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Social Media Marketing: The Role of AI in 2019

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By  Laura Jensen

We live in a world where we are incentivised to share. We digitally share our photographs, thoughts and buying habits more than ever before. There is a wealth of data available on consumers and if brands want to capitalise on this through their social media marketing, they need ways to collect and understand it.

However, the need for this data is far surpassed by the fact that it is unwieldy for brands to manage – the volume and velocity of data alone can make it a monumental task to understand. That is why the industry is changing and adapting to make sure this data is much more accessible.

As we’ve seen in the digital marketing sector as a whole, the use of artificial intelligence (AI) is increasing rapidly. With applications from voice search to chatbots, there’s a wealth of information that AI is already harvesting. But, there will be so much more it can do with social media in the future.

Assisting with social media marketing analytics

Steve Wozniak, when asked what his dream product would do, said that he’d love something that would give him “more time”. When a 400-millisecond Google delay results in 8 million fewer searches, the speed to insight needs to be lightning-fast.

Companies like Brandwatch, which provide a social listening service, are looking to use AI as a way to reduce the number of hours that social analysts spend looking at brand data. Instead of an average of 3.2 hours a week looking at basic analysis, social analysts could get on with the bigger things while AI makes that data easy to understand and easy to access across an organisation.

The way Brandwatch does this is by analysis the peaks and troughs in the charts and pulling together data from a number of different sources. This is then used to work out why charts may have peaked at a particular point – maybe a social post coincided with a news event from the same industry that drove new viewers to that channel. These AI insights make reporting on social media marketing far more straightforward, since they take out the guesswork of social analytics.

Integrating customer experience with social apps

As with chatbots, AI is becoming more of a feature on social channels, integrating customer care and social analytics through customer service.

As Donika Ruseva, the Digital Owner Experience Coordinator from Jaguar Land Rover, says, “There’s no better way to show off your brand than good customer service”. Many brands use automation to implement holding messages for complaints and comments on social media, to varying degrees of success, but there’s more that can be done with social and customer experience.

Messenger apps, such as Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, aren’t just for personal conversations anymore, but have become social media marketing platforms in themselves, providing access to both commerce and service apps. Personal banking apps, like Cleo and Plum, can help you save or manage your spending, while retailers like Made.com have created a conversational commerce experience for their customers. While these apps already exist, there’s a lot of scope in 2019 to see more businesses from different industries embracing this new use of messenger platforms.

From these AI apps, businesses can gain information on what their customers are primarily using them for, what aspects are important to them, and what trends occur on a regular basis.

AI and customer care

Supported by AI, businesses can achieve the quick, responsive and transparent response times that today’s customers expect. What’s more, AI can analyse what customers say in tweets, posts or comments.

Using AI to analyse sentiment and recognize key terms in messages to identify positive or negative feedback is already available, but there’s much more that AI can do for the customer care aspect of a business.Many AI systems have machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) capabilities, and these are key to real-time self-service on customer service platforms. AI can respond to automated queries quickly and generate responses with accuracy and speed that humans can’t match; this is especially effective, as we’ve mentioned before, when applied to chatbots on messenger services.

There are a number of other services that AI can provide in the customer service sector, such as providing an easier way to identify customer issues on social by processing and learning from gathered information, defining customer behaviour patterns, such as when or how they might complain or talk about a product, responding with suitable solutions, products or discounts after receiving complaints or messages, and much more. We’re looking forward to seeing more intuitive measures, developed over the next year and beyond, applied to social media.

By Laura Jensen

Sourced from Business 2 Community

 

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Top Social Media Marketing Tools in 2019

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Social media marketing is a baffling area. It looks like anyone can do it: Post something (anything!) on social media, look for new content, talk with people, keep filling the Instagram page of your company with your most photogenic team. It sounds like a task for today’s social media age kids.

If you want your ROI to grow, though, that’s not the way to go.

It may look simple, but without economic resources, talented people and the right tools for the job, it is almost impossible to make social media marketing effective. This article will focus on marketing tools for social media. These SMM tools actually stand out because they are user-friendly and continue to improve in response to social media changes and trends.

According to the most important SMM tasks requiring automation, we’ve divided them into three groups: Social media management, social media monitoring, and social media advertising.

These social media social media management tools help you manage the workflow required by social media. So they really make it easier, more organized, less stressful and thus more efficient. Some of our favorites are here.

1. IFTTT

IFTTT is the freeway to get all your apps and devices talking to each other. Not everything on the internet plays nice, so we’re on a mission to build a more connected world.

IFTTT is a website as well as a mobile app. The free service was launched in 2010 with the motto: “Put the Internet to work for you”. However, in recent years it has changed a lot. You can currently connect all your “services” with IFTTT to complete tasks automatically.

