Communication has always represented a big part of businesses’ sales revenue. Companies are getting more and more inventive regarding their adopted strategies. Varying communication platforms allows digital businesses to touch multiple groups of prospects. Let’s suppose that you just opened an e-commerce or that you just set your communication budget. You don’t know the current trends and you want to adapt your e-commerce communication strategy to today’s audience.
1. How to include storytelling in your e-commerce communication strategy ?
Before opening your e-commerce, you heard plenty of times that using storytelling as a communication mean was an effective way to touch prospects.
Indeed, storytelling allows your users to get to know more about your brand. Thus, its purpose is to raise awareness in people’s minds and to give your brand a good image. But the question remains: How can I do this?
There are multiple ways to integrate storytelling into your e-commerce communication strategy. A lot of brands use storytelling in their TV ads, for example. One of the cheapest solutions implies managing a blog. Indeed, this media allows you to add content regarding your activity, showing your expertise and create a proximity with your prospects. Storytelling gives an authentic touch to your posts and allows you to turn prospects into clients.
An effective storytelling can be created following these 5 simple rules:
- Be impactful: give your story a flying start to convince your prospects to give a chance to your content.
- Use emotional terms: try to make your prospects feel emotions. This is an effective way to hook your prospects and make them feel concerned by your story.
- Use details: in order to keep your prospects’ interest, you have to give details allowing them to project and visualise your story. However, use appropriate details. If you go too much in depth, the reader will get too much information and will shy away from reading the rest.
- Be relatable: chose a hero figure or a story your core target can identify to.
- Create a positive vision: for example, success stories work because people feel inspired. Thus, you need to motivate and inspire your prospects, making them feel good about your content.
To conclude, you need to include storytelling to your e-commerce communication strategy. You’d be able to create proximity with your prospects and build your brand awareness. Beyond that, storytelling can be carried out through multiple communication channels.
2. How can you use social media to improve your e-commerce communication strategy?
Once you have started writing posts, you might not yet know how to share them and most importantly, where. Social media is an effective way to build a community. In the continuity of building stories to create proximity with your prospects and brand awareness, social media allows you to intensify the effectiveness of your campaign regarding these goals. The added value of social media lives in your ability to interact with your audience.
You heard that Facebook was the most popular social media. Indeed, Mark Zuckerberg’s platform gathers millions of people every day and its tools allow you to directly target a particular audience within those millions. What else could you ask for? The only problem is that a lot of competition is also using Facebook today.
Facebook’s photo and video platform, Instagram, is also good tool to include in your e-commerce communication strategy. Like its mother company, Instagram allows you to build brand awareness and interaction with your prospects. This social platform is amazing to find your community’s interests. Indeed, its massive use of hashtags helps you finding interests and even helps you reaching more and more people as days pass. Plus, the social media likes giving to its users by adding more and more features, helping companies finding new ways to sell their products and exchange with their audience.
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Instagram’s competitor, SnapChat, is another effective platform. The app allows you to post stories to keep your following audience updated about your personal or professional activities. Its video format, like Instagram, allows you to include your storytelling strategy and share it with your followers.
Finally, Twitter is a an effective way to build an audience quickly and effectively. That way, you can keep your followers updated, like other social media platforms, and interact with them through a simple 280 max. words tweet. A lot of companies use Twitter for their support, allowing quick interactions and problem solving.
All you need to know is that you have to choose the right social media platforms to touch the right audience. You have to analyse their users and see if they meet your target prospects. To target effectively, you need to study your prospects’ age and region.
3. Is including Influencer Marketing good for your e-commerce Communication Strategy?
Influencers play a big part of today’s e-commerce landscape, they can be found basically on every social media channel. Influencers have the ability to gather and motivate a large part of their audience.
While building awareness around your brand on social media, you notice that some of your followers are really involved in your business. They like your posts, share them and you interact a lot with them. Above that, you noted that they have a large following. You check your stats and see that thanks to them, your posts reach a lot more people than you would without them. This behavior makes you think: “What if I paid them to promote my products?”.
This is one of the luckiest case you can come across. You just have to message them and ask them if they would share even more if you offered them money or goodies in exchange. There is an even luckier case, where the wanna-be influencer of your brand contacts you directly.
You are searching for ways of finding influencers and you come across a few platforms. But what is these platforms’ purpose? It is simple, they put you directly in talks with an influencer. Indeed, you brief the platform on your activity and your desired audience. They analyse their data base to find the best fitting influencer and put you in talks with him/her.
To conclude, a lot of possibilities exist regarding influencer marketing. Thus, if you notice ambassador-like behaviors on your social media, go and ask these potential influencers to promote your brand. If not, just go find some influencer and build a larger audience.
4. Does your e-commerce communication strategy need videos?
YouTube is one of the most popular websites of the world. Each minute, 400 hours worth of videos are posted. Uploaders and watchers are connected 24/7. You applied your storytelling strategy through social media and you are looking for a new way to build your branding.
Videos are an impactful way to drive a message. This gives a visual representation of your message to your audience and is a much more playful way to spread information about your activity. Multiple platforms are available.
Like depicted earlier, SnapChat and Instagram are effective platforms in order to spread messages. Their short-video format allows you to communicate with your audience quickly. These platforms real added value is their story feature. You can provide ephemeral content (available for 24 hours). This method allows you to communicate about short promotions or events once you have built your audience. This format is more playful and captivating than YouTube.
YouTube is interesting for your blog format. One day, you noticed that your audience is really involved in your videos. Like a lot of other companies, you decide to provide vlogs. That way, you can spread content about your company or expertise with to increase the engagement & the ease of consumption. This time-saving method also allows you to create leads to your website and products. Indeed, YouTube provides a description where you can add links or redirect watchers where you want.
To sum up, you can be present on social media platforms through videos. YouTube is a suitable platform for vlogs and Snapchat/Instagram allows you to provide content through stories to your audience. These services make you earn some time in your communication strategy.
5. Is checking your e-reputation an essential part of your e-commerce communication strategy?
Yes. Like restaurants should check and answer to comments on the dedicated platforms, you should check what netizens have to say about your brand and you.
Companies noticed that a lot of their clients checked about them before buying their products/services. Regularly checking ratings and comments, tweets, etc., about your brand, allow you to react and build supplementary interactions with your audience. On top of that, you will get the opportunity to adapt your business model or products to your clients’ needs. A reactive and adaptive company is always respected because it listens to its customers, the core of the business.
A great majority of a company’s following is constituted by an attachment feeling. Thus, you need to take care of your audience and listen to what your followers have to say.
Conclusion
In brief, your e-commerce communication strategy rotates around your storytelling and branding. These two notions are bond together. The more stories you tell, the more people will like and identify with your brand. Then, brand awareness allows you to build a big following that you can boost on social media with the help of an influencer. Above that, all you need is a little bit of flexibility and a good sense of analysis to adapt your content to your customer base.
