Category: Marketing

Social media has become an indispensable tool for businesses in today’s digital age. You need it to connect with your target audience, boost your brand’s visibility, and drive sales.

But most businesses and even beginner marketers don’t fully understand how to use social media for ecommerce.

If you’re one of them, we’ve got you covered.

Whether you’re new to social media or looking to enhance your existing social media strategy for ecommerce, this blog is here to help.

We’ve compiled ten effective social media ecommerce strategies that can propel your brand to new heights. So, grab your favorite snack, sit back, and get ready to unlock the potential of social media for your ecommerce business.

Let’s get started!

What is Ecommerce Social Media Marketing?

Ecommerce social media marketing refers to the strategic use of social media platforms to promote, sell, engage, and support customers in the context of ecommerce.

Some of the most common ways brands use social media for ecommerce marketing include:

• Setting up online shops and selling products directly on social platforms (this is known as social commerce)
• Promoting brands on social media accounts and driving traffic to online stores (ecommerce websites)
• Replying to customer queries and engaging with potential customers to build trust
• Offering customer support before and after sales
• Using customer insights and data to revamp marketing strategies

But why do brands do all of this? What’s the benefit of having a social media presence? Let’s try to understand.

What Are the Benefits of Using Social Media for Ecommerce?

Social media is a game-changer for ecommerce businesses, offering a wide array of benefits, such as:

1. Increasing Website Traffic & Generating Leads
2. To Build Brand Awareness
3. Building Customer Loyalty & Trust
4. Acquiring New Customers
5. Creating Opportunities for User-Generated Content (UGC)
6. Improving Customer Service
7. Engaging with Target Audiences in Real-Time
8. Enhancing SEO Efforts & Search Rankings

Fact: Did you know that online stores leveraging social media networks drive 32% more sales than those that don’t? (WPForms)

This stat alone should get you excited about crafting an effective social media strategy for your ecommerce business!

So, now that you know what ecommerce social media marketing is and the benefits it offers let’s look at how to use it.

10 Powerful Social Media Ecommerce Strategies

Here are ten powerful social media ecommerce strategies you can employ to drive sales for your brand:

1. Set Clear Goals

Setting clear and measurable goals should be the first step in your social media ecommerce strategy. Goals will provide you with direction, help measure success, and hold you accountable.

But what kind of goals should you set?

The most common ones can be:

• Drive Sales on Your Social Profile
• Drive Traffic to Your Ecommerce Store
• Get More Customer Queries/Leads

Other than these, you might want people to subscribe to your newsletter or…

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I didn’t think it was a big deal. We assumed these were typical results for those who focused and did the work.

The gaping mouths and the bulging eyes were our first clues. My next clue should have been when one podcaster told me he gets 50 to 100 pitches a week and he chose ours. Finally, reality set in like a bolt of lightning striking fifty feet in front of me. The words still rumble in my head like fading thunder echoing through the sky:

“I’ve never known anyone who booked 53 podcasts in two months.” – Ryan Deiss

When Ryan said that from the stage at the M3 Mastermind, I finally realized my wife had done something extraordinary. This was no surprise.

She is an amazing woman. Anyone who read her CaringBridge journal in 2021 already knows that. TLDR: The doctors gave up on me and told her to “pull the plug.” She didn’t. She prevailed. I’m alive.

Craig & Karen Andrews, December 2021

So, in March of 2023 I asked her to come to my rescue again. This time it was much lower stakes. I asked her to get me booked on podcasts.

Why Pursue Being a Podcast Guest?

Guesting on podcasts is a way to expand your own audience. According to ListenNotes, there are more than three million podcasts. The podcast hosts did the time consuming work of building their audience. And as a podcast guest, you get nearly effortless access to that audience.

Guest interviews are a great way to build your authority. Almost every host launches the podcast episode talking about how awesome you are. Their audience trusts them… and now their audience – the podcast listeners – trust you.

Your guest podcast interview will drive business and opportunities. Our 90-day rolling pipeline report tells that story best. “FTO Deals”, our discovery call metric, is up 700% compared to the prior 90-days when we weren’t guesting on podcasts.

