But reaching customers on mobile doesn’t have a one-size-fits-all solution. Consumers access many different channels on mobile, including websites, apps, social media, texting, and push notifications. To take advantage of the diversity available on mobile, you need a toolset that allows you to get the most out of each of these platforms.

Before diving into specific tools, though, let’s break down what mobile marketing truly is and why it’s crucial for your business.

What Is Mobile Marketing?

Mobile marketing is exactly what it sounds like — marketing that reaches people through their mobile devices, like smartphones and tablets. It’s all about meeting your audience where they are. With billions of people using their phones every day, it’s no surprise that mobile marketing has become essential for businesses of all sizes.

So, how does it work? Mobile marketing takes on a few different forms depending on the platform. Here are some of the main types:

• Social Media Marketing: There’s no doubt that social platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok are regularly accessed on mobile. Whether it’s through ads, posts, or influencer marketing, social media is a key way to reach consumers where they’re already scrolling.
• SMS Marketing: With open rates as high as 98%, SMS can be a powerful tool for sending timely updates, promotions, and reminders directly to customers.
• App Marketing: Apps offer businesses a direct line to customers. Push notifications keep your audience updated, while location-based marketing can be used to deliver personalized messages when users are near a physical location. Meanwhile, in-app ads allow you to promote your brand to users while they’re on their favorite apps.
• Mobile Websites: A mobile-friendly website is a non-negotiable. From shopping to browsing, most users are engaging with businesses on their phones. Optimizing your site for mobile ensures a smooth experience and keeps visitors coming back.

Each type of mobile marketing has its own perks, and together, they form a powerful way to reach customers with the right message, at the right time, on the device they use the most.

Why Mobile Marketing Matters

So, why is mobile marketing so important? Let’s take a look at some numbers.

According to a recent survey, nearly half of Americans (46%) spend five to six hours on their phone each day. On the other hand, only 5% spend less than an hour on their phone every day.

In other words, whether they’re checking social media, browsing websites, or using apps, your audience is spending the majority of its time on their mobile devices. That means if your marketing strategy doesn’t include mobile, you’re missing out on countless opportunities to communicate with your customers.

Plus, with consumers spending more time on their phones and tablets, mobile has become the primary way people interact with brands and make purchases. In fact, mobile e-commerce sales hit a whopping $2.2 trillion in 2023 and now make up 60% of all global e-commerce sales.

From discovering your brand on social to purchasing through an app or mobile website, mobile presents countless opportunities for your customers to connect, engage, and buy from your brand.

13 Mobile Marketing Tools To Know

Ready to level up your mobile marketing game? Whether you’re just starting out or looking to enhance your existing strategy, the right tools can make all the difference. From managing campaigns to analyzing performance, these tools will help you connect with your audience more effectively and boost your results.

Let’s dive into some of the options available, starting from general mobile marketing platforms to specialized tools for social media, SMS, and mobile apps and websites.

Multi-Channel Mobile Marketing Tools
Social Media Marketing Tools
SMS Marketing Tools
Mobile App and Website Marketing Tools

Multi-Channel Mobile Marketing Tools

ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is a marketing automation platform that helps you streamline your marketing efforts by combining email marketing, SMS marketing, social media marketing, and more into one tool. Its intelligent automation features allow you to send personalized messages to customers, while its robust analytics lets you track the performance of your campaigns in real time.

GroundTruth

GroundTruth is a media platform that specializes in audience, location, and contextual targeting. Its capabilities span various media channels, including mobile, desktop, social media, and even direct mail. This allows you to deliver highly targeted messages at multiple points along your customer’s path to purchase.

Omnisend

Working primarily with e-commerce businesses, Omnisend helps brands create targeted campaigns across multiple channels, including email, SMS, and push notifications, all in one place. With a variety of templates and automation workflows, you can easily design personalized messages that reach your customers at just the right moment.

Social Media Marketing Tools

Rival IQ

At Rival IQ, we’re all about making it easy for you to dive into your performance across all platforms. With detailed insights, you can quickly see who your audience members are, which of your posts — whether text, photos, or videos — are successfully engaging with your audience, which days of the week drive the most engagement, and more.

What really sets us apart, though, is our competitive analytics. Our platform lets you track your competition’s performance and see how your social media efforts stack up against theirs. With you and your competitors’ data all in one place, you can better understand who your audience is, what content they find engaging, and how your strategies fare against industry peers.

Start analyzing with a free Rival IQ trial.

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Later

Later is a social media scheduling platform that’s known for its visual-first approach. The tool lets you plan your posts visually, so you can see exactly how your feed will look before it goes live. It also lets you auto-publish your posts, saving you time while ensuring your content is posted at the best times for engagement.

Buffer

Buffer is a user-friendly, all-in-one platform for scheduling and managing social media posts across multiple platforms. It’s a great tool for busy marketers who want to keep their social media calendar running smoothly without constantly logging in to multiple accounts. It also offers convenient collaboration tools, with permission levels and workflows that let teams work together seamlessly.

SMS Marketing Tools

Trumpia

Trumpia is an automated texting software that offers a suite of automation tools to help you build smarter, more targeted SMS campaigns.

For instance, its “Smart Targeting” solution lets you deliver messages to specific segments based on specific criteria, such as customer characteristics, interests, or behavior. You can even create automated workflows, so certain tasks and actions will be set off once a condition (such as a particular customer response or reaction) is met.

TextMagic

This text messaging service is a great choice if you want to run and schedule personalized SMS marketing campaigns. You can send text messages with your brand’s name instead of a randomly assigned number from the convenience of your company’s email account. It’s also easy to track text delivery statuses to make sure your messages get through.

Slick Text

SlickText is a user-friendly SMS marketing platform known for its ease of use. Offering a wide range of features, you can craft personalized messages, set up auto-replies, and even run contests or polls to increase engagement. The platform also provides automation tools, so you can schedule texts or automate conversations based on what users say or do.

Mobile App and Website Marketing Tools

Mixpanel

If you have a mobile app or website, then you want to know how users interact with it. Mixpanel helps you track and analyze those interactions.

The selling point of this tool is its intuitive dashboard that allows you access to whatever information you’re seeking at the click of a button. You don’t have to wait for analytics reports to load to find out how many people liked, shared or commented on any section of your app or site. Instead, you can access the data instantly — no SQL or analytics background required.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a popular platform for tracking and analyzing user interactions on your website, and it’s just as important for mobile. With its comprehensive reporting features, you can track key metrics like bounce rates, session duration, and conversion rates, helping you dive deep into your audience’s behavior. Use it to identify what content resonates with them and understand how they navigate your mobile site.

BrowserStack

BrowserStack is a solution for testing both mobile apps and websites, so you can ensure they provide an optimal user experience across all devices. With no complicated setup or configuration required, you can quickly test your site’s responsiveness on various browsers and devices, saving you time and effort.

Whether you’re tweaking your design or fixing bugs, this tool makes it easy to ensure your site or app is user-friendly and efficient for mobile users. By helping you catch issues before they go live, BrowserStack helps you create a smooth experience that keeps visitors happy and engaged.

Adjust

Adjust is a comprehensive mobile analytics and marketing platform that helps you understand your app’s performance and user behavior. With its attribution features, it lets you track where your users are coming from, letting you see which channels are driving the most valuable traffic, so you can optimize your campaigns and allocate your marketing budget more effectively.

The Wrap Up

With consumers increasingly relying on their mobile devices for everything from shopping to socializing, a dynamic and effective mobile marketing strategy is essential for reaching and engaging your audience.

Fortunately, you don’t have to manage your mobile marketing strategy manually. All you need are a few tried and true tools in your back pocket to help you make the most of your efforts and unlock the potential of mobile.

What other tools have you been using to make the most of your mobile marketing strategy? Let us know below in the comments section.

This post was originally published in 2016 and has since been updated.

The post What is Mobile Marketing? Plus, 13 Tools to Help You Leverage It appeared first on Rival IQ.

In a time when social media has become a pay-to-play channel, and organic reach and engagement are nearly non-existent, brands have shifted their focus to influencers to get traction on social.

According to Adweek, one of the leading roadblocks to a successful influencer campaign is connecting with influencers. Seventy-five percent of those surveyed said identifying the right influencers was their most significant challenge. In 2017, 84% of marketing teams allocated resources toward influencer marketing strategies. With 71% of consumers stating that they’re more likely to make a purchase based on a social media reference, that trend is expected to grow in 2018. Marketers need more tools to help them quickly discover and connect with influencers who genuinely align with their brands.

With the rise in popularity of using influencers to cut through to audiences, we noticed more and more marketers asking questions about how to build an influencer marketing strategy. We wanted to help our customers, and fellow marketers find answers.

Since we are by no means experts in the influencer marketing realm, we turned to our contact list of expert marketers. With much enthusiasm and excitement, Chris Dickerson and Molly Hawkins from We Are Unicorns (both of whom ARE experts on influencer marketing) volunteered to discuss the essential steps to building an influencer marketing strategy with us.

Our very own co-founder, Seth Bridges asks them questions covering:

• Starting an influencer program
• How to identify the right influencers
• How to evaluate and measure influencers
• And so much more…

Full Transcript

Seth: Hey, good morning, everyone. My name is Seth Bridges. I’m one of the founders of Rival IQ, and I want to welcome you to this very exciting webinar we have coming all about influencer marketing. Now, as you know, we’re an analytics shop. We’re not really an influencer marketing shop. So, we love to leverage the smart people that are here in town with us. I am excited to be joined by two folks here, Molly and Chris, from We Are Unicorns. They’re a Seattle based content marketing agency. Molly started We Are Unicorns, what, over six years ago?

Molly: Six years, yep!

Seth: Founder and kind of creative director. Chris has been at We Are Unicorns for more than a year. He’s a partner and one of the senior strategists there. I’m really excited to have both of you here. You are doing the work, and I just get to ask the questions.

Molly: All right. Well, thanks for having us.

Chris: Yeah, thanks for having us.

Molly: This will be fun.

Seth: Yes.

Molly: I hope.

Seth: It will be fun.

Molly: You can tell us if it’s not.

Seth: Yeah, exactly.

Molly: [Laughs]

Seth: Before I ask the first question, though, we are recording this. We’ll send it out. So, if you’re interested in rewatching, sharing with your friends, we will absolutely get you a link to the recording. And please do ask questions. We’ll save some time at the end specifically for questions. But one of our team is over here… and I’ve actually got my… I got Slack going, and she’s going to be feeding over questions as we go. And so if it’s really relevant, I’ll try to kind of keep my eye on that and jump in and maybe even redirect the conversation a little bit as we go. So, without further ado, let’s kick it off.

Molly: Let’s do it.

Seth: So, everyone is here to hear us talk a little bit about influencer marketing – this is something that is a part of your practice. But before we get into details and specifics, let’s just start with the basics. What is influencer marketing?

Molly: Gosh, there’s no one clear definition as to what influencer marketing is because I think it varies from industry to industry, company to company. And I think that’s really important to remember. So, I would never encourage anybody to just copy and paste something that they Google. At the end of the day, I see it as almost open sourcing your conversation. It’s a way to build context around your brand and what you’re doing by including other people, vetted, obviously. But yeah.

Seth: Good.

Molly: Chris?

Seth: Do you have anything to add to that, Chris?

Chris: Yeah, it’s a great way to get organic amplification of your brands. Finding the right people that resonate with yourself and your brand, I think, is really important, and understanding the reasons behind an influencer program and why you actually want to do it.

Further Reading: “3 Marketing Problems Influencers Can Solve”

Seth: And so I want to…something you both just sort of said – organic. What is it about the organic piece of influencer marketing that’s so powerful?

Molly: Well, there’s an authenticity component. That’s a word that’s certainly overused in this space. But when you have other people talking about how rad you are, driving eyeballs to your social or to your website, that certainly is a lot better than you sitting there bragging about yourself. So, getting other folks to evangelize you is certainly opportunistic. Instead of paying… Because really influencer program is…one of the aspects of them is having people tag you, shout you out, drive traffic to you. And you can do that. And another method would be just doing paid ads, social ads, to drive eyeballs to your channel. So, organic…you’re not paying for…in theory. You might be paying downstream for that partnership or trading them product. But at the end of the day, it’s more authentic, and it’s probably, in a lot of ways, a cost-effective way to do it if you can truly nurture real relationships with people.

Seth: Got it. So, that makes sense. But then it’s not… So, Chris, it’s not that it’s organic as much as it’s the authentic piece that really is the driver.

Chris: Well, I think if you’re looking at organic, I look at reach. So, the way the algorithms work…it’s looking for a relationship between two people – whether it’s a brand or an influencer. And then if you work with people with a really solid following, they get high engagement, and say you’re having a conversation on Facebook or Instagram, the algorithms are going to be like, “Okay, this is a really important brand. This is an important person. They’re talking to each other, and they’re talking about a topic that might be trending or something special.” And so algorithms basically say, “Oh, this is really interesting. I’m going to make sure I syndicate this out to more…each of their followers to get them involved in the conversation because they’re probably going to be interested in it.” And the more you can create that relationship with two important people, that’s how you can sort of beat the algorithms organically and be syndicated to more people and have high reach.

Seth: Makes sense. So, I have a feeling that as we continue this conversation, that ‘relationship’ is going to be a word that comes up a lot. It sounds amazing. I want an authentic connection with other people who might resonate with my brand.

Molly: This is authentic.

Seth: This is very authentic. We hung out together yesterday for a good long time. There were not enough drinks involved, but it was still very organic and very authentic.

Molly: We can change that after we get through this.

Seth: We’re in Seattle, by the way. So, just note, Molly… Good idea. I like you even more than I thought. But here I am as a brand… All this sounds great. What do I need to consider? What are the factors that I should be thinking about before I even consider influencer program or influencer marketing as something I might want to try or do? I don’t even… Help me out there.

Molly: Sure. First and foremost, if you haven’t defined what your social mission is, understand what the purpose of your social footprint really is, you shouldn’t even be considering an influencer program yet. To back that up even further, really understanding your brand, your DNA, and who you are a brand is first and foremost. I’m assuming a lot of the folks chiming in right now already have established marketing programs, probably have a mission statement for your business. You should also have a mission statement for your social – what is the takeaway for anyone who’s traversing your social challenges, going and swiping through your content. Oh, wait, this isn’t Tinder. Sorry. Scrolling through your content.

[Laughter]

Molly: And how are you using your content to get them to do that? So, everything from developing a social mission, defining what your content pillars are, understanding what your aesthetic is and your voice tone. And starting there and then figuring out, “Okay, how can you bring influencers into the conversation to maybe off set the content production that you have to do or perhaps expand on the contribution in a way that you can’t?”

Seth: What I think I heard was this is not a quick fix thing, that all of the baseline fundamentals that we should be thinking about as marketers and as digital marketers absolutely apply, and that if you’re kind of a mess, an influencer program is not a savior. Do I have that right?

Chris: Yeah. I think you can look at it just as another channel of how to get your word out. I think there’s so many other things and distractions that go on in social where if you don’t have that dialed, all this extra time and effort that you need to develop these relationships with these influencers will go somewhat wasted. And it takes a lot of time – you’ve got to foster these friendships and relationships. And yeah, you want to make sure that you know what you’re talking about, how you’re talking about it, and why – what makes it ownable. And when you’re sort of identifying those people, how can we bring them into a campaign, how can we support the brand in this particular thing we’re talking about.

Seth: So, is this the conversation…as an agency that works with brands doing exactly this kind of work, I assume that this is the first conversation you have with clients when they’re starting to ask about influencer, or maybe you’re offering it as something that you see is a viable kind of channel for some clients.

