Tips to become really good at Facebook targeting

Facebook targeting seems to be the ‘it’ tool these days. In order for your business to thrive, it’s important to show your product or a service to the right people at the right time. Some experienced marketers like to say that it’s not important what are you selling, but who you are selling to. Who is your ideal customer? Where do they live, what do they do, what are their habits or behaviours, what drives them? Facebook knows ‘everything,’ and as such, it’s a great tool for customer segmentation.

Here is a quick guide to Facebook targeting that will turn you from a frog to a marketing prince! Keep on reading to find out how to get to the people who matter the most to your business.

Wondering what you can target?

Location: You can pinpoint a radius on a map, target specific cities, countries, exclude them if need be, and even target people who have recently visited a location, or they are travelling to it. This is great for tour guides for example.
Age: Select the age group you wish to target.
Gender: Choose whether you want your ad to be shown to female or male audience, or both.
Relationship: You can target people based on who they are interested in, or target single people, married, engaged, divorced, and more – all based on their relationship status. Market a dating site to singles and recently divorced people, or jewellery like wedding rings for recently engaged couples.
Education: The education filter lets you target people who are attending high school, college, individuals who are college grads or who finished some sort of diploma or college degree. Also, you can choose to show your ad only to people who possess a certain education degree, like associate degree, master’s, doctorate, and more. You can even target people who went to a specific school, in a specific timeframe.
Finances: This filter lets you segment people based on their net worth and income range.
Home: This filter comes with a lot of segmentation options. You can choose to target people based on the type of home they have, whether they are owners or renters, and what’s the household like – newlyweds, veterans, young people, young adults, seniors, families, and more. People who are in the remodelling industry can target people whose home was built 20 years ago, and offer repairs. Real estate agencies can target first-time home buyers and renters.
Job: You can target people who are working for a certain employer, or have a specific job title, or just the general industry they work in.
Ethnicity: You can choose to target people based on their ethnicity.
Generation: You can target baby boomers, generation X and millennials.
Parenting: This filter comes with plenty of targeting options. There is a whole segment within that is dedicated to targeting Moms, and the segment targeting all parents. This way, you can choose to market diapers to parents with babies, new workout regime to fit Moms, a new fashion line to trendy Moms, and so forth.
Politics: Target people based on their political affinities.
Life events: This filter allows you target people who have already experienced a life event, or will in the future – anything form new relationships, anniversaries, new jobs, birthdays, to people who have recently moved in, who are newly engaged, or any friends to people who have experienced a life event. This is one of the easiest targeting options. For example, you can target a friend of a person who will be having a birthday soon, with an ad for a special gift. Another example: Let’s say you are selling expensive romantic vacations, you might want to target people who have been engaged for a couple of months, and less expensive options and field trips to people who are in a relationship or married and who are celebrating anniversaries.
Entertainment: Choose people who enjoy watching certain movies, playing games, listening to music, reading, watching TV… For example, target Game of Thrones fans with an article about the show, or target them and market a new fantasy book which might pique their interest.
Interests: There’s an array of interests you can target, activities, pages they liked, topics, and all sorts of related events.
Wellness: Target gym-goers, bodybuilders, people into healthy nutrition, meditation, yoga, physical activities like running, weight lifting, exercising, AND even Zumba! This way you can market a new class in a gym, A yoga group, A new app for fitness and more.
Hobbies: This segment allows you to target people based on their hobbies – home improvements, arts and crafts, travelling, music, etc.
Purchases: Choose to show your ad to people who have recently completed a purchase. Market a beauty product to makeup artists, young female adults, who like pages like Maybelline and Max Factor. Or market a toy to parents whose child whose birthday is coming up soon.
Seasonal events: Market to people who are following sports happenings, games, or seasonal activities like swimming and skiing.

Facebook can also help you retarget people who visited your website. If you want to learn more about retargeting, read this article about Facebook Pixel here.

