Category: Marketing

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Overcome Your Fears, Get Unstuck, And Fuel Your Success

Don't let fear decide your fate

What scares you? Learning how to overcome fears of failure can be challenging for everyone.

Fortunately, all fears are learned. No one is born with fears. Fears can, therefore, be unlearned by practicing self-discipline repeatedly with regard to fear until it goes away.

The most common fears that we experience, which often sabotage all hope for success, are the fear of failure, poverty, and loss of money.

These fears cause people to avoid the risk of any kind and to reject opportunity when it is presented to them. They are so afraid of failure that they are almost paralyzed when it comes to taking any risks at all.

There are many other fears that interfere with our happiness.

    • People fear the loss of love or
    • People fear the loss of their jobs and their financial security.
    • People fear embarrassment or ridicule.
    • People fear rejection and criticism of any kind.
    • People fear the loss of respect or esteem of others.

These and many other fears hold us back throughout life…

Here are a few techniques to help you overcome your fears and fuel your success:

Fear Paralyzes Action

The most common reaction in a fearful situation is the attitude of, “I can’t!”

This is the fear of failure that stops us from taking action. It is experienced physically, starting in the pit of your stomach.

When people are really afraid, their mouth and throat go dry, their heart starts pounding. Sometimes they breathe shallowly and their stomach churns.

These are all physical manifestations of the inhibitive negative habit pattern, which we all experience from time to time.

Fear Shuts Our Brains Down

Whenever a person is in the grip of fear, he feels like a deer caught in the headlights of a car. This fear paralyzes action. It often shuts down the brain and causes the individual to revert to the “fight-or-flight” reaction.

Fear is a terrible emotion that undermines our happiness and can hold us back throughout our lives.

Visualize Yourself As Unafraid

By visualizing yourself performing with confidence and competence in an area where you are fearful, your visual image will eventually be accepted by your subconscious mind as instructions for your performance.

Your self-image, the way you see yourself and think about yourself, is eventually altered by feeding your mind these positive mental pictures of yourself performing at your best.

Practice Acting “As If”

By using the “act as if” method, you walk, talk, and carry yourself exactly as you would if you were completely unafraid in a particular situation.

You stand up straight, smile, move quickly and confidently, and in every respect act as if you already had the courage that you desire.

Use The Law Of Reversibility

The Law of Reversibility says that “If you feel a certain way, you will act in a manner consistent with that feeling.”

But if you act in a manner consistent with that feeling, even if you don’t feel it, the Law of Reversibility will create a feeling that is consistent with your actions.

This is one of the greatest breakthroughs in success psychology. You develop the courage you desire by disciplining yourself repeatedly to do the thing you fear until that fear eventually disappears—and it will.

Confront Your Fears Immediately

Your ability to confront, deal with, and act in spite of your fears is the key to happiness and success.

One of the best exercises you can practice is to identify a person or situation in your life of which you are afraid and resolve to deal with that fear situation immediately.

Do not allow it to make you unhappy for another minute. Resolve to confront the situation or person and put the fear behind you.

Move Toward The Fear

When you identify fear and discipline yourself to move toward it, it grows smaller and more manageable.

What’s more, as your fears grow smaller, your confidence grows.  Soon, your fears lose control over you.

In contrast, when you back away from a fear-inducing situation or person, your fear grows larger and larger.

Soon it dominates your thinking and feeling, preoccupies you during the day, and often keeps you awake at night.

Deal With The Fear Directly

The only way to deal with fear is to address it head-on.

Remind yourself that, “Denial” is not a river in Egypt.

The natural tendency of many people is to deny that they have a problem caused by fear of some kind. They’re afraid of confronting it. In turn, it becomes a major source of stress, unhappiness, and psychosomatic illness.

Be willing to deal with the situation or person directly.

As Shakespeare said, “Take arms against a sea of troubles, and in so doing, end them.”

When you force yourself to face any fear-inducing situation in your life, your self-esteem goes up, your self-respect increases and your sense of personal pride grows.

You eventually reach the point in life where you are not afraid of anything.

Source: briantracy.com ~ Image: Canva Pro

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7 proven MLM tips to become 100% successful in network marketing

MLM tips to become 100% successful
MLM tips to become 100% successful

We have been hearing network marketing success stories for a long time. But once we’re planning to expose ourselves in network marketing, it’s an end game! We browse a lot on the internet and check various network marketing success tips made by different people.

Run research to find what consumers think about the direct selling industry in general. Apparently, they are the ones who determine the success of the industry.

