Social Media Marketing – Filling Your Restaurant

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Marketing a restaurant on social media requires special considerations to effectively showcase the dining experience, engage with food enthusiasts, and drive foot traffic or online orders.  For restaurants in particular, we highlight some of the key areas of marketing that are key for success.

  • Visual Content (or “image”) is Everything:  Restaurants should focus on high-quality, mouthwatering visuals of their dishes. Invest in professional food photography to make your menu items look irresistible.  Instagram is particularly well-suited for showcasing food and beverages.
  • Regular Menu Updates:  Use social media to announce and promote new menu items, seasonal specials, and limited-time offers.  Creating anticipation for new dishes can generate interest and curiosity, and bring in customers.
  • User-Generated Content:  Encourage diners to share photos of their meals on social media with a branded hashtag.  Repost user-generated content on your restaurant’s profile to build authenticity and social proof.
  • Live Videos and Stories:  usse live streaming and Stories on platforms like Instagram and Facebook to give followers a behind-the-scenes look at your kitchen, chef, and food preparation process.  Live videos create a sense of connection with your audience.
  • Engage with Foodies and Influencers:  Partner with local food influencers or bloggers to review your restaurant or collaborate on content. Their reviews and recommendations can carry a lot of weight with food enthusiasts.  Emphasize unique dishes.
  • Promote Events and Special Occasions:  Highlight special events, such as wine tastings, themed nights, or holiday promotions, to attract a diverse audience and create a sense of community.
  • Interactive Content:  Run polls, quizzes, and contests related to food preferences, restaurant trivia, or menu choices. This type of interactive content can boost engagement and keep your audience involved.
  • Local SEO and Geotagging:  Optimize your social media profiles for local search by including location-specific keywords, hours of operation, and contact information. Use geotags when posting to help potential customers find your restaurant easily.
  • Customer Reviews and Feedback:  Monitor and respond to customer reviews and comments promptly and professionally. Encourage satisfied customers to leave positive reviews, and address negative feedback diplomatically.  A polite acknowledgment with resolve goes a long way to assuring future customers that the situation was one-off.  It also gives you control – end the exchange on a positive note, and your potential customers also get a good positive feeling inside. 
  • Loyalty Programs and Discounts:  Use social media to promote loyalty programs, discounts, and special offers. Create exclusive deals for your social media followers to encourage repeat visits.
  • Highlight the Community:  Engage with the local community by participating in or sponsoring events, charity initiatives, or collaborations with nearby businesses. Sharing your community involvement fosters goodwill.
  • Storytelling:  Share the story behind your restaurant, including its history, chef’s background, and the inspiration behind your cuisine. This personal touch can create a stronger emotional connection with your audience.
  • Online Ordering and Reservations:  If your restaurant offers online ordering or reservations, promote these services prominently on your social media profiles. Include direct links.

Marketing a restaurant on social media requires a mix of creativity, engagement, and strategic thinking. By understanding the unique considerations mentioned above, you can create a compelling online presence that attracts diners and builds a loyal customer base.

Reaching the Next Level in Content Quality

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Creating quality content that engages and stimulates your audience to action is the holy grail of content development.  This objective holds true for all types of media – written articles, graphics, video and audio.  For most social media promoters, any content is better than zero content (that is to say, any content which is grammatically correct and with at least minimal elements of style). 

Raising your game to the next level requires development skills.  Some people are seen to be natural writers, and it is true to say, some probably pick of the knack of writing faster than others.  The good news is that good writing, like anything else, is a skill that can be developed by nearly anyone over time.

This article focuses on written content.  After breaking down the basic steps to writing an article or blog, we’ll overlay this process with specific directions on enhancing the “sound” of the article to generate a storyline that is interesting to the reader and increases potential for a response – hopefully a positive one.

Writing can be done as a process of free-flow consciousness, or it can be done systematically.  This approach is actually the first decision a writer makes (whether it is decided consciously or not).  Bloggers who write for SEO ranking may require less structure in their articles, while those who wish to engage real people would spend time in crafting a message and storyline.  For this outcome, high quality writing involves a systematic process that includes planning, research, drafting, editing, and proofreading.

Let’s briefly break down the content creation process.

Select a topic that interests you and is relevant to your audience.  The topic should be specific enough to make a point.  Summarize the purpose of the article in one sentence.  A good plot has a crux, something that isn’t quite right, or a challenge that must be overcome.  Write another sentence that summarizes the challenge.  Finally, a good story is resolved at the end.  What is the resolution for your article?  Write a third sentence to summarize the finality.  Here is an example:

Consistent blog writing is a key strategy for a social media marketer to promote products and services.  However, many business owners and social media marketers find it difficult to develop content which effectively engages their audience.  Nonetheless, writing high quality content is a skill that can be learned, and with consistent practice and effort, writers can learn to better engage their audience and achieve higher readership with improved responses to promotions.

Three sentences – clearly summarizing the intent of the article and what the outcome should be – sets the tone for the article and structures the storyline.  These three sentences can also be used as a teaser, sub-header, or an introductory paragraph to the article itself. 

