Tag Archives: Social Media Marketing

Tracking Engagement – More than just likes!

April 3, 2024 admin Leave a comment

How well is your audience interacting with your content? The answer to this question will separate the novice social media promoters with the pros. The good news is, it doesn’t take 10,000 hours to become a pro in tracking your engagement. Use social media engagement metrics to enable a deeper understanding of what motivates your audience, and to determine how well your campaign is resonating with high-value readers and listeners.

Because there are so many engagement metrics to track, chances are that if you are a beginner to social media, with enough practice you will begin to see yourself as a winner in at least one of these metrics. With one win at a time, especially in the early days, you can find further motivation to keep tracking and keep improving your scores over time.

Here are some common engagement metrics with a description as to how you can benefit from them.

Likes

The most basic of all, and the higher number the better
What They Indicate: Likes and reactions (such as “love,” “wow,” “sad,” etc.) indicates a positive (or negative) reaction. More complex or sophisticated applications enable the audience to choose more than just a like, but also emojis for “love,” “wow,” and “sad” among others. It is the easiest and most rudimentary way a viewer can react, so not having any “likes” is like putting your audience to sleep.
What to Learn: Content with many likes and reactions lets you know which types of content get the most attention, and with that, you have a basis for replication of future content generation.

Comments

A deeper form of engagement, where the audience is so strongly interested in your posting that they set themselves apart (to show that you have their attention?) by creating new original content in response to your new original content.
What They Indicate: Comments show that your posting sparked interest. Even if you get trolls, you can have the satisfaction that someone bothered to post some nonsense, because they thought their own version of bad taste would be seen by others.
What to Learn: Read the comments and comment back – that is the most effective way to show users that you care about them and want to learn from them. With a deeper understanding of their sentiments made available through comments and feedback, you can use that to generate more meaningful content in the future, and in doing so, begin the virtuous cycle of interest among your readers, reflected by the interest you have shown them.

Shares and Retweets

Shares and retweets are likes and comments, but turned up a notch. Shares can amplify your reach and introduce your platform to new potential followers.
What They Indicate: More than just a comment, a share indicates that your audience is identifying themselves with you. A share of a posting means you have become and identity-maker. This step is a giant leap towards a full-on branding strategy.
What to Learn: As always, count the shares to see which comments resonate most you’re your audience. Go a step further and analyze what type of messaging, visuals, or information prompted users to share.

Click-Through Rate (CTR)

CTR measures the percentage of people who clicked on a link in your post. Are you getting any genuine action from your audience? What percentage of your audience is entering your universe?
What It Indicates: CTR shows the effectiveness of your call-to-action.
What to Learn: A high CTR indicates that your content was compelling enough to drive traffic. Analyze the content and its placement to understand what encouraged users to click through. As with any indicator of success, adjust your content strategy based on these findings.

Engagement Rate

Engagement rate is a combination of likes, comments, shares, and clicks relative to your total number of followers.
What It Indicates: While it is one thing to have likes, if you are reaching the next level in your engagement effectiveness, you will come to learn that certain customers (or readers, or viewers) will be engaging with you more than once and in multiple ways. This is your bullseye target audience. All the lessons you aim to learn from simple metrics such as clicks and likes are now compounded in complexity and, along with that, potential benefits to your future promotional designs.
What to Learn: Similar to the other metrics, you can compare the engagement rates of different posts to identify which types of content perform better. Beyond that, you can begin to piece together certain character traits of your audience. “People who wrote these types of comments also had a higher CTR, therefore that is the kind of person I’m trying to appeal to.” Write your own version of that sentence, but with specifics to show for it.

Mentions and Tags

Being mentioned or tagged by users means they’re actively involving your brand in their conversations or content.
What They Indicate: This metric tracking indicates an advanced level of identity on the part of your audience, and may indicate that your audience as a whole is growing more sophisticated. Your reach is now extending beyond simple impressions or single individuals, you are being remembered in other peoples’ conversations.
What to Learn: Monitor mentions to identify opportunities for engagement. Respond to mentions promptly, whether they’re positive or negative, as de facto feedback on your brand, your product, your service and your message. Target new groups that were not previously on your radar. Learn from the type of people who mention your brand, and look out for potential surprises – audience types which resonate with your messaging, but you didn’t expect. What is making them interested? Acknowledging and engaging with user-generated content can build and foster a greater sense of community around your brand.

