Why is Social Media Important for Small Businesses?

Social media marketing has a number of advantages for small business:

Low Barrier to Entry

Social media platforms are generally free to use as well as easy to set up and start creating content and interacting with customers. Unlike with websites, which require more work on the backend, it’s also simple to post updates or change static information on your social media accounts.

Discoverability

Strategic use of hashtags can draw in potential customers who are looking for the kind of content you’ve created and interested in engaging with it.

Direct Customer Contact

Social media allows your business to interact with customers in real time to provide customer service, answer questions, or just have fun. These interactions personalize your brand for customers in a way that a suggestion page on a website or a virtual help assistant might not. Of course, this is a double-edged sword, because any negative interactions with customers will be visible to others – but your thoughtful, customer-centered responses will be, too. 

How Do I Decide Which Social Media Platforms To Use For My Business?

Deciding on which social media platforms to use can be tricky. Different segments of your customer base may use one platform more than the others – and popular platforms and user engagement are changing all the time. While it may be helpful to claim your business’s handle on a number of platforms, it’s OK to focus on just a few as you’re building your brand’s social presence. Ask yourself the following questions:

Who Are My Customers?

Take the time to build customer personas – once you know who your customers are, it will be easier to modify your content so it will resonate with new people who fit the same profile and may be interested in your products or services. 

What Content Do My Customers Want?

Consider what kind of content will be most useful and interesting for your customers, whether they’d enjoy demos of your product or a look behind-the-scenes at how your business works and who the people who work there are. 

Which Platforms Work Best For My Customers And The Content They Want To Engage With?

Once you know who your customers are and what kind of content they find engaging, you can determine which social media sites they frequent that best curate that kind of content. 

What Key Guidelines Should I Keep In Mind As I Outline My Social Media Strategy?

Brainstorm Social Media Content and Create A Content Calendar

Develop a list of potential social media posts and videos to get a sense for the different types of content you’d like to produce and what topics and themes you’d like to cover. From this topline view, you can build a content calendar that is consistent – and manageable! – so your customers hear from you on a regular basis on a variety of topics, in a variety of forms – from polls soliciting customer suggestions to video testimonials about your products.

Post Often, But Not Too Often

Your customers want to hear from you, but they don’t want to be bombarded with posts – especially not promotional ones. Focus on creating smart, meaningful content that targets and engages your high-value customers.

Develop An Authentic Brand Voice

Social media is the perfect place to personalize your brand so your customers connect with it. Transparency, honesty, empathy, openness, and consistency can help build your brand’s authenticity with your customers.

Interact with Customers

If you’re not using social media to engage with your customers, you’re missing out on immediate feedback on what’s working about your business and what isn’t. These interactions can offer important context to your sales figures, click throughs, and other data metrics, so be prepared for customers to reach out with comments, questions, and complaints about your business – and be ready to learn from them.

Leverage Your Business’s Network

Does your business partner with other organizations? Make those connections happen on social media so you and your partners can elevate each other’s content and help expand your audiences. 

How Do I Create Compelling Content for Social Media?

Small business owners are often short on time, and most don’t have hours to spend crafting the perfect posts for social media when focus needs to stay on fulfilling orders and keeping existing customers satisfied. But if you’re organized – and you take advantage of existing tools – you can offer a satisfying social media experience for your customers.

Create Content Adaptable to Multiple Platforms

While you should certainly make sure that your content is displayed to its best advantage on individual platforms, it’s useful to maximize your output and minimize your input by crafting posts that can be reused, with a few or no tweaks. 

Try Out ChatGPT to Generate Quick Social Posts

If you’ve been following the news on generative AIs like ChatGPT, you’re probably already considering how this powerful new tool can be used to advance your strategy. When given the right guidance – well-defined, precise prompts that outline parameters like topic, length, and tone – ChatGPT can draft social media posts appropriate for different channels, based on its vast analysis of similar content. You can even ask ChatGPT to model its posts on existing content for your brand, helping to ensure a consistent tone. 

Get Started with Video

As video content becomes more attractive to customers of various demographics, TikTok has emerged as an important platform. Its enormous user base enjoys how TikTok’s algorithms curate content that matches their interests. Not sure your customers are on TikTok? Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter algorithms now all prioritize video content, and the video you create for TikTok can find new audiences through other platforms, like Instagram’s Reels.

Use a Social Media Management Tool to Schedule Your Posts

You don’t have time to manually post your content across multiple platforms, so find an inexpensive tool that will make your posts for you. By planning and scheduling your posts in advance, you’re making it more likely you’ll stay on top of your content calendar and still have the bandwidth to interact with customers in real time.

Track your Social Media Metrics with Google Analytics 4

GA4 tracks users’ every interaction across platforms, which offers your business an opportunity to get a holistic view of your customers’ journeys and insights into what content and platforms are the most effective at converting browsers to buyers.

Work with NetElixir

Not sure how to get started with social media marketing for your small business? Contact NetElixir today! As a small business owner or marketer, you have many demands on your time. NetElixir is here to help you develop a social media strategy tailored to your business and to your customers. We’ll work with you to decide what platforms are right for your brand and what content will showcase your brand as you seek to reach your target audience. 

Additional Resources: 

• Deep Dive into First-Party Data: How to Collect it and Use it Responsibly
• What’s Trending? The Importance of Trend Research in Your Marketing Strategy
• Smart Cookies: Leveraging Artificial Intelligence

The post Social Media Marketing Tips appeared first on NetElixir.