Molly: Yeah, it varies. Everybody is at a different phase in their marketing. And some people already have an influencer program going. And we might come in and make recommendations, and look at how to tweak and refine it. But often times, especially with smaller businesses, we’re starting at the bottom. And we’re helping them define what the social mission and figuring out what that voice and tone looks like. And it’s just like relationships – dating in real life. Until you really know yourself, and what you’re about, and what you want and don’t want, it’s very hard to ask other people to contribute to your life. It can be very messy, as you know, as with dating. If you don’t have the same expectations, you might be getting content…and this happens a lot. People will get in the cycle where they have this team of people who are throwing them content, and they’re spending a lot of time communicating back and forth, but it doesn’t really fit. Or maybe it’s not optimized. You’re getting images that aren’t big enough, or high enough quality, or, gosh, you can’t figure out how to get to Dropbox because you use Google Drive. So, really…

Seth: So the big and the small.

Molly: Yeah, all of it.

Seth: It’s all of these things.

Molly: Yeah.

Seth: Have you ever had to have that tough conversation with a client who’s like, “I want to get in there. I want to be doing…” Like they bring the buzz word, but they don’t necessarily have the fundamentals. Have you ever had to have that tough conversation?

Molly: Oh, God. It’s very common. I’d say 9 times out of 10, yeah.

[Laughter]

Chris: Yeah, because it’s exciting. It’s new. It’s like the big thing right now.

Molly: It’s the shiny object, yeah.

Chris: But what I sort of look at is where the company is at in their growth cycle – whether it’s growing their audiences, their engagement. Everybody is going to start hitting the plateaus. When you hit a plateau, maybe this is when it’d be the right time for an influencer program because you don’t want to start it too early because your fans and their fans might get directed to whatever content you’re promoting and be like, “What? This doesn’t make sense.” And then you lose that legitimacy, I think, right off the bat. So, you want to make sure that your foundations are correct and being executed with a cohesive message across all your channels, and then how can you layer on influencers to support that message.

Seth: Got it.

Chris: You’ve got your hand in ten different cookie jars. You want to make sure that everything is coming together at the same time.

Seth: That makes a lot of sense. So, here’s the question I want to ask you. Now, this is about sort of some previous stuff. And I didn’t really cover this at the beginning, but both Molly and Chris kind of come out of that outdoor lifestyle space. Both have been around at Evo, so here in Seattle, kind of started as an online and transformed sort of into a physical space, a meeting place for events and other things. Chris spent time in Whistler Blackcomb, so also kind of snow, outdoor lifestyle. When you all were in those roles, so kind of brand side… Influencers are still a thing, right? It’s just maybe social wasn’t as big in the mid-2000’s kind of leading on. But if people are out there sort of wondering how do I start small, how did you all approach that back in the day, as it were?

Molly: I’d love to share an anecdote. You can totally build on it since… It’s why Chris and I have had…our pathways have kind of intersected or are very complimentary. And I think he’s obviously the more analytical…

Seth: Obviously. [Laughs]

Molly: …smart…I won’t say, nerd. I come from, I guess, the squishier side of marketing and the things unseen. But when we were at Evo in 2005, I think Facebook wasn’t even open to the public yet. And we were given this challenge to kind of build this life force around this brick and mortar space that really was undefined, and people really didn’t know what to think of it. And so we were trying to figure out a way how to take those really cool things we were doing in Seattle and bring them to the web and to this base of customers that they had already established. And so we would have events, and we would do a lot of art gallery…really fun things on the ground. And we really depended on capturing that through photo, video, putting it into our digital sphere, and posting through social, sitting that content next to where the products lived on the web, and figuring out strategic ways to crosslink. And that equated to sales eventually downstream. But what’s more is we didn’t have a huge network. We didn’t have a ton of necessarily resources or much of a budget at that time. So, we really spent a lot of time nurturing what we could call now as micro influencers. So, whether it’s friends of the company, business partners, or athletes on our team, we would give them…we would build a little digital toolkit to hand off to these folks and get them to share all those stories and all that content, and that community footprint at Evo grew really quickly. And then as the company grew, and we saw success, and the idea became a reality, we started to formalize programs into a real athlete program.

Seth: So, a lot of user-generated stuff even early on.

Molly: Yeah, definitely. It was really cool to see how the community around that business was literally circling around that brick and mortar but then around our digital community as well.

Seth: So, starting small wasn’t like…it wasn’t like you said, “We’re going to start small.” It was, “What assets do you have? You have friends, you have supporters, you have customers, you have people that are just hanging.” Often, many of us have friends that are into the same things that we’re in to.

Molly: A few friends.

Seth: Some of them are more famous, some of them are better athletes. All these things go together, though, to kind of starting small.

Molly: Yeah.

Seth: I think about in our business, we have a bunch of amazing customers who love to talk about the value they get. And in a way, they are providing our voice to their network and their audience. And it’s not like we have a program. It’s just something that happens. At Whistler…at Blackcomb, was this a thing that you all were able to take advantage of?

Chris: Yeah, so with ticketing programs and shops. Especially in Washington state… We had really good relationships with all the ski and snowboard shops in town, and some of the mountain biking shops at the time. And this is when they would do discount lift tickets at local places. And so that was all about having the relationships with those shops and the employees to be like, “Hey, when you’re selling some skis, you know, the snow at Whistler is great.” And it was real life activation. When it snowed a foot, I’d go and deliver powdered donuts to places, and ya know, here’s some…

Seth: That’s a small thing, but it sounds like good impact.

Chris: Yeah, and it stoked out all the employees. And then as the internet sort of matured, and social media matured, you could see that going online, and people were stoked about…any time the snow would be happening, you would always find these people that sort of bubbled to the top always commenting on your post, always sharing your post, and really interacting with you in a really genuine way. And I just had a stack of gift cards at my desk. And every so often, when one of these people would sort of rise to the top, I’d get their information, and then send them a little pack – just a total surprise. And then that customer is a customer for life now, hopefully.

Seth: You’d hope.

Chris: Yeah. And then they’re going to of course tell all their friends. And that’s a really small inexpensive way to start a really good influencer program.

[Crosstalk]

Seth: …gift cards, T-shirts. I think about people love to get sort of swag, particularly if it’s unexpected.

Molly: Yeah, and meaningful. I guess this all kind of picks back to the authenticity component, too. It’s like look at the people around you that are real evangelists of your brand whether they’re partners, customers, and look at how you can mobilize them first and foremost. And then as your marketing and your business matures, you can look at creating something a little larger, and more formal.

Seth: So, I know my friends. You know your friends. We all know our friends, and kind of our closest customers, and people we spend a lot of time with. But if you’re going to grow an influencer program beyond those folks…obviously, this is something you spend a lot of time doing with some of your clients…how do you evaluate whether or not an influencer is something…for a brand, how do you evaluate that that’s someone that you want to work with or not? And how do you…? How does that process go?

Molly: I think there is qualitative and quantitative components to that. So, you’re of course going to be looking for whether or not they align with your brand values. That’s important. Because people can sniff out a fraud a million miles away. And you want to ensure that if they do have a sizable following that it’s relevant as well. So, make sure their audience aligns with your audience. You can obviously look at their more quantitative measures like how large their audience is, how does their engagement look, quality of their photos, does it align with your aesthetic. And there’s a number of different ways that you can find these folks through tools like Rival IQ, and there’s a lot. You can Google how to find influencers, I’m sure.

Seth: For sure

Molly: We can help you find influencers. But I think the best thing to do is ask the people…the thought leaders in your space who is at the top, or who… Define your goals for your influencer program after you’ve defined your social mission. And then that will give you something to set out and search for.

Seth: So, obviously this program…these are things you do. Do you have an example of something you’ve done recently where you’re like, “We had a mission. It was to find people to help somebody actually get after a particular audience.” Can you talk a little bit about the process that you used to…?

Chris: Yeah. I think depending on where the brand is, when we’re trying to find… For one particular brand, we were trying to find influencers that could actually make something with the product. And we were able to go through and vet a bunch of DIY people. And we had a series of questions that we set out like where they live, are they free, are they expensive. We had the whole criteria of what we were looking for.

Seth: And this is like an email, or a survey, or something…

[Crosstalk]

Chris: Well, at first we need the vetting side of it. So, we need to find these people who have blogs, who have a good following. But there’s sort of the sweet spot where you don’t want too many people because then they’re going to be unapproachable, expensive…

Seth: Expensive.

Chris: …unattainable. But then you don’t want people with too few of an audience. So, there’s sort of this sweet spot that we’re going for that are affordable and high influential.

Molly: And also, it was really important for us to define what that criterion was because different people across the company and even in our office, they’re just throwing out all these ideas. And we’re like, “Well, yeah, that could work. That could work.” And everybody knows somebody or has ideas.

Seth: Sure.

Molly: So, by defining the program, it just helped us to narrow down as well and put kind of some walls up, so it didn’t get too wild.

Chris: Yeah, so then we sort of identified a list of 20 to 30. And this is a big list. Ideally, you’d want to…you’d probably find five people and start small.

Seth: Sure.

Chris: We’d say go out… We’ve been doing this for a while, so…

Seth: Don’t go from 0 to 50.

Chris: Yeah, exactly. So, then from there, we have our sort of target influencers that we’re looking at. And then we define okay, what do we want from there, here are their requirements. Very clear, attainable… You don’t want to overboard because then they’ll be overwhelmed and like, “This is too much.”

Seth: Yeah, right.

Chris: So, you want to make it as easy as possible for them.

Seth: So, clear but easy.

Chris: Right. And then from there, because we did our due diligence, and have our foundation, and the core of the content plan, we’re able to say, “Okay, we like you. Here’s what we’re thinking. We would basically email out our quarterly content plan saying, “Here’s what we would like from you. Here’s what we’re planning as a company as to do as a brand. Can you think of anything that would help support this whole one message across all channels?” And then we’re able to get four or five responses back from that saying, “Yeah, we’d love that. Send me the product. I’ll build it. I’ll take photos from it. I’ll even write some stuff.” And we’re able to take that and be like, “Okay, great. Now we know for January. We’re going to have this blog. We can send out this email. Here are the social posts that we’re going to do.” From there, we can share out, and then that ambassador or influencer will also take that link and share it at the same time. So, then you get more amplification. It’s more organic. And then after the organic dies down, you could always put a small ad spend behind that and just amplify it even more and get even more organic added on to that.

Seth: Got it. It’s a funnel, like everything else.

Chris: Yeah.

Seth: You’re doing a bunch of research. You’re putting a bunch in the top. You’re figuring it out. Eventually, you’re going to do outreach. You want these people, but they don’t all have time, or they’re not in the right place, or something about the relationship doesn’t go. But once you get it, being clear, setting expectations, having a plan, hopefully delivering on… It’s like a relationship – being clear, setting expectations.

Molly: Yeah, and I also recommend defining what your goals are around those influencers and then setting a run of engagement, a period where you can say, “Okay, after six months, we’ll evaluate against this criteria,” so you can actually be able to speak to was this working. You have kind of a way to…whether it’s your internal folks that lobby for this person… You’re like, “Well, they’re great, but their content is not performing.” At least have something that you can, “Okay…”

Seth: Yeah, like, “This is the plan. This is what’s happened or not.”

Molly: Yeah.

Seth: So, are there…? The hardest part for many people in marketing… When you’re working on your own channels, and you’re working with your own team, it’s easy. As soon as you start to bring in outside people who have different schedules, and different expectations…also just getting those conversations… Again, it’s kind of like dating. How do you start the conversation? Are there better or worse ways? For example, do you email people? Do you DM them? Do you…? Or does it just depend?

Molly: Oh, boy. Yeah, it really depends. And I think it’s all of the above. My knee-jerk reaction to that is trying to find the most authentic personal way to do your outreach. If it’s somebody within your network, or you can get an introduction, that’s always the best way, I think. Obviously, if you’re just finding them through searches… A lot of people will publish their email or their website on their profiles, and you can just hit them up or DM them. It all depends on the space, the people, your time and resources. But I think doing so in the most personal way… Make sure that you know what you’re going to ask of them and what you want to say. Because they’re as busy as you are, and that’s just the world we live in today. And so the more prepared you can be and the more concise your ask can be initially, the better. And get them excited, too.

Seth: You would hope. That’s why you want them, right?

Molly: Yeah. Be prepared to share what you’re up to. Don’t go straight to the ask. You got to fluff a little bit, get them excited about what you’ve got going on so that they can know. Odds are they may not know who you are or what you are.

Seth: So, maybe the ask isn’t even the first thing that you go with often.

Molly: Yeah.

Seth: It’s a… I’m going to just keep going back to data or marriage here. You don’t just go for the ask.

Molly: You’re selling yourself, too. Don’t forget it. Yeah, definitely. And make sure they understand how…when you’re reaching out to them that they can understand how they would fit into your world and what that relationship could look like. A lot of people are getting used and abused, and it’s a very transactional thing these days because of influencer programs, and Instagram, and all this is very much a shiny object. And I think if people feel like amongst all the inquiries that they’re getting that there’s something a little more special about your program, I think they’re going to be more apt to give you their time.

Seth: Yeah, I think just really connecting with people on an ongoing basis has got to be that baseline. I was talking to another one of our customers who was talking a little bit about his influencer program. And he said, “Man, it’s like I almost need SalesForce to keep up with these people’s birthdays and the special events in their lives because it’s actually like I’ve become friends with a lot of these people. And it’s work.”

Molly: Yeah, it really is. You got to nurture those relationships. And again, it’s just like dating… Whether you do it systematically – make sure you check in with them. You remind them of what their little roles are. They’re busy people. No matter what… In every situation, I think I’ve found it to be a challenge… because especially if you’re an outdoor brand, you have a program that’s based around athletes that you’re asking them to go out into the wilderness to get photos. Of course, they’re maybe not going to be as connected. So, I think setting an expectation to some degree, have a cadence or protocol for communication with them that you explain, and then maybe tailor those communication pathways to the individual. But for every post, you’re going to spend hours communicating with those people.

Chris: Yeah, and also just pick up the phone and talk to the people, too.

[Laughter]

Seth: That goes…

[Crosstalk]

Seth: That’s a good life rule.

Chris: Like, I feel like you could, there’s [INAUDIBLE]the three emails or three texts, you should probably just call them.

[Crosstalk]

Seth: I know. People say that millennials don’t want to talk on the phone. I’m not a millennial. I like the phone. But connecting with people in the way that they want to be connected with, I think is generally an important…

[Crosstalk]

Molly: And sometimes it means Facebook Messenger. In some cases, we’ve created Facebook groups that are closed for our influencer programs that are a really great way to connect those individuals directly. As well, it becomes one repository when you can do your ongoing touch basis with those folks.

Seth: Yeah, that’s great.

Chris: Yeah. Well, with Facebook private groups for influencers, what I think is really interesting here is that you’re connecting these influencers who might not know each other, especially with athletes.

Seth: Do you have a good story about something that came of connecting two athletes or two influencers in some space where it created a new project or created kind of some better…some better than…

[Crosstalk]

Chris: Yeah. What’s also kind of cool about these little groups whether…you can create them on Instagram or Facebook. And if you sort of challenge them and say, “Hey…”

[Crosstalk]

Seth: “…what are you doing this week? What did you do this weekend? Upload some photos to the group.” And then a lot of times, they will be like, “Oh, you’re an ambassador, too? I had no idea.” So, connecting those dots is pretty neat. And then seeing them just almost challenging each other but helping each other at the same time.

Seth: So, is this like people jumping off bigger and bigger cliffs…

[Crosstalk]

Molly: We’re not going to ask anybody to jump off cliffs.

Seth: Well, that’s a good rule.

Molly: I think there’s…

Chris: It helps them support each other…

Seth: Yeah, I know…

Further Reading: “3 Brands That Nailed Influencer Marketing in 2017”

Chris: …even outside the brand. So, you created that connection, which is pretty valuable. And then you’re going to be known as the connector.

