Social media ecommerce offers great reward to businesses as brands can interact with their audiences where they already spend their time, providing social marketing the edge over other marketing methods and tools through a natural way of interacting with audiences. Since social media is a social networking place, successfully engaging users or audiences at the platform offers a way to ensure that the message spreads through the network of social media users.

Social media ecommerce is a great way to tap into the social network of social media users free of cost. Though the campaign itself costs money in order to manage the social media venture, the use of the social media does not involve any cost, providing a huge advantage to businesses. In fact, just one recommendation or share by users on social media means potentially a new customer. This positive feedback or recommendation can be followed upon by a brand to encourage those in the user’s network into buying a product offered by the business.

Therefore, free flow of information on social media, along with its inherent feature of free access, provides all that a business may need in order to ensure a successful marketing campaign. Moreover, brands can use web analytics to find out the result of their campaign and implement the necessary changes to the campaign in order to modify the campaign according to the recommendations based on the web analytics data. This ensures that the advertising campaign moves in the right direction and delivers the results in accordance with the goal of the advertising campaign.

But a social media campaign is successful only by following an effective social marketing strategy.

What is a social media marketing strategy?

Creating the ideal social media marketing strategy requires a careful consideration of a number of factors such as:

Goals: This is the most important part of a social media marketing campaign. A brand should have clearly-defined goals and set up methods for determining measurable results.

Target audience: This includes profiling the ideal customer as the target of the campaign.

Content: Any effective social media campaign must deploy a range of content delivery methods. Using one or two content delivery may not fetch the desired results if a brand aims for long term advantages. This is so because the different social media platform support different types of contents and have their own niche audience. Therefore, it is necessary to access the different modes of contents creation for reaching consumers across social media platforms.

Implementation: It is necessary to have dedicated infrastructure and tools in place to implement the social media strategy effectively.

Goal-setting

Brand awareness: The goal of social media marketing should be to reach as many users as possible since the optimum and targeted social reach is the underlying concept of social media marketing. The purpose of brand awareness is to be seen by the right people which can be measured using likes and shares features of the social media.

Generating demand: Brands can educate users about their products which can be measured based on the number of clicks to the business website, products added to the shopping cart or comments, messages and queries regarding the products etc.

Loyal fan following

This requires a certain level of trust in the brand. These are users who prefer products from a particular brand over those from others. But this requires regular and quality engagement with this user group and it is necessary to let them know that the brand cares for them. This requires resolving consumer queries and replying to their comments quickly and effectively so as to build a high level of confidence among them. However, it is necessary to have an authentic fan following as this will include only those consumers that are really interested in the products of the brand. Fake following may be rewarding in the immediate future but may not sustain over the long term. But loyal consumers are more likely to promote the products, even actively, if they have a high level of trust in the brand. This can be measured by the number of fans a business adds or loses over a certain duration of time.

Customer service: With active social presence, comes more customer questions, complaints and queries which is not so in case of the other advertising channels. Social media users expect a quick and effective reply to their queries, in the absence of which, they will turn to the competitor brand. Therefore, along with a social media campaign, a highly responsive customer support is necessary.

Identify target audience: Identifying the target audience is the key to a successful social media campaign. This should be based on the right consumer profile according to the niche audience of the industry. Brands should have the ideal customer on mind before planning the social media advertising campaign. The overall social media advertising should be oriented keeping in mind such an ideal customer. It takes time to prepare a campaign designed towards a specific target population but it is necessary to engage in due research for ensuring a successful start to the social media commerce initiative. Brands should research on the target audience in terms of demographic and psychographic data or observable patterns for determining the customer type that is most likely to buy the products offered by the brand. This will not only determine the direction of the social initiative but will also the voice and tone for the brand that appeals to them.

This ideal customer or the ‘buyer persona’ is where businesses should target their initiative at. The buyer persona may involve a number of factors such as the place where the buyer is located, age, gender, interests of such buyers, industry, income level, relationship status, motivation to buy and other information such as the level of education etc. Though this research will not guarantee sales, it will provide an outline for conducting the social media ecommerce campaign. Social media is one of the best ways to find out the niche customers for a brand. It will provide with at least one major target audience to begin the social media ecommerce advertising and know what exactly to post and how.