Three essential components of a good social commerce strategy
As social media platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, and Pinterest add new commerce features such as shoppable Reels and product tagging in live-streams, brands are investing and consumers are buying in. As a result, by 2025, social commerce is expected to be worth $1.2 trillion to $1.4 trillion.
So, how can business owners develop a successful social commerce strategy? Where should they begin, and how can they achieve success in an increasingly competitive market?
The cycle of community involvement
Positive reinforcing loops, or 'cycles,' are one way that ecommerce brands can achieve essential objectives. Begin by providing an excellent customer experience, which in turn helps increase traffic, which attracts additional brands and sellers to the platform. This eventually allows a company to lower pricing and improve other aspects of the consumer experience, and the cycle continues.
Another approach to think about cycles is in terms of community. This relates to the potential of a group of consumers - who are part of an actively engaged community on social media - to drive revenue and further business success. For example, the greater the number of users who engage and interact with content (related to a shared interest or category), the greater the visibility and engagement from others in that community, as well as the ability to recruit new members, and so on. This activity can also directly convert into purchases, especially if the content includes good product reviews.
TikTok's head of vertical, ecommerce, Simon Hofmeister, explained how the platform drives this type of community-driven shopping, describing the platform as having "lots of niche places for people to find other people who like what they like, and who are talking about what they like in short form, snackable, entertaining, video format." Whether it's books, fitness, or food, there's almost certainly a community that generates and promotes related material. The first step for businesses is to learn about this group.
Nike is an excellent example of a business that has taken a community-driven approach, tailoring its content to target particular communities - such as members of its Nike Run Club - and increase general brand engagement. Nike Run Club videos have had over 9.4 million views on TikTok, with a big portion of that coming from organic user generated material that feeds into the community, involving tips, guidance, and information for fellow runners.
Choosing the most appropriate channel and content format
For a variety of reasons, selecting the proper social commerce channel is crucial. To begin, marketers should consider the demographic they want to reach and how various platforms might fit into that. TikTok, for example, caters to a younger demographic, with users aged 18 to 24 accounting for 42% of TikTok's global audience as of April 2022.
The audience comes first, followed by the variety of content forms available on each platform. Some, like Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube, rely on brief video, whilst others, like Instagram and Pinterest, rely on pictures. Furthermore, content formats should be analyzed in relation to user behavior or the manner in which the content is consumed. TikTok users are targeted based on the types of videos in which they naturally engage and interact, whereas Pinterest users exhibit search behavior in order to purposefully seek out a certain area of interest. Business owners should consider how their content fits into this - for example, whether it is centered on entertainment, education, or advocacy - and how social media users may find and connect with it.
Business owners must also consider what their company's goals are and what platform would be best for achieving those goals. As long as the economy remains unpredictable, business owners will almost surely rethink their social advertising budgets in 2023. Because of this, as well as the deletion of third-party cookies, brands are increasingly looking for new ways to target customers on social media, with contextual targeting taking center stage.
TikTok's new contextual advertising capacity may persuade brands to invest their money there this year. This type of contextual advertising offering can allow brands to reach the right audiences without infringing on privacy, and with TikTok agreeing to split half of the revenue with the creator whose video appeared before the ad, it's clear that its investment in greater ad tools won't come at the expense of what it does best- facilitating creators.
The ultimate goal of social media content does not always have to be to increase sales.' It is vital to test many platforms, formats, and hosts when it comes to live streaming. You must figure out what works best for you & your business model.
Creating an effective measuring framework
Finally, creating a framework for measurement is crucial to the success of social commerce. Business owners should align three different types of measurements: platform metrics, business metrics, and third-party measurement analytics. When it comes to business measurements, for example, This requires thinking beyond last-click revenue targets and asking,Is this solution growing brand recognition or product consideration? and What impact does corporate social commerce have on other channels?
This is also where marketing mix modeling comes in, a method that allows marketers to assess how variable components affect sales and ROI. Meta has collaborated with Deloitte on 'Measurement 360,' a new measurement framework that, according to Meta, enables advertisers to use numerous best-in-class measurement systems in tandem to track all components of a marketing plan.
While this is not a novel method, one major component of Meta's approach (in combating so-called "signal loss" in direct response advertising) is its emphasis on first-party data, which it claims marketers must now leverage in order to future-proof strategy. To connect data collection to measurement and campaign activation, firms will need to break down barriers, such as tighter integration between IT and Marketing.
Integrating social media into CRM systems can also help to break down these silos, allowing teams from different firms to gain useful insights from social media interactions. In turn, social CRM data can assist firms in creating more targeted and effective sponsored social advertising.
