5 Ways To Optimize Your Social Media Campaigns

How Much To Advertise on Instagram And Why It ‘s Worth The Cost

October 12, 2023/in Articles, Digital Media, Directors, Mobile Advertising, Social Media /by Nicole Wagner

As many businesses have realized, visual content engages leads much more effectively than written content. The reason is simple: humans are visual creatures and process visual information 60,000 times faster than text. It’s no wonder why social platforms that focus on visual content are growing in popularity. Take for example Instagram, which as of 2018 had almost one billion active monthly users. Studies have revealed that the engagement rates of brands on Instagram are ten times what they are on Facebook. If you’re not leveraging Instagram to advertise your brand, then you need to begin doing so. The following are a few questions you might have about getting started on Instagram.

How Much To Advertise On Instagram?

First of all, using the basic features that Instagram offers is free. This means that you can post content without having to pay for it. For example, you can just post images or short videos on a daily basis with basic captions. While you can get a lot out of the free features of Instagram, to really increase engagement you’ll want to invest in Instagram ads.

When setting up an Instagram ad, you’ll only pay for the number of clicks your ad actually gets. You bid how much you’re willing to pay per click. This determines how competitive the ad will be (a higher bid means a more competitive ad). You can also set limits on how much you spend per day, meaning that you’ll never go over budget. As to how much you can expect to pay per click, most Instagram ads run somewhere between $0.50 and $1 a click. However, in more competitive industries, that CPC (cost per click) rate can certainly be a lot higher. You can also pay on a CPM (cost per mile), which focuses on impressions. On average, it costs around $5 to $6 per thousand impressions.

Similar Article: Social Media Solutions: Understanding The Importance of Social Media Engagement vs. Following

How Can You Use Instagram Effectively?

The following are a few tips on how you can use Instagram ads effectively:

Know your audience – Instagram ads lets you define your audience (including by age, location, language, interests, behaviors, and more). Not knowing who your audience is will make it more difficult to define the right audience to advertise to. As a result, your ads will not be very cost-effective.

Choose your placement – You can choose where your ads will be placed, such as on Instagram feeds, Instagram stories, Facebook feeds, Facebook instant articles, or on the right column of Facebook. You can even choose to target certain devices (such as mobile devices) or operating systems.

Find influencers – Tagging influencers or reaching out to them to see if they want to promote your brand can help to lower your ad costs significantly due to the number of relevant followers they’re likely to have.

Track your relevance score – Facebook has a relevance score that you should track to identify how efficiently your budget is being used.

What Makes Instagram Worth the Cost?

The following are a few of the main reasons why it’s worth investing in Instagram ads:

Target specific leads – You can target specific demographics in specific locations, thereby making your ads more effective at engaging a target audience.

Reach a massive audience – Not only can you target countless users on Instagram, but because it’s owned by Facebook, you can run your Instagram ads on Facebook as well

Use outside links – While you can’t include clickable links, you can include any link you want in the caption (users just have to copy and paste it). This means you can drive viewers to any landing page you want.

Create longer videos – Instagram limits videos to 15 seconds in length unless you’re using Instagram ads, in which case your videos can be up to 30 seconds long. There are many social channels that you can advertise on, but Instagram is one of the most effective at generating user engagement. This is especially true if you invest in Instagram Ads. When looking into how much to advertise on Instagram ads, understand that you’re only paying for clicks or impressions, making it a very cost-effective strategy.

How to Leverage Influencer Marketing for Your Brand’s Success

September 13, 2023/in Articles, Blog, Social Media /by Nicole Wagner

Starting a business is one challenge, and building it into a success story is another. Several startups fail due to factors ranging from poor planning and ineffective marketing strategies to economic downturns and operational inefficiencies. As far as marketing is concerned, there are several lessons to learn from some of the most successful companies. In the sections below, we’ll discuss influencer marketing and how influencer collaboration with the right influencers can be a recipe for business success. You’ll also learn how to maximize influencer collaborations and make this marketing strategy work for you.

What is Influencer Marketing, and Why Does it Matter?

As the name suggests, influencer marketing is a technique where you partner up with a popular figure or celebrity to help promote your products or services. Influencers can be individuals or a group of people with a huge following, especially on popular social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and TikTok.