Follower Growth Rate

Follower growth rate measures how quickly your follower count is increasing.
What It Indicates: a metric for more well-developed and mature campaigns, it is another dimension of likes (which could gradually increase over time) and the audience’s enthusiasm over your content (how many likes in a short period of time).
What to Learn: If your campaign coincides with a significant increase in followers, analyze the content you posted during that period. Determine if there’s a correlation between the campaign content and the growth in followers, and if your determination is that there is a positive relationship, then push that theme like crazy. At some point, you may experience the thrill of a single posting that, at least in a small way, has gone viral. You may not be able to replicate this phenomenon on a weekly basis (but you can try), nonetheless, learn what you can and try to identify the ideas you conveyed which so well resonated with your audience.

Time of Engagement

Analyze when your posts receive the most engagement by studying time-of-day and day-of-week patterns.
What It Indicates: This is a tactic for the pros, but essential when your promotional efforts are building a large following. At this stage in the game, you will be trying to improve your skills not by factors of 5 or 10, but by 10% or 20%. When you have a large audience, a mere few percentage points can make a significant difference in the volume of revenue (and profit) that you take in from a single post.
What to Learn: Let every word be leveraged to is max! Optimize your posting schedule and tailor your content to be available when your audience is most open to your messaging.

By closely monitoring and analyzing these engagement metrics, you can gain valuable insights into what content resonates with your audience, which strategies are effective, and how to improve your future social media campaigns. Adjust your approach based on what you learn to continually refine and optimize your social media marketing efforts.

Facebook: Deathbed or Flu?

February 29, 2020 admin Leave a comment

The past two years have not been good for Facebook. After taking a series of blows in the media centering mainly on privacy concerns (Cambridge Analytica), security problems and the propagation of fake news, Facebook has some challenges to overcome.

Despite these situations – some of which might have completely flat-lined any other company – Facebook remains by far the go-to platform for social networking. For example, in the UK, online interactions on the Facebook mobile app fell 38% in the 2018-2019 financial year, and in the US, Facebook has seen a dramatic decline in monthly page visits, dropping to 4.7 billion from 8.5 billion over the course of two years.

Still at the top spot

While the headlines look ominous – and it is certainly not a positive situation for the company – Facebook remains resilient. They have lost some market share and online activity has fallen, but there is no doubt about it, Facebook remains by far in the top spot among social media users. In fact, despite the headlines and reports, even in North America (its hardest-hit market), Facebook’s active user base grew by 1% in North America, and 12% in Asia-Pacific, with a global average growth of 8%. 52% of social media users listed Facebook as their number one platform (down from 65% in 2015), but the next-highest ranking platform was Snapchat, at 16% (CNET).

Facebook has seen some tough times, but they are not in retreat. User habits are changing, and the population as a whole is becoming increasingly cynical about what they see and read online. In fact, that is a good thing. Our collective naivety over online information is waning. Consumers are slowly becoming smarter about filtering out information they see online, and becoming more critical of information and stories which somehow fail to pass the logic test or otherwise ring some kind of dissonance with their gut feel.

What this means for businesses

Businesses which carry out their marketing campaigns in an honest and ethical manner can only stand to benefit in the long run. This also means that businesses which invest in relationships with their customers up front by adding value and building trust can move ahead in the growth charts. Advertisers must still develop copy which stands out from the rest, they must still connect with their audience, and they must still promote their products and services with aggressive offers. All of these activities are and will continue to be fundamental to a good advertising campaign. The good news is that with growing cynicism among the online population as a whole, those businesses which gain the trust of their customers stand to gain their loyalty over the long run.

The same holds true for Facebook. Although our trust has been shaken, Facebook has seen in no uncertain terms that violating this public trust – despite the potential of short-term revenue gain – is very bad for business and long run sustainability. Facebook may never bounce back to its market share of five years ago, but it remains the leader of the pack, by a long shot.

For businesses, there is no particular loyalty to Facebook or any social media platform. As Facebook market share drops and others rise, the online marketing decisions will be more complex, and will include further deliberation as to which platform is best for a business, and where their customers are most likely to be found. Platforms will also compete with each other over advertising rates and their ability to help you effectively reach your target audience and potential customers. This competition is good, and social media as an industry will emerge stronger.

Stronger in the end

Similar to the human experience, few of us run faster in our 40s than we did in our 20s. Facebook has probably passed its prime in terms of market share (not overall membership), and its health has deteriorated lately. But like people, a cold or a flue now and then keeps our immune systems active and helps us to better fight of illness in the future.

We hope the same will be true with Facebook.

