11 Witty Social Media Strategies for Summer To Boost Sales

Chances are that most of your potential customers are on social media. That means you can promote your products on social media platforms to generate sales. Done the right way, social media marketing can help your business grow.

That statement becomes even truer during specific seasons. Effective social media marketing can help skyrocket your sales as consumers go on a shopping spree for the summer, for example.

With summer around the corner, you have an excellent opportunity for growth. The key? Leverage social media and implement social media strategies to get results.

11 Ways to Boost Sales with Social Media for Summer

Here are 11 social media strategies to help you boost your sales this season. Complement these with great social media content and excellent products, and you’re sure to see stellar results.

1. Plan a Summer Discount Offer

Everyone is vying for consumers’ attention during the season, so you have to find ways to stand out. A summer discount will give you that competitive advantage.

Think of summer scenarios, such as outings at the beach and the goods consumers might need for those. Think of what consumers would wear in those scenarios, too, and offer a unique discount for those products.

Try experimenting with different discount offers. In the image above, Rip Curl, which sells surfing sportswear, gives different discounts to customers, depending on the number of items they purchase.

2. Spread the Word a Few Weeks Before the Offer

There’s a reason this tactic is on this list of social media strategies: it works.

Create a buzz around your offer a few weeks before the campaign launches. This will help your target buyers prepare. It will give them time to browse your product offerings and fill their carts.

Give your audience on social media a heads-up by announcing the sale dates. This way, they can mark their calendars.

It will also allow new potential customers to browse your collection and fill their baskets before the sale! Your existing clients will appreciate the prior announcement so that they do not miss out on the fun.

3. Special Discounts for Advance Orders

Here’s one of the most common social media strategies: You could go the extra mile and offer your customers special discounts for orders made well before the summer.

Hang Ten Pakistan, for example, offered up to 50% off on all its products during its pre-summer sale :

By announcing this offer on social media, they have the potential to reach hundreds of potential customers.

You can offer them special advance order discounts via social media with direct links to your website. You don’t have to always offer discounts on products as part of your social media strategy. You may also offer the following:

Free delivery
Free services
Coupon codes
Travel points

At checkout, you can have instant codes for use, too.

4. Run a Targeted Ad Campaign

Your audience is always going to be unique to you and your campaign content. While we can’t tell you precisely who is best for your brand to target, we can tell you how to find them.

To identify your summer audience, follow these five steps:

Launch your campaign with broad targeting.
Spend the first week gathering information about the responding audience. To define audience segments that will work for you, use this information.
Test a few of these audience segments during your second week. Pay careful attention to how various audiences react to different innovative advertising. Try multiple types of ad content. Use images, GIFs, and videos to find out which kind works the best for your brand.
Change the ad designs accordingly. Even without a designer in your team, you can create quality and engaging content using photo editors and video maker apps. Just experiment and do A/B research for better viewer performance.
Repeat.

Choosing what content to run will impact how your audience reacts to your promotions for summer and their actions.

Check out this example from Blenders Eyewear:

It highlighted a consumer need in the summer and presented its product as the solution in its targeted Facebook ad.

Note, though, that of the social media strategies on this list, this tactic is among those that would require that you shell out some cash.

5. Partner Up with Facebook Pages

It’s impossible for this tactic not to make it on our list of social media strategies. That’s because it’s really effective. By leveraging Facebook influencers’ reach, working with the right partners for your brand can be a profitable strategy in your content marketing.

You should know the end goal before you begin thinking about who you want to approach to represent your brand.

For a brand, some of the most common objectives behind social media strategies are:

Build engagement-generating content
Increase knowledge of the brand and reputation
Extend the scope of generated content
Leverage new opportunities

It is bad practice to reach out to Facebook influencers without a strategy to ask them what they can do with your brand.

