Tag Archive for: socialmediastrategy

Let’s talk social media. 

We all use it. It’s a platform that reaches billions of users, making it the perfect place for businesses to reach their audience. 

Source

So while social media advertising is undeniably effective, it can also be pretty tricky to get right. There are a lot of different opinions on what works and what doesn’t.

Luckily, we’ve gathered some of the best and brightest minds in marketing to give us their #1 social media advertising tip. 

Let’s hear what they have to say!

Tip #1: Focus on a strong message

When it comes to social media advertising, the most important thing is to have a strong message that resonates. This means creating clear, concise, and easy ads for your target audience to understand.

Too often, businesses make the mistake of cramming too much information into their ads, which can be overwhelming and confusing for users. Instead, keep your message focused and simple so your target audience can easily understand it.

Name: Jamie Shostak

Title: Head of Growth 

Company: Appetiser App Development

Social Media (LinkedIn/Twitter): LinkedIn

Tip #2: Don’t sell the product, sell the outcome 

People are buying your product to solve a need and address a specific pain point. So what is the solution that your product is offering? And are you communicating that solution sufficiently on your social media channels? 

The goal is to educate, engage and inform as this builds customer trust—which is incredibly important. So instead of discussing your products’ features, look at the outcome. What problem does your product solve?

A great example of this is Apple. When talking about the new iPhone, they emphasize that their commercial was shot entirely on the latest iPhone instead of only highlighting the features. Or Nike. Their advertising is about how their shoes will allow you to run faster, jump higher, and reach your fitness goals. You’re not buying shoes; you’re buying a lifestyle. 

So who are you selling to? And what is the problem your product is solving? If you can’t answer these two questions, then you need to go back to the drawing board. 

Name: Yvonne Ivanescu

Title: Founder / Social Media Strategist / Travel Wrier 

Company: Now In Rio Swim / Spreaker / Now in Portugal

Social Media (LinkedIn/TikTok): Linkedin | TikTok

Tip #3: Test and Learn – then Pivot

Most marketers have a test and learn plan in place, but a shocking amount of marketing teams aren’t utilizing those insights to power creative direction for future campaigns. To make an impact with your testing spend, compile those insights over time, and use the layered findings to drive your content and creative planning. 

Name: Amanda Stevenson

Title: Marketing Strategist 

Company: Convince & Convert

Social Media: LinkedIn

Tip #4: Make your brand stand out using explainer videos

There is no doubt that videos have become one of the most powerful marketing tools over the past few years. More and more companies have been allocating big budgets to make videos for their brands. Just when you think those are good news, actually, the competitions are getting fiercer.

Therefore, choosing the best type of video for your marketing purposes is vital to make your brand stand out in the crowd. One of the most recognized video styles is explainer video. A report says that 73% of shoppers are more likely to purchase after watching videos explaining the products.

Explainer videos have both appealing visuals and compelling storylines to attract and engage audiences. In addition, they are well known to be straightforward and impactful in delivering messages. Another winning point of explainer videos is they can break down any complex concepts into digestible pieces of information in the most interesting way possible.

Name: Andre Oentoro

Title: CEO and Founder

Company: Breadnbeyond

Social Media: LinkedIn | Twitter 

Tip #5: Know your audience and align your social ads with your brand

It’s important to tailor your social media to your primary audience. Create personas to better understand your customers and then create social media posts and ads in a way that will appeal to their needs and preferences. Also, remember that your images, videos, and messaging should all align with your company’s brand, regardless of the channel you’re on. 

For example, if you’re a consultant that targets professional service firms, you might want to avoid creating TikTok videos that are funny or silly. While those videos might help you go viral, they might not help you reach your core audience, and they could possibly work against your brand and turn off your target audience. 

Name: Candice Stennett

Title: Vice President of Marketing

Company: SCORE

Social Media: LinkedIn | Twitter | Facebook

Tip #6: Advertise where your users are

Sometimes the channel you market in will impact your results more than your actual marketing campaigns. This is because you need to advertise where your users are. For example, if you’re targeting B2B decision-makers, you will likely get far more results advertising on LinkedIn compared to a platform like TikTok. 