Seth: The connector.

Molly: Yeah, and everybody still… This is a much bigger conversation, but everybody is looking for connections and community around these shared common values. And I think it’s doing something much bigger if you can help build those bonds in that way. And yeah, there’s a lot of different vehicles for doing that, but that’s a really good example.

Seth: That’s awesome. So, there’s a ton of questions coming in. But before… I have one more thing that I think want to have you talk about because if you’re doing a program, you’re doing it to achieve a result. We talked about setting expectations, setting goals, particularly as an agency working with a brand, or if you’re doing it in-house. You still report to someone. This is still spending time, or money, or both to achieve an outcome. How do you all think about measuring the success or measuring the outcomes of the influencer programs you do?

Chris: Well, I think it goes back to that clear set of expectations – not only what you’re expecting from them but what you think you’re going to get out of it. And defining those goals up front, I think is really important because then you always have something to go back to. If you’re looking at quantitative sort of things, I want to look at reach, performance, how their images or videos doing compared to other people…

[Crosstalk]

Seth: And you’re looking for engagement…like video engagement, driving traffic, everything that…

Molly: Yeah, and how much are they interacting with your content, too? Because hopefully, you’re having a two-way conversation as well.

Seth: Sure.

Chris: Yeah, and maybe that’s what you want, also. Like at Evo, their team, they just want to be part of a community and support progressive athletes that are driving skiing, and snowboarding, surfing, or mountain biking.

Seth: Right.

Chris: They’re not too concerned about getting tons and tons of content. I haven’t been there for a couple of years, so maybe this has changed. But at the time, it was more of a soft ask like we are here to support you to do…make the sport better. And that was sort of the mission. And they did have some criteria and things that they needed to fulfill, but that wasn’t the most important thing. It was really about driving the community and creating that relationship. And because we knew that, we were okay with what they were doing. So, understanding what you think the outcome should be is super important.

Seth: And is that something…some of that measurement…whether it’s, again, more qualitative, if you’re coming particularly from a more creative angle where you’re trying to… I could never say that’s on brand or off-brand within reason. But some of the metrics… Metrics sort of don’t lie. And obviously, it’s useful to report back to your brand, or your client, or your boss. But do you also use some of those metrics about activity and some of the participation back to the influencers to either engage more or to actually decide like, “No, we’re done with this particular person.”

Chris: Yeah, so some things that we’ll do is do a six-month review of images and posts that did really, really well and posts that didn’t do so well. So, we’ll evaluate it based upon the content of the image, the copy of the image, and composition of the image. And you can see a very clear set that wins and the very clear set that aren’t doing very well with the audience. So, you might not want the same look and feel of every single photo because you do want to make sure that you’re representing your brand. We’ve got brands that are…they do a lot of community service work. But community service posts don’t do that well. But it’s a super important brand to tell that story. So, it’s totally fine if those don’t perform well. But as a brand, as a full, it’s very important to tell that story. So, going back to what performs well and what doesn’t perform well – we’ll often send guidelines out to ambassadors and influencers saying, “Hey, these types of photos are doing really, really well right now.”

Seth: Got it. So, you’re using some of the analytics about success or lack thereof to actually coach the influencers to do things that are going to help them become more successful which hopefully, in turn, helps you become more successful as well.

Molly: Yeah. And again, there’s no one right way to do this or wrong way. And even when you set your goals or build your roadmap and your toolkit for these folks and yourself…you want to constantly assess, reassess, and refine your program.

Seth: So, as metrics nerd…we’re clearly the metrics nerds. I don’t know how we got pegged.

[Laughter]

Seth: But I’ll just own it for the moment. Metrics matter. And having kind of quick access to data about kind of every facet of this… It sounds like every facet of this funnel so far from finding folks, engaging them, keeping folks on track, coaching, supporting, and then kind of continuing who to reinvest in…at every point, there’s some qualitative, and there’s some quantitative, too.

Chris: Well, and then I think if you’ve got some good metrics, you can tell when it’s working and when it’s not working. And social media moves so fast. They will leave you guessing because that’s the way they make money. You’re chasing the carrot that essentially is changing…

Seth: All the time.

Chris: …every couple months. So, data is a really good way to find out when that goal is changed. And then you’re like, “Okay, now I got to try this. Now I’m going to tweak this program in this way.” So, it’s pretty fluid all at the same time.

Molly: And for those creatives out there, it’s a really…the metrics and analytics are a really great way to solve or answer those questions, or to solve those fights and arguments about was this photo better, or was this photo better. Because there’s the person who maybe just personally attached to this one, but you look at the numbers, and they don’t lie.

Seth: We work with a lot of kind of very visual brands that produce lots of content and have a big reach. And looking at the worst stuff is often some of the more interesting analysis because the best stuff…it’s a mix of consistency or some flash in the pan. But the worst stuff has actually some consistency to it.

Molly: Yeah.

Seth: And being able to coach based on that is really, really important.

Molly: Yeah.

Seth: So, there are a ton of questions…

Molly: Uh-oh.

Seth: …that are coming in from…hi…for you all.

Molly: Hi.

Seth: And they’re kind of falling into two or three themes.

Molly: Interesting.

Seth: The first kind of theme that I’m going to jump into here is really about this idea of is it for pay, is it not for pay, budgets, sort of…and what’s… The specific question that someone asked what kind of ties into this is, “What should I be thinking about as a starting point in terms of a budget if I want to begin an influencer program?”

Molly: Oh, boy. Okay, I’d love to lead this question. So, I think the question was what should you be thinking in terms of budget. Well, since the first step is really defining your program, understanding what your goals are, that would probably be something that you could do yourself. So, that’s free, hopefully, or just time. And then from there, if you really have the ability… Brand varies. Your opportunities vary. But if you’re able to look at mobilizing that, say, micro influencer community kind of like what we talked about and develop a program that just incentivizes people to go a little further that might already be doing something to support your brand or folks that are already evangelizing your brand, that’s a great place to start. And that sometimes could just be a matter of allocating some promos, and swag, or some trade, or discounts. That said, smaller brands or startups maybe don’t have a sizable community quite yet, so it’s hard to do that. So, then from there, if you’re…you really need to start from scratch. Well, you could look at trade, or product, or discounts is always a good way to start. I think very few of our programs that we manage or have set up have a paid or cash component. I’d say it’s 50/50. It tends to be product trade because the people who are authentically going to support you and amplify your message already love your product, love your brand, and hooking them up with a discount or product is enough of an incentive. Then again…

Further Reading: “5 Tips to Kick Off your Influencer Marketing Strategy”

Seth: I just want to get you going on that a little bit more…

Molly: Yeah.

Seth: …get you going on that a little bit more. So, somebody else kind of followed in with other than money…which is obviously… So, I just heard you say it doesn’t have to be money. Product trade is a thing. What are other examples of ways in which you’ve said it’s not about the money pushed toward the influencer, it’s… What are some of the things…? You talked about…gift cards are, I guess, kind of money.

Molly: Experiences, too, is a…

[Crosstalk]

Chris: Yeah, and exposure.

Molly: Exposure.

Chris: Just the fact that you’re lending your brand that you’ve put your blood, sweat, and tears into. And you’ve created this community. Sometimes they just are looking for exposure.

Seth: So, you amplifying them sometimes as much as…

Chris: Right.

Seth: And they’re gaining access to your audience…

[Crosstalk]

Chris: Yeah, and they’ll hopefully get fans from our brands basically. So, that’s usually the tradeoff right there is like, “Okay, I hope I can work with X brand. They’ve got 10,000 followers. I’ve got 3,000 followers or what not. Yeah, give me exposure, and then we’ll be good.

Seth: So, when I see UGC contests, for example… And I know you probably have an example of this…where you have a campaign. You want people to tag their stuff so that hopefully you’re going to blow it up on your channels later. That’s the only incentive. That’s a thing, right?

Chris: Yes, with MSR, Mountain Safety Research, another Seattle company, make the best tents, and snowshoes, and water filters…

[Crosstalk]

Molly: Technical gear.

Chris: Yeah, technical gear. They’re awesome. And they’ve got a very highly educated customer base, pretty engaged audience as well. And they happen to be really good photographers.

Seth: What a mix?

Chris: So, it’s like let’s see if we can figure out something out. So, last summer, we held a 48-hour epic contest with correlating with a product launch of this handheld water filter. And we’re like, “Okay, so how far could you go in 48 hours where you want a super light pack?” And we just put it out there. We were very deliberate on the campaign, what we’re doing, how we’re doing it. And the response was incredibly positive throughout all summer. And being really cognizant of what we’re asking for and how we’re asking for it as well as the images that were selected to be featured was also a very deliberate…

Seth: So, people were out there doing their 48-hour epic adventure. Were they using some of this ultra-light gear, or is this even before the launch? This was just a campaign…

[Crosstalk]

Chris: It wasn’t necessarily so, but a lot of times there will be this MSR tent on this incredible outlook up in the mountains. It was beautiful.

Seth: Way deep backcountry.

Chris: Yeah.

Seth: Sun setting, they get the shot.

Chris: Yeah.

Seth: And they’re putting it on social as it goes? Like they were putting it on Instagram, they were putting it…? Yeah.

Chris: Yeah, absolutely. And then hashtagging it with the 48-hour epic. And then as those got pulled into the landing page, we were able to curate a really nice collection with the type of photos we were looking for. We preceded with the type of photos we were looking for. And then as the campaign went out and throughout the summer, people kind of caught on like, “Oh, these ones are making it on the site.”

[Crosstalk]

Chris: Which if I’m an amateur photographer or whatnot, this could be some pretty awesome exposure for my career or my photography whatever, just be stoked out that I’m featured with one of my favorite brands.

Seth: So, you preceded a little bit.

Molly: Yeah.

Seth: Obviously, it was a campaign though because there was a real push around doing this. But then did it take a life of its own at some point?

Chris: Yeah, I think so. I think it was kind of…went in waves. And every time we started talking about it again and how we leveraged all the channels… And again, it goes back to having a cohesive marketing plan. I think we were able to make sure… We work really closely with the MSR team, obviously, to make sure the homepage was updated, their emails were being activated, social…everything was all talking about this. And it was awesome. So, now we’ve got a ton of really, really good content of people that are letting us use their photos and images that we can use that currently on their Instagram account, and it’s a really nicely curated collection…

[Crosstalk]

Seth: And is that campaign still…are you still using that hashtag today?

Chris: We’re not promoting it, but people are still using it. So, it’s sort of taken on a life of its own.

Molly: So, I think that’s a really good example of a campaign based micro influencer program that has kind of taken on a life of its own that has this ongoing momentum that maybe…who knows…maybe it’ll become an annual thing. But we were able to mobilize people who were already saying, “Yeah, I love your brand. I’m already posting stuff.” How do we funnel their energy and efforts to support what we’re doing and incentivize them?

Seth: So, it’s funny then. So, again, there are a lot of questions sort of about budget and getting started. But I think I…if I play this back…and you will tell me if I’m right or wrong…but the relationship, the program, it’s like all the spend is much your time or agency time into doing this work to find the people, to run the program, to make sure you have your base. That’s where you’re going to spend a lot of your time and money. And of course…

[Crosstalk]

Seth: …I heard you could go pay people, but that’s not… Typically your experience, it’s much more investment in the program and the relationships.

Molly: Definitely

Seth: And that’s where you’re going to spend.

Molly: I’d say much…for folks who are familiar with the creative process, they say spend a good chunk of time in your preproduction and road mapping what your photo shoot or your video deliverables are going to look like, and you’ll save a lot of money during production, a lot of time. So, same with this. You put a lot of energy, heart, time into the preproduction or roadmapping what the influencer program needs are. You really don’t necessarily have to put a lot of cash into… But then again, there’s also that other side of it is like you straight up… So, just doing… I’m terrible at math. But if you were to do some napkin math, say, okay, there are 365 days in the year, right? Okay. 52 weeks.

Chris: You got that right.

[Laughter]

Seth: You know what, Molly? You can do some math.

Molly: I’ve outdone myself. So, just if you were to think about it, if you were trying to figure out a budget aside from the planning…say, you are doing just say one post a week which that’s…this is just for easy math….at one post a week, there are 52 weeks in a year. And safe you were able to…you wanted your influencer program to generate all of your content. So, say it’s just photos. You could figure out okay, well, how much would it have cost me to produce these photos on my own, or can I even. And then think about, okay, well, these folks have stated that they want to be a part of our program. There is a cost offset by getting these folks to contribute your imagery. So, say if you’re doing five posts a week, and say only one of them is coming from your influencer program, there’s still a way to do some math in there to figure out what it’s worth to you. Because if you’re having to pay for those photos from a stock imagery library or a photographer, this could either augment those costs in some way and so you could kind of validate this program and that way pull some budget away from, say, your asset creation over there, put it into your influencer program.

Seth: And that’s just on the creation side, let alone the sort of accessing their network and everything else.

Molly: Yeah, totally. So, it really quickly pencils. Even if you are paying them for their participation, the benefits still are much greater than…

Seth: Sign me up. I think… She’s like, “Great. We can do that.” So, let’s see. So, I got some… Scott…hey, Scott.

Molly: Hi, Scott.

Seth: Clearly working in higher ed. He’s thinking very specifically about sort of college and universities being able to leverage their community. So, obviously, the university community is really big. You’ve got students, you’ve got student-athletes. You’ve got notable alums, Olympians, so many things there. How can universities…? Are universities any different in this regard about how they might engage those folks to amplify some of their messaging?

Molly: Oh, wow. Gosh, I haven’t been in school for a while. I’m wondering… My first question would be how digital are the universities. I’m not sure what your position is, Scott, there, what you’re doing. But first, it’s like…going back to our conversation, it’s like what is your goal, what is your digital ecosystem look like. Somebody out there is going to have to drink. Sorry, I said ecosystem. So, what does your digital ecosystem look like, what are your goals for potential mobilizing these folks, and what do you have maybe already mapped out that you could plug into that digital sphere, and then what are your asks? That’s a big question.

Seth: Yeah.

Chris: Yeah. I think with universities, it’s… You’ve got politics, athletic programs, different schools within the schools. So, I say…

Seth: There’s either a lot to pull from or confusion depending on what you’re talking about.

Chris: Yeah. Like I went to UW, and I follow “Dubs”, their mascot, the dog. It’s [INAUDIBLE], but I love him.

Seth: Yeah. No, absolutely.

Chris: I have to follow the football team.

Seth: Right. And you’re an alum, and you have been there for probably a decade. We’re not going to date ourselves.

[Laughter]

Chris: A little bit longer.

[Crosstalk]

Seth: I’m a decade, so we’ll go from there. But we work with a ton of universities. And every kind of year or so, we put out a report, and we look at some of the top performing content. And this is not even influencer based. This is just what works for universities. And celebrating their community, particularly the notable professors, the Olympians… And this is not even working with them, just sharing the success of these people who are in their community in that…like, “This person went to this university 15 years ago, and now they’ve won a gold medal.” Does that math work? Are there folks who in their 40’s winning swimmers, whatever.

Molly: Yep.

Seth: And they’re using the success of those folks. I think often working with them. But the university connection is something that sort of never goes away.

Chris: Yeah.

Molly: Yeah, I think that’s a fantastic question and proposition. I think there’s a huge opportunity there. But I guess it just makes me think what are your goals. Because if, for example, you’re just trying to engage folks to increase awareness on the university to try and drive new students, that’s one thing. Versus trying to get people to sign up for specific programs.