The next step in the process is conducting some research on the topic.  Research is not just about obtaining facts to support the article’s thesis, but also to jog the author’s memory and to build comfort in the terminology of the subject matter.  While it is improtant to gather information from credible sources to support your article (published books, academic journals, reputable websites, interviews, or surveys as available), it is also helpful to take a pulse on the market to see what others are saying. 

A general outline is helpful.  A famous quote by President and General Dwight D. Eisenhower goes like this, “In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”  This view can be applied across our life activities, including writing. 

The value of a good plan, or in this case, outline, is in the thought that goes into it.  As the article is being written, other directions than the original outline may be well-inspired.  In other words, let the flow of thought carry the text forward.  As with any flow, there should be control and some boundary to the scatter of ideas, which is why having the outline is useful, as a way to leash back the author and focus on the end result.

The outline is also a useful brainstorm.  Starting writing from a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) can be daunting.  With a few notes in hand, sub-points, and supporting details you want to include in the article, the flow of writing can be started more easily, and along the way when an inevitable pause kicks in, referring to the notes and the outline can help stimulate new ideas. 

Expand on the main points from your outline in the body of the article. Each paragraph should focus on a single idea or point, supported by evidence and examples. Transition smoothly between paragraphs and use subheadings for better organization.

In comparison to writing content that keeps your readers engaged, simply writing an article is the easy part.  Better engagement comes from using a conversational tone, in a storytelling flow, sprinkled with anecdotes and relatable examples.  To be sure, not all articles are best-written in this format (we are covering the general topic of writing a blog, not writing a textbook of writing styles), but with reference to the three sentences, we are focusing on articles which “better engage their audience and achieve higher readership with improved responses to promotions.”

When the detailes of the outline are complete, summarize the key points of your article in the conclusion.  Restate your thesis or main message and offer some insights or implications. End with a thought-provoking statement or call to action.

The next step is to edit the article.  The most useful technique is to set the article aside, wait a day, and then begin to edit with a fresh mind.  You are your own best editor, and when you re-read the article the next day, the text will sound different.  That is good, and you can more easily enhance your own points and structure after you’ve given the content a bit of rest.  A detailed edit will cover the following:

  • Edit for Clarity and Flow:  Review your article for clarity, coherence, and logical flow.  Check that each paragraph connects smoothly to the next, and that your ideas are presented logically.
  • Revise for Style and Tone:  Ensure your writing style and tone are consistent throughout the article. Adjust your tone to match the intended audience and purpose of the article.
  • Proofread for Errors:  Carefully proofread your article for spelling, grammar and punctuation.
  • Formatting:  Format your article for clarity by adding headings, subheadings, bullet points, and formatting for online publishing.
  • Add Visuals:  Incorporate related images, charts, graphs, or multimedia elements to enhance your article’s visual appeal and understanding.  This addition also helps to increase search engine rankings.

Advanced content writing

Good article writing takes time, and good skill development requires effort.  The topics above address the basic process of writing articles.  Next, we delve into the finer points of making an article interesting.  There are hudreds of books on this topic, but to summarize a near-endless chain of discussion and learning, the following points – when put into practice – will put you well above average in quality and user engagement. 

Start with a Hook:  Begin your article with an attention-grabbing hook. The three sentences as mentioned earlier is a minimum.  Taking that approach a step further, begin with a compelling story, a surprising fact, a thought-provoking question, or a bold statement. The goal is to pique the reader’s curiosity from the very beginning.  Foreshadow what’s to come in your article to build anticipation.  Let readers know why they should continue reading.  To find the right hook, start from the audience perspective, and orient the narrative around their interests, preferences, or needs. 

Use Clear and Concise Language:  Write in a clear, straightforward manner. Avoid jargon or overly complex language unless your audience is highly specialized and expects it.  Use short sentences and paragraphs for easier readability.

Tell Stories:  Incorporate anecdotes, personal experiences, or case studies to illustrate your points.  Stories humanize your content and make it relatable.

Use Vivid Imagery:  Paint a picture with your words. Use descriptive language that appeals to the senses to help readers visualize what you’re discussing.

Engage Emotions:  Emotionally resonate with your readers.  Share personal stories or tap into common human emotions like joy, surprise, anger, or empathy to create a connection.

Vary Sentence Structure:  Mix up sentence lengths and structures to create rhythm and flow in your writing.  Short, punchy sentences can be impactful, while longer, complex sentences can provide depth.

Incorporate Dialogue:  If appropriate, include conversations or dialogue in your article.  This adds a conversational tone and makes your content feel more interactive.

Use Analogies and Metaphors:  Analogies and metaphors can simplify complex ideas and make them more relatable. They provide fresh perspectives and make your writing more engaging.

Create Visual Breaks:  Use subheadings, bullet points, numbered lists, and images to break up large blocks of text.  Visual elements can make your content easier to scan and digest.

Add Quotes:  Include relevant quotes from experts, thought leaders, or well-known figures. Quotes give your text a feeling of authority among the readers, and creates a positive association in the minds of readers between you and the individual you are quoting. 

