Welcome to Part 2 of our Digital Marketing Elements guide! If you missed Part 1 then we recommend that you head on over here and have a read before coming back to this blog, but if not, then you’ll remember that while these blogs are far from an exhaustive list, they’re the issues that came to mind as we brainstormed common trouble spots when it comes to commonly neglected elements of digital marketing that should be looked at more often. This week we’ll be focusing on Social Media and Content Marketing in particular, with a little look at the thing that connects the two: Engagement. Let’s start with the thing we most often find bites a business when they don’t keep up to date.
New Social Media Advertising Guidelines and Targeting
Whether it’s just the staples like Facebook and Instagram, or even Pinterest, Twitter and Snapchat, there are updates galore happening all the time across all social media platforms. It could be something as simple as an algorithm change that requires slightly different posts from you, or as complicated as the removal of vast swathes of targeting options you previously used (For example: Facebook Pay Per Click Marketing after the Cambridge Analytica scandal), you could find your efforts and your budget at a disadvantage should an important part of how you utilise marketing change and let’s face it, in this world it very likely will.
It’s best to break this down into two distinct areas to pay attention to:
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Organic Social Media Changes:
These are changes that affect how your posts, pages & accounts are exposed to users when you’re not paying for an increase in said exposure. It involves things like an Instagram photo, a hashtag, a Facebook post or a YouTube video, or the way you describe or define yourself in your profile. All of these things are subject to algorithms whether they affect a feed or an internal search engine within the platform. You may remember that a while back Facebook started algorithmically preferencing video that was uploaded directly to Facebook over YouTube links and stopped letting YouTube videos autoplay (or play within Facebook at all in some cases). Many people were impacted by this change and some (even though they were aware that it had happened) neglected making the change for far too long to the point where it severely affected their engagement and business. For this reason, we’d suggest you head on over to Forbes where they’ve compiled a pretty great list of places to stay up to date.
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Paid Media (Advertising) Changes:
If it’s not already self-explanatory, changes here affect the ads that you’re actually spending money on, which makes it even more important with regards to staying up to date. We don’t by any means want you to deprioritise point 1, but if you have to choose where to allocate your time from a pure sales based angle (and you’re not concerned with the reputation aspects of the organic elements of your social media presence), then we’d again suggest the outline of the blog in the Forbes link above, but here are a few more for good measure. If you’d like an example of how this area of your marketing might be impacted, we’d again point you to the Cambridge Analytica Scandal, which had strong repercussions with regards to what could be targeted via Facebook advertising. This move had many existing campaigns that were otherwise doing well suddenly fail to perform as their targeting options were suddenly made unavailable.
Online Customer Engagement Data
This one is brief, but there is one noteworthy element of engagement that no-one seems to want to acknowledge when it comes to both social media and straight content marketing and that’s percentages. Forget which Facebook post has more likes, the correct way to think about it is “which Facebook post has the highest percentage of likes per number of users”. If you had a post that got 10 likes for the 10 people it was shown to vs a page that got 10 likes for the 100 people it was shown to then the former was more valuable. You just need to figure out how to get that first post out to more people. The same goes for content on your website. If you’ve got Google Tag Manager installed (as covered in our previous blog), then you shouldn’t be concerned just with how many clicks a blog gets, but with how much of it is being read (meaning how far down the page they scroll, as GTM can track). The percentage of engagement rather than the straight number of a particular action. You might find a blog with a lower click-through rate, but I higher level of engagement, so it then falls to you to check for other reasons it might have a lower click-through rate because clearly, the content is engaging (and a side note, sometimes better-targeted content naturally has lower CTR’s because it’s more targeted and not pulling in irrelevant clicks). Look for more meaningful engagements and measure those.
Campaign Cohesion
We’ll end on this note today. If you’re someone who already does pay attention to everything we’ve spoken about in these blogs and makes changes to their accounts accordingly, it can become easy to lose sight of the fact that all of these efforts need to lock in together if you’re going to have a consistent tone of branding that is recognisable across all channels. If you’re updating each of your marketing platforms and campaigns in bits and pieces over time then it’s worth making sure that they don’t become disjointed with one another. It could be messaging, or something a simple as a colour scheme or compulsory tagline that you use across everything, but cohesion/consistency is always key to a great multi-platform marketing campaign. Check in every now and then across the board to ensure that this hasn’t been lost.
And that’s it from us again! We hope you’ve learnt a few things over the past couple of weeks and as is always the case, please feel free to get in touch if you’d like to know more. You can also leave a comment below if you’d like. Until next time!
