What a Profitable Social Media Marketing Strategy Looks Like (with 4 Real Examples)

We’ve come a long way in the last few years. Back in 2011, the biggest question that people were asking was if social was profitable. Since then, industry conversation has moved from ‘will I see an ROI’ to ‘how to measure social ROI’ and the tools that can help.

Yet, only 15% marketers have proven the impact of social media quantitatively. If you aren’t part of that 15% there could be two potential hitches – you aren’t working with a sound strategy, or you aren’t measuring the right metrics.

[ A sound strategy = targeted content + the right channels]

To eliminate the first possibility, let us study profitable social media content marketing strategies and compare them to our own.

1. ShipServ

Who’d have thought that a maritime e-commerce company would seize the social media opportunity and win at it? Shipping companies seem unlikely to be seeking information on social media, but ShipServ saw this differently. Since no one in their industry had conquered the social space, they moved in full force and established thought leadership in it.

ShipServ supplies software to support shipping companies and connects the industry’s vendors to buyers. In 2008, they were struggling with a host of marketing problems. They were selling technology to people who didn’t consider it necessary and on a limited budget. Creating that change in perception would be a huge task.

They began by studying their audience’s content consumption. They identified keyword themes to work with and planned a quarterly content and SEO strategy. A series of original content was promoted through a host of social media channels, driving traffic back to the main site. The channels they used included their blog, newsletters, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and podcasts. They also ran a white-paper series and created a LinkedIn group.

The result?

400% more leads

150% more contact to lead conversions

3 month break even on the social media investment

(Source)

Takeaway tactics

1) Study your audience. One thing that people forget to do is to study how an audience consumes content, where exactly the look for it and what they look for.

2) Consider your content competition when building out a social strategy. One of the social media marketing mistakes that people make is blind-sighting content competition. ShipServ boomed on social because none of its competitors were on it yet. You need to identify a platform that has your audience and isn’t already monopolized by your competition. You need to share content with a unique value proposition.

2. Lyfe Kitchen

For a food industry product, social media marketing may seem like the clear-cut solution. But Lyfe Kitchen is B2B, a restaurant and grocery product line. A few years ago, this company wanted to increase word of mouth on social media and rapidly expand into new supermarkets. What should their approach have been?

The company ran influencer marketing programs, but with a slightly unconventional approach. They chose influencers who belonged to their high-potential target audience across industries – health and fitness, sports, the fashion world, and moms. In addition to this effort, the company also did tastings for a national sports company and magazine editors. The sports management company loved the product so much that they convinced their clients (sports celebs) to get on board. The editors wrote articles and talked about the product on social media.

The result?

Their product distribution grew from 400 to 1400 stores within a few months of the effort. The expansion was a result of direct requests to stock the product.

(Source)

Takeaway tactics

1) Tap into every vertical of your target audience. Don’t restrict yourself to one target demographic or group. Consider all possible consumers when creating your social media content or planning a marketing strategy.

This company considered influencers across so many verticals, from health and fitness to the fashion industry. They even included influential moms, who may have been instrumental in getting distribution to local supermarkets.

2) Look beyond the conventional. Don’t tunnel vision your marketing strategy. If you think laterally you may be able to accomplish more than just your major objective.

For instance, Lyfe Kitchen could have sent free samples to influencers or interacted with them separately. Turning the activity into an event provided a unique PR opportunity, and to make the Lyfe Kitchen experience more memorable and exciting for potential influencers.

3. Crate and Barrel

Crate and Barrel is a chain of American retail stores that sell home furnishings. Wait, so why did they create the ultimate wedding contest? Well, they did it to drive gift registry creation and engage new consumers in the process of it.

Participants were required to create a gift registry with Crate and Barrel to enter the contest (Note: A requirement like this one to enter a contest often introduces legal complexities). After verification of the registry, the participants could move on to the next stage – submission of a photograph and some answers to questions. The contest was then judged by public voting and a panel to pick the winner of a $100,000 fantasy wedding.

The contest was promoted on the company’s website, on-site in their stores and by advertisement.

The result?

Over 17,000 applicants, each with a minimum registry value of $2,000 (a net value of $34 million)

Direct access and engagement with the participants wedding guests, potential new customers

(Source)

Takeaway tactics

1) Craft marketing strategies that target both current customers, and new customers through them.

