Posts tagged “Engagement”

 
 
 
If you’re thinking of marketing on social media, then you may be wondering how it can influence the behaviour of your consumers. Social commerce has become a huge part of a customer’s journey, with sites like TikTok even offering a shop function that allows purchasing to be done seamlessly without the need to leave the app entirely. 
 
Whether you’re selling on social media or building brand awareness, your marketing can influence the way consumers behave towards you and interact with your content. 
 
Here are 4 ways your social media marketing influences consumer behaviour. 

Social Proof 

Social Proof is where consumers can see what others think of your business, what they have to say and acts as a signal as to whether new audiences can trust you. Part of social proof is likes, comments, shares – any type of engagement on your post that shows if your products, services and/or business is credible. The more positive this social proof is, the better it is for your business. Responding to comments will also help you build loyalty and a relationship with your audience, showing new consumers that you care about their experience. 
 
Reviews also are a great form of social proof, and encouraging them from your customers allows you to have a stream of positive comments from those happy with your service. If you do get any negative reviews, responding promptly and professionally is the way to go - offer a solution but deal with it in private and take it away from your public timeline. Show you are willing to listen to any complaints, but also acknowledge if any review you receive turns out to be fake. Being transparent helps develop trust in your business and boosts your reputation amongst consumers. 

User Generated Content 

You can influence a consumer’s behaviour and buying intent by platforming user-generated content (UGC). UGC shows real-life examples of your products/services working and solving problems for people that your customer can recognise elements or traits of themselves in, helping to convince them your business is the right one for them. Having UGC be a part of your strategy helps to build a relatability between your brand and your audience, showing a genuine, authentic side to your content and your brand. Influencer Marketing is also helpful here. Influencers already have loyal, dedicated audiences that listen to what they have to say - 63% of people are more likely to buy a product when it’s promoted by an influencer that they trust. 

Engaging Content 

Creating content that engages your audience, is professional and communicates your brand values will all help to encourage interactions and shares – helping you reach more people. You should be using a mixture of content – videos, infographics, live streams, polls – anything that you think is helpful for your business to produce and matches with your brands style. You should also decide on a purpose for your content – what value will it bring to your audience? If consumers don’t feel swayed or interested, they’ll stop interacting entirely. Depending on the type of business you run, you must decide on a style that aligns with your brands personality and with your audiences wants and needs. 

Social Listening 

Social listening lets you discover what your audience are saying about you – being aware of the way your business is being perceived allows you to change your strategies in real time, effectively engage with your audience and identify the way consumer behaviour changes over time. Social listening is good for more than just studying consumer behaviours – allowing you to ensure you are keeping up with the latest trends and remaining at the forefront of your industry. Social listening tools can help with monitoring all of the information and data you need to study the way your marketing and business is perceived, giving you more opportunities, helping you avoid a potential crisis (if necessary) and allowing you to discover influencers you can work with. 
Consumer behaviour can be tough to predict, but the more your brand begins to understand your audience, the easier it will be for you to bring in more sales, grow your business and form loyal, lasting relationships with customers and followers. 
 
 
 
When your business starts marketing on social media, you’ll be competing with others in your industry who already have established strategies. As a “new” business to the platform, you will need to build your presence, create unique content and attract a loyal audience who’ll come to your business over others every time. 
 
In order to do all of this, a competitor analysis is key to understanding what you’re up against, and can give you pointers into where your business can take advantage and excel to becoming an industry lead. 
 
Here’s all you need to know about a competitor analysis, and how to do one successfully. 

What Is It? 

In a competitor analysis, you’ll be reviewing your direct competitions social media accounts and making notes based on everything you learn about their content, interaction with their audience, branding, SEO, keywords etc. You can then use this analysis to form your own strategy. 

Find Your Competition 

First, look up your competition and make a note of them. You can’t do a competitor analysis if you don’t know who they are, and when you’ve found them, you can separate these businesses into the following categories: 
 
Direct competitors – brands with the same product and audience. 
Indirect competitors – businesses offering the same product, but solving a different problem for the audience. 
Legacy competitors – established, well-known businesses that are trusted and known. 
Emerging competitors – new competitors that are trying to find space in the same market, similar to your business. 

Analyse Your Competitors 

You now need to look at your competitor’s social media and begin to learn more about them. Learn about the quality of the products they sell by looking at reviews, see how much they charge, check their style of interaction and customer service, see what their brand reputation is and discover how active they are. If you’ve already started out on social media, you can use some of these insights and compare them to your current marketing. Alternatively, you can use this information to form the foundations of your social media marketing strategy and craft the way you operate on your chosen platform. 

Look At Their Keywords 

What keywords do they use? You need to take advantage of using relevant keywords or phrases so that audiences can find you, so looking at what your competitors use will help you understand which keywords are delivering the best results. You should also be unique with the keywords you choose – there will obviously be some overlap, but coming up with terms or phrases that relate more to your business will help when users search those words or phrases. Keywords tell the algorithm what your business is about, allowing others to find your content easily when searching for a specific topic. 

