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How to Build a Successful Social Commerce Business: Strategies and Best Practices

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Social media platforms have rapidly become more than just a way to connect with family and friends. The rise of social commerce has transformed them into powerful tools businesses use to widen their reach and engage with audiences. With so much competition to contend with, how do you stand out and build a successful social commerce business?

A Few Effective Strategies

Here are a few strategies and business practices you should know about:

Understand Your Target Audience

Knowing who your audience is and what their pain points are is crucial for building a successful social commerce business. Identify who they are by conducting market research and social media analytics to gain valuable insights. These will help you understand their needs, preferences, and behaviors. 

When you know your audience, developing content strategies will be easy. Tailoring your marketing campaigns will help you create messages and product offerings that resonate with them. The data you’ll gather will be the foundation for building a solid and loyal customer base.

Choose the Right Social Media Platform(s)

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You don’t need to be on each and every platform available to establish your social media commerce businesses. Note that not all are created equal; thus, they are home to varying demographics. For example, Facebook is ideal for building a community, while Instagram is perfect for visual content.

Choose the ones that your target market stays in the longest. Once you know your audience, determining which platform to use will be easy. When done choosing your platforms, create platform-specific content that will optimize your online presence.

Create Engaging Content

After choosing your platforms, it’s time to create compelling content to lure in followers and differentiate your brand from the rest. A well-crafted content strategy that aligns with your business will go a long way in establishing your following. For this, you need to develop a good mix of product-focused and lifestyle content. 

An excellent strategy you can try is by leveraging user-generated content (USC). Encouraging your followers to share their experiences with your brand can create a sense of community and authenticity. This will help drive the success of your social commerce business.

Provide a Seamless Buying Process 

person holding a credit card

Businesses are now leveraging social media to provide positive shopping experiences for their customers. They want them to have the convenience of buying without having to leave the platform they are in. What would be an excellent accompaniment to this feature is by providing them with a seamless buying process.

To achieve this, it’s essential to integrate an e-commerce platform with your social media profiles, allowing customers to browse and purchase products quickly. Remember that a straightforward and user-friendly checkout process can help minimize cart abandonment and improve the overall customer experience.

Leverage Influencer Marketing

Another powerful tool for your social commerce business is influencer marketing. When you partner with influencers in your industry, you’re leveraging their clout to promote your products or services. Most of these have an established following already, which you can tap into.

To choose the influencers you’re going to work with, consider factors such as their reach, engagement, and alignment with your mission and vision. To create a successful partnership, you must set expectations and negotiate compensation upfront.

Measure Success and Adjust Strategies

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When you have developed a few marketing strategies based on the above tips, you now need to measure success. This will help you adjust your strategy by capitalizing on those that bring great results and weeding out those that aren’t working.

It’s essential to regularly assess your content strategy, social media platform choices, and influencer partnerships to ensure that they are aligned with your business goals and resonate with your target audience. Based on your analysis, you may need to adjust your strategies by pivoting to a different social media platform, changing your content mix, or modifying your influencer partnerships.

A Few Best Practices

And as promised, here is a list of best practices you need to keep in mind when building your social commerce business:

Build a Strong Brand Identity

Develop a clear and consistent brand identity that reflects your personality, values, and unique selling proposition. This will be the face of your brand that your customers and followers will remember you with.

Foster Customer Engagement

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Encourage your customers to engage with your brand on social media. To do this, make time to answer their questions or reply to comments. You can also run contests and surveys, give discounts, or ask for user-generated content.

Provide Social Proof

One of the biggest hurdles people face when shopping online is the proliferation of scammers and fraudsters. To set their minds at ease, provide social proof such as customer reviews, feedback, and testimonials. 

Optimize for Mobile

smartphone

Responsive design has never been more crucial than today. Make sure that you optimize your website, social media platforms, and e-commerce platform for mobile. Mobile phone usage has increased, and it’s the device most people use to shop, make sure that they see you clearly on their mobile phones.

