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How to Find Trending Hashtags

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In this article, we discuss an effective strategy to help you find trending, high-quality hashtags for your social media networking, and we also talk about why trending hashtags are important.

Hashtags across all social media networks these days are a powerful tool for brands both big and small. Using relevant hashtags on your social networks can serve a number of different purposes for your company.

Using trending hashtags can help you reach your target audience more, attract more followers to your networks, and increase your overall engagement.

Statistics show that social media posts that have more than one hashtag associated with them receive more engagement than posts that don’t include any hashtags.

However, it’s not simply about the number of hashtags that you use on your content, it’s about the quality of those hashtags. It used to be more about the quantity, but these days quality prevails, and the relevance and quality of your hashtags can significantly influence their impact.

In this article, we discuss an effective strategy to help you find trending, high-quality hashtags for your social media networking, and we also talk about why trending hashtags are important.

We will also share the best hashtag generator in the industry right now, Task Ant, and talk about why they can help you not only find the best hashtags for your content, but you can get help organizing them so that you keep your hashtag strategy unique, creative and varied.

Why Hashtags Are Important

Hashtags

Hashtags are basically the sorting mechanism for any social network out there, like Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. What’s interesting is that hashtags don’t really have too much of an impact on Facebook these days; they are more relevant to networks like Instagram and Twitter.

Hashtags determine the social media reach of your content, and how discoverable that content is. They connect categories to your posts, which helps you to reach a wider audience.

Most social networks these days like Instagram and Twitter have millions of people posting new content every day. This makes it really difficult for most people to connect their content with the right people.

Hashtags make your content a lot more discoverable, especially by people who are actually going to be interested in your niche and industry. This is why hashtags are considered the most efficient tool if you are wanting to grow your social media network successfully.

On a fundamental level, hashtags are used to categorize your content more efficiently. They link you directly with your target audience and help your target audience find you as well, which is exactly what you need to do well with your social media profiles.

When you use hashtags on your content, you are more likely to have people interacting with your posts, because it includes content they are on the network looking for. It is essential that you understand that you might not always get the interactions that you want just because you have included some popular hashtags on your posts.

Millions of users out there make the most of popular hashtags, which means that you will be competing with a high number of others to rank well for that particular hashtag. This is why it’s important to narrow this down and get as specific as you can with your hashtag topic, which we will talk about a little bit later.

On social media networks like Instagram, you are allowed 30 hashtags in your caption. You need to be smart with the words that you choose to include, because you don’t want to go over this number, but you also don’t want to include too few as well.

Why Trending Hashtags Are Important

Hashtags

Trending hashtags, in particular, are important for your social media networking in general because they connect you with the relevant audience for your content right now.

Your brand’s ethos and products might not change too much over the course of a few years, but your audience will. This is why if you plan on investing a lot of time and money into social media marketing, you’ve got to constantly keep up with what’s happening in your industry.

When you use hashtags that are trending within your niche, you are giving your content a good chance of being seen by your target audience, and you are keeping up with what people are finding interesting right now.

Your products might not be changing all that much, but how you connect with your target audience through social media will change and switching up your hashtags to fall in line with what’s trending is really important.

Are All Trending Hashtags Good for Your Business?

Trending Hashtags

With trending hashtags in mind, are all of them good for your business? There is a relatively short list of popular and trending hashtags that users make the most of all around the world.

Influencers on Twitter and Instagram make the most of these hashtags because they help them build their audience. For example, using the #likeforlike hashtag is a popular way to encourage people to like your content. The most popular hashtag on Instagram is #love.

When you use popular and trending hashtags on social media networks, this allows your posts to appear in places where there are millions of people that could potentially be interacting with your content. However, there are some aspects of trending hashtags that you need to be aware of if you choose to use them.

  • Might target the wrong audience: If you choose to build your audience with some of the most popular hashtags in the world because you are competing against millions of others who are also using that hashtag, there’s every chance that you might be targeting the wrong audience. Additionally, if you use hashtags like #likeforlike, while this might encourage people to interact with their content, it might not be for the right reasons. They might be simply liking your content because you’ve asked them to, and not because they are genuinely interested in your content. If you want to find the most relevant users for your content, then you need to get specific with the hashtags that you use and try not to be too general.
  • Hard to stand out: when you use hashtags that are really popular, this means that you are competing for attention with millions of other people and their posts. It means that even those posts that you have put a lot of time and effort into are going to quickly drown in the sea of competition and will wash up with a mix of content that doesn’t even fall into the same category as yours. There are some experts out there that believe that if you share a post with a hashtag that has more than 10 million posts associated with it, your post is going to appear in someone’s feed for only three minutes, before falling down the visibility list again.
  • Could end up using irrelevant or inappropriate hashtags: If the hashtags that you use for your content are too popular, they could potentially be irrelevant to your content, and not even trending in your industry. What’s more, they might even be considered inappropriate by Instagram, as Instagram has been known to ban hashtags in the past. When you are trying to find the right hashtags for your content by yourself, is difficult to know whether that hashtag has a history of being banned or not, and you could get yourself into hot water as a result.

How to Know Which Trending Hashtags to Use

Trending Hashtags

So, we’ve talked a little bit about the downside to trending hashtags, but this shouldn’t be enough to put you off. You have just got to know what you are getting yourself into and understand how to use trending hashtags to your advantage so that you can stick to relevant, targeted hashtags that connect you straight to your ideal audience.

Becoming successful with hashtags happens when you are able to maintain a strategic approach towards using them. Even though some of the most popular hashtags out there have been used with millions of posts, this doesn’t guarantee that your post is going to get a lot of interaction.

So, instead of trying to find the most popular hashtags out there, we recommend that you find trending hashtags that have an active community behind them, and are highly relevant to your target audience and industry.

So, how do you find trending hashtags like this? Well, we think that one of the best ways is to see what hashtags are being used by your competitors, target users, and industry leaders.

Remember, when you narrow down the scope of your hashtag, the more engaged your audience will be. When you start researching, you might be surprised to discover the kind of hashtags that are being used by your rivals.

Let’s take a little look at how to determine the best trending hashtags for your content.

  • Understand your audience

There’s no way that you are going to be able to find the best trending hashtags for your content on social media without learning all about your target audience. As we already talked about, including random hashtags on your Instagram posts is not going to increase your followers.

First, you need to do a bit of research, and figure out what hashtags your audience is using on their content and choose ones that align with these. Most social media networks out there have a search bar, where you can search up relevant hashtags.

Just remember that your tags need to be relevant to the target users that you are actually searching for. This is why you need to include keywords that relate not only to your content, but to the people that are going to be looking at it.

  •   Understand your rivals

While you might be a bit more excited about understanding your audience then understanding your competitors, your competitors can actually teach you a lot about what the industry is like, and how to be successful in it. If you want to do really well with your brand online, then it is extremely smart to keep a close eye on what your competitors are doing at all times.

Similar to how you can look up relevant hashtags on most social media networks, you can also find hashtags that your competitors are using. This is going to help you work out which hashtags are going to improve your engagement.