Facebook is an all-powerful marketing tool that allows you to fine-tune your perfect audience and then market to them what you think they will like, and what they are interested in. Your marketing strategy could be so intricate that you can reach virtually anybody and show them your ad.

Selling pet products? Target people who have recently got a dog. The options are virtually limitless!

Are you leveraging content marketing for your business?

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]As a team of digital marketing specialists, one of our core services at Twenty3Media is content marketing and content creation. We believe that every business benefits from including content marketing as part of its business marketing strategy to achieve its goals and ROI. Over the years, we have helped a number of businesses to leverage content to build their brand, establish themselves as thought leaders in their field and engage with their target market.

While almost everyone is aware of the benefits of content marketing, it can be a challenge to figure out where to get started. What is the right strategy to generate more leads and website visitors with content, without overshooting your marketing budget?

Content marketing can be a truly cost-efficient long-term marketing strategy, especially when planned, executed, and managed properly. If you manage a business that is yet to leverage content marketing, here are some quick tips to get you started, because no business can afford to ignore the benefits of content marketing – and it is never too late to begin.

In its most simplistic form, content marketing starts with understanding your target audience and the online platforms where you can reach them. Next is competitor research to see what your competition is up to. What types of content are they publishing? How frequently and where? Which types of content get the most traction? Whom are they targeting?

Armed with this information, do the following:

• Brainstorm with your team to determine content goals
• Create your own content strategy
• Determine measurement criteria to assess your return on investment to see what works
• Make an editorial calendar
• Categorise your content and mark publication dates in your calendar
• Create content and publish, followed by sharing on social media
• Engage with your audience
• Measure, and fine tune to meet your goals

All this can appear overwhelming to manage, especially if the required expertise is not readily accessible. Moreover, hiring and maintaining staff to carry out these activities can be expensive.

At Twenty3Media, we work as an extension of your team to help you achieve your digital marketing goals and invite you to get in touch with us for a discussion on how we can assist with your content marketing strategy.

In the meantime, here are some pointers on successful content marketing:

Maintain a business blog

Your business blog is an effective way to make sure you have a continuous stream of content. Decide on a publishing schedule and stick to it.

Publish quality content

Give your audience the type of content that appeals to them to increase engagement.

Share your content on the right platforms

The aim of content marketing, besides business generation, is to connect with your market and build a loyal customer base. Based on your research about where your target market spends its time, create and publish shareable content. Include images, videos and an appropriate call to action to engage your readers. This will also keep them longer on your website.

Remember it is about your audience

The days of building a product and hoping the buyers will come, are gone. Today, businesses must go to their audience. Marketing is no longer about pushing your products or services on your customer. It is about understanding your audience’s needs and pain points and creating content around this so that you can attract them into your sales funnel. Follow it up by engaging them in conversation.

Content marketing takes time and effort

Creating content and managing it is a continuous process and most businesses outsource the activity so that they can focus on building their business. The good news is that the investment is well worth it and will bring long-term rewards.

At the end of the day, the World Wide Web is a huge mass of data linked together in different formats that include blogs, videos, expert comments, guides, and much more. Every business must be a part of this to succeed. We are here to help!

Does your business use content marketing? We’d love to hear from you, please feel free to leave a comment below :-)[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

Facebook Pixel tutorial: How to install Facebook’s Pixel code on your website

If you read our blog post about the benefits of using a Facebook Pixel and the wonders it can do for your advertising campaign conversions, then the next logical step is setting up a Facebook pixel for your existing campaign. That is why we created this easy-to-follow tutorial.

Feel free to get in touch with us for assistance if you get stuck with any of these steps.

Step 1: Activate your Facebook Pixel

First, you need to log into your account and go to the Facebook Ads Manager. Then, click on the upper-left corner on ‘Facebook Adverts’.

Then, expand the drop-down menu by selecting the ‘All tools’.

