The consumption of social media has crossed 4.5 billion at the start of 2020. This means more than 60% of the world population is already online. This includes people of various ages, gender, ethnicity, and qualification. The easy accessibility to smartphones and tablets has also significantly increased the social media consumption of children below 18 years of age.
With these statistics, one thing is obvious; social media has become an integral part of people from all walks of life. It has also paved new ways for brands to interact with their audience. Social media has proved to be a useful tool to influence purchase decisions and increase sales.
Recent research conducted by GlobalWebIndex concluded that around 27% of people discover new brands on social media globally, while about 43% of people research new products on social media. Out of that, 23% admits being influenced to purchase a product or service based on the number of likes and comments.
This means there’s a massive opportunity for brands to increase sales on social media . Here are 11 actionable tips that boost your conversions on social media.
1 Sell it on Social Media
Social commerce is e-commerce on your social apps. With social commerce, you can directly purchase any product of your choice right from apps like Facebook & Instagram.
It takes a couple of minutes to set up a Facebook store on your existing Facebook business page. There are many benefits of selling products on Facebook than on e-commerce sites. Firstly, the store is set up exactly where you can expect most of your target audience to be present. Secondly, it is easier to set up and manage a Facebook store than an e-commerce website. The smart analytics dashboard also gives you a complete breakdown of the store performance data for better clarity.
Thirdly, you don’t need to invest in a website to sell your products. Moreover, brands that sell on the Facebook store can organize and group their products into different collections for a seamless shopping experience.
Similarly, you can integrate your Instagram shop into your IG business profile. An Instagram business profile can help to make your business easily discoverable. People will be able to contact you directly from the IG profile. You can also enjoy access to Instagram Analytics to get insights into the performance of your Instagram posts and stories.
You can either set a separate “Shop” section to display your products or tag them within your IG posts. You can even promote your products on Insta stories. If you are new to Instagram and want to sell your products on IG, try running Instagram ads.
2 Grow Leads Through Social Selling
Social selling is the process of building relationships with target customers through various social networks. Social selling is an effective lead generation technique that is a hundred times more effective than cold calling.
Since modern customers are smart and well-informed, they don’t make purchase decisions based on the claims you make about a product. They’ll look for online reviews and recommendations and closely know the brand before investing their money.
Therefore, brands need to first focus on providing value to their customers and develop trust in them. This will make your customer journey from the awareness to the consideration stage much easier.
Using social apps like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Linkedin, you can strive to create meaningful content that will engage your target audience and instill trust in them. Analyze the pain points of your customers and address them in your content.
Write new blogs, make interesting videos, testimonials, and other forms of content that are relevant to your niche market. Share your brand success stories and testimonials on social media to develop credibility in the niche market and be consistent in your efforts. Set up social listening alerts to grab any new opportunities that may come in your way to attract new leads.
Improve the engagement between your brand and your target customers by conducting questions and answer sessions, answering to their online comments, and participating in group discussions or any existing conversations on social media about your brand. Also, be very responsive to customer complaints.
Use analytics to track user engagement on social media and measure the success of social selling. This will also give you a hint about the kind of posts that work well for your audience and help you brainstorm new content topics along the same line.
3 Promote Flash Sales on Social Media
During a flash sale, businesses sell products at a discounted rate for a limited time. Flash sales are different from regular sales, which are conducted around the same time every year and are promoted heavily on social media to get huge engagement.
Flash sales are announced almost immediately before the sale starts or an hour or two before. Since these sales run for less than 24 hours, it creates a sense of urgency in people to shop. Many businesses send flash sale notifications through newsletters to engage existing customers.
You can promote your flash sale on Facebook & Instagram as well for better engagement. For Facebook followers, you can create an event to notify the date, time, and duration of the sale. For Instagram, you can publish posts or Instagram stories about the sale.
For additional buzz, you can run countdown posts on your IG profile or Facebook page. You can also run ads on both of these social media platforms to inform more people about your flash sale. This is beneficial when you have limited followers on social media.
4 Curate User-Generated Content on Social Media
Your brand users create User-generated content . These are the images, videos, and stories that people post on social media tagging their favorite brands. User-generated content also includes the comments, testimonials, reviews, and opinions that you share on public forums.
According to a source , 9 out of 10 users trust UGC because they come from general people who are best at giving unbiased opinions about a brand and its products. Therefore UGC acts as social proof to what brand claims about their products or services. UGC also saves you from the pressure of generating fresh content every day. You can rather create a library of user-generated content and publish it when you run short of new content ideas.
So, if you want to leverage your brand reputation, you must learn to utilize user-generated content. Every brand should encourage its customers to leave reviews on social media such as on the Facebook Page and share their personal experiences in their form of Facebook or Instagram posts and stories. This can make your customers feel valued and appreciated.
