Tag : social media content

Social Spring Cleaning: Throwing Out Your Old Content Mix

Social Spring Cleaning_ Throwing Out Your Old Content Mix
3Apr

I can’t tell you how often I see businesses posting regularly to social media but not posting anything that their audience cares about! If you’re experiencing low engagement or a drop off in your page’s followers, then I’m probably talking about you.

Please, for both your business and my sanity, take the time to improve your content mix. I know it can seem challenging, but that’s what I’m here for! I’ll walk you through how to create a content mix that works toward your business’ goals.

Post What People Care About
When I ask new clients about what they’ve been posting, the answer I usually get is, “I don’t know man, we just post stuff about the business.”

Not a great sign. Before you try to improve your content mix, figure out what you’re already sharing.

Let’s say you’re posting one message every day on your brewery’s Facebook. In a week, half of your content is about dark ales, one quarter is about brewing techniques, and one quarter is about IPAs. Is that a good content mix? Well, it depends on what people in your area are interested in.

Keeping the brewery example, let’s say you distribute within a 50-mile radius in central Georgia. To determine whether or not you’ve got a good content mix, look at what people are searching for in Google. Look for specific keyword searches by location, then compare those results to your content mix. If people are searching for information about IPAs twice as much as they’re looking at dark ales, then your content mix probably needs to be adjusted.

Click Here to Subscribe

It Isn’t All About You
No matter how much someone loves your hypothetical brewery, I can promise you that they’re not liking your Facebook page so they can hear about how great you are every single day. They want you to share relevant content that they can enjoy! And I’ll tell you something for nothing—if you’re not keeping them interested, your competitor will.

Instead of posting 100% promos, break up the monotony with new forms of content. We have a list of solutions that we go to when we need to break up a client’s promos and create value for their audience:

  • Industry tips
  • Quotes
  • News articles
  • Live posts about current events

These are just a few ideas to get you started, but customize it to your audience! There isn’t a perfect rule that says to use X promos, Y news articles, etc. But if you experiment and track your metrics, you can find a great content mix that your audience is eager to engage with.

Get Active Within Your Community
For local businesses, the best way to get organic reach and engagement on your posts is to be an active player within your community. That means posting about local events, showing customers how your business positively affects the community, and tagging whenever possible!

When your audience sees you playing an active role in the community, they’re much more likely to have a positive view of your business. Not only does that make your existing customers more likely to buy from you, but it can be a great way to reach a new audience. If you’re tagging local brands, they’re likely to tag you back in future posts and send traffic to your website!

For this reason, I recommend working in posts about local goings-on whenever possible. Your customers will love it, and that’s how you’re going to keep them around and buying from your business!

Content Mix Things Up
In the world of social media marketing, boring your audience is a death sentence. I don’t want you to fall into that trap! If you’re willing to invest in your business’ success, use this article to make a relevant content mix that your followers will love!

Could you use some expert advice for your new content mix? Schedule your free consultation with The Go! Agency!

Click Here to Subscribe

Read More

What a Graphic Designer Can Do for Your Business

What a Graphic Designer Can Do for Your Business
4Feb

You need a graphic designer—no ifs, ands, or buts. But what do you have them do once they’re hired on? Before you start sending job offer letters, it’s best if you figure out what your new employee will be doing.

Since you don’t want to hire someone without having work for them to do, I’m going to show you exactly what projects your new graphic designer should start with. Let’s talk (photo)shop!

Create a Branded Style Guide
Graphic design is so much easier when everyone is working off the same page. For this reason, you should have your new hire create a branded style guide that breaks down exactly what your visuals and graphics will look like going forward. This way, you can approve the style and make sure it’s conveying the message that you want for your brand, and your graphic designer will know what they need to deliver to make you happy!

Create a Logo
If you don’t already have a logo (or you have one you made yourself), then this should be where your graphic designer starts. Your logo is going to be prominently displayed on your website and across all social channels, so it’s important that you’re presenting something appealing for your audience! This also helps establish your branding color palette moving forward.

Create Email Signatures
You might not believe it, but email signatures go a long way in making sure that correspondences with your business are more professional and respectable. A professional will make sure that the signature is aligned with your business’ color palette, font, and overall style! Your emails will also be a lot more impactful once you have a professional signature!

Click Here to Subscribe

Create Ebooks
By working with your copywriter, your graphic designer will be able to combine great content with visuals that keep your readers moving through the ebook. Mixing text and visual materials is not only a great way to make sure your reader understands your points, but it breaks up the ebook and makes it easier to read!

