Nearly everyone around the world is embracing mCommerce (short for mobile commerce) due to its ability to allow your potential customers to search for products, compare prices, and make payments seamlessly from their smartphones. Simply put, M-Commerce involves shopping through a mobile device (typically a smartphone), while eCommerce involves shopping through your computer.
It’s predicted that m-commerce volume will rise at a 25.5% compound annual growth rate beginning in 2019 hitting $488.0 billion, or 44% of e-commerce, in 2024. A current study conducted by Business Insider forecasts that m-commerce will reach $284 billion, or 45% of the total U.S. eCommerce market, by 2020. Consumers are so reliant on digital devices that social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest have introduced “buy buttons” that allow shoppers to make purchases without leaving the platform.
Consumers are increasingly purchasing from their mobile devices because it makes purchasing power easy and fun providing a good customer experience. You don’t need to carry laptops everywhere you go. You can pay for just about anything directly from your smartphone.
mCommerce Social Selling Basics for your Small Business
Social selling or Social mCommerce is a more direct strategy of connecting with your target audience. With 1.47 billion daily active users on Facebook alone it’s clear that social media is a consumer game changer. In fact, 30% of online shoppers say they would be more likely to make a purchase from a social media network such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, or Snapchat.
Currently, 54% of social browsers use social media to research products with direct messenger sales massively outperforming email as the current ROI champion. If you put the right strategy and social media marketing tactics in place, you can improve brand awareness, drive more traffic and conversions, increase customer engagement and loyalty, and ultimately grow your business. So how can you incorporate mCommerce and social selling into your business marketing strategy?
Make it Easy For Your Customers To Connect With You on Social Media
Adding sharing widgets like Facebook’s “Like” button to all of your product pages can be very useful. Consider placing sharing buttons on your high-traffic website pages. This enables customers to share their reviews of a product with their Twitter followers or Facebook friends. With new tech from Instagram, it’s now easier for your customers to buy while scrolling through their social media. Businesses can now share gift card, food order, and fundraiser stickers in stories and on their profiles. When a user sees gift cards or food orders, they’ll be able to tap to make a purchase through a partner site.
Use Your Positive Reviews to Your Advantage
A powerful way to share reviews is to showcase user-generated content. Let your satisfied customers do your social media marketing for you by sharing their reviews of your products. Reviews are powerful tools because potential customers are more likely to buy a product or service when it comes directly from a loyal customer and not a salesman. In fact, 88 percent of consumers say they trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. Google reviews and Facebook reviews are a good place to start but there are many industry-specific product review sites such as TrustPilot, Angie’s List, Yelp, and Glassdoor, that can help boost your visibility.
Share Compelling and Eye-Catching Content
Instead of pushing a sales pitch on your potential customers, provide useful, share-worthy content that adds value to your prospects and customers. Keep the experience social, interactive, and contextual. Use your posts to tell customer stories, share news, and provide industry tips. Inform, entertain, and put customer needs above your own. The social generation is quick to point out a lack of authenticity. Be transparent with your customers.
Consistently Post on Social Media
Posting content on a regular basis is critical to improve customer engagement and drive more traffic to your small business. Consistency is key to show your audience that you’re interested in constantly sharing valuable content. Marketing automation tools help simplify the process by allowing you to schedule your social media posts in advance. Hubspot and Later are two we use. Facebook also has an internal video scheduler that you can use.
Use the Correct Hashtags
Hashtags help your content get discovered more frequently on social media platforms. They organize content, expand the reach of your posts, and promote interaction. Avoid using too many hashtags in one social media update, limiting them to one to two per post.
Give Your Posts A Financial Boost
If you have the budget, take your social media marketing to the next level with Facebook ads, LinkedIn Ads, or Promoted Tweets that you link back to a product page for conversion. As long as they’re highly targeted, these paid options can help you dramatically boost website traffic.
How Stax Can Help Your Small Business Succeed
As a small business, your goal is to obtain more sales every day. Adding mCommerce and social selling to your current business strategy can help you increase your revenue with both new and repeat customers.
Online payment solutions are crucial to modern business. Without them, you are unable to accept payment methods that are becoming an industry standard. With Stax not only will your business have access to the wholesale card-not-present rates, but you’ll also gain access to the Stax all-in-one platform. With the Stax Reputation Management tool, you can see all incoming Google reviews for your business in real-time. Simply connect your Google My Business account with Stax, and you can respond to all of your business Google Reviews right from your Stax Dashboard.
Whether it’s invoicing, recurring billing, pay by phone, contactless payments, or being able to receive payments through your small business website, Stax offers multiple online payment options that can help your business succeed.
Reach out to one of our Payment Consultants today and request a Custom Pricing Quote.
