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!

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.

Why Your Business Should Be Advertising On Facebook

Posted on 21st June 2024

Advertising on social media has paved the way for businesses to grow their audiences, make more sales and see growing success. Facebook is one of the markets leaders when it comes to such ads, providing a platform that makes the creation of ads a relatively simple process, and gives valuable insights into your performance – allowing you to make tweaks to improve the performance of your ads as they run. Facebook Ads also have the highest ROI for social media advertising, making it a key component in a digital marketing strategy.

If you don’t think Facebook Ads will work for you – think again. Here’s why your business should be advertising on Facebook….

Audience Reach

One of the best things Facebook offers you is unparalleled access to your audience – with 3 billion worldwide users, you target customer will definitely be out there, waiting for a business just like yours to solve the problems they’re having with a product or service that matches their needs and requirements.

Facebooks targeting capabilities are one of the most attractive parts of choosing Facebook over its counterparts, allowing not just the most basic levels of picking your ideal customers characteristics, but micro-targeting options that narrow down the size of your audience to help you not only with costs, but also ensures you mostly reach the audience who’ll be likely to make a purchase. Facebook has data on all of their users – such as age, gender, job - that makes targeting a simple process, with audience segments further boosting the suitability of the people your ads are displayed too. These segments include such things as income, behaviour, education, interests – metrics that can be leveraged to give your business a better chance at converting users.

Brand Awareness

Facebook Ads appear on feeds, and make audiences aware of your business whilst they’re scrolling through said feed. Ads that are creative, attractive and stop users in their tracks further help with this brand awareness even if the user doesn’t convert to a customer straight away, but interacts with the ad in some capacity. Ad are your chance to make an impression, and sticking in the minds of users is imperative if you want to grow your presence on social media.

Analytics & Insights

It’s pretty likely you’ll already know that checking your insights and analytics is one of the key components to social media marketing. Facebooks Ad Manager offers you information on clicks, cost per click, reach and impressions, letting you know what is or isn’t working with the ad so you can make the changes needed to keep expenses low and retain your customers. These are real time results that must be checked and tracked regularly so you can analyse your ad performance over time.

A/B Testing

A/B testing can be a huge help to advertising on social media – allowing you to make different versions of the same ad and review the results to see which performs best. Facebook offers this as a specific feature, with the ‘winner’ of the A/B testing becoming the ad that’s displayed Facebook wide. This style of ad helps you test strategies, and gives you the options of using different variables to figure out the best way to go forward with your advertising methods in future campaigns.

Mobile Optimisation

Facebook Ads are optimised for mobile, and with 98.5% of users using mobile devices to open Facebook, meaning you won’t have to worry about making different ad formats in order to fit with both mobile and desktop devices. Mobile optimisation provides a seamless and engaging experience for users and advertisers, allowing you to reach your target audience whether they’re at home or on the go.

Facebook Advertising is a huge part of what makes social media marketing a key part of strategies for many businesses looking to excel their digital presence. Start your journey by creating an ad today!

Retargeting vs Remarketing: What’s The Difference?

Posted on 14th June 2024

If you work in the digital marketing space, or you have some knowledge about the industry, it’s likely you’ll have heard the terms ‘remarketing’ and ‘retargeting' before. It’s also likely you’ve heard them be used interchangeably, despite both of them having some substantial differences.

But what do these terms mean, and how do they differ from the other? In this blog we’ll cover all you need to know about both remarketing and retargeting, and the places in which they overlap.

What is Retargeting?

Retargeting is where businesses will advertise to people who have shown interest on your website without making a purchase. This is where cookies are useful, being set in browsers when users interact with something on your site. You can use this data to retarget them, reminding them of the products or services they were looking at whilst browsing.

Retargeting is often split between ‘On-site’ and Off-site interactions.

‘On-site’ interactions are those that target individuals who have already visited your site and had some interaction with your products and services before but haven’t completed purchasing. This method of retargeting helps to increase your conversions and will also help you retain those potential customers who’ve expressed an interest but aren’t ready to convert just yet.

Methods you can use to do this include:

• Targeting based on a product they’ve interacted with

• Targeting based on the way they found your site

• Targeting those on your email list who’ve shown interactions but haven’t purchased anything

Google Analytics, Google Ads and Facebook Ads are all ideal ways to use ‘on-site’ retargeting.