For some quick insights into the key elements of Advantage+ Shopping, check out our recap video! Read on for more details about how to set up your own Advantage+ Shopping Campaign and discover tips to increase its efficiency.

What is The Advantage+ Shopping Campaign?

The Advantage+ Shopping Campaign is Meta’s new initiative to simplify the setup process for conversion campaigns. It relies on the ability of the algorithm to provide you with better results as compared to setting up a manual campaign from scratch. Through the power of machine learning, these campaigns help to steamline performance goals, refine audience targeting, and simplify set up.

Setting Up An Advantage+ Shopping Campaign

Once you click on the option to choose an Advantage+ Shopping Campaign, you’ll notice that the campaign type automates most basic optimizations required to launch, such as the conversion event, pixel, and placement, unlike its manual counterpart.

The Advantage+ Shopping Campaign promotes a consolidated audience approach that makes use of both existing customers and new users. This consolidated audience approach breaks free from the traditional prospecting vs retargeting campaign setup that most advertisers adopt.

How To Get The Best Out Of Your Advantage+ Shopping Campaign

You have the chance to place a customizable budget cap for existing customers. This means that you can tell the campaign to spend only 20% on existing customers, for example. The idea is to give the campaign as many data signals as possible to optimize the campaign for better results.

Make sure to add existing customers under the reporting section. This option allows you to track performance at an audience level breakdown (i.e. new and existing), which will further allow you to optimize your bid caps to the audience type that is most profitable for your goals! Meta’s new campaign structure uses machine learning to identify and target your highest-value customers.

Additionally, Meta allows you to add suggested ads on the basis of past performance; therefore, you can import your best-performing ads into the ad set in just one go.

NetElixir’s Best Practices For Your Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns 

It is our recommendation to run an Advantage+ Shopping campaign alongside your existing campaign structures (traditional manual campaigns) split out for different objectives for at least 4-6 weeks before adopting this campaign type completely across the account. Continually testing and gathering insights is imporant to creating a winning strategy.

Although dynamic product catalog ads (or DPAs) performed the best from a conversion standpoint for our test account, importing all creative options from the best-performing ads section gives Meta the leverage to drive creatives that resonate the most with different audiences.

We’d recommend adding as many customer lists as possible (e.g. email subscribers, past purchasers) at the account level. This gives Meta enough data to separate your existing customers from new ones. Adding customer lists to the account level also standardizes existing customers across all your new ASCs.

Although ASC allows you to place a budget cap to spend on existing customers, run a campaign with no budget cap alongside one with a budget cap for diversified results!

For the ASC campaign to learn faster, allocate at least 2X the average the budget you’d provide for your other campaigns.

Conclusion

Using Meta’s Avantage+ Shopping Campaign is a great way to help combat data loss in a post-iOS 14 world. Be sure to take advantage of the tailored setup, but simultaneously test it with a similar setup against your manual campaign to know what works best for you and your business!

Would you like an expert to go over your existing Meta strategy? Connect with in-house experts at NetElixir by booking a free consultation call!

Further Reading

• How Generative AI Is Disrupting Search
• How To Be Authentic In Your Social Media Strategy
• Your Social Strategy For The Cookieless Future

Featured image credits: Tada Images – stock.adobe.com

The post The Ultimate Guide To Setting Up An Advantage+ Shopping Campaign on Meta appeared first on NetElixir.

When Cookies Began to Disappear, Social Media Took the Hit

While many marketers have only begun to think about cookie deprecation now, with Chrome set to phase out tracking by 2023, social media marketers saw the writing on the wall as early as September 2020. That was when the release of iOS14 limited retargeting capabilities for Facebook and offered users the option to ask the app not to track them, making paid social campaigns more difficult to run. Social strategists saw the window in which they could retarget users shorten from 28 days to 7 days, curtailing marketers’ ability to reach back out to potential customers and requiring marketers to totally rethink how they use social media channels for marketing. 

Finding New Audiences through Social Media Channels

Savvy marketers are beginning to see social media as a critical channel for reaching out and connecting with potential customers and building new audiences. Paid social is a unique data-rich environment great for testing products, promotions, and messaging across different audiences.  As the appetite for first-party data grows, marketers will need to develop paid campaigns that help them generate new leads of potential high-value customers who can become brand loyalists that have continued engagement with your e-commerce business. 

Lead generation ads and campaigns that focus on exciting offers, not just discounts, and promise community and exclusivity, can inspire new audiences to connect with your brand on social. A community on social allows you to access first-party data that will let you reach users not only on social media but also on other platforms. Digital marketers are now thinking more broadly about how a brand is performing and growing across channels with the recognition that the growth of audience and engagement in a channel like social can have a broad effect across other channels. By leveraging the strong points from each channel, marketers can build a customer journey that keeps the user engaged and ultimately converts them from a browser into a buyer. 

Reinvent Your Social Strategy with NetElixir 

Whether you’re ready for a total overhaul of your digital strategy for the cookieless future or simply want to dig into how your social media channels can support your e-commerce business moving forward, NetElixir will work with you to find the solutions you need to reach your customers. We’ll help ensure you’re telling compelling stories that will engage new audiences, using marketing psychology, and our brand and data-driven insights to understand and influence customer behavior. We can help you devise and execute your first-party data collection strategy to ensure sustainable growth and engagement of your customers, as well as leverage incrementality for holistic growth and test new channels to reach new and desired audiences. Our hands-on, knowledgeable team is made of analytical thinkers who love to create and share knowledge and to innovate in the e-commerce. 

