Social Media Strategy for Ecommerce
Is Social Media right for your Ecommerce operation?
The first thing to consider when you are looking to drive quality traffic, prospects and sales from your Shopify site or Ecommerce platform, is to evaluate social media, just like you would any other marketing channel.
We want social media to pull its weight in terms of ROI, just like we would evaluate traditional media investment, search, digital display, thought leadership and organic social for building relationships.
Let’s evaluate your product or service through the lense of the strengths of social to see if there is a match.
Do you have an audience on Social Media?
The very first most fundamental question is can we find your prospects on social media? Can we use the sophisticated filtering capabilities of Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn to actually find the people that match your ideal demographic, regional, role or interests.
Spend some time upfront profiling the persona of your most profitable current customers and really making sure that you have a significant pool of prospects on social media that you can filter for and effectively target.
Is there a “discoverable” component to your product or service?
A medium like Google Search (AdWords) is a superb “lean in” medium where prospects are at the pointy end of the marketing funnel and know what they want or need and are actively searching for products and services. Social Media marketing on the other hand is much more of a discovery orientated medium that is a superb way to share with prospects products, services, experiences and outcomes that they didn’t necessarily know were available to them. We know when we are all scrolling through our social media feeds, that social is a superb way to discover and come across travel experiences, recipes, fashion, trends, news, insights and perspectives that we weren’t aware of.
Therefore you should be looking for and ensuring that your product or service can play to its discoverable strengths in social. For example, if your product or service is a well known commodity where people tend to search and purchase by way of price comparison and/or on an immediate needs-met basis, then you are probably better off concentrating on paid search and SEO to attract search volume...perhaps even mediums like digital display and programmatic to advertise on websites where people are making comparisons or checking reviews of products in a particular category.
You must approach social selling as a system for your Ecommerce business
Once you have established that you have a targetable market that you can find and once you have established that you can share insights and information that add value from the customer’s perspective, you need to ensure that you understand that social is an “always on” long game.
Unlike traditional advertising campaigns where activity is planned in specific “flights” of activity, social needs to be approached as a “selling system”. The fundamental difference is in the algorithmic learnings that platforms like Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn employ.
The Facebook algorithmic learning phase for example, is a minimum of ten days. That means the algorithm is testing and refining your campaign across thousands of variables within elements such as:
Audiences
Messaging
Imagery
Headlines
Offers
Interests
Regions
Ad Formats etc. etc.
Not only do you need to be patient and let the system work its magic to improve your ROI over time, but you need to be aware that turning off your campaign immediately loses your algorithmic learnings to date. In essence, if you dip in and out of social like traditional media, it’s an incredibly inefficient and wasteful process as you never let your social “selling system” and algorithms gain traction.
Put another way, you are far better spending less money on a day to day basis but staying active in an always on fashion to allow your system to improve steadily over time. Many brands have missed their fundamental opportunity in social by viewing it through a traditional short term tactical marketing lense.
It's important to also remember that patience is a virtue for a whole range of other reasons aside from just the algorithms involved. It’s essential to remember that the success of your social “selling system” hinges not just on the “front end” ability for social ads to generate traffic and prospects, but your “back end” ability to land them in an Ecommerce environment that:
Meets their expectations when they click
Serves up relevant and credible reasons to buy when they get there, and
Makes it easy for them to transact
So whilst your patience may have been rewarded at the front end with a well performing traffic generating system, if your conversion rates and ROI are not as expected...it is really important to take a breath and look hard at the levers you can pull to complete the loop and build a profitable social “selling system”. Landing pages and Ecommerce UX are a whole other topic for another day, but absolutely sit hand in hand with your front end traffic generation strategy.
Social Commerce for Ecommerce businesses is a volume game
Closely related to the need to have patience, is the need to understand that an effective social “selling system” requires constant good content to keep it humming along. Remember that the algorithm is a sophisticated selling system that is hungry to work on your behalf. A product or service with a single audience, single offer and unchanging single appeal will often quickly run out of steam in social with diminishing returns in terms of ROI. Even if you have a solitary product or service, you need to test multiple appeals.
For example, some customers will respond to a value appeal. Others are looking to reduce risk or make gains in their lives. Others will respond to the credibility or popularity of your product or service with others. Some people will respond to technical, feature driven appeals. Others couldn’t care less about the specs, but just want the bigger picture pay off. The point is that a healthy social “selling system” is constantly testing, comparing and contrasting appeals to find the “seam of gold” on your behalf...and then scale up to mine that seam for incredible returns.
Volume of activity in social also goes far beyond just appeals. You can and should be testing hundreds of variables...target audiences, territories, visuals, headlines, offers, ad formats, landing page combinations etc. Go into social with not just patience, but a clear understanding that a healthy selling system requires a healthy variety of approaches to test over time.
Effective Ecommerce Social Media requires effective attribution
Finally, the ability to understand and stick with and continue to invest in a healthy social “selling system” is utterly reliant on your ability to attribute sales and profitability to your social investment.
Whilst we all understand that this is much much easier than ever before with the sophisticated data that platforms like your Facebook Ad Manager and Google Analytics provide these days, it's important to remember that there are still debates and different “schools of thought” amongst many marketing and digital practitioners. The great debate will always rage on between for example a search team in the business wanting to apply Google last click attribution versus the social team who are adamant that Facebook pixel 28 day attribution (for example) is the more reliable measure.
Many a social campaign has been killed by a narrow last click attribution view of the transaction, whereas a deeper dive with more sophisticated attribution tools will almost always show that people like the messy human beings that we are, gain their information and are influenced by multiple touchpoints from multiple channels...called the “Customer Journey”.
It's not uncommon for example for a prospect to discover a product or service in social, forget about it temporarily, find it again via paid search...then be distracted...but then go back to the website via an organic keyword or brand search...and then finally a purchase made after a social retargeting campaign. The lesson is...it’s incredibly easy to find short term data to kill any campaign. You are far better off using a holistic and more mature multi-channel view to grow your healthy Ecommerce business over time.
Once you unlock these secrets, many Ecommerce businesses find that social an insanely powerful and consistent machine to grow their businesses.
Checkout our case study for social commerce, e-commerce & shopify.
Also for a great insight into E-Commerce fundamentals read Jonathon Lau’s great article here: https://www.toptal.com/product-managers/ecommerce/ecommerce-product-strategy 5 Considerations for a Strong E-commerce Product Strategy.