Marketing Strategy

A Guide to Creating Long-Term Marketing Plans During COVID-19

SN:D Agency · March 18, 2021 ·

In the time between now and when COVID-19 first entered our lives, consumer social media usage has surged by over 50% across markets. So why do many brands say they are posting LESS on their company social media accounts than they were before the pandemic?

It’s not uncommon for businesses to cut marketing budgets amid an economic downfall. Especially in a rapidly changing situation like a global pandemic, finding a long-term marketing plan that can endure shifts in public focus is difficult. Surveys show that only one in four companies are expected to increase their marketing activities in the coming months, but here’s why you should: cutting marketing costs might have saved you money in the beginning of the pandemic, but COVID-19 is projected to impact us well into 2022 and beyond. Even after the bulk of the population is vaccinated, the lasting effects of it on our culture will prevail.

With the right long-term marketing plan, your business can get back on the path of growth and stability, and continue growing for years to come. Read on to discover how businesses can hone in on core markets, strategies and initiatives, and create effective long-term marketing plans during COVID-19.

Long-Term Marketing Plans During COVID-19: Focus in On Core Business

One mistake many businesses make is trying to be everything to everyone. The best strategy is to focus on the core of your business—this is the foundation that the rest of your business is built upon. This means figuring out what the main selling point is that defines your brand. To determine this, you’ll have to get to the nuts and bolts of your business, including its purpose, consumer-base, and central product.

Re-establish Core Purpose and Objectives

It’s challenging to plan for the long-term without a dependable vision of where you’re going, especially when COVID-19 means that nothing is predictable. Ground your marketing plan by remembering your business’s primary purpose, mission, core values, and key message. Do they still hold as true today as they did before COVID-19? The reality is that the way you think about the future of your brand may look very different now.

Recall some of the questions you and your company had to ask yourselves in the beginning of the pandemic and reassess your answers now. What are your long-term goals for the business? Where do you see the future of the business in 5 years? 10 years? What do you need to do to get it from here to there? Once you’ve re-evaluated your business goals and values and feel confident in them, you can start considering your concrete marketing goals. These should be specific to the times we’re facing during a pandemic, when many places of businesses are still not fully open and face restrictions. More than anything, you should be considering how to reach them digitally. Determine what your digital marketing focus should be, whether its increasing brand awareness, driving traffic to your website, expanding your audience, or otherwise. Remember, it’s not just about boosting sales, it’s about how you intend to boost sales.

For more tips on determining marketing goals for your advertising campaign, read: GUIDE TO CREATING A SUCCESSFUL DIGITAL ADVERTISING CAMPAIGN

Focus on Core Market

Once you have your business and marketing goals, the next step is to hone in on your core market segment. Take an honest look and determine who your main customers still are. This doesn’t mean other markets are neglected, but you should identify your key market segment so you can build your core strategy around them. A good indication is who has still been spending during the past year of the pandemic.

Next, determine their long-term needs and how you can cater to them and retain their loyalty for the long run. Think solid customer service, listening to their needs, creating loyalty programs, and meeting them in the current moment, while embracing flexibility, since the needs of the current moment continue to change.

For more tips on targeting the right customers during COVID-19, read our blog post here: TARGETING THE RIGHT CUSTOMERS DURING COVID-19

Focus on Core Product

Your store may have 200 different products, but typically, people are coming for one or two specific products (or types of products). Instead of investing money into all your different items, pick the one (or two) main things that really define your business, and put your ad spend into selling those.

You might be thinking about how many great products or services you have to offer, and of course they are still valuable. However, customers typically come for one thing, and the important thing is to get them through the door (or to your website) and check out the others products along the way.

Sellers using Shopify, one of the top ecommerce sites in the nation, frequently say that they have the most success when their website’s front page has just one to three featured products. Of course, there’s a link to shop the entire store, but the first thing you see on their page is best-sellers. You can also highlight these products using referral programs and deals, or advertising special offers.

This strategy works because when you settle on a specific product, or type of product, at a time, you can define your core marketing around it and invest your messaging and money into that primary selling proposition. By identifying what your market is returning to over and over again, even during a recession, you’ll have a better chance of succeeding overall.

Long-Term Marketing Plans During COVID-19: Advertise Smarter, Not Less

We recommend that businesses and brands do not attempt to keep all of their marketing initiatives that they used pre-pandemic. However, we are also not suggesting that they reactively slash all budgets towards advertising.

Instead, our advice is to make informed decisions based on analysis of metrics data, and look for areas that are working well that you can invest more into, as well as aspects of your marketing plan that aren’t working well that can either be cut or revamped. How do you determine what parts of your marketing plan are successful or not? We’re glad you asked.

Analyze Channels

Social Media

Which of your social media platforms are driving traffic? This is the first step to determining where to cut spending and where to invest more. To get a better sense of what’s working and what’s not, you should:

Review metrics every week and/or month to see where traffic is coming from, what the conversion rate is, how many conversions come from each source.
Look for channels that consistently generate leads and consider allocating more money into those to continue growing your business during COVID-19.
Identify the channels that don’t tend to drive much traffic and determine whether to try a new strategy, add more budget, or cut those costs and reallocate the money to better-performing channels.

For example, if you run an equal amount of ads on Facebook and Instagram, but Facebook drives 90% of your traffic, analyze why this is (does your market simply not use Instagram, or do you just need a better Instagram marketing strategy?), and act accordingly.

