Using Social Media & Blog for eCommerce: A Definitive Guide

Content is the king of marketing; it is the most efficient and reliable way in which you can promote and market your products and services. When accumulated with social media and blogging platforms, it creates potential to penetrate the core of a browsing platform, generating more leads and increasing traffic to your site.

Buying behaviour in recent years has changed due to the heavy influence of social media. Your daily influencer has more impact on a buyer’s mind if compared to a normal regular advertisement. To have a strong eCommerce strategy plays a highly significant role in the success of any online business. It acts as a catalyst for the business in increasing traffic and sales.

Social media acts as both a provider and an advisor for various demographics as it provides information about new products and advises unfamiliar people about the potential of the products available on various platforms. Blogging creates an elaborate and more detailed description or information for your commodities. Blogging, if consistently done, can increase the traffic on your eCommerce site and helps you generate more leads and hence, increase profits.

The pandemic has also created a huge impact on the buying behavior as window shopping has become ancient history and eCommerce businesses have experienced a boom which was unprecedented by many experts. As there are hundreds of thousands of pages and platforms that are available to promote and market any product, repetition of the approach and crossing of similar strategies has become a common embargo.

In this era, there are billions of search results and around millions of sites that provide them. Expecting to get on top just uploading a single blog post or a social media advertisement is just the biggest blunder you can make while starting a business. It is fairly difficult to stand out in this deep web of social media and blogging fiasco. It is significantly important to understand how to use social media and how to use a blogging platform.

Here we will understand and acknowledge in depth about the use of blog and social media for coerce content marketing. Let’s get started!

Table of content

• Using social media for ecommerce content marketing
  • Influencers generate sales
  • Promote, rather than selling
  • Communication is the key
  • New platforms, new leads.
  • Data is a catalyst
• Using blogging for ecommerce content marketing
  • Maintain quality
  • Set a permanent domain name
  • Large information at one place
  • Study the trends
  • Maintain balance
• Wrapping up

Using social media for eCommerce content marketing

Influencers generate sales

When you link with any influencer, who has a strong and loyal following on any social media platform and make him/her promote your product will help you to expand your market by just paying a decent amount of money.

It is like a door-to-door promotion done by sitting in one place. Evidently, tying up with a female influencer is more effective as the followers or users of the platform are able to trust them more if compared to male influencers.

The important thing to note here is that not only their followers are targeted but, the usage of proper hashtags helps in increasing the range of leads making your market bigger and wider.

Promote, rather than selling

Selling is the part to be done when a buyer reaches your online website. These social media platforms are used only and only for promotional purposes. Trying to sell it here creates a negative impact and forces the buyer to think of your product as a counterfeit or a replica of the original product.

Promoting your products on social media also opens an interactive window between you and your leads. This can be done through comments, direct messages or hosting a live chat session (possibly with the influencer) to create a colossal impact on the psychology of the buyer.

Try to keep the relationship with your customer “voluntary” rather than keeping it “monetary” to create a positive and affirmative image of your brand in their mind.

Communication is the key

Social media can be used with many various approaches for promoting any product. Infographics, aesthetic visuals, enticing photographs and many other elements are combined to create a strong promotional strategy.

What you upload is what is perceived by the viewer, not the product but the quality and effectiveness of the post. Your content makes or breaks the impression you want to make. Therefore, it should be of good quality and easy to understand by the majority of the target market.

Build trust

Trust is the foundation of any monetary transaction. If the buyer trusts you and your product, he/she won’t second guess it and won’t think before buying it. To do the same, you have to do some aggressive investing.

Provide free samples to the influencers for them to make a video while testing your product, showcasing how good and well-built it is. What influencers use becomes a trend for their followers, which in turn increases your sales.

With the help of certified experts, you can go live and make your leads understand the quality of the product as those experts can explain it to them which will lead to a trustworthy brand name.

New platforms, new leads.

If you are aware about the new up and coming social media platforms then it will help you to grow significantly. With every new platform, many new social media influencers are made. For example, with the introduction of the application named Vine, it generated hundreds of new social media tycoons like Logan Paul, Amanda Ferny, David Doris and many more.

The point of this agenda is, if you find those influencers on the verge of their fame and build a long-lasting relationship with them, they will simultaneously make your brand as famous as themselves. And as discussed in the first point, ‘INFLUENCERS GENERATE SALES’

Moreover, promoting your brand on the new platforms is cheaper if compared to more famous ones as they don’t have as high leverage as the pre-existing ones. However, this might backfire too as you are investing a lot of time, money and effort to execute this task but unfortunately the platform which according to you was supposed to go viral, flopped and failed to get a hold of the market.

Everything you planned will become a waste of time and money, demoralizing you to make any future efforts in your business. Therefore, a strategic approach with good quality content holds a great influence on the success of your business.

Data is a catalyst

When you use the data information properly, you will understand how the buyers’ behaviour works towards every single product, the average searches made for any specific product, the average seconds and buyer watches a promotional advertisement, polls made for any product, direct or indirect promotional strategies used are all available on the analytical sites of any main social media platform.