You might not always want to use the hashtags that you find on your competitor’s pages, but it’s going to definitely help you figure out how everyone else is growing their social media profiles. You might end up discovering completely new hashtags that you’ve never thought of that you can add to your list.

  •   Understand the industry leaders

As well as your competitors, there will be some influencers and industry leaders in your niche that you look up to and wish you could be like one day. One of the most practical ways to find trending hashtags for your content is to follow industry leaders that have similar interests to your target audience.

Influencers are people on social media networks like Twitter and Instagram that perform really well with their content. You can make the most of their success by finding relevant tags to add to your content.

Make sure that you find those people that have done really well within your industry and are continuing to do really well. Because they are already strongly connected with their target audience, you will only learn good things from researching them.

  •   Use Related Hashtags

Another effective, easy way to grow your community is to find trends that relate to your own hashtag. All you have to do is enter your hashtag in the search bar of any social network, and you will get some results.

You might even want to search for an Instagram image or video that contains a hashtag that is already working really well on your content. This is a great place to start, and it’s going to give you a lot of options that are directly related to the tags that you already use.

  •   Look on the Explore Page on Instagram

If Instagram is one of your main social networks that you use for your brand, then you will be well aware of the Explore Page.

The Explore Page is where a collection of posts are generated by what you have previously liked and interacted with. Believe it or not, this is a great place to get hashtag suggestions, so that you can keep your content connected with your target audience.

The best part about the Explore Page is that you can access it both on desktop and mobile. The first thing that you will want to do is scroll down until you see posts that are relevant to what you’re trying to post yourself.

Click on these posts and look at the hashtags they are using. Make sure to use the ones that you think are the most relevant to your content.

  •   Follow your favourite hashtags

If you have discovered a hashtag that is relevant to your content, try following it and seeing top posts once people share them. Looking up certain hashtags is going to help you develop new ideas and come up with even more tags that go along with the original.

All of the content that you put up that uses these hashtags will be pushed onto these hashtag pages, so you can easily follow other hashtags, and look at the top posts that fall into these categories.

Checking top posts can help you get new ideas for your hashtags and engaging with these posts can actually bring people over to your page.

Just make sure that the selection of hashtags you are including on your posts are relevant and directly reflect what your post is about. We don’t suggest that you create a crowded post that has a lot of hashtags.

Quality over Quantity

Quality Over Quantity

Speaking of crowded posts, let’s talk a little bit about why quality is more important than quality at this point when it comes to your trending hashtags.

If you have just started implementing certain techniques in your hashtag strategy, then you might be a little overenthusiastic about how many hashtags you include in your post.

However, if you want to do really well, and not compromise the potential of your content before it’s even out there and in front of the right people, we suggest that you take time to figure out a sweet spot when it comes to the number of hashtags that you use.

We mentioned above that Instagram has a post limit of 30 hashtags. However, we don’t think that you should use this many every time.

In fact, there are many people out there that think you should be using less than 10 hashtags per post – some people think that seven is ideal. The key here is to focus first on the quality of the tags, and the quantity will follow.

If you find three or four highly relevant, targeted tags for your content, then you won’t need to use any more than this to get your content in front of the right people. However, while you are still looking for those perfect hashtags, you might want to increase this number slightly.

One way to do this is to experiment a little bit and figure out what works best for your content and your engagement rate. If the number of tags you are using is resonating well with your target audience, then stick with this.

The good news is that your hashtag strategy can be ever-changing, and there’s always room for improvement. If you find a hashtag that you want to use, you can always add it to your existing list, or even replace one that you don’t think is as effective as it used to be.

As long as you are including more than one and less than 30, you will be able to find the right fit for your niche and industry.

Task Ant for Finding Trending Hashtags

Task Ant - Trending Hashtags

Another way to find trending hashtags for your content is to make the most of a hashtag generator. Sometimes, you don’t have the brainpower or the time to figure out your hashtag strategy for yourself, and sometimes it seems like everyone has taken all the good hashtags.

This is where a hashtag generator comes in. A hashtag generator like Task Ant has the experience and expertise that you need to get ahead of your competition and polish your hashtag strategy until you’ve perfected it.

Task Ant has a search bar for hashtags that you will see on their homepage when you visit them for the first time. All you need to do is enter a keyword or hashtag that you use already, and they will suggest relevant tags.

The best part is that they include data and analytics around their suggestions so that you can work out which ones are relevant to your content, and which ones aren’t worth your time.

One of the things that we like the most about Task Ant is that they are willing to go the extra mile for their clients. They understand that finding relevant hashtags is only half the battle – you’ve got to keep things interesting on your content if you want to keep up with what’s trending.

Task Ant - Finding Hashtags

This is why Task Ant helps you organize your tags into different sets so that you can apply different hashtags to each piece of content and keep it dynamic.

There aren’t too many hashtag generators out there that are prepared to do this on top of suggesting relevant tags to their clients, which is why Task Ant comes so highly recommended.

Final Thoughts

So, there you have it – everything you need to know about trending hashtags, how to use them, and what to look out for when you are doing your research. Remember that your hashtag strategy is a fluid thing – this means that it’s always changing, just like industry trends.

It’s important to keep up with the play and learn how to adapt your hashtag strategy to what’s going on with social media networks like Twitter and Instagram. Also, don’t be afraid to play around with the numbers, and try a different list of hashtags on each piece of content, until you’ve found a good match.

Mix it up from time-to-time as well so that you’re never relying on the same five or six hashtags for each post. Good luck!

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Sourced from INFLUENCIVE

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10 Best Consumer Engagement Platforms 2021

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By TechMag

The emergence of social media and other means of communication revolutionized how businesses communicate with their consumers. Most companies have historically focused on telephone contact and e-mail to get consumers involved. Yet over the last couple of years, things have changed so much.

Consumers don’t like newsletters today. You don’t want to be in touch like this anymore. They would like to communicate via social media, video chat, and other related platforms. This is why you have to adapt to organizations like yours. How do you do it best, however?

How best can you enhance communications with your clients? Well, you need a consumer engagement system/ platform. Such a platform will assist you to connect with your clients through a variety of channels. The consumer engagement system can also give you enough customer data to personalize your marketing campaigns. In a nutshell, a customer engagement platform has the ability to revolutionize your company’s customer experience and make it more dynamic.

Best Consumer Engagement Platforms: 1Q, RedPoint, Bold360, Astute Solutions, LivePerson, Pega, Chirpify, WalkMe, Aurea CX Platform, Vivocha, Velaro, Magentrix, Avaya, Eudata, Doxim, etc.

What are Consumer Engagement Platforms?

Consumer engagement platform provides the ability to centralize multiple customer experiences. Any of the services that a website can have included social networking, webchat, personalized marketing, and CRM functions.

It is important for customer involvement platforms to empower you with what you need to interact effectively with your customers, to monitor customer actions, and to test marketing strategies. This kind of functionality can help you appreciate the pain points of your client and deal properly with them.

Consumer interaction is a business communications link through several correspondence networks between a customer and a company. This relationship may consist of online and offline response, contact, effect, or overall customer experience.

