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The Rise of Social Commerce: How Brands Can Leverage Social Media to Drive Sales

Person holding a phone, engaging in social commerce as it drives sales

Social media has become an essential marketing tool for growing your business’ reach and reputation. However, another one of social media’s goals, like other marketing, is to convert that attention into sales. One of the best tools for accomplishing that is ‘Social Commerce’, where products are sold directly on social media. We’ll explain what social commerce is and how you can leverage social media to drive sales.

What is Social Commerce?

Social commerce is selling products directly through a social media platform. Product discovery, selection, and checkout all occur on the platform rather than redirecting individuals to your own store. It’s a service that is now available on most major social media platforms, including Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok. For all three, you create product listings that appear in a shop on your account. Users can then browse and order products directly through the app. In exchange for offering the service, the platform takes a percentage of the sale as a fee. 

The Benefits of Social Commerce

Social commerce is different from eCommerce which happens on a business’ own dedicated website or online store. As a result, you have slightly less control over the presentation, and it requires creating a store dedicated to the platform. However, there are clear benefits to using social commerce to drive sales. 

People Use Social Media to Shop

Over 80% of users research products using social media and nearly half of both Millennials and Gen Z are already making purchases on social media. Social commerce immediately drives sales because you provide a shopping experience for these many users precisely when they are actively searching for or considering products. 

A Seamless Shopping Experience

That immediacy and convenience also translate into an effective shopping experience that helps further drive sales. Social commerce provides the opportunity for a potential customer to immediately purchase upon discovering a product they like. This creates a more streamlined shopping experience. Rather than leaving the app, navigating to the product on your digital store, adding it to their cart, and filling in their information to complete their purchase, the user can immediately checkout and continue their browsing. The eCommerce checkout can be a moment where carts are abandoned and sales lost. The speedy and seamless shopping experience of social commerce means there are fewer chances to lose the customer’s attention and that purchase.

A More Thorough Representation of Your Business on Social

Another benefit of social commerce is that you can better showcase the products that your company provides on social media. You could make posts for every product you sell, and you should highlight new items, but these inherently move down the feed as time progresses. Those ever-drifting posts aren’t an effective way to continuously show off your entire catalogue. Instead, the dedicated storefront of a social commerce space on your profile allows social media users to conveniently get a better sense of your products and services without needing to leave the app. 

Shopping That Reaches Your Audience

Social media platforms have an incredible amount of user data at their disposal. With social commerce, you can use that data to promote specific products to those whom the platform knows to have certain interests. Because of the wealth of data available, these product suggestions can be highly specific. For example, one product might suit a certain demographic like men in their 40s, while another suits young adult women. Each can be selectively targeted on social commerce to users in those demographics. Specific product suggestions of this specificity on your own eCommerce store need a shopping history and will take time to generate. Social commerce allows you to specifically tailor such suggestions and promotions from the start.

Social Commerce Isn’t the End of eCommerce

Social commerce has clear benefits for driving sales, but it doesn’t replace eCommerce and having a dedicated digital store and website. It’s an addition and effective supplement to your eCommerce strategy. Ultimately, the goal is to drive sales away from social media platforms, which take a 2-5% cut, to shopping and browsing on your own digital storefront. There customers can browse and better familiarize themselves with your products in a space that is exclusively dedicated to them. Social commerce’s strength is in getting new customers as they are generally browsing and securing that initial sale. That sale then converts someone into a dedicated customer when they understand the quality of your products. 

Making the Most of Social Commerce

Social commerce’s ability to convert and drive sales lies in the shopping convenience it creates for those actively browsing. It’s a valuable tool for attracting and recapturing dedicated customers. If you think social commerce is part of your next social media strategy, contact us at Rosewood. We’ll be happy to help you expand your eCommerce horizons. 

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Amazon Vine Voice Reviews: A Tool for Improving Your Product’s Reach and Reputation

Amazon Vine Voice Reviews on a laptop and phone.

When you’ve hummed and hawed over that next purchase on Amazon, you have probably perused the reviews and come upon an Amazon Vine Voice badge.  Those reviews come from certain individuals who are part of the Amazon Vine program, an invitation-only review program. This program helps small businesses get verified reviews for their products when they have yet to receive many from customers. It also, however, comes with certain caveats. We’ll explain the details of what Amazon Vine is, what are some of its limitations, and why you might benefit from it.