Surprise and Delight:  Insert unexpected twists or surprising facts that keep readers engaged.  Unexpected elements can create excitement and arouses response.

Encourage Interaction:  Sew suggestive seeds of response throughout the article.  Invite readers to participate by asking questions, conducting polls, or encouraging comments and discussions.

Conclude Effectively:  Summarize your main points and leave readers with a thought-provoking conclusion.  Offer a call to action or suggest further reading if applicable.

With these elements of style incorporated into your text, your audience will be more open and attentive to your messaging, resulting in greater engagement and better results for any of the targets you aim to achieve. 

Optimize your content writing

Why is it important to optimize your writing?  Better content not only engages the audience, but also generates better search results, which extends your audience even further.  From an SEO perspective, we can affirm the following:

Start with Storytelling:  Weaving storytelling into your content captivate and maintain your audience’s interest, and effectively increases the likelihood of its dissemination across social media platforms.  Stories enable extended periods of thought engagement on the part of the audience, which also reduces bounce rates.

Savor the Sentiment:  Content that elicits emotional engagement will be shared more frequently. 

Save to memory:  Memorable narratives leave a lasting impression, prompting the reader to associate your story with everyday situations – like a song that sticks in your head, a good story keeps the memory of your content alive. 

Seal the association:  Create a positive and lasting association between your content and your brand by eliciting positive emotions.  This, in turn, boosts the likelihood of their return to your website and their inclination to recommend it to others.

Search for Success:  Improved engagement metrics also raise a green flag to search engines, signalling the high value of your content. 

To cap off the above content with a simple and concise closing:  writing is a skill that improves with practice and consistent effort over time.  Remain open to revising and refining your work and learning from the experience. 

5 Easy Steps to Using Surveys to Understand your Audience (Plus 2 Difficult Steps)

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Surveys are a powerful tool for gaining direct insights into what your audience wants, needs, and values.  

This article describes how you can effectively use surveys to understand your audience’s preferences and tailor your offerings.

Step 1 – Define Your Goals:  Every survey question will be oriented around the objective of what you are trying to discover.  Starting the out the process, write down in once sentence what you want to learn from the survey.  Are you seeking feedback on a specific product, service, content, or overall brand perception?

Step 2 – Choose a Survey Platform:  Use a reputable survey platform such as SurveyMonkey, Google Forms, Typeform, or Qualtrics to create and distribute your survey.

Step 3 – Choose a Survey Type:  Common types include multiple-choice, open-ended questions, rating scales, and Likert scales (opinions on a spectrum of 5 points).  Exploratory surveys, where you are looking for depth of insight, would use more open-ended (short answer or long paragraphs) questions, and where your audience may be small.  Statistical sampling can be done with a large population of responses, but will require questions to be written with precision, and answer choices which cover the universe of possibilities in order for the results to provide meaning.   

Step 4 – Craft Clear and Concise Questions:  Create questions that are easy to understand and avoid ambiguity. Use simple language and avoid leading questions.

How to write good questions for an online survey

Question Development Guidelines: 

  • Focus on Relevant Topics:  Keep your survey focused on topics that are directly relevant to your audience and your goals. Avoid asking unrelated or unnecessary questions. 
  • Use a Mix of Question Types:  Include a variety of question types to gather both quantitative and qualitative data. This can provide a more comprehensive understanding.
  • Keep Surveys Short:  Respect your audience’s time by keeping surveys concise. Long surveys can lead to survey fatigue and incomplete responses.
  • Ask the Right Questions: The quality of your survey data depends on the quality of the questions you ask. Craft your questions carefully to gather actionable insights that can help you better understand your audience and tailor your offerings to meet their needs and preferences.

Step 5 – Test Your Survey and Initiate:  Test the survey on a small group to identify any issues with question clarity, formatting, or technical glitches.  After making adjustments based on testing, you may initiate your survey and watch the results roll in.

Difficult Step 1 – Promote Your Survey:  Share your survey through various channels, including email, social media, your website, and relevant online communities.  Getting responsiveness on your survey invitation may be a challenge, but underscoring a greater good or specific benefit to your customer will increase responsiveness. 

  • Convey a greater purpose to your audience.  The messaging behind the survey will be key to encouraging participation.  From an audience perspective, surveys can be quite a hassle.  They always take more time than advertised, and the longer the survey, the more nonsensical the questions become.  Who wants to waste their time with a set of meaningless questions?  The user should feel that by taking the survey, they are a part of something greater, and contributing to the good of society.  That kind of messaging gives motivation and meaning to the user in exchange for the 5 (or 10) minutes they will take out of their day to finish the question list.
  • Offer Incentives such as discounts, freebies, or entry into a giveaway to encourage participation.  The key question here to answer is, “what benefit is there to the customer for taking the survey?”
  • Use Engaging Survey Titles:  Craft a compelling and concise survey title that captures attention and conveys the importance of participating.
  • Personalize Invitations:  Personalize survey invitations with the recipient’s name and relevant details. Personalization can increase response rates.
  • Maximize Social Media:  Share the survey link on your social media platforms, and encourage your followers to share it with their networks. Use paid social media advertising for wider reach.
  • Engage Online Communities:  Share your survey in online communities, forums, and groups that are relevant to your target audience. Ensure you’re following community guidelines.
  • Collaborate with Influencers:  Partner with influencers or individuals with a strong online presence who can help promote your survey to their followers.
  • Use Visuals:  Eye-catching visuals or graphics can help to highlight key aspects of the survey and make your promotion more appealing.
  • Highlight Previous Survey Insights:  If you’ve conducted surveys before, share insights or improvements you’ve made based on participant feedback.
  • Simplify the Survey Process:  Ensure that the survey is easy to access, navigate, and complete. A user-friendly experience can reduce drop-offs.
  • Ask for Referrals:  Encourage survey participants to refer the survey to their contacts.
  • Transparent Data Use:  Assure participants that their data will be used responsibly and confidentially, addressing potential privacy concerns.
  • Thank Participants:  Express gratitude to participants for taking the time to complete the survey. A thank-you message can leave a positive impression.