Whether your business is a startup or an established entity, influencer marketing can help drive brand awareness, increasing traffic and conversions. It’s worth noting that every business is unique, and how effective influencer marketing will be for your business depends on factors such as:

Nature of the business. Beauty, lifestyle, and fashion businesses have a natural fit with influencers, while those in the B2B sector may find this marketing technique challenging.
Online presence. A robust online presence, characterized by a well-designed website and active social media profiles, will attract the best influencers and may translate to better conversions.
Target demographics. The influencer’s ready audience should be your preferred target market. Otherwise, a mismatch will see your marketing campaign struggle.
Choice of influencer. Consider the influencer’s values, reputation, and audience engagement before striking a partnership deal. More on this later.

Besides having an engaged and loyal following willing to buy your products or services, influencers put a personality and face to your brand, making it more reputable and trustworthy. The right influencers will also push your product or services to a broader audience, thanks to the varied platforms they’ll use to promote your brand.

How Can You Leverage Influencer Collaborations to Drive Business Success?

Most influencers have great ideas on how they can partner with you to market your brand. Even so, you may specify how you want them to promote your products or services. And while there’s no wrong or right way to promote your brand, some influencer marketing techniques are more effective than others. Here are a few ways to leverage influencer marketing for maximum impact:

Try Podcast Endorsements

According to PEW research, 49% of adults in the United States have listened to a podcast in the past 12 months. Therefore, it makes economic sense to partner with podcast hosts to promote your brand among their loyal following. To make this strategy work best, you want to sponsor specific episodes of several podcasts your target audience is already subscribed to.

Use Influencer Content as Paid Ads

Standard ads on social media platforms rarely convert since everyone sees them as a nuisance. However, this won’t be the case if you partner with an influencer and let them create a social ad with their face or voice on it.

Use Brand Ambassadors

Over the years, businesses have used brand ambassador programs to build trust and win customers. With this technique, companies tap into loyal customers who already use their products or services and partner with them to recommend their brand to their following or audience. This program works well when the loyal customer you want to pick has a huge following that can convert easily.

Try Contests and Giveaways

With this technique, you’ll provide your influencers with a product or service they can reward or give to their followers. You can modify this technique to have the influencer’s followers like your brand’s page or post. The giveaways may come in the form of contests or challenges meant to boost social media engagement, brand following, and awareness.

Gift Influencers and Obtain Honest Reviews

Another way to leverage influencer marketing is to gift an influencer your product or provide them with your services for free and let them give their followers an honest review of what they think about your product/service. If the influencer thinks your product/service is excellent, they’ll recommend it to their followers. Otherwise, they won’t.

How to Identify the Right Influencers for Your Target Audience

Before comfortably trusting an influencer to promote your brand, you must follow due process throughout the sourcing and selection stages. The right influencer for your brand is someone you can trust and who believes in your business. Here are a few things to look out for when choosing an influencer to partner up with:

Relevant audience. Not all influencers have an audience that resonates with your business or target demographic. Do your research to ensure you partner with someone who will directly add value to your business.
Brand Values. The right influencer will have values that resonate with your brand and target audience. You can check the influencer on social media platforms to learn more about their values and belief systems.
Communication and professionalism. One of the pillars of the 4Cs marketing model is effective communication. Customers always want to know how buying your product will benefit them, meaning the influencer should do a great job selling your brand. Similarly, you want to work with a professional influencer who has strong communication skills.
Content Quality. As much as the influencer is authentic, trustworthy, and meets the brand alignment metrics, you also want to ensure the content they produce meets your expected quality standards.

Bottom Line

Whether turning your employees into influencers or picking celebrity figures to partner with, influencer marketing is generally a true and tested technique. The goal is to choose a trustworthy person with a reasonable social following committed to walking the marketing journey with you, one step at a time. Use the tips above to guide you throughout the influencer marketing campaign, and where necessary, seek professional help from a reputable marketing company.

Establishing Your Brand Personality Through Social Media Personas

April 12, 2023/in Articles, Blog, Brand Development, Search & Social, Social Media /by Nicole Wagner

When setting up accounts and profiles on various social media platforms to promote your brand, remember that your competitors are also on social media. Simply posting content on multiple platforms isn’t enough to get your brand at the forefront, especially without a clearly defined social media persona.

Customers are nowadays looking for content that resonates with their needs. Research shows that 90% of consumers buy products from businesses that advocate for a cause they can identify with.

People love associating with brands that provide a personal, human touch. They would prefer to associate with a business that delivers on its brand’s qualities and values. If your business demonstrates reliability, commitment, loyalty, honesty, and longevity, it can better succeed in the competitive business landscape.

