You have already used social media sites for your e-commerce store, but the results do not meet your expectations, let’s find out some tips to enhance it in this article.
According to a forecast by Forrester, U.S. online retailer sales grows more than 10% in the period from 2012 and 2017. In fact, the figure in 2012 is nearly 16%, increasing from $194.7 billion in 2011 to $225.5 billion in 2012. To explain for this trend in online shopping, there is not only because the change in the number of online sellers, but also the factors related to buyers. Many retailers realize that their customers’ shopping habit has changed and moved toward shopping in e-commerce stores, which makes the online market become more competitive than ever before.
However, a lot of store owners do not use social media channels as effective as it should be partly because they are not aware of their great influence yet or do not know how to carry out a measurable marketing campaign.
That is the reason why today’s blog post will give you 3 ideas to optimize social media for e-commerce stores, which will be useful for you to raise your social conversion rate.
1. Understanding your customers to optimize social media
Why should understand your target customers
However good your product or service is, the simple truth is that no-one will buy it if they do not need it or there are some constraints keeping them away from buying. You cannot persuade anyone that they want or need to buy your offerings unless you clearly understand what the problems are and what your customers really want. So, finding an answer for the question of customer needs is the key to every successful business.
After detecting your target customers and understanding their needs, always remember to think about your customers before making any decision.
How to understand your target customers
It’s recommended that you should follow this four-step process to investigate your current and potential customers.
Step 1: Who are your target customers and what are their habits?
A thorough demographics research is a good place to start. You should begin with analyzing age, gender, income, location, and so on, then divide them into separate groups and continue to analyze other factors.
Next, move on to find out what are your customers’ habits such as how much time a day they spend on work and surf the Internet, whether they prefer online or offline shopping, what makes them tick, etc.
Through answering these above questions, you are in the first steps to build ideal buyer personas and design suitable products and services for target customers, which will promise to raise your conversion rate.
Step 2: What are their goals and what do they value most?
If you know why customers buy a product or service, it is much easier to match their needs with the benefits your store can offer.
You should firstly find out the purposes customers visit your sites: Are they intended to be taught? Be informed? Be entertained? Whatever their goals, try your best to satisfy them by providing a targeted, seamless, contextual-driven and user-friendly experience.
Then, it is essential that you know what they value most. Because buyers have tendency to behave according to what they feel, emotion is one of the strongest motivators to appeal to their interests and drive their decisions.
Step 3: Where are they on the Internet?
Knowing where customers will go to find what they need allows you to build up a strategic marketing plan for your e-commerce store. First, you should find out where your customers spend most of their time on the Internet (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc.), then what key words and phrases they often search for, what they are actively talking or raising questions about. In addition, make sure whether they make decisions based on your store’s public reputation or not.
It is said that Facebook and Twitter are the easiest ways to gather information about the stores’ offerings. And 44% of marketers reported to find their customers on Twitter.
Step 4: What are your customers’ expectations?
The quality of your customer service is determined by your ability to meet your customers’ expectations. You can have a great service team, but if your customers perceive their needs are not being met, your service reputation suffers.
Additionally, because customer expectations are an ever-evolving process, it can be very challenging to know precisely what those expectations might be. Therefore, I will state below some common expectations for you to consider:
- Fast, efficient and accurate services
- High quality products at reasonable prices
- A friendly, helpful service staff to provide information and answer questions
- Prompt responses to their inquiries, whether online, by phone or in person
- A Sufficient stock to meet their needs without long waits
- A trained staff that can handle their questions without referring them on
- A professional interface design and an easy-to-navigate website
Though customers’ expectations are difficult to achieve, once you reach them, you can transform your customers from
first-line visitors to loyal customers and increase sales as customers feel more comfortable doing business with you. Moreover, as I have mentioned above, their decision to buy a product or service is partly affected by the store’s reputation, so you can gain more referrals from satisfied customers who brings in additional business by word of mouth.
2. Be visible in the social media
Why should be visible
In many case, many customers, see that it is impossible to find out the store’s profile in social media channels when they investigate the company. However, a store’ social profile is an important clue for online shoppers to decide whether to buy its products or services or not. Approximately 20% of products or services purchased after customers research for the store carefully on social media channels. As a result, if your store does not have a complete and consistent profile, you will fail to boost sales and gain valuable exposure.
Besides, you need make sure your social media profiles are easily found and visited by search engines for the queries you are targeting. And eh…, well, you must remember search engines now give more love to social signals such as votes up, likes, shares or +1. Social Media Optimization is now an important part of Search Engine Optimization.
How to be visible
For customers
The first thing you should do after creating a social media profile is to link your profile to your website. You are also advised to put icons of social media sites on website; they are just images linking to specific URLs. Moreover, remember to add “Like” and “Follow” button to allow customers to subscribe your store, and “Share” button on products pages and blog posts. This encourages customers to share your updates in their own social media sites.
For search engines
Bear in mind that not limited to some common search engines you know like Google, Bing or Ask.com, every social networking site have its own search engine and you should learn how these niche search engines work.
You will get a better result if put keywords in the important places of your profile or posting. When you are targeting a specific keyword on your website or blog to generate traffic, make sure these same keywords appear in your profile. The good areas for keywords are titles, headlines, biographical paragraph, and description of your business, past positions and so on.
Besides, you should focus on long-tail queries related to your customers most frequently asked questions. Create and follow up social communities and discussion groups, be there to answer members’ questions in the most thoughtful and professional way to get positive social signals.
3. Be attractive in social media channels
Why should be attractive
There is a common mistake often made by many stores, they always post boring technical and product-related content in your social media channels. Your fans may be not in need of your products, so you need to catch their attention and engage them.
In reality, most of users spend their time to entertain on social media channels, so if you want to use social media for marketing, application of rule “Content is King” is necessary. Your content should be brief and funny to attract customers and encourage them to follow and share your content.
How to become attractive
You surely know that the creative and flexible usage of events, photos, videos, music, etc. plays an important role in marketing because it is easy for customers to like, comment and share your content in their own sites. However, keep in mind that you must balance these kinds of content with text. In other terms, you need to create easily shareable entertaining and engaging content that makes sense for your brand.
Over to you
So, how do you think about these ideas to promote your e-commerce store? What else do you want to know to improve social media effectiveness?
Leave us a comment and we are glad to hear.
