Social media and eCommerce both had great hype in the last few years. Store owners make extensive use of various social media platforms to stay tuned with the customers. According to a study by Statista, in 2022, the number of social media users is expected to reach 3.96 billion and can even grow further.
Currently, social media is one of the best channels to proliferate for online businesses. Developing a solid marketing strategy is essential to establishing an online presence for your eCommerce store. This article will cover the importance of social media for your eCommerce business in 2022, how to effectively run various social media campaigns, and make the most out of it.
What is Social Media Advertising?
Social media advertising is also more often referred to as social media targeting or social media marketing. It can be defined as various techniques used by the store owners to grow their eCommerce business.
Advertising through various social media channels such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn is more likely to produce content that is highly attractive for audiences and help them make a purchase.
Moreover, the marketing strategy largely depends on the niche and goals you need to meet, which are mentioned below:
- Leverage traffic to your website.
- Promoting sales directly on social media.
- Connecting the customers and the prospects.
- Evaluating the customer’s journey on your online store.
A thin borderline differentiates social media eCommerce marketing from social selling and social commerce. Let’s have deeper insights into all three for better understanding.
- Social Commerce: It can be termed as selling goods directly through varied social media platforms. It can be through Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, or other social media channels.
- Social Selling: Social selling can be defined as establishing relations with prospects and new customers utilizing social media platforms.
- Social media eCommerce marketing: It can be defined as the process of growing your eCommerce business rapidly using social media. It helps create brand awareness, lure potential prospects, and even generate more sales.
With the increased use of social media platforms, merchants have started using various promotional activities to leverage sales. According to one study by Statista in 2020, it was estimated that the revenue earned through Facebook advertising had crossed over 84 billion U.S. dollars. Instagram ranks among the top five social media platforms, with approximately 1.3 billion Instagram users globally.
Developing a Solid Social Media Advertising Strategy
Developing a solid social media advertising strategy is advisable to generate more sales from social media platforms. So, here is a list of a few advertising strategies that can help you to promote your online store:
Setting up Campaign Goals
What are the expected results you want to achieve while running a campaign? Numerous goals need to be completed that are equally important for the company. Running such campaigns effectively can attract many customers, generate more revenue, increase website traffic, or more. The goals defined need to be specific and target-oriented.
Selecting the Most Appropriate Social Media Platform
Social media platforms have provided a wide range of opportunities to showcase products globally. Digital advertising makes it easy for the online businesses to capture the target audience’s attention. The power of social networking sites is rapidly increasing, and by 2023, the number of active users is estimated to cross over 3.43 billion users.
Before starting an online business, you need to determine where your target audience resides. It is necessary to select the most suitable social media platform that helps to drive more traffic to your website.
Develop Creative Ad Text Content
Want to stand apart from the competition? It is essential to create unique and eye-catching content for your brand. This will help to seize the visitors’ attention easily and encourage them to make a purchase. Compelling content with an attractive image helps represent your brand identity more likely and can easily represent yourself amongst the community.
Ensure using high targeted keywords that hold great importance and help increase product appear at the top searches. Using hashtags effectively will help to make your content easily visible on social media channels.
Create Custom Landing Pages
Creating a custom landing page is an effective way to boost conversion. Additionally, it may also help drive more traffic, improve overall SEO, and establish your brand identity.
Landing pages assist customers with specific products or services and aid them to perform a certain action. A good landing page can easily attract the customers’ attention for a long period. As a result, it helps offer the customers exactly what they are looking for.
Set up Ads for Specific Target Audiences
For running a successful campaign, it is advisable to select the best social media platform where the target audience is available. Getting to know more about your target audience and their needs will be easier to satisfy their needs.
If you want to promote your engagement ring collection, your research must focus on couples instead of teenagers or parents.
The target audience can be classified depending on various demographics such as age, gender, geographic location, income, interests, and so on. Thus, running ads will easily help to connect with prospects easily and boost sales.
Monitor Results Continuously
Analytics facilitates getting deeper insights into customer behavior. This may help you guide the future about the results curated and what has worked out. Performing certain activities may not lead to desired results and so one needs to keep a continuous watch over those campaigns.
Social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest offer analytics and can even use third-party tools to get a better understanding.
Partner With an eCommerce Marketing Agency
Collaboration or partnering with an influencer or a brand having similar products or services has proved beneficial. This, in turn, will help customers know more about your product and also aids them staying connected with your products. As a result, it will help drive more traffic and boost sales.