Chris: Yeah, and I think it’s really cognizant of what you’re posting, too. If it’s just a photo of some dude on my Instagram feed, it’s like I don’t really care about that. So, some people might, but is Instagram the right place to have a guy in a lab coat or a bunch of students gathered around a table on my Instagram feed? I probably am just going to scroll by that. But if say you use LinkedIn, you can tell a little bit more of a story, a little bit more interesting…

[Crosstalk]

Seth: So, platform matters. And so Caroline [Phonetic]…hi, Caroline…

Molly: Hi, Caroline.

Seth: …has asked a couple questions. But she was talking about thinking…so, it’s a combination of…

Molly: Impromptu question.

Seth: No. Well, so… A lot of these platforms…all these platforms are global. Right, like Instagram is global. LinkedIn is global. If you’re really looking to attract more of a local following – whether you’re a local business, or you have a local angle to what you’re doing… Obviously Evo, for you, with a retail bringing up, that was a local thing. But are there things you should be considered when running a program whose specific goal is to try to blow up locally?

Chris: Yeah. Funny, we’re actually just starting a project with the…give a shout out to Washington National Parks Fund. They are in charge of…

Molly: You just give a shout out.

[Laughter]

Seth: It’s good.

Chris: Nonprofit organization. They help fund programs in the Olympic National Park, North Cascades National Park, and Mount Rainier National Park. So, it’s all about supporting our parks in Washington State. So, we’re going to help them with their digital marketing and digital media strategy and some campaigns that they’re going to be launching over the year. And it’s all about awareness. But because it’s just Washington State, our whole strategy is activating people in Washington State. So, whether it’s geo-targeting… You’re going to probably naturally attract local people already if you’re only talking about Seattle, or Washington, or wherever, Denver,  wherever. You’re probably just going to attract it. Another example is with Evo and their stores in Seattle, Portland, and Denver. Well, each store has their own social media accounts, so you can keep it hyperlocal. And then you’ve got your global accounts that’s the worldwide account that has way more followers. But you’ve got to get 4,000 to 6,000 fans on each one of those accounts, so you can get really local and really specific. Because if I want to know there’s an event, or a sale, or something going on, you’ve sort of fostered this local audience.

Seth: It’s about finding the people who are here.

Chris: Yeah.

Seth: Is part of that working with other organizations that are local, too?

Molly: Yeah, that’s a huge part of it. So, I think to kind of play off of what Chris was saying, one of the first things…all these platforms have the ability to geo-target your content. Because all of them are global. And when you’re saying…whether you’re doing paid ads on social or just publishing your content, it’s getting syndicated out to the entire country or world in theory. So, to get more precise with your spend and ensure you’re not wasting dollars or to make sure that you’re not annoying people who may not care about something that you’re posting that might relate to a different country or state, you can either target your posts with specific regions, cities, times. But then also I think the big thing that you were bringing up is partnering with folks and engaging them almost like influencers even if they’re business partners, clients. Engaging with them, making sure that they’re building equity within that region and from an algorithmic standpoint in Facebook or in Instagram so that Instagram knows… So, say if all these people are talking about this thing in the Seattle area, it’s going to start showing up more on people’s Seattle feeds.

Seth: Got it. So, for that project, you’re thinking about organizations like WTA, and Forterra, and folks who are focused on conservancy…

Molly: Yep.

Chris: Right.

Seth: …who are focusing on doing things here in Washington, probably all have highly overlapping but not completely overlapping audiences.

Molly: Correct.

Seth: And firing up some of those other organizations.

Molly: Yeah.

Chris: Yeah.

Seth: Because that’s…organizations can influence for you too.

Molly: And that could be very visual, and overt, and obvious. But then there’s all that magic going on in the back of all these social channels that… Facebook is listening, and Instagram is listening. And they can see those connections and put those dots together when all these related communities are talking.

Chris: Yeah, I try to put myself in Facebook or Instagram’s shoes like I’m the algorithm.

[Laughter]

[Crosstalk]

Chris: Sometimes I make a mistake.

Seth: Wow.

[Laughter]

Chris: No, not really.

[Laughter]

Chris: So, the goal of those companies, they’re publicly traded, they want to make money. What am I going to do? I need people to stay on my platform as long as possible. So, how can I help them achieve that goal?

Seth: Right.

Chris: And if my content is helping them achieve that goal, it’s more valuable to the platform, and they can see people are interacting, and their platform becomes more valuable. My content becomes more valuable because I’m now helping them out. Hopefully, I’ll be syndicated to more people.

Seth: Right. So, this is why native video matters. This is why visual content matters. This is why links offsite get no reach because it creates the opposite of the experience that Facebook wants. And heck, you can’t even link off Instagram.

Chris: Yeah, and then with an influencer, making…setting up those goals like, “Okay, place a comment on my photo, or share my photo, or share your photo,” that sort of stuff, that just helps the relationship between you and the influencer as well as helps the platform out at the same time.

Seth: Yeah…

[Crosstalk]

Chris: So, everybody wins.

Seth: So, we’re just about out of time.

Molly: Oh, no.

Seth: I know. We have been doing this…you have been paying attention for a long time. We really appreciate it. Sort of before we go, though, let’s do one more fun question for you just because.

Molly: Oh jeez…

Seth: Let’s let people into your life a little bit. Podcast folks… Are you either of you big podcast folks?

Chris: Yes.

Molly: Oh, yeah.

Seth: So, what’s the podcast that…marketing or not…what’s the podcast that’s got you kind of hooked right now?

Chris: Oh, gosh. I like the Nerdist podcast.

Seth: Okay. Why?

Chris: I love comedy.

Seth: Okay.

Chris: And interviews. It’s long-form interviews with Hardwick. And I like the NASA podcast now.

Seth: The NASA podcast?

Chris: Yeah.

Molly: Interesting.

Chris: It’s pretty interesting.

Seth: All right, Molly did have you nailed.

[Laughter]

Seth: This is the guy who’s got a Ph.D. in computer science. I’m the big nerd, too, so it’s fine. How about you?

Molly: Wow, well, this might be nerdy in another way. There’s this podcast called Podictionary. It’s like etymology. You get a word of the day, and they unpack it. I’m a big fan. And then ‘How I Built This‘ is really cool. It’s just interviews with different entrepreneurs, business owners. And it basically…it’s mostly people who have had these wild stories. Usually, they’re at rock bottom crying on their kitchen floor to wherever they are now which is…most of them are successful business owners or sometimes folks who have moved on and… Yeah.

Seth: Awesome.

Seth: See, now I’ve added a couple more to things I need to be listening to. Again, Molly, Chris…

Chris: What are your podcasts?

Seth: Oh, me?

Molly: Oh, yeah. Come on.

Seth: So, I have to admit, I don’t do a ton of podcast listening. However, this is going to be a business one just because it’s actually the most recent thing I’ve listened to – Intercom, the kind of in-app lightweight marketing automation tool. They’ve started an interview series, kind of some internal folks and some external folks. And I think they’ve been so successful in the business that they’ve been building that it’s sort of nice to hear some of their experiences. But what’s the last real thing I listened to? Probably Serial. The thing that probably everyone is listening to.

Molly: Yeah, nice.

Seth: So, you’re not learning anything from me here. My wife swears by Desert Island Disks, though. So, if… It’s long-form interviews with really famous people.

Molly: Cool.

Seth: And yeah, she talks about it a lot, and I’ve yet to listen to one. She’s smarter than I am, though. So…

Molly: That’s the right answer.

Seth: …listen to her and not me.

[Laughter]

Seth: So, again, Chris and Molly from We Are Unicorns, thank you both so much for taking the time.

Molly: Can I leave people with closing words?

Seth: Yes.

Molly: But I want you to have the last word.

Seth: I have no last word. So, thank you all. Thanks to these two. Molly wants the last word. We’re going to do that.

Molly: Be patient. It doesn’t happen overnight. And I think that’s the thing you want to make sure that you just nurture this program and these relationships as you would any relationship, and that takes time.

Seth: There you go – relationships. Thank you, both.

Chris: Yeah, thank you.

Seth: And yeah.

Seth: Have a good rest of the week, everyone.

Molly: Yeah.

The post Essential Steps to Creating an Influencer Marketing Strategy appeared first on Rival IQ.

With the support of over 3 million members and supporters nationwide, it’s hard to imagine what the Human Rights Campaign was like in 1980 when it began as a small fund designed to provide financial support for gay and lesbian political candidates and gay civil rights legislation. Within two years, the Human Rights Campaign Fund was the 17th largest political action committee in the United States.

Today, HRC is America’s largest civil rights organization working to achieve “a world where lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people are embraced as full members of society at home, at work, and in every community.”

We wanted to learn more about how a successful non-profit organization leverages social media to generate awareness, tolerance, and acceptance while inspiring and engaging people and communities.

So, we analyzed HRC’s social media activity in 2017. After looking at nearly 10,400 posts across six social media channels (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, and Google+), we learned that one of their favorite, most successful strategies had nothing to do with promoting themselves or their brand, and everything to do with highlighting their supporters and who they fight for.

User Generated Content (UGC)

You’ve probably heard a bit about user-generated content (UGC). It’s a tactic many organizations, brands and businesses have been successfully using for years where consumers, or users, generate content on the organization’s behalf (not always intentionally, but ALWAYS with permission).

UGC is powerful in the sense that people value trust in the organizations they do business with and support. By allowing someone else speak on your organization’s behalf instills authenticity and trust in your brand.

UGC stats

• In a case study run by Chobani, UGC shared across websites, billboards, and social media resulted in a 225.9% increase in revenue between 2009 and 2010
• 51% of Millennials trust UGC more than anything on a company’s site, news article or blogs about the company, product or ad copy
• 70% of consumers trust online peer reviews and recommendations more than professional content and copy

For the Human Rights Campaign, user-generated content is their bread and butter, and they execute it well. Here are some UGC best practices and examples from HRC to help you incorporate UGC into your social media strategy.  

User-Generated Content Best Practices

Ask

To get started, you’ll need to ask your audience to share related content. In your ask, be specific about what you’re looking for, how content can be submitted, and how it will be used. Asking via social posts and newsletters are the easiest ways.

If you notice content that aligns with your brand that you’d like to reshare, you must ask for permission to reshare. Asking via a comment or direct message is the easiest way to get permission.

The Human Rights Campaign accomplishes wider reach on social media by using the power of “the ask.” Each social channel is different and asking for your audience to share your content may look slightly different channel to channel.

In this Facebook post, HRC asks their audience to:

1. Follow them on Instagram. If your audience likes your content, odds are they’ll like you Instagram content as well.
2. Take a picture that includes HRC’s logo. When you ask for content, audiences are more likely to participate if you are specific about what kind of content you want. Bonus points if you can get them to incorporate your branding.
3. Use the hashtag #WeAreHRC. Use a custom or branded hashtag so you can easily track UGC

They also let their audience know what’s in it for them by participating. By doing these three things, their participating members are entered into a favorite photo competition. The winners will be featured on their official site touting over 2.6 million followers (serious exposure!).

Use a hashtag

Create a specific or branded hashtag for your user-generated content. Asking them to use a designated hashtag will allow your audience to easily share their content with you, as well as help grow awareness. On Instagram, you can now follow a hashtag – ensuring you’re always up to date on who is using your campaign’s hashtag.

By asking their audience to use the hashtag, #WeAreHRC, the marketing team could track who was participating in their ‘Equali-gram Contest’ and select winners by searching that hashtag.

Here are the four winners of that contest:

Proper credit

Whenever sharing user-generated content, it’s especially important to give proper credit. You can do this by adding ‘credit’, ‘photo,’ or ‘cc,’ along with the creator’s handle. HRC often includes the handle on the image, alongside the hashtag #repost, and credit to the original creator.

See the handle of the original author on this image in the bottom left-hand corner:

#LoveIsLove. Double tap if you agree! ・・・ #Repost @maxisms: ・・・ Hello from #gay #army #prom. @andrescamilo___ @matthewsuber

A post shared by Human Rights Campaign (@humanrightscampaign) on Apr 4, 2017 at 5:23pm PDT

In this repost, HRC uses the hashtag #repost and gave credit to the original author in the comment section and named them by their handle:

“One way to channel last weekend’s energy into sustained action for #LGBTQrights: Share your stories like this one of @chefemiliacirker and her daughter. “

One way to channel last weekend’s energy into sustained action for #LGBTQ rights: Share your story like this one of @chefemiliacirker and her daughter. Use your voice to inspire change. Never underestimate the value of your story and its ability to move hearts and minds to the side of equality. Check out hrc.org/blog for the full list. #HumanRightsCampaign #LoveConquersHate #WhyIMarch #WhyWeMarch #LGBT #Equality #UnitedAgainstHate.

A post shared by Human Rights Campaign (@humanrightscampaign) on Jan 26, 2017 at 8:59am PST

Engage

When your audience shares content by tagging your brand, or using the relevant hashtag – be sure to acknowledge them. You may not be able to use every piece of content, but there’s nothing wrong with having too many people sharing your product or mentioning your brand.

Here’s the original post by @babybaileymamadrama. She posted a series of family photos and tagged HRC in their Instagram post. 

We @humanrightscampaign = . . . #humanrightscampaign #humanrights #ivfjourney #herbunmyoven #hereggmynest #AheadOfTheCurve #thebump #ig_motherhood #thatsdarling #motherhoodrising #momtogs #babylistbabes #uniteinmotherhood #momsquared #lesbianmommies #thenextfamily #teamtwomoms #lesbianfamily #femmetribe #mrsandmrs #photos4ellen #samesexfamily #loveislove #somefamilies

A post shared by (@babybaileymamadrama) on May 29, 2017 at 2:54pm PDT

Here’s a look at HRC’s repost of the first image above:

#Repost @babybaileymamadrama We @HumanRightsCampaign = . Tap twice to thank this beautiful family for their support! . . . . . . #LoveIsLove #OOTD #LGBTQ #LGBT #Equality #LesbianMoms #BabyFashion #Family #HumanRightsCampaign

A post shared by Human Rights Campaign (@humanrightscampaign) on May 30, 2017 at 6:18pm PDT

Reflect Your Brand

Stay true to your brand with the content you reshare. If you’ve been specific in your ask from followers, and you’ve done a good job of promoting your request, you should have enough content to give you options.

Choose high-quality images that reflect your brand properly. There’s no need to lower the bar when it comes to sharing user-generated content. HRC does this well – the images they share align with their owned content.

Shifting your social strategy to utilize user-generated content can be intimidating. For non-profits and community focused brands, it’s a must-have component for social success. Your audience wants to see themselves in your social presence and user-generated content is the best way to do it. If you’re just starting to add this to your social strategy, start small, follow these best practices, and bask in the excitement of your audience. You might just be surprised at how excited your followers get at the possibility of sharing their own content, and of course, your engagement numbers will reflect it too.

The post The Human Rights Campaign: Generating Awareness Through Social Advocacy appeared first on Rival IQ.

What started out as a small group of volunteers with a love of the outdoors, has become Washington state’s most trusted leader in regional land conservation and sustainability.

Forterra’s key objectives are:

• Acquire keystone lands in Washington state. From old growth to the highest mountaintops in the Cascades, Forterra has completed over 400 land deals covering more than 250,000 square acres. Their projects have ranged from protecting farmlands from becoming subdivisions, saving property in the heart of the city for affordable housing, and securing funds to purchase land that has sustained the region’s most popular and scenic hiking spots.  
• Care and develop keystone lands. With the help of local partnerships, the Green City Partnership Program, and community volunteers they restore, maintain, and care for the lands they acquire.
• Create livelihoods in keystone lands. From working with city planners to develop sustainable urban areas to backing sustainable building materials and securing funding, Forterra works with a wide range of groups to increase economic potential.