Difficult Step 2 – Extract Actionable Meaning:  Analyzing the results is easy.  Once you’ve collected responses, analyze the data to identify trends, patterns, and insights.  Look at both quantitative data (numbers) and qualitative data (comments).  Knowing what to do about what you see is the hard part. 

  • Segment Your Audience:  If you have a diverse audience, consider segmenting your survey to tailor questions to specific groups.  What are the common preferences, pain points, or suggestions from your audience?
  • Adjust Your Strategy:  Use the insights gained from the survey to inform your content, product development, marketing strategies, and customer service efforts.  Ask the following questions: Does the survey indicate any surprises?  Is there something new you learned about your audience that you didn’t expect to see? Specifically what about the marketing strategy is validated through the survey?
  • Set up for a future survey:  Test the same or similar survey format in the future to determine if your changes had an impact. 
  • Know your audience: What kind of person has taken the survey?  Inversely, who did not take the survey, and what does this mean to the results?

Leverage survey results to gain audience insights

Surveying your audience is just one approach to learning.  One-on-one engagement, responding to comments, and researching publicly available information about your line of business will help to bring greater insights and depth of understanding to your survey analysis.

Advanced Account Management – A/B Testing

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A/B testing, also known as split testing, informs the social media marketer which advertisement or promotion text is more effective.  A/B testing involves comparing two versions of a social media post to determine which one does a better job in achieving an objective, which can be higher audience engagement, reach, click-through rates (CTR), conversions or any other promotional success metric.

Before addressing the step-by-step approach to A/B testing, knowing what to get out of it will enable thinking backwards from the end goal, to ensure that you get the most out of the testing process.  Are you testing for higher engagement, conversions, or another metric?  For a starting point, we will focus on CTR.

A/B testing enables greater social media impact

Why is A/B testing important for a social media marketer?  A/B testing enables data-driven decisioning over promotional effectiveness, and aims to provide a clear pathway forward to achieve better results.  It enables content creators to determine which types of content (e.g., images, videos, text) resonate best with their audiences, and by testing different variations of content, key drivers for higher engagement, click-through rates, and conversions can be better understood. 

This understanding comes from obtaining insights about your audience’s preferences and behavior.  You can test different messaging or creative approaches to see what appeals most to your target demographic, helping you refine your content strategy.  For paid social media advertising in particular, A/B testing is crucial to refining ad copy, images, targeting options, and ad formats, to ensure maximum financial return on the promotional budget.

Beyond just the financial results, A/B testing can help to optimize the user experience by testing different layouts, navigation options, or call-to-action buttons, and in this way can lead to higher user engagement and conversion rates.  Most importantly, by testing variations of landing pages or lead generation forms linked from social media, you can optimize lead generation and ultimately improve revenue from online offers. 

A/B testing is not just about format.  Timing and scheduling can also be tested, to determine the optimal times and days to post content.  This ensures that your posts reach your audience when they are most active and likely to engage.

A/B testing is an iterative process, enabling a virtuous cycle of continuous learning on the part of the social media promoter, and provides an empirical basis through which to refine social media content and promotional strategies.  Slight improvements over time can generate meaningful differences over the long run, which will give you and your business a competitive social media landscape.  Through this process, you will discover innovative approaches that differentiate your brand and messaging from others in your industry.

The steps to conducting an A/B test

  1. Choose a Variable to Test:  Decide on the element you want to test. This could be the headline, image, call-to-action (CTA), posting time, caption, or any other aspect of the post.
  2. Create Variations:  Create two versions of the social media post, keeping everything the same except for the variable you’re testing. For example, if you’re testing the headline, use the same image, caption, and CTA in both versions.
  3. Determine Your Sample Size:  Decide how many users or followers you want to include in the test.  Ideally, it should be a statistically significant sample size to ensure accurate results.  Statistical sampling is a topic for another day, but if your audience size is small, then aim to divide the samples evenly.  Keep the variations limited and focused – but with significant differences to test – so that the outcome can be clearly understood.  If the sampling is small, then keep in mind that the results, due to random factors over which you have no control, may show a small enough difference that you cannot fully determine which version is better. 
  4. Randomize the Audience:  Split your sample audience randomly into two groups.  The groups should be similar in terms of demographics and other relevant factors.
  5. Schedule the Posts:  Schedule the two versions of the posts to go live at the same time. This minimizes the impact of external factors like time of day (unless you are testing for differences in posting times, in which case your promotional text would be the same, and the only variable difference is in the timing). 
  6. Monitor Engagement:  Track the engagement metrics for both versions of the post. This could include likes, comments, shares, clicks, conversions, or any other relevant metrics. 
  7. Analyze the Results:  After the posts have been live for a sufficient amount of time, analyze the results. Compare the performance of the two versions to see which one achieved your desired outcome. 

