever software won’t help your organisation understand the value of social media, you need to either have the skills internally to integrate and analyse the data that is meaningful to you, or to work with a skilled partner company.

We hope you found this blog post on social media trends useful. For help with social media and digital marketing campaigns for your business in 2020 get in touch.

Much of the information and stats in this blog post is based on Hootsuite’s recent live webinars on social media trends in 2020 and Hootsuite’s blog on social media trends.

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