Social Media

TikTok’s advertising rush

Posted on August 29, 2020October 25, 2020 by Cristian Croitoriu

29
Aug

TikTok’s advertising rush

What exactly is TikTok?

The platform essentially allows users to share short videos (under a minute long) which are then augmented with the help of music samples, filters, stickers, quick cuts, and more.
TikTok has around 800 million monthly active users according to a leaked internal marketing document obtained by AdAge back in late 2019. The average user opens the app 8 times a day, spending a total daily average of 52 minutes on the platform.

Marketers are quickly flocking to TikTok—and rightly so. The app is an attractive marketing tool due to three main reasons.

The size of its audience
The primary demographic
Its (supposed) authenticity

During the COVID-19 pandemic—when people suddenly had more time on their hands (due to furloughs and layoffs) and were seeking forms of escapism—TikTik exploded.

The app added 52.2 million users worldwide in March 2020 alone. Not only that, but the time spent on it also increased. In the US, for example, the average user spent 8 hours on TikTik throughout March—a 10.8% increase from January.

Not only does TikTok have a burgeoning audience, but it also attracts some of society’s younger generations. For example, it’s estimated that Gen Z accounts for 60% of all TikTok users.
Young people are happy to give their attention away to platforms—however, they expect a quick return on their investment. They won’t wait around for things to get interesting; they’ll make a snap judgement in a few seconds.

Tips to developing your brand’s TikTok strategy.

Understand your target audience

Like every other successful social media platform, TikTok leverages the power of community to bring people together.
By researching your target community, you can gain critical insights into the way they communicate, the hashtags they use, the content they respond well to, and more. This research may well demonstrate if your brand needs to adopt a slightly different angle than before.

Create your own organic content

With your target audience’s preferences, you can now begin to create content tailored to that specific community. This will then have a snowball effect.

The more content you produce, the better a grasp you’ll gain on your community’s preferences.

Potential strategies:

Branded Effect: With branded effects, brands can create their very own effects (like filters or augmented reality objects) that users can then add to their own videos.
Hashtag Challenge: If you want to quickly leverage the power of community, come up with a hashtag challenge. Create your very own video with an accompanying hashtag and encourage users to do the same thing.
Hashtag Challenge Plus: This is essentially a combination of the two previous strategies, integrating branded effects with Hashtag Challenges to form powerful brand-specific movements.

Set up your TikTok ads

Create a TikTok Ads Account
Create a campaign
Define the placements and targeting
Control the details (such as ad spend, duration, and goals)
Make your Ad using their video creation kit
Publish it to the masses

Top 5 Social Media Marketing Tools

Posted on July 22, 2019October 22, 2020 by Cristian Croitoriu

22
Jul

Top 5 Social Media Marketing Tools

Social media marketing can help you improve your brand awareness, boost your engagement with your followers and even explore new opportunities with potential customers.
There are many social media management tools to help you be more effective.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite helps you manage all your social accounts in one place. It is probably one of the most popular options in social media management and monitoring.

It allows you to publish and schedule your social media posts and you can also use it to monitor your mentions and the keywords that you want to track.

This way you can use the platform for all the stages of your content, from finding new ideas to publishing them and measuring their performance.

It’s one of the most popular options among social media marketers and it’s also a good way to get started to social media marketing

There is a free version for those who want a very simple solution but it’s limiting the number of posts that you can schedule and the data that you’re seeing through analytics. If you want to give it a try, the free option lets you schedule up to 30 posts while you can link up to 3 social profiles.

The Professional plan at $19/month allows you to connect 10 social profiles for 1 user and it includes unlimited scheduling. If you want to involve 3 users, you will have to pay $99/month and you’ll be able to connect up to 20 profiles along with team message assignments, custom reports and exportable analytics.

Buffer

Buffer is a popular social media management platform.
It’s probably the most popular option along with Hootsuite.

The free plan can help you get started to learn how to use the tool. However, it’s very limiting so if you’re thinking of scheduling more posts you might want to consider a paid plan. The free plan is currently let you connect up to 3 social profiles and you can schedule up to 10 posts. It’s similar to Hootsuite’s limits on the free plan, but it is limiting even more the number of posts that you can schedule (30 over 10). It also doesn’t give you access to analytics to start measuring your performance.

The cheapest option starts at $15/month and it lets you connect up to 8 social accounts for 1 user and schedule up to 100 posts. You are also able to access Post analytics to analyse the performance of your posts.

The Pro plan can be a great solution for small businesses that want to schedule their content and save time when planning ahead. You are even able to include Pinterest as an additional integration and load content to the Queue for up to 100 posts. You can also access the Content Inbox to follow up to 15 RSS feeds.

