KIP: Getting Results On Social Media
Social media is an essential marketing tool for businesses, but it can be difficult to use it in the right way to see the results you want. In this Knowledge Is Power article, we’ll talk you through the three main components to success on any social media platform. Before we do that though, it’s important to consider who your target audience actually is and that your business probably doesn’t need to be on every single social media platform. This is a mistake we see time and time again. So the first step to achieving your social media goals is identifying which platforms to be on. What social media platforms should my business be on? At Constructive Marketing, we look after a wide range of businesses’ social media channels and each one is on a different mixture of platforms. For businesses that operate in the B2B market, LinkedIn, Instagram and X is usually the way to go. Whereas one looking to target individual consumers needs to be on Facebook and Instagram or even TiKTok or X. This is only a general recommendation and where ‘knowing your audience’ really matters as you may find that a specialist platform, like Etsy, could benefit your business.. Of course, things aren’t usually that simple and for some clients we find that a two-pronged marketing approach works best for them. For example, some of our clients predominantly serve the B2C market, but can also supply to businesses. For them, a mixture of social feeds with varying content is the way to go. If you’re not sure where to start, it’s best to speak to an expert to make sure you’re on the right track. The Three Main Components Of Social Media Success With a combined social media experience of over 20 years, our social media team identified the three main components you will need for social media success. The great thing about these components is that they apply to each of the social media platforms and to any social media strategy. Regardless of what you want to achieve and on what platform you want to achieve it. 1: Accuracy The first thing to understand before you start using social media for your business is who you are trying to reach. Whether you’re looking to increase brand awareness, sales, website visits or something else, you need to always start with that question – who am I trying to reach? Then you can move on to ask, ‘what is it I want them to do?’ This is the cornerstone of all marketing and is especially true for social media. The main aim of each platform is to show its users content they are most likely to engage with (and therefore keep them using the platform for longer and more often). So making sure that the content you’re creating will be liked by your target audience is key. This may seem like an obvious point to make, but you’ll be surprised by the amount of people that don’t do this. More often than not, people get carried away with creating content they like creating, or content that they would like to see in their own feeds. Rather than what is best for their target consumer. 2: Consistency There are two ways that consistency is important to social media success: the amount of posts and the quality of the posts. Posting consistently is crucial to get the attention of any of the social media algorithms. Think of it like knocking on the door of a packed networking room. Eventually, you’ll be let in and be able to meet everyone inside. Algorithms look for consistent activity so if you’re posting the same amount of times each week, your content will begin to appear to more people. Making sure that the quality of the content is always good is the other way that consistency is key. We’ve written a whole blog post on why content consistency gets great results. In that blog post, we also give a couple of client success stories that show that it works. 3: Time One of the misconceptions of social media is that it’s a quick fix that will secure sales straight away. Yes, a tiny percentage of posts do ‘go viral’ and create a huge buzz but in reality that’s not the case. Building interest and reputation through organic social media activity is a long game. Remember that, above all else, the aim of social media is to build a relationship with your current and potential customers, and this takes time. You wouldn’t walk up to a complete stranger, ask them to marry you and expect them to say yes, (unless you’re on ‘Married At First Sight’ of course!). It’s the same with social media; why should you expect people to buy from you after you’ve put out just one post asking them to? Instead, you need to take the time to build a relationship with them and gain their trust before they even consider becoming a customer. Your post also needs to direct that potential customer to a credible source of more information, such as a specific landing page on your website. There are lots of different factors at play that impact the time it will take so it’s important to trust the process. One of the mistakes business owners make is cutting their social media budget too early. Implementing these components into your social media It’s best to put the components into practice in the order we’ve listed them in. Identifying who you’re trying to reach and what you would like them to do is an important first step to getting the results you want from social media. We offer a diagnostic service that involves a half-day meeting with one of our experts to identify where you’re going wrong and what you need to be doing instead. Once that’s been done, we’ll produce a non-obligatory strategy that we can help you implement or you can take elsewhere. If this sounds like something you
KIP: Branding