For more tips on best practices for each social media platform read our blog post here: WHICH SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS YOUR BUSINESS SHOULD BE USING DURING COVID-19 AND BEYOND

Blogging

The benefit to blogging is that it drives traffic to your website and improves SEO. But in order for your blog posts to be successful, make sure you are using an optimal blog strategy. Here are the main things you should keep in mind:

Choose interesting topics. Blogs drive traffic – but only if they are on topics that people are interested in. Don’t post blogs just for the sake of posting them. Find out what topics people in your market are curious about, and use your blog to meet your audience in the current moment. You can also use Google Analytics to analyze which of your blog posts drive the most traffic. This will help you to get an idea for what’s working well for you, and then invest your time into putting out more content like that.
Choose useful topics. In addition to making sure you are writing posts that intrigue people, write about topics that provide value to your customers (and potential customers). This could be a step-by-step guide, a list of useful tips, or an opinion piece incorporating your knowledge as an industry leader. It should also speak to how your business is responding to COVID-19 and provide evidence of what sets you apart. Show your expertise to your customers and they will be more likely to choose you over a competitor.
Promote blog posts with ads. While the above tips focus on how to organically generate more leads, you may still feel you aren’t getting the exposure you want. If you have great blog posts that aren’t getting seen, try running some ads for them. Google Ads and Facebook Ads are great places to start getting your content noticed.
Promote blog posts with emails. Another tool you can use is the email list. Use your business’s email list to send emails to people who have either bought or looked at your products, and start sending them updates when a new blog post comes out. This is a great tool because this specifically targets people who have shown some interest in your brand already, and would be most likely to take interest in your blog.

For more tips on optimizing a blog post for SEO, read our blog post here: HOW TO OPTIMIZE A BLOG POST FOR SEO

Invest in SEO

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process of growing the quality and quantity of website traffic by increasing the visibility of a website or a web page to users of a web search engine. This includes using keyphrases consistently, balancing images with text, using outbound links, and more.

SEO is important during COVID-19 because it provides businesses with the online visibility they need to market to customers digitally. Since people have shifted significantly to online shopping and activities, SEO allows you to position your website high on search engines. When potential customers search related keywords or topics, you can ensure that your website is ranked highly in their results. In the long-term, this can help make up for lost foot traffic and engage some of those casual shoppers who are no longer visiting your store in person.

Long-Term Marketing Plans During COVID-19: Create a PR Plan

Advertising is only half of a great long-term marketing strategy–the other half is public relations. Part of being engaged with consumers during a crisis is sharing how your company is responding to changing needs and feelings of people. It also creates a strong brand image and shows your corporate social responsibility.

Most people believe that businesses have a duty to contribute to important causes, which is why crisis response is such an important part of business strategy.

Show You Care

When and where it’s appropriate throughout the duration of the crisis, share how your business is responding. During COVID-19, there will continue to be new updates, relevant news, and more information arising for many months. Continue to adjust and share your company’s response when this happens. This means releasing new or updated guidelines, safety procedures, services, offers, and more.

One example of a great PR response is Hewlett Packard, a software engineering company. They responded to the crisis by donating supercomputers, as well as their own engineers, to help the U.S. government make software for fighting the virus.

Ford also responded to the crisis in a timely manner. They partnered with other companies to help by contributing the air filtration system from one of their truck models and engineering it to be used in ventilators.

If you can invest in big causes for big changes, great, but it’s also just as important to be involved in your community and contribute to local causes, whether it’s fundraisers, special offers for healthcare workers, or simply meeting and contributing to this moment we’re all in. This will ultimately help show your customers that you care and create long-term trust and loyalty.

Be A Trusted Source

Overall, be a credible source for your customers who they can trust. When talking about the pandemic, keep it relevant to your industry. While contributing to the cause is important, make sure you are focusing, for the most part, on how it relates to and affects your industry, employees and customers. None of us are complete experts on COVID-19, but the key is to be credible. Stick to the facts, follow CDC guidelines, and make choices that are best for the safety of everyone involved.

The right digital marketing strategy in the age of COVID-19 makes a huge difference for businesses of all sizes. As a full-service digital marketing agency, we have seen firsthand these long-term marketing plans make a huge difference for our clients. These strategies allow businesses to continue growing throughout the pandemic and overcome challenges that come their way.

For more tips on how to successfully market during COVID-19, be sure to check out our other blog posts, and remember that SND Agency is an experienced, results-driven digital marketing agency who understands that many businesses need extra help during this time. If that sounds like you, we would love to hear from you about partnering with your business to leverage your social media presence for success now and in the future! Contact us today!

Strategies for Having Authentic Social Media Interactions

SN:D Agency · February 18, 2020 ·

According to research from Sprout Social, 81% of people feel that businesses have an obligation to be transparent on social media. Consumers want to feel understood by brands on a human level, and to know that their needs and expectations are valued. Authentic social media interactions are important in creating an engaging online presence because this is how brands develop meaningful connections with customers. Brands who can connect with consumers in an authentic way are trusted and often loved by their customers.

However, being authentic on social media can be hard, especially as a small business with fewer resources to spare on extra expenditures. While social media is a great way to connect, it is often difficult to balance having genuine interactions while also delivering more sales-driven promotional posts that are aimed at cultivating profits. How does a brand combine marketing strategy with an authentic brand voice?

In this guide, we have outlined 3 primary characteristics that make a brand authentic, and for each of these qualities, we offer specific strategies that you can implement to demonstrate these traits. The three traits we focus on are transparency, genuineness and sincerity. Read on to learn how you can demonstrate these qualities in your brand online.

Authentic Social Media Interactions: Transparency

One of the most important qualities a brand must have to foster authentic social media interactions is transparency about the business and its practices. This means showing how your brand is open about your business and its employees. Doing so demonstrates realness, shows that the business is ethical, and proves that the behind-the-scenes work is just as good as the front-end show. Let people see that you have nothing to hide, that your brand is honest about the company practices, its goals, and its management. Generally speaking, transparency means being open about how your products are made or how your services are delivered.

Below are some examples of posts you can make that demonstrate transparency.

