Unlock the power of Social Commerce: how to drive cost-effective leads for your business.
Is Social Commerce the right channel to drive cost-effective leads for your business? Is focusing on leads the right approach? Or is lowering your cost per acquisition a more meaningful objective? And what’s the difference? These are just a few of the questions we get asked by businesses, like yours, looking to unlock the power of social commerce.
Just like traditional and digital media investments, we believe social media should – and can - pull its weight in terms of ROI. Let’s dive deep into how social commerce can become a robust system that drives growth and returns for your business:
Is social media right for your business?
The first thing to consider when you’re looking to drive quality traffic, prospects or sales is to evaluate the opportunity social media provides.
Just like any investment your business makes, social media needs to pull its weight in terms of ROI. So let’s evaluate your product or service through the lens of the strengths of social - to see if there is a match.
Where on social media is your ideal customer?
The first and most fundamental question is: “Can we find your prospects on social media?”. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn have sophisticated audience targeting and filtering capabilities to find the people that match your ideal demographic, regional, role or interests. Add-in the power of remarketing and you have the ability to reach prospects at all stages of the conversion funnel.
As powerful as these targeting tools are, they’re only as good as the data your audience is built on. Spending time upfront profiling the ‘persona’ of your most profitable customer segments will help to quantify the size of your ‘prospect pool’ on social media; which in turn ensures your budgets are fit for purpose and able to drive the results your business needs.
Is there a ‘discoverable’ component to your product or service?
Whereas search is a superb ‘lean-in’ channel when prospects already know what they want or need and are actively searching for products and services... social commerce is a lot more ‘discovery’ oriented.
Positioning your offering in the social feed of your target audience is a superb way to make them aware of products, services, experiences and outcomes they didn’t necessarily know were available to them.
Presenting your products and services in a way that encourages interaction – through reactions, comments or video views – unlocks the power of retargeting which draws your audience down the marketing funnel - from simply being aware, to being actively engaged and ready to purchase.
Do you have an ‘always on’ mindset?
Social commerce delivers the best results as a long-term, ‘always on’ activity. Unlike traditional advertising campaigns that are planned in specific ‘flights’ of activity, social needs to be approached as a selling system. The fundamental difference is in the algorithmic learnings that platforms like Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn employ; the Facebook algorithmic learning phase, for example, is a minimum of ten days. That means the algorithm is testing and refining your campaign across thousands of variables within elements such as:
Audiences
Messaging
Imagery
Headlines
Offers
Interests
Regions
Ad Formats, and more.
Not only do you need to be patient and let the system work its magic to improve your ROI over time, but you need to be aware that turning-off your campaign... immediately loses any algorithmic learnings. In essence, dipping-in and out of social is incredibly inefficient - as it prevents your social ‘selling system’ from gaining traction.
Put another way: it’s better to spend less money day-to-day but stay ‘always on’ than to invest more heavily in short term ‘flights’ of social commerce activity.
Are you really ready to generate leads?
The success of your social selling system hinges not just on the front-end ability of your social ads to generate traffic and prospects, but your back-end ability to land them in an E-commerce or landing page environment that:
Meets their expectations when they click
Serves up relevant and credible reasons to buy (or enquire) when they get there, and
Makes it easy for them to transact, book an appointment – or leave their details.
If your conversion rates and ROI are not as expected, don’t panic - optimise. Take a breath and look hard at the levers you can pull to complete the loop and build a profitable social selling system.
Everything from landing pages and website design through to the content you are posting on your social channels all sit hand-in-hand with your front-end lead generation strategy.
Which messages does your audience respond to?
An effective social selling system requires a constant flow of good content to keep it humming along. Remember that the algorithm is a sophisticated machine that is hungry to work on your behalf. A product or service with a single audience, single offer and unchanging single message will often quickly run out of steam in social... with diminishing returns in terms of ROI.
So, even if you have a solitary product or service, you need to test multiple messages: for example, some customers will respond to a value appeal. Others are looking to reduce risk or make gains in their lives. Others will respond to the credibility or popularity of your product or service.
Some people will respond to technical, feature-driven messaging. Others couldn’t care less about the specs... but just want the bigger picture pay-off.
Think of each of these different angles as, ‘hooks’ that appeal to different people with different mindsets. You can write a dozen hooks (and you need to test dozens of ads) for the very same feature or benefit of your product. e.g. “Come experience one of the most trusted brands in X – and never have to worry you’ve made the wrong choice or... save time wading through dozens of inferior choices...”. This is the same feature (most trusted brand) cast differently to one prospect who values lower-risk vs. another who values time-saving and convenience.
Now, once you have a healthy portfolio of messages... it’s time to build a healthy social selling system by constantly testing, comparing and contrasting messages to find the ‘seams of gold’ in social for your business. Once you find it? Then scale-up and mine that seam of gold for incredible returns.
You can and should be testing hundreds of variables...target audiences, territories, visuals, headlines, offers, ad formats, landing page combinations etc. Go into social with patience and a clear understanding that a healthy selling system requires a healthy variety of approaches to test over time.
How do you measure success?
We know the ability to understand, stick with, and continue to invest in a healthy social selling system is utterly reliant on your ability to attribute sales and profitability to your social investment.
While the sophisticated analytics behind all modern social media platforms make this easier than ever before... it's important to remember that there are still debates and different schools of thought amongst many marketing and digital practitioners - particularly when it comes to interpreting the data.
Many a social campaign has been killed by a narrow, ‘last click’ attribution view of the transaction - whereas a deeper-dive, with more sophisticated attribution tools, will almost always show that people (like the messy human beings that we are) gain their information and are influenced by multiple touchpoints from multiple channels... This is called the ‘customer journey’.
It's not uncommon for a prospect to discover a product or service in social... forget about it temporarily... find it again via paid search...then be distracted...then go back to the website via an organic keyword or brand search... and then finally purchase after being a social retargeting campaign. The lesson is...it’s incredibly easy to find short term data to kill any campaign. You are far better-off using a holistic and more mature ‘full funnel’ multi-channel view to grow your business over time.
Taking an holistic view also helps you see the wood for the trees; marketing money invested in the top of the funnel... should convert to acceptable ROI out the bottom... irrespective of how many channels you’ve invested in on the way through.
Measure the big simple things that underpin this:
How many people have we reached?
How much traffic did that generate?
How many people ‘did something’ (engaged) to indicate higher interest levels?
How many of them identified themselves? (a real hot prospect)
How many bought?
How many bought again?
Once you unlock the secrets to this system, many businesses find that social commerce is an insanely powerful and consistent machine to grow their businesses.
Checkout our case study here for social commerce, e-commerce & Shopify.
Also for a great insight into E-Commerce fundamentals read Jonathon Lau’s great article here: https://www.toptal.com/product-managers/ecommerce/ecommerce-product-strategy 5 Considerations for a Strong E-commerce Product Strategy.