Saving the Lake Serene Hiking Trail

Just an hour long drive north of Seattle, the Lake Serene hiking trail is one of Washington’s most popular hiking destinations. Take a 4.1-mile hike on an old logging road up a series of thigh-busting stairs to find yourself surrounded by towering cliffs and staring across a placid alpine lake.

Another great experience from 2017 was helping save the Lake serene trail. @forterranw raised $275,000 to keep it from being logged close to the trail. #savelakeserene #forthisplace #northwestnature #northwestcoast #northwestlife #northwest #pnwlife #skykomishvalley #skykomish #king5explore #q13fox #kiro7seattle #komoloz #adventurevisuals #thatpnwlife #pnwonderland #wanderfolk #beautifuldestinations #pnwcollective #hikingadventures #hike #hiking #bridalveilfalls

A post shared by Brian Kilpatrick (@kilpatrickphotography) on Dec 6, 2017 at 6:43am PST

Weyerhaeuser, one of the world’s largest owners of timberlands, owned a quarter-mile portion of the timberland that borders the Lake Serene hiking trail. The trees that run along the trail were scheduled to be clear-cut over a year-long period beginning in fall 2017.

Even though Weyerhaeuser would replant after harvesting their trees, clear-cutting would leave a massive bald spot along one of Washington state’s most beloved day hikes for years to come. This kind threat falls right into Forterra’s wheelhouse.

Forterra decided they wanted to purchase the land from Weyerhaeuser to preserve the forest within 500 feet surrounding the popular hiking trail, but they needed money. A lot of money. Weyerhaeuser was willing to sell the land at the market value of $800,000 US dollars.

So, Forterra put their resources to work. They reached out to their community partners and connections securing $405,000 from the Snohomish County Conservation Futures Program. An anonymous donor agreed to match donations up to $75,000, but they still needed to raise $275,000 before October 30, 2017 (it was mid-August). 

Amazingly, with the help of over 600 contributing hikers and climbers, they reached their goal! They purchased the land from Weyerhaeuser, protecting the forest from ever being logged.

But, how did they do it?

Certainly, there were many contributors to their success in raising awareness and the funds they needed to save Lake Serene. It’s worth noting a few social media marketing tactics they used to help them cross the finish line.

Tell a story

When you plan on running a social media campaign, one of the first questions you need to ask yourself is “which social channels will be most impactful for achieving my objective?” (assuming you’ve already defined your objective). Forterra shared posts on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter for this campaign which were good choices because these channels are:

• Great for engaging with communities (ie. Facebook Groups)
• Popular for driving a lot of conversation (hashtags and mentions)
• Intentionally built for generating excitement around events
• Designed for easy sharing
• Effective at educating people

No matter your objective, capturing your audience requires good storytelling. We more easily absorb information from stories because they engage us. We want to know what happens next. Stories use emotion and personal connections to inspire action.

In this campaign, Forterra used video to tell a powerful story in a short amount of time.

Choosing your media type

A joint study by Neilsen and Facebook found that people who simply see an impression (<1 second) of a video without actually watching the video were still impacted by the ad. In the first second of Forterra’s video, they stated their objective, “Save the Lake Serene trail.” That is the message that people will remember even if they just scroll by, so make sure to get to the point early in your social video to increase engagement.

In this video, they tell their story and keep it brief, which is perfect for social. They distill their problem, what they hope to achieve, and the call to action in 30 seconds. Simultaneously, they use imagery in the background that illustrates the beauty of the area at risk. They also manage to tug at the heartstrings by showing video clips of families enjoying their outdoor adventures on the trail.

Embrace the dark side 

What is dark social media, you ask? Coined in 2012 by former deputy editor of The Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal, dark social refers to “the portion of referral traffic that lacks the information to trace it back to its source and is essentially invisible to most analytics programs.” When people share content on private channels, such as email and instant messengers, it’s considered dark social. Madrigal estimates that roughly 70% of social referrals come from dark social. 

Think about the last time you shared a link to blog with a friend in Facebook’s native messenger or via email because you didn’t want the world to know that you’re into craft shows. That’s dark social. The primary takeaway is that there is a lot of valuable activity happening that you can’t track. There are over 1.37 billion daily active users on Facebook every day. Although you can’t track dark social, it has the potential to pack a ton of value, so keep this in mind when you’re reporting on the impact of your social media campaign. 

Social tracking headaches

On a related note, to help social markets track their campaigns better, we recommend that you always use UTM parameters in your social media posts. Sometimes, even UTM’s can get a little messy when people begin sharing urls on the internet.

To help wrap your mind around what we mean, let’s say your organization sends an email to your subscribers with a link to donate to your cause. One of your subscribers copies the donation link in your email, pastes it in a Facebook post, and shares it with a Facebook group to help spread the word. Awesome! Except that it’s going to be tracked as traffic from your email campaign, not from Facebook. This is because the URL they shared in the Facebook post still has the email UTM parameters attached to it. 

This is exactly what happened in Forterra’s ‘Save Lake Serene’ social campaign. Here’s a screenshot of a Facebook post in a public Washington Hikers Facebook group.

Check out the social engagement metrics in this post:

• 23 comments
• 27 shares!!!
• 143 reactions

This post generated incredible organic engagement! Imagine if just one of these 27 shares was as successful as this Facebook post. The reach of this post has the potential to grow exponentially, but it’s not accurately tracked. This is one of the reasons why accurately tracking the ROI of social media campaigns can be really difficult.

We decided to dig deeper to see if we could discover anything else about where this post came from.

Here’s the link that was shared in this Facebook post:

Notice anything?

We clicked on the link in this post and found that the Forterra’s email campaign UTM parameters were still attached to the link. It’s likely that this user subscribes to Forterra’s emails and copied this link from an email campaign. If this is true, this also means that Forterra’s Google Analytics will report that all the traffic generated from this social post (and traffic from its shares) came from the email campaign, not the social media post. So, the traffic generated from this post will have attribution metrics, they’ll just be incorrect at no fault of Forterra. Double bummer.

You may feel that attempting to track your social media campaigns is pointless, but we’d argue the opposite. Regardless of dark social and misattribution, your message is still reaching the right folks and making an impact.

Seek out public and private social communities to find audiences who are most likely to make a difference and share your content. To help curve the misattribution problem, ask your followers to share specific links on different channels. Justifying social media can be tough, but you should still report on the activity you can track and keep in mind that your efforts have likely made a bigger splash than you can prove. That’s a good problem to have.

Drive momentum by sharing your goal progress

Your followers will notice when you share a new post every week about how close you’re getting to reaching your goal. That’s exactly what Forterra did. As more partners and supporters committed to donations, Forterra made sure their base knew about it by posting about it on Facebook and Twitter.

Here’s a Facebook post from September 26, 2017, when a community donor offered to match up to $75,000 in donations. By sharing your progress, your audience will be energized by the momentum of your organization and the likelihood that they will share your content (and donate) increases.

Call supporters out by name!

Calling supporters out by name and sharing their content encourages more engagement and builds trust in your relationship. Share the UGC warm-fuzzies when someone writes a blog, snaps a high-quality image, or shares your content.

Collaborate with partners

As they say, “many hands make light work.” It’s almost always worth the extra effort to collaborate with partners, vendors, local businesses, and organizations who have a similar audience to help amplify your message and reduce the workload. 

As a conservation organization, Forterra is well-versed in partnerships. They were able to mobilize quickly with the support of their community, nonprofits, outdoor retailers, local breweries, and other active partners to help save Lake Serene. They know that their audience is active and that they love the outdoors, free gear, and craft beer (welcome to the PNW).

Here’s a list of events they co-hosted with a few of their community partners to help raise awareness and money.

Concerts at the Co-op

In the month of August, REI planned a concert every Thursday to celebrate a life outdoors. Forterra came to discuss their cause, increase awareness and energize attendees to get behind the cause.

Guided tours of Lake Serene

REI also lead a guided hike up the Lake Serene trail. They organized this hike as a fun and interactive way to show what could be lost, to educate people about what Forterra was trying to accomplish, and to teach people about the history of the land.

REI also hosted the event on their Hiking and Camping Classes & Events page.

Happy Hour at Fremont Brewing

Working with Seattle-based Fremont Brewing, they hosted a happy hour event to raise awareness and money. They also gave away some pretty awesome swag!

On the Facebook event page, they made sure to communicate what each individual could do to help the cause.

“With a $45+ tax-deductible donation to save the Lake Serene trail, you’ll receive an exclusive member patch! The first 200 patch members to the happy hour will receive a special treat from the brewery! Learn more and donate at www.saveserene.org.“

You don’t want to surprise people or make them feel as though they were baited and switched. Spell out what you’re looking for upfront when you host events.

Ask for help

You won’t get help if you don’t ask for it. Forterra wasn’t shy about asking for help from their audience. In blogs, press releases, articles and on social media they asked their followers, supporters, and readers to help spread the word about their mission and their goal.

Nonprofits understand that some supporters don’t have extra money to give, but they can help raise awareness and share the message with their friends, family, and social networks. For those who couldn’t make a monetary donation, they wised up and asked for them to spread the message about what they were doing in an effort to reach a wider range of people with similar interests.

Here was their alternative ask:

People interested in helping to save Lake Serene Trail can learn more and donate at forterra.org/serene.

People who visit Serene, or have in the past, are encouraged to help spread the word over social media:

• Use #SaveLakeSerene with photos and posts on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram
• Use the geotag “Lake Serene–Bridal Veil Falls” when you share your photos
• Tag your photos with three friends you’ve hiked with or would like to hike with to raise awareness

Thank your supporters!

It goes without saying that raising $250,000 takes a massive community with a lot of love, and nobody could do this alone. Forterra took on a huge challenge and brought the right people to the table to achieve what they set out to do. Without the supporters, this never could have been done. Forterra understands the hard work and commitment it takes and they made sure their supporters were recognized for their contributions, participation, and activism in spreading the word.

It was just as much of an achievement for their community as it was for them, and they gave credit where it was due.

Want to get involved? Here’s what’s next.

The next project in Forterra’s the campaign is to secure the 320-acre Maloney Creek property in the town of Skykomish. The Washington Trails Association and Evergreen Mountain Bike Alliance have flagged a suite of new hiking and mountain biking trails that depart from an in-town trailhead and work up the scenic Maloney Ridge.

Forterra’s will help secure the keystone land. The property includes old growth, a critical habitat for endangered species, and protects the watershed above the town of Skykomish. 

If you have any questions about the project, you can contact Michael Beneke, the VP of Communications at Forterra at 206-204-8059 (office) or email him at mbeneke@forterra.org.

Follow Forterra on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter to keep up on what projects they’re working on!

**Featured Photo Credit- Brian Kilpatrick of One Summit Media

Editor’s note: All of Forterra’s hard work paid off! In October 2018, Forterra acquired the last privately-held piece of the Lake Serene Trail. Congratulations to all involved!

The post Forterra Uses Social Media to Help Save A Washington Treasure appeared first on Rival IQ.

We are incredibly excited to announce that HubSpot customers can now leverage Rival IQ’s social media analytics for free thanks to our integration partnership with HubSpot! We pulled the troops together to get this integration up and running just in time for INBOUND, HubSpot’s annual conference.

Free Rival IQ Social Analytics for HubSpot

Exclusive to HubSpot customers, this offer of a free lifetime subscription to Rival IQ delivers a powerful solution to refine the social component of inbound marketing, benchmark social performance against direct competitors, strengthen social marketing strategy, and discover actionable insights.

“Rival IQ provides HubSpot customers with an opportunity to benefit from meaningful social analytics, helping them identify content that resonates with their followers, which dovetails with the way they leverage HubSpot to optimize their inbound marketing strategy,” said Kevin Raheja, director of strategic partnerships at HubSpot. “Understanding social data helps marketers better manage their brand, programs, and campaigns across their social and inbound channels.”

Social marketing + @HubSpot friends, get amazing social analytics from @RivalIQ for free. https://t.co/cQ6b8FKZIL #INBOUND17 pic.twitter.com/OKdPfKqIWM

— Seth Bridges (@seth_bridges) September 26, 2017

Rival IQ enables marketers and brand managers to identify engaging content by providing critical competitive social insights, extending the value of their existing Hubspot subscription. Creating your free account and join the thousands of marketers who consider Rival IQ their secret weapon. 

“Rival IQ’s social media analytics complement the robust reporting on inbound marketing already available in HubSpot,” said John Gallagher, head of marketing at Rival IQ. “With free lifetime account access to Rival IQ analytics, HubSpot customers can immediately begin benchmarking social performance to the competition and start making more data-driven decisions based on comprehensive channel-by-channel engagement analysis.”

Get your free Rival IQ account

Do I qualify for a free Rival IQ account?

Active HubSpot customers who are subscribed to a Basic, Pro or Enterprise HubSpot account can sign up between now and September 30, 2017, for access to Rival IQ social media analytics for as long as they maintain a paid account with HubSpot.  

How do I access my free competitive social analytics?

Qualifying HubSpot customers can access their free Rival IQ social analytics by logging into Rival IQ with their HubSpot credentials at https://www.rivaliq.com/product/HubSpot/

Step 1: Follow link

Step 2: Click “Connect Rival IQ and HubSpot”

Step 3: Read through permissions. Click “Grant access”.

Step 4: Indicate whether your company is a brand or agency, then enter the website URL of your top 3 competitors, influencers, or any other organizations you’d like to compare your social performance with. Click “Continue” when you’re finished.

Step 5: Once Rival IQ has finished populating your landscape data, you’ll be redirected to the Rival IQ dashboard where you can dig into the data! Enjoy!

My account is set up. What Happens Now?

Within Rival IQ you’ll track yourself and up to 4 competitors across Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Going forward you’ll receive regular emails that include reports like Social Summary Report, Cross-Channel Performance Report, Social Post Report as well as intermittent alerts with noteworthy activity in your landscape.

Rival IQ gives you the power – you’ll be able to:

• Improve your social strategy with the right data for actionable insights to increase engagement, traffic, customers, and revenue
• Predict social performance, maximizing your social success
• Outshine your competitors with insight over your industry, performance, and strategy

Put your social analytics to use

Start by analyzing what social content is working across your landscape, and discover what you can do to drive your social strategy and tactics.

Social Posts summarizes social activity and engagement by pulling every post in your competitive landscape and presenting it in one comprehensive view. Use the breakdowns that matter most to you — hashtag, emoji, keyword/phrase, and more. Get started with social posts now.

Reach your goals with Rival IQ. Start benchmarking your social and understand how others are finding success with social media. Landscape Comparison gives you a solid comparison of the overall social performance. Use it to determine where your brand is compared to your competitors. See your comparison now.

The post Free Rival IQ Social Analytics for HubSpot Customers appeared first on Rival IQ.

Getting campaign buy-in from your boss, clients, or team is a hurdle too. You can transform the painstaking process of coming up with great (potentially viral) content using the social news hub, Reddit.

Reddit’s value as a source of inspiration was reaffirmed this year when I attended MozCon for the first time. There were so many fantastic speakers and topics I could write about, but Daniel Russell, the Digital Marketing Manager at Go Fish Digital, captured my attention with an intriguing talk about using Reddit as a tool to help inspire, inform, and curate new and creative content for your marketing team or client.

I love Reddit. I find myself perusing some of my favorite subreddits on a daily basis (time kill suggestions that will make you smile include r/aww and r/showerthoughts). I found it fascinating to learn how other marketers are using my favorite source of news and entertainment to make them better at their job.

What is Reddit?

Reddit is an online forum where over 250 million users form communities on the internet to post content, discuss topics, read and write reviews, have conversations and debates. It is currently the 8th most popular website on the internet and experienced over 274 million unique visitors in January 2017 alone. Reddit is arguably the biggest and best place to find content ideas, and you can be using this forum to come up with amazing content. Full stop.