We’ll use our proprietary social media campaign framework to help you find, target, and engage the perfect customers for your brand. We’ve invested over 500,000 hours developing social media campaigns on Facebook/Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and Pinterest from initial design to final implementation. We’ll work with you to develop an authentic brand voice that helps your customers identify and connect with your business across all your social media channels. And while you’re creating content for your social campaigns, why not let NetElixir help you take a good look at your SEO strategy and make sure it’s meeting your requirements for the cookieless future and get your e-commerce business set up with Google Analytics 4 for all your tracking and reporting needs. 

Ready to Learn More?

Contact NetElixir to discover how we can help your e-commerce business put together a social strategy ready to target new audiences in the post-cookie world.

Additional resources

• Christmas in May: Your Holiday Strategy in the Cookieless World
• Preparing for the Cookieless World With Google Analytics 4
• Crafting an Effective Social Media Marketing Strategy

The post Your Social Strategy For the Cookieless Future appeared first on NetElixir.

While crafting an effective social media strategy means getting your brand into the public’s awareness, how you tell your brand story is crucial to maintaining a relationship with your customers. Being authentic and humanizing your brand is how you make your brand story memorable, engaging, and yours. 

Tenents of Authenticity In Your Social Media Approach

Authenticity is key to customers trusting your brand. Brands are competing on the idea of who can be the most authentic. No one is going to win that award — for one, it doesn’t exist, and two, that level of competition can cause brands to misrepresent themselves in the effort of appearing authentic. Authenticity comes from being genuine so stop overthinking and actually just be real.

Be Transparent

There is no room for gimmicks. People believe brands have a responsibility to be transparent. In fact, businesses are the most trusted institution, according to the 2021 Edelman Trust Barometer, surpassing NGOs, the government, and the media. Maintaining that level of trust with consumers means being transparent about your brand’s values, missions, company culture, product, sustainability efforts, and more. 

Be Honest

Authenticity is not a fake it until you make it gig, so don’t try to fake it. Not everything has to be perfect. Let your humanity show through silly and unfiltered photos. Don’t over-edit or photoshop your images and products to appear as something they are not.

If you don’t have a DTC site, then tell consumers where they can go to buy your products. A lot of brands try to work around this and it only causes more confusion. And if your customers are confused, they’re unlikely to return to your brand. Ensure your product descriptions and company information are all correct and up-to-date so consumers know what they are investing in.

Be Empathetic

Consumers expect brands to have a voice that speaks on bigger social issues and topics. This means being inclusive and aware of what’s happening around the world, as well as understanding the issues that are relevant to your customers. While customers’ social consciousness was rising, the pandemic helped cement socially conscious shoppers as a significant portion of the new pandemic personas. According to Businesswire, 70% of consumers want to know what brands are doing to address social and environmental issues. 

Be careful, however, to not jump on the social cause bandwagon just because. These socially conscious shoppers are not interested in patronizing brands that engage in lip service or performative allyship on important days that have been reduced to a hashtag. Make sure your internal team thoroughly understands the social cause(s) your brand is claiming to stand for. And make sure your brand’s actions and values support what you post as well. 

Be Open

Take ownership of any mistakes or errors you make; after all, you are only human. If you made a mistake, apologize; if there’s a delay in orders or shipment, update your customers; if a product misses the mark, own up to it. 

Sometimes social media can be nice about your mistakes, like the rush of support of been there when an HBO Max intern sent out a test email. Openly apologize if needed — and make sure your apology is actually an apology. Don’t delete negative comments, but address them head-on. Be professional in all your responses.

Be Consistent

Consistency matters, both in terms of scheduling so your brand is reliable, but in messaging and how you present yourself. This means making sure your content fits the reality of your brand’s values, mission, culture, and goals. Maintain a consistent brand voice and experience so customers trust you and follow you across platforms.

Conclusion

Brands have to find a balance. While they need to demonstrate empathy, inclusivity, and awareness, they also need to not be tone-deaf to current social crises or performative. This list is nowhere near exhaustive and each brand has to find a social media strategy that aligns with who they are and what message they want to send.

The point of social media is to have fun and connect with people, so humanizing your brand can help you tell your story, authentically and genuinely. As such, authenticity boils down to being yourself; your brand has a lot of unique products to share and truly interesting employees that make magic happen every day. Social media helps you engage with your followers on their time and platform of choice, so truly connect with them. Share your story and welcome them along on the journey. 

Further Insights on Connecting with Your Customers

• Insights into the DTC E-Commerce Explosion 
• SEO Strategy to Responsibly Engage Your Customers
• Repeat Customer Prediction of New E-Commerce Customers
• Emotions in Superbowl Ads

The post How to Be Authentic in Your Social Media Strategy appeared first on NetElixir.

At its core, social media connects people to one another. As a marketing tool, social media helps brands connect with and target current and potential customers. Nearly 92% of U.S. marketers in companies with more than 100 employees use social media as part of their marketing strategy, according to Statista. But just because it’s easier to engage with customers does not mean that engagement is always easy. Your social media strategy has a lot of variables to balance and goals to meet to be effective. 

Amid all the digital noise, how can brands make their content and channels stand out? Beyond the usual elements of understanding the nuances of each platform, posting consistently, and finding the right hashtags, an effective social media strategy should authentically communicate your brand’s story. 