You should pay attention to three major metrics when searching for influencers as part of your social media strategies:

Resonance: This tells you how people engage with the influencer’s material—for example, comments, linkbacks, likes, and shares on Instagram.
Reach: These stats display the influencer’s audience size—for example, their number of blog readers, followers of Instagram, and fans of Facebook.
Relevance: This shows you how the influencer is related to a particular topic. The keywords used and the type of content produced by the influencer should give you an idea.

You can understand their effect on Facebook, audience engagement level, and how important their content is to your brand by looking at their stats.

You’ll need to find an arrangement that will help both sides when you’ve found the right Facebook influencer for your brand.

The most significant things on which you can concentrate are:

*Time: *Make sure you send the influencers clear guidance to be aware of the marketing campaign‘s deadlines.
Content: Agree on what sort of content for your brand you want the influencer to make. A series of Instagram posts about your brand or goods?
Ownership & rights: Reach an agreement on the rights to use the content. Influencers are usually the owners of any material they make. Still, you could ask them to give you permission for a certain period of time.
Retribution: Recognize and agree on the structure of payment, dates, and amount that you are willing to pay for the influencer’s services.
Usage of hashtags: You can make custom hashtags for the summer associated with your brand and ask the influencers to use them on their social media. Unique hashtags will make your brand stand out and make potential customers curious about your brand and products.

Partnering with Facebook influencers builds credibility and increases your reach and the ability to tap into new markets, drive more traffic to your account and generate more sales.

6. Connect with an Instagram Influencer

Influencer marketing is an excellent way to help you reach new audiences, increase brand awareness, and boost your marketing ROI. Like Facebook, Instagram is a great way to promote your products.

Working with Instagram influencers is one of the best marketing strategies. These advantages included below show what you can do when you collaborate with an Instagram influencer:

Reach a larger audience
Build trust in your brand
Grow your followers socially
Increase traffic on pages
Receive more leads
Drive sales

You are much more likely to do the same when you see celebrities and other famous people who look up to wearing things or promoting products on that popular visual platform:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by BRIANA DAI | Boss Mama (@iambrianadai)

To make the most of summer on social media, team up with Influencers on Instagram and start promoting your company.

7. DM Possible Buyers Directly

What’s more powerful than sending personalized messages to your audience?

Suppose customers see that your company is active on social media. In that case, it encourages communication, maintains a regularly updated blog with customer-focused tips; they will feel confident about this way of contacting your brand.

There is more to direct messaging than simply putting a chatbot on a website. The creation of direct messaging on social media sites, such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, enables businesses to build relationships with their users privately.

One of the first sites to do this was Facebook messaging. We now see direct messaging on Twitter, and even direct messaging on Instagram is even more useful in these promotions.

In general, messaging is a valuable tool for a marketing campaign for a brand. Still, businesses tend to ignore the “instant” appeal, the most important justification for using direct messaging.

There are numerous benefits of direct messaging your audience during the summer season using social media:

*Instant Networking: *Using DM on social media empowers you to connect and find your dream clients.
*Promotions: *Direct messaging is an excellent way to send instant and customized discounts, sales, and other business offers!
*Communication: *Online businesses that connect with consumers also use direct messaging for order and product queries.
*Enhance relationships with clients: *The advantage of direct messaging is to create deeper ties with your customers through personalized messaging.
*Increase brand loyalty for followers: *Direct messaging is an opportunity to offer current, and future customers fast and personal customer support.
*Increase sales: *You can reach out to social media influencers and work together to increase sales for your company for the summer.
*Lead generation: *Connect with your audience and answer their queries. This can lead to them becoming future customers.

The power of direct messaging could be infinite if brands and businesses become more conscious of their direct message marketing strategies. Make the most of it during specific seasons when social media is ripe with customers.

8. Make Customers Your Affiliates

At present, according to Business2Community, 92 percent of global consumers trust word-of-mouth more than other types of advertisement.

Who better to promote your brand and products than your customers? For a commission, customers can promote your brand effectively as affiliates.