Improving insights from A/B testing

While the steps to conducting an A/B test are straightforward, the art is in the application of Insights and in identifying the winning elements of your test to improve engagement and results.  To enable better insights and to accurately attribute the results to a specific variable, ensure that you’re testing only one element at a time.  Testing multiple variables in one test can make it challenging to identify which element led to the change in performance.  As noted above, this is especially important if your audience size is small (less than 50 viewers). 

Conducting an A/B test is only the first step in achieving sustainable improvement over time.  A/B testing is an ongoing process.  Continuously test and refine your content based on the results you gather, and to develop a better understanding of what resonates with your audience.  By systematically testing different elements, you can refine your strategies and improve your social media engagement, reach, and conversions.

You can “up your game” with A/B testing with a broad range of testing tools.  Start with your own social media management platform, which frequently provides A/B testing features and key engagement metrics to track your success.  These tools can help you set up and manage A/B tests more efficiently.

A/B testing tools to improve analysis

Here are some tools that you may use:

  • Google Optimize is a user-friendly tool that allows you to create A/B tests and multivariate tests.  The advantage of using this tool is that It integrates well with Google Analytics.
  • Optimizely is a robust experimentation platform that offers A/B testing, multivariate testing, and personalization features. It’s suitable for both web-based platforms and mobile apps.
  • VWO offers A/B testing and split URL testing. It includes a visual editor for making changes without coding knowledge.
  • Unbounce is primarily designed for landing page optimization and A/B testing.  It offers drag-and-drop functionality for creating landing pages and experiments.
  • Convert is an optimization tool that supports A/B testing and facilitates split URL testing. It also includes advanced targeting and personalization options.
  • Crazy Egg is a more advanced tool for A/B testing which also provides a heatmap function and user session recordings. It’s focused on improving user experience and conversion rates.
  • Adobe Target is part of the Adobe Marketing Cloud and offers A/B testing, personalization, and targeted content delivery.
  • Split.io specializes in feature flagging and experimentation for software and product development. It is optimized for testing new features and changes.
  • Apptimize is aimed at mobile app optimization and A/B testing. It includes support for improving user experiences within mobile applications.
  • Other applications for consideration include HubSpot (own marketing platform), Leanplum (mobile-focused), Webflow (includes web design tools), Kameleoon  and Omniconvert (both with AI-driven experimentation).

The choice of the aforementioned tools will be driven by your own platform focus, as many of these are specialized for either web-based or mobile-based content.  Other key drivers are your budget, level of technical expertise and ability to integrate these with your existing platform. 

While these tools can provide insights and facilitate large scale testing, A/B testing does not require complex tools to start out, but rather, only your ability to collect and analyze the resulting data.  The power of A/B testing is taking the guesswork out of marketing decisions. Instead of relying on intuition or assumptions (which are usually good for a starting point), you make better decisions over time based on real world data, leading to more effective and efficient marketing strategies.  By systematically testing different elements of their campaigns, marketers can optimize their efforts and adapt to the ever-changing dynamics of social media platforms.

Advanced Account Management – Calculating the SMM ROI

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Calculating the Return on Investment (ROI) of a social media campaign involves measuring the revenue generated from the campaign against the costs associated with it. Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you calculate the ROI of your social media campaign.

Steps to calculating social media ROI

  1. Define Your Objectives:  Clearly define the goals and objectives of your social media campaign. Are you aiming to increase sales, website traffic, brand awareness, or engagement? Each goal will require different metrics for measurement.  This step also requires that you define the time frame over which you’re measuring ROI.  Some campaigns might generate revenue over a longer period, so make sure to account for ongoing effects.
  2. Determine Key Performance Indicators (KPIs):  Identify the specific metrics that align with your campaign goals. For example, if your goal is to increase sales, relevant KPIs might include the number of conversions, revenue generated, and average order value.
  3. Calculate Total Revenue Generated:  Sum up the revenue generated directly from the social media campaign. This could include sales attributed to the campaign, leads generated, or other monetizable actions.  This might involve using tracking links, unique promo codes, or specific landing pages for the campaign to specifically link revenue results with campaign efforts.
  4. Calculate Campaign Costs:  Calculate all costs associated with the campaign, including ad spend, content creation costs, tools or software expenses, and labor costs (hours spent by your team working on the campaign).
  5. Subtract Costs from Revenue:  Subtract the total campaign costs from the total revenue generated to get the net profit attributable to the campaign.
  6. Calculate ROI:  Divide the net profit by the total campaign costs and multiply by 100 to get the ROI percentage.

