Quick Tips: Instagram for Business

Serious social media marketers know that Instagram can be a game-changer in the business world.  With 1 billion+ users, Instagram’s mobile-first philosophy allows the company to engage with target audiences to build brand awareness, debut products, drive website traffic, and sell online.  Engagement on Instagram is high, its users are brand loyal and extremely hashtag and trend-savvy. Key demographics for this social media channel are 18-24 years olds, with most users under age 35—all with money to spend.  80 percent of all accounts follow businesses on Instagram, making it worth the time and energy for companies of all sizes to utilize this social media channel!

GETTING STARTED

The Instagram audience is 70 percent more likely to buy via mobile and nearly 40 percent of online users utilize Instagram.  Instagram makes it easy to create and maintain a FREE business profile, but it’s not enough just to set up an account.  While business accounts are automatically set to “public,” allowing billions of potential likes, views, and visits from around the globe, smart marketers build their profile section, do their research and study their competition.  

1. Build Profile:  Include contact information, physical location, website address and utilize business-only options like corresponding buttons.  Be sure to select your category, giving you a leg up in reaching out to potential customers searching for your business type. Make sure you offer clear branding for your company allowing your business to reach new audiences.

2. Research:  Determine who your customers are and who currently follows/buys from you.  Age, socioeconomic background, interests, region, etc. You can gain a lot of infor from audience insights on your other social media channels, too. Keep in mind the under 35 demographic.

3. Study Your Competition:  Don’t be afraid to get nosy.  Various apps and websites exist to help you hone in on keywords and hashtags.  Follow your competitors and take advantage of the “similar accounts” page recommended by Instagram to expand your audience and grow your page followers.  

Each of these points will help you as you set Key Business Requirements and Key Performance Indicators for your business and Instagram account.  Make sure you establish upfront the type of metrics you will follow to measure success.

BUILDING AN AUDIENCE

Unlike other social media channels built around groups and friends, Instagram offers an explore feature, additional search options and advanced insights for business accounts to further build a following.  Here you can see your content rated from most viewed posts, activity insights (like interactions, discovery, reach and impressions,) as well as an audience tab. It’s important to note here that Instagram only measures your audience insights once you obtain 100 followers, so this is an important threshold to reach.  

1. Engage with the right people through the right hashtags. Select hashtags relevant to your product/service/brand.

2. Take advantage of “suggested” accounts.  Follow and engage with these accounts for audience growth.

3. Use the “places” search option to zone in on key event venues, cities, and regions where your target audience can be found.

4. Utilize the explore feature to browse by categories—this one is BIG. Find related categories, influencers, and accounts and tag them in your own posts expanding your audience reach.

5. Capitalize on established connections.  Instagram offers ready-made audience builders through the setting tab.  Choose Close Friends, Discover People, and connect through Facebook options.  

Throughout this audience building process “like, follow, comment” and “message” personal and business accounts to grow your own following.  Statistics show that the more you engage on the platform the more opportunities you have to grow your account.  

CONTENT CREATION AND AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT

Now that you’ve found your audience, create content that will pique your audiences’ interest, meet customers' needs, tell a compelling story, entertain, and otherwise build your brand.  Instagram is mobile and visually driven. Audiences respond to aesthetically pleasing photography (think Kylie Jenner,) infographics, and videos. This social channel moves fast and caters to a young demographic, so it’s important to make sure your content is captivating from the get-go!  You’ve researched your audience, tapped into their passions and further established relationships between brand and audience. When it comes to engagement, take advantage of the best Instagram features.

1. Posts:  Compelling images with catchy captions that can quickly tell a story.  Include hashtags.

2. Instagram Stories:  Creative and longer interactive narrative via the stories feature.  Stories run from one image to the next. Use this for product demos, to ask questions, to create polls, share music, go live, and draw your audience back to your website with Call to Action buttons.  

3. IGTV:  IGTV is connected to the Instagram platform and offers new opportunities to connect with your target audience.  The video is in the vertical format, making it eye-catching and different from other social media channels.  Businesses can use up to 60 minutes of video. Apps allow for editing and text options, as well. A great option for how-to videos, to showcase feature products, and hosting FAQs.

