Ecommerce brands consistently make the same mistakes when it comes to digital marketing. They think that having a presence on places like Facebook and Twitter is enough to attract more customers.
Nothing is further from the truth, because you must also focus on engaging your social media audience, choosing the right social media networks and combining social media with other marketing platforms.
Moreover, social media is not really digital marketing. There are many channels and opportunities to uncover.
Keep reading to gain a deeper understanding of how you should approach social media marketing for an ecommerce brand:
1. Build Your Brand’s Identity
It all starts with your brand’s visual identity. You need to find a good domain, a matching logo and color scheme that will remind your audience of your goals and message.
Once you define your visual identity, keep it consistent across all your new and existing marketing channels. That’s how you create brand recognizability.
Namify can help you with all of that. It will help you find a domain name, pick a logo concept and even register social media accounts that will be your additional digital marketing channels.
From there, you can set up an email newsletter to build up your list and have your own channel you can reach out to at any time. WP Beginner offers a great tutorial on that.
A weekly email digest of posts of interest, questions that need answers and mention of new resources in the community are a must to drive engagement and make participation in the community a habit.
2. Choose the Perfect Social Media Platform for Your Brand
It’s easy to simply sign up for a Facebook and Twitter account and hope that they work out for your organization. In fact, if you don’t want to complete any research, there’s a much better chance of you building a useful platform through these two sites than any other social networks.
Why not put in the research though? There could be a goldmine waiting for you in a network like Pinterest or Instagram, and it’s up to you to figure out if one of these more niche social sites is primed and ready for your customer base.
The goal is to hammer down the ideal social network for your industry before committing to the one that seems most obvious.
Sparktoro is a social media analytics and market research tool allowing you to find your perfect channels. It shows you which communities your target audience frequents, which influencers they are listening to and which channels they are watching.
3. Build Your Community
The million-dollar question is how to get those first few followers on your social media sites. It’s a tough game, so we recommend beginning your marketing efforts through your personal social profiles.
This way, you can connect with friends and family who may be interested in what you’re selling, then eventually move these people over to a page for a more professional presence. A word of warning: Keep your marketing to a minimum with your personal pages, since it can get annoying for friends, and most social networks don’t like this.
Now that some of your friends and family are aware of your endeavors, create a page and try to invite those people to the page. Start sharing useful information that they may be interested in sharing with their own friends.
Hopefully this marketing campaign drums up enough buzz to start filtering a consistent supply of people to your page. Some quality posts to share from the start include:
- Inspirational quotes
- Surveys and polls
- Trends and news from the industry
- High quality photos that are either funny or cute
- Stories or interviews that inspire people
Trello will allow you to plan your blog’s and social media calendar, record ideas, plan seasonal content and delegate to your team members.
As stated before, it’s not uncommon for ecommerce brands to get their starts on Facebook or Twitter, even after building a solid website presence. Both Facebook and Twitter offer solid conversion potential, and building your followers becomes easier when you implement some of the following strategies:
- Place follow and like buttons on your online marketing content and websites
- Include branded social media buttons on your website and email newsletter
- Embed a Twitter or Facebook feed on your site
- Present a special offer or promotion that convinces people to follow your Facebook or Twitter accounts
After this initial promotion, it’s time to implement the 80/20 rule, which states you should only promote your brand 20% of the time. The rest of your social efforts should be spent on sharing useful information such as industry trends, funny pictures, videos and more.
Quality is always your goal, so make your accounts hubs for conversation, as opposed to billboards for your organization. And make sure to engage (and engage your team members and customers to engage) with your own page, start conversations, reply to comments and encourage feedback!
4. Create Helpful and Fun Videos for YouTube
YouTube is a rather common social network for all brands, because it generates an area for customers to learn about your goals, community and even the people in your organization who are working behind the scenes.
The key is to think of your YouTube page as an actual TV network. In order to find success, you must produce content on a regular basis, so your target audience can start looking forward to what you have to say.
Consider posting weekly educational videos explaining what your ecommerce business’s goals are. After that, think about how you can share unbiased stories and even social proof to improve your social credibility.
Canva will help you create videos to share your message and publicize social proof.
5. Create Visual Content for Instagram
Instagram is nice, because it’s a fairly closed network with one sole focus: beautiful images. If you decide this is the best route for your organization, remember to implement a strategy that shares fun, motivational and useful images. In addition, the golden rule for Instagram is to make your images bold, colorful and beautiful.
Here are some tips for making the most of Instagram:
- Ask for user generated content, then add that content to your landing pages
- Run contests based on hashtags to prompt people to share your page and visit your website
- Post consistently so people don’t forget about you
- Brand your images with small logos or overlaying URLs
- Mix in inspirational quotes, since this is one of the most shared types of content on Instagram
Adobe Express offers a handy tool allowing you to create professional content for your Instagram feed to visualize your brand’s message and share your milestones:
Over to You…
Let us know how your digital marketing campaigns are going for your ecommerce brand. Your first step is setting up your website and setting up your visual identity. Once this is done, you can branch out to off-site channels, starting with social media.
It’s clear that Facebook and other social platforms will never overshadow your website, but they can become an integral part of bringing in more traffic, building brand awareness and sharing your message. Social media is one of the best ways to build a community around your ecommerce business.
Make community building your focus. Online community can be much more than just a place where people connect for networking. Make your community your platform for employee collaboration, idea sharing and motivation.
About the Author
Ann Smarty is the Brand and Community manager at InternetMarketingNinjas.com as well as the founder of ViralContentBee.com. Ann has been into Internet Marketing for more than a decade, she is the former Editor-in-Chief of Search Engine Journal and contributor to prominent search and social blogs including Small Biz Trends and Mashable. Ann is also the frequent speaker at Pubcon and the host of regular Twitter chats #vcbuzz and #myblogu.
