Social Media Planning - Binary

Why you need a Social Media Strategy

Post author By binadmin
Post date 05 Aug 2017

Social Media planning

For organizations it has become highly important to follow a specific strategy that will help them achieve their company goals. Strategies are nothing but a set of defined rules and methods that organizations will follow at a given point of time to achieve strategic goals. Social media strategy regulates the use of methods supporting platforms and tools. Social strategies play an important role in engaging your audience to your business. Some businesses do not make use of planning but important is to know that strategies will help them to stand out even if they are not actively involved, because their competitors are. Let us discuss few of the key points to consider Why Social Media Strategy is a useful for your Business

Social Media is vast and growing

Social Media is stealthily growing quicker than we think. The key factors driving the social web according to Global Web Index study are the use of Mobiles and Older User Adoption. The mobile internet usage increased to 818.4m that is by almost 60.3% between 2012 and 2014. The people in the age group of 55-64 years age group are adopting Twitter at fastest demographic rate of 79% since 2012. As compared to this, the fastest growing demographic on Facebook and Google+ stands at 45-54 years of age. Overall globally there has been an improved mobile connectivity; people are using mobiles “on-the-go”. People are using social networks like never before, they are getting online, sharing the watching the videos. The Ruder Finn social media usage research in the US shows why people go online and why social outings are the driving elements.

A targeted social media strategy helps to focus on using relevant platforms to connect with new and existing customers.

Social Media influences Buying Decisions

The Social media trends keeps changing, right now the focus is on commerce and personalization. Earlier it was audience building and engagement. The platforms increasingly lured marketers with improved APIs and smart targeting. It included the ability for uploading email lists for running personal remarketing campaigns. With the use of Facebook API marketers’ helps to manage audience data for custom audience targeting, creating the campaigns and ads, building custom dashboards and run analytics. The Crowdtap research shows 64% of 3,000 people surveyed make use of social for shopping purposes, it is driven by retailers to target consumers with personal offers and deals on social networks.

Almost 46% of social media users are using social platforms while they are thinking of making a purchase. 40% of users are deciding of buying while already making use of social media platforms, this also includes reviews and recommendations. The recommendations from peers are influencing factors when it comes to holiday purchases. Each social network plays a vital role in the purchase cycle. Some social networks works better with visual products where people find inspiration. Facebook is better for businesses for sharing content and finding promotions.

Strategy Absence gives Competitors the benefit

Every organization today is following some kind of strategies that aligns with their business goals. Marketers prepare a strategy that has a framework through which they can plan, prioritize, execute, measure and optimize. A proper framework will give better results because the activity has been designed and has a direction.

The absence of proper social strategy will not give a clear idea if the campaigns are successful or not. Simply posting social content would not always show results, the efforts that are being put up should have some direction and some objective in mind.
A non-structured approach will lead to gap in communication and measurement. The marketing team would not know what to post, when to post, how, to whom and why to post. The savvy competitors’ works smarter by engaging customers having clear objectives, goals and targets to perform better and give better measuring tools.

Active Customers on Social Media

The new technologies have emerged as a manifestation of all social tools that work with integrations to give finest benefits to the users of the technology. People can access, use and share the information based on their choices. Many people simply make use of Social platforms like Facebook to read content rather actually reading any blogs. It doesn’t amount to a total number of audience, although a subset, some customers may want an information from a social network. Twitter is highly known amongst brand for providing customer service, it acts as a good backbone for brands looking to solve customer enquiries and act as a problem resolution channel.

Strategy is required by brands to connect with its customers through strategic thinking. The social strategy needs proper aligning with other communication channels to define its role and understand.

Social Networks have Key Influencers

Influencers can turn tables in a matter of just few minutes, hours or days, so never underestimate the power of peers. It is a known fact that over years, retailers have seen increase in conversion rates by the power of peer influence. The feedbacks from other customers are seen as worth. Endorsements from experts help to increase brand credibility. The high-end tech markets have led to more people relying on opinions from experts in the field or celebrity or a famous person’s endorsements.

It is highly important for brands to be part of influencer’s world, if you don’t; you have the bigger risk of losing out on market share that has more aware competitors that are creative and innovative with their campaigns.

Social networks can Make or Break a Brand

Social networks help brands to deliver an experience to users, they are good valuable resource to uphold a particular reputation hence reputations are enhanced or destroyed on social networks. Social platforms give voice to the users to have their voice heard on the networks. They are transparent and portable and are readily available to users. The below example shows Aldi social team; launched a genuine marketing campaign which attracted a lot of negative tweets and trolls.

Many companies have faced social media backlash and they literally struggle to cope with negative comments and feedbacks. Some companies having social media strategy with crisis response have failed at giving handling such backlash and bring back the same reputation to the brands. The damage is irreparable so it is best advised to have a social media strategy that helps to take effective steps towards maintaining online and offline reputation.