Create Videos
Whether you want an animation or just a high quality video to showcase your business, this is all in the realm of graphic design. Video content is more popular than ever, so start pushing out some video content! Don’t overdo it, but it would certainly be worth your time to have your graphic designer create a few short videos and see how they perform on your social media channels.

Create Building Branding Elements
Whether you’re a brick and mortar store or an office, you’re going to have clients/customers stopping by eventually. Make sure that your location looks like it belongs to your brand! Your graphic designer can make room tags, signs, and other materials that will bring your brand’s identity into your physical location.

Create Name Tags
Never underestimate the power of a good name tag! Your name tags should follow your brand’s color palette and feature some sort of visual—preferably your brand’s logo. This way, when you’re interacting with clients or customers, they know that they’re dealing with a professional and are more likely to take you seriously!

Don’t Wait to Get Started
We’re still early in the year, so take this opportunity to try something new for your business. It might be a little pricy, but paying now is better than investing in subpar social media and branding work! You know why you need a graphic designer, and now you’ve got a list of tasks for them, so there’s no reason not to dive in and make this investment for your business!

Do you want to discuss what you can expect from your new graphic designer? Schedule your free consultation with The Go! Agency!

Click Here to Subscribe

Read More

5 Reasons Why You Need a Graphic Designer

5 Reasons Why You Need a Graphic Designer
30Jan

Visuals are a vital part of social media marketing. As humans, we’re not just lazy and refuse to read—our brains are hardwired to better retain visual information. So while we’ve established that you need a writer and even given a few suggestions about work you should have them do, none of that is going to take you very far without a competent graphic designer!

You want to get a great return on your investment into digital marketing, and I’m here to make sure that happens. Here are five reasons you need a graphic designer right now!

1. First Impressions Matter
Before you’ve fully formed an opinion about something, your first impression has already been decided. The instant you see a site without a consistent color palette or a blog post without accompanying visuals, you’ve already decided that what you’re looking at is amateurish and probably not worth your time.

A graphic designer changes that entire experience. The homepage is crisp, clean, and comes together to create a visual narrative. The blog comes with a relevant image that helps you understand the sort of content you can expect when you click the link. In short, your work stops looking shoddy and lazy and instead appears well-crafted and professional!

2. Your Brand Needs an Identity
Your copywriter will help you develop a unique voice for your brand, but that voice needs to extend to your visuals, too. Acting on your own, your visuals will probably lack the consistency that develops your brand identity, and your audience will be unsure of who you are or what your business’ angle is.

Conversely, a good graphic designer can keep certain elements the same in visuals, which will build your brand’s voice. If you’re operating a brewery, your graphic designer would probably use photos of people in their 20s and 30s rather than images of people 60+. This tells your audience that your brand is youthful without you ever saying a word!

Click Here to Subscribe

3. Grab Attention
Let’s be honest—people are rarely paying attention to what they see when they’re scrolling through social media. Great copy is informative and draws the reader in, but only if they stop to actually read it. Visuals are better for grabbing attention!

Visuals give information in an instant rather than the few seconds it takes to read. If you see a man picking up a can of soda, you’ll understand what’s happening much faster than if you read my description of what he’s doing. Saving that time is key to getting your message across before a social media user swipes past your post!

4. Vary Your Content Mix
There are certain kinds of content that really only work with visuals. Quotes are a great example! An inspirational quote is very shareable content that showcases your brand’s values, but it’s pretty dull without an accompanying graphic. Once you add in a visual, though, it instantly becomes a viable way of encouraging your audience to engage with your brand!

Graphic designers also allow you to post videos, graphs, and a host of other content that would be impossible without a professional graphic designer on staff. If you notice that your competitors’ social media pages are looking a little bland or stagnant, this is a great way to get ahead of them!

5. Things Look Clean
I’m sure that there’s at least one person reading this who’s sure that they could handle all of this graphic design work even though they have little to no experience. To that person, I respect the confidence, but the reality is a little different.

Good graphic design means monitoring visuals for consistency with brand image, kerning, spacing, style, color palettes, and a thousand other things that nobody but a professional has the time or experience for. So sure, you could probably post a stock image of a woman laughing, but that’s not nearly the same as having a professional on staff creating quality, compelling visuals for your brand.

Find the Right Professional
It’s tempting to cut corners on things like this, but that’s only going to hurt your business’ social media in the long run. If you want to manage your own social media, then there’s nothing to do but bite the bullet and hire a professional. You’ll be glad you did when your page has consistent, polished visuals going out!

Do you want to discuss the realities of hiring a graphic designer? Schedule your free consultation with The Go! Agency!

