How Customers Can Do The Marketing For You Via User Generated Content

5Mar

Content Creation, Facebook, Local Marketing, Marketing, Social Media

You go into your favorite pizza shop and on the counter next to the cash register is a small sign that says “Like us on Facebook!” At your eye doctor, right next to display of business cards, there’s a laminated flyer that says “Give us a good rating on Facebook!” Even at your child’s school, they’re doing a fundraiser and encouraging parents to share the info on social media.

Yes, social media has indeed integrated itself into nearly every aspect of our lives. But have you noticed something in the above examples? All of these organizations are asking customers / patients / patrons, to interact with their social media channels.

When your customers engage with your brand on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and the other platforms, they are solidifying its identity and legitimacy as credible company. The beauty of social media marketing is that when you have an engaging online presence, your customers essentially do the work for you by tagging your accounts, commenting, rating, and much more.

This is the “social” part of social media — your customers are sharing their story and perception of your brand. We call this User Generated Content (UGC).

Why is UGC so important? It allows customers to share their story and build a relationship with your business. By creating this content, they’re participating in one of the most responsive and innovative forms of customer service ever conceived. The best part of this is that your customer’s friends will see their review, like, or comment and as a result, your brand’s visibility will increase. The term “word-of-mouth” just received an upgrade, and it’s amazing for business.

So, you may be wondering, how do I get my followers talking? This is a valid question. After all, it doesn’t benefit your company to have, say, 5,000 followers if none of them are engaging with your brand. Here are just a few tips that could help you get people talking online and increase UGC.

1. Host a contest requiring participants to comment, follow, or leave a review.

2. Directly ask customers to engage with your company on social media (as the pizza shop, eye doctor, and school did.)

3. Share polls with your followers.

4. Offer social-media-exclusive discounts on social media.

5. Start asking your customers questions. The pizza shop could ask “What topping combo should be Flavor of the Month?”

6. Create content that your customer will find useful and that they will want to share, such as blogs and podcasts.

These are just a few ways to increase UGC. However, one thing that is important to keep in mind is that all this is meant to start a conversation. You need to respond, thank them for their comment, and encourage them to continue this customer-brand relationship.

At The Go! Agency, we take pride in generating UGC for our clients through our content and target advertising. If your brand isn’t getting any love online, contact us! We can get the ball rolling for you!

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The One Mindset That Will Ruin Your Target Advertising

By Christopher Tompkins

28Feb

Facebook, Facebook Advertising, Marketing, Social Media

In our last blog, we spoke about the importance of focusing your audience when you are working on Facebook advertising. This is an extremely important step in reaching the right audience. But time and time again, we hear from professionals who say, “My product is for everybody.”

Having this mindset is when problems start to arise.

There is a distinct possibility that you sell a product or service that could technically be used by everybody. However, that does not mean that every person wants/needs your product.

Everyone drinks water, for instance, so you could easily assume that the target audience of a bottled water campaign would be everybody. However, this disregards the fact that “everybody” would include multiple types of people (demographics), each of which would be best communicated with in a different way. Creating a marketing campaign that speaks to everyone is nearly impossible as different groups receive messages in different ways.

Think of everyone who lives on your street. They all have different ages, different interests, different ways of talking and thinking. So trying to create one style of marketing that would connect with each of them would be impossible.

It’s not just a good lesson for marketing, but a good lesson for life. You can’t be all things to all people.

Even if your product can be used by everybody, it’s best to target your marketing at a specific demographic instead, to make your message more effective. It’s better to hit a million people with a campaign that resonates with them, rather than hitting a billion people with something that makes them all feel apathetic.

In a perfect world, it wouldn’t be the job of your marketing department to choose this target audience anyway, it would happen while developing the product and branding it. Creating a bottled water that appeals to a certain demographic is better than a bottled water that’s supposed to appeal to everybody, and then has marketing targeted at a certain group.

A product or service can die quickly if there is no target demographic even as the product is being thought up. The more thought that is put into your product at the early stages, the better.

This is why it is essential for you to use social media’s plethora of tools to hone in on your ideal customer.

At The Go! Agency, our team of marketers are working hard to ensure our message reaches the right people! All this is so our clients gain optimal online visibility!

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Change Is Good: Why You Need To Tweak Target Audiences On Facebook

By Christopher Tompkins

26Feb

Advertising, Facebook, Social Media

Picture this — you own a bakery in Raleigh, NC. You decide to promote your budding brand online through social media marketing with an emphasis on Facebook advertising. But here’s the issue, once you log into your Business Manager, you see a plethora of options ranging from target demographics to specific zip codes to much, much more.