However, if your posts still miss the mark and don’t help your brand effectively reach its target audience, it may be because you haven’t clearly defined your social media persona. The persona sets you apart from the competition and gives your brand a voice.

It guides your social media marketing strategy, engagement with your target audience, and the content you post. This post will explain how to create a buyer persona to boost your social marketing strategy.

Social media personas are fictional profiles you can develop to represent your brand and target your customers. They combine qualities and characteristics that give your brand a distinct personality, including character, tone, voice, and approach. These factors are critical because they influence how customers interact with your brand.

Remember that your customers don’t read statistics about your brand’s performance and probably don’t care how many awards you’ve won. They care more about who you are and what your brand stands for, not your logo.

Creating social media personas can help establish a consistent and familiar presence on your social media platforms. These personas must be authentic and align with the values of your organization. The process doesn’t have to be complicated, and you can find and build the perfect persona for your brand in a few steps.

The best practices to consider while creating these personas are:

Identify Your Target Audience

The first step to creating a successful social media persona is to make the “ideal customer.” Who is it that your brand targets, and what are their demographics? It would help if you established the following factors:

Their gender
Age
Employment status
Income levels
Location
Home types
Relationship status

You may also want to research more information like their hobbies, goals and motivation, purchasing triggers, pain points and fears, and personality traits. For a more comprehensive persona, it would also help to find out the social media channels they actively use, the influencers they like to follow, and the hashtags they respond to regularly.

You can research this information through the following:

Your existing customer data available on your CRM, email lists, point of sale systems, and customer support systems
Your social media analytics, such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and your website analytics
Collecting customer feedback through social media polls, emails, or surveys.

The goal is to create a brand persona that appeals to every segment of your target audience while aligning with your business niche.

Stay True to the Values Which Your Brand Wants to Convey

Once you have all the information you need to develop your brand’s perfect social media persona, determine the values you want to convey to your customers. Your content creation strategy should revolve around the following:

The unique selling proposition that sets you apart from other brands
How you want to portray your brand
What you want to offer your audience on social media
The kind of tone that typically resonates with your audience

Once you have answers to these questions, brainstorm a list of adjectives to describe your brand’s voice. Think of terms like professional, candid, passionate, authentic, relatable, bold, honest, and trustworthy. These will guide your brand’s personality when approaching the above factors. Staying true to these values is the easiest way to maintain consistency across all your social media platforms.

Choose Visual Elements Which Align with Your Brand Identity

In maintaining consistency across your brand, you also must include visual elements that resonate with your brand. Studies prove visuals are more effective in passing your brand message than words. Photos, videos, illustrations, and infographics can strengthen your brand and boost engagement with your audience.

Choose visual elements that embody your brand’s personality and create a strong brand image. Some tips for creating compelling visual elements that your audience easily recognizes are:

Creating a visual guide to ensure consistency, including colors, sizes, fonts, and file formats
Using unique visuals such as custom illustrations as opposed to stock images
Repurposing content such as customer feedback, product images, and blog posts

Stay Consistent Across All Platforms

Inconsistency is one thing that can kill your branding efforts on social media. Strive to stick to the persona you created across all your social media platforms. If your business description, tone, values, messaging, or brand image differs across the platforms, your customers will likely perceive your business as multiple entities. The result is lower engagement and fewer sales.

An effortless way to maintain consistency in your message is to develop a comprehensive voice and tone guide for your brand. It should appear on your blog, company website, social media platforms, email newsletters, and other touchpoints relevant to your business.

Creating a social media persona for your brand can take time. It also requires that you have the right tools and leverage teamwork for the best results. Once you do the groundwork, you will have a valuable tool to create compelling content.

That way, you can meet your customers right where they are and communicate effectively. Besides, you will improve your social media strategy for more personalization to increase overall conversion rates. A digital marketing agency like Steven & Tate can help you get your social media marketing strategy right. Talk to us for a consultation.

How to Improve Your Social Signals for SEO

March 27, 2023/in Articles, Blog, SEO, Social Media /by Nicole Wagner

Social media has become a critical part of our lives, and businesses are taking notice. Today, the platform isn’t just a place to share memes and cat videos – it’s also a powerful tool for digital marketing. One key social media aspect often overlooked is its impact on SEO. Over the years, social signals have significantly impacted search engine (SE) rankings, and ignoring them could hurt your site’s visibility.

