Traditional (organic) vs digital marketing

Ask questions, share photos of your works in progress, promote stuff other than your products and services, publish evergreen content. Organic posts are often used to build your presence and authority as a specialist provider of a product or service and 47% of marketers say that Facebook is their number one influencer of purchases. You can also create invite-only groups for your most engaged audience members to reward them with special offers for their loyalty or creating exciting competitions and sharing surveys that ask for their opinions. You can also publish videos natively on Facebook to promote your brand.

With the increasing flood of content published in newsfeeds in recent years, decent organic reach is getting harder and harder to achieve. This will force you to be more creative and strategic with your communication ideas. The whole idea behind organic posts is to keep your fans engaged and make them feel like they are part of a special community. It is all about meeting the needs of your customers and establishing a unique value proposition for your audience – i.e. a reason for people to keep coming back to your page, clicking on your posts and sharing your content, to the exclusion of your competitors.

It’s equally important that you respond to all queries and complaints in a timely and polite manner. This will show your customers that you genuinely care. Take your community’s advice on board and let them know when you’ve created their chosen item or have written that post they wanted.

When not to use organic posts

When you want to announce a new series of work that just went live in your shop or make a super important announcement that you need as many followers as possible to see, or promoting a sale, you may want to consider laying down some cash instead and rather ensure good reach by using paid posts. Facebook is primarily ‘pay to play’ and Facebook’s News Feed is constantly flooded with different branded publications and content promotions. Facebook wants to keep its users happy and engaged. The more their user experience is dragged down by irrelevant, sales-pitchy posts, the worse it is for Facebook. Facebook wants to ensure that its users are only shown highly relevant content and is limiting the reach of irrelevant organic posts. Paid advertising on Facebook is thus probably a must for your campaigns and general promotion efforts.

What are Paid Facebook Posts?

With more and more content being created on Facebook every day, organic reach is steadily declining. … While organic posts only get shown to your own Facebook fans, paid ads allow you to target people who have not liked your page but have similar product or service interests and/or demographics. There are two types of paid Facebook posts: paid ads, and boosted posts. Paid ads are advertisements that you create in Facebook Ads Manager with the express intent of showing up in someone’s feed who wouldn’t otherwise probably see your post, in order to advertise something important to them. “Boosting” a post, on the other hand, is paying money for Facebook to show what was originally an organic post to more of your own followers that weren’t seeing the original post.

When to use paid posts

If it’s something you’d pay money to have advertised in a more conventional sense (for example, if 5-10 years ago you might have paid to show it as an advertisement on a high-traffic website or in print), you should pay money to advertise it on Facebook. The most successful ads will be targeted to a specific group of people with a specific action they can take to obtain your products or services.

Paying for clicks and traffic on social media can be a great option to market your blog, i.e. paid and organic posts can support each other. Depending on how you leverage each, your paid Facebook efforts can inform your organic, and your organic strategies can enhance your paid campaigns. A lot of the information about blog marketing covers the organic options. While some of these can turn your blog into a popular destination quickly the more likely scenario is that it will take time for you to build communities to promote your blog content.

With paid social, you have the opportunity to pay for traffic and clicks right away. And if you do well to target your target audience on the right channels you can build your audience with advertising to supplement your organic efforts.

When not to use paid posts

Paid Facebook posts should be strategic and planned in advance, i.e. part of a well-structured marketing plan with specific defined outcomes in mind. Facebook will often suggest that you boost certain more popular organic posts but do not willy-nilly follow their advice – you may be wasting money while enriching Facebook’s advert department.

In summary: it is important to recognize that paid and organic are not mutually exclusive when it comes to content on social media. It can be a good idea to mix different engagement metrics to improve any Facebook campaign.

These two options (organic vs paid) may require some very different strategies for further growth:

• If growth is attributed to organic growth, you proceed this way: more brand awareness, intensify calls to action (deeper in sales funnel), more conversions deeper in the funnel, more active leads, more sales, increased revenue.

• If attributed to paid growth, you proceed this way: successful paid campaign, raise advertising budget in Ads Manager, increased paid likes, not necessarily any higher-level leads, more cold leads, not necessarily more sales, increased spend will not increase revenue.

To keep up with rapidly evolving consumer behavior and historic demand, online retailers need to be more efficient and reliable than ever before. One of the best ways to do so is by integrating tech-based analytics and artificial intelligence.

