Social Marketing Insights for Retailers
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Social marketing is becoming increasingly more valuable for retailers. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+, Pinterest, and Instagram are some of the social networking platforms that are being used to grow business. The following are key Social Marketing insights for retailers.
Social Marketing can help build customer engagement and product awareness:
Social marketing can help you increase engagement with your online customers, but be sure to choose the appropriate channel based on your goal. For example, Pinterest is a must for retailers because it is excellent for sharing product images. As a visual network, it provides great value to retail brands. It is also important to reach the right people. Capture core fans and bring them into your social scape via website, emails, shares, and likes within a social network. To drive awareness to your brand, optimize content to meet brands by using social analytics. You can do this by determining which posts are receiving the most engagement and creating more content from that. Continually manage and keep track of your Likes, Shares, Followers, Retweets, and Comments.
Social Marketing can generate brand advocacy and increase positive brand perception:
Personalize brand experiences by encouraging product recommendations and interactions, which are powerful drivers for buying behavior. You can also ask for social media referrals and talk about brand experiences. Start with implementing easy-to-use and easy-to-find social buttons (Like, Tweet, +1, inShare, Pin It, Share). Include these buttons for every product page for your brand. Also include the ability to add personal comments and the ability to share wish lists and recent purchases. It is also a good idea to leverage third party content; e.g., celebrity endorsements. Lastly, show your brand’s community involvement with events and charitable efforts. Showcase any content on community efforts to receive positive engagement and sentiment with your customers and fans.
Social Marketing can increase customer retention and lifetime value:
Utilize social media as a communication channel to help increase the quality of your customer service. A social customer will spend 21% more with companies who provide great service. On the other extreme, social media users will tell more than 2x more people about bad service experiences than the general population. Take advantage of streamlining your customer service. Use customer feedback to drive product innovation. Be authentic and transparent. Constantly improve and evolve to create customer satisfaction. Initially acquiring the customer is the most expensive marketing activity a company can incur, while retaining them is by far the least expensive. Leveraging social media to retain a customer and in turn facilitate a life time of brand loyalty can increase your ROI by several fold.
Social Marketing can help drive direct sales and revenue:
Driving measurable revenue lift should be a goal for most retailers. The growing social trend is significant for retailers because social efforts can increase website and in-store traffic. Visual heavy sites like Pinterest drive website and in-store traffic through pin boards dedicated around particular themes. This can also be achieved with the use of relevant limited-time offers posted on Facebook, or made available on apps such as Foursquare. Research shows these special offers and deals are the #1 reason people follow brands on social networks.
Social Marketing efforts can be measured:
You can track the impact of your Social Marketing efforts by utilizing web analytics tools such as Adobe Omniture. Measure likes, tweets, and other interactions on a product page level. Optimize web analytics to track engagement to links. Measure how engagement, such as likes and comments, drives actions such as orders and revenue. Utilizing web analytics tools will help you close the loop on your Social Marketing campaigns.
