You cannot successfully market your eCommerce store today without using social media. The benefits of social media marketing are enormous, and the best part is that it doesn’t even take a huge commitment of your time or resources to pull it off! In short, social media marketing is tailor-made for small online businesses that need to use their resources wisely.
As a small online business, you don’t have a big ad budget—that’s just a fact. You also don’t have unlimited man hours to advertise your business because you rightly have to worry about making sure your startup runs smoothly. When you factor in the extra work that small business owners always have to do anyway, the time and effort commitment to marketing seems daunting.
Again, that’s where social media can come to the rescue for your eCommerce store! All it takes is a few hours every week, an active account on big social networks like Facebook and Instagram, knowing who your target audience is, and a very small ad budget.
Here are some of the benefits of social media marketing.
Much better brand loyalty from your customers due to the benefits of social media marketing
The thing about social media is that it’s a way to directly connect with your eCommerce customers. The more you connect with them because of your social-media presence, the more highly they will think of your brand.
As soon as your customers interact with your brand more and form a better impression of you, other good things happen! For example, according to Convince and Convert, 53% of people who follow a brand on social media end up being more loyal to that brand. There you have it! When social media is a facilitator between brands and customers, it is a surefire way to strengthen brand loyalty as well.
Here is the key, though: you can’t expect to have brand loyalty suddenly appear out of the blue. If you only curate your social media channel infrequently and don’t personally address or reply to your customers, then your brand loyalty is going to be pretty weak, even if you are using social media.
So remember that more brand loyalty is indeed one of the benefits of social media marketing, but only if you share valuable content with your customers regularly.
More traffic to your website
Your eCommerce site is where your conversions and sales happen. Social media is only one of your inbound marketing tools to get your leads and customers to your site for conversions and sales, and it works very well.
On every social network — whether that’s Facebook, Instagram or Twitter — your eCommerce store will always have a backlink to your online store right on your brand’s account page. This is how your leads and visitors will find your site through social media…if your content is excellent.
Generally, you want to send more traffic to your site by using the 80/20 rule of social media, which states that you should share 80% high-quality content and resources for your customers in your industry while only sharing self-promotional content 20% of the time.
There’s also another beneficial reason behind more traffic coming to your site. The more social shares your content gets, the higher your eCommerce store is actually going to rank for its keyword in search engine results pages (SERPs). And the higher any individual page on your site or blog ranks in the SERPs, the more people will see it, click on it, and visit your online store!
Newsjacking for extra attention; another of the benefits of social media marketing
Newsjacking is essentially when you align your social media activity with a very hot, trending topic on social media. Newsjacking works because you amplify your own marketing message by referencing and riding on the coattails of a news story that many people outside your industry are already paying attention to on social media.
Simply look at the trending stories on Facebook or Twitter. You’ll always be able to easily jump on a particularly hot story, provided that you can somehow work it into an angle for your eCommerce business.
The only word of caution is that you’ll have to be quick to successfully align your social media content with a trending story! After all, the lifecycle of any news story is only usually very short, lasting a day or two, so it’s in the best interest of your online store if you jump on the news story near the beginning of its news cycle.
If you do this technique right, you’ll be able to capitalize on the heightened interest of said news story that you’ll see in the form of extra traffic to your online store.
It never hurts to think of clever ways to capitalize on a hot news story and find an angle for your brand — and then share it on social media!
Give a boost to your SEO efforts
These days, SEO isn’t just about optimizing your site, individual pages, and blog. Social media has become an important signal that plays a role in either positively or negatively affecting your SEO rankings, according to none other than Google’s Matt Cutts. In other words, according to your social media activity for your online store, you are being graded by Google on whether or not you’re a trustworthy source on the Internet!
Therefore, since social signals are so valued in Google’s algorithms, having an active and regularly curated social account on Facebook and Instagram can noticeably help your SEO rankings. Why wouldn’t you want to use social media for this purpose since the investment is very small to begin with?
Your online store occupies just one tiny corner on the huge, vast web. If your social media posts and shares help get your store more attention to people on search engines, then it’s a no-brainer.
The benefits are many, and the effort is relatively little
We get it. You’re a small eCommerce business owner. Your budget isn’t big, so you have to be smart and discerning with what you spend money on. You can’t spend a lot for ads, and you definitely don’t have the money to hire people to run elaborate marketing campaigns for you! Your solution is social media marketing. The benefits of marketing for ecommerce via social media are real and very promising. All it takes is a small commitment.
As we’ve shown you, using social media to market your online store isn’t complicated. Nor does it take a lot of time and money. If you can understand the basics involving newsjacking, social signals, and regular curation, you are already a step ahead of other small business owners.
To sum up, here are the benefits again:
- More loyal customers for your store
- More traffic to your site
- The ability to newsjack and gain extra brand attention
- Higher SEO rankings
Want to learn more?
- 10 Social Media Trends Every Marketer Should Know in 2021 [Infographic]
- How to Create a Killer Social Media Marketing Plan
- Social Media Marketing Books and Blogs You Must Read
- Social Media Marketing for Small Business Explained
Is there anything else you’d like to know more about and wish was included in this article?