This week we will talk about getting eCommerce sales from Facebook and Instagram, and this is a topic that comes up often. We mostly work with clients who are earning more than two to three million dollars annually from eCommerce sales.
The Next Level of Digital Marketing
At Optimum7 we are eCommerce heavy. When clients are already doing Google Shopping, effective content marketing, SEO, organic rankings, affiliate marketing, established branding, and email marketing campaigns, they ask, “How can we get more sales?”
Everyone asks that question. What is the lowest hanging fruit on social media? We see most of the time that Facebook is the best place.
If it’s so easy to make money from Facebook, why isn’t everybody doing it?
Because there is a specific formula that you need to catch and that formula has to do with your audience, with how you’re retargeting, with your pixels, how you define that audience, what your offer looks like, and, the most important thing, the strategy. We are going to review all of these facets.
Why is Facebook so important for eCommerce?
There are multiple reasons why it’s extremely important. One, Facebook humanizes your brand, humanizes your product offering. It allows you to engage with potential and existing customers.
The retargeting factor is probably the most crucial aspect when it comes to Facebook. And we’ve seen tremendous results from that.
Starting a Social Media Marketing Strategy: First Steps
Let’s break it down. Obviously, there are some structural things that you will need, and some people, not a lot of people, but some people think that this is just the magic wand that the agency or the marketer can wave and suddenly you start getting conversions, and it does not work like that. Let’s break it down.
You have to have your Facebook pixel on your site. Choose a good platform that converts.
If there are any issues with the platform, like OS commerce or Magento and it’s a nightmare. The platform loads slowly, your checkout is not optimized, and you are not going to get conversions from Facebook and Instagram. When they click on that ad, they need to be already sold.
Target Audiences
How are you setting up your audience? How are you retargeting to that audience? And when we say audience one example, for example, is taking everybody that engaged in your eCommerce site, which engagement means any contact forms, and add to carts.
Anybody that signed up for your newsletter counts as engagements. When they come to the site and they just hang around the site, that’s not really an engagement unless you define time spent on-site more than two minutes’ time spent as an engagement. So you are able to do that and define that.
Suppose your website got 100,000 visitors in the past 30 days. You define those pixels to measure that 2,000 people that engaged with your brand. This is added to cart contact.
Facebook allows you to take those people, retarget them with an aggressive offer. That’s number three, what your ad looks like, what your call to action looks like on Facebook. Those are some of the things that need to be ironed out. But Facebook allows you to create these audiences and to target in this manner.
How can I get conversions? What can you say that makes them understand that there’s potential in Facebook, but it’s got to be done the right way?
Facebook gives you the ability to continuously target bottom-funnel traffic. Engage people who add to cart with a specific call to action while at the same time create a lookalike audience bringing in top-funnel traffic.
That top-funnel then turns into bottom-funnel traffic that then you can continuously retarget. So it builds this, this slight cycle of potential clients, revenue and sales. So that’s the beauty of it. It gives you that ability because of the Facebook pixel.
This cycle that we’re referring to with the bottom of the funnel and bringing more people to that bottom of the funnel, what that means is, again, anybody that engaged with your brand, with your website, with your eCommerce site, but never bought from you.
Facebook’s targeting and technology are very advanced. We all know they have facial recognition and a bunch of other stuff, AI technology. They can define who the engaged shoppers are, and who is engaging with your brand.
The algorithm can choose to show your ad to only those people who are more likely to convert. Facebook is one of the few platforms where you can target for conversions.
You can say, “Hey, I’m willing to pay up to $10 for these conversions.” Facebook sends you conversions and they bill you for the conversions, not for the clicks or impressions.
Instagram Marketing for Business
How does this play along with Instagram?
Instagram is just another placement where you could potentially place your ad. Again, it’s built into the same platform, which is another reason why it’s great: two completely different social media platforms, one ad manager. The content that you’re promoting and the way that you’re promoting is just going to be slightly different. At the end of the day, however, I would say it’s essentially the same strategy.
If you are doing more than $1 million in annual revenue on your eCommerce site. If you are on Volusion, BigCommerce, Shopify, Magento, 3Dcart, or WooCommerce, and if you don’t have the Facebook pixel on your site installed or any Facebook retargeting, you’re leaving millions of dollars on the table.
How Instagram Users Can Make Purchases
Instagram is just another placement, but it has a shoppable feature. There are two ways you can implement this. Number one is you submit your feed, your product feed to Instagram through Facebook, your catalog, and you can tag products as you share your products.
Let’s say you sell luxury watches, you can actually tag and they can click on the Instagram post and go to your site to buy that specific watch. This better integration has existed for six months. They have shoppable Instagram where you check out on Instagram.
if you want to see an example of this, you can go to H&M or Zara. You have to be a big brand. There are two conditions. You either have to be a big brand and you have to go through all those integrations manually, or you can be on Shopify or BigCommerce.
Integrated Instagram Marketing
These are the only two platforms that have this capability integrated with Instagram right now. On other platforms, or for the foreseeable future, you will not be able to have full integration. By that we mean go to Zara or H&M on Instagram or Nike and you can add an item to the cart, enter your credit card, checkout.
Anybody who has ever used Apple Pay on your phone knows how easy it is to check out. All of your information is saved. I don’t even have to enter a password. It just takes facial recognition. You don’t have to go to checkout or enter my shipping address. You don’t even have to leave.
If you are on BigCommerce or Shopify, and not leveraging this functionality, you should definitely reach out to your account rep on BigCommerce or Shopify to ask about this. We can help but an account rep can do better.
eCommerce Business And Social Platforms
We can cover more, but at the end of the day, there’s only so much time that we can talk about this. You need an expert to handle this. There are so many details involved when putting together that perfect formula that’s actually going to drive conversions, and it’s not just going from A to B. There are many, many steps it takes to get to that point, which is why you really need someone who’s experienced with Facebook advertising to handle it.
If it was easy to make money from Facebook and Instagram, everybody would do it. A lot of business owners will say dumb stuff like, “Oh, I spent $100 on Facebook. Nothing happened.”
That’s because you did not have a strategy. You had no idea what you were doing. There are people who make millions of dollars on Facebook and Instagram, but they commit to a strategy.
You need a strategy when you’re advertising on Facebook and Instagram and you have to commit for at least three months for that strategy. See if you can cash the right formula for that ROI or not. It has to be an intermediate-term strategy. We suggest a minimum of 90 days.
You have to be able to commit. There are a lot of details. We’ll talk to you guys next week.
Want to increase eCommerce sales through Facebook and Instagram WITHOUT wasting money?
