The key to increasing merchandise sales through Facebook

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As an artist, selling merchandise is a vital part of your career. Whether you choose to create a huge store with a wide variety of items for sale or to simply sell one t-shirt displaying your logo, your merchandise store can provide a great source of revenue. Although it is vital to host a merchandise store within your own website, Facebook also offers great options for setting up a store.

Facebook is a great place to sell merchandise as most artists have a bigger audience on Facebook than on any of the other leading social media platforms. Setting up a store within Facebook itself speeds up the purchase process and encourages impulse purchases. By making it easy for fans to quickly purchase items, you will soon see a rapid increase in orders. Ease is key, the more quickly fans can purchase your merchandise; the more likely they are to make it to the end of the ordering process without changing their minds. Once you have a store set up, you must make sure that you are maximising its potential. In this article, we’re going to take a look at the best methods for encouraging a high volume of revenue through merchandise sales on Facebook.

The first step in creating a profitable merchandise store is targeting the right audience. In this case, it is best to target a lookalike audience, this includes targeting people who have common interests with those who have already made a purchase or visited your website. To do this, install Facebook Pixel, a programme that is designed to track visitors to your website. You can create a Pixel through Facebook by visiting the Pixels tab, which is located in the Ads Manager section. Once the code is generated, it needs to be added to each page of your website. Make sure the Pixel is working, then proceed to track visits to your site.

Once your Pixel is set up and you have tracked visitors to your site for a period of time, go back to Facebook Ads Manager and create a new audience. Select the option to create a custom audience and select ‘website traffic’. You can then select from a variety of options, you may want to select people who have made a purchase within the last 6 months. Next, you’ll need to create a lookalike audience, which is possible within the Facebook Ads Manager. You can limit your lookalike audience to people within a specific country, or can allow anyone worldwide. Once you have your lookalike audience, you can then start using advertisements to drive them to your Facebook store.

Sneak peek, one of them, coming soon..

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Through this method, you will be able to target the people who are the most likely to make a purchase, providing much more revenue potential than targeting people randomly based on speculation. As with all aspects of advertising, looking back at past data on people who have already connected with your brand is the most beneficial in finding exactly the right audience to target. Many artists make the mistake of broadly targeting potential fans without narrowing down their audience, leading to high expenditure on adverts that may not necessarily connect with many of the people who will see them. Using Facebook’s own algorithms to target those similar to customers who have already completed the purchase process is the most fool-proof method in finding people who are most likely to make a purchase.

Another ideal audience to target is customers that have items left in their shopping cart that they are yet to purchase. Using Facebook’s advertising tools it is possible to build an audience consisting of people who have exited your store without making a purchase, but are clearly interested in particular items. By reaching out to this audience specifically, you will tempt them to complete their purchase, generating more revenue and recovering lost sales. In order to advertise to this audience in the most effective way possible, it is beneficial to use carousel ads, showcasing a number of products. With this method, you may even encourage the customer to increase the value of their shopping cart before they complete the transaction. As a merchandise store owner, the worst thing that you can do is allow customers to slip through the net and forget to make a purchase. In the current climate, the attention span of social media users is increasingly short and it is not uncommon for people to lose interest in the middle of the purchase process. By reaching out to those who have not completed their purchase, you stop your store from losing valuable sales.

Although many artists are reluctant to dedicate some of their marketing budget to Facebook, paid advertising is imperative in order to allow your page or merchandise store to reach its full potential. Now more than ever, Facebook requires spending in order to have any kind of reach when posting. Without payment, posts will struggle to reach their potential and you will find that your engagement level suffers as a result. It is important to dedicate time and budget to make sure that your Facebook page is reaching its full potential and providing exposure for your brand.

By dedicating the right amount of budget to advertising your store and targeting the right selection of people, you will be giving your merchandise store the best possible chance of increasing its revenue. By connecting with those who are most likely to make a purchase in the future, you will be advertising in the most cost-effective manner, with your store feeling the benefits.