There are numerous ways you can connect all your services – and the resulting combinations are called “Applets”.

Applets essentially automate your daily workflow, whether smart home devices or apps and websites are managed. For example, if you own the intelligent lighting system, Philips Hue, you can use IFTTT to automatically turn on a light each time you are tagged on a Facebook photo.

Price: free

2. Buffer

Buffer makes it easy for businesses and marketing teams to schedule posts, analyze performance, and manage all their accounts in one place.

BufferApp lets users manage a range of social media accounts, lining up updates to be shared in the future across a range of social networks.

Every time you find a post you want to share, a tweet you want to retweet, or whenever you write some content that you want to share out over time, you can add it to your Buffer.  This places it in a queue and the posts are sent out in order, at times you have pre-selected.

This means that you don’t need to choose a date and time for every single post you want to schedule.  You just add it to your queue, and Buffer does the work for you.

Buffer has a smooth, clean interface that is really enhanced by installing its browser extensions – a lot of its best functionality comes from these add-ons.

Price: freemium; paid plans from $15/mo

3. Quuu

Quuu is the number one source for content and the only place where each and every piece has been hand-reviewed in house.

Quuu’s main goal is to increase your follow-up and commitment to social media by helping you post hand-curated content in your niche. Quuu sends relevant, high-quality content from its niche to its users every day, which they can easily program and post on their social media profiles via Quuu scheduler or any other tool such as Buffer or HubSpot.

These suggestions include a link to the content (article, blog post, video, podcast episode…) and a text containing relevant hashtags and social handles (making it easier to tag the author or source).

Price: plans start at $15/mo

4. MeetEdgar

MeetEdgar is another programming tool that stands out for one reason: You can recycle old posts. This is more important than it seems: Content is forgotten and left behind even good and popular content. It is low-hanging fruit and too often a missed opportunity to recycle this old content so that it can get views again.

With MeetEdgar, you organize posts by category, schedule content by category, and then, every time the tool has gone through your scheduled posts, it will automatically post old content from each category so it can get attention again.

Price: $49/mo

Social Media Monitoring Tools

Social media marketing is divided into two processes. One is about the content you and your brand have. You create content, aggregate and share content with your audience and promotional content. The SMM tools discussed above to automate and optimize this part of social media marketing.

The audience is the second aspect of social media marketing. It’s your brand’s online mentions, reviews, questions, compliments, and complaints.

Although posting may be more important to raise brand awareness, it is also important to keep an eye on what people say about you and to respond appropriately. It’s almost impossible to manually find all brand mentions on social media, as people don’t always tag the brand even on social media platforms.

That’s why there are social media monitoring tools: To ensure comprehensive communication with an online audience. Here are some of the highlights:

1. Awario

Are you looking to bring your social media presence under one roof and get usable, real-time insights? Awario lets you join in conversations about your business after crawling the web and finding the people having those conversations.

When the web and social media are saying something about you, the Awario monitoring tool is able to pick up mentions instantly using non-stop monitoring in any language. This lets you respond quickly to what is being said, good or bad. You can then amplify the positive and clarify any negative comments or untruths regarding your brand before they get out of control.

Having a website and social media are now almost requirements for small businesses in today’s digital ecosystem. And once you create your channels, managing the different platforms and interacting with users takes a lot of effort. Being able to do it in one place, makes the task that much easier.

Price: starts at $29/mo

2. Mention

Mention offers real-time social media monitoring, and you can set up alerts for your brand, your competitors, and your industry. With this tool, you can view and respond to each like, tag, or mention (ah, see what they did there?) right in the app. You can also sort mentions by importance or significance, and even set up filters, including by source or by language.

Price: starts at $29/mo

3. Brandwatch

If your budget is much wider, Brandwatch can be your tool. The analytical data of Brandwatch is highly visual: If you are an agency, it is perfect to illustrate the significance of social media marketing for customers.

Price: starts at $800/mo

3. Talkwalker

Talkwalker is another tool at the company level that is without a doubt one of the most powerful on the market. It offers a wide range of filters, subfilters and coverage platforms. It covers not only social media, news sites, blogs, and forums, but also broadcasting, television and printing. The available data is nearly endless.

Price: starts at $9,600/year

Sourced from ma-no

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Instagram Stories is Now Being Used by 500 Million People Daily

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While the impact of Stories is variable across the different social media platforms, it’s hard to deny the rising influence of the form more generally, and the way in which its changing user behaviors, much as Facebook has long predicted.

Underlining this, Facebook, in the accompanying earnings call following its Q4 report announcement, has reported that Instagram Stories, its most successful Stories option to date, is now being used by half a billion people every single day.