Under the ‘Assets’ column, you will have the option to select ‘Pixels’ – click on it.

Voila! Click to create your Facebook Pixel. There can be only one Pixel code per account.

Step 2: Insert the Facebook Pixel code

There are two ways to you can insert your code, and in this tutorial, we will cover the ‘copy and paste; method – which means manually inserting pixel code into your website. So, select the second option.

You must install two types of code in order for the Facebook Pixel to work. The first is the base code.

Simply click ‘Copy code to clipboard’ to copy your code.

Since the base code needs to be present on every page of your website, you need to paste this code into your header. If you have a WordPress website (or other content management systems), just search for a header template. Learn where to find this template or code in different web management systems. Facebook even offers help on how to find this template or code in different web management systems.

Since business owners mostly use WordPress as their CMS platform, in this tutorial we will cover how to paste the code into WordPress, but the main idea is similar to every platform. You need to access your code, find this </head> tag, and simply paste the Facebook pixel code above it.

If you are an average to advanced WordPress CMS user then use this method:

In your WordPress dashboard, you can reach that code by selecting Appearance > Editor. Find the header template (header.php) through the search function, click on that template and then find the </head> tag.

Now just paste the Facebook Pixel code.

The easier way to do this, is to install a plugin. Go to Plugins on your dashboard, and click Add New.

Then, search for the ‘tracking code manager’ plugin. Install one of your choice from the list, and paste the code where you are told. Save the change and now you have a Facebook Pixel code installed on your website.

In this tutorial, we are using the plugin Tracking Code Manager v1.

Step 3: Install the Facebook Pixel event code

Base code must be placed throughout the entire website, and that’s why we installed it on a template that is found on every page – the header. But, event code needs to be placed only on pages where we want to track the specific conversion. This allows us to track different conversions on different pages.

Facebook lets us track 9 different types of conversions/events.

1. Search

Facebook Pixel tracks this action when people use the search function on your website, and you need to type in a query you are interested in. You need to define that exact query in the code.

Instead of leather sandals shown in the Facebook’s example above, type in the query you are interested in.

2. View content

If you want to track people who clicked on product detail pages, landing pages, or any content, this is the option you should choose.

3. Add to basket

This is a great option everybody with an online shop should use. This event lets you track people who have added an item to the shopping cart. If you read our previous blog post, you learned that 3 out of 4 people abandon the shopping cart and don’t complete the purchase. Retargeting them could help you increase sales, and with this option, you can.

4. Add to wishlist

Quite similar to the add to basket event, add to wishlist lets you track people who have added a product to their wishlist. You can use this information to serve a Facebook ad, notifying the people about the discount for that exact item.

5. Initiate Checkout

Whenever someone clicks on the checkout, this event will be triggered. Also useful for retargeting and retargeting shopping cart abandonment.

6. Add payment info

This one is self-explanatory.

7. Purchase

Place this event on your order confirmation page so you can retarget your loyal customers.

8. Lead

A lead is a potential customer who has expressed an interest in your company. A person who has signed-up for your newsletter can be considered a lead, or completes a form, signs up for a trial, etc. This option allows you to market to your leads.

9. Complete registration

Whenever a person completes a registration for a product or a service, this event is triggered. Add this event to a registration confirmation page.

10. Custom event

Facebook lets you define the conversions you are interested in, but this does require a bit more advanced knowledge in order to set the right parameters.

Step 4: Installing the Facebook Pixel event code

You can place the event code when a user is taken to a new page, or when an action happens on the page. These two actions have different codes so you have to pay attention to which one you will use.

For example, if a person clicks the button for checkout and is taken to another page, then you would place the event code using option A.

Go to the installed plugin and click on the tracking code manager, then create a new tracking code. Name it however you prefer, and then paste the code from Facebook. Then, copy the code for the event you want to track on that page. Go back to Facebook. You can find event codes on your Facebook Ads Manager / Pixels / Create Conversion. Copy the code you want (the one that you want to track every time a specific page is opened). Go to the WordPress again.