Best Consumer Engagement Platforms

Bold360

BoldChat is a market-leading live chat and customer commitment solution which allows companies to engage customers online, mobile, and socially quickly and effectively. Unleash the distinctive identity of the organization and adapt chat execution to individual deployment methods, team dynamics, and specific market requirements. We also reinforced BoldChat’s proactive chat engine effective features to target a visitor to a website with the appropriate message at the right moment to connect with a live chat conversation, which is six times more likely to purchase proactive chat.

Avaya

Avaya offers business collaboration and interaction systems globally to businesses of all types. Avaya provides centralized email, call centres, networking, and associated services. Incorporating speech, video, data and notifications, conferences, and technologies to enable real-time commitment, the organization explores messaging, conference contact, and technology solutions. When Avaya brings companies together in an environment of convergence, software, social, and cloud, it connects business people more smoothly and improves efficiency. Innovation is flourishing and customer loyalty is growing.

1Q

1Q is the best consumer engagement platform that has changed the way brands reach consumers, giving you instant access to key audiences to make quick and informed decisions. By 1Q you can reach people where they live, where they are now, where they have been and where they will be in the future. With 1Q, consumers are paid instantly, per response, in cash, cultivating an eager, honest, and incentivized member base. 1Q knows the value of consumer’s time. While other platforms not pay.

WalkMe

WalkMe is a cloud-based Communication and Interaction Platform for businesses. The context-smart platform directs and leads users to work within every online experience. The Framework anticipates user requirements and offers support when and when it is needed. WalkMe also drives consumers to behave by identifying new features and suggesting good quality products. WalkMe is a forum for improving games that simplifies the online user experience immediately. WalkMe supports marketers and product managers to maximize customer acceptance and revenues by offering a lively, effortless, and customized online interface.

Pega

The next step in evolving the consumer engagement platform is Pega Marketing. With advanced customer analysis and market rules integrated in real-time, Pega actively reviews and advises the most appropriate offers, information, channels, and actions for any customer encounter. With Pega, consumer relations with consumers can be improved and customer service management can be focussed across all platforms beyond segmentation projects. Pega delivers a consumer brain that is still online. Pega Marketing allows the users to satisfy their loyalty to their clients.

Zendesk – Cloud customer service

Zendesk is one of the best consumer engagement platforms. Build improved consumer experience with Zendesk, which is the leading software for user involvement in phones, chat, e-mail, social media, and other platforms. With the help of Zendesk, you will easily respond to your customers. Implementation, usage, and scale are simple. With this app, you can become a reliable operator and establish brand loyalty. It’s a really marvelous company support ticket scheme.

Customer engagement Features: Analytics, Checkout, Churn Management, Communication Management, Community Management, Content Syndication, Feedback Collection.

Chirpify

Chirpify is a conversation white-label platform. It offers users different features for tracking social media, such as holding tags on similar hashtags, images, check-in, and sites. Triggers can be tracked and an instant and complex response can be submitted to them when a customer sets a key. It helps users to start electoral campaigns, tournaments, gating materials, utility management, and more. The analytics functionality by Chirpify analyses consumer campaign views, posts, scope, and impacts. The functionality tests the transfer of ads and demonstrates whether clients link their social media pages to the programs of users.

Vivocha

Vivocha is a small and big company’s online customer interaction platform. In a few simple steps, the online customer service can be set up, beginning with collaboration and re-time collaboration, which allows the customer directly to reach an agent via chat. The next move is to include consumers on every website by constructive guidelines, for example, the “working time.” Pageviews and communications can then be displayed graphically by real-time analysis and reporting. The most interesting last move is definitely to design the logo using the widget designs.

Velaro

Velaro is a live chat software company that offers its customers the best living chat experience. Live chat lets consumers reach the brand’s distribution and support team directly so that Velaro offers all the major resources that the customer needs. It also gives an insight into what the guests do and from what they come to ensure that figures will still refresh the brand. Velaro focuses on Workflow and Routing, in addition to visitor monitoring, allowing the user to locate the correct person at the right time for their issues.

Eudata

Eudata is a hub for customer engagement and supports large corporations in providing value-added services for the customer base. Eudata WCS is the perfect companion for all moments of contact with digital consumers and organizations, from self-help programs to the initiative. Live or continuing contact between business executives and consumers (agents, specialists, or account managers). Organizations can use voice or video on the web or on smartphones to humanize the experience of their customer.

By TechMag

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6 Common Business Challenges Solved with Creative Social Media Strategy

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There are 3.8 billion active social media users. For context, world population is 7.8 billion. So, when nearly half of the world’s population is using social media, it stands to reason that a social media strategy to engage customers is important, right?

It makes one wonder why so many companies skip over social media strategy and focus on tactics. They use the tips, tricks and hacks they learn via how-to articles or free webinars and then wonder why they aren’t getting the results they expected.

Setting goals greatly increases the chance of achieving them, but so many companies jump into social media without determining what their goals should be.

Others bring their goals to the table with wide-eyed enthusiasm but get attached to problematic tactics. When those don’t work, they give up and say, “Social media doesn’t work for us.”

The challenge of making social media perform doesn’t vanish when you give up.

It’s important to remember that the company is on social media (whether you’re participating or not). Conversations happen concerning the company and a growing number of consumers are joining in that conversation, preferring to communicate via social media.

If you’re not engaging with customers in a meaningful way, your competitor will be.

With a well-defined social media strategy, which includes a plan to distinguish your brand/company, things begin to fall into place more readily.

  • Everyday problems that seemed unfixable suddenly become an afterthought.
  • There’s no wasting of valuable assets on efforts of little value.
  • Worthwhile tactics come into focus and begin to pay off.

A real-time example to illustrate how creative social media strategy clears the path for success.

A large company reached out to Kruse Control for help getting traction with a new product via social media. The company leadership was admittedly in the dark about how social media works but they recognized its importance and wanted expert guidance.

Most leaders have a preliminary plan of how their operations need to shift with the launch of a new product. Where things get murky is how best to present the product into the social space, what metrics to track, and how to budget for it.

With all the players in place, including data, we were able to provide them with a social media strategy that delivered the right message, reached the right people at the right time, and exceeded their goals by 35%.

As social media becomes even more complicated, and as skeptical consumers have growing disinterest in run-of-the-mill brands and offers, the need for social media strategy gets more intense.

If you don’t have the expertise in-house to determine actionable goals and integrate a social media strategy that works for you, contact a qualified expert to help remove the guesswork and establish the best course of action…

Creative Social Media Strategy…For The Win!

Here are 6 common business challenges that can be solved with a data-driven, creative social media strategy.

1. Challenge: Weak Brand Awareness

Social media is ideal for reaching a broader audience, however, why you post is central to success. Every post creates an impression in users’ minds.

Social media strategy to solve this challenge: Steps must be taken to identify what makes the company and its products valuable. Identify internally why people choose you rather than your competitor, then craft content to support that differentiation.

Refrain from promotional sales content when the challenge is strengthening brand awareness. Approach as though you’re meeting users in person for the first time. No one likes to be greeted with a sales pitch so focus on more meaningful content that personifies why customers choose you.

