Owning a store on Shopify is a good idea for someone who wants to go into eCommerce. This is because of its versatility, advanced features and tools required to succeed.
The goal of Shopify is to provide an online store where you sell your product irrespective of where you are in the world. You can deliver to your customers both locally and internationally.
However, having a Shopify Store does not guarantee sales. It only provides a platform to sell your products.
To make sales, you need to go the extra mile to promote your business across several sales channels, most notably social media.
Done right, social media marketing can help build awareness for your business, attract more customers, and supercharge your sales. But you must understand how social media marketing works for that to happen.
In this post, we will share tips and strategies to grow your Shopify store sales in 2023 with social media marketing.
Let’s get right into it.
What is Social Media Marketing?
Social media marketing, or SMM for short, refers to the practice of promoting your business or products via social media platforms, like Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, etc.
Why Use Social Media?
Kepios analysis team shows that there are over 4.76 billion social media users around the world. This means over 50% of the world’s population is on one social media platform. This number is expected to increase to 6 billion by 2027.
And 91% of users spend an average of 3 hours per day on social media.
This means you have a large, engaged target audience for your business. And the earlier you start leveraging social media to promote your online retail business, the better for you.
What Goals Can You Achieve With Social Media?
To Build Brand Awareness
Every brand and business on social media has its vision, mission and goal they set out to achieve.
If you are starting a new store, for example, your goal will most likely be to build awareness for your business. To achieve this, you’d have to get active on various social platforms. You also need to consistently pump out educational and engaging posts.
It may take a while to get noticed but while you are at it, be sure to be available to reply to your messages and continue posting.
Here is an example from Bols cocktail, a cocktail brand on Instagram that is not shy of telling the world about its brand. Their social content is so exquisite you would want to have a taste of their drink
To Boost Sales
You can even choose to sell directly on social media and not bother about Shopify. For example, some small businesses, mostly those that sell handmade products, focus on social media as their primary sales channel.
Also, Social Media can be a great tool for advertisement. It helps you to display your product to a large number of people and also to your target audience thereby creating awareness for your brand to potential customers but also your target audience sees your product too.
To Build Engagement
Leveraging social media can also help boost user engagement rates. And the easy way to check for engagement is by the comments people leave your business page, the likes they leave, and how frequently they share your post.
To Drive Traffic
Lastly, social media can be an excellent source of traffic. Your social media pages act as a cross path between their users and their website. All you have to do is regularly publish posts on your Facebook/Instagram page with a link back to your website.
Oraimo is one brand that does this well. They utilize their page to market their products which are only available for sale on their website. A typical example of driving traffic to your website.
With all that said, let’s now share tips and strategies for selling on social media.
Social Media Marketing Tips To Grow Sales On Shopify
1. Write Out Plans and Objectives
Before the execution of any project, job or task comes planning. As the saying goes, when you fail to plan, you plan to fail. It is an important step to every success.
When preparing your plans you’ll need to answer these basic marketing questions. Your answers will help you to create successful social media marketing plans.
5 Basic Marketing Questions
- Who – Who are your target audience? Do you know your competitors?
- What – What is your product? Do you have a market for your product? What can you do differently from your competitor?
- Where – Where do you want to sell your product? Where is your product mostly needed?
- When – When do you want to enter the market? When do you want your products to be seen?
- How – How do you intend to achieve your goals? What measure have you put in place and how can you measure your performance?
When you have the right answers to these questions, you are now on your road to success using social media.
You may also want to review and implement the 4 P’s of marketing, also known as the Marketing Mix to successfully market a product.
4 P’s of Marketing
- Product – Other than knowing the product’s name, marketers need to understand their products, define them and know their qualities. They need to know the life cycle of their products and how to deal with them at each point of their life span.
- Price – The type of product will determine the price of your product. You do not want your prices to be too high above your competitors or way below them so that your product doesn’t come off as inferior. There are exceptions to this price especially on luxury items and highly valued items.
- Place – Places you want your products to be available, do you want to use the limited editions to sell your products, or do you want to be the sole supplier of your product or do you want it to be in every store? It is yours to make the best decision for your product.
- Promotion – Promotion comprises all the plans and strategies used to get the product to the end users. That is from advertising, customer relation, offline and online marketing etc. The aim of promotion is to communicate to your customers the need for your product.
2. Choose the Right Social Media Platforms and the Right Target Audience
One mistake Shopify store owners make on social media is trying to be active and post on all social media. It can be daunting and usually unproductive because you can be strained beyond your capabilities.
These social media platforms are unique in their own way just like your target audience, so it will be more interesting when you choose the right platforms. If you are new to social media marketing, you can carry out multiple tests on various platforms to know where the demand for your product is higher.
For instance, if your product is centered on Millenials and Gen Z, your focus should be around TikTok. You may want to run adverts on this platform as it is likely to be seen more by your target audience.
Likewise, use Instagram to show more video content for your products, and how to use and take care of your products. You may want to use Instagram to feel closer to your audience where you can show live videos and interact live with your customers.
Facebook is the bedrock of marketing. If your products are centered around the Boomers and the older generation, or you may want to market your product based on demographics you may want to focus on Facebook.
Facebook is where your marketing begins therefore, it is important to have an active community on Facebook.
For more news and updates about your brands and product, you can leverage Twitter and LinkedIn to keep that professional astute of your business.
Nonetheless, your target audience should be a major determinant for the right social platforms to market your product.
3. Be Authentic and Let Your Personality Reflect on Your Social Platforms
Being too serious or too professional will not get you any attention. Be yourself, be authentic and genuine. You don’t need to copy another brand’s style and personality.