Authentic Social Media Interactions: Company Culture

Does your office get donuts delivered every Friday? Do you have company potlucks every month? Do you give out for top performing employees? Share these things with your audience on social media. This is a great way to let customers see exactly how your business works on the inside, and give them a reason to not just like your product or service, but to like your brand as a whole. Show how you treat your employees with respect and how the culture of the company reflects the quality of service you provide.

Authentic Social Media Interactions: The Manufacturing Process

The manufacturing process is important for all businesses. How do you manufacture your products? Who are your suppliers? What materials are used to produce your products?

Chipotle does a great job of using this strategy. They make themselves unique by advertising that they, unlike other fast food restaurants, use “real” foods. They only use 53 ingredients. You can go on their website and see in a nicely designed infographic exactly what each ingredient is. They also make it clear that they use ethical measures for obtaining their ingredients, including getting them from farms rather than factories.

Even if your brand offers services rather than products, you can show the process by explaining what system you use for training employees, what methods are used in your practice, and the research behind why your service is better than your competitors’. This is a great way to show your transparency to your consumers.

Authentic Social Media Interactions: Insights into Business Decisions

When your consumers feel included in your company’s decision-making process, they will see your brand as more trustworthy. This is important because the consumers, above anyone else, are your stakeholders. If you’re changing something about your process, explain why. If you are making a big decision, share it with your consumers. Describe how you’ve grown and changed as a business over the years to include customers in your story and help them feel part of that journey.

One of the best examples of this is when Domino’s released its 2009 campaign about recreating their pizza recipe. They made a video reel of all the complaints they’d received from dissatisfied customers, including things like, “It tastes like cardboard,” and, “Microwave pizza is far superior.” They took this criticism and launched an initiative to redo their pizza recipe in order to create a new and improved product. This made consumers feel heard; it showed them that Domino’s was truly listening to them, and it gave them a backstage pass to see exactly how the company underwent this huge transition and all the steps that went into this process.

It might seem like overkill to explain your business’s entire behind-the-scenes process and the story of your brand development, but it adds a level of transparency that will pay off in fostering authentic social media interactions.

Authentic Social Media Interactions: Genuineness

One important way to have authentic social media interactions on social media is to show your audience that you are genuine. This means creating posts that demonstrate your company values and show that your brand is “real” — or, made up of real people who care. Ask yourself how your business and employees follow through on what they say they will do? Can you paint a picture of how they care about delivering on their promises?

The following examples provide insights into how to show this kind of business integrity through your social media channels.

Authentic Social Media Interactions: Employee Spotlights

A great way to demonstrate genuineness is with employee spotlights, where you routinely post an employee’s story and share what they love about their job. Featuring your employees is a great way to gain credibility with your audience. When you can share firsthand from an employee why they love what they do, it proves to your consumers that your company is as great as you claim it to be.

You can do this in a variety of ways, such as sharing “Happy birthday” posts for your employees, messages about employees of the month, or posts that showcase different departments. Anything to demonstrate that your employees matter and are at the forefront of your brand make for authentic social media interactions.

Authentic Social Media Interactions: Company Values

Another way to show genuineness is to share your company values. It is good to remind your audience why your company matters, what its purpose is, and what values it holds. For our clients, we make a post at least once a month with their company mission statement. We often link to the “About us” page on the website, and share what the company’s primary goal is. This is a great way to humanize your brand and display that your goals are, in fact, genuine.

Authentic Social Media Interactions: Causes and Philanthropy

How does your company give back to the community? Most people believe that brands have a corporate social responsibility to use their wealth to help solve social problems. A great way to earn trust with your consumers and show your genuineness is to let them see how your business meets their expectations of ethical behavior.

If you donate a portion of your proceeds to a charity, share that information on your page on a regular basis. If your employees volunteer at a food shelter once a month, post pictures from the events. Earn your consumers’ trust by showing them what causes are important to you, and you will begin generating authentic social media interactions in no time.

Authentic Social Media Interactions: Challenges We Solve

One pro tip they teach you in marketing school is that your aim in advertising should never be to sell a product; it should be to sell a solution to a problem. Every product or service is in one way or another an answer to your consumer’s problem. What challenge do your consumers face that using your product or service solves for them? What does your brand do to better its customers’ lives?

Examples posts for this include detailing the health benefits of a certain product, giving statistics on customer satisfaction, or describing the amount of time they can save if they use your service over a competitor’s. Of course, the problem you solve varies greatly depending on your product or service, but there is always a way to tie it back to the improvement it effects in your consumer’s life. Your genuineness in this will show and make for more authentic social media interactions.

Authentic Social Media Interactions: Sincerity

Sincerity is an important characteristic of authentic social media interactions, and the more you can demonstrate this, the better your consumers will feel about your brand. Sincerity means connecting with customers, addressing their concerns, and showing that you care about their needs. This includes interacting with them directly, replying to feedback (both positive and negative), and addressing their questions openly. It is imperative to be empathetic in your approach when talking with customers. Below are some strategies you can use to make your voice more sincere in your interactions.

Authentic Social Media Interactions: Customer Spotlights and Reviews

One effective strategy we use is taking customer stories (with their permission) and posting them to the company’s social media pages to show how the consumer has benefited from the product or service, and how their life has improved. At SN Digital, when a customer posts a review about a product for a client, we typically ask them if they can send us a photo and if we can use it in a future post. When brands show that they care about their consumers as individuals, it not only humanizes the brand, but it demonstrates that they actually care about making a difference in their customers’ lives. You will find that the more sincere you come across, the more of these authentic social media interactions you will begin to have.

Authentic Social Media Interactions: User Content

Similar to the previous point, sharing user content is a great way to show your viewers that you are listening to them. For example, if you ask a question on Twitter and tell people to reply using a certain hashtag, Retweet their replies. Have authentic social media interactions by showing that you are sincere in your concern for the consumers’ opinions. Reposting user content is an effective marketing strategy that transforms your brand in the eyes of your consumer from a faceless corporation to an authentic team of real, caring people.