Six ways to dial up marketing in 2020 (without breaking the bank)

January 14, 2020 admin 2 Comments

The new year is upon us and so are many fantastic opportunities. To turn these opportunities into reality will require the same consistent, thorough and robust online marketing efforts as before, and at the same time, businesses will need to continue innovation in messaging and sales pipeline strategy. The effectiveness of new marketing strategies from 2018 and 2019 will begin to fade as clever new approaches start to take over.

Our approach at Content Savants is to continuously innovate online marketing while building – step by step with proven effectiveness – on tried and true methods that have made sustainable business growth possible for ourselves (including our internal products and services) and our clients.

Trends

First off, there are some key trends in areas that are near and dear to our hearts that we will briefly mention. These trends are in four key areas, which are areas that Content Savants specializes in regarding our customers and helping them to achieve their business goals.

Content Style: the first category is content. It is in our name! While some businesses which focus on specialty advisory or traditional services such as audit and advisory may continue with their persona of formality and traditionalism – which is what clients tent to expect from these types of companies, most other businesses will do best to follow a more conversational style and approach to messaging. This style can be applied to imaging (imagine people in relaxed settings with non-staged scenes), short-form descriptions, headers and bylines, as well as long-form descriptive text. Vocabulary should remain within a list of 2,000 commonly-used words, and verbiage written to replicate a conversational tone, of the type that a business people would have at a coffee shop, but not at a formal dinner or conference.
Content Substance: flowery language and scare tactics popular with so many sales funnel developers will not be enough. In continuation of long term trends, as information becomes more easily and readily available, consumers will continue to expect specific examples and data to back up assertions. That is why the research portion of your online messaging development will be ever more crucial in the coming years. 2020 will be a great chance to get ahead of the curve without significant expense in custom-tailored research requests.
Content Types: video content will continue to grow, as will the online platforms which enable video content creation. Facebook has already launched their Video Creation Kit, which enables advertisers to create “mobile-first” video ads which draw upon images already uploaded into your Facebook account. We have seen Facebook do similar types of automated video production in the form of commemorative and anniversary videos. With the Video Creation Kit, users can choose templates for basic customization and to adapt the advert according to your end goals, such as selling products or building brand value through unique messaging or stories. These can then be applied use in both Facebook or Instagram ads.
Leveraging Content: along with a rise in competitive efforts needed to push ahead of your competition, a key priority for 2020 should be to leverage your existing content into other channels. By this, we mean going beyond just online marketing opportunities, but also making sure that your business gets the broad range of exposure that will be critical to giving your business an added advantage. Print more business cards, attend more conferences, and get out there in a way that uses the content assets you have already generated. Here, we’re speaking involvement in speaking engagements, making guest posts on popular forums, and obtaining media coverage for your expertise. Use what you have and leverage that to the max!

These are just a few of the many developments that are shaping up to make 2020 an amazing year for online and social media marketing. These were selected based on their importance to small and medium-sized businesses, with a prioritization based on areas where Content Savants can be of direct service.

Six dial-up strategies

Now, as promised in the header, here are six actionable steps your business can begin to take right now, which can help boost your online presence and convert viewers to customers.

Use your email lists: have you asked customers to join your email list? Aside from the advertising funnel strategy, it is amazing how many businesses fail to take advantage of information they already have right in front of them. Email is still an extremely powerful means of communicating directly with customers. The key here is to offer them value. Customers see commercial email and will automatically assume it is junk. Or they see a newsletter and automatically assume that it will have no relevance. Why do they make these assumptions? Because that is what we have all come to learn and expect from the rash of absolute junk that comes to our in-boxes. Rather than promoting your business, give your customers real information that they can use, and write it in a way that sticks in their minds.
Up your blogging game: is your business a once-per-week blogger? (Even us, we try to be, but customers come first! …and lately we’ve been very busy – but that’s NO EXCUSE, not for us, not for you or for anyone). Time to ante up and increase your messaging. Let customers know that you are serious about building a relationship with them, increase their trust in your brand, and let them know that you are an ACTIVE business. One more blog per week goes a long way.
Entice interaction: a quick and simple step you can take now is to ask your customers about their experience with your product or services, either through a photo or a short paragraph. Encourage their participation through a reward for the best entry, and posting that (and all of them) online. This approach gives them value and helps to build your own set of testimonials, while creating a fun and interactive engagement.
Speak to customers directly: while you’re at it, combining this step with the previous one can enable you to receive vital feedback on your business activities directly from your most valued customers. Choose a handful of customers (as your time allows) and get them on the phone. You can tell them you are the owner, tell them how valuable their business is, and ask if they can answer a few survey questions – or just start asking them some basic questions about their experience. The most important part here is, among those who are positive with you, ask them kindly to post a (honest) review. A kind, personal request can stretch miles beyond an email reminder in terms of getting their attention and earning their active support of your business.
Expand your business: of course that is always the objective. In this context, while you’re working on steps 3 and 4, go ahead and take the next baby step in the conversation and ask them for a referral. While not all businesses offer products which lend themselves to referrals (you can think of your own examples), you can at least solicit their idea about the type of customers they think that you should be targeting. Some people will respond by saying “well, I don’t know it’s not my business,” but if you have already developed a positive rapport, take advantage of the fact that people love to give advice and to be an expert. They have already bought into your service or product, so they must know something about who is your best target. At the very least, from this type of question, if they respond by giving you a profile of someone that does not match their own profile (as in, “someone else would be more interested in this product than I am”), that can give you a new perspective on what your selling, who your selling it too, and what value customers are getting from your offer.
Annual review: take a couple hours and write down successful efforts and lessons learned from the past year. So often it is easy to forget an idea that we thought about pursuing and then got distracted, or a mistake that lent itself to some important lessons, or otherwise small but important goals that got lost in the shuffle. Take some time to reflect on the past year, identify some opportunities that may have fallen through the cracks, and put those back on the list for 2020.