2. Challenge: Slow Sales

Social advertising is one of the most powerful tools to increase sales. By publishing engaging content you lay the groundwork for further engagement. The next natural step is to target would-be buyers with offers.

Social media strategy to solve this challenge: Facebook’s ads platform is highly adept at identifying and reaching your ideal customers. A successful Facebook Ads strategy has the following components:

  • Define your target audience.
  • Choose the right ad placement – Awareness, consideration, conversions.
  • Strategic ad design is crucial – ads must attract attention and compel buyers to click.
  • Use landing pages with lead forms to track conversions.
  • Test and track your campaigns.

3. Challenge: Declining Customer Retention

It costs 5 to 8 times more to acquire a new customer than it does to keep an existing one. Social media is excellent for staying in touch with current customers…and it’s fairly cost effective!

Social media strategy to solve this challenge: Treat your social channels as communities where like-minded people come to hang out. Appoint a “community manager” or who engages and supports your community by listening and being responsive to questions, needs and concerns.

A good social media relationship with customers improves perceptions and fosters offline relationships.

4. Challenge: Poor Online Reputation

Reviews are insanely influential.

  • 90% of consumers read online reviews.
  • 88% trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.
  • 86% will hesitate to purchase from a business that has negative reviews.
  • Customers are likely to spend 31% more with a business that has positive reviews.
  • 92% will use a local business if it has at least a 4-star rating.

Don’t give online ratings sites the power to control your business. If what’s being said about you doesn’t mirror the true customer experience delivered, take action now to turn things around.

Social media strategy to solve this challenge: Remove the obstacles that stymie reviews.

Create a review funnel. Systematically drive customers to one conversion funnel that routes them to the review sites you care about.

  • Automatically ask, remind and guide happy customers through the funnel.
  • Recover unhappy customers before they vent online.

5. Challenge: Declining or Nonexistent Connection with Customers

We’ve been witnessing a massive shift in what it means to be effective on social media. The pandemic has shaken things up, further driving the wedge between companies and their customers. It’s time to think differently.

The big challenge that companies face is connecting with customers on an individual and personal level. Connecting with customers in meaningful ways humanizes your brand and builds genuine relationships.

Social media strategy to solve this challenge: Monitor all social media channels and respond authentically (aka: like a human!). Ask questions, provide insights, or offer help with problems.

Note: In the road to the car sale, this strategy is crucial because more and more customers are preferring some or all of the transaction be conducted digitally.

6. Challenge: Low Search Visibility

Nearly every buyer starts her or his purchase journey online. Your website is the virtual storefront of your business and not being found in search means fewer customers and decreased revenue.

On Google and Bing, and now Facebook, it’s super important to be visible when people are searching for what you sell.

Social media strategy to solve this challenge: To improve search visibility on Google and Bing, focus tactics on publishing links to content that go directly to your website. Although social media is not a ranking factor, it has a link to search engine optimization. These “social signals” will increase a site’s authority, thereby indirectly improving search rankings.

To improve search visibility on Facebook, promote those links with Facebook ads. A well-researched, data driven Facebook Ads strategy is an integral part of your over all social media strategy.

A Facebook page with high engagement shows up in search more prominently and positions your company as a trusted resource.

Take action, improve business with social media strategy.

Today’s challenges must be met with today’s solutions.

Companies must develop a strong foundational social media strategy to meet customers where they are and help them buy.

If you would like advice or help with creating your company’s social media strategy, please reach out to me here. I’ll get back to you within 24 hours.

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Sourced from Kruse Control Inc.

 

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You Need to Start Converting Your Social Media Followers Now. Here’s How.

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If you want your business to thrive rather than merely survive 2021 and beyond, seize the spotlight you have.

Social media followers are cool and all, but if you’re not converting those fans to customers, your efforts and investments are futile. If 2020 taught us anything, it’s that the world can, and will, change overnight. So, if you want your business to thrive rather than merely survive 2021 and beyond, you have to be prepared for the worst to happen.

Imagine if TikTok had been banned in the U.S. last year as nearly happened? A lot of people would have lost these leads. What if the same threat looms over us for Instagram or other platforms in 2021? If you don’t want to be caught with your proverbial pants down, you need to start converting your followers to customers now.

Why, though?

Unless you purchased fake followers, most of your social media fans like your products or services, making them hot leads. Failure to implement a strategy to convert these fans to customers means you are missing out on sales that are there for the taking.

An increasing number of individuals and organizations have lost their Instagram accounts to hackers, unable to ever re-access their former accounts. What happens to all of those followers if you weren’t already converting them to customers? They are lost forever, and all the time and energy you invested in building your online presence is flushed down the drain.

The how

Most brands only pay attention to their post-engagement analytics. Yes, likes and comments per post are important so that you can adapt your content strategy accordingly, but what if your account gets hacked tonight? Kiss those leads you had on ice, waiting to be reeled in like little fishes on a hook goodbye. Read on to discover how to convert fans to customers.

1. Activate email subscription. Most site visitors will not subscribe to your emails unless there’s something in it for them. Entice visitors to share their information with you by offering limited-time discount codes, giveaway entry or free ebook downloads in return for their information. Offering 20-40% off a visitor’s first purchase from you is one of the most effective ways to push newbies across the finish line of your sales funnel. To get ahead of the competition, you have to cut through the online noise by offering consumers value for money over competitors. That’s the holy grail of influencing purchasing decisions.

2. Retarget, retarget, retarget! I know you’re busy and overwhelmed, but another essential step in successful conversion is retargeting those who share their information with you. It sounds obvious, but you’d be surprised how many social media users, including some of the biggest powerhouse brands in the world, are culprits of dropping the ball at this level of marketing Jumanji.

Your email-subscription set-up should be connected to the email platform of your choice, whether that be a basic MailChimp account or a more advanced platform, so that all of your new contacts are automatically added to your email database. The more advanced your platform, the easier it will make your life, as a lot of the actions, such as segmenting, are automated. (The importance of email segmentation is a separate topic for another day.)  An email database you don’t utilize is as pointless as social media fans you’re not converting. Aim to send out at least one email per month to your contacts, preferably with special offers or new products or services rather than just company news (which everyone deletes).

Case in point….

Here’s a quick summary of a case study for you. The year is 2019, and the biggest concern for brands was probably the rumours about Instagram potentially being shut down and disappearing over night. Thankfully, that didn’t happen, but we were hit with a global pandemic that no one was prepared for either.

Anyway, with the Instagram rumours in full swing, I reached out to a fashion powerhouse brand to collaborate on a giveaway with a prominent entrepreneur I was working with at the time. The result? Nearly 1,000 emails within 24 hours, and a 23% increase in sales within three weeks as I retargeted these leads via weekly email marketing.

If that doesn’t demonstrate how valuable converting your fans to customers is, then I can’t help you.

Feature Image Credit: Witthaya Prasongsin | Getty Images

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Sourced from Entrepreneur Europe

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TikTok faces trouble in Europe after it narrowly escapes U.S. ban

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By Michael Allison

More trouble for the social media company.

What you need to know

  • TikTok is facing complaints from European consumer bodies.
  • The BUEC and 15 other bodies accused the company of being lax with data and having skewed terms of service.
  • By way of response, TikTok offered a meeting with BEUC representatives to “listen to their concerns.”