Authentic Social Media Interactions: Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ’s)

You know that one question everybody asks about your product, the one you feel like you have to answer over and over again? Don’t wait for people to ask it. Make a few posts with some recurring questions you get and include your answers, then share them on your page once every few weeks. You can end these posts with a call to action and a link, such as “For answers to all of these questions and more, check out our FAQ page!”

This is a proactive way to show your audience that you understand their concerns and are sincerely invested in making sure they have all of the information they need to make a sound decision. This sincerity will indicate that your brand has authentic social media interactions with its audience.

Authentic Social Media Interactions: Interacting with Customers

Speaking of authentic social media interactions, let’s talk about interactions with customers who reach out to you. Our rule of thumb is to respond to everything. This obviously gets tricky if your business has grown into a large corporation flooded with thousands of comments and messages. But as long as it’s still reasonable, reply to everything you get on social media. Is it time-consuming? Yes. Is it worth it? Absolutely.

There is nothing that shows sincerity like taking the time to connect with each person who reaches out. Reply to all comments, answer all questions, show gratitude for any compliments, address negative feedback. Show your consumers that you are listening to them, and that they are your top priority (because, well, they are).

What we find in social media marketing is that the more human and real you are, and the more people feel a genuine connection with the brand, the more likely they are to buy your product. This is why authentic social media interactions are so important. Brand loyalty often has very little to do with the actual logistics of a product, and everything to do with how the customer feels about your brand. And these feelings are driven by how much of an authentic connection exists between the consumer and the brand.

This is why social media marketing is so much more than simply Tweeting about every upcoming sale or discount your store has going on. Remember, a lot of businesses sell the exact same thing as yours, at the exact same price–some even cheaper–to the exact same target demographic. Why should they pick your brand? Authentic social media interactions are a huge factor in why consumers pick one brand over another.

In order to stand out you must show that your brand is transparent, genuine, and sincere. By demonstrating your willingness to be real, your concern for living up to your values and your sincere empathy for your customers’ needs, you will establish an authenticity that goes far beyond social media, but pervades your entire business as a whole.

For those wanting to know more about navigating the world of social media for business, did you know that SocialNicole is a full-scale social media marketing agency? We manage our clients’ social media channels with the same strategies we shared above, and we have years of expertise and experience behind us. Don’t hesitate to contact us today!

Top Tips for Social Media Management

Emma Kaiser · July 31, 2019 ·

Social media wears many faces, and there’s a lot to keep track of, especially when you are using social media to market your business. Managing social media channels can be time consuming, complex, and downright confusing, which is why the SocialNicole team are sharing our tried and true tips for managing social media. With tips ranging from staying present, to producing quality content and mastering engagement, down to the nitty gritty details of analytics, read on for our top tips to help you master social media management.

1. Social Media Management: Be Present

This may be the simplest (but not necessarily the easiest) tip we can offer. In order to get the most out of your business’s social media channels, you need to be active and present on them. To get the responses and engagement you want on your platforms means putting in time and effort on your end. Luckily, we have some methods and tricks to make it a little easier for you.

a. Social Media Management: Stay Relevant

First you need to ensure that your pages stay relevant. Pay attention to what’s trending or time-sensitive, but also to the types of evergreen content that can be shared again and again. Post content that your audience will find relevant to themselves and their lives. When you do this you become more relatable, which means your audience is more likely to engage. Remember that your followers don’t want to feel like they’re interacting with a robot, so don’t be afraid to show the humanness of your brand, whether that means cracking jokes, taking advantage of emojis, or just talking like you would to your actual friends.

b. Social Media Management: Remain Consistent

You may have heard it before, but consistency is key. You shouldn’t blast twelve tweets one day then going radio silent the next. Ideally you should be posting every day, and you should spread out your posts so that you have content being shared regularly throughout the day, not all at once. You also want to achieve a balance with your content. Make sure you aren’t posting too much of one kind of content and not enough of another. We like to use content calendars to map out our monthly content so that we can see exactly what’s being shared on each day and stagger out our messages appropriately. An especially helpful tip for doing so is to schedule messages in advance, using a scheduling tool.

c. Social Media Management: Use Scheduling Tools

Scheduling tools are great for letting you appear present all the time, even when you’re not. Use these tools to schedule posts throughout the day or even the whole month, timing your posts so that they get the maximum amount of engagement. You can even schedule retweets or comments to go out when you’d like them to. This way, you can put more thought and strategy into your posts and publish them when they can be most effective. There are tons of scheduling tools out there for social media, but we love platforms like Buffer and Sprout Social, especially for social media on a budget. You can also draft and schedule posts directly in Facebook for no extra cost. You can do this under the “Publishing Tools” tab on your Facebook page. But before you get scheduling, let’s talk a little more about content.

*NOTE: It’s essential you check in on your social media channels EVERY SINGLE day. Do not schedule and forget. It’s important to be present and answering questions.

2. Social Media Management: Produce Quality Content

You can’t run your company’s social media without content, and the kind of content you share may be what makes or breaks your social media presence. You should be posting the kind of content that your followers want to like and comment on, share with their friends, and see more of in the future. Those are the reactions that will increase your brand recognition, drive more traffic to your website, and create a more loyal community of customers. How does one generate such content? We’re glad you asked…

a. Social Media Management: Quality over Quantity

Though it’s important to be present like we talked about above, hurling a constant stream of content at your followers won’t help anything if it’s not quality content. People are hit with content all day long, whether it’s through news outlets, text and emails, or their multiple social media feeds, and the only reason anyone will care enough to engage with your content is if you know how to make it valuable and meaningful to them.

