As eCommerce develops, brands and businesses realize the benefits of social commerce.
This is especially true as consumer behavior evolves from using social media as a communication tool to a shopping destination.
Buying and selling inside social media platforms are now becoming the norm.
If your business is not yet leveraging social commerce, you could be missing out on a huge opportunity to grow your online store.
Not yet convinced?
Let’s dive in!
TOP 5 SOCIAL COMMERCE BENEFITS
1. ENHANCED CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
eCommerce went from a simple exchange of goods into a social activity that requires a lot of brand engagement to stimulate the desire to purchase.
Putting the customer first remains an essential element in business success, especially now that the power to determine trends has shifted into the market’s hands.
Being able to purchase through a social commerce platform reduces friction in the shopping process that otherwise serves as a barrier for customers to opt out.
That said, here’s what savvy consumers are demanding from businesses in their social commerce experience:
- Provide the latest brand information
- Have ongoing promotions and discounts
- Share entertaining and valuable content
- Offer quality customer service
- Accept client feedback
Social commerce provides the convenience of mobile payment and checkout on the same platform, so users don’t have to go browsing between pages and apps to complete their purchases.
| The main goal of social commerce is to speed up the transaction process and increase convenience for online shoppers. |
2. BUILD CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIPS
Apart from customer experience, it is the brand’s responsibility to pay attention to its audience.
How customers react and engage with a brand on social commerce platforms helps determine what strategies work and which ones don’t.
Smaller businesses can start experimenting with a focus group to narrow down their target market.
It can be categorized into different segmentations like demographics, psychographics, behavioral and geographic groups. (Read this article to learn more about marketing for MSMEs.)
Social commerce platforms are designed to be personalized, where customers can interact with brands through direct engagement.
Instead of speaking to your audience in general, your customers feel that you are communicating to them one-on-one.
| This approach of catering to customers improves the brand image and fosters customer loyalty — retaining more customers in the long run — compared to earlier approaches to digital marketing and social strategies. |
3. CONSTANT GROWTH EVERYWHERE
There are over 4 billion people on social media today, a number that continues to increase every day in terms of users and time spent online.
For businesses located in the social media capital of the world, adopting social commerce technology is an upgrade from a basic online presence.
As more people use smartphones versus desktops worldwide — apps and websites are accessed on mobile more frequently.
| Social commerce grows your business quantity with a global market reach and quality in terms of future-proofing the techie generation (millennials and Gen-Zs). |
4. IMPROVE SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION (SEO) RANKINGS
Notice how this point is a domino effect of the previous benefits we mentioned.
When brands adopt social commerce to improve customer experience, there will be an increase in traffic rooted in customers engaging with them.
And when brands are actively interacting with their customers, the number of transactions is also bound to grow.
| What social commerce does for a brand’s SEO is raise their “trust factor” so they appear more on search results when people look for them online. |
Brands can further improve their rankings by consistently marketing and targeting keywords that fit their business type and reaching out to a specific audience.
5. MULTIPLY SALES AND PROFITS
For the cherry on top, social commerce is an added sales channel for businesses to make more money online.
Like we have mentioned before, social commerce isn’t for everyone. Putting all your eggs in one basket (or one channel) might not work out well for some brands.
That’s why we suggest giving it a shot to see whether it will be suitable or not.
| According to our research, social commerce platforms have a higher average in order value and repeat orders, compared to selling on regular social media pages and listing marketplaces. |
Product reviews and customer testimonials are more reliable because these are social proof from actual people who used the platforms and purchased from brands directly.
Brands in social commerce can also collect business metrics and insights that are more accurate because they come directly from the customers.
Further reading:
CONCLUSION
And that’s just FIVE right-off-the-bat social commerce benefits for brands with an online store.
It’s so easy to get started when you work with the pros!
Here’s a summary of the points we shared in this article to help you remember:
- Enhanced Customer Experience
- Build Customer Relationships
- Constant Growth Everywhere
- Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Rankings
- Multiply Sales And Profits
At Prosperna, it’s our mission to continue empowering Philippine MSMEs in growing their businesses with the help of eCommerce software technology.
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