Social media marketing offers retailers an invaluable opportunity to expand their eCommerce web traffic. There are so many platforms to choose from, so there’s no reason every business shouldn’t be using social media as part of their marketing strategies today. It’s not just Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest, either; forums and podcasts round out the equation with even more ways to reach your customer base. There are many aspects of social media that have potential to drive revenue for businesses. Here are some key ways social media increases your eCommerce business.
Widening Your Customer Base
The very nature of social media broadens the scope of any marketing campaign’s reach. When you create an online persona for your brand, you make it possible to reach a diverse group of people who you couldn’t by using local advertising. For instance, not everyone watches cable television, listens to the radio, or reads newspapers, but a large percentage of consumers do use social media. Today, one-third of adults primarily turn to the Internet for their video streaming, as opposed to traditional broadcast television. By simply establishing and carefully maintaining an online presence, you’ll grow your customer base significantly.
It’s important to incorporate several modes of advertising to get your message out there anyway, so why not give the fastest growing phenomenon of this generation a chance?
Establishing and Enhancing Customer Relationships
When it comes to marketing efforts, there are few options that involve a two-way conversation between advertisers and consumers the way social media does. Another key component of social media is the “social” part. Consumers use it to communicate with their friends and other aspects of their lives that are important to them. A successful social media marketing campaign will establish the brand’s humanity. Interacting with your target audience is a huge part of establishing that humanity with your audience, and that’ll garner a sense of brand loyalty as a result.
Gathering Feedback
Social media relationships give marketers a chance to gather and evaluate feedback about their brand from the very audience they seek to reach. Take the recent Domino’s debacle, for instance. A couple of employees made a disgusting video in which they tampered with food that was to be served to customers. Unfortunately, the company didn’t exactly implement the most effective damage control and the incident seriously damaged the brand’s reputation.
Using your Android or iOS device to monitor your online reputation, and acting quickly in times of crisis, can help you nip it in the bud right away. Without this outlet, you may not hear about these concerns until it’s too late and your reputation is tarnished forever.
Through the glory of the mobile Internet, you have the opportunity to address these concerns in the open with a classic public relations mentality. When you publicly acknowledge your customers’ concerns, you not only repair the damaged relationships, but you also show the rest of your audience that you value their business.
Promoting New Products and Services
Now that you’ve widened your customer base to include social media users and established a positive relationship with them, use your social media accounts as megaphones. Spread the word about new products and services your company features. Offer discounts and special pricing on these new items for those who join your pages, promoting links that lead them to a page where they can purchase items.
Enticing people to like or follow your page by offering specials on new items creates a snowball effect that’ll propel your brand into an entirely new level of visibility. The eCommerce aspect of your business will undoubtedly see an increase as well.
At the end of the day, what you’re ultimately aiming to do is to convince more people to purchase your product or service. Social media drives traffic to eCommerce sites. Smart Insights reports that, based on data gathered by Monetate, more than half of all the traffic referred to eCommerce websites come from Facebook, with Pinterest coming in second at about 20 percent.
There’s no doubt that social media plays a critical role in driving eCommerce revenue. The question is, how well can brands leverage that potential to their advantage?
About the Author : Teddy Hunt is a freelance content writer with a focus on technology. When not behind a computer, Teddy spends the majority of his free time outdoors, exploring the Tampa Bay area, where he currently resides.