In an age where customers are spoilt for choice when it comes to choosing from a multitude of brands, it is critical to ensure that your brand stands out.
This is especially important considering all the noise on social media and the various other digital platforms that exist today, that has resulted in a drastic increase in the customer acquisition costs across all industries.
So, the question is how do you cut through all this noise?
Well, this is where brand authenticity becomes important.
In this article, we cover everything you need to know about brand authenticity and why it is important.
Let’s dive in!
What is brand authenticity?
First things first, before we go on to understand the importance of brand authenticity, it is key to understand exactly what brand authenticity is.
To put it simply, brand authenticity is nothing but the extent to which a brand is faithful to itself – this includes your business vision, mission and expertise.
When customers place their trust in a brand, they expect you to understand and do what you do with complete conviction. The more they trust your brand and its motives, the more they are willing to spend their time and money on your offerings.
And this is why it is critical to ensure you do a brand authenticity check every now and then.
Why is brand authenticity important?
When you have a unique branding in place already, why is establishing brand authenticity so important? Here are some of the reasons why it has become so important:
1. Brand authenticity is critical for brands to stand out
Research shows that there are more than 500,000 brands across the globe.
That’s just a lot of competition and it means that if customers don’t believe your brand, it may not be long before they look for other trustworthy brands. You may even risk losing your existing customers to competitors.
This is where brand authenticity comes in.
Apart from clearly establishing what your brand stands for, it gives your audience a reason to trust what you have to offer and continue to choose you over others. This is similar to how everyone looks up to Tiffany’s & Co. when it comes to luxury jewelry and sparkling stones!
The familiarity that this further builds owing to the strong connection with the audience, further helps improve brand recognition. This in turn makes it much simpler to stand out and capture audience attention.
2. Brand authenticity is key to building emotional connections with customers
In a recent report by Sitecore titled ‘Brand Authenticity Report’, it was revealed that as many as 86% of customers have stronger relationships with brands that are empathetic and understanding of customers and what they need.
Brand authenticity means staying true to yourself and it is important to ensure that your messaging, marketing, and ideas are a true reflection of what you believe in. This helps in building stronger and long lasting connections with customers.
This is very similar to how consumers today choose to associate themselves with brands that support a cause that they care about.
3. Brand authenticity is becoming increasingly important to younger generations
The younger generation today leans towards brands that they feel are “real”. They are less inclined towards brands that seem repetitive, packaged, and without purpose.
The brand authenticity definition varies for different brands. But, Gen Z and Millennial customers are bound to strongly resonate with brands that show a genuine concern for the various socioeconomic issues that exist today.
A good brand authenticity example is how many youngsters today feel strongly about how businesses contribute towards saving the environment. In such cases, they may insist on buying from brands that truly recognize the importance of ‘zero waste’ and strive towards keeping their businesses environment friendly and sustainable.
This nudges them to support sustainable brands even if their products and services come at a higher cost as compared to others.
Statistics that prove the impact of brand authenticity
Brand authenticity clearly plays a crucial role in driving a business forward. But, what is its impact?
Let’s look at a few brand authenticity statistics to understand the long-term impact of designing authentic brand experiences.
88% of customers feel authenticity is a key factor when deciding between the brands they prefer
81% of customers say that they need to trustthe brand that they buy from – brand authenticity has a long lasting impact on customer loyalty and trust
Only 1 in 3 customers trust the brands they buy from especially since a number of brands use socio economic issues as a marketing ploy
13% of customers are willing to pay nearly 50% more if they believe that your brand could make a positive impact on the world – clearly, brand authenticity can amp up your revenue!
94% of customers are highly likely to be loyal to a brand that offers complete transparency
4 in 10 customers have boycotted a brand they associate with irresponsible actions
86% of shoppers prefer brands that have an honest and authentic presence over social media.
How to build brand authenticity?
Brand authenticity, without question, is an integral part of how you present your business to a target audience. But the presentation is easier said than doneNow, how do you build an authentic brand?
Building brand authenticity calls for a very detailed understanding of your target market, your offerings, and, more importantly, an understanding of what matters most to your audience.
Here are the key steps in building brand authenticity:
1. Develop a thorough understanding of your audience
Brand authenticity matters most to your customers. This is precisely why it is important to have a holistic understanding of both your audience as well as your customers. Data plays a huge role here.
Here is an overview of how to go about building an authentic brand:
Collect audience intelligence
This involves collecting highly detailed information about your audience. It involves understanding audience demographics, interests, purchase intent, brand preferences, etc.
Collecting audience data helps you understand the likes and dislikes of your customers and allows you to tailor your messages and ideas accordingly.
How your audience reacts to your content is an indicator of how they perceive your brand. Keeping a regular check on how various types of content, such as blogs, social media posts, video content, etc are performing can help you fine-tune what you put out and ensure it resonates with your audience.
Tracking content performance also allows you to narrow down what’s working best and then build on it further.
Understand what people think of your brand
An important aspect of building brand authenticity is to understand how customers perceive your brand.
This can be done through social listening. By leveraging social media listening tools, you can better understand what customers think of you by tracking their social conversations. It is also a great way to get deeper insight into what your target audience thinks about your competitors as well.