It’s good to hear their tips based on their experiences, it will motivate us to go forward. However, we need something more than that. Here are 7 proven MLM marketing strategies that have great practical value rather than just plain concepts. If you follow these network marketing tips, then the result is assured!

How to Succeed in Network Marketing

Let’s learn and master the network marketing strategy one after the other right way. Also, I’m going to show you the easiest way to achieve success in network marketing as a bonus tip.

Source: epixelmlmsoftware.com ~ Image: epixelmlmsoftware.com

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How to Succeed at Network Marketing Without Annoying Anyone

Network Marketing, Multi-Level-Marketing, MLM, are all terms for a common business structure in which companies utilize a sales force made up of “Independent Distributors” to market their products. It’s a business structure that has been around for a long time and the appeal of it comes from a distributor getting residual income, having their own business, and being their own boss. In short, it’s the American dream.

Unfortunately, for most distributors, it will remain just that, a dream. In this article, we’re going to discuss the most common reasons people fail at MLM and give you suggestions on how to succeed at network marketing.

Network marketing has a bad reputation and is often referred to as a pyramid scheme. The reason for this is twofold. First, there have been some companies out there promoting real pyramid schemes disguised as multi-level-marketing companies. The other reason is the average person doesn’t really know what a pyramid scheme is.

So, just to be clear the difference between a legitimate network marketing company and a pyramid scheme is how they earn their money. Network marketing companies derive a majority of their revenue through the sale of a product or service. An (illegal) pyramid scheme gets most of its income through the fees charged to its distributors. Now, does that mean that if a company charges a fee to become a distributor is a pyramid scheme?

No, and we can think about it this way. Legitimate MLM companies use a micro franchising model in order to sell their products. And like any franchise, (McDonalds) they charge a franchising fee. Then you as the new franchisee make money by selling the company’s products, be they hamburgers, makeup or supplements.

But, unlike the McDonald’s franchise, a network marketing company allows you to find other individuals who want to sell the products and when they become a distributor (franchisee), the company rewards you by paying you a commission on their sales too.

It’s this model that benefits the company through low-cost marketing and growth, and it rewards independent distributors for their efforts in expanding the business.

So, what does a pyramid scheme look like? Well, there are variations, but the classic pyramid scheme runs like this.

  • A person recruits ten people who pay $100
  • They then instruct those ten people to recruit 10 more people to pay $100
  • The initial 10 people have just made $900 on their $100 “investment”
  • But now there are a hundred people who each have to recruit 10 others in order for them to get paid

This process repeats itself over and over until it eventually collapses under its own weight.

But, enough about pyramid schemes, let’s talk about legitimate network marketing companies and how to succeed at network marketing.

Network Marketing, Pros, and Cons

As we stated earlier, network marketing is really just a way for a company to market its products. By using independent distributors, a company’s marketing and advertising costs go way down. It also provides a way for the average person to own their own business either full or part-time. But with that said, there are both pros and cons to network marketing.

Pros:

  • Low initial investment – Most network marketing companies only cost a few hundred dollars to join. Compare that to a Domino’s pizza franchise ($25,000) Mcdonald’s ($45,000) or Burger King ($50,000), making them one of the cheapest ways to start a business.
  • Financial independence – Many people invest in becoming distributors for multi-level marketing companies because it offers them a chance to earn extra income. Whether full-time or part-time because it provides an extra income.
  • Flexibility – Network marketing allows stay-at-home moms and dads to generate an income without putting the kids in daycare. It’s also a business that can be done in your spare time, it’s not a regular 9-5 gig.
  • You can leverage your income – By recruiting others into your “downline” you’ll be paid a commission on all of their sales as well as your own.
  • It can provide “residual” income – Residual income is just income that reoccurs over and over again. By building your business and downline sufficiently, you can develop a significant amount of residual income.
  • Growth opportunities – It’s not always clear how to grow in your career at a “regular” company. In fact, for some jobs, there is no way to advance your career at all. With network marketing companies you’ll have a very clear idea on what it will take to advance up the ranks.
  • There is no cap on your income – Unlike a job, there is no upper limit to the amount of money you can make.
  • The internet has changed everything – The internet and social media have made MLM marketing much easier.

