Sumeet Anand January 21, 2021 So, what does a winning product strategy look like? Hint: No, it is not just about being able to find and sell products.
If you are a business owner, there are high chances that you have already utilized social media as a crucial part of your brand’s marketing strategy.
But, if you are still not convinced about the power social media brings—think of reaching out to more than 3.18 billion active users in one go! These are already there, and hundreds of thousands join every day through platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest. You are missing out!
While your online store should be on social media, knowing how to develop a winning product strategy is easier said than done.
Before we discuss how to grow your online sales on social media, here is a quick overview of the core pillars of social media marketing.
The Core Pillars of Social Media Marketing
1. Strategize
Of course, the first step is to strategize. You should come up with a solid social media strategy. How do you do that? The following tips should help:
- Focus on your business goals. Is it to increase brand awareness? Is it to find and sell products? or Is it to drive website traffic. In our case, we’d want to boost sales.
- Decide on the social media platform you want to use. A few of the major ones include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, Tumblr, and Anchor. You do not have to be all over the place. Just pick a few where you think you can find your target audience.
- Finalize the type of content. What kind of content will drive the most sales? Find out if it is the image, video, link, or educational content depending upon your market persona.
2. Plan and publish
You need to have a consistent presence on social media to allow your brand to be discovered by billions of users.
Publishing any content (be it an image, a blog post, a podcast, or video) is easy. It is almost similar to using your personal social media account.
What’s crucial is planning when to publish your content. For example, according to Sproutsocial, the best time to post on Twitter is Wednesday and Friday at 9 am, the best day is Wednesday and Friday, while Saturday is not recommended.
Source: Sproutsocial
3. Engage
Another winning product strategy is the more you post your content on social media, the more consumers will start interacting with your brand.
People will start commenting on the posts they like, maybe tag you in their post, and if you are lucky, they will reach out to you directly.
Make it a routine to monitor all your social media conversations. You will get an idea of what worked for your brand and what did not. Also, take criticisms constructively.
4. Analytics
You need to master your social media analytics. Social media is a brilliant way to engage with your audience in real-time. Therefore, mastering analytics will help you gain a better understanding of what your audience wants.
For example, when you know if you are reaching more on social media than last week or find out how many people have used your brand’s hashtag. It can help you figure out if your product needs further improvement.
7 Best Social Media Marketing Strategies to Grow Your Online Sales
1. Post content frequently
Quality and consistency are key. Remember that audiences respond differently based on your posting frequency.
A Hubspot study found that posting once per day (or a maximum of two per day) is enough for Facebook. In fact, business pages under 10,000 followers experienced a 50% drop in engagement per post if posted more than once per day.
- Monthly Facebook post clicks
Source: Hubspot
2. Create micro content for social feeds
Your users could be doing anything while browsing social media. Maybe they are traveling or taking mini-breaks during work or on a mobile device to simply kill time.
One thing that is common for all scenarios is people do a lot of scrolling on social media. So, if you want to find and sell winning products, too, play with bite-sized content that audiences can grasp.
For example, if you sell hair products and already have a blog written on “Best Products for Hairfall Under 30$ ”, repurpose it. This means breaking that long piece of content into several micro-content and leveraging the information on your social media feeds.
3. Create high-quality content
Everything you see online is content. Therefore, you need to create high-quality content regularly that stands out from your competitors.
Content marketing is a winning product strategy that allows your business to shine. According to Gartner’s Annual CMO Spend Survey, 53% of companies handle social marketing and manage content marketing themselves.
Why? Because when they increase control over brand messaging, they see real returns on their investments.
For example, if you are selling on Shopify, ensure your content is engaging, easy-to-understand, contains a lot of visuals, and is easier to optimize.
4. Make it easy for users to share your product
Social media buttons are a key component of growing a brand’s “conversion rate,” which can, in turn, boost traffic and increase online sales. Therefore, make sure that your users can easily locate the share button on popular social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.
At times, you may also want to customize your share buttons to match your brand’s visual aesthetics. Yes, it might be visually pleasing. But if a huge chunk of your audience isn’t using your social share buttons enough, it may be worth switching them back to their default colors.
5. Share visual content
A critical aspect of social media marketing is text-based content. But you need to start creating and distributing a lot of visual content on social media to materialize your winning product strategy.
Content Marketing Institute reveals that 65% of B2B marketers use infographics to increase sales. Similarly, other types of frequently used visuals elements are:
- Memes and gifs: Images described with some means of a humorous pop-culture reference.
- Videos and presentations: The use of webinars, animated, or recorded videos embedded in the content.
- Charts and data visualizations: The representation of raw data or complex datasets.
- Infographics: A combination of data and graphic design.
- Photos: High-resolution photographs from your brand directories to find and sell products.
6. Create content in different formats
You will be exhausting your subscribers or followers if you only keep sharing blog posts on your social media handle.
The reason is simple. Too much of everything is harmful, and not all your followers may love reading blogs.
To really connect and develop a lasting relationship with your social fans, you need to keep things exciting and create different content formats.
Infographics, ebooks, case studies, podcasts, interviews, videos, guides, research, and original data are a few examples that you can try.
7. Use hashtags sensibly and be active on the right ones
Hashtags are a powerful way to extend the scope of your business on social media. They make it easy to join in on discussions and events, find and sell products by posting using the relevant ones.
A good practice is to treat hashtags differently on different channels. For example:
- A single hashtag on Twitter may generate more engagements than tweets when appropriately placed.
- For Instagram, you can add as many as 10+ hashtags for better engagement in a single post.
- Facebook posts do better without hashtags.
The trick to hijacking a hashtag, however, is not hijacking it at all. Sometimes contributing in a positive, normal way to a discussion can also help.
Conclusion
All-in-all, there is no one key to winning product strategy on social media. Apart from the ones mentioned above, you can also experiment with influencer marketing, organize contests, automate word-of-mouth with social reviews, or even enable shopping on Instagram to help find and sell products.
What you need is a creative touch to understand and engage your audience in the world they live in. With so many brands using social media marketing to pitch their products, break the convention by building real connections with your audience.
Thanks for reading. If you like this post, please share it on social media.
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