Social listening allows you to identify patterns, topics, trends, and discussions that are important to your audience. You can use this to build content and offerings around what matters most to your customers.
Close collaboration with other teams
Teams such as sales, customer success, and PR need to constantly collaborate and work together since these teams have the highest insight into customer behavior. Seamless collaboration is key to building brand identities that truly align with what customers expect from you.
Redefine the rules for diversity and inclusion
Inclusive marketing is a key element of brand authenticity. Customers want to be heard and understood. More importantly, they are looking at brands to drive the way forward when it comes to inclusion regardless of gender, heritage, culture, and color.
Brands that demonstrate genuine and unbiased support stand out and earn loyalty from customers.
2. Leverage data to build a detailed brand strategy
Now that you have collected and built upon audience insights, the next step is to leverage these insights to build a brand strategy that emphasizes your brand authenticity.
Spend time mulling over aspects like your brand’s values, differentiators, and what customers think of your brand and your competitors.
Based on these insights, develop a strategy for different platforms, such as social media, PR, sales, marketing, etc., that truly showcases everything your brand believes in. Have a clear idea of the kind of stories you can tell and the experiences you can share. This is important in building deeper emotional connections with your customers.
Keeping all of this in mind, strategize and come up with critical goals for your brand. It could be monthly, quarterly, or even annual. The important thing is to identify the right opportunities and showcase your brand’s values at the right time and bring about an impact from these initiatives.
3. Track your success and fine-tune further
No one gets it right the first time. It requires multiple iterations and closely tracking the metrics that matter. This, in turn, helps you identify what matters more in building your brand authenticity.
Observe the performance of different types of metrics over a period of time. Use both insights and intuition to understand what it is that makes your audience feel more connected to your brand.
Identify key takeaways, ask all the right questions, and more importantly, keep experimenting. Every experiment yields a better understanding of your audience and will help you reiterate your strategy to make it better.
Final thoughts
The internet is chock full of ads, information, marketing campaigns, and more. Cutting through all this noise and keeping your head above the water may seem like quite a bit of a challenge, and it surely is.
However, focusing on what truly matters to your audience and what you believe in is a great way to stand out.
A good way to build brand authenticity is to focus closely on your market share of voice. It is also equally important to constantly be aware of and monitor the sentiments of your target audience and customers.
In order to help you achieve this, it is important to have a social listening and monitoring tool in your arsenal.
For instance, Radarr is a tool that can effectively turn online conversations into powerful brand insights. It helps you to track and monitor social conversations with ease and gather actionable insights.
Curious to know more about Radarr can help your business?
Do you really need a social media style guide for your brand?
There is no shortage of the number of channels and platforms over which marketers can set up campaigns to reach a target audience. While this highlights an opportunity for brands to establish a sustainable presence on the digital landscape, there is also an increasing concern about losing brand image rapidly with each platform the business decides to take on.
With an increasing number of social media platforms, we often find marketers struggling to keep up with the various algorithm changes, trends and audience needs – especially if the brand is scaling and entering new markets. The need for speed often results in haphazard efforts to create textual and visual content, leading to compromising on the overall brand guidelines.
One thing leading to another, brands are often unaware when they lose out on 80% of what they want the business to be portrayed as.
This is where having a social media style guide comes in handy and we’re here to share how to create one for your business.
What is a Social Media Style Guide?
A social media style guide informs the way you approach different social media content, influencing how your audiences perceive your brand. It is a document outlining the specific choices in styling for social media branding. For this reason, your style guide plays an integral role in social media branding. It guides your brand’s actions and appearance on social media platforms.
When social media marketing strategies are made up of tactical information that allows for growth on social media, your social style media marketing guide can break these actions to portray your brand voice.
A good social media style guide also includes details on what your brand should and should not be talking about on platforms. Since the topics and themes of campaigns can have an impact on how your brand is perceived, this guideline serves as guardrails.
Why is a Social Media Style Guide Important?
Having a social media style guide will allow for more control over the way your brand gets defined. This means that your style guide would be able to define how your content would look when it gets shared.
Even with a good team, knowing how to create social media brand guidelines is a must. These are some of the major benefits of having a social media brand guide template:
As social media managers often have a lot going on their plates, having a solid source to reference from is important
Even in instances where you are occupied and there is little supervision, the team can keep your social media marketing efforts functioning smoothly
With a social media brand guide template in place, you can offer a smooth onboarding process for newer members of the team
With a styling guide your content remains consistent and unique, making the content easily recognizable for your audiences
Minor details like spelling, and punctuation on your social media content that impacts brand perception can be sorted and made consistent
A good social media style guide can also give you complete control over your share of voice and the overall sentiment you want to stimulate through digital platforms
Brand guidelines can also help in monitoring overall digital health
Helps streamline the type of content your marketing team wants to create to keep up with audience needs
What Should a Social Media Marketing Guideline Include?
The primary purpose of a social media style guide is to create a consistent brand voice through your content. Hence, it should remain clean and concise. It should take into account factors like your brand voice, tone on various social platforms and your target audience.
When your organization has established or is working towards creating its social media presence, you’ll want to ensure that each individual account is branded consistently. Here are the major aspects that need to be included in every social media style guide:
1. Have A List of All Your Social Media Accounts
The first thing you need for a social media branding guide is a list of all the social media accounts that your business is present on. You will also have to include your brand’s existing social media handles and what type of content is being shared on the platform, as well as how it aids in achieving your business goals and objectives.