That means that Facebook now sees around 1.25b people using the Stories options across its family of apps daily – which is a billion more users than Snapchat, the originator of the Stories format, has in total.

Social Stories usage comparison [chart]

As noted, the updated Stories usage count reflects the rising influence of the option – if you’ve not considered how your business can use the Stories format in your social media marketing efforts, it’s likely worth giving it some thought. As more people become increasingly attuned to the layout and style of Stories, their expectations for content is changing, – and with Facebook maintaining a steady flow of Stories updates, it is becoming the primary sharing and engagement option for many.

Facebook now clearly owns Stories – which is not overly great news for Snap, but it’s not the only trick up Snapchat’s sleeve either. I mean, Snapchat has some issues to iron out, and it is under ever-increasing pressure to come up with new tools, but the Stories battle, really, was over long ago. If anything, the broader adoption of the format may help other platforms, as users look for the same on each surface (note: even LinkedIn is trying out the Stories format).

In addition to the updated user count, Facebook also noted that it’s working on more private sharing options for its Stories tools, while Instagram specifically will soon see new commerce and shopping features.

Facebook has long held that Stories are the future of social sharing, and whether by trend or by design, that does now appear to be coming true. Again, if you haven’t considered the potential of Stories within your planning, it may be time to give them a look.

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Follow Andrew Hutchinson on Twitter

Sourced from Social Media Today

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How to Organize Social Media Marketing Tasks: 3 Tools

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Do you need to bring some organization to your social media workflow? Looking for tools to help?

In this article, you’ll discover three tools to help you better organize social media posting, monitoring, and campaign execution tasks.

#1: Plan Your Social Media Schedule With ContentCal

One of the biggest challenges for multi-platform social media managers is keeping all of their channels meaningfully active and engaging. Finding content that works and keeping social media accounts updated are keys to building a solid social media presence.

A social media tool like ContentCal can help with this. It’s a neat social media editorial solution that helps you manage all of your social media entities using an online calendar and delegating tasks.

To set up your ContentCal calendar, you’ll need to:

  • Register for a free trial and invite team members to help you manage your brand’s social media calendar.
  • Connect your social media accounts (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn).
  • Set up your “planning channels.” These are the types of content you’re creating and marketing—videos, email marketing campaigns, or interview-type posts, for example.
  • Set up category color-coding. This allows you to color-code your calendar for more balance. A quick look at your calendar will allow you to see which topics you cover more often than other topics.

From there, you can start filling in your calendar with all kinds of updates to make sure you’re posting something each day.

Click HERE to read the remainder of the article.

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Sourced from Social Media Examiner

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4 Social Media Marketing Bad Habits (and How to Break Them)

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Social media is the one thing that almost everyone has access to, yet few fully understand, and this is especially true when it comes to business.

Many people – even some with years of marketing experience – believe that posting pretty pictures on Instagram is “doing social media,” when posting images is really only the tip of the iceberg. The activity that lies beneath the surface is much more complex, and important for successful social media marketing.

There are a heap of posts out there which outline tips on things you should start doing in order to maximize your social media marketing success, but in this piece, I want to look at some things that you should stop doing, immediately, to get your process on the right track.

Here are four social media marketing bad habits, and how to break them in 2019.

1. Focusing Only on Vanity Metrics

Guess what? Followers and on-platform engagement alone will not help grow your business.

This is a fact – thousands upon thousands of studies and articles can prove it. Sure, there’s a correlation between the amount of time consumers spend with a brand online and their likelihood of going on to make a purchase from said brand, while there’s also something to be said for positive consumer sentiment. But brands and marketers who are content to simply track the number of followers they gain on Instagram, and/or the amount of likes they get on a Facebook video, are making a huge mistake.

You absolutely have to base your social media marketing success off of more than just vanity metrics.

While community growth and engagement are pieces of the puzzle, you would be much better served by including metrics such as impressions, website visits, time on site, conversions, and bounce rate. By layering in these true digital marketing metrics, you can start to see how social media activity helps you meet your business goals.

Now, it is important to note that sometimes the main objective of your social media marketing efforts truly might be brand awareness – which is fine. In this case, you’re going to want to push for as many Impressions and targeted brand engagements as possible.

The big thing to avoid here is judging your social media marketing activities by follower growth or engagements alone.

2. Lack of Storytelling

One of the most underused strengths of social media marketing is storytelling.

Let me clarify by saying that storytelling in marketing isn’t this majestic fable that your brand is stringing together. Storytelling is how your brand provides snackable, contextually full snippets about why your brand exists, and how you do what you do. These stories should be concise and easy to understand for uber-distracted social media users.

Sometimes brands try to string out storytelling across a few different blog posts or content pieces, without realizing that distracted social media users are more likely to get confused by the lack of ongoing context than to follow a single story from start to finish. To avoid any confusion, I typically recommend a series of independent stories which can stand alone and be easily digested.

