How to Enrich Social Media Marketing for B2C

The ever-advanced globalized era had urged the businesses to effectively market their products and services in order to overrun their counterparts.

However, the incorporation of digitalization has made those conventional marketing strategies obsolete.

To a greater extent, this development has evolved digital marketing for B2C organizations to showcase their products and to allure the target audience over several digital platforms.

But Why Social Media Marketing?

The possession of the users’ volume for over 3.5 billion, has been a concrete reason as to why marketers have inclined towards embracing social media as a competent marketing platform.

Image Source: WeAreSocial 

Even though committed social marketing efforts will aid in generating exceptional outcomes; also, conceding a dedicated service experience could lead 71% of the happy consumers to further recommend the brand.

While, in my perception, merely setting up a Social Media Campaign may not dispense desired results.

Thereby, effectively leveraging the social media platform is essential for a higher ROI and an enhanced volume of B2C sales leads, which will be discussed in the subsequent sections.

Inculcate these social media marketing tactics for generating B2C sales leads:

1. Elevate Customer Experience by Artificial Intelligence

Customer Experience (CX) is nothing, but an insight of the buyers about how the company treats them.

CX holds the potential to directly influence the purchasing behavior of the customers. 

Customer Experience is, as well, considered as a prime contributing factor in building loyalty among prestigious shoppers.

Findings from the 2019 State of Customer Journey Management and CX Measurement report, is a paragon for this, which states that the importance of CX is backed up by 87% of marketers. 

 

On the contrary, bad customer experience could also cost you future sales. 

Just imagine!

Losing one-fifth to one-third of your customers in a single day…    Isn’t it frightening? 

The PWC survey, for instance, had shown that owing to the bad customer experience, customers stop interacting even with their loved brand.

The above instances are quite noteworthy, isn’t it?

But, why is CX imperative for B2C and how to enhance it?

Customer Experience is crucial for the businesses to:

• Improve Customer retention
• Improve customer satisfaction
• Increase cross-selling and up-selling 

Execute it by making robust AI, operable.

Since artificial intelligence is assisting the users in almost every sphere, social media marketing is not any exception though.

According to the latest State of Marketing Report, 84% of marketers are using AI, which is 29% up than in 2018. Let’s dig deeper to analyze the features of AI for Customer Experience:

• Fulfilling Customers’ Immediacy

A majority of the consumers desire to have rapid responses from the businesses. Considering this fact, the marketers are now relying on Social Chatbots in order to deal with this immediacy.

Manual follow-ups are certainly a time-consuming process, which might impulse a prospect lead to bounce out of the sales funnel.

Hence, a lot of time and resources could be saved merely by embracing the chatbots over manual workflows.

A study by Mimi_An from Hubspot revealed that 40% of the customers don’t care whether they are interacting with a bot or a human, as long as they are getting assisted for the help, they actually seek.

• Social Insights with Deeper Details

AI possesses the potential to find out the actionable insights from social posts at scale. AI automatically labels various attributes of the posts according to your preference, which helps the marketers to plan for future marketing actions so as to convert the prospects into final sales.

Now, after retaining an optimum customer experience, marketers should draw up their attention towards extensive customer reach.

Let us find out, how! 

2. Encompass Paid Social Media Advertisements

Owing to the massive volume of rivals across the social media platforms, the possibility of attaining organic reach is likely minimal.

As a consequence, B2C marketers are embracing the paid media as their prime aspect of social media marketing. Is paid social media worth it?

According to the stats, 14 -17% of the users get converted by paid Ads, while another 25% responds by visiting the store or the website after watching the ad.

Multiple benefits associated with the paid social media ads are worth mentioning here:

• Lowest CPM (Cost Per Mile)

One of the chief advantages of Social Media ads is the lowest CPM rates, which technically, is the cost required to reach 1000 people.

In contrast to the conventional ads; the marketers, on the social media platform, merely have to allocate less than $3 to reach a 1000 targeted audience.

Source

By analyzing the above graph, it is certain that even if the social ads get you the same number of sales as the traditional ads, yet lower ad pricings will save you a lot of funds.

• Reaching Targeted Audience

Unlike conventional ads, paid social media renders the option to the marketers for choosing their targeted audience. This approach ensures the ad to reach ideal customers that collectively enhance the overall efficacy of the advertising campaign.

Facebook ads, for example, allow the marketer to choose the appropriate demographics to filter the target audience such as location, age, gender, language, and so forth.

B2C marketers could even be more specific with the details such as relationship status and individuals’ interests.

Despite Facebook, other social media platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, and Linkedin also have the option to choose the target audience.

