How to Use Social Media to Boost Your Ecommerce Brand
You’ve got an ecommerce brand launched and getting decent traction, moving some product, and generally having a good time with it, but you can’t get over the nagging feeling that you could be doing better. Social media certainly seems to be driving engagement for others, why shouldn’t it be doing that for you? That’s a very good question, and the answer is that it should absolutely be doing that for you. So let’s take a look into how to make social media work for you.
Build a Following
The first step is also the most obvious. You need a following to do anything on social media. Without any sort of following you are essentially just screaming into an infinite void and you will accomplish absolutely nothing. In order to build that following there is one thing that is absolutely crucial above all else; consistency. In order to build a following you need to be consistently putting out content. A lot of people misunderstand this point and go for quantity of content, but that isn’t quite right. You do need to make sure that you are getting a decent amount of content out there, but it has to be on a fairly consistent schedule. If you’re just dumping a bunch of stuff onto Instagram or whatever at irregular intervals it doesn’t really help you at all.
Outside of consistency there are certainly other factors that go into building your following. You do need the quantity of content, just not without the consistency. You also need quality content. Nobody is going to engage with your content if it sucks, and the engagement is entirely necessary. Quality content gets shared, which builds your potential following exponentially. The quality of your content also depends on your audience. If you’re posting content about sewing for some reason, even though your brand is all about windsurfing, you’re going to have a really bad time in getting the sort of audience you really need.
Promotional Posts
Promotional posts can be a powerful tool in the arsenal of brands on social media. The caveat is that you need purpose behind any promotions you are pushing. You don’t want to pay the money to promote just a normal post for your brand, that’s largely a waste of limited marketing budgets. A promotional post, at its best, will do the work to draw an audience to your brand. You should turn that promotional post into something that will hook the sort of audience you want to bring in. If you’re a windsurfing company, a good example of a promotional post would be to partner with a big figure in the windsurfing community to show credibility to the audience that promoting your post would allow you to reach. It is absolutely crucial in every aspect of building your brand, from conception, to execution, to social media promotion, that you consider your audience and what you want to say to them.
Selling Directly on Social Media
Social media used to be something that could only be used for promotional purposes. You had to convince the audience that saw your posts to go somewhere else to make the purchase, which adds extra steps, and every single step loses you potential sales. These days you can sell directly to the audience your posts are in front of in the app they are using to see your posts. It is a wonderful time to be a brand because your audience is basically limitless and there are few steps between eyeballs on the brand and a sale. With so many options to convert sales, however, there is also drastically increased competition. So even though you are getting those eyeballs, so are a million other brands, which means you need to stand out. What is necessary to stand out is obviously different for everyone, so I can’t really help you with that from my lowly place as a blog writer. You know your product and what your brand is trying to say, so I trust you to figure out what you need to do to stand out. You’ve got this, I believe in you.
Conclusion
Social media is arguably the most powerful tool there has ever been for building brands. There is essentially no barrier for entry like there had been for previous forms of advertising. Anyone can start an Instagram account for a brand, it’s really not even different than a personal account. This means that, no matter what it is you’re doing, you can find your audience for it. The trick is to make sure you’re doing the work to convert that audience and get them to do what it is you need them to do. The details on what that takes will be different for everyone, but the steps I have outlined are generally applicable, they just take some tweaking for your specific use case. Ultimately, like any tool, social media takes some level of knowledge and practice to use it to its best. The only way to get there is to start from wherever you currently are.