Social media offers retail brands the opportunity to reach new audiences, increase brand awareness, and boost product sales in a huge way. If you’re a retail business and you’re not taking advantage of the online audience that social media offers, you’re really missing out.
First of all, “going digital” doesn’t have to be a scary process. In fact, it can be one of the best things you can do for your business. If you know where your customers are, you can meet and market to them there.
Your customers are online. Here are the global stats to prove it:
- 3.4 billion people worldwide use the Internet
- 2.3 billion are active on social media
- 2 billion actively use social media on mobile
Now you have to reach these people. But how?
Social platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest continue to turn their platforms into ultimate online one-stop-shops that you can use with ease. Here’s a breakdown of a couple of these networks and the best ways to harness their power for your brand’s benefit.
This content sharing platform is a place for members to “pin” images and videos that interest them to their “boards,” follow boards and users that post content they enjoy. It’s the ideal place for brands to reach a mostly female millennial audience.
Why should you join?
According to a recently released study by Pinterest and Oracle Data Cloud, 70% of sales driven by Promoted Pins campaigns came from new customers and sales from existing customers increased by four times.
Oracle’s senior vice president Eric Roza said, “Oracle’s findings show that Pinterest plays an important role in a retail consumer’s path to purchase, particularly in helping retailers reach new customers and drive incremental sales.”
What tools does Pinterest offer?
Pinterest has made many changes recently to make it easier for brands to advertise on their platform. In the past year, they have improved and introduced a variety of business-focused tools aimed at helping boost the advertising potential on their site.
Most recently, they announced new retargeting options for advertisers. These new features allow businesses to:
- Target people who have interacted with their Pins and are most likely to buy that product
- Track more actions (like page visits, search, add to cart, signup, etc.) made by their website visitors in order to target them on Pinterest
- Create “actalike” audiences to target purchase behaviors among similar users
Another recent and exciting tool Pinterest has recently implemented is Buyable Pins. Buyable pins let users purchase products without ever leaving Pinterest. Now, when Pinterest users have the urge to buy when they see the product in their feed, they can do so without leaving the app.
This photo and video sharing platform is used by individuals, celebrities and personalities, brands, and pretty much everyone these days. Photos are edited through filters and posted with a unique caption, along with any added hashtags, geotags, or tags of other users. Users follow other accounts, and all photos are collected in a feed, similar to Twitter or Facebook, where they can “like” and comment on the photos.
Following Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram a few years ago, the platform has undergone many changes. In April of this year, they switched from a chronological feed to an algorithm similar to Facebook’s.
Why should you join?
Instagram now boasts more than 400 million active users, and 60% of them use the app daily. 30% of all Internet users are on Instagram, while 90% of Instagram users are younger than 35. They have shared over 40 billion photos since the app first launched; on average, 80 million photos are shared every day.
What tools does Instagram offer?
Businesses who want to advertise on Instagram now must go through Facebook’s ad platform, Power Editor. This offers all of the extensive targeting options that Facebook has, including look-alike audiences, extended location targeted, and all of the behavioral and demographic options they have offered in the past.
Beyond paid reach, there are a few things retail brands can do to entice people to follow, and eventually buy from, them.
Unlock social media’s full potential
There is a lot of power in using social media to advertise your retail business. Smart targeting and messaging is the key to running successful ads. Many retail business owners find themselves short on time, and social media may fall low on the priorities list. But that’s what the Posse is here for! Contact us today if you’re interested in learning more about our social media marketing services.