• Measurable Outcomes 

Another prominent aspect of social advertisements is having measurable campaign results.

This feature enables marketers to use real-time data to take necessary actions or realign the campaign, if necessary. 

The ad analytics also assist the B2C marketers to identify the root cause, in case, the advertisement has been unable to provide satisfactory results. Marketers could readjust the campaigns to convert the failed campaign into a successful one.

3. Promote User-Generated-Content (UGC)

User-Generated Content is a part of social media custom content strategy, which specifically encourages the customers to share the individual experience with a brand.

The marketers, then, utilize the customer’s experience to generate brand awareness and to create a buzz over several digital media platforms. 

The UGC content could be in any form such as video, pictures, memes, or texts.

Does UGC hold enough potential?  ...I’m glad you asked! Indeed it does!

From a consumer’s perspective, the user-generated content is more appealing.

As the findings from Stackla survey depicts that consumers are 2.4 times in favor of the notion that the UGC tends to be authentic in contrast to the content created by the brand.

Furthermore, a survey conducted by TINTUP has revealed that:

• 73% of marketing professionals claimed that UGC adds authenticity to their marketing. 
• 48% of marketing professionals believe that UGC content helps in humanizing their marketing.
• 34% of TINT users and 45% of marketing professionals confessed that UGC helps increase key social media KPIs.

The above-mentioned data is fair enough to consider UGC as one of the optimal mediums for B2C brands to dramatically market their products. But how to proceed appropriately?

A digitally-native eminent beauty brand Glossier is a perfect example here; which features the photos of its consumers for the lately launched products, over Instagram.

A perfect strategy adopted by the brand to create a pre-launch hype around the Bubblewrap plumping cream is a paragon for utilizing UGC to enrich the brand awareness among the target audience.

Once you’ve created a substantial ‘brand buzz’ among the target audience, now it’s time to uniquely engage the prospects.

4. Engage Customers in Contests or Giveaways 

A decline in organic reach and customer engagements have insisted the marketers for being punctilious about social media contests.

Organizing a social media contest or giveaway turned out to be an optimum approach for the brands because it amplifies the reach for their products and services. 

Moreover, the process merely necessitates a decimated promotional budget, while enriching the customer engagement volume.

But before jumping onto the ‘’how’’, first, let’s cover ‘’why’’!

Contests could aid in:

• Brand building 
• Building a relevant email list
• Fostering customers engagements 
• Generating brand awareness

To exemplify, the results of the Tailwind study over 60,000 Instagram posts are worth noticing, which revealed that:

• Instagram contest or survey can attain a 70% faster brand followers growth than not hosting a contest at all.
• Of all the posts with 1000+ comments, 91% of them were the contest posts.
• More engagement in terms of likes and comments, 3.5x and 64x respectively. 

How to Host a Fortunate Contest

Initiate the plan by determining appropriate goals and budget, be it for boosting brands or build an email list, or increasing community engagements. 

After deciding the goals and budget, the next crucial aspect is to choose an alluring giveaway prize, which is a prime contributing factor to attract more and more participants. The next thing to be structured is the entry requirements, which should be selected pertaining to the contest goals.

Since, determining the winner announcement date is crucial in order to boost the excitement, select the date based on the volume of your followers’.

Everything set?

Now, it’s time to promote the contest and get engaged with the participants. Once the contest is over, certainly it’s needless to suggest running the analytics on social engagement for analyzing the ROI.

For our esteemed readers, as a reference, I am hereby citing a case study of an Instagram giveaway, hosted by Coconut Bowls.

The goal of the contest was to:

• Generate emails
• Social awareness
• Increase engagements
• Enrich sales of this unique product 

The giveaway was able to fetch exceptional outcomes:

• New emails collected = 41840
• Pageview on the giveaway = 223594
• Subscribe to the @coconutbowls YouTube channel = 6914
• Like + Tag 3 friends on this Instagram post = 7136
• Follow @coconutbowls on Instagram = 11353
• Follow @veganbowls on Instagram = 10861
• Upload a video of you using your coconut bowl = 126
• Post a photo of you and your bowl on Instagram = 269
• Buy our Best Selling Coco combo = 393
• Like @coconutbowls on Facebook = 8579
• Share this Instagram Post to your feed = 4502
• Like, Comment & Share this Facebook post = 3900
• Share your referral link on Facebook = 5049

That was an astonishing campaign run by Coconut Bowls, which indeed have yielded amazing results.

Have You Sorted Out Your Social Media Marketing Strategy for B2C?

I hope this guide has served you with the exceptional tactics to make perfect use of social media marketing to generate plentiful B2C sales leads, along with the enhancement of the overall brand engagements over the social media platforms.