TikTok is facing multiple complaints from the European Consumer Organisation (BEUC), and other consumer organizations in 15 European countries over privacy rights violations. The BEUC today argued that the social media app breached EU consumer rights and failed to protect children from both inappropriate content and stealth advertising. It called for a comprehensive EU investigation into TikTok’s policies and practices and requested more transparency from the company.

More specifically, the BEUC alleged that TikTok was unclear in its terms of service with the terms drafted to give outsized benefits to TikTok rather than users when it came to content ownership and remuneration.

The BEUC also took aim that TikTok’s virtual coins as well as its hashtag challenges, noting that both provided significant financial benefit for TikTok with little benefit for users. when it came to hashtag challenges, the body also accused TikTok of not doing due diligence in protecting teen and child users from suggestive content.

Finally, the BEUC stated that TikTok violated the GDPR by being unclear about what personal data it collected and how it used it.

Monique Goyens, BEUC Director, said in a statement:

In just a few years, TikTok has become one of the most popular social media apps with millions of users across Europe. But TikTok is letting its users down by breaching their rights on a massive scale. We have discovered a whole series of consumer rights infringements and therefore filed a complaint against TikTok.

Children love TikTok but the company fails to keep them protected. We do not want our youngest ones to be exposed to pervasive hidden advertising and unknowingly turned into billboards when they are just trying to have fun.

Together with our members – consumer groups from across Europe – we urge authorities to take swift action. They must act now to make sure TikTok is a place where consumers, especially children, can enjoy themselves without being deprived of their rights.

Speaking to Reuters, TikTok responded:

We’re always open to hearing how we can improve, and we have contacted BEUC as we would welcome a meeting to listen to their concerns.

The company has faced more challenges than most nascent social media did in their early years including attempted U.S. bans, temporary bans in Pakistan, and a seemingly permanent one in India leading to potential divestment.

Feature Image Credit: Source: Android Central

By Michael Allison

Sourced from androidcentral

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Programmatic: Why building a curated marketplace should be a priority for buyers in 2021

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By Michael Feeley

Anyone working within programmatic advertising is likely to hear the phrase ‘curated marketplace’ a lot in 2021 – but what does ‘curation’ really mean in this context and why should it be a key priority for media buyers over the next 12 months?

Michael Simpkins, Marketplace Commercial Lead at Xandr explains, as the programmatic landscape has become increasingly cluttered and complex over the past decade, many people now assume that media buyers operating their own ‘curated marketplace’ are simply looking to work with fewer partners in the advertising supply chain. However, this is only the first step and barely scratches the surface of how curation can help improve the effectiveness of a media strategy.

Going back to basics

With the rapid growth of the programmatic industry, the supply chain became fragmented, resulting in a loss of control and transparency for both buyers and sellers. Buyers are also facing increasing pressure to justify return on ad spend, but siloed spending, rigid metrics and a convoluted supply chain make it hard to prove marketing impact on business outcomes.

As a collective, the industry has matured in the past few years to take a step back and simplify the complex landscape. Direct relationships between buyers and sellers are being rebuilt and big steps are being taken to improve supply chain transparency. Marketers, now more understanding of the supply chain, are seeking to regain control not just over their ad spend but over their campaign performance too and, with the deprecation of the third-party cookie, these objectives take on even greater importance. On the other hand, with the proliferation of header bidding, publishers want to make sure their most important media buyers are still able to reach and value their inventory effectively. It is important for companies to deliver unique value across the advertising ecosystem from consumers, buyers and sellers. One of the ways we at Xandr are able to do this is through our curation offering, which brings buyers and sellers together on our platform, offering buyers a simplified and dedicated workflow to easily build out their own curated marketplaces from the supply available on our premium advertising marketplace.

Regaining control of the supply chain

By building out a curated marketplace, buyers gain control within the SSP (sell-side platform) and can apply macro business rules to supply before it hits the DSP (demand-side platform) for targeting, significantly reducing risk in a diverse supply chain.

Through curation, buyers are able to maximise their investment by having full control over supply decisioning and ensuring all media is run across brand safe environments and eliminating non-essential pass throughs in the supply chain. Costs can also be reduced as buyers streamline supply sources, campaign workflows and operational complexity while also having the ability to negotiate price and priority within publishers. Buyers are able to receive regular reports on supply-side fees and auction dynamics, strengthening cross-industry relationships and supporting our industry’s quest for supply chain transparency.

As collaboration becomes even more important in 2021 and beyond, curating a marketplace on a single platform can reduce the risk even further. With fewer partners you’re able to work together on market and regulatory changes, niche audience targets and specific campaign needs together.

What is curation?

Today, we are used to a two-party transaction with a buyer using a DSP to purchase inventory and a seller using an SSP to surface their inventory to the buy side. Curation moves us to a three-party transaction where we now have a curator that sits between the SSP and DSP and works alongside the publishers to decide what inventory is allowed into their marketplace and then packages and merchandises that inventory via a curated multi-seller private marketplace (PMP) to make it available to the buy side to trade in their DSP.

Creating your own curated marketplace does not have to be a huge undertaking – in fact, it involves just four key steps:

  • Identify what you want to get out of the curated marketplace. Is it fee and auction dynamic transparency? More control on your supply paths? Performance gains? Setting a clear objective and strategy for the curated marketplace will make the process clearer for all parties involved.
  • Establish who you want to partner with to build out the curated marketplace. Pick a technology partner that has the supply coverage, tools, expertise and service models to implement a successful curated marketplace.
  • Work with your technology partner to understand what supply to bring into your marketplace and how to work with the publishers to do so. A curated marketplace should bring buyers and publishers closer together, not act as a blocker.
  • Optimise your curated marketplace. These marketplaces shouldn’t be static and should constantly be optimised based on performance, market changes and pricing.

As consumers continue to access media content across numerous devices, their attention becomes increasingly difficult to capture and hold. To catch their audience wherever they are viewing content means marketers are having to reconsider their strategies for planning, buying and measuring advertisers. We have to introduce an option for those who want to buy advertising and access to consumers on all devices and formats in one place, and that option is curation.

By Michael Feeley

Sourced from The Drum

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On a Shoestring Budget? 7 Cost-Effective Ways to Promote Your Business

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Many businesses have to squeeze out expenses to break-even and start making a profit. Unfortunately, some important processes, such as marketing, go underfunded.

However, that doesn’t have to be the case. There are several ingenious low-cost strategies to promote your business while you’re on a tight budget. You just need to start small and you’ll be able to scale up as you go.

Here are seven cost-effective strategies that will attract customers to your business. Your main goal should be to scale up the process so that you get more revenue by applying all these techniques consistently. The cycle will spiral upwards, later on, bringing you more clients each time.

1. Create engaging online content

Time; that’s the only thing you’ll need to start producing excellent content. Running a blog is quite easy nowadays. There are many templates available and you don’t have to worry about hosting. Many blog hosts offer free hosting without premium features. Zero capital for starters, that only requires effort. If you decide to improve things down the line, you can hire remote employees.

