Social Media Strategy – Page 4

Benefit of Having a Social Media Presence Across Multiple Platforms

September 1, 2020

With billions of people in the world, it is impossible to assume that everyone is on the same social media platform. Social media marketing is an amazing tool that many companies are using in order to reach and expand their audience. But is one social platform enough? In order to effectively market any brand, product, or company, one must utilize the ever-growing list of social media platforms that are out there. A social media marketing agency can help you determine how to maximize the use of each social channel for your business.

Having an audience is part of what makes a business successful. In order to include and grow your audience, your business should be accessible to their preferred social media everyone has a different preference for social media, it is more effective to expand to a handful of platforms, rather than to only have one. This also establishes a connection and forms a community in the platform itself. For example, all of those that follow your company on Facebook will be able to connect together, form groups, and spread the word of your company on that platform. People will often use social media to further communicate with the company as well.

Customer reviews and experiences with a company are extremely important. They are what controls the reputation of a company. When someone experiences something negative, most of the time they go right to the social media page of the company and write out their bad experience for everyone to see. Customer care through social media will not only give the company a chance to respond to those comments but also will make the customer feel more connected to the company. This is easier for the customer when the business is easily accessible to them and when the social media site used has a direct message option. If a customer is upset and is not able to find a way to voice their concerns, they may be swayed to look for another company to use. If your competitor is more active on social media platforms, upset customers may flock to them instead.

Odds are that your competitor is using multiple social media marketing platforms. According to Statista, in 2017, 90% of businesses were marketing their companies using social media.By expanding to other outlets online, you are just as accessible, if not more, as your opponents. By looking up another company, you can see what platforms they use and do not use. By using the same platforms as your competitors, you expand your network community and give your targeted audience a variety of companies to choose from.

Before putting your business on every social media platform out there, it is more effective to look at what audience you want to reach and then what social media they prefer. This means to see the top three or four used social media platforms for your targeting demographic and use them to advertise your company. Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter are just a few of the leading social media platforms that businesses use for marketing.

The ways in which you post are just as important as being on the platform itself. Prosperous companies consistently post a range of quality content. Consistent posting does not mean to post sporadically. It means to have a routine in which you post so your followers can expect when the next promotion or giveaway is posted. In addition to consistent posts, the quality of the posts has just as much importance. The posts that are created should have something to do with the company, products, or audience they are promoting and connecting. A range of content is included in the quality of the content. If you are always posting the same thing, viewers tend to get bored. A range of different photos, videos, and interesting events will create a more interesting page for the viewer. For example, Galaxy Theatres’ Instagram posts are movie-related happenings such as trailers, memes, and actors or theatre promotions such as movie ticket giveaways or special discounts.

Recently, the world has been forced to remain inside, giving people even more time to be online. Simple tasks, such as grocery shopping, can now be done with apps. Over a short period of time, we have moved as online as we can. Although social media marketing began years ago, it is now almost required that a company be functioning online. This includes services, consultations, and advertisements. By changing to a more internet-dominated world, social media marketing is imperative for a company to flourish. A company will only get a full audience scope, high content levels, and future growth if it maintains multiple social media platforms. If you are looking for a way to expand your followings, a social media marketing agency, such as Bright Age, can take your business to the next level when it comes to social media engagement. Connect with Bright Age and watch your audience and company grow!

How to Establish Your Perfect Brand

July 10, 2020

Determining your company’s brand can be an intimidating task if you don’t know how to approach it, but it is one of the most crucial parts of marketing. With a unique and effective brand identity, you can develop a social media management strategy that leaves buyers with a good impression and keeps business rolling. In order to establish the brand that is right for your purposes, you need to understand your audience, mission, and brand personality. Let’s take a look at each step in establishing your perfect marketing brand.

Establish Your Audience

Before you can create a compelling brand, you must determine your audience. While it might seem strategic to aim for a large range of people to make the most sales, you’ll have more luck if you get specific about who you are targeting. Consider things like age, gender, location, and education. Once you know the basics, dive deeper. What does this group of people care about? What are their hobbies and lifestyles? The more detailed you can get about your audience, the better you will be able to create content that tailors to their interests.