Humanize Your Brand

People join social media to engage with others, to stay informed, and to be inspired. So, get to know your audience. Understand their wants, needs, and expectations and then build a specific social media strategy around those points. Know that audiences across different platforms may have different needs. Leverage industry data and trends and your performance across channels for a baseline of what your customers respond to and need.

But don’t just guess at what your customers want; allow them to speak for themselves and tell you what they expect from your brand and how their overall experience can be improved. Ask questions on a live stream, share polls and surveys, and listen to their comments and questions. Having a Q&A session with the social media manager that gives your customers a face behind the posts can further humanize your brand. Your customers will feel included in the brand’s overall story and you’ll be able to tailor your social media experience directly to what the customer wants and expects. 

Consumers today react positively to transparent, genuine, and raw marketing campaigns. It’s ok for videos to not be perfectly polished, professionally-edited pieces. Instead, share a quick story of office life, show some behind-the-scenes of making your products, and make your content casual. Staged perfectionism does not work — and often, customers can see through that, anyway.

Just as you aim to humanize your brand, add some personalization to your outreach to humanize your individual customers. Don’t just copy and paste automated messages when replying to comments or DMs. When responding to an inquiry, start by addressing the questioner directly, such as “Hi Jen!” or “That’s great feedback, Jen, thank you! We will pass this to the rest of our team.” Good brands remember people and treat them as individuals who are all part of the same community. 

Build a Raging Online Community

Yes, the keyword there is raging. The ideal scenario of any social media strategy is to have your brand’s supporters become your mouthpiece to boast about you on your behalf and do free advertising for you. To work toward that ideal, you need a raging online community that is in love with your products and services and who are willing to become brand ambassadors of their own accord. 

This community can be fostered by taking your brand beyond simply a sales and revenue focus. Remain true to your values and brand voice, communicate honestly, and take responsibility for your actions.

Create a strong relationship between your brand and your followers.

Partner with influencers who can share your brand story from a different angle and leverage their own community followings. Put together a brand ambassador program to reward loyal customers. A strong community relies on constant day-to-day communication from a solid social media team that replies to DMs, posts, comments, tags, and reposts. Your team should also be open to receiving honest feedback from it’s most loyal followers. 

Offer value to your customers.

This means value beyond simply selling and promoting your products and services. Value can come from sharing knowledge about your industry, tips and tricks, and inspiring quotes, for example. Avoid aggressive sales posts. Share resources and knowledge that will empower others. 

Remember when you asked your customers what they needed? A product that specifically addresses a customer’s needs offers tremendous value. This new product can be branded around a social media campaign that lets customers know your company worked hard to address their specific concerns. This shows your brand listens and cares about your customers.

Share attention-grabbing content.

While content is an important element of your social media strategy, this point comes last for a reason. Often, brands tend to put content first, but without conveying real values and maintaining a strong relationship, good content alone will not carry your social media strategy.

Don’t post just for the likes. Skip shocking and click-bait content. Post real brand updates that adhere to your brand’s values and the likes and engagement will come organically over time. Share original images and videos that showcase your team, while updating your followers on the day-to-day office shenanigans (whether remote or in-person) to show off what makes your team and company great. This builds a sense of familiarity and shows your company culture. Plus people trust other people more than they trust companies: ResearchGate reports that photos that feature faces are 38% more likely to receive likes and 32% more likely to receive comments on Instagram. Sharing original content shows customers who your brand really is, so don’t copy the competition. You can be inspired by what your competitors are doing, but ensure your individual pieces align with your own brand story.

Additionally, incorporate user-generated content into your strategy. Businesswire found that consumers are 2.4 times more likely to consider UGC authentic compared to brand-generated content. This further contributes to your raging online community, as people love to see themselves acknowledged by the brands they care about.

By building a raging online community, you can tap into the best type of social advertising around. While paid social media advertising like Facebook and Instagram ads help support your revenue goals and influencers diversify your content, word-of-mouth advertising and peer reviews go a long way into boosting your brand’s reputation. Nothing can top authentic, organic, unfiltered content from a trusted peer or friend.

Putting Together Your Social Media Strategy

Social media is a strong tool to have in your marketing portfolio. The diversity of channels and experiences social media offers, as well as the ability to meaningfully engage with customers and authentically share your brand’s journey, is crucial to your overall growth strategy. 

NetElixir’s social media experts can help you create and execute your social media strategy and create a holistic plan that unifies your paid and organic social media approach. Contact NetElixir now.

For extra insights, download our 10 best practices to optimize your organic social media guide to ensure your channels have a strong foundation for growth!

Read More on Your Social Media Marketing Strategy

• Social Media Trends for 2021 and Beyond
• 9 Search, Social, and Amazon Trends for 2021
• Using Data to Guide Your Content

The post Crafting an Effective Social Media Marketing Strategy appeared first on NetElixir.

So, let’s get social! NetElixir’s social team shared insights into the latest social media trends and tips on how to best implement those trends into your social media marketing strategy. 

The Social Media Market

The social media market is constantly growing. According to eMarketer, social ad spending is set to increase 21% to reach $49B in 2021. For a breakdown of the anticipated growth for specific channels, see below:

While Facebook and Instagram have dominated the market for several years (especially in the United States), platforms like Snapchat and Pinterest are gaining active users.

Pinterest, for example, has always been a market leader for inspiration. According to SproutSocial, 89% of Pinners use the platform for purchase inspiration and 85% of users have bought something based on Pins. Last year, Pinterest improved the platform’s overall ad offering, added integrated shopping ads, and launched a shoppable feature, making it more than just a source of inspiration.

