How Social Media Can Promote Your Ecommerce Website

According to a report compiled by Nielsen Online, nearly two third’s of the world’s population visit social networking sites. Imagine how lucrative it would be for an online business to tap into this vast consumer base and engage with their prospective customers?

As an owner of an ecommerce business you can be rest assured that a good majority of your customers irrespective of gender, age and economic status are actively using social networking sites. Hence, by adopting an integrated social media marketing strategy your ecommerce business would stand to gain improved customer loyalty and interaction, visibility for your brand as well as useful insights about your targeted audience.

• Generating brand awareness – Word of mouth dissemination is the best way to generate brand awareness for your ecommerce website. All it takes is one satisfied customer to start a thread about your product. Eventually other consumers join in the discussion and before you know it you have established a credible reputation for your brand and in turn generated widespread brand awareness for your product.

• Advertisements and promotions – Social media sites can be used by your ecommerce business as a useful propagation tool. Major social networking sites such as Facebook have developed promotional tools that are custom made to serve the marketing requirements of online businesses. Prospective customers would click on these advertisements, which would immediately direct them to your landing page where they can browse and purchase your products.

• Create consumer interest – Social media websites can be used to successfully create an interest in your consumers about your products. Using this medium you can initiate product discussions, showcase your expertise in your field and in turn convince your customers about the value proposition about your products. This creates valuable mindshare about your brand in the minds of your consumers and is a concrete step in fostering customer loyalty.

• Reputation monitoring – Listening to what your customers and competitors are saying about your enterprise constitutes and important aspect of your marketing strategy. The viral nature of social media websites where people engage in frequent discussions is the best way to gauge what people are saying about your ecommerce brand. This gives you an opportunity to engage and pacify disgruntled customers as well and prevent your reputation from getting tarnished. Useful criticism and inputs from customers would also help you to augment your marketing strategy and improve your discourse with your target audience.

• Encouraging product reviews – Social media sites provide a forum for customers to write their own product reviews. This can have a resounding impact for your ecommerce business as you can stream positive product reviews about your enterprise directly to your website. Also product reviews by your customers give you a phenomenal opportunity to grow organically. Reviews written by customers provide useful user generated content to the search engines which establishes the credibility of your website and helps your ecommerce site gain enhanced visibility on SERP’s.

• Determine your target audience – Social media profiling helps you determine your target audience and provides you with valuable insights into which platform would be the most lucrative. For instance by asking your existing customers about which social media websites they are on you would be able to hone in on the most popular website to run a successful marketing campaign. This would also furnish you with valuable consumer data, which you can use to run a more targeted email marketing campaign for your ecommerce business.

Leveraging the power of social media can jettison the success of your ecommerce business. The ability to connect with customers and prospects on a real time basis hastens the sales process as with just a click consumers can visit your online store and purchase your products. By connecting with your audience on social media sites you can establish a phenomenal presence for your ecommerce business. This would further translate into building customer loyalty, increased sales and a high ROI for your business.
By: I Need Di$cipline.com