3 Proven Strategies To Use Social Media For Ecommerce 
Marketing 
https://instantfans.co.inhttps://instantfans.co.inThe eCommerce industry has become highly competitive as more and more retailers are going online. By 2022, the global eCommerce market is likely to be... Free Book Preview Money-Smart Solopreneur This book gives you the essential guide for easy-to-follow tips and strategies to create more financial success. June 17, 2021 6 min read This story originally appeared on ValueWalk The eCommerce industry has become highly competitive as more and more retailers are going online. By 2022, the global eCommerce market is likely to be worth $5.4 trillion. In 2020, the consumers spent $861.12 billion online with US retailers. In addition, as per Statista, 73% of eCommerce sales will take place on a mobile device by the end of 2021. Q1 2021 hedge fund letters, conferences and more Consumers, nowadays, are making their buying decisions based on recommendations made on social media platforms. Around 57% of consumers follow brands on social media platforms to remain aware of any new products or services launched. In comparison, 47% follow brands to stay up to date on any other company news. Tips For Using Social Media For Ecommerce Marketing Thus, social media has become an integral part of eCommerce marketing. An effective social media eCommerce strategy helps you market your eCommerce business better. It allows you to reach your target audience, improve brand awareness, and raise more sales for your online store. Here’s what you need to know. Utilize Social Media Advertising The global ad spending on social media is likely to be worth over $110 billion by the end of 2021. The total percentage of marketing budgets for advertising on social media is expected to double by 2023. You can target your social media ads on dimensions such as age, gender, location, income, interests, and languages. You can go for various ad options provided by popular social media platforms like: Facebook: Facebook plays a crucial role in the success of eCommerce ad campaigns. On average, a Facebook user clicks on 12 ads every month. The best ad types for your Facebook eCommerce marketing campaigns are dynamic ads, collection ads, video ads, domain ads, messenger ads, instant experience ads, lead ads, carousel ads, and offer ads. Here is an example of a sponsored ad on Facebook: Instagram: Ads on Instagram are paid image or video posts published by online businesses. About 50% of Instagrammers are interested in a product or brand after seeing an ad on Instagram. The various types of Instagram ads are photo ads, video ads, carousel ads, collection ads, stories ads, and ads in explore. Image credit Snapchat: You can also use Snapchat for creating ads. The famous ad formats on Snapchat are snap ads, story ads, collection ads, or commercials. Pinterest: In recent years, Pinterest has grown as a valuable platform for businesses. You can use promoted pins and Pinterest shopping ads to engage with your potential customers. YouTube: YouTube has around 2 billion visitors a month. With YouTube ads, you can expand your reach, find potential customers with advanced targeting and customize ads. The main formats of YouTube ads are display ads, overlay ads, skippable video ads, non-skippable video ads, bumper ads, and sponsored cards. Make sure to calculate your return on advertising spends for making cost-effective marketing decisions. Knowing your ROAS enables key decision-makers to look at the bigger picture and measure ‘the impact’ of their advertising campaigns. Partner with influencers A joint study by Twitter and Annalect shows that nearly 40% of consumers purchase a product online after seeing it used and recommended by an influencer on social media platforms. You can leverage the follower base of influencers who have built a strong reputation in a particular niche to reach your target audience and improve brand awareness. Here are a few ideas you can use to collaborate with influencers: Offer influencers to test your products and share their honest opinions with their followers. Ask influencers to feature your products and include discount codes in their content to give their followers a percentage off on a purchase. Create catchy hashtags for your influencer campaigns, such as #SassyShoeSunday, #BlackFriday, or #TacoTuesday. Create contests and giveaways campaigns through influencers. Keep the instructions clear for the followers, such as tagging friends, sharing the content, liking the posts, etc. Host Q&A sessions on social media platforms with influencers affiliated without your eCommerce business. Thus, partnering with influencers can work wonders for your eCommerce business as recommendations by influencers seem more authentic that keeps the audience engaged than a paid ad. You can also look for influencers that promote your competitors' products or target influencers popular in your niche. Popular influencer marketing tools, such as Followerwork, Upfluence, and BuzzSumo, help identify an influencer according to your marketing goals. Image credit Provide options for social shopping Social commerce is a new way for eCommerce businesses to promote and sell their products on social media platforms. Providing an option to shop from social media platforms creates a low friction way to gain a potential customer. Here are some innovative methods to reach customers via social shopping: Create a shop tab on your Facebook business page to allow potential customers to purchase from Facebook directly. Create Facebook Shops to feature your products on both Facebook and Instagram. It allows customers to browse the products and place orders. Ensure to enable the checkout option so that customers can purchase without leaving the app. Use the new ‘Live Shopping’ feature by Facebook. It allows brands to showcase their products and answer customers' questions in real-time. Use Instagram's shoppable feature that allows eCommerce businesses to tag their products shown in their posts. Also, provide a shoppable link on your Instagram bio section. Here is an example of Instagram checkout for eCommerce: Image credit Use the recently added 'Shop' tab by Pinterest to allow users to search and check in-stock items. This tab directly links to the checkout page on the eCommerce website. Set up buyable pins on Pinterest to allow your potential customers to purchase your product directly from Pinterest. You can also use the Twitter buy now button, which allows you to sell certain items directly from Tweets. Soon, WhatsApp will also enable its users to check out products on Facebook Shops and buy products through the chat option. You should leverage a combination of social shopping platforms to increase the reach of your products. Brand loyalty is key For any eCommerce retailer, the aim is to sell as much as possible and create a base of loyal customers. If you haven't already started leveraging social media for the growth of your business, then start tapping into the benefits of social media marketing. Social media advertising, influencer marketing, and social shopping are the top three methods of reaching potential buyers in a non-disruptive manner.

