Tag: Content marketing

Not as easy as it looks!

A few months ago, a friend of mine was telling me he wanted to start posting content on his social media profiles for his business. He didn’t ask for my help and he didn’t ask for any advice, he just said he was doing it and that it was an easy thing to do.

Last week, I had dinner with this same friend. He was complaining about how hard it is to come up with something interesting enough to post. He told two other friends that posting on social media was very difficult and that it wasn’t as easy as he thought.

He was saying he was out of ideas and that he needed help. One of the other friends looked at me and said something like “That is what you do, right?”. This guy looks at me and says “I thought you were in Marketing”. You can imagine what my answer was.

So, yes, you can do it yourself, but you need to have a plan. You need to have a strategy. If you don’t you will run out of ideas very soon. Like my friend did. This is a very time-consuming activity. The best thing you can do is to have somebody exclusively dedicated to this.

I know there are a lot of companies that hire a graphic designer and let them take care of their website, their e-mail campaigns, their newsletter, their logo design, their photos and videos, AND their social media content. That is the worst thing you can do, as we have discussed in previous posts.

There is a reason why Community Managers and Social Media Managers were created. If you can’t hire a Digital Marketing team, at least have someone that will handle exclusively your social media content.

Always have a plan, be ready to answer a lot of questions, and be prepared for all kinds of situations. Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Many think that it is “only posting on Facebook”, and “how hard can it be?”. Well, it is a lot harder than you think and no, it is not only posting on Facebook. People don’t like to hear this, but that’s the truth. You need at least one professional Community Manager.

In previous posts, we have already talked about the importance of a content plan. You need a tone, a style, topics for your posts, a graphic concept, and a few other things. But the most important thing is that you need someone with the necessary criteria about what to post and how to post it.

This person needs to have some experience and some knowledge about what they are doing because they will be making a lot of fast decisions and calls about your published content and about how to respond to the interactions they will be having with the people that follow your company on social media.

Taking some online courses is ok, but that’s not everything. Those courses will teach you the technical aspects of being a Community Manager, but they will not give you the creativity or the experience needed to perform this job, as my friend has found out.

There is only one thing that can give you all the skills that you need to become great at this job, and that is doing it. Make a plan, stick to it, and in a few months, you will be looking at the results of your hard work. Be ready, so that when mistakes happen, you know what to do.

23 de April de 2023
Take the ladder!

If you are constantly promoting your products on Instagram and/or Facebook, people might get tired of watching your ads all the time and they might lose their effectiveness. That’s why it is important to have some periods without paid ads and let some organic growth happen.

Paid ads should be used when you have important information to share with your followers, like the launch of a new product or relevant news of any kind, but you have to be careful not abusing them because people might get used to seeing your ads and start ignoring them.

If you are beginning and want to let people know that there’s a new face in your business sector, that’s a different story. Awareness is one of the most important steps of every strategy and you should invest as much as possible in this, but just for a few months.

Once people know who you are and what you do, you can move on to the following stages of your campaign. You can boost some posts if you consider that the information they contain is relevant to your customers; but if you saturate people’s newsfeeds with your ads, they will unfollow you.

Alternating periods of paid activity with periods of organic activity looks like a ladder on a graph, hence the name of this pattern of growth. Photo by Burak The Weekender on Pexels.com

One thing that works very well for most brands is to alternate periods of paid reach with periods of organic reach – that means periods with paid ads and periods with no paid ads. That way people don’t get tired of you, and your business keeps growing.

As long as you have fresh content every week, everything is ok. Because if your only activity on social media is having paid ads campaigns and promoting your products, that means you are having long periods of inactivity and that is not good at all. It’s boring.

Remember, your content has to be of value to the people that follow you. Not every post should be about you selling your products like we have been discussing in previous posts. Your content should keep going independently of your ads, though they should be coherent.

That way people will be interested in seeing what’s going on on your social media profiles all the time, and not only when there’s a campaign running. This alternation of paid reach and organic reach is known as a ladder pattern of growth, because of the way it looks on a graph, and this is one of the best ways to grow on social media.

