We often have clients coming to us complaining that social media isn’t working for them – whether it’s for organic growth or for their social media advertising efforts.
But more often than not, we have found that there are a few crucial factors that – without them – can significantly affect your online success.
Here are the 5 things we believe that you should have in place in order to set yourself up for success on social media management.
A responsive website
This one is a big one. When we run ads for your brand, we have to direct them somewhere – and that somewhere is your website. Having a functioning + eye catching website that is responsive across all devices is essential to getting those leads in the long term. A good website tells the viewer that your business is legit, and it will be the main thing that will get them over the line – a poorly functioning website will only lead to a high bounce rate, and a frustrated viewer (leading to negative associations with your brand – something you definitely don’t want!)
For example, an e-commerce site that doesn’t have the shopping cart working properly is going to waste any marketing budget used in your social media campaigns to drive shoppers to your site as it won’t yield any results.
You only have 5 seconds to capture and hold your viewer’s attention – and in a digital world where the viewer is inundated with so many choices, you want to make sure your website is one worth staying on!
A brand guideline
No, a brand guideline isn’t just your logo and fonts – a proper guideline includes language, tone, brand voice, brand messages, in addition to accepted secondary and tertiary design elements, and accepted visual types that can be used in future marketing collateral. (Most of this should be provided by your graphic designer when they give you the logo they have created for you).
Having a clear, concise brand guideline in place will ensure that your branding and message is consistent across all marketing efforts and platforms. This makes life easier for your marketing teams, your design teams, and your social media teams to work together and ensure that all ideas, efforts and messages put forward will work cohesively and match visually.
Your 6 word story
This is important as all of your marketing messages will be derived from your 6 word story. What is a 6 word story? It is your business, summed up in 6 words. It can be individual words, it can be a sentence, it can be two sentences – there’s no ‘right’ way to do it. It takes a while to craft one, and it may change in the future as your business evolves, but it is important that you have this written down before starting any social media things. Whenever we are stuck creating content for clients, we look to their 6 word story for content inspiration; it’s the heart of the business. When you know ‘who’ you are, it will be easier for us to tell your audience ‘who’ you are and ‘what’ you stand for.
If you don’t know who you are – your audience doesn’t know either, which then makes it hard for them to tell other people about you. Keep it simple and memorable, and it will make for content that is consistent and memorable too.
Clear, quality pictures or videos of your products or services
This point is not just for retail or food businesses – this applies to services too. Putting a face to a name is key to helping build relationships with your customers on social media. Real people will always dominate over the stock images or clean cut graphics (though is a place for the latter, where appropriate). Having a stockpile of high quality imagery will make it easier when producing content and ads. At the end of the day, social media is for just that – being social. It might be a company page, but it’s still people talking to people – and that is what your audience is seeking when they come to your page. They’re looking to speak to a real person on your team when they want to discuss your products or services.
A clear marketing strategy or business goals
Coming armed with a clear idea of the goals you want to achieve from your socials definitely helps us derive a clearer social strategy for you. We have had people approach us with grand, but vague, ideas of where they want to go.. which isn’t bad, but it makes it harder for us to discern which area you want to focus on first. We’re mindful of your budgets and how they get spent – so we want to be sure when we enact our strategies, they’ll get the results that you’re after.
If you’ve got these five things at the ready, it makes things a lot easier for us to help you reach the digital marketing goals you want to achieve.
If you are looking to give your social media a kick start this year – give us a call; we like to start with coffee.