    ROI (%) = [(Net Profit / Total Campaign Costs) * 100]

A positive ROI indicates that your campaign generated more revenue than it cost, resulting in a profit. A negative ROI indicates that the campaign incurred more costs than revenue.

What’s in a number? 

What are the factors that might be directly tied to revenue but still contribute to the campaign’s success, such as brand awareness, customer engagement, and long-term customer retention? 

Is there an investment factor at play?  To what extent can the revenue generated can be directly attributed to the campaign?

What is your benchmark for success?  Can you compare industry benchmarks or previous campaigns to assess your campaign effectiveness?

Can you regularly monitor your campaign’s performance and adjust your strategies based on the results?  

The ROI metric can help you identify which campaigns are successful and which need further optimization or re-messaging.  At the same time, it has inherent limitations.  In other words, the value of social media to your branding may go beyond immediate revenue by contributing to building brand loyalty, customer relationships, and long-term business growth.

Advanced Account Management – Sentiment Monitoring

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While audience sentiment is a more abstract and subtle layer of understanding, therein lies its power – crafting themes which leverage emotion. 

What is sentiment analysis?

Sentiment analysis allows you to gain deeper insights into how your audience feels about your brand, products, services, and content. This knowledge helps you understand customer opinions, preferences, and pain points.  You can better tailor your content strategy to match their emotional state.  Positive sentiment, for example, is optimally placed in the context of messaging that reinforces loyalty and sustainable co-identification with the brand.  Addressing negative sentiment can help you improve areas of concern, enabling you to better manage your brand’s online reputation. You can address negative sentiment promptly and engage with customers to resolve issues before they escalate.  Negative sentiment towards an external situation can be used as a rallying point for customers to reinforce community identity. 

Sentiment analysis relies on uncovering emerging trends and shifts in opinions, and with that, you can more effectively adapt your strategies and offerings to stay aligned with customer expectations.  Understanding sentiment not only applies to your brand but also to your competitors.  Analyzing the sentiment around your competitors can help you identify their strengths (for you to enhance and replicate) and weaknesses (for you to expose and leverage).  Negative sentiment points to specific product or service issues that need attention, enabling you to solve a problem in the market and to make advance improvements to enhance customer satisfaction.

What makes monitoring sentiment difficult is that there is no way to perfectly quantify feelings and opinions.  Data analytics relies on key words and phrases, and associating these with desired responses in engagement and purchasing.  Recognizing patterns of behavior and applying these with your messaging demonstrates that you’re listening to your customers and valuing their opinions.  This can foster customer loyalty and long-term relationships.  People are more likely to interact with content that reflects their feelings.

What can you do with sentiment monitoring? 

  • Better Decision-Making: provide data-driven guidance for marketing strategies, product development and customer support.
  • Crisis Management: understanding sentiment allows you to gauge the extent of the issue and take appropriate actions to mitigate its impact.
  • Personalization: more personalized and relevant interactions, improving customer satisfaction and increasing click-through rates and ultimately, increased sales.
  • Opportunity Identification: positive sentiment can highlight areas where your brand is excelling. You can leverage these strengths to further engage your audience and differentiate your brand.
  • Refined Marketing Messages: craft marketing messages that resonate emotionally with your audience, leading to stronger connections and higher conversions.

How can you carry out sentiment monitoring?

Incorporating sentiment analysis into your business strategy empowers you to make informed decisions, tailor your interactions with customers, and foster a positive brand perception. By addressing both positive and negative sentiment, you can build a more resilient and customer-focused brand that thrives in the digital landscape.

This analysis is no longer exclusively the domain of “rocket scientists” and back-room quants.  There are several automated tools and platforms available that can help you gauge the sentiment of your audience.  Advanced tools use natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning algorithms to analyze and categorize the sentiment expressed in social media posts, comments, and mentions.  Here are some popular options:

  • Brandwatch – social listening and analytics services, including sentiment analysis, to help you track how your brand is perceived on social media.
  • Sprout Social – social media management tools, enabling categorizing of social media mentions as positive, negative, or neutral, helping you understand how your audience feels about your brand.
  • Talkwalker – a social listening and analytics platform to help monitor your brand’s reputation across social media channels.
  • Hootsuite Insights – also enables understanding of the tone of conversations surrounding your brand or platform, giving assessment of content as positive, negative, or neutral.
  • Meltwater – a media intelligence platform.
  • IBM Watson Natural Language Understanding – natural language processing tool.
  • Socialbakers –social media marketing and analytics tools.
  • Lexalytics – text analytics platform.
  • MonkeyLearn – text analysis platform utilizing machine learning models.

Wrapping it up

Before choosing a tool, consider factors such as the social media platforms it supports, the depth of analysis it provides, its ease of integration with your existing tools, and its pricing structure. While these tools can automate sentiment analysis, when it comes to your own learning and understanding of your audience, nothing beats manually reviewing and interpreting results, developing hypotheses of audience motivation, and frequently testing these hypotheses through frequent and personal engagement.

