7 Social media strategies to better engage with your customers

Social media is a massive part of modern life and if you’re not making use of it for your business, you’re doing yourself a disservice. Properly defining your social media strategy helps to drive traffic to your e-commerce site, builds awareness of your brand and provides a handy medium for you to engage with a widespread audience.

You can interact directly with your audience via your own social media channels, or get others talking about and recommending your business on theirs. Build enough trust with your audience and many of them could become paying customers. On the other hand, if people can’t find information about your business online, other than on your own website, they are likely to go elsewhere.

7 social media strategies for e-commerce

It’s possible to make some progress with a hit-and-miss approach, but to be most effective, your social media strategy should be part of your wider digital marketing strategy. These are some of the aspects you need to consider:

1. Be clear on your goals

Before diving down into strategies and tactics, it’s important to know what your social media goals are. These will probably be closely linked to your digital marketing goals. For example: you may want to:

• Raise brand awareness so that more people know who you are and what you do
• Convert visitors to your eCommerce site into paying customers, boosting your sales
• Use social media to engage with and support your customers
• Increase your number of followers
• Increase your audience’s engagement with your posts via Likes and Shares

Being clear on these up front will help you focus and measure your efforts.

2. Know your audience

You need to know who your audience is in terms of demographics and interests, as well as how they behave online. Your first step here is to create customer segments and personas. Then you can align your strategy with the aim of attracting them to your site.

If your audience is local, this report may give you some insight, and if it’s international, it’s also worth understanding behaviour in the United States.

3. Choose the right channels for your business

The social channels you choose will depend a lot on which ones your audience uses. This blog covers some of the more important social media platforms. Note that we recommend you pick a couple to start with, rather than trying to cover them all.

4. Create content your audience needs

For your business to stand out from the crowd, you’ll need to put in some work to establish it as a trusted authority in your industry. One of the best ways to do this is to post content that your audience will find useful and interesting. If the information you share also helps them solve their problems or achieve their goals, you’ll be able to convert them into customers far more easily.

5. Optimise all social media profiles and pages

It’s your responsibility to manage everything online that pertains to your business. So just as your website should be up to date and current, so should your social media channels. For example:

• Provide all the information you can about your company
• Create relevant and compelling titles
• Use high-conversion keywords to optimise all your content for search engines
• Post excellent images optimized for the specific platform
• Tidy up your Facebook page with a customized URL and page tabs
• Draw attention to your best content by placing it prominently e.g. pinned to the top of your feed
• Include calls to action that drive people to your website or desired landing pages

6. Decide on processes, resources and tools to make social media successful

If you don’t have a plan for managing your social media strategy, it may become haphazard and actually work against you, or begin to seem like too big a chore. To avoid that, start by deciding who will do what. Will you be doing everything yourself, do you have employees who can help with certain aspects (and have they been trained to do so?), or will you hire a digital agency to help you work out a schedule for your content? You’ll also need a brand style guide so everyone knows what message your brand is putting across and what that looks like.

Remember too that it’s not just about posting and forgetting about it. You need to pay attention to anything happening online that involves your brand, and also respond to members of your audience who engage with you on social media. Consider using helpful tools like these to schedule posts and keep an eye on your analytics. Others, like Wishpond, can help you manage marketing funnels and competitions.

7. Track and measure (and then improve)

If you want results and not just window dressing, you need to keep an eye on what’s working and what’s not, then tweak your strategy where necessary. There are many ways to track your data, including Google Analytics and the individual social media tools themselves. To get the big picture and identify what’s giving you the most bang for your buck (i.e. driving the most traffic and converting it), set up a master spreadsheet which you update on a regular basis. For more on what to track and how to do it, see here.

The bottom line….

Social media marketing creates a huge opportunity for your business. With 70% of Generation Xers saying they are likely to purchase something from a brand they follow, you have to think about your Social Media approach strategically. Dylan Kim, the co-founder of Brevite, relied entirely on social media to build his camera backpack eCommerce business. He says:

“But, at the end of the day, it’s really all about having good content, having genuine conversations with your audience, and having a good product that really serves people.”

Do you use social media? If so, what are your strategies for managing it to maximise your time and money spent?