How To Build An Email Newsletter

Posted on 19th September 2024

If you have plans to send a newsletter to your audience, then email is the perfect tool to use to reach out to your audience.

A lot goes into building an email newsletter, so here are some tips on how you can build one for your business.

What Is The Goal Of Your Newsletter?

Like with anything in marketing, knowing the goal of the content you produce and put out is crucial to measuring its success. What do you want your Newsletter to do? It can be anything from getting clicks through to your website or you want to promote new services or products you have to sell, defining exactly what you want out of your newsletter campaign will help you track it’s performance. You should also come up with some key performance indicators (KPIs) that tie closely to your goals to get the full benefits of using email to send out your newsletters.

Choose Your Template

Sites like Mailchimp and Buffer offer premade templates that you can use to lay out your newsletter in a style that’s best suited to your brand, makes sense with your newsletter and will show up perfectly for those who access their emails on both mobile and web. Alternatively, you can create your own design for your email if you have more experience in the field, or use a template you’ve already made for your business’ other marketing emails. After you have selected or created a template, you can then use the same design on each newsletter you send out. Brand the email here and there and don’t overload it with images and colours – whilst a few are fine and relevant to what you are sending out, you don’t want to distract from your newsletter content.

Subject Line

Your Subject Line is more important than you think – it draws in the audience and makes them want to continue reading by opening the email itself. Your subject line should be short and snappy, and relate to the contents of your email. There are tactics to use that can be a powerful way of boosting intrigue and open rates – the fear of missing out, using the name of your audience, or being a little bit unusual can help your emails stand out and peak interest.

Remember – you should always make sure you have set the name of where the email is coming from, so that the people who receive said email newsletter know it’s coming directly from your business to avoid suspicions that your email could be spam.

A/B testing can come in handy with your subject line, as you can test out different style so see which one gets your newsletter the most opens. You can then implement this into your email newsletter

Body Text

Chances are you’ve already got newsletter content ready to go, so all you’ll need to do is copy and paste it into your email campaign and format it correctly. Depending on how long your newsletter is and what it is you’re discussing within it, using a few images can help to convey what’s in the text whilst also breaking the sections up so it isn’t just one, long singular stream of wording.

When writing your newsletter, make sure your points are clear and concise, and if you have a team or work within a marketing department, get another person to check over the content and see if there’s anywhere that needs editing or cutting down so your email is the perfect length for your audience to read from start to finish.

Test Your Email Before Sending

Before you send your email to your audience, you should send a test email to yourself or someone in your team to see how it looks on different devices and to see if it reaches their inboxes. When you know that your email works and is optimised for different devices, you can then send it out to all of your subscribers, who can then enjoy what your newsletter has to offer.

Creating a newsletter can help your business update your audience, give them behind the scenes insights and provide them with information about new products or services you are going to sell. Whatever the goal, you can use these tips to build a newsletter that not only looks good, but performs well too.

5 Ways You Can Optimise Your Instagram Profile

Posted on 13th September 2024

If you’re using Instagram for your marketing but are noticing that you’re not getting a lot of engagement or that your posts aren’t performing consistently, chances are you don’t have an optimised Instagram profile or strategy that will guide you to getting your desired outcome each time you post. Having great visuals is one thing, but it’s the components that surround them that form the key to your success on Instagram as whole.

Here are 5 ways you can optimise your Instagram profile.

Optimise Your Profile

Optimising your profile requires a few tweaks here and there which can strengthen your overall presence and boost your professional appearance to those on the outside who could become potential customers of yours.

Firstly, make your profile public and then register for a free business account so you can begin tracking your analytics and engagement.

You need to brand your account using your logo as the profile image, your business name for your Name and Username sections, add your ethos or slogan into the bio and take advantage of links by either linking to your website or using a platform like Link Tree to link to multiple websites, making it easier for your audience to find you.

Use Keywords

People will type keywords into the search bar, so you need to use a primary keyword that matches these searches. You can do this by putting your keyword alongside your business name, for example if you’re a fashion business, you can use the word ‘fashion’ in your name so that your business pops up when someone searches that word.

A secondary keyword relates to your primary keyword – using our example, ‘clothing’ ‘outfits’ ‘designer’ or ‘luxury’ all would work in your bio to boost your positioning when these words are used to search for a business just like yours.

You then need to create a strategy for your hashtags – treat these like keywords. On your posts, use hashtags that are relevant, valuable to your content and a mix of more general and post-specific tags. This will help people discover you when they look up these specific hashtags, and will show up in feeds if users already follow said hashtags. Instagram algorithms prefer hashtags to be contained within post captions instead of comments, which was previously the best strategy. Make note of this before creating content to post on Instagram and ensure it’s put into practice with each post you upload.

Image Caption

Beyond hashtags, your captions are still hugely important – even if Instagram is more of a visual platform. Use your secondary key words but don’t over-do it as this can be off putting – consumers still favour authenticity and originality, so don’t switch up on brand voice and the way you market just to ‘fit in’ on Instagram. There are ways of seamlessly working in these secondary keywords into your content and chances are, you’re already using them when creating captions anyway – you just may not be aware of their power just yet. Strike a balance between engaging your current audience and attracting a new audience so you can see a steady increase in the audience that’s unique to your business.

