Module 5: SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING AND E-COMMERCE

Social Media Marketing:

What is social media marketing? Social media marketing means using social media
platforms like Instagram, Twitter and Facebook to promote your brand and sell
your product or service. Why have a social media marketing strategy? Social
media marketing Strategy is a roadmap to how you engage with your audience, so
that you can maximize your social presence to grow your business.

Why have a social media marketing strategy?

Social media marketing Strategy is a roadmap to how you engage with your
audience, so that you can maximize your social presence to grow your business. A
social media strategy will help to:

 increase brand awareness and reach new audiences on each social media
platform
 nurture customer loyalty
 provide proactive customer support
 attract inquiries and convert leads into sales
 A solid plan will ensure you get the best return on your social media
marketing efforts.

How to build a Successful Strategy

1. Run a social media Audit :

 Write down all the social accounts you own add your basic statistics.
  review all your contact information and bios
 check that all the links you use in your bios work properly
 Research which types of interactions have been the most successful – posts,
reels, stories, product types?
2. Do a competitor Analysis:
 identify products and services online that are similar to yours
 Review the social media accounts of businesses like yours – what do they
tell you about the company?
 Use search engines for specific queries that your customer might use, such
as the ‘near me’ query.
3. Set social media goals
1) Increase brand awareness
 number of followers
 post impressions
 mentions and shares
2) Generate leads
 conversions from social media
 downloads
3) Increase revenue
 Signups
4) Drive traffic to the website
 traffic from social media
 clicks on social media posts
 trials
4. Get to know your target audience
o Use (native) audience insight tools
 o Find out where your audience is most active
o Survey your customers
o Identify or create buyer personas
5. Choose the right channels
 Create an ideal customer persona
 Search the social media channels you’re considering using to see if your
competitors are there
 Search for relevant industry hashtags and see what conversations are taking
place on each platform.
6. Pick your topics/categories
 What pain points does your ideal customer have?
 Which keywords are important to your followers?
 What can you teach your target audience?
7. Establish a schedule
Create a social media content calendar to manage all the planned social
media posts.
 publishing date and time
 social media platform
 post format (reel, story, YouTube short) post copy
 visual (image, gif, video)
 hashtags
 Location tag.
8. Interact with your followers
There are a few tried and true engagement drivers that help social media
marketers interact directly with followers:
 responding to comments
  asking questions
 posting statistics
 running contests
 using stories and Reels to hype important events
 directing website users to social media platforms
9. Create and curate engaging content

Allow the content to promote the personality of your brand. Ideally, you should
center it around a theme. This will help create consistent and aesthetically pleasing
content.

10.Measure results
 What is the typical reach of your social media content?
 How much have your social media accounts grown?
 Are your followers engaging with your content?
 How has your conversion rate grown over time?
 Do your content strategy and social presence align with your business
goals?

Major social media networks

There are several major social media networks that have a large user base and
significant impact on the way people communicate, share information, and
consume media. Here are some of the most popular social media networks:

1. Facebook: With over 2.8 billion monthly active users, Facebook is the world's
largest social network. It allows users to connect with friends and family, share
photos and videos, join groups, and follow pages.
2. YouTube: With over 2 billion monthly active users, YouTube is the world's largest
video-sharing platform. It allows users to upload, share, and watch videos on a
wide range of topics, from music and entertainment to educational content.
3. WhatsApp: With over 2 billion monthly active users, WhatsApp is a messaging
app that allows users to send and receive text messages, voice messages, and make
voice and video calls.
4. Instagram: With over 1 billion monthly active users, Instagram is a photo and
video sharing app that allows users to share their daily lives, connect with friends,
and follow influencers and brands.
5. TikTok: With over 1 billion monthly active users, TikTok is a social media app
that allows users to create and share short-form videos set to music or other audio.
6. Twitter: With over 330 million monthly active users, Twitter is a microblogging
platform that allows users to share short messages (tweets) with their followers.
7. LinkedIn: With over 740 million members, LinkedIn is a professional networking
platform that allows users to connect with colleagues, search for jobs, and build
their professional reputation.

