Is social media a big part in your traffic generation plan right now?
According to the Internet Retailer’s Social Media 500 report, social-driven online retail sales and referral traffic are growing at faster pace than all other online channels. From 2014 to 2015, social media increased its share of e-commerce referrals nearly 200%.
For online retailers, social commerce is now a must for flourishing business. Get back to our question above, if your answer is a No, you should definitely include social media into your traffic generation plan right now, together with other channels like direct, email, google search… Otherwise, you will soon regret missing a big source of highly potential online shoppers, given that 2.3 billion of people all over the world are active on social media now.
Next question: how to leverage social media to generate endless leads into your online store? In this post, we’d like to share some simple yet really effective changes to make on your website that can altogether help bring in traffic and sales.
#1 Content is King! Feed them with what they’d like to share on their social outlets!
Nothing works best than good content that engages with people, brings true value to them and is worth their sharing to their networks, especially on social media. If you can create the right type of content that makes customers share on their social profiles, it means you succeed in activating social conversations around your brand, getting people pay attention to and talk about it, and definitely generating organic social traffic to your website.
Some actionable suggestions for you to consider if you’re thinking about engaging with your customers with content and getting them to share on social media:
Tell them how to use your products in the most awesome ways (if you have a food / kitchen appliances store: create videos of cooking recipes and tutorial, if you sell fashion, write posts about mix & match tips…)
Tell them why they should use your products and which added values they will have (if you sell fitness products, write content about physical and mental benefits of being fit and healthy, or write about celebrities whose success is the direct results of fitness…)
Get them excited about sales promotions!
Make sure your content is valuable and trendy to your target audience, they will highly likely share your stories on their social outlets and bring traffic from their own social networks to your store.
#2 Give customers convenient ways to share on social media
Once you have created the right content that encourages customers to share, next step is to make it super easy for them to share! Don’t expect your readers to copy the url, paste on their social and write beautiful caption about it for you. You need to make sure everything has already been prepared for them, what they have to do is just do a few clicks, and their job is done!
Urban Beardsman store is a decent example to look at: they have a “resources” section in which stories, trends, products information are written about:
Right under the posts, you can see that they install a social sharing plugin that gives customers many options of social outlets to share: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube…These buttons don’t draw too much attention to themselves, but are simple to find.
Depending on which social platforms your target customers gather the most, present social sharing buttons that help customers to be more willing to share your content on your personal accounts.
#3: Optimize your website for mobile users
According to one recent report of We Are Social, mobile social media user is increasing 23%+ since last year, and more than 15% of all ecommerce sales are made from a mobile device. These numbers are rising, which is an ensured future trends, because smart phones users worldwide keeps increasing every single year, and more and more people are inclined towards using social media on mobile instead of desktops.
Thus, it is obvious that online retailers should take extra care of how their ecommerce site displayed on mobile devices, to increase more social traffic coming from mobile. There are plenty of options to make your site looks smart on mobile devices such as choosing Mobile-first Responsive Designs, setting up plugins for mobile users if your site is based. The most important thing to keep in mind is that mobile web version should maintain a simple and intuitive interface with fast pace of loading because there is a tendency that people who check in your store by mobile devices are mostly on the go.
If you want to see how well your store displayed on other mobile devices you can try mobiletest.me or Google’s Mobile-friendly test, which show views from different mobile devices and the rate of mobile compatibility of your site.
#4 Just ask your customers to share (with some incentives)
There’s actually nothing wrong to just ask your customers to share your content / products on their social accounts. Creating content costs you time, making a mobile-friendly design costs you money, but making direct request is simple and brings instant results.
But can you just simply write a line in your website, “Please share my website on your social media to help me get more traffic” ? Definitely that’s not gonna work. People need incentives and rewards for any actions they are asked to take. Give your customers enticing offers, such as a discount code / free gift / free shipping for their purchase, if they share your products on their social channels:
(Take a look at Checkout Boost app to implement these offers)
Or more simply, make your current customers become your social fans, to engage with them via your social pages, get them share your social posts and draw more traffic from their networks to your brand. The below coupon pop up offers customers a discount code if they follow one of the store’s social channels:
(Powered by Better Coupon Box app)
Conclusion
E-commerce traffic can come from many channels, but social media is becoming more and more widespread worldwide. It is a promising plant worth your investment of time and efforts to seed and create traffic flows into your online store So keep an eye on the coming era of social ecommerce and keep up with the latest social media marketing trend to make your business bloom.
The post 4 on-site changes to generate social traffic for your online store appeared first on Beeketing Blog.