Through the previous links of cross-border e-commerce SNS, I believe that a basic content system, a preliminary social relationship network, the following and content collection of several Internet celebrities have been established, and we have also had a considerable understanding of product-related topics in the community.
On this basis, we begin to have social interaction with the target audience, and when interacting with the audience, we must always remember that our ultimate goal is to promote sales. If this is not the goal, then SNS operations will fall into confusion without direction and will be easily affected by SNS operations with other purposes.
In other words, SNS operations that ultimately lead to sales are the most difficult. As a team responsible for SNS operations, it is likely to lose direction in many pure content SNS operations, that is, SNS operations with “self-media” as the direction, and gradually give up the guidance to sales and move towards self-media operations.
So, can self-media operations and e-commerce SNS operations not be taken into account at the same time? The answer is no, they can be taken into account at the same time, but the requirements for the team are very high. If you can operate an SNS with the direction of e-commerce sales, then operating a self-media SNS is a piece of cake.
In addition to direct verbal communication with the audience, there are some more directional interactive methods for pre-sales social interaction, such as raffles, competitions, questionnaires, live broadcasts, topic events, etc. These will be elaborated in the following chapters of this book.
Here, we first need to understand a background concept, that is, why are these more directional interactive methods suitable for pre-sales social interaction?
In social interaction, people have many needs to be met, among which sales-related needs need to be met by purchasing goods. From the perspective of consumer behavior, the generation of a consumption motivation requires consumers to have a strong motivation and willingness to buy; otherwise, it is difficult to make a consumption decision.
One of the important issues is the sunk cost issue. Simply put, the more the cost a consumer has spent on a product or service, the stronger the motivation and willingness to choose the product or service, because if it is not purchased, then this part of the cost becomes a real sunk cost, which is completely wasted. In order to avoid such waste, consumers will be more inclined to buy the product or service after participating in strong interaction.
To this end, we need consumers to pay more costs when engaging in social interactions than simply typing and speaking, such as time, brainpower, energy, expectations, etc. These costs belong to this category. The interactive methods mentioned above, which are highly oriented and have certain participation rules and participation costs, become the best pre-marketing methods for SNS marketing with sales purposes.
If consumers’ interactions with us are limited to a few simple chats or forwarding, then their sunk costs are often not enough to make them “reluctant to give up” us, while participating in lotteries, questionnaires, Q&A, etc. at least make them pay time, brainpower, expectations and other costs. Therefore, when sales conversion is finally achieved, it can be considered that such consumers are more motivated and willing.
Based on this background, before guiding from normal social interaction to sales behavior, we can adopt the above social methods. The major SNS platforms also provide us with basic functions. In the following text, we will focus on how to use these platform functions to implement interactive methods that create sunk costs.