Buffer’s biggest advantage is the simplicity and the UX that understands what social media managers really need.

Sprout Social

Sprout Social is another popular option among marketers for social media management.
It is a complete social media management platform and it also provides a social CRM and an all-in-one social inbox to monitor all your messages.
The pricing plans start from $99/month, which can be considered a bit more expensive compared to other social media platforms. This plan is limited to 5 social profiles so if you’re interested in adding more profiles and make the most of analytics, then you might benefit from the Professional plan starting at $149/month. Except for the features of the Standard plan, it also involves engagement and trends reporting, campaign planning and reporting and also reporting on your team’s productivity.
It is also offering the option to purchase your own add-ons, such as Amplification and Social Selling to improve your social media success as part of your own funnel.

AgoraPulse

AgoraPulse is a social media management and CRM platform to help you improve your social presence.
It can also be a useful platform for social CRM, managing your inbox, the comments and messages that you’re receiving on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Youtube and Instagram.

You can also manage the comments from your Facebook and Instagram ads, which makes it easier to monitor all comments in one place.

There is a free trial option and the Small plan starts from $44/month. It allows you to connect 3 profiles and 1 user while you’re having unlimited reporting, publishing, and mentoring. It can be a good option if you’re managing the social presence of a small business. However, if you want to bring your team together, access advanced sync of inbox monitoring and the option to monitor ad comments on Facebook and Instagram, then you might need the medium or large plans at $89 and $180/month respectively. The Medium plan lets you connect 10 social profiles and 3 users and the Large plan allows you to connect 25 profiles and 6 users. It is the most popular option, especially for medium-sized teams who want to make the most of the team workflow in their content by creating their own processes for drafts and approval.

ContentCal

ContentCal is a visual calendar that can simplify your social media content planning. Its simple and intuitive use makes it very appealing to marketers of all skills to ensure that they streamline their planning as much as possible.

There is a free plan for the social media enthusiasts who want to create their own basic version of a social media calendar to connect up to 4 social profiles while scheduling 50 posts per month.
There is the Pro version at $12/month that involves one calendar and up to four social profiles. It lets you schedule as many posts as you want and there is also a monthly calendar view and the function to search for your posts in the calendar. This plan also provides access to Analytics and a PDF export.
The Company plan will be a good option if you have two people managing a social media calendar. It starts at $39/month and it features 2 calendars and 2 users. You can also add more calendars and users at an additional cost. The different with the Pro plan is that you can now manage approval workflows, access comments to improve the collaboration within your team and use a professional video uploader.
The premium plan at $80/month is still for 2 users and 2 calendars but it also features multi-calendar posting, sending Facebook posts to drafts, training and filtering of the Analytics.

Social Media

Social media Marketing Trends

Posted on December 29, 2018October 25, 2020 by Cristian Croitoriu

29
Dec

Social media Marketing Trends

These are trends to follow for another successful year of social media marketing for your business. It’s good to review your existing social media marketing strategy. It is important to keep up with the latest trends every year to ensure that your strategy is still successful.

Engagement is more important

As organic reach becomes harder, the only way to survive is to aim for content that is:

Interesting
Appealing
Engaging

Algorithms are becoming smarter so there’s no short route to genuine engagement.
It’s time to stop ‘cheating’ to win engagement and start thinking of an improved engagement strategy for every channel to continue reaching your followers.

Influencer marketing and micro-influencers

Influencer marketing is becoming an established element of your marketing mix. Influencers can make thousands of dollars through paid sponsorships while brands are constantly seeking for the best influencers for their campaigns.
As influencer marketing grows, big influencers are becoming more expensive for small and medium-sized brands. That’s when micro-influencers came in to make up for the gap between being interested in influencer marketing and having the right budget to try it out.
Micro-influencers may not have the outreach of celebrities, but they may have an even bigger influence in their own followers. Even 40k followers as an audience can be perfect for a brand, provided that they are working with the right influencer for their target audience.

Social media for sales enablement

Social media is already helping customers in the phase of product discovery. Brands are able to promote their products through social channels and customers are finding out about them before making a purchase.

Social media is not anymore just about awareness and engagement, but it’s heading even more towards consideration and sales enablement in the business funnel.

Customer service

Bots and automated messaging have already shown up in many brands’ customer service. Social media has made it easier for customers to reach a brand, which means that the expectations about the response time are increasing.

Chatbots have started becoming popular through Facebook’s Messenger when brands realized that it’s an easy way to add an additional customer support to the mix.