It is also a good idea to list the platforms your brand may want to experiment with in the future to take into accounts its requirements.
2. Brand Voice and Tone
A well-defined brand voice makes all the difference when connecting with customers. Each brand has a personality that needs to be communicated and projected to the audience in order to maintain an appeal.
Be it funny sarcasm or mature formalness, your brand has to remain consistent with the personality it holds. This is where outlining your voice in your social media branding style guide comes in. Let’s have a look at a few aspects to look into when outlining your brand voice.
Inclusive Language
It is only fair that the language you use on your socials is inclusive and open-minded. This is why brands should communicate with their team members to develop guidelines for inclusive social media language. Different views and perspectives can contribute to crafting a fair language guideline.
Post Authorship
Here you have to outline whether you post as a brand or attribute authorship of posts to team members.
Jargon
Using or not using jargon depends on what industry your brand belongs to. It’s better to stick to plain language that offers clear communication unless you are in a technical industry with a niche audience.
Sentence Length
When constructing captions or paragraphs, keep in mind that short is better. But keep in mind that the length of your sentences should be appropriate for each of the different social media platforms.
Using CTAs
When using CTAs, brands should identify the fine line between too much and too little. Make sure that you are focusing on the type of actions that you want them to take and the wording of your CTAs.
Using Emojis
Ask yourself and the team, whether emojis should be a part of your social media content. If yes, what emojis will you use and how do you intend to use them? It’s also a good idea to look into what each emoji means for the netizens before including them in your style guide.
3. Social Media Policy
A social media policy lays out the dos and don’ts of employee behavior on social media. This will include factors like content, guidance on dealing with negative feedback/comments and disclosure. These are some major points that need to be taken into account when drafting a social media policy:
Designate who holds responsibility for tasks like creating, approving and publishing posts
Content can be anything from product photos and company news to meme videos; clearly describe what kind of content is appropriate and what is off-limits
Have a well-defined plan for when your team handles a crisis
Mention how your brand’s security protocol; how will security risks and passwords be managed
Layout the employee guidelines for both personal and professional social media use in relation to your business
Convey when the content should be published for the best impact and when it calls for moving it back to drafts/ getting deleted
When it comes to regulated industries, make sure that your team and business are compliant with the law
4. Brand Language Rules
Often a brand will have its own specific set of acronyms, names, phrases etc. The usage of such words and phrases needs to be clearly defined in your social media style guide.
We can look at trademarks as an example. Include a list of your brand trademarks in your social media branding guide. Note that having a list in all caps will complicate the list.
When using acronyms, it’s ideal to provide a section that explains their usage. For acronyms that are niche or are not widely in use, it is better to spell them in full form, where it first appears. Also, convey where specific acronyms are appropriate and where they are not.
Also make sure that you include the correct pronunciation of your brand name if your brand name has a peculiar pronunciation that might confuse the audience. Including the phonetic spelling of a difficult name in the style guide, is the easiest way to address this issue.
5. Consistency Guidelines
Consistency guidelines help ensure that all your content uses the same language throughout. Begin by sharing a carefully selected dictionary with all the relevant team members. Grammar and punctuation choices, when made uniform throughout, can do away with many inconsistencies in language use.
You’ll also have to choose between US or UK English, depending on the location where your business is based. Businesses might even have to consider both if they have a global audience.
Another thing to note is punctuation. On social media, brands usually punctuate in a proper manner. This covers things like correctly utilizing apostrophes and avoiding text speak. Things like hashtags and some abbreviations are exceptional cases here. In your social media style guide, be sure to specify when and where acronyms and slang are okay.
Other things that need to be detailed in your social media style guide include headline capitalization, the use of serial commas, dash style, the format of date and time, links and numbering.
6. Customer Personas
You might already have defined customer personas before your brand got established. If not, then now is the time. Knowing your target audience will help you develop a brand voice and content that resonates with them. To do this, you should create customer personas.
Knowing your audience is essential before you can create a compelling brand voice. When developing customer personas, consider the following points as well:
Demographics like age, location, gender and occupation
The way they use social media
Interests
Business goals
Challenges/pain points
Type of content customer engages with
7. Guidelines for Curation
Curated content can be an excellent method to improve the quality of your social media feed. This is important because not always will your ideas be new and unique.
Here you should define which source you can share and which source you will not share from (For example- your competitors). Your guidelines should also define how third-party images should be sourced and cited.
8. Hashtag Usage Strategy
How does your brand use hashtags? Your objective is to outline a hashtag strategy in your social media style guide that maintains your social channel’s consistency.
Do you use branded hashtags? How do you collect user-generated content? You have to list down all the branded hashtags of your brand with guidelines on their usage, in your style guide. You should also create a list of hashtags that are specific to ongoing or one-time campaigns.
Other guidelines on the number of hashtags to be used, as well as the case in which your hashtags should be written (upper case, lower case or camel case), are some other aspects that need to be included in your social media style guide.