You can use YouTube Analytics, Facebook Insights on Instagram Analytics to gauge the and track the buying behaviour of the customers at large. Data plays a vital role in your decision-making; it will always have a positive impact on the strategies you come up with.

As data provides information from the first click of the customer till their last, what they think and want, the trend that is circling in the market, future predictions and many other elements are analysed and used for a better promotional strategy and more importantly what kind of content is required by you to promote your product.

Your content can become more relevant and insightful if you have a thorough knowledge of the market behaviour.

Using blogging for ecommerce content marketing

A blog is an online journal that keeps a record of all the information that you write for the public to read at large. It can be of any genre, niche and calibre. So, let’s see how blogging can help you in ecommerce content marketing.

Maintain quality

To reach out to the target audience and persuade them to read your blog from the first sentence till the last, it is extremely significant to maintain the quality of the vlog. It is a difficult art to cope with the quality of the vlog which is required to convert your leads.

It requires a lot of practice and professionalism to become a successful blogger. If you want to learn how to become a professional blogger and earn money on a regular basis, you must seek knowledge about how to create a blog and make money with it.

Blogging has a lot of potential if consistency is maintained. You can create a blog and plug your brands and services there, and it has a snowball effect on the popularity and recognition of your brand. Other brands might also reach out to you to promote their products if you maintain the quality of the blog on a consistent basis.

Set a permanent domain name

Your web domain name is the foundation on which your future blogs are based upon. You will have to pay for it because an unpaid domain name might change and lose consistency.

A permanent domain name helps you to stay organized as every work you do will be registered under a single domain. And buying one will help you customize the name according to the name of your brand or with the next best proxy with similar context that will direct the audience towards your blog.

Large information at one place

Blog is a piece of data with a huge amount of information present in it. It comprises links, images and social media posts that eases the buyer’s journey of buying a product. Blogs also consist of detailed information about the product respective to the context of the blog you are writing.

When a buyer reads a blog that has good recognition and is appreciated by the customers, then the information you put in their gains more credentials and builds trust amongst the target leads.

This helps you to understand the potential of a well written blog. If your blog is lagging the required information and the context is underwhelming, then the traffic you expect on the site won’t match your predictions.

Study the trends

With good writing skills you can convert any trend into a gimmick of an anecdote in your blog and can relate to your brand in the most organic and effortless way possible.

The best example is the advertisement team of the brand called ‘AML’. They take the latest trends and make the best version out of it to promote their own brand.

What you can take away from this is, when the trends are followed by the customers they tend to click on links related to the same, as long as the intentions, needs and wants match with the context.

Maintain balance

A blog that generates sales is the most balanced blog in the sense of promotional pushing and providing information. If there is rigorous pushing and forcible tone for converting sales then the blog becomes overwhelming and has a negative impact on the reader and if there is only information and no persuasive element then the blog becomes boring and unreadable.

As mentioned before a customer should read from the first till the last sentence of the blog, to make that happen you need an understanding of how to maintain balance and how to write to achieve the best possible reaction from the audience.

Content knowledge is the biggest element which needs to be mastered by the blogger to reach his goals and have high traffic on his website.

To get an essence of how these tips are applied in real life by real entities, let’s look at a real-life case of Buffer, who grew traffic to 1.5 million monthly viewers.

Buffer that we see today has been moulded with many days and nights of sheer will, dedication and determination and a whole lot of trial-and-error methods to climb the ladder of success. Their writer Alfred Lua once said “Our audience enjoy the long-form, educational blog posts” and once they discovered that blueprint of success Buffer tried to replicate it organically to increase the traffic as-well-as profits.

They used:

• keyword searching,
• content auditing,
• headline testing
• capitalized on trending topics.

These approaches led them to increase their monthly blog viewers from zero to a whopping 1.5 million.

Initially they used and tried more than 20 blogs per post and made a detailed analysis on which title will get the most clicks. The trial and error went on and on till they started to experience a little growth in their website.

They write about everything and anything related to their market, it can be a minor mishap in the market or a major law passed by the government, Buffer always has a detailed article about these sensitive agendas.

Overall, Buffer is a great example on how to grow and maintain a steady, stable and increasing stream of traffic on your website through blogging.

Wrapping up

In the above article, we got a brief idea about how to write and use blogs and other social media platforms for content marketing. Your content is the key element when it comes to marketing your products and services.

Social media provides you a platform with potential to promote and market your products with photos, videos and infographics which makes it pleasing for the viewers eyes and creates a deep impact in their decision-making while buying any product or service.

Blogs provide a platform which will store the information in a large quantity and is a detail oriented way to market your content. When used properly, it has a large potential to generate money and traffic to your website.

To put the final nail, these tips will surely help you to expand your business and increase profits and understand the market behavior in a thorough and detailed manner because, the post-pandemic period is going to be more eCommerce savvy if compared to the pre-pandemic market.

Author Bio: Soumya Pathak is passionate about blogging and writing. She fondly calls it “the art of words”. She is unique and so is her content. Blogging about education and ideas to grow is something that she loves doing. Learn more about how Soumya’s Education and online money making articles could grow your business by visiting her blog at https://surejob.in.