Use Alt Text

Instagram will automatically add Alt Text if you don’t use it, but it’s best you take this extra step to accurately describe what’s in your image and help visually impaired users understand your content. Accessibility is a big thing on social media, and you shouldn’t isolate what could be a huge part of your audience by avoiding the alt text feature or allowing Instagram to guess what your image is. You can access the alt-text section by clicking on ‘advance settings’ and selecting ‘write alt text’ under the accessibility section.

Track Your Analytics

Like with anything on social media, your analytics tell you everything you need to know about your performance. It’s why having a business page is so important, as this gives you access to your detailed analytics. By knowing your numbers, you’ll be able to see the bigger picture about your engagement, what content your audience are most interested in, where your posts don’t make an impression, when your audience are online and how well you’ve performed over specific time periods. Keep on top of your analytics, as they’re telling you vital pieces of information that you need to operate at your full potential on Instagram.

Instagram is a great platform for marketers who are looking to reach out to their audience, create interesting visual content and becoming a leader within their industry. Try out these tips today and get your profile fully optimised and set up for success.

5 Top Tips To Promote Your Business On Facebook

Posted on 6th September 2024

Now that your business is on Facebook, it’s time to promote yourself so that your audience can become aware of your presence and begin engaging with you and your content.

When done correctly, Facebook can become a key platform in your marketing strategy and bring you a lot of business and success from your audience.

Here’s 5 top tips for promoting your business on Facebook.

Optimise Your Business Profile

You must optimise your business profile to ensure your customers are getting all the information they need about your business, improving your brand image, trust and boosting your chance of being shown to potential customers on social media.

Make sure you include:

- Your logo

- Your ethos and slogan

- Contact information such as an email or telephone number

- Business location (if you have a physical store)

- Your website

- Opening Times

- Business Page

- Call To Action

- Select relevant categories that best describe your business

Having all of this information included not only authenticates your business and shows your audience that you are real, but it helps them understand a little bit more about what you do, who you are and how they can get in touch if needed. By ensuring your business page is fully set up and ready to go, you can then begin to move on to these further tips to grow your page into a valuable marketing tool for your company.

Facebook Groups

Facebook Groups have become a huge source of success for businesses using the platform for their marketing. In the last few years, 74% of creators have used Facebook Groups to build their communities, with over 1.8 billion users of groups every month – meaning your community is definitely out there, you just need to find them and make them aware of your brand. You should have an idea of who your target market Is and who your ideal customer is. Abiding by rules of the group, look around and join groups that align with your business and its values, that include all the right people you’d like to eventually convert into loyal customers.

Brand awareness is key to building an audience – if people remember you and can recognise you, whether that’s simply from your name and logo or from the way you’ve been able to provide information on a topic they’ve asked about, that’s a great first step to making people aware of your business. When people become aware of your brand via a group, they’re much more likely to engage with you and your content, which could then lead to them liking your page and continue the interaction outside of these groups and onto your business page instead before making a purchase. It’s all about the customer journey, and brand awareness is a key component in this.

Interact With Followers

The art of social media is to be social, so don’t constantly use sales pitches when talking to your potential audience, interact with people you see as potential audience members using your brand voice and answer any question’s they have using your brand voice and industry knowledge. Interacting with your followers shows them that you care about what they have to say, want to help them understand any queries they have about their industries and solve their problems with a product you provide. Even if you’re simply thanking them for a great review, this fosters positive environment for both you, your customers and potential audience members who see you’re actively engaged with those within your community.

Valuable Content

When you have a business page you need to be producing valuable content in order to convey your message to the audience and boost engagement. Whether you are creating graphics, videos, focusing on live content or have another way to promote your business via your content, everything you post must be meaningful and have value that will be recognised and appreciated by your audience. Show your knowledge and expertise, balance your value posts and advertisement posts and make sure you’re looking at your analytics so you can work out when the best time to post. Don’t just focus on the timeline – reels and stories have also grown in engagement in the last year, with 57% of businesses noticing that including Facebook stories to promote their products and services is crucial to their success.

Facebook Ads

Facebook Ads have become a staple tactic for marketers who want to use the platform for business promotion. When done correctly, you won’t need to spend a lot to get big results, especially if your ad is optimised for mobile devices which accounted for 94% of sales in 2019. Facebook’s Ad platform offers you multiple different options when it comes to creating your advert, from the ad types to the creative you’ll be able to tweak and change things so it’s fully suitable for what you want your ad to achieve.

One of the best thing Facebook offers is their ad targeting options. You can break the targeting down so it targets your ideal customer exactly, even having the option to select what interests they have to make your audience size perfect for your business and for your budget.

Promoting your business on Facebook is a journey, and one that will take your time and attention to successfully be carried out. Why not try out these tips and see how they can help with business promotion on social media?

Social Media & Digital Marketing Roundup August 2024

Posted on 30th August 2024

We’re at the end of August, which means it’s time for another social media and digital marketing updates round up!

Here’s all you need to know…

TikTok Leans Into AI Use

Want to give your TikTok video a voiceover but don’t have the time?

Well, thanks to a new TikTok feature you now don’t have to worry about this, as they’re now letting users create their own digital AI simulation of their own voices to use in clips. All you have to do is record a couple of lines of yourself speaking, and TikTok will generate a private, AI version of your voice from what you’ve provided. edit it.