Cons:

  • Competition – Because most MLM companies only cost a few hundred dollars to join, they can be a lot of independent distributors located in any one area. This can impact sales and profitability as they are all selling the same products.
  •  It’s not a good fit for everyone – Because the barrier to entry is so low, basically anyone who pays the fee becomes a distributor. Even people who don’t have the time, temperament, or personality for network marketing can become distributors.
  • Motivation – Being a distributor is a business there is no boss telling you what to do and when to do it. You need to be a self-starter.
  • It takes time – As stated earlier, multi-level marketing is a business. And it’s also one that you are starting from scratch. Don’t expect to make a lot of money right away. It is normal for the average distributor to go two years without making any significant money.
  • There is a lot of rejection involved – Many people will tell you “no” when you first start network marketing. That negative response is going to continue on and on… and on. The average person who is first getting started with this challenge may have a conversion rate of 1%. That means out of 100 people who are approached for a sale, 99 of them are going to turn the opportunity down. For those who get discouraged by such negativity, the rejection can cause a good network marketing opportunity to go away.
  • High turnover rate – A lot of network marketers simply quit. They might move to a different company or product, or they might just stop with MLM businesses completely. That’s a problem for you because the most profitable way to operate an MLM is through recruiting other people into your downline. If those people quit, then you won’t be getting residual income from commissions on their sales.
  • Constant recruiting – As a result of the high turnover rate, you’ll find yourself back out into the field spending more time recruiting people. This can also interfere with friendships and family relations if you are looking to those groups for your recruits.

Steps to Success

Despite what your company tells you, building a list of people in your warm market isn’t the best way to start out. When you look at the top performers, they have very few people that were on their original list in the business. Now, I’m not saying it’s wrong to let your friends and family know what you’re doing, but most of your warm market will only join after they see you succeed. So, the bottom line is to go ahead and let your warm market know what you’re doing, but if they say no, let it go.

  1. Target your market – Some companies call this “pre-qualifying” a prospect. You must understand who the person is that would be interested in your product or opportunity. What are your customers’ wants and desires? Only then can you tailor your marketing efforts to that portion of the population that is most likely to buy.
  2. Focus on gaining customer-first – People are naturally skeptical of “money-making” opportunities, so don’t focus all your energy in recruiting your downline. Instead, focus most of your efforts on recruiting customers. Once someone is a customer, they are going to be much more receptive to joining your downline.
  3. Don’t convince anyone to join your downline – This is why we concentrate on generating customers first. You will have already narrowed down your target market to people who have used and know the benefits of the products. Then you can offer them the opportunity. But, never convince, cajole or hound people to join your business, they won’t do well anyway.
  4. Be genuine and ethical – This is where network marketers can give the entire industry a bad name. Don’t come off as the clichéd “used car salesman” anxious to close the sale. This is a “people” business, your prospects are going into business with YOU, not your company. By the same token, be careful when marketing your products or services. Over-hyping or exaggerating the benefits of your products or services is a sure way to set people up for failure.
  5. Separate yourself from all the other distributors – This is one of the inherent issues with network marketing. You are just one of the thousands of distributors offering the exact same products at the exact same prices. You need to set yourself apart from everyone else and give the potential customer a reason to buy from you. Check out the resource section below for some great suggestions on how to do that.
  6. Have a system – If you really want to succeed at network marketing, then having a system in place is critical. Marketing to customers and prospecting for recruits takes a lot of time and effort. By putting a system in place you can; target your marketing efforts to those looking for your products, set yourself apart from other distributors, add value to the consumer giving them a reason to buy from you and finally to automatically follow up with the customer to build a relationship and for re-orders.

Internet Marketing

It happens to every network marketer, you run through your warm market and then hit the internet. But how do you use the internet?

Here’s how it goes for most people. They get on all of their social media accounts and post a link to their generic company website. Some people even join groups whose members would have an interest in the products. For example, if you’re selling weight loss supplements, there are a ton of groups out there talking about weight loss. And while there’s nothing wrong with doing either of these things, I have never seen them generate any substantial business for network markers. So, what should you do? CONTENT MARKETING. 

Virtually no one clicks on a random link to a website that’s trying to sell them something. If they want to buy your product, they will do a Google search and find it themselves. But, that’s a problem. You see, most company websites are identical. Google doesn’t like that because all the content is the same. So, Google will only index one site, ignoring all the rest. Using content marketing will not only help in getting you ranked in Google, but it will also help to set you apart from the thousands of other distributors out there.