AUDIENCE ANALYSIS & INSIGHTS

Finally, evaluate your audience growth and engagement.  Here’s where the rubber meets the road. Are you growing your number of followers, utilizing the right hashtags, consistently engaging with the audience, and posting relevant content for the 35 and under crowd on a daily basis?  Instagram offers helpful Insights to analyze success. Your business account keeps a log of Feed Posts, Stories, Promotions and an Archive allowing you to review your best efforts and explore audience participation allowing you to grow your business.

Quick Tips: Facebook for Small Businesses

Compared to traditional marketing, social media marketing offers new, and relatively, inexpensive ways to grow businesses of all sizes.  So it’s no surprise that companies around the globe turn to social media giant Facebook first as a central part of their marketing plan. The numbers don’t lie.  Facebook touts itself as the most prominent social media channel globally with more than 2 billion monthly average users.  It reaches 20% of the world population with the average user spending at least an hour every day on the platform.  Today more than 65 million businesses use Facebook Pages and more than six million advertisers are actively promoting their company on Facebook right now.  Basically, a large chunk of the world’s buying population is on Facebook, and if your business isn’t—it should be!

BASICS

One of the keys to Facebook’s success is that it’s extremely user-friendly and customizable.  Creating a business page is similar to setting up a personal Facebook profile, but with several additional perks.  Page owners can tailor their business page by adding a logo and cover photo, including vital information in the “about” section, and linking to their company website or other social media channels.  Through the creation of a business page, friends, followers, clients, and potential customers can receive news, updates, and exclusive offers via a simple post. Content creators can (and should) add images or graphics to their posts to further appeal to their audiences, but these basics merely serve as a starting point as Facebook offers so much more!

TARGETING AUDIENCES

Your business can’t grow without customers and great business content needs an audience.  Facebook is here to help! Another feature available via this channel is the ability to find and engage with a target group inside and outside of your page.  Using business.facebook.com, business page owners can explore Audience Insights.  Now, instead of being limited to an audience of friends and existing customers, businesses can obtain demographic and behavioral data about their audience as well as their competitors in order to generate new customers.  Audience Insights can be an important tool in determining the type of content that your audience wants. Business page owners also have the ability to invite people to their page as a way of expanding their reach. Here a personal invitation can go a long way!  Through Facebook Notifications, a business page owner can see the profile of someone who has “liked” a post and then send that user a message to “like” the page and see future posts as well.

ENGAGING CUSTOMERS

Engaging with customers has never been easier.  Similar to a Facebook personal profile, users are encouraged to like, share and comment on a post.  Smart business page owners can interact with customers here, create contests, offer polls and quizzes, “caption this image” post and “fill in the blank” posts.  Another great way to engage customers is to share User Generated Content (UGC) to your page.  People love to see their photos shared on a large platform and, like social media influencers, UGC can grow your brand!  Page owners can also utilize Call To Action buzzwords encouraging current followers to like, share and invite their friends to your page. It’s important to remember that Facebook rates a page’s response time to Messages so engaging with customers quickly is key.  

VIDEO

Video content is king on social media and Facebook has seen great success with its “go live” feature.  Facebook Live videos are watched 3x longer than standard videos and 54% of users say they want to see more video content from marketers.  Statistics like these are good news for social media marketers who are looking to connect with their audience in real-time.  Additional ideas for video use include adding a featured video on your page and utilizing video within Facebook stories.  Marketers can also create Facebook 360 videos allowing for virtual reality as a communication and social interaction tool.  These types of video content can be leveraged through Facebook features like events, promotions, reminders, and links drawing in your audience for a “must-see” presentation.

FEATURES

Business owners can also utilize Groups, the Facebook Marketplace, and the Jobs Board as a part of their overall social media marketing plan.   Through Groups, there is the potential to grow your business page audience and subsequently find new clients and customers through interaction and discussion.  Through the utilization of Facebook Stories, a business page can create still images and mini-vignette videos that capture the attention of their audience, too.  Stickers, emojis, text and CTAs can also be added as well as direct links to a company website. Facebook has also made moving between social media channels easier through its acquisition of Instagram.  Now business owners can connect the two platforms and post both stories and posts simultaneously, saving time. Furthermore, Facebook increased the capabilities of its Messenger service whereby business owners can send automatic messages to subscribers to receive “insider” information and deals thus creating its own “insider” club vibe.  

