The Most Effective Ways to Increase ROI Through Social Media

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As we all know, social media is an essential part of consumer’s lives, but social media operations are actually a huge part of a company’s return on investment as well. 90% of U.S. businesses are on social media for marketing purposes, however many of them are simply not getting a great ROI. A lot of this is due to their poor social media performance. A study found that only 1 in 5 of the brands surveyed indicated that they never had conversations about social ROI. It is a topic that gets looked over way too often. Out of the total worldwide population of 7.8 billion people, the internet has 4.54 billion users, which proves that there is an immense market online. In 2020, companies must take ROI into consideration in order for their brand to thrive as the world rapidly shifts. This concept is quite complex and takes time to incorporate it into your business plan. However, having a social media marketing agency, like Bright Age, will help your brand succeed in doing so, as our marketing specialists are experts in this concept.

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Measuring what needs to be fixed is the first step in improving your social ROI. Ask yourself these questions: Why are you using social media? What is the main goal of social media marketing? Will this benefit my community? Really analyze these ideas and gather things that you want to measure. Identifying goals and measuring social media metrics will really help increase your ROI. Social media helps to amplify brand transparency. In fact, 86% of Americans say transparency on social media is more important than ever before. This makes it certain that consumers are willing to take their business to a competitor if there is a lack of transparency. This is one of the ways a company’s ROI can decrease through social media. Knowing your target market and developing an understanding of their consumer behavior will help you be more digitally transparent with them.

It is important to know the type of content that your audience engages with online. Low engagement on social media is a huge problem brands face. There are several reasons why engagement could be lacking, but one reason could be simply because they may not have the time to consistently keep up with all of the consistent posting, creative content, and community management that goes into every social media network. This is where a social media marketing agency comes into place. Social media is currently over 10% of the average company’s marketing budget. However, in order to actually increase ROI, that 10% must be generating useful and engaging content. Much of this incorporates the use of software that social media marketing agencies use in order to improve their performance.

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Gaining more followers of course helps draw awareness to your brand, but keeping your existing, loyal followers is just as important. From a marketing standpoint, although it may be rewarding, it is more cost efficient to keep existing customers happy, than to get new ones. Follower retention is extremely important on social media. As previously mentioned, transparency will help increase follower retention and in the long run, increase ROI. A few top things to consider when posting content is making sure it is resonating with your followers, making sure it is engaging and interactive, reassuring your followers that your networks are a place of fresh, relevant content, and simply keeping up with regular market trends.

Developing a connection with global influencers is a huge plus if your brand is ready for it, especially in 2020. For Instagram, there are currently 500,000 active influencers on the network. Having people who inspire others everyday representing your brand is a vital use of social media marketing. Having the opportunity to incorporate influencer marketing is a great source of curating relevant content, relating it to current market trends.

Lastly, it is important to be authentic. Represent your brand in a way that is crisp and unique to the public. The culture of social media is revolved around modern, fresh content and your followers will recognize this. Don’t be afraid to break the mold and try new things. Experimenting through social media can be a great way to increase ROI.

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As we navigate through the ever-evolving technological world, it is easy to slip through the cracks and hurt your brand. Developing an effective social media strategy can be slightly overwhelming, but Bright Age has you covered with all things digital. Increasing ROI effectively through social media is somewhat of a new concept. With social media vastly growing, try reaching out to a social media marketing agency to help improve your knowledge on how to maximize social media ROI.

How to Develop a Digital Media Buying Strategy on Social Media

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Regardless of the brand you represent, the size of your company, or the foundation you have built, developing a digital media buying strategy is essential for maintaining structure and growth for your brand. The fundamentals that make up your social media buying strategy include advertising, employees, the software you use, etc. There are many steps that need to be taken when developing a buying strategy for your business. Having a digital marketing agency such as Bright Age will help you through this systematic process.

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The first step in developing a digital media buying strategy is to determine goals and set a budget at the beginning of the year. These social media goals vary upon the company, but overall, they should be things that you plan on putting money into. For example, if one of your goals is to create more engaging advertisements, you may be putting a large sum of money into paid social media ads. This is something you would put in your budget, which is the next leap in developing a digital media buying strategy. It is a way to keep track of costs, determine your social ROI, and overall to make sure you are not using more than you have. It can be a traditional budget, where you start with a sum of money, allocating amounts of each category, a flexible budget, where if one category runs out of money and another one has some to spare, you would just move it over, or a zero budget, where you basically start every category with a budget of zero dollars, increasing the amounts per category while justifying the cost every time.

