Social media strategy for a retail store. 6 tips to grow!

Even when you manage a retail store or a business that has nothing to do with the world wild web, you should still use social media to grow up and expose your activity in front of a wide and growing audience.

With the arrival and development of social media, our lives have changed. The way we communicate has changed, the way we get informed, we share our photos and the way we shop… Entrepreneurs in every sector had to learn how to exploit these new opportunities. The alternative was to remain excluded from the market.

Retail store managers are not excluded from this process. When they think that social media won’t affect their business, their sales or their clients’ turnout, they are making a huge mistake. Because of how people of every condition and age are using social media, if your business isn’t present on those social media, you’re not existing. The audience will have no chance of learning of your existence.

We’ve tried so far to make you understand the importance of social media for retailers. Now, Cerdá also wants to help you learn how to exploit the possibilities of social media. We’re going to show you 6 important tips that you’ll need to build up an effective social media strategy.

Before we start, take into consideration that a part of your social media marketing strategy will have a cost. Make sure to follow our professional advice to avoid building up a failing strategy that would turn out to be a waste of money.

1.  Set the goals of your social media strategy

You need to be on social media with your business account and pages, but this won’t be enough. To use social media effectively, you should have a strategy.

The first step of drawing up your social media strategy is to set your goals. What do you want to achieve with it? Do you want to increase the sales of a particular item? Would you like to increase the traffic to your business website? DO you want to advertise a promotion?

Depending on your goals, you’ll be drawing different strategies and using different tools. That’s why setting your goals as your first move is highly important.

2.  Choose the best platforms for your audience

As you may already know, there is more than one social media platform out there. Social media shares the same principles (people create free accounts and share their content) but they have huge differences.

One of the main aspects you should consider is what type of content the social media platform is based on. For example, Instagram is based on photo sharing, while with Twitter and Facebook people share text content or links to other blog posts or articles. Think of what type of content is better to communicate your messages.

You should also - and this is very important - consider the type of audience that uses each social media platform. Instagram, for example, is more utilized by teens and young adults, while older people prefer Facebook. Who is your business’ audience? If you want to make sure you’re effectively communicating with them through social media, pick the right social media platform.

3.  Define your content strategy

Once you’ve set your goals, you need to define your strategy: you need to create a plan, a series of steps you’re going to do to make sure you achieve those goals.

In the social media strategy for your retail store you’re mainly going to share content: have a precise plan for them and for your publishing calendar. One of the first phases of your social media marketing campaign is deciding what kind of content you’re going to share (depending on the goals you’re pursuing), how often you're going to publish them, and if you’re going to pay for advertising or not.

It’ll be easier to put everything into motion and stay consistent with your strategy when you’ve planned it in advance. Staying consistent is key when you deal with social media: both the algorithms and the audience reward consistency.

4.  Create a report model

Monitoring your campaigns is one of the most important aspects of every strategy. When it comes to social media marketing, you want to make sure you monitor your expenses, the relevance of your post (how many users have visualized or interacted with them), how many conversions (actual purchases, or subscriptions to your newsletter, for example) are related to each post and how your sales increased or not in relation to your campaign.

To monitor your strategy effectively, decide in advance what parameters you are going to monitor. Also, choose a given period of time for example a month, a quarter or six months and evaluate how those parameters change before and after the period (you’ve run your social media marketing campaign in the meantime, of course). This is how you make sure you can improve your strategies over time and it’s also the most effective way to check your investments and your ROI.

Monitoring every parameter “by hand” isn’t always easy, and - as your business grows - it can become impossible, but there are tons of software that helps you with that. Some monitoring tools are also included in the Facebook or Google advertising service.

5.  Define the budget for paid campaigns

Running a social media marketing campaign involves some expenses, in terms of both time and money. Define a budget for your campaign in the initial phases of your strategy so that you make sure you don’t go beyond that with your expenses. The monitoring aspect is highly important here; you can’t have any idea of how much you’re spending on your campaigns otherwise.

6.  Customer service is mandatory in social media for retailers

Social media isn't only a way of letting users know about your store or today's promotions and offers. Since we’re speaking of social media for retailers, you should be aware that providing customer service through social media is mandatory for retailers. It’s what your clients expect, and you can’t disappoint your clients!

The first thing a customer will do anytime they’ll have a question or a problem is to check the social media and contact you through them. You need to be ready to answer their needs through these channels, and this is one more reason why social media for retailers is so important.

We hope that, with this article, we’ve just helped you understand the importance of social media for retailers. Now, you also have a better comprehension of how to build up your social media strategy and make sure it doesn’t turn out to be a complete waste of time and money. You probably won’t be avoiding any mistakes, but with Cerda’s social media tips you can at least avoid some and make sure you’re going to learn from the inevitable ones.