“FTOs Sold” means we closed a new client. That’s up 400% compared to the prior 90-days. And we expect that to rise further because most of the discovery calls haven’t happened yet.

Fill your pipeline by being a podcast guest

Our podcast focus started within this 90-day view. Most of the podcast episodes are scheduled to go live in the next couple of months. And yet we’re seeing triple-digit 90-on-90 growth on our most important metrics.

Look closer and you’ll see another hidden nugget. Double-digit lead growth drove triple-digit opportunity and sales growth. That’s what authority does for you.

If you’re running out of ways to unleash an instant triple-digit firehose on your business, then read on. I’ll show you how we did it.

How to Get on a Podcast: How it Started

Be careful when you curse adversity…

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If you are reading this article, chances are that you know something about Ryan Deiss and his Customer Value Journey. Ryan literally built a marketing education empire on the concept of this framework.

It’s so important to the DigitalMarketer community that he even has the original napkin version framed like a relic to be viewed like the Mona Lisa.

My name is James Bullis. I am a Marketing Technologist / Webmaster with over 25 years in the industry.
I remember when I first learned about this concept around 15 years ago.

It was originally called Customer Value Optimization and had an entirely different structure. I’m a web designer and when I started working in this industry I started out in marketing.

When I became a web designer, I didn’t understand that a business web design is a part of a business’
marketing plan. After learning more about marketing, I realized how I could put these concepts into the website and use them to create a better website experience for my customers’ website visitors.

Then the along came the Customer Value Journey (CVJ) which was a fundamental upgrade and made the entire foundational framework make more sense. It essentially closed the loop and created an endless flywheel of customers if applied correctly.

It really played well in helping to understand how a business website should be laid out so that the traffic could be funneled through the Customer Value Journey.

The CVJ is not the only part of this foundational framework. It is usually accompanied by an Ideal Client Avatar and the Before & After exercise. Essentially, you need to understand who you want to help and be able to empathize with them to discover how you can bring value by easing their pain.

But there is a real problem when it comes to the CVJ that I have noticed over the years. It seems to me that no one will sit down and do it.

Do I know this for a fact? No. But, I can guess with some authority that most people who have learned this framework skip over it in practice.

This became obvious to me some years ago inside of DigitalMarketer Engage – the Facebook group of people who have spent some time and money with DigitalMarketer to engage with other members to talk about the frameworks, get advice, and learn from each other.

You could always tell when a fresh wave of members would join because the same questions were asked repeatedly.

These were questions that could simply be answered if they took the time to go through the process of completing these exercises for each new campaign or business that they started to work on as marketers.

I don’t know why people skip over these foundational steps. The framework itself along with the worksheets probably make…

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The distinction between content marketing and content strategy is subtle because the two concepts work together. Once you figure it out, you can use them as the one-two punch to help grow your brand. 

This post explains content marketing and content strategy and gives advice for using both to benefit your business.

The Difference Between Content Marketing vs. Content Strategy

Content strategy is your master plan to drive business goals with content. It focuses on the big-picture tasks that help you meet your customers’ needs and achieve your business objectives.

Content marketing is a group of tactics or activities you use to enact your content strategy. It’s the creation and distribution of content that helps your audience solve problems and lead better lives. Even though you may not actively try to sell with all content marketing, the free information you provide will eventually help you attract and convert your target audience to drive business growth.

The objectives, approaches, and outcomes differ for content strategy vs. content marketing. 

Objectives

Content strategy seeks to document the role content will play in your business goals. It gives content marketing efforts direction, cohesion, and meaning. 

Content marketing revolves around creating brand awareness, generating leads, and capturing demand by transforming ideas into content assets and sharing them.

Approaches

Content marketing assembles your marketing resources to create and distribute content assets across relevant channels to build a brand’s presence. It also includes measuring data to alter content campaigns where necessary.

Content strategists determine the content marketing tactics will be most meaningful for your business objectives. They handle all the backend of content from pre-production (like research, content audit, and content guidelines) to production (like content creation, distribution processes, and tools) and post-production (promotion, evaluation, and analysis).

Outcomes

Content marketing leads to increased brand traffic, authority, trust, lead generation, conversion, and loyalty.

Content strategy produces content marketing systems that position a brand as the solution to customers’ needs.