These are just a few of the major social media networks, and new platforms are
emerging all the time as technology advances and user needs evolve.

How to choose the right social media Platform

 What are your social media strategy objectives?

 What network is your target audience using?
 What network are your competitors using?
 What kind of content do you want to create?
Facebook Marketing

Facebook marketing is the practice of promoting a business and brand on

Facebook. It can help businesses build brand awareness, grow an online following,
gather leads, and sell more products or services.

Instagram Marketing

Instagram marketing is a type of social media marketing, which involves

promoting a brand on Instagram. This social media platform helps brands connect
with an enormous audience, increase brand awareness, and boost sales.

Types of Ads

 Image Ads
Image Ads are great for driving traffic to your website. They’re easy to make and
can be paired with links straight to specific pages on your site. They’re available
on almost every social media platform but perform strongly on Instagram,
Snapchat, Facebook and Pinterest since people want and expect images on these
platforms. Images with little or no text usually make for a better audience
experience, which is why Facebook will only serve your ad if 20% of the image or
under contains text. Book covers, album covers and product images are usually
exempt from this rule. Use this handy ‘Image Text Check’ tool to check your
Image Ad text falls under the limit.

 Carousel ads
Carousel Ads are awesome for telling a deeper story about your brand. You can
show more in this ad format than arguably any other and take your audience on an
interactive ride. Available for Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Audience
Network, most carousel ad formats allow you to showcase up to 10 images or
videos within a single carousel, each with its own individual link and CTA button.
You can also remove CTAs altogether for a cleaner look. Facebook will even
optimize the order of the carousel images, based on each card’s performance, but if
you’re using this ad format to tell a sequential story, naturally you should opt-out
of this automated feature.

 Product ads
Product Ads are great to use when you have more than 10 products or want to
retarget customers in a more dynamic way. You’ve probably seen these clever
Dynamic Product Ads (DPAs) pop up in your social feeds after you’ve visited a
shopping site. They use Facebook Pixel tracking to serve up previously viewed and
best-performing products. Platforms like Instagram let businesses tag multiple
products directly in posts to make it easier for people to discover and engage with
products. The best product ads have eye-catching, high-quality visuals and very
little text. Ad Espresso analyzed 750,000 Facebook ads and found that the most
effective ads had less than 20 words in the ad copy and 4 – 5 words in the link
headline.

 Collection ads
Collection Ads are often a subset of Product Ads that allow a more immersive and
visual experience for audiences. They are like a storefront that allows users to
window shop: a big image (or video) banner with a row of four products
underneath. Tapping on a Collection Ad seamlessly takes users to a fast-loading
visual experience powered by Instant Experience – allowing them to browse and
learn more without leaving Facebook or Instagram. This aims to help nurture
interest and intent. On Snapchat, each individual image can link out to its own
webpage, PLUS one more link to ‘swipe up’. It’s useful for providing your
audience with more detail on a single product as well since you can feature photos
of the same product from different angles.

 Interactive ads
Interactive Ads make use of the latest digital technology to encourage users to stay
on the ad longer and interact with it. They are often experimental and seek to
engage audiences beyond clicking an outbound link, whether that be by tilting a
photo 360 degrees, replying to a question or answering a poll. Interactive Ads build
connections between the brand and the audience that lead to better recall and better
sentiment. The longer audiences stay, often the lower the cost for the advertiser –
that’s you!

 Lead Form Ads

Lead Form Ads – also called ‘lead ads’ and ‘lead generation ads’ – help you build
your list of interested customers, whether that be for newsletter subscribers,
follow-up services, or event registrations. They excel when you’re giving the
customer value, so use them when you’re going out of the way to give your
customer something that they will use, like an e-book or Guide. When you deliver
upon this, platform users are more than happy to offer up their personal details in
exchange for something. Our paid specialists have seen Lead Form Ads work
really well when the creative illustrates what the customer is actually getting. If
that’s an e-book, then the image or video will show a mockup of a book.

Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn offer their own special contact form that can
even pre-fill the customer’s details based on their social media profile, making it
even easier for customers to give you their details. Lead Form Ads can often
integrate with other technologies you might be using, like CRM (Customer
Relationship Management) databases for capturing the customer details,
Messenger or InMail services, or event hosting websites. Anything to make life a
little easier!

Two variations on the standard image or video Lead Form Ad:

 Promotion ads: these call for people to submit entries to a competition,

register for an event, appointment, or even for follow-up meetings or future
deals and discounts (like flash sales!), in return for their contact details
 Carousels and “drip” ads: a series of ads that target the same customer
several times with different ads, hopefully increasing their interest in your
product, service or business; the series ends with the lead ad linking to a
contact form
 Video ads
Video Ads are super popular on social media. Not only are they available on every
major platform, they’re largely preferred over other creative ad types. Video ads
are visually captivating and work well at grabbing and holding audience attention.
Facebook users watch close to 3 billion hours of video per day – and many of those
videos are, or are sandwiched between ads. Much like with image ads, video ads
start from a basic “video + text” format and branch out from there according to the
platform and your objective.

Getting your video specs right on social media is key to maximising your video
views, reach and engagement metrics. If you want to run a carousel of video ads,
you can only go square. Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook Stories are mostly
vertical, and this option is great for claiming the most “real estate” on someone’s
mobile screen.
Advertising experts recommend keeping your video ad to a single powerful
message. Often the way that users interact with a platform (ie touching or swiping)
will also affect the interesting things you’re able to do with a video ad on each
platform.

It’s usually always best to think like a silent film director. That’s because 63% of
LinkedIn (mobile-viewed) videos and 85% Facebook videos are watched with
sound off. Video ads will also autoplay in silence when more than 50% of the ad is
on the audience’s screen (when a user has autoplay enabled) on any social media
platform.

If you want to make a series of video ads, YouTube offers ad sequencing

technology that can remix and then deliver your ads to particular watchers at
different levels of interest. Facebook has also ventured into the dynamic ads space
to automatically deliver different combinations of high-performing content.

 Text ads
You can ‘boost’, ‘sponsor’, or ‘promote’ any text-only post you make on
Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter to increase its reach. Text ads often appear in
the right-hand sidebar of a user’s news feed (and as ‘headline ads’ above the news
feed on LinkedIn) and feature your brand’s logo. The linked text is especially
important on Text Ads. If you’re going to try these ad formats, keep your message
short, targeted and highly attractive to those targets.

With the constantly changing landscape of ad formats and types, and even the rise-
and-fall popularity of social media platforms, we’re bound to have not mentioned
them all. If there’s another ad type you want to know about, please open up a chat
with us and let us know! One of our digital ads specialists can walk you through it.
 Advertising Insights

An Advertising insight is a true revelation of the consumer. It helps us Find out

why your target audience think what they think, behave as they behave and feel
what they feel. And we work on it to respond to real needs.

Ad Campaigns

Ad campaigns are a set of advertisements that focus on a single message. They are
intended to meet a specific business goal as well as lead to conversions. An Ad
campaign is a marketing ad or a set of advertisements targeted at particular
segments of the audience. Their main goal is to increase conversions. The success
of an ad campaign depends on the choice of a channel, strategy, and tactics.

