Marketing for stores through social media is something many businesses rely on when they want to promote their product more. When we open a store, whether or not we have a physical point of sale, we can choose to run different channels. Interacting with our customers is key, and here we’ll focus on a set of strategies that plenty of brands use today.
Win more customers through social media
1. Choose the platforms where you want to promote yourself
Through posts, real-time stories, videos… you generate daily content that makes interaction with consumers direct and easy. You can create posts that add value and even sell through it with Instagram Shopping.
Personally, I’d say this is a channel you should have if you’re just getting started with social media. Facebook gives us the Fan Page platform, where you can manage your business profile with a range of tools that let you interact with customers, measure and analyze audiences, and build a page where they can keep up with your product updates.
Twitter is a channel where interaction is immediate. It’s more informative and lets you connect with users quickly, retweeting and sharing up-to-date news that ties in with your brand’s philosophy.
2. Plan a strategy, don’t wing it
Marketing for stores is all about planning a strategy and doing your homework. Be clear about the brand values you want to convey and, knowing your customer, communicate with them. A good strategy can target both online and traditional channels, but it’s important to pick a few and keep a clear vision. Your business may have different audiences, and it’s important to know which channels they use so you can get your message across.
3. Interact constantly
Be active. It sounds easy, but bringing fresh content to your followers is crucial. Don’t limit yourself to talking about your business alone; you can explore topics they find interesting that relate to you. Tell a story, be creative.
For example, Blue Banana Brand is a start-up whose main channel for communicating with its followers and fans is Instagram. They’re very active on social media, running exclusive contests and giveaways around their products… They follow various strategies that have taken them to a potential year-end close of 8 million in revenue.
4. Connect with macro and micro influencers
For those who don’t know what influencers are, they’re people with a minimum number of followers who influence the lives of their audience.
- Macro-influencers: more than 100,000 followers
- Micro-influencers: between 1,000 and 100,000 followers
It’s very common for brands to run collaborations with them, where they promote your product in their posts and, in return, you offer a percentage of the sales or a clothing pack, depending on the person’s terms and your company’s. The more followers the influencer has, the more the budget varies, and it will ultimately depend on your goals and your brand.
It’s a widely used strategy, but it works. If you manage to reach out to influencers who connect with an audience you can’t reach on your own, that’s a huge gateway to potential customers.
5. Make use of contests and giveaways
Running contests and giveaways is a quick and easy way to gain “Likes” and new followers. You have to choose the rules of the contest. Many brands opt for:
- Liking the post.
- Tagging friends in the comments to earn more chances of winning points in the giveaway.
- Sharing your contest post on their Instagram, giving your brand more visibility.
6. Use hashtags on any of the platforms
On Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, hashtags are a big part of every post. Hashtags are words that tag and define your content. Across the different platforms, they help you rank within them. For example, on Instagram, having more than 6 hashtags per post helps improve the post’s visibility. On Twitter, meanwhile, it’s common to use 2 to 3 hashtags per tweet.
One of the tools for seeing the reach of hashtags is ritetag.