Monitor Trends

Staying up to date with the trends in your industry is essential. When you know what’s in and what’s not, you can create your content accordingly. You can then adapt your strategies to include what people want to see, making you relevant. 

Emphasize Authenticity

The digital world has consumers seeking a higher level of trust in the brands they follow. This is where authenticity comes and becomes all the more critical. This is a trait that many customers look for and consider before making a purchase. To achieve this, you need to share stories about your brand, its history, and personality. Always be honest and transparent to help build long-term relationships with them.

Final Thoughts

It may seem from the above tips and best practices that building a successful social commerce business is difficult. These are proven effective, and no matter how challenging they are, they are sure to differentiate your business from competitors, build trust and loyalty with your customers, and drive sales for your social commerce business.

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Business

10 Best AI Tools for Entrepreneurs 

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AI tools have evolved fast, and entrepreneurs now rely on them not just to automate tasks but to scale entire workflows. That said, it’s not surprising that many business owners are leveraging the power of cutting-edge technology. And this is where AI tools for entrepreneurs come in. Let’s look at what they are and a few examples you can check out.

1. Aomni Agent

AI Tools for Entrepreneurs 

Packed with powerful AI-driven features, Aomni Agent is a tool that can help you grow your company’s outbound pipeline by conducting research to give you new Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs). With it, you no longer have to create account plans for each of your prospects, as the AI tool will do it for you. 

Aomni Agent engages with your customers, provides support, automates routine tasks, and gives you real-time insights and analytics, among many other features. To know its pricing and additional information, you need to contact them directly through their website.

2. Pictory

AI Tools for Entrepreneurs 

A video creation tool, Pictory, can help you create engaging and professional videos in minutes. It uses AI that automatically generates videos from your text, images, and audio. This means you get excellent results even without any video editing skills.

You can use Pictory to generate videos from your blog posts, articles, and other text. It can also edit existing videos and add images, music, or text. It offers a free trial and three plans with subscription fees that range from $23 to $119 per month.

3. Zeda.io 

Zeda.io has grown into a powerful AI-powered product operating system. With its 2.0 update, the platform now connects customer feedback, product strategy, roadmapping, and internal documentation into a single intelligent workspace.

Its AI engine analyzes thousands of customer inputs, from surveys to reviews to support tickets, to identify patterns, prioritize features, and suggest product improvements. What used to take days of manual synthesis now takes minutes. The updated version also includes AI-generated product briefs, automated roadmap updates, and integrations with popular tools like Slack, Notion, and HubSpot.

4. Slite Ask

AI Tools for Entrepreneurs 

Slite Ask is one of the most reliable AI knowledge-base assistants for teams. Instead of manually searching docs or old messages, entrepreneurs can simply “ask” a question and get an instant answer based on their workspace knowledge.

The AI scans company documents, policies, SOPs, and internal notes to deliver accurate responses without hallucinations. This makes onboarding smoother and speeds up decision-making, especially for remote or hybrid teams.

5. Credal.ai

AI Tools for Entrepreneurs 

Keep your data safe with an AI tool that’s perfect for entrepreneurs. Credal.ai is a software that provides a secure environment for AI applications to run and monitors them for any potential security threats. This helps you protect your business’s sensitive data from unauthorized users.

Credal.ai protects your data from leaks, malicious codes, and unauthorized access. It has a free plan but with limitations, so to get the most out of this AI tool, a Team or Enterprise plan is recommended. Pricing starts at $500 per month.

6. Webscraping.AI

AI Tools for Entrepreneurs 

Web scraping is the process of extracting data from a website, such as stock prices, product details, company contacts, and many more. If you want access to this information, you’ll need Webscraping.AI. It is easy to use and won’t require you to have any coding or technical skills. All you need to do is enter the website you want to scrape, and the tool will automatically get the data from the website.

