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Increase WooCommerce Store Sales with Social Media Marketing
The world of eCommerce is crowded, but don't let that discourage you. Having a WooCommerce store is just the beginning of your journey towards sales and growth. By adopting a strategic approach to attract and retain customers and harnessing the power of social media marketing for WordPress eCommerce, you can unlock a world of potential for your business.
By leveraging the power of platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, you can expand your reach to a broader audience, engage with potential customers more personally, and ultimately drive more sales for your WooCommerce store.
So, in this blog post, we'll explore actionable strategies and tips for harnessing social media marketing's potential to boost your WooCommerce store sales.
What’s WooCommerce Social Media Marketing?
As someone running a dropshipping business, hopefully, there are a few actions you’ve already completed before turning your attention to social media marketing - for example:
- Launching your WooCommerce store
- Integrating with a reliable WooCommerce dropshipping platform
- Begun writing your dropshipping business plan, which should include your approach to marketing, with a specific section dedicated to social media marketing.
Once the above is all checked off, you can start focusing your attention on social media.
Just so we’re all on the same page, social media marketing, whether for WooCommerce or other eCommerce platforms, is using social networks to boost your brand's profile, drive sales, and increase traffic to your online store.
Such social media networks could include:
- TikTok
- X
- Snapchat
For the purposes of this guide, we’ll focus on the social platforms most popular for eCommerce, namely, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.
Social Media and WooCommerce
Before leveraging social media for your WooCommerce store, let’s look at the WooCommerce Extension store to see what it offers. You can use the following free social media downloads:
- Facebook for WooCommerce (you can also use this plugin to reach your customers on Instagram, Facebook Messenger, and WhatsApp).
- Pinterest for WooCommerce
- TikTok
Now that we’ve covered a few practical bits of information, here are some tips on boosting your WooCommerce store sales with social media marketing.
Find the Right Platform for your WooCommerce Store
Rather than going all in and using every platform, choosing the right ones for your WooCommerce store is important. Invest some time researching which social media platforms appeal to which demographics, then align that with your target demographic.
As a dropshipping business, you’re likely to be a B2C business. In this instance, statistics show that Facebook offers the highest return on investment (ROI). However, it’s also essential to consider where the majority of your target audience likes to hang out online.
For example:
- 18.1% of Gen Z use Facebook
- 43% of Millennials use Facebook
- 56.5% of users are male
- 31.2% Millennials use Instagram
- 33.7% of Gen Z use Instagram
- 49.7% of Instagram users are female
TikTok
- 64% of Gen Z and 49% of Millennials use TikTok
- 52% of users are men
- Two-thirds of 18-19 year olds use it
Of course, it's also worth researching general preferences among your niche. Still, hopefully, the above information provides you with a good starting point.
Determine Your Goals
What do you want your customers to do when they see your posts? What’s your end goal?
For example:
- Make a purchase
- Generate leads
- Raise brand awareness
- Showcase new products
- Establish your brand as an authority
Once you know your end goal, you can tailor your social media content accordingly.
Set up a Business Account
Next up, you need to create business accounts on each social network you plan on using, for example:
Facebook, owned by Meta, requires you to create a 'business portfolio.' This empowers you to manage your:
- Facebook Pages
- Instagram accounts
- Ad accounts
- Product catalogues
...and more, from one place.
Please note: To get up and running with this, you need a personal Facebook account.
- From a desktop browser, head to business.facebook.com.
- Click 'Create an account'.
- Log in to your personal Facebook account.
- Enter your business details.
- Click Submit or Create to create your portfolio.
Instagram Business
You can set up an Instagram business account from your personal Instagram profile. The platform will walk you through this process.
The benefit of using an Instagram business account is that you can access in-built account insights, such as information about your account's followers and your store’s performance on Instagram. You can also view ad and audience engagement metrics about specific posts, videos, reels, stories, and live videos.
TikTok for Business
TikTok for Business is also quick to set up, and doing so gives you access to the TikTok Ads Manager.
A TikTok business account provides access to advanced tools like the Business Creative Hub. This resource aims to help you create a TikTok-specific marketing strategy.
