With an estimated 3.6 billion people using social media worldwide, by now you’re probably aware that maintaining your brand’s presence on social media is critical if you want to compete in this ever-progressing digital landscape.
A strong social media presence not only offers new opportunities for leads and sales, but also strengthens customer loyalty, enhances your networking, and opens the door for more partnerships and customer feedback – all the while driving traffic to your website and raising awareness of your brand.
However, the steps needed to assert or improve your presence on socials may feel unclear. Many businesses assume that social media management is easy to take on at first, due to the deceptively simple user experience on most platforms. But in actual fact, it’s a very different, more intricate experience than managing a personal account, and if handled incorrectly, it can even have a detrimental impact on your brand.
So here are seven steps that any modern business can take to ensure their brand is making the most out of social media in the digital age.
By monitoring the performance data of your competitors, you can gain insights into what works and what doesn’t, for smarter decision-making and a better strategy. Researching and analysing competitor behaviour means you can stay one step ahead, and be inspired by new ideas while avoiding their mistakes – and you can outline any threats to your business and identify gaps in your strategy.
After all, why reinvent when you can circumvent?
There are a number of social competitor analysis tools you can use to do this, including FanPage Karma, Awario, Unmetric, and Iconosquare. You then need to decide which audience, engagement, and content metrics are useful to you.
Some of those metrics might be percentage of engagement per media, followers gained, follower growth, comments, likes, the most used hashtags, average posts per day and so on – it’s what’s important to your business.
If you don’t know who your audience is, how can you give them what they want? It’s important to learn your audience’s needs and motivations, as well as their behaviours. What social media platforms do they use? When do they use them? And what are they looking for? With the answers, you can tailor your content to ensure you are serving the right message, at the right time, in the right place.
Different audience demographics behave differently online. So knowing who’s on what platform aids your researching, advertising and marketing decisions, and ensures you’re providing the most relevant content to achieve your business goals.
Once you have an understanding of your audience’s needs and preferences, as well as those of your competitors, it’s time to select which social media channels are most suited to your audience and products/services.
Each social network provides unique delivery opportunities for you to entice your audience. For example, Instagram is a highly visual, creative platform. It can be a great place to showcase your products and services in a more imaginative or artistic manner. It’s also considered to be less formal than other platforms – perfect for showing off your brand personality and company culture.
Twitter, on the other hand, is most often used for consumer care. It’s an effective platform for engaging with your audience, ripe for quick feedback and offering speedy responses. Whereas, LinkedIn is arguably the most useful platform for B2B marketing or targeting a professional demographic.
Consider your channel selection carefully to ensure your messaging is broadcast in the most effective way, reaching the right prospects and generating leads.
It’s common for marketers to spread themselves too thin, so bear in mind your staff resources as part of the selection process. If you have only one team member, attempting to establish a brand presence across six different social media channels may be unrealistic.
Your presence on social media is an extension of your brand, and should, therefore, align with your other forms of brand messaging. Maintaining a consistent voice helps your brand strengthening its trust and reliability, creating a distinct personality among your competitors.
To help you adhere to this, developing brand guidelines can be a helpful tool when maintaining consistency in your Tone of Voice. Consider why your brand exists, what its values are, and how you want customers to feel when interacting with your brand.
The overuse of internet terms or trendy slang can actually damage your reputation, making you seen out of touch or ‘cheap’, and subsequently hurting engagement. In your guidelines, you may consider outlining limitations for hashtag use to avoid being penalised by certain platforms and creating an emoji palette to regulate your messaging. Without such consistency, there’s a lot of room for errors in communication between your brand and your customers.
Arguably the most important social media best practise is your willingness to engage with your audience.
Posting regularly and capitalising on customer interest is a necessity in today’s social climate if you want to keep your followers invested in your brand – and it’s crucial for the growth of your business.
No one wants to receive an automated message or talk to a robot. So, interacting with customers and responding to them quickly is essential if you want to humanise your brand, nurture relationships and increase customer loyalty.