Types of Facebook Ads:

Facebook offers several types of ads that businesses and advertisers can use
to reach their target audience. Here are some of the most common types of
Facebook ads:

1. Image Ads: Image ads are simple ads that use an image to convey a message
to the audience. Advertisers can use a single image or multiple images in a
carousel format.
2. Video Ads: Video ads are ads that use a video to convey a message to the
audience. They can be in-feed, stories, or in-stream ads.
3. Carousel Ads: Carousel ads use multiple images or videos to showcase a
product or service. Users can swipe through the images or videos to learn
more.
4. Collection Ads: Collection ads are mobile-only ads that use a combination of
images and videos to showcase a product or service. They also feature an
"Instant Experience" where users can learn more about the product or service
without leaving Facebook.
5. Instant Experience Ads: Instant Experience ads are full-screen mobile ads that
feature an immersive experience. They can include multiple images and
videos, and can be used to tell a story or showcase a product or service.
6. Sponsored Messages: Sponsored messages are ads that appear in a user's
Facebook Messenger inbox. They allow businesses to send personalized
messages to people who have previously interacted with their brand on
Messenger.
7. Lead Ads: Lead ads are designed to help businesses generate leads directly
from Facebook. They include a form that users can fill out to provide their
contact information, without leaving Facebook.

These are just a few of the many types of Facebook ads available. Advertisers
can choose the ad format that best suits their goals and audience.

Facebook Ads Manager

Ads Manager is the starting point to selecting objectives, building campaigns, and
setting campaigns live on the platform. it is here where you can create and manage
your Facebook ads. In Ads Manager you can create and run your ads, target your
ads to the people you care about, set your budget, see how your ads are
performing, and see your billing summary, payment history, and payment method
information.

The primary features and settings available in Ads Manager include:

 Marketing Objectives. These are the various brand and direct response
approaches an advertiser can take.
 Campaign Structures and Planning. These are the Campaign, Ad Set and Ad
levels that allow you to set the right Objective, Targeting, and Creative.
 Ad Creation and Management. This is the section that lets you build ads
across the three layers.
 Assets Management. This is a space that holds your pixels, audiences,
product catalogs, and more.
 Ads Reporting. This is the interface that allows you to analyze the
performance of all campaigns.
 Billing and Payment Methods. Here you can add new payment methods,
download invoices, and set spending limits.

Creating a Campaign in Facebook Ads Manager

i) Go to Ads Manager. Select Create to get started.
ii) Choose Auction as your buying type.
iii) Choose an ad objective.
iv) Select Continue to open the creation pane.
v) Enter a descriptive name in the campaign name text box.
vi) If applicable, turn on Special ad category, and choose a category from the
dropdown.
 o If you want to create an ad campaign that relates to credit,
employment, housing, social issues, elections or politics you must
choose the Special Ad Category that best describes your ads.
vii) You have the option to create an A/B test.
viii) You have the option to turn on Advantage campaign budget.
o Set a daily budget, for the average amount you want to spend on an
ad set per day.
o Another option is to set a lifetime budget, for the amount you can
spend over the entire runtime of your ad set.

Creating an Ad set in Facebook Ads Manager

Creating an Ad Set in Facebook Ads Manager involves a few key steps. Here's an
overview of the process:

1. Choose your objective: The first step is to choose the objective for your ad
campaign, such as brand awareness, lead generation, or conversions. This will
determine the type of ad you'll create.
2. Define your target audience: Next, you'll define the audience you want to reach
with your ad. This can include demographics, interests, behaviors, and other
factors that are relevant to your business.
3. Set your budget and schedule: You'll then set your budget and schedule for your ad
campaign. This will determine how much you're willing to spend on your ads, and
when you want them to run.
4. Choose ad placement: You'll choose where you want your ad to appear, such as in
the Facebook news feed, Instagram, or other placements.
5. Create your ad: You'll then create your ad, including the format, text, images or
videos, and call to action. You can preview your ad and make any necessary
changes before submitting it for review.
6. Launch your ad: Finally, you'll launch your ad and monitor its performance. You
can track metrics such as impressions, clicks, and conversions, and make
adjustments as needed to optimize your campaign.

Keep in mind that there are many additional settings and options available in Ads
Manager, depending on the type of ad you're creating and your specific business
goals. It's important to experiment with different approaches and strategies to find
what works best for your business.

A/B Testing:

A/B Testing lets you compare two versions of an ad strategy by changing variables
such as ad images, ad text, audience or placement.

