Social selling has become the newest trend in eCommerce that’s taking digital marketing to another level. The purchasing power of the masses through social media is something that business owners can no longer ignore. When social media apps became popular in the 90s, we thought that it was just a way to connect to long-lost friends. We were all excited at the thought of personalizing our internet experience by making a digital mark out there through our social media accounts. But the likes of Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, have taken social media into a level where people are regularly glued to it, rely on it for not just connecting with friends or posting content, but also for other tasks they used to do on separate platforms. News and information websites, for instance, also keep their social media platforms updated alongside their website.
Table of Contents
If you want to master the art of social selling, here is how to increase your social media conversion rate by setting up effective social media campaigns that generate greater ROI.
-
-
-
- Introduction to Social Media Selling
- Reach Your Target Audience with Relevant Social Ads
- Different Platforms Need Different Content Distribution
- Improve Sign-ups with Social Login
- Create Landing Pages that are Seamless, Responsive, and Mobile-Friendly
- Increase Brand Awareness and Engagement Through Video
- Conduct Split or A/B Testing on your Social Media Campaigns
- Provide Social Proof Through User-Generated Content
- Use Peer Reviews and Recommendations
- Schedule Posts and Interactions Well
- Use Simple Checkout Process
- Use social listening to stay on top of buying trends
- Track your social analytics and conversions
- Conclusion
-
-
Introduction
Business owners now maximize the potential of social media apps to reach a 3.8-billion-strong market with social media ads in the hope of converting followers, likes, and shares into actual sales. Now, it is easier to align social media strategies with sales goals because these major platforms have integrated Social Selling into their system.
Worldwide, Facebook now has 2.50 billion monthly active users (MAU). It has daily active users (DAU) of 1.66 billion people on an average log. This is a vast market, and if social media marketers and advertisers just play it right, they can have a portion of this market share, generating leads and conversion for their brand. We should be looking at how we can use our content to potentially bring in revenue for our brand through paid and organic reach. Social media engagement is also one of the metrics that search engine algorithms use to rank websites on SERP. So, the next time we post, we need to make sure we are optimizing that post’s full potential instead of just filling digital space.
According to Shareaholic, social media leads all others in driving traffic towards websites. You’ll know if your social media marketing strategies are worth their weight in gold if they are converting leads not just into engagements but to sales. Keeping track of your social media conversion rate will give you insight into how your social profiles directly affect your company’s sales.
How to Improve Your Social Media Conversion Rate – 12 Steps to Follow
Here are 12 effective ways that can help you increase your social media conversion rate:
1. Reach Your Target Audience with Relevant Social Ads
Assuming you have a website before your social media accounts, you may already know your target audience and is simply following them where they are at to seek more significant attention space. You need to be consistent in your client avatar, even if you are on a different platform. Make your marketing efforts align with your existing target market to make the most of your social media strategies like brand awareness, higher engagement, and relevance. Ultimately, you want these strategies to guide users to your website and convert them to consumers of your products and services.
One of the best ways to get users to go to your site and buy or subscribe is ad placement for your products on social platforms. When users click on your social media ads, they’ll be directed to your landing page, which brings you closer to a sale.
You can target your ideal audience by factors such as demographics, keywords, profession, intent, or behavior. You will then know where to dangle your ads to reach your specific market to turn up your conversion rates.
Strategize how you will place your ads in such a way that you are not hard-selling. People know when they are being marketed to, and brands that sell at first contact tend to turn off users. Even if you have to spend a little bit more with new ads, it is better to build brand awareness organically but steadily. Your goal is not just to get one-time sales opportunities but to convert visitors into repeat customers and even loyal supporters of your brand or product.
2. Different Platforms Need Different Content Distribution
Creating content for different social media platforms is not a one-size-fits-all scenario. Different demographics go to various platforms. For instance, Gen X and younger generations prefer Instagram over Facebook, while millennials and older use Facebook more than Instagram. All these generations meet comfortably in the middle on platforms like YouTube. So creating content and merely copying it on all your platforms is not optimizing the unique reach of individual platforms. Here are different content delivery based on the platform:
- Facebook: Videos and curated content, stories.
- Instagram: High-res photos, high-quality videos, quotes, and stories.
- Twitter: News, blogs, and GIFs.
- LinkedIn: job posting, company news, business content.
- Pinterest: Infographics, instructional photos, and videos.