AD CAMPAIGN

Social media managing tools like Hootsuite and Buffer offer great blogs to help business owners optimize their Facebook Ad campaigns.  Knowing the different types of ads available goes a long way in creating a strategy. Link click ads, video ads, boosted page posts, page like ads, and even Messenger ads are a few great examples of where to start.  Once an ad is created, business owners can then choose a target audience based on several criteria:  people who like the page, people who like the page and their friends, keyword, demographics, and target location among others.  Finally, business page owners can choose the duration and budget for the ad.  

ANALYTICS

In order to measure your business page’s Return on Investment (ROI,) you must review the analytics.  Page owners have an opportunity to review ad performance during and at the end of their ad campaign with Facebook analytics doing all the work.  Business owners have access to in-app performance graphs and charts. This allows for tweaking the ad (if needed) and noting any changes that can or should be made before the next ad campaign begins.  These ready made tools are key.

Facebook has rolled out the red carpet for business owners and marketers over the last few years and even offers tips through its own sponsored ad posts.  Using Facebook’s many options for creating, maintaining and engaging audiences helps marketers to create concrete goals and ultimately measure the success (or failure) of their ad campaign all within one social media channel.  

Identifying KBRs & KPIs for Effective Digital Marketing

Photo by William Iven on Unsplash

An effective digital marketing strategy has clear goals and outlines the metrics needed to meet these targets.

• Key Business Requirements (KBRs) identify business goals and expectations.  They outline a purpose and help to map out priorities.

• KBRs are an important FIRST STEP in a digital marketing strategy.

• Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) determine the metrics you will use to measure how well you’re meeting these objectives.

This distinction is important because in today’s business climate we have access to an incredible amount of data.  While this is ideal, if we’re not paying attention to the metrics that will help our company to meet its goals, it doesn’t really amount to much. For example, monitoring “likes” on a social media platform only helps us move product if we can get the consumer to the website where a purchase can be made. However, if your goal is brand awareness then the “likes” become valuable information. Without these objectives, we’re basically just collecting meaningless stats with no end result in mind. Creating a chart with clear KBIs and KPIs can help. This approach maps out a digital marketing strategy where business owners, stakeholders, and marketers can all see the objectives and the measurements required to reach their goals.

10 Ways to Build Your Social Media Content Calendar

MIX AND MATCH FOR A MONTH’S WORTH OF POSTS & TWEETS

Your social media strategy can make or break your business!  Between maintaining your brand and engaging with customers, it can be hard to find the time to keep up with it all.  But if consistency is the key (and it is,) you can’t afford not to make your social media content calendar a priority.  A recent study shows that seventy percent of all Americans are active on social media, many engaging in several platforms multiple times per day proving that it pays to be seen!  Make sure your brand gets the attention it deserves and layout a content calendar using these ten ideas.  

1. Original Post  The queen bee of all social media posts!  The original post is most authentic to your brand.  Through graphics, video or photography, you can engage with your current and potential customers.  It’s helpful to have a series of professional photos of your product/service on hand to create this type of content.  
   

2. Blog  The blog is the heart of your narrative.  Here you can sing the praises of your product/service.  No one knows what you offer as well as you do, don’t be afraid to share.  Through conversational writing and bullet points, blogs make for great social media calendar content that can be used repeatedly on a number of platforms.   Plus, regularly updating your blog on your website increases your visibility on search engines.  Win, win.
   

3. Quotes  No need to recreate the wheel here.  Pull select quotes from your blog and link back to it.  Another option is to share quotes that directly relate to your product/service.  For example, make a list of five keywords that describe your business. Use these words as a starting point for finding quotes that speak to your brand.  
   

4. Links to Published Pieces  A personal favorite.  Smart business owners monitor leaders in the industry.  Share items that relate to your type of business. If you're a realtor, perhaps you share landscaping tips on Tuesdays from publications like Better Homes & Gardens or Garden Design magazine.  Similarly, a personal trainer might link to articles on healthy eating as part of their content calendar.
   