The code you first pasted should look like this:

Click the exact place where the red arrow is pointing, and press Enter.

Now you need to paste the smaller event code you copied from Facebook Ads Manager. These codes look like this:

And now, paste it right above the </script> tag like this:

Unlike the base code placed in the header, these codes only make sense when they are used on the page they are supposed to, so make sure to select the correct page name from the drop-down menu below.

Whenever setting up codes in this manager, always choose the option: Standard code tracking in your WordPress. This opens up the menu where you get to choose on which pages you want to use this code. The base code is meant to be used throughout the whole website, and these event codes should be used only on specific pages.

Save the changes and voila! That is how you insert event codes into your website and can track them through Facebook Pixel.

Step 5: Check to see if Facebook Pixel is working

The only thing left to do is to confirm that the tracking is indeed working. Simply download the Facebook Pixel Helper Chrome browser extension (you can find it here), reload your website and click the icon in the upper-right hand corner. This is also a troubleshooting tool that shows all Pixel events, and a complete overview.

Learn how to maximize your Facebook ad budget with a Facebook Pixel

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Increasing conversions should be one of the main goals of every business. If you chose to do advertising through Facebook and have an ad budget in place, then you should do all that you can to maximise it. This is where Facebook’s Pixel comes in! Facebook’s Pixel is basically a short code that you put on your website, that will help you with conversion tracking, ad optimisation and retargeting. Don’t let the “code” part scare you, implementing a Facebook Pixel is really simple, and you don’t need to be a programmer to do it. If you want to know how to set up a Google Pixel, we’ve created a useful step-by-step tutorial that you can view here.

Why you should track conversions

In order for your marketing campaigns to work effectively, you need to measure them and make adjustments as needed. Tracking conversions is one of main KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). A conversion can be anything – it’s a completed goal on your website. This completed goal should relate to your overall marketing and business goals. If you are running an online shop, then checkout (a sale) will be your main conversion.

Facebook campaigns show you how much each ‘like’ or ad impression is worth, but what’s the use of these metrics when you don’t know how many customers have actually performed your desirable action or goal? Whatever your conversion goal might be – whether it’s gathering leads, subscribers, receiving phone calls, app downloads, and anything in between, it’s important that you measure it.

How to use Facebook Pixel to track conversions?

With Facebook Pixel, you’ll see a new tab labelled “Conversions” in your Facebook Ads Manager. Conversion metrics can tell you exactly how much it costs to get a person to buy your product through Facebook ads. Let’s say you have set your Facebook Ads budget to be ZAR500 and that you are selling a product for ZAR100. If you get hundreds of likes, but only sell 2 items, then that means that you have spent ZAR500 and earned only ZAR200 – of which you still need to deduct product cost, shipping costs, etc. Through Facebook Pixel conversions, you will be able to see if you are losing money, and whether you need to optimise your campaign.

How to maximise your campaigns through lookalike audiences

Facebook’s Pixel will help you expand your reach by optimising your conversions. Once the Pixel gathers sufficient data about the people who have already completed the conversion, it will find similar people through an algorithm – and show them your ad! It’s that simple, Facebook Pixel does all the work, and you get more conversions.

Sales funnel misinterpretation

Sometimes people just need a nudge in the right direction. Every sales funnel picture is the same, it shows a funnel, where the end goal is a completed conversion. In reality, things aren’t so funnel-shaped and easy. Ideally, a person will click on your Facebook ad, which will lead it to a landing page on your website. Ideally, there will be an action that the person can perform, like – complete the sale, sign up or call you. But people, now more than ever, make informed choices before they buy a product. The sales funnel would consider this person lost, because he or she exited your website without completing the goal. Many people just want to know more about the product before committing to the purchase. They will perhaps Google experiences, compare it with similar products, ask their friends about it. At this stage, they aren’t ready to buy your product, and that’s where that nudge in form of retargeting can really help you.

