As social media and social commerce play increasingly significant ecommerce roles beyond millennial audiences, multi-channel marketers must embrace these platforms and marketplaces to connect with their audiences where they spend their time.
Four key considerations when developing your paid social strategy are:
The integrity of your data feed is a competitive advantage
As every company uses the same advertising platforms to drive their targeting, there’s no distinct advantage. But every business’s data is unique. This makes it vital to ensure your data is accurate and consistent and to train your algorithms so marketplaces, shopping engines, and social commerce channels display your product listings correctly to reflect your target audiences. And ensure your data feed system reflects stock and size availability. This avoids buyers discovering only at the end that what they want to buy is unavailable, resulting in disappointed and annoyed customers and potentially lost future revenues.
Think like a consumer
Don’t underestimate the importance of linguistics in helping you to be found – and therefore considered – when people search for items they want. Use descriptions and words that consumers search on, rather than those that sound distinctive, exotic, or interesting. So instead of ‘sunflower’, use ‘yellow’ or ‘blue’ rather than ‘midnight’. And if your product data isn’t optimised for search, you can miss out on sales when exposing this data to third-party shopping platforms and marketplaces.
TikTok’s different
On TikTok, low average order value products work well. And if you’re considering if it’s suitable for your target audience, you must treat it as a different content platform to other social media to make it work. So forget high production, quality videos. This will make you appear as just a salesy, commercial entity and negatively impact your brand. Instead, your look, feel and approach must be home-made, short, and informative. And there’s also the content challenge – you need to be constantly serving fresh content to make an impact. While it’s good for expanding reach and audience, TikTok’s a slow burn, so don’t expect immediate results. Success may require you to have a dedicated team focused purely on this platform.
It’s not just about performance
The challenge of attributing upper-funnel brand marketing activity to results means lower funnel channels often get more attention and investment. But branding is becoming ever more important. Today’s customers are changing and don’t want to be fed a continuous stream of products and short-term sales messages. They want to understand and engage with brands to seek out and buy from those that reflect their aspirations and values. Take time to communicate your brand story to your audience and help them buy into your ethos.
If you’re looking to evolve your channel strategy, get in touch with us at hello@the tapestryagency.com, and we’ll be happy to chat with you.
