SMM is no longer about cats and chasing likes. It is a full-fledged promotion channel that can bring in sales and contribute to the development of your online store. But you should not be limited to it. Using all the tools of digital marketing in combination with high-quality customer service will bring even better results.
Many entrepreneurs do not know where to start promoting their online store on social networks. If you are faced with the same problem, try testing the methods of attracting traffic from our selection. They will help you find your first customers on social networks and attract more subscribers to your account.
Features of Promoting an Online Store on Social Networks
Modern social networks are characterized by a great variety of tools for business. Among them is the ability to create product cards, run targeted advertising on certain characteristics, or accept applications in personal messages of the group. Every year the functions are expanding and becoming more and more versatile.
A key feature of social networks is that many tools are available to businesses for free. For example, the ability to conduct giveaways or create business pages.
How to Promote an Online Store
First, let's look at the paid promotion tools a business can use to attract traffic. They require different costs, but they do not always pay back the investment. Therefore, it is worth approaching such promotion as responsibly as possible: to study the target audience, create high-quality advertising posts and choose platforms for promotion with a relevant audience.
- TARGETED ADVERTISING
This is the official tool of promotion in social networks. It means that you pay the site for the display of your promotional publications in the news feed, videos, or special places for banners. The advantage of this kind of advertising is that you can customize the display of content to the audience of the right age, gender, marital status, as well as select the interests and even devices to be shown.
You can run ads both on Facebook and Instagram through the Facebook Advertising Account. For e-commerce projects, remarketing - showing ads to users who have already been on the site - will be very useful. Instagram also has an advertising account, but there are much fewer possible goals for advertising campaigns and settings in general.
- ADVERTISING FROM BLOGGERS
Targeted advertising is not the only option for online stores. Advertising publications from bloggers are no less in demand. There are Influencers of various subjects: mums, travellers, entrepreneurs, and many of them will agree to talk about your product on their profile for a fee.
The price of advertising with a blogger depends on various factors and is not always dependent on the volume of the audience. More specialized Influencers with a loyal and active audience sometimes charge more for publications, because they do not want to risk their reputation.
Advertising with opinion leaders (influencers) is one of the best ways to attract a live, active audience today. Of course, effectiveness depends on many factors: the quality of the content that the blogger generates, reaching the target audience, and the product being advertised. You also need to be careful and know how to define bloggers with fake followers.
- ADVERTISING IN COMMUNITIES
This tool is similar to advertising with bloggers, only you are not buying a publication from an individual, but from the owners of the thematic community. In such communities, you can often find an active and business-relevant audience: car owners, parents, music lovers, and other categories of consumers.
- CONTENT MARKETING
Content marketing on social media is used to retain an audience in an account, but it can also attract new subscribers. If your posts are shared with friends or commented on, social media algorithms will take care of their promotion.
Beautiful, high-quality, unique content is the key to the success of any profile. Today there are programs both for professionals (primarily the Adobe software package) and for beginners (Canva, Crello, mobile applications). They will help create bright, colorful content, which will attract users.
This promotion method requires no direct investment, but in one way or another consumes business resources to create publications. If you do not have the opportunity to conduct social networks on your own, this task can be delegated to an agency or an individual specialist.
How to Promote Your Online Store for Free
In addition to paid methods, there are free or almost free promotion tools. They are less effective and also require time, but in some cases bring good results.
We will tell you how to promote your product online with minimum costs.
- MUTUAL PROMOTION
You can agree on a mutual PR with a brand with a similar audience and publish each other's ads on your social media pages. For a mutually beneficial exchange, you should have about the same number of subscribers and similar topics. For example, a baby stroller store can publish ads for a children's clothing showroom and vice versa.
- GIVEAWAYS
Social networks approve of giveaways if they do not violate the rules of the site. You can raffle off a product or a gift certificate to a store among your subscribers for the condition of subscribing and reposting, and thus get an influx of new audience.
- GEOTAGS AND HASHTAGS
It is believed that hashtags and geotags are dead promotion tool, which does not bring results. They do work worse, but in some cases, they help attract a small number of audiences on narrow topics. If you sell clothes or cosmetics, they are unlikely to work. In the case of more topical products like diabetic products, the result may be much better.
- TRANSFERRING TRAFFIC FROM OTHER SITES
TikTok and Pinterest can still gain an audience without investing in advertising solely by creating content. Take advantage of this to transfer traffic to the main sites for further monetization.
- MAPS
Many users look for stores on maps and then go to social networks to see the assortment in more detail. If you have an actual address, you can add links to media accounts on GoogleMaps and Yandex.Maps to attract a larger audience.
- OFFLINE PROMOTION
Promoting a store online is also possible with offline channels. For example, you can put a QR code to a social network with an appeal to subscribe in exchange for a discount. Or post links to offline outlets and offer gifts for joining a community. Many customers will welcome the opportunity to get a bonus for a simple action, and you'll attract new subscribers this way.
Conclusion
Without putting into practice and implementing various experiments, no social media tool will yield great results. It's important to take a holistic approach to increase the loyal audience of your social media account or community.
You can also speed up your business growth with professional eCommerce PPC Management.
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