Creating retargeting ads with Facebook’s Pixel

According to eMarketer, three-thirds of shopping carts throughout the world remain abandoned, which means people got to the final stage of sales funnel, but didn’t complete the purchase. And with Facebook Pixel, that can be your goldmine. Create an ad that will specifically target people who have previously visited your website, or simply target people who have abandoned the cart. A Pixel also allows you to target people who have completed an action on your website, like pressing a call button, subscribing to your newsletter, or searching for something specific through your website’s search function (if you have it).

This opens a world of possibilities for marketing. For example, you can target email subscribers with an ad that will offer them a discount. Or you can serve an ad to people who added a product to the shopping cart and didn’t complete the purchase, so you can remind them to come back and finish it. Retargeted customers are 70 times more likely to complete the purchase! You can find a very interesting retargeting infographic here.

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Image by Invesp

If you need help with your Facebook marketing campaigns or setting up Facebook Pixels for your different campaigns, get in touch with us. Let us help you optimise your advertising spend![/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

Where to start with designing a digital marketing strategy?

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Designing and implementing a digital marketing strategy from scratch can be a daunting task. Or, perhaps you took over the management of a brand’s digital marketing from another individual or team, and you need to determine what elements of the strategy are working, and what not.

While it may seem like an impossible task, if you break up the bigger process into smaller chunks, it’s completely manageable. In this post I’m going to explain very briefly the process we follow at Twenty3Media when we start working with new clients.

The best starting points are to determine what is currently working and what not – and to determine what your competitors are doing online. This is the starting point for our team too when we start working with a new client. We familiarize ourselves with the client’s industry, their target audience as well as their competitive landscape to name a few.

The first step is going to be to check whether or not the website in question (your brand’s website) has Google Analytics installed. If not, get the tracking code installed immediately, so that data can be generated. You will need to have at least a month’s data, ideally more, to do your audit.

If you need to wait for Google Analytics to generate data, you can take that time to draw up a thorough competitor analysis document. Firstly, you’ll need to determine whom you’re going to compare yourself with. We like to get feedback from the client with regards to their direct competitors in the industry, and then we also do online research to identify online competitors.

Select your top 5 (or 10 if you want to be thorough) competitors, and note them all in your competitor analysis document.

Next you’ll want to research all aspects of each competitor’s digital strategy, including:

Their website: What pages do they have on their website? What tone do they use for the content? Look at the page source for each page (in Chrome, right click and select ‘view source’), do you see optimized meta tags? Who do they link to from their website? How many backlinks to their website do they have? Do they have a blog? If yes, how often do they publish content on their blog? Can you pick up specific keywords that they are optimizing different pages for (in the actual content)? What type of calls to action do they have on their website?
Social media platforms: What social media platforms are they active on? How often do they post? What type of content do they post? What is the engagement rate (comments, like, shares, retweets, etc) on different posts? This can help you identify content that you can include in your social media strategy.
Online advertising: Have you seen any online ads (on Google, Facebook, etc) for the competitor in question? If yes, what is the CTA? What artwork / visuals are they using?
Newsletters and email marketing: Do they send out newsletters? If yes, how often? What is the content of the newsletters?

The above will provide you with a good starting point for your competitor audit. Make the competitor analysis document as thorough as possible, as this will help you determine what areas you need to focus on.

Next, you can move on to your own brand’s website and social media channels, and compare it against your competitors’ platforms. What are you doing better than competitors? Where can you improve? Again, include as much detail as possible.

Once you have sufficient Google Analytics data, look at:

The top content on your website: Which pages are the most popular? Do these pages have sufficient CTAs on them to convert visitors to leads?
Demographics: Where are you getting your most visitors from (country, city)?
Engagement rate: What is your website’s bounce rate? How many pages do people view on average per visit? How much time do they spend on your website? What can you do to improve this rate?
Devices: What devices do people use to view your website? Make sure that your website renders properly in all of the most popular devices.