How Content Strategy and Content Marketing Intersect

Despite being different, content strategy and content marketing work together. They are two sides of the same coin.

Strategy is the Foundation for Marketing Practices

Content strategy helps you decide why and how you want to create content. So, content marketing success depends on your strategy.

Content marketing is the process of putting your content strategy to work. It’s creating, distributing, and measuring the success of the content according to the content strategy. So, your content marketing efforts rely on your content strategy to achieve your business goals.

Neither Can Stand Alone

As marketing expert Amanda Milligan said, “Don’t try marketing without strategy; don’t bother strategizing without marketing.” What’s the point in making plans if you don’t implement them? And how can you succeed with your marketing efforts if you don’t have a plan? Strategy and implementation go hand in hand.

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Artificial Intelligence is a game changer for marketing. While AI will be useful in many industries, the nature of the marketing profession makes it even more powerful, from the need for constant content generation, to ideation for advertising concepts, to automation for day-to-day operations, AI is the biggest innovation in marketing since the internet.

Since the beginning of 2023, the amount of AI tools for marketing has exploded.

While there’s no official count of new AI applications since the beginning of the year, if you monitor websites like TheresanAIforThat.com, you’ll find dozens to hundreds of new applications being added every day, with the current list including 4,600+ apps covering over 1,300 tasks.

Further, the investment in new AI companies has rapidly expanded. According to the International Data Corporation (IDC), investments in AI software, hardware, and software for AI-centric systems will increase 26.9% to $154 billion in 2023 over 2022, with $300 billion expected by 2026 (SOURCE).

In 2021, the investment in AI doubled globally from less than $40 billion to almost $80 billion (SOURCE), and look what has come from that!

Needless to say, there are many, many choices when it comes to AI applications, and it can be difficult to nail down which ones to use, much less which ones you should focus on.

After discussing the topic for dozens of marketing professionals and AI experts, I’ve come to a simple conclusion: marketers should master ChatGPT BEFORE anything else.

Here I’ll explain why.

Why Marketers Need to Focus on AI Skill Development

Marketers are notorious for falling prey to “shiny object syndrome.” It’s no surprise why… the easiest person to get sold is a salesman after all!

There are always new methods, platforms, techniques, tricks, tips, and tools to make your marketing faster, better, and more effective. Every company needs marketing to succeed, and the impact of good marketing can make or break your organization.

AI is the shiniest object of all for marketers…

Here’s why AI is such a vital development in the marketing industry:

Ideation: Marketers and marketing agencies may have to create multiple concepts for content and advertising for each client every day. This need for volumes of creativity was time consuming and tiring, but with AI the process has become 10 times easier. No more lag time between needing to brainstorm and creating new concepts… AI makes it almost instant.

Volume Creation: In addition to massive amounts of new concepts and ideas, AI also provides the ability to create brand-specific content whenever necessary. By “training your AI” to create content based on a particular style, marketers can create new advertising copy, landing page headlines and text, email drip campaigns, social media descriptions, lead magnet materials, and much more 10 times faster than before.

Personalization: With AI, marketers unlock the…

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What if I say your company’s success relies on someone else’s success? 

Yes… you read it right!

Growing your business is possible if your products or services are good enough and help users reach their goals. 

Today’s market is customer-centric, and the top-performing organizations are those that focus on customer success more than their competitors do.

Believe it or not, customer success is the best strategy to boost customer happiness. And as we all know, happy customers always lead to growing business. 

Considering the significance of customer success, today we’ll discuss how to drive customer success with interactive content. So, let’s get started from the basics and understand more about it. 

What is Customer Success?

Customer success is meeting customers’ requirements when using your products or services. 

This may imply deploying your team as strategists, thought associates, and the customer’s advocate internally to meet those demands. 

However, customer success is more than just fulfilling customer needs. It’s also about focusing on customer relationships. 

Customer success management includes proactively predicting customer questions or challenges and actively providing resolutions.

Customer Success vs. Customer Support 

Customer success and customer support- are both essential functions within a business that aim to provide excellent customer experiences, but they have different objectives and methods of achieving them.

Let’s break them down further in a definitive list: 

• Approach: Customer success proactively examines and strategizes, while customer support acquires and replies. 

