How To Reap The Benefits Of A Content Marketing Strategy

Content Marketing can have some incredible benefits for your business

But a lot of people still underestimate the value of Content Marketing, or indeed don’t fully understand what it is or why they should invest in bespoke content.

So let’s start by working out exactly what it is!

CONTENT MARKETING – a type of marketing that involves the creation and sharing of online material (such as videos, blogs, and social media posts) that does not explicitly promote a brand but is intended to stimulate interest in its products or services.

But I prefer Content Marketing Institute’s definition:

Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.

Especially the line following that definition which says “Instead of pitching your products or services, you are providing truly relevant and useful content to your prospects and customers to help them solve their issues.”

So Content Marketing is a way to talk about your products or services in a way that’s audience first and user driven. It’s less about you, and more about them – a good place to start.

What can be content?

Anything your audience can consume can be content.

Blog posts
Video & Slideshows
Graphics & Animations
Podcasts
Quizzes
Ebooks & Whitepapers
Resources & Workbooks
Playlists
Q&A or AMAs
Facebook/Instagram Live
Branded Filters & Camera Frames

And the list goes on!

The type of content you create for your Content Marketing efforts will depend completely on your audience and objectives.

Great Content Marketing can have a multitude of benefits to your business, let’s look at some of them.

Traffic & Search Results

Everyone wants more traffic to their website, or at least more qualified traffic. When you publish or host quality content on your site, people hit your site to consume it. And you know they’re more than likely interested in your product or services because that’s what your content (even if loosely) relates to.

When you offer something of value to your audience, they’ll come to you. This is the complete opposite of traditional marketing where you go to where they are and interrupt them. If you content is strong enough and valuable enough you might not even have to pay to promote it. You can publish it, and let people come to you in their own way and their own time.

Here’s a great example – Jon Loomer’s Facebook Image Dimension Guide. In case you don’t know who Jon Loomer is he’s a Facebook Ads heavy hitter who runs online training and a couple of membership clubs for exclusive content. In fact, everything Jon does is an example of excellent Content Marketing.

I read in one of his emails a while back that this page on his site is the most visited. It comes up if you Google “Facebook Image Specs” and in creating it, he knew that anyone who visited that page was looking for information on how to optimise their creative to best display on Facebook.

Whether they were marketers, or business owners, or entrepreneurs – they all had that in common. And they were coming to him. For free!

Imagine you’re in a competitive niche; all clamoring to get to the top position in a Google search, but your content – perhaps a simple “how to” video is what people are visiting? That’s YOUR brand getting ahead. Standing out without pushing people away with a hard sell.

We’ll talk more about what you can do with this traffic in a sec.

Brand Awareness & Recall

Word of mouth is still an incredibly powerful way to get your business noticed, and you’ve probably heard the phrase “word of mouse” said too. It’s so important to be known and remembered.

How can people use your services if they don’t know who you are?

How can they recommend you to their friends if they can’t remember your business name?

Create content that resonates with your audience and they’re more likely to remember you. And if they hadn’t heard of you before it’s an even better way to make them aware of your brand!

The idea is that it’s not only valuable enough for them, but sharable as well. Any time you can get people to share your content as a brand you’ve allowed them to represent you and vice versa. They’ve thought whatever you created was good enough for them to put their name to and pass along to their friends and colleagues.

And with Content Marketing you can do this without the rude interruption of more traditional types of advertising.

Brand Affinity & Loyalty

Something else you can achieve with Content Marketing is affinity from your audience, and loyalty from your current customers.

This isn’t just touchy-feely (not that there’s anything wrong with that) but in a crowded market you want people can choose your brand, over others and their affinity for what your brand stands for could be the deciding factor. But they can’t do this unless they know what your brand MEANS.

You content can explain your brand positioning, and win your audience over into fans and purchasers.

Tell your brand’s story and let your audience fall in love with you.

Then once you’ve earned their support you want to retain them!

Great content can remind people why they choose you and not your competitors. It can help deepen the relationship they have with your brand and make them less likely to stray.

Audience Segmentation

Content Marketing can help you segment your audience and only show them what they want to see more of.