Content and Stories

Visual content in a vertical format that usually lasts for 24 hours became popular from Snapchat and it soon was copied by Instagram to turn into a global trend for people of all ages.
Advertisers have already realized that Instagram Stories ads can be very effective, with Snapchat and Facebook following up with their current hype and demand.

Social media Marketing Trends

Social Media

Why social media marketing is important for your business

Posted on February 22, 2018October 25, 2020 by Cristian Croitoriu

22
Feb

Why social media marketing is important for your business

Social media is quickly becoming one of the most important aspects of digital marketing, which provides incredible benefits that help reach millions of customers worldwide. And if you are not applying this profitable source, you are missing out an incredible marketing opportunity, as it makes it easy to spread the word about your product and mission.

Improved brand awareness

Social media is one of the most stress-free and profitable digital marketing platforms that can be used to increase your business visibility. To get started, create social media profiles for your business and start networking with others. By applying a social media strategy, it will help you significantly increase your brand recognition. By spending only a few hours per week, over 91% marketers claimed that their social marketing efforts greatly increased their brand visibility and heightened user experience. Undoubtedly, having a social media page for your brand will benefit your business and with a regular use, it can also produce a wide audience for your business in no time.

Cost-effective

For an advertising strategy, social media marketing is possibly the most cost-effective way. Creating an account and signing up is free for almost all social networking platforms. But if you decide to use paid advertising on social media, always start small to see what you should expect. Being cost-effective is important as it helps you attain a greater return on investment and hold a bigger budget for other marketing and business payments. Just by investing a little money and time, you can significantly increase your conversion rates and ultimately get a return on investment on the money that you primarily invested.

Engage with your customers

Social media is a good way for engaging and interacting customers. The more you communicate with the audience, the more chances you have of conversion. Set up a two-way communication with your target audience so that their wishes are known and their interest is catered with ease. Moreover, communication and engagement with customers is one the ways to win their attention and convey them your brand message. Thus, your brand will reach more audience in real terms and gets itself established without any hassle.

Improved brand loyalty

When you have a social media presence, you make it easier for your customers to find you and connect with you. By connecting with your customers through social media, you are more probable to upsurge customer retention and customer loyalty. Since developing a loyal customer base is one of the main goals of almost any business. Customer satisfaction and brand loyalty typically go hand in hand. It is essential to often engage with your customers and start developing a bond with them. Social media is not just limited to introducing your product, it is also a leading platform for promotional campaigns. A customer sees these platforms as service channels where they can directly communicate with the business.

Healthier customer satisfaction

Social media plays a vital role in networking and communication platform. With the help of these platforms, creating a voice for your company is important in improving the overall brand image. Customers appreciate the fact that when they post comments on your page, they receive a modified reply rather than a computerized message. A brand that values its customers, takes the time to compose a personal message, which is perceived naturally in a positive light.

Marketplace awareness

One of the best ways to find the needs and wants of your customers instead of directly communicating with them is Marketplace awareness. It is also considered as the most valuable advantage of social media. By observing the activities on your profile, you can see customers’ interest and opinions that you might not know otherwise if you didn’t have a social media presence. As a complementary research tool, social media can help you get information and a better understanding of your industry. Once you get a large following, you can then use additional tools to examine other demographics of your consumers.

More brand authority

For making your business more powerful, brand loyalty and customer satisfaction both play a major role, but it all comes down to communication. When customers see your company posting on social media, especially replying to their queries and posting original content, it helps them build a positive image in their minds. Regularly interacting with your customers proves that you and your business care about them. Once you get a few satisfied customers, who are vocal about their positive purchase experience, you can let the advertising be done for you by genuine customers who appreciated your product or service.

Increased traffic

One of the other benefits of Social Media is that it also helps increase your website traffic. By sharing your content on social media, you are giving users a reason to click-through to your website. On your social account, the more quality content you share, the more inbound traffic you will generate while making conversion opportunities.

Enhanced SEO rankings

Social media presence is becoming a vital factor in calculating rankings. These days, to secure a successful ranking, SEO requirements are continuously varying. Therefore, it is no longer enough to simply optimize your website and regularly update your blog. Businesses sharing their content on social media are sending out a brand signal to search engine that speaks to your brand validity, integrity, and constancy.

Final words

There is no denying that Social media marketing has many advantages for startups and established brands. By regular updating the right social media marketing strategy, it will lead to increased traffic, better SEO, improved brand loyalty, healthier customer satisfaction and much more. Your competition is already increasing on social media day by day, so don’t let your competitors take your probable customers. The earlier you start, the faster you see the growth in your business.

Why social media marketing is important for your business.