‘Off-site’ interactions are actions taken by users on your social media pages – for example, Facebook now offers ‘engagement targeting’ for their ads, allowing businesses to target audiences who have interacted with your page, events or other areas of Facebook that register as interest in your business.

What Is Remarketing?

Remarketing is all about re-engaging your existing customers through media or email platforms. Emailing a customer to renew a subscription or service, using previous purchase history to remind customers to take some kind of action or even asking for users to upgrade their previous purchases all count as remarketing, and mainly exist in the realm of email marketing campaigns.

If your business has any of the following, you should consider using remarketing:

• You have a product/service that is typically a repeat purchase.

• You want to sell customers additional products

• You don’t have a big budget.

Do They Overlap?

Remarketing and retargeting often overlap, with the terms often used to cover both definitions. For example, Google’s ‘Remarketing Tools’ can actually be considered ‘Retargeting Tools’.

With Google and Meta also offering businesses the ability to use email lists for ad targeting, the terms have started to be used as one in the same. They do share the same goal – to re-engage potential or former customers with you business by utilising data on user behaviour in order to target a message via email or ad to drive conversions. Both can also be used alongside the other – pushing an on-site retargeting ad and emailing a similar offer means you’re doubly reaching your targeted audience using two methods that go hand-in-hand, reinforcing your businesses presence, message and increasing the likelihood of converting leads.

Retargeting and Remarketing are two terms that businesses should consider using beyond the general acquiring of new customers, but you must understand what both of them entail and what they mean before slotting them into your campaign strategy. Take a look at how your business is performing on social media and see where you could use both of these things today.

How To Sell On Instagram

Posted on 6th June 2024

Social media has been increasingly used to sell products over the years, with many taking advantage of the ever-growing list of features available to users who are looking to these platforms for sales as well as engagement.

Selling on socials doesn’t just limit you to creating ads – although this is a good way of getting your products out onto the feeds of the people you ideally want to target. Instagram is just one platform offering a ‘shopping’ function to users, keeping their audiences interacting with their page without having to exit out of the app to find products.

Here’s how your business can sell on Instagram...

Getting Set-Up

Firstly, you need to make sure you meet the following requirements stated by Instagram in order to set up a shop:

• Be located in one of these markets - Australia, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Ukraine*, United Kingdom, Brazil, Mexico, Canada, United States

• Have an Instagram business or creator account

• Comply with Instagram's merchant agreement and commerce policies.

• Connect your Instagram account to a Facebook Business Page

You can use a site like Shopify or manually upload through Facebook Business Manager to put your products onto Instagram. You should keep your product inventory on these sites updated as you get new items in your store.

You then need to submit your account for approval to Instagram. You can do this by accessing your Professional Dashboard > Get Started > Select Catalogue > Submit For Review.

Instagram Shop Posts

When your account is approved, you can then upload photos and tag your products within them. To do this simply upload to the grid as you would usually, and then select the ‘Tag Products’ option. This will allow you to search for a product and select the right one before sharing to your audience. You can go back to your old posts and tag products too if needed to give your feed a more consistent appearance and boost your performance on social media.

How To Optimize Selling On The Site

If you have access to Instagram Shop Posts, then don’t change your posting style just because you want to use the features. Keep your posts consistent, tag your products and give them a natural feel on the feed. You may want to change your content strategy slightly when it comes to new product releases or sales, but don’t let these sales style posts take over from your usual social media marketing efforts.

Use Influencers

Influencer Marketing is something that may be possible for your business to take advantage of, even if the influencers you pick aren’t some of the top names in the industry. If you send a product ton them and they ake a post promoting and tagging your brand and what you’ve sent, you’ll be attracting their audience and potentially start making more sales thanks to the power of the influencer you’re working with. Building up industry connections like this can be really helpful in getting your business out there beyond promotional posts or adverts.

Create Your Shop Page

When you’ve posted nine shoppable ads on Instagram, you can then open your shop page, which will display all of your products linked on posts in one section, which users can then click to buy. Users can also save these products for future purchase from this tab, making Instagram a great place not just for purchases but also for creating wish lists too.

Selling on social media is a big part of what makes digital marketing so powerful, and you’ll be able to take advantage of all of these features when you get yourself set up on Instagram. Take a look into the benefits of Instagram shop and get started today.

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