You can track and tag pages of your website and/or individual pieces of content, to build audience pools from your different content themes into remarketing segments.

That way when you pay to promote a new piece of content you can target the people who’ve consumed similar content. Facebook targeting allows us to differentiate traffic that’s visited certain pages of our website and not others, and also people who’ve spend a certain amount of time on a particular page so we can serve ads to people who interacted with particular content this way.

It’s the same concept ecommerce stores use when they offer you similar items to the ones in your cart. They know you like xyz product with certain attributes, it follows you’ll like other products with similar attributes.

This segmentation keeps your audience seeing the content that resonates with them, and prevents them seeing content themes that may not.

Funnel Content

If you have a sales funnel you need to fill that funnel with content.

This content needs to be relevant to the audience AND their buyer journey.

Content Marketing can attract people to your brand and fill the top of the funnel.

And it’s especially important during the consideration phase (middle of the funnel) to make sure people choose your brand over your competition.

Thought Leadership

Content Marketing can position you (as a personal brand) or your company as the thought leader in your niche.

Great content will ensure your fans know you’re the “go to” source for information on your product or industry and give you an edge over your competitors, just like in the Jon Loomer example.

Business Opportunities

Checking the data from your Content Marketing efforts can point you in the direction of new business opportunities.

If you’re looking at expanding or even narrowing your offerings, the data on which content your audience consumed can help you refine your business to offer what has most resonated with your target market.

Content Marketing & Social Media – BFFs

Why am I telling you about Content Marketing?

Because Content Marketing and Social Media are BFFs. Your content can be distributed on Social Media, and content themes can be established based on your social posting.

Think about your most popular Social Media posts – what were they about? What can you learn from this to inform your content offering?

Social Media gives us the power of community for our brands, and it also allows us to target with a high level of accuracy people we want to reach beyond that community where we know our content will resonate.

So put some thought into your Content Marketing efforts and invest in some quality creators if it’s not your thing. The work of an excellent copywriter, graphic designer or videographer will elevate your content and you’ll reap the benefits.

But make sure to leave some money in the budget to ensure this content sees the light of day with the people you made it for.

Do you invest in Content Marketing?

What questions do you have about content?

October 18, 2016July 5, 2019

Engage Bali by Socialbakers: Part One

Engage Bali by Socialbakers – Social Media Summit

Over the weekend I attended the #EngageBali Social Media Summit by Socialbakers, held at the Grand Hyatt in Nusa, Bali. #EngageBali was my first Social Media conference and I was really excited to attend and learn some new things, meet some social media professionals and enjoy the luxurious surroundings of the resort.

I was not disappointed!

I flew in late on Thursday night, and was lead through the expanse of the resort to my room. Wow!

We really were learning & networking in paradise!

Friday was our day of workshops. I had downloaded the Engage Bali app and after much deliberation signed up for “INCREASING YOUR SOV – HOW DUAL BRAND STRATEGIES CAN INCREASE MARKET SHARE” with Holly Stewart from Seek for the morning session and “FACILITATING DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION THROUGH SOCIAL MEDIA INTELLIGENCE” with Olivier Girard from Digimind for the afternoon session.

Armed with the sim card given to us by sponsor Telkomsel (super handy!) I managed to find breakfast, eat a quick bowl of noodles (I love embracing different breakfast cultures) and headed into the main conference area. The Telkomsel sim wasn’t the right size for my phone – so I went to see them and in 1 minute flat they had punched it into a microsim and fitted it to my phone. Yes! No data roaming fees 🙂

I picked up a free bubble tea and headed to my morning workshop.

Holly is clearly very knowledgeable about Social Media Marketing and the focus of the session was using a Dual Brand Strategy.

Dual Brand Strategy

For the non-marketers reading, this means creating or acquiring a secondary brand as a strategy to help you maintain share of voice (market share) that wouldn’t necessarily appeal to your main brand.

Think of Coke and Mount Franklin. Coke know not everyone drinks Coke, but they can still drink Coke brands when they’re drinking water – ie. Mount Franklin. They maintain market share, it doesn’t hurt the main brand (not sure if anything could in this example) and they can reach new audiences who would have dismissed Coke.