Updates To Threads

Threads has had a huge update, with new features and upcoming features being tested that will be extremely useful for those using social media for their marketing efforts. Here’s everything added to the Meta’s newest social media platform this month…

Firstly, they’re introducing an analytics tool, which includes:

• View counts

• Interaction insights

• Overall Like, Reply, Repost and Quote counts

• A follower growth chart

• Audience demographics

This will help marketers on the platform figure out a content strategy, as they’ll now have the information available to them to grow an audience and make the needed improvements to get their business on user’s radars.

Whilst Ads still may be way into the future for Threads, Meta has started laying the foundations to introduce monetisation to the platform. Promoted posts could be one of the first steps they take into a Pay-Per-Click system, with App Researchers releasing images of how a sponsored post could appear - although nothing is set in stone just yet.

Custom Feeds, Cross Posting to Instagram and Facebook and a Media tab have also all been added, or are due to be rolled out.

Google Updates Trending Tool

Google has now launched an update to its “Trending Now” tool. This is a feature of Google Trends, providing more information on which search terms are seeing an increase in volume. This is helpful for planning SEO updates and assists with campaign building.

This update now gives users more insight into each trend, such as the length of time a topic has been trending and the total search volume. You can hover over the trend for a snapshot of the information, or click to expand it for more detailed insights.

Google has offered further detail:

“A cutting-edge trend forecasting engine is behind our upgraded Trending Now tool. It detects 10 times as many emerging trends as before and refreshes every 10 minutes on average, so you see the latest upward Search swings right as they take off. You can even compare multiple trends and easily export their data for a closer look.”

Meta Labels Business Chats in Messenger

To make it clearer to those messaging with businesses on Messenger, Meta has introduced a “Business Chat” label and a “Business chats and Your privacy” shortcut link, which gives users information on how Meta uses said chats to improve experiences – explained in their own words: “We’re giving people more information about how their business messages may be used to improve their experience. Depending on where people live, this could include improved product experiences such as faster response, personalized ads, and improved AI quality.”

That’s all for August! Have a great September and remember to keep an eye out for more social media news over the coming month.

Finally, your social media tip this month is… 5 Reasons Your Facebook Ads Are Wasting Money – And How to Fix It 🔥

❌️Targeting the Wrong Audience

If your ads aren’t reaching the right people, they’re bound to fail. Use Facebook’s targeting options to narrow down your audience. Focus on demographics, interests, and behaviours that align with your ideal customer.

❌️Weak Ad Creative

Bland or generic ad creatives don’t catch attention. Invest time in creating visually appealing and compelling ad content. Use high-quality images, engaging videos, and strong copy to make your ads stand out.

❌️ Poorly Defined Objectives

If you don’t know what you want to achieve, your ads won’t deliver. Clearly define your campaign objectives—whether it’s brand awareness, lead generation, or sales—and tailor your ads to meet these goals.

❌️ Neglecting A/B Testing

Sticking with one ad variation is a missed opportunity. Run A/B tests to compare different headlines, images, and calls-to-action. This helps identify what resonates best with your audience and improves performance.

❌️ Ignoring Analytics

Data is your best friend. Regularly monitor your ad performance and make data-driven adjustments. Look at metrics like CTR, CPC, and conversion rates to understand what’s working and what isn’t.

🔥 What to Do About It: 🔥

✅️ Refine Your Targeting

Continuously tweak and refine your audience targeting based on performance insights. Don’t be afraid to experiment with different segments.

✅️ Enhance Your Creatives

Invest in professional design and copywriting if needed. Your ad creative is often the first impression and the reason people stop scrolling — make it count.

✅️Set Clear Goals

Define clear, measurable objectives for every campaign. Align your ad content and targeting to these goals.

✅️Embrace A/B Testing

Continuously test different elements of your ads. Use the insights gained to optimise and improve your campaigns.

✅️Analyse and Adjust

Regularly review your analytics and be ready to pivot. Successful campaigns are built on continuous improvement.

Why your Business Should Be Using Video

Posted on 22nd August 2024

Digital Marketing isn’t just limited to a graphic and text-based post, but it incorporates a vast array of methods that can boost the way your audience engages with you online.

One of the top methods you can use is video. Whether that’s longform video content on platforms like YouTube or you take advantage of short form content on TikTok or Meta’s Reels feature, uploading your own videos for your brand can become a big part of your strategy. In fact, 88% of video marketers see this method as an important part of their overall strategy, with 91% of businesses using video as a marketing tool.

Here's why your business should be using video marketing.

Increase Brand Awareness

Videos can be a helpful way to increase people’s awareness of your brand. Whether you want the video to teach your audience something, entertain them, highlight customer stories, hop on trending topics – when your video is watched, they’ll take note of your brand too. The more aware they are of your brand, and the more they enjoy the videos, engagement with your content will increase – improving your visibility and reach overall.

Get New Sales

You may not realise it, but videos can actually bring in new sales. What better way is there to show off your products than recording yourself using them? Showing your audience exactly how your product works and how it will solve their problem is all part of drawing them in. You can also create videos that don’t necessarily seem like an ad, but does give your audience some information about your business. Whilst you must specify if you are selling something to viewers within your post, your videos still don’t need to be all about your product if you’d prefer to give more background on your business and be more personal with your followers. As long as videos are compelling, you can easily boost your sales.

