Social media ecommerce marketing vs. asocial selling vs. social commerce
You probably heard of all the terms like social selling or social commerce before. They’re used interchangeably, but they often mean the same thing.
Let’s take a look at how they’re different.
Social media ecommerce marketing
This is where ecommerce businesses use social media as a marketing channel that promotes the brand or service to drive more sales.
Social Selling
Social selling is when you as a brand use social media to identify, connect with prospects and nurture them. This tactic helps businesses reach and engage with sales targets across social media and generate leads through a website.
This is when you capture the person in their buy mode.
Social Commerce
This is where brands sell products or services directly on social media or through inbuilt solutions like Instagram and similar channels. using an ecommerce frontend. With social commerce customers can shop, select and complete purchase on social media apps through a user-friendly interface provided by the ecommerce frontend..
Ways brands can use social media for ecommerce
1. Build brand awareness
There’s no better channel for creating an initial buzz than social media. There’s no better marketing channel for generating buzz than social media. It is the perfect spot to promote your store, your products, services, events or promotions. It’s great for engaging in conversations with your target audience. TO build brand awareness, create a consistent posting strategy and post with a unified message.
A better well-known brand also reduces paypal chargeback time should you face the issue.
Engage with hot button topics and hashtags, and create direct conversations with other people.
- Showcase personality and values
- Be consistent in your messaging
- Demonstrate value.
- Speak to the correct people.
- Respond to feedback
- Have comparison UI rich tables and images
Tentree a clothing company is all about sustainability wear. They lean on this on social media, posting content several times a week. The posts don’t directly promote Tentree but they’re inspiring and pleasing.
2. Advertise
There are very few places for advertising your channel than social media. The ad reach on social media is high and keeps growing.
Here’s the ad reach by social media channel as per Hootsuite
- 2 billion on Facebook
- 1.44 billion on Instagram
- 1 billion on TikTok
- 849.6 million on LinkedIn
The audience is huge and they also powerful targeting and segmenting tools.
To advertise effectively on social media, make sure you:
- Identify your target market and audience
- Offer them discounts and free trials
- Layer your targeting parameters to zero in on your audience
- Create compelling content strategy to speak to them.
- Define your goals and KPIs
- Pick ad types that align with these goals
- Choose the right conversion metrics
The goals you have for social media advertising will dictate the ad types, KPIs, and conversion metrics you choose. And the platforms you invest in.
A goal suited to drive brand awareness is best suited to:
Image, video, carousel ads that drive store visits, ad impressions and engagement
If you want sales go with product, collection or shopping ads that drive purchases or product page visits.
To get started choose your goal. Then define the type of ads and targeting. And define how you track success.
The Bay for instance uses Instagram advertising for its brand.
Prioritizing local SEO tactics will help you get more leads locally.
This generates additional product sales. In the ad below, they use visual flare together with shoppable catalog ads.
3. Sell products directly on social media
Social commerce has never been easier in history than it has been now. There are four appswithsocial selling built in it.
- TikTok
Twitter and Snapchat teamed up with Shopify to fashion their own social commerce tools. This is where social media ecommerce marketing overlaps with social commerce. Whether the reach and its brand building power can yield direct business connections.
The benefits of using social commerce solutions include:
- It’s free and easy to set up
- They create memorable interactive experiences
- They streamline the entire sales process
- The extend places where sales can happen
- They enable headless commerce
- They give you the freedom to create shopping experiences.
CCM’s Instagram blends lifestyle marketing as well as shoppable product placements. THey showcase professional hockey lifestyle and make the gear HHL lovers use.
4. Increase sales with an ecommerce chatbot
Brands that expand sales on social media need to scale support too.
You can scale this with eCommerce chatbots
- Connect and itneract one to one with channels.
- Offer pre and post sale support
- Offer discounts, products and highlight promos
- Answer FAQs
- Guide users through the buying process
Creating a social media chatbot takes under an hour with a codeless chatbot builder like Chatfuel, SendPulse or MobileMonkey. With SendPulse for instance, users can create an Instagram chatbot that can react to subscribers' stories that mention your brand.