How do you know you are targeting the right people? For some, this leads to a mistake that can waste an entire advertising budget. If you’ve chosen wrongly, your advertisements may be reaching the people that would never bother to enter your bakery and become a loyal customer.

When is it time to consider a change in advertising audience? Here are three scenarios we have seen occur from time to time:

– You received a large number of engagements and conversions with your advertising at first, but showed a significant decrease in the next batch.

– Customers are complaining they are seeing your ads too much.

– You’re getting inquiries for areas your business does not serve.

All of these have happened to real businesses thanks to poor advertising targeting. Unfortunately, you can’t get those hundreds or even thousands of dollars back just because you chose to target the wrong audience members. However, you can move forward and adjust your scope.

Do yourself a favor and step away from your business for a moment and look at your customer base with fresh eyes. You may be interacting with these people on a weekly or even daily basis, but you might not have really looked at who they are. Don’t forget, these are real people with real wants, needs, and lives.

Your goal is to boil down your ideal customer by looking at the categories your customers fit into.

You should ask yourself the following questions:

– What age range does my brand appeal to? Does your business cater to a younger demographic? Or perhaps an older group of people? Maybe you sell products aimed at children, but you should really be marketing to their parents. Or maybe you manage a senior living community, whose audience is not the potential residents, but rather their families, who are in the 35-55 age range.

– What location does my ideal customer live in? Are you trying to appeal to someone in a specific city, like you would if you ran a bakery in Raleigh? Or do you need to compile a list of zip codes to tackle a whole region, like say the Philadelphia / New Jersey region. Regardless, location is an important factor. You may need to adjust your settings so that you don’t over-saturate your market as well, which would actually do damage to your brand.

– What is the income of your ideal customer? We once had a client that owned a luxury home renovation business. They would do amazing work on homes that were worth at least $650K+. Yet before they came to us, they tried to advertise on their own and failed to specify income. Needless to say, they had a lot of calls, but they were dead leads as none of the people that received the ad could afford their services. We were able to narrow their reach and bring them real results.

These are just a few reasons why you need to make sure your social media advertising is on-point. You need to be sure those that see your ads would actually utilize your business.

Here at The Go! Agency, we fine tune our advertising strategy on a daily basis to ensure our clients hit their target!

Click here to learn more: http://ow.ly/7fiY30iyugk

3 Obsolete Practices All Social Media Marketers Need To Stop

By Christopher Tompkins

21Feb

Social Media

It’s 2018– let’s market like it. Social media marketing has been around for quite a few years now and as we’ve mentioned in previous posts, there are always new strategies that should be incorporated. On the other hand, there are also tactics that should be erased and left in the archives.

You should always make sure your brand is competitive and staying in-tune with the times. As a result, certain antiquated strategies may age your strategy.

Here are three techniques we recommend you should stop using and what we would recommend to do instead:

1. #Overload. For some time, many marketers felt the more hashtags the better. #As #a #result, #some #posts #looked #like #this. While you should ALWAYS use hashtags, you don’t want to clutter your content. Obviously, you don’t want to do that. No only does it saturate your content, but it annoys your readers. Additionally, it misses the point of hashtags, which is to incorporate searchable and vital keywords. You should chose 2-3 for Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn and 7-10 for Instagram.

2. Is that a blog or a novel? Let’s face it — people’s attention spans are not getting any longer. With that in mind, you should make your blogs shorter. Some marketers see blogs as an excuse to share extremely long articles. Even though these pieces may prove to be helpful, you’re likely to exhaust your reader and instead of getting a take away out of the blog, they’ll be annoyed. If you have a very long piece of writing you’re excited to send out, we recommend breaking it up into a series of blogs. That way you can share your thoughts without cutting down the copy. You will also engage your customers by promising the next installment in your series.

3. Making a tweet a party. Are you mentioning another social media user? Tag them! Are you mentioning them and the magazine they were just referenced in? Tag the magazine too! But after that, you should probably stop. Unfortunately, some people didn’t get the “three’s company” memo and waste their space with a ton of tagging. Not only will this annoy the people you’ve tagged, but your content’s quality will suffer greatly. We have seen this happen a lot when someone who is overly eager to get followers will tag everyone that had followed them recently. The result is a list of 10-15 tags per tweet, and with the new 280 character limit, it could be worse. If you feel inclined to engage with every person who follows you– an act we would not recommend– a simple private message is sufficient.

When social media first started, it was a bit like the Wild Wild West. There may have been rules, but not many followed them. As a result, you saw content like above. Make 2018 your year for professional content, writing that follows the rules of the web. Trust us, your customer engagement will come back to life if you avoid the above ideas.

At The Go! Agency, we are constantly restructuring our strategy to stay modern and in touch with the most effective marketing methods of today. We would love to work with you and give your brand a competitive edge.

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