Lauded by his fans as a world leading investigative journalist and condemned by critics as ‘media-hating zealot’, it’s not hard to dig out articles from Nick Davies lamenting about the rise of PR. Speaking in 2007, he commented that there was a huge increase in journalists moving to the ‘dark side’ of PR. He…
Ellie Gittings, Senior Account Executive
In order to generate the best possible return on investment (ROI) through social media you must ensure that you and your team have a clear understanding of what you want to achieve from social media marketing. This is best done by setting out objectives from the very beginning. For example, do you want to:
Next, you need to understand which products/services your business would like to promote and to whom. For each product/service you will need to visualise and really understand its targeted audience. This will help you speak to them, sell to them and, eventually, develop them into your own brand advocates. A great way to do this is by researching your competitors’ social media channels and analyse reviews, comments and content. Answering the questions below will be hugely beneficial in giving your target audience a face and creating your ideal customer profiles.
You should now have a clear understanding of what content to use on your Facebook Business Page based on your demographic, market and competitor research. A comprehensive content strategy must include:
You will now have a clear understanding of what you need in order to get your campaign off the ground. This may include sourcing videographers, photographers or graphic designers to help bring your campaign to life.
Example: Nutella has an atypical challenge of having to promote a single product in different ways over and over again. They have adopted a Facebook video strategy which saw views double on their Facebook page from four to eight billion views per day! Nutella engages its audience with creative posts such as ‘emojifying’ breakfasts using its own products:
Source: Nutella
We strongly recommend implementing a social media content calendar to keep on top of things. This will simply house all of the pre-planned content for your social media accounts.
The bulk of the hard work should be done by this point with campaign posts scheduled into the content calendar and bank of media ready to be published. The hard work doesn’t stop there though. You need to keep your content topical and so allowing time to post on-the-fly content, for example, breaking news, company announcements and topical updates, is important.
Ensuring a variety of content across your company’s Facebook Page is crucial to keeping your Page’s followers engaged. Trying to deploy the 80/20 content publication rule acts a great basis for optimum engagement and increasing brand exposure. Eighty per cent of the content published should be of interest to your customers and prospects in order to build a targeted audience, which in turn will increase brand exposure. Twenty per cent of the content published should be self-promotion; this could be posting links to certain products or services on your website, notifying your followers of current discounts and company news/PR.
Not all content will work all of the time and it is important to be continually measuring the effectiveness of your content marketing. Luckily, Facebook makes this super simple with its Insights measurement tool. Use this to evaluate which pieces of content are working best and at what times. This will help you adjust future campaigns and posts for maximum impact.
At Acceleris we approach content-led campaigns with a six-stage process that is grounded in brand and consumer audience insight to ensure it really delivers commercial objectives. We create great content and get it to the right people, at the right time, in the right context. Whether that’s a series of videos on YouTube, delivered through a brand’s Facebook page or on a digital content hub, we ensure it is where ever your audience is.
Recently we developed a carefully researched, planned, co-ordinated and implemented content campaign for a national second hand car dealer. They came to us because they wanted to:
The campaign kicked off in April and as you can see from the graphs below the client is already seeing phenomenal results.
Total reach – Facebook
Number of people reached on Facebook (organic)
Total number of Facebook page likes
Brands are spoilt for choice when it comes to choosing a platform on which to share content. A recent trend in content sharing is to do so using Snapchat. Snapchat is a mobile messaging app that enables its users to share photos, videos and text, all of which last for only a brief amount of time before disappearing forever. It has an estimated 100 million daily active users globally, receives approximately eight billion video views per day, and is the third most-popular social media network today.
Yes, these figures are impressive, and perhaps I’ve just opened your eyes to a pool of potential consumers you knew nothing about but don’t worry, you won’t be the only one. The most important thing to know about Snapchat is that, it’s where you’ll find two of today’s largest target markets; millennials and Gen Z. With 71% of Snapchat users being under the age of 34, it’s an ideal platform to engage a younger demographic of consumers.
This blog details the fundamental elements of effective content marketing as identified by us here at Acceleris, and considers Snapchat’s ability to capitalise on these by looking at examples of its use by a couple of British brands.
Timing, pro-active and re-active, can significantly impact the effectiveness of content marketing. There is a great amount of added value to content campaigns that are timed to perfection. Snapchat enables both planned and real-time marketing with which audiences can engage and interact.
Cadbury for example, used the mobile app to promote its ever-favourite Cadbury’s Creme Egg during Easter. The company is the first confectionery brand to use Snapchat’s Sponsored Lenses function, which allowed users to decorate their snaps with a specially-designed overlay as part of its award-winning ‘Have a fling with a Creme Egg’ campaign.
Source: Cadbury’s Creme Egg
The seasonality of the Snapchat lens gave the campaign immediate context and relevancy. It received an overwhelming reaction and saw great levels of interaction receiving over 11 million views from Snapchat users, including famous blogger and YouTube star Zoella, who shared pictures of herself enjoying the Cadbury filter to her millions of followers.
We live in an age of excessive personal sharing; sharing of information, experiences, opinions and purchases. This is what’s known throughout marketing as social currency. Social currency is a concept built around the idea that individuals share information that benefits them to do so. Social psychologists identify the main driver of sharing information as a need to feel a sense of personal value. Put simply – we like to show off! Brands are becoming increasingly aware of the value of playing on social currency to promote themselves.
Snapchat as a mobile app excels in utilising FOMO – that’s ‘fear of missing out’ by the way – and making user’s feel like they are part of an inner circle. The ‘Burberry Snapchat Show’ is the perfect example of the use of Snapchat as harnessing the power of FOMO.
Source: Mike Phillips – Eat, Sleep, Social
The luxury fashion house used Snapchat to stream a first look at its spring/summer 2016 collection the day before it hit the runway at London Fashion Week in October last year. The images were only viewable for a period of 24 hours before disappearing forever, creating a sense of urgency among fashionistas who clambered to Snapchat to authentically experience the fashion-first.
The brand’s chief financial officer Carol Fairweather previously revealed that its use of Snapchat to promote a show was the best the brand had had in terms of digital engagement producing approximately 100m impressions.
Source: Burberry’s Snapchat Show
At Acceleris we understand the value of content and work with all of our clients to produce and place content that will penetrate target audiences which are increasingly harder to reach. Our six-stage content marketing process is grounded in brand and consumer insight and is proven to increase brand awareness, foster brand advocates and reach new consumers and audiences.
Check out our online content marketing presentation that explains our process and the expertise that goes into its delivery: https://prezi.com/content-marketing/
By Mollie Robinson, a third year PR and Communications student from Leeds Beckett University, who joined Acceleris for a work placement in April 2016.
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