9. User Generated Content
Content generated by your audiences will have a hugely positive impact on your brand. But your team should have the proper guidelines on how to curate and credit such content. Some basic guidelines for user-generated content are as follows:
Request permission from the user
Credit the creator
Provide value in return for the content
Find missed user-generated content with search streams
Keep in mind that the specific instructions on tagging and crediting should also be there in your social media marketing style guide.
10. Guidelines for Visual Design
Visual design is where the look and feel of your brand finally gets defined. These are some of the key points to include in visual guidelines:
Colors
Your brand colors need to be prominent in your socials. You may want to use colors that complement your brand when designing your content. Sometimes softer variations of your brand colors can set tones to your backgrounds when it comes to designing images and CTAs.
Logo
You will already have a logo. But where do you use it? Where won’t you use it? Answer these and point them in your style guide.
Using Images and Filter effects
This is where you outline the kind of images you are going to use on your social media content. Are you going to use stock images? How will you promote user-generated images? Will you use watermarks? Detail these in your guideline.
How to Implement The Guidelines You Create?
There are five steps involved in implementing your social media style guide. In short, it is a process of including all the above elements in your guideline; but here’s how it typically flows:
Define your brand voice and tone
Audit and align all your social media accounts
Set up guidelines for formatting
Create guidelines for media
Develop your strategies to deal with crises and other situations
Pro tip: Ensure that you get a stakeholder buy-in for all the steps above; this will help reduce the number of last-minute changes in your social media strategy and guidelines, and also take into account their industry expertise and insights.
Social Media Style Guide Template
Goals
Audience
[Describe your majority audience persona or insert link to customer personas.}
Accounts
[insert handle or links to every social account run by your organization]
Content pillars
[Insert types of content you post and how often you aim to post each type of content]
Voice and Tone
[Summarize the voice and tone of your social media presence in one sentence]
Words and Phrases to Avoid
Emojis to Avoid
[Describe which emojis should be avoided and why, and what each mean]
Capitalization
[Identify capitalization style to be used when writing on social media, i.e., sentence case, title case, no capitals, etc.]
Timing
[insert link to editorial calendar and/or guidelines on how often/when to post on each network]
Bad Post Examples
[insert at least one screenshot example of a type of post you don’t do per network]
Content Curation Blocklist [insert list of outlets that you do not share content from (i.e., competitors, untrustworthy sources, etc.)]
Inspiring Brands
[insert list of brands that inspire your content creation, include space for notes on what exactly you like about them]
Guidelines for Visuals
[insert list of outlets that you do not share content from (i.e., competitors, untrustworthy sources, etc.)]
Tagging Guidelines
[make sure to answer the following questions: ●When do you tag someone? ●Do you include a tag in the photo, caption, or both ●In which cases do you need to ask permission to tag?]
Crediting Guidelines
[make sure to answer the following questions: ●When do you need to credit someone? ●What format should the credit follow (i.e., “Name, CCO)? ●Are there different levels of crediting? If so, what are they? ●When do you not need to credit someone?]
Optimize your social media branding for higher ROI
Social media marketing requires consistent efforts to drive the desired ROI from organic and paid campaigns.
For this reason, a social media marketing style guide becomes one of the most important aspects to keep your efforts directional and streamlined. With a guide in place, you equip your team to not just keep up with your target audience and trends, but also adapt the strategy to suit the changes in unpredictable circumstances such as launch of new features or algorithm updates.
Constantly improving your social media style guide based on real-world testing and analytics of your socials, will ensure that your brand has what it takes to compete in the market. This is where having a powerful social media analytics tool like Radarr comes into play.
With its ability to process millions of conversations online, it helps you measure your share of voice, sentiment of your audience, the ongoing conversations around your brand and provides insights on how you can optimize it all for a positive impact on your business.
New to social media analytics that can help with branding?
List of social media marketing skills you need as a manager.
A decade ago, the term “social media manager” wasn’t even a part of the lexicon. Facebook was still new and only used by people to connect with friends. No businesses, no marketing.
Fast forward a decade, and every organization is involved in social media. It has become a channel for businesses to connect with their customers, leading to more sales. This impact on growth has increased the demand for social media managers.
Building a robust social media presence requires social media managers to wear multiple hats because of the diverse nature of different platforms.
The algorithms of every platform work differently. What works on Twitter might not always work for the Instagram audience. Therefore, it’s essential for social media managers to have a comprehensive set of skills (including technical, analytical, creative, and management).
In this blog, we’re going to look at some of the most important social media marketing skills that managers must have in 2023.
Let’s jump right in!
13 Most Important Social Media Marketing Skills You Cannot Ignore
Social media managers have no specific education path or work background. They can come from various fields due to the diverse skills and traits required for the role.
Here are 13 social media marketing skills and traits that your manager must have in 2023 and beyond:
Creativity
In 2021, almost 92% of marketers working for companies with more than 100 employees were expected to use social media channels for marketing. This indicates how crowded this space is. But you’ll see great success when you cut through the crowd and noise.
Your social media manager will be responsible for creating standout campaigns that bring attention to your brands. This is why “creativity” has to be the most prominent part of their portfolio.
It’ll help them find ordinary trends and turn them into extraordinary campaigns. Here’s how Oreo creatively seized the opportunity when there was a power out during Super Bowl in 2013:
Writing and Editing
No matter how much social media evolves — from text to images and now to videos — captions will always be there. This makes writing a non-negotiable skill for social media managers.