Ensure your account looks active with real-time updates, through Instagram stories or live tweeting for example. Avoid cheesy iStock imagery, and instead opt for authentic, original content that reinforces your brand personality and culture.
In order to remain active and engage, you’ll need to monitor your channels as often as possible, at least daily, and post regularly. There are plenty of social media management tools that can help you do just this. Pre-scheduling social posts is a huge time-saver, rescuing you from posting manually at all hours of the day.
It’s also good practise to keep your ear to the ground, through social listening. Social listening is the process of monitoring social media channels for mentions of your brand, product, competitors, and more, providing the opportunity to track, analyse and respond to conversations. Understanding how people feel about your brand helps you keep your marketing and product/service development efforts on track.
Without social listening, you might be missing out on a big piece of insight about your brand or industry that people are talking about. It also allows you to outline pain points, and better your crisis management tactics by responding right away to negative posts (should there be any!). It can also help you identify social influencers, providing opportunities for partnerships and advertising.
The final step in any digital marketing campaign is measurement. As with your initial data-gathering exercises, measuring the effectiveness of your social media marketing activity will help you to optimise your approach and guarantee ongoing success. And luckily, there are a range of analytics tools you can use to gain these insights.
Social media is a vital tool that all businesses should take advantage of in order to maintain optimum brand loyalty, reach, and engagement.
If you would like to fine-tune your business’s social media activity, boost your reach and get noticed, get in touch with us today at [email protected].
Lawless and Inspired have combined to bring together the UK’s best emerging street-artists and their influencer networks, allowing agencies and brands to tap into visual culture. Artists include Jody Thomas who created the 15m high Greta Thunberg wall mura, which highlighted issues of climate change and was featured on the BBC, across national press and went viral on social media.
The Lawless Inspired partnership aims to harness the power of today’s creative pioneers, to deliver physical/digital projects that excite and inspire. Alex Kopfli, Director at Inspired notes ‘by joining forces, we essentially offer agencies and brands a turn key solution, delivering creativity through artistic talent, brought to life by impactful real-life productions merged with digital creativity. The concepts are then distributed to an authentic and sizable audience online through our network.’
Since Lawless launched during the Covid Pandemic, the niche influencer agency has started working with brands to deliver artist-led creative solutions, adding a stamp of cool and credibility to brand campaigns and executions. Lawless Studio has already built up an impressive roster of artists, with the likes of Jody Thomas, Jack Watts, Nerone, Bond Truluv and Shay Casanova, reaching a significantly growing audience of 760k followers as a combined network, quality audiences loyal to each artist they follow, and trend setters in their own right.
Josh Moore of Lawless Studio calls out Inspired’s ‘exceptional track record in delivering first-class brand experiences for the likes of Wavemaker, Mediacom, M&C Saatchi and Fuse’ is the missing piece to the puzzle of delivering stand out creative solutions.
‘We now have the production capacity and logistical know-how to give brands access to creative pioneers and allow them to create amazing content, to give credibility and authenticity to brands through their output, and also reach huge dedicated followings through their social channels.’
Softech firm Amdaris have won the Great British Entrepreneur Award just 6-months after securing a £6m investment from BGF.
The Bristol company has offices in the UK, Dubai, Moldova and Romania, providing software development teams in high profile industries from Oil and Gas to finance and logistics.
In 2017 the board appointed AgencyUK to help develop a brand and marketing strategy fit for global expansion. Scale has been rapid, with new offices in Dubai and Romania in 2019.
AgencyUK have continued to support Amdaris with their external advertising, internal communications and PR strategy. This award win follows a string of new customer appointments.
Georgia Christley has joined the Carnsight Communications team as Account Manager and will work alongside business owner Jessica Morgan and Account Executive Leigh-Ann Hewer; who became a permanent member of the team in March following a three-month internship with Carnsight.
