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The Value of High-Velocity Marketing

JULY 21, 2021

How “fast” is your customer experience? Marketing has to be a timely dance nowadays for how immediate inquiries, comments, emails, DMs are. Not to mention, the internet never sleeps, and neither do things that can go wrong (Sorry, we’re not trying to keep you up at night anymore than you already are).

Here is the run down of doing Rick Bobby fast marketing (hint: it’s about being prepared):

Understanding your “Speed of CX”: It’s the measurement for how quickly you can deliver new or highly appropriate content and service.
Pick the right platform: A high-velocity content process means getting technology that can support it. Immediate responses are a new standard, but there are plenty of ways to deliver that without your team losing sleep.
Utilize segments and personas: Make them as identifiable as possible for the best individual experiences. It’s a lot of work up front to make your custom messaging more efficient.
Funnel Vision: Understand your most important journeys across your customer funnels. Where can time to market be reduced? Map out content to make sure your boat is free of holes for smooth sailing.

If you’re not first…you’re not last. But when you market at high velocity, you gain a competitive advantage. This may seem like a given, but reducing time to market on products or deploying content quickly means getting that marketing finders fee.

We want to stress that faster is not always better. And we’ve all seen that too many hot potato turnarounds can lead to burnout. Read more on high-velocity marketing tips in CIO’s piece and the featured case study.

How to Use Educational Content to Drive Brand Engagement

JULY 20, 2021

Creating content that inspires people to engage with your brand’s values, even if they aren’t considering your product yet, is a fine balance of information and entertainment.

Lifestyle suggestions, recipes, procedures, accountability, and forecasting are just some of the topics that separate a brand from a products/services-only content approach. It’s more than just content, it’s useful education pieces. But what kind of educational content can you make? According to EveryoneSocial:

Executive Transparency- Personal thoughts and experiences from the CEO create authentic, hands-on bits of content that can drill down into their areas of expertise.
Contextual Resources- Content that answers the question: How does your brand fit in the big picture of your industry?
Extra-brand Engagement Tools- Creating tools that provide engaging educational content that enlists anybody to act on the brand’s mission is a labor of love. One that your users might enjoy seeing in a thought leader type of brand.
Product Displacement- This can be a tricky one, but making educational content as brand-agnostic as possible is any company’s best bet to build trust.
Brand Lobby- This is putting it all out on the table without pushing a sale. Creating a “gallery” of information and services as a passive way of providing educational content.
Upfront Lagniappe- Present yourself as an authority by sharing educational content as a means to gain subscribers and dangle a loyalty reward while giving up the wisdom goods.

EveryoneSocial gives some amazing real world examples of each type of educational content being made by brands. Check out the full article to read for yourself.

3 Common Mistakes Brands Make with Representation

JULY 19, 2021

Representation and more diverse groups are nothing new to entertainment and advertising. While many brands are making good strides in diversity and representation both in their creative and workforce, there are still a lot of bumps in the road for others. Here are the 3 most common mistakes when it comes to representation in marketing, and how to avoid them.

Including the token diverse person: Diversity and inclusion isn’t a box to check off, it’s something to integrate across the board. Focus on building your network to include plenty of diverse talent so when the time comes for hiring, speaking events, or panels, diversity is authentic and not an afterthought scramble.
Thinking stock is enough: The article says it best, “Photos can be bought, but real stories and expertise from real people cannot.” It’s a basic instinct from consumers to want features, storylines, and more in-depth content from people who look like them and have backgrounds similar to theirs. While looking for diversity in your content is great, the real stuff like stories and testimonials with more representation will resonate on a deeper level.
Not building an inclusive brand from the start: Increasingly, consumers are looking beyond brand products and services. They want to know your brand’s values. Is your board diverse and do you support diverse hiring? They want to see brands supporting their communities either on local or national levels. You can’t support every group, but making an effort on the workforce level is crucial.

The biggest key is to be authentic. It’s becoming more and more clear where things are for the social clout. For more details, check out the Inc. article.

14 Ways to Use Instagram Stories for Business

JULY 18, 2021

Stories are everywhere: Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn (RIP Twitter Fleets). Have you been incorporating them into your social strategy? Hopper gave us 14 ways to give you some inspiration with Instagram Stories. Here are our top favorites:

Announcements: Stories for announcements are perfect because they are time sensitive. Countdowns, hype ups, and behind the scenes can all be put in your stories in anticipation for something. It makes an audience feel like they have the inside scoop with your content.
Highlights: These are amazing for brands because they act as an extension of your bio as quick call outs for products and news. They’re customizable and cool. If you haven’t added highlights to your Instagram, go through your existing stories for content or start thinking of a posting strategy to make them.
Polls & Questions: Market research, customer feedback, or just to get to know your audience and have a bit of fun with Instagram’s two-option polls or get directly typed answers to a question. Both of these are great ways to add some engagement to your audience.
Going Live: We covered last week all about the beauty of Live Rooms. Going live on your stories is great for a lot of reasons as far as engagement and the format itself, but a huge benefit is placement. When you go live, Instagram notifies your audience and puts your story spot at the top of the list.

Hopper, a social media management tool, has 10 more ways to utilize Instagram Stories. Check it out for examples and more inspiration.

Selling on LinkedIn without ads

JULY 14, 2021

It can feel like the finding a bunch of holy grails when organic leads actually werk for you. Thankfully, since LinkedIn is often industry specific or pinpointed by like-networks, it can do the most for you. Here’s some tips for selling on LinkedIn without paying for ads.

Tip No. 1 – Utilize Your Own Profile

Fix up your featured section: This can include showcasing a hot link to a post or article you shared on LinkedIn, a YouTube video, blog post,

Strategically share content: Follow some industry hashtags, find the thought leaders, share away.

