This article is part of a series: "Activating influencers across the customer journey" comprised of the following:
Overview - Awareness - Consideration - Conversion (this article)
After awareness and consideration comes conversion.
The social landscape is changing and shifting towards a conversion-driven model with the recent Instagram release providing anyone the option to add a link to their stories. This creates the opportunity to leverage social platforms for generating conversions to sales. Social commerce is developing day to day in Western and MENA markets and it has been widely adopted in Asian markets for many years now. The capability of tastemakers to influence the choices of their fans gives brands the ideal space to activate their product in more real and relatable ways. It’s therefore, once again, necessary to work with the right influencers to unlock the full potential of your marketing dollar and set the right foundation for successful conversions.
When you assess your social strategy, you should look at it through the perspective of community building and reinforcement, and just like with awareness and consideration, it should be at the heart of your conversion approach. So, you should segment your target audience based on their passions rather than demographics to make sure you're building on and leveraging their common interests to reach your goal. The starting point to ensure maximum possible conversions is to ensure you are working with a homogeneous community united by the passion you are trying to tap into.
Overall, it’s important to use the power of a network to convert people to your brand because focusing your campaign on an individual won’t translate into strong performance. Just like with an awareness-based or consideration-based strategy, here are certain factors to spot that will boost your chances of achieving good performance and reaching your goals. This involves working with people who have a high viewership and engagement scores in a well-defined community to generate the needed conversions. Once you try out different influencers and assess the sales they generated, you can start computing an average cost per acquisition (or sale - CPA) - which you can calculate by dividing the investment you made in the influencer by the number of products sold. This CPA should make financial sense to you depending on how much you are willing to pay to acquire a customer and how much the Lifetime Value (CLTV) of a customer is.
Also, it’s important to take into account the context because the purchasing power of the population and their willingness to convert are key factors that influence your benchmark Cost per Acquisition and Cost per Engagement. Basically, the more a population generates sales for your brand, the more you would be willing to pay, and if the CPA and CPE increase in a market where people are less likely to convert then you would probably pull out of this specific location, and so it is important to ensure you are generating engagements and acquisitions at the lowest possible CPE and CPA. Using the Performance Planning module on Sociata, you can pre-plan your campaign and predict the possible CPE you would be paying which gives you the confidence to move forward with your plan.
In terms of your content output, it’s always best to immerse your brand in your audience’s consumption habits. With paid media, you’re interrupting the seamless flow of content which is often jarring and doesn’t translate well for you. Think of it this way, when you’re strolling through a mall and a salesman randomly jumps in and stops you to discuss a product you’ve never heard of, your first instinct will probably be to dismiss him. However, imagine instead that you’ve been previously exposed to the product, you will be more willing to explore what he’s saying due to a previously established interest. This also highlights the importance of integrating remarketing into your strategy.
You should also mobilize the latest platform updates to your advantage, such as the changes to the way you can add links to stories on Instagram. The shift from a swipe up to a sticker facilitates the integration of product links, especially for nano and micro influencers. Another way to attract conversions is through offer-focused incentives because these are a good way to convert people who are already considering making a purchase and most importantly, they are likely to generate immediate conversions.
With your conversion-focused strategy in place and once you’ve launched it, you must measure to ensure it’s indeed the success you hope it is. To do so, you must look at metrics such as the number of checkouts and the size of the orders placed. These should be tracked within a 30-day window should the customer view the content and come back later to complete the purchase, this could happen for a variety of reasons including people’s salaries being paid at the end of the month.
In the end, the goal is to build upon previously established awareness and consideration to generate as many sales as possible in the most streamlined way possible. If you want to learn more about leveraging the full funnel, check out the rest of our customer journey series.
Read next article ➡️ Overview