After all, how realistic is it that users will remember post #1 of a five-post series about your product or service?

It’s a fragmented experience – imagine scrolling through your own social media feed and seeing a content piece that’s in the middle of an ongoing story, one which you’ve missed the beginning of (and will likely miss the end). Pretty confusing right?

Consider creating smaller stories that build your brand up, individually, and over time. This way, if users get interested by one content piece, they can dive deeper into those stories across your social accounts and/or blog.

3. Your Analytics are Weak

There are so many data points being spun off by social media activity that it’s unacceptable not to have your analytics organized in a way to capitalize on such insights.

Too many brands simply post daily and hope for the best, as opposed to reviewing detailed reports to learn about what worked, what didn’t, and what opportunities might be on the horizon. To avoid having weak, or useless, analytics, you’re going to want to organize your data so that it helps you derive context from the numbers.

For example, are your impressions lower than the previous month, but your overall engagements are up? This suggests that your content was favored less by social platform algorithms, but people really liked it.

Did your website visits from Facebook spike, but no conversions came through? This suggests that the experience on your landing page might not be optimal or there was an inconsistent experience along the way.

By improving the data collected, you can optimize your social media marketing efforts to ensure that you aren’t wasting time, money, or resources.

Here are the data points I recommend you analyze:

  • Social community
  • Social media impressions
  • Social media engagements
  • Social media website visits
  • Time on site from social media
  • Pages per visit from social media
  • Bounce rate from social media
  • Conversions from social media

You can use a tool like Sprout Social to easily collect social media analytics. I also highly recommend using Google Analytics to review how traffic from social media sites is behaving on your website. This will enable you to standardize activity, and find trends across marketing channels.

4. Social Media is Siloed

A big mistake that a lot of brands make is thinking that social media marketing alone should be responsible for business success.

All too often I’m asked to launch a social media strategy without a high-quality website, an email marketing strategy, or even a solid search engine marketing approach. When social media marketing is the only player out on the field, your team will lose.

When you think about user behavior and your own activity when making a purchase online, it becomes apparent that consumers interact with multiple stimuli before making a final buying decision. By only relying on social media marketing to make sales, you’re leaning on a channel that really focuses on upper funnel awareness activity to carry a consumer all the way through to final buying decision. Don’t get me wrong, it can happen, however it’s not likely to happen as frequently as you might hope.

Another point here is that many brands fail to use social media marketing to support an overarching initiative. For example, if your company has a really awesome piece of downloadable content, you should create blog posts which support it (be sure they are optimized for search engine visibility), deploy email marketing campaigns to generate traffic to the content, publish paid and/or organic social media content supporting the effort, and retarget all traffic that’s visited the content landing page but didn’t convert.

An integrated approach like this will go much further for your brand than placing social media marketing in a silo and hoping for the best.

5. Neglecting Advertising

I am a huge fan of social media advertising. Comparatively, you’d be hard pressed to find a more cost-effective method for targeting consumers online.

With interest data, behavioral data, CRM data, and lookalike modeling, social media advertising can target almost any group of consumers in one way or another. But unfortunately, many brands have been slow to embrace social media advertising. I personally believe there are two main reasons why:

  1. The altruistic intention of social media marketing to bring brands and consumers eye-to-eye digitally doesn’t exist anymore. It’s just unrealistic. There are so many distractions and competitors online that it’s not rational to think that a brand can cut through all the noise via organic engagement alone. Almost all social platforms limit the reach of content in some way, so brands are already starting at a loss.
  2. Most brands don’t understand how attribution impacts the ROI of social media advertising. As noted earlier,  social media marketing tends to be very effective when it comes to building awareness. Social media can help stimulate direct sales, but most consumers bounce around between devices and marketing channels when shopping, so tracking breaks and social media activity doesn’t get the trackable credit it deserves for generating sales. There are ways to fix this, however, when brands are ignorant to the situation, they simply look at conversions and get disappointed that social media hasn’t generated more.

The big missed opportunity here is omitting social media advertising from your social media marketing strategy. No matter your business goals, there’s a social media platform and an ad unit that can help you achieve them.

Once you quit these four bad habits, you’ll undoubtedly begin to see improvements in your metrics, and be well on your way to achieving greater social media marketing success.

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Follow Nathan Mendenhall on Twitter

Sourced from Social Media Today

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A 23 Step Social Media Marketing Checklist for 2019 [Infographic]

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Are you just getting started with a social media plan for your business? Need a checklist to help you implement your social media marketing strategy?

Last year, the team from SEMrush published a helpful checklist for effective social media management, and they’ve updated the listing for 2019, adding in relevant, up-to-date information to help keep you on the right track.