You should take some time to list down different platforms your ideal customers use and focus on the platform that is the most relevant to your audience. This not only gives you a higher ROI on your marketing spend, but it also allows you to build a relevant brand on a platform that your audience is active on. 

Name: Ali Ali

Title: Founder

Company: Alisquared

Social Media: Twitter

Tip #7: Use the B2Bob framework for B2B creatives 

This one makes so much sense, yet it’s often overlooked. With the introduction of stories, the attention span decreased, and along with it, the way we consume content altogether. If you add on the complexity of B2B where the challenge lies in showcasing the promise or benefit of the product, it may seem like there’s no point in even doing ads for B2B users. 

However, Facebook introduced the B2Bob framework after the company extensively researched the consumption habits of social content. So, instead of “business to business,” we should rethink the acronym as Brand, 2 seconds, Benefit. Or in other words, you should aim to showcase your Brand within 2 seconds by highlighting your Benefit while speaking to a human such as Bob, if you will. 

If you add storytelling to the mix, striking facts, or surprising benchmarks, your ads have a better chance of standing out from the crowd and stopping people from scrolling. 

Name: Raluca Bejgu

Title: Digital Marketing Manager

Company: Verifone

Social Media: LinkedIn

Tip #8: Go back to basics

Despite all the new trends constantly happening in social media marketing, I believe many of us still do not use basic strategies in full capacity.

When was the last time when you used the AIDA model while creating your social media posts? Of course, the type of content is important, but users’ psychology and best practices on how to get their attention are already in the books.

Name: Evaldas Mockus

Title: VP of Growth

Company: Omnisend

Social Media (LinkedIn/Twitter): LinkedIn

Tip #9: Emphasize more on content creation than media amplification. 

Most social media marketing teams (small or big) spend 80% of their time and budget on media buying rather than creating the content itself to buy the media in the first place. I’ve seen what works for my eCom business is to make more creatives because that’s the prime variable for relating with people, which leads to more sales. 

Allocate at least 60% of the efforts for contextual creatives and the rest for buying and distributing the media. This has worked really well in my experiences.

Name: Bhujal Patel

Title: Founder

Company: My Digital Kube

Social Media: LinkedIn

Tip #10: Tell a Story 

Advertising on social media is all about storytelling. People hang out on Facebook and other networks to share their stories – what they’re nuts about, what they’re tired of, and what they can’t keep in anymore. So instead of a generic product description with a cliche CTA, focus on the emotional side. 

Let’s say you’re going to promote cold email software. Your target audience must have tried lots of tools like yours. What’s the point in wasting time on one more? To get them interested, you could tell a controversial story.

For example, a typical cold email tool usually comes packed with humorous follow-up templates allowing senders to look like funny peeps to deal with. But the truth is – jokes sound manipulative, almost like negging, when told by strangers. And many influencers actually criticise this follow-up strategy. 

Source: https://twitter.com/Marie_Haynes/status/1133461675548528640

That’s what you should talk about in your social ad.

Any contradiction or controversy will draw attention for sure. And if you add that your templates are based on a different approach and showed high response rates in your tests, people will want to try them.

Name: Mykola Haichenko

Title: Content Marketing Manager

Company: Visme

Social Media: LinkedIn | Twitter

Tip #11: Invest in Video Content

The most engaging sort of social media material is definitely video. Video content is 12 times more successful than other types of content, according to InVideo. In fact, it has a higher percentage of engagement than both text and image content put together.

Video helps you to be succinct and pique the interest of your audience in the first few seconds. Your ability to condense information into easily digestible snippets of content that are lengthy enough to hold viewers’ interest but short enough to leave them wanting more is key to your social media success.

Name: Eldo Roshi

Title: Co-Founder

Company: Codeless

And that’s a wrap!

There you have it, 11 social media advertising tips from some of the top marketing experts in the industry. 

What do you think? Anything that stands out to you that you want to try first? 

While fancy strategies are great to test and optimise, I believe that the best strategy is simply staying true to your brand: focus on what your product/service is and present it to those you know it will serve. 

And of course – get creative, have fun with it, and see how your brand can start attracting more people and start outperforming your competition!