Have a great year in 2020 and look forward to working with you to make your business ambitions a success!

New FB feature can improve business targeting

November 26, 2019 admin Leave a comment

Facebook is currently in a phase of testing a new capability that will allow page owners the ability to share and reveal content specifically targeted at pre-determined contact groups. This capability will be connected to Facebook Stories and Messenger.

Companies that use Facebook as a way to communicate to their customers – most frequently being entertainment, retail, fashion and specialty businesses – will typically develop content that is relevant to the wide body of users and followers. With the opportunity to narrow content broadcasts to a select few, businesses can better target their messaging and hone in on key interests to the defined customer audience.

The content development process typically begins with profiling either the existing base of users via key interest and demographic indicators, or profiling the specifically the target audience that the business aims to develop and convert to sales. Having the ability to better target content is something that businesses have long been waiting from Facebook. This current testing effort is indication that Facebook is further responding to these requests, and enabling businesses to better leverage their promotions on this increasingly critical marketing platform.

This development would be par for the course in a social environment that aims to reflect and complement the way people naturally communicate. On a social level, we all have friends, family and contacts with different interests. Our communication to each group is different, and tailored to their interest, or our common interests. In a similar fashion that perhaps a college student wouldn’t discuss details of last weekend’s frat party with close family (or maybe they would?), the message to new versus existing customers may be very different. Social media communication can reflect real-life communication, and with that, increase our engagement overall.

We believe that is the best foundational view for content development, and hope to see Facebook and others continue to replicate a natural social structure in their social communication platform.

Five content tricks to boost social media performance

November 15, 2019 admin 4 Comments

Content Savants aims to continually enhance and improve upon social media content, and as such, we are ever in search of tips, tricks and hacks that help to boost performance of social media postings. By “boost performance”, we mean increase social engagement, likes, comments, and… most importantly, grow sales for you and your business.

Use Video Content

Research on social media marketing says again and again, videos perform better than stills. According to research by online content consultant BuzzSumo, Facebook video posts enable over 70% more engagement than posted photos. For the same set of clicks it takes to post a meme, the video content will outweigh the benefit by far, according to this and many other research reports.

The challenge with video content isn’t imagining why or how it draws better engagement, nor is it in the effort of posting. The challenge is in the development, requiring much more time and complexity. The good news is that still, video content represents a minority of postings (~10% on Facebook and Instagram). Your business can stand out better, enabling much greater value for the work you put into video content.

Use the right language

While it remains true that nearly any content posted on a regular basis can have a positive result for engagement with potential customers, what makes content development a professional art is the fact that there are some patterns which can distinguish a “good” post from an “average” post. We’re not even talking about a “bad” post – in this context, meaning one that works against your business interests. Offensive material would, for most industries, count as a bad post. What we’re looking at here is the opportunity to optimize postings from simply “Product x available” to “Shop now for your new Product x”. The former is a rather bland statement that merely announces availability, compared to the latter which touches on enthusiasm and personality. Here are some other examples:

“OK”	“Great!”
See our new Product X	Check out Product X
Top 10 new products	The most sought-after products of the year
You’ll love…	You’ll be amazed… or You’ll be inspired…
Let us show you	Come and explore
Be sure to check out our latest products	Don’t miss out on limited-time offers

Leverage built-in features

Instagram has a great sticker as part of Instagram Story called the countdown, making it possible for individuals and businesses to set a countdown clock for publishing new content. This feature is brilliant for generating curiosity and interest, particularly for product launches, business openings, special events and live streamed content.