What is a brand? Why is it important and how can you start managing yours? One of the things that we do for clients is manage their brand reputation to make sure that they are represented in the correct way across all marketing channels. This can take a variety of forms as every channel requires different management. In this Knowledge Is Power article, we’ll be taking a deeper look into branding. We’ll explain what a brand is and give examples of the ways in which we manage our clients’ brands to give you a better understanding of how you can be managing your own. What is a brand and why do I need one? We hear the word ‘brand’ being thrown around a lot, but what really is it and why is it important to have one? In short, a brand is the identity of a business or ‘the sum of how a product or business is perceived by those who experience it’. The most important thing to remember about a brand is that it is one of the things that separates you from your competition. It also helps you to build a strong relationship with your customers. Both of which are very important when it comes to establishing yourself in your market. How to manage your brand When talking about branding, people often think about the huge international ones like Coca-Cola or Amazon, but every business has the opportunity to have a brand – including yours. There’s lots of components to a brand, but we’re going to be looking at brand personality and the elements you need to think about in order to manage it. As well as real examples of how we put theory into practice at Constructive Marketing. Be consistent As we’ve mentioned, a brand is a way for you to differentiate yourself from your competition. As such, it should be recognisable among others. The key to this is consistency with everything that you do. From the quality product or service you provide to the customer service and of course, your communications. There are two main elements of communication that people will recognise most – your visuals and your copy. Consistency with your visuals can be achieved by adopting brand guidelines and sticking to a template for social media posts. If it’s difficult to stick to a template for social posts, simply using your logo on all the images is a good idea so that consumers recognise it’s your business. Not to mention that by exposing your target audience to your logo, you will be reinforcing your brand to them. How we do this for clients For Cheesmur, we developed branded social icons that we use across all platforms for specific post types. For instance, if we’re posting about a finished project, we’ll use the ‘Cheesmur project complete’ logo. By doing this, a style can be established which allows Cheesmur to be recognised in people’s news feeds. Posting consistently with this style allows the Cheesmur brand to be reinforced to its followers. It also shows their target audience that they are actively working on and completing projects. Manage the tone of voice Although visuals are recognised quicker, the way your writing sounds when you’re representing the business is also important. A lot of people like to think of a brand as a personality and so the tone of voice in text is important. It’s how your business sounds and it needs to align with your brand values. Make sure that the copy you write for all channels is consistent to reinforce your brand and make it recognisable. That’s not to say that the message has to stay exactly the same on every channel as the audience will differ slightly from channel to channel. How we do this for clients Take Wall Bros as an example; the message we’re communicating for them is that they’re local flooring experts that have extensive knowledge on flooring. They also deliver high quality customer service and are traditional in their approach (they don’t sell online). We don’t explicitly say these things, but we convey that message in different ways across channels: The thing that stays consistent across all channels is of course the tone of voice. Which is warm and friendly. Hopefully seeing our breakdown of the different channels and what we do on each of them demonstrates to you how your messaging can be communicated through different channels in different ways. Making sure you’re managing your brand personality is integral to a marketing strategy and helps you achieve your goals. If you’re struggling with managing your brand, or you need help establishing a marketing strategy, get in touch. Our team of marketing specialists are on hand to give you the help that you need.
KIP: The Power Of Email Marketing
Find out what email marketing is, why you should be doing it and how you can implement it into your marketing strategy. Welcome to our new blog post series called, ‘Knowledge Is Power’ or ‘KIP’ for short. In this series we’re going to be diving deeper into different marketing topics, helping you to strengthen your knowledge of them and understand how you can start implementing this into your business. The more you know about how to market your business, the more it will help to ultimately grow your business. For our first post in the series, we’re looking at email marketing and the things that can be achieved when a business implements it in the right way. It’s a marketing technique that business owners often want to start doing, but they’re not sure where to start or what they really want to achieve with it. If this is you, we hope that this article is of use and that you find you can start using this amazing marketing tool within your business. What is email marketing? We’ll start from the beginning. Email marketing is a marketing technique which involves an organisation sending out a commercial message to a group of people over email. The great thing about email marketing is it doesn’t have to be a ‘hard sell’ tactic and can instead focus on building a relationship with the organisation’s target consumers. Just like other forms of digital marketing, email marketing allows the organisation to not only send out marketing communication but measure it too. So that over time campaigns can become more intuitive to the audience and more effective at achieving the goal they were set out to. The benefits of email marketing Email marketing can support any stage of the consumer journey and can help organisations achieve their marketing goals. Here’s a few key benefits a good email marketing