How To Ramp Up Your Facebook Shops for the Holidays

The 2021 holiday season is here. As consumers start to do their holiday shopping, what is your multi-location business doing to stand out? This is where a strong Facebook Shops strategy comes into play. Facebook Shops are an excellent way for your locations to promote products and services where consumers are already spending their time - on local social. Within this blog, we’ll provide tips your multi-location business can leverage to ramp up your Facebook Shops for the holiday season and win more sales. If you’re just getting started with Facebook Shops, our recent blog is a great place to start.

Plan Ahead and Start Building Your Facebook Shops NOW

Once your Facebook Shops are set up and ready to go, it’s time to begin strategizing. If you haven’t already started, plan out a calendar of what you would like your business to promote on its Facebook Shops throughout the holiday season and when. For instance, Black Friday and Cyber Monday are just around the corner. Are there any specific promotions you’d like to share on your Facebook Shops during these huge shopping days? Have you thought about offering new customers a discount or a buy-one-get-one-free promotion? These are things to consider to attract both new and existing customers during the busy season. Much of your marketing team will likely have off during the Thanksgiving holiday and in late December, which is why planning ahead is essential - having a schedule of what you want to promote and when is critical. While you can’t directly post in your Facebook Shops, you can promote them on your local social channels and link to the shops. Some localized marketing platforms allow you to pre-schedule social content ahead of time at the local level, which will help your multi-location business stay organized during the holiday season.

Take SOCi, for example. SOCi’s social media management solution enables multi-location businesses to manage and deploy localized content at scale while maintaining brand consistency at both the enterprise and local levels. With SOCi’s social media management solution, your multi-location business can also organize and share content libraries and pre-scheduled social media calendars that empower you to deploy winning content in just a few clicks. This feature will be handy during the holiday season. Pre-scheduling local content promoting your Facebook Shops ahead of time will allow your marketing team to focus on other crucial localized marketing efforts when it matters most.

Include Creativity and Holiday Classics

How can your multi-location business get its Facebook Shops to stand out from the competition? That’s where creativity comes in. For instance, consider creating a holiday gift guide promoting products in your Facebook Shop. Consumers crave convenience, and a gift guide that takes them directly to a Facebook Shop where they can purchase the products found in the gift guide is seamless. Like gift guides, your multi-location business could create collections focused on various interests where consumers can easily find gifts for any person. For instance, a self-care collection may feature products like candles, face-masks, and bath bombs, while an active collection could feature a yoga mat, running shoes, and headphones. Sectioning your Facebook Shops into various collections that make it easy for consumers to look through your products and pick out the perfect gift is key. The easier it is for consumers to navigate your Facebook Shops and find what they’re looking for, the better. During the holiday season, many consumers also think about giving back to the community. Consider running a promotion that will donate a particular portion of sales to a local cause. You can share this information on your local social channels, which will drive sales and increase the amount of money raised for the local cause. This shouldn’t be done as solely a sales tactic but should come from the heart. Choosing a local cause that your multi-location business cares about is a great way to build brand authenticity.

Reach More Consumers With Shop Ads

Shop Ads are another great way to ramp up traffic around your Facebook Shops during the holiday season. Like other ad campaigns your business runs on Facebook, you can run targeted ad campaigns to attract a larger audience to your Facebook Shops. Like other ad campaigns, you can choose your target audience based on their interests, needs, and location. Running targeted ad campaigns during the holiday season when you know that consumers are likely doing more online shopping is a smart move. For more tips on what it takes to run an effective targeted ad campaign across your local pages, check out our blog on the topic.

While running ad campaigns across 100s or 1,000s of local pages can seem challenging, SOCi is here to help. SOCi Ads PLUS allows you to instantly create, pre-schedule, and deploy highly customized, targeted local ads. With this tool, your multi-location business can promote its Facebook Shops effectively, making the most of your ad spend. Get more insight on SOCi’s next-level localized ad solution here.

Leverage Product Tags on Facebook and Instagram

It’s also important not to let product tags slip through the cracks. You’ve probably seen them before. Product tags can be used on Instagram and Facebook and are often seen in posts highlighting products, as shown in the example below. Product tags can link back to your Facebook Shops and again give consumers easy access to your inventory.

When planning your local social strategy for the next few months, think about ways to incorporate product tags. The more opportunities you have to use product tags linking to your Facebook Shops, the more traffic you can expect. It’s important to note that Facebook recommends using five product tags or less per post, so consumers don’t get overwhelmed with too many tags. Now that you have all of the insight needed to give your Facebook Shops the boost they need for the holiday rush, it’s time to get started! There isn’t much time left, but SOCi is here to help. From creating a local social strategy to running localized ad campaigns, and more, SOCi has you covered. For an in-depth look at how SOCi can help your multi-location business crush its local social efforts and win more sales through your Facebook Shops, request a demo today!