Liz Papagni — March 9, 2020 
Social media has absolutely revolutionized the many ways that brands can market to potential buyers. Through the ability to reach vast numbers of people, exposure to new brands is now easier than ever. Brand communities give products and their makers a chance to cultivate dedicated audiences that help boost word-of-mouth, which, as we all know, is the most powerful marketing available.
There’s so much more to social media marketing than exposure and fan groups, though. You want to see your efforts affect your bottom line, right? The only way to do that is to focus on social media marketing activities that will convince your visitors to convert to buyers. We have some tips to help you do just that.
Social Media Advertising
While data gathering has its downside—users don’t want to feel as though they’re being “watched” or manipulated—it’s crucial to reaching the right buyers at the right time with social media marketing.
All platforms allow you to target specific buyer groups through various categories, from geolocation to income levels. You can focus on buyers with specific interests that align with your products, even if they’ve never heard of your brand. You can even target users who are friends or followers of your loyal customers in order to expand your potential audience.
Just be aware that your advertising must serve several purposes at once. First, you want to attract interest, which means your posts must be informative, eye-catching, and, for best results, entertaining. You don’t want to annoy anyone who comes across your ads, so be sure your targeting choices are relevant.
Retargeting Ads
You must stick with it. A click doesn’t always equal a purchase, and this could be the case for several reasons. The interested user might not see the right product right away, or your advertising may have worked so well that the item in question is sold out. Perhaps the buyer is very interested but needs to wait for a paycheck in order to complete the purchase.
Once those buyers visit your website or click through your social media marketing ads, you must continue to keep your products and brand top of mind through retargeting advertising. This means your ads will continue to populate the users’ social media feeds so they don’t forget you.
If you don’t put enough budget behind your social advertising in order to reach potential buyers over and over through retargeting, you could end up leaving a lot of money on the table, because 76% of people say they have purchased a product they saw in their social media feed.
Purchasing Buttons
The key to increasing revenue through social media marketing is to eliminate any friction between “want” and “buy.” Social platforms understand this, and that’s why several have introduced purchase buttons for brands to use with in tandem with their advertising images.
On Instagram, 130 million people tap on shopping posts each month. After seeing those shopping posts, 46% say they made a purchase. If you add a purchase button to those posts, then you can increase the possibility of a purchase, as you give the buyer less time to get distracted between seeing your product and making the decision to buy it.
Brand Communities
We’ve touched on brand communities before, specifically from a customer service standpoint. What better way to create brand advocates than to bring them all together and let them chat about your products? You have the chance to solve problems the moment they arise, which keeps the buyers happy and also generates a lot of goodwill.
Brand communities also provide chances for you to convince potential buyers to take the leap and make a purchase. These communities, where your loyal customers share stories about your products, are the perfect places for new followers to ask questions and get genuine answers from past buyers. This gives you valuable social proof that you just can’t pay for with influencers, because they come from a place of honesty and authenticity.
Influencers
While genuine customers within your brand communities are valuable, don’t rely entirely on those users to convince potential buyers. An influencer program—specifically micro influencers with small but dedicated audiences—can do a world of good for your bottom line. These influencers often have higher engagement and conversion rates than mega influencers like celebrities because their audiences trust them to make honest recommendations based on their experiences.
When you work with influencers that are carefully chosen to support and magnify your brand, you can see a big difference in your social media conversion rates. Just be sure to fully vet your influencers or, better yet, work with an agency that has long-standing relationships with powerful and trustworthy influencers.
Chat Options
When your social media followers have questions about a product, you should be available as soon as possible to answer them. The time it takes for you to receive, read, and respond to an email could be long enough that the potential buyer has already become distracted or moved on to a competitor.
By offering chat or messaging options on your social media platforms, you can eliminate that lag and answer your buyers’ questions right away. Without the ability to monitor your social media 24/7, you might consider installing a chatbot to answer some of the most common questions to keep the purchases moving. Several high-tech AI options are available, all with the ability to learn and ask detailed questions of your buyers in order to give the best possible answers.
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