Grow Social Media Accounts

Video content is a powerful tool for growing your social media accounts – it captures attention quickly, and engages users more so than graphics or text could within a few seconds. Videos that are well-made and relevant are likely to appear on users feeds and be favoured more within the algorithms, and with short-form videos on the rise it’s more important than ever that your business makes an instant impression.

Video’s give your audience the chance to build a deeper connection with your brand, increases your visibility and drives interactions – which helps to build your business page and retain your audience.

Educate Customers

Effective videos can educate your audience about a number of topics about your products, your business or your industry in general. As mentioned earlier, your videos can be instructional and tell your audience exactly how they can use and get the benefits from using your product or service. Give them a look behind the scenes, answer any questions they have and give them some knowledge about your industry using simple, non-jargon terms so they can fully understand what your business has to offer and why you are the business your potential customers should purchase from over your competition.

Establish Brand Authority

When people are looking up a product or problem, they need a product to solve, you’ll want your business to be the one that shows up. This is where using keywords should be a priority – when a search is made you need your video to be one of the first things people see, so put yourself in your audience’s shoes, think of the types of questions they may search, and use these keywords in descriptions and tags. The more your brand is visible the more authority and awareness it brings to your business.

Using video in your marketing can be transformative to the way you operate on social media, giving you another outlet to reach out to your followers. Start making videos today and discover how they can help your business!

Why Should Your Business Create A Buyer Persona?

Posted on 15th August 2024

Are you running a business and are thinking about taking it online? If so, you need to have a think about who your ideal buyer is.

To do this, you need to create a Buyer Persona, which will aid you with the creation of your marketing strategy.

Here’s all you need to know about Buyer Personas and why your business should consider creating one.

Personalisation

Did you know that 96% of marketers have said the offering a personalised experience increases the likelihood of buyers becoming repeat customers? 94% have also said that offering a personalised service has increased sales. Think about some of your favourite businesses – the likelihood is they cater their marketing towards you in emails or ads, to give you updates and suggestions based on similar products that you’ve purchased before.

So, what does this have to do with a buyer persona? Well, it’s all about knowing your target audience on a deeper level. It’s all well and good knowing the basics, but that personalisation requires you to really get to know your buyer so you can specifically target your campaigns or ads to them, instead of sending out general emails or ads that don’t capture their attention as instantly.

Optimise Your Lead Generation Content

When you’ve created your ideal buyer, you can optimise your lead generation campaigns to maximise your acquisition of customers and reach your audience the most frequently. Buyer personas provide a clear understanding of your audience’s demographics, behaviours, goals, and challenges so you can create highly targeted marketing messages that attract more qualified leads. Your content can be tailored to meet specific needs, increasing your chances at conversion, whilst you allocate your budget more effectively into the styles of content that is performing the best for you.

Product Development

Researching your target buyer and knowing everything down to things such as income, their pain points and location will help you with the process of developing products and innovate the creation process. When you can design your products and improve them based off of your audience’s information, you can change your marketing as you go to reflect new product updates that provide a solution to your audience’s pain points.

Tailor Your Messaging

Having a buyer persona that you and your team are all aware of will help you with tailoring your content, messages, products, and services directly to their needs and problems, which is where all of what we’ve already discussed plays a part, especially personalisation. When your audience feel like they’re being spoken to directly, they’re more likely to take notice of what you have to say and what you can offer them.

How To Create A Buyer Persona In 5 Simple Steps

You’re now aware of why buyer personas are a great choice for a business just like yours - so now it comes to creating one. Here’s how you can make your very own buyer persona in 5 simple steps.

Get Information About Your Audience

You can look at the following….

• Demographic info (age, gender, education, location)

• Customer Behaviour

• Lifestyle information and Interests

• Pain Points

• Information about their Job

• Income

This will help with finding new customers, and getting your campaigns aligned with all of the information you’ve found out about them. If you already have customers, start with what you already know about them and further get to know more by sending out surveys or simply reply to their comments and messages to get conversations started. If you need further ideas, take a look at your competition and use social listening to understand exactly who it is you want to reach with your marketing.

Analyse Information

When you have collected all of this data and information, start looking for patterns and common information that comes up. This will then help you begin to form the solid foundation of a buyer persona, as you’ll be able to use the most frequent data to get a picture of the type of person who would be interested in buying from you.

Build Your Persona

You can now build your audience persona – you can do this by breaking it down into different sections to make it easier for you and your team to understand by categorising certain aspects you’ve discovered about the person you aim to target. Make sure you note everything down so it can be easily accessed when it comes to the next steps.

Craft Your Communication Strategy

Now you have an idea of who you want to talk to – how are you going to talk to them? What brand voice do they want? What style of content and wording draws them in, and what should you avoid? Work on the things they may like about your brand, and things they might not, and make sure everyone knows exactly how to respond to your audience without jeopardising your brand image or reputation, or making your team seem unorganised if they go for different brand voices when dealing with customers.

Create Your Marketing Strategy

Your marketing strategy has to be tailored to your buyer – which will help with everything from your website updates or creation to your content and style and communication. How will you market? What platforms? What graphics will you use? Are you going to use a mixture of styles? How will you bring in engagement? Are you using paid or organic methods? Consider all of these by always relating back to your buyer persona.

Buyer Personas are a great way to get your business out in front of people and becoming a success in your industry. Begin creating your buyer persona today and discover the power of targeting!

