If you’re an avid reader of the Code3 blog, you’ve likely taken a look through one of our recent posts, ‘Halloween is Cancelled’. For true fans of the fall months and children looking forward to trick-or-treating, this isn’t technically true. However, it’s an undeniable reality for brands, retailers, and advertisers. Most can agree, each year it seems like the holiday season begins earlier and earlier—and this year is no exception. If you feel like you’re behind in preparing your online presence for the premature holiday rush, it’s not too late to make a difference. We’re currently working with our clients to optimize their efforts across channels. In this post specifically, we will focus on Facebook shopping. Continue reading for best practices, tips, and tricks, and important considerations to keep in mind.
Released in March of this year, Facebook shops is a newer shopping experience for many brands, advertisers, and shoppers. If this is something you're just trying or considering for your business in the future, let's take a step back.
It's important to understand the purpose of this element of strategy to make the most of your efforts. Above all, the evolution of consumer behavior has increased the value of and need for discovery commerce. And Facebook has been at the forefront of adapting its platform accordingly. Shoppers are buying online more than ever before and their purchase decisions are largely pushed by discovery.
In other words, e-commerce refers to shoppers finding products on their own. And, discovery commerce, the foundation of Facebook shopping, is based on product finding shoppers.
With the above in mind, whether you're leveraging Facebook shopping for the holidays or throughout the year, it's important to provide a positive customer experience. It's all about designing opportunities for shoppers to find your products and purchase them.
We've stressed the importance of having a presence across platforms. And streamlining these experiences for shoppers to be consistent and seamless is crucial. Doing so will decrease friction and increase sales.
So, why Facebook? According to the platform, more than 74% of people find products on the channel compared to avenues like search, e-commerce, and D2C websites.
Now to the tangible considerations you can take back to your team today. Once your Facebook Shop is set up, it's important to decide where you're driving traffic. Whether it's your D2C site, Amazon, or another online marketplace, your presence on those channels must be fully optimized. Otherwise, you run the risk of wasting your efforts. It should be a priority throughout your strategy to help shoppers and support them in finding what they are looking for, your products.
We strongly suggest creating a single commerce catalog. This will serve as a home for all items and cater to the shopper experience making it simple to search, sort, and filter. That being said, don't forget to complete all catalog fields like prices, titles, and descriptions. It's crucial to include specific information so shoppers have all they need to find a product and purchase it. From a back-end perspective, having a single catalog is also important for inventory management and keeping track of item counts.
Then, within your shop, customize it as much as possible. Including high-quality and interesting imagery will make all the difference when influencing purchases. And using several images in combination with video is most effective and can increase the likelihood someone adds that product to their cart. Of course, an attractive price point is also important for discovery commerce. Most people won't impulsively buy something worth more than $100, so we suggest keeping this in mind and focusing advertising on products within this price range.
Finally, to drive the most conversions through Facebook shopping, advertising and the built-in check-out experience are invaluable. For our clients, we leverage product tags and add them across our clients' content to make products even easier to discover and buy. Then we broaden the reach of product tags through advertising. Finally, we take things up a notch and increase conversions within the Facebook app by using selling tools like check out.
Final Thoughts
There’s just more than a month remaining until Black Friday and Cyber Monday take place. And, according to BlackFriday.com, Cyber Monday spending is likely to break records. We’re looking forward to seeing how our clients succeed and capitalize on this momentum in the new year.
If you could use the support of a strategic partner, please reach out. We’re here to support you during one of the most crucial times of the year and beyond. We’d be happy to jump on a phone call and talk about what your brand has in mind and areas of opportunity on Facebook and other major digital platforms.