Marriage between e-commerce, eCommerce solutions, and social media is a strategy that allows consumers to discover brands, products, and services through the content you post on social media. Here are four tools and strategies you can put into action to drive more sales.
Products That Can Be Purchased
The list of ways brands, brand ambassadors, influencers, and other creators can drive product sales is growing significantly. In recent years, business pages have been able to tag products on posts and stories on Facebook and Instagram, allowing customers to tap a link to a product they’re interested in and follow it to an online store to buy it. Today, consumers do not need to leave a social media app to buy a product.
Facebook recently introduced Stores - available on both Facebook and Instagram - where users can discover businesses and buy products without ever leaving the app. It was initially introduced in a select group but is now available to all eligible companies, and new features have been added, including page design capabilities, messaging capabilities, and new insights to help companies measure results.
Livestream Store
To achieve even more interactivity, live streaming is a powerful way to connect with customers in real-time. Consider QVC, but on social media. Using the live stream shopping format, an expert or influencer demonstrates the product, talks about various features and answers questions from a digital audience live. Such broadcasts can be purchased on ubiquitous social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, as well as on Amazon.
This format provides an opportunity to create fun, informative, personalized, interactive experiences that can attract new customers and establish loyalty.
Facebook Pixel
A Facebook pixel is a small code that, once added to a website, collects data that then allows you to track conversions from Facebook ads, optimize ads, build a more targeted audience, and re-engage qualified customers (users who have already taken action on your website). Once the pixel code is added to your site, you can sit quietly and watch the data arrive. Pixels give you the ability to do three key things that are challenging with other marketing tactics: tracking, measuring, and re-targeting.
User actions on the website are classified into categories called events. An event can be the moment when a particular page is viewed when a search is performed when a product is added to the cart, when a purchase is made when registration is completed, or when a registration form is completed. The ability to associate an intent or action with a unique visitor allows you to segment your audience for strategic re-targeting in the future.
Micro-Targeting
Insights gathered from tools such as pixels provide a huge advantage when it comes to recognizing audience subgroups or micro-targeting. As the word implies, micro-targeting is the process of segmenting an audience into concentrated groups based on indicators such as interests and demographics and targeting each segment with messages tailored specifically to the target audience.
One of the popular micro-targeting tools is Facebook’s Lookalike Audience feature. Allows advertisers to load email lists or create custom Facebook audiences. Using its algorithm, Facebook then generates a “copycat” audience of similar users who are likely to be just as interested in your business as the original audience.
Micro-targeting data can be derived from the page someone is following, the group they are in, the interest they state - even their browsing habits. Micro-targeting is a science, but when it happens to a customer, it can feel like destiny, which is why it often works.
The process of discovery through social content is important especially, though not exclusively, for smaller niche brands. This is partly due to, of course, budget constraints, but these tactics also attract customers who would not otherwise look for these products on the online store platform.