At the beginning of December people are starting to plan their Christmas shopping lists whilst many businesses are putting the finishing touches to their festive season strategies. Nowadays many businesses have moved online, it’s a fresh start to find creative ways to get festive this season.
Facebook shops is a mobile-first shopping experience which allows businesses and brands to create an online shop for free. The business can customise the items and products they want to feature, create collections and manage the shop all in one place.
Copper Square has created an easy how-to guide on the best ways to utilise Facebook shops to spark inspiration for the season ahead; through the use of festive ideas for your shop and new product features, below.
It’s imperative to reach customers early
As a business, one of your Christmas strategies needs to be getting in front of holiday shoppers on Facebook well before your sales peak. This will allow potential customers to remember you when they want to make a purchase.
Shoppers can become drained by seeing the same kind of ads on repeat. By reaching shoppers early you can use a wide range of innovative approaches to appeal to a variety of consumers and their reasons for shopping over Christmas.
Using mixed formats such as reels, stories and carousels can help you entice shoppers.
Messaging is one of the factors that influences purchase decisions. So, by giving yourself time, your business can craft customised messages for different audiences and persuade them to buy your products.
Showcase your best products in a catalogue
Your catalogue provides the details that enable customers to know about your products and provide them with all the information required before purchase. A good quality catalogue improves your SEO ranking in search results thus getting more eyeballs on your products.
A few tips to improve your catalogue quality include:
- Your catalogue must be up-to-date: inventory counts, products, prices and product information.
- Add all catalogue fields and make them specific to help buyers make informed purchase decisions.
- Include concise product titles, detailed descriptions and product categories, including attributes like colour, size or material
- Use eye-catching visuals: Visuals are highly influential in purchase consideration, especially for lifestyle categories. Featuring several images and videos per product will result in more ‘add to cart’ and ‘buy’ actions compared to products showing just one image.
Get your shop “window” displays ready by creating Collections
A great way to add some holiday flair to your shop is by getting creative with collections. Collections should be customised with the products you want to showcase such as festive gifts, best sellers and gift bundles.
By using collections creatively through eye-catching imagery, you can give your store a festive feel.
Ideas for showcasing and encouraging holiday collections include:
- Create a festive-themed collection that highlights top sellers and fan favourites.
- Gift guides by price point: Create curated gift collections for every budget. Consider curated gift collections across a range of price points. Entry “impulse buy” prices and price points under £20, £50 and £100 are popular ways customers shop to stay within their budget.
- Gifts for your selected audience: Appeal to the interests of your customers by creating fun gift collections such as Gifts for him, New products or On sale.
- Feel-good products: although the consumer cannot touch and feel products on Facebook shops, you can create close-up shots of soft textural items that create warm and fuzzy feelings.
Tag Products In Posts
It is vital when posting about new products or festive gift ideas that you make your posts shoppable by tagging the products. Shopping tags help customers shop as soon as they discover your products. It is important to not tag too many products in your visual as this can be confusing for consumers so we recommend that you tag fewer than five products per image.
The benefits of tagging your festive products include:
- When you create an ad with product tags, you can drive customers straight to your brand’s product detail pages as soon as they engage with the ad, this a boost to season festive traffic on your site.
- You can use new Facebook audience tools to reach new and existing customers through shopping Custom and Lookalike Audiences.
The most successful businesses use tags frequently across different formats:
- One way to get your products noticed is by consistently adding product tags to feed posts. Businesses can tag up to 5 products per post to increase engagement.
- Using product stickers can help make your Stories more interactive and engaging.
- Engage in long-form storytelling around your products, collections, and brand by tagging products in IGTV, Facebook Watch and InstagramReels.
All of these tips will eventually enhance your product discovery. You can also use them to reveal essential information about the product including the price and a short description through a single tap.
However your business celebrates the festive season, remember to lean into what makes your business unique. Being true to your brand and adding value for customers, will allow your business to make connections with people that last well beyond the festive season.
To find out more about how Copper Square Social Media training would be of value to your business get in touch for more details on the social media packages we offer.
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