https://instantfans.co.in4 Social Media Marketing Trends to Implement in Your 2021 Strategy 

With the rise of social media comes the increase in marketing being leveraged across these platforms. Each day, more businesses are realizing the infinite potential that social media marketing has. Even brick-and-mortar businesses that have existed in the same capacity for decades are now jumping on the social media bandwagon — and rightly so.  Never has it been easier to identify, find and sell to our target audiences through social media. With infinite resources at our fingertips, we have the ability to instantly chat to just about anyone we like (whether or not they respond is an entirely different story). Now, at least a whopping 91% of businesses are marketing on social media. With that being said, the social media landscape is evolving faster than ever, and in order to keep up to date, we must be aware of the latest trends. Here are 4 social media marketing trends to incorporate in 2021.  Related: This TikTok Star, Who's Made $1 Million in 2021, Tackles the 'Taboo' Topic of Money and Reveals the Major Flaw in Dave Ramsey's Approach Stories over feed posts In a recent move, LinkedIn jumped on the story bandwagon. Why? Because more and more people are opting to view stories rather than scroll the newsfeed. Stories are more exciting, in part because they are only up temporarily, and in part because they give more of a glimpse into people’s everyday lives. The element of scarcity, combined with humans being natural stickybeaks, gives stories the ultimate power to form a more personal bond. Have you ever followed a particular entrepreneur or influencer on social media for a prolonged period and then seen them in real life? To me, it felt like I actually already knew them. Opting towards spending more time and energy towards stories is a great way to build unbreakable bonds with your audience.   Short-form storytelling I’m a big believer that our attention spans as a collective are getting shorter and shorter — and so are companies like Microsoft. Many people simply don’t have the time or patience to watch a five- to 10-minute video without scrolling further down their feed. Becoming skilled in condensing your content down to 90 seconds or less is a great way to retain your audience’s attention, keeping them interested enough to not scroll past. This is a big reason why Instagram reels and TikToks are so powerful — they’re short, entertaining and often an example of visual, short-form storytelling. Artificial intelligence (AI) ad-tracking We all know that technology is evolving at an astounding rate. What was cream-of-the-crop a couple of years ago is now old news. With the vast majority of businesses spending money on ads, a lot of time and energy has been poured into their optimization to ensure you can outperform your competitors, without making a battle of who has the biggest ad-spend budget. This where AI-tracking shines. With the ability to read data thousands of times faster than humans, AI-tracking can take your ad optimization to a whole new level. According to Australian digital marketing agency Yakk Digital, clients return-on-ad-spend has increased by a whopping 25 percent since implementing AI-tracking for their ads. By optimizing your ads using AI, you'll significantly reduce your cost per lead and ultimately, make more money.  Related: 9 Tools to Help Grow Your Social Media Channels This Summer Connection and community If the pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that we humans crave connection more than we ever thought. Staying connected with our community is essential, and most great brands and marketers know the best way to build a brand is to create a community behind it.   Human beings crave significance, and that significance often comes from being a part of online communities. This can come in the form of joining the livestream of someone they admire or being in a Facebook group of like-minded individuals, but connection and community go hand-in-hand, so keep that at the forefront of your mind and marketing strategy.  Social media has certainly passed the test of time and is here to stay. In order to leverage it to your greatest ability, keep up with all the latest trends, incorporate them in your strategy and most importantly, be consistent.  Copyright 2021 Entrepreneur.com Inc., All rights reserved This article originally appeared on entrepreneur.com

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Why Social Media Is Boring Your Board (And What To Do About It) 