You'll also gain access to analytics, which will help you better understand who is visiting your store and whether your ads are working.
Start Creating Social Media Content
Attractive visual content is paramount for inspiring your target audience to follow you and eventually make a purchase.
However, it’s essential to stay within the parameters of your brand. For example, use your store's color palette as the base for your social media graphics and video thumbnails. Similarly, you want to ensure that your tone of voice, style of images, and so on remain consistent. That way, customers are likelier to identify your social content with your online store.
When planning your social media content calendar, don't flood your socials with promotional posts. Instead, in addition to advertising your products, use your socials to introduce yourself to prospective customers, establish yourself as an authority, and nurture relationships. Use proper, relevant, and best-performing hashtags to reach the right audience for this utilize tools such as Instagram Hashtags Generator.
There are a few ways to achieve this:
- Provide access to valuable content, such as links to blog posts, how-to guides for products you’re selling, and listicles related to your niche.
- Publishing Q and A sessions
- Posting 'behind the scenes' content
- Posting polls that encourage customers to tell you what they’d like to see next
- Live streams—For example, if you sell apparel, you could showcase particular pieces and suggest ways to accessorize them.
- Posting user-generated content like customer testimonials, photos of shoppers using your products, and so on
The advantage of offering such content is that it shows your dropshipping store is authentic and genuine. Plus, if your content is interesting, fun, and informative, people might share it, which works wonders for extending your brand's reach.
Pro Tip: When planning your social content, don't forget to capitalize on holidays like Valentine’s Day, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Christmas. In addition, there are tons of consumer-related calendar days like National Lazy Day (great for pushing sales of leisure wear, cozy bedroom throws, and so on).
Ads
Suppose you can invest some of your marketing budget into creating ads. In that case, it’s important to familiarize yourself with each social site’s ad manager.
Here, we’re zoning in on Facebook and Instagram ads.
For Facebook, you can create the following ads:
- Image and video ads: These look like organic posts but have a CTA (call to action) button like “buy now.”
- Carousel ads: These also appear as organic posts on the Facebook news feed. You can showcase up to 10 images or videos per post, with individual links for each product under each one.
- Story ads: Users see these in-between Facebook stories from friends and followed accounts. They can include a CTA at the end of the ad.
In contrast, for Instagram, you can create the following types of ads:
- Image: A single image to promote a product with overlaid text at the bottom that users can click on to go to your product page
- Video: Demonstrate how products work, tell a brand story, or showcase new products with a swipe-up link at the bottom of the app that takes users to your store.
- Carousel: This shows up to ten images or videos users can swipe through. This can include a CTA button and/or a link to your website.
- Story: This ad appears in the customer’s Story feed. It's a full-screen image or video ad with a CTA swipe-up link at the bottom of the story.
- Shopping: Instagram business accounts can run 'Shopping' ads if you have set up an Instagram shopping catalog and enabled Instagram checkout. Instagram shopping ads can take customers to a product description page where they can make a purchase without leaving the Instagram mobile app.
- Collection: This is a combination of a shopping and a carousel ad. It shows products directly from your product catalog and allows customers to buy directly from the ad. They're taken straight to the Instagram Instant Experience Storefront to purchase.
- Explore: These ads appear in users’ Explore tab based on their previous browsing experience.
- Reel: These are shown between Instagram reels and last no more than 60 seconds. They have a “sponsored” mark under the account name.
By targeting ads to users who have previously engaged with your content but haven't made a purchase, social media retargeting helps recapture their interest, increasing the likelihood of conversions. This method ensures your brand remains prominent in their considerations, effectively boosting sales through personalized advertising.
Social Media Plugins
There are plenty of plugins you can use to streamline the creation of some of your social media content.
One such example is Outfy. Once you've integrated Outfy with your WooCommerce store, you can use this tool to effortlessly create product collages, videos, animated GIFs, and sales promotions and promote these assets on your social media accounts, including:
- YouTube
Other social plugins worth considering include:
- Renderforest
- Postly
- WoFox
- Simplified
- CleverBrush
- Feed Image Editor
- FotoJet
Social Media Tips
As we come to the end of our guide, here are some further tips to help you boost your WooCommerce store sales with social media marketing:
Customers don’t need to be bombarded with several posts every day. That can feel like overkill and oversell. Instead, plan how often you'll post and think ahead. It’s also important to be consistent with your posting, i.e., don’t post daily and suddenly switch to monthly or fortnightly.