Even if you had the money to keep your ads running all year, you shouldn’t. That will get old fast. Try intercalating paid and organic reach and wait to see the results. In case you have something really important to share, you can always boost that post to help it get to where it needs to go.

12 de March de 2023
What do you mean?

Sometimes we take a lot of things for granted, like the meaning of words. We think that everybody knows what one word means, but to our surprise, it is not always like that. Each of us could have a different meaning for the same word, which could lead to misunderstandings.

Think of the word “house”. What’s the picture in your head? Do you imagine a one-floor or a two-floor building? Does it have a garden and a fence? What’s the color on the outside? Each one of us creates a very different image inside our heads. Each one of us gives a different meaning to it.

Another thing that happens is that we all think we know the meaning of a word. We believe we do, but when we look for it in the dictionary we find discrepancies; most of the time it’s about slight variations, but sometimes we find that words mean something completely different from what we thought.

This phenomenon becomes very relevant when you’re writing a book, an article for a newspaper, or an ad. Are you sure that everybody will understand whatever it is that you are trying to say? Will the picture inside their heads be the one that you want it to be?

That’s why you have to do your research. Make sure that you know what you’re saying and that everybody will understand the same thing. Some companies do this for big corporations, but since we don’t have that kind of budget, we’ll have to do it ourselves.

Words mean different things to each one of us and that can lead to many misunderstandings or even cause conflicts. Make sure you know what words mean. Photo by Craig Adderley on Pexels.com

Ask your friends, your neighbors, or anybody around you that you can get to read your ad and that might help you make sure that your message is very clear and understandable to anybody who reads it. Of course, you will make some interesting findings if you do this.

What do we do then? You can’t get inside people’s heads and change the way they think or what they understand, but you can change other things. Choose another wording, use a synonym, or add another word that makes it even more clear. Control what you can control.

I know about a campaign that fell apart after the agency discovered that they were using a word that people didn’t understand. And it wasn’t the case of a little-known word with a strange meaning, it was just that people understood different things. The word was “tolerance”.

Words are concepts, and each one of us has a unique concept for them. That’s why dictionaries were invented, so we could all agree on the meaning of words. Sometimes we need to use images, font faces, colors, sizes, and layouts to make our message clear. But we will talk about this some other time.

12 de February de 2023
The Big Temptation

When a brand starts posting content to its social media profiles it is very common to make the mistake of sharing too much. They post ten times a day on every possible platform they can. This is wrong!

Think about it as a user, a follower, and not a brand. You start following your favorite car company, or whatever you like, and suddenly they start flooding your news feed with their posts and stories. One week later, you unfollow them.

You don’t need to post ten times a day. That will get you nothing. You are not going to get more followers and, very possibly, you will lose the ones you have. Don’t do it.

We have already discussed the fact that you don’t need to be on every social media platform that there is, especially if you don’t have enough content or the strategy to do it. The same thing happens with your post frequency.

You can start by posting two times a week on Facebook and Instagram and work from there depending on how many followers you have and the interactions that you get. For LinkedIn, make it once a week.

If you are using Twitter, you can make between two and five tweets a day, but make sure to stay in topic and don’t repeat the same content too much. Try different days and times.

It is very hard to resist temptation, but in the same way, we avoid eating too much dessert, we have to resist posting too much. Photo by Giorgia Licini on Pexels.com.

Like we said before, it is a great idea to boost your posts when starting on social media. Once you have a reasonable audience, try paid ads. They are really helpful when you’re trying to attract more followers to your profiles.

Remember to keep an eye on your metrics and make adjustments based on what they’re telling you. Resist the temptation of posting too much and having a profile on every social media platform. You don’t need that.

What you need to do is to have a strategy, stick to your plan of content, and build a community. Of course, you can try new things, new formats, and new topics, but you have to make it in a planned manner.

