How to Plan Social Media Strategy for eCommerce

The Internet has undergone a sea change over a few years and now it is full of eCommerce stores selling a wide range of products and services. These stores try to offer customers with the best shopping experience. eCommerce has become a trillion-dollar industry that consists of more than 12 million online stores.

To be a successful eCommerce business owner, one has to make strategies and plans to make their eStore stand out in the crowd.

It is a common misconception that you need to put the prices of products very low in order to increase sales and lure more customers. However, this is not always true and is perhaps a risky approach. Because this may devalue your products/services alongside your brand’s reputation.

One of the best ways to promote your brand to the wider customer is through the social media platform. However, before you get onto social media to start the promotion of your brand, you have to ensure that the site is well optimized for success. It should be easy to load and navigate, and also an advanced real-time inventory and an optimized and easy to follow checkout experience.

You also need to understand that promoting the product through social media requires you to have complete dedication and a proper strategy to implement on social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, LinkedIn, etc. You have to realize that success cannot be achieved overnight and needs some patience.

These are the three main factors that will help you strategize social media plan for your online store’s success:

Who – Your Target Audience

You need to first have an idea of the customers that you will cater to. Try creating a customer profile in order to define the demographics of the customers you are trying to reach. The customer profile will help you to expand your business in terms of the product range as per the requirements. Accordingly, you need to choose the right and most appropriate social media platform and the demographic uses. For example, marketing the brand on LinkedIn may not be as effective as an Instagram campaign if your customers are Millennials.

Getting the information can be easy as you will already have access to data, such as name, order history, address, shopping history and so on. You can also wish to get additional information if required like their hobbies, the likes, total income and so on. Newsletters can also be another way from where you can get the relevant info, and accordingly, you can categorize customer segments.

What – The Purpose of Your Posts

Once you are aware of your target audience, you can now start with a defined content strategy to cater to them. Social media marketing falls flat without proper content as it is one of the most potent tools to market your product on the social media. It leads to widespread reach and reception and also helps build trust. Your website needs to have the content that will appeal to your target audience and brings out the brand value. Your content needs to be:

• Brand supporting: Whatever content you have needs to correlate with your brand. The social media posts need to strengthen brand value. In addition, you have to provide the right hashtags that are relevant to your brand. Everything you post and do on social media needs to be relevant to your brand.
• Shareable: One of the best advantages of social media is that it allows you to share information. In that case, you have to create content that can be shared and reach the target audience. Your posts and content need to be clear, concise, have proper headings, bullet points, images, or even infographics that help create brand value.

Where – Chose the Right Channels

In most cases, choose your social media platforms based on the demographic segments. Accordingly, you have to tailor your content to cater to the various demographic segments. It is advisable that you do not repeat the same content across all demographics as there is always a chance that you will lose followers.

The content that you post has to be not only unique but clearly bring out the brand value. You also need to alter your marketing strategies a bit to cater to different target audiences. For example, if you are selling pens, your marketing technique for students should lightly vary from that for the professionals.

All in all, your social media postings are the example of your company values and outlook and so you need to keep your content significant to both your brand and the target audience. Try to write engaging posts to induce the human side of a business, and be assured that you will get people to buy from you.