Ecommerce chatbot example: DeSerres
Another example is the arts and crafts supply store DeSerres whose traffic exploded during the pandemic. They added an AI chatbot to respond to customers. Its job was to answer queries from users while also driving sales.
5. Customer support
Customer support is at the heart of any social media strategy as it offers a platform to nurture and support new customers.
People who visit your site have come there for many reasons, like
- To discover information
- Ask questions
- Generate feedback
- Engage with the content
- Offer insights regarding what they like
Brands and others must prepare themselves to handle incoming comments as well as DMs. If not, an eCommerce chatbot can be of great help. In addition to that they may consider providing customer support via email, and use SPF record check to keep their data safe from email security threaths.
A social media presence leaves brands vulnerable to both positive and negative feedback.
Yuo can see brands comment to hostile comments directly and readily offering a solution to fix the same.
6. Social listening
With the right marketing project management tools, social medai can offer a wealth of data. Social listening is the process of scanning social media for mentions of your brand to dig up relevant conversations.
67% of marketers say social listening is a useful way to track and understand their customer needs. Not only that, it offers invaluable insights like:
- Products people love
- Where recurring problems are there
- Public’s sentiment toward the brand
This lets you address issues, solve them while refining your message to meet new market demands.
7. Showcase your personality
Buyers love connecting with brands. To do this, be yourself. Don’tbe terrified of your own personality. Social media is the place to craft this personality. Use humor, engage is social causes and biome the most responsible brand around. The goal is to make it easy for users to both remember and recognize you. Also, highlight your personaliity not only for social media users, but when sending transactional emails to email suscribers as well.
Wendy’s for instance is quite free with their social media channels. They post jokes, roast people and engage in conversations. They have cult following as a result of that.
8. Collaborate with others
Collaboration is the key to success on social media. Engaging influencers and partnering with other brands are two ways to turn collaboration profitable.
Influencer marketing keeps growing in size and is worth $16.4 billion today. It has become one of the most popular tactics to expand your reach, provide social proof and generate tons of new followers.
Collaborations are equally powerful. More brands keep partnering with other companies with similar audiences. When they run collaborations they create high-value bundles or promotions. Brands both amplify and validate their products and co-market their products to respective followers.
Glamnetic is another example. They see a network of influencers who promote their products. They provide influencers free products and ask them to demonstrate that on their channel. In return influencers get an affiliate link that they can promote on their accounts.
9. Use video as much as possible
Video is easily one of the more popular and influential content types out there. 88% of people say they want more video from brands. And the same number confess to buying something after watching a brand’s video.
No coincidence that TikTok and Instagram storeis are some of the most popular real estate for brands. Both offer opportunities for brands to post paid and organic engaging content.
Video doesn’t have to be expensive. It doesn’t need high production value or glossy effects. All it has to do is demonstrate value, showcase your personality, and speak to your customer. Another good example is Vessi which use Instagram stories as a way for them to promote products, share career stories and create engaging experiences.
10. Post user-generated content
User generated content can form the centerpiece of your social media strategy.
User reviews, unboxings, or anything else the user discusses on items they purchase are solid examples.
This content reiterates the importance of positive reviews, social proof and influencer relationships. It’s real world people providing commentary about a product and it’s something brands can easily leverage on social media channels.
Encourage customers to share pictures and videos that feature your products on socail media and track them using social media monitoring tools. Ask them to tag your brand. When they tag you, reshare the content to your own profile.
For example, some of our best-selling brushes are procreate anime brushes, free brushes, and procreate tattoo brushes.
This tactic has another benefit of making your customers feel connected with a brand. It creates engagement and you see the value that your customers are getting and creating. THis is a huge win for all of us.
Conclusion
What do you think of the different ways to sell more with social media? Do let us know in the comments below.