Clever, right?

Background

There are some challenges involved in running a dual brand strategy. The main one is not to cannibalise the main brand in building the secondary one. But we’ll get back to that in a bit.

Seek is a transactional brand. People looking for work go to Seek to find job ads. So who are their target demographic? EVERYONE.

Ugh. That’s tough! How do you appeal to everyone? According to Holly at any given time there are:

So at any given moment up to 75% of people are looking for work!

To further complicate this: Low skilled jobs are easy to fill, and high skilled jobs much harder to fill she said. Makes sense.

Traditionally Seek has been among a small field in the online jobseeker realm and has occupied 80% of the market. A great place to be for a brand! But they were starting to face increased competition from new players.

How would they maintain their share of the market? This is where the dual brand strategy comes into play.

How does the Dual Brand Strategy Work?

Since people wanted to make sure they were getting all the available information users were looking at more than one job site. Seek had to make sure they weren’t losing ground to one of the others that “scrapes” jobs from all over the web. They stopped these scraping sites being able to access Seek – so if you visited them, you could get all the other jobs – but not the ones from the biggest jobs marketplace and would have to look there separately.

Seek introduced JORA, their secondary brand. JORA was able to scrape the job websites, but it also had access to the Seek.com jobs – meaning it had ALL THE JOBS, which when you’re job hunting is what you want. One site to rule them all.

But you can’t just launch a secondary brand on a whim.

Holly explained the following phases:

Engagement
Traffic & Conversion
Segmentation & Relevancy

Your brand has to be ready. Listen before you launch! She said that with 30b pieces of content fighting for your attention in the newsfeed, it’s not easy to gain attention for your brand. In Australia 1 in 3 internet minutes belong to Facebook owned sites (Facebook, Messenger, What’s App, Instagram…) and that a dual brand strategy can help open up new segments.

It was all about mapping your customer journey, and using what data you have to either include or exclude potential customers.

I think this is where we lost some people.

I’m not sure everyone was fully across segmentation and the ability to exclude audiences via pixels and custom audiences. I have some photos of Holly’s slides (which aren’t very good quality photos, but it might help me explain the strategy)

So here goes – you can use the data your brand has to grow your supporting brand through targeting and exclusion.

If you were a bank and someone had been to your main site to look at credit cards (which would know because of the segmentation set up on your site) you could target them with a credit card offer from your supporting brand.

Then follow them through the customer journey, making sure the secondary brand is seen as the alternative voice at each touch point through the journey.

You’re drowning out your competitors, and with this the chance of losing your market share to them decreases.

Pretty simple concept, right? It’s a bit more complicated to implement – but the idea is a simple one!

How do you measure it?

Holly identified the metrics to use to measure if your dual brand strategy was working:

1. Increase your brand share (growing secondary brand)

Measure: share of visits/share of wallet/share of attention

2. Decrease competitors share

Measure: Measure: share of visits/share of wallet/share of attention

3. Brand Health (don’t cannibalise your primary brand)

Measure: Brand study metrics

4. Brand Lead

Measure: share of visits/share of wallet/share of attention

You can see the slideshare of Holly’s presentation HERE.

After Holly’s presentation we moved on to an exercise in groups where we came up with a strategy using what we had just learned to create a pitch for the brans we were allocated, which was a good way to cement the learning.

I learned a lot from this session, even though I don’t currently work with any multi-brand clients – to know how one group of marketers can go about finding market segments is always interesting!

And the negative targeting, and the workflows associated with this process means it’s a well established method in Seek’s repertoire, which we can assume means if set up correctly it works!

What I also found interesting was seeing how diverse the APAC region is. Although I think Australia is still an emerging market for Social Media, with many brand still resisting or implementing their strategy like it’s 2012, there are some people (like Holly) obviously leading the pack too. But we’re very different from Asia! Their population density means they have huge audiences that devour content and these content machines need to be fed! Some of the small teams in attendance had audience numbers and publishing schedules that would make an Aussie marketer choke!