You can do this by pin-pointing which specific audience you’re trying to reach. If you’re so vague that you’re aiming for everybody, you might not hit anybody. Know your target audience well enough to know what is valuable and worthwhile for them. Tailor your content to their interests and needs, their language and aesthetic. Pay attention to what they respond to and what they don’t, and let your social media pages be an extension of what you can provide to your customers as a business.

b. Social Media Management: Curated Content and Created Content

To publish the best content on your channels, you should understand the different types of content and know how to take advantage of both. Created content is your business’s original content. It’s your photos, your messages, your blog posts and web pages. These are great for really individually crafting your content for your followers and letting them see who you are as a business. The majority of the content you share will probably be your own, but it would be ignorant to think that your own content is the only kind worth sharing. That’s where curated content comes in.

Curated content is content you share from others, whether it’s in the form of blog posts and articles, or posts and retweets. Sharing content can make your account more diverse and interesting, allow you to share relevant topics you may not be an expert on, and can create beneficial relationships with other content creators. Plus, sharing is a great way to get people to engage with and share your content in return. You can find shareable content by following relevant accounts and pages. At SocialNicole, we have tools for finding shareable content that we like to use as well.

c. Social Media Management: Helpful Tools

Tools like Feedly are a great way to find and organize feeds of blogs, articles, and podcasts from reputable sources, all of which make prime curated content. See the latest posts and articles from a huge range of bloggers, websites, and news sources and schedule them right to your social media feed. Feedly allows you to create your own custom feeds of the publications you are interested in and want to follow, and Feedly will even suggest publications, which may help you discover a valuable new source. This is a great way to increase your presence and provide valuable content to your followers, but remember to review the content you are sharing and the sources you are sharing from, to remain a trusted source for your own followers.

3. Social Media Management: Mastering Engagement

Engagement is a leading goal when it comes to social media, and the amount and quality of engagement your business receives has a lot to do with how you manage. What goes around comes around, so the more you’re engaging with others, the more likely they are to engage with you. If you’re curious what your exact role is on this two-way street, read on.

a. Social Media Management: Responding to Comments

One of the easiest, but often overlooked, steps of engagement is to interact with others who are already engaging with you. This means liking and responding to comments, favorite-ing and replying to tweets, and simply letting your followers know that someone is there and listening. Be active by responding to mentions and thanking people for sharing. Interact by “liking” other people’s pages and inviting them to like yours. When it comes to social media, you get out of it what you put into it. Whether it means answering questions or just replying with a smiley face, practice the kind of engagement you want to receive.

However, you do get to be a little choosy about what kinds of comments you want to respond to and how you choose to respond. It’s ok to hide, or even block, users who you feel are misrepresenting the values of your brand on your channels, or anyone who makes you or your other followers uncomfortable. You may want to remove any profane, discriminatory, or otherwise offensive material that could damage your brand and give people a bad impression of your channels.

b. Social Media Management: Experimenting

Another great way to foster engagement is to experiment. Play around with your content and see what leads to the most responses. Whether it’s photo or video, inspirational or humorous, see what makes your audience react or gets their attention. There are endless possibilities for content out there, so play around to find out what gets people talking and what gets crickets. Another important note: social media is perpetually evolving, so never stop doing this. You will need to continually test strategies and make adjustments. Don’t let yourself become stagnant, because if you do your audience engagement will certainly follow your lead.

c. Social Media Management: Ask Your Followers to Engage

Perhaps the most obvious, but sometimes not so obvious, way to get your followers to engage is to simply ask them. That’s right–post content that garners a response. Ask questions and encourage your followers to answer in the comments, create polls for them to participate in, or offer giveaways which ask them to post or share in order to win. By creating scenarios that get your followers active and involved, you foster loyalty to your brand and generate additional exposure for your business. Get creative and see how many different ways you can ask your community to respond, and then don’t forget to reply and engage with the answers you receive. Keeping the conversation going just gives you more opportunities to connect and invest in your followers.

4. Social Media Management: Analytics

In order to really know what’s working and what’s not, you need to be looking at the numbers. This is where social media analytics come in. This is data tracked by most social media platforms to indicate your engagement levels. Yes, we know that it can be intimidating and confusing, but you don’t have to be an expert to learn from what the analytics are telling you, and the confidence will come the more you work with analytics. Being informed means that you can manage your social media channels based on hard data rather than hunches, which can in turn lead to serious growth for your company!

a. Social Media Management: How Analytics Can Help You

With social media analytics, you can measure the growth as well as the effectiveness of your social media channels. With this information in hand, you can move forward to improve brand awareness, drive profits, and receive a higher ROI (return on investment). Not only do analytics let you know what’s working and what’s not, but they also help you track your progress and know how to better allocate your time.

The basics you should familiarize yourself with and start using are Twitter analytics, Facebook Analytics, and some basic data offered by LinkedIn, and we at SocialNicole also use Google Analytics to gather our metrics, but there are many other options for providing analytics and even helping you interpret the data you’re looking at.

b. Social Media Management: Analyzing Your Numbers

With these tools you can discover information like number of page views, page likes, post engagements, page followers, and reach. You can also learn more about your followers by tracking them over time, seeing when they’re most active, and seeing when they’re not engaging. You can assess what content was effective and what was ignored. Analyzing the numbers ensures that you’re not just taking a shot in the dark, but looking at and learning from actual results. By taking the time to analyze how your content performs, you can take steps to guarantee your content is successful in the future.

From analyzing the data, to producing quality content, to actively and consistently engaging with your followers, we know that managing social media is a lot to juggle. That’s why it’s important that you remember to take a breath and try to have fun with it when you can. The more authentic and human you can be to those on the other side of the screen, the better. You’re trying to connect with people, after all. So trust your gut, listen to what your followers are saying, and we’re confident that you’ll see results.