In the sections below, we’ll take a closer look at social signals, including how you can use them to boost your SEO efforts.

These are people’s reactions to online content they interact with on social media channels. They include views, likes, dislikes, comments, shares, tweets, etc. The more responses a post receives, the more mainstream and popular it becomes.

Remaining visible on the internet is key to gaining more reactions. From an SEO standpoint, social signals can improve SE rankings and help individuals or businesses establish their identity, popularity, and reliability.

It’s worth noting that different platforms use different metrics to measure or categorize social signals. Before seeking user engagement and reactions, you need to understand how a given social media platform works.

Social signals tell more about a brand’s popularity and relevance on social media platforms. They play an important role in SEO optimization as they indicate the quality of content and generate traffic, which ultimately helps in ranking higher on search engines.

And while social signals are not an official ranking factor for Google, they do indirectly impact SEO performance. Social engagement, such as comments, likes, and shares, can increase the visibility of social posts, resulting in higher traffic and better SE rankings.

To improve social signals for SEO, you need to focus on visibility and brand awareness while posting on social media. You should also engage with your audience, share valuable content, and optimize your posts with relevant hashtags and keywords. We have covered these and more below.

While social signals are just one factor in SEO, they are still an important aspect of any digital marketing strategy. Investing time and effort into social media engagement and optimization can improve your online visibility and ultimately drive more traffic to your website. Here are some crucial steps you can take today to improve social signals for SEO.

Link Your Website to Your Social Media Pages

One obvious and most common way to improve your social signals is to link your site to all the social media pages. Linking your website to your social media pages will improve your online visibility and user experience.

By making it easy for users to find important URLs related to your brand, you’ll increase engagement and drive more traffic to your website.

To ensure a smooth connection, place links to your social media pages in the footer of your website. This way, users won’t be distracted from your call-to-action buttons or lead-generation forms.

Publish Consistent Content Across Social Channels

Another less common yet effective way to boost your social signals is to stay consistent across social. Consistency in your brand voice and communication style allows you to build brand recognition and a loyal following.

updating social media

Understanding your audience’s demographics and interests will help you choose the right tone of voice and content that resonates with them. When creating and sharing content, aim to be relevant and authentic and ensure you verify the accuracy and ethics of the information you share.

Consistency in your posting schedule and visual aesthetics can also maximize your organic reach, helping you reinforce your brand identity and leave lasting impressions on customers.

Ensure Your Content is Shareable to Social

Adding social plugins is one way to ensure that your content is easily shareable. These plugins allow site visitors to share your content with friends and family on their social media accounts.

For instance, you can add social icons that stick as the user scrolls through blog posts. That way, you encourage users to share your content, increasing your site’s visibility and reach.

Remember that consumers are more than five times more likely to make a purchase recommended by a trusted friend or family than as a result of seeing an ad or influencer endorsing the product. So optimizing your content for social and making it more shareable can increase reach, brand awareness, and trust.

To make the most out of social media marketing, you should stay active on all social media channels. Responding to comments and shares is a great way to show your followers that a real person runs your profile. This also makes them feel more connected to your brand.

By actively engaging with users, you create more opportunities to share relevant links to your website and increase traffic. If you’re too busy to manage your social media accounts, consider hiring a marketing manager or outsourcing your social media tasks to an agency.

Don’t forget to listen and digest what people say about your brand. You should also respond constructively to any criticism you receive.

In today’s digital age, building strong partnerships is one of the organic growth strategies you should adopt. One way to achieve this is by sharing other people’s content. Here, you not only show support for your peers, but you also establish yourself as an active member of your community.

If you do this properly, i.e., retweeting, thanking, and reposting content on social you can form partnerships and increase engagement with peers. In turn, this could lead to more shares and likes from the same accounts in the future, ultimately growing your reach and strengthening your business relationships.

Get Started Today

Taking your SEO game and the overall digital marketing strategy to the next level takes time and effort. The strategies we have highlighted above aren’t exhaustive but will give you an idea of what to tweak to boost your social media marketing.

Before taking any action, ensure you set realistic goals and have some means to monitor your efforts and track the results. As long as you are doing the right thing, it’s never too late to act.

6 Best Practices For Using Facebook Video Ads

February 21, 2023/in Articles, Directors, Marketing Strategy, Social Media /by Mark Beebe

As you may already know, Facebook Ads can be a very effective advertising platform, especially when you consider its overall cost-effectiveness (it’s a pay-per-click advertising platform, after all) and the ability to target audiences based on a variety of criteria (from demographics to location to interests and more). Facebook Ads has a lot of features that you’ll want to take advantage of, including their Facebook Video Ads feature.