Georgia’s appointment marks the expansion of the permanent team at Carnsight Communications and promises an exciting future for the small business.
Jessica Morgan, Business Owner, commented, “Georgia has natural ability to build strong professional relationships with clients and colleagues alike. She is a positive and driven individual and I am thrilled to welcome her to the business.”
Georgia added, “Having worked within Office Management roles for over 10 years, I felt ready for a new and exciting change in my career. I have always had a passion for writing and media and feel very fortunate to have crossed paths and worked closely with the team at Carnsight Communications on a professional level.
From my initial meeting with Jess and Leigh-Ann, I instantly bonded with them. I just knew I wanted to work with this fabulous team! The company ethos is something that I longed for in an Employer, the flexibility and support from the team is second to none.
I am so excited to be a part of this modern, fresh and innovative company and to learn and develop in PR alongside a great team of professionals who immediately made me feel like part of the team.”
Carnsight is built upon 17 years’ of industry experience in London and now Bath.
Did you know there are 3.8 billion social media users across the globe? And this is a figure that’s only going to grow. That’s a huge opportunity for advertisers and businesses to take advantage of.
Without a clear understanding of your audience, you’re unlikely to reach your intended users effectively. This is exactly why you need a good understanding of social media metrics.
Read on for our guide to social media metrics and how to utilise them for your success.
Social media metrics are the measurements of your marketing performance across your social media pages.
But before measuring the results, you need to set your social media goals. What do you want to achieve? What results are you looking for?
For helping you understand what exactly you want to look into when setting up a social media campaign, let’s clarify what are the most important key metrics in social media marketing.
1. Impressions
Impressions are the number of times a social media user is exposed to your content. They are calculated each time your post is shown to the end-users, whether they take action on your post or not.
To increase the chances that users will click on your posts, you need to take into consideration: the design of your post, the caption, the call to action, even the colours that you use.
2. Reach
Reach shows how many unique users have seen your social media content. With new algorithms being introduced every day on social media websites, reach is one of the metrics that is most affected in organic posting. This is why companies are investing more in paid social media marketing. Post boosting or ad campaigns has the advantage of showing your content to users who are not following your page, allowing you to reach more users.
3. Clicks
Clicks are the total number of times that your content was clicked on. For users to click on your posts, they need to be appealing, engaging, interesting and to tell a story. We find that creative story-telling doubles the chances of clicks when the story feels personal to your audience.
4. Unique Clicks
Unlike regular clicks, unique clicks refer to the number of unique users that clicked on your content. It is highly likely that a unique user clicks your post multiple times. This will count as 1 unique click and it will add to the total number of “clicks” each time they tap on that post.
5. Engagement
Engagement refers to the actions users take on your ads or posts. It’s the way users respond to your content. Like, comment, share, repost and retweet are just several ways in which users may engage with your content.
While engagement does not necessarily, or immediately, translate into conversion results, it is an excellent benchmark of your social media success and it contributes to your brand awareness.
6. Social Media Conversion
Social Media Conversion is the total number of conversions that came from social media. A conversion is an action performed on your website, such as subscribing to your newsletter, downloading a white paper, or purchasing a product or service that you sell.
Social media conversion occurs each time a user clicks on a link included in your social media posts that takes them to your website, where they perform any of these actions.
7. Cost-Per-Click (CPC)
This is an important one. CPC relates to how much you spend per individual click. This is calculated for paid social media activities. In an ad campaign, it will show you which ads have a higher or lower CPC, allowing you to optimise your ads and budgets accordingly.
In social media marketing, metrics are important for understanding the results of your marketing efforts. Based on the metrics you get, you can optimise your marketing budgets and the time you spend on creating valuable content for your audience. Moreover, social media marketing metrics can reflect upon your sales funnel.
The metrics that you get through social media will help you make more accurate decisions on your future marketing efforts, but also your sales strategy. For instance, you may find that certain audience segments have a lower conversion rate than the others.