The listing breaks the essential tasks down into daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly notes – check out the full infographic below for more detail.

Social Media Marketing checklist

A version of this post was first published on the Red Website Design blog.

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Sourced from Social Media Today

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Which Brands Have The Best Social Media Marketing?

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By Mike Gingerich

We have always witnessed and admired huge marketing campaigns from global top-most brands like Apple, Pepsi, Adidas and Coca Cola among others. These market leaders invest millions of dollars on viral commercials, and influencer marketing that never goes unnoticed. Unfortunately, not every brand has the financial muscles to compete with the giants. But, no need to worry!

In the last couple of years, social media has leveled the ground for marketers. It is no longer about the company size or the budget. Today, any business can use social networks such as Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and many others to run effective marketing campaigns without spending millions. Additionally, there are several helpful tools such as rank tracking software by serpbook to enhance your digital marketing strategy.

Effective Social Media Marketing (SMM)

In today’s digital world, SMM is undoubtedly one of the most marketing tools for small to large brands in the world. However, some companies have succeeded in social media, while others are still struggling. It all runs down to the strategy.  For effective social media marketing strategy, you need creativity and unique online marketing ideas which involves:

  • Choosing the ideal social media platform(s) for your business – You may target multiple networks with large and active audience.
  • Understanding your audience – Learn their challenges and what solutions they are looking for.
  • Excellent Communication – Deliver your brand message in simple and precise manner.
  • Great content – Generating regular, interesting and readable content for your audience.
  • Evaluating the SMM strategy – A good example is the use of serpbook rank tracker to assess the progress of your strategy.
  • Improving existing campaigns – Use the analytic tools to identify mistakes and new opportunities in the market and make the right adjustments.

For most brands, the main challenge has always been coming up with creative ideas to execute the right strategy. Below are a few top brands with the best social media marketing campaigns.

Top Brands with the Best Social Media Marketing Strategy

  • Reebok – LinkedIn Masters

The brand is known for its quality shoes and sportswear. Reebok SMM strategy focus on multi-platform digital marketing across a range of social networks. On Instagram and Facebook the brand uses colorful fitness and latest Reebok products photos. It also generates informative visual content for the YouTube Channel.

Surprisingly, Reebok stands out for its successful LinkedIn marketing. Their secret is not only regular update posts, it also creates valuable content for its audience as well as shares links to their blog. Reebok understand its audience and uses videos, simple formatting and photos to attract audience and encourage them to read through.

  • Pop-Tart – Twitter Marketing

A legend in production of toaster pastries, the brand’s Twitter account does it all. Pop-Tart maintains a sarcastic voice on Twitter with a target on young and Twitter-biased demographic. The brand mimics popular accounts and are quick to create their version of any viral or trending content. The brand has over 164, 000 followers on Twitter and more brands in the sector have started to copy their style because it pays off.

Pop-Tart SMM success comes from actively interacting with their audience in a funny way. It works because they have identified the right audience and defined a SMM tone that suits them.

  • Peel – Facebook Ads

Peel has become a powerful brand that deals with stylish phone cases. Its strength comes from its massive social support, especially on Facebook. Peel marketers use Facebook ads to showcase the different features of their products. The Facebook strategy has increased its revenue by over 100%. It also runs a visually impressive Instagram feed.  Peel focuses on differentiating themselves from competitor and telling their story through SMM.

In summary, the common thing across the above brand is simple. A successful SMM starts with understanding your audience and choosing a channel that they use most. It is also evident that choosing a style and tone for your marketing strategy is vital and can win you the right followership. Additionally, it helps to try various strategies, measure their effectiveness and focus on one or two that works best for you.

Sourced from Mike Gingerich

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8 Ways to Justify Your Social Media Marketing Program

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Demonstrating value and ROI from social media marketing campaigns has been challenging since marketers first began using the platform to target prospects and customers. But should ROI even be a major social media justifier? Some say social media marketing success means looking beyond ROI, while others adhere to the age-old advice that says your company’s business objectives prove social media worth. “Social media actually goes beyond ROI,” said Hariraj Rathod, social media analyst at Numbertank. “It helps in achieving good branding effect on audience and also helps to showcase products and services by segmenting and targeting the correct audience. Social media marketing also helps a brand understand how well their products are being consumed or liked by certain demographics.”

Is social media even worth it for your organization? If it is, where should your focus be as a marketer? To answer these questions, we caught up with digital marketing pros who offered a number of social media marketing tips that can help you make the most of your social programs.

Understand Younger Generations and Their Growing Mistrust

Deciding which metrics matter isn’t the lone challenge for marketers using social media. Some say it’s deciding whether to invest energy and resources into it in the first place. After all, marketers face a growing mistrust of social media platforms in light of data breach scandals like Facebook-Cambridge-Analytica and shrinking social media audiences.

