How to use social media for your e-commerce business: tips from a social media marketing agency
Social media has become an integral part of a business’s marketing strategy in recent years. And as a social media marketing agency, we have seen the ways that you can use social media to market your e-commerce business change a lot.
So, we want to share some useful tips on how to use social media to enhance online sales and promote your e-commerce business.
What is social media e-commerce marketing?
These days, 26.5% of social media users go to social platforms to find products to buy*. This is why, if you are an e-commerce business, having a social media presence is vital.
Social media e-commerce marketing is exactly what it says on the tin; using social media platforms to market your e-commerce business. Platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and TikTok can be used to generate brand awareness and promote your online store.
As a social media marketing agency, we often use social media to drive traffic to the e-commerce website, sell products, engage with customers, provide a touch point for customers to contact the business, and build an online community around the brand and product.
It is worth noting here that social media e-commerce marketing is different from social selling. Social selling is the process of using social media to engage with and nurture a prospect or customer, while social media marketing is the process of spreading your business’s name to an audience you’re targeting.
So now we have cleared that up, let’s look into how you can be using social media to help market your e-commerce business.
Build brand awareness
With 4.76 billion people around the world now using social media*, there is no better place to be spreading the word of your brand.
Creating business pages on social media platforms is free, making it a cheap place to market your products and brand.
To build brand awareness you need to create a consistent posting strategy, with a consistent tone of voice, branding and message. Posting regularly and with a unified tone of voice will help audiences recognise you and your brand among the many other posts that they will see while scrolling.
Use your tone of voice and organic posts to share your brand’s personality, and add a human element to your brand, this is a great opportunity to show that your business is not a robot, but run by humans who care for their customers and are passionate about their products.
Part of our digital marketing retainer packages includes social media marketing in which we will often schedule organic posts, with the help of a client, to create and share their brand personality. We will also engage with the followers, responding to comments and feedback in the brand’s tone of voice.
Speak to us about how we might go about doing this by calling our team on 01202 888200.
Run social media adverts
The global reach on any social media platform is huge, making them great platforms to advertise on.
As the potential audience is such a large pool, platforms such as Facebook, Linkedin, and, even, Instagram have great segmentation and targeting tools. This allows you to target an audience who are most likely to engage with your business, increasing your revenue.
Before you start advertising on social media platforms, make sure that you define your goals and set key performance indicators (KPIs); this will then help you select the right ad types to use to get the best results for your goals.
If you are looking to drive brand awareness and traffic to your website, you will want to use image, video, and graphics to show your product, services, and physical shops if you have one.
If you are wanting sales then you want to focus on products by setting up shopping ads.
As a social media marketing agency, setting up and running social media adverts is something we do day-in-day-out for our clients on a digital marketing retainer. This will often include running brand awareness campaigns to spread the word of the clients, traffic campaigns that aim to reach new audiences and encourage them to click through to your website, shopping campaigns, which generate a purchase, and engagement campaigns to boost page likes and interactions on the business’s Facebook page.
Typically, when setting up sales campaigns, we would focus on 3 types of audiences:
- Interest – these are people who haven’t yet engaged with your business or social media, but have expressed certain interests in the types of products you sell.
- Remarketing – customers who have already engaged with your website (e.g. visited product pages but not purchased)
- Lookalike – this is a custom audience that can be generated by the AI looking at your current website converters or social converters.
Use social media to sell your products
Make the most of being able to reach a large audience with social media by selling your products directly on the sites.
There are currently four social media apps that allow you to do this:
- Facebook,
- Instagram,
- Pinterest,
- TikTok
If you haven’t already figured it out, this is where social media marketing and social commerce overlap as the reach and brand-building abilities can lead to direct sales and business.
As an e-commerce company, you might need to think about your products and decide if these platforms are the best place to promote your products. There may be some products and services that Facebook just won’t sell, meaning that running shopping ads will be expensive for very little return.
However, for most e-commerce businesses, setting up shopping ads and shops on these platforms is a no-brainer.
There are many benefits of using social commerce. These include:
- Being free to set up,
- Creates a memorable and interactive shopping experience,
- Can streamline the sales process as the user doesn’t have to bounce from one site to another,
- Extends your sales opportunities and places to make a sale,
- Gives you an opportunity to reach a wider geographical location if you have the infrastructure within the business to deal with it.
As a social media marketing agency this is one of the first things we set up for our e-commerce clients. We are then able to use this in the rest of our social media marketing strategy.
If you are unsure about how this might work, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us on 01202 888200 and we will be happy to discuss the benefits of this with you.
Use it as a customer service support platform
Social media profiles are a great way to nurture and maintain existing clients as they create an easy point of contact. Due to this, they have become an important part of a business’s customer service.
Customers may visit your profiles to get a range of information, ask questions, give feedback engage with your brand, and offer insights into what they want.
To make the most of e-commerce marketing on social media, you must be prepared to deal with these engagements in a timely manner. Having a social media marketing agency on board might help with this as they can help with the immediacy of social media; replying to comments and messages, and making sure that information likely to be searched is already on your profile.
Engaging with your followers acts as social proof, which will help build trust with new or prospective customers. If they see you are engaging with your customers there is a higher chance of them wanting to make a purchase.
Get to know your customers and their desires
Social media is a great place to listen to what is being said about your brand. You can track what people are saying and react to it.
If they are saying great things about your products or content then you can continue doing what you are doing, but if they are asking for a change, you can provide that. If you react to what your audience is saying, you stand a chance of generating more sales as you are giving your audience what they asked for.
CW Marketing have a skilled team of social media marketers who are able to use the tools within each social media platform to track comments, tags, and other mentions of your business and respond in the appropriate manner; be this by changing up their social schedule and changing when they post, or to creating more content that performed well.
Let us help you
We are an experienced social media marketing agency and are no strangers to e-commerce social media marketing.
As part of our digital marketing retainer packages, we will work with you to create organic posts and social media adverts on the relevant platforms for your business so that you will get the most out of e-commerce social media marketing. Whilst we’re not restricted to the following, we focus mainly on:
- Facebook marketing
- LinkedIn marketing
- Instagram marketing
If you are interested in working with us, then get in touch by calling 01202 888200, or emailing info@cwmarketing.co.uk.
To find out what we get up to as a team, follow us on Facebook.