Social Media Planning and Aligning with other Channels

Post author By binadmin
Post date 02 Aug 2017

Social Media Marketing plays an essential role in the implementation for varied marketing strategies. Brands today are coming forward to accepting newer planning and implement strategies alongside aligning with other channels. Marketing Calendar forms as a rock solid pillar for the success of the strategies in business.

Role of a Marketing Calendar

The organizations today are resorting to following a specific plan to outline their business processes. Hence, a Marketing Calendar comes handy to follow the guidelines set and expectations to reform with brand objectives. A Marketing calendar is a plan that outlines the key campaigns for the year; they follow a monthly cycle rule. The content calendar helps in defining big campaigns, promotions, key messages, CTAs and different channels that it shall deliver in. Social Media helps to align with the calendar and it is executed across different channels simultaneously. The core message is to promote with a slight different execution in every channel. The marketing calendar is flexible that allows to change the marketing plan and the team.

Custom Marketing Messaging for Social Media

The Marketing calendar offers a campaign level plan. Given below are some of the examples:

Product Campaigns:

The new product launches offer product imagery that helps to create new boards on Pinterest, Instagram Photos, etc.
Make use of Visual posts on Twitter then only text.
Using Animation to bring products to life Example: gif images, short videos.

Events:

Engaging photos with the use of photography for visual networks like Instagram.
Adding new events to Facebook and geo-tag locations.
Announcing the events on Twitter having the link to the “About” landing page
Using the events or campaign hashtags in different posts.

Brief the social team for handling the campaign activities

The campaigns are created with the sole purpose of Marketing. An offline ad is shared by the user on social networks that generates interactions with other users. The Social teams should be aware of what is happening, when, where and why. It has to plan to take advantage of the campaign in the social space and ensure the monitoring of social channels and brand mentions.

Social Organic Marketing

Social Marketing is done to get best results on Search Engine Ranking Algorithms. The brand should look out for ways where they can merge the key content with landing page URLs; it can be shared socially to maximum the reach. It includes activities like promoting new landing pages through social networks or posting the links to latest content like videos and blogs.

The social teams can make use of social research tools like Buzzsumo that helps to find the content and the keyword that is most popular. The brands can use this insight to work out the style of content that would be useful to the social audiences. The Social and SEO teams can work together to analyze the content trends and share information to inform the plans.

Understand the difference between the Paid Social and Paid Search

Paid Social and Paid Search requires a lot of honest efforts in researching to get targets to your audience effectively. It requires targeted ad copy and a structure to run the campaigns so right ads reaches to the right people. Paid Social is a form of push marketing that requires segment and structure for the activity so that best optimization can be made on ROI by using the data that is generated. The paid social planning is effective in blending the right resource. Paid Social is an intensive tool that helps to manage the high standards as compared to the Paid Search.

Social Media ad tools offers various targeting and goal options hence it’s important to get the right grip with the platforms that you can start before planning.

Paid Social and Paid Search informing each other

These two are different techniques but they should be well integrated. The money spent on optimizing paid search creative and landing pages can be used for informed paid search campaigns. The keyword data should be full of useful insights. You can apply your keyword learning to the social scene and use those keywords for driving social keyword research. You can also make use of the CRM data that helps with social targeting by creating look alike used on existing customer profiles.

It is highly important for both teams to coordinate well with each other, it’s important to share the data, plans and insights.

Use the Social Networks for Event Marketing

Given below are some of the methods to maximize social reach during and after the event. It has helped good number of organizations create social media marketing plans and events. The simple activity can help drive good increase in social engagement

Remind people of #hashtags during the event and help them to post live by making use of those hashtags.
Include the live tweeter that shares your key content like quotes and pictures from your event.
The thread can be made for every event and it can be shared even when the event is fresh in the minds of people.
Publish a blog write-up and videos sharing key insights and share it on social channels after some days of the event. For videos, tweet each speaker the link that will encourage them to share.
Contact Social influencers, share your event content with them and ask them to share. Parallel, you can also create event photos for creating a Facebook album.

Social Media helps to extend life of an event, the content created can be used to share and maximize the benefits by reaching more audiences.

Adding Social Data to CRM Contacts

Tools like Full Contact is a useful tool that helps to upload customer email addresses and add social data when needed. It can also directly imbibe Twitter handles. The audience can be fragmented to differentiate the high-value customers and also deliver personalized communication. You can do it through email and it is highly important to have alignment of CRM and Social Data, it helps to enable more personal style of communication. Remarketing tools like Facebook are used for Paid Social, it helps to enrich CRM database with customers’ social handles.