• Goal: Customer success operates to acquire preferred business results with the customer journey. On the other hand, customer support concentrates on problem resolution and prevention. 

• Talents & Disciplines: Customer success is consultative and can expand to various disciplines and industry expertise. Customer support experts have skills corresponding with marketing, engineering, and operational teams. 

Both roles demand practitioners be resourceful issue solvers, empathetic, and thoroughly familiar with customers. 

• Metrics: Customer success concentrates on metrics associated with business impacts, like customer retention, growth, and lifetime value.

Customer support metrics estimate the quality of the service delivered, solution times, and overall customer satisfaction. 

• Business Impact: Customer success is usually a value-added business process, driving revenue and development.

On the other hand, customer support is vital to operating a business since customer questions always need to be answered. 

Why Is Customer Success Important?

The worldwide customer success platform market will grow from $850M in 2020 to $3417.5M by 2026, expanding at a CAGR of 26.10% within 2023-2028.

There is a reason why the demand for customer success platforms is increasing gradually. 

Customer success allows organizations to unlock the value of their resolutions and get an exciting ROI. With customer success, companies can help achieve their business goals, and it: 

• Develops trust
• Amplifies the relationship
• Brings higher satisfaction

Moreover, customer success interactions assist firms in collecting valuable consumer insights that are advantageous…

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Do you know AI is revolutionizing businesses and their marketing plans? Artificial intelligence (AI) has been a hot topic in the digital marketing industry for quite a long time now.

Trends have changed and AI has created a vast difference in working and planning strategies for marketing purposes. Having the ability to gather and analyze large amounts of data in just a few seconds has changed how companies approach the digital market now.

Chatbots

AI-powered chatbots are being used by companies to enhance their productivity, and customer handling, and reduce human efforts. This automated messaging system can be used to help customers with their queries and give them suggestions, also answering a lot of questions at once and being available round-the-clock.

Comprehending customer inquiries and responding appropriately in real-time using artificial intelligence chatbots are being used by companies.

Do Chatbots Market the Business?

Unlike a human being, AI Chatbot does not go out and market your company. However, it is a marketing tool especially on social media, because they can deliver targeted messages on your behalf, collect customer data to help you target messaging, and provide customer service that is beneficial to both the company and the customer.

Chatbots are very good at converting the viewers into buyers just by locating the desired products and asking the customers some specific questions according to the gathered data.

Creating the Content

Content creation is where actual human effort is needed a lot. It takes time, intelligence, ideas, and administration of plans to create high-quality and customer-centered content for marketing purposes.

It is predicted by experts that data generation all over the World is going to be more than 180 zetta-bytes by 2025. And there is no doubt that AI and machine learning will have a significant role in developing and creating the content at that time.

Let’s see how AI content creation is helpful in digital marketing;

1. Enhances the Social Media Content Performance: 

Social media primarily plays a role in moving customers to their sales funnel. In the same manner, advertisers and marketers make themselves aware of the demographical data of their followers to create social media content that appeals to them.

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In this aspect, AI is the game changer. Artificial intelligence-powered tools can go beyond demographics to analyze client behaviors and preferences. This data is used by marketers to make their customer engagement better by refining their SMM  actions.

2. User-Generated Content (UGC) Can Be Curated:

Do you know that social…

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Scott Cunningham

Scott is the Co-Founder and Managing Director of Merchant Mastery, an 8-week intensive training and coaching program dedicated to helping Shopify store owners master advertising, email marketing, and conversions to grow their ecommerce empire. He is also the Founder and Managing Director of Social Lite Communications, a full-stack digital marketing and design agency with expertise planning and executing lead generation campaigns for a wide span of industries in B2B and B2C sectors.

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In the world of digital marketing, data is king. With so much information available, it can be overwhelming to try and make sense of it all. One of the best ways to gain insight into digital marketing trends is through the use of graphs.

Graphs can help to visualize complex data sets and identify patterns that may not be immediately apparent when looking at raw data. In this article, we will explore the top nine graphs for revealing digital marketing trends.

Line Graphs For Digital Trends

Line graphs are one of the most commonly used graphs in digital marketing. They are particularly useful for showing how a particular metric has changed over time. For example, a line graph could be used to show how website traffic has changed over the course of a year.