 

The post 11 Marketing Experts Reveal Their #1 Social Media Advertising Tip appeared first on Content Marketing Consulting and Social Media Strategy.

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Over three billion people around the world use social media every month. Out of this, 75% feel that social media platforms play a key role in their purchasing mindset. This shows how a good social media strategy is a must for businesses that want to come out on top.

But with the constantly changing trends and increasing social media competition, it isn’t easy to make a mark today. So, where should you begin from? Your best bet is to audit your current social media channels to find improvement opportunities and make changes that drive better results.

In this article, we’ll dive deep into the world of social media audits to discuss the what, why and how, so you can give your social media profiles a facelift and pave your way towards enhanced brand awareness.

What is a social media audit?  

To stay on top of your brand’s online presence, you need to evaluate and optimize its social media profiles. This process is called social media auditing. Conducting social media audits regularly is instrumental in reaching your engagement goals because it helps you identify the strengths and weaknesses of your social handles and develop a cohesive social media strategy that can drive your business forward. 

Many facets come together to conduct a comprehensive social media audit that reveals the good, bad and ugly of your profiles—only to help you improve your game and better engage your audience. It includes: 

• Performance Metrics: To understand how your profile fares with your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) like conversions, engagement, followers and clicks.
• Social Listening: To track online conversations around your brand, so you can boost customer engagement by interacting with your audience, protect brand reputation in case of fake news and respond to customer feedback.
• Content Pillars: To maintain a consistent brand voice and provide niche-specific content to your target audience.  
• Hashtags: To understand which hashtags are specific enough to increase the reach and engagement of your posts.
• SWOT Analysis: To analyze strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats to get a snapshot of your social media performance and identify areas for improvement.

Many social media tools on the internet can help you conduct a social media audit seamlessly to get accurate insights. Yes, the sheer volume can make it hard to single out the top-performing ones, but here’s a curated list of great platforms to begin with:

• BrandMentions: Get alerted whenever your brand is mentioned across social, news, blogs and videos.
• Agorapulse: Schedule content, discover trends and access detailed analytics.

• Followerwonk: Audit your Twitter performance and analyze what type of content gets the most followers to tailor your social media strategies accordingly.
• Phlanx: Analyze your engagement rate on Instagram to measure the success of each social media post in your marketing campaign 
• Facebook ads library: Explore all ads running on Facebook and Instagram to understand what your competitors are upto and get ideas for enhancing your content strategies.
• Sociality.io: Create in-depth content calendars, publish posts and track news about your brand.
• Hypeauditor: Pick and choose the best influencers for your business by analyzing quality of audiences and engagement.
• Analisa: Analyze your Instagram and TikTok content to understand your engagement rate, follower count and post performance.

Why should you conduct a social media audit?  

Although conducting a social media audit may seem like a long and drawn-out process, the insights will help you get the most out of your social media efforts and get greater engagement and conversions that impact your bottom line.

Here are some ways conducting social media audits can help you:

• Allows you to keep a pulse on what people say about your brand and competitors. 
• Provides in-depth information on your current social media performance.
• Helps identify opportunities to tap into a new market or target group.
• Spotlights the engagement strategies of your competitors, so you can learn from them and engage your audience better.
• It gives you actionable steps to up your social media marketing game and one-up your competitors to create a mark.

5 steps to conducting an effective social media audit

Now that you know the importance of conducting a social media audit let’s look at how to actually do it.

While there are multiple ways to conduct an audit, here’s a simple 5-step process you can follow to begin right away.

• Analyze your current social media performance

While conducting a social media audit, your first order of business should be to create a comprehensive list of all the social media accounts you currently have on different channels. Dig deep into each profile and look for inconsistencies in brand voice, theme and style guide. 

Note down these inconsistencies on a Google Sheet and share it with your creative team. Then, create a timeline to revamp your social channels’ overall look and feel. 

Ideally, an optimized profile should have a relevant social media account name, brand logo as the profile picture, an optimized bio that tells users what you do, the products/services you offer and why they should follow you, along with a Call-to-Action (CTA). SkullCandy is a case in point. 

The next step is to identify well-performing posts to understand their virality factor. This will help you understand what type of content works well with your audience.