Webscraping.AI can help business owners make better decisions by providing accurate data to identify new opportunities. It can also help them make better decisions for their strategies. Pricing for this AI tool for entrepreneurs ranges from $29 to $249 per month, with no hidden fees.

7. ValueProp.dev

AI Tools for Entrepreneurs 

A value proposition is a statement that tells your customers what your product or service is all about. This can be tricky, but worry no more, as ValueProp.dev is an AI tool for entrepreneurs created explicitly for this. It uses machine learning to analyze your customer data to generate unique value propositions for you.

ValueProp.dev can help you improve your business by generating value propositions that significantly increase customer acquisition, retention, and sales. It is free for up to three value propositions, but they also have premium plans for more options and features. Pricing starts at $29 per month.

8. Lovo.ai

AI Tools for Entrepreneurs 

A text-to-speech and text-to-video platform, Lovo.ai can help you create engaging and informative content for your content marketing strategies. It uses AI to generate realistic and human-loke voiceovers, videos, avatars, and others. You can extend your reach globally as this tool can do voiceovers and videos in more than 140 languages.

Lovo.ai can help you increase your engagement, improve your SEO rankings, and boost conversions. You can try their free plan to give you an idea of what the tool can do for you. But for more features, a paid plan that starts at $19 per month can provide more value.

9. Zigpoll 

AI Tools for Entrepreneurs 

Zigpoll remains a solid choice for collecting customer insights, but its capabilities have expanded over the past two years. Today, Zigpoll uses AI to generate survey questions, summarize responses, detect sentiment, and even segment customers automatically.

Entrepreneurs can embed polls on websites, email campaigns, or post-purchase pages, then let Zigpoll’s AI categorize feedback into actionable insights. This helps brands quickly spot trends, product issues, or opportunities for upselling.

10. Pitches.ai 

AI Tools for Entrepreneurs 

Are you looking to increase your business funding? Then creating the perfect pitch deck should be your priority. You can easily and quickly do this with Pitches.ai. It is an AI-powered tool for entrepreneurs to develop and refine pitch decks. 

Pitches.ai analyzes pitch decks and gives you feedback on their structure, persuasiveness, and clarity. This gives you a higher probability of success. It offers four premium plans with prices ranging between $95 to $1,195.

Conclusion

Artificial intelligence is slowly becoming popular among business owners. Thanks to their many advantages, it’s no surprise that many will be using the technology from now on. These AI tools for entrepreneurs are a great example, and you should check them out today.

Featured Image Credit: Photo by Anna Shvets from Pexels

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What’s the Best Graphic Design Service for Education & eLearning?

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Graphic design for education

TLDR: Best unlimited graphic design services for education and eLearning: ideal for quick turnaround, high-quality designs, and affordable pricing.

84% of communication is visual. Thus, for a world of education and eLearning, graphic design is imperative in the creation of projects for students and complex concepts. From interactive course materials to compelling marketing, strong visuals drive success. But finding a reliable, affordable design partner is tough.

Thus, it’s hard to come by a reputable service that can provide all your needs at a reasonable cost when it comes to project designs, turnaround expectations, anticipated quality and budgetary allowances.

But never fear! We’ve vetted what’s best for you!

1. Penji

If you’re looking for the best for education and eLearning purposes, Penji has the best overall value as quality, turnaround time and offers have placed it at a reasonable flat fee monthly.

Penji is an unlimited graphic design service that works as you would expect – unlimited – which means that for a flat fee monthly, you’ll have access to your very own team of designers.

Features:

  • A Well-Qualified Team of Designers: Whether you need e-learning interactive designs to course visuals (infographics, presentations) Penji’s graphic designers make everything visually appealing to an academic audience.
  • Turnaround: Average turnaround is about 24-48 hours so you can keep churning out material for course creation or marketing.
  • Unlimited Revisions: As many times as needed to get your requested project right.
  • Accessibility and Submission Portal: Penji comes with a site that’s fairly user-friendly for ease of access in submissions, critiques and conversations.