  1. Start by making a simple website of your own. There are a lot of companies that have a very simple drag and drop systems for building websites, including, [WordPress], Wix, and Weebly. Be careful, don’t make your website another advertisement for your MLM. It needs to be an informational site that provides valuable information to the people who visit. Once they are there, you can have a products page.
  2. Start creating valuable content with a blog. Again, this is not to be content-focused on your products or company, instead focus on creating content that would be helpful to readers. For example, “Tips on Starting an Exercise Routine for the Procrastinator” or “10 Tasty Snacks that Won’t Ruin Your Diet”.
  3. Post all of this valuable content to your social media accounts and in the various weight loss groups, you joined. Always have a “For More Information” link that goes to your website. This increases your profile and credibility within the community. People will only buy from those they trust, and you are building trust.
  4. Once someone visits your site you want to be able to collect their information so that you can continue to communicate with them. The easiest way to do this is by using a lead capture system or landing page.
  5. Generate additional streams of income by incorporating affiliate marketing into your website. Not everyone who visits your website will be interested in your products or opportunity, but that doesn’t mean you can’t profit from them. Affiliate marketing is a great add-on to any network marketing business. It allows you to sell other people’s products and services without having to stock, ship or service them.

Conclusion

Network marketing can be a fun and profitable business for the average person looking to earn some money. With a low initial cost, network marketing puts business ownership within the reach of almost everyone. The downsides are that you will run through your warm market fairly quickly and that the products you sell are exactly the same as every other distributor. However, you can overcome this by setting yourself apart from other distributors, providing more value to the consumer, and developing relationships within the online communities you associate with. Remember, if you can help people out with valuable information, they are more likely to trust you and become customers. And satisfied customers are more likely to become partners, so concentrate first on getting and maintaining customers and your downline will follow.

Resources

You can get a copy of our latest book “The Complete Internet Marketing Strategy” for free by clicking on the link below. After you get the book, take a look at our videos explaining the automated supplement marketing system. It was designed for Herbalife distributors, but can be modified for use in ANY network marketing business. It is designed to target consumers that are already searching for the products you have. Then offering the customer more value than other distributors makes you stand out and gives them a reason to buy from you. Finally, it automatically follows up with them for re-orders, offers on other products, and downline recruitment.

Source: onlinebizfacts.com ~ By David Carpenter ~ Image: Canva Pro

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Social Media for eCommerce Businesses – Tips, Stats, Best Practices

Social-Media-for-eCommerce-Businesses-Tips-Stats-Best-Practices

Social media has become one of the most dependable and powerful sales tools for eCommerce businesses. Companies can go the patient route by building an organic following or the more direct route, with highly-target ad campaigns.  

With 35% of millennials (and a significant number of older shoppers) making purchases via social media, there has never been a better time to get on board. Use this article as a guide for understanding the real value of social media for eCommerce, how to build an effective strategy, and tips & best practices for getting the most out of your social presence.  

Why social media is crucial for eCommerce brands

The idea used to be that using social media in eCommerce was a bit wishy-washy; no tangible return to the business and “while it could work for some brands, it wouldn’t work for us”—this was a very common belief.  

eCommerce businesses can’t afford that perception today. The fact is that every type of business can improve sales or grow the business using social media—with an extremely tangible return. The main reason is that for virtually all businesses:  

      1. Your customers are on social media; 
      2. It is extremely cost-effective to market to them;
      3. It helps create a solid image.

It’s where your customers are 

Today three-quarters of shoppers use social media when making a purchasing decision.  

Most of them use social media to actively engage with and discover brands and products to do with their interests. If you sell motorbikes, you can build a following of motorbike enthusiasts on social media—and gradually and thoughtfully sell to them.  

Some brands never sell directly on social media (we cover how to do this later) but simply use the platform to build an engaged audience with awesome content…which inevitably leads to improved sales anyway. The benefits of social media in eCommerce can be massive across the buyer’s journey: from stoking awareness of the product or solution (like we’ve just described) to actively acquiring customers and then retaining them over the long term. 

It’s extremely cost-effective 

At its most basic, social media is free. Companies can set up their pages, post content, respond to messages, and build a following without spending a dime on the platform. There are still internal costs (mostly staff costs for planning, creating content, and handling messages) but it’s still possible for businesses to enjoy massive growth using free social media.  

Paid social ads are more divisive: they can be exceptionally cost-effective (which is easy to measure since there is direct attribution) when done right. The problem for many brands is that they launch head-first into paid ads without a plan—and in those cases, the costs can get out of hand fast.  

This is why the rest of this article is devoted to building and executing your eCommerce social media strategy, what to expect, and in-the-trenches advice for making it work.  

It helps create a solid image 

Social media allows eCommerce companies to cultivate, build and share their image. That’s why elements such as logos and cover photos are so important: over time, audiences learn to recognize your brand even when they’re not actively looking for your products.  

Your brand image helps you stand out and cut through the noise of social media, which is an essential weapon because that noise can be loud!  

Why-social-media-is-crucial-for-eCommerce-brands

Building a social media strategy for eCommerce

 Here we’ll explore valuable, general advice for building an eCommerce social media strategy. We’ll follow this up with specific tips for building an organic following and also executing paid social media ads—these are both exceptionally powerful tactics, but each has its own set of requirements and techniques. Let’s start at the start: goals.  