Your Guide To Digital Marketing

Posted on 8th August 2024

Digital Marketing is one of the best ways to get your business out in front of people in the modern world, and could launch you to success if you spend the time getting your strategy right.

Knowing where to start with your digital marketing is important for ensuring you stay on the right track towards your business’ targets and goals.

Here’s your guide to digital marketing for your business.

Define Your Goals

Setting clear goals sets the foundation of a successful digital marketing campaign. Without defining your objectives, you won’t be able to know how effective your campaigns are, ultimately hindering your ability to make changes when and where needed. These goals should be aligned with your businesses objectives and reflect your overall business plans – whether that’s increasing awareness of your brand, getting more web traffic, generating leads or boosting your sales.

It’s important to break down your goals into small steps that can each be measured and analysed – such things such as setting timescales for specific metrics can help to make goals achievable and show you where things are and aren’t working. Defining your goals is something you have to consistently do as you evolve and grow as a business, and must be one of the core focuses of your digital marketing campaign as a whole.

Identify Your Audience

Understanding your audience is critical to your digital marketing efforts – knowing who you’re targeting, their values, their online behaviour and their pain points will help you tailor your messaging, choose the correct platforms and create content that resonates with them and solves their problems.

Start by creating an audience/buyer persona – this will help you craft an idea of your ideal customer that includes all information you can think of about them, such as their location, age, gender, income, interests, potential problems your item could solve, purchasing behaviours and job. By defining these characteristics, your marketing can become more personalised and relevant. When you’ve identified your audience, you can then start creating the right content and anticipate their wants and needs, which is essential for creating a campaign that connects and engages your target market.

Establish Your Budget

Setting a budget for your digital marketing campaign is essential to ensure your resources are allocated effectively, and stops you from overspending on methods that don’t end up working out. Planning a budget well can help you drive the most money towards the channels you deem to be the most important and impactful, whether that’s pay-per-click advertising, creating content or email campaigns. Again, consider your goals and break down your budget for each with the allowance to reallocate this budget depending on each goals performance and as these aims change.

Paid vs Free Marketing

Strike a good balance between paid and free marketing methods is key to maximising how effective your campaigns are. PPC can provide results fast if done right – Facebook and Google Ads both proving popular with marketers – generating leads and clicks based on the information you provide about your audience. However it can be costly and take a lot of time to perfect if you’ve never been faced with creating your own ad, meaning other businesses swing more towards free marketing methods to get organic and sustainable growth without the financial impacts that can come with PPC. Having a balance of the both can help you figure out what works best for your kind of business, with pay per click helping to bring in sales or an audience that can then transfer over to your free marketing methods, working hand in hand to boost your visibility, income and brand awareness.

Engaging Content

Creating content is the backbone of your strategy – it’s what helps to hook audiences in, drives traffic to your page or website and builds brand loyalty and recognition. Understanding your audience is what really helps with content creation, and you must ensure the posts you put out are resonating with them. Whether your content is graphics, videos, blog posts, text based you need to stand out from the crowd and make room for yourself within a crowded digital market. Regularly published high-quality content helps build trust, establishes your brand to new audience members and displays what your business is really about.

Keyword Research

Keywords directly impact your SEO, so ensure your copy is rich – but not too overloaded – with important keywords that relate to your business and services. Effective keyword research involves understanding what your audience is likely to look for when searching for things your business has to offer, which you then need to include within your content so you can climb the search engine rankings and attract custom. You can regularly analyse data to see which keywords are emerging as popular phrases that you can then incorporate into your marketing strategy to enhance your visibility.

Make Changes Based On Analytics

Your analytics will show you how your campaigns are performing. The insights are valuable to improving and progressing your tactics, giving you opportunities to stay proactive with your digital marketing and make the needed changes and budget re-allocations when needed. It’s unlikely you’ll get it right first time, and that’s ok – using your insights and making tweaks can help you find the thing that starts to grow your audience and work well for your business consistently.

Digital Marketing is a great way to bring your business to the forefront of people’s minds – get started on your strategy today and see what it can do to help your business.

5 Social Media Tips For Small Businesses

Posted on 1st August 2024

Are you a small business that’s getting set up on social media? Taking the foray into the world of digital marketing can be an exciting and rewarding time, but knowing what to do when you’ve not come face to face with running your own business page before can be a little overwhelming.

That being said, there are some great methods you can try to get your business out in front of your ideal audience and keep people engaged with your posts.

Here are 5 social media tips for small businesses.

Be Consistent

Consistency is key to social media marketing – whilst you may not have a big audience when you begin, consistency will help to establish your brand and will give those who visit your page a backlog of content to look at so they can learn more about what you do. The more consistent you are, the more algorithms will favour your content and display it on the timelines of those who are looking for a business just like yours.

Don’t be disheartened if you don’t see results in the first few weeks – social media growth is often a slow and gradual process. Having content readily available to access by those who fall upon your page will be one way you can attract an audience, as they can engage with what you’ve already posted and learn more about your brands style, tone of voice and what you have on offer.