Look At Audience Feedback and Engagement 

How much are audiences engaging with their business’ content? Are they frequently commenting, liking or sharing post? Is there a specific form of content they’re producing that’s attracting the most engagement? Even if they’re leading the industry, audiences may not enjoy their content if it’s not 
getting a lot of engagement. If you see a post with a lot of feedback noting that their audience enjoyed a piece of content, then you can use this post as inspiration for when you start to design your own content. Don’t copy them however – create something original and individual that touches on elements used in successful content by competitors. 

Identify Gaps 

Finally, look for where there are gaps in content produced by competitors, make notes, and then fill those gaps with your content. For example, if they’re making video content but don’t have any captions or chapters, you can add these in when you create your video content to make them more accessible to your audience. Alternatively, if they don’t respond to comments, you should make this a key part of your marketing strategy. By identifying the weaker areas in their strategy, you can ensure they’re covered and strengthened in your own plans, advancing your opportunities to attract the platforms existing audiences. 
Competitor Analysis’ are key for your business to carry out. Not only can you get to know other businesses in your industry, but you can use it to better your own output and show your audience that your business should be their go-to choice. Create yours today and see how it helps you with your marketing. 
 
Social media is an essential part of marketing for businesses, allowing them to directly contact their customers and showcase their services or products, values and personality. 
 
However, it’s easy to make mistakes that hinder growth and engagement. Whilst there are many things that you need to keep in mind before you start your social media marketing, these are some of the most important to be aware of. Here’s how you can avoid these top 5 mistakes and create a winning social media strategy. 

Ignoring Analytics 

Mistake: Many businesses will put a lot of time and effort inro creating and posting content, but fail to analyse their results to see how this content is performing. Ignoring your analytics, or being unable to find space in your day to monitor them means you miss insights that could help to improve your future campaigns. 
Solution: Regularly reviewing your analytics on each platform, paying attention to key metrics like your engagement, reach, click—through-rate, cost-per-click and follower growth help you identify what content is resonating with members of your audience, which areas require improvement and when the best time to post is. Outsourcing your social media, or using third-party tools can help if you don’t have time to do these yourself. 

Inconsistency 

Mistake: If you don’t have a posting schedule, and do things on a whim or when you have a free minute, it can make your brand look inactive when there’s large gaps between your content. This may result in followers forgetting about your business, or losing interest in future posts. 
 
Solution: Creating a content calendar will help you keep on track with your posting schedule. If you don’t want to log in and post every day, using platforms like Buffer or Hootsuite will let you plan your posts in advance, so they’ll be posted without needing your involvement on the day. You analytics will help you figure out the best time of day to post so you can get the maximum engagement from your audience. 

Over-Promoting 

Mistake: Whilst you can make the mistake of not posting enough, you can also promote your products too much. If all of your post’s focus on selling, your content may begin to be viewed as constant advertising – turning your followers away. 
 
Solution: Create a plan centred around when you post your promotional content, and when you post your value content. Think about customer stories, industry insights, behind the scenes content, more information about your brand, tutorials – something that will keep your followers engaged for the type of business you own. Social media is all about being social, not all about selling. 

Neglecting Engagement 

Mistake: Posting then going silent means you’ll miss out on building communities and loyalty to your business. Neglecting engagent will end up with people no longer commenting, sharing or liking posts as they won't feel acknowledged.  
 
Solution: Make it a habit to respond and interact with your audience, post user-generated content and answer any questions that are asked. Regularly check your messages and try to promptly respond to build brand trust. Your audience need to know you appreciate them which is why staying active is key to crafting a business page that puts your customers at the heart of what you do.  

Ignoring Feedback 

Mistake: Ignoring your feedback means you won’t know how your business is being perceived, or if there are any negative comments you need to clear up, take on board or clarify are false. Even worse than ignoring feedback is responding angrily and informally to bad reviews – so make sure to avoid this too. 
 
Solution: Address your feedback promptly and professionally. Offer solutions, take conversations off line so they can be dealt with privately. Handling complaints, can help to turn these dissatisfied customers into loyal ones if you’re able to get things sorted quickly. Alternatively, acknowledging great reviews can help you encourage more happy customers to leave 5 star reviews and shows your brand to be reliable and trustworthy. 
These mistakes are all rectifiable, and by avoiding them you can grow your business on social media. Even if you slip into any of these habits, making sure you make changes as soon as possible will help to get you back on track with your marketing and returning to your strategy for success. 
 
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? 
 
 
 
 
In the current digital landscape, social listening has become an easy yet under-utilised tool for businesses to use and pay attention to when it comes to their marketing online. 
 
