Driving Sales Through Social Media: A Beginners Guide

These days most businesses are familiar with the advantages of social media for reaching out to both new and existing customers, using social media platforms to encourage site visits, engage with their customers and even for dealing with customer service enquiries. Social media has become a staple for businesses and organisations for achieving great marketing goals. 

It’s not just large businesses that can benefit from social media however, even small businesses can make the most of social media marketing, with its very little costing and wide availability social media is available for every business without breaking the budget. 

Ultimately social media’s primary function isn’t to generate sales, the main function is to build your brand reputation and help build your relationship with your customers, however there are plenty of ways for brands to increase online sales using social media, however to do so brands need to adapt and approach things in a unique way. 

While the jury still may be out on whether or not social media can live up to the hype and actually encourage sales, here’s a look at how brands can be using social media to generate sales and increase return on social media.  

Social Media Ads 

Many social media platforms now offer their own paid advertising tools, including Facebook’s ad feature and Twitters promoted posts options, which are some of the most effective ways businesses can use social media to generate sales. With a number of advanced targeting options available, businesses can choose the perfect audience for their business based on information such as age, gender, interests, location and even based off page likes. 

Through continued testing, you can optimise your social media ads and the message included in each ad, to provide your customers with powerful and relevant messages that can encourage them to not only check out your website but also look to purchase your products. 

‘Shop Now’ Buttons 

Using call to actions on your social media posts is always a good idea and by including things such as “shop now” buttons, you can encourage audiences to head directly to your site to make a purchase or even check out the rest of your products. You can add these buttons on Facebook to both your ads and your Facebook page, encouraging people to visit your site or get in touch in a quick and convenient click of a button.

By using different link destinations for users based on what devices they might be using, you can personalise your call to action buttons for the best audience for your business, allowing you to provide targeted content, that is much more likely to generate traffic and sales. 

Include Links To Products

There are many out there who simply link to their homepage on their social media and in social media ads, while this can definitely drive traffic to your site, it can make it difficult to drive sales.  If you’re looking to generate sales through social media it’s a good idea to link to your products and department pages. 

By sending your customers directly to your products it means they don’t have to waste time looking, which can lead them to get distracted and leaving your site. Not only is this an effective way of driving conversions but it’s also a great way to provide a better shopping experience for your customers. 

Social media can be a difficult channel for marketers and businesses, especially when it comes to generating direct sales, however with the right strategy and a targeted message that provides value to your audience, you can not only increase your social media reach but also look to drive more sales, enabling your business more chance to grow!