Click Here to Subscribe

Read More

Go!TV Episode 12

GOTV Episode 12
23Nov

Welcome to this week’s Go!TV episode recap! Who’s ready for the biggest breaking news from all across social media?

How to Make Gripping Content
Everyone wants to make content that pulls in readers, but not everyone knows how. Technical aspects like marketing strategy and adhering to buyer personas are important, but they can’t replace authenticity. Do you believe what you’re writing? Do you think it’s valuable for your audience? If you don’t, your readers will see right through it and the content won’t be able to help your business!

Express Writers

How to Create a Buyer Persona
At its core, there are six steps to making a realistic, useful buyer persona: Undergo user research, collect your findings, brainstorm ideas, refine them, make them applicable to a real human, and apply your persona to your customer relationship management (CRM) platform. With an effective buyer persona, you can relate to your audience in an authentic way. Use the resource below for a more detailed step-by-step guide!

Social Media Today

That’s the end of our recap! The takeaway: If you want to reach your customers, you need to speak to them like real people. Keep this in mind as you create content and buyer personas, and you should have a good leg to stand on! For more social media marketing advice, check out our blog and podcast!

Want to keep up with your favorite social media experts? Find us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter!

Read More

Evergreen Content VS Dated Content: What’s The Big Difference?

Evergreen-content-vs-dated-content-whats-the-big-difference-200x300
3Sep

Did you know that Apple is going to reveal iPhone 7 soon? That may be news at the time of this article’s publication, but in maybe a month or just a few weeks, that sentence will have dated this whole article. In a year, we’ll be getting ready for iPhone 7S, or whatever version Apple is planning next. (Rumors say it’s a big one since it will be the iPhone’s 10th birthday, but I digress) When that happens, that sentence will look like a relic in the eyes of the internet. This type of situation is something all social media marketers need to be attentive to!

Our sentence above is one of the defining factors of dated, or time-sensitive content.This isn’t to say that news updates are bad for social media. Much like weekends, they may not last forever, but they sure are important to our lives. Yet your social media content cannot entirely consist of these fleeting moments. A company’s Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other accounts need some non-perishables in the mix. Content that will never expire, or evergreen content, is crucial for high engagement rates and legitimacy to your brand. We’re not just talking about stone-cold facts from textbooks (although those would definitely count as evergreen content). This type of content simply needs to stand the test of time. A mission statement, code of ethics, tried and true details about your industry, promotional materials, etc.

Now, why would a business’ social media page need both? Because that’s how the internet works. It’s a constant flow of fleeting and forever content. We see it every day without even realizing it. Trending items deliver a powerful boost to your social media marketing, while evergreen content is your core. Without one or the other, your content strategy will be incomplete. 

Time-sensitive content will show that your company is updated, adaptable, and aware of contemporary business practices. Evergreen content expresses your industry knowledge, experience, and professionalism. It’s plain to see why you would want to have both, right?

At The Go! Agency, we take extra efforts to strike just the right balance of these two categories of content. Our clients deserve to have every reward social media has to offer, and it’s the marketer’s duty to accomplish that.

How does your business utilize both these types of content? Share your story below!

Click Here to Subscribe to Our Free Newsletter

Read More

Are Your Images Social Media Ready?

Are-your-images-social-media-ready-200x300
20Jun

With social media platforms like Instagram, Pinterest, and Snapchat rising in popularity, we see visual content becoming increasingly essential. After all, who wants to read anymore? Social media requires a nice balance of eye-capturing imagery and engaging copy. That being said, you can’t just pick a random picture, throw it onto your timeline, and expect gold. There are certain requirements each platform administers. So let us see just how ready your photo library is for social media, shall we?

Those who run the big social media companies know full well that images are key to a successful post. These people have a job to do, which is controlling the stream of content that goes through their platforms and to ensure it doesn’t turn into chaos. As a result, dimensions for imagery have been created and must be adhered to. Since these images are on the web, they are measured in pixels. Here are the rules:

Facebook:
– Cover photo- 851px x 315px

– Profile photo- 180px x 180px

– Images in updates- 1200px x 630px

Twitter:

– Header photo- 1500px x 500px

– Profile photo- 400px x 400px

– Pictures embedded in tweets- 440px x 220px

Instagram:

-Profile photo- 110px x 110px

-Thumbnail photos- 161px x 161px

-Posted images- 640px x 640px

LinkedIn:

– Cover photo- 974px x 300px

– Profile photo- 400px x 400px

– Banner image- 646px x 220px

If you decide to go against these rules, you’ll find yourself with an image that has been inappropriately cropped or a pixelated mess. Consult with your graphic designer, photographer, or social media manager to be sure that your pics are perfect.