Advanced Account Management – Unlocking Demographic Insights

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What can you learn about your audience by studying their demographics, and how can you use that knowledge to create better content?

Studying your audience’s demographics can provide valuable insights into their characteristics, preferences, and behaviors. This information can help you tailor your content to better meet their needs and interests.

Start with the basics – age and gender.  The focus here is on life stages and experiences.  More than just general trends among young males versus aged females, see your audience in contrast to opposing demographics to identify what makes your audience unique.  For example, content for a younger audience might focus on trends and pop culture, while content for an older audience might emphasize practical tips and advice.

Bring the age and gender analysis to a higher level by overlaying this understanding with geographic-based trends.  Knowing where your audience is located can help you create content that’s relevant to their geographic interests, in particular, keeping note of local events and holidays, and local culture in the form of cuisine, historical context, and music.  Local festivals and seasonal events are ripe for promotion opportunities.  Furthermore, with a broader geographic base of customers, language and national cultural opens up new areas to explore variations in offers and messaging. 

Beyond basic demographic indicators – and more difficult to track – are variables related to education and occupation.  These allow you to tailor your content’s complexity and tone.  A key driver of audience participation and engagement is their ability to associate themselves with your content.  Content for professionals might be more in-depth and industry-focused, while content for a general audience should be accessible and engaging.  Inversely, a highly educated audience would not prefer content that is written simply, with flashy colors or cartoon images.  This association is sometimes the most subtle, but at the same time most effective. 

Taking that analysis to the next level, a useful though exercise is to ask the question, if your audience were to design your platform, content and social media, what would it look like?  What does your audience expect to see? 

Additional demographic differentiators:

  • Interests and hobbies are driven significantly by lifestyle, location and social networks.  References to leisure activities can conjure feelings of passion, bringing a positive co-association to your brand. 
  • Buying behavior and income are key to highlighting the impact of purchasing power and preferences.  Is your audience more tailored for evaluating offers based on cost effectiveness or value-for-money assessments?  Are they focused on quality or quantity?  Does a discount motivate purchases or bring a mass appeal to your offer?  Does a “mass appeal” turn off potential high-value shoppers?
  • Family structure (singles, families, parents, or caregivers) can guide you in creating content that addresses life challenges and core needs. 
  • Emotional triggers and pain points can further reinforce emotional association to your products or services.  Pets, social issues and identity references can bring a more personal and human touch to your messaging.  These can also conjure opposition, underscoring the importance of having a full and comprehensive profile of your audience, and of the segments of your audience which are most likely to engage and spend.

Continuously monitor engagement metrics and gather feedback from your audience. Adjust your content strategy based on their reactions and comments.  At the same time, avoid overgeneralizing.  Each person is unique, and adherence to demographic expectations can risk identifying new and unexpected preferences among your audience.  In other words, keep an open mind. 

As your audience evolves, their preferences may change. Regularly update your understanding of your audience’s demographics and adapt your content strategy accordingly.  By using demographic data to guide your content creation, you can ensure that your content resonates with your audience, builds stronger connections, and delivers value that meets their specific needs and interests.

Advanced Account Management – Optimizing Posting Times

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How can a business optimize its posting timing?

Test test test.  That is the answer.  At the end of the day (proverbially speaking) there is no magic formula for determining the best time to capture your audience’s attention without some trial and error testing. 

Nonetheless, there are some notable patterns. Determining the best time of day to post on social media leverages a combination of understanding your target audience’s behavior and taking advantage of platform-specific insights.

This article provides a starting point for this analysis, and highlights key tactics to optimize your posting times. 

Optimizing posting time for audience engagement

Know Your Audience – Start with demographics, habits, and time zones. Who is your customer and what is their profile?  Other factors include age, profession, and typical lifestyle to estimate when they’re most likely to be active on social media.

Analyze Audience Insights – Leverage your data from past postings.  Keeping a close track of platform analytics will help to gather data on when your audience is most active. Most social media platforms provide insights into your followers’ online behavior.

Experiment and Track – Begin by posting at different times of the day and track the engagement metrics for each post. Over time, patterns will emerge, and you’ll be able to identify the times that consistently yield the best results.  This analysis, in particular, will help you find peak hours.  Generally, posting during peak hours (when users are most active) can maximize visibility. These hours can vary depending on the platform and your audience’s location.

Third-Party Tools – As always, there are several applications that can support this process, but which will take some time to learn.  While the best foundational knowledge is gained through sifting through the user data (did we mention above, know your customer?), there are various tools and services that can analyze your audience’s behavior and suggest optimal posting times based on the data you input into the application. 

Understand the Platform – A growing body of research in recent years has shown patterns of engagement in common social media platform.  Some platforms will prioritize content when it’s initially posted, while others might distribute it over a longer period, to enable a pattern of likes and shares to develop.

Key variables in optimizing posting time

For many social media marketers, there are some specific variables to assess in determining most favorable posting times:  

  • Commute Schedule:  When there’s nothing else to do on the morning public transport commute, many users engage with social media.
  • Competitor Behavior:  Observe when your competitors post and when they seem to receive the most engagement.
  • Audience Profile: Younger audiences are more likely to turn to social media after dinner, versus older audiences who are still attached to network broadcasting for entertainment.
  • Platform Usage Patterns: Different platforms have different peak usage times. For example, LinkedIn daytime is relatively busier than evening Instagram.

