Social media is a very useful tool to drive traffic to your online business and, consequently, create sales opportunities. As most users and your prospective clients spend time on social media, it is very important to communicate on these platforms in a way that is consistent and relevant.
Communicate on social media
Your target audience is not active on every social media platform; determine which platform they are most likely to spend time on. Concentrate your efforts on social media platforms that represent a real opportunity to engage with your target market and thus, to generate sales opportunities.
Communicate regularly with your community and build your brand image by creating content that reflects your positioning. Storytelling—the ability to tell a story and create a universe around your brand and your products—raises awareness and engages your target market. Different types of media are also worth considering. For example, depending on your message, a video may be the most impactful medium.
In some cases, influencer marketing may be an option. Finding people who share and value your products can be an effective strategy. Importantly, there is no need to find influencers with 400k followers, who tend to be expensive. For certain needs, it is preferable to choose micro-influencers with smaller communities and to benefit from reaching a more committed community.
Your social media posts must get your community to engage with your brand and your products. Your messaging should be clear and should encourage interaction. Organizing giveaways is an effective strategy as they require commenting, liking, sharing a post or tagging a friend. They grow your community by increasing your exposure with people you may not have typically reached with your usual posts.
Take advantage of social media to offer exclusive discounts or limited-time offers; you will grow and engage your community even more since they will feel privileged to follow you.
This phase of social media marketing is interesting because it will build your brand’s credibility in users’ eyes. Positive feedback from your customers on social media serves as very good social proof for your target audience. Conversely, negative feedback can quickly become a serious disadvantage, so do not neglect this point!
Increase your exposure with sponsored posts and Facebook ads
Organic post reach on social media is relatively limited and generally tends to decrease. To gain exposure and sales opportunities, it is possible to create advertising campaigns on all social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, SnapChat, Pinterest, Tik Tok… In this article, we only address Facebook ads.
Facebook and Instagram are among the most popular social media platforms. These two networks allow you to increase your exposure with qualified users in two ways.
The first is to boost a typical organic post, targeting an audience by age, gender, location or interests. Your post’s reach is increased, allowing you to reach new users during the entire boost duration of your post.
The second are sponsored ads. They do not appear on your business page and are only visible to the audience you have targeted. These ads also grow your following, targeting new prospects by offering ads visible only to targeted audiences. When created optimally, an ad on Facebook or Instagram yields a strong return on investment.
The Facebook Business Manager tool allows you to centralize your marketing actions and your advertising campaigns for Facebook and Instagram and is highly useful for optimizing your ads. You can add your business page to manage all your campaigns using the same tool.
Facebook Pixel
Once your Facebook Business Manager has been configured, create a Facebook pixel that will allow you to monitor user interactions on your website. This is a script to insert on all website pages, similar to the Google Analytics script. You can integrate it manually on all pages or by using Google Tag Manager. Once this script has been added to your site, you will be able to create remarketing audiences and lookalike audiences (i.e., internet users who don’t know you but who are similar to your existing customers), but also to track key actions on your site (conversions).
Campaign objectives and targeting
You may choose among different strategic objectives for your advertising. The most common objectives are awareness, traffic and conversion. The latter is of particular interest to us because it specializes in generating actions, especially purchases.
Remember to appropriately target users in your campaigns because you will appear in the news feed of people who, for the most part, do not know you and will not be in the active search process when they see your ad. The pixel will allow you to reach different categories of users, from the person who looks like your last buyer, to the user who visits your site regularly but hasn’t bought anything in months. You can easily tailor your ads to these target audiences after defining them as a custom audience.
In conclusion,
Social media represents a real opportunity to grow your online business. The more you refine your strategy, the more you will be able to precisely target your ideal market and generate online sales. More specialized social media platforms (e.g. LinkedIn for B2B or Tik Tok for teens) can also be very relevant depending on your sector of activity.
Communicating with relevance and implementing an advertising strategy on social media requires time and expertise. Our eCommerce Accelerator is a customized service offering that meets every online business challenge, allowing you to quickly increase your performance. For more information, contact us!