Your numbers will tell you when to start posting more frequently. And even then, make it gradually. You don’t want to overwhelm your followers. Remember you are an intruder on social media. They were not meant for you to advertise there. We use it that way because it works, but that’s not their main purpose.

8 de January de 2023
Merry Christmas!

Let me tell you a story. Many years ago, I was hired by a luxury car brand to manage their social media campaigns in Mexico City. I can’t tell you which one, but I can tell you Elvis liked it a lot.

Well, I had been working there only for a few months when I decided it was time to have a Christmas giveaway. But I needed a prize first, so I asked my then-boss to whom I needed to talk to get one because depending on the prize the size and duration of the campaign would change.

I explained what I wanted to do and gave him all the details about this campaign. When I finished, he was just staring at me, as if I had committed a crime. He said: “You don’t know a thing about marketing. You never never mess with Christmas“.

Remember this happened in Mexico City, and Christmas there is something sacred, so you have to be very careful and try not to offend anybody. You can see many “Happy Holidays” campaigns, but none explicitly mention Christmas.

I explained to him that, the year before, I had a similar giveaway for another car brand – their main competitor actually – and that it had performed really well. As a matter of fact, that campaign gave such good results that it had landed me that job.

To keep it short, He agreed reluctantly to the campaign and I started doing what I needed to do to get it going. After a week, I showed my boss a report with all the metrics and all the results. It performed really great.

What happened next is not relevant to what I want to tell you, which is that, in social media and digital marketing in general, there are no rules, as we’ve been saying from the beginning.

This idea that I couldn’t have a campaign related to Christmas was so aberrant for me, that I had to show my boss that his concepts and his “recipes” on traditional marketing didn’t apply to social media. This was something new and we had to try new things.

If you want to have a giveaway or a dynamic of any kind on your social media, do it. Be respectful of all the different traditions, and try to include everyone, but there’s no reason why you shouldn’t do it.

All these old concepts and formulas that traditional marketing people have, need to change. With the internet and social media, everything changed, so we have to change the way we promote our brands. We have to change the way we interact with our audience.

So go ahead and try new things. Don’t be afraid and experiment with images, copy, platforms, and formats. Measure everything you can, so later you can learn from your results, whichever they are, but never refrain from having the campaign that you want to have.

Happy holidays, Merry Christmas, Happy Hannukah, or whatever works for you, just enjoy this season, hopefully with the company of your loved ones, and take care of yourselves.

25 de December de 2022
Give it a boost!

The term “organic reach” represents the number of people that sees your content on social media without you having to pay for it. A few years ago, you could have some pretty decent interaction and reach numbers this way, but not anymore.

Social media platforms have made sure that the organic reach of your content gets seriously limited because they want you to pay. They want you to invest in the promotion of your content because that’s their business, that’s the way they make money.

Surely, you’ve already heard something about the algorithms and their negative effect on the reach of your content. Maybe you’ve heard someone blaming the algorithms for their posts’ low interaction and engagement.

Algorithms are just mathematical expressions that work as a set of instructions when performing a calculation. For example, the algorithm that determines the number of people that sees your content on their news feed for free versus the number of people that sees that very same post when you pay to boost it.

Paid reach is always greater than organic reach, and it helps you grow your audience in a shorter time. It would take you years to get your organic reach to the levels that paid reach does in just a few weeks. So definitely paid reach and boosted content should be a part of your strategy.

Just like a ladder helps you reach higher spots, boosting social media content will help you reach a wider audience. Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

But what happens if you are working on a limited budget? Don’t worry. You don’t need to spend a lot, there is no minimum amount to invest. You can spend as little as a few dollars a month and get some results.

Obviously, the more you invest the better your numbers will be, but even just a few dollars a month can make a difference for your brand, especially in the early stages of a campaign or when launching a new product.

Promoting on social media will always be cheaper than doing it on traditional media, like television, radio, or newspapers, and the results you get are a lot better too, so don’t hesitate to invest your money in boosting your content.

It is a shame to see a lot of quality content go to waste because of the extremely low organic reach it gets. Many brands make the mistake of increasing the frequency of their posts, instead of increasing their reach by boosting them.