When social media managers are good at writing, they send a clear brand message to the audience. And with social media, word count is often a limitation. For example, Twitter only gives you 280 characters, making it challenging to be snappy while sharing the brand message and CTA.
Moreover, typos can hurt a brand’s online reputation (unless done intentionally). Therefore, social media managers should also have editing skills that’ll help them catch all the typos and errors before they hit the “Post” button.
Understanding Design
Image and video content generate more engagement compared to posts with just text. Given that visuals are such an integral part of social media platforms (especially Instagram), your social media manager must be able to differentiate between a good and bad design.
They don’t necessarily have to design the post themselves. You have graphic designers for that. But having a good understanding of design makes their collaboration easier with the designers and enables them to provide constructive feedback.
Awareness of Pop Culture and Current Events
Pop culture and current events are the base for every social media trend and meme. It is especially true for Instagram and TikTok, where content is targeted to the younger audience.
Your social media manager will have to consistently identify ongoing trends and events around the world. And it’s not just to bring engagement by participating at the right time; it also lets you know when you should pause your social media game due to major global events.
Your social media manager needs to have a good awareness of global events so that you don’t hurt the sentiments of your audience.
You can use Radarr’s social listening feature to identify trending topics and also keep track of what your audience is saying about you.
Public Speaking
Public speaking skills are built upon your ability to communicate to large audiences articulately and with confidence.
Facebook and Instagram introduced the live stream feature, which has further evolved the social media marketing scene. More than 80% of customers prefer engaging with a brand on their live streams over their social posts, and this makes it essential for your social media manager to have great public speaking skills.
If you want to be a social media authority in your industry, then how well your social media manager communicates with the audience matters a lot. They have to have the ability and confidence to conduct live sessions, live interviews, QnAs, etc.
Customer Service
Social media is one of the first channels where people contact a brand when they have a query. But only 21% of businesses use social media to provide customer service. It’s a good statistic for your competitors if you’re not a part of this 21 percent.
Social media managers are the face of your company on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. They are the ones who’ll be responding to at least some of the messages that come from your existing customers or target audience.
Therefore, it is important for them to have good conversational skills and empathy to help the customers out.
And irrespective of which platform you’re providing support on, you can use the social listening feature to get real-time data from social media platforms. This data tells you what your audience is saying about you. If you find someone complaining, you can reach out to them and solve their issue.
Community Engagement
Community engagement, in the context of social media, means retaining the attention and interest of existing customers while also acquiring new customers. Nothing drives conversion better than an engaged community.
And being the forefront of your social campaign, your social media manager will have to foster digital relationships. They must have the ability to actively listen to what the audience is saying and maintain transparency with them.
The good news is that with tools like Radarr, social listening and social media responses are only going to get easier. Learn how here.
Efficient Organization
Businesses generally post every day. It’s the duty of the social media manager to maintain a calendar for each platform where the business is present.
But what’s challenging with calendars is a lot of things are subject to change. The designer might get late in submitting the visuals. There might be a global event stopping you from posting. Or even the social media platform can face glitches.
And to tackle all these issues and ensure a timely delivery, your social media managers need to be highly organized.
Understanding Behavioral Psychology
By analyzing data, you can find out the type of posts that work best on social media platforms. But behavioral psychology, on the other hand, allows you to identify the “why” of successful posts. It tells you why some posts perform better than others.
So, by knowing “what” type of post works the best, you’ll be able to repeat past success. But when you know the “why,” you can understand why something goes trending and can also try to make your own trends.
Your social media managers don’t need to have a degree in behavioral psychology. But some understanding will take your social media game to the next level.
When your social media manager is curious about their profession, they’ll dive the deepest into social media. They’ll know all about the latest developments and will not fear experimenting with strategies.
They’ll also spot the trends quickly. And if they can adapt and make changes to the strategies at the right time, then the engagement rate will also pump up.
So, combine curiosity with adaptability, and you’ll go miles ahead of your competitors.
Good Business Sense and Objective-Oriented
Social media managers don’t need a business degree. But if they have no sense of business, they’d not be able to relate how your conversion rate changes with changes in strategies.
Now, being able to generate likes and shares is one thing, but creating social media strategies while keeping business goals in mind is what true success looks like.
Your social managers should see the bigger picture and understand how social media can contribute to growth. They should push the relevant metrics higher to maximize output.
With Radarr Command Center, your social media managers can monitor KPIs that determine how social media is helping your brand.
Social Media Data Analytics
Apart from being creative and curious, it’s essential for social media managers not to fear numbers. Social media platforms generate a truckload of data, and it can be overwhelming for managers if they are afraid of it.
One of the must-have skills for your social media manager is to be able to wade through this truckload of data and find the relevant metrics and points that lead to meaningful insights.
You can use a social media analytics tool like Radarr to understand your audience, identify their sentiments about your brand, keep up with the trends, monitor campaigns, and do much more.
Social media managers are given a fixed budget to work with. They have to fit their social strategies within this budget and optimize their expenditure in a way that ensures maximum return on investment.
Marketers claim that 26% of their budget goes to waste because of ineffective strategies. Therefore, having strong budgeting skills is a must for social media managers. They need to estimate their expenses and have some contingency plans ready.