Shama Hyder, CEO of Zen Media, a marketing and new media consultancy, noted in a Forbes article last month that Millennials and Gen Z are annoyed with brands taking up space in their social media feeds, and a third of them have deleted their Facebook account.

Know Social Media’s Place in Your Digital Ecosystem

Using social media is a thing of the past, according to Hyder. Companies should shift from a mindset of “using social media, to a mindset of adapting and thriving in an ecosystem where a highly connected, social, empowered consumer is now the norm, and traditional econometrics and data are no longer adequate to measure and track the success of content and campaigns,” Hyder wrote.

ROI is not the be-all and end-all for measuring success, she added. It’s more effective that metrics match the “complexity, ambiguity and dynamism” of a customer’s journey, she said. Integrate social data and metrics with other KPIs from web analytics, CRM, etc. and view social media platforms beyond just a “marketing channel, and leverage it instead as one prong of a larger strategy and source of customer insight.”

Support Engagement and Education, Not ROI

Belinda Alban agrees. Alban, the founder of Your Virtual Assistant Service, said the focus of social media should not be on ROI but on growing your following to increase brand awareness, engaging with your customers to create raving fans and educating your potential customers about the benefits of your product. “The bigger your platforms are the more opportunities you have to do this,” Alban said.

Social media may or may not lead to an increase in sales, but it will give you the opportunity to build relationships with your audience and deliver “amazing” customer service. “On the back of the relationships and trust and confidence your brand has built with social media you should see an increase in the reputation of your brand,” Alban said. “And it is your reputation that can make or break a company.”

Know Thyself, Know Thy Company

As long as your brand matches its social media playbook to its company objectives, you’re on the right track, according to Maria Burpee, a B2B marketing consultant for MB Consulting. “The ROI — and the metrics — comes from the board and company objectives,” Burpee said. Do you want to be the most well known or favorite brand or build a community or movement? Social media, even if it doesn’t lead to sales, is key. Are you looking to generate leads? Social media listening is key. Are you trying to create high loyalty and referrals? Cultivating social media “love” and responsiveness is important. Do you want to have the best customer service and hang your hat on that as a differentiator? Social media can be part of the mix. Social media metrics wouldn’t be found in a high-level executive dashboard, Burpee added, but rather the metrics are important to support a broader KPI dashboard.

Consider Using Unique URLs

One way to capture and track ROI on social media is using unique URLs. “Any time we post content that includes a link, we use a unique URL so we can track where the traffic is coming from and not for social media in general, but each channel specifically,” said Tiffany McEachern, social media specialist for PSCU, which provides solutions for credit unions. “Each social channel has a unique URL so you can see where your clicks are coming from and spend your time and efforts on those social media platforms,” McEachern said. “Even if social media isn’t giving your company a strong ROI, it builds brand awareness and in today’s day and age, companies are expected to be on social media.”

Assign Specific KPIs, A/B Tests

James Bray is a social media marketer who works for the Equal Opportunity Community Initiative (EOCI), a nonprofit that relies on donations received from fundraising activities. Bray said his Board takes spending decisions more seriously than most, whether the costs are incurred by outright paid advertising or through the staff’s efforts to create and manage social media content. “The return on our social media marketing investment is therefore calculated in terms of engagement: profile views, click-throughs to the website, email subscriptions and volunteer recruitment,” Bray said. “These measures are a great deal more important than, for example, simply counting the number of Instagram followers, because they reflect the degree to which someone is interested in partnering with us.”

To ensure the nonprofit receives a return on its social media investments, Bray said the team needs to be clear about its objectives and how much time it can afford to devote to each. It then attaches KPIs to those goals to ensure they are met. “The EOCI’s communications team is constantly A/B testing its social media strategies, using a combination of each platform’s own insights along with Google Analytics to determine what sources constitute the best outreach and result in the most beneficial conversions,” Bray said. “Based on these results, the EOCI Board feels that our social media engagement strategy has a positive effect on our ability to connect with our target audience and reach our objectives.”

Listen on Social, Execute in Customer Service Channels

Clair Jones, chief strategy officer and co-founder of Witty Kitty Digital Marketing, said monitoring how your audience is talking about your brand through social listening is vital. You can use the data to inform your customer service programs. “You can learn so much about how to improve customer service and experience, tap into audiences you didn’t know you had, and hone your branding and messaging,” she said.

Balance Between Organic and Paid Social Efforts Matters

If your organization is going to invest in social, consider the aforementioned tips and also strike a balance between paid and organic social media marketing. “Advocate for smart social that communicates the organization’s mission and engages the audience,” said Maria Mora, content director at Big Sea Design. “And layer a strategic paid social plan over that for a stronger return and more targeted presence on social platforms.”