Social media is ever evolving, so it is important to determine exactly when it is a good idea to take a “leap of faith” and jump into something drastic. As the social world evolves, you must evolve with it, which may be overwhelming. With this said, new features on social media platforms are something that you may want to incorporate into your social media strategy. Unique content creation, paid advertisements, and creative promotions are all things that will help your audience identify your brand. These are also things to incorporate into your budget. Content creation takes time, money, and creativity, which is what a digital marketing agency will help maintain. Speaking strictly on advertising, this is one of the biggest budget areas. The best way to determine where to put most of the advertising money, would be to first determine which social media channel is most relevant to your brand. If your most engaging channel is Instagram, it would make the most sense to put more advertising money toward that specific network. Depending on what industry your brand falls under, the cost per click will vary.

The software your company is using is something to consider as well. Making sure you are using what is necessary for your brand is the key component when determining what subscriptions to be a part of, and what to renew on a monthly basis. Analytics tools are essential for many companies using social media for marketing. A social media agency will manage this for your brand when evaluating your social media report. This will track things such as live engagement, cost per click, follower rate, likes, etc., which in return will help you determine what category to spend more time in.

Influencer marketing is one of the biggest topics in the social media world today. A decade ago, that sentence would read differently. Because of brand deals, influencer marketing has been widely used especially in the past few years. This is a great tool to use if applicable to your brand. For example, clothing, wellness and beauty, and makeup brands use this tactic a lot. Influencer marketing tends to follow the more authentic, casual appeal when choosing what photos to post while representing your brand. The influencer marketing industry is huge. In fact, the industry is set to reach $10 billion in worth by 2020, which is why many companies are taking advantage of this opportunity if it fits their brand image.

Analyzing what, where, when, and how to incorporate specific segments into your brand’s budget for the following year can be overwhelming. While we have highlighted many things to consider in this decision-making process, incorporating a digital marketing agency into your brand will immensely help this process. The digital world as we know it is only projected to increase in size, which is why it is essential to know what to represent when developing a digital media buying strategy on social media.

How to Use Facebook and Instagram Live to Market Your Brand

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Live streaming has become a popular trend that brands are utilizing to market themselves on a variety of social media platforms. Since live streaming was not offered on social media apps previously, platforms like Facebook and Instagram have followed the trend and allowed users to become part of the experience as well. Viewers would rather watch videos via live stream than watch a video through a traditional post, so why not use live streaming to help elevate your social media strategy?

screenshot of Sephore Instagram Live to show example of social media strategy

It is important for brands to utilize Instagram and Facebook Live because it creates a personal connection between the brand and the viewer, as the content is natural and unedited. A brand can utilize live streaming in a variety of ways: to reveal new products, debut recent initiatives, or cover live events in real-time. Live streaming is geared towards an in-the-moment experience, causing users to feel an urgency to watch the live video or they will miss the opportunity to see what the brand is promoting within the live stream.

On Facebook Live, viewers are able to respond during the live video using different “reaction emojis” to be able to show the brand how they are reacting to their content within the live stream. By live streaming, it allows viewers to feel like their feedback is being heard. Both Facebook and Instagram provide viewers with the option of responding within the comment section for questions, comments, or feedback that the streamer could respond back to within the live stream if they choose.

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When using Instagram and Facebook Live, it automatically moves your content to the first spot within the “Stories” feed, showing users that you are currently live streaming. These platforms are prioritizing live stream content as they want users to be able to have the opportunity to interact real time with the streamer. Live streaming also acts as a free advertisement tool to help expose your live streams to your followers, as a free notification is sent when you start the live stream to users who prefer to receive Instagram Live notifications. After the live stream is over, brands can post the completed live stream to their story so users who were unable to watch, still have access to it for 24 hours.

A variety of brands and influencers have used Facebook or Instagram Live to increase their social media marketing and have been successful doing so. Let’s check out a few different ways you can be successful using live streaming!

Ways to Be Successful Using Instagram and Facebook Live

  1. Understand Your Purpose: Think to yourself, what is the point of this live stream? To gain more followers? To launch a new product? To receive feedback from viewers? Understand what you are trying to accomplish throughout the livestream, so you can strategize different tactics to reach it.
  2. Set a Goal: Before you start live streaming, create a clear goal of the things you want to accomplish during the live stream. Understand what target audience you want to reach and the number of viewers you want to reach throughout the live stream.
  3. Engage Your Audience: Engaging with your viewers allows a relationship between the viewer and the brand to be built. Creating a strong relationship takes time and effort, so responding to comments and answering questions allows the viewer to feel like the brand cares about their opinion.
  4. Promote Your Live Stream: Post a few days before the live stream on different social media platforms announcing that you are going to be live streaming on a certain day and time. This allows hype to be built for the live stream and gets followers curious as to what is going to be announced.
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Live streaming can be a new way of elevating your social media strategy, while also creating a strong relationship between the brand and the viewer. Viewers want to trust the brands they spend their money on, so live streaming is a perfect way to show reliability and authenticity.