Nearly 94% of marketers in the B2B space prefer using Linkedin to distribute their content. They leverage tools like LinkedIn Social Selling Index to measure the authority they gain through their Linkedin-driven sales strategies and identify improvement areas to optimize their strategy further for better performance. 

Derive inspiration from competitors

Around 90% of Fortune 500 companies engage in competitive analysis. Studying your competition can help you zero in on your own company’s Unique Selling Proposition (USP). 

Here are three sure-fire steps to conducting an effective competitive analysis: 

Make a list of your top competitors 

Open Google Adwords Keyword Planner, and enter some keywords related to your business. The tool will show you where these keywords are ranking, along with their search volume. You can then enter these keywords in the Google search bar and understand which businesses are ranking the highest for them—these are your competitors. 

Similarly, you can also enter your competitor’s website and understand which keywords rank higher on the search engine results page. 

Analyze their current strategy 

Gather intel on your shortlisted competitors’ strategies, themes and content pillars by evaluating their active social media profiles. Use Twitter Lists to keep a close eye on what kind of content they’re tweeting, and sign up for their newsletters for more insight. 

You can also ask yourself questions like: 

• What platforms are my competitors on?
• How often do they post? 
• What is their engagement rate?
• What are they missing out on that I can address to one-up them?
• How can I provide a better social media experience to my audience?

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Around 90% of Fortune 500 companies engage in competitive analysis.
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Use the insights to guide your implementation strategy 

After completing the analysis, draw up your action plan to act on your findings and optimize your social media channels to improve performance and engage with your audience better.

Zero in on suitable social media channels

The platforms you choose for your business entirely depend on your target group. For example, if your audience includes marketers and C-level or VP executives, it doesn’t make sense to focus your marketing efforts on Instagram—you’re likely to perform much better on a B2B platform like Linkedin or Twitter. 

Another great way to understand which platform you should be on is to analyze how your audience interacts with your content. Do you get more likes on your Instagram reels, or do thought-leadership articles on Linkedin garner better attention? 

Depending on your engagement, choose a few primary channels to focus your social media efforts on. In an IDC study, three out of four B2B buyers and eight out of 10 executive buyers in the survey relied on social media to make purchasing decisions.

Here are three platforms you can use if you have a B2B audience:

Twitter

• Perfect for posting company updates and keeping up with trends through Twitter hashtags.
• Allows businesses to keep track of brand mentions and gain insights into customer pain points and brand perception.
• Best to create bite-sized content under 280 characters that can quickly capture audience attention. 

Linkedin

• In B2B marketing, 80% of leads sourced through social media come from LinkedIn —making it an ideal platform to find new customers. 
• LinkedIn accounts for 46% of social media traffic to B2B websites, demonstrating its effectiveness in driving traffic to your website, and driving conversions and sign-ups.
• 69% of social media users believe Linkedin is the best platform for authentic and high-quality content, contributing to brand credibility.

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Nearly 94% of marketers in the B2B space prefer using Linkedin to distribute their content.
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Facebook

• Business decision-makers are 1.3x more likely to watch product demos on Facebook, making it an effective space to approach prospects and boost content engagement.
• According to Meta, business decision-makers, your primary target audience as a B2B brand, spend 74% more time on Facebook when compared to other people on the platform. 

Image source 

Identify opportunities from new social media platforms

The next step in your social media audit is to look for opportunities where you can establish your brand’s presence because there’s a huge world beyond Instagram and Facebook on platforms like Peanut and Caffeine.

For example, a women’s fashion brand would do well on Pinterest, given that the majority of the platform’s users are women. Similarly, Twitch and Discord are great options for gaming brands. Several businesses are also exploring audio platforms like Twitter Spaces and Clubhouse to engage in real-time audio conversations. 

Here are some steps that can help you recognize new opportunities to establish your social media presence:

• Refer to the list of shortlisted competitors from your competitor analysis.
• Check out the websites to understand which platforms they’re on.
• Make a list of all new platforms and identify if your audience is active on them. 
• Conduct in-depth research about each platform’s user demographics and content types. 
• Create a list of pros and cons to understand which platform is right for you.

