Turning ordinary website visitors into paying customers is no joke, especially for new e-commerce websites.
It’s common knowledge that e-commerce businesses have an abysmal success rate, yet a lot of online courses, guides, and various learning resources don’t talk about it.
If your products have been flying off the virtual shelves days or weeks after launch, you’re either a genius or extremely lucky.
Fortunately, that doesn’t mean small e-commerce startups can’t carve a more profitable future for their endeavour.
It’ll definitely be an uphill battle, but as long as you focus on one step at a time and capitalize on every opportunity you get, you should be able to accomplish your e-commerce goals.
In this post, we’ll focus on the potential of social media as a lucrative growth opportunity for your e-commerce business.
None of these strategies requires thousands of dollars in funds or a stacked in-house marketing team. You just need persistence, a “can-do” mindset, and an ounce of patience.
1. Utilise Social Media Listening
Social media is filled with opportunities to bridge the gap between you and your ideal customers.
With a social media listening tool, you can be in touch with the market’s sentiments towards your brand and the industry in general.
For example, Keyhole allows you to create “Trackers” that can monitor the social media sphere along with blogs, news sites, and online message boards for relevant conversations. All you have to do is enter a hashtag, keyword, or social media account name and click “Search” to start tracking.
By listening on social media for the brand or keyword mentions, you can immediately respond to potential customers who’ve shown interest in your brand.
In some cases, it also enables you to clarify any misinformation that may give other users a bad impression of your brand.
You can configure Keyhole to send you real-time alerts to make sure you seize these opportunities while the conversations are hot. Simply locate the right tracker from the “Hashtags & Keywords” section, click “Edit Alerts,” and set your preferences.
Below are a few more use cases for social media listening tools like Keyhole:
- Connect with influencers who are already familiar with your brand
- Spy on the social media activity of competitors
- Stay on top of trends in your industry
2. Capitalise User-Generated Content
Another way to benefit from social media listening is to look for user-generated content or UGC.
As the name suggests, UGC refers to posts uploaded or submitted by users that are about a specific brand or product.
The most typical examples of UGC are customer reviews and testimonials. Incidentally, they are also the easiest to leverage.
Again, a social media listening tool like Keyhole would come in handy for this objective. Simply create a tracker that monitors for brand mentions, check if a customer posted anything about your brand, and ask for their permission to re-share their content to further your brand.
Even a free email marketing service like MailChimp are equipped with the tools that can help you generate reviews for your e-commerce website.
On the campaign creation window, select “Email” and switch to the “Automation” tab for a list of pre-configured workflows you can use.
The workflow you need in this case is the “Follow up on purchases” template, which will let you automate review request emails as soon as customers complete a purchase.
3. Promote eLearning Content
At this point, you probably already know the importance of a blog and content marketing in general for e-commerce businesses.
Truth be told, it doesn’t matter how amazing your products or services are. If customers don’t trust your brand, they’ll understandably be hesitant to make a purchase from you.
With this realization, a lot of small e-commerce businesses scramble to regurgitate content that’s already available in hundreds of different sources. Unfortunately, this is often insufficient in winning your customers over in the age of content noise.
At times like this, overreaching is no longer an option. Your content should prove to your target audience that you’re the real deal — the go-to brand in your industry for advice, tips, and solutions.
eLearning content will be your ticket there.
In simple terms, eLearning content could be step-by-step tutorials, quizzes, online courses, and other materials that create a learning experience for the audience.
It’s a classic case of selling power drills by teaching customers how to make a hole.
All this may sound like a long shot, but it’s actually more than doable with self-service platforms like Kajabi. It has everything you need to develop and structure eLearning products, like mini-courses, subscription-based content, and ongoing training services.
Once your eLearning content is ready, the next step is to promote it relentlessly on social media platforms where they matter.
You should also consider creating a YouTube channel to share teasers of your online course material and incite more customers to take the bait. Of course, you can host your entire online course library on your channel if you think it would simplify your eLearning campaign.
4. Double Down on Visual Content
Suppose an online course is too tall of an order for you.
Another way to spice up your content for the social media community is to weave visual assets into your content strategy.
Statistics show that content pieces with visuals tend to do perceivably better on social media that their plain-text counterparts. It may contain a blog banner, infographic, image quotes, and so on.
The good news is, you don’t need to hire a professional graphic designer to load up on visual content for social media marketing. There are dozens of drag-and-drop design tools out there that can be used indefinitely for free.
Canva is a great example of a tool that fits the bill. Apart from its intuitive, easy-to-learn interface, it also has a sizable stock of templates that can jumpstart your design efforts.
If you plan to dropship products, do so with a tool like Oberlo for Shopify to make sure you don’t have to worry about quality product images — another form of visual content that’s imperative to your store’s sales performance. It also lets you personalize your product pages to match the overall aesthetics of your site without writing a single line of code.
5. Target Buyer Keywords
Keyword research — this probably isn’t your first time to encounters this word, and it’s not hard to see why.
The right keywords make sure your content is discoverable to the right audience. Get it wrong, and you may end up wasting money on traffic that won’t convert into prospective leads — let alone paying customers.
When doing keyword research, it’s always been a rule to look for long-tail keywords that target a narrower audience and pertain to a more specific intent.
Ubersuggest, for one, allows you to sieve profitable keywords from a pool of long-tail suggestions using filters. You simply have to define the commercial or action-based terms your target audience would most likely use when they’re ready to take action.
Some examples of these terms are “buy,” “order,” “price,” “rent,” and so on.
Let’s look at the Ubersuggest results for “photo booth” when you create the filter for the word “rental.”
So, there you have it. A list of reliable strategies that will let you leverage social media to boost e-commerce conversions.
There’s just one last thing you need to remember before you put these strategies to use.
Before you do, bear in mind that there are no one-size-fits-all solutions in e-commerce. Treat the strategies above as malleable and do extensive research — something as simple as a target keyword can make or break your entire campaign. Good luck!
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