Brands must come up with innovative campaigns and contests to boost user-generated content creation. UGC can develop a brand desire and inspire people to try out new products. This, in turn, generates brand loyalty and encourages people to follow a brand closely. Moreover, UGC is entirely authentic and shapes the purchase decisions of many people.
5 Host Giveaways on Social Media
Giveaways offer new opportunities to generate new leads for your business. You can run giveaways on multiple social media apps where you can ask your followers to perform certain tasks to enter the giveaway. These tasks can be asking people to subscribe to your blog, subscribing to your Youtube Channel, or referring friends to follow you on social media, etc.
As more people enter these giveaways, you can find leads for your business and increase your brand awareness. Additionally, it also helps to promote your products and services free of cost.
6 Share Discount Coupons With Your Social Media Followers
Whether you have an existing customer or a new customer, everybody enjoys shopping with discount coupons. When you offer discount coupons, you are attracting customers by offering them rewards for their purchases. If you keep the discount percentage high, you’ll stand out from your competitors who might still be selling their products at the standard cost.
When comparing the price difference between the products, they’ll be naturally drawn towards your items on sale. There are various ways to offer discounts to your customers. Based on your business goals, you can use them accordingly.
For example, if a buyer has abandoned their shopping cart, you can offer a discount coupon within 15 minutes, or you can offer a discount coupon to first time users. These can also be given out to your loyal customers or to encourage returning customers.
You can promote your discount coupons through social media posts and stories. You can also loop in influencers on social media to promote your product and share exclusive discount coupons. You can even create a branded video to notify people about available discount coupons or use social media advertising to promote the same.
7 Use Paid Advertising on Social Media
With the changing social media algorithms, it is getting more challenging for brands to increase their organic reach. To ensure people come across your business on social media, paid advertisements seem to be the only effective way to reach out to a large number of people at a time.
You can utilize Facebook, Twitter & Instagram ads to target people based on their demographics and ensure that there’s enough engagement from it. For Facebook ads, you can even promote your ads based on any of the four pre-defined objectives-click-through, reach, impression, and engagement.
8 Create Hashtags For Various Social Media Campaigns
Hashtags can bring attention to your brand and make it easily discoverable. It is an important element of social media marketing. Using unique brand hashtags on social media posts can help people understand the topic or theme of your social media posts, drive engagement, and increase their visibility.
When you work on your brand’s hashtag, try to keep it simple and concise. It should also match your brand’s personality. A trending hashtag on Twitter can bring you lots of views and engagement, which can increase the number of leads on your site. Hashtags are also widely used in other social media platforms such as Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram and LinkedIn
Hashtags help people discover user-generated content related to a brand and get a better perspective of the brand’s online reputation.
9 Generate Leads Through Contests on Social Media
As you’ve already learned how to drive engagement on social media giveaways, online contests on social media are another way to involve people in your brand activities and build leads through it.
You can host social media contests on any social media platform of your choice. However, you should remember to create a buzz around the same a few days in advance. This will ensure that you get maximum engagement.
Your contest can revolve around questions related to your brand itself so that people can take an active interest in your business and learn more about it. Arrange exciting gifts for your contests, so that people take a genuine interest in participating in them.
10 Boost Sales Through Social Influencers
A significant percentage of profiles that people follow today belong to influencers from various niches. These influencers are well-versed with their target industry and keep a tab of new product launches and review them as well.
Brands can reach out to these niche influencers on social media and collaborate with them to promote products. If you have a well-established brand, then it will be easy for you to work with macro-influencers who have huge followers, mostly crossing a million. If you have a small business, you may reach out to micro-influencers, who have thousands of followers.
When influencers endorse your products, it creates a lasting impact on your consumers as they trust these influencers more than anything else. Moreover, influencers give unbiased and honest opinions about the products they receive to review, unlike celebrity endorsements or brand advertisements where there’s no proof to back up the claims. As influencers demonstrate your product, it acts as social proof of its quality. Therefore, you should work with influencers to promote your products on social media.
Reach out to influencers via direct message and see where it goes!
11 Support a Social Cause and Publicize
A great way to garner attention on social media is to support a cause. As per Forbes , 87% of customers are more likely to purchase from brands that support a cause such as feeding the poor or helping people in the rise of the COVID pandemic.
As a responsible business owner, it’s your duty to dedicate a part of your profit to support those in need and demonstrate people how to contribute to the same. When you are working for the needy, you are creating an example for others to follow. Moreover, you are building a positive reputation when you support a cause, and people are going to reciprocate this kind gesture by improving your sales and revenue.
Conclusion
Social media is a powerful tool for all businesses. Use it creatively to reach out to your target customers, build good relationships with them, and develop brand loyalty. Only then can you drive more qualified leads to boost sales.
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