Diverse Content

Switch up your content every now and again to get more people viewing your page – in the early days of your business you can afford to change up your content style and get to grips with a schedule and style that feels comfortable and suitable for your business. You could try:

- Static posts

- Text based posts

- Carousel images

- Videos

- Live Streams

- Sharing links to your website

- Polls

- Q&As

- Behind The Scenes

- Customer Spotlights

- Testimonials

Diversifying your content when your audience is growing will also help you to see what they respond the best to, narrowing down the different types as you go to find that middle ground for what’s best for your business and what’s best for your audience.

Quality Over Quantity

Each post you put up needs to add value.

You need to show your business in a good light, and that comes with posting content that represents your business and informs your audience in the best possible way. Consistency is important, but so is reigning posts in if you seem to be posting lots with no engagement. Overloading your page with irrelevant posts or posting too much can harm your chance at success, so think about what will bring your audience the most value. You don’t need to be on every platform – in fact, many people won’t have the time to be on all platforms – after all, you have a business to run. Pick the platforms that are most likely to have the majority of your target audience on and start creating content for those specific platforms only.

Take Advantage Of The Trends

Leveraging trending topics will help you increase your visibility, engage with a broader audience and show you understand what’s relevant right now. By looking at popular conversations, you can get an idea of what is currently making waves online and take advantage of it with your own marketing. Engaging with trending topics provides opportunities for creative and timely content that resonates with users, which increases your visibility and organic reach whilst enhancing your brand image, displaying you are active in your targeted communities and are listening to their current interests.

Use Social Media Tools

Social Media tools are there to help you with content creation, and are simple to use when you get to grips with them. Here are some you can look into:

Reels & TikTok – Capcut is a platform that’s been on the rise in the last few years, and has now established itself as a great platform to use to create your Reels and TikTok’s. You can also find templates that are trending on TikTok too, and edit them so they fit with your brand.

Scheduling Tools – Scheduling tools such as Hootsuite and Buffer allow you to schedule posts on social media, so you don’t need to worry about logging on at different times on different days to post when you’re busy working.

Analytics – Each platform will have their own analytics tool built in, but you can also use Google Analytics to track your social media performance, looking at:

- Visitors

- Session Time

- Post Shares

- Conversion rates

- Which campaigns generate traffic & conversions

Graphics – Adobe photoshop and Canva are two of the top platforms you can use to create graphics, with templates available on each site to edit and brand with your own colours, fonts and logos.

Starting out on social media isn’t always straight forward, but with hard work and dedication it can elevate your small business to success. Follow these tips today and get started on your digital marketing journey!

Social Media & Digital Marketing July 2024 Roundup

Posted on 25th July 2024

We’re reaching the end of another month, and during July we’ve seen a couple of updates to the Social Media & Digital Marketing world that are worth being aware of.

Here is everything you need to know….

New Creative Options Added To Shorts

With Shorts becoming one of the most popular ‘new’ features on YouTube in the last year, the platform has been working hard to ensure that it remains to be used and becomes even more of a rival to TikTok. This month they’ve rolled out some new features, including auto-layout for Android users, a text—to-speech option (much like TikTok), auto-captions that can be customised, the ability remix already remixed videos and, in a move like the sticker template on Instagram, the ability to use the new ‘Add Yours’ sticker and join in with other users based on the sticker prompts.

YouTube Spaces

In another move by YouTube, they’re also adding community spaces. Channel membership has been a thing for a while, allowing loyal viewers to get different perks should they sign up – this was then followed by the Community tab where creators could make posts either for all viewers or just members.

Now, Spaces will allow not just the creator but also viewers to make their own posts and interact with one another within the channels Community Space, opening the platform up to becoming a more social and collaborative media platform. It’s currently being rolled out on selected channels, with hopes, if it’s successful, it will be rolled out across the platform soon.

Overlay Ads On Reels

Reels, like Shorts, seem to be Meta’s focus right now – with over 200 billion daily views - and they’ve been making changes over the last year to keep up with rivals and keep users on Facebook on Instagram instead of switching to TikTok or Shorts.

Now, Meta is making it easier for advertisers to get engagement with their ads via reels, allowing an overlay option for ads either between clips or for ads to expand on the second playthrough of the reel.

Small Update For TikTok Users

TikTok will now allow users to add their own thumbnails to videos, which may help with grabbing user’s attention, creating cohesive profile feeds and luring users to click on videos on your profile. We’ve seen a the power thumbnails have had on YouTube, with different trends popping up over the years which, when used correctly, have maximised video views. Whilst TikTok in itself works different to YouTube in terms of it’s display, the new option to add a custom thumbnail could still have a big impact.

That’s all for July! Have a wonderful August and remember keep an eye out for any more digital marketing or social media updates.

Finally, your social media tip is: Analyse your Post Performance

Seeing which posts get the most reactions and reach is key to growing your visibility.

Simply head to your Facebook driving school's Meta Business Suite and click insights in the left column. You will see an overview of all your content with their reach (how many devices it appeared on) and reactions (likes, comments and shares etc).

From there you can monitor what works and what doesn't.

Simply do more of what works and less of what doesn't 😊

How To Create A Social Media Report

Posted on 11th July 2024

Marketing on social media is great – but if you don’t check your analytics and create reports to track them, you won’t know if your marketing efforts are working or if you’re spending time on something that’s wasting money which could be directed elsewhere.

Social Media Reports are more than just listing your numbers – they provide a detailed, visual insight into your performance that can be shared with the relevant teams in your business so they know where to make improvements.

Here’s how you can create a social media report.

