10 Easy Ways to Drive Sales With Social Media

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Businesses use social media to engage with fans, raise brand awareness, and build an audience, but are you using social media for sales?

Social media is one of the best marketing channels for driving sales and generating a great ROI. You just need to know the right sales strategies and tactics to use.

In this guide, we’ve broken down the easiest and most effective ways to use social media to increase sales. Use these strategies to turn your social media channels into revenue.

1. Be Where Your Audience Is
2. Create the Content Your Audience Wants to See
3. Use Your Social Channels to Sell Directly
4. Use Social Media Influencers
5. Run a Giveaway
6. Encourage User-Generated Content
7. Run Social Media Ads
8. Share Customer Stories
9. Generate More Leads On Instagram
10. Create Meaningful Relationships On Social Media

1. Be Where Your Audience Is

The first step to any good social media marketing strategy is knowing where your target customers are spending time online and using these channels to reach them.

Don’t waste your time trying to build an audience on every social media platform. Instead, concentrate on a few essential platforms where your target audience is active. By using the social channels that your followers use, you’ll create a bigger impact with less effort.

So, start by knowing your target audience. Do a target audience analysis. Understand your target demographic, find common characteristics of the right prospects, or dig into profiles of your existing customers.

Some good general guidelines for different social media users are:

  • Facebook is used by most people but has lost popularity with the younger generation (ages 18 – 29)
  • LinkedIn is a great platform to target a B2B audience
  • TikTok is an increasingly popular channel, especially for the younger generation
  • Your target audience’s age doesn’t necessarily reveal their buying habits. Once you’ve established an audience, make sure they’re showing buying behavior on the channels you’ve chosen

Being present on every social media channel can spread your resources too thin, and cause more damage than it’s worth.

By being where your audience is, you’ll be able to target them in their native habitat where they’re ready to buy. This will result in reaching more customers and making more sales.

2. Create the Content Your Audience Wants to See

Social media marketing all comes down to great content.

Your aim is to sell to potential customers, but this doesn’t mean your content should be sales-y. Instead, you need to be focused on quality content that your audience actually wants to engage with.

Rather create a small batch of high-quality content than post mediocre content frequently.

Remember, people come onto social media to see content that excites or inspires them. Don’t focus directly on sales, rather create valuable content that makes followers want to become customers.

To do this, post content inspired by real-life situations. Social proof is incredibly powerful here. Post content with helpful tips and advice in it, content that is entertaining, or content that gives potential customers a reason to buy from you without forcing sales on them directly.

Valuable content excites and engages the user first. Once the user is engaging with your brand, they will be inspired to become a customer.

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3. Use Your Social Channels to Sell Directly

If you want to use social media platforms for sales, then you should be selling directly through these platforms.

Social commerce allows users to discover products and buy them on social media, without ever leaving the app. This makes the checkout process a lot quicker – resulting in more impulse buys.

Right now, all the major social media platforms have developed their own in-app shopping experiences.

Instagram

Instagram Shopping allows eCommerce store owners to sell their products directly on the platform. Your Instagram Shop is just like your usual online storefront.

Here are some of the features and different ways to use Instagram Shopping:

  • Shoppable Posts: You can integrate your store with Instagram product tags. Tag products in your posts just like you would tag people, and when users tap the product tag, they will be sent to the relevant product page.
  • Shoppable Stories: Just like shoppable posts, you can also use product tags in your stories to send more traffic to your store.
  • Shoppable Ads: Product tags can also be used in Instagram ads if you want to get your products out to a wider audience. You can set this up in the Ads Manager, or boost shoppable posts.
  • Live Shopping: This can be a great way to launch new products and promote sales of a specific product in real-time. You can incorporate your product tags into your live stream, where users are sent to your store from your broadcast.
  • Shopping Tab: The Instagram Shopping Tab is an excellent way to get your products and brand out to new customers. Users can discover relevant products and brands through this tab, where yours could be included to boost your visibility to new customers.

Instagram shopping

Facebook

Selling on Facebook is done through the platform’s easily accessible Facebook Shops tool.

Anyone with a business profile can set up a Facebook Shop for free, which is connected to your eCommerce product range.

Facebook’s social commerce solution allows buyers and sellers to easily communicate via Messenger. This can be a great way for your brand to connect and engage with its audience.

Facebook is also a good platform for shoppers to organically find products that match their interests. Organic discovery works well through the mobile app, and users can complete their transaction from discovery to purchase all within the same app.

Facebook shopping

TikTok

TikTok has partnered up with Shopify to introduce organic product discovery and shopping tabs to TikTok.

The goal is to make TikTok a hub for social media eCommerce. Being one of the fastest-growing social media platforms, TikTok is definitely a place to look towards for social media marketing.

With its new social commerce feature, the potential to reach a large new audience of customers is huge.

Follow this guide for a more complete understanding of how to use TikTok for eCommerce.

Tikok shopping

Pinterest

Pinterest has become a popular platform for selling online. In fact, 89% of Pinterest users are on the platform to find purchase inspiration.

Pinterest social commerce is done through the use of Shoppable Pins. These rich pins are directly linked to your eCommerce products, and users can just tap on your product image and be directed to a product purchase page.

The visual appeal of Pinterest makes it a great place for brands to show off their products online and attract new customers.

