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For years now, eCommerce web designers have understood that one of the most important aspects of building a great eCommerce site and web presence, a structure to build branding and marketing upon, is all about keeping up to date. That means social media has never been more vital.
As a cutting-edge reflection of current events, as a method of individual communication and as a way for brands to directly interact with customers, social media is utterly crucial when it comes to keeping up-to-date while building a brand. That’s not even mentioning the marketing and traffic-boosting aspects either.
The fact is, people don’t want to buy from faceless, disconnected eCommerce sites anymore. It’s all about integration, consistent branding and customer service. You can’t truly thrive as an eCommerce business without social media anymore.
Back to Basics for eCommerce Web Designers
Initially, the question you’ve got to be asking yourself is what makes for great eCommerce web design and functionality? We all know that streamlining and simplifying the buying experience helps eCommerce businesses make more sales, but what’s the underlying theme here? Convenience. The promise of eCommerce is convenience. Speed, ease and simplicity.
Utilising social media integration properly, eCommerce web designers can create sites that make proper use of social media business pages, as well as the integrated platforms within social media. By making the sales journey more intuitive and straightforward, you’re doubling down on one of the most important aspects of eCommerce.
More than that, social media is all about trust signals. By providing content and pages for your customers and their friends to interact with, you’re able to embrace transparency that will always serve as a hugely encouraging sign for potential customers. This is exactly why influencers are an effective marketing technique, you’re utilising trust, transparency and honesty to get your product across, ideally without seeming too salesy and slick. It’s the same thing as featuring plenty of reviews on your eCommerce site. You know there’s going to be some negative feedback, but that doesn’t faze you because transparency and trust are more valuable. Fundamentally, for eCommerce web designers, it comes down to humanising your business. Making your brand available to interact with, while presenting a regular and welcome presence on follower’s feeds.
Social Media Marketing
When it comes to building the perfect eCommerce site, it’s about more than just onsite performance. It’s about eCommerce web designers need to be thinking further afield. A perfect eCommerce website is more than just an aesthetic and functional online shop, it’s a platform for a dozen other marketing techniques and approaches, and a lot of these require integration with social media. Some of the most important are:
- Content Marketing
- Social Media Branding
- Influencer Marketing
- Promotions and Competition
- Paid Social Media Advertising
Obviously, these are just a couple of important aspects, but you get the message. You need a website that’s ready to intermesh and communicate the same branding elements, for instance, as your social media presence.
Onsite Integration
Fundamentally, powerful onsite integration requires consistency from your eCommerce web designers. It needs to be fully up-to-date in terms of plugins, as well as featuring plenty of sharing buttons. There needs to be a back-and-forth between the site’s social media presence. This allows the visitor to see both the contemporary nature of your business, as well as the accessibility and awareness.
This can be as simple as featuring plenty of social media share icons on your site. However, more than that, you need active and consistent linking between your site and social media pages. This of course necessitates active and consistent social media pages.