By plotting data points over time, it is easy to see any trends or patterns that may have emerged. Line graphs can also be used to compare data sets over time, such as comparing the performance of two different marketing campaigns.

Chord Diagrams Connecting Different Marketing Channels

Chord diagrams are a type of visualization that show the connections between different variables. They are often used to show the relationship between different parts of a complex system or network.

In digital marketing, chord diagrams can be used to show how different channels (such as social media, email marketing, and search engine marketing) are related to each other. By visualizing the connections between different channels, businesses can optimize their marketing mix and ensure that each channel is working together to achieve their marketing goals.

Scatter Plots for Digital Correlations

Scatter plots are often used in digital marketing to show the relationship between two different metrics. For example, a scatter plot, designed by a graph creator, could be used to show how the bounce rate on a website correlates with the time spent on the site. 

By plotting data points on an x and y axis, it is easy to see any correlations that may exist between the two metrics. Scatter plots can also be used to identify any outliers within a data set.

Bubble Charts Show How Differing Variables Relate to Each other

Bubble charts are similar to scatter plots, but they add a third variable to the mix by varying the size of the bubbles based on a third data point. This can be a useful way to visualize trends and patterns in complex data sets.

In digital marketing, bubble charts can be used to show how different variables (such as ad spend, click-through rate, and conversion rate) are related to each other.

Bar Graphs for Quick Comparisons

Bar graphs are another common graph used in digital marketing. They are particularly useful for comparing different data sets. For…

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Another day, another article, you might think, from some “random” on the internet preaching about
marketing and artificial intelligence. But I’m not here to give you fluff and generic knowledge about what
you could easily Google online. 

Hi, I’m Joshua B. Lee, and you might know me as the “Dopamine Dealer on LinkedIn”. In the past 2 decades, I’ve built 16 businesses, authored a book called Balance is Bullsh*t, and I’ve had clients like MySpace and Google managing nearly a billion dollars in advertising spends.

While working with companies that are larger than life, I realized one thing: The digital landscape became
quite “noisy”. AKA, there were too many automated things, robotic language, and SELL SELL SELL energies online, and the human touch got lost in the mix.

TL;DR: Human connection was obliterated, and too many people focused a lot on monetization for profit’s sake. I’m a consumer myself, so I saw a gap that could be fixed and asked, “How can I bring back the heart in this digital universe? How can I help people see beyond the screen and build genuine
connections?” 

Enter → Standout Authority, my baby since 2014. We’re all about helping folks (like you, who’s reading
this) bring the human back to your brand.

And we’ve chosen to zero in on LinkedIn—the Avengers’ HQ of business platforms—to build authentic
relationships and clients.

Why LinkedIn?

Perhaps this number will sum it up for you: as of April 2023, LinkedIn has 922.3 million active members
on the platform.

So if you’re looking for the perfect place for marketing, networking, and reaching your audience as a thought leader in your field, this would be THE platform for you.

And as LinkedIn turns 20 this year, it’s making a huge push towards AI—quite the HOT topic everywhere,
regardless of the niche/industry.

Here’s what’s coming to a LinkedIn profile you want to get going:

LinkedIn’s Drive to Embrace AI and Transform Content Creation 

LinkedIn continues to push the boundaries of AI-powered transformation, making your content creation
more engaging, entertaining, and downright amazing.

Here are some of the bold moves LinkedIn has been making towards AI: 

• Ever since LinkedIn joined forces with the latest AI technology, ChatGPT, the platform has been on a roll (If you didn’t know yet, Microsoft invested $10 billion into OpenAI).
• Since then, they’ve released a series of helpful tools such as “Smart Replies” and “Resume Assistant”— just a couple of examples of how LinkedIn has harnessed the power of AI to streamline your messaging and job-hunting experience.  
• LinkedIn has created Collaborative Articles, a feature that allows multiple creators to work together on a single AI-generated article, offering diverse viewpoints on a given topic. 
• AI isn’t just great for writing; it’s also an amazing helper when it comes to insights and analytics. LinkedIn is launching Content Insights, an AI-driven tool that provides data on article performance. You can’t…

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