#1 Define your goals 

Your goal is probably to get more customers, more revenue, and more growth. But when it comes to building a strategy, your big goals should be more targeted:  

      • We want to drive more traffic to our website or specific webpage 
      • We want to build an engaged following that loves interacting with our brand 
      • We want to sell % of our products directly through social media 
      • We want to bring more locals into our brick-and-mortar store 

It might be a variation of one of these or something completely different, but this top-level aim is vital. When making decisions down the line, you can always say, “Okay neat idea, but is this helping bring people into our physical store?” It serves as a check against yourself.  

You can then create actionable sub-targets depending on your main goal:  

      • We want to drive more traffic to our website or specific webpage 
      • Convert 1% of post viewers to site visitors 
      • Hit 10,000 monthly site visits within 6 months 
      • We want to build an engaged following that loves interacting with our brand 
      • Achieve an Instagram engagement rate of 5% 
      • Grow a community of 2500 followers on Facebook 
      • Land 5 volunteers a month for your “Our Customer’s Story” feature posts 

You get the idea. Look for measurable, SMART outcomes which you can directly attribute and tie to your larger goal. Getting a boatload of new followers sounds fantastic, but if none of them are visiting your website, it might be worthless. 

#2 Find out where your audience “lives” 

Nearly 3 billion people on Earth are “active social media users”. Since your customer base likely runs in the thousands (possibly the hundreds or tens) that’s a really unhelpful number. Your goal is to dominate a very specific niche, not appeal to half the world.  

If your eCommerce business is just starting with social, you don’t need to be on every platform. Figuring these platforms out takes time, and you’re better off getting good at one before moving to the next.  

Companies like Hootsuite, Keyhole, Google Analytics, or SparkToro can tell you where your customers spend their time. You can trace certain keywords or hashtags, search by demographics (based on your past customers) or see which social platforms are directing the most traffic to your website.  

Once you have the right platform(s), it’s time to start building your presence and dominating your niche—with the most relevant content and the best interactions with the audience.  

Find-out-where-your-audience-lives

#3 Create and optimize your profiles 

When creating your company profile, it’s incredibly important to get the basic information down first:  

      • What’s your company called and what do you offer?  
      • Where are you based?  
      • How do I contact you?  
      • How do I buy from you?  

It’s incredible the number of businesses who neglect these essential details. The use of relevant keywords and hashtags, clear CTAs, and minimal jargon is essential. Optimizing for eCommerce means having clear buttons and CTAs, website links to any products showcased, and never forgetting that the end purpose of your social media profile is to convert.  

#4 Start posting  

The fundamental key to building an engaged organic following is content. This can be virtually anything:  

      • Blog posts and helpful tips 
      • eBooks, Guides 
      • Customer success stories 
      • Collaborations with industry influencers or partners 
      • Webinars, Videos 
      • User-generated content 

We’ve listed most of the big hitters in terms of longer-form content. However, in 2021 we are seeing a massive rise in the popularity of snackable content: infographics, memes, quotes, and video clips are popular attention-grabbing formats for social media scrollers.  

As long as it fits your brand and resonates with your audience, your social media profile is boundless. Inject your personality into everything—doesn’t matter if you’re funny, serious, insightful, playful, antagonistic, or flamboyant. As long as it’s consistent, high-quality, and on-brand.  

Not sure where to start with content? Start by thinking about any questions your customers might want answers to—and turn the answers into content! Getting inspiration from your competition is also fair game, as well as deploying social listening: this is a relatively new technology that lets you “listen” to what people are saying about your brand, competitors, industry, or product type across social media and the internet in general. Use this data to inform content ideas. 

Start-Posting

#5 Use tools to automate  

The biggest hurdle to social media success is the sheer amount of time you can lose racing down rabbit holes, analyzing the competition, responding to comments & DMs, creating and scheduling content, and producing analytics. From day one (and long before you see any kind of payoff) there is a lot of work to do.  

Here are a few ways you can optimize your workflow without losing your personality or credibility:  

      • Schedulers—There will be a most active time window for your audience. Use post schedulers to prep content in advance and always release it at the optimal time.  
      • Sophisticated replies—As a rule, automating replies to your brand is an awful idea. It’s disingenuous and off-putting. But some tools allow you to save authentic, pre-written responses to common questions. When a question comes through, you can send the appropriate response with a single click, which can save time for some companies without any reputational damage.  
      • Customer support chatbots—On social media, it’s generally accepted that chatbots are a reasonable first line of defense. If you get a lot of simple queries, it might be worth having a bot direct them to other resources (like guides or FAQs) or whatever ticketing and support system you use for more complex queries.  

