Social media as sales channel?
Social media is overlooked as a sales channel. Marketeers see it is brand awareness and identity channel, spending thousands of dollars to create beautiful posts. Video and live has changed the game.
👋 Hola! Welcome to Out of Singapore. I am Shantanu, friends call me Shan or Shan Shan. I love the abbreviated name. My day job is building businesses. Rest of the time, I browse Instagram Reels as if there is no tomorrow. 🫣
I have been sick this week. Either the flu has caught up to me or my body has refused to support me. I was almost going to skip writing this weekend, but here I am on a Sunday, feeling better and ready to blast off my thoughts.
How have you been?
Hoping to start light work outs tomorrow morning. 🏋️
Before jumping on the topic, HAPPPPYYYY DIWALI 🕯️🕯️
The purpose of social media
What is the role of social media for a startup? I have been dabbling on this for a few months. Today I will share thoughts instead of actions already taken. After all, what are actions? They are remnants of our thoughts. 🫡
This piece looks at social media from the eyes of a new DTC brand. Social media is the most frictionless way for potential consumers to interact with the brand. New brands work with barebone structure and resource. It is critical that every channel is able to drive money in the banks.
Today, we will cover -
How marketeers treat social media? Add examples below (later)
What can your social media channel to be? Awareness, Customer Support, Sales?
How to drive sales via social media?
Before we go further, tell me why do you go on social media?
Here is my understanding -
Instagram - Entertainment, what are friends doing, some news
Tiktok - Purely entertainment
X (Twitter) - News, Quotes, Updates
Facebook - Who goes to Facebook? Billions do! Exhibiting same behaviour as Instagram.
LinkedIn - I stop. This is a cringe platform. Great for B2B. Not my piece of cake.
#1 How brands treat social media?
A branding channel. A look good channel. A beautiful channel. Brand identity. 🤨
Social media managers and brand managers overemphasize on the how the feed looks. Going to the depth of planning each row being split into 2 videos and 1 image or vice versa. They treat the social media page as brand book or website.
They also define social media guidelines - text size, font, color, acceptable content, use of logo and other minute details. If you get an agency to make this, it costs thousands of dollars.
The expectation is that customers will visit the page, scroll through it and make a good impression of the brand. Maybe.🤷♂️
#2 What can a social media channel be?
Users login to Instagram or Tiktok to look at their feed. The feed of each user is hyper optimized. Trendy videos get lots of views. Informational (but engaging) videos get lots of views. Gym and fitness videos millions of views.
NFT companies were built on Twitter. Crypto survives on Twitter.
Brands are competing with content creators to grab an eye share of the users. Brands need to create content that are as consistent and engaging as a content creator.
Let me repeat, users visit social media for -
Entertainment
Information
To check on their friends
The objectives a brand can achieve will be one of these three only. Point 3 is difficult to replicate for a brand. It can generally be done by product seeding to micro and nano influencers.
Providing entertainment and information centered around the brand’s product or space is a great way to win the “social media challenge”.
In short, brand social media channels can be
Information channels 🗽
Entertainment channels 💃
There is sub-section of infotainment used by intimate wellness and sexual wellness brands. For ease, I will classify them under information channels.
#2a Identify the niche as a start 🤌
The niche for a brand selling mineral water or mountain water is “water”. They can create interesting content around sources of water, how water is consumed in different parts of the world (Indians don’t drink direct from bottle, rest of the world does), or just water sports content.
The niche for skincare brand could be skin or people’s lives
Information - skin issues, skin treatments (irrespective of the brand’s products)
Entertainment - “experiments” on skincare products (chemical reactions?), “full day going without sunscreen in direct sun”
Similarly, niche for a vacuum cleaner brand could be “dust”. Tons of entertaining or information content can be created on dust alone.
#2b Go bold and create daily videos and image posts 🏃♂️🏃♂️
An engaged social media account needs content to be posted everyday, sometimes few times a day.
Here is a post lifecycle
Week 1 - Post 10 content
Week 2 - Select 2 best performing ones and boost them
Week 2 - Create more content that worked well in the week before.
Week 3 - Pause boost for week 1 posts.
Week 3 - Boost 2 best performing posts from week 2.
Repeat this cycle of new content, feedback and boost.
Social media is often run as a monthly activity. Feedback is delayed by 1 month. Social media algorithms see changes everyday, with music and trends changing every day or week. If the feedback and action loop is not fast, even good content won’t work.
Timing is critical, not quality.
#3 Drive sales with livestream on social media 🆓
Self hosted live and affiliate hosted live is a great way to nudge users to make a purchase. Instagram and Tiktok have launched social commerce in several countries. Where the social media shops are available, there are solutions to collect orders via comments and DM.
Our most successful live sales have happened on Facebook Live. Tiktok is not far behind but the pace is slowing down. Facebook beats Tiktok in terms of traffic in Singapore.
#3a Improve marketing ROI with an engaged social media audience
Deliver entertainment or information to create a audience that likes your post or engages with it (comments or shares). This helps the marketing ads on Meta platform to reach the target audience faster. It would also drive down cost of purchase for the brand.
#4 How would I change social media strategy for our brand?
Let’s talk about our supplements brand. Here is how I would define the social media execution.
Niche - Specialized nutrition
Content angle - Informational
Creative type - Plain information static images and video of fitness enthusiast. No brand affiliation required.
Objective - Drive awareness of nutrition via the social media channel.
Conversion activities - Go live on Facebook every Sunday to share latest nutritional hacks and product deals. Go live on Tiktok few days a week, once with deal and other times with information sessions.
I haven’t started making these changes yet. Soon :)
Yesterday was my first Singles Day sale. It did pretty well. Shopee, as usual, drove the highest sales, dwarfing other channels. To drive sales, here is what I have realised
Run sale campaign on website and Tiktok one week before a major sale campaign on Shopee (like 11.11). Sale volume will be high on brand website.
On the major campaign day, focus only on Shopee. The entire Singapore buys from Shopee on big sale days.
Post the campaign day, reduce the spends since no one likes to spend any more.
Restart the sale cycle 7-14 days after the campaign ends.
Okay, okay, I stop here. 🫷
Thank you so much for reading till the end. If you have read till here, I believe you are mildly intrigued with my content. Please do like the post. Every single like makes my day.
Jisoo doesn’t like to work, haha. Have a great week ahead folks! I have got an extra day to relax tomorrow. Yayy!