Know Your Mission

It is equally important to know your company’s mission – why do you exist and why should people care? Your mission is the driving force for your content and the reason people come to your company. In fact, trust in a brand’s purpose is increasingly crucial to customers. One study found that 85% of consumers want brands to solve their problems, and 80% of consumers want brands to solve society’s problems. Marketing is no longer about selling a product, but selling the purpose and values behind it as well. A brand development agency like Bright Age Digital Creative Agency can help you determine how to communicate your mission to the appropriate audience, so that your content appeals to the needs of your consumers.

Determine Your Brand Personality

Once you understand the basics, you have the tools to refine your brand personality, which largely comes across in the kind of culture or emotional appeal your company pursues. Some possible personalities include compassionate/sincere, enthusiastic, sophisticated, informational, or funny. Whatever you land on, your brand personality should be consistent with your target audience and core values.

One of the primary ways to get this personality across is through your marketing voice. For instance, Geico’s funny brand personality consistently puts out humorous social media posts, which is modeled perfectly in this Instagram post.

In addition to a fun photograph, Geico’s caption is simple and silly, using colloquial language with a funny hashtag. Whatever your brand personality is, make sure that your word choice, tone, and visual style match it.

Part of your brand personality also involves a strategy for engaging with users in comments and DMs. For instance, will you respond to an upset user with helpful information, a witty comeback, or no reply at all? Each of these responses have their own strengths, so it is important to find the one that works best with your brand. A brand development agency can help you with this tricky social media management by quickly and professionally engaging with users on your behalf. Galaxy Theatres provides a good example of social media interaction. With an enthusiastic brand personality that cares about their customers’ movie experiences, they efficiently respond to questions and criticisms with a friendly tone and helpful information. These comments come from a Facebook post about a popcorn pickup deal during COVID-19 closures.

Find What Sets You Apart

The internet makes every competitor available at a person’s fingertips, so you need to make it clear why your brand is the best choice. It is important to observe what other companies in your industry are doing and understand why your company is unique in comparison. The SWOT analysis is a helpful tool that guides you through your company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. This can help you determine what you’ve done well so far and what needs improvement in order to boost your brand.

Your brand is your reputation, so make sure to revisit these steps as your company changes over time. Spend time thinking about your brand, and don’t be afraid to narrow in on your mission and audience. A brand development agency like Bright Age will help you in all of these steps and take the work of social media management off your hands, so you can get back to the company mission you’re so passionate about.

Which Social Media Platform is Best for Your Business?

June 9, 2020

In this day and age, marketing on social media is not a question, it’s a must. With 3.5 billion people globally on some sort of social media platform, there is a guaranteed audience for your product or business online.

For many small businesses, the decision of whether or not to join a social media platform spawns from the idea of over saturation in the marketplace. However, the point of marketing online is being able to target your audience directly in order to break through those barriers and find your niche.

Social media agency photo to show example of analytics of Instagram impressions

Social media is overwhelming, to say the least. From designing the proper content to understanding the changing algorithms, the difference between impressions and engagements, psychographics vs demographics, and even as simple as how to post a photo, there are so many functions and dynamics to understand in order to make the most out of your social media strategy.

If this is you and your business, don’t worry because you are not alone. As a social media agency, it is our job to help our clients and potential clients to bridge the gaps in what is a complex and in-depth world of social media and social media marketing.

The big five social media platforms based on their monthly active users are: Facebook (2 billion), Instagram (1 billion), Twitter (330 million), Pinterest (320 million), and LinkedIn (250 million).

These five are the most user friendly, can be used across phones, tablets, and laptops and have the most diversity amongst users.

In order to determine which social media platform is best for your business, it’s important to first understand your target demographic through market research and compare them to the demographics of the users on each platform.