#6 Interact with and engage your followers 

Any time a person comments on a post or sends you a private message, you should always take the time to respond—without copy pasting or giving very short responses. Apart from an inundation of similar queries (like we talked about in the last section), it’s always worth the effort to give personal, personable replies. Everyone builds your brand, credibility, and relationship with followers. 

Research shows that 29% of consumers expect this response within an hour; the vast majority expect to hear back within a day. For successful eCommerce businesses, social media is becoming a valuable extension of traditional customer support. Not only that, but when queries are handled well and customers are delighted, social media can become a lucrative source of customer reviews.  

Interact-with-and-engage-your-followers

Tips for building an organic following

You’ve already done the required legwork: you know who you’re targeting, you know their interests, and you’re actively building out content they’ll value. The first step to building an organic following is to keep up this effort with total consistency: keep creating, keep publishing, and don’t give up when nothing changes overnight.  

Ideally, you’ll use your analytics to learn to publish the right content at the right time for your audience. Maybe you get huge engagement with your hilarious snackable content on weekday mornings, or your spike in blog traffic is always 24 hours after posting. You never know what you’ll find, but hitting your audience with well-crafted and well-timed content makes for a powerful one-two punch.  

At the start, simply promoting your social media profiles is key. Promote them everywhere. After building your strategy, you need to let people know you exist! Leverage your employees’ accounts, ask industry friends and colleagues, and add it to your signature or business cards—anywhere you can get your name out.  

Another tactic to consider is identifying, following, and connecting with influencers in your industry. We’ve done a full exploration of using influencers to boost eCommerce sales, but essentially these collaborations can help bring qualified, interested followers to your channel or profile. Successful collaborations can drip-feed new followers for months!  

It should go without saying that you should interact with everyone who comments on or shares your content. Being proactive (with your authentic tone of voice!) and „mingling” with followers is crucial. It’s key to showcasing your brand’s personality and building trust.  

Finally, we recommend getting a hold of your hashtags. Deploying relevant hashtags can significantly increase the discoverability of your brand. Many social media users follow specific hashtags related to their interests—it’s an easy way to see industry news and what thought leaders have been up to without following tonnes of accounts.  

Make sure to search hashtags yourself before using them (some hashtags are used for nefarious purposes!) and where possible, create unique hashtags for your brand. On popular content, you can simply tell users, to follow this hashtag for all posts related to [subject] rather than leaving them to figure it out themselves!  

Tips-for-building-an-organic-following

Tips for executing paid social

 There are two challenges with organic social media as a strategy: success is not guaranteed, and it’s slow. Despite being immensely powerful once you get going, most companies will put in months or years of effort before their organic social account is thriving.  

eCommerce ad campaigns are much more direct: you pay to get your content in front of highly specific audiences instantly. When the content, audience and offer align well, you can get tremendous results. Such campaigns attempt to:  

      • Spread awareness about new products or causes 
      • Increase post engagement and/or your follower count 
      • Increase overall traffic to your online store  
      • Promote a specific product, catalog, or event (like a sale) 
      • Bring potential customers in-store 

Leverage audience segmentation, targeting, and personalization  

Knowing your audience is a useful yardstick for organic social media. For ads, you can target this specific audience and exclude everyone else! Big social networks like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest all allow you to segment audiences and create ultra-personalized campaigns.  

Say you run an online apparel store. If you understand the demographic that’s most likely to purchase a certain line of clothing, you can build that audience on Facebook and then target them with highly specific ads—but demographic is only one data point. You can also build audiences off:  

      • Specific brands that prospects follow 
      • Geographic location 
      • Job title or income level 
      • Hobbies and interests 
      • Behaviors, partner connections, and more. 

With a bit of practice (or by hiring an expert to help), this personalization creates superpowered ads.  

Leverage-audience-segmentation-targeting-and-personalization

Understand Ad Types 

If you’re new to paid ads, you might be surprised by how many different options there are. To avoid overwhelming you here’s a quick intro to some of the most popular ad types:  

      • Image ads—These are the staple of social media advertising. An engaging, text-light image that catches the user’s attention. Most of the ads on Instagram and Facebook are image ads, with some descriptive text underneath or to one side.   
      • Carousel ads—Carousels are used when a single image isn’t enough. They allow users to swipe through various images or videos, typically for things like full product lines, seeing multi-step processes, or companies offering an array of solutions.  
      • Product ads—These let customers see the prices for every item in the ad. As Social Commerce takes off, we’ll be seeing more and more of these ads across social media.  
      • Stories ads—Brands can insert ads between users’ stories on Snapchat, Facebook, and Instagram. These are becoming increasingly interactive, allowing users to click and navigate ads in a more immersive experience. You’ll need a good design team on-hand for these!  
      • Text ads—Your classic text-based ad still has a role for many companies, though image-driven posts have become the significant majority.  