Once you’ve worked through the checkpoints above, you will have quite a bit of information to add to your digital marketing strategy document. Firstly, start off with what you want to achieve. Let’s say your marketing goal is to ‘increase sales,’ then your marketing objective will need to follow the SMART rule, for instance: Increase sales by 25% over the next 4 months. You can create annual goals, or quarterly goals – it’s up to you to decide what will work best based on your scenario. However, it’s important to make your marketing goals as specific as possible, so that you can measure the success of the tactics you implement.

There are many free digital marketing strategy templates available online – but, there is no need to go fancy. The key is to identify areas that you need to focus on, design a strategy and consistently implement this strategy.

The above will provide you with a good starting point to design your digital marketing strategy. If you need help with identifying areas you can improve on, or if you don’t have the time or resources to implement the strategy, contact us and we’ll assist![/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

How design plays a role in your marketing efforts

Marketers and graphic designers often have the same goals, but look at them from a different perspective. Marketing creates interest in a brand, and design communicates a brand.

Dan Slagen, VP of Marketing at Crayon explains how involving marketers in your design process is essential to a successful product, or brand. He says that when you hear marketers talk, you’ll hear words like content or copy, conversions, funnel, and brand tone. Talk about the same project with designers, and they’re focusing on hierarchy, purpose, emotion, and experience.

There’s a disconnect between the two teams, and figuring out how to collaborate is key to selling your business. “Focusing on performance can align marketing and design teams to better solve problems together,” suggest Slagen. “You can have clever copy and the best targeting, but if it doesn’t perform, it’s not viewed as a success.”

Creative graphic design is one of the fastest ways to build brand recognition and a following on social media. This in turn, helps your marketing team. A beautiful design will help you stand out from the hundreds of other companies competing for the same audience, and can be the deciding factor in how successful your next campaign will be.

Not only is it important to have strong visual content, but consistency is an equal priority. You want people to come across an image and immediately think ‘isn’t that that one company?’ Your brand should always show similar fonts, photos, colors, etc. Use the same logo – don’t constantly change the color. Each and every single element in a design piece should portray the message you’re trying to send.

Design elements also help build trust with your clients. If a client can see that your website is done professionally, and your flyers, and postcards all look well done, this helps with your credibility. Clients are more likely to trust a brand with professional graphics versus a company that just has a couple images and some text printed out on normal paper.

The most important part about all of this is the conversion. If you aren’t getting conversions, then your campaign isn’t working. Maybe it’s the graphics, maybe it’s the marketing, or maybe it’s both. Conversions are key to propelling your brand forward. A clear, concise call-to-action will help draw people in. Tell them to do something. The mere suggestion to ‘register’ will get them thinking about it.

If you’re company doesn’t have a graphic designer employed, it may be time to look at outsourcing some of your work. Take a look at your past campaigns and evaluate if there are areas that could have been done better. Take the time and invest in your company with well-done graphics that will convert and produce your audience.

If you need help with your graphic design projects or your digital marketing strategy overall, get in touch with us.

How to determine which social media profiles to be active on

There are so many social media platforms to choose from – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube, Tumblr, Snapchat…it almost looks like new social media platforms are emerging on a daily basis!

If you are in the process of creating your social media strategy, your first instinct might be to simply choose all of them. We are here to tell you, don’t. Chances are you won’t have enough time or resources to commit yourself properly to each social media profile, so you might end up having a mediocre representation on all of them, instead of excelling at a chosen few.

Whatever your choice is, here is a detailed guide to get you started on your social media management journey, through a series of questions and answers.

Will you oversee your social media, or will you pay a professional to do it for you?

If you are in charge, then you should choose the platforms you are familiar and most comfortable with. Or, at least at first. As you gain experience, and more importantly – the routine to be active on selected channels, you can easily incorporate more profiles into your social media strategy. And yes, you WILL need a strategy.

