It’s no secret: eCommerce is reshaping online social shopping trends.

With the rise of eCommerce and social media, there’s been a major push towards social commerce, where retailers and social networks are partnering to offer consumers a more convenient online shopping experience.

The value of social advertising

The ability to target a bespoke audience, and at the times of day they are most active online, means advertising on social media – and particularly on Facebook – often resonates better than traditional outreach. As consumers become increasingly savvy, this targeting becomes ever more crucial.

In many cases, paid social ads are the only way to generate a return on investment from social. Your organic content often isn’t even seen by your community. On average, organic tweets now only reach around 10 per cent of followers. A Facebook page with over a million likes only averages around a 2.27 per cent organic engagement rate.

What makes a successful social ad campaign?

Several factors go into building a social advertising campaign to help you drive sales via social:

Strategy – Making sure you adopt a strategic approach to paid social media is crucial. Without it, you could risk incorrect targeting or wasted budget. A strategic approach should involve defining your demographic and scaling a paid social strategy that will convert your audience, while considering how to market your product and what the sales funnel looks like to ensure success.

Budget – Without stating the obvious, marketing investment is the first step to supercharging your social commerce campaign. Audience size and budget allocation are key considerations at this stage of the process.

Expertise – Social advertising should be a dedicated role, rather than an afterthought. Building successful campaigns is an iterative approach – you need to grow your understanding of what works well for your audience in terms of messaging, imagery, time of post, and many more factors.

Patience – Don’t focus too heavily on your bottom line and fail to give the strategy the time it needs to come to fruition. Growing an audience for any brand is critical, and making sure you strike the right balance with new audience acquisition could make all the difference.