Integrating organic and paid for a powerful LinkedIn social media strategy

A lot of social marketers ask, does our brand really need to be on LinkedIn? In short, yes. By the end of March 2020, LinkedIn reached 690 million users and saw a 26% increase in user sessions quarter-over-quarter.

Your LinkedIn social media strategy will be a bit different than your strategies for other platforms. LinkedIn is unlike its social competitors in that it’s widely regarded as a professional social network, the largest B2B marketing platform in the world and the number one platform for lead generation. The platform presents major opportunities to identify, connect with and advertise to thought leaders, leads, potential candidates and audiences that are entirely new to your brand.

Building a strong organic LinkedIn strategy is still an essential foundation for success on the platform. However, the key to getting the most from LinkedIn is marrying your organic and paid strategies.

LinkedIn outlines an integrated paid-organic strategy in three simple steps:

1. Build a compelling organic presence
2. Boost organic reach and engagement via paid
3. Measure, learn and optimize to drive more impact

In this article we’ll expand on those steps and demonstrate how Sprout can help you optimize your strategies, determine what content to invest in and measure ROI.

Complete your LinkedIn Page

First things first; make sure your LinkedIn Page is complete with accurate, relevant and up-to-date company information. That may seem like a no brainer, but it’s important to be thoughtful and thorough because pages with complete information get 30% more weekly views, which bodes well for your content performance.

The information you provide should include basics like your website URL, logo, banner image, industry, company size and location. Additionally, in your company overview, you should include relevant terms and phrases about your mission and purpose. That way when users add keywords in their search engine or on LinkedIn, your brand will come up in the results.

Build out a mix of engaging organic content

Now, let’s get to the heart and soul of your LinkedIn strategy—your content. Just because LinkedIn is a professional network, that doesn’t mean your brand’s content has to be completely buttoned up and dry. Your content should tell your brand’s story, show personality, provide value for your audience and entice them to engage.

When it comes to building your content calendar, it’s all about providing variety and keeping your goals at the forefront. Increasing brand awareness is the top priority for marketers, and on LinkedIn, persistent brand building yields long-term sales growth. Continually share content about who your brand is, what you stand for, what products and services you offer, what you have that your competitors may not, and why you’re a current or up-and-coming leader in your industry.

Given that LinkedIn is also one of the first places potential candidates look for jobs, you should incorporate employer branding content that highlights your company culture, employees, perks and available roles into your organic strategy. Plus, it’s not just candidates that care about your employer brand, consumers do too. According to Morning Consult, the second most important consideration when deciding to purchase a product or service from a brand is that that brand takes care of their employees and team members.

Thought leadership is powerful content, especially on LinkedIn. According to the platform, 75% of potential B2B buyers say thought leadership helps them determine which vendors to put on their short list. This kind of content also demonstrates the trustworthiness, authority and wisdom of your leaders, which makes a positive impact on both brand awareness and lead generation.

 

Prospective buyers on LinkedIn also typically engage with 7-10 pieces of content before making a purchasing decision, so a well-rounded organic strategy includes a mix of upper, middle and lower funnel content so you can connect with audiences at every stage of the buyer journey.

You should also mix up the types of content assets that you publish and reuse content you already have. When building out or repurposing content for LinkedIn, keep these data points and best practices in mind:

• Companies that post weekly see a 2x lift in engagement with their content.
• LinkedIn posts that include images typically result in 2x higher comment rate.
• Videos get 5x more engagement on LinkedIn than other platforms and live streams get 24x more comments than standard native videos.
• Updates including links can have up to a 45% higher follower engagement than updates without links. When including links, add URL tracking codes to measure post-click actions like site visits or conversions, which you can then measure via Google Analytics.

These considerations will help elevate your content, but determining what content works best for your goals and audience comes down to reporting and analytics.

 Let organic success influence your paid strategy

Reporting on your organic LinkedIn content performance is the moment where your paid and organic strategy can begin to work in tandem. You should invest in the best content—that is, what resonates with your audience and supports your goals. To find out what that content is, use a social media analytics platform like Sprout Social. With Sprout’s powerful analytics, you choose the metrics and Sprout pulls the Top Posts into your LinkedIn Pages report.

If brand awareness is top priority, look at KPIs like impressions, likes, video views, photo and video clicks. For consideration stage, middle of the funnel content, your top performers might be those with the most comments, shares, engagement rate, link clicks or click-through rates. If you added UTM tags to your links as recommended, use Google Analytics to track which links are driving conversions to your website and driving leads.

In the Post Performance Report, you can also find which types of content fall flat. It’s equally important to know what your audience doesn’t react to, so even metrics that are perceived as “underperforming” are very telling.

If you’ve tagged your content up-front while scheduling, or do so retroactively, you can use the Sprout Tag Report to measure the effectiveness of your content themes, the types of creative assets you’ve used, what stage in the funnel the post aligns with and so much more. Let’s say you want to know if your audience clicks a post more often if the imagery is people-focused versus product-focused. Or perhaps you want to know if a video employee testimonial drives more engagement than a blog post. These are all variables you can test and track with the tag report.