Paying a professional will probably yield better results, but that is largely dependent on your budget, naturally. On the other hand, you will get their expertise, knowledge, and the benefit of having free time on your hands. Twenty3Media is more than happy to help you with that, of course.

What is the type of content you will be distributing?

Each social media platform has a type of content for which it’s better suited than the rest. Visual content should find its way to Pinterest and Instagram, and videos are certainly best hosted on YouTube and Vine, while short, concise updates are for Twitter. Facebook supports all formats successfully (but, the overall trend favours videos).

Twitter is a very in-the-moment channel, which demands a lot more attention (and a very good response rate) which means that if you have up to date news to share with the world, Twitter is the way to go. If your posts aren’t time sensitive, and would benefit from being shown to a highly-targeted audience, then you should choose Facebook. Determine the type of content you will be creating and choose the platform accordingly.

What is the main purpose of the chosen channel?

If you want to increase sales, achieve better ROI and have more conversions, then your social media strategy should also reflect that. In this case, it’s not really about the traffic. While traffic is important, it shouldn’t be the ultimate goal. But if you want to increase brand exposure, attain a loyal following and form connections, then traffic is of importance.

Choose the main purpose you wish to achieve and then select the channel best suited that will bring you results.

Stay tuned for more useful advice about social media platforms, community management and pro tips on how to become the very best social media marketer your brand deserves you to be!

Why a content calendar is critical for your content marketing strategy

For every business, regardless of its size and niche, content marketing is among its primary digital marketing strategies. However, unless this is organized and implemented with meticulous planning, all the content that goes out to its audience can be a waste of time and money.

At Twenty3Media, we believe that content marketing, in its simplest form, begins with knowing one’s audience, creating engaging content, and promoting it to the right audience across the platforms frequented by them.

During the content planning process, a content calendar is invaluable. Not only does it enable us share it with our virtual team to plan and monitor our content marketing activity in real time, but also shows us, at a glance, scheduled content, important event dates to keep in mind to plan content, and ensures that we have different types of content ready and published on schedule.

As we already know, a business must consistently publish quality content to build its brand, its credibility and its presence in its niche. The frequency of publishing can vary depending on the business and the industry in which it operates. It is also important to be flexible based on changes in the industry, showing that the business is up to date with trends.

So how do we build a strong content calendar to support our content marketing strategy? Here are our top three tips:

Know your target market

Practically every business activity is based on knowing one’s target audience, and content planning is no exception. In fact, a brand must plan its content in such a way that it appeals to all audience segments the business caters to: for example, prospective and existing customers, potential employees, investors, and suppliers. Besides focusing on lead generation and sales, this content must be diverse enough to connect with all its audience types. Based on this, content must be planned in terms of what, how much and how often for each segment.

Plan and create the content calendar

Depending on the business, content can either be created from scratch or take into account existing content to work from there. Existing marketing material can often be reworked into new forms of content. For instance, if there are marketing presentations in the form of PowerPoint, these can be made into videos, blog posts, or made into SlideShare presentations that can be shared online. Existing blog posts can be updated with new data to make them relevant. If there is market research, this can be made into infographics, which in turn can become blog posts. If there are industry white papers, these can be published as case studies and blog post series.

The idea is to leverage existing content, as well as to come up with new ideas, which can then populate the content calendar. Responsibilities can then be assigned and tracked. Once the content has been created, it can be scheduled for publication on various platforms as per the content marketing strategy.

Promote and monitor

Just publishing the content is not enough. It must be aggressively promoted on social media and through business newsletters, besides engaging with the audience it reaches. The response and engagement must then be monitored and compared with similar previous activity to gauge what works and what doesn’t.

Based on this the promotion strategy and content can be tweaked to achieve the content strategy goals. There are a number of analytics tools available to measure performance or each type of content.