If the pros of a particular platform outweigh the cons, create an account on it and analyze the performance of your posts to see whether marketing on this platform is worth your time and effort. Use analytics to validate your decision to be present on a platform and tweak your strategy accordingly for better performance.

Create an implementation plan

Now that you know which social media platforms your brand should focus on, begin creating and tailoring content for each one of them. Your Lifestyle Business has an easy 5-step system for this: 

Step 1: Identify the purpose of your content. Do you want to build brand awareness, trust boost sales, drive traffic to your website or improve customer loyalty? Tailor your overarching content pillars based on the answer to this question. 

Step 2: Use the pillar and cluster technique to organize your social media content into specific topics areas and create topic clusters. For instance, if you’ve chosen “social media marketing” as a content pillar, you can divide it into more specific topics like social media analytics, influencer marketing and paid ad campaigns. 

Here’s an illustration of how SEMrush zeroed in on “SEO” as their content pillar and further divided it into smaller topic clusters:

Step 3: Write down ten questions per cluster. Create social media posts based on the answers to these questions. This will give you a content bank of around 50 pieces of social media content. 

Step 4: Create a content calendar. Once the content is ready, you can schedule each post through a scheduling tool like Planable. 

Step 5: Repurpose your posts to create a content bank that’s tailored to all the platforms you’ve identified in the previous steps. 

For instance, Linkedin posts are often long and text-heavy, while Twitter posts contain snackable content. So, if you’ve created a content calendar for Linkedin, you can repurpose all of the posts by cutting down the fluff to retain key points and post them on Twitter as a thread. You can follow the same process and repurpose content for different platforms as well. 

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In B2B marketing, 80% of leads sourced through social media come from LinkedIn
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Track results over time

You can’t just conduct a social media audit once and call it a day. You need to constantly track your social media profiles to ensure you’re targeting the right set of audiences, creating content that works for you, and are on the right platform.

If you want to generate consistent ROI, you need to perform regular audits. 

Here are a few steps to guide you through the process: 

Step 1: Identify two or three SMART goals you want to achieve by your next audit. 

This means that whenever you’re creating goals for your social media strategy, make sure they are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound. 

Here’s an example:

• Specific: Boost engagement on Twitter
• Measurable: Get 10 comments, and 5 followers per post
• Attainable: Attain 200 followers over 30 days with ads and sponsored posts
• Relevant: Increase engagement rate by 5% to drive brand awareness
• Time-bound: Achieve 10,000 post views in 30 days

Step 2: Choose relevant metrics to measure performance 

Start tracking your results (we suggest doing it every quarter). You can assess how social media is contributing to your larger business goals by tracking social media metrics like: 

• Sentiment analysis: Evaluate the overall perception of your brand, whether it’s positive, negative or neutral. 
• Brand-specific keywords: Understand which keywords work for you and keep updating them with changing trends. 
• Audience insights: Gather demographic data of your target group. Study their interests, preferred language, income level and unique interests..
• Engagement rate: Analyze the number of reactions, comments, shares, and clicks on your social media posts during the specified period

Step 3: Create detailed reports to validate your strategy 

Develop in-depth reports of your social media performance for every quarter. For this, refer to the goals you set in the first step and see if you’ve succeeded in achieving them. If you haven’t, playback your social media strategy and identify loopholes, areas of improvement and weaknesses. Use data to understand why you couldn’t achieve your goals and optimize your strategy to get better results.

For example: if you wanted to gain 100 followers on Twitter in 30 days but could only manage 30 followers—look at your impressions per post, month-on-month growth in followers, and engagement. You can also use Twitter Analytics to see your high-performing posts and include more of such in your content strategy.

You can use these to change course and get a better outcome in the next quarter. 

Conclusion

Conducting a social media audit may seem intimidating at first, but the process becomes intuitive after the first few cycles. With the right elements and a few SMART goals to back them up, you can boost your social media presence and ROI. 

Always remember to keep looking for new platforms and trends to latch onto. After all, staying relevant is crucial in today’s changing business landscape. 

The post 5 Easy Steps To Running An Effective Social Media Audit appeared first on Content Marketing Consulting and Social Media Strategy.