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Fast Forward Commerce: The New Era of Social Selling

Catch up on Tug’s latest webinar

Mastering your shoppable content strategy will become a non-negotiable for brands wanting to remain successful on social media. 

At our webinar ‘Fast Forward Commerce: The New Era of Social Selling’, our panel speakers explored the evolving nature of shopping online, how audiences have also changed, and what brands need to do to leverage new opportunities across platforms.

 

The Transformation of Shopping and Role of Social

The definition of shopping has changed. Nowadays, it’s not about visiting a brick and mortar store or scrolling through a brand’s website until you find exactly what you’re looking for. The shopping experience now incorporates several key experiences. It’s about dreaming, sharing hauls, getting advice, compiling lists, thrifting, being entertained, packaging and paying. All this is supported by social media, offering a full-funnel experience to shoppers. 

For marketers, focusing on driving awareness is not the only sales driver. They need to take discovery, consideration, search and recommendation (purchasing choice) into account. 

It’s also essential that they understand who their audience is and why they’re shopping on certain platforms. Fern Miller, Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Uncharted Studio, identified 5 reasons why a shopper would be on a social platform: to connect with friends, to kill time, to share news, get inspiration or discover new products and brands. 

“Social platforms act as a gathering of people. As a brand, you need to ‘read the room’ across platforms”, says Fern. 

This means identifying a platform’s specific use to shoppers. For example, users may be shopping on Pinterest to get inspiration or be shopping on Instagram as a way to source lifestyle-specific products. 

 

How to Make Media More Shoppable

There are a few ways to maximise your shoppable content strategy across platforms. 

Ian Khan, Tug Paid Media Account Director, stresses the importance of creating the right creative for the right channel. “Brands need to match the creative with the aesthetic of the social platform”, says Ian. Avoid high-production, glossy creatives and opt for natural, personable imagery and video.  

Brands also need to embrace customised creative at scale. AI-driven feed tools can enhance product feeds at scale while maintaining content differentiation. This includes greater colour and visual adaptations, clearer branding and pricing options, as well as avoiding ad fatigue. 

Another good tip came from Petra Urban, the Senior Agency Account Manager at Pinterest, who offered the analysis of trend seasonality as a tool to enhance your shoppable content strategy. This is especially useful if brands are leveraging Pinterest – a visual-heavy platform already experimenting with unique shopping journeys and creative formats for brands. 

Petra explains how brands need to look forward and predict seasonal trends that can be used for specific campaigns. Her examples included Summer festival season, Pride month and even Winter fashion ideas. 

 

Leveraging Data-Driven Strategies

We believe data-driven strategies are essential to making successful shoppable content experiences, as well as supporting the data feedback loop between sales and customer behaviour. 

Towards the end of our webinar session, Ian shared how we understand advancements in data measurement to be fuelling investment in shoppable content campaigns. It’s based on this knowledge that we’ve continued to develop our suite of proprietary tools – one of which demonstrates value for budget spent across channels and platforms while growing full-funnel growth for brand campaigns. 

The implementation of such data-focused strategies is easier said than done – Fern offers marketers some key advice: remain flexible when it comes to the challenges of integrating social commerce and e-commerce strategies. Don’t try to sell the same thing on every platform but rather identify and curate your shoppable content to the relevant platform and audience. 

Missed the webinar? Watch it here