Pro Tip: Social media scheduling tools, such as Buffer and Later, can help you stay consistent with this.
You also need to ensure your posts are grammatically correct, as poorly written content smacks of unprofessionalism and will hurt your brand. So, if spelling and grammar aren't your strong points, use tools like Grammarly and QuillBot—both have free plans you can subscribe to.
Keep an eye on your analytics to pinpoint your highest-converting social content—then make more of it and, where possible, transform this kind of content into shoppable posts.
Utilize conversational commerce. For the uninitiated, conversational commerce is a marketing strategy that combines messaging and shopping, enabling customers to use chat and/or voice assistance to purchase from you. You can also use customer service chatbots to triage the direct messages you receive via your socials (Facebook, X, Instagram, etc.), enabling you to use social media to up your customer service game.
Use social listening tools to identify topics your audience is interested in, and then consider those topics when creating your upcoming content calendar.
Lastly, don’t buy fake followers. It makes you look untrustworthy, and your business could lose any credibility it's gained. It can also harm your engagement rate because fake followers aren't active and won’t engage with your marketing efforts.
Are You Ready to Boost Your WooCommerce Store Sales with Social Media Marketing?
After reading this guide, we hope you have a better idea of how to start using social media to promote your WooCommerce store.
If your campaigns gain little traction to begin with, try not to be too disheartened. Instead, learn from your mistakes, keep an eye on your metrics, and focus on what resonates with your audience. It's also worth monitoring what your competitors are doing to get an insight into what works well for them!
That's all from us, over to you. Do you have any tips and tricks for leveraging social media to boost your WooCommerce sales? We'd love to hear about your experiences in the comments box below! You can also try Spocket while you're at it!
Frequently Asked Questions
Although we’ve covered a lot in this guide, here are a few frequently asked questions that may help you along the way:
What About Hashtags?
Yes, use them. There are tons of guides on how to use hashtags on each platform. For example, Facebook has a guide, as does Instagram and TikTok. In addition, HubSpot has a free hashtag generator you can try out.
Which Dropshipping Products Sell Best on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok?
The following product categories sell best on Facebook:
- Baby products
- Fitness and sport
- Home and Garden
- Office products
- Pet supplies
- Beauty and health
- Outdoor products
- Tech accessories
Whereas, on Instagram, the following products sell best:
- Apparel
- Beauty and skincare
- Jewelry and other accessories
- Gym gear
- Art
- Furniture
Elsewhere, on TikTok, it’s these products:
- Perfume
- Mobile phone cases
- Beauty products
- Apparel
- Make-up
- Tech accessories
What About Instagram Influencers? Should I Use Them?
Influencer marketing is certainly worth considering. Approximately 49% of social media users buy a product after an influencer has promoted it. Don't worry; you don’t need to work with big, famous influencers. Instead, you can focus on working with influencers with a smaller niche following.
Should I Tell My Woocommerce Brand Story to My Social Media Followers?
Absolutely. Telling your brand's story is an excellent way to engage with social media customers. Tell customers what inspired you to set up your WooCommerce store and why you chose the specific products you sell. Tell them about your successes and failures, your lifestyle ethos, and how you spend your time (ensuring this aligns with your target audience). This is great for helping customers relate to and identify with your brand.
How to Increase Sales Through Social Media Marketing?
As mentioned above, you can increase your WooCommerce sales using social media marketing by:
- Keeping an eye on your analytics to pinpoint your highest-converting social content
- Utilizing conversational commerce.
- Use social listening tools to identify topics your audience is interested in
How Effective Is Social Media Marketing to Online Sellers?
In short, social media marketing can be very effective for online sellers. These stats speak for themselves:
- 87% of online shoppers say social media helps them make purchasing decisions.
- 43% say they learn about new products via social media networks
- 66% have bought something after seeing other people’s social media posts.
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