7 Social Media Marketing Strategies for Ecommerce Websites

Marketing is one of the most vital elements in the world of ecommerce. It’s a business’ chance to show customers what makes their product or service unique and worth purchasing over other, similar products on the market. 

You’ll usually have a specific goal in mind for your social media marketing strategy. After all, the point of investing time and money into marketing is to increase conversions, sales, and leads for your business. Social media marketing strategies for ecommerce are particularly focused on driving sales. 

Social Media Marketing Explained

What is Social Media marketing? Well, social media marketing is the section of your overall marketing strategy that aims to engage your customers on social media. 

Business processes can vary wildly by industry, as can the size of an audience base, so social media marketing strategies are highly unique to each business and sector. 

There are lots of different areas of social media marketing. This article will take a look at seven of the most relevant strategies for ecommerce sites to promote traffic to your site and convert visitors to customers. 

You’ll also need to consider what platforms you’re using and where your audience exists in an online space. Some of the data that you need on your customers, with examples of why this is important, for a successful social media presence include:

1. Age - around 31% of Instagram users are below 34 and around 3.7% of Snapchat’s audience is over 50.
2. Nationality - only just over 20% of Americans use Twitter, but it’s Japan’s most popular platform

Organic vs Paid Marketing

Organic reach and marketing is the engagement that a post or piece of content receives from just being posted. This might be because the platform’s algorithm has shown it to certain people, or may have been caused by having your existing followers see the post and engage with it. 

By contrast, paid reach and marketing is the engagement that a piece of content receives on top of its organic results from paid advertising campaigns. 

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For example, an Instagram post announcing your product’s latest updated features might receive 700 organic impressions from an account with 8000 followers. Instagram’s algorithm has shown your content as relevant to roughly 8% of your follower base. 

A smaller account with 800 followers might receive the same number of impressions by promoting the post to a predetermined audience. 

You can set parameters for your audience so that paid posts are shown to users more likely to be interested in your product. These include - but aren’t limited to - age, location, gender, education level, interests, and other pages that they like. 

Social Media Marketing Strategies for Ecommerce Websites

Use these seven strategy points to start developing and improving your social media strategy to bring in more customers. 

Share Quality Content

Creating relevant social media content is the top way of engaging your audience to its full potential. 

With so much competition for the world’s 4.55 billion social media users, it’s vital that you understand what your specific audience wants from your social media presence. 

You also need to fully understand your goal for your social media strategy. Do you want to make more sales? Further engage your existing customers? Encourage repeat purchases?

Your goal will determine what sort of content you put out. 

As an example, a business with a highly technical product might create how-to content and share the experiences of other users. Potential customers of new technology want to know how it works and whether it’s suitable to solve their individual problem. 

As well as posting for quality, make sure that you’re posting regularly and have a plan for your content. A content series is a great way to encourage repeat visits to your profiles, where you can then go into advertising your product. 

Perform Competitive Analysis

Many ecommerce sites have a presence across a wide range of social media platforms. Dealing with omnichannel sales can lead to inconsistencies in your marketing strategy on social media. 

Performing a competitive analysis lets you understand what your direct competition is up to and find any weaknesses in your own strategy in comparison. 

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There are plenty of templates that you can use, or you can do this in a more informal style. 

Choose three to six competitors and note down their strengths, weaknesses, and audience size. Try viewing their social media as a user to see what you like and what your customers may want to see from you. 

This will help you to remain competitive in your industry and avoid putting off customers with an inconsistent social media presence. 

Introduce Promotions

Promotions are a great way to bring in new followers and get more people interested in your product or service. What type of promotion you run will depend on your product or service and your social media goal. 

As a case study, let’s look at an example ecommerce site producing personalized gifts. 

This site could benefit from offering a discount or promotion to any customer coming from a given social media platform, usually their main platform. Instagram would be a good choice since this business is likely to rely on visuals for promotion. 

Other businesses with a different service or product might consider discount codes, giveaway campaigns, or a free trial to social media users. 

The goal of this is to increase awareness of your business on social media and gain potential repeat customers. 

Add Relevant Hashtags

Some platforms rely on hashtags more than others. Twitter and Instagram are well-known for using tags to influence post reach and audience. On the other hand, Facebook and video platforms like YouTube are less reliant on hashtags. 

It’s still good to have an idea of relevant hashtags in your niche, even if you aren’t using them actively. This is because they will give you an idea of keywords for your product on social media. 

Hashtags for your niche should be used in combination with more general, but still relevant, hashtags. 

For example, imagine an ecommerce business whose major service is a non fixed VoIP phone system. This is a very niche business, so their hashtags will have a high degree of relevance to their audience. But they’re unlikely to have a wide reach. So, alongside tags like #voip, this business should consider tags like #communication and #techbusiness to increase their reach. 

Be Responsive

Customers want to know that they’re being listened to. If a customer sends you a message with a question or, more importantly, a complaint, you need to be responsive. 

This may take the form of replying to direct messages (DMs) quickly. Some platforms, like Facebook, will rate a business based on how rapidly they respond to messages. 

Many businesses have found that upgrading their communication technology has helped to improve response time and consistency.

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For example, a cloud-based call center may allow for more agents working at any one time and helps to prevent the slow processing of customer data. 

Being responsive can also mean replying to comments and having your finger on the pulse. Using “social listening” software, you can detect when a customer mentions your brand, even if you’re not tagged, and quickly respond to any issues. 

Build a Video Content Strategy

In today’s market, customers want to be able to interact with brands. They want brands and businesses that understand their needs and work to meet them. 

This is where video content comes in handy. Video content receives more engagement and is favored by most algorithms above image and text content. It’s also a great way of involving customers in your business processes and showing them that they’re being listened to. 

For example, a business that produces a new style of headphones might create short video content for Instagram and TikTok that explains their advantage over traditional headphones. 

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Popular video trends include how-to videos, tours, and product breakdowns. 

Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing can be divisive, but it can be incredibly useful when it comes to reaching a wider audience. 

Working with large influencers can be expensive, and this strategy can fail if a business prioritizes follower numbers of an influencer’s niche and the interests of their followers. 

This is why a lot of businesses are now working with micro-influencers in their industry. Micro-influencers are generally found on Instagram and have a large following from a particular community. This means that their opinion tends to have a lot of sway when it comes to new products and services within that industry. 

The strict definition of a micro-influencer varies, but they tend to have anywhere from a thousand to tens of thousands of followers in their niche. 

Micro-influencers generally have more realistic rates when working with small businesses. They also have highly focused knowledge of your industry. 

The Final Word on Analytics

Once your social media strategy is up and running, you’ll need to monitor it for success and areas of weakness. The best way to do this within your team is to gather and analyze social media metrics. How you do this varies by platform. Below is an example using Twitter, which is commonly used to communicate news and promotions to a business’ audience. 

This is what a Twitter Analytics page may look like: 

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Collecting this data month-by-month will help you to build up a picture of how your strategy is performing over time. For example, a steady increase in Tweet impressions demonstrates that your content is becoming more engaging or relevant to your audience’s needs. 

Try to decide which metrics you want to collect before implementing your strategy. These analytics should be in line with the goal of your marketing campaign. Avoid collecting every single piece of data, and instead, focus on the data points that tell you something useful about your strategy.