Crate and Barrel could have simply worked with the contest applicants, but the registry angle increased their reach exponentially (Please consider legal complexities before creating a campaign of this sort).

The simplest version of this tactic is to share the contest post to enter (which will give you access to your audience’s connections).

2) Make your unique value proposition exciting. A dream wedding of that value was certain to attract large application numbers. It was also compelling enough to make applicants want to get through stage one – the registry.

4. IBM

The popularity of ad blockers tells us this – people are growing immune to advertisement. In this market scenario, how do you reach your target audience? How do make someone willing to consume your content?

At IBM, it is all about people. The focus isn’t on the corporate blog or Twitter id, but the people who make the company. IBM has over 17,000 internal blogs, and a 100,000 active bloggers running that community. People are more likely to listen to other people than they are to a faceless brand.

IBM trains its social champions. They call themselves IBMers, and they are given the tools necessary to build a powerful social media presence. Thousands of people identify themselves as IBMers on Twitter and LinkedIn. I was surprised to see that the company culture remains with employees even when they leave IBM.

The result?

Over $100 million in crowdfunding

Over 40% in gross profit revenues

(Source)

Takeaway tactics

1) Invest in people. Employees, partners, well-wishers. There are over 40 studies to prove that they are more influential than official brand accounts on social media.

2) Use an employee advocacy platform to help your employees share your content on social. Build a powerful employee advocacy program that can achieve incredible reach and drive impact for your brand.

How to Be Profitable While Marketing on Social Media

So far, we have broken down profitable social media marketing strategies for insights. Now let us explore the basic framework that a social strategy requires to be profitable. Here five tips to help you implement a solid and returning social media marketing strategy.

1. Create awareness

2, Blog

3. Focus on the right platform

4. Collect and use audience data

5. Engage with your audience

1. Create awareness

Irrespective of your industry, brand awareness should be on your plan. Your target audience should be aware of the need for your product/service, what concerns of theirs it addresses and why they should choose your brand over others. Ensure that your business is known for something.

Begin by building a solid social media presence.

Organize your blog

Optimize your social media accounts

Participate in the relevant social media communities

Social media success depends on the value you create. You have to give away substantial value to succeed in a market where so much of it is already free. Do it HubSpot style, help potential clients achieve results by sharing free insights from your experience. Several companies see returns from their credibility and reputation on social media.

2. Blog

People seek help on the internet, and social media. It is no surprise that ‘How to’ is a heavily searched term. Your blog could be a powerful platform to field and answer queries that your target audience has. Like we discussed in the ShipServ case study, it is good to know exactly what they are asking first.

Share your expertise (make it unique)

Partner with bloggers and industry experts to create more value

Spend 20% of your time creating blog content, and 80% of it distributing it (on social, in email newsletters)

Your blog is an anchor to pull and hold your social media traffic. Ensure that the loop is complete though. Write blog posts that drive people to purchase your product/services. You don’t have to be promotional about it, you only have to show readers its use cases.

3. Focus on the right platform

Every platform you build a presence on is an investment of your time and money. Look at your budgeting as a mathematical equation. The variables (spends on each platform) on the left add up to the maximum budget that you have on the right.

Prioritize your platforms by their ROI

Accordingly allocate resources to your prioritized platforms

Track your progress and optimize your spends each month/quarter

Sometimes, the cost of work on a platform doesn’t justify what you earn out of it. In such a scenario, you could de-prioritize that platform and push something else up the priority list. Optimizing your effort and spends in this manner can help increase your overall social media ROI.

4. Collect and use audience data

Google Analytics has a module called ‘audience insights’. Based on visitor data, the module helps you understand more about who you are targeting and helps you identify the groups that you aren’t targeting yet. Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter also give you demographics and user interests so you can build an informed content strategy.

Pull audience insights from Google and social media platforms

Keep the insights in mind when creating your content marketing strategy

Tailor content on each social media platform based on its audience demographics

Your audience will make a move only when encouraged by exactly the right content. The more you know about them and the more you consciously use that information, the better your conversions are likely to be.

5. Engage with your audience

There are many ways in which you can engage your social media audience. While you should engage them on your platforms, you should also go beyond them to target your potential audience. They don’t have to be consumers, they can be partners or simply enthusiasts.

