For most e-commerce brands social media is a critical piece of a marketing strategy. You know that it can help to build brand awareness, nurture existing customers and drive sales. It is pretty essential that your social media is eye-catching, engaging and always on brand to stand out in all the noise of the online world.
Beautifully branded social media
A struggle for many small businesses is consistently creating great social media content. It can be time consuming and if you don’t (yet) have a designer on your team then a lot of the content creation is likely to be in-house or maybe just done by you entirely! And with all the other tasks of running a business that can be a lot!
This is where strategically creating a number of beautifully on brand templates can really speed up the process. You can mix and match elements to create fresh posts that retain the brand personality and identity each time. No rogue Canva templates that do not feel aligned!
How to keep your social media consistent:
- Use your brand fonts
- Keeping to your brand colour palette
- Photography style
- Keep the brands personality in mind
- Use templates
Using high quality product photography
Another must is having high-quality photos to use and this doesn’t have to mean you need to book regular photoshoots although if you can then amazing. My photography skills are average but with good natural lighting and a backdrop you most likely can create good enough photos with your phone nowadays especially for social media use. And with apps that help you edit and tools like Canva that offer image background removal there is so much you can do yourself without hiring a designer once you have the brand foundations and social templates in place – leave your budget for hiring a designer to do the big impact work like making sure your website is conversion ready.
What does your social media need to do?
It can be helpful to define content pillars for your brand and figure out what type of graphics or photos you need. Some ideas are:
- Cut out product photos
- Lifestyle photos
- Product details – think lipstick swipes, swash of cream, a close up of a detail etc
- Informative posts – could be infographics or short text based graphics
- Behind the scenes
- Team/founder posts
- Quotes and stats (relevant to brand)
- Reviews/testimonials
Leveraging user generated content (UGC)
Organic social media can be very effective on it’s own but it can also be a great strategy to encourage user generated content. Showing real users using your products feels authentic and can gain trust with potential customers, after all “your brand is what other people say about you when you’re not in the room” – Jeff Bezos.
This approach can be successfully adopted by businesses of all sizes, often people like to naturally share their purchases anyway especially if they will get reshared on your stories, but you can also just ask or incentivise. Now something worth considering is the better the customer experience the more likely they are to share – and it just makes good business sense. If you can throw in a small surprise with every order, this could even be a beautiful quote postcard, stickers or some sweets then even in my personal experience I feel more inclined to post about it!
Don’t forget to engage with your customers and other users
Unfortunately it’s not really enough to post and ghost (ask me how I know…!), you do need to have someone or yourself able to spend some time interacting on a platform like Instagram or Facebook. Without that I have anecdotally seen that an accounts posts just don’t gain as much reach compared to more active phases. Now this can be really tricky when you are a small business owner or team but it is definitely a consideration. As you grow you will be able to potentially outsource this aspect if you wanted to.
The benefit to being active especially as a founder is seeing feedback on your brand and others, which can help you innovate and keep on the pulse of what’s going on in your industry and others.
You can also utilise stories on Instagram and Facebook to share more behind the scenes content, ask questions or run polls to engage your audience.
Making it shoppable
With both Instagram and Facebook a huge feature for e-commerce business owners is the ability to tag products in your feed making it shoppable. This is an opportunity to strongly consider (although I would caution using it for every post) because if someone loves the product there is very little friction to them going ahead and purchasing right then in the moment. Depending on your e-commerce platform there will be different ways to set this up but it is completely possible with WooCommerce, Shopify and Squarespace to name a few. Find out more here.
‘130 million accounts tap on shopping posts to learn more about products every month’ – Instagram internal data, 2019
Benefitting from this free organic marketing approach
Engaging social media posts have huge potential for e-commerce business to reach their target customers, capture attention and lead to website traffic. By utilising well designed consistent graphics to inform and build brand awareness businesses can boost their social media impact and drive business growth exponentially. Especially in popular niches which includes apparel, accessories and jewellery and for younger generations.
The key is ensuring that your content is compelling.
