In the field of cross-border e-commerce, the status of social media marketing has been basically clarified, and more and more businesses have recognized and accepted social media marketing. It is generally believed that social media has the following four main functions in the field of cross-border e-commerce.
1. Brand marketing
Compared with e-commerce platforms and search engine marketing, social media has a rich information carrying capacity and has outstanding advantages in brand marketing. For example, businesses can widely disseminate creative brand videos on YouTube, and with strong interactive advantages, brand marketing effects are better. By creating a company account on Facebook, you can continue to publish company dynamics. Social media has also developed paid advertising in the CPM model to help businesses quickly accumulate fans. Social media gathers users and directly helps businesses build private domain traffic pools. A series of advantages make social media the most effective position for brand marketing.
2. Customer acquisition
It is generally believed that social media’s customer acquisition ability is not strong compared to e-commerce platforms and search engines, and the customer acquisition model of social media is mainly the practice of the “traffic pool” concept. However, in the field of cross-border e-commerce B2B, LinkedIn is widely used, mainly in two types of applications: direct customer acquisition and auxiliary customer acquisition. Salespeople will use LinkedIn’s rich professional attributes to accurately locate overseas buyers and directly link these buyers on the platform, which is direct customer acquisition. In more cases, after obtaining limited potential customer information through other channels, they will query their detailed information on LinkedIn, making LinkedIn an important auxiliary customer acquisition platform for B2B business.
3. Remarketing to improve customer lifetime value
To a certain extent, the best application of social media is remarketing, which can be understood from two levels. First, social media perfectly supports the concept of “traffic pool”. The operation process from user to customer can be considered as a process of repeated remarketing. Second, it has strong interactive private domain traffic operation attributes, which supports merchants to operate their own membership system based on social media platforms and continuously remarket to continuously improve member contributions.
4. E-commerce direct monetization
In recent years, the live streaming model has swept the world. In fact, before this, leading social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc. have already started e-commerce business, supporting shopping ads and product libraries, and completing the shopping closed loop directly on the platform. Domestic social e-commerce is developing in full swing, such as community group buying. I do not think that social media e-commerce has more advantages than e-commerce platforms, but it is undeniable that social media e-commerce also has its unique advantages. Direct monetization of social media e-commerce will surely become an important supplement to e-commerce platforms. “ByteDance” company calls its e-commerce model “interest e-commerce” and believes that it is an innovative model that is different from traditional e-commerce.