Tip No. 2 – Get Your Company Page to Work

Your banner is your friend! CTA’s and news can be put front and center.
Use LinkedIn features: Buttons are a particularly powerful tool to use for free.
Share the love: Your employees are some of your best LinkedIn brand ambassadors. Ask them to share content with your company tagged in it.

Tip No. 3 – Slide into the DM’s

CAUTION COLD! No one likes out of the blue messages. So be strategic as the WHY someone would want a message from you. You have to know when they’re ready, and typically that’s after an initial action (liking a post, commenting, sharing content, etc.).

Social Media Examiner has a whole lot more of best practices and tips for LinkedIn. Check out the full article for more.

How to Create an Effective Social Media Policy

JULY 13, 2021

Social media is everywhere in our lives. Sometimes it’s great! Sometimes it’s a friggin’ nightmare 🙂 Social media managers question their livelihoods often, and it’s usually because of the weird curveballs sent their way.

Game plans are your best friend. Having your social media policies in the bag is the best way to stay ahead of any sucker punches and stressors. This is especially true for your brand’s employees and handling anything negative.

Where to Start:

Create a central library: Gather your evergreen, already approved content and keep it on lock. This way anyone has a set standard for posting.
Assemble a team: Get the whole gang in on it. Senior leadership, HR, legal, marketing, communications, and IT don’t all need to be in the muck of it, but need to be up to snuff on social media in general.
Bake it in: Make sure everyone knows what’s what when it comes to your policy from the get go. Especially new starts. Your policy should be in your employee handbook and called out as important.

What to include:

Acceptable conduct and content: What can and can’t your employees post online? Think about how they should be interacting when representing your brand. Make sure they know what breaks regulations, what is legally restricted or sensitive information.
Response for conflict or crisis: What should your employees do in sticky situations? Who should they reach out to? Canned responses are something you should develop for different use cases as well.
Call to action for participation: Get the whole squad on board with supporting company culture and messaging. Getting their input is actually a great way for UGC!

SHRM goes into much more detail of the shifting world of social media and how to handle social issues with it as well. See the full article to see if your policies could use an adjustment.

Building the Right Mar-Tech Stack for Your Organization

JULY 12, 2021

There are thousands of options for software platforms, plug-ins, and tools out there. We cover ‘em every day! So how can you ensure that you have the best possible tech on hand for your marketing? Luckily, AdWeek and ChiefMarTec.com have all the details for you to know.

The general categories for marketing solutions are:

Advertising & Promotion
Content & Experience
Management/Operations
Commerce & Sales
Data Visualization & Management
Social Media & Relationships

Now, those drill down into the many specific nuances of marketing (i.e. video advertising, content generation, automation, etc.), but it all depends on what your individual needs are for your organization.

How to figure out the right Mar-Tech stack for you:

Set your goals: What are your top 3 priorities?
Assign your champions: Who are your top tech dogs that can organize the research, organization, and rollout for your tech?
Determine your needs: There are a lot of Q’s here but the biggest one is what areas are going to bring the highest ROI?
Try things out first: Everyone loves a freebie! See what free trials you can get your hands on.
Read up: Online reviews, features, and partnerships are your usual suspects. Pricing isn’t everything, but it matters!
Compatibility check: Now, as you’re narrowing down your list and trying things out. Make sure EVERYTHING checks out smoothly with your existing systems.

Now that you have all the steps, committing is the hardest part. This is where your champs come in to help roll it out. To read the full detail list of how to build your Mar-Tech stack, check out AdWeek’s piece!

How to Use Instagram Live Rooms

JULY 11, 2021

Going live, everyone and their momma is doing it. With the blip of Clubhouse, popularity of podcasts/streaming, Facebook’s recent development of audio rooms, and Instagram’s feature called Live Rooms, you gotta wonder if live is going to be the new EVERYTHING for marketing.

Well, we’ll cross that road when it comes, but for now let’s focus on Insta. Live Rooms by Instagram is a live broadcast feature with a split screen for up to four people and interactive panels. So what? So how? Let’s get into it.

4 Ways To Use Live Rooms:

Hosting Q&A’s: Authentic, informative, and real-life, what more could your audience want? Get new consumer insights by directly interacting with their audiences.
Product Testing: People turn to user reviews and testing all the time. Show them your products in-use for yourself! Showcase all benefits, features, uses, or little nuances directly to many viewers.
Shopping Events: Combine Live Rooms with Instagram Shopping! With Live Shopping, you can sell your products or services during your live sessions by adding a link that allows viewers to add products directly to their shopping cart.
Talking to Experts: Informative content can be a great use of live sessions especially for a specific niche topic. Interviews with the experts on it is a perfect utilization of the split screen to make it easy for users to view everyone speaking.

Now that you have some inspo, you can get started with your own Live Rooms experiences. Our final tips on any live experience: have an agenda, choose your panelists wisely, and hype the live session beforehand. For more specific examples, check out the full Forbes article.

How Do People Like to Text with Brands?

JULY 7, 2021

“Heyyyy 😉 lol” is not the texting we’re talking about here. In a recent survey, MarTechSeries asked a bunch of Americans how they feel about texting for brand messaging. Let’s go over the results and how to best navigate SMS marketing.

55% Americans prefer a lower-pressure approach for text messages from brands. What’s that mean? Most peeps are ok with brands using slang and casual tone of voice. But choose your words carefully.

Most recipients are fine with what the kids are saying these days. But watch the abbreviations and ease up on the exclamation points!!! Over 64% dislike it when brands abbreviate words and too many exclamation marks make them want to opt out.

72% of the group said they opt out of texts from a brand after receiving messages too frequently. BUT texts are becoming a new necessity to users.

The biggest reasons people actually LOVE texts from brands: