I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase “university sets you up for the real world,” but what if I were to tell you this couldn’t be further from the truth? My experience interning at Media Mortar has sparked a new love content marketing through real world application.
We’d bet our morning coffee that either you’re addicted, or you know someone who is addicted to the app that’s taken social media by storm -TikTok. After all, it’s been the most downloaded app in 2020, 2021 and 2022 consecutively and 2023 doesn’t look any different.
As I face my second round of maternity leave, I feel like a seasoned pro at stepping out of my business baby to have the human-kind.
Since I’ve been asked (and interviewed) many times about what structures I put in place to do it so well the first time, I wanted to share my blueprint for other entrepreneurs thinking about doing the same.
We love predicting social media trends, so it was fitting for our latest Feeling Content live event that we turned the whole morning into a forecast session – looking forward, looking back: hottest social media trends to come out of 2022 and into 2023.
For those that couldn’t make it, we wanted to share our best guess on what we think will stay and what will go.
At our recent Feeling Content Event, we shared our top four tips for recruitment marketing through social media.
It’s our view as content marketers that there’s a golden opportunity to be channel diverse in the way you talk to potential employees.
Let me walk you through our recommendations, which are all included in this handy recruitment checklist we built.
A wise mentor of mine once told me, “if you can make it to five years in business Hannah, you’ll be flying”. Her words have echoed in the back of my mind since she uttered them, and I’ve speculated fondly for years about what this business birthday and might feel like.
What if we told you that you could outsource your marketing to experienced individuals for the cost of a sliver of a sale? May we introduce you to affiliate influencer marketing.
Have you ever been curious about those ‘sponsored’ posts you see while scrolling through Facebook or Instagram and wanted to use them for your business? Read on my sponsored-post loving friends.
Calling all novice social media advertisers.
If you’re looking to dabble in your first social media advertising campaign to help solve a pain point for your business, then this blog is for you.
Before you launch straight into the world of Facebook Advertising Manager, take a moment to educate yourself on the different types of paid campaigns available to you, to ensure you don’t waste precious advertising moolah on ads that don’t align with your end goal.
From top of the funnel advertising, all the way down to the bottom, social media advertising allows you to move customers from awareness to consideration to conversion, based on an objective of your choosing.
With two awareness objectives, six consideration objectives and three conversion objectives at your advertising fingertips within the Facebook advertising matrix, get to know the most common Facebook Ads and discover which one might be right for you.
Given the fact you’ve just launched your business (congrats, btw!), it’s likely the number of people who know about it is low. If you’re nodding, you need to start at the very top of the marketing funnel: Brand Awareness.
Facebook Ads Manager has two objectives to choose from for this top of the funnel activity: Brand Awareness – which measures your brand uplift – or Reach – which aims to reach as many people as possible.
Unless you’ve got a big chunk of advertising dollars to put behind a campaign, we recommend choosing Reach over Brand Awareness, which is most effective when used to study an uplift over time.
Think of a Reach campaign as casting the net wide. This campaign objective is optimised for impressions because at this stage of your business journey, you want your brand exposed to as many people as possible.
While Facebook follower numbers are often referred to as a vanity metric, there’s method to a growth-first strategy.
The more followers you have, the more eyes you’ll have on your organic posts.
There are three types of engagement objectives you can choose within Facebook Ads Manager: Page Likes (optimise for people to like your page – Facebook only), Post Engagement (optimise for likes or comments on your ads – both platforms) or Event Responses (optimise for responses).
Choosing Event Responses will optimise for people to respond to an event which is helpful to gauge interest; however, this objective sits under ‘consideration’ in the marketing funnel aka is still only a way to garner engagement rather than convert people to buy tickets for an event. You’ll need to choose a conversion objective if you’re all about reporting ticket purchases.
If you’re thinking ‘great! I’ll put a social media paid campaign in market to build my Instagram following”, unfortunately, there isn’t an equivalent as Page Likes on Facebook for Instagram.
If you’re wanting to grow your Instagram, organic growth is key, along with partnering with digital influencers.
More people in your database = more people to send future communications to.
There are two ways to do this. Firstly, you can use Facebook Forms as the creative for your ad, where people can sign up directly through the form. However, this requires a bit of manual labour downloading the customer list and uploading it to your CRM.
The second option is to create a Traffic Campaign and direct people straight to the sign-up form on your website, which should already be integrated into your CRM (less manual input).
Lead generation activity like this also sits as a consideration marketing activity, as you are moving people through the funnel who want to learn more about your business or brand and are actively opting in to hear more.
Just like a drag car driver puts their foot down on the accelerator to speed as fast as possible towards the black and white chequered flag, a Traffic campaign tries to achieve the same. Your audience is the driver and the finish line is your web page.
You can choose to optimise your campaign for Link Clicks (get as many people in the target audience to click the link) or Landing Page Views (if you want people to wait for the landing page to open).
As you’re moving people through the marketing funnel, you can consider refined targeting here using demographics and interests.
“Show me the money,” said every e-commerce marketer ever.
If you want people to buy your product using social media advertising, you’ll need to ensure they are ready to purchase. Meaning, it’s not the first time they are learning about your business or brand.
As a conversion objective, social media ads are optimised for people who are ready to purchase.
This is when you’ll be targeting your most qualified audience, based on performance primed for conversion.
Remarketing is a great way to achieve this, by creating a custom audience such as your CRM database, recent website visitors or people who have engaged with your ads in the past 180 days.
There are a few additional steps required to create a Conversion campaign, such as installing a pixel and creating a custom event; however, you should have a pixel regardless of which campaign you’re running to ensure you can always track your paid performance.
Get in touch with our team and book a call with one of our social media paid specialists to learn how we can help.
If you prefer to DYO social media advertising (or would like to upskill in this field), book into our 1:1 training to learn the ins and outs of Facebook advertising for yourself.
You’ll learn how to set up a campaign, define your audience, community manage your ads, create retargeting audiences and monitor performance.
If this is something you’re interested in, shoot us an email and learn more.
When not climbing mountains on two wheels, Rochelle can be found on the hunt for the best almond croissant around town. A lover of good coffee, food and wine, and with a passion for travel, Rochelle is always on the lookout for new adventures locally and abroad.
Got 99 problems and boosting your Instagram engagement is one? Let us help.
Whether you’re a social media manager or you’ve been tasked with overseeing the channels on top of your workload, one of the things we get asked often (read: ALL. THE. TIME) is how to improve engagement on Instagram.
With its fickle algorithms and ever-changing platform features, it’s easy to feel a little lost when hatching a plan to move the needle on your engagement.
Don’t despair, there are things you can do to give your engagement more b-b-bounce than a berocca by leaning into the platform’s algorithms and new features.
Read on for our top seven ways to help improve engagement on your Instagram.
Do you ever find yourself scrolling in the Explore tab on Instagram, waiting for something to jump out at you and grab your attention?
Us too, along with the other 200 million Instagram users who scroll the Explore tab each day. Let. That. Sink. In. For. A. Moment. 200 million people.
Now that you know how many Instagram users are ‘exploring’ what’s new on the ‘gram, it makes sense that’s the place your content needs to play.
With Reels occupying two squares in the grid compared to the standard single square posts in your feed, you’ve got double the chances of getting users to stop mid-scroll and click your content.
More impressions and views = more engagement.
We don’t just preach this to our clients, Reels are something you’ll find weekly in our Media Mortar feed – here are a few reasons why they are part of our social media strategy too.
If you thought you only had to wave the SEO (search engine optimisation) wand over your website copy, we’ve got news for you.
Since November 2020, Instagram has extended how people can find your business based on a keyword search that picks up words in your Instagram handle, name, bio and, wait for it … captions.
While #hashtags traditionally were (and still are) a great tool to make your content discoverable by adding them to your caption or first comment, keyword search provides more scope for your business and brand to be discovered with words and phrases across other touchpoints on your profile.
It’s time to put down short form captions in favour of keyword-rich ones. We have some copywriting tips to help you over here.
Now that you know your Instagram handle and bio have a chance of appearing in an Instagram user’s keyword search, you’ll want to ensure you make it crystal clear to users who you are and what you do.
If you only have a few seconds to capture the audience’s attention, you’ll want them to know they’ve landed in the right place.
If your username doesn’t have a clear searchable connection to what you are selling or the service you are providing, the first thing you’ll want to do is update your ‘name’ on your profile.
For example, @mediamortar doesn’t tell anyone that we are a content marketing agency, does it? So, our name in our bio is ‘Content Marketing Agency’. If someone searches for a content marketing agency there’s more chance of Media Mortar showing as a search result rather than if our name was still Media Mortar.
Beyond updating your name, ensure you are optimising your bio with keywords that help identify your business or brand.
On our Media Mortar account, you’ll find copywriting, social media, graphic design and marketing strategy – calling out a few of our key services for those that might not be searching for the umbrella service “content marketing”.
If you nearly fell off your office chair when you found out how many Instagram users are scrolling the Explore tab each day, you’ll want to place your feet firmly on the ground to stop your chair from spinning with this one: over 500 million accounts use Instagram Stories every day.
Thanks to the functionality of interactive stickers, such as quizzes, polls and question boxes, Instagram Stories are an effective way to encourage engagement and two-way communication, which is a refreshing change for users who are constantly bombarded with one-way communication.
Like any social media platform or function, there are a few things to consider ensuring the infamous algorithm favours your content. These include Stories with video content, visually led with limited text and content with a cohesive look and feel of feed posts, to name a few – read our tips on how to lift your Stories game to help you on your engagement boosting way.
Hands up if you started to notice blocks of additional text at the bottom of Instagram recently, which give a description or summary of the image? Meet, alt text.
This game-changing feature uses automated object recognition technology that aims to describe photos for people with visual impairments.
Not only does adding alt text to your posts ensure your social media posts are more accessible and inclusive (snaps), it also provides another opportunity to optimise your profile with your brand’s SEO keywords by crafting copy for the alt text rather than using the automated caption.
How many times can we tell the internet that we’re a content marketing agency in a caption? Turns out, plenty!
Want more eyes on your Instagram profile and more people engaging with your content? Get your business or brand tagged or mentioned by others in their Instagram posts, Stories or Reels.
Whether you partner with influencers to tag or mention your brand in their sponsored posts or collaborate with business partners to cross-promote each other’s services, having your account tagged elsewhere is discovery gold.
Of course, you’ll want to be selective with where your business is tagged and promoted and ensure you’re tagged on quality content. The goal is to ensure the content piques the interest of the audience and drives them to click on your tag, taking them straight to your profile to learn more.
If the television show Survivor aired at midday on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, do you think the ratings would be the same as when it airs at 7:30pm on the same days? I think not.
Just like commercial television, planning your social media content for when your audience is online or will be most engaged is a simple solution to improving your post stats.
Given how much content is uploaded every minute of every day on Instagram (reportedly 95 million photos and videos), by posting when your followers will be online, there’s more chance of seeing it pop up on their feed when they are mid-scroll, rather than it being lost amongst the other posts and videos from accounts they follow.
When not climbing mountains on two wheels, Rochelle can be found on the hunt for the best almond croissant around town. A lover of good coffee, food and wine, and with a passion for travel, Rochelle is always on the lookout for new adventures locally and abroad.
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