On a Concluding Note
Want your social media channels to be a success? You need a social media manager who has these skills. Or at least someone who’s willing to learn all of them.
You can take Radarr’s 360-degree course on social media analytics to know everything you’ll need to make successful strategies.
We update Radarr Academy courses frequently with the latest industry benchmarks so that what you learn remains actionable and relevant.
PS. As the new year rolls in, we may add more to this list of social media skills that you need for adapting to different technologies and platforms. Don’t forget to bookmark or save this page.
Get your BFCM marketing strategy for social media ready.
The year is almost coming to an end and the holiday season and all of its fun-filled festivities are right around the corner! For businesses, this means getting ready to run some awesome holiday marketing campaigns. This is especially important since BFCM or Black Friday, Cyber Monday is just a few weeks away.
For the uninitiated, Black Friday falls on the Friday after Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday falls on the following Monday. The key difference is that Black Friday is more for retail shopping while Cyber Monday is all about online shopping. Businesses offer massive sales and discounts on products and services during BFCM much to the delight of their customers. Essentially, it is a big season for businesses irrespective of whether they are B2B, B2C, or D2C.
To put it in perspective, research shows that American shoppers spent $8.9 billion during Black Friday 2021 while Cyber Monday the same year attracted a total sale of $10.7 billion.
Clearly, it’s time to start preparing your business for BFCM 2022.
A great way to reach your audience this shopping season is through social media. You can run BFCM promotions on social media to garner attention and ensure that you are not losing out on this amazing opportunity.
However, social media planning for BFCM has to be approached very meticulously and strategically. In this blog, we elaborate on how your business can make the best out of BFCM 2022.
How to use social media for BFCM marketing and promotions
1. Create a social media calendar in advance
Your BFCM social media strategy needs to be planned at least 3 weeks in advance to get the most out of your campaigns. This involves ideating and preparing the different types of content, creatives, offers, etc. This is especially important if your business has a social media presence across three or more channels. Ensure that the content you create resonates with your audience and attracts them to make purchases. Visual content is key here.
2. Segment your campaigns to ensure maximum efficacy
The fourth quarter of every year gets everyone in their festive spirits. This means that if you plan your campaigns strategically, you can drive profitability as well as acquire new customers in one go. For this, you need to divide your campaigns.
For instance, you can have a pre-BFCM campaign running for two weeks prior to BFCM and then you can have a Black Friday and Cyber Monday campaign running from 24th November to 28th November. Post this you can also launch campaigns centered around Christmas shopping and gifting.
3. Run tiered discounts for driving higher volume of sales
Since BFCM is notorious for their huge promotions and discounts, a great way to attract more sales is to run a tiered discount program. In this method, the higher the amount the buyer spends, the greater is the discount they get.
For instance, customers get a discount of 2.5% for a spend of $250. Now, if they spend $500, they get a discount of 5% and they get $100 off on a spend of $1000.
The advantage is that customers are motivated to spend more in order to earn better discounts, thereby driving more sales.
4. Run compelling early-bird discounts to increase interest
A great way to increase engagement and interest and hit your promotion goals is to offer attractive early-bird discounts and offers.You can send out emails or special coupons to a targeted audience to drive more sales. Combining a sense of urgency with a significant discount is a sure-shot way of ensuring that your products or services sell out. Plus, your risk of loss is significantly lower since early-bird offers run only for limited periods.
5. Buy one get X% off on next to increase average order value
This is quite an effective tactic to increase the value of an order. You can also run a similar campaign along the lines of buy one get one free as well. Both have been proven, time and again, to be killer methods of driving sales, especially during BFCM and the holiday season.
You can run these campaigns on specific products or run it as a general offer on all your products. For instance, buy a perfume worth $100 and get a moisturizer worth $50 absolutely free! Or buy ABC Foundation for $100 and get 50% off on any ABC product.
6. Run gift guide ads to simplify holiday shopping
A large number of people are likely to kickstart their gift shopping spree for the holiday season during Black Friday and Cyber Monday owing to the huge discounts. Gift guide ads are a perfect way to take advantage of this buying behavior. As the name suggests, gift guide ads are perfect for suggesting products that can be gifted to friends and family.
However, a number of businesses simply consolidate a huge list of products in the name of gift guides. This simply confuses customers. Instead, put some thought into it and maybe even group products by different categories such as price, tech, clothing etc.
7. Live shopping events to motivate impromptu shopping sprees
The advent of several live streaming social platforms has given rise to a new trend in shopping called live shopping. However, this is nothing new. A lot of you might remember televised shopping from brands such as QVC. Live shopping is simply televised shopping elevated to suit the current age of smartphones. It involves influencers and ecommerce brands using video streaming platforms to showcase different products and launches. The advantage is that you get to showcase your products to millions of viewers which is highly likely to generate quick sales.
You can simply add product links to the live shopping videos and experience the benefits of live shopping.
8. Develop visual storefronts for your social media platforms
One of the key aspects of your BFCM social media strategy should be to create visual storefronts for your social media pages. This means leveraging attractive visuals and social selling features to motivate shopping within the social media application itself. This makes it a whole lot easier for your shoppers to make purchases rather than adding an extra step by redirecting them to your website or landing page.
