Opportunities To Do Business OTDB is the main aim for ecommerce websites and then converting relevant potential customers to your website, maximising profit at the checkout with a shopping cart full of products, extra revenue with 3-4-2 deals, gift wrap and spend another £50 to be VIP customer with benefits.
With 500 million active users Facebook represents the biggest community of people online and for a long time has been a very attractive audience for all online marketers aiming to increase sales through their online shops. “How to get the Facebook community to buy?”.
Firstly create product focused content that creates interest around specific projects through detailing features and benefits of a particular product or range of products.
Once your content is read by potential OTDB then they will read and follow through to making a purchase and refer others. After correctly choosing products that interest people, stimulating them with more detail and facts associated with that a particular product may cause them to buy it.
The challenge can be too much like a salesman who will not leave you alone and you are ruining the risk of making that sale by pushing it at them, you risk turning them off and in effect pushing them away from your brand forever.
The alternative approach is to just create general content relevant to any potential purchaser. Don't sell just tell stories around subjects connected to a specific industry that are of interest to your audience.
This information will attract more OTDB to your Facebook presence and convert more sales on your website.
We have proven you can engage with more people if the content is informative enough and your coherent with your brand’s relationship with your target audience.
The content does not have to be 100% informational, you could ask questions about the readers views on a particular packaging style and get feedback on a subject thus building a far stronger relationship.
Which approach is more profitable: Direct product focused content; or more community interest information and engagement? Our findings see a mixture of the 2 approaches will work in the longer term.
As a Facebook page can take time to gain full engagement of your followers and get the confidence in replying to postings and hopefully even feeling close and interested enough to actually initiate content relevant to other community members following your brand and page.
E-commerce brands should focus their efforts around building communities of people “liking” them, we call this establishing trust and making friends through Facebook pages firstly.
Next your followers qualify the likes, dislikes, essentials and preferences to make the offering you present grow stronger, more active, more frequent and more engaged then perhaps interspersing slightly more product focused content will keep the attention of a community. This is far more likely of course if the followers are used to interacting with a page’s postings.
Focus on areas of general interest, community oriented and engaging content with small amounts of sales focused content. If the product sales content gains too much presence then people will switch off from the brand again.
How interesting is your content? If the general content fully engages with your community and then your product posting frankly just talks at them then you will not convert anyone to buy.
Do not sell slow moving items work on your best offering as promoting these further will increase sales. Trying to promote ranges of slow selling products that nobody is buying is like pushing water up hill.
Over the top discounts on a product that nobody wants may grab attention for a short time but will anyone actually buy it? If the hurdle to purchase is price then you must look at how and why this works and make sure you are not just passing your worries about non-selling products and how to shift these.
Promote products that buyers like already and use Facebook and other social media to gauge your audiences thoughts and feelings on hot products.
Ultimately if the right products are chosen for promotion through Facebook, the type of promotion is right and the frequency between general community content and product content is balanced then success should occur.
FIVE LAWS OF FACEBOOK SELLING
1. Build fan community first, get engagement and interactions with your community then drop in interesting selling messages occassionally.
2. Allow follower numbers to grow naturally without bribery: Targetted Fan Page Ads work but as long as they are real.
3. Less sell sell sell and more engaging with people “Is design A better than design B?”
4. Use Facebook to research customers views about products and services
5. Pushing will not sell will although it can demonstrate you don’t know what OTDB actually want to buy.
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PPC isn't a "set it and forget it" medium. PPC basics still apply. Testing, monitoring, and reporting are crucial to achieving the best possible ROI.