2. Kimp

If you need an unlimited source and don’t mind one that’s second best, Kimp boasts graphics and even video. Consider this option with caution – some reviews do mention turnover can vary and this wouldn’t be the best reliable option if you’re on a time crunch for every project.

Features:

  • Wide Range of Services: Kimp provides both graphic design and video services, offering a versatile creative solution.
  • Dedicated Designers: You’ll work with a group as your designated team so you get to know your specific creators.
  • Easier Feedback Opportunities: Feedback can be given on the Kimp site for creations with visual access as to what you want changed.

3. Design Pickle

Design Pickle: unlimited graphic design services

Design Pickle was one of the first unlimited graphic design services to go for an unlimited design game. This is helpful if you need custom illustrations or a presentation created for a polished look in any educated (or business) endeavor – higher tier subscriptions go with probability – but in all other worlds, it has more value than other sites when stacked against one another.

  • Unlimited revisions to get the exact illustrations or graphics needed for presentations or other projects.
  • Quick turnaround times to keep on schedule with 48 hour returns.
  • Global Design Team: Boasts a diverse team of professional designers, offering expertise across multiple industries to match various client needs.

4. ManyPixels

Many Pixels: unlimited graphic design services

ManyPixels is another reputable source that has unlimited graphic designs services but assignment transparency which means you’ll have one assigned designer to you, but they’re a bit more transparent with regards to who may (or not) be able to help you but will get back to you with good timing. 

  • One Dedicated Designer: ManyPixels is a company that does not have unlimited designs, however you’ll have one assigned who will know your needs better than most.
  • Good Turnaround Time: Generally they’ll turn around assignments within 1-2 days after submission regardless of simplicity/complexity.
  • Reliable Designs: Good for marketing or simple visuals/templates you’d want to use for educational continuity but they may not give as specialized feedback as you’d think.

Cover Image Credit: Photo by Fox on Pexels

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What are the Best Graphic Design Services for Fashion Brands?

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best graphic design service for fashion brands

For many businesses, graphic design means conversions, credibility, and brand recall. So, if you’re in the fashion industry, you also need to have significant visual assets if growth is your priority. If you need help finding the best graphic design service for your fashion brand, we made a list of the top five:

Penji

Best Graphic Design Service for Fashion Brands

An on-demand graphic design platform, Penji offers unlimited graphic design services for fixed monthly fees. This allows you to send as many requests for lookbooks, catalogs, packaging designs, and many other marketing materials for less. Its team of top-notch designers assures you of consistent and high-quality work worthy of your fashion business.

Kimp

Best Graphic Design Service for Fashion Brands

Built to support the creative needs of many businesses, including fashion, Kimp is another platform that offers unlimited design requests. It can craft product mockups, campaign visuals, packaging designs, and social media graphics, among others. It also provides video editing services, making it ideal for fashion companies that run reels, seasonal promos, or behind-the-scenes edits.

Designity

Best Graphic Design Service for Fashion Brands

Combining agency-level creative direction with flexible access to US designers, Designity suits fashion brands that need polish, strategy, and scalability. They can provide you with social media graphics, online ads, label designs, logo and branding, and magazine layouts, among other key services.

Flocksy

Best Graphic Design Service for Fashion Brands

If your business needs video editing, copywriting, and voice-over services, then Flocksy is the best graphic design service for your fashion brand. In addition, it also offers custom illustrations, packaging design, infographics, and many other design services. It operates on a flat-rate pricing model, making it a more cost-effective option than hiring freelancers or working with expensive agencies.

Reel Unlimited

Best Graphic Design Service for Fashion Brands

With its predictable pricing and wide array of graphic design services, Reel Unlimited is an excellent design solution for fashion brands. Like many on this list, it offers unlimited design requests and fast turnaround times, making it the ideal option for those with tight schedules and limited budgets.

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