5. Website Share  Generate more clicks for your already existing website and create calendar content at the same time.  Most websites have several ready-made content items. Everything from your About page to your Events page can become a link.  Use photos from your website to create continuity in look and tone.
   

6. Testimonials  The bread and butter of a well-run company is positive feedback from customers.  Car dealerships provide a great example here. Often times, a car sale and a positive referral from a customer make up the bulk of the social media content on a dealership’s account.  Customers are excited and happy about their purchase and this is an easy photo op that becomes quick content.
   

7. Giveaways  Everyone loves a prize!  EVERYONE. Create a Call to Action asking for followers to like, share and tag a friend for an opportunity to win your product or service.  Stretch the promotion out for a few days and instant social media content. Plus, the word of mouth generated following the giveaway doesn’t hurt either!
   

8. Polls and Questions  Take the temperature of the room with polls and questions.  This is a very informal way of product testing to create content.  Polls can be as benign as color choice or you can offer a more in-depth questionnaire with a handful of selections.  Either way customers and even potential customers love to be a part of their favorite company’s decision-making process.
   

9. User-Generated Content  Your fans are your greatest asset!  Digital entrepreneur, Pat Flynn smartly identifies super fans as a company’s “free” marketing team. Search your mentions and hashtags for followers who give a shout out to your product/service and then share their praise (always ask permission.)  In today’s social media climate we all have the potential to influence our own followers. User-Generated Content is a fun and easy way to fill up your own content calendar.  
   

10. Newsletters  List your accomplishments and what’s next via a company newsletter.  Your newsletter is like a highlight reel, use it to share important news and product reveals.  With several free newsletter templates, creating a polished and professional newsletter is easy and can be shared more than once!

Creating a content calendar is vital to today’s business. Remember, you can repurpose the content throughout the month with new lead-ins, keeping in mind holidays and other important dates. Be sure to track engagement.  Analytics can help you determine which posts received the most attention and help you decide which days of the week (and even times of the day) your customers are most likely to engage. The scheduler feature on many social media platforms is also helpful or use a social media content calendar service (several are free) to help you manage your posts across platforms.  

Now, let’s get started!

Build Your Brand for $0 (I’m Not Kidding)

TAP INTO THESE 5 NO COST PROMOTION IDEAS USING JUST A SMARTPHONE

You’re starting your own business!  With any luck, your new venture will pay the rent but creating a company goes way beyond product.  In today’s entrepreneurial environment, building a business requires branding. Branding is more than a logo and tagline.  It’s the personality and vision of your business, and it requires getting your name out there. Sound expensive? It doesn’t have to be.  Here are five zero cost strategies for marketing your company using just a smartphone.

1. SOCIAL MEDIA

   First things first, your business needs a social media presence.  Take advantage of the numerous FREE platforms available. Be sure to set up a business account on the three main outlets—Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.  Business account designation gives credibility, provides networking opportunities, access to analytics, and allows for reviews/recommendations.  

2. BLOG SITE

   Nobody knows your product like you do, so start writing about it!  Create blogs that feature product details, satisfied customers or tell the tale behind your company.  FREE blog site options exist on WordPress and Medium. Simply create an account, name your blog, and go!

3. IMAGES

   A picture is worth a thousand words, but we’re not all professional photographers.  That’s where royalty free image services come into play. Websites like Unsplash and Pexel provide FREE, high quality, professional images.  With thousands of photos at your fingertips, your business promotions will look like a million bucks!

4. GRAPHIC APPS

   Downloading a graphics app will let you add that special something to your social media posts.  With creative fonts and designs, your posts will really pop! Several FREE apps exist. Try Adobe Spark Post for still or animated graphics options.

5. EMAIL MARKETING

   FREE email marketing services like MailChimp will allow subscribers to receive emails, newsletters, etc. from your company straight to their inbox.  With easy to use templates, you can create professional quality emails that effectively market your business in minutes.

Promoting your business doesn’t have to break the bank.  In fact, with today’s smartphone capabilities you can create and manage your entire marketing plan with a few clicks.  Be sure to subscribe to podcasts like The Science of Social Media and Social Marketing Academy for additional tips and ideas.