For those who still have concerns or lack the time to really care for your business’s social media, did you know that SocialNicole is a full-scale social media marketing agency? And that we manage social media channels with many of the same strategies we’ve been sharing above? We have years of expertise and experience behind us, and we would love to hear from you about partnering with your business to take your social media presence to the next level. Don’t hesitate to contact us today!

5 Social Media Advertising Strategies

Abby Sorensen · July 24, 2019 ·

You don’t have to be on social media for long to realize that it’s taking the advertising world by storm. While advertising was a part of running a successful business long before social media came on the scene, today, social media advertising reigns supreme. But when it comes to putting an actual social media ad strategy in place, many of us are left scratching our heads. With so many different options, each with their own complexities, it can be difficult to weed out the effective from the ineffective.

At SocialNicole, digital advertising is a huge part of what we do, which is why we’ve put together a list of 5 great advertising strategies within social media marketing. These include macro-level tips such as creating a master advertising plan and maintaining quality control, down to the nitty-gritty details such as creating precise target audiences and determining the best words or images to use for a particular channel. So whether you’re brand new to social media ads or you just feel that your business’s advertising plan needs a boost, read on for our 5 killer social media advertising strategies.

5 Advertising Strategies for Social Media

1. Social Media Advertising Strategies: Create a Master Plan

Whether big or small, your business must have an advertising plan in place before you even think about placing an ad or running an ad campaign. At SocialNicole, we have spent years honing our ad plan approach to make sure our ad plans are streamlined, easy to read and decipher, and paint a clear picture of our business’s goals. Our first strategy for social media advertising success is to determine what your business’s advertising goals are, and then to create an ad plan, complete with a plan for budget and metrics, to implement and start achieving those goals.

Business Goals for Social Media Advertising

It is important for your business and everyone on your marketing and advertising team to have a consistent macroview as well as microview of your advertising goals. The macroview is the big picture, the main objectives, your brand’s personality, and what is going on with the ads across the board. This bird’s-eye view can help you identify where there is room for improvement. The microview is the look at each social media channel and how you can translate your macroview (big picture) into the daily microview (social media channels).

Before you begin mapping out your advertising plan, determine what your business goals are. Are you looking for brand awareness? To drive more traffic to your website? Perhaps you want to generate more qualified leads? Or build your email list? Or maybe you are looking to build up engagement on your social media channels and grow the actual audience size? You probably have a mixture of goals, which is ok, but it is helpful to know what it is you want to accomplish before you set out to create a plan of action.

Ad Plan for Social Media Advertising

Now that you have your goal(s) in mind, the next step towards achieving it is to create a social media content calendar, as well as an ad plan. Map out your content across all channels for each week, month, quarter, year–whatever works for you. Keep track of important events, holidays, dates, etc. for your business. Then, create an ad plan that promotes the content that is most in line with the goals determined above.

At SocialNicole we create monthly content and complementary ad plans, which allows for constant assessment of performance and reevaluation of our goals at the time. In our ad plans, we clearly lay out each specific goal and the ad type needed to reach that goal. Your goals may change from time to time, and social media advertising works best when you keep it moving, all the while keeping in mind the mission and goal of the business as a whole. By assessing and changing this ad plan each month, you will be able to continuously course-correct as needed to keep your goals in sight.

The monthly ad plan strategy that SocialNicole uses complements any specific campaigns our clients may choose to run concurrently. When a specific campaign is being planned out, we will create specific content and ad plans that are just for that one campaign. The campaign ad plans, once approved, run at the same time as the monthly ad plan, each with a unique set of goals. The monthly ad plans are always focused on the big picture, keeping businesses present and relevant, while the campaign specific ad plans are narrow and focused on achieving the goals of the campaign.

Budget for Social Media Advertising

One of the first decisions you need to make when creating your ad plan is how much money you are able and willing to spend on each ad campaign. People often ask us, “How much money should I spend on ads?” and the answer is something you have to determine for yourself. How many people do you want to see your ad? What budget is your business operating under, and how much of it can you allocate towards social media advertising? We believe so strongly in social media marketing and advertising that we would advise you to put a large portion of your ad spend budget into it. At SocialNicole, we know that what you get out of social media advertising depends on what you put into it – so we encourage you to give it the juice it needs to take you where you want to go.

Metrics for Social Media Advertising

In our opinion, the best way to find out what works for your advertising budget is to test as much as you can to determine how much money you need to spend to get the results you want. This may take some time, but testing is a very effective and hands-on way to become an expert on social media advertising. Keeping a detailed account of the performance of your ads will help you determine what works and what doesn’t (this extends beyond budget to audience, content, etc.). At SocialNicole, we provide weekly and monthly metrics for all our ads and are constantly assessing the data to continue improving our advertising strategies.

In providing these metrics, we assess the performance of the ads in terms of link clicks, reach, impressions, and more, as well as the cost of each link click and result. In this way, we can be careful to give more of our budget to the ads that have historically performed the best.

2. Social Media Advertising Strategies: Optimize Your Content

You have no doubt heard the phrase, “Content is king.” When it comes to your business’s digital presence, this point cannot be stressed enough. If you don’t have quality content, you will lose viewers, followers, and prospective customers. If you do have quality content, you could see your business reap incredible benefits, and social media advertising is the way to get that stellar content out on the screens of the people who will bring you those benefits.

So let’s say you are already creating quality, organic content for your business on social media–what we are focusing on here is how to optimize that great content as you advertise, particularly across multiple channels. Advertising on multiple channels is great, but when doing so, it is important to pay attention to what kind of content “sells” on each channel. If you sell products, using Instagram with its handy-dandy “shop now” advertising feature might be perfect for driving traffic directly to your online shop. If your goal is more page followers, Facebook might be your best bet.