Once you do understand what organic content captures your audience and drives success, you can determine what should get a boost, what creative elements you should continue to test and what types of ads you should invest in.

Invest in the best: Boost and elevate

Boosting your existing content and creating Sponsored Content In LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager extends your organic reach and delivers content right to your target audience.

Boosting is a good way to get started with your paid LinkedIn strategy and is cost-efficient. Rather than starting from scratch, if you have an organic post that’s working really well, you can put just $50 or so behind it and see how reaching a wider audience impacts your goals. The process of boosting your content is simple as well. Once it’s posted on LinkedIn, just click “Sponsor now” above the post in your Page feed.

Even when you have a larger budget, boosting can give early insight into performance and help you determine what content you should invest more in or pull back on.

If you’re ready to start a new LinkedIn advertising campaign, you’ll use the native Campaign Manager and walk through these four easy steps:

1. Choose your objective and goals to customize your campaign. Just as it was with your organic content, those objectives would be awareness, consideration or conversions, with specific goals like engagement, video views, website conversions and more. It’s up to you.
2. Then, select your targeting criteria from over 20 different audience attribute categories including company size, company name, skills, job title, job seniority and more. Targeting is what’s really going to drive success. Sprout pro tip: You can choose the same targeting options for organic posts in Compose free of cost.
3. Pick your ad format. You can use Sponsored Content, Message Ads, Dynamic Ads, Text Ads, or a mix of all four.
4. Finally, set your bid, budget and schedule. If you’re unsure of how much money to bid and budget, ask a paid strategist or digital marketer on your team for suggestions, if you have one. LinkedIn also has a ton of resources on how to maximize your budget.

It’s best practice to refresh LinkedIn ads once a month by changing copy and/or image. Determine what to mix up by turning to your paid reports data. LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager provides a full breakdown of your campaign performance so you can see cost per impression (CPM), cost per lead (CPL), and more. The lower the cost, the better.

If you’ve connected your LinkedIn Ad account, Sprout also generates a LinkedIn Paid Performance Report, with a full breakdown of your metrics and data visualization, making analysis simple. Just as you did while reporting on your organic content, you can determine what content is worth the investment.

Try, try again

Organic and paid strategies are both about trial and error, learning what works and what doesn’t—and improving with each new approach by using your performance data. Rather than throwing money at content based on a gut feeling, continue to use your organic content as your testing ground. Use your data to validate assumptions, optimize your campaigns and create cost-efficient content.

LinkedIn is an influential platform for growing your brand, no matter what industry you work in. And when you leverage the power of an integrated organic and paid LinkedIn strategy, there’s really nowhere to go but up.

Want to dig deeper and learn more about turning B2B social data into a revenue driver? Download our guide.

This post Integrating organic and paid for a powerful LinkedIn social media strategy originally appeared on Sprout Social.

from Sprout Social https://ift.tt/33jxLEx
via IFTTT

10 Best Ecommerce Tools to Sell More with Email Marketing

Did you know 80% of retail professionals say email marketing is their most significant customer retention driver? Plus, it costs 5 times as much to attract new customers than to keep existing ones. That’s where email marketing becomes a vital tool to growing your business.

But we’re willing to bet that email marketing isn’t the only tool you use to run your ecommerce business. And it shouldn’t be. With the right ecommerce tools in your arsenal, it’s easy to turn first-time visitors into lifelong customers.

Pairing email marketing with top ecommerce tools can help businesses of all sizes automate their marketing and focus on growing their business.  

Email is incredibly effective at driving ecommerce sales

Email plays a pivotal role in encouraging a customer’s repeat purchases  — email drives more repeat sales that search, direct, and social channels

Shopify data shows that email as a channel had the highest average order conversion rate during Black Friday Cyber Monday.

Integrating your email marketing with the right ecommerce tool can help you: 

• Grow your audience through personalized communications and landing pages.
• Tag prospects based on interest or buying habits to send more relevant and personalize emails.
• Automate targeted email campaigns to segmented lists.
• Send cart abandonment emails to close more sales based when customers leave products in their online shopping cart.

But finding the perfect ecommerce solution is no easy task. There are hundreds of providers to choose from. So to make it a bit easier for you, we identified 10 of our favorite ecommerce integration solutions that seamlessly integrate with AWeber.

1. Shopify integration
2. WooCommerce integration
3. PayPal integration
4. Etsy integration
5. ClickBank integration
6. BeatStars integration
7. SendOwl integration
8. ThriveCart integration
9. SamCart integration
10. JVZOO integration

10 ecommerce tools to integrate with AWeber 

1. Shopify integration

Shopify is one of the best ecommerce platforms with everything you need to sell online, on social media, or in person. The AWeber and Shopify integration leverages the powerful customer data from your Shopify store to create targeted, timely email marketing campaigns. 

Shopify allows you to easily create an online shopping experience, including website creation, product management, and inventory. Connecting Shopify and AWeber requires absolutely zero coding experience. 

