How will the new shopping functionality of various social networks (like Pinterest) impact brand marketing in 2016?
1. Pay Equal Attention to Your Posts and Your Website
Brands spend lots of time and money making their websites look great and user-friendly, but the new shopping functionality means that some customers will never navigate all the way the site. Spend just as much energy on creating your shoppable Pins and posts as you would on your website. – Micah Johnson, GoFanbase, Inc.
2. Incentivize Customers to Convert to Followers
A customer’s social media engagement is typically ignored after a sale. Now, the conversion from buyer to follower will become valuable as a measure of repeat business potential. Email newsletters and websites will increasingly link to social media which presents the dual possibility of an immediate purchase or a follow, which could lead to future purchases down the line. – Manpreet Singh, TalkLocal
3. Increase Focus on Keyword-Based Advertising
As Facebook and other platforms roll out shopping pages and feeds, brands will need to identify keywords for shopping search bars. Other social platforms, like Twitter and Instagram, continue to evolve with more sophisticated search features. Hashtag and keyword research for social media will gain importance for brand marketers. – Shalyn Dever, Chatter Buzz
4. Prioritize Brand Marketing
Shopping options coming to pages like Pinterest will simply increase brand marketing. We already see it every day on Instagram, where the latest celebrity is marketing a product for a large paycheck. Bringing a buy option to social networks will increase the functionality of branding a product and allowing people to purchase on impulse. – Matt Doyle, Excel Builders
5. Add Social Links to Every Page
Pinterest serves as a virtual corkboard that displays vibrant inspirational quotes and even works as a visual shopping list. As most e-commerce businesses have already discovered the value of adorning their product page with social media links, I suspect Pinterest programmers will optimize this feature and possibly even cross-market it with other services. Shopping will become a more social event. – Duran Inci, Optimum7
6. Focus More on Brand Identity
The expansion of shopping on social networks means that you need to have a strong brand focus more than ever. If your brand is not recognizable, you will not be able to take advantage of these different functions. Having a strong brand across all platforms will allow you to become a major player. – Phil Laboon, Eyeflow Internet Marketing
7. Don’t Ignore Customer Outreach
Even with new social shopping functionality, it’s the connection with the brand and the product that drives the conversion. Reducing the friction helps, but it doesn’t change the fact that brands need to actually connect with consumers before they’ll sell anything. I think you’ll see a big push to experiment in these new areas as the space evolves, with mixed results. – Simon Berg, Ceros
8. Increase the Speed of the Sales Process
Social networks such as Pinterest are now offering “click to buy” functionalities that allow customers to immediately find and buy items that they like. This kind of immediate satisfaction will push sales processes for all sorts of companies to be more “on demand” and available with one easy step. There will be much less use of sales funnels and more on the spot purchases through social pages. – Miles Jennings, Recruiter.com
9. Create New Sales and Buying Funnels
Buying funnels will change as people can buy from social media channels. With Shopify’s partnership with Facebook, and Pinterest offering shopping functionality, users can buy from social, reducing touch points and increasing impulse buys. Marketers should allocate higher budgets to increasing visibility from these channels. – Marcela DeVivo, National Debt Relief
10. Reduce Friction
It will reduce friction in the e-commerce experience, moving us closer to an omni-channel world where brands are able to transact with a consumer at any point of their journey. Brands will be enabled to reach consumers in intent-rich moments, whenever they occur. Successful brands will leverage this for growth in the new year. – Peter Sena, Digital Surgeons
11. Focus on Rich Content
It’s been a consistent message for the last decade, but creating rich content is always the key to success. Understanding your target audience and providing the type of engagement that will allow those users to buy confidently is the biggest hurdle. Social commerce is simply another facet with which we need to adapt that mentality. – Blair Thomas, EMerchantBroker
12. Create Specific ROI Measurements
The deeper platform integration and continued advancement in social commerce functionality will allows brands to, arguably for the first time, truly measure the impact of social media. The question of whether social is providing a worthwhile Return on Investment (ROI) on owned media via internal resources and paid media in support of social channels will have an e-commerce data-driven answer. – Alex Frias, Track Marketing Group
13. Focus on Storytelling
Brand marketers will need to center their core focus on storytelling to compete in the rising world of direct response ads and functionality across various social platforms. While shopping functionality and direct response ad types have been improving and picking up steam for marketers, improvements to video functionality has been championed by brand marketers in 2015, especially on Facebook. – Andrew Torba, Automate Ads
14. Work on Converting Right Away
Social Media Marketing in 2016 is going to be all about the impulse buy. Smart marketers will need to adapt to the new shopping functionalities on social media channels and use them to grab their fan’s attention and convert on the spot. – Jyot Singh, RTS Labs