Use quizzes

Through a Facebook lead gen campaign, you can also set up quizzes by using the lead form. Typically this feature is used to interact with the audience after they have clicked on your Facebook ad, and is meant to help categorize customers by obtaining their initial feedback on an offer or opportunity. Giving customers a quiz enables more active engagement and begins the customer on a journey. Questions that are on-topic (relevant to your products or services) while invoking common knowledge can give the prospective customer a good feeling for being smart and knowledgeable, effectively creating a positive association with their first experience.

Avoid the mistakes

As mentioned earlier, there is a way to place “bad” content online, and defeat the purpose of your own efforts. That’s why we recommend playing it safe from the start, avoiding political, religious or other potentially contentious issues. A quick search on Google will reveal gargantuan mistakes made in the past by well-known global brands. While they can buy their way out of a PR disaster, small and medium-sized businesses wouldn’t have the resources.

More subtle mistakes that many marketing teams make is to focus on branding. Brand and image are important, but the leveraging of good branding at the early stages of a marketing campaign is far outweighed by the need to educate your customers and raise awareness of the business. That’s why content rules the day for fast-growing businesses, enabling posted messages to reach more effectively into the customer’s needs and motivations for seeking out your products and services.

Closely related to an excessive focus on branding is a more practical mistake that is all-too-common, not giving customers a way to respond. Clever memes and stories are great to entertain your audience (and that has value), however give your customers a link, a phone number, a web address… anything that allows them to initiate a connection and reach out directly.

And finally, the most impactful mistake that companies make is to start a social media campaign and quit too early. Real results take time. At the heart of social media marketing is an effort to connect with customers, and to make your business a part of their thinking. Specifically, the aim of a social media campaign is to trigger action, preferably immediate action, but if the customer is not ready to respond, the posting must set a trigger which reminds them of your business at a later time. In this way, consistency and perseverance are everything when it comes to sustainable success.

Inspiring Word of Mouth through Social Media Posting

November 14, 2019 admin Leave a comment

In academic marketing jargon, social media is often considered to be a variation on word of mouth marketing. This view is a flattering portrayal of social media platforms in all their variations, and conforms to the standard approach to what these platforms would have its users believe, that social media posting is like a person-to-person conversation, but done through a digital platform.

While we know social media networks and the postings that are shared have a sort of conversational look and feel, particularly where comments and chat sessions are involved, the sort of mindset that is required of making an effective social media posting is entirely different from that of a personal conversation.

Consider the following:

Conversation	Social Media
Look them in the eyes and make yourself immediately vulnerable to their opinions (expressed verbally or expressed through gestures)	While the social vulnerability remains, the sense of your listeners’ opinions are delayed, there is no split-second feedback that you get from a conversation
Often spontaneous, with thoughts transferred to communication near instantly	While many social media postings are indeed an instant reaction to a thought (and then regretted later) social media by nature allows people to think about what they write or public in advance, and gives people time to cultivate a well-thought message (not that many people use that opportunity)
Generally unrecorded – the memory of the conversation is reliant on the other person’s ability to internalize messages, which in turn often depends on their emotional reaction to not only the words, but also the tone used to express	Recorded, for all posterity to see – therefore the memory of the message is also influenced by ways external factors can influence and change the meaning through a different context than the one originally intended.
In your face – it is nearly impossible to ignore someone who is speaking directly to you, the listener therefore has nowhere to hide	The audience may or may not regard anything you say

So conversation and social media are totally different. What of it?

We know the value of word of mouth marketing, or referral-based marketing. Social media’s greatest strength is in enabling a mass marketing message to be communicated at little cost to those who have spent time (and money) in developing and cultivating their online social networks. Prioritizing this type of network has brought amazing success to many businesses.

Focusing only on this aspect of social media may doom the businesses which fail to obtain maximum leverage from their social media investment.

How to maximize the investment?

The key here is to remember that everyone who sees your post not only has their own followers, but also has individuals in their network with whom they have actual – real, live – conversations on a daily basis. Breaking through the digital realm into the organic, analog world is an amazing feat in terms of the value-for-money impact it can have on your marketing campaign.

How can that be done?

There’s no magic to making it happen. We’re talking about hard-core messaging that is designed to elicit a human reaction that is so strong, that the reader or the viewer wants to walk away from their desktops or smartphones to tell someone else about what they just read.