Decide Your Presentation

Knowing how to present your analytics in a clear and concise way relies on your presentation. Whether you prefer a spreadsheet, power point, word document or memo template, whichever you choose will form the basis for your future reports where you can simply input the data each month or every few weeks as they change.

Having a consistent presentation will help you and your team spot trends and notice when or if things begin to improve or worsen with your marketing efforts. It’ll also help if your business grows and you hand the metrics reports over to another team or hire someone new, as they’ll be able to get to grips with reporting quickly.

Know What Metrics You’re Reporting

What is it that you want to track? You must be aware of what matters the most to your company when it comes to your metrics, but if you need some guidance on what you could look at here are some ideas:

• Audience Growth – If your goal is to expand your audience, then you need to track the growth of said audience. This metric is one of the core indicators of how well your social media marketing is doing, showing that your content is attracting the audience you set out to gain when you started up on these platforms.

• Post Volume – How many times are you posting? There is such thing as over-posting, but there’s also the chance you aren’t posting enough either. This will become clearer when you check your metrics and the engagement on these posts, and can give you indication on when your audience is more likely to be online. Tailoring your content to go out when your audience is about to log on will give you a better chance at appearing higher up on their feeds and capturing their attention straight away.

• Post Engagement – Tracking engagement is the main way you can see if your audience likes what you post – comments, shares, clicks and likes are all considered engagement, and helps you know what content is enjoyed by your audience, and what you may need to rethink or remove from your digital marketing strategies.

• Clickthrough Rate – When you link off your social media page and to your website or to another page, you need to know how many people are clicking these links. This is especially important if you’re running ads as clicks cost you money, and you want your cost per click to be as low as possible but your clickthrough rate to be high. This also allows you to measure your conversions and work out if you’re getting the best return on investment possible.

• Competitor Metrics – You’re in a competitive industry, so make sure you keep an eye on other businesses like yours. You can do analysis from time to time to see if you’re beginning to become a go-to source in your industry and if you begin to rank higher than the competition the more you improve your digital marketing efforts.

Gather Data

When you’ve worked out which metrics you’ll be reporting on, you need to get all of this data together. Know where you’ll be finding these analytics and make a note of your sources – link to where you get these analytics from for transparency with your team, allowing them to access these sources if they take on reporting or if they notice any discrepancies with what's within the report.

Be Visual

Visual information helps to break up your analytic reports, making data easier to digest and more understandable. Using graphs and charts to display your data also helps with making comparisons to previous reports, and with grasping key insights at a glance. If you want your employees to engage with your reports and use the data effectively when it comes to creating strategies, visual elements are the thing to use.

Social Media Reports are imperative for taking your business to the next level online, and should be used to improve the way you approach digital marketing as whole. If you want to get your business out there, then creating reports is one of the main steps to ensuring you’re on track, so begin creating your social media reports and discover their power today.

What Facebook Ad Dimensions Do I Need?

Posted on 4th July 2024

If you’re creating Facebook Ads, then you must ensure the dimensions are correct so they’re displayed perfectly when they start running.

With a variety of ad formats and placements that are available, understanding Facebook Ad Dimensions make the difference between a professional ad and one that appears unfinished or distorted.

In this blog, we’ll take a look at the different Facebook Ad Dimensions for 2024, and discuss the benefits to running an ad campaign on the platform itself.

Facebook Ad Image Dimensions

There are multiple different options for images with Facebook Ads that vary based on the ad format you choose.

If you’re using Feed Ads, your image should be a resolution of at least 1080 by 1080 pixels, or anything up to 30 megabytes. The minimum requirement for your Facebook Ad dimensions is 600 by 600 pixels, but there is no maximum size. Feed Ad image ratios go from 1.91:1 to 4:5, however if you’re using any stock images or you are advertising an offer then your image should be in the 1.91:1 ratio.

For Facebook Ad Dimensions for carousel ads, file size can also be up to 30 megabytes, and at least 1080 x 1080 pixels in resolution. The image ratio should be anywhere between 1.9:1 and 1:1, and the maximum image size is 600 x 600 pixels. The same thing applies for column ads, article ads, collection ads and marketplace ads, although image ratio for these is 1:1.

For stories, things change slightly- file size stays at the maximum 30mb, but the image size can be up to 500 pixels and 1080 x 1080 in resolution. The ratio is 1:1. Facebook does recommend leaving space at the top and bottom of story ads for a call to action and in-app features such as links or text.

Facebook Ad Video Dimensions

If you’re using videos, then the Facebook Ad Dimensions are as follows:

- At least 1080 x 1080 pixels

- Use the highest resolutions, as Facebook doesn’t have a maximum for videos

- Use MP4, MOV or GIF Ad formats

- Video length can be anywhere between 1 second to 240 minutes

- Ratio is 1:1

In stream videos have this set up, and you can use 2-10 videos for this style of ad.

Benefits Of Facebook Ads

Facebook Ads give your business a direct opportunity to reach out to the exact audience you’ve been looking for, allowing you to target them specifically on things such as age, gender, job and location along with much more to give you a better chance at converting. They also offer in-depth analytics into your performance and make it easy to understand how your paid advertising methods are working for your business. As one of the most popular advertising platforms on social media, Facebook have perfected their offerings when it comes to their Ad offerings, ensuring your business is set up for success when your ads are created to perfectly display what your business is selling or advertising to users.