Morning session done, we headed to lunch, and the hotel had not let us down!

After lunch (and another bubble tea) we proceeded to our afternoon sessions. As I mentioned in the beginning – I had chosen after much deliberation on the Digimind session about Data Intelligence.

I did not find this session as in-depth as the morning session, and think it was more of an overview of what Data Intelligence is and a little bit of background.

Digimind is a tech vendor, Olivier said, and has been in business for 18 years. That’s a lot of listening!

So what is Social Intelligence?

There’s a huge amount of data on Social Media that can be used to identify trends and support marketing teams. But there are also many challenges.

Anyone, anywhere – so much data!
All demographics – who are you looking for?
Influencers
New Platforms
People have choices & preferences

So he outlined some Digital Intelligence Best Practice tips:

1.Understand your audience (which will be a theme over the weekend)

What is their “digital maturity” how tech savvy are they?

2. Teamwork & Diversity

He said it was better to interpret data from a diverse base to be able to see the data from different approaches.

3. Make a contact person

If it’s one person’s responsibility they’ll be more engaged.

4. Apply SCIP principles (Strategic and Competitive Intelligence Professionals)

They are not hackers! There’s a limit to what they can access.

5. Focus on the right scope

There’s so much data – “let’s try to structure that”

6. Ask Questions

Find out more about what the data is for

7. Make your goals very specific

It’s easy to exclude irrelevant data in the scope, than after the data is collected. You can always expand the scope next time

8. Add your insights

And importantly –

9. Present the data in an interesting way

So, what can be measured?

The 5 Ws – What | When | Who – Influencers | Where – Platforms | Why – Sentiment

Something else I got from this session; whether you engage and the success of your engagement in crisis management is not only based on your content, but timing!

Olivier gave an example of how 2 brands that supply the same product fared in a crisis management situation. One brand chose to engage. The other decided to wait it out. Surprisingly the brand who did not engage came out unscathed. Now I do how some hesitation that ignoring crisis’s is ever a good idea from a Community Management point of view, but you can’t argue with data!

Again there was a workshop to reiterate the learning.

You can see the slidershare of Olivier’s presentation HERE.

And that was day one!

There was some networking, where I met up with Helen Cripps from ECU (who I had previously met at an SMPerth event), Sasha from Fanfare Media, and Matej and Claire from Socialbakers, among others. But the structured part of the day was done.

Time for some R&R!

I hope you enjoyed this first instalment! It’s been fun digesting it all and sharing it with you!

Stay tuned for Part Two – where I’ll get into the main event. I can’t wait to share with you the speakers insights! When you have the brains behind the Social Media of brands like LEGO, NASA, Canon Australia, MGM Hotels, Cathay Pacific and more – plus businesses who’ve achieved success by an in depth understanding of their audience, like Go Jek there’s no way you can’t pick up some valuable insight!

September 14, 2016November 19, 2019

2 of my all-time favourites: Social Media & Learning!

Engage Bali 2016 Social Media Summit

Engage Bali is a Social Media Summit by Socialbakers, who are a Social Media Management tool. I don’t currently use their tool for my client work, but I have often read their reports, especially to get Australian specific data!

One of their features that really interests me is their performance optimisation tool, that uses “predictive analytics” to determine how your content will perform! Thier announcement post has a detailed explanation of how it works.

One of the other things Socialbakers do that’s pretty rad is put on a summit for Social Media Marketers. Normally the big Social media Summits are either in Europe and the US, so it’s a big undertaking to make it when you’re from Perth.

Since the announcement of Engage Bali, I knew this time would be different! Being only 4 hours from Bali, with frequent and cheap(ish) flights this was much more realistic for me – and the idea to go along to my first Social Media Summit was hatched.

It’s very exciting! If you’ve read some of my previous blog posts, you’d know that I love my stats! I truly believe that good Social Media Marketers are equal parts creative and analytical. Also with my love for learning (I’m currently completing an Advanced Diploma of Business and the Digital Marketer courses, among others) this really appeals to me.