You need one or two outstanding writers. Plus, an editor and a graphic designer would also be useful additions. The good news is that most of them work as freelancers, meaning, you get to pay for services only when you need them.

Always make sure the content aligns with your product or service. Research extensively and give customers what you’d consider reading yourself. Some ways to keep content engaging is through:

  • Sharing useful tips across articles
  • Adding an FAQ section with detailed answers
  • Incorporating lists, graphic assets, and multimedia
  • Listing best practices in your industry
  • Highlighting key points and crucial ideas

Now, regarding your potential earnings, the following chart shows the average revenue possible for ~60% of the population who is willing to publish 3 pieces of valuable content a week, as you can see the profits are considerable:

shoestring-budget-own-elaboration-based-on-data-by-financial-samurai

Image Source: Financial Samurai

2. Do cold calling

There are many agencies and marketplaces that offer professional cold calling services. You brief them on what you are offering, pay a fee, and they’ll do the magic. If you cannot afford such services, you can do this in-house.

All you need is to research the best cold calling practices. Then, prepare scripts to ensure consistency in your message. Stay courteous on the phone, explain things patiently, and you will start seeing your first leads. Just keep in mind that cold-calling is a number’s game.

You can also consider incorporating cold emailing. It works the same way as cold calling only that you do not get instant feedback. Send out emails to prospects, then wait a few days to send follow-ups when there’s no reply. There are many options to automate this process, which will save you a good amount of time.

3. Leverage referrals

One of the oldest ways of promotion is through word of mouth. Encourage your satisfied customers to spread the word. After all, any product is best understood by those that use it.

Referral programs are quite flexible so you can be very creative with them. Giving rewards is the best way to do it. Here are some ways of using rewards in your customer referral programs:

  • Have giveaways for customers with the most number of referrals.
  • Give customers and those whom they refer, a percentage discount.
  • Give some free products/services to customers with a certain number of referrals.
  • Make a scoring system with hierarchies to make customers gain points and upgrade their status, unlocking additional benefits.

4. Apply for awards

There are many companies that offer online awards to businesses of different niches. Find one related to your industry. Showing that you have awards boosts trust ratings among your potential customers.

Some awards are easier to get, whereas some have very rigorous criteria. Getting those harder awards will definitely grant you trustworthiness, and customers recognize that. This increases your business reputation.

If awarded, the organizations share your business information on their site and social media platforms. That drives more traffic to your business. Thus, bringing prospects your way.

If you are granted an award, here are some things worth doing to take full advantage:

  • Share the announcement on your website and social media
  • Prepare a well-written press release
  • Write a blog post expressing your gratitude for the award by outlining what it means to your business
  • If the award comes with a badge, place it strategically on your site

5. Strengthen your business through partnerships

When people come together costs are easier to bear. Team up with other local businesses and do joint campaigns. It applies to businesses relevant to your industry.

Don’t go about it blindly though, you need businesses that complement yours. For example a wedding photographer can team up with a wedding planner and a wedding dress designer.

Such partnerships will widen your customer database. Your partners’ customers trust them, so your information shared on their platforms gets easily trusted too.

6. Stay active on social media

Let’s take a look at some amazing stats shared by Oberlo to give you an idea of how massively important social media (SM) is for businesses:

shoestring-budget-oberlo-social-media-users-data

As you can see, social media is probably the biggest marketplace in the world right now, and it is no longer just about replying to messages and posting content. People want to establish meaningful relationships. Therefore, you need to take the time to know your customers, get them to know your business and cultivate a loyal customer base. This requires you to stay constantly active.

Understand your followers and people who interact with your content. Engage with them often and listen to the feedback given. Act on such feedback and show that you care about your customers and value their opinions.

In order to improve engagement consider introducing fun activities. Social media contests are an outstanding example. They keep your customers engaged, they’re fun, and some customers get to take cool prizes back home.

This is an easy low-cost strategy that will help you build your online reputation, which is more important. With time, word will spread, and soon you’ll have your website visits exploding. The conversion rate also skyrockets as long as you take the time to cultivate relationships.

7. Get involved in your local community

While staying active online brings customers from all corners of the globe, your local community is equally important. They probably formed your initial customer base and might be your most loyal customers.

It’s important that you keep them engaged as well. Take part in local fairs and events. It keeps your business fresh in their memory and provides you a platform to introduce fresh developments.

Carry some business cards and posters when you attend local events. Also, don’t simply dish them out. Make meaningful conversations with prospects as you would with online followers. Only this time you are doing it in person, so facial expressions and other non-verbal cues matter.

Conclusion

Most of what is listed above requires exclusively effort or very low investment. Experiment with each strategy and you will soon realize that you don’t need a super large budget to promote your business.

It’s often through simple interactions that you create long-lasting impressions. Add a little creativity into the process and you will never run short of a constant customer flow. By the time you decide to scale up, you will have gained not only some stability but also a great deal of experience.

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Guest author: Bryan Osorio is a Blogger, SEO enthusiast, Content Marketer, and Digital Marketer with 3 years of experience within the Tech and Digital Marketing Industry. He likes to read, write and talk about Science, Technology, AI, Video Games, World News, and more. He studied Psychology at the National University of Colombia and enjoys writing about leadership, remote work, team motivation and others.

Sourced from Jeff Bullas

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In no-spectators era, digital platforms are turning sports sponsorship on its head

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By Caroline Parry.

Nothing beats the thrill of watching live sporting events unfold. Those impossible acts, the surprise results and glorious victories – there is nothing else like it. Sport is emotional, it is engaging and it has the power to unify.

There is a huge global appetite for sport and, after the Covid-19 pandemic forced many spectator sports to shut down for much of 2020, fans became hungrier than ever for the excitement of live events.

While many rescheduled tent-pole sports events are due to take place over 2021, all eyes will be on the Tokyo Summer Olympics, set to launch on 23 July. Although organisers are working tirelessly to ensure the Games go ahead, there is still a real possibility that fans will be unable to attend in person.

For brands, this presents the challenge of connecting with fans without them being physically in the stadium. However, it also creates new opportunities for brands to engage fans at home and enhance their mobile and digital experience.

Without a doubt, it will be a different experience for sports fans, but new viewing patterns and behaviours were already evolving. Live sports broadcasting is being disrupted by digital devices and online platforms, meaning it is no longer a linear TV experience.

This change was already apparent in the viewing figures for the 2016 Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro, where 3.2 billion people watched on a combination of TV and digital devices. Today, according to the research firm GlobalWebIndex’s (GWI) data from Q3 2020, 54% of global sports fans watch coverage or highlights online.

Digital viewing for the Olympics Games has been soaring since Beijing in 2008. According to e-Marketer’s Sports OTT Landscape report from January 2019, it was expected to hit new heights in 2020 with video views predicted to top 3.5bn. TV views were projected at around the 3bn mark.

Fans are also taking their conversations online as highlighted by GWI (Q3 2020) showing that two-thirds of sports fan use social media while watching TV. With duel-screening now almost universal, brands should note that mobile sports consumption is increasing multi-faceted. According to Facebook data, there are 700 million sports fans on Facebook and 400 million fans on Instagram.