Social media metrics are ultimately important because they bring changes and improvements to your business, allowing you to market effectively and reach your intended users.
If history has taught us anything, it’s that when the going gets tough, marketing is nearly always the first department to face cuts.
Predictably, research from the World Federation of Advertisers’ Covid-19 response tracker has now revealed that 89% of large multinational companies deferred marketing campaigns in April, up from 81% in March. What’s more, 52% of marketers at these companies said they’ll now hold back ad spend for six months or more, compared to just 19% who considered taking similar medium-term action last month.
At present, only 7% of brands want to ‘seize the opportunity’ to invest more in marketing during Covid-19.
While the need to keep a cap on spend and adopt a delicate approach to advertising is perfectly reasonable given the uncertainty of the current climate, this knee-jerk reaction could in fact be to the detriment of their sustainability and growth in the long-term.
When McGraw-Hill Research studied the 1981 and ’82 recession, it found that companies that marketed aggressively had 256% higher sales than those that did not.
Of course, much has changed since then.
However, studies since then have consistently shown that stopping all marketing activity in the wake of an economic downturn hurts a business’ chance of bouncing back stronger.
While the Coronavirus pandemic has been colossal by comparison to previous crises, it would be shortsighted to say there won’t be opportunities for success in the future.
During the financial crash of 2008, swathes of businesses struggled to stay afloat – on the other hand, job losses in the tech and creative industries saw a surge in start-up activity as talented professionals took their skills to new ventures that flourished to become some of the industry’s most dominant players. Uber, Airbnb and Slack were just a few of the enterprises founded at the time of the credit crunch.
In the next ten years, there will no doubt be a host of new brands delivering solutions for a whole new breed of consumer.
The best-received stories on the news right now are the uplifting ones. From a business perspective, that could mean an initiative your company has launched to support your customers, valuable insights your company has uncovered from research or a successful fundraising campaign it has spearheaded.
When pitching stories to the press, it is of the utmost importance for customers to respond positively to the crisis without sounding tone-deaf. Consumers are more alert than ever (no pun intended) to the companies looking for a quick win in the crisis. For that reason, the severity of the situation must always be acknowledged while the tone must be uplifting: juggling the two is a challenging task to say the least.
Prior to the pandemic, people were increasingly engaging with brands who were honest and transparent in their approach, and little will change here.
A recent study from Kantar shone a light into consumer expectations during the coronavirus pandemic. According to their research, 75% of respondents feel strongly that companies should not use this time to promote their band – yet only 8% of the same group suggested that companies should halt PR & advertising activities altogether.
This leaves us in a grey area.
However, 77% of respondents expect brands to be helpful during the pandemic. In practice, that means choosing carefully what you promote, how you position successes and putting the focus firmly on ways you can genuinely support your customers.
It isn’t about spinning an unrelated victory to appeal to your audience or bombarding your audience with ads about how you can “help.”
It’s not about completely cutting spend, but rather about taking a sensitive approach to PR and marketing campaigns. Only by delivering an authentic message that clearly communicates how your product, service or personnel can help during this difficult time.
In truth, it’s the same approach we’ve always taken to advertising, marketing, and PR:
your goal, above all, should be to earn your audience’s trust. Only a genuine brand who stays true to their values can be successful during this time: if that isn’t your business, it’s best to take a step back.
For more advice, insights, tips and tricks in digital marketing and PR, follow us on LinkedIn or get in touch with our team.
Top team news today and bringing it home for Bristol … AMBITIOUS has been awarded Best PR Agency of the Year at The Drum Recommends Awards for the third year running.
Having previously picked up Best PR Agency for under 40 staff, 2020 sees Team AMBITIOUS pick up the award across small, medium and large agency categories.
Organised by The Drum, a global media platform and the biggest marketing website in Europe, the awards are one of a kind in the industry. There are no entries to submit, work to design or papers to write. Winning can only be achieved through the high regard of clients, supported with their ratings and feedback.
