The explosion of social media has enabled consumer discussions to spread and to become more pronounced, offering brands powerful new channels from which to draw valuable insights on customer behavior and preferences. With millions of real-time discussions happening across social media networks every second, listening to your consumers is key to understanding them and can help you attract the right customers with the right offer at the right time.
With consumers spending an average of two hours and 25 minutes on social media every day and the number of social media users across the globe projected to reach 4.41 billion by 2025, it stands to reason that leveraging social media stats must be an integral part of your product marketing strategy.
The power of social media lies in the fact that you can reach a large number of people within seconds of posting an ad and is becoming an increasingly influential and important platform to market your products, your services, and your brand. Apart from staying connected with friends and family, many consumers use social media to research brands and products and social media provide a perfect platform to directly interact with consumers and to better understand their unique needs.
If you’re looking for a piece of the global social commerce market pie, expected to reach $604.5 billion by 2027, then read on as we outline a few effective strategies to integrate social media stats into product marketing to optimize your eCommerce store.
Use Smart Merchandiser to Gather Social Media Data and Insights
Social media platforms hold a goldmine of data on consumer behaviors and preferences. However, collecting and analyzing all this data for specific products can quickly become a cumbersome task. You might have to spend hours or days creating spreadsheets sorting and analyzing mountains of data. It’s inefficient and time-consuming especially when considering that in today’s digital age, there are powerful tech tools that can manage these tasks faster and smarter.
A visual merchandising tool such as the Smart Merchandiser offers a wealth of information on customers and their interactions with your brand. The platform makes it easier to track various parameters, such as the number of Facebook likes, the number of Twitter mentions, as well as ratings and reviews. By overlaying key social media insights over each product image, you are able to use this data by instantly adjusting your display options accordingly.
You can easily determine your top-performing products and promote these so customers can easily find what they’re likely to be shopping for. Likewise, you can identify poor-performing products and decide if they warrant a different promotional path or be discontinued altogether.
Smart Merchandiser also makes it easy to assess the impact of your marketing campaigns. You can incorporate valuable insights gleaned from social media customer interactions into your merchandising decisions. Integrating this data into the workflow makes it easier for you to develop an ecommerce strategy that truly takes your customers’ needs and opinions into account; access whether your campaigns are headed in the right direction; and enable you to tweak your product marketing strategy on the go to get the best results.
Understand Your Customers Using Social Media Analytics
Social media platforms aren’t just a tool for promoting your products and building brand awareness. You can leverage these channels to gain a deeper insight into what your existing and potential customers really want. Through these interactions, you can identify and target their pain points to dial up your product marketing campaigns.
Check the Analytics Section
Leading social media platforms, including Facebook and Instagram, have built-in analytic tools. These features provide you with a treasure trove of useful social media stats about your target consumers.
For example, if you select “Insights” on the left sidebar of your Facebook business page, you’ll get access to crucial data about your audience, including:
- Age group
- Geographic location
- City and country
- Preferred language
You can even find out when they’re more likely to be online and engaging with your content. For instance, if your target consumers are mostly online in the morning, you can modify your Facebook ads’ copy, visuals, and timing.
Likewise, checking the “Insights” section of your Instagram business account will provide you with a wealth of data on your followers. Make sure you monitor the performance of individual posts/stories as well to measure how they’re engaging with your content.
Leverage Social Listening
Another great way to understand target consumers is to closely monitor conversations about your brand. Track brand and product mentions on different social media platforms to find out how your audience perceives your online store. It’ll give you a deeper insight into their aspirations, expectations, and pressure points.
Creating a hashtag for your brand (and keeping an eye on it) will allow you to analyze posts that use your hashtag and to better understand the impact of your products on consumers. Additionally, following Instagram hashtags related to your brand, niche, and product categories is also an effective way to gather social media stats and insights for a wider audience.
Seek Feedback and Opinions
When it comes to understanding your audience, there’s nothing more effective than asking for (and really listening) to their feedback. Watch for comments on your social media posts for a clearer picture of their likes and preferences. It’s also critical to monitor your DMs, ratings, and reviews on different social media platforms.
You could also consider hosting polls, AMAs, and live interactive sessions to directly connect with your audience. It’s particularly useful when you’re developing a new product or rolling out new features. It’ll offer a glimpse of their personal lives and help you identify issues they’re passionate about. You can use this information to customize your product marketing strategies.
Discover Product Trends Using Social Media Platforms
In today’s competitive eCommerce landscape, staying abreast of product trends is essential if you want to stand out from the crowd. Social media stats are just as useful for identifying and capitalizing on the latest product trends.
A good place to start is by checking your Pinterest feed and monitoring specific categories that are relevant to your brand. It’ll help you identify any new product features that are gaining traction. Be sure to watch out for product ads on your Facebook and Instagram feed. Follow hashtags that are relevant to your brand and product categories.
Monitoring consumer chatter on social media can further enable your business to improve product specifications by analyzing the most discussed features of your current product offering on social media.
Make Social Media Stats Intrinsic to Product Marketing
The biggest impact of social media on your ecommerce strategy is that these platforms give you the opportunity to have more meaningful conversations with your customers, enabling you to better understand your audience’s unique pain points and expectations.
Zobrist’s Smart Merchandiser will empower you to look beyond the number of impressions or followers but, crucially, to note engagement rates such as likes, comments, and shares which can better inform your marketing approach. Implementing the Smart Merchandiser means you have a precise tool to ensure you’re meeting your customers’ needs on the right platform at the right time.
Leveraging social media stats is crucial if you want to grow your eCommerce business and allows you to maintain your brand identity and relevance among your audience. Schedule a Smart Merchandiser demo now and discover how easy it can be for you to have integrated social media tracking to capture Facebook likes, Twitter activity, ratings, and reviews (BazaarVoice and Power Reviews) at your fingertips and in one centralized hub.