Retail Jeweler recently reported on the importance of jewelry businesses reaching their customers through a multi-channel approach, and they estimate that after consumers complete their initial research, 44% of jewelry shoppers use a digital avenue to make a purchase (online or mobile app) as compared to an in-store visit. If shoppers are buying online, that means they’re probably researching and engaging online as well. Dreamgrow reports that in 2015, 52% of online and offline purchases were influenced by Facebook. This isn’t to say that brick-and-mortar business success is stuck in the past forever; these statistics just illustrate the undeniable shift in which social media has become a pit stop on the buyer’s purchase journey.
Numbers are great, but how is social media going to help your image?
Increase brand awareness. Maintaining a strong and active social media presence may sound like more work than it’s worth, but this industry leader would like you to think twice. World-renowned jewelry store, Tiffany & Co., has more followers on social media than most of its counterparts.
With 9.9 million followers on Facebook and 8 million on Instagram, they are crushing the brand awareness game in the jewelry industry on social. With nearly 81% of all adults in the U.S. active on social media, why wouldn’t you use these platforms as a way to showcase your beautiful product lines via photo and video? Go forth and capture your audience right in the feed. Though it may take longer to get noticed than the big box guys, persistence is key.
Engage with the consumer directly. Social media has gained a reputation for being a surefire way of easily communicating with your audience directly, and more importantly, without delay. Sprout Social reports that 48% of consumers feel that being responsive on social media is the number one most important action a brand can take to influence their decision to buy. Networks like Twitter especially make it very easy to reply to questions, resolve problems, and further engage with their followers in a few clicks and 140 characters or less. Thanks to social media, we no longer live in the world where “we’ll respond to your email in 5 business days” is an appropriate or expected method of customer communication. As an added bonus, being active on social and prompting users to tag your business in their own photos for shares, etc. gives you free user-generated content that you can then reshare on your own platforms. This generates brand loyalty and a longer lifespan of your content such as this #ringselfie from Zales’ #LOVEZALES social campaign.
It’s cheaper than you think. In the past few years, brands on social have had to adapt to a more “pay to play” methodology since organic content doesn’t work in the favor of business profiles like it used to. Never fear; paid social advertising such as boosted posts on Facebook and Instagram Ads can be relatively inexpensive for a brick-and-mortar jewelry retailer. It’s hard to say how much your business has to spend in order to see results, but in a recent retailer’s Sponsored Posts study on Instagram Ads from Penna Powers, the CPM (cost per thousand impressions or times your ad was served) only cost a little over $6. This means that if this retailer had spent $200 on a Sponsored Post campaign, their ads would have been shown potentially 33,000 times.
Okay, but if you have no time to actively build or maintain your business’s social presence, what do you do? Let us handle it.
In just five months, we increased the Facebook page and post engagements of one of our jewelry clients by 297% and their page followers by 77%.
When you work with Harmon to organize your social strategies, you can expect a full content calendar with post dates, content, copy, images, and more. We’ll also do all of the preliminary research to ensure that we are hitting the target audiences around your store, provide guidance and strategy advice, create and implement paid social advertising budgets and campaigns based on best practices, and provide you with quarterly performance analytics reports.
It’s time to take charge of your social. We’re here to help.
If you want to know more about what we can do for your brand or business, contact us.