Snapchat’s augmented reality features make the channel unique and helps it resonate with younger users, as over 75% of Snapchatters use the AR feature.

Of course, we can’t forget TikTok. TikTok is projected to reach one out of every 4 internet users in the United States by the end of 2021, according to eMarketer. 

“If you [as a brand] are talking to your customers online, then they are most likely on TikTok,” Manish summarizes. 

Teenagers predominantly favor TikTok and Instagram. As more people actively join social media, brands need to meet their consumers where they are to create a winning social media marketing strategy. 

“Social Media has been quite an interesting space during the pandemic, with a lot of consumers moving online and discovering new brands that they can shop from. Social media played an integral role in all of this.” – Manish Mohan, Senior Direct of Digital Strategy

Improve your brand’s social presence with these five social media trends:

5 Social Media Trends Brands Should Know in 2021

1. Be Real

Authenticity helps drive loyalty. If your customers resonate with who you really are as a brand, then they will be inclined to stay with you. Transparency in values and missions, honesty and integrity, and an openness to connect with your customers as people and not just buyers help establish an authentic brand identity. The importance of authenticity as a social media trend cannot be denied: 90% of consumers said authenticity is a deciding factor in choosing which brands they like and support.

Create authenticity by going back to your roots, your brand’s core values, and what you stand for, Zara Asad, our Social Media Senior Analyst, shares. Build authority and expertise in your industry by sharing your know-hows and tips without being too salesy. Share your journey. In turn, others will share your brand among their peers. Expertise, peer-recommendations, and shares will cultivate your brands open and authentic identity. 

Be everywhere your customers are so you can be there to answer their questions and thoughtfully engage with them without putting them too far out of their comfort zone. Build and foster a positive community around your brand with factual information. Don’t be misleading or click-baity; this decreases customers’ trust in both social media platforms and your brand specifically.

Expect criticism with an online social presence. Deal with criticism proactively and apologize when you need to. Conversely, accept praise when due as well. How you react to both negative and positive feedback will help develop your brand’s voice and how you interact with customers. 

2. (Almost) Every Customer Can Be An Influencer

While professional influencers can greatly help your brand grow and get attention, your loyal customer base are potential brand ambassadors because they are already engaged with your brand. They may only have 200 followers, but peer recommendations go a long way: over 80% of people say they’re influenced by what their friends share on social media.

Influencer engagement should be authentic as well. Take time to engage with influencers, even before signing them, so their followers have a chance to get acquainted with your brand. Additionally, this gives you time to vet the influencer to ensure they are someone you want to connect with personally. 

As Jennifer Altema, our influencer guru says, “Followers these days can sniff out a shallow campaign a mile away.”

Look carefully within your user base for potential micro-influencers. Maybe add an option during checkout or in a post-checkout survey for a returning customer to share their social profile and then periodically check their follower count and engagement. Consider the following steps:

• Outline your collaboration details ahead of time. Have a contract ready to go – but offer a lean, bulleted, neat contract so you don’t immediately overwhelm them.
• Know your brand’s dos and don’ts on influencer relationships, such as don’t mention a competitor and do include brand colors.
• Give your influencer room to be creative as they know what content best resonates with their audience. Their promotions are highly curated to their audience.
• Be prepared to pay micro-influencers.
• First impressions are important, especially with products. Consider the whole package; don’t just ship a product, but an experience.

By creating an experience around your product, you can ask an influencer for a social livestream. Shoppable livestreams are the modern generations’ QVC, as Jennifer says. 

Influencer content should supplement your overall social media content strategy.

3. Leverage the Social Network

You need to have a cross-channel strategy to amplify your brand reach across all social channels, especially as they are growing.

Each channel has their own strengths and strong following in certain demographics. Don’t just split your paid media budget across five channels to maximize exposure; curate a social media strategy that leverages the social network in appropriate relation to your target audience. Look where your customers are and what platform they use most. You can’t be everywhere, Zara says. “Pick two platforms that you can really master and then branch out,” Zara recommends.

For example, your target audience may be aged 25-35 years. While reaching that specific age demographic on Facebook and Instagram, consider allocating a small budget to testing on Snapchat and TikTok to start getting a younger demographic familiar with your brand. When they come of age, they already may have started engaging with you. Develop discovery and outreach strategies for channel-agnostic and channel-specific audiences, optimizing for each platform and each customer profile on each platform.

Additionally, you need to be able to measure the success of each channel. NetElixir’s proprietary technology, LXRInsights, tracks every customer touch point and builds out your customers’ purchase journey. 

4. Don’t Let Measurement Curtail Your Social Goals

The contribution of social media in your overall distribution strategy is only increasing.

Work to develop models to understand the correlation between incremental volume on social media of reach and conversions to revenue gained. It is not a linear correlation. For example, devise a model that says for every 2% increase in reach and impressions, your brand has a 0.5% lift in revenue. While this is not a given, it will help scale your social media contributions. Connect social media hits to your owned and earned media. How does an incremental lift in social media related to organic and website traffic? 

Prioritize cleaning up, segmenting, and mapping your first party data. This can go a long way to retargeting and retaining customers through strategic social media marketing campaigns and help you engage new customers on different social platforms. 

5. Serendipitous Discovery with Social Commerce

Other forms of paid media rely on consumer intent. Social media, on the other hand, champions serendipitous discovery and can get your brand in front of customers who are not actively searching for your brand.