Let your personality reflect via your brand messaging. That is what your customers want. They want to feel that raw connection with you. They want to know you for who you are.
Let your customers see your struggles and your accomplishments. Celebrate your milestones whenever you get the chance.
Take a step further by letting your personality shine through your content.
Always keep in mind that your goal is to be remembered and recognised at all points in time so you’ll need to do things to stand out against your competitors.
Use bright and stunning images to boost the aesthetics of your page so that potential customers can like your page.
Example: Angel Marie is a speaker and coach. Her brand is a success because of her personality. It radiates through her page and you can feel the authenticity of her real self when you are on her page.
4. Diversify Your Content
While product images are good content for your social media, they should not be the only content you show your audience. Spice your page with other content formats like videos, illustrations, voice-overs, live streams, polls and many more.
Experiment with different content formats to see which works best. These contents can be anything from educational content to hot trending topics today or just random posts on the internet.
For instance, if you are most activeTikTok, try video content. For Instagram, you may want to do live streams and take advantage of Insta Stories and reels. While on Facebook, you can try all content formats. You may want to interchange this process on a daily basis.
Don’t forget to keep an eye out for emerging trends and ride with them.
5. Post User-Generated Content & Seek Opinions From Your Audience
User-generated contents are free self-marketing content on social media. They are proof of your brand’s credibility, reliability and reality. Contents such as customer reviews, package unboxing or customers talking about your product.
For an online store, a positive customer review is the best form of marketing because of its credibility with other customers. It is a determining factor if customers will buy from you, that is why it is important for customers to leave them on your page.
Recently, unboxing is another social media sensation that brands need to leverage. Encourage your customers to video themselves unboxing, and wearing your products, take beautiful images of themselves and tag you along these images.
Share them on your social platforms and tag the customers, this will make them feel connected to your brand and also serves as free content for your page.
Besides, seek the opinions of your customers on certain topics such as the colors to use as your cake covers. Where are they watching from? Where can you get certain products? Engaging them with questions will make them feel like your family.
6. Collaborate With Influencers and Other Brands
Brands who understand marketing know that collaboration is one important factor to achieve success with social media marketing. It can be through Influencer marketing or by collaborating with brands that sell complementary products.
Collaboration can be in the form of sharing content together, running sales campaigns, giveaways and promotions. Partnership collaborations to get a lot of eyeballs to your products.
For instance, a wedding ring brand can collaborate with a wedding gown brand to run discount sales when the products are bought together.
Also, you can leverage the Influencer markets, ie those with large followings. You get them to help you market your products and brands on their page in exchange for free products or at a price as the case may be.
Influencer marketing is another growing market and has over the years proven to be the best way to promote products.
7. Be Consistent
Growth does not come in a day. The same applies to your social media marketing campaign. Consistency is the rule of the game.
There will be times when you will put in incredulous hours but have little to show for it. Don’t quit – keep going.
If a particular method isn’t working as you expect, tweak it a bit. But post regularly.
The more you post, the higher your chances of becoming popular.
Remember, it’s not enough to pump out posts all the time; you need to make your post as attractive as possible to draw attention.
A quick glance at your page should be able to tell potential customers what your brand is about and what you offer. If you are lacking in these areas you may want to restructure your page and add more relevant content.
8. Use more Videos Content & Hold Live Sessions
If a picture is worth a thousand words, then videos are worth one hundred thousand. Pun intended!
The truth is that video contents are more advantageous, especially on platforms where your customers want to get the full information about a product, services and process.
Videos are better at stirring engagement than pictures.
Creating videos may take longer times than images, but it’s always worth it.
Also, you can try live sessions and see how it goes. This is because people like to see the faces behind a brand and product. It increases the trust in the brands and gets to receive first-hand information about the product.
9. Use Polls, Question and Answer Sessions to Engage Your Customer
You can also try experimenting with polls and QA sessions to strengthen your brand.
During your sessions, don’t just focus on your products. Educate people. It can be a general knowledge question or relatively about any topic. It gets your brand the attention it needs.
You can also use polls to ask customers what they want to see more from your brand or how the brand can be of more help to them.
Remember the goal is to increase sales and as such need all the attention you can get from social media.
10. Use Social Media Tools
Marketing on social media can be exhausting. Getting to market your products, providing customer support to customers, replying to messages, and constantly updating your content can be draining.
This is where social media tools come into play.
These tools are designed to make your life easier and work smarter. They can be used at the planning stage of your social media marketing and also for creating content.
Let’s review some of these tools.
Tools for Social Media Marketing
1. Asana
Asana is a project management tool for planning. It is built with features that make your content planning easy. It can be used by a group or an individual. It is also very good for teams to help assign and monitor the progress of the task at every point in the project journey.
It comes with a free and premium version. With the free version, you can have unlimited projects and tasks assigned and can allow collaboration of up to 15 teammates.
However, there are limitations to the free version and to use some of the advanced features you’ll need to upgrade to the paid version.
Other project management tools include Treello and Click Up.
2. Canva
Canva is a design tool like Photoshop but it is simplified so that it can be used by anyone. It helps you to create stunning images and videos for your social platforms.
The good thing is that it comes with different templates that you can choose from to design your content, saving you the headache of designing from scratch.
There are also stock images and videos you can use to create beautiful designs.
Other design tools include Photoshop and Sketch.
Conclusion
Growing your Shopify sales through social media can be slow and challenging but will be well worth it in the end. By following the 10 tips and strategies we’ve shared here, you are halfway to success already.
Are you getting a lot of traffic to your Shopify website but are having a hard time converting that traffic into sales? Adoric can help.
Adoric comes with a load of tools and features designed to help you convert your website visitors into customers. Add Adoric to your website right away to see it in action.