One of the best ways of interacting with clients is to deliver exclusive deals depending on the season. During new seasons and holidays, people tend to look forward to changes; they get into the mood and tend to spend more time and money shopping than they would otherwise.

You engage them at this stage when you give seasonal deals, giving them something to get excited about and an excellent reason to buy.

Shoppers know that they can usually score discounts and are always searching for that perfect offer.

But imagine if you offered them a chance to earn money as well!

Now you may be wondering, why make customers affiliates as part of your social media strategy?

Customers are reliable: your product has already been purchased and used by your customers. But who could be a better choice than them to market your goods and get anything in return?
Customers may have vast outreach capabilities: What if they have a company of their own and an audience? Or what if it turns out that they are influencers?
Customers receive bonuses: Your customers can earn back some cash through affiliate programs, and that is an offer they might find very tempting.

Not every consumer will be an affiliate, so don’t waste too much time pushing them. Usually, those who wish to be involved will make themselves known.

9. Invite Customers to Promote Your Products on Social Media

When customers love your products, they also love to share their experiences with them on their social media platforms. Consider integrating customer testimonials into your campaign. There are many successful testimonial advertising examples that have helped their companies stand out from the high competition.

Another way to make the most of social media for the summer is by encouraging your customers to post their experiences and photos of your brand products.

Then create a hashtag, say #summerishere or #summer, and invite fans to use that in their posts.

10. Use UGC to Your Advantage

You can engage with audiences on a deeper level during the summer by running a user-generated content campaign. A UGC content campaign is effective, too. A Stackla survey found that 79% of consumers believe UGC highly impacts their purchase decisions.

Glossier, for example, ran a very successful UGC campaign that saw its customers taking pictures of its Balm Dotcom products in places they went to for the summer. Glossier then shared the best photos on its Instagram account.

With the campaign, Glossier did not just manage to promote its products. It also engaged its loyal customers and attracted new ones with its out-of-the-box marketing concept.

11. Explore Co-Marketing

Co-marketing is exactly that: You are marketing products jointly with someone else.

That someone else is usually another brand. The idea is this: Two firms can reach a wider audience than one.

In co-marketing, all businesses contribute to a marketing campaign, cross-promote the message on their platforms, and reap joint promotion benefits together. These are mutual value partnerships.

To find the right co-marketing partner, ask yourself the following questions:

Does the other company have a similar type of audience as your company?
Are the expected leads you’re getting from this partnership enough?
Does the other company have a good reputation?
Do you have a good working relationship with your counterparts?

Agree on the content you will share and promote on social media for the summer. Make your goals clear from the start, too. In this case, it’s to generate as many sales as possible for the season.

In Closing

During the busy summer shopping season, there are a number of ways that you can promote your brand. Planning and starting promotions and a “seasonal awareness” campaign a few weeks in advance are critical.

Combined with a strong social media strategy, a few minor changes to your site, and a bit of fun will get your shop the extra exposure you want without too much money or effort.

To summarize what we discussed:

Plan and organize special summer discounts weeks ahead and start promoting on social media to give your audience a head’s up.
Offer special discounts for advanced orders to your customers in the form of free services, goods, coupons, and more.
Run targeted ads to fish out customers looking for deals during the summer.
Find perfect social media influencers and work with them to generate new content, reach a wider audience and get more customers.
Connect with your audience by sending them personalized messages. You can send them promotional content or answer their general queries about your brand or product.
Give your customers a chance to earn back some money by making them your brand affiliates. You will generate more sales, and your affiliates will feel rewarded. It’s a win-win situation.
Ask your customers to post pictures of your product on their social media using custom hashtags. It will generate curiosity and possible sales.

Summer is a time when people are ready to relax and have fun with their families. It is also when social media is full of people looking for new places to shop, eat and have fun.

Take advantage of this season and skyrocket your business.

Written by our guest writer Becky Halls, co-founder of Hyperise

Hyperise is a Hyper personalization toolkit for B2B marketers. She’s an experienced Growth Marketer, passionate about product design/development and online marketing.

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