Feature Image Credit: Shutterstock

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Realistic Small Business Marketing: 5 Strategies for Branding and Sales

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By Jane Brown

There are countless marketing strategies one can explore as a small business owner. With that said, it’s unrealistic to explore all possibilities due to budgets, time, and resources. In fact, spreading too thin is a disservice to the marketing efforts as it never truly allows a realistic return on investment from a particular technique.

It’s the notion of “Jack of all trades, master of none”, or, “The shiny object syndrome”. A small business owner’s high impressionability and thirst to succeed often leads to hopping from topic to topic, never truly completing projects and marketing campaigns. Let’s dial it back and explore realistic small business marketing strategies worth exploring.

5 Small Business Marketing Strategies for Branding and Sales

Small Business Marketing Strategies for Branding and Sales

1. Social Media Marketing

Every business should create accounts on:

These provide free platforms to connect with the business’s audience. Their usage is 1-for-1 as done for personal accounts: find interested parties, start discussions, and share content. Except, a small business will inject promotional offers and sales on occasion.

These platforms should funnel users to one’s email newsletter as this mutes the social “noise”. The newsletter and social account work in tandem building brand awareness and lead generation.

Plus, it’s free.

2. Merchandising

Merchandising creates three awesome benefits:

  1. Unifies the workforce through branding
  2. Mobilizes employees and fans to passively promote the brand
  3. Provides incentives for contests, giveaways, and outreach

Utilizing customized business merchandise is the best option for providing items like branded work shirts for employees, gizmos for around the office, or novelty items for customers and fans. These items constantly remind others about the business brand, creating opportunities to bring past customers back into-the-fold between purchases.

3. Referral Systems

This is called by many names:

  • Word-of-Mouth
  • Affiliates/partners
  • Refer-a-Friend

The idea is creating an incentive when interested parties and customers help drive new leads and customers to the business. This is accomplished through low-tech flyers or business cards, or high-tech with referral systems and apps.

What you’ll need:

  1. A unique code for each, active participant
  2. A worthwhile incentive (cash, points, discounts)
  3. A way to track the referrals and participants

Give participants the tools and resources and they’ll help in several ways. Their methods could include writing online reviews about the business, sharing their code/links on social platforms, or distributing branded print materials to acquaintances.

The cost? A few bucks for cards or $10 – $20/mo for a simple tracking app/plugin.

4. Search Engine Marketing

There are two avenues. They are:

  • Improving organic traffic through optimization
  • Getting instant traffic & leads with advertising

Got a website? Good, the business is already halfway there.

DIY or outsource SEO work to improve the website’s page by including its relevant keywords, expanding its content, and building backlinks from relatable, trusted websites. Then, conduct outreach efforts to create an online presence increasing its odds of being shared, linked to, and being the topic of discussion.

Likewise, leverage website & business data to develop an advertising campaign on popular channels like Google Ads. Or, advertise directly on relevant websites in the business’s industry & market. This involves writing ad copy, developing creative banners, and funding the PPC/CPA platform.

Search marketing costs vary but range from free (DIY methods) to thousands (professional). A middle ground, about $500 – $1000/mo, provides ample, realistic returns.

5. Email Marketing

Starting an email marketing campaign begins with:

  1. Subscribing to an email marketing provider
  2. Creating and populating an autoresponder
  3. Adding opt-in forms to the website or landing page(s)
  4. (Optional) Creating an incentive to increase list building efforts

Email marketing campaigns are among the best forms of outreach and sales. Your continual effort to collect emails creates a hedge against wild swings your website may experience from search engine algorithm changes (as we see often).

Email marketing costs anywhere between $0 – $20 to begin with most providers. The setup process is easy enough for any small business owner — requiring little to no technical skill as it provides WSYWIG form builders. Once set up, the opt-in form is placed in strategic areas of interest enticing visitors to sign up for a newsletter.

What can you do with an email list? Consider regular discounts & deals or blog updates & exclusive content.

Treating the email list as its separate business entity transforms the platform from a passive feed to a marketing machine. Sending an email takes less than 10 minutes but can deliver thousands of site visitors and potential sales!

 Realistic Marketing Methods Grounded in Reality

These marketing methods are fundamental strategies used throughout the business world for good reason: they work. Reexamine the business’s efforts and investments — is it chasing shiny objects or trying to do everything without succeeding at any?

Get realistic with marketing strategies.

By Jane Brown

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5 Bad Habits that Will Tank Your Social Media Marketing

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When I think about social media, I start to sound a lot like somebody’s cranky grandma.