Plus, AWeber’s Shopify integration includes tag support, which lets you tag your subscribers based on their interest in specific products. This lets you send more targeted content to customers within the same list, including cart abandonment emails.

Shopify's integration with AWeber allows users to communicate with their audience in the time and space they choose to sell both products and services.

Want to learn more? Check out our step by step instructions on how to integrate Shopify with AWeber.

2. WooCommerce integration

WooCommerce is one of the most customizable ecommerce platforms for building the online business of your dreams. It is also one of the most popular WordPress ecommerce plugins. 

With the AWeber and WooCommerce plugin, you can quickly and easily grow your email audience and boost sales. It includes tag support — making it easier to know more about your audience, boost sales with personalization, and motivate your audience to purchase by emailing them incentives.

The cart abandonment options in AWeber's WooCommerce integration have some additional features that are worth checking out. Customers can recover an abandoned cart by simple clicking a link in the email. This recovery hyperlink takes them back to their cart and allows them to complete their purchase. You can also see when a cart is or is not recovered, so you can send them an incentive to revisit your store.

Learn more about AWeber’s WooCommerce integration by seeing step by step connection instructions.

3. PayPal integration

PayPal is one of the most popular online payment systems with over 325 million active subscribers worldwide. But did you know PayPal has 44% higher conversion rates than non-PayPal transactions? 

PayPal is one of the easiest and most convenient ways to let customers complete their purchases. Plus, AWeber's PayPal integration adds subscribers to your email list when a payment is made with a PayPal button. It can also unsubscribe them if recurring payments stop. You can also add customized product tags to your subscribers, which lets you send more personalized email messages based on what you know they like. 

Tags allow you to create all types of awesome segments, broadcasts, campaigns, and dynamic content to target subscribers more precisely. This makes it easy to turn first-time buyers into repeat customers by emailing new customers an incentive — like a coupon, discount code, or free content they may like based on their first purchase.

View step by step instructions on how to integrate PayPal with AWeber.

4. Etsy integration

Etsy is a global commerce platform that focuses on selling unique and creative goods, including handmade, vintage, and craft supplies. The Etsy platform is an awesome ecommerce solution for creative and crafty entrepreneurs. Etsy allows creative entrepreneurs to sell their products online and offers a wide range of tools that help makers start, manage, and scale their businesses.   

Etsy is fast and affordable. Plus, creating a shop on Etsy is free, but you only have to pay $0.20 for listing your products for four months or until they sell.

The AWeber and Etsy integration includes tag support, making it easy for you to use advanced settings to automate email campaigns when specific tags are applied, so you deliver emails based on a person's purchase history. Emails followed up with personalized content help to increase revenue opportunities in your automated campaigns. 

Check out our instructions to integrate Etsy with AWeber.

5. ClickBank integration

ClickBank is a global retailer and an affiliate marketplace that allows entrepreneurs to earn income on commissions of other people's products that they promote and sell. It benefits the product owner and the affiliate promoting the product as it provides the opportunity for both parties to earn revenue. Plus, it potentially expands the products' reach to a new audience.  

AWeber's integration with ClickBank makes finding affiliate products to promote to your audience incredibly easy and straightforward. Simply select the product and get a link to include in your newsletter or on social media. When a member of your audience purchases that product, you receive a commission. Commissions vary by product but tend to be around 50%. 

AWeber's Clickbank integration has tag support, similar to many of the other integrations we already talked about. Tagging subscribers based on products they’re interested in makes it easy to email customers an incentive — like a coupon, discount code, or free content they may like based on their first purchase. Easily automate campaigns based on a person's purchase history when a tag is applied, allowing you to follow up with more relevant and personalized content to increase your revenue opportunities. 

See step by step instructions on how to integrate Clickbank with AWeber.

6. BeatStars integration

BeatStars is a social music marketplace for recording artists, songwriters, beatmakers, and music producers to upload, sell, and distribute music. As the beat selling industry becomes more popular, it is more important than ever for artists to connect with their audience to create a long-lasting relationship. 

Email marketing is one of the most effective ways for beatmakers and music producers to market their audio. By connecting with AWeber, sellers can add people who purchase music to an email list. When you have new music to download or a tour to announce, you can easily reach out to your audience.

AWeber allows you to use tags to segment your audience based on what links they're clicking. Set it up to trigger campaigns automatically when a tag is added, so you can easily send personalized content to the right audience at the right time to increase beat sales.

Check out our step by step instructions to integrate BeatStars with AWeber.

7. SendOwl integration

SendOwl makes it easy for you to sell digital products directly to your audience from your blog, social media, or anywhere you can paste a link. SendOwl is a simple tool to help you sell your digital creations online. 

SendOwl provides digital delivery for files, tangible goods, and services you wish to sell online. It communicates with payment gateways such as PayPal and Stripe, or online stores such as Shopify, to ensure that orders are only completed once the buyer has paid for their product, and you have received the funds.

SendOwl provides a streamlined checkout and secure product delivery, including revenue-boosting features such as upsells, affiliate schemes, and on-site checkout.