Social commerce as a channel has been rapidly evolving, along with everything else in the digital sphere. According to eMarketer, more U.S. consumers are willing to shop directly from a social media platform. Activating social selling will help you navigate the cookieless digital world. Social platforms are essentially walled gardens, Manish explains, as when someone shops within Facebook Shops, that data lives within Facebook. 

Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest Shops are the top three social commerce channels. If your customers are already active on these channels, consider implementing these shops into your e-commerce strategy.

Your Organic and Paid Social Media Strategy

Over half of consumers research a business on the internet – including on their social media profiles – before buying. You want to make sure you’re making a positive impression on any potential customers that may be evaluating your company.

Organic and paid social media work together to successfully strengthen your brand’s online presence. When users see an advertisement on social media, the next step is usually to visit the brand’s profile. Without a strong organic presence, you could be missing that conversion because the customer in question cannot fully engage with your brand prior to purchasing. Ads are temporary; your organic social content is how customers grow with your brand.

For more detail into these five social media trends, watch our Emerging Paid Social Trends for Retailers webinar. 

A marketing strategy operates best with a strong foundation to rely on. Get deeper insights into the nuances of different social media channels and learn how to develop your brand voice and audience by downloading our ebook, 10 Best Practices for Organic Social Media. 

Further Reading:

• 9 Search, Social, and Amazon Trends for 2021
• Forget Brand Content; Say Hello to Influencer-Generated Content
• Facebook Shops: A New Digital Storefront

The post Social Media Trends for 2021 and Beyond appeared first on NetElixir.

Paid Search Strategy

Data visualization and live consumer analytics are the keys to fine-tuning your paid search campaigns. You can keep filling up ad spaces across search engines, but if you aren’t reaching your target audience or personalizing messaging for their behaviors and expectations, then you’re wasting your budget and the customer’s time. Access to continual data will also help you better understand your audience’s buyer journeys, allowing you to target potential customers more effectively at every turn.

ECommerce is continually growing. The coronavirus pandemic jumpstarted rapid eCommerce growth, accelerating online shopping by nearly two years. Your brand needs a strong online presence in order to effectively compete against and win market share in 2021 and beyond. Diversifying platforms that house paid search campaigns are crucial to success in 2021, as consumers spend more time online than ever before. As consumers researched more prior to purchase during the pandemic compared to pre-pandemic times, it is crucial to expand the reach of your ads to continually meet the needs of your customers and stay top of mind. Testing different media mixes and messages across different channels will only improve your overall performance as you learn exactly what resonates with your audience.

Automation will continue to gain importance in a marketer’s toolbox, requiring stronger data implementation. Despite the expansion of automation to yield greater results, campaigns will still need a human touch for that innovation and ingenuity to heighten performance. However, with alerts in place to notify marketers of any problems or changes in campaigns, we can respond more quickly to fix any issues. Marketers will need to use modern technology to stay current with the increasingly digital world, but stay agile and nimble to pick up on any opportunities that come their way.

Social Media Marketing

If content is queen, then video marketing is her crown. Videos continue to outperform other types of content, such as emails, blogs, and social images according to Hubspot. Incorporating more videos into your content strategy can better engage users. And, while quality content should always be your goal, your videos don’t have to be red carpet ready. Customers want to see a more transparent, human side to brands so showing off your WFH set up, your pets, and employees working hard behind-the-scenes will do a lot in helping consumers truly connect with your brand.

User-generated content can be a goldmine for your social strategy. According to SocialMediaToday, USG is vastly outperforming brand-generated content: ads with USG content are getting 400% CTR compared to the industry average. USG content rewards customers for engaging with a brand or product, showcasing what they actually want to see because they actively posted about it. USG can strengthen consumer and partner relationships by being relatable and inspirational. 

A brand’s mission and values are becoming increasingly important to consumers from the Millennial and Gen Z demographic, as they expect brands to speak out for social causes. Hootsuite finds that brands need to have a stronger presence in digital dialogues. Authentically participating in conversations help put the customer’s needs and wants first so brands can respond appropriately. Consumers care about current social issues, safety, and sustainability; showcase how these values resonate within your brand to build out your content strategy and social profiles. 

Amazon Strategy

Recent updates to Amazon’s A10 Algorithms shift prominence to favor buyer’s search intent, seller authority, product credibility off Amazon, and more in determining ranking. As Amazon’s reputation for the store that has everything expands, they’re focusing on user intent more and more. With Amazon’s recent acquisition of the podcast publisher Wondery, the brand is increasing their share of user’s listening time to continue to reach customers wherever they are and through their preferred media.

Amazon will continue to experiment with and expand their frictionless and contactless shopping capabilities. As customers respond well to initiatives like Amazon Go, the corporation will seek rollout to other retailers to expand the technology. According to eMarketer, the coronavirus pandemic greatly increased customer’s preference for mobile checkout, accelerating the need for contactless shopping options. Retail brands need to consider how they could best implement new technologies to make the shopping experience convenient and stress-free for their customers.

Open experimentation and innovation are key strategies to success in the new year. While we have ideas on what will help businesses succeed in 2021, brands still need to find their personal sweet spot in engaging and targeting customers. Amazon is an excellent testing ground, as brands get pretty immediate feedback in user reviews and product and campaign performance. Products that perform well on Amazon can be prominently featured on your home website. Testing on Amazon will deepen your overall e-commerce strategy in giving customers exactly what they ask for. 