Reddit’s Key Features for Marketers

So what makes Reddit so attractive to marketers?

Subreddits

Subreddits are smaller forums within Reddit dedicated to a particular topic. Examples include r/movies, r/content_marketing, and r/socialmedia. For example, r/movies is a subreddit where you can read reviews about a movie, watch the trailer, or discuss the movie with others. On a more relevant marketing note, r/content_marketing is a subreddit dedicated to content marketers helping each other improve content, give feedback, and share advice and tools from the trade. The subreddit, r/socialmedia is intended for professionals who are actively engaged in social media and community-oriented websites around the world.

Subreddits are powerful because you have people self-segregating themselves into interest groups and providing you topics that are important to them. What you’re digging for as a marketer is already happening organically on Reddit.  

As marketers, we’re always searching for more data that is going to inform us about who our target market is and what topics and issues are important to them. With so many users on Reddit, there is a subreddit for just about everything you can imagine, which makes this website so valuable.

Discussion Threads

People can comment on content as well as other people’s comments. When they do this, it’s called a discussion thread (go figure). By reading through discussion threads, you’re essentially tapping into a focus group discussing content that you haven’t even created yet.

To do this, simply find a piece of content you like on Reddit and read through the comments. You can analyze the sentiment for the content you might want to create. 

Ask yourself:

• Did they like the content?
• Did they hate it?
• Are they critiquing it? How?
• Are they discussing how that piece of content could have been better?

Upvoting/Downvoting

Upvoting and downvoting on Reddit is an ‘informal expression of the values of many Redditors”. Redditors upvote something if they think it contributes to the conversation and downvote something if it’s off-topic, irrelevant, or lacks value.

Upvoting and downvoting on Reddit will help you get buy-in from skeptical or risk-averse bosses and clients. You can look at the most upvoted content for new ideas and inspiration. Hundreds, sometimes thousands of people, have already validated the most upvoted content. You can take that idea to your boss and say, “People find this content valuable. Let’s create this.”

Ranking

The upvotes and downvotes contribute their ranking. Top content automatically bubbles to the top and becomes more visible to a wider reach of Redditors. Top content is determined by an algorithm of upvotes, downvotes, and time.

Ranking = # upvotes + # downvotes * time

If content gains popularity via upvotes in a short span of time, it has the potential to earn a spot on the front page. The front page is an amalgamation of the most popular content across all the subreddits.

Usually, the majority of content that actually makes it to the front page comes from the most popular subreddit channels. This is because more people belong to these channels, and therefore are more visible, faster to more people.

Rules of Reddit

1. No spam
2. No vote manipulation
3. Each subreddit has its own rules – read them!

For example, the Data is Beautiful subreddit has a rule stating that you can only post about politics on Thursdays. Violating rules can get you kicked out of subreddits.

How to Find the Golden Nuggets on Reddit

Become an active user

Use Reddit enough to understand the environment and the culture of the Reddit community.

Master Reddit’s Search Function

Reddit doesn’t have a sexy search bar, but it gets the job done if you know how to use it. Here are a few tips to help you get started.

Most Valuable Filter Combo: Top content of a particular subreddit + past month. This search combination will give you the most recent top content relevant to your target audience that hasn’t been “played out”.

Search by author: If you are interested in one user’s content

Search by website: If you’re trying to dig into a specific topic, like sports, you can look at what’s been most upvoted on ESPN.com

Sort by categories: Categories include top content (most upvoted), newest content, most comments, etc.

Search by Time Frame: Such as the last 24 hours, week, month, year

Limit results by particular subreddit: This helps to narrow down relevant content

Filter subreddits: You can search content posted on a particular subreddit or by the most controversial topics (controversial topics = most up and down votes)

Creating Great Campaigns with Reddit

So, how do you combine the most popular subreddits and the best content to transform these findings into something for your marketing team or your client? Here’s a mini case study Daniel discussed at MozCon to help illustrate how this works.

The Hydraulic Press Channel is a channel on YouTube where you can watch a guy crush things with a hydraulic press in his machine shop. Anything from cheeseburgers to anvils, this guy will crush it. People love it. Searching for a compelling video content idea for a jeweler client, Daniel noticed that videos from the Hydraulic Press Channel were trending on Reddit. 

Goals

• Backlinks
• Brand exposure

So, he got the bright idea to see if this guy would crush one of his client’s diamonds. After finding his email address, he reached out to make a deal. Go Fish Digital sent him a massive diamond from their client to crush for his channel. In exchange, they asked that mention who gave him the diamond, that he include a link to the client in the YouTube description, and to mention where he got the diamond from if reporters reach out to him. He agreed.

Results

• The Diamond Crushing Video became #1 on YouTube for over 24 hours (massive brand exposure)
• It received over 10.5 million views
• Every news outlet talked about it (including the weather channel)
• Bonus: they received a TON of backlinks (including to this blog)

Limitations using Reddit

When something sounds too good to be true, there’s usually a catch. The catch with Reddit is that its data is skewed. The Pew Research Center did a report and found Reddit users are more likely to be male, young and digital in their news preferences compared to the overall public. Here are some further demographics they uncovered.

Reddit users are:

• Overwhelmingly male. 2:1 ratio
• Young. 59% are between the ages of 19 and 29 years old
• Well educated. 48% have a college degree
  • Only 9% have a high school diploma or less
  • The rest are in college or have dropped out of college
• White. 74% identified as ‘white non-Hispanic’
• Liberal/Moderate Political views. 47% are liberal, 39% are moderate, and only 13% conservative.

These demographics reflect on Reddit users as a whole, so these limitations don’t necessarily apply to every subreddit. If you’re looking to create fresh content about women’s fashion accessories, the subreddit for women’s accessories is probably a better representation of your target demographic than the overall demographics of Reddit in its entirety.

Reddit is powerful because you have live data you can pull from people visiting the site on a regular basis. You have access to organic focus groups, and content ideas are validated long before you seek internal approval.

Good luck and happy Redditing!

The post Reddit: The Social Channel That Will Make You Look Like a Content Marketing Genius appeared first on Rival IQ.

In the last month, we’ve hosted two separate webinars about Facebook Ads. Each of them had a slightly different focus, but there was one common theme: They both elicited a TON of questions. We tried to keep the webinars short to make plenty of time for these inquiries and curiosities, but we simply couldn’t get through them all.

We figured others might have similar questions as well. So, we filtered through, categorized, de-duped and answered all of them to the best of our ability and wanted to share them with you. Cheers!

Webinar: “Level up your Facebook Ads”

Questions & Answers

Facebook Pixel

What is the Facebook Pixel?

The Facebook pixel is an analytics tracker that enables Facebook to monitor the behaviors of your website visitors. The Facebook pixel is used for 3 main functions:

• Building Custom Audiences from your website for re-marketing.
• Optimizing ads for conversions.
• Tracking conversions and attributing them back to your ads.

Technically speaking, the Facebook Pixel is a snippet of code (that Facebook provides you) that lives on the web pages where you want to track conversions.

How do I collect data from using the Facebook pixel?

You don’t collect primary data from using the Facebook pixel, Facebook does. Facebook uses that data to report conversion stats to you about your audiences and allows you to create more relevant audiences for you to target on Facebook.

Once you have the Facebook pixel set up on your website, it works by following and identifying users who visit your website. When someone visits your website and takes an action (like completing a purchase), the Facebook pixel is triggered and reports this action. This is how Facebook knows and reports conversions on someone you showed an ad to on Facebook, clicked on it, and landed on your website. This way, you’ll know when a customer takes an action and will be able to reach that customer again through future Facebook ads.

Is the pixel different than the facebook icon that links back to your Facebook page?

Yes, they are different. As mentioned above, the Facebook pixel is a snippet of code that lives on each webpage you want to track Facebook conversions, like a landing page for a white paper or a blog for instance. Your customers, website visitors, and co-workers will never see the facebook pixel (unless you have an engineer setup the code for you on your site.) The Facebook icon that you’ve added to your site is indicating to your web page visitors that they can find your organization on Facebook and simply acts as a link to your company’s Facebook page.

The Facebook icon that you’ve added to your site is telling your visitors that they can find your organization on Facebook. It simply acts as a link to your company’s Facebook page.

After installing the pixel, I want to be able to serve an ad related to the page they visited. Can you talk about that?

Yes, you can create a custom audience based on which pages on your website they have visited. You can read more about that on the Facebook’s Custom Audience page. 

Do you have any idea if the pixel slows down website load time? We’re having an issue with load time, so we’re avoiding adding the pixel.

From an engineering standpoint, the Facebook pixel should not slow down your website’s load time. It’s written in a way to tell your page to essentially skip paying attention to that code when loading a page.

Where do I get this script for the Facebook pixel? 

Here is a link to the Facebook Pixel Implementation Guide that explains how to install the Facebook Pixel including where to get the script.

Does that Facebook pixel fire for everyone who visits the website or only the paid traffic that you include the parameter for?

It fires for everyone who lands on that web page, not just those who were driven there from Facebook. This is critical information for lookalike audiences on Facebook and retargeting your website visitors on Facebook if you choose to do so. 

If you have your FB pixel ID on all pages and a potential customer visits multiple pages of your website, will FB only consider that one-page view conversion?

Great question! Yes. The pixel can live on every web page of your site. Conversions are determined based on what you assign them to be at the campaign level. So, as long as you have the Facebook pixel on the final page of the conversion process, and the Facebook conversion tracking is set up correctly, it will work. 

As a business school, our conversion is for people to apply for our programs, but they apply on a separate website than the one that we send them to. Is it possible to add my facebook pixel to a second website and is Facebook able to track those conversions through a conversions campaign?

Yes. You can put the pixel on multiple sites. You can put the pixel anywhere. There is a way to make it work properly. 

If your Facebook ad conversion is set up as a standard event, like visit the “application thank you page” then you just need to make sure that the Facebook pixel is set up on that web page. It may make more sense to create a “custom event” to ensure you’re tracking things correctly. We recommend you read up on the difference between ‘standard events’ and ‘custom events’ on this Facebook Help page to find out which will work best for your use case (you’ll have to scroll down about ⅓ of the way down).

Targeting

When designing a custom audience, you choose ‘males of a certain age group’ and get an estimate of the audience size. Then you add an ‘interest’ and sometimes the audience size goes up! How can that be when you’re narrowing it?

Our best guess is that you may be accidentally selecting the incorrect targeting by picking males OR interest rather than males AND interest. You’ll need to use the “narrow targeting” options.

If you’re already doing this and you’re sure it’s not working properly, it may be your cache affecting the audience visibility. Try clearing the cache and cookies on your web browser, then try narrowing your audience again. 

If it’s neither of these things, we suggest you reach out to Facebook and submit a ticket with their support team.

What are some reasons to load my customer list into Facebook?

Mostly, you’d add your customer list to Facebook to exclude them from receiving your ads or ads that aren’t relevant to them (ie. “start a free trial”). Of course, you probably have a list of people who aren’t customers yet that are sitting in the top of the funnel who you’d like to specifically target. This is another case scenario where you can upload that list to create a custom audience.

Other reasons include:

• You may want to add more touchpoints to a campaign you’re running for a segment of people you have in external lists.
• To block your existing customers or suppress current Facebook fans from seeing an ad on Facebook (to save money).
• You want to specifically target only your followers for special offers or create lookalike audiences for your ads.

Setting up your Ads

What is CTA?

A CTA is a “call to action”. This is the action you want someone to take such as “download” or “sign up”.

What constitutes a “conversion”?

A conversion is whatever you set it up to be. It could range from anything from landing on a specific page on your website to signing up for a webinar. When the user completes any action you’ve set up as the end goal, that is the conversion.

If I’m making an ad for a hotel and the URL is their reservations page, would conversions make more sense than traffic as a goal?

Yes, conversions would make sense as long as you have the Facebook pixel on the final page of the reservation process. You want it to record the conversion after they’ve actually booked at the hotel, so you want the Facebook pixel to fire when your customer has landed on the page after they make the reservation. As long as the Facebook conversion tracking is set up, you should be good to go. Once Facebook learns what sort of users will likely convert, it will begin to show the ad to those users.

When you saw the huge increase in CTR from changing your objective from clicks to conversions, did you change the copy/image/targeting or was everything else the same?

No, we changed nothing at all. Our aim was to test the same audience and the same ads, only changing the objective. We were curious to see what Facebook would do, and it turns out that Facebook does indeed know how to work its magic. In fact, we wrote a blog where we discuss this experiment and the results called, “Getting Started With Facebook Ads for B2B”.

Testing Ads

Is it true that you should go broad at first, or narrow when testing ads? I’ve been taught to go broad and then narrow it down.

There are numerous ways you can narrow down your audience. The method that’s Chris discussed in the webinar begins with setting up your personas, or identifying who you want to target. Once you have a good idea of who this target audience is, you’ll want to brainstorm ways to narrow this group down as much as possible. Then, tailor content to each of those personas. This way, your ads will show more relevant content to the different segments of your target audience.

Let’s say that you sell athletic gear. Your target audience consists of people who like sports. “People who like sports” is a pretty broad target audience, so think about how you can narrow this down. Let’s say it’s October, so you narrow this group down by type of sport – American football, soccer, and basketball. You will want to create separate ad sets for each of these interests.

Why? At first, Facebook’s algorithm will begin running your ads evenly across your audience. As time progresses and people engage with it, it will learn which types of people, say football fans, are more likely to respond to it. Then it will optimize to show your ad to that group more frequently. So if the majority of the clicks your ads are getting are from football fans, then Facebook isn’t going to show your ad to soccer and basketball fans. By creating three ad sets, one for each of these narrow audience segments, you can guarantee that each interest group will continue to see the ad (Facebook can’t optimize them out), you can see which of these three groups are responding to these ads best, the costs associated with advertising to each segment, and have the data in hand to make critical next step decisions (like test a new ad for an underperforming segment).

With all that said, this method can help you confirm if your ads are reaching your intended audience and if they’re actually working on that audience. Starting too broadly won’t allow you understand all of this.

Are A/B tests recommended for a page which is just starting out with little budget?

Yes, yes, yes! Always test your ads. Test out colors, people, images, faces, font, copy, buttons…. You name it! Make small iterations each time you run A/B tests and make adjustments based on your small learnings. A/B testing is a very good idea even if you have a limited budget. Bonus: if you are A/B testing and begin to spot trends and differences in ad performance, a great way to advocate for more budget is by taking these preliminary findings back to your executive team to demonstrate what you’re seeing.

How long do you test an ad?

We’d argue that it’s not about time frame, but rather about reach. You need enough data to know whether your results are meaningful. If you run an ad for two weeks, but only receive 100 clicks on 5 ads, you don’t have enough data points to make your findings reliable or powerful. Another aspect that’s important when testing ads is spend. The more budget you have, the more reach you will have. These things go hand-in-hand. When you’re testing, start out by spending $10/day on your ad set and let it run until you have enough data to make a meaningful decision.

How much should I spend per month per ad for a Facebook campaign?

That is impossible to answer because it’s really about what works for you. At Rival IQ, we spend anywhere between $100 – $500 a day on Facebook Ads, but we have customers who spend up to $5,000 a day. Your Facebook ad campaign spend is going to depend on budget, conversion goals, and your marketing strategy.

What are some reasons to use ads vs. boost a post?

The primary reasons to use Facebook Ads are to expand your reach and the ability to narrow down your audience segments. Using Facebook Ads will give you further reach into new audiences. Facebook’s robust targeting allows you to get granular in your audience targeting. Boosting is great if you’re simply interested in increasing your engagement more than an organic post would do on its own, but mainly you don’t feel the need or have the time to go back and fine-tune your targeting. It’s also nice when you’re pressed for time, but you want to get the word out about something.