The AWeber integration with SendOwl lets you easily add your customers and tags to your AWeber mailing list. You can also set up automated campaigns in order to follow up with them seamlessly. And then send discounts and promotions to encourage reorders. 

Want to learn more? See our step by step instructions on how to integrate SendOwl with AWeber.

8. ThriveCart integration

ThriveCart is a shopping cart service that allows you to take payments and customize your customers' experience for all products. ThriveCart specializes in delivering digital and subscription services.

ThriveCart offers plenty of options to increase your sales, including high converting checkout pages, upsells, sales funnels, bump offers, upsells, and down sells. It also has a powerful affiliate program built-in, so there’s no need to purchase additional software.

ThriveCart is somewhat unique when it comes to pricing. Most shopping cart services charge a monthly fee, but with ThriveCart, you pay a one-time fee for a lifetime of services. 

When you use AWeber's integration with ThriveCart, you add customers to your AWeber lists as they purchase your products. You can apply product tags easily to trigger campaigns, making it easy to follow up later with personalized content or an incentive coupon.

Check out  instructions on how to integrate ThriveCart with AWeber.

9. SamCart integration

SamCart is a checkout platform that focuses on the product level and not the store level for converting sales from digital products. SamCart offers tools to help you create beautiful pages to showcase your products and sales optimization tools built specifically for the "non-techie."

Design tools include drag & drop page builder, pre-designed templates,localization (sell you products in any language or currency), digital wallets integrated with payment providers,  automatic coupons, and custom domains to keep your branding front and center.

SamCart also provides a number of revenue optimization tools to help you show additional products on your checkout page. Other tools include add-ons (order bumps) and one-click upsells, A/B testing on every page, advance reporting, the ability to segment users into courses and bundles, and pay-what-you-want donation options. 

With the AWeber and SamCart integration, buyers can be added or removed from the lists you choose. AWeber makes it easy to automate a welcome series campaign for new customers to begin building a relationship with your audience while keeping them engaged over time. 

View step by step instructions on how to integrate SAMCart with AWeber.

10. JVZOO integration

JVZoo is an affiliate marketplace that helps facilitate and automate sales, process payments, market and deliver digital products in over 200 niches, including affiliate marketers, software developers, info-marketers, membership sites, and product creators. 

For product sellers, there are no setup or maintenance fees. Your affiliates only make a commission when a sale is made, not when traffic comes to your site.  

If you are an affiliate, your commission will be deposited instantly into your JZooPay affiliate account every time you make a sale. JZooPay is 100% free to use for affiliates.

When AWeber is integrated with your JVZoo, customers are added to your AWeber mailing list at the time of purchase. Once you know your customers’ preferences and purchase history, you can set up AWeber campaigns to send relevant, personalized content, and even suggest additional products to increase revenue opportunities.

Learn how to easily connect AWeber with JVZoo.

How to get started with an AWeber integration

AWeber’s integration dashboard makes it super easy to connect with integrations that power your business with your email marketing.

To find the integration you’re looking for, go to the AWeber Integration home page. Enter your integration and click to connect. 

Try AWeber and start growing your ecommerce business online

You'll get everything you need to start growing your ecommerce business online — including sign up forms, email templates, pre-written automated campaigns, and landing pages. 

AWeber is a powerfully-simple email marketing solution that makes it easy to communicate with your online store visitors. AWeber is committed to building tools for small business owners who want to understand and connect with their customers, deliver personalized experiences, and turn more first-time shoppers into lifelong customers.

Along with its award-winning 24/7 US-based customer support, AWeber delivers the ability to load and manage contacts quickly, send amazing emails, build visually-stunning landing pages, and analyze results without having to be a tech whiz.

Get AWeber Free

The post 10 Best Ecommerce Tools to Sell More with Email Marketing appeared first on AWeber.

from AWeber https://ift.tt/3cRkgPp
via IFTTT

4 Benefits of Twitter for business

Twitter is one of the top platforms to keep up with the latest trends and conversations. It helps you discover which TV shows people are watching, which social media challenges they’re trying and more.

You may already be using Twitter on a daily basis to follow your favorite brands and take part in trending conversations. But what about using Twitter for your business?

Perhaps you understand the benefits of Twitter but not sure how exactly to use it for your business. In this article, we’ll give you a detailed breakdown of why Twitter is important for business and how you can make the most of it.

1. Gain valuable customer insights

Twitter sees 6,000 Tweets every second. This puts into perspective how actively people are using it as a conversation platform. And for businesses, these conversations can prove to be a valuable source of customer insights. Using Twitter can help you research trends and topics that your audience cares about so you know how to reach them more effectively.

In fact, according to Joe Rice, who leads Twitter’s EMEA Data & Enterprise Solutions, “Twitter is the world’s largest focus group because at its core, Twitter is a consumer insights engine. What do people think about a certain topic or trend?  What are their needs, moods and mindsets?  It’s all there on Twitter and these insights can help brands do all sorts of things from launching new products or services to improving the ones they already have. It’s also a great place to engage with consumers in an authentic way, humanizing your brand.”