What is Amazon Vine?

Amazon Vine is a program where reviewers called Vine Voices can receive free products to write reviews for the product pages that express their “unbiased opinions – positive, neutral or negative.” It originally began in 2007 as monthly emails that featured product reviews. By 2011, as Amazon’s inventory and number of Voices grew, the emails became unwieldy, and one could feature over 400 reviews. As a result, the program was overhauled in 2016 to its current form, where reviews became featured on the individual product page above other reviews with a prominent “Vine Voice” badge.

Who are the Vine Voices?

Anyone can become a Vine Voice, the unpaid reviewers of Amazon Vine. However, they first need to be invited to the program by Amazon. That invitation only comes after someone consistently leaves fair and detailed reviews about the products they purchase. After enough reviews have been written and rated highly by other users, Amazon will invite that account to become a voice for the Vine platform. Similarly, Amazon regularly removes Voices who stop writing reviews or break their terms of agreement, although it is not always apparent to these reviewers why they lose access.

Once they join the platform, Vine Voices can access a special product feed on Amazon of items targeted towards their interests that need reviews. The products offered have little to no reviews; this ensures Vine Voices are focused on vetting less popular or well-known products. Any of the products they request are shipped to them for free with the requirement that they use it and write a detailed review. Those reviews are then featured on the product page above all other users.

Whose Products Can be Reviewed on Amazon Vine?

Since 2019, third-party sellers have been able to enter their products into the Amazon Vine system to receive reviews from Vine Voices. To enroll as a seller in Amazon Vine you must pay a $200 enrollment fee and be a registered seller. Once in the service, you may offer your products for review provided that the item:

  • Has less than 30 reviews
  • Has already launched and is available for purchase
  • Is an FBA (fulfilled by Amazon) offer with the “New” condition
  • Is not an “adult” item
  • Has available inventory
  • Its listing has an image and description

So long as it meets all those criteria, the product can be offered to Amazon Voices for free so that they will write a review.

What are the Benefits of Amazon Vine?

Amazon Vine can be beneficial to smaller companies who offer their products through Amazon because they can provide less popular products with reviews, which are central to online shopping. 93% of customers state that reviews impact their purchase decisions, and studies have found that a product is up to 270% more likelyto be purchased if it has at least 5 reviews. Furthermore, on Amazon, positively reviewed products are given priority in product feeds and searches. 

Therefore, Vine helps small businesses get those reviews because it only offers products with a few reviews for Voices to review. If your products are high quality, you can expect good reviews. Those reviews are extra valuable because they are verified and vetted. The general probability of a purchase increases by 15% if a review is a verified purchase. That verification along with the priority display and status of a Vine review can be only more convincing.

What are the Limitations of Amazon Vine?

Vine and Voices can be an excellent way to secure reviews and reach on Amazon, but there are a few caveats to the program. There is no guarantee that a Vine Voice will request your product or provide you with a stellar review. The reviews are also nominally anonymous because Amazon does not require Voices to use their real name. However, there’s little incentive for a Voice to maliciously leave a false review; it is a breach of the program. If Amazon finds their review misleading, such as by a seller’s appeal, the review will be erased and the Voice’s membership revoked. Yes, that anonymity can undermine their credibility and they are less recognizable compared to a product review from a well-known influencer.

Some other factors to consider are the program’s cost. There are no payments besides the initial fee. However, products must be provided for free to incentivize the otherwise uncompensated Voices to write reviews. That isn’t necessarily unusual for professional reviews. Products are typically ‘gifted’ to influencers and professional critics for their publicized and expert opinions, but Voices also aren’t professional reviewers, nor experts, which can limit the quality of their reviews. Furthermore, if your products are expensive, large, or heavy, it will inherently mean a higher investment to ship free products for these reviews. This can make Vine better suited towards lower-priced items that sell more frequently. That positive attention can get your brand wider recognition on Amazon, leading to potential sales and natural customer reviews of those big-ticket products.

Growing Vines and Settling Roots

Hopefully, you now have a good sense of what Amazon Vine and Voices are, along with the benefits and limitations of the program for small businesses. If you’re interested in adding your products to Amazon Vine or discovering other methods to expand your store’s reach, be sure to contact Rosewood Marketing. We will be happy to strategize and discuss various options in both e-commerce design and marketing.