The growth of ecommerce:

The growth of ecommerce has been tremendous over the past decade, as more and
more people turn to online shopping for convenience, price comparisons, and
wider product selection. Here are some key factors contributing to the growth of
ecommerce:

1. Increasing internet and mobile penetration: With the increasing number of people
with access to the internet and smartphones, more consumers are able to shop
online.
2. Convenience: Online shopping provides consumers with the convenience of being
able to shop from anywhere, at any time, without having to physically go to a
store.
3. Price comparison: Online shopping allows consumers to compare prices across
different retailers and find the best deals.
4. Wider product selection: Ecommerce allows retailers to offer a wider range of
products than what is available in a physical store, as they do not have to worry
about shelf space or other inventory constraints.
5. Enhanced security and trust: With the advent of secure payment gateways,
improved user interfaces, and customer-friendly return policies, consumers have
more trust in online shopping.
6. Advancements in logistics and supply chain management: Improved logistics and
supply chain management technologies have allowed ecommerce companies to
offer faster and more reliable shipping and delivery services.

All of these factors have contributed to the growth of ecommerce, and it is

expected to continue to grow in the future.
Online advertising and Ecommerce:

Online advertising can have a significant impact on e-commerce, as it can help

drive traffic to e-commerce websites, increase brand awareness, and boost
sales. Here are some of the ways online advertising can benefit e-commerce:

1. Targeted advertising: Online advertising platforms allow businesses to target

specific audiences based on demographics, interests, behaviors, and other
factors. This means that businesses can reach the people who are most likely
 to be interested in their products or services, and therefore increase their
chances of making a sale.
2. Retargeting: Retargeting allows businesses to show ads to people who have
previously visited their website or interacted with their brand in some way.
This can help keep the business top of mind for potential customers and
encourage them to return to the site and complete a purchase.
3. Increased brand awareness: Online advertising can help increase brand
awareness, as businesses can show their ads to a large number of people
across multiple platforms. This can help build recognition and trust, and make
it more likely that people will choose the business over competitors.
4. Analytics and optimization: Online advertising platforms offer detailed
analytics and reporting tools that allow businesses to track the performance of
their ads and make data-driven decisions to optimize their campaigns for
better results.

Overall, online advertising can be a powerful tool for e-commerce businesses,

as it can help them reach new customers, drive traffic to their website, and
increase sales. By carefully targeting their ads and continually optimizing their
campaigns, businesses can maximize the impact of their advertising efforts
and achieve their goals.

Framework of Ecommerce:
 E-commerce, or electronic commerce, is the buying and selling of products or
services over the internet. The framework of e-commerce typically includes the
following components:

1. Website: A website is the online storefront where customers can browse and
purchase products or services. It should be well-designed, easy to navigate, and
have clear calls-to-action to encourage customers to buy.
2. Shopping cart and payment gateway: A shopping cart is the software that allows
customers to add products to their virtual shopping cart and proceed to checkout. A
payment gateway is the software that facilitates the payment process by securely
processing customer payment information.
3. Inventory management: This includes managing product information, stock levels,
and shipping information. This information needs to be accurate and up-to-date to
ensure that customers can purchase products that are in stock and receive them in a
timely manner.
4. Order fulfillment: Once an order is placed, it needs to be processed and shipped to
the customer. This involves picking, packing, and shipping products, as well as
providing customers with tracking information so they can track their package.
5. Customer support: E-commerce businesses need to provide excellent customer
support, including answering customer questions, handling returns and refunds,
and resolving any issues that may arise.
6. Marketing: E-commerce businesses need to market their products and services to
drive traffic to their website and encourage customers to make a purchase. This
may involve a variety of tactics such as search engine optimization (SEO), pay-
per-click (PPC) advertising, email marketing, and social media marketing.
Overall, the framework of e-commerce involves creating a seamless experience for
customers, from browsing products to making a purchase to receiving their order.
By focusing on each of these components and continuously improving the e-
commerce experience, businesses can create a successful and profitable online
store.