Daily Budget vs. Lifetime Budget, Auto vs. Manual Bidding. Which do you recommend and why?

We will always go with daily budget over lifetime budget, and adjust it every few days based on how things are performing. If you’re doing a time-based campaign, for example promoting this webinar, lifetime makes sense: you have a specific goal and specific timeframe for when it will end. The types of ads we run for lead generation, for example offering a free whitepaper, we want to continue running the ads until the cost per conversion begins increasing and we’ve clearly saturated my audience. By using a daily budget and monitoring it, we’re forced to keep an eye on it and we know when it’s time to pull the ad.

We use auto bidding because we trust Facebook to do what is best based on my objective. After running a few experiments, we know that their algorithm is smarter than we’ll ever be. Check out a blog where we discuss experimenting with Facebook Ad objectives and the results here: “Getting Started With Facebook Ads for B2B”.

What best practices do you have a first timer testing remarketing ads on Facebook?

Here are the best practices we recommend for someone starting out:

• Install the Facebook pixel on your website.
• Start small. Test your ad sets with $20 per day to see what works.
• Use narrow audience segments to identify which groups have high costs vs. low costs (remember, this does not infer quality clicks!) and to ensure you’re reaching the audience you want.
• Test different objectives to discover which objective resonates with your audience most.

Also, if an ad performs well, does it cost less to run it?

Facebook wants to show people content that they like (it’s in Facebook’s best interest). If your content is engaging, Facebook is more likely to show it and charge you less money to incentivize you to create more.

It also depends on what your objective is. Sometimes, a higher quality lead may end up costing your more per click, conversion, etc., but they’re more likely to convert into a customer. Again, it’ll take more testing.

Managing Ads on Facebook

Is there a way of using the Facebook funnel with organic content? With all the ads you run to target different groups, that’s a lot to monitor. How do you manage that? In Facebook or in another program?

Yes, you can create audiences based on people who have already engaged with your organization’s Facebook page. If you’re just running content that’s getting huge engagement, you can create an audience of the people who engaged with that content people too (it’s a new feature!). Learn more on Facebook’s Custom Audience’s page (click the ‘Create Audience’ button to get started. 

How can you best provide budget recommendations for clients? In other words, how can you actually calculate how much it will cost to reach the desired KPI? How do you formulate an ad budget for a client to incorporate the testing period?

This is an incredibly complicated question that has no single answer. If we could work backward and give someone a perfect answer, they wouldn’t need marketing agencies or consultants, right? If we were to walk someone through this process we’d say, “If you want to see good results, you’ve got to spend at least $500 – $1000 a month.”

At the end of the day, it’s a numbers game and if you have low bids because you’re too sensitive to budget, you won’t reach the audience you’re targeting. The impressions won’t be there. You can’t spread yourself too thin.

Try offering to do a two-week discovery phase where we spend $50/day per an ad set that will amount to $500. With this information, you can determine what your budget will be moving forward. That budget will vary depending on if they’re looking for ad clicks vs. conversions. Collect as much information as you can during the discovery phase so you can try to offer them a realistic, slightly conservative estimate for an impactful budget. We understand this isn’t a very satisfying answer, but it’s honest. Success really depends on:

1. Their goals
2. Their target audience
3. Their budget

Facebook Ad Analysis

Where can I find which part of the audience/placement of an ad is underperforming?

The best way to do this is by narrowing down your target audience into smaller segments you’re interested in testing. To reiterate, Facebook’s algorithm will begin running your ads evenly across your audience. As time progresses and people engage with it, it will learn which types of people, say football fans, are more likely to respond to it. Then it will optimize to show your ad to that group more frequently. So if the majority of the clicks your ads are getting are from football fans, then Facebook isn’t going to show your ad to soccer and basketball fans. By creating three ad sets, one for each of these narrow audience segments, you can guarantee that each interest group will continue to see the ad (Facebook can’t optimize them out), you can see which of these three groups are responding to these ads best, the costs associated with advertising to each segment, and have the data in hand to make critical next step decisions (like test a new ad for an underperforming segment).

If you’re already doing this, and you’re asking how to identify underperforming ads, we recommend you use Rival IQ’s Facebook Ads Analysis tool. Once setup, it syncs up to your Facebook Ads data (in real time) and alerts you when an ad is underperforming based on all the other ads you’re running. The alert provides you with a direct link to that ad in Facebook Ads so you can turn it off or make adjustments. Otherwise, you’ll have to sign into Facebook Ads and manually analyze your ads to see which ads aren’t performing so hot.

Organic Posts

Knowing Facebook only promotes your content to 1/3 of your fans unless you promote it. What’s the best way to reach most of your fans without pissing them off? I have heard that most of your audience who already likes your page generally does not see your posts. How can you change that without huge money put towards boosting.

You have a couple of options. One, you can begin boosting your posts. Boosting is different from Facebook ads in that it takes an organic post from your page and turns it into an ad. You can choose to boost it to your existing audience. Boosting posts puts your content at the top of their feed.

Alternatively, if you don’t have the extra budget to increase your reach, you can increase posting the media type that Facebook’s algorithm prefers. For instance, Facebook wants you to stay on www.facebook.com. Therefore, posting content that will keep consumers of your post on Facebook will help increase your reach. Think native images, native video (not youtube videos–that drives traffic to youtube) and instant articles. Facebook prioritizes video. The more consistently you post native video, the further your organic reach. Keep your eyes open for a blog post coming soon about this from Rival IQ.

Can’t you boost posts to audiences that you chose outside of your followers?

Yes, you can. However, if you’re looking to reach a very specific audience, then jumping into Facebook Ads Manager and creating an ad is probably a better idea (for your budget). Boosting posts is a great tool when you’re in a hurry or looking to expand your reach to your fan base, but when you’re looking to optimized cost per click, we always recommend using Facebook Ads.

Resources and Tools:

Can you say his name again? john who?

Jon Loomer – Hands down the best resource for Facebook Advertising. Follow this guy @jonloomer ‏on Twitter!

What tools do you use?

1. I use AdEspresso, owned by Hootsuite to simplify A/B testing and bundle results of ad sets so they’re easy to consume. They have great reporting and updating of their ads
2. Rival IQ’s Facebook Ads Analytics has a great display of the demographic breakdown of my ads and tell me when my ads are underperforming.
3. The Chrome extension
4. Facebook’s Ads Mobile App is good for digging into demographics and tweak ad sets on the fly.
5. If you use Hubspot, use their ads reporting. It’s stellar!

The post Your Facebook Ads Questions, Answered. appeared first on Rival IQ.

We wanted to find out which NCAA Tournament teams are killing it when it comes to social – but not just in terms of audience size. In fact, we found that often times, teams with the biggest follower base had lower engagement rates.

That’s why this report delves deeply into what the most engaging NCAA Tournament teams are doing across Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to give you some great ideas and hopefully inspire your next post.

The 2017 March Madness Report

At Rival IQ, we built our software to help digital marketers not only analyze, interpret and improve their organization’s social media presence, but also enable them to compare their own metrics to all the competitors in their landscape. We took this technology and applied it to the 68 NCAA basketball teams who qualified for the national championship tournament to see how they’re harnessing the power of social media and discover which university is winning engagement on social media. You can find the methodology for this report at the bottom of this blog.

This in-depth report looks at each college and university’s cross-channel metrics as well as specific platforms audience and engagement. This blog covers some of the highlights of our report, but you can download it in its entirety here.

The Full Report Covers:

• See how your favorite team fares when it comes to social
• Best practice posts examples from Twitter, Instagram and Facebook
• Learn how to get a 30% engagement rate like Bucknell
• Kill it with GIGs like the Miami Hurricanes

Your Sneak Peek at what’s inside:

The Bracket

Here’s how the March Madness Tournament would pan out if teams went face to face based on their school’s cross-channel engagement rates on social media:

Cross-channel Metrics and Analysis

Engagement Rate

Total Audience

Social Media Best Practices on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter

Twitter Best Practices

Mood: ? pic.twitter.com/zJAnPQiYu3

— Miami Hurricanes (@MiamiHurricanes) February 21, 2017

Leverage video and .gifs like the Miami Hurricanes

While Twitter is traditionally more of a 140-characters of text medium, our data shows that posts with video and .gifs are usually better at generating engagement. Plus, you can’t express this kind of happiness in 140 characters. This is priceless.

Miami is lucky in that their coach isn’t shy in front of the camera and knows how to get down.

This post had a huge 16.3% engagement rate.

Our recommendation? Teach your coach how to dance (or don’t) and capture them on video when they’re bustin’ a move.

Methodology

We used Rival IQ to analyze social media posts across all social channels for the 68 NCAA Division 1 teams that qualified to compete for the national championship. We analyzed post data across a four-month period in beginning on November 11, 2016 through March 16, 2017, the first day of the tournament.

We gathered data using Rival IQ’s cross-channel ranking capability, as well as channel-specific rankings for Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. The cross-channel (or overall) ranking is defined by engagement rate across all channels for each university’s athletic department (meaning not exclusive to posts related to men’s basketball, but all social posts between the indicated dates).

Engagement is defined as measurable interaction on social media posts, including likes, comments, favorites, retweets, shares and reactions. Engagement rate is calculated based on all these interactions divided by total follower count.

We’ve also provided qualitative analysis with best practice examples from some of the top-performing organizations.

The post The March Madness Social Engagement Report appeared first on Rival IQ.

You’ve made your argument to the executive team that social media plays a critical role in achieving your business goals. You’ve even convinced them to allocate some of the budget into social media activities to build and grow the ideas you brought to the table. Now that they’re excited, you have to maintain their support. To show progress on all the wonderful things you’ve promised to do, you need to tell a story, featuring numbers.

In this post, we cover the metrics that matter and how to give those numbers power to continue successfully leveraging social media for the business.

Metrics That Matter

Here are the key social metrics you can use to tell a story about the progress and success of your social media strategy.

Engagement

Engagement Rate

Engagement rate is the key metric in social that indicates success. Social engagement made up of interactions and interest in your brand. For instance, when someone likes, comments, or shares/retweets your post. Calculate engagement rate by the number of these events divided by the number of impressions your post has.

Engagement Rate/Post

Engagement rate per post standardizes your engagement so you can compare it to your past performance, competitors, and other organizations that are targeting the same audience as you. Often, only a small percentage of posts get an abnormally high amount of engagement while the rest of them get a steady, more predictable level. By averaging it out, you can cut through the performance variability of single posts and focus on increasing engagement overall whether you’re comparing to yourself in a previous time period, or to competitors in your landscape.

Types of Engagement

As mentioned, engagement is defined as “interactions and interest in your brand” that most social channels calculate by adding up your post’s likes, shares, and comments. These types of engagement should not be treated equally. Each of these social metrics is communicating something different.

• Like: A ‘like’ is pretty straightforward. Your audience is telling you that they are interested in what you’re posting and that they would like to see more content like this. If your goal is to increase engagement overall, earning likes is a great place to start.

• Comment: A comment carries more weight than a like because it takes more effort to comment on a post than to like a post. When your audience comments, they have read your content, thought about it, and taken the time to start a conversation with you about it. Depending on the sentiment, when a post gets comments, they’re telling you it’s thought provoking and they either really like or dislike your content. If your goal is to increase conversation with your audience, measuring comments will do you good.

• Share: A share also carries more weight than a like. Not only does it take more effort to share a post then to like it, your audience has found it valuable enough to share it with someone else they know in hopes that they will find value in it too. If your goal is to establish yourself as a thought leader, number of shares is a good indicator that you’re on the right track.

If you can elicit a good engagement rate on social media, it means your content is resonating with your audience. The higher your engagement rate, the more likely your audience is to be loyal to your brand and spend money with you.

Awareness

Fans/Followers

One way to track awareness is by your fan/follower growth (or loss). Simply plot the total number of people in your various social networks per period, and you can see how your fans and followers are trending.

Audience Growth Rate

Calculate audience growth rate by dividing new audience members by total audience members on each social channel. This way, you can see which channels are experiencing the highest and lowest levels of growth (or loss), helping you prioritize which channel to focus on first.

Mentions

Another way to measure awareness is by keeping track of the number of times your brand is mentioned online per a given period. You can use tools like Buzzsumo or Moz to listen for mentions across the internet or Rival IQ for mentions on social media.  

Social audience growth indicates that your message is successfully making it past your current followers to new, relevant markets. Wider reach happens when your followers share your content to their networks, tag your organization in a post, when you use hashtags correctly, post in social communities, or when you boost posts or create social ads with proper targeting.

Reach

Post Reach

You know how many fans and followers you have, but not everyone in your social audience sees every post you create. Post reach is the estimated number of people who see a specific piece of content at least once during a given period.

Each social channel has a unique algorithm for deciding which of your posts reach a certain percentage of your audience. Keep an eye on your reach metric, and you’ll notice that different post types (status update, photo, video, live video, etc.) elicit different levels of reach. Take note and adjust your strategy to maximize your social reach.

It’s crucial to create a baseline of these social metrics for your organization because they’re most relevant when the time comes to tie social performance to high-level organizational goals.  Communicate to leadership that these are the metrics that matter. Once everybody is aligned to what the important metrics are, what they tell us and how they impact the business, you need to be able to report on them on a regular basis.

Metrics That Tie Social To Revenue

Traffic & Conversions

Beyond social metrics, you need to be able to tie activities on social media to how they drive traffic to the website. If you can attribute a visitor on your website to a Facebook post, then you can demonstrate that your social media activities are getting the job done.

Google Analytics will tell us a range of things that will help you tie your social media efforts to revenue. They include:  

• How many people are visiting your website?
• Which pages are they visiting?
• Are they bouncing?
• Where did they come from?
• Which social posts are getting people on your website (if you’re using UTM’s… use Google’s UTM Builder!)
• What content is driving sign ups?

Take this data will help you better understand how you’re interacting with that audience, the steps that they take once they’re on your website, and where you can improve your website to keep them there.

Powering Up Your Metrics

Competitive Benchmarking

Key performance indicators like Net Promoter Score, the number of clicks on a social post, or even a player’s batting average tells someone a lot about what is happening as a result of their activities. But it tells them nothing regarding whether their efforts are successful, failing, or where to focus on closing those gaps. Why? Because benchmarks are relative.

Incorporating benchmarks into your social reporting is crucial to outperforming your competitors on social media. You need to look at your competitors and other organizations targeting the same audience as you to establish context so that you get a baseline understanding of what they’re doing and how they’re performing on social media. You can discover your competitive benchmarks for free with Rival IQ. 

Using Rival IQ, Burberry can see their social performance analytics compared to the averages of their direct competitors on their Instagram dashboard.

Example Scenario:

The head of marketing wants a report on social media activity. As a part of your report, you might say, “Hey, I’ve grown our social audience by 2%”. However, without context, they won’t understand if 2% is a good level of growth or not. If month over month audience growth in your competitive landscape is 5%, you’ve given that 2% metric context–you have room for improvement.

Conversely, you may find that your engagement rates are at 0.5%, which may not feel like success. However, looking at your competitors, you could find that they’re only getting 0.25% engagement rate. That casts your half a percentage point in a whole new light. Competitive benchmarking is important because it gives your social metrics context and meaning on an individualized level.

Results, Outcomes, and Benefits

It all comes down to telling the story of how social media has helped achieve business goals. If the organization is seeing progress in the right direction, tell the story of how social helped. Narrate how the leaps and bounds in audience size and online mentions have led to higher brand awareness. Or, how higher engagement and more social conversations have led to a higher Net Promoter Score. Maybe you’ve been able to show that a handful of campaigns last quarter drove X number of new sales opportunities. You have the data, now write the story that demonstrates impact.