The Twitter Explore page gives you an updated list of topics and hashtags trending in your region and relevant to your interests. So you can use this section to discover the Twitter hashtags and conversations that are important to your audience.

2. Build brand personality and awareness

How you style your Tweets and engage with your audience on Twitter is highly effective for establishing your brand personality and growing awareness.

One of the top benefits of Twitter for business is that it lets you share information quickly and start conversations with your target audience. In turn, your audience would find your Tweets and content valuable and ideally, even share with their followers.

Make sure you use a tone that aligns with your brand voice and personality. The types of conversations and topics you’re interested in and the tone in your Tweets will help you attract an audience whose views align with yours. If you’re starting out or need a refreshed strategy, Twitter recently launched an Organic Tweets starter kit worksheet to help brands establish their tone of voice.

For example, Ben & Jerry’s may sell ice cream but it regularly talks about political and social issues through Twitter. It uses the platform to promote social causes that are important to the brand, so it’s been able to make a huge impact on people who care about the same causes. We even did a Social Spotlight on Ben & Jerry’s for this very reason.

Today marks the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, granting women the right to vote. Sweet, right? Well, not so much for women of color. Take the quiz to test your knowledge of women's suffrage: https://t.co/6a35BOQOTW pic.twitter.com/x9TQeXuaKD

— Ben & Jerry's (@benandjerrys) August 18, 2020

Additionally, engaging with your audience’s replies and mentions  also improves your chances of showing up in non-followers’ feeds. These actions help you boost visibility and brand awareness, thus proving to be a major benefit of Twitter. The most successful brands on Twitter have both paid and organic strategies. To illustrate, a Followers campaign is more likely to be successful if your profile has a healthy stream of engaging organic content. Conversely, promoting a Tweet can give it organic momentum.

The Sprout #BrandsGetReal survey even found that the top three behaviors that help brands connect with consumers are:

1. Liking or responding to customers
2. Showcasing brand personality
3. Supporting a cause that consumers personally support

3. Deliver customer support and gather feedback

According to Rice, “The most advanced brands see Twitter as a vital marketing, customer care and market research medium that can provide valuable insights on every aspect of their business.”

And rightly so. The platform makes it easy for customers to reach out to brands and provide their feedback or ask for help. Brands can then use this as an opportunity to not only collect vital feedback to improve their products but also to deliver the support their customers need.

Companies such as Netflix have even set up a dedicated Twitter account to provide support. The company offers support through this page in multiple languages and in locations across the world.

Hey thanks for reporting this to us and sorry for the delayed response. Our members are reporting the issue is fixed for them. Can you check if your Netflix is working again as well? *CS

— Netflix CS (@Netflixhelps) August 7, 2020

Netflix also uses the same account to collect feedback on how to improve the service and user experience, which they then pass on to their research team.

Great! We have received it and passed along your info to our research team.

— Netflix CS (@Netflixhelps) August 23, 2020

4. Cultivate a brand community

With the ease of conversation between brands and consumers, one of the major benefits of using Twitter is for building and cultivating your brand community. Brands can use the platform to start and join in on relevant conversations, engage with their community and build a loyal following.

In fact, our #BrandsGetReal survey found that 55% of consumers want brands to help them connect with likeminded people through social media. And 36% expect brands to build communities that consumers can belong to.

So it’s no surprise that one of the top benefits of Twitter for business is to cultivate a brand community and bring people together around a common interest or cause.

Taco Bell has done an exceptional job of nurturing its brand community through Twitter. The brand regularly shares its customers’ and super-fans’ Tweets to show appreciation while getting others on board.

Two Crunchy Tacos, a Baja Blast and a makeup tutorial. https://t.co/uXewresz3v

— Taco Bell (@tacobell) August 6, 2020

Unlocking these Twitter benefits

Hopefully now you have a clearer idea of how these benefits of Twitter can add value to your marketing mix. If you’re not sure where to start with using Twitter for your business, check out our guide on what to Tweet for some ideas.

This post 4 Benefits of Twitter for business originally appeared on Sprout Social.

from Sprout Social https://ift.tt/33jfuXX
via IFTTT

How to use Snapchat for business in 2020

When Snapchat emerged in 2012, it excited users by letting them tell stories, use fun filters and create off-the-cuff content. Since then, other apps like Instagram, Facebook, and now TikTok, have made their own versions of this style of storytelling. Even though Snapchat pioneered this style of content, it seems like fewer people are talking about the platform these days.

So, where does Snapchat stand as a social media platform and marketing tool in 2020?

By the end of Q1 2020, Snapchat still has 229 million daily active users around the world. Although it may seem like fewer people use Snapchat for business, it has seen a 20.5% increase in usage since 2019. And its numbers have since been increasing.

Compared to Twitter and Facebook, Snapchat is the most highly trafficked social platform among teenagers and young adults. And Snapchat users post over 210 million snaps on the platform every single day.

Who can still benefit from Snapchat marketing?