Benefits Of Outsourcing

If you don’t have time to manage your Facebook Ads, you’ve tried it with little success or you simply don’t know where to start, outsourcing could be the better – and cheaper – option. Instead of spending your money on trying and testing methods yourself, pay someone else to take on your Facebook Ads that know exactly what to do to bring you the highest ROI and conversions.

22:22 Marketing offer outsourced Facebook Ads Management, where you’ll receive everything from the creation to management of your Ad on the platform. We know how to create an ad that performs, using our methods to deliver the right style of ad for your business. Don’t spend all of your time trying to figure out what work best for your business, hand it over to experts that can bring you results. See more of what we offer by taking a look at our Facebook Ads Management page, or Book A Call by filling out the form below to get started.

Social Media & Digital Marketing June 2024 Roundup

Posted on 27th June 2024

June is coming to an end, which means it’s time for another social media roundup!

We’ve seen quite a few updates to digital platforms over the last month, so let’s take a look at what’s been hitting the headlines over the last few weeks…

AI Insights Added To Google Ads

Google Analytics 4 has been updated, now offering AI-powered notes created to highlight key data events, using more simplified language for better understanding. Google have explained this by saying: “Imagine your “Purchase” events spiked on a series of individual dates. Our AI engine works through the countless combinations of dimensions and metrics to proactively connect the dots, explaining why these spikes are happening. These insights will be written in a natural, easy-to-understand way, almost like a colleague summarizing the key takeaways for you.”

With Google Analytics 4 becoming the standard platform from July 1st, they’ll be adding aggregated impressions from the linked Campaign Manager 360 accounts. Cross-channel budgeting will also be added so users can see their projected performance against target objectives.

AI Assistance Tools Expanded For YouTube Creators

Struggling for video ideas? YouTube has updated their ‘Research’ tab – renamed the ‘Inspiration’ tab - in YouTube Studio to provide AI recommendations for creators looking for some ideas on what videos they should make. YouTube have commented on this: “Breakout Videos will highlight videos from similar channels that have performed exceedingly well. The goal is to give creators a more holistic understanding of channels similar to them, what content is resonating with their audience, and inspiration.”

They’re also adding A.I. tips, where creators will add a topic into the search bar so YouTube’s AI can provide ideas and notes based on what viewers may be interested in watching, and can generate a bullet pointed outline to help you get to grips with these suggestions.

They’re rolling these out currently, and hope to have them in the EU and the UK soon.

TikTok to Add ‘Virtual Influencers’

TikTok stay ahead of the curve by taking the AI boom further – now allowing businesses to choose from digital characters in their ‘Symphony’ Platform that can advertise their products and services on TikTok Live.

If you don’t want to use one of their digital creators, you can create your own, which have the ability to advertise in multiple languages.

The feature has been used in China since 2022, and has seen huge results for business owners who have seen their sales rocket thanks to these 24/7 livestreaming virtual influencers.

TikTok have added further detail on this new innovation: “To help creators and brands captivate global audiences and deliver impactful messages in an immersive and authentic way, we are excited to announce Symphony Digital Avatars. Digital Avatars help breathe life into branded content with generative A.I. avatars of real people, which will enable new ways to scale creative strategies on TikTok.”

Meta Adding New Features

AI seems to be the topic for June – and Meta aren’t getting left behind.

First of all, they’re rolling out an A.I. Q and A feature to help streamline the query process for businesses and their customers.

They’re also offering users the chance to sign up to business’ marketing – from then on, any messages, offers or information from businesses will be sent directly to a user’s Messenger inboxes.

Broadcast Channels are set to be rolled out for Facebook Pages with 10,000 or more followers, allowing businesses with smaller audiences the chance to get their followers into one channel and communicate with them directly.

X Analytics Updated…For Premium Users

Probably the most significant update this month for marketers on X – they’ve finally switched over what was Twitter Analytics to X Analytics, with a catch.

The previously free-for-all feature has been locked behind a paywall, with users signed up to X Premium or the tier above the only ones able to access their advanced analytics.

These analytics are now offering the following: total impressions, engagement rate, profile visits, video performance, link clicks and a new display to allow ease of access to different data.

X have been slowly trying to drive up subscriptions in the last 2 years, with little success of hitting any of their targets to do so. By putting analytics behind a paywall, it’s just another way they hope to get people to pay for previously free features. The question remains whether they will – analytics are imperative to businesses whose main marketing is done on X, but often they’ll be using multiple platforms – so using another website who can provide the same info in one central place is probably the way many will go.

That’s all for June! Have a great July and keep an eye out for any updates to come over the next month.

Your social media tip this month is: Many business owners I speak to struggle to get their ads in front of the right people, pouring money into campaigns but seeing little return.

You see the key to cost-effective, profitable paid ad campaigns is understanding your audience better.

By using detailed targeting options and creating content that resonates with your ideal customers, you can turn your ads around and start seeing some real results.

So, here are three tips that when used will help improve your ad performance:

✅️ Research Your Audience - Dive deep into their interests, behaviours, and demographics.

✅️ Test Different Ad Formats - Experiment with images, videos, and carousels to see what works best.

✅️ Monitor and Adjust - Regularly check your ad performance and tweak your targeting and content as needed.

These 3 simple steps can transform your ad strategy and help you see much better results. 💡

Blog