This Social Commerce post was written for SafeShops.be and appeared in the SafeShops newsletter of May 2016.
-
Blog about your audience’s questions
Keep a list of questions you receive from prospects and clients, and use it as an inspiration source for your blog posts. Some people will directly ask you their questions via one of your channels, but others will ask Google. So make sure to think about which keywords to use in your blogposts, and write detailed articles covering the questions. If you did it well, your post might come up as the first ‘natural’ search result, which is a great way to drive targeted organic traffic to your website! And don’t forget to share your blogposts via your social media channels, because this is the kind of content people are looking for!
-
Inspire via your social media channels
If you use it in a good way social media can not only generate traffic to your website, it can also generate sales hence Social Commerce. But an important lesson is to adapt your social media content to the channel you are posting on and inspire your audience. Let’s use Instagram as an example. There it’s not done to post product shots with a white background. On Instagram you need to go for authentic pictures, place your products in a setting that Instagram-users will appreciate and make use of the same tactics influencers use on Instagram. You can’t put a link in the caption, but you can point your audience to the link in your bio and regularly update this link. You can also track the link so you can measure how much website traffic Instagram is providing you. Same goes for all social media channels, take the context and the audience into account!
-
Think about partnerships with others
There are different kinds of collaborations possible which will provide you additional traffic. Influencer marketing is very popular for the moment. Maybe you’ve already been approached by bloggers, but as always make sure that there’s an audience match. You can also think further and set-up a collaboration together with another e-commerce company with a similar audience to yours (but who isn’t a competitor of course). For my own webshop So Baggy I have an exchange deal with www.snoepzoet.be: we add their flyers to our orders, and they do the same for us. By mentioning a discount code we can track how much sales we get from this tactic. And we do the same with bloggers when we offer them a personalized discount code to share with their readers. E-commerce companies need to stick together and there’s a lot that works better when multiple companies step in, like social media contests for example.
-
Don’t use a bazooka, go for targeted social media advertising
Social media advertising offers a lot of opportunities to really target your adverts to an ‘interested’ audience, make use of these advanced targeting options. For So Baggy I target advertisements to fans and followers of other e-commerce companies in the fashion industry to avoid that I reach people who are afraid to shop online. Another tip is to promote your content that works well organically, cause this is the content that people like and which will give you the most traffic and hopefully also sales ?
-
Generate leads via your social media channels & website
Don’t think that people who already discovered your website will automatically visit it again. Give them a reminder once and a while. To be able to do so you can start with building an email database. Stimulate people to subscribe to your newsletters via your website and via social media. Keep in mind that people hate spam, so clearly line out what they may expect (how often will you mail them?) and make it worthwile by giving exclusive VIP-offers for newsletter subscribers or an immediate discount after subscribing. Once you have a qualitative database you can do a lot more than just use it to send newsletters! You can also use it to create custom audiences for social media advertising, and show ads of a new collection of a specific brand only to people who bought that brand before. Or why not surprise your customers on their birthday?
I’m sure these 5 Social Commerce tips will help, but don’t stop there. Regularly monitor how your organic traffic is evolving, 
analyze what worked best, what didn’t and learn from it and keep improving your webshop & social media approach!
Kel Wouters – Social Strategist
Owner of sobuzzy.be, sobaggy.be & soblankenberge.be