If your brand caters to Gen Z or younger millennials, then Snapchat can have a considerable impact on your business. These generations have billions of dollars of direct spending power as well as influence over household spending.

Snapchat also tends to work best with direct to consumer brands who can use the app to drive traffic to an ecommerce website or app. Since Snapchat lets businesses create short, highly engaging content, it makes users heavily invested in those stories. Because of their high engagement rates, Snapchatters are 60% more likely to make impulse purchases based on products they see on the app.

Ways to use Snapchat for business in 2020

So as a digital marketer, how can you use Snapchat in ways that make sense and cater to the demographics that are active on the platform? Here are a few ways brands can continue to incorporate Snapchat into their marketing strategies.

Cross-promote content from other platforms

To use Snapchat successfully, then you need to have followers on the platform.

If you have a large following on another platform, let those followers know about your Snapchat to encourage them to check out your content there. It helps to have a specific angle or focus on your Snapchat content or share things you don’t share on other platforms.

You can give your followers on other platforms a sneak peek of original content you’re posting on Snapchat. This will create excitement and encourage people to follow you on that platform as well.

Keep up with the latest social media trends to make sure that you’re always creating content that is fresh and engaging. This is especially important when targeting generations known for being in tune with what’s trending.

Create interactive filters for your brand

One of the things that makes Snapchat so popular are the filters—or Lenses, as they’re referred to—and geotags on the app. Businesses have an opportunity to get their message in front of Snapchat users by creating interactive filters that Snapchatters want to use.

The average Snapchat user interacts with a Snapchat Lens for at least 20 seconds and is likely to share images or videos of themselves using the filter. This essentially creates user-generated content that is promoting your brand to their audience.

With geofilters, you can create location-specific filters for when users are bear your business or location. This works exceptionally well for stores, restaurants or any business that has a brick and mortar storefront. When someone uses a geofilter or Lens on Snapchat, you’re getting instant exposure, free advertising and social proof to their followers.

Creating a branded geofilter can cost between $5 and $5,000 depending on how widely you want to promote the filter. A national campaign, with a high budget, can reach up to 60% of Snapchat users in one day.

Dunkin Donuts took advantage of National Donut Day by creating a goofy and fun Snapchat Filter that turns your head into a giant pink, glazed donut. In addition to the lens, they made custom geo-filters that were unlocked when someone visited their store.

You donut want to miss our #NationalDonutDay lens on Snapchat today 6/2! 👻: dunkindonuts pic.twitter.com/wEEJjRJ4xJ

— Dunkin’ (@dunkindonuts) June 2, 2017

This campaign single-handedly gained them 10x more followers on their Snapchat.

Coordinate brand takeovers on your account

If you’re working with influencers, you can incorporate a Snapchat takeover into your content agreement. Letting influencers take over your Snapchat account for a day will encourage their audience to follow along on your account. The influencer will also likely promote that takeover on their account, helping drive traffic to your page.

When doing a Snapchat takeover, try to make it exclusive to the platform. It might seem like a good idea to repost stories from an Instagram takeover to Snapchat, but you want to encourage people to follow you on Snapchat as well as Instagram to get the full impact of the platform. Create takeovers that are specific to Snapchat and work with influencers who are already active on the app.

Set specific goals for the platform that contribute to your overall marketing goals

Setting specific social media marketing goals can help you understand how Snapchat can help you meet those goals.

If your goal is to increase traffic, then Snapchat can help drive users to your website. The platform recently added the ability to add links to your Snaps, which works very well when promoting products or offers on your website.

Every Snapchat business account has access to their account analytics through the platform’s native analytics tool, Snapchat Insights.

Image via Snapchat

These metrics include the demographics of your stories’ views, including their age, gender, location and general interests. You’ll also see who watched your Snapchat story until the end and the number of people who saw your story.

Invest in paid advertising

If you have an advertising budget and a large audience on Snapchat, then Snapchat ads can be a lucrative part of your social media marketing strategy.

Here are the main types of ads you can use in Snapchat.

Collection ads

Collection ads use tappable tiles to link to products that users can shop directly from the app. These shoppable ads are ideal for ecommerce businesses. When testing this type of ad against standard Snap ads, eBay saw five times more engagement when using Collection ads on the same products.

Image via Snapchat

Filters and Lenses

We already mentioned how filters and lenses could increase engagement and brand awareness on the app. These Snapchat features also fall within its advertising platform. In addition to the fee for creating a filter or lens, you can also pay for sponsored filters or lenses that Snapchat will distribute to your target audience. The higher your distribution budget, the more people you’ll reach with your filters or lenses.

Story ads

Story ads appear in Snapchat’s Discover section and as branded advertisements. With story ads, you can create 3 to 20 images or video ads. These are usually straightforward, full-screen ads that contain a call to action. Most of these ads contain an attachment allowing users to swipe up and go to another website.

Hopper worked with Snapchat to create static story ads that targeted geographically specific users with flight deals in their area. The ads were straightforward and had a clear call to action, which was to install the app.

With these ads, Hopper found that Snapchat users were 37% more likely to download the app and watch a specific flight than their other acquisition channels. Using Snapchat ads, they were also able to reduce their cost per install by 50%.