You can make use of such storefronts to display a range of products belonging to different categories and pricing tiers.
9. Leverage data and analytics to find out the right social media platforms
Prior to ideating for your BFCM social media campaigns, first sit down and gather the engagement, traffic, conversion rate data of different social media platforms over the course of the past few months. Use this data to understand your best performing social media platforms and also to understand how different sets of audience react to different types of content on these platforms.
You can then leverage this data to get an idea of what kind of campaigns are likely to work across which platforms. This is key to running profitable BFCM campaigns.
10. Ensure you have enough people and resources to engage with your audience
One thing about using social media for your BFCM campaigns is that you can expect a flurry of comments, messages, and queries from your audience regarding various details of your promotions. It is important to make sure that you have enough resources to engage with your audience and answer any questions they might have. It is important to plan this in advance so that you are not overwhelmed during BFCM and also so that your customers are in no way unhappy with your business.
11. Don’t forget to run post-holiday campaigns
If you think your job is done once the holidays are over, think again! The truth is that most businesses face a slump in sales right after Christmas. People are done with their holiday shopping and gifting and gearing up for the New Year. Which is why post-holiday marketing campaigns are necessary.
Running attractive offers and promotions on your stock and promoting those on social media may just help you overcome the holiday slump. People are likely to spend more on themselves, especially with the new year in sight. Clearance sales, self-care promotions, and year-end promotions are some great ways to run post-holiday campaigns.
Pro tip: Stay on top of BFCM campaigns with social listening and monitoring
BFCM is going to be competitive this year. The only way to ensure you don’t end up running campaigns that don’t appeal to buyers or get lost in the volume due to lack of engagement, is to leverage social listening and social monitoring.
Social listening can help brands uncover BFCM trends, predict products that can turn hot-selling and optimize their campaigns accordingly. Similarly, using social monitoring can help them keep the engagement going, giving you a chance to turn consumer interest into a purchase.
Want to learn more about the role of social listening and monitoring in ecommerce? Read this article.
Final thoughts
Looking at the calendar, it might just feel like BFCM is a month away and you have enough time to plan and launch your social media campaigns. However, to make the best out of this season, it is important to get started early and plan ahead so that you have everything in place.
Of course, the number one step in your BFCM social media strategy is to identify exactly what your target audience is engaging with and also to gauge their interests. A great way to do this is to monitor what your audience is saying through social listening. A tool like Radarr can convert online conversations into critical brand insights.
If you’re curious to learn how, book a demo of Radarr today!
Learn the difference between Micro-Influencers vs. Macro-Influencers.
Trust and credibility are the souls of every successful business. Every interaction customers have with your business shapes how credible and trustworthy they find you. With influencer marketing, you can establish your brand’s credibility and win customers’ trust from the outset.
And the benefits of having an influencer marketing strategy are second to none.
According to a survey, 93% of marketers have used influencer marketing once. And more than 66% of brands are expected to increase their budget because of the success of their campaigns.
Influencer marketing relies only on influencers’ words. Their audience trusts them and trusts everything that the influencer recommends. And brands ride on this trust. It helps them reach the audience that they miss via their marketing and advertising efforts.
Are you struggling to navigate the influencer marketing world and don’t know which influencers you should choose? Good news, you’re not alone. It can be a bit challenging to figure out the best fit for your business.
Don’t worry. We’ve got you covered. In this blog, we’ll discuss the two types of influencers — micro and macro. And will also help you determine which one you should go for.
Hop into our macro vs. micro-influencer marketing guide!
Micro-influencers vs Macro-influencers for marketing
Who Are Micro-Influencers?
Micro-influencers are social media content creators who stick to a particular niche or topic. They share their views, opinions, and recommendations about niche-related products or services with their followers.
The spectrum of followers for micro-influencers is quite broad. It lies somewhere between 10-100 thousand.
And because their content is niche-oriented, micro-influencers are considered to be experts in their fields. This means whatever these influencers post, the audience trusts it because they know it’s coming from an expert.
But every coin has two faces. Let’s look at some of the pros and cons of using micro-influencers for your campaigns.
Pros of Choosing Micro-Influencers
Credibility
We have already mentioned that the audience of micro-influencers trust them because they’re experts in the field. And the other major reason for this credibility is that the audience can relate to their content.
Let’s say someone’s (micro-influencer) hobby is fishing, and they have used gear from various companies. When they post reviews about these gears, the audience will trust them as they know it’s the experience talking.
Highly-Targeted Niche Audiences
Micro-influencers have highly-targeted niche audiences. Let’s say if someone is posting fishing-related content consistently, then people who are interested in fishing are most likely to follow them. A fishing gears brand can reach out to such an audience to target a very specific audience.
Good Engagement Rates
Because the audience can relate to the content and influencers themselves, they engage heavily with the content. They ask questions in the comment regarding products, ask for tips, and much more.
Campaigns with micro-influencers produce a 60% higher engagement rate compared to macro-influencers.
They cost almost seven times lower per engagement.
They produce 22 times more weekly conversations.
Availability
Micro-influencers are almost available for their clients and audience. They consistently engage with the audience in the comment section, clearing all their doubts. Moreover, they attend events to further push the brand and product they are working with.