The 2016 Summer Games in Rio also demonstrated how the behaviour of sports fans is changing. Facebook saw 1.5bn interactions during the games from 277 million unique users, while Instagram registered 916m interactions from 131 million unique users. The last Football World Cup generated 5.3bn interactions.

More than half of viewers are also chatting with friends via platforms such as WhatsApp sharing key sporting moments, while a third is reading the news, playing games or searching for products related to what they are watching. What does this mean for marketers, particularly sponsors?

Sports sponsorship has long been big business for brands, offering a vast, often international, reach, and a culturally relevant audience. According to the research and data company Kantar, sports sponsorship will account for 10% of all global advertising spend in 2021, hitting nearly $50bn.

Tracking the performance of those campaigns and measuring success has always proved tricky for brands. At the same time, sponsorship properties have often only been available on long-term contracts. It is no surprise then that Kantar research also found that 44% of marketers believe sponsorship is the least understood media channel in terms of return on investment.

However, digital and online platforms, such as Facebook and Instagram, are turning the sponsorship model on its head. The opportunities for bespoke content and agile and trackable campaigns allow brands to target their campaigns more accurately and assess their success more quickly.

Andy Childs of Facebook’s Central Europe Connection Planning unit explains: “Sports sponsorship is in transition, with brands all vying for consumer share of mind and share of wallet. With our platform and analytics, Facebook and Instagram offer brands a unique opportunity to grow – to reach mass audiences, enhance the fan experience, trigger relevant purchases and importantly measure the business impact of sport sponsorship.“

It means not only are brands seeking shorter, more targeted sponsorship opportunities than are the market norm, but there are more ways for non-sponsoring brands to get involved in tent-pole sporting events.

With more opportunities for brands to get involved in the 2021 Summer Games, the need for creative campaigns that cut through the noise will be more critical than ever. To do this, marketers should consider these creative thought starters:

Amplify brand association

A brand should develop a meaningful link with its chosen sports event among its audience, and cut through the clutter by demonstrating its interest and reason for getting involved with the sport. Where fans are aware of the link between sponsor and property, there is a 30% uplift in commercial effects compared to where fans are unaware of the correct linkage.*

It is vital to identify a different emotional space to other sponsors, particularly close competitors, while also targeting a broad audience with content such as snackable video. Use in-stream advertising to build a stronger association.

Enhance the fan experience

To reinforce the connection between the brand and the event, offer fans something exclusive or innovative that enriches and deepens that emotional connection. Where fans are aware of the linkage and further believe that there is benefit to the property and to the fan experience (arising from the sponsorship), there is a 71% uplift in commercial effects.*

Meanwhile, offer fans a 24/7 experience through branded content and increase relevance through contextual and geo-targeting. Sponsors can also seek to augment and gamify sports consumption.

Trigger consumption opportunities

The third way to grow with sports is through sales – generating a commercial return is the most important overall objective for sponsors or non-sponsors alike. The best way is to Integrate a brand’s product or service into the fabric or experience of the event. By focusing on products connected to an event that are a natural fit or can be enjoyed during the event. Campaigns should promote relevant products or services at relevant moments, including athlete participation, home matches or weather triggers. This strategy will help improve understanding of sports event ROI.

The whole sports community from the fans and sportspeople, athletes and teams through to leagues and associations, media and influencers to advertisers and brands have all embraced this brave new world of sports. It is an evolution that has the potential to enrich the experience for everyone.

Even when fans are allowed to return to live sports events, online platforms and brands will continue to enhance and build on that experience. The potential, the reach and the creativity that online platforms can offer are only beginning to be realised.

* Professor Tony Meenaghan, Jamie Macken and Mark Nolan, Core Ireland, 2018

By Caroline Parry

Sourced from The Drum

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CMOs: Adapt Your Social Media Strategy for a Post-Pandemic World

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By Christine Moorman and Torren McCarthy

The Special Covid-19 Edition of The CMO Survey found that social media has become critical to marketing during the pandemic. The survey reported that social media spending has increased from 13.3% of marketing budgets in February 2020 to 23.2% in June 2020 — a 74% lift. Meanwhile, spending on traditional advertising is projected to decline, as CMOs estimate a 5.3% reduction in traditional advertising channels in the next 12 months.

Companies are seeing a historic return on their social media investments, according to the survey. The self-reported contribution of social media to overall company performance has risen sharply, up 24% since February 2020. This is an important finding because, despite steadily rising investments social media, the impact of social media has remained relatively flat since 2016.

CMOs anticipate that social media investments will remain high at 23.4% of marketing budgets into 2021. Along with this, CMOs are increasingly investing in online customer experiences: 60.8% of CMOs indicated they have “shifted resources to building customer-facing digital interfaces” and 56.2% planning to “transform their go-to-market business models to focus on digital opportunities.” It is clear that social media will continue to play an important role in driving consumers toward digital offerings.

How can marketing leaders build upon this growing trend and plan their social media marketing strategies for a post-pandemic future that is equally bright? Here are 10 key recommendations:

1. Run formal experiments. The Special Edition of the CMO Survey found a high level of marketing improvisation during the pandemic, with CMOs reporting an average 5.6 out of 7 (where 1 represents “not at all” and 7 represents “a great deal”). Despite this, survey results also document a decrease in formal experimentation on social platforms, with only 31% of marketers reporting that they conducted experiments to understand the impact of their marketing actions during the pandemic, and only 29% of marketers reporting that they invested resources into building research and experimentation capabilities.

These statistics indicate that marketers are implementing new, improvised strategies frequently, but without fully understanding their effects. They need to correct this trend in 2021: Social media platforms provide excellent opportunities to test new brand messaging, advertisements, and offerings — and to receive direct measurable feedback from target consumers. Marketers must use these tools to learn.

2. Play with new channels and features on existing platforms. Social media strategists should always be aware of what’s new on existing platforms. For example, Instagram Reels, which launched this past summer, provides a new channel to deliver the short-form video style that has swept the internet. Facebook’s gift cards or TikTok For Business, which were also released earlier this year, are similar examples. These new tools provide an opportunity to build a unique connection with consumers, who will associate their discovery of these features with the brands that first use them. A strong social media marketing strategy will include a process for identifying new features and channels and quickly creating content for them.

3. Integrate social media strategy into your overall marketing strategy. The August 2019 CMO Survey reported that social media is not well integrated with marketing strategies (scoring 4.2 on 7-point scale where 1 represents “not at all integrated” and 7 represents “very integrated”). Although a slight improvement from past surveys, this number is still too low to produce adequate returns on social media investments — and far too low for an expenditure that comprises nearly a quarter of marketing budgets.

As social media takes center stage in a post-pandemic marketing world, it needs to integrate more seamlessly with the firm’s broader marketing strategy. Because social media is the current bright light, CMOs should ensure their social media strategy directly aligns with overall marketing strategy to maximize the benefits produced by these synergies.