Share your thoughts with us below!

 

Click Here to Subscribe to Our Free Newsletter

Read More

The Top 4 Ways to Be Original On Social Media

The-Top-4-Ways-To-Be-Original-on-Social-Media-200x300
19Jun

When you begin to plan content for your social media updates, a little bit of finesse is needed. Sure, you can always share, retweet, and comment on others’ material, but this cannot be your only activity on your account! To have an effective social media marketing strategy, you need original material. It is easier said than done, as you could imagine. However, you do not need to be a master marketer to figure out how to formulate your marketing. Here are some of the tools of the trade:

    • Promotional Posts- Of course, where would social media marketing be without…marketing? Strategically placed sales posts will be helpful as long as you do not drown your feed with them. Use strong language, be confident, and remind your followers why they chose you as opposed to your competition.
    • Events- Depending on your business’ industry, you might host some events of your own and want to spread the word. Whether it is a company picnic, a guest speaker, or a blowout sale, social media is the perfect place to promote. You can also show your support for certain movements such as Alzheimer’s Awareness Month or contribute to fun events like National Candy Month.

    • Imagery- Original visuals are integral to your posts. It is an important tactic to raise engagement levels. The best part is that you don’t have to be a professional graphic designer to make exciting pictures. Apps and websites like Canva and Layout make pictures look like they were done by a pro.

    • Fun Posts- Yes, social media is great for marketing, but it is also a form of entertainment for many users. Create updates that are fun, engaging, and receive some feedback in the process. You can create quizzes, polls, caption contests, and more. These are the types of posts internet surfers look out for when browsing social media. Give it to them!

While it can be important to share others’ content and social media posts, it is just as important to have an arsenal of original and enticing updates to send out to your followers.

Do you have other ways of creating original content? Comment below!

Click Here to Subscribe to Our Free Newsletter

Read More

If Trust is King….is SEO Queen?

content_is_king-300x241
23Feb

Content is king.  And if you are interested in marketing your business using social media, it is important to generate original content.  Writing original content will not only help you get more traffic from social media sites and search engines, but also help you engage with your target audience and create a power of influence.

I want to give you a proven tactic that will help you get your content rolling BEFORE you even put pen to paper to formulate your first blog or social media update.

Building keyword lists.

With all of the fervor over the power of content marketing, one aspect of it that I don’t think is stressed enough is the use of keywords when developing your content.  Those who know search engine optimization (SEO) tactics know how important keywords are to online success.  Keywords are how the right people will be able to find you, your company, your services, and your products online when searching for you—plain and simple.

If you currently have an active SEO campaign, whoever is managing this activity should be able to supply you with a list of keywords.  Another key person who could help you is your website designer or manager.  Even if your website is 10 years old, your keywords should be present throughout.

If you do not have these resources, I have a simple two-step process to help you formulate your first keyword list.

1. Pull out a list of your target market

2. Pull out a list of your products/services

By looking at these documents, you will be able to consider who is searching for you online and what words they are they using to find you.  Go above and beyond what you think the term “keyword” means, and really think about how your target market would look for you on search engines like Google.  Come up with a list of words and short phrases that you think your target market would use to find you online. I would first write this down on a pad, but then transfer to an online document for future tweaking.

Need some more help coming up with keywords and phrases?  The Google Keyword Planner can provide some good outside-the-box ideas.  Also, this tool will help you discover competitive keywords and phrases that have high searchability but low competition with others in your market.

The point of this exercise is to come up with a solid keyword list that you can begin to use when formulating and executing your content strategy for social media and other content.  The more relevant keywords that you pack into your social media updates, blogs, and website, the better chance you have of showing up in Google searches and social media searches for your topic.

Once you start to incorporate your keywords into your content, a great tool to see how your keywords are working for you is Google Analytics.  If you are not using this wonderful tool to monitor your website, I would suggest that you install it now.  It is free, and it helps you determine where your traffic is coming from and what words potential customers are using to find you.  Just ask the person who manages your website if this tool is installed and, if not, get it installed today.  Above and beyond keywords, Google Analytics gives you real-time data about on the effectiveness of your website on many different levels.

Keep in mind that your keyword list will continue to evolve and grow as your business does.  I would suggest taking a look at your list every month to see if it needs tweaking.

While building and maintaining a keyword list can be taxing, in the end it will truly help your content strategy get off and running with a bang!

Read More
x
Bulletproof Marketer