Further Resources to Optimize Your Digital Marketing Strategy

When was the last time you scored an A+?

Additional Reading:

• Check out NetElixir’s Amazon services
• Say Hello to Influencer Generated Content

The post 9 Search, Social, & Amazon Trends For 2021 appeared first on NetElixir.

Linqia Survey Results on Content Performance

Convenience is the word of the day. At this time, companies are now working remotely and everyone is adjusting their lives every day. But this doesn’t mean marketing has been put on hold. Now more than ever, it is important to be active online. However, many new challenges have arisen as we work from home, especially for new product launches, content creation and photography. Companies should be reassured, however, that creative solutions are producing excellent and easy results.

Linqia Survey On Influencer Marketing Budgets

In addition to strong performance, influencer generated content can be much cheaper to produce compared to professional photography. There’s no need to rent a studio and typically the photographer/model is the influencer themselves. Three different charges are consolidated into one flat fee! Even better, if you are working with nano-influencers (influencers with 5K followers and below), they are typically more receptive to product only payment. They also have the highest engagement rate, with 3.9% compared to micro-influencers who sit at 3.0% (Linqia).

Finally, the days of poor-quality content from influencers are long gone. Smartphones are able to produce high-resolution images that are comparable to entry-level stand-alone cameras. You no longer need a thousand-dollar camera in order to create stunning work. Brands benefit from broader and more diverse options. 

Influencers bring word of mouth marketing to the next level. Not only can they advertise your product but they can also provide content that can be reused across all of your marketing channels. In challenging times such as these, brands can smartly use influencers to get the most bang for their buck, without sacrificing quality or quantity. If convenience is the word of the day, influencer marketing is the natural solution for brands. 

Resources

https://www.linqia.com/insights/the-state-of-influencer-marketing-2019/

https://www.linqia.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/The-State-of-Influencer-Marketing-2020.pdf

The post Forget Brand Content, Say Hello to Influencer Generated Content appeared first on NetElixir.

According to May 2020 data from Pymnts.com, 66.4% of US small/medium business (SMB) owners said they will rely on e-commerce more after the coronavirus pandemic. As SMBs worldwide rush to get their business online, Facebook wants to grab a large piece of the pie in this “new” e-commerce world. Facebook launches Facebook Shops as an online business solution.

In what appears to be a major shift to enable social commerce and amplify the power of social platforms for simplified shopping experiences, Facebook and Instagram rolled out Shops earlier this week. The challenging economic climate is forcing businesses to rethink and innovate ways to go digital. Facebook couldn’t have launched this new digital distribution point at a better time. Over 1 million businesses have already signed up for Shops within 48 hours of the launch!

Quick Facts of Facebook Shops:

• Businesses will be able to create a Facebook Shop for free, but will pay a “small fee” on each transaction. The Shop can be discovered by customers through ads, stories, Marketplace, or photos tagged on social feeds.
• The closest parallel we can draw to the Facebook Shop is an Amazon Brand Store that offers a complete brand experience outside of the business’s actual website. 
• Facebook will be working with partners like Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, ChannelAdvisor, CedCommerce, Cafe24, Tienda Nube and Feedonomics to give small businesses the support they need.
• Any seller, irrespective of their size or budget, can move their business online and engage with new and existing customers in a fun social ecosystem.

Our Thoughts On This Launch:

This new digital storefront is here to stay and will benefit from the impact it has for businesses who have been hit hard due to the pandemic. While key stakeholders such as banks have extended small business loans, this announcement has the potential to revive small businesses in an unprecedented way by creating demand in an otherwise cautious spending environment. 

Facebook is looking at major social dominance as it will now have access to shopper insights from millions of users. Brands could benefit from integrated payment options, selling through live video from creators, and offering customers the option to connect their loyalty programs to their social accounts. Influencers will become an integral part of this arrangement as they can drive their followers directly to the Shops on Facebook and Instagram.

As Facebook continues to expand and add focus on SMBs, NetElixir is here to help. We have been partnering with retailers for over 16 years and are prepared to provide guidance, insights and more.  NetElixir is a Facebook marketing partner and a Feedonomics partner, and our team is ready to get your retail business started with Facebook Shops. 

The post Facebook Shops: A New Digital Storefront That Small Businesses Cannot Afford To Miss! appeared first on NetElixir.

To help more retailers thrive on social media, NetElixir hosted our first-ever #SocialWeek, a three-day webinar series. Joined by experts from around the industry, our social media team presented actionable insights, proven best practices, and useful tools to improve your performance on social. Each day featured a specific topic or focus related to paid social media advertising.

If you missed the event or just want to refresh your memory regarding the most important points, read on for a detailed recap of all three sessions.

Day 1: How to Create a Winning Holiday Paid Social Strategy

We officially kicked off #SocialWeek with our own paid social team. Manish Mohan, Director of Paid Media, and Lauren Greenberg, Social Media Manager, shared a variety of paid social hacks and strategic frameworks to set you up for holiday season success.

Overall, we’re seeing holiday shoppers going bigger, earlier with 43% of them beginning their search for gifts in November or sooner. While this an enticing opportunity for retailers to capture the attention of these eager shoppers, it’s important to note that consumers expect as seamless a purchase experience on social media as they do on other platforms.

Paid Social Strategic Framework

To ensure your social media presence is operating at peak effectiveness, we recommend using our paid social strategic framework. This four-stage process helps to continuously optimize your paid social ads on Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest to ensure they’re making the greatest impact.