Let’s Break It Down

Facebook:

You can post just about anything on Facebook from images to videos, text posts, and beyond. Facebook is the all-encompassing app that creates a seamless transition from Grandma posting photos of her dog to running a fully functioning business. 61% of Facebook’s active users are primarily made up of American women and men between the ages of 25-54 with only 9% of their users between the ages of 18-24. So, if your company’s target audience is under 24 years old it might be best to use your marketing strategies on another younger social media platform. However, if your market is a little older, you are in luck because out of that 61%, 44% check Facebook several times a day so a business could be booming!

Instagram:

Images and videos are the keys to growing your Instagram presence. It is a visual app but it also has one of the highest ROI’s when it comes to marketing. It is constantly evolving to create the best platform that caters to both its users and its businesses. It is the fun and fresh side of social media. With 59% of its users checking the app every single day, it is ideal for marketing. 75% of Instagram users are 18-24 and 52% of them are American women. 57% are between the ages of 25-29 and 47% are between the ages of 30-49. To reach your audience on Instagram, it is important to create a strategic plan to capitalize on its one billion users.

Pinterest:

Similarly to Instagram, Pinterest is home to images and videos. It is a haven for design, fashion, mood boards, graphic designers, wedding planners, and cooks. Its main use is to create boards for inspiration on various forms of art, design, and motivation. It is by far a female-dominated site. 42% of Pinterest users are women with 34% of them being between the ages of 18-29 and 28% between the ages of 30-49. The site has its net cast over a wide age range and creates the perfect platform to market to women across vast demographics.

Twitter:

Immediacy is the name of the game when it comes to Twitter. Twitter caters to those who need to get a short message out fast. If you are dealing with the need for managing public relations responsibilities that are time-sensitive or if your business can mainly be established through text alone, Twitter is your platform. Unlike most of the other platforms, more men are on the site than women with 66% of Twitter’s users being men and 34% women. The age ranges on Twitter are also vast with users between the ages of 18-29 making up 38% of its users and 26% of users are between the ages of 30-49.

LinkedIn:

LinkedIn is the professional side of social media. You’re more likely to find mimosa pictures on Instagram and NASDAQ findings here. More people are seeing the importance of LinkedIn, but the chances of a high-end boutique finding much business in terms of marketing on the site are slim. Breaking it down by numbers, the percentages of older individuals is staggering. 72% of LinkedIn users are over the age of 30 and 90 million of their 250 million active monthly users are senior-level influencers.

These are the big five, they have proven ROI, they are efficient in insights and analytics and social media agencies love them! However, that’s not to say there aren’t tons of other social media platforms out there, some that might even have bigger audiences, but have yet to capitalize on the marketing capabilities.

TikTok, formerly Musical.ly, has grown exponentially in the early months of 2020. With over 800 million active monthly users globally and an explosive number of downloads during the Coronavirus quarantine, 315 million, it surpassed 2 billion total downloads making it the app to beat. Its audience is very young, 69% of users are between the ages 13-24 with only 15% over the age of 35. TikTok still has a long way to go to become market-friendly, but when a hashtag for a campaign gets used properly by the right influencers, it can reach over 1 billion people.

Snapchat is another one of those off the cuff platforms. It has slowly been declining in interest over the years due to its lack of marketing capabilities since it is only a quick photo-sharing app. Photos and videos only last 24 hours and can’t be saved. Facebook and Instagram have capitalized on this concept making their own 24-hour stories which are way more viable since they can be tracked through analytics. Snapchat’s audience is similar to TikTok with 62% of its users between the ages of 13-17, but they only average 46 million monthly active users in the US.

Social media agency clean modern working desk

At the end of the day, social media will constantly be evolving and new platforms will always be emerging. The most important part of your business is to stay true to your brand and continue to develop trust and consistency with your audience. Social media agencies are one of the best ways to develop community management, increase engagement, design content, and maintain brand loyalty at the forefront of your business on social media.

The Most Effective Ways to Increase ROI Through Social Media

March 23, 2020

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.

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.

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

March 16, 2020

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.

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

February 17, 2020

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?

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.

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

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.
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.
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.
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.

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

January 9, 2020

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!