Commercials

These ads are non-skippable for at least 6 seconds and appear within Snapchat’s curated content. Commercial ads are great for building brand awareness on the app and reaching new audiences.

If you have a large enough budget, and your target audience fits into Snapchat’s target demographic, it’s worth experimenting with running commercial ads on the platform.

Final Thoughts

Even though it attracts a particular audience, there are still ways that using Snapchat for business can help grow your brand. When you use Snapchat as an intentional and strategic marketing channel, it can help you drive traffic and increase sales among millennials and Gen Z more effectively than other platforms.

To learn more about prioritizing the right social media platforms, check out our article on how to choose which social media channels are right for your brand.

This post How to use Snapchat for business in 2020 originally appeared on Sprout Social.

from Sprout Social https://ift.tt/36m3CpR
via IFTTT

The lean social team: How Sprout powers efficiency for social marketers and proves their ROI

We’ve all heard the saying, many hands make light work. And yet social media managers, who could definitely use more hands to juggle their many responsibilities, are often a team of one.

Essentially, social media managers flying solo must be human Swiss Army knives to successfully plan, create, schedule and report on social content. And on top of that, they have to monitor and engage with their community and turn data into a story to prove the ROI of their work.

If your heart rate just increased, we feel you. It’s a lot to take on, but we’re here to help.

Throughout the year, we’ve heard from our social communities and several Sprout customers who have felt the weight of being a team of one. In the Social Marketers Exchange on Facebook, a member started a poll to learn more about the structure of other members’ social media team and who manages their inbox. Turns out that 64% of the respondents do it all by themselves.

And if you’re looking for even more solo social marketer solidarity, look no further than this Twitter thread.

raise your hand if you are or have ever been a social media team of one.

🙋🏾‍♀️ pic.twitter.com/BXI9v9Eqc1

— jayde i. powell (@jaydeipowell) June 24, 2020

If you’re part of a lean social team, then organization, automation and efficiency are key! Sprout Social can help boost your productivity, maximize your marketing impact and show real ROI to your bosses. Read on to learn more about Sprout features, tips and tricks that will make it work feel a little easier.

Get creative when planning content

Content planning requires your attention and intention. There are a lot of social media managers out there that will post just to post, but on social, quality usually trumps quantity. Save yourself time and energy by planning value-rich content tailored for your audience and aligned with business objectives. Then, think about multiple ways to position and reuse that one piece of content, before spinning your wheels on an entirely new idea.

Making the most out of every resource is key. One way to extend the life of video content, for example, is to cut down longer clips into teasers or short, impactful snippets that can stand on their own. And when sharing blog content, write a variety of options for post copy that each tell a different part of the story, so it feels fresh and enticing each time you share.

According to the 2020 Sprout Social Index™, 50% of marketers feel they need more content creation skills to achieve their goals. For more advice, read “5 tips to make the most of remote content production.”

Not every social post has to be content that you created. Curated third-party content creates a more nuanced and balanced feed and can fill any publishing gaps in your calendar. The Find Content tool, available in all Sprout plans, aggregates timely, engaging and relevant content that’s been shared across social platforms. Filter by categories, themes and industries to instantly surface content that your audience will value. Once you find what you’re looking for, just hit the “Send to Compose” button to add it to your Sprout Queue or Calendar.

Compose yourself: Content scheduling made easy

Once you’ve got a tentative content plan, map it out, queue it up and bring it to life in Sprout’s publishing suite.

Scheduling content can be relatively time consuming, but the Sprout content calendar can streamline the process. Here are few Sprout hacks right in the Compose window that speed up scheduling:

• There are several different scheduling options. When you’re posting the same content across channels, click “Schedule + Duplicate” and voila! A replica of the post will pop up which you can edit as necessary and tweak for different platforms. Or if you’re just not ready to commit, save it as a draft in your calendar and come back to it later.

Some personal news: the schedule+duplicate feature in @SproutSocial has actually changed my life. #smm

— stephanie rojas (she/her) (@_stefro) September 16, 2020

• The Sprout Asset Library—available on Sprout’s Advanced plans—can be a major, well…asset. Essentially, it’s a bank of important, reusable content and brand assets. You can save everything from post templates, visual assets, groupings of brand hashtags, videos and more. Then, access them all in the Compose window.
• Tagging your outgoing content will help you organize your posts and measure ROI down the road. Customize your tags so that they’re aligned with campaign goals, content themes, creative asset types, your target audience and more. Then, in Compose, you can access a drop-down list of all your tags and add them directly to your posts.
• Optimal Send Times powered by ViralPost®—available with Sprout’s Professional and Advanced plans—automatically generates the best times for you to post based on your audience’s activity and engagement patterns. Neat, huh?

Organizing and scheduling content ahead of time will free you up to create more timely content, engage with your audience and put out any fires, if necessary. Prep is also paramount if you want to make the most of your social data later.