After identifying your target audience, you must tailor your ad creatives toward that specific group of customers. Make your ads stand out with truly compelling text, images, videos, and whatever other elements you plan to use. After fine-tuning your audience targeting, give your ads time to perform, then test and measure their results. You can use your findings to make improvements to your creatives, audience targeting, and any other areas where you can strengthen the performance of your ads.

Top 5 Paid Social Holiday Recommendations

After years of helping retail brands use paid social to their advantage during the holiday season, you tend to develop a few best practices. We recommend keeping the following “hacks” in mind as you approach your holiday social strategy:

1. Invest 60% or more of your budget in prospecting campaigns from now until mid-November.
2. Activate catalog ads on Facebook and Pinterest. Optimize your product feed for your paid social audience.
3. Personalize dynamic ads with overlays and custom intro cards.
4. Implement Instagram-only campaigns for added reach and creative relevance.
5. Utilize Facebook’s Instant Experience ads to drive frictionless sales.

Watch the full webinar by clicking here or view it below.

Day 2: Unlock Smarter Paid Social with Smartly.io and Smartfluence

Social media is always better with friends, which is why we invited our partners from Smartly.io and Smartfluence to join us on the second day of #SocialWeek. These special guests walked through live demos of their platforms, explaining why every social media advertiser should use these tools during the holiday season.

Smartfluence: Performance-Driven Influencer Marketing

Sid Kumar and David Ko created Smartfluence with the goal of making influencer marketing more accessible and productive for businesses. Smartfluence is a tool which helps brands identify relevant influencers within their industry who may be able to spread the word to potential customers about their products or services. Through the tool interface, you can narrow your search by industry, sub-industry, audience location, age, number of followers, and other criteria.

Smartfluence specializes in the segment of influencers known as “microinfluencers,” defined as individuals with between 10,000 and 500,000 followers on any social media platform. Microinfluencers hold significant potential for online retailers for several reasons:

• Their audience is passionate about one key area, allowing you to focus on a very targeted interest.
• They tend to have the highest ROI of any segment.
• Most don’t work through agents and are highly negotiable regarding their fees.

With more brands trying their hands at influencer marketing, and a greater percentage of consumers placing their trust in the opinions of influencers over other sources, this is one strategy you should definitely consider in your holiday game plan.

Smartly.io: Holiday Success Through Automated Campaign Management

Lauren Rinaldi, Senior Customer Success Manager at Smartly.io, illustrated how this platform elevates the performance of your paid social ads. Smartly.io automates each step of the social advertising process, making it easier for businesses to create ads that look great, connect with shoppers, and secure conversions. From testing ad creatives to determining budgets and audience targeting, Smartly.io optimizes every aspect of your paid social efforts.

Amid the booming business of Instagram Story ads, having lots of creatives at your disposal is key to making the right impression on your ideal customer. According to Smartly.io, having 11 times more creative assets drives a 23% lower cost per incremental buyer. Find your winning combinations of text, images, and video and ride them to success.

Smartly.io has helped recognizable brands like eBags and Hopper experience greater results with their paid social advertising, and they’d love for you to be their next success story. To give yourself a solid start to the holiday season, they recommend trying these tips and tricks:

• Bid higher during the holidays.
• Create an extra-relevant seed audience for your lookalike audiences.
• Save time and personalize with creative automation.
• Mix video and static ads for a positive impact on your performance.
• Always optimize toward your end goal.

Watch the full webinar by clicking here or view it below.

Day 3: Inspired Holiday Shopping on Pinterest

The holidays are a time for inspiration, and where do holiday shoppers go to get inspired? Pinterest, of course! Tim Smith, Agency Lead at Pinterest, joined us on the final day of #SocialWeek to explain why this social platform is the perfect place for businesses to find highly-motivated potential customers during the holiday season.

Visual search is becoming a more prominent means for users to find what they need online. Pinterest is full of images, illustrated how-to guides, and similar content highly useful to those searching for gift ideas, decorations, recipes, and more for the holidays. It’s the planner’s social media platform of choice, and if your business offers a product or service that’s relevant to their holiday planning process, advertising on Pinterest is a powerful way to get in front of these high-value customers.

Pinterest recommends “seeding the purchase” by involving yourself in the decision-making process early. Visual searchers are always on the lookout for the latest trends to supplement their favorite traditions from holidays past. If you can associate your brand with emerging popular trends and meet consumers’ eyes with engaging images throughout the entire purchase journey, you’re well on your way toward earning their business.

Pinterest offers several distinct ad formats to drive awareness, consideration, and sales. These include Promoted Pins and Shopping Pins to spotlight individual products, as well as Carousel Pins and Catalogues that allow you to showcase a variety of items. No matter your specific goals and budget, advertising on Pinterest can definitely jump-start your holiday paid social performance.

Watch the full webinar by clicking here or view it below.

Stay Social, Now and Year-Round

This recap provided just a taste of the key learnings from #SocialWeek 2019. You can view all three sessions in their entirety by signing up for access to our library of on-demand digital marketing webinars.

Interested in finding out how NetElixir can grow your brand on social media? We offer a full suite of paid social services to help your business craft a strong social strategy and win more customers.

Keep following NetElixir for more retail digital marketing insights as we enter the holiday season, and feel free to contact our team with questions or specific inquiries!

The post #SocialWeek 2019: Boost Holiday Revenue with Smart Social Media Marketing appeared first on NetElixir.