6 Practices For Using Facebook Video Ads

The following are six Facebook Video Ads best practices that you should be sure to implement:

1. Get Your Message Across Immediately

Don’t just assume that your viewers will stick around until the end of your video ads. According to Microsoft, around 19 percent of online viewers lose interest in video content after 10 seconds. Keeping this in mind, it’s a good idea to get to the point as quickly as possible so that your viewers know why they are watching. Try to get your message across in the first ten seconds.

2. Optimize Videos For Lack Of Sound

A lot of people watch videos with their sound off. You want your videos to not only get the message across even if they’re silent, but to engage the viewer to the point that they will turn the sound on. To optimize for the lack of sound, show captions, add text overlay, and be sure to use powerful, moving images.

3. Keep Mobile Videos Short

Although some viewers may be more willing to watch a longer video ad on their desktops, this is not so for mobile users. Mobile users are often on the go, which means that they’re not going to have the patience to watch a video that’s minutes long. Try to keep videos under 15 seconds long to help ensure that mobile users actually watch your whole video.

5 Types Of Marketing Videos You Should Think About Using

4. Customize Thumbnail Images

Many Facebook users will turn off autoplay on videos. However, just because some people won’t see your video ads play automatically doesn’t mean that they won’t watch them. You need to spark their interest by choosing a thumbnail image, which is a static image representing your video. Facebook will provide a number of options of still images that it pulls from your video ad. However, you’re not limited to these options–you can also upload a custom thumbnail instead. Make sure the image you use is of high quality and that it’s relevant to your ad.

5. Test Your Video Ads

To make sure your Facebook Video Ads perform to the best of their ability, perform A/B testing. You can create several versions of your video ads through Facebook by changing the creative, the placement, the product set, optimization events, and the audience. Test your ads for three to 14 days to get the most accurate results. Use the results to optimize your video ads so, thereby increasing their chances of performing successfully.

How Facebook Advertising Helps You

6. Analyze Performance

Make sure to analyze your video ads as you run them. The data you collect should help you when it comes to creating future video ads. For example, track which video ads had the highest levels of engagement, what times of the day your audience engaged with your videos, how many viewers visited your landing page after viewing a video ad, which videos were watched from beginning to end, and more.

Considering how effective video marketing is in general, you should be sure to take advantage of Facebook’s Video Ad feature. These are six Facebook Video Ads best practices that you should be sure to take note of before launching a video ad campaign on Facebook.

Creating Measurable Social Media Goals

October 5, 2021/in Articles, Directors, Social Media /by Nicole Wagner

Social media is a necessary part of advertising online. It creates awareness of your brand, facilitates customer interaction, promotes your content, and does a host of other things.

Even though it is so important, a lot of businesses still struggle with how to do it successfully.

Here are some tips and strategies to help you refocus your campaigns, create stronger goals, and implement a tracking schedule, so your social media efforts will be successful.

Developing a group of goals should be the first step in any social media program. Your goals could be anything from attracting new followers and audience interactions, to an increase in white paper downloads and qualified leads. But, in order for your program to be successful, your goals should be attainable, measurable, and most importantly, a reflection of your overall business goals. Read more

How Facebook Advertising Helps You

June 30, 2021/in Articles, Directors, Social Media /by Nicole Wagner

Facebook has had its share of controversy over the past few years, yet it remains as popular as ever. As of this year, there are roughly 190 million Facebook users in the U.S. alone. Worldwide, the monthly user base is approaching three billion. As such, Facebook advertising continues to be an effective way to reach your target audience and to generate leads for your business. If you’re not using Facebook Ads as a part of your social media marketing strategy, then you should consider changing that, immediately.

The Benefits Of Using Facebook Ads

There are plenty of PPC (Pay-per-click) advertising options available across the Internet, including Google Ads. However, there are a number of reasons why you should use Facebook Ads in particular.

