How to Stand Out of the Crowd This Season in Social Media Marketing
The holiday season is fast approaching and many marketers are scrambling to find new ideas to increase revenue and promote sales. With the exponential rise of social media marketing and advertising within the last three years, brands are shifting a growing portion of their budgets into digital marketing to connect with their audiences, including the most coveted millennial group. A recent study shows that only 25% of millennials “fully” engage with brands—meaning they do not tend to stick with one brand. Due to social networking and review sites such as Yelp, it’s easier for people to connect with each other by sharing their thoughts on certain brands, causing disengagement when a better brand with more popularity is discovered. However, 95% of millennials will stay loyal to a brand when they are fully engaged and are more likely to give recommendations to their friends.
So how does a brand authentically connect with millennials who make up 92% of the U.S. population? This is where a professional digital marketing agency comes in. At Kitchen Collaborative, we ideate, implement, and manage campaigns for both B2B and B2C accounts with the goal of elevating each brand to its highest potential and connecting with its audience on social media, thereby fueling brand loyalty and sales. This includes monthly strategic client meetings to establish content, weekly content strategy and development, social media posting and monitoring, advertising, influencer engagement, public relations, customer service, and detailed analytics to measure ROI. Below are just a few ways we have generated results in marketing to our clients’ audiences over the holiday season.
Targeted Content Creation
Posting original content that authentically connects with the audience is one of the most important parts of social media, particularly during the busy holiday season. In social media marketing, it’s critical to follow the 80/20 rule: 80% of posts should entail educational or lifestyle content that relates to the industry and category and only 20% should be direct sales messaging. Social posts have to reflect the company’s tone and style in a consistent manner and be visually and verbally enticing in order to stand out in the social media clutter. At an agency, the social media team helps plan when to post by running A/B tests on the best times to achieve high engagement. Photos are also shot professionally with custom graphics to tell the story and get the most attention possible. As videos begin to increase in popularity, professional production is now a must. Brands such as Tasty have flourished in social media due to well edited videos making recipes. Kate Spade produces holiday commercials featuring Anna Kendrick with the hashtag #missadventure. With an agency, a brand is given a team that plans, directs, and produces ideas from start to finish.
Running Giveaways
One method we use to increase real engagement in a short amount of time is by hosting giveaways. Giveaways can be exclusive to the brand or be partnered with complementary brands and influencers with large audiences for brand association and additional promotion opportunities. Most recently, we teamed up with Fernanda Romero as well as other beauty brands and bloggers on behalf of our cosmetics client L’eclisse for a loop giveaway on Instagram. To host the giveaway, every brand or blogger had to give away one or more piece(s) of product in exchange for followers on Instagram. For users, if they came across the giveaway photo, they would like the photo, follow L’eclisse, then follow the next brand, and continue on in the loop until they get back to L’eclisse Cosmetics’ page and the entry is valid. The end result was an 1,100 increase in followers, as well as 978 accounts that engaged with the giveaway. Other successful giveaways that we have hosted are themed giveaways such as L’eclisse’s Back to School Beauty Giveaway, which garnered 2,417 entries.
Advertising
As social media platforms become more sophisticated in their ad platforms, they are making it increasingly difficult for brands to connect with their audiences without paying for advertising. Newer algorithms filter out organic posts from brands, particularly if a marketing message is very direct. To augment our organic posts, our agency posts ads on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn for our clients, depending on needs and budget. This entails constantly being in touch with current advertising specifications – for example, Facebook ads frequently change ad sizing and word count limits, as well as ad platform capabilities. A social media agency can help stay on top of these ever changing specs, troubleshoot issues, create well-written and eye-catching visuals, and make sure the brand is running an appropriate type of ad to meet their goals. Creating great ads help increase followers, brand awareness, and website traffic. An agency will run a series of A/B testings over a course of time and analyze which ads are achieving success in views, web clicks, engagement, and lower cost per click. We keep track of budget spending efficiency by compiling reports on each ad’s cost per click.
Our general rule of thumb is if an ad’s cost per click is under $0.30, the ad is efficient in reaching our targeted audience with lower costs. For example, we posted an ad on behalf of our client Seachrome and the ad reached 154,302 Facebook users with 7,255 clicks to their website with just $0.07 per click. With the help of an agency, businesses are able to utilize their budget as efficiently as possible, especially around the holiday season when a brand wants to promote their sales or promotions to thousands of people while minimizing costs.