Social media platforms like Linkedin, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and the newest one, Tiktok, help dropshippers connect with potential customers. Even so, it’s important for marketers to have a firm grasp on social media strategy and be able to handle interesting content so they can connect with their audience.
Every entrepreneur wants their eCommerce business to make a lot of money and soar above the clouds. The best way to put yourself on the path to success is to learn how to use social media. As a dropshipper, there’s nothing more important than having a strong social media presence if you want to do a lot of business.
This blog is for dropshippers who want to learn more about how to use social media to market their products and more.
How to Build a Strong Social Media Strategy
Before you post anything on social media, you should think about what you want to get out of it and how you can best get there. Your business (via your website) is, of course, at the center of your social media strategy. And your strategy is how you tie together all of your social media projects with their different goals. This is because you have a lot of different channels to look at, and each one has its own strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities.
Dropshippers can build their social media strategy on five key pillars that make it easy to get started:
- Goals: Say what the results of your work will be and how you plan to measure them.
- Target Audiences: Do research and make a profile of your ideal customer.
- Content Mix: Build your social media programming around content archetypes that are used over and over again.
- Channels: Figure out how much time you want to spend on each social network and what you want to do with it.
- Set up the tools and infrastructure you’ll need to carry out your strategy successfully.
This is not a recipe for success on social media. Instead, it is a way to get started. By the end of this guide, you should have a better idea of how all of these factors work together and affect each other. This will help you make better decisions and change your social media strategy over time.
Everything you write should help your company reach one of its goals. To start, write down your goals and think about how you will track your progress.
Social media marketing requires a lot of trial and error. You can’t improve any part of it until you know what signs to look for. You could even set goals for your social media activities based on these signals, which will be different for each channel. This will help you stay motivated and on track.
Here are some goals to think about for your social media marketing, which you may add to your strategy over time:
- Increase Brand Recognition: Talk to more people to increase the chances that your brand will be seen by the right people. You can keep track of this using impressions/reach, likes, shares, mentions, or any other metric that shows a real person saw your content.
- Get people to want your products: Get people interested in your products by giving them relevant ideas or information. You can measure this by the number of clicks on your website, the number of products added to a shopping cart, or the number of comments or messages from interested consumers.
- Get leads: Turn your audience into email subscribers, who you can then use social media to turn into free sales. Another option is to build a group of interested buyers that you can send ads to again and again.
- Get Sales: These are customers who bought something from you because of what you did on social media. You can measure this in terms of orders or income.
- Drive Traffic Offline: If you run a store or an event, one of your goals may be to get people to go to a certain place in person.
- Build alliances and networks: Do influencer marketing or co-marketing with influential people or companies with similar goals.
- Create “social proof” by collecting positive customer reviews or content made by “influencers” that promotes your business and could be used in other marketing efforts.
- Client Service: If you’re on social media, people can ask you questions, make complaints, or ask you to do things. So, one of your goals will be to help customers with this or point them in a different, more private direction. One way to tell is how quickly you answer direct messages.
- Remember these goals as we move on to the next step, which is to decide who you will try to get in touch with.
Getting to Know Your Target Market
The first step in marketing on or off social media is to know who you want to reach. Of course, it takes time to learn a lot about your target audience, but there are things you can do right now that will give you a better start.
Spend some time learning about your target audience. Look for demographic, psychographic, or observable trends that can help you form an idea of who is likely to buy from you. After doing research, you can put it all together to make a “buyer persona,” or a picture of a customer who is likely to buy from you.
You don’t have to list every trait, but you should describe as much as you can to build a picture of this person in terms of your business.
- Location:Where do your ideal consumers reside? You might find it helpful to know about the whole country, but if you’re a local business or only want to serve a certain area, you need to separate those places.
- Age: What is the range of ages of your customers? Keep this as broad as possible unless you know for sure where your target consumer is in their life.
- Gender identity: What gender do they think of themselves as? Depending on your brand, this may not be important or it may be very important.
- Interests: What do they like to do for fun? These help with coming up with content ideas and finding the right audience. (For instance, cooking, hip-hop dancing, and yoga).
- Career/Industry: What do they do for a living and what jobs have they had? Again, how important this is may depend on your brand.
- What is the income range of this buyer persona? Are they more interested in price or are they willing to pay more for better products?
- Do they live alone, are they in a relationship, or are they married? For example, if you work in the wedding business, this could be helpful.
- Favorite Websites/Apps: What kinds of websites do they bookmark? How often do they use Instagram or Pinterest? Is there something they can’t live without?
- What would make this customer buy your product? Do they want to show off a status symbol or find time to work out even though they are busy?
- Purchase Concerns: Why don’t a lot of people buy your product? Is the standard important to them?