Reach Facebook users with greater success – There’s no guarantee that the content you post on your page is seen by your audience. Followers may not be online when you post and even if they are, there’s no guarantee your posts show up on their feed. Facebook Ads lets you target specific followers to whom your ads will be relevant so that they will be sure to see them.
Remarket to users who engaged with you previously – Facebook users who may have visited your Facebook page or website previously won’t always re-engage. Facebook Ads allows you to target such users to re-engage with them, thereby helping ensure that you don’t miss out on potentially high-quality leads.
Facebook Ads are very cost-effective – Like all PPC ads, you can set your bids per click and you will only pay for the actual clicks the ads get. This makes it much easier to control how much of your budget you spend on your ads — and also ensures that you’re only paying for results.
Generate new leads on Facebook – Besides being able to target specific users from your follower list, you can also use the “Lookalike Audiences” feature to find and target users that are similar to your followers, thereby allowing you to identify and reach new potential leads.
You can scale your Facebook Ads to build on any success – You can scale your ads. This means that if an ad is doing particularly well, you can put more money into it in order to build on its success. Once it’s no longer performing the way you want it to, you can simply stop them. You can also take an ad that’s been successful and duplicate it. This allows you to target a different audience with the same content.
Facebook Ads Manager offers in-depth analytics – The analytics tool makes it easy to track and compare ad performance, allowing you to make adjustments to your strategy on the fly.
Facebook Ads Manager makes ad creation easy – Facebook Ads Manager makes it incredibly easy to create content for your ads, tailor your ads to your needs, and target specific audiences.

Ready to read more about the benefits of Facebook Advertising ?

How To Use Facebook Ads Manager

Facebook Ads Manager is the feature that will let you create and run your Facebook Ad campaigns. Follow these easy steps to find Facebook Ads Manager:

Ad Center > All Ads > Ads Manager

Once you select Ads Manager, you’ll be directed to the Facebook Ads Accounts page. Here, you can add users to your account and choose roles for each user. These roles can be Ad account admin, advertiser, or analyst.

Creating Ads In Facebook Ads Manager

Once you’re on the Ads Manager page, you shouldn’t have much trouble figuring out how to create ads. There’s a Create Ad button at the top right corner. Once you click on it, you’ll be provided with 15 different ad objectives to choose from. You’ll then be presented with a variety of options for customizing your ads. Options include choosing CTA buttons, images, and more. On top of that, you’ll be able to set the budget, the schedule, and your targeted audience, which can include:

Users who visited your page
Users who engaged with your content
Users who clicked on a CTA
Users who sent you a message
… and more

Once you create your ads and your campaign, you can edit your campaigns, ad sets, or ads. One at a time or in groups. For instance, you can:

Edit the campaign, ad set, or ad names
Edit your budget
Switch on and off
Edit the target audience
Edit the schedule
Edit the ad placement
Edit the individual elements of the ad

Leverage Facebook Advertising This Year

Facebook Ads are a great way to engage your followers as well as generate new leads. The customization options and reporting features provided by Facebook Ads Manager make advertising on Facebook a user-friendly experience. As such, be sure to implement the use of Facebook Ads into your social media marketing strategy if you haven’t done so already.

Integrating Social Media & SEO Efforts For Enhanced Search Engine Results

New Social Media Channels and Clubhouse

June 22, 2021/in Articles, Directors, Search & Social, Social Media /by Nicole Wagner

Social media marketing is an essential way to expand your reach, increase your brand authority, build relationships with your audience, and drive traffic to your website. This is no secret to anyone, which is why businesses of all sizes have established a social media presence on some of the more popular social platforms, including Facebook and Twitter. However, as important as it is to market on the biggest social media platforms, you should always keep an eye out for newer social media channels. Ignoring new platforms in favor of focusing on the most popular social media sites can cause you to fall behind quickly. After all, platforms such as TikTok can gain massive traction over as little as a year. With that in mind, we recommend that you consider the Clubhouse app.

What Is The Clubhouse App?

The Clubhouse is unique in that it combines the social aspects of an online forum with the conversational aspects of a podcast. If you’re confused by this description, don’t be. To break it down further, it’s basically an audio-only social media network. The way it works is simple — there are different Rooms that you can join. In each Room, a live audio conversation is going on. You can listen to this conversation as well as join in.

The Clubhouse is a little over a year old, but it’s already gaining notice after both Bill Gates and Elon Musk appeared in Clubhouse rooms. One of the things that makes the Clubhouse app attractive to many users at the moment is its exclusivity. While there are over 10 million users, the app is currently only available on iOS. Additionally, you can only gain access to the social media platform through an invitation by a user.