More than just a buzzword or sci-fi concept, artificial intelligence already has a multitude of applications to convert browsers into buyers. Things like user personalization, registered shopping habits, tailored advertisements and customer engagement can push the likelihood of purchase toward e-commerce retailers — and that is just the tip of the iceberg.

From Browser to Buyer

Consider the importance of the customer — the human element in this equation. Customers are the ones who need to be convinced that their decision to purchase is the right one, and tech-based analytics help to improve the likelihood that their decisions go in the vendor’s favor.

For starters, analytics tools backed by artificial intelligence have been getting much better at creating user profiles of each customer. These can reveal valuable information on each and every visitor — from age to gender to what they actually do on the store website.

This information then can be used by any given e-commerce store to influence other parts of the business, such as online store design and special offers. Is a customer a repeat visitor? Does the customer search for specific categories? What is the customer’s average spend? These insights and many more can help to segment buyers and improve appeals to individuals.

Back in the real, non-virtual, brick-and-mortar world, businesses also have been monitoring customers more closely than ever before. Artificial intelligence solutions are used to monitor facial expressions and emotional reactions as people shop.

While this may sound like some sort of dystopian surveillance scheme, the tech aims largely to combat shoplifting. It also garners some usable data for stores, though, revealing which areas of the shop attract the most foot-traffic or what elicits the strongest reaction.

In the end, these methods allow companies to know their customers better than ever before. Essentially it all comes down to better customer relationship management: Applications that streamline the entire process from person to purchase require less manpower to achieve better results.

The Best Store Possible

It’s under the hood of e-commerce stores where the possibilities of analytics and artificial intelligence really come to the fore. Smart systems are able to help businesses manage their inventory, automate indexing, instantly categorize, detect low-quality images, and flag objectionable content faster than ever before.

Humans no longer need to go through each post and every page manually. Instead, analytical tools can be used to maximum effect, making the online customer experience as smooth as possible.

Automated processes help to optimize a website, which in the world of e-commerce and online browsing is of the utmost importance. Some software operates like artificial intelligence with vision — essentially using advanced image and video recognition to see the world as humans do.

Machine learning then allows these systems to sort through huge volumes of data and customize Web pages for each shopper. It’s this personalization that is key to winning over buyers.

The more a website can appeal to individual needs, the more likely a browser will become a buyer.

This can take the form of anything from a simple website greeting to something more elaborate like a chatbot. Almost half of consumers who participated in a survey last year reported live chat as their preferred way to connect, and roughly the same number of shoppers said they would buy from a chatbot.

Evidently, high-tech solutions and relatively straightforward customer connections can live side-by-side in the online environment.

Market to Me

These trends all point to one simple aim for e-commerce platforms: Sell more things. No matter how much the world or technology changes, selling goods and services to customers always will be the paramount aim. So, the last — but likely largest — element to discuss is the impact these technologies have on advertising and customer experience.

The latest technologies herald a movement toward individual, tailored marketing. Unlike past advertisements, which aimed for blanket appeal, advanced marketing solutions can pinpoint customer desires and accurately foreground products for every single user.

This method can be incredibly effective, with the right ad in the right place allowing e-commerce stores to snag customers before they leave the house. An estimated 80 percent of shoppers conduct online research even when they plan to buy an item in-store. Therefore, when marketed with intent, e-commerce retailers can attract customers by the sheer benefit of being online and adjacent to information the customer requires.

All of these metrics allow analytical tools to retarget prospective customers with meticulous precision. For instance, these systems can recognize when a customer spends a notable amount of time browsing a specific product and store this information for the next time that customer visits. This knowledge can then be used to make special offers or promotions based on the previous user activity.

Tech-based systems effectively remove missed sales opportunities. In fact, the marketing opportunities using artificial intelligence are almost endless. Cart abandonment rates, ease of catalog navigation and customer engagement all can be improved through the implementation of smart, customer-based systems.

Just the Beginning

The e-commerce sector is ripe for collaboration with artificial intelligence systems. They can improve customer service, pinpoint marketing, and overhaul ineffective online stores — and that is just the start. There are many other elements of marketing and sales that can be improved significantly through the implementation of smart systems, and the uptake is expected to continue.

By the year 2020, 85 percent of a client’s relationship with a business will be managed without the need for human interaction, Gartner has predicted. The message seems to be clear: join the revolution or get out of the way.

E-commerce has been generating historic demand, and failure to integrate smart solutions that convert browsers to buyers ultimately could hurt a company’s bottom line.