Back when I was starting out in marketing, we didn’t have all this Twitter or LinkedIn or Facebook. If you wanted to run an ad, you bought a classified. In the newspaper! Which people had to pay for!

Did I mention we had to walk to school in the snow, uphill both directions, even in May?

The internet, and the free social platforms that have been developed for it, have given us genuinely amazing tools to connect with other humans. Those tools have accomplished a lot of good … as well as some harm.

Today, social platforms are critical to content marketing and digital business. They help us find potential customers. They act as amplifiers for our content. They help us connect with people and learn more ways to help them.

So if social media is so important, how come so many small digital businesses are doing it so wrong?

It’s one thing if your local bank is a bit … unsophisticated in its use of social media. They’re supposed to be slow to change.

But digital businesses like yours and mine? We should be good at this. Let’s look at some of the things that hold us back.

Bad habit #1: Spreading yourself too thin

It can be depressing to realize how many different social platforms are out there. And for every one, large or small, someone will tell you that you simply have to be there.

I’m telling you that you do not simply have to be there.

You should probably have a presence on the social platform that matters the most to the audience you serve. But it makes no sense to try to have a viable, meaningful presence on every platform you think might have some customers.

If you need someone’s permission, I’ll give you mine. You don’t have to be on every “important” social platform. You probably shouldn’t be.

Focus on one or two. Show up, pay attention. Make fewer, better connections.

Bad habit #2: Consistently ignoring context

Social scheduling tools are fantastic. The Copyblogger team certainly benefits from them. But schedulers can also create very weird juxtapositions.

Your Twitter feed might be blowing up with a serious or even tragic event … and there are your scheduled posts, blathering on about your launch.

We all miss things sometimes. And most people understand that social media schedulers can make us a little tone-deaf … temporarily.

But it’s hard to care about a social media presence that has clearly been put on permanent “set and forget” mode.

When I see a small digital business — particularly one that revolves around one individual person — who never seems to notice what’s going on in politics, sports, current movies, hit TV shows, or anything else … it’s hard to feel like there’s any connection happening there.

Bad habit #3: Talking more than you listen

One thing about those “set and forget” accounts is they don’t seem to do a lot of listening. (Which is why they’re so oblivious to whatever is blowing up around them.)

Failing to get onto the platforms and listen to what people have to say about your topic is a terrible wasted opportunity.

Product-to-market fit is the cornerstone of any successful business. If you can figure out what your audience wants, and the value they put on it, you can shape your offers to meet their needs.

Social platforms give you an incredibly user-friendly listening post. Don’t squander it.

Bad habit #4: All chit-chat, no strategy

Okay, real talk for a moment.

It’s so much more comfortable to chit-chat on social media than it is to actually work on your business.

You can spend every second of every day sharing memes, squawking about trivial outrages, and letting the social media noise make you feel like you’re doing something.

That’s about as productive as spending 18 hours a day sitting on a barstool with the other bar flies.

Maybe you actually do have the insights that would solve all of the world’s problems. But unless you get your ass out of that bar and into the world, no one will ever benefit from them.

Bad habit #5: All strategy, no chit-chat

On the other hand, if everything you do is part of a carefully choreographed sequence of funnels and trip wires and optimized squeeze pages leading to upsells and downsells and cross-sells … your audience starts to wonder if there’s a human being anywhere in there at all.

No one wants to feel like they’re just fuel for your marketing machine. The whole point of doing business with you — with a smaller, more personal business — is that your customers can make a connection with a human being.

Not the “brand voice” concocted by an ad agency that they get with their bank. And not an “internet cash machine” designed to suck money out of their wallet.

Social media platforms are where we hang out. They’re where we get silly.

If you don’t ever post something random or conversational, just because you feel like it, then your social media presence is just another collection of ads.

And in 2018, we’re all very, very good at ignoring ads.

Finding the right balance for your situation

We have to find that smart middle ground.

Not spending all of our time yakking on Facebook and thinking that’s “business.”

But also not setting up soulless automated “funnels” that ignore the social context. (Especially if your business is you — your name and your face.)

Copyblogger is a brand that has a pretty curated Twitter feed, although we do have kind, friendly humans who listen and respond to conversations.

But we also have a Facebook group where we can have more in-depth, human conversations about business, writing, clients, sales, and the finer points of English punctuation.

And “Sonia Simone” is a human who also has a business, and who makes conversation on social media about business stuff and personal stuff. The techniques that make sense for the larger brand aren’t nearly as effective for the individual human.

How about you … where are you on the chit-chat/strategy spectrum? Do you think that’s the best place for you to be? Let us know in the comments …

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Sonia Simone is co-founder and Chief Content Officer of Rainmaker Digital. Get more from Sonia on the CopybloggerFM podcast, or connect on Twitter.

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