How To Use The Clubhouse App

Users build their profiles based on their interests. They can then search the app for Rooms that focus on their interests, follow individuals on Clubhouse, and send messages. The Clubhouse homepage displays Rooms that are live at the time and that are related to the user’s interests (or that are being run by people the user is following). There’s also an Explore feature that let’s users scroll through suggested people, Rooms, or Clubs to follow.

Each Room is basically a live conversation that you can listen to or participate in. As you might imagine, it could get quite hectic if there are hundreds of people trying to talk over each other in any given room. To avoid this, users who join the room are muted automatically. The people who are running the room essentially have the floor. Users can then click on the Raise Hand button if they want to contribute to the conversation (such as by asking a question). One of the people running the room can then unmute that user if they want to hear what they have to say. Attendees can only see the profiles of the moderators and speakers, unless another user is invited to speak after raising their hand, in which case their profile can also be seen.

Starting a Room is easy. There’s a Start a Room button on the app’s homepage. You can start a closed chat (open to specific users), a social chat (open to followers), or an open chat (open to anyone).

How Can Clubhouse Help Your Marketing Strategy?

In the beginning, Clubhouse was meant as a social media platform for industry elites, such as CEOs, social media influencers, and celebrities. This is no longer the case, although general users are attracted to rooms being run by such members. The question is, how can joining Clubhouse be of benefit to your business? Essentially, Clubhouse could help you to connect with your target audience and expand your reach. More importantly, you could use Clubhouse to boost your brand authority.

For example, a small group of accountants might hold a discussion about taking deductions on your tax return. Such a discussion is going to be very informative for people who are looking to save money on their taxes, especially if it’s tax season. Not only will listeners be able to learn about the subject by joining the room (and listening as well as asking questions), but the accountants will get some exposure for their business as well. If their discussion proves informative, listeners who weren’t familiar with them might check out their website and connect with them further off of the app.

Read More About Posting on Social Media

Paying attention to new social media platforms over the years is vital to keeping your social media marketing strategyrelevant and fresh. Not only can you continue to reach a larger audience by expanding your presence to new channels, but new social media platforms like Clubhouse often provide new and innovative ways to connect with your audience.

5 Types Of Marketing Videos You Should Think About Using

June 1, 2021/in Articles, Directors, Media, Social Media, Video Marketing /by Nicole Wagner

Year after year, marketing videos grow in importance. Video has never been easier to consume for Americans, especially when considering the increasing quality of smartphones and tablets. Video is also the easiest way for people to absorb information. Additionally, according to a prediction by Zenith, the average person will spend around 100 minutes a day watching videos in 2021. The pandemic certainly had an impact on these numbers as well. People have more time on their hands to watch video content, especially those who have switched to a work-at-home environment.

Because of this increase in video consumption, a video marketing strategy is an absolute must. The following are some of the different types of marketing videos that you should consider producing this year.

1. Educational videos

Educational videos should be used to help inform your audience about a particular subject. No video marketing strategy will be successful without them. This is because the more informed your audience is, the more confident they will be in making a purchasing decision down the road. Educational videos provide them with the knowledge they need to understand your business and the solutions you offer. There are several types of educational videos, including:

Demo videos – Videos that demonstrate how your product or service is used.
Explainer videos – Videos that showcase why your product or service is needed.
How-to videos – Videos that provide step-by-step instructions on how to do a specific task.
Animated videos – Animated videos are a fantastic way to deliver information in an entertaining way, whether they’re explainer videos or how-to videos.

When is the Best Time to Post on Social Media?

2. Interview videos

Interviews are an excellent way to provide detailed information about certain subjects to your audience while also providing a personality to engage with. You can film interviews with both employees and upper management as well as experts that are relevant to your industry. What’s great about interview videos is that they are incredibly easy to produce.

3. Event videos

Certain events, like industry tradeshows, conferences, fundraisers, and round table discussions, can reveal a wealth of information. Film these events and edit them into event videos for your audience to enjoy.

4. Case study and testimonial videos

These types of videos focus on customers and their experiences using your product or service. Not only can you use them as social proof that your products or services work, but they make it easier to build trust with your audience. Potential customers are much more likely to relate to and believe what previous customers have said, after all. Using case studies and testimonial videos, you give customers the chance to explain what their challenges were and how your product or service solved those challenges.

5. Behind-the-scenes videos

A big part of creating a successful brand identity is presenting your company as being relatable. You don’t want your audience to think of you as a big faceless corporation, after all. Creating videos that depict your company behind the scenes is a great way to do this. It shows that there’s a human element behind the business. There are tons of ways to go about creating behind-the-scenes videos. A video of the day-in-the-life of the typical employee or a video of the manufacturing process of a product are great examples.