I can’t wait to see how the world’s top Social Media minds are using Social Media to reach, inform and delight their audiences! If you want to see them it’s all on the Engage Bali website.As a freelancer, I’m privileged to work with some very diverse people – but I am aware that we can easily become stale in our own little bubbles.

As a freelancer, I’m privileged to work with some very diverse people – but I am aware that we can easily become stale in our own bubbles. We are all occasionally guilty of doing things the way we think is right and not investigating new functionality or features. Sometimes we think that’s just the way things are, then you find out someone else has tackled the issue completely differently to you did!

I’m even more excited for Engage Bali because the amazing people at Socialbakers have allowed me to attend free of charge (bonus!) and also asked me if I would host one of their panel discussions – how terrifyingly wonderful!

I can’t wait to bring you updates of what I learn during the day of workshops on the Friday, and the full day event on Saturday. I’m going to be a busy girl!

Have you ever been to an industry conference? Do you have any tips for me – a conference noob? I’d love to hear them! You can leave a comment here of hit me up on my Socials.

September 6, 2016June 2, 2019

LinkedIn: Now More Than A Digital Resume

LinkedIn has moved on from being thought of as a ‘digital resume’ where people only log in to update their skills when searching for a new role.

These days it’s a great place to publish your original content! It’s a must if you’re trying to build your personal brand and position yourself as a thought leader in your field.

Most of you would have a LinkedIn profile, and have probably at one time or another posted a status update. If you do it regularly, that’s awesome! You’re already half way there. You know who’s who in your sector. You already have connections and followers.

Use LinkedIn Published Posts to extend this to building influence beyond your connections. Published posts go to LinkedIn’s Pulse platform. Here they can be swept up and read and shared by anyone, whether they follow you or not! And not only that, each time you publish a post your own connections will receive a notification that you did so, encouraging them to come and check it out.

Top Tip: Use tagging. People on Pulse don’t follow you necessarily – they follow subjects that interest them. Think about your tags carefully, you are only allowed 3.

LinkedIn also has a product called Slideshare where you can post publications. These are similar in essence to the old PowerPoint Publications but more image-focused. You can publish your own LinkedIn Slideshare content and depending on the quality and category can be seen by tens to hundreds of thousands of people. Pretty cool huh?

Top Tip: Use content that has performed well as a blog post and re-create as a Slideshare. It’s a bit of work to make them look good and you don’t want to risk it on un-tested content.

LinkedIn Groups can be a great place to publish valuable content to your industry peers. Just make sure it’s a group in which you contribute to the discussion, dropping in to post a link to your latest post is considered a bit rude if that’s all you ever do.

Top Tip: Seriously, don’t be that guy who drops in once a week to post a link to their latest article – the rest of the group secretly hates you.

LinkedIn Pages are a good way for your company to have a business profile on LinkedIn, and your content can be shared there. LinkedIn Pages have a post max of 400 characters, so not really any good for articles – just a blurb and a link with an eye-catching image is all you need. If it’s not your company you’ll need to submit your article to the page admin/s to post for you should they deem it appropriate to come from their corporate voice.

Top Tip: You can advertise from LinkedIn Pages. Targeting examples that work well include roles within industries, i.e. Assistant Manager in Human Resources.

Whether you choose LinkedIn as a place to publish original content or not, you can add your links under publications on your profile. This way people will be able to find them if they are LinkedIn stalking you; which they will if you start getting some attention.

Top Tip: You can set your LinkedIn to private so when you stalk people your name is not listed, however this might not be the best idea. The first thing you do when someone checks out your profile – is look at theirs in return!

These are my top no-fuss tips to using LinkedIn for your personal branding. Do you have any to add? I’d love to hear your feedback!

April 26, 2016October 31, 2018

Professional Social Media?

Is there such thing as Professional Social Media?

Is it all cat memes and photos of food?

Recently I had the privilege of writing a guest blog post for Scope Vision, a wonderful local RTO I’m currently completing an Advanced Diploma of Business with. It’s run by a fabulously creative and quirky lady I just adore, MJ Satterthwaite. Her brain (and business blog) is bursting full of ways to improve your leadership skills to develop yourself; and business planning tips to rock your career!