- Google+: Blogs that you want to rank on Google.
Creating content that respects the social media culture and content expectations in every platform increase the chances that its audience will accept your content. More so, your campaigns.
3. Improve Sign-ups with Social Login
It becomes more convenient for users of your website if they can just subscribe or sign up using their social media accounts, rather than creating a new account just for your website. Website owners are seeing higher conversion rates through this method, and if you notice, more and more websites are adapting Social Log-in into their interface.
Image Source: Stitch Fix
Visually, people see clicking a button to be much more comfortable than filling out a form. On a screen, a web page form looks heavier—as if it takes more effort to complete. People will almost always choose a more straightforward option. The way you offer account sign-up affects your visitors’ choices. Providing this option increases your conversion rate faster.
4. Create Landing Pages that are Seamless, Responsive, and Mobile-Friendly
Since there are 89% of internet users on mobile devices, it’s a no-brainer that our websites and social media content should be responsive to any type of device and Mobile-Friendly. Our goal is to give our users a seamless, consistent experience as they move from point A to point B. Landing pages must be easy to navigate and has a cohesive feel as to the social media site the visitor came from, with no interruptions, if possible.
Hubspot gives this short guide on how to create landing pages in this short video:
Video Source: HubSpot © 2019
If you’re not sure if your landing pages are up to par, you can use Google for a quick mobile test. To further improve your strategy for social media conversion, you can continuously split test your social landing pages and optimize them over time with tools like Optimizely that allow you to A/B test different elements such as imagery, article copy and link placement to maximize conversions. Unbounce also offers mobile-friendly landing pages to make it easier for you to create stunning and simple landing pages based on your current social media campaign. It’s good to refresh your landing page designs to match any ongoing promo, theme, or campaign as part of your users’ seamless experience.
The following tips are ways you can optimize your landing pages:
- Use the images of your product that was in your ad: Do not mislead your customers with a different product or service than the one you placed on your ad. Be consistent, so your visitors will not get turn sour in proceeding to whatever you said you were offering that made them click the button in the first place.
- Provide complete product details: Provide as many details about the product as possible, enough to answer the questions of your potential clients just by looking at your landing page image or video.
- Mention product applications when necessary: Briefly mention how the product can benefit your customers, or maybe how other satisfied clients are using your product or service.
- Don’t hide the Price: Do not give your visitor a hard time by hiding the pricing on another page or not providing it at all, or else they will quickly bounce from the landing page, and you lose the chance to convert.
- A Compelling Call to Action (CTA): Be straightforward yet sincere in your call to action. Your CTA should be very understandable, easy to find, and use with direct verbiage like “Buy Now,” “Learn More!” or “Get involved today.” Don’t use vague CTAs that may be creative but lack the power to give clear directions for your visitor as to what’s next in the funnel.
- Mobile-friendly: Since 4 out of 5 mobile phone users do online shopping and banking, it is critical for any conversion campaign that every element of the user’s social media journey is mobile-friendly and again, responsive to any type of mobile device he or she might be using. Don’t ignore mobile-friendliness in your design strategies because SERP rankings are greatly affected by this feature. Your website or social media page will be less prioritized when it is not mobile-friendly, as search engines continue to aim to give the most accurate and useful results to queries that they get from visitors.
5. Increase Brand Awareness and Engagement Through Video
Videos prove to get the most engagement on Facebook, and compared to text ads, Facebook also offers video ads much cheaper. It is wise to take advantage of this and use video ads to increase awareness for your brand and encourage more engagement with visitors and followers.
Videos do double duty in getting the attention of social customers and social ads that optimized this generated more leads and conversions than traditional ads. BigCommerce claims that with video ads, you can increase free trial conversions by 3x, decrease per lead cost by 20%, and increase the quality of leads by 10%.
A simple, stop-motion video campaign by Nuxe showed that “the campaign successfully conveyed the inspirational quality of NUXE’s products, resulting in a 6.2X return on ad spend, at a far lower cost. The ads in Instagram Stories placement converts and resulted in a 46% lower cost per acquisition and a 62% lower cost per click as compared to other placements.”
Here is a sample of an Instagram video ad campaign by Make Me Reach and Instant AdCopy and Spotify:
Instant ad-copy
Spotify
There are websites like Wideo and Biteable that help create video ads to make the process of producing fresh content often be so much more convenient for advertisers.
6. Conduct Split or A/B Testing on your Social Media Campaigns
A/B tests allow you to run two different versions of your ads or landing pages so you can determine which is more successful in terms of engagements and conversions. No brand is going to get it “totally right” from day one. So, exploring the market with tools such as split testing gives the advertiser greater insight into the pulse of the market and the effectiveness of the campaign they are running. If a campaign is not connecting well, it will be easier to see why because there is another version of the campaign running that can be used for comparison.
Sprout’s social analytics helps advertisers see their top-performing posts and campaigns across all their networks. Their reports include details such as best hashtags to behavioral trends among followers. Facebook and Instagram can split test your ads automatically for this same purpose.
7. Provide Social Proof Through User-Generated Content
Take advantage of users raving about your products or services. Encourage comments and sharing of pictures and videos. It’s mostly free advertising for your brand. Not to mention, 55% of consumers of all ages trust user-generated content over other forms of marketing, so a word form your loyal customers, for example, build trust in your brand and increases your conversion rate.
Social proof “is the marketing tactic/technique for easing the minds of worried customers,” according to Gregory Ciotti of Help Scout. It comes in many forms like reviews, social status updates, side conversations, word-of-mouth marketing and more.
Social media is a critical player in relaying social proof because people tend to trust the feedback they see on social media, which to them more unbiased and genuine.
Leverage your happy customer’s experiences with pre-fill social sharing options where all they need to do is click a button to share information to their social network about their purchase or even your latest promo or blog. Include promos if you can, like incentives on the next deals, when they share their experience with their friends or when they write a review about your product or service.
Google considers your social following when displaying search results on SERP as well. Embed positive comments from Twitter, or view the current number of social shares, and other positive comments and testimonials. Curate your social proof and refresh at least once to twice a month, so users know that you are actively making customers happy with your product or service. Think of a creative way you can incorporate social proof, like what Keds did with theirs. They used user pictures and included it on their landing page.
8. Use Peer Reviews and Recommendations
Peer reviews are excellent trust elements that can help increase conversion rates as well. A word of recommendation from marketers and other influencers through tags, posts and mentions can make a huge difference to increase lead generations and conversion rates.
9. Schedule Posts and Interactions Well
If you are serving different areas with different timezones, you must schedule posting content and responding to messages to interact with as many people as possible. Make sure to keep that schedule consistent. You can use different tools to manage postings wherein you post consistently on schedule, in multiple accounts.
10. Use Simple Checkout Process
Baymard Institute gives the following reasons for online cart abandonment:
Use a simplified checkout process so that you don’t lose potential customers just because they lost interest along the way through a cumbersome checkout procedure. Keep customers hooked and ready to purchase by providing several payment methods, allow payments without requiring an account, delivering a seamless design, so people don’t get nervous they are being redirected somewhere unsafe, making errors easy to spot and correct, not asking for unnecessary information, and providing proof of secured payment and privacy. eConsultancy found out that 58% of respondents dropped out of the checkout page because of payment security concerns to concerns about payment security.
Be sure to display your security credentials with SSL and PCI badges, and an updated tally of satisfied users served, all upon checkout, so that customers will feel more secure with the transaction they are making with you. Also, integrate a social check out option to minimize shopping cart abandonment as much as possible.
11. Use social listening to stay on top of buying trends
Social listening is the process of monitoring mentions of keywords or key phrases across social media and the Internet at large. It’s a way of knowing people’s awareness about your brand, their opinion on it, without having to ask questions. There are digital tools available that allow social listening that can influence your social sales strategy, such as Awario, TweetDeck, Talkwalker, Mention. Doing this keeps you fresh and up-to-date in giving the needs of your target market in every season.
12. Track your social analytics and conversions
Make sure you assess your social media conversion rate. You can begin by watching your social traffic in Google Analytics. You can set explicit social conversion goals to scoring a better social media ROI.
Conclusion: Increase Your Business through Social Media Conversion
In the world, with over 70% of internet users active on social networks, it is clear that social networks have become a sort of reality in which people connect, communicate, and place confidence in. Social media has definitely become a new dimension of reality in the business world where 90% of marketers now use social networks for business, with more than 60% of them getting new customers over social networks. Hence, it is more than crucial to optimize business promotions through social media platforms to generate more awareness and income for your brand. It is your time to increase your social media conversion rate this year. Start engaging your audience!
More About Me
Very good,,,, nice information
good ….keep it up