The Drum Recommends database contains over 64,000 ratings left by brands, businesses and organisations. Client feedback covers rating for services, such as PR strategy, content planning, media relations and social media, along with ratings for performance levels – from effectiveness to value for money.
Lis Anderson, Director, AMBITIOUS: “We’re so proud of the team and really appreciate the feedback that our clients have given us. Client service is a big part of our agency life, it’s central to everything we do and everyone works hard to deliver that. We’ll be doing some virtual celebrating and look forward to a big team knees up when we’re back in the office.”
AMBITIOUS works across B2B and corporate clients covering healthcare, trades, education, professional services, tech and property sectors. Being based in Bristol and benefitting from a strong network, the PR agency also works with a number of clients across retail and hospitality supporting their market entry into the South West region.
Connect with us on social media – LinkedIn, Instagram or Twitter or drop us a line at hello@ambitiouspr.co.uk
Continuing on from the first part of our blog on social media tips for companies, we have 3 more tips in the second part of our blog series…
Want to know more about how to run your company’s social media accounts? Give us a call.
Once you have started posting, the best way to find out how people are responding to your brand is through social listening. Social listening platforms, such as Awario, can help keep track of how your brand is being perceived online. Social listening can help you to understand whether the conversation around your brand is positive or negative and can also help you to keep track of what your competitors are doing and stay ahead of them.
This one is more of a just-in-case measure, but you’ll be glad you have it if it is ever needed. PR disasters are very rare on social media, but a crisis plan can help you to avoid them. Your crisis plan should include what to do in the event of negative press coverage, how to respond to an extreme negative reaction to your brand on social media, and which member of your team is best equipped to deal with a social media crisis in the unlikely event that one may occur.
Analytics are a form of social media data which are designed to measure how well your content is performing. Analytics are an important part of understanding how you can improve your online presence. They can help you to understand if you are reaching your target audience, what type of content is the most beneficial to your brand, and the best time to post. Analytics are crucial for improving your social media content as they give insight into what’s going well and what can be improved upon, so it’s important not to neglect them.
Enjoy our social media tips for companies but still not sure about how to run your business’ social media? Talk to us at OggaDoon, and find out.
Social media delivers huge benefits to businesses, particularly start-ups and SMEs, after all 71% of consumers who have had a positive experience with a brand on social media are likely to recommend the brand to their friends and family. However, it isn’t always easy to know how to approach social media, or if what you are doing is delivering the maximum benefits.
Finding your social media a headache? Get in touch to see if we can take that pain away…
We will be giving you our top social media tips for businesses in a two-part blog. Here are our first 3 tips…
For your business to be successful on social media, you need to understand what your competitors are doing, how to get the most out of different platforms, and what platforms your current and target audiences are engaging with. Spend time analysing your competitors’ social channels and learn from what they are doing well and what they could improve on.
Also, take time to research the demographics (age, gender, etc) of each of the channels your business is on. This will help you to be more specific when targeting your content.
Research what content works well on each platform. Certain forms of content, for example, video, delivers 130% more engagement than still images. This could be because of a platform’s algorithms favouring video, or because users enjoy engaging with video content more than still images. Either way, it is important to understand what forms of content work well on different channels.
This is particularly important if you are not the only one managing your brand’s social media accounts. As a business, consistency on social is important. Content plans and brand guidelines are a good way of ensuring consistency. Content plans are used to outline what to post on different channels and are usually created a month in advance. Brand guidelines should include things like tone of voice, brand message, and a style guide for social media graphics. Best practices for brand guidelines are making sure to include design standards, such as font, type size, and colours, and including key words to describe your brand’s tone of voice, for example, ‘professional, friendly, and approachable’.
