Gone are the days when physical stores were the only option for accessing services or attaining products. Selling and buying online have become inevitable in the modern era. eCommerce is convenient and quick, and besides that, customers get access to a variety of products.
No doubt building a business’s online presence can benefit numerous parties, streaming from customers, potential buyers, suppliers, and the business itself. This is all thanks to internet accessibility. Internet users have immensely increased in the present century and according to DataReportal, a total of 5.16 billion people globally use the internet.
This means that building a strong online presence can offer a competitive advantage to business owners and marketers. This can be done in several ways like opening up a virtual store or investing in search engine optimization (SEO) and social media.
Many online merchants invest in search engine optimization which involves the use of relevant keywords to drive relevant traffic to a website. However, another major growing trend today is social media marketing. This blog explores the different ways you can promote your eCommerce website on social media and the main social media marketing tips to keep in mind. Let’s take a deep dive into it!
Table of Contents
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing refers to the use of social platforms to promote brands, services, or products. The latest statistics indicate that there are over 4.76 million social media users globally. This offers a grand opportunity to every business owner and marketer.
Social media marketing is an effective way to promote your virtual store at a low cost or no cost at all. Moreover, social media management tools simplify marketing work. Therefore, if you have an eCommerce website, here is how you can promote it on social media;
1. Use Multiple Platforms
From Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Twitter to TikTok, there is a range of social media platforms that online merchants can leverage to promote their eCommerce stores. Consider using multiple platforms to promote your eCommerce website because this widens your reach.
However, it is essential to prioritize your social media marketing channels. For example, you can choose to invest more in Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook as these platforms have over six billion users with mostly millennials and Gen Z.
Also, you can choose to open up a Twitter account to tweet about your products. Choosing the right social media platforms will help you build a powerful social media presence that can extend your reach. Besides that, it can help you engage with different audiences, boost brand awareness and accelerate conversions.
2. Partner with Influencers
Partnering with influencers can help you strengthen your social media marketing efforts. Moreso, it can help display the relevance of your products and eCommerce website. Influencers are generally people with a powerful reputation both online and offline. These can also be people with expertise in a given field or on a topic.
Many brands currently partner with influencers because they highly influence customers’ buying behaviors. Moreso, their reviews on a product or brand can attract millions of new customers to a brand. With that, you can also collaborate with influencers to promote your eCommerce website. This will help your virtual store to become popular and stand out.
However, ensure to partner with the right influencers. Also, your influencer’s audience must be connected to your target audience. Also, ensure that the preferred influencers have a big online audience and that their reputation is good. This will help you capture new audiences, turn subscribers into buying customers and keep your brand and eCommerce website relevant
3. Invest in Video Content
No content is becoming more consumable these days like videos. When well-created, videos can enhance brand awareness, attract prospects, and keep audiences talking about your brand. If you have an eCommerce website, you can choose different social platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok to share video content about your eCommerce website.
Social platforms like Instagram and Facebook are popular video-sharing platforms with billions of users. Moreover, findings show that over 87% of people prefer watching video content from their brands. Create engaging videos and make sure that their quality is also good.
You can describe your products in a video or you can post a video to support your blogs and articles. This will improve their shareability. Additionally, ensure to follow the ideal copywriting tips when creating content. Besides that, ensure to promote your brand identity by maintaining a good tone, and content quality.
4. Use Trending Hashtags
Hashtags power social media marketing efforts and can optimize your results in a short while. Hashtags are features that can help you group conversations, or connect your content to specific events, locations, or themes.
Hashtags are effective in improving exposure, attracting new audiences, and promoting content visibility. They can similarly help your eCommerce website expand its reach and stand out within the most relevant audiences.
However, you must understand that there are different types of hashtags that you can leverage depending on the need. These range from campaign hashtags, location hashtags, product hashtags, community hashtags, and trending hashtags among others.
Also, check your competitors’ hashtags to ensure that you’re using the right hashtags. You can use hashtags to push events or if you want to join a trending conversion.
5. Engage in Contests, Quizzes & Giveaways
Every brand wants attention, and failure to reach the right eye can impact brand awareness. That’s why options like online contests, quizzes, and giveaways have become popular nowadays.
These mediums can be used to attract new customers and reinforce your virtual store’s popularity. Where necessary, conduct giveaways and contests to get new customers, and gain data, plus customer opinions.
On the other hand, you can consider live streams in the case of events or where you want to reward your loyal customers. To effectively run contests and giveaways, try to leverage hashtags and also provide links to your eCommerce website. This will directly connect your social media audience to your eCommerce site.
6. Share Customer-Generated Content
Social media platforms can be used for several purposes but they are an excellent channel to maintain relationships with customers and engage them whenever necessary. Besides that, they are a reliable avenue for sharing user-generated content (UGC).
User-generated content is a type of earned content that is created by customers. Like reviews and testimonials, UGC can influence social media users. That’s because many customers trust user-generated content.
You may not fit every customer content on your website, but social media platforms like Instagram offer you the opportunity. Share customer-generated content, testimonials, and reviews to enhance your social media presence. Also, use hashtags to improve their reach.
7. Invest in Ads
Social media advertising is another way to promote your eCommerce website on social avenues. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube offer a chance for merchants to promote their online stores using ads. There are generally different types of ads i.e image ads, video ads, collection ads, carousel ads, and message ads.
Some of the best tips for running a successful ad campaign include; defining your target audience, using demographic information, and creating buyer personas. Also, run social media ads on platforms with the highest target audience.
Essential Tips for Promoting on Social Media
It is beneficial to keep certain things in mind when promoting on social media, but you can start with the following;
Identifying your Target Audience
Surely, not every social media user is your lead or customer. This makes it important to understand where your audience is and several concerns for example their preferences. In this case, utilize social media analytics and Google Analytics to obtain the required data when running campaigns on social media.
Set KPIs
After setting goals, ensure to define the key performance indicators that will help you measure performance. Marketing KPIs are a great way to track and attain insights about the performance of your marketing campaigns. Setting the right KPIs depending on your goals can help you achieve better results faster.
Consistency
Promoting on social media requires consistency because of the ever-growing competition in the social media world. With that, don’t post once a week or a few times a month, and expect to fetch incredible results from your social media marketing efforts. Ensure to post relevant content, understand your target audience and focus on creating experiences. Consider a mix of posts with mostly videos and imagery to enhance your marketing performance.
Conclusion
Using social media for business purposes can open up vast opportunities for business owners and marketers. Generally, you can choose to invest in social media marketing whether you run a brick-and-mortar store solely or alongside an eCommerce website. This piece of content details some of the best ways an online merchant can promote an eCommerce website on social media. These tips will surely help you promote your business on several social media platforms and also improve SEO results considerably.
Byline:
Jessica Robinson loves to write interesting and knowledgeable blogs regarding business management, education and life to satiate the curiosity of her lovely readers. Currently, she is serving as a content manager at the ‘Speaking Polymath’. Every piece of content that she writes demonstrates her immense love and passion for her profession.
