Posts from 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. 
 
 
 
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! 
 
 
 
 
 
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! 
 
 
 
 
 
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. 
 
 
 
 
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!