A more sophisticated analysis will track engagement statistics not just for volume, but also for quality.  Analyze when your posts receive the highest engagement (likes, comments, shares), which can indicate when your audience is most active and most open to new offers. 

As always, continuously analyze your data and adjust your posting schedule based on what works best for your specific audience and goals.  The best posting times can evolve over time as your audience changes and social media trends shift.  Regularly review your analytics and be willing to adjust your strategy to maximize engagement and reach.

Advanced Account Management – Optimizing Hashtags

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Here is a quick reference article on the use of hashtags.  Using hashtags can significantly improve your content’s visibility, reach, and engagement on social media platforms.  

Choose Relevant Hashtags – just get started by researching possible tags, see which ones reflect your messaging themes, and also note which additional hashtags are most often connected to the ones you think would be most relevant.  Here is where you will find new possibilities that you can use as the basis for testing different tags.  Research hashtags that your competitors and industry leaders are using. This can give you insights into what’s popular and effective within your niche.

Use a combination of broad, niche, and specific hashtags. Broad hashtags might have high competition, while niche and specific ones can help you reach a more targeted audience.

Create branded hashtags.  Develop a unique hashtag for your brand or campaign.  Take inspiration from competitors and successful brand promotions from leading companies.  Branded hashtags can help build a community and encourage user-generated content.  At the same time, these are best used at a more mature stage in audience development.  A silent, unused hashtag would show your customers that you have not yet reached a broad appeal in the market.  If your followers have a very niche or distinguished identity, a branded hashtag can help build a sense of community identity.

Hashtags are best when the are short.  Avoid long and complicated hashtags. Keep them memorable, and easy to spell to encourage more users to engage with them.

Use location-based hashtags to show your unique presence in the community.

Check hashtag popularity.  Use tools like Instagram’s search bar or third-party platforms to check the popularity of hashtags. Balancing between popular and less competitive hashtags can improve your post’s visibility.

While one hashtag is not enough, 4 or 5 are too many.  Avoid overloading hashtags.  While platforms like Instagram allow many hashtags, avoid overloading.  Aim for quality.

Test and track hashtag performance.  This can be done by experimenting with different combinations of hashtags and track which ones perform best.  Analyze engagement and reach to refine your strategy.

Weave hashtags into Stories.  Add relevant hashtags to your Stories. They can help them appear in hashtag-related searches and increase discoverability. 

As with many things in life, the more you give the more you get.  The same is true of hashtags.  engage with hashtag communities.  Like, comment, and interact with other posters using the same hashtags. Positive engagement increases your content’s exposure and builds connections.

Hashtags effectiveness is driven by your audience and your content.  Regularly review your analytics to understand which hashtags are driving the most engagement and refine your strategy accordingly.

Social media marketing execution plan – pet boarding case study

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Social media is a powerful tool for local businesses to connect with potential customers, and is an essential part of the marketing strategy for any small retail business.

This case study will explore specific steps a local pet boarding business can take to leverage social media marketing and achieve success.

Meet Happy Paws Pet Boarding

Happy Paws is a cozy, family-run pet boarding facility known for its loving care and personalized attention. However, they faced the challenge of reaching a wider audience and attracting new clients.

The Social Media Strategy

Happy Paws identified their target audience – pet owners who prioritize their furry friends’ well-being. They focused on platforms popular with this demographic, like Instagram and Facebook.

Content is King

Visual Appeal: High-quality photos and videos showcasing happy pets playing, napping, and enjoying the facilities are key. Behind the Scenes: Introduce the staff, their experience, and daily routines to build trust.

Testimonials: Share positive reviews and heartwarming stories from satisfied customers.

Educational Content: Offer pet care tips, highlight boarding benefits (stress-free travel!), and address common concerns.

Interactive Engagement: Respond promptly to comments and messages, fostering a sense of community.

Run contests and giveaways: Encourage pet photos, adoption stories, or boarding questions. Offer free consultations or discounts as prizes.

Host live Q&A sessions: Address pet boarding anxieties and showcase your expertise.

Leverage pet holidays: Create fun content around National Dog Day or National Cat Day.

Paid Advertising: Utilize targeted social media ads to reach pet owners in your local area. Highlight special offers or promote specific services like puppy playtime or senior pet care.

Track and Analyze: Monitor post performance and audience engagement. Identify what resonates with your followers and adapt your strategy accordingly.

The Results

By consistently implementing these steps, pet boarding social media marketers can see a significant increase in social media followers through a continually growing community of engaged pet owners. Furthermore, more potential customers will explore your services, which leads to greater interest in booking inquiries

Conclusion

Happy Paws’ case study demonstrates the power of social media marketing for local pet boarding businesses. By focusing on high-quality content, audience engagement, and targeted advertising, you can build trust, attract new clients, and establish your business as a trusted pet care provider in your community.