 

How to Establish a Successful 2020 Social Media Strategy

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As we get closer to ending another year, companies should start thinking about how they want to establish a successful social media strategy in 2020. Social media has taken off in recent years and will continue to change and evolve with each coming year, but with help from a creative marketing agency like Bright Age, your brand can keep up with the changes in social media and figure out successful strategies. Some of the ways a creative marketing agency can help you establish a successful social media strategy are by building your community, figuring out the timing and frequency of your posts, and planning and creating content, along with reporting and analytics.

How to Build a Community

Once you identify your target audience, your strategy on building your brand’s community should be focused around these people first. This way you gain a following of people who are actually interested in your brand who will hopefully become loyal members. You can attract your target audience by having paid and organic strategies to help boost your following. Some of the goals with these strategies are to gain more traffic on your pages, bring awareness about your brand to increase sales, increase your engagements, and generate leads for customers to receive certain content of yours. Each strategy, paid and organic, has similar goals but there are different ways of accomplishing them. An example of one paid strategy that Bright Age implements for our clients are Facebook “page like” campaigns to help our clients accomplish the goals stated above.

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Timing and Frequency

Since each brand has different content to offer on their social media profiles, a creative marketing agency can help you find out how many posts would be beneficial to your company. Some companies benefit from a post once a day while others may need a post once a week. This depends on what your goal is with social media.

Once you have an idea of how many posts to send out, a creative marketing agency can help determine the best times for posts to be shared on each social media platform. On the different social media platforms, each day of the week has different times when most engagements occur. For example, looking at the global engagements on Facebook, the best day to post is Wednesday at eleven o’clock in the morning and one o’clock in the afternoon. On the other hand, the lowest engagement day during the week for Facebook global engagements is Sunday.

graph of the beest times to post on Facebook

Another example of time scheduling is with Instagram posts. Looking at the global engagement times on Instagram, the best times to post are Wednesday’s at eleven o’clock in the morning and Friday’s from ten to eleven o’clock in the morning. The worst time to post is Sunday because there is the least amount of engagements that day.

graph of the best times to post on Instagram

These are just two of many examples in determining the best time to post on different social media platforms. Depending on what your brand is will ultimately decipher what time is best for the posts to be sent out on each platform. This could be difficult to figure out, but when you hire a creative marketing agency, they can help you find out which day and time would be best to share your content. By knowing the number of posts one brand needs and the best times to share their content, agencies can create organic content days in advance to schedule different profiles throughout the upcoming weeks on the best days and times.

How to Plan and Create Content

When creating your content, you want to ensure you’re adding value to your community. For example, you want to tell your followers your brand’s story through what you post. Some ways you are able to tell your brand’s story is through videos, images, and tutorials of what your brand does.  Depending on your company, the content that works best for you will vary. This can be tricky to figure out unless you team up with a creative marketing agency to help you find out which form is the best for your company. For example, with Woodland Hills Magazine, one of the clients of Bright Age,  we post images with captions that lead their followers to their website to read more about the articles they offer along with getting them to look more into who they are as a company. We also engage with their followers by posting fan photos to gain more one-on-one connections with their audience and build up their community.

Woodland Hills content post on Instagram

Reporting and Analytics

When it comes to social media, you want to keep track of which posts are receiving positive reactions from your audience and working for your brand. By keeping track of a month to month basis and tracking each week in a document, you will be able to see the trends of your content with your followers. An example of how  Bright Age does this for one of our clients, Galaxy Theatres, is by taking reports from Sprout Social, Facebook Business Manager, Google Analytics, and Google Ads to gather the data of Galaxy Theatres’ profiles over the past week. Then we put all the data into one document for the month, which allows the client to easily analyze and see how their social media pages are doing and what their next steps should be going into the upcoming month.

Graph on Sprout Social for an example of how a report looks.

By teaming up with a creative marketing agency, like Bright Age, you can receive help with tracking your data and seeing the trends of your social media postings. This last step in establishing a successful social media strategy for the upcoming year is the finishing touch to your social media strategy masterpiece. By completing all these steps, you will be on your way to creating a strong social media presence going into the New Year!