Almost every business recognizes the importance of operating a social media marketing campaign. Not only is it an inexpensive way to entice new or loyal shoppers, it creates a two-way conversation between brands and consumers.
Still, not everyone knows how to use social media effectively. Below are a handful of tips to develop a meaningful campaign for your business and for your shoppers.
Know Your Audience: The first step to a successful marketing campaign is to identify your target audience. Are you trying to reach fashionable Millennial women or cost-conscious stay-at-home dads? Tweak your strategy to match your goals and connect with your audience over the platforms they already use and love!
Of course, connecting with your audience should be easy if you are already using an enterprise ecommerce platform to host your site! Who shops at your online store? Tailor your communications toward this target audience on social media to drive future traffic and sustain interest in your brand.
Post Regularly: Social media marketing is sometime referred to as “feeding the beast,” since your audience is consistently hungry for content. If you want to stay top of mind, post to your page at least twice a day, but avoid spamming your followers with too many updates. It’s all a delicate balancing act.
Pro Tip: Use an automatic social media management tool, like Hootsuite or Sprout Social to schedule posts ahead of time.
Stay Positive: Social media marketing is most successful when it is light and playful. Try using a lot of exciting high-definition images, silly memes or helpful product tutorial videos. Also, avoid bad mouthing your competition. This will only hurt your reputation and distance crossover shoppers.
Respond to Fans: Remember to thank your followers for posting friendly comments on your page as this will build rapport. Conversely, you will also want to respond to negative comments on your page with aplomb, assuring the disgruntled shopper that their input is heard and valued. If a shopper post an interesting image or video, repost it with credit.
Spread the Word: It’s totally cool to ask your followers to share your site or page with friends and family, and there are plenty of ways to do it. Ask your followers to tag their friends in the comments as part of an online contest, post a funny meme and ask your audience to tag people who can relate to the image or provide coupon codes for referrals.
Hashtag Responsibly: Hashtags are a wonderful way to increase your page’s visibility online, find new followers and join conversations; but a little goes a long way. Too many hashtags can seem spammy and will make your ecommerce business look like #JimmyFallon #JustinTimberlake.
Just Leave It Alone: While its sometimes appropriate to join conversations happening online (sometimes referred to as “trendjacking”), other times it can actually hurt your business. Unless your store sells politically relevant merchandise, steer clear of controversial tweets or political posts. DiGiorno Pizza suffered public embarrassment and backlash after using a hashtag associated with domestic violence to sell their food. The result was truly cringeworthy.
You Can’t Buy Friends: This one is important. Eschew any service that promises to boost your number of followers for a price. These numbers do not represent real people, but rather bots and phony profile pages; it can do more to damage your reputation online, label your business as spam and make you look foolish. After all, you want to be interacting with real shoppers! So, forget the bots and do it yourself.
Now you have all the wisdom you need to get started on your ecommerce social media marketing campaign. It takes a lot of work, but it pays off big time! One last word of advice? Have fun with it.