Target communities, forums, websites and blogs that are popular in your industry

Don’t sell before your audience is ready. Begin by being useful to them regardless

Engage with your target market and people who have access to them

Consistency is key in a community. You have to establish yourself as an expert and really become part of your community. Becoming a thought-leader us even more effective, but that requires staying ahead of trends and covering the evolution of your niche.

It is possible to generate ample revenue from your social media pages alone, but you require clarity in terms of your goals and plan of implementation. With the right tactics, partners and tools, you can surprise yourself with your social media results.

Image credit: Pixabay.com

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5 Savvy Brands on Instagram And What Makes Them Successful

The human brain processes visuals 60,000 times faster than it can manage with text. Instagram has made the power of visual storytelling accessible to businesses and individuals, boasting over 700 million active monthly users and delivering an engagement rate of 4.21% per follower, around 58 times higher than the engagement per follower on Facebook.

• More than 80% of Instagram users follow a business on the app
• 30% of Instagram users have purchased a product first discovered on the network
• Instagram photographs on site increase conversions by 24%
• Visitors from Instagram stay on a website for an average of 192 seconds, longer than that on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.
• In March 2017, more than 120 million Instagrammers visited a website, received directions, called, emailed or sent direct messages to learn about a business

Sources

yotopo Instagram Data Benchmarks for 2017

Instagram.com

Instagram-press.com

For B2C businesses in particular, Instagram can provide the highest impact simply because products and certain services – hospitality, pet care, personal care and fitness – lend themselves naturally to the image- and video-oriented medium. As is the case with any social platform, some brands have been savvier in their use of the visual-based network and earned a solid following along the way. Here is a look at five.

1. Desigual

Desigual is a Barcelona-based clothing brand focusing on vivid patchwork and graffiti art designs. As you would imagine, their Instagram account is filled with flamboyant splashes of color and leggy models, but beyond the necessities of fashionable promotions, Desigual does an excellent job of curating their feed with imaginative and expressive photos that imprint brand USP strongly- the product is the hero in this case, not the model or celebrity wearing it. The brand also encourages followers to contribute their experience with the #mydesigual hashtag.

2. VMware

Cloud computing and virtualization software provider VMware isn’t the sort of brand you would expect on Instagram. There is no way you could make enterprise software look sexy or build an emotional connect with a cloud storage appliance. And that is why VMware’s Instagram page features instances of company culture, values, events, community participation and the rare nerdy meme. Admittedly, their Instagram follower count is measly- 10.4k versus 266k on Twitter. But it does a great job of conveying the ‘cool’ and lighter side of the company, which can be immensely valuable for talent acquisition and reputation enhancement.

3. WeWork

NYC-based WeWork provides shared workspace, community and services for start-ups and small businesses. Established in 2010, the company has amassed 135k followers on Instagram on the back of compelling photos that clearly showcase their ‘make a life, not just a living’ tagline. What stands out most is the informal, fun and eco-friendly vibe of the featured workspaces. Sure, WeWork builds creative office interiors, but their Instagram photos communicate a strong human element, showing people and pets in action, along with the occasional peppy motivational quote. Check out WeWork’s Instagram page for creative inspiration and the art of making a big statement with simple, tasteful imagery.

4. Brick Lane Bikes

How many ways can you make bikes and cycling products look appealing enough to plonk down your money? Brick Lane Bikes, a London-based workshop selling bikes and cycling products has the answer. Their Instagram page has 44.3k followers, and each post receives hundreds of likes and a fair amount of engagement. Besides the fact that the store has some pretty neat bikes, including vintage and custom-made products, the quality of photos, creative use of hashtags (#lifebehind bars, #bikeporn, #bikesagainstwalls, #winwin), event promotions, YouTube video plug-ins, customer submissions make for a diverse and appealing page even if you’re not really into two-wheelers.

5. Cleveland Clinic

Cleveland Clinic knows how to tug at your heartstrings, show you how much medical technology has advanced, give you new health goals, and marvel at the complexity of the human body. The multispecialty academic hospital also puts the spotlight on patients, caregivers, customer service personnel and CSR initiatives. Their #tbt photos are also pretty epic, giving you a feel for the hospital’s history and heritage.