 Design ads with a mobile-first focus 

79% of users exclusively access social networks on their smartphones—if your ads are still set up for desktop, they’re set up to fail. The easiest areas to focus on are:  

      • Simplicity. Keep all artwork, text, and designs simple and easy to understand.  
      • Concision. Convey your message impactfully, but with as few words as possible.  
      • Display. Build all aspects of your design around smartphone use, then scale up for desktop users. It’s all about tapping, scrolling, and swiping.  
      • CTAs. Make all buttons and CTAs as obvious and prominent and easy to find as possible.  

One interesting idea is the B2Bob framework. Instead of „business to business”, we should rethink the acronym as Brand, 2 seconds, Benefit. Or in other words, you should aim to showcase your Brand within 2 seconds by highlighting your Benefit, while speaking to a human-like Bob. Read more about the B2Bob framework.  

Design-ads-with-a-mobile-first-focus

Test, Measure, and Optimize 

Testing lets you discover which of your ads works best. You iterate on the successes to create increasingly effective ads for lower costs. Once you have a successful ad, make small and iterative adjustments—if you just change everything, how will you know what was working?  

Facebook in particular makes assessing and improving your ads straightforward. They provide heaps of data (including which audiences are most receptive to your ads) to help you improve. This is because they provide an out-of-the-box A/B testing tool that allows you to change the various variables in your ad campaign (such as audience, placement, or ad creative). 

The difference between eCommerce social media and “social commerce” 

The main ideas of eCommerce social media are building brand awareness, engaging with prospects and clients, building trust, and ultimately contributing to the final conversion. More recently another powerful function has emerged: selling products directly within your social account, and this process is referred to as social commerce.  

Most of the major social media platforms now offer native shopping solutions:  

      • Instagram—Shoppable Posts 
      • Facebook—Facebook Shops 
      • Pinterest—Shoppable Product Pins and ‘Shop the Look’ ads 

Snapchat and TikTok are dipping their toes into social commerce but haven’t committed yet. Once smaller social platforms have a cost-effective way to join the party, social commerce will become ubiquitous. After all, jumping from one app to another is an extra hoop for customers and will cause some churn.  

And of course, social media companies want your social commerce to succeed so that users stay on their apps for longer in general, since this all helps them increase revenue. It’s a natural partnership and the impact of social media on eCommerce is only rising—keep your eyes peeled.   

Start your social media journey

If your eCommerce is considering a move into the world of social media, there’s no better time to start than right now. Across this post and our other content, you’ve got all the information and guidance you need to make a considered and impactful beginning. Power up your social media from the start with this list of 14 great social media tools to help you create images, schedule content, access analytics, and much more!  

Source: 2checkout.com ~ By: Stefania Oprea ~ Image: 2checkout.com

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5 Practical Social Media Marketing Strategies That All eCommerce Sellers Must Know

ecommerce marketing strategy

With more customers shopping online than ever before, and ever-increasing competition for attention, online businesses will only be able to maximize their success if they learn how to build on organic engagement in social media.

Don’t get me wrong, gaining organic traffic through search, and even conversions from paid ads, are still great ways to build a business. However, leveraging a community to build sales from organic engagement costs nothing more than your time. And besides that, there are plenty of tools available to help you along the way.

Here are five practical strategies you can implement straight away which will help boost traffic and sales through your social channels.

1. Create, Curate, and Share Awesome Content

If all you do through your social channels is promote your products, your audience is going to burn out on your pages and posts pretty fast. The more the engagement drops on your posts, the less often your new posts will be seen by your followers – after all, channels like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest want to display only the most interesting content to keep users engaged (and there are a lot of brands competing for the limited space in a user’s social feed).

Ramp up engagement by finding awesome repurposed content. I’m not just talking about reposting old articles or sharing cool stuff you found on other websites. Instead, take the Skyscraper approach or create something similar to Buzzfeed’s listicles.

Find an interesting topic and mold it into something much better than the original. That’s what the guys at Shopify did when they were tasked with launching a profitable business in just three days.