I had to find common ground between what I’m passionate about, Social Media (obvs) and what subjects her audience is interested in reading about, and have come to expect from her posts – leadership and career development.

Can you see where we’re going here?

You guessed it, LinkedIn is going to feature heavily! But it’s not the only way you can use Social Media to showcase your skills an experience. I discuss the features of LinkedIn you might not be using, and also explore Medium and Quora as other places to publish content to boost your professional authority.

The best thing about these methods is they can be applied by anyone. You don’t have to wait until you’ve entered the workforce, publishing your own content will certainly help you stand out from the rest of your graduating class, especially now there’s a LinkedIn for Students app! Conversely you are also never too old to start!

I shared my top tips for helping you become an authority in your field using Social Media. If you’d like to read it on the Scope blog I’ve linked it HERE for you!

Anther thing I’m often asked is how connected your personal and professional Social Media should be.

Can you use your personal profiles to share your business content, and should you post personal updates on your business or professional Social Media accounts?

Well – the answer is a big IT DEPENDS.

I know that’s not what you were hoping to find, but before we explore the subject together – see what it depends ON.

I would break it down into 2 main categories: The type of person you are, and the type of business you have.

They type of person you are would be more to do with your beliefs around privacy etc., and the type of business you have speaks more about the level of appropriateness to sharing personal content on your professional Social Media platforms.

To elaborate: the level of comfort you feel about sharing certain personal details of your life to your colleagues, customers, suppliers etc. is very personal and no-one can tell you how to feel about this. No one view is right – or wrong. You can be guided by a professional advice, and should solicit some if you are unsure.
Take this example of parents posting pictures of their children on Social media! Some parents go snap-mad posting photo after photo, and other parents never post pictures of their children due to privacy and safety concerns. There’s a whole spectrum in between, but everyone is doing what feels comfortable for them.

The type of business you have makes a big difference to the appropriateness of posting personal content! It also makes a big difference whether it’s your own business or you are an employee. If you are an employee who wants to post something personal on the company Social Media channels and you’re not sure, you can always check with your boss, or your marketing team – so we’re more speaking to you about your own business.

One of the things you’ll need to take into account when deciding whether you need professional Social Media accounts is “Social Media Friendliness” of the business. Is your business in one of the categories that tend to perform well on Social Media; like food, fitness, animals, etc. Is it a SOCIAL industry?

I would expect someone who owns a patisserie to post photos of them baking, but I would not expect to hear their political views. I would not expect an accountant to post photos of them using a calculator (or whatever it is they do…) but an accountant could do well from sharing a personal update like a photo of them on the golf course as it shows their human side. (I have really stereotyped accountants and for that I apologise, I needed an example…) See what I’m saying? Clear as mud.

If your job requires you to get to know people and quickly develop a rapport, sharing personal updates can be an advantage. Think industries like hospitality and retail to name a couple. If your followers have seen your updates they could feel like they know you better – increasing their likelihood of being a customer. In marketing this is referred to as Brand Humanisation.

If you do decide to share personal updates on your professional Social Media accounts there’s definitely some guidelines to bear in mind! Here are a few:

Avoid alienating your potential/current customers – re-think statements that are overly political, controversial or could be offensive. You don’t want someone who loves your product to not love you and therefore stop buying.
Everyone’s sense of humour is different – what you might think is a harmless joke, your business contacts may not. Carefully think about who the target of the joke is. Industry humour can be ok.
Don’t over-share – Your professional contacts don’t need a 1,000 photo album of your recent holiday.
Don’t vent about work – This is a no-brainer. That difficult customer, by all means tell your significant other but do not vent about them seeking sympathy from other customers. This will make you look unprofessional.
Keep security details to yourself – Which days you carry cash to the bank, your work vehicle’s rego number etc. do not need to be on your professional Social Media accounts.

Let’s look at some other people’s thoughts on this subject!

The Harvard Business Review suggests that you can make 2 lists; one for colleagues and one for friends and post different updates to each list. This would avoid most potentially awkward situations – but can you remember to do this? Especially after a couple of drinks?