While that precise scene rarely happens – ie., someone jumping from their desk and talking about what they just read – we know that people like to talk. What they talk about is highly influenced by what catches their attention and gives them a way to garner attention from others.

What kind of attention do people seek?

Tools of leadership (otherwise known as manipulation) are a key driver in relaying messaging. Therefore, social media content which conveys authority and knowledge are those which are most useful to the type of people who influence others.

Few companies have a plan to develop word of mouth marketing. Part of the reason for that reticence is that there is no budget for word of mouth marketing. As said by Jonah Berger in his book Contagious: Why Things Catch On, speaks about difficulty of developing a plan of action. As he has said, “You can shape it, you can encourage it, you can drive it, but you can’t buy it.”

That’s why Content Savants is pleased to present what may be your company’s first word of mouth advertising campaign strategy, in these succinct steps:

Step 1 – Shape it: More than what you want someone to talk about, decide how you want someone to feel when mention of your company, or your product, or service comes up in conversation. What feelings do you want to associate with your business?

Step 2 – Encourage it: The key here is to ensure that the messaging is relevant to the viewership. Implementing this strategy often means that social media campaigns must be more finely targeted. Rather than mass distributions to a large list of followers, narrowly-defined lists to followers with similar characteristics are often critical to the success of a message or posting. In this step, relevance is everything.

Step 3 – Drive it: Make people want to recount the message. Driving references, or more specifically referrals, requires that the content give the referring person a way to enhance their standing or stature vis-à-vis the ones they are conversing about. In the world of social media, memes which sound smart are top priority. Here are general content themes for driving word of mouth discussion:

Data which offers explanatory insights about which products/services work well and which ones do not
Information which succinctly explains why designs or works of art are better than others, with a bonus for characterizing admirers of competing works of art (thinking of fashion designs) as being inferior in terms of class and taste
Anecdotes which explain how things work, in a social or political context especially – and these tend to work better if they are cynical in nature
Funny messages which have a dual use in explaining human behavior
Comments which explain the universe and human nature in a way that someone who got in trouble should have known better.

Great ideas, now what?

Remember that investment into social media is not just about frequency, timing and the audience. It is also about content, and ensuring that the messaging has the intended outcomes.

This article is about driving word of mouth marketing into your social media marketing strategies. Will it have the intended outcome?

Back to Basics – Drawing Customers to your Online Presence

November 9, 2019 admin 1 Comment

Building an online presence is more than just activating a website. With the popularity of template websites enabled through WordPress (originally intended for frequent bloggers), or DIY website development on platforms such as WIX, the volume of businesses self-managing their online presence exploded. Along with that there was created a vast wasteland of online content receiving nothing more than the occasional click, often brought upon by a Google search that happened to contain a lucky phrase that matched something on the website.

The fastest and easiest way to bring customers to your online URL is pay-per-click advertisements on Google and other online platforms, including those focusing on social media content such as Facebook (and all the rest). Without a PPC budget, however, businesses must focus on organic search rankings through an SEO strategy. Companies which outsource this work find that often times they get what they pay for. Red Hat SEO techniques – ones which try to cheat the system – frequently produce good short-term positive results, but are eventually red-flagged by the search engine algorithm, and businesses can spend thousands of dollars and many months to restore their credibility in the sight of the search engines.

While an effective SEO campaign takes quite a bit of time or money (or both), low-budget businesses can see positive action with limited investment through a few approaches.

Emails: Now considered a bit old-fashioned and for many businesses, would require a very manual process to carry out, direct emails can still draw attention, and may be particularly effective if your business or service offer is high-valued with a small base of customers. Semi-original emails sent out in small volume (less than 10 at a time) are often not flagged as spam by the receiver’s host service, and therefore can serve as an effective way to highlight your business to the recipient.

Emails are still a great way to communicate with customers, as an easy format with which to include visuals, white papers and other educational content, links to other online resources, and all of that with a personal touch.

As always, some level of personalization is required, lest your business be seen as just another email spamming enterprise. Nonetheless, even if a customer does not read your entire message, or for that matter simply deletes most in-coming messages as part of a routine, a personalized subject header can be sufficient to remind customers of your presence and thereby build additional brand equity.

Here is an example of where multi-channel marketing strategies may be most effective. If you go to all the trouble to send out a personal email to an individual customer, picking up the phone and dialing direct could have a greater impact. Emails are most effective when they are a follow-up to some other direct communication. As a simple reminder that your business exists? Emails can help if they are not perceived as spam. There is a grey and sometimes very thin line between the two.

