How to Drive Traffic to Your eCommerce Store with Social Media

Drive Traffic

Last updated - July 8, 2021

Social media is a powerful, cost-effective tool for driving traffic to your site and, in turn, revenue. If you’re starting from scratch, building an audience and driving tons of website traffic will take time, but it’s worth the upfront investment. 

If you’re lucky enough to have a foundation developed, you’ll find that it’s easier to gain traction and reach exponential results with social media. The strategies we’ll discuss below are applicable no matter where you are in your social media journey. Implementing each recommendation in order is the best way to drive results.

Refine your strategy and build a foundation

Before you’re ready to begin sharing content or enticing prospects, you need to develop a plan. Start by considering the demographics and interests of your target buyers. Use that information to determine which platforms you’ll use. For example, if you’re targeting Millennials and Gen Z, you’re better suited to invest your time in Instagram and TikTok over LinkedIn and Facebook.

Once you’ve selected the platforms to focus on, build your foundation. Fill out all possible profile information and add brand photos. Be sure to include a link to your website, information about your products, and a way to contact you. 

Develop a consistent brand voice

On social media, your posts show up alongside your followers’ friends and family. Your posts shouldn’t stick out as aggressive advertisements or robotic sales pitches on their feed. Develop a brand tone and personality based on your company culture and target audience. Consider the traits your brand would have if it was personified — are you funny? Thoughtful? Satirical? Philanthropic?

Drive Traffic

Every piece of content developed by your brand should align with those personality traits. This ensures a cohesive experience for your followers where they’re interacting with you on social media, making purchases from your website, or getting a confirmation email.

A consistent brand voice will also help you appear more approachable. People want to buy from people they like. Show off the human side of your brand through your messaging.

Post a variety of content

As you already know, social media is designed to be social. Most people don’t elect to receive advertisements — even from their favorite companies. If all you post on social media are sales pitches and promotions, it will be hard to attract followers, and you’ll likely turn off existing followers.

Instead of always talking about yourself, incorporate a mix of content that keeps your audience interested and engaged. You should have explored your audience’s interests when first building out your social media strategy. Develop content that aligns with your audience’s interests and compels them to follow you for more.

A good rule of thumb is to share a healthy mix of three different types of posts: educational, lifestyle, and promotional.

Educational — 70%

Most of your content should teach your audience something or provide value in some way. Consider their pain points and goals as well as how you can help or teach them through content. Your goal should be for your audience to find the content so engaging they share it with their friends, expanding your audience.

Educational content helps build your authority and credibility with your audience. When implemented correctly, you’ll be the resource individuals turn to when they want to learn more about your niche.

Lifestyle — 20%

A handful of your content should be focused on the lifestyle of your target audience. This can include sharing customer stories, user-generated content, and other content that’s related to your audience’s lifestyle. Curated content from industry publications can be a great way to source lifestyle posts. The goal of lifestyle content is to help your audience envision themselves achieving their goals.

Promotional — 10%

For every ten posts you make, only one should promote your products or services. This is just enough to keep your audience informed about your brand without inundating them with advertisements. Your goal is to entice users to explore your products further, without them feeling like they’re being sold.

Publish regularly

All social media platforms reward some level of consistency. Best practices for posting frequency vary by platform, but for most, publishing daily is a minimum. Any time you stop posting regularly, you lose momentum which is difficult to regain. Your best bet for growth is through consistent publication.

Drive Traffic

Amidst managing your eCommerce store, how can you manage to post multiple times each day, mixing in a variety of content on different platforms? If you’re trying to visit each individual platform and manually publish posts, you’re doing it wrong and are bound to be spending way more time than the benefit you’ll see.

Instead of manually managing your social media, use a scheduling tool to handle posting and monitoring. At the beginning of the week or month, you can visit just one site to queue up all your content for a period of time. Then, you won’t have to spend hours each day coming up with posts, visiting the different channels, publishing them, and monitoring the results.

Tools like Missinglettr take social media scheduling a step further by automatically developing promotional campaigns for each new blog you publish to streamline all your marketing efforts.

Invest in ads

Social media is an incredibly affordable avenue for driving traffic. You can do a ton for little-to-no cost besides your time. However, building a following and driving results organically can take a long time — what if you want results right away?

Drive Traffic

Social media ads give a substantial boost to your audience and engagement. Additionally, running social media ads allows you to target individuals by demographic qualities as well as their interests. There aren’t many other sales avenues that let you target buyers that specifically. 

After targeting capabilities, the second best thing about social media ads is how affordable they are. You can begin driving results for less than $100, and many platforms provide advertising credits when you first sign up. This makes the barrier to entry incredibly low for getting started with social ads.

The final benefit of social media advertising is being able to understand the cost of a lead. For each ad you run, you’ll be able to see exactly how much each result cost you. Over time, you’ll be able to figure out the average cost of each lead and determine your investment from there.

Ads for Followers

Advertising can be a key strategy for building your audience. To do so, start by running ads that encourage individuals to follow your page. Showcase the value-adding content you share and highlight the existing community you’ve developed.

While these ads don’t lead to direct sales, the goal is to bolster your audience so future organic posts can lead to sales.

Ads for Site Traffic

Ads can also be used to drive traffic right to your website. Typically, these ads perform best when you’ve established a base level of brand awareness. Viewers won’t be tempted to visit your website if they aren’t sure who you are or what you sell. 

When running ads for site traffic, don’t highlight your products alone. Instead, driving traffic to educational resources on your e-commerce site, like blogs, can help you build trust with your audience before asking for a purchase.

Engage with your audience.

Social media is meant to be, well, social! Don’t use your platforms to only have one-to-many conversations. Instead, you should engage with your audience on an individual level too. If followers comments on your posts or direct message you, respond in a timely manner.

Along the same lines, go out of your way to interact with your target audience, potential followers, and adjacent brands in the industry. The more you engage with your audience, the more likely they are to engage with your brand.

Turn social media into your best lead source.

Social media can be an incredibly powerful lead generation tool. Start by building a strong foundation focused on your target audience. From there, follow best practices to develop a strategy that will drive traffic to your website. As you see results, adjust your strategy accordingly. When you notice a certain type of post driving sales, create more of those posts. Continue to test and iterate to develop the most effective strategy possible.

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2 COMMENTS

  1. I want to promote my site using social networks. I thought it was very easy. Your article was very useful for me, although now I understand that promoting in this way is a very difficult process. But it’s very effective, so I’m going to try it!

    • Hi, We are glad to hear that. Keep visiting learnwoo for more articles and guides.

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