Understanding your customers allows you to stay ahead of trends, and can transform the way you create your strategies and market on social media. Growing your business is often one of your main priorities, and social listening can be a helping hand in doing just that. 
 
Here’s why your business should be using social listening… 
 

Make Your Customers Feel Heard 

There are multiple ways to make your customers feel heard, whether that’s replying to their comments and messages, answering questions during live streams or even just acknowledging them with a like on one of their posts. 
 
When your customers feel valued, their overall satisfaction will be enhanced as they’ll feel like their comments, reviews and questions have been acknowledged. It shows your business cares about the customer experience and lets you manage your reputation. Knowing how your customers think and feel about your business means you’re able to effectively address any concerns before the problem grows. 
 
Research by Hubspot has found that 93% of customers are likely to make a repeat purchase with a business that offers them excellent customer service. Brand loyalty can be built by making customers fee heard – if they can see you’re actively taking on and applying their feedback to make positive changes for them and other customers, they’re more likely to become loyal to your brand and advocate for it. 

Keep Track Of Growth 

As your business grows, you may notice that you get fake reviews, more negative comments or find people are seeing genuine faults with someone you offer. This is where social listening comes in handy, as you can begin to address concerns that have been raised and change things to take things better. Positive management of your growth and your platforms will help you stay on top of all this. When it comes to fake reviews or angry comments, addressing them in a calm and professional manner and taking them out of the public space will let you directly solve any issues without drawing too much attention to it. Fake reviews should be investigated and cleared up as soon as possible, as not to affect your brand trust. 

New Opportunities 

If you’re running business and notice customers have complaints or suggestions, then you’ll be able to take this feedback on board and look to find ways to expand your business beyond what you’re offering, if budget enables. Say you run a course, and have an overwhelming number of applications but not enough spaces, you can use this interest to see how you could increase your business’ output and operations in the future. 

Identify Pain Points 

Looking at your products or services, do they solve your audience’s pain points? Social listening can be a huge help with this – looking at conversations your audience are having online will help you adapt your output in order to help solve their problems, and fill any gaps in your current marketing that could make the difference between success and failure. Use keywords to search for information and take a look at discussions that your audience are having to help you discover exactly what your business needs to be doing in order to get ahead of your competition and be the one people go to first. 
 
 
 
 
Digital Marketing is a broad term, and encompasses many different elements – two of the biggest being social media marketing and email marketing. Both are popular with businesses looking to attract more customers beyond the traditional forms of marketing, and have seen great results for those choosing to go with these forms of digital marketing. 
 
Social Media Marketing and Email Marketing can both link to boost their performance on their respective platforms, whilst also tying your digital marketing efforts together. Here’s how you can link both platforms together to create a winning strategy for your business. 
 
 
 
 
Starting out on social media means you’ll need to attract an audience to your page and get them engaging with you. This can be a big task at first, especially if you don’t have much of an idea who your target audience should be, what platforms they’re on, what kind of content they enjoy or if they’d be interested in what you’re offering. 
 
When you find your target audience, you’ll be able to start marketing directly to them, and get them engaged with your business and products. 
 
Here’s how you can discover your target audience on social media… 
 
 
 
 
Social media has become an important part of many people’s marketing strategy, with many businesses turning to these platforms to expand their reach and increase their sales. 
 
With so many platforms to choose from offering different incentives for marketers, social selling can seem like a big task at first. Hubspot research suggests 78% of salespeople who use social selling methods perform better than their peers – meaning it’s important you hop onto this marketing trend if you want to compete with others in your industry. 
 
Here’s how you can use social media for sales. 
 
 
 
When you start marketing on social media, you need to build your presence. This visibility helps you engage new audiences and boost your brand awareness/recognition. 
 
Your social media presence is vital to successfully marketing your business online, but where do you start? 
 
Here are some tips on how you can increase your business’ social media presence. 
 
 
Social Media Marketing is an important part of getting your business out in front of people, giving you an opportunity to grow your business beyond a local, small business into one that becomes a leader within your industry. 
 
The power of online marketing allows you to reach people from all over the world, building up an audience who may not have found you if you weren’t online. 
 
Here’s why your small business should use social media marketing to become a success. 
 
 
 
If your business is planning on creating a great email marketing campaign that helps you to sell, then there’s a number of things you must consider when creating your emails. 
 
With these campaigns being a way for you to advertise your products and offers directly to your audience, you need to find away to get your audience opening these emails and engaging with what’s included within them. 
 
Here's what you need to consider when you create your email marketing campaign. 
 
 
 
 
If you’re looking for new ways to market your brand online, then you could consider influencer marketing. 
 
Influencer marketing is where you contact a social media influencer, offering them products in exchange for them promoting your business on their social platforms. You need to reach out to influencers who have similar target audiences to yourself – research by DASH reports that 71% of people are more likely to buy a product or service if it's recommended by influencers they trust. 
 
Here are the benefits of influencer marketing for your brand.