To build traction on Instagram, curate content with fixed goals in mind. Invest in high-quality photographs and entrust account management to creatives who can make you look good on the platform.

Image credit:Pixabay

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How to Run Social Media Marketing Experiments (with 73 Ideas)

Running social media marketing can be hard when you have no idea where to begin. Social media is vast and the abundance of social media marketing options leaves social media managers undecided on which is the best strategy to follow. Fortunately, there exists a way to identify top performing social media strategies. You can identify top performing strategies with maximum ROI by running social media marketing experiments.

So, how do you run a social media marketing experiment?

Here’s a clean, 6-step process.

1. Set goals
2. Prioritize goals
3. Design the experiment
4. Test ideas
5. Analyze tests & glean insights
6. Automate top-performing ideas

Before we proceed with details on every step, here are a few characteristics of social media that you should consider before designing social media marketing experiments.

1. On social media, there are controllable (content quality, target audience and impact) and uncontrollable factors (organic reach).

2. Every experiment can have different outcomes based on different inputs. For instance, the experiment when boosted by say employee advocacy will show different results when not.

The 6-step process to setting-up, running and measuring a social media marketing experiment

1. Set goals

Social media needn’t be only a marketing tool. Social media can be used to impact every aspect of a business, from its inception to revenue-generation and customer support. In 2018, social media managers are aware of this fact, which is why it’s important to question ourselves how much value we’re getting from the time and resources spent on social media.

Goal-setting is one way to answer this question. In fact, goal-setting may also have a direct impact on an individual’s performance and happiness, according to a Harvard study.

The following is a list of social media goals that you can consider when planning your social media marketing experiments.

13 social media goals you could consider chasing

1. Product/company branding

2. Increasing brand awareness

3. Driving social media traffic

4. Lead generation

5. Revenue generation

6. Increasing brand engagement

7. Building communities

8. Providing customer support

9. Multiplying press mentions

10. Growing co-marketing opportunities

11. Acquiring brand advocates

12. Collecting UGC, reviews and testimonials

13. Launching products

Broad or narrow, these goals provide context to your social media marketing activities and help you measure them accurately. It’s best to create experiments that have no more than one goal, so your efforts are focused and easier to measure.

Consider, for instance, that you have created two social media posts – Post A and Post B. Post A has performed better in terms of social media engagement but Post B has performed better in terms of social media traffic. Which post would you consider a success?

Having goals in place prevents this kind of ambiguity.

2. Prioritize goals

Every business has multiple goals that can be reached via social media marketing. But every business also has to deal with limited resources and budgets. That’s where priorities become important. Priorities help you decide where and what to focus your resources on.

There are tons of systems that you can use to effectively prioritize goals. The trick is prioritizing what will give you most important results. How do you identify those goals?

At DrumUp, we use the Cost-Targeting-Control-Effort system. Here’s how it works.

1. List all of your goals on sheets.

2. Score every goal on Cost-Targeting-Control-Effort on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 implying most and 1 implying least.

3. Calculate an average rounded off score that you can refer to for decision-making.

4. Work on the easiest goals first and make your way up to the harder goals, or prioritize but whatever is most necessary.

This process may eat-up your time in the beginning, but once you get used to it, using this process will save you tons of invaluable time.

3. Design the experiment

Once you have prioritized goals, it’s time to design an experiment. Doing this is simple. You need a bucket of ideas and hypotheses on how those ideas will help you achieve your goal. When connecting the idea-hypothesis-outcome, ask yourself what you’ll do and how it’ll lead to achieving your goal and why that will be the outcome.

For instance, if the goal is to increase brand awareness, you can accomplish this outcome in so many different ways. You can create a social media contest or you can run social media ads. It’s best to conceptualize the experiment in detail at this stage so you can set expectations and predict the outcome accordingly.

Here are different ways in which you can get inspiration to conceptualize experiments –

1. Follow top social media marketers and read their blogs for ideas

2. Identify prevailing social media trends and follow them

3. Conduct competitive research and see what industry leaders are doing

Once you have a concrete idea, decide on what the task will entail and how you’ll measure the results with respect to the goal. If website traffic or conversions are the goal, you’ll need to create custom URLs using URL builders to ensure conversion-tracking.