Pinterest also has a link to Etsy, which can make it easier to use the social media platform to boost your Etsy store sales.

Follow this guide for a more complete understanding of how to use Pinterest for eCommerce.

Pinterest shopping

Twitter

Twitter Shopping is starting to test out eCommerce on the platform, which could be a major breakthrough for this social media channel.

Twitter shopping is done through a new “Shop” module where brands and retailers can showcase their products on their Twitter profiles.

Users can tap products, and this will open the business’s website inside the Twitter app. Shopping will only be available for those with a Professional Profile.

4. Use Social Media Influencers

Influencer marketing is huge right now. It’s also one of the best ways to sell products on social media without pushing the products yourself.

Social media users trust influencers more than they trust businesses. If an influencer recommends a product to their audience, this seems a lot more natural and convincing than a business trying to convince its audience to buy a product.

Influencer marketing helps you reach a big new audience and build trust. This is why it delivers such a high return on investment.

In fact, when you look at recent marketing trends, influencer marketing has consistently produced the best ROI for businesses.

Find influencers that match your niche. You need to make sure their audience is also your target audience. Connect with these influencers, and work out a deal for them to promote your products.

Just make sure that the influencer has high engagement rates – this is generally more important than a large follower count.

5. Run a Giveaway

A social media giveaway remains one of the best ways to ramp up your sales.

Giveaways help you highlight specific products, increase brand visibility, and get more engagement. Of course, they also help you make more sales.

This is because your social media giveaway draws in people who want your products. With every entry into your giveaway, you gain an email address that you can target with valuable marketing content later on.

A great strategy is to send out a limited-time discount code to all entrants straight after the winner has been announced. These are already people who are interested in your products, so there’s a good chance this discount will give them just the push they need to become customers.

With Wishpond, you can create easy social media giveaways and contests that do more for your business. Try it out today.

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6. Encourage User-Generated Content

One of the best ways to promote your products on social media is to get other people to do it.

User-generated content is incredibly powerful for your business. This is when existing customers can become brand advocates by posting about your products and business online.

This type of content helps your brand build up a lot of trust. If potential customers see positive mentions of your products from real-life users, they will trust this more than product posts by your business page.

You’ll need to encourage user-generated content if you want to get your brand more exposure. The best way to do this is to run a contest that requires users to post about your brand to enter. This is often done in the form of a branded hashtag challenge.

@iamkelianne If only it was this easy to get ready ? @lauramercier #readySETgo #lauramercierpartner #ad ? #readySETgo – LauraMercier

And when people mention your brand online, share it. Sharing user-generated content in your stories is an excellent way to improve brand exposure and trust.

And this doesn’t have to end with user-generated content from social media. Other areas of social proof, like positive reviews, can also be shared on your social media channels. The more good social proof you share, the better.

7. Run Social Media Ads

If you want to reach a bigger audience on social media, then you should run paid ad campaigns.

Social media is incredibly competitive. Even if you’ve got great content on all the right channels, there’s a good chance it won’t reach many people.

The good news is that paid ads on social media let you target very specific potential customers. Social platforms hold huge amounts of data on their users, so you can be very specific about who you want your ads to target.

All social platforms have their own advertising options. Make sure you invest in the right social media channels where your audience is most active.

If you’re not sure where to get started, Facebook ads are generally the best place to begin.

You can even check your Facebook ad reporting information to get better insights.

Facebook product ad

8. Share Customer Stories

83% of buyers have said that word of mouth has influenced their buying decision.

Incorporating word-of-mouth recommendations into your social media sales strategy can help you attract a lot more customers.

These are stories that potential customers can relate to, and they will have a lot more influence over how customers perceive your brand.

So, make sure your marketing team and sales professionals regularly share the stories of happy customers. Sharing real-life customer success stories will make a big difference to how your brand is perceived, as well as your social selling efforts.

9. Generate More Leads on Instagram

It’s important to have an engaged Instagram audience, but you should also focus on converting this audience into business leads. If your business relies on leads, then social media is a great place to reach targeted prospects.

There are a couple of different ways that you can combine Instagram’s features with calls to action (CTA) to generate leads for your business.

First, make sure your Instagram bio includes a link that goes to a lead-generating landing page. Then, include CTAs in your organic posts. Include a value-added proposition that makes users want to click on your link.

You can also generate leads through stories with a swipe-up link. Just make sure you include an enticing CTA in your stories.

Of course, these lead generation principles can also apply to your other social media channels.

Instagram bio

10. Create Meaningful Relationships On Social Media

Social media shouldn’t only be used to promote your brand. It should also be used to build relationships.

Creating meaningful relationships through your popular social media platforms will go a long way in boosting the sales process. This is because you want people to trust and like your brand.

So, don’t just make social media marketing a one-way flow of information. Respond to comments, engage with users, encourage feedback, ask questions, and do anything else that could build relationships with your audience.

Social selling is all about developing positive relationships with potential customers on your social media channels. So, make sure you remember the “social” part of social media marketing.

Summary

You don’t have to be an expert to generate more sales opportunities through social media. Driving sales on social media is easy, as long as you know which strategies to focus on.

Identify potential customers, understand the channels they use, target them with relevant content, and start building relationships with them. That’s really all it takes to create an active presence on social media that boosts the buying process.

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