CMO and Founder of Bango. Fighting to build a strong connection between marketing dollars spent and revenue generated by businesses. Getty There was a time when marketing wasn’t measurable enough. It seems like a distant memory now, but it was a problem all marketers faced: standing in front of the board and trying to justify above-the-line budgets to the CEO. “You spent how much on newspaper ads?!” These days, when we can measure every sign of life, it feels like we’ve gone too far in the other direction. As a marketer, I have more metrics than I can count. I’ve got likes, clicks, conversions, shares, retweets, engagement rates, applauses, pins, posts and everything else in between. Most of this has come from social media platforms that churn out hundreds of enticing (if meaningless) metrics that rarely tie back to the bottom line. Rather than having too few metrics, today’s challenge is deciding which metrics are even worth tracking and which (if any) are worth communicating to the board. CEOs don’t generally care about likes, shares or engagement rates. Marketers are often tempted to present everything. When we’re faced with so many easily accessible metrics, we end up stuffing our reports and quarterly presentations full of statistics in the hope that we’ll impress with the sheer volume of what we measure. In reality, I’ve found that all these meaningless figures are baffling our boards and putting our CEOs to sleep. The truth is that your board probably doesn’t care about likes, nor do they care about shares, retweets or any of that stuff. As someone who both sits on a board and works in digital marketing, I can safely say that even I don’t care. But, hey: don’t just take my word for it. Look at the research. My company, which offers a purchase intent targeting solution, surveyed 200 CEOs in the U.S. and U.K. in 2021 and found that 65% aren’t interested in hearing about likes, 76% said they don’t care about retweets and 66% said they’re not interested in impressions. Worst of all: all these meaningless metrics are now making them question the value of good marketing. Of those surveyed, 60% agreed that the value of social media marketing has been exaggerated, while 59% felt it wasn’t a good way to generate sales. Sixty-two percent also believe their marketing budget is being wasted on tactics that don’t tie back to business results. And the sad thing is that they may not be wrong. Social media doesn’t always deliver as it should. The truth is that many social media campaigns aren’t delivering as they should be. While social media campaigns can help build reputations and increase brand awareness, not all of what marketers spend their time doing on social media translates into paying customers. Adparlor recently found that businesses were wasting (or inefficiently spending) up to 80% of their social media budgets. This is a serious concern for the U.S. marketing industry, which is projected to spend over $40 billion (paywall) on social media in 2021. Sadly, as long as marketers have superficially impressive metrics to hide behind, these problems are not always directly addressed. However, we may be able to end this era. If both CEOs and the wider board grow tired of hearing about clicks, shares and engagement rates, marketers will be under pressure to present stats that tie their social activities to the business’s bottom line. Marketers who want to get ahead of this trend would do well to start now by ditching the meaningless metrics and focusing on the things that really matter. But just how do we do that? I believe there are three things that any digital marketer can do to tie their social campaigns to the business’s bottom line: 1. Spend at least 50% of your time on targeting. Done well, social media can deliver meaningful business results; it can deliver conversions, and it can even deliver direct sales. But that’s only possible if you target your ads correctly. As with so many other areas of marketing, social media professionals often spend too much time on the “doing” — the creative, the implementation and the activation — and not enough time on an effective targeting strategy. They’re so busy chasing chickens that they’ve forgotten to mend the fence. Take the time to get your targeting and segmentation right before you do anything else. I believe that’s the most important part of any social marketing campaign. Without that, the best creative in the world will likely not perform well. 2. Focus on purchase behaviors, not interests. “Purchase behavior targeting” is one of the best-kept secrets for effective marketing on platforms like Facebook. Rather than selecting a campaign audience from the standard dropdown menu of likes, interests and demographics, the “purchase behavior” option allows marketers to target based specifically on the things users have previously bought. This data is the hard evidence of purchase intent. You can also enhance the power of purchase behavior targeting by applying purchase data from outside of Facebook; for example, multiple marketplaces now offer purchase targeting data from across Amazon, eBay, Google Play and other sites. (Full disclosure: My company offers a marketplace like this.) Forget likes and interests; focus on targeting social media users based on what they buy. 3. Focus only on metrics that reflect buying intent. As marketers, we need to stop getting sidetracked by metrics that cannot be tied to sales, buying intent or the business’s bottom line. If we’ve been tasked with running campaigns that drive sales or profit (i.e., most campaigns), then we should focus our attention on the handful of metrics that accurately address this goal. Conversion rate should be king; I believe everything else is a distraction. Not only can this approach improve our marketing results, but it can also stop us from boring the board with metrics that don’t reflect their business goals. Forbes Communications Council is an invitation-only community for executives in successful public relations, media strategy, creative and advertising agencies. Do I qualify?
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