Social media is a perfect place to test out new ideas. Some ideas work, but many don’t. If an initiative you sold to leadership turns out to be a dud, don’t stress! Discuss what you set out to do, what happened as a result, and most importantly what you learned. The primary focus should be talking about what your team learned and what iterations you plan to make next. 

The ability to walk through the logic, track behaviors, and answer questions are key to effectively explaining the impact of social media. Data, a little bit of critical thinking, and a storyline are everything you need to justify social media.

The post Social Media Metrics that Matter appeared first on Rival IQ.

It’s  2017. You’d think that marketers wouldn’t still be convincing executives that social media is a vital part of your marketing mix, but unfortunately, that’s not the case. We hear frustrations from marketers at all kinds of organizations – B2B, B2C, Nonprofit Organizations, NFL teams, Universities – you name it! The good news is that it doesn’t have to be such an uphill battle. We’ve put together a few actionable steps you can take to clearly communicate the value of social media to your executive team and even persuade them to invest in more social efforts.

Frustrations we hear:

• “I can’t get more budget for social media even though it’s where our audience is”
• “Our executives don’t realize how much our competition is investing in social”
• “I know social media has helped the company, but I can’t show how”
• “I’m overwhelmed and I can’t convince anyone to approve budget to help me”
• “Senior leadership treats social as an afterthought”
• “Our audience is growing, but I can’t explain why”

Align Your Goals

How do you convince someone to jump on board with your idea? You do research to find out what’s important to them first. Then, you do some critical thinking to align your goals. How can your proposal help them achieve their goals?

The same technique applies to prioritizing social media. Start by aligning social media with existing team, department or company goals. You need to be able to demonstrate that your social media efforts are needed to support broader company objectives. Show them where social media fits.

Example Scenario:

Your company has a goal of increasing their NPS (Net Promoter Score). You have a goal of increasing budget for social media efforts. Think about and understand all the ways that social media might be able to help increase your company’s NPS. Then, tell them a story about how social can be used to improve customer loyalty through sharing content your audience is interested in, increase customer retention by using Twitter as a channel for customer support and creating better communication with your customer base by having timely conversations with them. Because tying movement on the NPS needle directly to a social post is unlikely, explain to them that you want to see if there’s a correlation between content engagement and NPS or Twitter support use and NPS. It’s not a perfect science, but you’re making a logical argument that can be measured in a proactive way.

Demonstrate that Social Media Drives Revenue

One of the most difficult challenges marketers face today is the expectation that every marketing dollar spent could and should be tied to revenue. In reality, there is implicit value to many marketing efforts that we simply cannot assign an accurate ROI. However, that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try. If we want something from someone, we need to be able to speak their language. For many (not all) executives, that language is in terms of dollars.

Tying social media activities to revenue can be difficult, but it’s the best argument for increasing investment in social media. Find a way to show that social posts are driving new leads, customers or revenue to grow the business. One way we do this is by tracking EACH SOCIAL MEDIA POST. Yes, I said it. It’s time-consuming, but it works.

You can do this by using Urchin Tracking Modules. A UTM code is a simple code that you attach to a URL to track the source, medium, and campaign of your traffic. It tells Google Analytics where your prospects and customers came from (source), how they found the content (social media), and which campaign it was associated with (campaign; content). There are additional values you can track too including campaign name, term and content type to differentiate your ads. Start by using Google’s Campaign URL Builder.

At Rival IQ, we use a social media account management tool called Buffer. We schedule our posts weeks in advance (with a little wiggle room for timely content) and Buffer automatically assigns a unique tracking code to each post. When I open Google Analytics, I can see exactly which lead conversions initially found us through social media. That’s lead generation, and leads have a dollar value assigned to them.

Explain the Power of Promotion

This is where the implicit value of social media marketing comes into play. Increasing engagement, attracting top talent, solidifying your reputation and communicating with customers and prospects quickly all have immense value to your organization. This is like second-nature to you, but not necessarily to your leadership team. Be able to help them understand that social media is the central place where potential and existing customers will engage with your brand.

What’s the first thing you do in the morning? Do you check your email, news and social media on your phone in one hand while hitting the snooze button with the other? So does your audience. Your brand needs to be in front of the millions of people who do the exact same thing in their morning routine so they’re thinking about your brand, product or service throughout the day. Social media is like the modern-day billboard. Get in front of your audience and promote your brand where your potential customers are already going – on social media!

Anticipate Objections To Your Argument

Know going in that you’re going to get push-back. Understand why social is not a top priority at your organization and address it directly with facts and data. Bringing data to an emotional fight is a quick way to win an argument.

Common arguments you might encounter:

1. “Social media doesn’t contribute to revenue”
2. “It’s a B2C concept”
3. “An intern can do it, so it must not be important”
4. “It’s inexpensive and you’re only going to get out of it what you put in – nothing.”

Come to the meeting with a rational argument that is solutions-driven and backed with data to make your points. If you don’t have data to make your point, then ask for the resources (budget, time, headcount, etc.) to test things out on social media to collect the data you need. Your manager will appreciate your logical approach, taking initiative and asking for the opportunity to collect the information to make your argument for an investment in social media.

The post Justifying Social Media To Your Executive Team appeared first on Rival IQ.

Broadway Briefing, the must-read morning newsletter for theater professionals, launched a weekly social media analytics report for top producers, investors, and promoters in the theater industry. Powered by Rival IQ, the report provides an unprecedented perspective on Broadway shows’ social successes, as well as the opportunities to increase awareness, engagement, and sales with theater-goers. You can read the full press release here. 

A Whole New Path to the Great White Way

As an industry with 46 million annual attendees in the U.S. and over $1.3 Billion in ticket revenue annually, Broadway shows are one of the most popular tourist attractions in New York City. Known to have the best performances in the world, the theater industry on Broadway has to put forth a tremendous amount of effort to effectively market their productions. With up to 40 different Broadway shows playing at any one time, Broadway shows must actively market themselves to ensure new or continued success.

With the recent improvements to social advertising on channels like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, the transition from traditional advertising methods to online marketing, namely social media, is in full swing. Shifting the promotion of an organically non-digital form of art, like a Broadway show, onto social media is no easy feat. However, productions like Hamilton seem to be figuring out how social media platforms can allow productions to take their shows beyond the stage, attracting a younger audience to the theater. Shows playing on Broadway in New York City are honing in on what they need to do reach, inspire and engage their audience on these digital platforms. In 2016, they’ve managed to gain a lot of traction.

Top Broadway Posts for 2016:

#1 Post – The Color Purple

#2 Post – Kinky Boots

#3 Post – Dear Evan Hansen

#4 Post – Hamilton

#5 Post – Wicked

Theater professionals are clearly making an impact. Matt Britton, the owner of Broadway Briefing, picked up on the need for more social data and a better understanding of social marketing activities in the industry. Regardless of the type of business or industry; digital marketers have a good knowledge-base about their performance on social media, but without benchmarks and an understanding of competitors’ social performance, you can begin to feel a little lost. Theater professionals face the same struggle. Matt saw an opportunity for a solution; to create a weekly report that will help producers learn from one another and become better social marketers.

Bringing the right data to the right people

“With this exciting update to our ‘Broadway Briefing Pro edition, Rival IQ provides our Pro readers with actionable social data and analysis the theater industry can use to make better, more informed social marketing decisions,” said Matt Britten, owner at Broadway Briefing. “For theatrical professionals with limited access to industry-wide shared data, this new weekly report will certainly provide uniquely informative insights.”

Subscribers to ‘Broadway Briefing Pro,’ receive a weekly summary, analysis and insights of social activity for all 30+ Broadway shows, providing the opportunity to learn social media best practices and industry benchmarks. The new addition to Broadway Briefing Pro’s content lineup informs Broadway’s top players, thought leaders, and marketers about the social activity and specific content that is resonating best with their audiences and helps them increase the impact of their social media efforts.

“Rival IQ is pleased to provide Broadway Briefing Pro readers with social analytics and insights to accelerate their marketing results,” said John Gallagher, vice president of marketing at Rival IQ. “The information shared in the newsletter every week will inspire new types of social content and uncover creative ways to keep audiences engaged with their favorite form of entertainment.”

The Broadway Briefing Pro edition includes exclusive industry insights and analysis — created for Broadway professionals, by Broadway professionals. For more information, visit broadwaybriefing.com and broadwaybriefing.com/pro.

The post Social Media… On Broadway! appeared first on Rival IQ.

You can follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter or Instagram for your tip of the day. Enjoy!

The Rival IQ Team

Check out this video for the last week’s Marketing Tips from Rival IQ! Explore the rest below!
 

Have a Consistent Message

 
You’ve got a brand voice, right? So use it. You want your social posts to sound like they came from the same person – your brand. Your audience will notice if you suddenly shift and start screaming or making crass jokes. Stick to the voice your audience knows and loves.

Be Timely

 
Social channels have become the first stop for breaking news. Your audience is conversing on every topic under the sun. When there’s a conversation that relates to your audience, tap into it. Of course, it’s critical to stay relevant. But even seemingly unrelated brands can jump in. Snowmaggedon about to rear its ugly head? That resort in the warm and sunny south sounds good.

Don’t Forget Humor

 
No matter your brand voice, humor should be a component. Successful brands find ways to balance humor with their brand, even for the most serious brands (think hospitals and nonprofits). Your audience will appreciate the relevant humor and it’ll make your day managing social channels more enjoyable.

Conduct a Social Audit

 
Before jumping in head-first to tackling a social media strategy remodel, run a social media audit of your current social media presence. Take a look at what you and your competitors are doing. By watching where and how your competitors are gaining traction, you can make better decisions about which steps you should take next in improving your social media strategy.

Favorite Marketers Design Tool: Canva

 
Not all marketers are designers. We know that first-hand. A tool we use for all of our blog posts and many of our social posts is Canva. Its drag-and-drop system, professional layouts, and templates enable anyone to become a designer on the fly. My favorite feature is the Magic Resize feature so your one design is instantly resized to fit the social channels of your choice for quicker social management.

Boost Posts, but not all of them…

 
Trying to figure out which posts to boost? Start with those posts that are already getting good engagement rates. If all of your content has great engagement, look specifically at number of shares. A high number of shares or retweets indicate that your audience is already enjoying that piece of content enough to share it with other they think will enjoy it too. Odds are, that more than just your followers are going to find this content compelling as well.

Personalize Whenever Possible

It’s become common practice to personalize consumers names into emails, but it’s a challenge to personalize in other marketing practices. Use your customer data to leverage granular targeting on social media channels like Facebook and LinkedIn to target your audience by their interests, profession or other demographics.

Track Absolutely Everything

Impressions and engagement rates aren’t the only metrics you should be measuring in regards to your social media posts. Use UTMs (or Urchin Tracking Modules) or URL shorteners, like Bitly, to track traffic from each specific social post to your website or landing page. This way, you can actually tie revenue and measure success down to the social post.

Join a Community, or two, or three…

If you’re looking for a better way to understand and speak to your audience, consider joining different online communities to find out what other professionals are doing and what issues your customers are experiencing. Being a part of an online community (or two) can give you critical insight into who your audience is and what they want.

Start with the Hook

The title you use in any piece of content to hook them is crucial to increasing engagement. Give them just enough information to catch their attention and make them want to read more.

When in doubt, try it out!

Try mixing up the content you’re posting on your social channels so your message doesn’t get stale. Feel free to experiment and A/B test with new social content, media types (like live video or .gifs) or joining a new social media channel.

Reward Loyalty

 
Leverage your social media channels to give your most loyal fans, followers and customers a shout-out! Retaining your loyal customers is easily overlooked, but the truth of the matter is that retaining customers is easier and way cheaper than finding new customers. Take the time to incorporate rewarding loyalty and retention into your social marketing strategy.

Use Data to Take Action

Follow your numbers! Use the data in your reports to make data-driven decisions that will improve your metrics and social strategy. Check out these marketing tools to help you make better data-driven marketing decisions.

When in doubt, use Kittens!

 
Social media is about connecting with your audience and using emotion is incredibly effective. People love animals, so use them to connect with your audience and find that spike in social post engagement. Read about the many ways you can use psychology to capture attention, drive engagement leveraging emotion, and increase shares on social media.

Favorite Marketing Tool: HARO (Help A Reporter Out)

 
Having a PR agency can be a luxury for many brands, with Help a Reporter Out (HARO) you’re an email away from relevant journalists. By signing up for HARO, you’ll have daily opportunities for media coverage. HARO segments by industry, so you’ll get the most relevant requests to your inbox 3 times a day.

Create a Social Calendar, but…

Create a social media calendar, but don’t be afraid to change it! A social calendar will prevent last minute post scrambles and help keep your content strategy aligned with your social campaigns. Pay attention to breaking news, trends and timely content to sprinkle in as it comes up too.

Engage your Employees

Your employees are one of your most valuable assets. Leverage employees to help further your social reach by encouraging them to share and like your posts. Many hands make light work.

Repurpose your Content

Repurposing content is a marketers’ best-kept secret! If you find yourself in a content slump, look to your content archives for inspiration, because you’re sitting on a gold mine! If you’ve written five different blogs on one topic, consider mashing them up into an eBook or whitepaper. Take your most viewed video on YouTube and cut it into bite-sized video clips and post them on social media. The possibilities are endless, and you’ll save lots of time.

Don’t forget your Keywords

Remember your keywords when you’re creating content. Let your keywords help drive your content strategy to align your SEO and content strategies. Consistently using your keywords will increase your ranking when potential customers search for you. Refrain from littering your content with keywords, but don’t forget to use them.

Steal like an Artist

Watch what your competitors are doing for a couple reasons. The first is so you’re in the know on the competitive front. The second is to learn what content works the easy way – by watching what content does and doesn’t resonate with your audience.

The 80/20 Rule

The 80/20 rule applies to your social marketing posts as much as it does business. 20% of your content should be promotional, and 80% should be entertaining, informative, and trending content primarily for increasing engagement.

Join a Community, or two, or three…

If you’re looking for a better way to speak to your audience, consider joining different online communities to find out what other professionals are doing and what issues your customers are experiencing.

Follow the Fear

Fear is a powerful emotion, which is why so many marketers use fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) to make customers stop, think and change their behavior. Use fear to drive someone to action by proving to the consumer that they
1. Are likely to be affected by something
2. When it affects them, it will be painful
3. You have the ability to avoid this pain

Prioritize Quality over Quantity

Prioritize Quality over Quantity. Get to know your audience to understand the type of content they enjoy so you can spend your time finding quality content to share with them. Otherwise, you’ll be spinning your wheels posting content at random in hopes that something will stick. To start, take a look at the content you’ve already posted and identify the most engaging pieces. Create and curate similar content to increase engagement.

Be Efficient. Schedule your Social

When you’re in charge of social media at your organization, you realize how much of a time-suck posting across multiple channels becomes. Consider using scheduling tools, like Buffer, to schedule out your social posts to be more time-efficient. You can plan content out weeks, even months in advance allowing you to free up the rest of your work week.

There’s no such thing as a ‘best time’ to post

There’s no such thing as a ‘best time’ to post on social media. Your audience is unique to your industry, which means the social channels and times they’re most active and engaging are probably different than the general population you find referenced in blogs and articles across the internet. As you gain followers, track when they’re most active and adjust your posting times to them.

Embrace the Emoji

Embrace the emoji! Try using emoji’s in email headlines, hashtags and social posts to communicate emotions and ideas. You may be surprised at how it affects open rates and engagement.

Use Hashtags, but not too many!

Using hashtags are not optional on Instagram and Twitter! Hashtags help you grow your audience, increase engagement and optimize your social media strategy. The magic number of hashtags to use is seven. It’s just enough so you’re not leaving reach on the table without coming off as spammy.

Favorite Tool: Trello

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