For an E-commerce company, online success is everything, especially since the Internet constitutes your primary real estate.

To hit a home run on the home front, you’ve to ensure you have all your bases covered, and it can’t be easy with the intense pressure of competing in crowded markets.

Social media can make a real difference. An effectively managed social media presence can help you create long-lasting relationships with your high-value market audience. To capitalize on social’s potential, you need a good, strong, organized game plan.

Here are five quick tips and a sixth fundamental tip for good measure:

1. Find Good and Reliable Tools to Help Manage Email and Social Media Marketing

The tools you pick should ideally have scheduling as part of their features, so you can schedule all your emails and social posts at the beginning of each week and not worry about them for the most part through that week.

MailChimp is a cool email marketing tool that lets you create series of emails and reach them to your mailing list as per your plan. Its features include pre-designed templates, and editing and sending options that you can tailor to suit your needs. This tool also has more E-commerce specific functions that you should check out to see if it works well with your app plan. The app comes with click rates and open rates analytics.

DrumUp is a social management platform that allows you to post to multiple social accounts across Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter with a single click. It also lets you schedule posts to go out when you want them to, draft and share posts with images.

If you intend to share useful content created by other people, the tool also provides intelligent social media content recommendations. The tool offers social media engagement analytics. DrumUp has yet another interesting feature, an employee advocacy platform, that businesses could use to drastically boost your views on social media.

You don’t always have to create your own content. Effective content curation can save you time and increase your audience engagement levels.

2. Set Up Social Listening Mechanisms Early on to Stay on Top of Mentions and Responses

The smartest social media business presence is one that acknowledges its audience and converses with them. To know what your audience is thinking and saying about your brand, it is important to have a powerful social listening tool.

Social mention, for instance, lets you watch and measure keywords that you pick (which could be your company’s name). It covers blogs, notes, and even comments so the entirety of social’s landscape. Monitor your mentions and respond to each of them as you would in conversation with a person.

3. Leverage Social Media Platforms to Extend Effective Customer Care

“Social care” has been extensively spoken about by social media managers everywhere, and in reality, it isn’t something to fear but rather something to be leveraged. People are expressing their anger on social media whether you’re handling social care on there or not, so you might as well be present where the fire is for damage control. You don’t want to leave a negative comment unanswered because other potential clients will see it as negligence on your part.

On the positive side, social care is good for E-commerce companies, because it is quicker. Consider its advantages over doing things via a phone call. If you can train personnel to answer common questions, it’ll take them seconds to type responses on social. If you’re courteous about it, chances are that you can even turn that setback into an advantage like the team has in the following example.

Social care saves you both time and face.

4. Introduce Analytics Into the Mix for Valuable Marketing Insights

If your aim is to grow and consistently keep that going, you’ll have to bring in an analytics step at some point, because you can get better only when you know what’s working and what’s not.

The internet has a plethora of analytics tools that can help with this part of your social media strategy, but you need one that is easy to use and provides sufficient insights at an affordable price.

Google analytics is free, at least the basic package that covers a good amount of statistics is. Once you create and customize your dashboard, this app becomes very easy to manage. Referrals, landing pages and keywords under acquisitions are especially noteworthy features because they tell you exactly where your traffic is coming from so you know where to focus your resources when marketing on social.

The tool does all the work for you and you need seconds to re-frame your strategies based on those insights.

5. Encourage Social Connections So as to Create More User-Generated Content

Again, a clever way to avoid the need to create your own content. As E-commerce platforms, you are particularly in a good position to use user-generated content, both on your social platforms and on your websites.

Hold selfie contents. Create catchy Twitter hashtags and do quick campaigns around them. You could schedule a week’s worth of Tweets using that hashtag in 30 minutes. Discern a way to make your social connections use the product in a social media share. Plenty of ways to do this.

Encouraging social shares involve some interaction with your social community. Spend 10 minutes a day just saying nice things to people or doing something easy but meaningful to them, and it will come back to you when you least expect it. This phenomenon of investing in relationships on social media is referred to as “social capital” and is mighty valuable.

See what happened when:

6. Pre-Empt Your Marketing Hang Ups With Clear Cut Fore-Planning

The reason why I’ve placed this tip at the bottom is because it is by far the most important and basic one. Great planning averts unnecessary hangups during execution, considering the speed at which social media moves, you cannot afford to take time off to do research once you have started maintaining a solid presence. You have to keep the momentum going, so it is crucial to get the basics right before you begin your social run.

If you have access to the market research conducted prior to launching your product, there’s nothing like it. Recover all information you have related to your target audience, the age bracket, and other characteristics that can help you construct a Buyers persona needs, concerns, interests of an “ideal customer”. You could create more than one persona, just as long as you have noted a specific list of “things to note” when implementing your social media campaigns.

Bearing these notions in mind, you can proceed to the next stage that I like to call “50 hard sells”. The goal is simple and clear. List out 50 reasons why your Target Group should choose to buy your product over the others in the industry. The list need not have 50 reasons, but setting the bar high drives you to come up with more creative and interesting sells. Every communicational sell you make subtle or not, social media or not will bank on this bank of “50 solid reasons”. So make them good.

Next, you’ll need a content bucket. Selling on social isn’t like selling on any other platform because people have personal accounts on social, which changes the playing field. While you can promote yourself openly on your website, you’ve to do it subtly on social. A great way of doing it is through content related to your industry.

Most social users seek content on their social media accounts, and you can give it to them. Make a list of types of content you can share with your Target Group. For instance, a fashion E-commerce platform could share fashion trends, accessories, celebrity styles, great looks, celebrity interviews, runway videos and so on.

Transfer this list onto a content calendar in advance, and put your content types on a cycle.

To summarize, your planning would constitute three lists.

1. Things to note about your target group when social marketing
2. 50 reasons your target group should pick your product over others
3. Content bucket for social media content marketing

And then you’re good to go. Tie your plan in with some of the ideas mentioned at the beginning of this list, follow it consistently with some discipline and you should see positive results.

Article written by Disha Dinesh of business.com