Social Media - Digital Marketing Foundations

The Number One Risk for E-Commerce Business

You may find yourself in a situation where you are not generating the leads necessary to meet your benchmark while your budget is already spent for that month. This sort of situation is astonishingly common for early start ups in ecommerce, but how do we remedy such a dilemma?

Having a diversified marketing strategy is a highly recommended approach that employs a variety of organic and paid methods to develop your brand and drive interactions. Each medium used to communicate to your prospective customer has its own unique properties and also strengths.

This article focuses on the fundamentals of digital marketing through the scope of a manager who is actively working around budgetary restrictions. Cost management is the number one risk that e-commerce businesses encounter categorized by over spending on marketing with insufficient sales conversions. This is based upon the ratio between investment capital and the rate of return from lead generating marketing efforts. This article suggests that web traffic is an absolute must and that there are always ways to maintain sustainable levels of traffic.

Organic sources of traffic are all about diversifying your outreach by establishing multiple high engagement platforms to drive brand awareness. We are approaching this junction where customers expect social media as part of a company's brand identity. It is simply a matter of fact that a customer is most trusting of channels that they are familiar with. Instagram is an example of a channel that is well known and is actively being used by both sides of the coin, consumers and businesses, which makes the conversation almost normal or casual. This is the nature of people, who are more comfortable with websites that they are familiar with or have committed to memory.

Why Social Media is the Foundation to Digital Marketing

Social Media is inexpensive to operate, enhances your other marketing efforts, generates stable flow of organic traffic and is reliable under pressure economic or otherwise. It is very important to understand that whether you are using a low cost strategy or have available funds to market your business freely, social marketing still serves a purpose. For these reasons social media is an important inclusion for any marketing strategy. If you include schedule Instagram posts in your strategy, it will definitely gonna help you with lot more things. For the same reason how blogging helps improve your organic traffic, social media platforms are known for having high ranking potential for SERP’s and their ability to activate a brand strategy. Since many businesses struggle to rank high enough to be featured on the front page of SERP’s, social media platforms have enough prominence to remain relevant across different industry segments and business sizes.

It’s worth mentioning how when a customer interacts with a Social Media profile their interactions are classed as being high intent. The fact that the customer is interacting with your brand is a sign that they are both familiar and also endorse your product. This confirms that your brand is effectively communicating the product's qualities and your brand's trust factor is either improving or is already secure. Information is important for guiding the decision making process, when dealing with social media the feedback given by customer interactions can produce actionable data which could produce major changes in your products development. Social Media can be a source of valuable information for product managers.

Especially during periods of economic uncertainty, keeping costs as low as possible is more than a wise choice, sometimes an imperative. This is why we are seeing many businesses change their company structure and over marketing strategy towards a more reserved one in the past few months. The best alternative to traditional paid channels like Facebook or Google is social media. Social Media of course is highly competitive as well, with top brands and personalities dominating the industry with millions of followers. Their drawing power is something to be envied and a single promotion on their channels is enough to rocket your brand exposure. It is highly recommended that you check-out the competition in your niche to get a getter idea of how to approach the market. There is substantial potential in Social Media even as a primary marketing channel.

We have seen companies both large and small use social media as a main lead source due to its overall cost efficiency. During economic unrest or just plain cashflow problems, we have seen companies pause their paid channels and focus on creating content in combination with social media. Especially if you have a specialist on payroll, content can be a great way to create genuine high quality pages that have long term benefit for the customer and help to build your brand, while also cultivating followers and interactions. This has the benefit of making your business more discoverable and also more reliable due to the high level of activity throughout channels.

• Content Creation (Articles, Videos, Live Streams)
• Social Media (Omni-Channel, High Frequency)
• Email and SMS (CRM, Loyalty Programs)

Scenario One

You are trying to keep a low budget or you have some sort of limiting factor like inventory turnover or cash flow that keeps you limited. In this scenario, you are generally trying to find a way to improve your inventory turnover with as little investment as possible. When you do decide to invest into some sort of paid channel, you can only afford to do it in bursts which is mainly used for testing.

Scenario Two

You rely on paid traffic to generate millions of impressions. The bulk of your budget is centered around paid ads and you are looking to make the most of your adverts. Paid ads are always subject to ROI evaluation, we know this much to be true. How do we increase the efficiency of our paid channels and capture these leads for re-engagement? Social Media and other lead capturing software tools like CRM’s and Loyalty Programs are ideal for the job. They can take the large waves of in-organic traffic that is being driven to your business through paid channels and secure their contact details for later re-engagement with email and sms notifications. This will improve the efficiency of your marketing efforts while also helping your social media grow more competitive.

Scenario Three

You keep very active on social media and actively work to improve your social media presence. You see social media as a competitive advantage, and want to make your social media more interactive than the rest of the market. You believe that having high activity and a developed social media platform is a great way of differentiating yourself from the rest of the market. You use social media as a foundation to your multiple marketing channels, and rely on social media as a main source of leads when markets are bearish. Your mixed strategy relies on social media as a permanent fixture because it is free to use and also as a lead capture tool for when you are trying to generate maximum exposure through alternative channels.

Conclusion

Based on these three scenarios we can see that there is real application for social media as a brand strengthening and lead generating marketing channel. It is a perfect place to describe your company, use your creativity to brand your business and a way of providing assurance to your prospective customers. Social Media is perfect for creating loyalty and answering questions or concerns of the customer. Social Media has grown in prominence over the past year as companies have transitioned into tighter operations amidst poor market performance. The thing that makes social media so valuable is reliability. In any situation social media, because of its free price tag, has applications as a marketing channel. This makes it an excellent addition to any comprehensive marketing strategy.

‍