Social Media: Planning and Strategy

Social Media planning and strategy is an integral part of any marketing campaign in 2020. It is a powerful tool to include in our marketing strategy: it has the ability to help build a personal connection with your prospective customers and your community. It can help build
(and foster) a relationship that you can leverage to

  1. grow your brand
  2. understand customer needs
  3. lead to more business down the line

The main goal with your business’s social media should be to grow awareness of your products and services (while doing your best to avoiding overt selling). The content you create and curate, should be consistent in tone and messaging, and needs to focus on educating your existing and potential audience, not only about your products and services, but about you and your staff as well.

BUT WHY?

The benefits of a robust social media strategy include:
● Increased brand awareness
● Growing a larger audience
● Connecting with your audience better
● Increased website traffic
● Generating more leads
● Leads to more sales (aka conversions) – current statistics indicate that 73% of people
purchase items or services because of social media

Curious for more? Let me help you out! Contact me for all the things social.

Social Stats

Statistical data is my jam. I love stats. There are so many sources for social media statistics these days, it can be overwhelming. Here, I’ve narrowed down a few of the most relevant ones (but would love to work with you on digging deep into the more juicy ones that are perfectly tailored to your business):

Current top social media sites:
● Facebook – 2.2 billion active monthly users
● Pinterest – 150 million monthly users
● Instagram – 2nd biggest social media network (surpassed Twitter in 2015)

Overall social media statistics:
● Currently 3.397 billion active social media users
● On average, people have 5.54 social media accounts
● Average daily time spent on social: 116 minutes a day
● 91% of retail brands use 2 or more social media channels
● 81% of all small & medium businesses at least one kind of social platform

Video Content Facts:
● Facebook – the most popular channel for businesses to share video content (81%)
● YouTube is second (62%)
● Instagram is third (57%)
● LinkedIn is fifth (32%) – early data shows that videos on LinkedIn are shared 20+
times more than any other content.

So what does all this mean? YOU NEED TO BE ON SOCIAL MEDIA if you want to reach your audience in new ways, and to finally find that elusive audience you’ve been just dying to connect with. Let me help you.

Content Marketing 101

What the heck is it? Ask a dozen different folks on the job, and they’ll all tell you something relatively similar.

The Content Marketing Institute, the go-to resource for information on all things content marketing related, defines content marketing here:

Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.

What stands out most to you in this definition? I think it’s the emphasis on “valuable.” That is what a good, no great content marketer should be able to bring to you, the business. At the end of the day, you want to get your product or message out there – you want that unique fingerprint recognizeed. And that’s hard. We live in a sea of over-saturation, and businesses, no matter how big or small, want to and need to connect and provide worth to their existing and potentially new customers.  That is where an experienced and relatable content marketer comes in. Sure, lots of business do this themselves. They are the closest to the goods they are selling. I get it. But I believe that if you bring on a team member for this role, contract or full time, who can get right in there, become that brand ambassador, understand the business as well as add on some new ideas, that there is the sweet spot. (And hopefully, that is where I can add that value to you and your customers.)

Sharing circle

I am a BIG fan of sharing things that I think are super interesting. Why not lift up others whenever you can, right? So here are some links to content marketing gurus and campaigns that I often look to for advice and inspiration. Enjoy!

Best of 2016

I LOVE a best-of list, and I can’t get enough os some of these campaigns. Namely, the Deadpool Movie Marketing. Full disclosure: I am a HUGE comic and superhero nerd, so this one was ‘dead’ on for me. The insider humour, the self sacrificing jokes, it all added up to one of the best in 2016.  https://contently.com/strategist/2016/12/20/best-content-marketing-2016/

Best of 2017

Have a look at some of the best in big business for this past year. http://digitaluncovered.com/6-best-content-marketing-campaigns-2017/

Jennifer Sable Lopez

Jennifer is an original. I like her honesty and foresights. Does she know me? Do I have any invested interest in her or her work?  Nope and nope. She just rocks and you should know her. http://jensablelopez.com/

Helen Tremethick

Now here’s a local gal I do know, and have had the fortune of meeting her at a Women in Tech Conference called Gather North, that literally CHANGED MY LIFE (story on that one at a later time).  Helen has it all: experience, approachability, credibility.  Maybe I’m cannibalizing myself by posting her here, but  I’d rather she get a referral from me here than not. https://communicationsdistillery.com/about/