Social media: Once again, multi-channel marketing is important to give your customer a sense of sophistication in your product or service. Content Savants devotes a significant portion of its attention on social media content development and publishing strategies.

There is a lot to discuss in this category, however looking at if from the perspective of driving customers to your website, then that is absolutely essential. Memes and other postings don’t need to always be clever or colorful. A simple link with a descriptive comment can be sufficient to drive traffic. Too frequent posting will bore your followers. Too occasional, and you miss out on the opportunity to provide diverse and creative content.

Influencers: Akin to buying an audience, online influencers (including social media influencers or professional bloggers), can be an effective way to reach a niche audience. Although this type of promotion is not without a cost, the good news is that as influencing grows in prevalence as its own category of online marketing, the niche focus becomes more intense. What that means for your business marketing efforts is that there are more likely cost-effective options for social media influencers or bloggers, ones who have already attracted and cultivated the audience you are intending to reach.

While the influencer market remains a cowboy frontier, the most effective way for you to separate the wheat from the chaff is to search online and find social media influencers and bloggers who are relevant to your business. Otherwise, if your ad campaign is not necessarily targeted to a specific customer group, an accurate user profile – targeting a type of consumer – will be necessary along with matching that user profile to the profile of followers of your intended influencer. As with many marketing campaigns, accuracy in profiling is often as much an art as it is a science.

Costing social media marketing

November 8, 2019 admin Leave a comment

While many articles online regarding online marketing speak of the freeness of social media marketing, the fact remains that an effective campaign requires a combination of time and skill. These qualities can be purchased, but without them, a social media effort is little more than a trickle after a light rain. Getting over that hump is one of the greatest challenges for small businesses that venture unaided into social media.

To be sure, some business owners take to social media enthusiastically. Frequently their efforts pay off. Having a strong social media presence signals to your customers that your business means business. It is a way to communicate confidence and strength, both of which are personas that attract more customers. If success begets success, then active social media marketing is a way for a fledgling business to jump on the virtuous cycle of success.

Newcomers to social media advisory often wonder about the pricing, and the cost of a robust social media campaign. Costs range nearly anywhere your imagination can wander. Some media companies which focus their operations on one or two types of activities (Content Savants, for example, specializes in meme production and blogging), whereas other media companies can provide a full range of services, including PPC marketing strategy, SEO and overall campaign management.

Businesses which seek a narrow solution may pay a minimum of around RM 1,000 for regular content development (Content Savants offers daily meme production at less than that for monthly contracts), while full service campaign management may start at around RM 10,000 per month. Both services can offer great value in marketing, depending on your scale of business and capacity for growth.

From a practical perspective, it is useful to look at outside marketing support as falling into three categories:

Category 1: Making noise: publishing blogs and memes or other social media posts on a regular basis can make a significant difference in your online business profile. If we were to graph the number of businesses on a horizontal axis showing the number of posts per week, there would be a tall bulge at the early part of the curve, indicating there are many businesses, many of which are your competitors, that engage in occasional social or online media posting. Many businesses rely on location and word of mouth for their business growth. Social media is an online word of mouth advertising, and with occasional activity, your presence can gradually grow. Nonetheless, having a consistent and steady presence can move your business past the initial bulge of social media posters into the territory of value-added posters – businesses which are known for their activity and whose messages bring value to their respective communities and followers. The first level of support from social media consultants can bring a business to this level.

Category 1 typical service cost: RM 1,000 to 2,000 per month

Category 2: Getting serious: services which provide the second level of support often include more detailed tracking of social media engagement with potential customers, with analysis of a wider range of online activity to both inform development of content as well as to track success of the overall campaign. Businesses which seek this level of support are those which see social media as being an important part of their marketing (if not, the major part of their marketing). Businesses which see social media marketing as significant to their success frequently have staff in-house who are at least skilled in content development and who dedicate a significant portion of their time each week to ensuring that content is developed and published. Often times their campaigns are also managed in-house, but they may seek outside support in the form of blog writing or other content development, which on its own would fall into the first category above.

Category 2 typical service cost: RM 2,000 to 5,000 per month

Category 3: Focus on the core: businesses which already pursue sophisticated marketing campaigns and which have chosen to focus on their core business (without investing in advanced in-house marketing capabilities) would require outside support to fulfill a wide range of marketing activities. While a senior in-house individual would oversee marketing campaigns and their success, an external media agency (or a combination thereof) would be used to design, develop and implement the campaigns. While these services come at a substantial cost, businesses which have achieved this level of market maturity would require – and be willing to pay – for top-level service so as to enable long-term growth or protect market share against equally-ambitious competitors.