4. Test the experiment

Now you’re ready to test your social media experiments. When testing social media experiments, you need to bear some basics in mind.

1. Never test more than one thing at a time. If you want to be sure of what’s moving the needle for a particular goal, it’s critical to ensure that you don’t have conflicting readings. For instance, if you want to increase traffic to your website, any social media posts that is clickable can contribute to the effort. That’s why it’s essential to know which posts/theme of posts you want to focus on.

2. Refer to the right metrics to measure posts. Typically, goals decide which metrics you should monitor. For instance, if you want to increase brand awareness on social media you would choose impressions as the key metric instead of choosing clicks or something that’s less representative.

3. Run each experiment for a sufficient period of time. If the experiment is minor, you can run it for shorter time intervals such as a week or two weeks. If the experiment is major, for instance, if it involves a re-haul of your entire social media marketing strategy, then it’s best to run it at least for a month or two months.

4. Use A/B testing on every set of posts. The content you create for your social media experiment should ideally be A/B tested for the best results. That’s because you won’t know the full potential of your social media posts unless they are in their best forms. For A/B testing, you need to be able to track each version of a post, so you’ll need custom URLs.

5. Ensure that the experiments are all closed-loop. You don’t need any loose ends or blind spots in an experiment. If you have any, try and fill them in. For instance, if you want to measure the effect of your content on revenue, you need to be able to see the actual purchase and that might need some development effort on your website. Don’t shy away from collaborating with developers when needed.

5. Analyze tests & glean insights

After an experiment is run, you’ll need to analyze results and learn from what you’ve done. While you’ll want to know if the experiment worked, you’ll also want to know to what extent it worked and what exactly made it work. It’s also useful to know what didn’t work and why, so you can apply those learnings to future social media campaigns.

Social media experiment tracking is an exact science, with numbers. When running experiments it’s important to process the statistical significance of the results. You’ll want to ensure that the results aren’t because of chance factors and don’t include false positives and exclude false negatives.

One way to ensure that your data is clean and that your experiments are actually worth investing in, you could repeat the experiment a couple of times and see if the results stay consistent. You can also repeat experiments by changing factors and understanding how you can future amplify results.

6. Automate top-performing ideas

Once you have consistent results stemming from particular experiments, you can make the most of those ideas by automating them. For instance, if you know that your blog posts bring a ton of traffic to your website and convert new users, you can set-up your blog on an RSS feed and set it on an auto-posting schedule.

When automating top-performing ideas, you’ll need the help of automation tools. Even if you can’t automate entire processes, you can definitely automate large portions of the process. Once the process is automated, you can save a ton of time and be more productive.

Here are different ways in which you can automate your social media marketing –

1. Save social media posts of different campaigns in different libraries on a social media management tool such as DrumUp, from where you can set-up an extensive publishing schedule.

2. Add RSS feeds of your blog and top news agencies or blogs and set them up on an automatic publishing schedule, so you never have to publish a post manually.

3. Follow influencers on Twitter and add them to Twitter lists, from where you can follow their work and retweet/engage with posts when required.

73 social media marketing experiments to try today

• Use Twitter’s advanced search to find potential clients
• Try social media ads and native content promotion
• Try employee advocacy for social media
• Activate social media follow and social media share plugins on your webpages
• Test different positions for social media plugins (consider mobile placement)
• Publish content when your followers are online and active
• Publish content when your followers and offline and inactive
• Publish content during lunch break, on the weekends, during commute times and on public holidays
• Publish content late nights and early mornings
• Publish more frequently
• Publish less frequently
• Craft short and punchy post content
• Craft long and descriptive post content
• Use popular hashtags
• Use less popular or similar to popular hashtags
• Include testimonials or social proof in social media posts
• Add emojis to social posts
• Create the same post for all social media platforms (cross-post)
• Create custom posts for each social media platform
• Post questions and quizzes
• Run contests
• Conduct QnAs and AMAs
• Create interview sessions on text and video
• Publish and curate infographics
• Share GIFs and short videos

  

• Post behind the scenes content
• Work with disappearing content (statuses and stories)
• Run promotional campaigns (discount campaigns)
• Host live giveaways clubbed with planned rant sessions
• Create Twitter Moments and Instagram Stories
• Share SlideShares via social media posts
• Post audio clippings and podcasts
• Livestream events
• Experiments with music on videos and podcasts
• Leverage social media analytics dashboards to gain insights
• Create short and long social media videos
• Use photographs of your team, clients and partners
• Conduct events to collect UGC