strategy can bring to your business: Build relationships with existing customers Marketing isn’t just about acquiring new customers, it’s also about nurturing the relationship between the business and existing customers. This makes sure that they continue to see the business positively and, in turn, gives you repeat business or new customers through recommendations. Sending out regular emails to your existing customers increases the touch points they have with your business. This strengthens the relationship the two parties have and increases customer advocacy. What is customer advocacy? Customer advocacy refers to the final stage of the loyalty ladder, a concept developed by marketing theorist, Adrian Payne. The concept outlines the stages a consumer goes through to become an advocate of a brand. Meaning that they actively recommend your product or service to people and speak well of the company. A very powerful asset when growing your brand. Get customer feedback The only way to build customer relationships is to understand what your customers want and email marketing can help you do that. Through sending online surveys via email, you can gain good insight into a huge variety of things: Having these insights is invaluable and will help you to improve your future marketing efforts as well as your products or services. It can also work really well with customer nurture – how many times have you received an email that looks like this: Not only is an email like that a post-purchase touch point, it’s also an opportunity to gain customer insight. Send very specific content to target audiences While customer segmentation is possible in all marketing techniques, email marketing platforms like Hubspot make it really easy to segment your audience. Which is separating your contacts into lists based on different factors. For example; have they only just made their first purchase with you or have they been loyal for over two years? By segmenting your audience, you’re able to send very specific content to each segment. Making it relevant to them and increasing the campaign’s effectiveness as it’s much more likely to resonate with the audience. There’s no point in sending a ‘thank you for your first purchase’ email to a customer who has been loyal to you for years. In fact, it could harm your relationship with the loyal customer if you did so. Instead, why not offer your loyal customers a special discount to thank them for their loyalty? Which is possible to do with the correct segmentation Automate the nurture cycle One of the problems businesses face is not having enough time to maximise the benefits we’ve listed above. But, when used properly, an email marketing platform like Hubspot allows businesses to automate emails. So keeping on top of it doesn’t become time-consuming. Send out welcome emails, thank yous and even reminders to consumers automatically to make sure you hit all the right touchpoints and ultimately grow your business. How to implement email marketing into your marketing strategy Thousands of businesses are already harnessing the power of email marketing and using it as part of their marketing strategy, but it can be hard to know where to start. So here’s a step by step to give you some pointers. Although we would recommend getting a professional on board to guide you to making the most of your email marketing. Once you start using email marketing in your marketing strategy, you’ll start reaping the benefits we spoke about. As we said earlier, it can be beneficial to get an expert on board, not to take over your email marketing but help guide you in the right direction. When you’re ready to start using email marketing within your organisation, we recommend using Hubspot. As a very user friendly platform, it’s easy to get to grips with it – it has lots of fab free resources too! You can sign up for Hubspot here:
Knowledge Is Power!
Having a lot of knowledge in our field is great for us, but it feels even better to share that knowledge. Which we do through various talks that we put on at different events. Just recently, we spoke to South East Construction attendees about how to make the most out of exhibiting. We also run training sessions for clients to improve their in-house capabilities. Including social media training for groups so that staff can better understand how social media works for businesses and how to plan and formulate good content. Just recently we built a new website for a client and our web designer, Liam, made sure that the client was completely happy with how to make changes themselves. While we can of course look after everything from social media to websites, we understand that sometimes it’s best for those things to be predominantly looked after in-house. Running training sessions that work for you The main aim of our training sessions is to make sure that you and your team get the most out of them. Which includes delivering them in the way that you would like; whether that’s in-person, virtually or a mixture of both. In some cases, virtual training sessions are the best way to work. Which was especially the case for one of our clients based in Suffolk! Other times, attendees prefer to be in the same room and have a more hands-on experience. Whichever way you or your team want to work, we will accommodate you. Making sure that everyone comes away with a few key takeaways that they can start implementing into their work straight away. A recent attendee said, “I had a real light bulb moment” which is exactly what we like to hear. The approach we take with our training sessions is often hands-on, we love to get the people attending interacting and trying out the skills they are learning right there and then. If you’re looking for training across any marketing sphere of expertise, we can most likely cover it. Our sessions are delivered bespoke to clients’ needs. What’s your marketing pain point? We’d love to help you! Give us a call on 01903 686858 or email us at info@constructivemarketing.co.uk.