How To Build Your Social Media Marketing Strategy For Your Dropshipping Business?

Social media marketing is a great way to help you build engaged audiences. It also helps to create multiple sources of traffic that continually bring in visitors. What’s more, it can increase your brand awareness and grow your business. It is as important as your products, your suppliers, your brand, your domain name, and all those other essential elements that you’ll need to create a successful business. Platforms like Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram are invaluable tools. The article will introduce how to build a social media strategy for your dropshipping business.

How To BuildASocial Media Strategy

There is a framework to lay the foundation of building a social media marketing strategy.

1. Setting your goals

You need to set your goals first, which means define the outcomes of your efforts and how you’ll measure them. A great tactic for setting achievable goals is to use the S.M.A.R.T. framework which includes Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound. And it is a good idea that you measure metrics may lead to sales, like the number of leads generated or conversion rate.

There are some social media marketing strategy’s goals for you to consider:

①Increase brand awareness: Widen your reach to more people so that the possibility of the brand getting seen by target audiences will be increased. You can measure this by impressions.

②Motivate interest in your products: With relevant inspiration or education, you can motivate target audiences interest in your products. You can measure this by clicks.

③Get more email subscribers: Get more subscribers to your mailing list which you can retarget with ads.

④Provide customer service: Provide support to customers when they have questions, complaints, and inquiries. You can measure this by response time for direct messages.

⑤Establish social proof: Social media posts and comments from your customers can be a gold mine of positive reviews and testimonials for your dropshipping store.

⑥Build an engaged following: Build an authentic community of people who are interested in your products and grow an engaged audience. You can measure this by engagement rate.

⑦Drive more traffic: Make your followers to click links to your blog or store to boosts traffic and increases the chances of a purchase.

⑧Form partnerships: Engage with influencers or like-minded brands for influencer marketing or co-marketing campaigns.

⑨Get more sales: Getting sales directly from social media. You can measure this by the number of orders or revenue.

2. Identifying your target audiences

Research your target audience thoroughly. Look for demographic and psychographic data or observable patterns about them that will help you form a mental image of who will likely be interested in and will buy your products.

There are some datas for you to consider and whether to choose is depend on your products:

• Gender
• Age
• Family
• Location
• Education Level
• Income level
• Career/Industry
• Marital/Relationship Status
• Interests/Hobbies
• Favorite sites/apps
• Motivation to buy
• Buying concerns
• Other information

3. Coming up with content

Planning and come up with your content mix in advance helps you conceptualize and produce your content so that you offer both a constant posting schedule and various content types.

The content mix can cover:

①News: Information about what’s happening or trending in your industry or posts.

②Inspiration: Motivation to use your products and personalize your brand.

③Education: Share tutorials, or how-to posts from your blog or video channel.

④Product/promotional posts: Show high-quality product shots, demo videos, testimonials, or feature explanations of your products to get sales.

⑤User-generated content: Content that your customers generate about your products, such as testimonials, reviews or photos of them.

⑥Contests and giveaways: Make a contest and giveaway something and get emails.

⑦Customers connect: Shots or videos featuring your customers or just greet with your followers.

⑧Community events: Share meetups, fundraisers, or learning opportunities, especially if you’re a local business.

⑨Question and answer: Ask a question and inspire your followers to answer in the comments.

⑩Polls or quizzes: Similar to Q&A posts but the answers come from you.

⑪Behind the scenes: Share how your product is made or what you’re doing to grow your business.

And there are some tips for coming up with the right content mix to post on your social media.

①Vary your post types rather than focus on promotional posts

Always ask this question whenever you’re planning content: How can I consistently add value to my followers and target audience aside from my products? When new followers land on your account, their perception of your brand will likely be your last 3-6 posts, if they are all sales posts, followers will be bored and turn it off.

②Start with 5-7 content archetypes

Balancing your content mix with post archetypes that you can quickly create with content types that might a bit more difficult to produce. For example, content types like Q&A posts, customer-sourced content, and sharing content from your blog can be mixed with harder content types like a product demonstration video, as well as posts that aim for sales and posts that just seek to delight and grow your audience.

③Set up a content calendar

You can organize your schedule by setting up a content calendar which is helpful in planning out your content. Scheduling posts in advance that will take time and resources to create gives you ample time to set them up. You need to plan how frequently you post on social media and which content types seem to draw engagement from your followers.

4. Choosing  prioritize channels

There are many social media channel and you need to prioritize what you’ll be focusing on when you start out based on the target audience you’ve identified and which channels can support your content archetypes and your goals. It is important to understand the strengths and weaknesses of each channel. Take some time to learn and test one or two platforms at a time and focus on one or two channels. If you have other time and ability, you can start content marketing such as a blog which can be content posts on social media. And optimize your profiles and fill out your social profiles with all the information your customers might want and try to claim the same username on every platform, especially a unique tracking link to your website.

There are brief introductions of the main channels:

①Facebook

Facebook is also one of the most widely used social media apps by a broad range of consumers. It has many features such as facebook Shop, customer reviews, and Facebook Messaging for customer service. For its prioritization social interactions with individuals instead of businesses, unless you pay to promote your posts, you won’t be able to reach many people. It also has a database of information that you can use to deliver targeted ads to your ideal customers.

②Instagram

Instagram, whose users are millennials, lets you focus on building a following through a variety of visual mediums. You can post images and videos with hashtags as well as share moments through Instagram Stories and Instagram Live. It is a good idea for you to post the highest quality visuals along with compelling captions to boost your user engagement and it’s possible to get pretty good results without necessarily paying. However, Instagram doesn’t allow you post clickable links in captions or comments. You can work around this by taking out paid ads that will allow you to post ads with CTAs linking out to your store.

③Twitter

Twitter might not be as strong as a sales channel for many brands, but can be used to showcase your brand’s personality. You can network with other brands, journalists, and connect with potential and existing customers on a smaller scale through Twitter. Your followers can just reply to your tweets, or ask you questions and give you feedback while mentioning your Twitter name. This feature to communicate real-time gives you the opportunity for social customer service.

5. Creating a process to execute

It is necessary to collect ideas and plan content using soft wares such as Trello which can save ideas, attached links, files, and notes to each idea. And then, scheduling content about when, where, and how often to post contents using a tool like Buffer, Hootsuite, Later.

Popular posting times will vary depending on seasons and other variables. If you need a good place to start, think about when people check their feeds: in the morning, at lunch, during their commute, before bed. As for post contents, start slow and then ramp up to a higher frequency as you develop your routine and figure out what works. Try to schedule your posts in batches, at least a week in advance.

Holidays are a great opportunity to be topical and timely with what you post. Pay special attention to what’s coming up so you can brainstorm social media marketing ideas in advance.