 

• Co-host live events
• Run co-marketing activities on social media
• Try Twitter chats
• Join and work within LinkedIn and Facebook groups
• Build a presence in LinkedIn communities
• Get C-suite executives involved on social media
• Run campaigns for brand advocacy on social media
• Pin important posts
• Comment on active social media posts and conversations
• Use Facebook for remarketing
• Build a Facebook Messenger bot
• Use LinkedIn inMail for marketing
• Follow top customers’ Life Events
• Add CTAs to all links and content you share
• Add Click-to-tweets within blog posts
• Experiment with graphic design to pull attention to parts of posts
• Use social media tools to find the right times to share content
• Work with evergreen content to get more social media referrals
• A/B test types of social media content
• Play around with colors and typography
• Test images with people vs objects
• Optimize landing pages to convert social media referrals
• Build an email list with gated social media contests
• Use humorous social media content
• Create a band persona/character to endear customers
• Connect with customers on social media and activate them to be advocates
• Experiment with tone
• Try different types of copy
• Target different groups of people
• Work with different time zones

Wrap

There are infinite possibilities in social media marketing if you consider all the variables in content, publishing and advertising. To develop the best formula for your brand, you need to run social media experiments. Remember social media trends are always changing and it’s always a good idea to test new ideas every year or so. Keep an eye on your social media analytics and be open to making changes when required, this mindset will help you make the most of your social media efforts.



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5 Questions If You Launching a New Business

Successful entrepreneurs share some common traits. You have definitely heard about many of these. Passion, motivation, self-belief, flexibility, hard work and networking, right?

But there’s one trait which overrides all – ‘’asking the right questions.’’

If you are planning to launch a new business, you have multiple challenges that stare you in the face. At any given point of time, you’re asking yourself whether you should do something or you shouldn’t do something. In fact, there are millions of questions that you face. But only a few of them actually matter, ones that you should really ask yourself to get started right and lead your business in the right direction. You need to know what those questions are.

Given below is a list of five questions that are essential to your success as an entrepreneur.

1. Is my market segment profitable enough?

Before you start to operate your business, you should find out whether that market offers opportunities for making sufficient revenue. On the surface, the market you pick may look like a promising one. But the truth emerges when you dig deeper and explore. Nowadays, most market segments are highly competitive because they have been so saturated.

Do adequate research and make sure that the market you choose will allow you to build a profitable business.

2. What are my target audience demographics?

Your business can’t win them all. To achieve success, you must reach a specific group of people who have a specific need. The challenge for you, as an entrepreneur, is to identify that specific audience.

It requires you to know as much about your target audience as possible. Once you have collected that information, you’ll find yourself in a better position to reach out to them and make a real impact. Start your research by looking at the key demographics of the geographical location that’s on your radar. Study groups of people in terms of their age, gender, income range, marital status, occupation and education among others.

3. What are the needs of my potential customers?

Now, move on to the next vital piece of information: customer needs. Why would people purchase your product or service?

The answer lies in understanding what your customer needs are. If you are going to start a business in health and fitness, you need to find out what your customers care about. Are your customers looking for home-based exercise? Do they have time to attend a gym? Conduct thorough research and connect with friends and colleagues who are conscious about their health and aspire to lead a happy and disease-free life, for insights.

That way, you’ll be able to craft a product which fits in with the actual needs of your customers and marketing will be easier too.

4. Who are my key competitors?

To beat competitors, you need to know and understand competitors. When you start a new business, one of the first things you should ask yourself is what your key five or ten competitors look like.

Find out who your top competitors are so that you can learn from them and improve your own offer. When you keep a close watch, you’ll always be aware of the changes they make to their marketing and advertising, which in turn reveals new processes and strategies. Use different tools for researching content strategies, display ad strategies, ranking strategies etc. It will help you size up the competition really well.

5. What are my business goals?

Be crystal clear about what you want to achieve from your business – both for the short and long term. Not just business goals, you should also take your personal and financial goals into consideration. Knowing your expectations from day one will help you make the right decisions.

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