One important clarification that has to be made is that boosting your content will only get you a greater reach for your content, and more engagement too, but it is not the same as Paid Ads, that’s another story and we will talk about it later

27 de November de 2022
The World Cup has started, be careful

Today, the FIFA World Cup started in Qatar. Many brands see this as an opportunity to promote themselves by talking about this, supporting their home teams, orusing the same hashtags.

That can be a great idea as long as you know what you’re talking about, but if you don’t know anything about soccer, it’s better to stay out of the discussion, because it could work against you.

It is generally a great idea to stay away from topics that have nothing to do with you as a brand, be it politics, sports, or whatever subject comes to mind. If your brand is not related to sports, why would you say something about them?

Supporting your home team is one of the pretty safe things you can do, but be careful and do not engage in a discussion with the opposite team. If you do, keep it polite, keep it brief, and keep it about the sport.

If you’ve spent some time doing marketing stuff, you surely have noticed that you should never engage in a discussion about politics, unless you are a politician and/or fully understand every aspect of the topic that’s being discussed.

The same thing happens with sports. Especially soccer, which is some kind of religion in some countries like Brazil or Argentina, or even Mexico. So, if you are not a soccer expert, stay away from it.

You don’t want to be seen as an opportunistic brand or as a fake fan. That’s a label that’s going to take a lot of effort to remove once you’ve earned it. You’d think it’s harmless, but it’s not.

Sportswear brands are generally very careful with their content. They have to make sure they are not sending the wrong message. Photo by EVG Kowalievska on Pexels.com

Sportswear brands are very careful with this kind of thing. They hire experts to handle their content, so they don’t say anything inappropriate or anything stupid. One post can cause a lot of damage to your brand.

Every time you post something, you should consider every aspect of it. Are you saying something that could be misinterpreted in some way? What is it saying about your brand?

Remember, you should only talk about things that you want to be associated with. When someone thinks about your brand, do you want them to think about sports? About soccer?

If the answer is no, then don’t even think about using the World Cup’s hashtags or saying something about it in your content. Soccer fans are very passionate, and even using the wrong terms can be very costly reputation-wise.

You don’t need to be a part of every trend. Your content doesn’t need to include every hashtag. Pick only the ones that say the right things about your company, above all if it is about soccer and Qatar.

20 de November de 2022
Make a plan, stick to it

When to post is important, and how often to post is also important, but what to post is the most important thing and is frequently overlooked. There are topics that you should be writing about and others that you shouldn’t.

You want to be seen as an expert in your area or you want your brand to be perceived as the epitome of quality and great service. Then you have to talk like an expert or say the things that such a brand would say.

There are some topics that are essential to what you do for a living. If you make cars, for example, you should know everything about engines, seats, and gearboxes. Those are your topics.

Make a list of those topics or a list of the characteristics your brand should have to be seen as the best in its sector. Depending on what you do, that list is going to include very different things.

Brands are more concerned with the quantity of posts they make in a week than the quality of their content. Being relevant should be their main focus. Photo by Markus Spiske on Pexels.com

You’re going to post about your topics two or three times a week – or as frequently as it is recommended for the platform that you are using -, but you are doing it according to a plan.

Make a calendar of when to post about which topic on which platform, with pictures and everything. That’s your plan and you should have enough content for a week or two.

That’s why brands shouldn’t just jump on the next trend. You have to think about what that post will say about you as a brand. If it is something that works for you, go ahead, but it’s something you shouldn’t do most of the time.

Having a content plan also improves your SEO rankings. Remember search engines crawl websites looking for certain factors that define the order in which they will appear on the search results page.

If you frequently post about certain subjects and somebody performs a search about them, the search engines already know that your website has the answers to such questions and they will include you in their results.

As conclusion, having a content plan is essential when positioning yourself or your brand as an expert. It also helps you create content more easily and it increases your SEO rankings. You just have to stick to it.

15 de October de 2022