Once again, the best way to determine how to do this is to look at your own advertising history: where did your ads particularly shine? If you are brand new to advertising and don’t have past data to analyze, then play around with it. The time and ad spend you dedicate to learning what type of advertisements work best for your business will pay off in the long run.

You can also look at your competitors. Where are they advertising? What types of ads are they running on each channel? What are they doing right and what are they doing wrong? You can learn from both.

Be ruthless and give your own business a social media audit frequently. Assess the data and figure out what isn’t working, what you need to change, and where you can take things to the next level. Social media is ever-evolving, and a smart business will evolve with it.

3. Social Media Advertising Strategies: Congruence Across Channels

Keeping your ads congruent across all channels may seem to contradict our previous strategy, but if we look a little deeper, we find they aren’t really opposites. Our third strategy is to maintain congruence of your brand’s voice, personality, and your advertising goals. It’s likely that you have common followers across your social media channels. Someone who follows you on Facebook should get the same message from your brand that they do on Instagram. This will help them remember you and can earn you loyal followers. The consistency also keeps your brand looking professional.

Remember the social media content calendar we mentioned above? This is a very helpful tool in achieving this congruence. Think of your business as if it were the protagonist you are writing in the next Great American Novel. What is your character’s (business’s) voice? What is his/her (its) main goal? What character traits, morals, and personality quirks does this character (business) possess that make him/her (it) unique, special, worth listening to (or, in the case of business, worth following, hiring, buying from, etc.)? Make sure that the content you are advertising across the board all reflects the voice, values, and goals of your business.

Run each social media platform like it is a unique piece of a whole; it should do its part to serve the big picture while also playing to the strength of the specific channel. In this way, the content we share on Twitter is going to look different than the content we share on Facebook, but in the end, they are both going to look like SocialNicole.

4. Social Media Advertising Strategies: Targeting the Correct Audience

Our next tip for social media advertising is one we consider a non-negotiable: determining the best audience for your ad. If you want your ad spend to go further, and to see better results (not only in the performance of your ads but in sales, too), targeting the best possible audience for what you are promoting is crucial.

In our first strategy, we told you to create a master plan which includes a goal. If you have a clear goal in mind, it likely involves the type of people you want to reach (or, if not, will make it much easier to determine the type of people you want to reach). Since you know your business best, you probably already know your customer demographic. You can build audiences for Facebook and Instagram, as well as Linkedin, advertising. Include age group, gender, job title, field of study, interest, and more to tailor-make your audience.

We also like to use retargeting audiences, which means creating an audience of people who have visited your website, added items to their online shopping cart, used your app, and more. Retargeting consumers who have already interacted with your business in some way can be a great way to boost sales, particularly if you were able to give these individuals a great experience the last time they visited your website or app, shopped your products, interacted with you on social media, or something else. Retargeting is a very valuable strategy, but you do have to have Facebook Pixel (or pixels from whatever social media channel you want to advertise on) installed on your website or on your app before you can take advantage of this audience group.

Our biggest tip for honing your audience selections is to test, test, test! As we have said above, we keep careful track of the ads we run and assess the metrics of their performance every week and month. Based off of these metrics, we will often change out audiences to test which bring in the best results. There are some general rules that will pretty consistently affect the results you see (for instance, a large audience will lead to a lower cost per result on your ads, while a tiny audience can cause this number to go way up), but in many ways you will have to test audiences and see what results you get.

5. Social Media Advertising Strategies: Quality Control

Our last, but not least, tip in this series is to maintain quality control of your ads. A master plan is the first step in our guide to great social media advertising, and part of quality control is to create this plan, keep it consistent, and adjust it every time you make an adjustment to the ads–keep a paper trail, so to speak, of the changes you make or suggest for your ads, so that your plan matches the actual ads being set, checked, and running every step of the way. This quality control extends to the content you are using as well. Making sure to use proper and consistent language and grammar, clean links, and high-quality images is important to maintaining the quality of your ad content.

As a professional social media marketing agency, SocialNicole takes extra measures to ensure accuracy for each and every ad and post we place. We have a very detailed “2nd check” process that we use for all ads and content placed. One of our team members is tasked with checking all work in detail against the approved ad plans and content documents. We have specific spreadsheets where this employee must sign off that every element was checked and place their own name and reputation (and job) behind it being right. With digital ads there are many moving parts, audiences, links, budgets, ads placement, creatives and more. Ensuring absolutely everything is done right is part of what makes us a leading social media marketing agency and why people choose to work with us. While this process may seem tedious, it is worth it to ensure the kind of quality that your business and your customers deserve.

With these 5 strategies in your wheelhouse, you are well on your way to more successful advertising on social media! Once you have created your master plan, created killer content (curated and congruent across all channels), targeted your ideal audience, and set in place a quality control system, you should start to reap the benefits of great social media advertising!

Still daunted by the idea of advertising on social media? Let us take it off your hands and do it for you! Contact us today – we are a full-scale social media agency which specializes in social media advertising, and we would love to share our expertise with you.

Why Hire a Social Media Management Agency?

Abby Sorensen · July 11, 2019 ·

Is your business questioning which is the best, most effective way to engage in social media marketing? We can all recognize the pervasiveness of social media in today’s marketing, but you may still be wondering in what specific ways social media can truly help your business, and, even more so, how to best take advantage of it. For many businesses, navigating management on their own may be more trouble than it’s worth, but getting the right help from a professional social media management agency can truly make all the difference. That’s why we’ve laid out the reasons social media marketing is vital to your business’s success and why hiring a social media management agency can offer the most effective, advantageous solutions to your marketing needs.

Why Social Media Marketing Is Important for Every Business

Before you ask yourself whether hiring a specialized social media management agency is the right route for your company, it helps to understand why social media marketing is so important for all businesses.

