Social Media E-commerce Strategies

 

A social media e-commerce strategy is a set of social media tactics you can use to market your e-commerce business.

Depending on your business model and goals, your strategy may focus on:

• promoting an ecommerce destination, i.e. driving traffic to a website or branded app,
• selling products directly on social media,
• communicating with customers, both pre-purchase and post-purchase,
• collecting insights about your industry (your audience, competitors, benchmarks for success)

… or combine some (or all!) of the above.

Is social media e-commerce marketing the same thing as social selling or social commerce?

Not exactly. Social media e-commerce marketing is the broadest term of the three and can include elements of both social commerce and social selling.

Let’s brush up on the definitions:

• S. commerce is the process of selling products or services directly on social media, using Facebook Shops, Instagram Shops, Product Pins and other native social media shopping solutions.
• S. selling is the process of using social media to identify, connect with and nurture sales prospects.
• Social media ecommerce marketing can involve building brand awareness, advertising, community management, social customer service, social listening, competitive analysis, social commerce and social selling.

How to use social media for ecommerce

Building brand awareness

If you’re launching a brand new store or product, you should start building buzz around it before you are ready to go live with sales. The sad truth is that you won’t be able to make any sales if people don’t know about what you’re selling.

Then, in 2021, social media is busy with brands, but there’s still room for newbies. Also, a unique voice and a consistent posting strategy will help you build brand awareness and reach your target audience. For a head start, follow the tips we listed at the end of this article.

Building brand awareness is a process, and it does take some time. If you wish you could speed things up just a bit — paid social can help you do just that.

Advertising

Recent statistics show that:

• 190 million people can be reached by Facebook advertising,
• 140 million people can be reached by Instagram advertising,
• 170 million people can be reached by LinkedIn advertising

… in the United States alone. (Source: Digital 2021 report by Hootsuite and We Are Social).

Source: Hootsuite

Of course, not all of them are your target audience, and your budget will likely get in the way of reaching that many people.

But most social media platforms offer advanced targeting tools you can use to carve your perfect audience out of this bulk — and serve them ads that will support your goals.

Speaking of goals, make sure that you set up the right objectives for your social media ads. As an e-commerce business, you will likely want to use social media advertising to attract people to your store, or a specific product or collection.

Facebook and Instagram, for example, let brands pick one of three conversion-oriented objectives:

• Conversions. With this goal, you can encourage your target audience to take a specific action on your website, e.g. add a product to cart.
• Catalog Sales. Use this objective to pull products from your catalog into ads.
• Store Traffic. If you have a brick-and-mortar location, this ad goal is great for promoting your store to potential customers who are in the neighborhood, based on their location.