This article by Sprout Social offers advice in choosing whether you need business accounts and has a pretty good list of pros and cons. Be Inbound also offers some ‘what not to do’ advice for professional Social Media accounts on their post.

If you are still deciding if you need professional Social Media accounts, consider this: What is your goal? What would be the purpose of starting these accounts?

If the goal can be achieved by your personal profiles then I would suggest keeping it simple and hold off running multiple accounts.

If you need to create specific professional Social Media accounts to achieve your goals and maintain boundaries in your personal and professional life then that’s the best course of action for you.

Consider what sharing personal posting might add to your business account, and vice versa – what posting business-related updates will add to your personal profile. If it’s not going to add something or help you achieve your goals (either personal or professional) then re-think it altogether.

As I said – it depends!

If you would like to get in touch I would be happy to discuss your individual circumstances with you.

February 26, 2016October 31, 2018

8 Crucial Lessons I learned from The Social Chameleon – Guest Blog By MJ Satterthwaite

As a small business owner entering into the world of social media was rather daunting and not to mention time consuming. Lucky for me…I met Carma, The Social Chameleon!

If you are about to embark on a social media journey, here’s the 8 crucial lessons I am thankful not to have learned the hard way!

1. Chat…and someone will chat back!

Conversations evolve if you start them. Social media is the perfect platform to use to engage in a two-way communication strategy with your target audience. You are always doing something interesting in business, so share it! You’ll be surprised at the response when you do.

2. Get in the saddle.. the horse is bolting!

If you are not actively building your business brand on a digital platform you are not connecting with all of your target market. If you haven’t engaged a Social Media Specialist you are riding bare-back; fun for a while but damaging long term! Invest in a professional and enjoy the ride.

3. Provoke thought

Always ask a question or elicit an opinion when you post; encourage your target market to engage with you. End users shape and mold the future of your business….so listen; listen actively!

4. Develop and stick to a Social Media Strategic Plan

The Social Chameleon knows I am not so good at this one! I always get excited and post more than we scheduled! Agree to a plan and stick to it; your audience gets used to hearing from you and will start to look forward to your interactions.

5. Don’t just ‘give it a go!’

Always seek professional advice. You wouldn’t buy a car without learning to drive; so what makes you think you can navigate the world of digital media without an instructor! We enlisted a professional to ensure that our messages were always congruent with our brand messaging and that we were on track to connect with our target audience.

6. Blog! Create! Seek thought credibility

Be passionate about what you do and share it! You go into business as an enthusiast and often a specialist on a particular topic; share your insight with others. Gaining ‘thought credibility’ from your target audience is the best gift they can afford you.

7. It takes time!

Social media marketing takes time, as the Pantene commercial states “It won’t happen overnight, but it will happen!’ If your strategy is aligned with your vision and your messaging hits the mark; your target market will engage once they know you are there. Time, patience, persistence; you need to take a longer term view than you may be used to in business; once planned your vision will become more than a dream.

8. Be awesome; be authentic; be you!

Know who you are and what you want out of the digital world. Is it sales you are after? An increase in brand awareness? To be seen as a thought leader in your field? The approach you adopt will be different depending on the outcome you seek.

There is one similarity regardless; always stand out from the crowd; be awesome; be authentic; be you!

Maria-Jane has customised and delivered initiatives for the Department of Housing, Department of Transport, Royal Perth Hospital, Princess Margaret Hospital, Armadale Health Services, West Australian Police, Western Australian Museums, WorkCover, Colonial Leisure Group, Australian Leisure and Hospitality Group, Holyoake, Brightwater Care Group, The Centre for Cerebral Palsy, Paramount Health, Airflite, Air Services Australia, Automotive Holdings Group, AMCAP/Covs, Western Australian Cricket Association, Fulton Hogan, Ertech, Western Power, Logsys Power Services, Future Grid, Perth Power Lines, Mobile MOUSe, Home Base Expo, Australian College of Beauty Therapy and the Australasian Academy of Cosmetic Dermal Science, just to name just a few.