Top 9 Social Media Platforms for eCommerce
There is a number of social media platforms for your online store that you can gain benefit from, such as:
Facebook
Facebook is considered one of the most widely used social media platforms globally, with many active users. Such a platform easily attracts a wide range of users for your eCommerce business.
It is possible to boost your eCommerce business using Facebook by directly selling products. Additionally, certain advertising features are available for Facebook that help promote products easily on the platform. It is easily possible by setting up a Facebook Shop.
Retargeting options for Facebook allow generating potential leads, sending messages, and helps show content to the audience that has shown interest in your products or services. Another added advantage is that Facebook provides split testing where various versions of ads can be easily compared, determining which works best and the areas where improvements are required.
YouTube
Youtube is one of the largest and fastest-growing social media platforms, with approximately 2.24 billion users globally. It allows store owners to represent brands and products via video. Such a social media platform is used for entertainment purposes and helps gain more knowledge.
You can easily connect to your users by creating a video channel and continuously optimizing the videos. As a result, it helps to get more views on your videos. It is remarkably a great way to showcase your brands’ identity. Videos are a great way to lure customers and can generate huge sales.
WhatsApp
WhatsApp is a mobile messaging application that provides great business opportunities. It relies greatly on the Internet for the transmission of messages. People use it to communicate with their friends and relatives. But now, using WhatsApp for business has made it easy for the store owners to communicate with the customers regarding offers, discounts and regularly send updates.
An added benefit is using the WhatsApp link generator, which provides more tools and functionalities to expand your business. One can even set a business profile for companies using this messaging app, making it easy to give customer support. Even customers directly contact the store owners in case of any issues or queries.
Instagram
Instagram is the perfect choice to attract a huge chunk of young audience and can leverage huge sales directly from the platform. Instagram’s shopping platform offers to display your virtual storefront for your eCommerce business. The visitors can shop from their feed, story, or either from your profile.
Such a platform offers tons of advantages like Instagram Live and IGTV for representing long-form video content. If you are a Magento store owner, default Magento does not provide such functionality. To integrate Instagram feed with online businesses easily, Meetanshi has developed Magento 2 Instagram Feed that can easily fetch Instagram images for creating attractive Insta shops. Thus, Instagram advertising can be the best match for you if it suits your niche and has a relevant target audience.
Snapchat
Snapchat is one of the great multimedia messaging social media platforms. It provides a great value for your business and can be a perfect partner for increasing the followers’ list and leveraging more sales. You can showcase your products using video snippets rather than sending text messages here.
Facility to customize video messages is also possible using emojis, stickers, and filters. Snapchat is not only used to expand your business but also to discover new ones. Thus, using Snapchat is one of the most efficient ways to gear up your business and reach a new audience.
WeChat
The multi-purpose social media platform WeChat was developed in China. These Chinese messaging and payment app have taken place globally. It is the best-used platform if you consider expanding your business internationally. WeChat is widely advantageous for Chinese countries as top social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube are banned.
To flourish your business on WeChat, you need to create an account or collaborate with third parties. This makes it easy to interact and sell products to your fellow customers. In addition to messaging and calling, WeChat also offers a platform to shop online and easily make payments.
TikTok
TikTok is one of the most popular social media advertising sites that helps scale your business to the next level. It offers the facility to create short videos with funny songs in the background. According to a survey by Statistics in 2021, such a video-sharing platform has more than 100 billion monthly active users globally.
TikTok provides a couple of new opportunities to brands to allure customers entirely differently. You cannot neglect the business capacity of TikTok. TikTok live streams, hashtag challenges, and creating short-form videos with catchy sounds have opened up a new door to growing your business. As a result, TikTok aids businesses in increasing brand awareness, sell and advertising their products to the relevant audience.
Pinterest
According to the research carried out in January 2022, it has been noticed that nearly 76.7% of Pinterest users were female, and only 15% of users were male. Moreover, it is a visual platform that mainly shows reels related to the fashion industry, cooking videos, and wedding photos.
The visitors’ purchase products from promoted pins as they easily get attracted to them. Pinterest is one of the best platforms for advertising the products with the highest-performing pins. It is especially beneficial for eCommerce retailers to showcase their products easily infront of the target audience.