4. Invest in top social media talent. Social media managers are now being asked to manage a costly and highly effective piece of the marketing budget and to take on a role that often requires wearing multiple hats (copywriter, graphic designer, customer service rep, etc.). So marketing leaders need to think carefully about who should fill this key position. While the best social media managers can have a positive impact, an inexperienced or unqualified one could be detrimental to a company’s brand. The national average salary for social media managers is $50,500, according to Glassdoor, which seriously lags the average compensation for the positions they often serve in: copywriters average $58,500, marketing managers average $65,500, and ad managers average $71,000. To get top talent in this area, compensation must meet the increasing value of the role.

5. Ensure agile social media management. 2020 has shown just how quickly the social media landscape can change. Recognizing this, CMOs ranked the “ability to pivot as new priorities emerge” as the top skill they look for in marketing talent. So, when it comes to social media management, CMOs must ensure that talent, processes, and agency partners are prepared to respond to and capitalize on these sudden changes. Organizations willing to re-evaluate their social media strategies in a rapidly changing landscape will minimize risk and maximize the opportunity to connect with consumers. (To that end, a recent Journal of Marketing article highlights how real-time shifts in social media activities generate more virality online.)

6. Harness the power of influencers and creators. The allocation of marketing budgets towards influencers is on the rise, up to 7.5% from 6.5% a year ago and expected to rise to 12.7% in the next three years. As online traffic continues to increase, it will be critical for brands to identify the right influencers to attract target customers and identify growth segments. It will also be important for social media managers to invest in influencer training and relationship building; Influencers are a great way to build trust and authentic relationships with followers, who may end up being paying customers. Scheduling individual and group touch points with influencers to discuss product updates and gain feedback on trends they are observing will go a long way toward fostering a mutually beneficial partnership.

7. Carefully consider the right platform(s) for your brand. CMOs have consistently ranked brand building as their top use for social media, so it is important to consider how the platform you choose impacts consumers’ perception of your brand. In the special edition survey, consumers indicated that a “trusting relationship” is most important to them in a brand (beating out low price, product quality, and even innovation). So always consider how the policies of social media platforms (as they relate to privacy and hate speech, in particular) may undermine consumers’ trust.

8. Reduce friction between social media and e-commerce platforms. To make online shopping easy, social media managers must ensure a smooth process of funneling consumers from social media to their e-commerce site. A bad user experience in this area can lead to lost sales; a good one can boost them. So as new digital tools are developed, social media teams must insist upon frequent collaboration with development teams to ensure a smooth customer journey from mobile-app and social sites to your company’s e-commerce site.

9. Adapt your creative content to the times. It is important for brands to keep creative content relevant to the current Covid-19 reality, whatever that may be. For example, a social media post that portrays a brand at a large, indoor gathering of people could be ignored by consumers who perceive it as outdated — or worse, insensitive. On the other end of the spectrum, many consumers are fatigued from content that centers around the virus. To resonate with followers, social media content must a balance. A good example of this is the Stella Artois Staycation Swap, a contest that matches would-be travelers who had planned trips to each other’s cities that were cancelled due to Covid-19 to swap itineraries on TripAdvisor for an all-expenses-paid staycation instead.

10. Take care to select and onboard the right agency partners. Results from the February 2020 CMO Survey indicate that 24.1% of companies’ social media activities are now performed by outside agencies — an increase from 17.4% in 2014. As agency partners become an increasingly important part of an increasingly important part of the business, selecting, training, and building a strong relationship with these partners is crucial.

As the Covid-19 pandemic pushes consumers to spend more time online, social media becomes an increasingly important part of the connection between brands and their customers — both existing ones and potentially new ones. Now is the time to invest in building an integrated and agile social media management function to adapt to the new landscape.

Feature Image Credit: Westend61/ Getty Images

By Christine Moorman and Torren McCarthy

  • Christine Moorman is the T. Austin Finch, Sr. Professor of Business Administration, Fuqua School of Business, Duke University. She is founder and director of The CMO Survey and Editor in Chief of the Journal of Marketing.
    Torren McCarthy is a Senior Consultant with Deloitte Consulting LLP and a 2020 MBA graduate from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business.

Sourced from Harvard Business School

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What Skills Marketers Say They Want In 2021 — And Why

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Although 86% of marketers feel they are adequately trained and skilled, nearly all report that they want a new skill in order to advance their careers. The most frequently reported skills are data analytics, performance marketing, social media, and SEO.

Sidecar surveyed 146 marketing professionals in the retail industry. The majority of respondents were based in the U.S., with the remainder in Canada. All reported that they contribute to ecommerce marketing efforts at their company.

  • C-Level executives want skills in data analytics, social media, and performance marketing.
  • SEO directors or vice presidents want data analytics, performance marketing, and leadership skills.
  • Associated and managers want data analytics, SEO, social media, and performance marketing.

Job titles including associate, manager, director, vice president, chief marketing officer (CMO), and chief executive officer (CEO). The analysis groups these titles into associates and managers, directors and vice presidents, and C-level. Responses were fielded between September and October 2020.

Some responses were not discrete skills marketers want, but rather strategic knowledge and big-picture capabilities they hope to acquire. One CEO cited the ability to create the perfect balance between digital marketing spend and great content. A director asked for strategic thinking on how to lead a brand through the changing environment.

The top five functions that have had the greatest focus in hiring during the past 12 months include social media, content marketing, SEO, email marketing, and graphic design.

This differs from the functions that marketing professionals plan to hire for during the next 12 months. Social media marketing tops the list, followed by email marketing, content marketing, digital strategy, data analytics, and graphic design.

Survey participants were asked what platforms they would like to spend more time on. Some 42% cited Google paid search, while 41% cited Facebook, 40%, Amazon; 40%, Instagram; 37%, Google Shopping; 32%, Pinterest; 20%, TikTok; 15%, Snapchat; 13%, Walmart; and 10% cited Microsoft.

Participants in the survey were asked which tasks they want to devote more time to. Brand building and data analysis were tied for the top response, with about 45% saying they want more time to do each, followed by 43% who cited competitive analysis, while 36% cited customer experience; 34% cited creative; 33% cited multichannel strategy; 32% cited customer shopping trends; 32% cited marketing attribution; 20% cited more time to devote to improving their company’s mobile experience; and 14%, more time to set goals.

  • C-Level executives cited that they want more time for brand building
  • Directors and VP levels want more time for brand building
  • Associate directors and managers want more time for competitive and data analysis.

Marketers at small businesses want more time for data analysis, creative, brand building, multichannel marketing, and customer experience.

When asked to cite the number one goal for the company’s marketing team rather than an individual goal, 38% of marketers cited the acquisition of new customers, while 29% cited driving profitability; 9% cited increasing customer lifetime value; 9% cited retaining existing customers; 6% cited growing brand awareness; 3% cited growing website traffic; 3% cited SEO; 2% cited developing quality content; and 1% cited improving the customer experience.

When asked to cite the top challenges for this year, (multiple choice) 51% of respondents cited limited time, followed by 40% who cited limited budget, while 32% cited competing priorities, 26% cited brand recognition, 24% cited achieving scale, and 23% cited manual processes, among many more such as competition, lack of skills in-house, lack of data-driven decisions, insufficient marketing attribution, and lack of collaboration.

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