As of 2015, there are 205 million U.S. digital shoppers that have browsed products, compared prices or bought merchandise online at least once, according to Statista.com. This figure illustrates how prevalent online shopping is nowadays. This number is predicted to grow in coming years.
When you consider the fact that you can use coupon marketing alongside social media marketing to reach ideal clients that are insanely interested in what you’re selling, the prospect of succeeding as an online seller doesn’t sound so far-fetched.
Allow me to share with you four strategies you can use to pair digital coupon marketing alongside the social media marketing to skyrocket your online sales.
1. Share offers on high-traffic community driven coupon sites
If you’re unfamiliar with coupon marketing, it’s easy to get tunnel vision and solely focus on sites like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest, and Instagram when it comes to social media marketing.
While these social platforms are certainly effective in their own right, the marketers shouldn’t forget about high traffic community-driven discount coupons sites. Not only are coupon websites considered to be within the social media space, but most coupon marketers value them because these sites are laser-focused in the sense that the only thing that their audiences does in these platforms is talk about discount coupons.
When you visit reputable discount websites Dealspotr.com, RetailMeNot, LivingSocial, and Groupon you’ll notice how real people are sharing and editing the deals on the site. Some couponing sites also offer a personal deal feed that visitors can use to follow their favorite stores.
If your ideal customers flock to coupon sites to look for great deals, then shouldn’t you be adding your coupons to these sites as well?
2. Publish your coupons on your Twitter profile
Why Twitter? According to Compete, “94% of people follow brands on Twitter to receive deals and offers.”
It’s fairly easy to run marketing campaigns and track results on Twitter so it makes coupon marketing an easy fit. When using Twitter as a couponing platform some best practices include:
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Share a visual
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Add a scarcity element to the post
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Encourage your audience to retweet and follow
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Incentivize shares
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Pay attention to timing when publishing posts
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Use proper hashtags
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Know the demographics of your target audience
Also, I urge you to review campaign data at a midway point in order to optimize and improve results.
3. Leverage word of mouth marketing
Even if the social media and coupon marketers aren’t intentionally trying to initiate WOM, they almost always end up benefitting from it because we, as humans, have the natural tendency to share.
In fact, according to ID.me’s data, “68.6% of students are “very likely” to tell others when a brand offers student discount.” You can probably relate.
If you spend time browsing your social media feeds, then you’ve probably seen several discount coupons from the brands you follow. Now, let me ask: If you stumbled upon a coupon you liked, did you use it and keep the deal to yourself or did you share it with others?
It’s likely that you answered the latter, especially if you’re an active online shopper. And if not, it’s likely someone has shared offers with you. This solidifies the idea that WOM is an anticipated result of using coupon marketing alongside social media marketing.
4. Share coupons several times a day
I used to worry about how my audience would react if I shared the same content several times within a day. Will they think I’m spamming them? Am I giving them an impression that I’m running out of content to share? Since both scenarios aren’t good perceptions for any business, I needed to make sure these presumptions weren’t entirely accurate.
So, I did some digging. I looked for other businesses that regularly share the same content several times within a day. Surprisingly, I identified six businesses using this strategy, and I have yet to see any of them stop or suffer repercussions. If anything, they’ve received more shares and conversions.
This article has been edited.
Jimmy Rodela is a Digital Marketing consultant. His work has been published on reputable business websites with millions of monthly traffic like Yahoo.com, SEMRush.com and Business2Community.com and more. He is one of Business.com’s Market Experts of the month, and the owner of Guildofbloggers.com. Connect with @dbjim21 on Twitter.
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