Once your content plan is created, scheduling tools will make posting a lot easier. Your content plan makes it easy for anyone to schedule content and will save valuable time you can be spending on your business. Some examples of good scheduling tools are Hootsuite, Buffer, and in-platform scheduling from Facebook. But, beware: make sure you amend any scheduled content that has become irrelevant, for example promotion of an event that has been cancelled. Also, remember to check back in for replies to your content.
If you found this blog post helpful, then come back to our blog later, when we will be posting the second part of our Social Media Tips for Businesses blog.
There is an obvious value to PR activity because you know the brands who hit the news over and over again – for the right or the wrong reasons. If it wasn’t possible to calculate the value of PR then few people would ever invest in it, but as soon as you start trying to work it out, you start to realise how complex it becomes.
Many of the clients we work with look for a specific metric for press coverage but the truth is, one single metric simply doesn’t exist. On the other hand, when it comes to investing in your brand and your business, there are many places you can spend your money. You want to ensure it’s going to the right place, and that means you need some sort of ROI metric.
How do you calculate the ROI of PR?
Typically, you would calculate ROI simply:
ROI = (cost of marketing activity) / (results of marketing activity)
The exact metric will look a little different, depending on the channel. A £10 on a Facebook Boosted Post that reaches 20 people will have an ROI of £0.50 per impression. A £500 banner advert that reaches 10,000 people will have an ROI of £0.05 per impression.
But what about marketing activities that have associated costs? Have you taken into account the design time and cost of the banner?
What about marketing activities that have lighter metrics? A Mailchimp account could cost you $9.99 a month, and if it delivers you a CTR of 2%, how do you put a value on that? If one of your team spends a whole working day a month managing the Mailchimp account, are you including that personnel cost – or the opportunity cost of what else they could be delivering?
And then you come to PR. The value of PR is critical to understanding, but it’s especially difficult to calculate an ROI metric because unlike most digital marketing, press coverage doesn’t always have visible metrics.
When a digital title says it receives 2m UMV (Unique Monthly Visitors), how do you know they haven’t fudged the numbers? How can you be sure they haven’t received 2m visitors that aren’t unique – or that they’ve reached that number of visitors in total in the website’s existence?
So can you calculate the value of PR?
Yes, but there are three different ways you can do it. Depending on your business, you may want to use just one of these, or all three.
1. Reach.
Reach is a simple metric: it’s how many people actually see the content you’re trying to push. If your company is featured in The Telegraph, for example, your reach is the number of people who read The Telegraph on a monthly basis. You then calculate how much it would cost you to reach the same number of people through PPC across a variety of channels.
Why this method is good: starting with the number of people you are actually reaching is a great way to measure the impact of your press coverage.
Why this method is bad: it doesn’t have any nuance. A tiny mention of your brand name is measured the same as a full interview with your founder, and 2m readers in your target title is considered the same as 2m readers in a title that your target audience would never read.
2. Equivalent title advertising.
This method has a little more nuance, and focuses on the title itself that your brand has appeared in. It asks the simple question: how much would you have to pay the title through its advertising/sales team to gain the same amount of print/digital space? This gives you an immediate financial number.
Why this method is good: if you’re looking for a quick and direct answer linked to the title you’ve appeared in, this is the best way to do it.
Why this method is bad: sales teams are notorious for upping their prices, so you may over-inflate the value of some coverage to the detriment of others. It also discounts the importance of specific audiences to your company: if poodle owning men in their 50s is the most important audience to you, gaining £10k worth of coverage in a title that doesn’t hit your audience is not as valuable.
3. Brand benefit.
While this is the most intangible, it is also often the most valuable in the long term. That is because you cannot measure the specific benefits you gain from being featured by xyz titles, but you then see an uplift in other areas that you cannot ascribe to anything else. This could include:
As you can see, these elements are all vital for the successful growth of your business.
Why this method is good: benefits across all these elements ensure your brand’s strength grows in multiple directions.
Why this method is bad: it’s almost impossible to directly tie a particular piece of press coverage to these benefits, which can get frustrating.
How are you calculating the value of PR?
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