Category 3 typical service cost: RM 5,000 to 20,000 per month (and above)

What is true for all categories of social media service is that there are very few businesses which cannot benefit or do not need additional support in their online marketing efforts. More people than ever are relying on social media and online research to guide them in purchasing decisions. Online marketing strategies are having greater impact than ever before in moving people toward not only preferring certain products or brands, but to even want certain products at all.

Fashion is an example of an industry that is fast-driven by social media marketing. Fashion trends are defined by popular usage, and increasingly driven by influencers. For fashion in particular, influencers have substantial… influence. Unlike celebrities, they are seen as being normal people who, through hard work and brilliant content, have worked their way to a position of respect within the industry and among its user base, and for this reason their opinions are highly valued. While a social media star may be in fact another type of celebrity, there is no denying their ability to sway and drive public opinion on fashion, trends and style.

With the rise of popularity of social influencers and the endorsements they offer, this niche online activity is becoming a mainstay of the industry, where businesses of all types will soon have a lead influencer for their category of business, and with even greater granularity to follow, for their category of business within their specific geography.

For businesses, the start of the social media strategy is category 1 as described above, making some noise. Most business owners will choose to do this themselves at the start. In time, the demands of business and the need to focus on core customers and activities will require that they consider external support, mainly for the “grunt work” of regular and frequent content development. When they see the potential of social media and its ability to bring in new customers, the next logical progression will be toward Category 2 and 3.

Alternatively, some business owners will see that actually, doing the social media work in house is quite fascinating, and when you get the knack of it, can be a lot of fun. Either way, greater activity online is a win for the business and a win for the online community.

A Social Media Case Study – Pet Boarding

November 8, 2019 admin 6 Comments

One of the first clients for Content Savants was a small pet boarding business in Kuala Lumpur, Park City Pet Boarding located in Sri Petaling shop area. With the initiation of a regular and frequent campaign of posting memes on Facebook and Instagram, positive results were seen in less than a month. A fledgling small business which frequently had days with zero customers quickly transitioned into a business with a regular trickle of customers. Continuation of the early positive results led to growth over time, and after four months, the business turned a highly-subsidized operation into monthly profits.

While a “regular trickle of customers” was not the end goal, this situation represented a substantial improvement in operations, and helped to build momentum which culminated in its profitability. Content Savants has continued working with the business to meet the owners’ goals of expanding its service offer. The initial results, however, show a monthly RoI (not annual, as RoI typically conveys) of over 100% on the cost of social media marketing.

The content service provided by Content Savants enabled regular and frequent posting on social media accounts, an activity which serviced to draw attention to the business among the thousand or so followers which had been accumulated in the business’s three prior years of operation. The number of followers also saw a gradual increase of about 5% per month. While this metric calls for further optimization, the priority focus for the business was to do a better job of attracting existing customers. In other words, at this time, other metrics were of secondary importance to the business’s bottom line. Content Savants highlighted this approach in our initial discussions with the business team, and developed a cost-effective strategy to see early, positive results.

Development of the social media theme was based on two motivating factors: 1) enabling a positive association with the business to develop over time a stronger connection between customers and the business, and 2) to convey the personal nature of the pet boarding service versus competitors which frequently caged up their overnight guests. Park City saw this factor as key to distinguishing themselves from the competition, and to enabling a basis through which they could justify a higher fee compared to their nearby competitors.

Implementation was carried out through the development of content that invoked association with well-known personalities. Quotes about dogs and cats from authors, actors and other celebrities were developed into memes and published on Facebook and Instagram. This content supported the first theme of enabling a positive association with the business. By invoking quotes of famous people, the business also stood beside individuals with authority, generating a positive impression by customers who would recognize many of the famous personalities who also loved animals.

The second theme was achieved through inclusion of original photographs taken at the shop, depicting animals in a fun and playful setting. A wide range of images were selected, showing dogs and cats of different breeds, and also featuring other unique pets that the shop takes in from time to time.

While the initial phase of Park City’s online presence has been sufficient to build the business to profitability (and over time, generate a social media RoI that can only be expressed in multiples), the next phase will require a more sophisticated management of a marketing campaign which combines elements of online social media with regular blogging on the business website, combined with a pay-per-click strategy that is guided by a detailed tracking of customer response rates.

A more holistic and comprehensive approach will be the next step to raise Park City to a level above its more dominant competitors and to establish the business as a leader in pet boarding services across Malaysia. At the same time, the early success of Park City’s approach demonstrates the amazing potential of social media marketing to raise business profile and attract the attention of online customers.