5 Tips For The Aspiring Social Commerce Superhero

July 10, 2015 By Adam,

With San Diego Comic-Con in full swing, downtown San Diego has transformed into Gotham City with costumed superheroes and supervillains around every corner. This year we decided to embrace our inner geek and combine our love for pop culture with our passion for eCommerce and create a list of the top five necessary tips for the aspiring social commerce superhero.

Engage With Your Customers

First, let’s not forget that the main reason customers use social media is to be social. As a brand, your goal should be to become part of your target customer’s social network. In order for this to happen, you must foster meaningful and personal relationships with your customers through social media before selling to them. Whether this means answering questions or responding to reviews (both positive and negative), customers are more likely to make purchases when they feel that the brand genuinely cares and wants to ensure their happiness. [caption id="attachment_8687" align="aligncenter" width="459"]

Image via: http://bit.ly/1oIDNke[/caption]

Know Your Limitations

When advertising on certain social media sites, it is important to be familiar with each site’s specific regulations and policies. For example, your ads on Facebook may not include images with text that covers more than 20% of the image’s area. Facebook does this for several reasons including the fact that minimal text makes the content for engaging for users. It is also crucial that you are familiar with Facebook’s age appropriate content policies and ensure that your ads do not violate any of its “Prohibited Content” guidelines. So next time you are creating a Facebook ad, keep those limitations in mind and work with what you’ve got! [caption id="attachment_8688" align="aligncenter" width="580"]

Image via: http://on.fb.me/1F0G32Q[/caption]

Utilize Retargeting Campaigns

We know that the majority of consumers use social media to research purchases well before actually making the purchase. By implementing retargeting campaigns, your brand remains front and center in the consumer’s mind and draws them back to your site when they are ready to purchase. Through repeated exposure, you will gain brand recognition with your customer and you will see an increase in conversions. Facebook tools such as Custom Audiences and Lookalike Audiences further help you target your ideal consumer audience. Custom Audiences helps strengthen existing connections by finding your current customers on Facebook using your email database. Lookalike Audiences help you make new connections by targeting people who are similar to your custom audience lists. These tools allow you to increase brand awareness and off-Facebook purchases.

Get Personal

Understanding your audience is key to successful social commerce campaigns and with developments such as Facebook’s Insights tool, it is now easier than ever to get into the mind of your target customer. Facebook Insights allows businesses to track their social commerce campaigns while using metrics such as “Likes” to gain valuable demographic and behavioral information about their customers. This assists businesses in understanding what messages, images, and rewards will be most effective in driving conversions from their customers. [caption id="attachment_8689" align="aligncenter" width="300" class=" "]

Image via: http://bit.ly/1JXhhjE[/caption]

Employ A Call-to-Action

Perhaps the most important thing to remember when creating social commerce campaigns is to implement a call-to-action with your message. Effective social commerce CTA’s make it easy for your customer to navigate from their social site to your website. With Facebook’s launch of “Shop Now” buttons at the end of 2014 and Pinterest’s newly implemented “Buy It” button, social media sites are making it even easier for customers to shop online and are further helping businesses drive conversions. At the end of the week, the masked superheroes that currently fill the streets of downtown San Diego at Comic-Con will have to remove their capes and return to normal life. However, by following these five essential tips to succeed in social commerce, the aspiring social commerce superhero never has to take off their costume and can continue saving businesses from social commerce mistakes one day at a time. If you need help with your social commerce needs, drop us a line and one of our many social commerce superheroes will come to the rescue!