We have discussed before in this blog, how important it is to have a clearly defined social media strategy. In large organisations, social media marketing accounts for roughly 1-5% of digital marketing budgets; and this figure is increasing, as companies start to see the fruits of their labours.
As we have mentioned before, the biggest benefit of social marketing is it’s ability to enable you to engage in ongoing dialogue with existing and potential customers. You cannot expect real quantifiable Return on Investment (ROI) from the outset, but in time you will see the benefits. Below are 8 top “social tactics” that you can deploy..and many of them you will be delighted to hear..are inexpensive!
1. Ratings and Reviews: These are already used by most retailers, and offer an opportunity to reduce content creation costs. This also enables you to have direct contact with your customers, and gain an honest insight; which will help you refine your product more effectively to meet customer needs.
2. Microblogs (eg. Twitter) This is inexpensive to launch, can provide a great platform to offload excess stock (Dell); and provide an opportunity to serve your customers’ needs in real-time. It can also put a face to your brand.
3. Social recommendations - gives you an opportunity to “leverage” the wisdom of the customer. It exposes customers to content deeper in the site, and encourages “stickiness”. A referral from a friend is, furthermore, so much more powerful, than from a company!
4. Company Blogs – provides the biggest opportunity for SEO benefits. They do not drive a great deal of traffic, but can be set up for relatively low cost.
5. Customer generated outfitting – Enabling customers to see how they will look in different products will enhance cross-selling considerably. This method further engages shoppers and provides a more interactive customer experience.
6. Product sharing on social network sites – Much more effective than company social network pages. Customers promote your brand for you! Nice..
7. Social shopping aggregator sites – This is a great opportunity to drive incremental traffic to your site.
8. Open APIs – Opportunity to “crowdsource” technology.
These are some of the methods you can look at to drive sales through social media. It all points to the same thing though. Before embarking upon any of this, you need to have clearly identified your target audience, decided upon your goals, and then your approach to meet your objectives. Only some of these methods will be of benefit to your business, but I hope this gives you a guideline as to what those who have achieved success, do!
A lot of this material was taken from a presentation given by Suleika Bloom , who is the Social Media Director of Heels in the US. This was posted on Social Commerce Today , a fantastic source of information by Dr Paul Marsden.