I am doing cross-border e-commerce. At what stage is it appropriate to invest my team resources and energy in social traffic promotion? What data indicators can I use to help judge whether this stage is suitable for social traffic promotion?
Answer: This question is worth thinking about for cross-border e-commerce entrepreneurial sellers on any platform and in any category. Not all categories, at any stage, and all cross-border e-commerce sellers are suitable for social traffic promotion.
From a practical point of view, to do social traffic promotion, first, the conditions of the stage are suitable; second, the social attributes of the category are suitable. These two aspects are indispensable. Regarding the social attributes of the category, we will talk about it in the subsequent questions. So at what stage is it particularly suitable to carry out social traffic promotion? What data indicators can help sellers judge whether this stage is suitable for social traffic promotion?
Stage 1: In the operation of the site, your traffic share and conversion rate have advantages over platform competitors. The traffic and positions on the platform, such as hot search words, precise long-tail words, soaring words, natural search and keyword advertising of brand words, and even related recommended traffic and positions, are the traffic population you can optimize on the site. For the positions, you already have a good foundation. At the same time, your store content, browsing experience, user reviews, etc., these core details related to conversion rate, compared with the same type of sellers on the platform, you have made an advantage.
In other words, if you want to do a good job of attracting traffic from the community outside the station, you must first do a solid job of the basic skills on the station, and you can’t give up the near and seek the far because any effective promotion method needs to be restored to the online shopping behavior and psychological needs of the purchasing users. You have spent a lot of energy on the team and obtained some traffic from off-site channels such as communities, but the conversion rate and sales volume on the site have no advantage over your competitors. Many details of the conversion rate that should have been done well are not done well, so your traffic conversion is directly delivered to your competitors. This is a loss and harm to your products and stores. This is not worth the loss.
Stage 2: Your products or stores, as well as the sales platforms you leverage, start to go the brand route
We see that the entire AliExpress platform is pushing all platform merchants to move towards their own brands. For sellers, there are two specific operational data indicators that can help determine whether it is time to try social traffic diversion and promotion.
Data indicator 1: The search volume of product brand or store brand keywords on the AliExpress platform. The greater the search volume, the stronger your customer base’s awareness of the brand. At this time, it is necessary to actively interact with your customer base through social platforms.
Data indicator 2: The proportion of repeat customers in the store. For example, through platforms such as AliExpress, you have 1,000 orders a day, and the proportion of old customers who have purchased more than twice in these orders is increasing. If this indicator shows a growing momentum, you can also try to carry out social traffic diversion and promotion.
When you plan to really start investing in off-site communities, you can ask yourself and your team whether you have a certain foundation for the above two stages and two data indicators.
If you do not do a good job on the basics of the site, and you only do social traffic outside the site, you will not be able to further control the traffic population and slots on the site for a long time, and you will not be able to help the brand and old customers to settle down, especially when the cross-border e-commerce team is still in the survival period of entrepreneurship. Therefore, I personally do not recommend that you immediately start to expand social traffic outside the site at this stage.
On the contrary, if you are already the leader in the platform, firmly control all the traffic population and slots that the platform can give you, and you have also started to build your own product brand, and are constantly settling your old customer base, and even have been planning to accurately obtain small wholesale and Small Business distributors outside the platform. Localized business, then at this stage, my personal suggestion is that you can immediately start to invest resources and energy and study it carefully.