5 Practical Social Media Marketing Strategies That All Ecommerce Sellers Must Know | Social Media Today

Using BuzzSumo, they searched for pieces of highly-shared content that was relevant to their audience. Using the original video created by someone else, they took the tips and created a targeted list post, then shared that to a relevant community online.

5 Practical Social Media Marketing Strategies That All Ecommerce Sellers Must Know | Social Media Today

It didn’t take long for the new content to start driving traffic to the online store where the article was hosted.

While this surge of new traffic usually won’t result in immediate sales, well-optimized content like this will continuously send traffic and generate sales over the long run.

2. Embrace Micro-Content

One of the problems faced by many marketers today – not just those in eCommerce – is that the web is in a constant state of information overload. Audiences are bombarded with updates from their favorite brands, publishers, and media outlets, both directly and through the shares of people in their network.

With limited time and shrinking patience, consumers just aren’t willing to spend a lot of time digesting content anymore, you can’t expect them to be willing to watch a 10-minute video or read a 5,000-word article when they’re on the go.

This is why micro-content comes in handy. Short, 10-second Snapchats or brief videos posted to Instagram and Facebook – or even a video converted to GIF format for Twitter – can bump up your engagement.

With micro-content, you get the same benefits of video, and your audience is more likely to watch when they know it won’t cost them more than 10-20 seconds of their time.

Major brands have been leveraging this since Vine took off, including Lowe’s, Doritos, Taco Bell, and even NASCAR.

3. Blogs Are Social, Too

It’s not uncommon for marketers and online store owners to have tunnel vision and get stuck on the idea that social media is all about Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and Snapchat. But blogs are absolutely forms of social media – they’re platforms where content is posted, and that content sees shares and comments, just like the more popular social platforms.

When you’re marketing an eCommerce business, be sure to include regular blog outreach in your social media strategy. It can drive a LOT of traffic back to your store if you do it right.

That’s what Richard Lazazzera from A Better Lemonade Stand learned when he challenged himself to launch a t-shirt business in just 24 hours. After creating his store on Shopify and listing his products, he reached out to a local blogger to ask if he would be interested in covering the products since they related to an article the blogger had recently published.

5 Practical Social Media Marketing Strategies That All Ecommerce Sellers Must Know | Social Media Today

When Richard woke up the next morning, he found a stream of notifications from new customers that came from that blogger publishing a post about the shirts. That post not only led to sales but other people interested in collaborating with Richard.

5 Practical Social Media Marketing Strategies That All Ecommerce Sellers Must Know | Social Media Today

Don’t just create your content, reach out to influencers and bloggers who align with your audience and work with them to get your business or products featured on other sites and social channels.

4. Create More Engaging Content

Whenever you post content on your social channels, it should have a purpose, whether that’s to generate comments, and shares, drive traffic to your store, etc. The best way to do that is to always create content with a focus on maximizing engagement.

Some of the best ways to do this include: asking questions, crafting strong call-to-action specific to engagement, and targeting your audience’s emotions with a little controversy from time to time.

This is particularly effective if you center your content around a product or your brand like Ahole Gear has done.

5 Practical Social Media Marketing Strategies That All Ecommerce Sellers Must Know | Social Media Today

Doritos recently combined another one of the above approaches by creating a short video clip that leverages its product and adds a touch of political controversy to get people talking.

5 Practical Social Media Marketing Strategies That All Ecommerce Sellers Must Know | Social Media Today

The more engaging your content is, the farther it will reach beyond your immediate followers as they comment, like, and share the content. This will lead to repeat customers as well as the acquisition of new customers who weren’t previously aware of your brand.

5. Use Social Reviews

Customer product reviews are great ways to build social proof on your product pages and let new customers know what they can expect when purchasing from you. A lot of eCommerce platforms use apps like Yotpo to develop more engaging reviews in their online stores, but you can also leverage reviews from your social media.

Not only does Yotpo enable you to connect your social accounts to post user-generated content on your pages, but Facebook also has its own native reviews that you should activate. This way, when prospective customers discover you in social media they can see right from the channel, without ever going to your site, that people are raving about your products and service.

For example, Coval Vapes is a brick-and-mortar store that also sells its products worldwide on its online store, and it has amassed a nice run of highly-rated reviews on its Facebook page.

5 Practical Social Media Marketing Strategies That All Ecommerce Sellers Must Know | Social Media Today

Be sure to consistently encourage your fans to leave reviews. Rather than ask for reviews through your social channels, send follow-up emails after purchases and include a highly visible call-to-action note. Ask them to please come back and review their purchase on your social channels, or within your store, so you can later benefit from greater social proof generated by satisfied customers.

Source: socialmediatoday.com ~ By:   ~ Image: Canva Pro

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