In 2023, approximately 4.9 billion people used social media worldwide, and this number is expected to reach around 5.85 billion users by 2027. With billions of consumers now within reach of companies through social media platforms, brands have unprecedented opportunities to connect, engage, and build lasting relationships with their customers. Companies can no longer rely simply on traditional advertising methods; instead, they must embrace the dynamic and interactive nature of social commerce to establish strong relationships with their target audience.
The two main pillars of user engagement in social commerce are building strong user communities and fostering high levels of interaction. These factors provide new avenues for marketing.
User Communities: Building and nurturing communities around your brand fosters loyalty and encourages interaction among users. These communities become powerful advocates for your products or services.
High Interaction Levels: Brands that actively engage with their audience—whether through content, conversations, or campaigns—create lasting impressions and drive brand affinity. Brands can now evolve beyond legacy advertising strategies on individual social media platforms!
Evolving Marketing Strategies
To succeed in this highly competitive social commerce landscape, organizations must adopt a holistic approach across all aspects of marketing.
- Organic Reach: Leveraging organic reach ensures that your content reaches a wider audience without relying solely on paid advertising.
- Media Mix Modeling: Balancing different media channels optimizes your marketing efforts and maximizes impact.
- Awareness and Conversion: Crafting campaigns that raise awareness while driving conversions is essential for sustained growth.
- Customer Feedback: Listening to your audience and incorporating their feedback helps refine your strategies.
Users are active across multiple platforms, with the average person spreading their digital footprint across six to seven platforms each month. This highlights the importance of a multi-platform approach in social media marketing. Organizations that use a holistic approach will have opportunities to come out ahead in a highly competitive environment that has dramatically increased the reach for all brands.
The Rise of Influencers
➡️ Influencers as Brand Ambassadors:
72% of Gen Z and Millennials follow influencers on social media platforms. Their influence in shaping consumer behavior and brand perception cannot be ignored.
Across the social media landscape, influencers have swiftly become the new brand ambassadors for companies. Their ability to create engaging content, leverage short-form formats, and drive virality allows even resource-constrained brands to compete effectively with larger counterparts.
Take TikTok, for instance—a platform teeming with influencers who utilize short-form content to amplify their reach. Brands recognize this potential and increasingly prioritize authentic, long-term relationships with influencers over one-off collaborations.
➡️ Paid Partnerships and Scaling Impact:
Paid partnerships with influencers offer a powerful avenue for brands to tap into their broad reach. These collaborations allow brands to access influencer audiences that align with their target demographics.
Paid partnerships are an effective way to recruit influencers with a broad reach. Choosing the right influencers—those who genuinely resonate with the brand’s target audience—is crucial for the success of these partnerships.
Generative artificial intelligence (AI) also allows for scaling influencer impact by creating avatar personas that resemble the creator, assisting in creating scenarios and videos without using too much energy and time from the creator. However, transparency is critical to maintaining consumers’ trust by ensuring they are informed about whether content is generated or enhanced using AI.
Unified brand strategy
➡️ Maintaining a unified message across multiple influencers is vital, especially across various platforms. Ensuring brand safety and suitability is critical when working with influencers. There is a risk of partnering with a brand ambassador who has shared controversial social or political views that can damage a brand’s reputation and does not align with the brand’s core values and positioning.
➡️ A notable example of a successful campaign leveraging new opportunities with social media is Samsonite’s “Take What’s Yours” campaign. Samsonite leveraged the familiar and relatable predicament of not taking enough paid time off (PTO) and experiencing burnout. Dozens of TikTok and Instagram influencers created content featuring Samsonite luggage with the #TakeWhatsYours hashtag. Following the campaign, new visitors to the Samsonite website rose by 97 percent, brand searches increased by 78 percent, and sales grew significantly.
➡️ User engagement has spawned new opportunities using various techniques. Live video shopping, augmented reality (AR), user communities, and new product discovery methods have transformed the online shopping experience. AR allows consumers to use cutting-edge technologies, like AR glasses, to view a product in their space before making a purchase. This is useful for items such as furniture and clothing. Innovative retailers have taken advantage of this emerging technology to great effect.
➡️ Research shows that authentic content performs far better than curated content. A successful case is how GoPro encourages its community of adventure enthusiasts to post their original content along with hashtag campaigns and its impactful GoPro Awards program, which includes unique and inspiring challenges. The most successful of these is the Million Dollar Challenge, which moved users to submit 43,000 videos last year alone. The content GoPro created from these submissions resulted in thousands of new impressions across its social media platforms.
Measure, refine, repeat: Elevating Social Commerce Strategies
➡️ The final pillar of a brand’s social media strategy is the effective use of data analytics. Three fundamental aspects are recommended: viewer counts, content, and influencers.
- Beyond just tracking the number of viewers on posts, it is effective to collect and analyze the metrics on the pipeline of discovery to consideration to purchase.
- Brands can also segment their audience into different groups and perform sentiment analysis to determine which products resonate with which groups.
- When it comes to content, think beyond frequency. Consider the types of content shared. Metrics like clickthrough rate, new-to-brand engagement, and purchase rate can help understand which strategies are effective. Apply these insights not only to your content but also to your brand’s influencers.
➡️ Brands that take advantage of emerging trends and new technologies in social media marketing have a competitive edge over those relying on legacy approaches.
By using creativity and initiative to work with influencers and organic users, create viral trends, and use generative AI ethically, the potential for skyrocketing user engagement becomes more likely. By diligently deploying data analytics, brands gain valuable insights into their audience’s preferences and behaviors, allowing for more targeted and effective marketing strategies.
Ultimately, the brands that remain adaptable and innovative in their social commerce strategies will be the ones to lead the market and foster lasting connections with their customers.