- Something Else: Anything else that wasn’t mentioned but should be, like their education, where they are in life (parents with new babies), what they do for fun, and so on.
- The goal of these personas isn’t to be 100% accurate, but to describe the type of person who would be the easiest to turn into a customer. Any way you look at it, social media marketing is one of the best ways to learn more about your customers. Also, what you learn might be a part of your bigger business plan, such as what products you’ll put out next. But once you’ve found at least one important group of people to target, you’ll be in a better position to think about the next part of your social media strategy: what you’ll post.
Social media content creation
Taking care of a social media channel is like having your own TV network.
You could make a series of content with new “weekly episodes” on each channel, like our Ask Shopify series. You can also share your content on other channels, like posting the same thing on both Snapchat and Instagram. You can fill empty time slots with reruns of popular shows (#ThrowBackThursday), and you can advertise your products during commercial breaks.
Defining your content mix—the formats and types of posts you’ll use on a regular basis—makes it easier to come up with and create social content and gives your posting schedule a rhythm, so you can give your audience a mix of variety and consistency. If you don’t, you’ll have to look for new content every day.
The mix of content you make could include:
- News: Posts about what’s going on in your business or about what’s popular right now.
- Insight: Quotes or photos from around the world can inspire people to use your products or live a certain way of life. Share stats, lessons, facts, or how-tos from your blog or YouTube channel that people can learn from.
- Product/promotional Posts: High-quality photos of your products in use, demo videos, testimonials, or descriptions of their features can all help you reach your ultimate goal, which is to sell your products. When you’re done with them, you can usually use them as ads.
- Contests: Running a contest or offering a free download in exchange for an email address is a great way to promote something that isn’t your product but is still useful to you and your audience.
- Characteristics of your customers or the people they follow: pictures or videos of your customers or the people they follow.
- Share information about community events, fundraisers, and chances to learn, especially if your business is close by.
- Behind-the-scenes: Tell your audience how your product is made or what you’re doing to grow your business. This will be clear to them. Giving your customers a look at the people behind your business could help build trust and your reputation as a founder.
- Also, be creative when coming up with a mix of content that sets you apart from your competitors.
You can set up a presence for your business on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. Each channel you choose makes the number of channels you have to keep track of grow. You have to decide where to put your first focus based on your chosen target audience and which channels can help you reach your content goals and archetypes. The first step is to know what each channel can do well and what it can’t do well.
Advice and more information
Here, you’ll learn the best ways to do the same thing to make a lot of money with your dropshipping business:
- Think about these content marketing channels: As part of your social media plan, if you have the time and skills, you could start a blog or a YouTube channel. Content marketing can add to what you’re already doing on social media, and social media can be used to share your content marketing and get ideas, photos, and other media.
- Focus: Take some time to learn and test one or two platforms at the same time. It’s better to be great at one thing than average at a lot of things.
- Optimize your accounts: Fill out your social media profiles with all the information your clients could want, and try to claim the same username on each platform, especially if you want to add a unique tracking link to your website. Also, make sure you have a short bio that tells people what you do and who you are. This is your digital elevator pitch. Also, add an avatar and cover photo whenever you can.
Now that you know your goals, target audience, and how you’ll use different channels, it’s time to build the structure you’ll need to manage and organize your social media calendar.
When you first start out with social media marketing, you need to be careful about how you spend your time.
Always think about how you could make better use of your time by recycling or reusing content or spending money on paid promotion to get a better return on the time you spend creating content.
Extra Help and Resources
Other things you have to do are respond to your audience, manage the community, run ads, and provide the content. Here are some more tips from experts that will help your campaign:
- Make models: When you can, make design and copy templates based on what works. This will make it easier to put out new content on a regular basis, especially for content series that are repeated. For instance, you can save your most-used Instagram hashtags so that they are always available when you post, or you can use the same filter on all of your photos to make them look the same.
- Keep the dates of the Calendar close at hand: Holidays are a great time to make sure your posts are relevant and up-to-date. Pay close attention to what’s coming up so you can plan your social media marketing strategy in advance. If you need something to look at, Sprout Social has a great calendar with hashtag holidays that you can use.
- Customize your posts for each channel. You can share the same post or image on multiple social networks, but make sure the text, photos, and videos are optimized for the network you’re posting to.
- Make time for proactive communication. Social media is a two-way street, and for it to work, you need to interact with other people on and off your content. This includes commenting on other people’s posts, tweeting at people in your area, and just being friendly on these social networks.
Wrapping Up
Basically, you are keeping track of how well your social media marketing is working and trying out different things to see what works best for your audience.
If you still don’t understand something and want to learn more about dropshipping and anything else related to an online business, you should check out dropship-empire blogs. You will have the chance to learn about the professional advice in every area of your online business presence.