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Who Are Your Customers? Targeting A Customer Persona

A shop owner interacting with a customer.

Your marketing is essential to your business’ growth, but it needs to be focused. You can cast a wide net to get a few catches of the many fish in the marketing sea. That can be a functional strategy in some circumstances, but it is far more efficient and effective to aim your marketing towards certain target groups interested in your business’ products and services. To determine these targets, marketers create customer personas, which significantly improve the performance of all your ads. Targeted marketing is up to 5.3 times more effective for increasing click-through rates, nearly 40% of people prefer targeted ads, and targeted ads have shown to increase brand searches by 800%! Along with those conversions, these results will only increase your ROI even more, since you will spend less on target ads than on widescale, untargeted marketing. This guide will explain what customer personas are, how to create them, and how to use them in your marketing.

What are Customer Personas?

A customer persona is an imaginary person defined by certain demographics and characteristics of a key member of your current or desired target audience. Qualities that can define a customer persona are their interests, profession, finances, age, gender, language, locality, etc. These qualities need to be specific enough to define a subgroup of an audience, but also broad enough to reflect more than just one individual. Typically, a business will have multiple customer personas within its whole audience.

How to Define Your Customer Personas

To create and define your target personas, you will need to some research about your business’ current and/or desired audience. If you have been running your business for a few years, you should already have some familiarity with your business’ target(s). If you are already using Google and Meta for your advertising, these platforms collect valuable information about their users. They will provide you with a wide set of analytics about your business’ advertising and search to help generate target personas. There are numerous other research methods for determining target personas, including surveys, interviews, observing industry trends, and analyzing your competitors and their target audiences.

Don’t Forget About a Persona’s Role

An important aspect of these personas is their role. Certain individuals are more likely to make purchases based on certain roles in their personal lives. For example, Old Spice’s series of “Hello Ladies” advertisements that began in 2010 were a result of the deodorant company determining a major target audience of women customers who purchased deodorant for their male partners. While Old Spice’s primary audience consisted of men with the role of users, these women had the purchasing role that made them a critical target and essential to the company’s rebranding this past decade.

These roles can be more difficult to determine than the raw demographics provided to you by various marketing platforms and tools. They rely on observing and analyzing your customers’ behaviour. However, they can prove invaluable for understanding and strategizing around the purchasing power and decisions of a target customer.

How to Use Your Customer Personas

Customer personas will allow you to plan and specifically strategize any focused marketing campaign. Specific products or services of your business may not appeal to your entire audience, so knowing your business’ targets will allow you to properly focus on individual marketing campaigns. For example, PPC advertising platforms like Google Ads and Meta will allow you to set targets for each ad campaign. By defining your customer personas, you will be able to appropriately target each one of these ads. 

You will similarly use these personas in your social media marketing, to strategize which posts will best attract engagement. An important strategizing factor is customer personas’ preferred platforms. Certain targets may be specific to one platform for your digital marketing such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. Any marketing on these platforms should be targeted toward the interests of that specific customer persona. 

The Importance of Refining and Redefining Your Customer Personas

Defining and targeting customer personas is not simply a one-and-done deal. You should regularly refine them as you receive more data and complete more research. This refinement will help you determine whom to exclude from your customer personas. For example, women might be a general target audience, but you may find that those under the age of 20 or those over the age of 60 are not typically your customers. This kind of information refines your business’ customer personas to be more accurate targets.

You will also need to redefine your target and customer personas as both your business and audience naturally change over time. To come back to the Old Spice example, the company is currently again retargeting its marketing as they have determined new younger customer personas. This continuous research is also important for developing and strategizing your business’ brand, products, and services. It’s not enough to merely know your audience, you need to keep understanding them.

Keep Your Eye on the Target

Creating and maintaining customer personas is essential to effective marketing and business strategizing. Knowing the subgroups of your audience will allow you to more directly communicate with them and grow your business’ reach among these individuals. It will also ensure your business isn’t pursuing audience dead ends. If you need help creating, finding, or redefining your target audience and customer personas, contact Rosewood’s digital marketing team. They’ll help you get and keep your eyes on the target.

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