In short, the content calendar can be used to record content ideas, determine types of content and frequency, create that content, schedule it, and monitor it, so that you can accomplish your content marketing goals.

Do you use a content calendar as part of your content marketing strategy? Let us know if you have any tips to share!

Use Pinterest to drive website traffic and sales

As a brand manager, do you sometimes feel that you are being pulled in a hundred different directions when it comes to deciding on the tactics to use to drive traffic to your ecommerce store?

Don’t panic, we have some advice to simplify the process when using Pinterest. There are many social media sites you can use to drive traffic to your ecommerce store – these include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, You Tube and your own blog to name a few. We know that it can be a daunting task to manage so many social media profiles, but with a solid content strategy and editorial calendar in place, it is more manageable.

Pinterest is another great social platform to drive traffic to your ecommerce store. According to an article written by Shopify (which is a website where you can easily create your own online store), Pinterest shoppers are 10% more likely to purchase something than shoppers coming from other social media sites. Of those purchases, the average order amount is double the order amount of customers coming from Facebook. To read the full article, follow this link: http://ow.ly/B53Dl

Here are some ways you can use Pinterest to drive ecommerce sales:

Let pinners see how your products are made. Let people in and show them the inside of your business, behind the scenes so to speak.
Create thematic boards to create new interest, and keep them updated.
Engage with followers on Pinterest and ask them to share photos of them using your product. You can even offer a prize of some sort to entice them to upload photos.
Keep track of what type of pins and boards your followers like and build on that.
Make sure there are links on your pins and boards to the relevant product pages. Make it easy for customers to find excactly what they’re looking for in your ecommerce store once they come from Pinterest.
Make use of Pinterest’s rich pins. It’s especially important for ecommerce stores as it shows the price and availability of products.
Pinterest price alerts is a great way to let people know when a product goes on sale. If the user has an unpurchased product on their board and it becomes cheaper, Pinterest will send an email informing them.
You can also use the “Promote pin” feature to promote certain pins.

You may have already realised that social media plays a big role in driving traffic to your website and ecommerce store. Pinterest in particular can offer your business the opportuity to increase traffic and sales, but you have to be diligent about using your Pinterest account strategically.

Why blogging is important

In today’s day and age, every business should have a website along with a blog.

Most marketers and digital marketing consultants will advise businesses to regularly update their blogs with relevant and quality content. Businesses will follow this advice, but they don’t really know why they are blogging, or realise the impact blogging can have.

In this post, we will explain some key benefits of blogging and why it is so important for your business. To get started, here are some of the main reasons why blogging should form part of your business’ marketing strategy:

It can drive targeted traffic to your website and as a result it can improve your website’s search engine rankings
It can position your brand as an industry leader through thought-leader and opinion posts
It can help you build better customer relationships
It can encourage visitor engagement if you include the correct calls to action in your post

Why blogging is important

Blogging should form a big part of your business’ content marketing strategy. The idea is to drive traffic back to your website from your social media and other platforms therefore you want the content that you share, to sit on your own website or blog. As part of your content strategy you can decide on different topics or themes for a week or month and focus your blog posts, social media updates, newsletter, podcasts and so forth on that specific topic.

As mentioned, blogging is also beneficial when it comes to search engine optimisation. By regularly updating your blog and correctly using keywords and meta tags, you can improve your website’s ranking on search engine result pages. It is advisable to do research on the keywords you should focus on, and to try and incorporate these keywords into your blog posts.

Blog posts can also be a good way to generate leads and sales. For instance, you can write an optimised blog post about what your product is about, how it works, what the benefits are, and so forth. You can then link to the specific product pages from your blog to encourage people to visit the page and either enquire about the product or buy it.

So if you are asking if blogging is beneficial to your business, then the answer is yes. It can be very powerful if done correctly. Do you need help with your content marketing strategy or the writing of blog posts? If yes, get in touch with our team.