April 25, 2015April 10, 2016

Know Your Enemy

Ok, so that’s a bit of dramatic title, we apologies for that – but we really want to stress to our readers that the more they know about the social media platforms they use for their businesses the better their efforts will work.

How can you create good posts, great content and awesome engagement if you don’t know how – or what the users (let’s call them people) are looking for?

To expand: How do you know how to promote your messages on Instagram if you don’t have an account and have never used it? How would you know what content people like, what types of interactions are commonplace, how often to post and what hashtags to use? We know there are loads of great tools out there to help us – but that doesn’t beat knowing.

PLUS you spend your precious time creating these posts – if you don’t make them count it can become a big drain!

So, where do we start?

[bctt tweet=”The Chameleon’s suggest that you have personal profiles on each of the platforms you use or intend to use for your business and suss them out!”]

Do you research and gain advice from the “big guys” like Social Media Examiner, Moz, and your favourite Thought Leaders in social so you stay up to date with trends and feature updates.

If it’s a new platform – maybe ask a millennial 😉

We’re going to start with a quick couple of things about Facebook, which will hopefully help you understand how you can improve your business page!

1) You have a Facebook email address

You have a facebook email address which is yourname@facebook.com and it’s how messaging works.

2) Saving Posts

You can save posts to read later!

Ever seen something in your newsfeed you wanted to read but couldn’t at the time you saw it? Well you can click on the right arrow of posts that contain links (and some others) and click “Save Link” to add it to your “Saved” listing on the left hand side of your timeline. One of our chameleon’s described it in detail here.

[bctt tweet=”Did you know you can save posts on Facebook to read later?”]

3) Interest Lists

have a particular interest or hobby you like to read about? Find all the best content on that subject in the one place with Interest Lists. Create a list and then add pages or people who have relevant content! This gives you a whole new newsfeed just of those accounts you added about what you’re interested in!

A great way to stay up to date in what you like – and an awesome way to curate content for your page.

[bctt tweet=” Find all the best content on that subject in the one place with Facebook Interest Lists!”]

4) See & Manage your Facebook Ad Settings

Ironically you can only get to this from an ad, and when you’re looking for one it’s harder to find them – the rest of the time they seem to be everywhere!

Find out why you get targeted by advertisers on Facebook in a blog post a chameleon wrote here.

5) See where you are logged in to Facebook

You can find out where your Facebook account is logged in – the location, operating system and whether it’s mobile or desktop. You might be surprised where you are logged in, the first time I did this there was an old phone listed that hadn’t worked for 3 years!

Go to Security>Where Your Logged In and check for yourself.

We recommend taking the time to familiarize yourself with your Facebook settings. This can help you become a better “user” of the platform, in turn helping you run your pages.

6) Graph Search

There have been many blog posts written on this subject – so we’re not going to cover it end to end in this one, but we probably will take another run at it at a later date.

Graph Search has been around for about 3 years – but you need to have your language selected as English US. This pains us as much as it might you – but it’s worth it as all updates from Facebook roll out to US users first! Graph Search means you can find all kinds of data about your friends, your page likers, and – well anything really! And they have now released this feature on mobile too.

This will be handy with your profile for finding “that post with the turkey recipe that Julie had around Christmas” or “That photo of Dad with the lawnmower” but this information can be incredibly powerful for brands.

Imagine you can search for which other pages are liked by people who like your page? You can! What about where they live, what they are interested in, where they go, how old they are? That too – the possibilities are endless!

Having this information can help you align your brand with other brands they love, help you post relevant and engaging content and teach you about what audiences your messages appeal to! You can use this info to determine if your online fans are the ones you were after and adjust your posting to suit if they aren’t – AND see whether your online fans are the same sort of people who love your brand in real life! Amazing, well worth leaving the “U” out of words like colour…

There’s some great article articles on Graph Search here for you – but stay tuned here too as we will definitely be going deeper into this one.

Facebook’s description

Social Media Examiner’s Blog Post

Moz Post

We hope that by better understanding the playing field you can gain insight into how your fans use social media and act more like a person than a branded self-promotion robot we often see, as no-one wants to follow those brands on social.

[bctt tweet=”Being good at social media is about being social after all!”]