#Hashtags. News Feed. Trending. Stories. Followers.
These are buzzwords that make up our daily conversations. Social media marketing is utilized now more than ever. We continuously witness the overall impact of our social media campaigns; it’s a huge part of our marketing strategy. Whether we are working on our own content calendar or that of a client, we are constantly strategizing the message and our target audience.
Just today, one of our clients told our CEO, Christina Dickerson, that a majority of their new customers learn about their business through their social media marketing that we create and execute. Those are the messages that validate that our marketing strategy is on target. Essentially, the intent of social media marketing is the same as traditional publicity and marketing campaigns … it is all about strategy, content and messaging. For many of our clients, we believe social media campaigns work best in conjunction with a traditional media and marketing campaign.
What makes social media so different in the marketing world is the rapid introduction and adoption of new platforms and their continuous enhancements. It is truly remarkable how it’s growth and change continues to expand. Whether we are talking about Facebook or Instagram, each platform’s need and ability to advance in technology propels them to constantly focus on development and creation. Because of the constant cultivation of ideas, we as marketers need to explore these concepts and continuously learn and evolve our creative messaging capabilities.
When Instagram first introduced the concept of ‘Stories,’ it was an exciting new development for marketers because it gave us a fresh way to showcase clients. We were no longer confined to a limited theme or color scheme on our feed. It broadened our content as an additional avenue of highlighting posts about clients, upcoming events or product launches etc. With this informal format, it allows users to have fun with the vast amount of emojis, gifs and fun fonts. One way that we embraced this exciting addition to our social media strategy on DCC’s Instagram was to give our followers a “behind the scenes” look at our world.
Although some critics would say that Facebook isn’t as relevant now, we would disagree. We believe that for many businesses, it remains a consistent means of reaching a target audience. For many of our clients, especially those we plan events for, we have found that purchasing an ad, even a minimal ad buy, enhances engagement. Once you understand your target audience, you have the ability to tailor Facebook ads to the demographic you want to reach. A prime example is our event, Savor Pittsburgh, a is a culinary competition of over 20 restaurants. We utilized Facebook ads to let our followers, and the people who weren’t following Savor Pittsburgh to know about the amazing variety of participating restaurants. These ads were also an opportunity for us to garner extra exposure for the restaurants as a way of recognizing their large contribution of product and labor to the event. We started doing $10, 3-day ads featuring our participating restaurants. We worked with the restaurants to determine what we featured and then we went in and carefully selected specific interests for our target audience. Overall, it was a tremendous success: our post engagement increased, Savor Pittsburgh gained new followers, website clicks increased and so did ticket sales! Another perk was the ability to run this ad on Instagram as well.
With the start of a New Year, we have been reading numerous articles about the importance of strong social media campaigns and the trends we can expect for 2019.
One of the recent articles that Social Media Today published is the 5 Social Media Trends to Watch.
In essence, this article recommends:
1. Personal Branding as part of your company’s marketing strategy. This is a large part of our own marketing campaign because we believe that most of our followers want to know the team members behind the company. We see great engagement when the posts are more personalized.
2. Long-form content for greater Search Engine Optimization Impact. This article suggests that blogs with a higher word count are best for impacting your SEO.
3. Personalized Marketing. This has to be what every retailer is targeting: creating customized marketing based on the interests of the buyer. We all see this as we scroll through our IG feed and continue to see ads based on our browsing trends. These ads definitely catch our attention … especially prior to one of our events when we tend to do more browsing for the next best outfit!
4. Video! It makes sense and based on this article, we will see videos become more prominent in social media campaigns.
5. Pay to Play. It’s no different than a traditional publicity campaign, purchasing ad space guarantees a better reach. The good news: buying ads on social media can target a specific demographic and it is cost-effective.
From our perspective, staying on top of the ever-changing world of social media is essential.
Stay creative.
Seize the Moment.
Stay focused on your message.
Stay engaged with your followers.
Evolve your social media options to best stay on trend.
As our social media clientele varies from financial wealth advisors, restaurants, non-profits to events we love the creative aspect of creating content calendars. We absolutely love creating new concepts and effective ways to stay engaged. If one of your 2019 Goals was to create a stronger marketing campaign, let’s enjoy a coffee and brainstorm creative together!