Mission possible: Get to inbox zero

Monitoring the inbox and community management is a daily duty for solo social media managers.  These days, social media is one of the first places people will turn for customer service. Given that 49% of consumers will unfollow a brand on social if they receive subpar service, the stakes are relatively high. If the responsibility of providing customer service on social is yours alone, having a tool like Sprout’s Smart Inbox can save you time and stress.

In Sprout’s Smart Inbox, you can check messages off like a to-do list and file them away so they don’t clutter your view. If messages require more attention or you’re not sure what the right response is, you can assign it to yourself as a task, which puts a digital pin in it so you can mull it over or consult leadership about it.

You have a lot more to do than spend all day keeping one eye on your inbox, though. Enter your new best friend, Sprout’s Inbox automations.

Even though social media is always on, you don’t have to be. Sprout Bots can be your inbox coverage after quitting time, on weekends and during your busiest workdays. One of our customers let the Sprout Marketers Exchange know how valuable it’s been for them. “We ended up adding it because we were getting a lot of negative reviews on Yelp, Google, Facebook, etc. and there just wasn’t 24/7 staffing available to give one-on-one support. It has definitely helped alleviate a bunch of frustrated reviewers.”

In the Bot Builder, you can customize a tree of conversation flows. Then, when users go to DM your brand the Bot will prompt them and manage the conversation until it’s time to hand it off to you. Bots can focus on FAQ and basic customer service inquiries while you focus on the more difficult questions and comments that require a personalized response. It’s a win-win for you and your customers.

River Island, a major international fashion retailer, has seen the results first-hand. The brand activated Sprout Bots in mid-April of 2020, and consequently, their chatbots provided nearly 10,000 auto-responses on the brand’s behalf by the end of August.

When you’re the only one monitoring your brand’s social profiles, it can be a struggle to truly sign off at the end of the day. But with Sprout you can rest assured that important messages won’t slip through the cracks. If a sudden influx of incoming messages hit your inbox, they will trigger Message Spike Alerts, which send an email or mobile push notification. Best case scenario, your raving fans are just stoked about your latest product release. But in the event that those messages are spurred on by a customer service issue or call-out culture knocking at your brand’s front door, you won’t be caught off-guard and can react quickly.

And finally, Inbox Rules provide additional support in catching the most important messages. Here are a few examples of some rules you should consider setting up:

• Keyword-based rules: Get alerted when someone says a specific word or phrase. This can be really helpful in remaining on top of crisis management and customer service. For instance, if consumers have issues with online orders or are looking for a refund, set up rules with those keywords so you can provide efficient customer care.
• VIP list rules: Add users to Sprout VIP lists so you never miss a message when they reach out. Or, if you’re looking to identify potential brand ambassadors or influencers, you can set up a rule to get alerted when a user with a high follower count messages you.
• Spam-blocking rules: Not every user on your VIP lists has to be a high priority. Avoid seeing spam content by adding repeat spammers to a VIP list and setting a rule to auto-complete messages from those users.

There is value in everything you do. Social data can prove it

 Demonstrating and proving the value of social media marketing efforts is one of the top challenges for marketers, and yet, only 23% use social data to measure ROI. It’s time to embrace your inner data analyst.

Data analysis and reporting are crucial skills for social media managers. For teams of one looking to be more efficient with reporting, tag your content, add UTM parameters to your links and make the most of your social analytics tool. These steps will streamline the reporting process and help you more accurately represent the business impact of your work.

Sprout’s Tag Report is a great way to track, test and validate campaign performance, the content themes and topics that resonate with your audience, which creative assets are engaged with most frequently and so much more. With those insights, you can be more intentional about what content you spend your time creating and you can build a stronger social strategy.

Naturally, when people think ROI, they follow the money. However, with organic social, the return is more than just financial. As a social media manager, you probably know your brand’s audience better than anyone else. That is a HUGE asset.

Follower count might often be called a vanity metric, but growing your social following directly supports your business’ revenue and overall marketing goals. Just look at the actions consumers take when they follow a brand on social media.

When you have a full understanding of top business goals and Sprout’s robust analytics suite, you’ll be more equipped to efficiently report on the most important social media KPIs for each stage of the funnel. Plus, Sprout reports generate presentation-ready, exportable data visualizations that will help you paint a picture of your successes for leadership.

Need a little help identifying those KPIs? We’ve got you covered. Check out our free Social Media Metrics Map.

Your time is money, so start saving it

When it seems like you have a million things to accomplish in a day, it can be hard to stay organized. Bouncing back and forth from one task to another can be a real time-suck.

Whether you’re on a small social team or it’s just you, your time is money. Sprout’s content calendar, automation tools and reporting options help give you time back, so you can do more in your day—and maybe even log off at a reasonable hour and sleep better at night.

A social team of one’s work can disrupt their real social life if they don’t have the right tools. Stay organized, improve efficiency and maximize your impact while maintaining a work-life balance. Start your free trial today!

This post The lean social team: How Sprout powers efficiency for social marketers and proves their ROI originally appeared on Sprout Social.

from Sprout Social https://ift.tt/2HAqt6J
via IFTTT