This year’s Marketing Festival was dominated by SEO, PPC and tech-focused topics. However, savvy social media marketers also found plenty to take away, gaining strategic inspiration and practical tips. Here is a selection of what might interest you:
1. Address your customers’ positioning
Here are a few key takeaways from Marty Neumeier, who spoke about brand strategy:
- Don’t profit from your customers’ weaknesses, naivety or dependence. Profit from enabling them to do great and meaningful things.
- A brand is not a logo. A brand is what people say it is. A brand is the customer’s inner feeling about a product, service or company.
- Your goal is not to repeat what your brand is, but to build the right associations in customers’ minds.
- Customers buy into the meaning that products and services embody. The customer asks themselves: Who will I be if I buy this?
- People shop to feel secure and successful within their social circles. So don’t worry about positioning your products; focus on positioning your customers.
2. Monitor and engage in the discussion
Use monitoring not just for social media; look for opportunities to join the conversation and build both content and links
In his case study on SEO and media monitoring, Martin Šimko from the agency Robertnemec.com presented a method for monitoring media mentions using readily available tools (e.g. Mention), systematic real-time aggregation into Google Sheets, and processes for the client to respond to mentions. Benefits: Backlinks from responses to conversations are a source of substantial long-term traffic growth, and the topics of these responses gradually develop into standalone PR opportunities.
A very similar approach can be applied in practice to social media. Do you consistently track mentions of your brand, your CEO, your key products and your competitors’ products? Do you respond to them consistently and in a timely manner? Do you measure the impact of your responses?
3. Combine data and focus everything on your best content
“Indirect conversions are the new direct conversions,” said Larry Kim, CEO of Wordstream, ranked by Forbes magazine among the world’s top 10 online marketers, who perhaps surprised part of the audience with his emphasis on Social Ads. “The strongest aspect of search advertising is also its weakness – it responds to existing demand and does not create new demand,” he continued in his presentation.
He highlighted the importance of linking Google Analytics data with other data sets for advanced remarketing – particularly interests and purchasing behaviour – as well as the importance of precise targeting, and recommended investing heavily in the highest-quality content, which generates the highest engagement on Facebook: “Go all-in on your unicorns.” Before the videos – which you should definitely subscribe to – we asked Larry directly for further details.
4. Try to get inside your customers’ heads
It’s nothing new that, depending on how the brain’s hemispheres function, there are two types of people – predominantly emotional and predominantly rational. Dutch consumer psychology expert Bart Schutz likened them to the Dutch queen (very emotional) and the Dutch king (very rational). However, every customer contains both systems, and each of your customers is actually two customers in one.
Whenever you speak to them, you are not speaking to a single customer, but to both of their brain systems, and you do not know which system will respond to your message. This is influenced by many factors, the most unpredictable of which are the context of the message and the customer’s context (day of the week, time of day, tiredness). Even an emotionally driven customer operates in a structured and systematic manner on a Monday morning, whilst a rationally driven customer might make a spontaneous purchasing decision on a Friday evening.
What does this mean for social ads?
Experiment with copy and creative at different times of the day and week, targeting men, women and different age groups, and monitor the differences in responses. Consider how context (desktop, mobile, party, work) influences your customer’s emotions. If you want emotionally driven customers to make a rational decision, eliminate multi-criteria decision-making and highlight the single most important aspect. If you want to sell an expensive bed to a rational customer, convert its price into the cost of one night’s quality sleep.
source: www.newsfeed.cz