How To Use Paid Social For Your eCommerce Store

By: anthony Carranza

Businesses today must cater their promotions for products and services for social media platforms. This includes targeting their brand messaging in a way that resonates with most potential consumers who are shopping for a great deal.

Currently, the sales generated from ecommerce equals $100 billion in the United States. This number will only continue to grow over time. How businesses of all sizes succeed in the ecommerce market involves strategy, analytics, and continuous optimization.

It’s not enough for business to simply setup a website and add all their products or services. To attract more potential customers, social media is an incredibly lucrative platform.

Unlike the earlier days of social media platforms reaching your audience organically and for free, paid options are transforming the rules of the game. And Shopify is a proven tool for boosting paid social media campaigns.

The following infographic explains this trend:

he visual graphic above covers the essential areas of how to drive engagement and grow your brand. To get your money´s worth — or in this case, paid return on investment (ROI) — you’ll have to strike a balance between owned social, paid social, and earned social:

>> Owned social is the narrative related to your company´s brand. This includes your brand’s personal messaging, and what other brands are saying about you.

>> Paid social is what brands pay to make themselves more visible to their targeted customers.

>> Earned social is what about people have to say about your brand.

It’s not enough for your business to just share updates on social media. Content curation and reaching out to influencer marketers are key components to an effective social campaign for your ecommerce store. This combination can yield success on social media, bring in business, and generates more revenue sales.

Utilizing Shopify for your e-commerce strategy

Shopify is a Canadian-based ecommerce platform that is growing and adapting rapidly. Conforming to TechCrunch, the company posted a 75% increase in revenue and totaled 500,000 merchants for this second quarter.

Whether you’re on an existing platform or are looking to try out a new one, Shopify makes your efforts easier and more effective. The enhancements include dozens of integrations, plugins and other tools for accurate targeting segmentation, and automation.

After installing Facebook pixel shopping on your site for products or services becomes that much more flawless. All nine website events like “Add to Cart”, Website Search”, and “Purchase” are automatically tracked by Facebook Pixel.

Use Facebook Business Manager and install the Facebook Pixel

Managing your Facebook page and your campaign ads through a personal account is limiting — not to mention difficult for working with third parties. You could end up missing out on business if you don’t have all the functionality and capability to promote your products or services.

The Facebook pixel monitors traffic and successfully completed purchase events on your site, from a single visit to a purchase. Facebook provides demographic and behavioral information about the users completing these actions, and allows you to optimize your ads to reach more users.

Create Product Feeds and Sets via Facebook Product Catalogs

Creating product feeds and sets is a streamlined process when you’re using Shopify and the Flexify Product Feed plugin. If you’re not using Shopify and don’t have a huge inventory of products, you may want to build this feed manually.

If your inventory is large, you can consider building a Best Sellers feed. Product Sets will let you group certain products for advertising purposes. This could be used for sale products, for specific brands, or individual product categories.

Set up Retargeting with placements on Facebook & Instagram 

Retargeting via Dynamic Product Ads is a low funnel, always-on campaign that remains automated once you’ve set it up.

Instagram is a great placement for retargeting (given your target audience uses the platform), and Facebook lets you advertise on Instagram without having an Instagram page.

Set up Daily Automated Reports 

Daily automated reports will give you a customized daily snapshot of how ads are performing.

These reports can be broken into categories like age, gender, region, placement, time of day, etc. All the demographic information becomes relevant when you analyze it in relationship to your conversions.

Use Pinterest

Product pins have incredibly long lifespans on Pinterest, which essentially acts as a search engine for low-funnel shoppers. Pinterest users know exactly what they’re looking for and use the search bar to pull up relevant pins.

Detailed pin descriptions allow your products to be organically visible when matching with users’ search terms.

Tip: If you’re using Shopify, this is simple and automated using the Pinterest store plugin.

After generating some performance data, look at which pins are performing best. From there, you can invest part of your available budget behind those pins to promote and get gain greater visibility.

Given you have website retargeting set up, any users who move from Pinterest to your site will be retargeted on Facebook and Instagram.

Takeaways

Social media marketing is about having a clear strategy, and targeting your audience. Utilizing paid social media campaigns is one effective way to boost your brand´s visibility.

You will have to monitor conversations on the various social platforms, and be active engaging people interacting with your content. After all, everything that transpires on social media is about creating, and providing solutions.

Using Shopify, Facebook Business Manager, creating daily automated reports, and others are just one of the avenues to improve your brand´s presence.

Source >> https://socialmediaweek.org/blog/2017/08/how-to-use-paid-social-for-your-ecommerce-store/