Twitter
Twitter is a powerful platform for engaging with customers and promoting your eCommerce business. With its real-time nature, Twitter allows you to quickly share updates, respond to customer inquiries, and participate in trending conversations. Additionally, using the Twitter API can provide valuable insights into user engagement and campaign performance, helping to fine-tune your strategies for maximum impact. The API allows you to access Twitter data to analyze trends, track mentions of your brand, and monitor the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.
Whether Paid Social Media Marketing is Right for You or Not?
Paid social media marketing has proved to be advantageous for certain businesses—all it depends on the size of the business, the niche, and the target audience. Several other factors play a major role in the success of paid social media advertising.
Average Order Value (AOV):
Average order value is a metric that keeps a track record of the average amount spent by the customer while placing an order. It indicates the profit gained through your paid social campaigns. Higher AOV suggests that you are getting high returns from your customer. It is necessary to keep continuous monitoring on your AOV, either daily or weekly.
Setting a Budget
A marketing budget can be defined as a business’s money to spend on marketing-related activities over a year. It mainly includes expenses such as paid advertising, automated tools, and many more. You need to spend a huge amount on marketing to get good returns. If done correctly, paid social media advertising could be highly profitable.
Define Marketing Goals
Before running paid ads, it is important to set a solid marketing strategy to get success. Investing without setting goals may not lead to appropriate returns. Identifying the most suitable metrics is crucial to meeting the goals. The cost per click needs to be evaluated to spread brand awareness. So, if the campaigns don’t end up working effectively, you need to change them.
Timeline for Success
Compared to organic campaigns, paid social media campaigns have proved effective enough. You can expect to get results within a time frame of three to four months. You can keep a track record by certain metrics such as likes and shares, followers/following ratio, etc.
Organic Social Performance
Organic social media makes it easy to stay connected with your potential customers once they are your followers. Success in organic social performance makes it easy for you while running paid campaigns. It can be measured through engagement, conversions, impressions, and response rate metrics.
Branding
Branding is nothing but constant efforts to stay engaged with the target audience on various social media platforms. The main aim is to increase brand awareness. If done rightly, branding will help people interact and establish good relationships with your brand.
Different Types of Ads for Social Media Platforms
To develop successful paid campaigns, you need to determine the most suitable platform where your target audience lives. There are different types of ads for various social media platforms, which are mentioned below:
Facebook
Image Ads: Image ads help customers to attract your brand easily. Having attractive photos helps in increasing sales and can stand ahead of the competition. You must include displaying a single image with fewer texts.
Video Ads: Can allure a wide range of customers using video ads. Having a single video may help to drive huge engagement on the platform.
Carousel Ads: Carousel ads help show up to 10 images or videos using their link. It is beneficial for the merchants to represent multiple products in a single ad.
Collection Ads: A group of mobile responsive ads can be opened into a fullscreen. The ad opens up while interacting with the ads, allowing customers to look at the product, explore, and even make a purchase from the platform itself.
Slideshow Ads: These ads comprise images, videos, and text for offering a great shopping experience to your customers and also aid in standing apart from the competition.
Instagram
Image Ads: These types of ads help to perform better with a single image and less text included in it. Ensure using appealing photos that help to boost sales.
Video Ads: Advertising through video ads on Instagram is a great way to attract the audience’s attention and advertise the products. Usually, it includes landscape and square videos that run for 60 seconds.
Carousel Ads: It is especially for eCommerce merchants who can showcase up to 10 images or videos using their link.
Collection Ads: Collection ads facilitate showcasing multiple product images at a time.
Pinterest
Carousel Ads: The customers can easily explore the products through carousel ads and include 2-5 images or videos in the ad.
Collection Ads: Collection ads mainly comprise one large image with three secondary images of the products.
Shopping Ads: These ads mainly include uploading products from your catalog to turn into high-performing pins.
Useful Social Media eCommerce Tips
- Establish your brand that is easily recognizable to others just by its personality.
- Collaborating with a social media influencer or other related brand helps attract a new audience.
- Ensure using short-form video content.
- Before carrying out any social media campaigns, identify where your target audience lives.
- Stay tuned up with the latest trends.
- Make sure that ads are mobile responsive.
Wrapping Up
There’s no doubt that social media advertising is a great way to showcase your products and reach a new audience. It has proved quite beneficial for most eCommerce stores. Identify the perfect social media platform and determine which platform is most used by your target audience.
Investing in the appropriate ones will help to get potential customers. Running social media ads effectively can help your eCommerce business grow to the next level. As social media usage is growing every day, it offers a great business opportunity for companies to sell their product and services, increase brand awareness, and boost sales.