1. Social Media For Business: Your Customers Are Social

Today, social media encompasses more than channels like Facebook and Twitter, and it’s not contained to an app like Instagram. It is integrated into every aspect of communication. The internet is social and so are your customers. It’s how communities interact and where your customers spend their time. It plays a major role in what we’re exposed to and helps shape our opinions and preferences. It’s how we share ideas and get our messages across to others. There’s no doubt that we are living in a digital age, which means that for your business to be successful, it has to have a digital presence as well.

2. Social Media For Business: Brand Recognition

Social media is key for brand recognition. It allows you to meet customers where they are. When your business is consistently present on social media instead of just your website, your brand will reach the screens of more individuals. A huge part of brand recognition is remaining in front of your audience in a consistent and relevant manner. Leveraging social media for brand recognition makes sense and will affect your bottom line as more people remember your brand and choose you over your competitors.

3. Social Media For Business: Website Traffic And SEO

Leveraging social media marketing is essential for driving traffic to your website or online shop and can help in boosting your overall traffic and sales. The Google algorithm factors in overall traffic as well as “social signals” in determining your expertise and value as a business. These factors all play a role in whether your website shows up as relevant in Google searches. That means leveraging social media marketing is essential to building your organic search rankings and increasing your chance to be found by potential customers.

4. Social Media For Business: The Power Of Word of Mouth

Word of mouth is a huge reason why people choose the products they buy and the services they select. People trust the brands their friends and family use, and customers seek out businesses that the people around them speak well of. In many cases, a personal recommendation is more effective for bringing in new business than any ad or promotion. Positive word of mouth is vital for business growth, and social media is one of the best ways to spread it. When your followers share your content, tag your account, or retweet your post, you’re reaching a far greater and more receptive pool of customers than you could ever do through traditional networking.

5. Social Media For Business: Community Growth

When using social media, your business is looking for growth in terms of loyal followers and repeat customers. Think of your customers as a community – social media is a superb way to grow this online (and even in-person) community. It presents many opportunities for your followers to interact with your business in ways that go beyond visiting a brick-and-mortar store. You can have your followers answer questions, share feedback or photos, enter contests, and even use social media to invite them to events. These kinds of daily interactions are what help build brand loyalty and a solid customer base.

Why You Should Hire A Social Media Agency

Now that you know the reasons that social media can be incredibly beneficial for your business, it’s time to look at the facts: having an effective, robust social media presence for your business is a lot of work. It can be difficult, confusing, time-consuming, and it takes a while to see consistent hard work pay off in terms of business and sales. Read on, and you’ll see that a social media marketing agency can be a solution to all of those very real concerns.

1. Professional Social Media Management: Saving Time And Money

While it takes a lot of time and effort to be effective as a business on social media, the pay-offs can be massive. ‪By hiring a social media management agency, you bring in a team of professionals who already know exactly what they’re doing. A qualified social media marketing agency is likely to already have the necessary software and systems in place to operate your social media marketing effectively, which saves you time and resources in purchasing and learning new software yourself. That way, you can allow experts to manage your social media so that you can focus all your energy on what you do best: building your business.

2. Professional Social Media Management: Hiring An Agency Versus An Employee

Even if you know you don’t have the time to really pour into your business’s social media platforms, it can still be tough to make the decision to pay someone else to do it for you. So let’s quickly consider the alternatives.

Maybe you’ve thought about assigning an employee to be your business’s social media manager. After all, they already know your business’s brand and voice. The problem is that employee will still require a significant amount of training and experience before he or she can operate your social media successfully on their own. Social media marketing also requires certain systems and software that your business would have to purchase and learn to operate. Operating social media can also be a time consuming role that your already-existing employees just may not have the time or energy to take on. You will also have to oversee the work your employee does for your social media and that means you have to be tuned in and have a full understanding of how it all works. This takes your valuable time and energy.

You may have also considered hiring your own in-house social media manager. While it’s an option worth thinking about, and an individual social media manager may have the expertise, it takes a lot of time and resources to hire and train a brand-new employee. And even after that hire takes place, your company needs to think about how that employee will be managed and whether there is anyone in your business who has a high enough level of knowledge of social media marketing needed to oversee the work of that employee. You should also consider that social media is not always consistent, and, depending on your business’s needs, you may have enough social media needs to justify a full-time position, or your needs may require just a couple hours of management per day. The most effective social media management happens with a team approach, which means multiple levels of oversight and different expertise coming together to create your content, place your ads, manage your metrics and complete the other work required for an effective social media program. Most businesses cannot afford a team of 2-4 people dedicated to their social media marketing, but with a professional social media agency, a team approach is common and should be what you look for when hiring an agency.

When considering the pros and cons of assigning the task to an existing employee or hiring a social media manager, most companies find it can be far more cost-effective to hire a social media marketing agency to manage your channels. As we’ve said, social media management agencies are made up of professionals who already know the ins and outs of the industry and likely already have the necessary experience to represent the voice, message, and personality of your brand online. Finally, when hiring a agency like SocialNicole Digital, you are getting a full team of experts so that every client has a dedicated social media manager, social media director, and ads manager.

3. Professional Social Media Management: Professional Expertise Is Everything

Social media is an ever-changing creature, and it can be a headache to stay on top of it–so why not leave it up to the professionals? An agency dedicated solely to social media management makes it their business to stay on top of new channels (or changes to the old channels), what’s out-of-date, and what’s trending. Hiring a agency that stays up-to-date will help to ensure that your company stays at the top of the social media game. Plus, they probably have proven results and examples of work they’ve done for other businesses in the past! An agency worth its salt will be willing to listen to your needs and come alongside your brand’s vision to work with you and deliver results. If you want to take your business’s social media presence to the next level, hiring a specialized social media management agency may be the perfect next step for you.

Did you know that we are a full-scale social media management agency–like we’ve been talking about above? We would love to hear from you about partnering with your business to take your social media presence to the next level! Contact us today!