These are five different types of marketing videos you should consider creating in 2021. As you develop your video marketing strategy, remember that the quality of your content matters — and so does the audience that you’re creating it for. Always keep viewers in mind to ensure that your video marketing efforts are relevant.

How to Use TikTok to Reach Your Engagement Group: An Insight Into the Algorithm

March 29, 2021/in Articles, Digital Media, Directors, Media, Social Media /by Nicole Wagner

Arguably the primary goal of social media marketing is to reach as many people in your engagement group as possible and to interact with them. As such, it’s important that you establish a presence on social channels on which this is possible. While almost all businesses use social platforms like Facebook and Twitter, there are a few others to consider as well; for example, TikTok.

What Is TikTok?

TikTok is a video-based social platform that has exploded in popularity over the last couple of years. What makes the platform so unique is that users can only upload videos that are 15 seconds long. There is, however, an option to edit together multiple 15-second clips into a minute long video. It gained traction among teens because they could upload videos of themselves lip-syncing, doing comedy bits, and dancing. At first, the marketing opportunities on the platform seemed limited. However, the size of the audience simply cannot be ignored:

There are over one billion monthly active users worldwide.
There have been over 2.6 billion downloads of TikTok since its creation.
In January 2021, there were 62 million downloads of TikTok alone.
Users spend an average of 52 minutes on TikTok every day.
83 percent of users have posted videos to TikTok.

TikTok’s advertising strategies are becoming more common. Read more here.

Why Should You Market On TikTok?

Advertising on social media platforms can cause numerous issues for users. The user experience can often be disrupted for the sake of the ad. Users on those platforms are often less likely to engage when annoyed by a barrage of advertising. TikTok is different in that ads are almost no different than the regular content posted on the platform. They can’t be longer than 15 seconds and they’ll appear on user feeds just like regular videos do. The user experience is not hurt because of this, as they appear just like other videos.

Why Should You Consider Using TikTok for Your Engagement Group?

Many people do not even realize they’re watching ads (especially if the content created by the brand is of particularly high quality). With this in mind, the following are just a few other reasons to consider using TikTok:

Reach younger generations – Younger generations rarely want to follow in the footsteps of their parents, which is why you won’t find a lot of Generation Z users on Facebook or Twitter. Instead, you’ll find them on TikTok, which is where a lot of Millennials are fleeing to as well. If you’re looking for a younger audience, TikTok is where you’ll find them.
Multiple marketing options – Despite the platform’s limitations (which were by design), there are still a few ad types that you can choose from, including in-feed videos, branded augmented reality (such as custom filters, stickers, and more), TopView ads (which appear at the top of user feeds), branded hashtag challenges, and sponsored content.
Flexible CPM – The cost-per-thousand impressions becomes cheaper the broader your audience is. The more you target your audience, the more it will cost; however, the ads will be more effective at engaging users as a result.
A level playing field – TikTok’s algorithm is based on identifying content that’s based on each user’s location, preferences, and viewing patterns. That is why user-created content goes viral so often on TikTok and it is why marketing businesses have a better chance of going viral as well.
Better chances of engagement – Outside of the algorithm, TikTok also allows you to go live once you reach a thousand followers. What makes this option particularly effective is that you can see how many followers are currently active so that you can determine when the best time to go live is.

Tips For Using TikTok To Reach Your Engagement Group

There are some serious benefits to using TikTok; however, your success depends on your ability to leverage the platform effectively. The following are a few basic tips for using TikTok:

Know your audience – Develop your buyer personas so that you can more effectively target users that will be more likely to engage.
Identify influencers – TikTok influencers often have millions of followers. You can get them to post sponsored content that their users will see.
Create challenges – TikTok users love challenges. Branded hashtag challenges are a great way to get people to engage with your brand without being overly promotional. It’s also a great way to generate user-made content.
Go live – Going live on TikTok at the right time can make it easier to engage with followers who will drop everything to view to ensure that they don’t miss out.

Leverage TikTok To Reach Your Engagement Group Today

TikTok has a massive audience and is growing significantly year-by-year. Due to the algorithm’s design, companies have a level playing field against other businesses that already leverage TikTok. Just keep in mind that if you focus on creating high-quality content that engages your target audience, the chances of success on TikTok will be much greater.