6 Effective Ways Social Media Marketing Can Boost Your E-Commerce Business

With a spurt in e-commerce start-ups and established players adding more verticals to their existing offerings, the industry has become even more challenging to have conversions and sell products to the right customers looking out for desired products and services. The benefit that social media gives to companies is that they can find the right audience, connect and engage with them and sell their products in the process which is cost effective in comparison with traditional mediums for a brands journey from Awareness, Aided Recall to Top of Mind Recall.

Research says that 4 out of 10 users have purchased an item via social media. Let us look at 6 ways Social Media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Blogs, Pinterest, Instagram etc can boost your E-Commerce business in the ever competitive environment:

1. Effective Blogging: Blogging is one of the most effective ways to organically get traffic to your website. It can range from a variety of activities related to ones industry such as news & facts, how a particular product can fit an occasion, season trends, tips & suggestions etc. The same blog can then be also promoted on other social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+ etc. for better engagement and click to websites. This eventually establishes an organization as industry expert educating the readers, helping create a large pool of followers looking out for information and how the products can fit into reader’s lives.

2. Facebook Applications: All the success stories in E-commerce have one thing in common; a large pool of customer database (apart from how you use it). Special Facebook applications can be created which entices the customers to fill the database form and get a discount voucher on a successful registration. Large number of companies are using this technique considering the discount offering as customer acquisition cost which in turn becomes a win-win situation for both.

3. Creative Post Designs: As they say, a picture speaks more than a thousand words; the same applies in social media as well. Social media is all about engagement and those posts with good designs, informative content will have higher chances of getting liked, commented on or share/Re-Tweets. Eg: An apparel e-tailer can create a custom posts of a casual business look with website links of the Shirt, Jeans, Shoes and Belt in the description guiding audience towards specific pages of the website which they want to buy or find the price. Pinterest, even though at a very nascent stage in India, but picking up very fast, can be a very good medium apart from Facebook, Twitter etc to apply this.

4. Contests: Contests are one of the best ways to engage your audience, boost traffic to your website and increase your followers. Companies need to know their followers well in order to decide on a “give away” to entice more participation, hence more engagement which can range from gift or discount vouchers, free products, free consultation (in case of service oriented companies) in order to let people experience their portal once they win.

5. Campaigns: Social Media is all about two-way communication, where brands not only should promote their offerings all the time but also try & listen to their audiences in terms of what exactly do they require. The more you keep them engaged, the better the relationship & trust will be. The main idea is not to hard sell else the marketing effort is doomed to fail. Brands can come up with social media campaigns to keep their audiences interactions on, get engaged and hence infuse the brand message in their minds. Rewarding them for their participation lets them have high recall & preference value eventually gaining out of them when they become your loyal customers and promote you through word of mouth (well social media is all about that isn’t it?)

6. Click to Website Ads / Offer Posts: The most useful feature of Facebook is its ad manager through which we can promote specific campaign offerings to specific set of people having particular interests, behavior patterns etc. Another way brands can leverage the different platforms is to provide special offers only for their page audience and promote through “Offer Claims” tab which also allows you to track how many people have claimed the offer. This way apart from analytics, one can gauge on what are the kind of offers and promotions their existing audience are looking out for and which offers are not of their interest.