Cons of Choosing Micro-Influencers
Limited Reach
Micro-influencers have a small audience which leads to limited reach. They might not be the best option for you if your goal is to spread brand awareness.
Difficult to Identify
Finding a micro-influencer whose audience aligns with your goals is an arduous task. You also have to ensure their content is good quality, has a high engagement rate, and is affordable. All these factors in a single influencer — tough job!
Decreasing Content Quality
The demand for influencers is increasing rapidly. And micro-influencers tend to work with multiple brands at once. And they sometimes end up compromising the content quality in a bid to keep all their clients happy.
Fake Followers
In a bid to collaborate with brands, some micro-influencers use unscrupulous means. They buy fake followers. And though the follower count becomes relatively large, the engagement remains very low. You are better off without such influencers.
What Are Macro-Influencers?
Unlike micro-influencers, macro-influencers are well-known by social media users. They’re household names or some celebrity. They have a large follower base, ranging from 100k to even millions.
They are the ones who set the trends on social media. The same trends that micro-influencers follow to promote your brand and products. However, the audience demographics of these influencers are quite diverse, so targeting a particular set of audiences becomes difficult.
The growth rate of macro-influencers in terms of followers and collaboration is consistent. But if they don’t have another title (celebrity, TV actor, author, etc.) attached to them, then their connection with the audience is fragile, leading to a low engagement rate.
That said, let’s look at some pros and cons of choosing macro-influencers.
Pros of Choosing Micro-Influencers
High Reach
Macro-influencers are an excellent option for brands who want to improve their brand awareness. These influencers can reach a broad audience with just one post. Their reach is 22 times more than that of micro-influencers.
Professionalism
Most of the macro-influencers are managed by agencies that are very professional in the way they deal with brand collaborations. They have some set “terms and conditions,” and if both parties agree, the deal goes smoothly.
Brand Exclusivity
Macro-influencers bring brand exclusivity. They’ll work for you for a fixed time where they’ll not collaborate with any of your competitors. And the collaboration will make your brand appear cool and credible to the influencer’s audience.
Less Risky
As we mentioned, micro-influencers can have fake followers. But that’s not the case with Macro-influencers. They are genuinely popular because of their career and guarantee a good campaign reach.
Cons of Choosing Micro-Influencers
Lack of Trust Among Audience
The audience finds it difficult to trust macro-influencers. It’s because most of the recommendations are staged. They feel that the influencer is only promoting the product for the money, and it might not be worth buying. The lack of a personal angle is also a significant factor in this lack of trust.
High Charges
These influencers charge pretty high because of their popularity and name in the market. The cost per post depends on the influencer, the platform, and the size of the audience promised by them.
Inaccessibility
Due to the fact that macro-influencers are managed by talent managers, it can be hard to get them on a call. They get multiple requests for collaboration, and the brand has to really stand out to their attention.
Irrelevance
A lot of time, macro-influencers promote products that do not fit in their niche. And these campaigns act as just another ad because it’s irrelevant to the audience.
One such influencer marketing example is when David Beckham collaborated with AIA Hong Kong in the “What’s your Why?” campaign. The audience didn’t find it relevant, resulting in a lower engagement rate.
Micro vs. Macro Influencers: Key Differences Between the Two
There’s a huge difference between how micro and macro-influencers operate, cost, and produce returns. This sends marketers into a dilemma over which one of these two they should work with. From a distance, macro-influencers might appear to be more effective, given their huge following and wide reach. But things are not that straightforward.
Here are some parameters that’ll help you determine the winner of “Macro vs. Micro-Influencers” for your brand:
Macro vs. Micro-Influencers: Engagement
Micro-influencers have a significantly higher engagement rate across social media platforms. According to a report, micro-influencers generate 7x more engagement compared to macro-influencers.
And not just a high engagement rate, micro-influencers are also the fastest-growing category of influencers. On the face of it, the lack of followers might put you in doubt. But they are only followed by the users who are genuinely interested in their content, which pretty much makes up for the low follower count.
Here’s the social media account of Komal Pandey, an India-based fashion influencer. She has over 1.8 million followers on Instagram.
If you check her profile, her likes count ranges somewhere around 70k to 100k. Here’s one of her posts where she got around 65k likes.
Having 65k likes on a post is not a small number, mind you. But if we compare it to her follower count, the number of likes is only 3.6 percent.
Komal Pandey is a macro-influencer. Let’s look at a micro-influencer from the same region and industry. Soundarya Thakur has 151k followers, and her posts generate 10k to 15k likes.
Here’s one of her recent posts that generated over 10.6k likes. This is quite low compared to the number of likes that Komal’s post generated.
But this result flips as soon as we compare the ratio of like to followers. Soundarya (micro-influencer) has more than 7% likes with respect to a 151k follower count.
This was just one of the countless examples of micro-influencers having more engagement than macro-influencers.
Macro vs. Micro-Influencers: Reach
Reach is where micro-influencers don’t even come close to macro-influencers. Macro-influencers can reach hundreds of thousands of social media users with just one post.
This gives them the power to convey a brand’s message to a large target audience. If you want to gain the same reach with micro-influencers, you’ll have to partner with a lot of them.
So for brands who intend to use influencer marketing for brand awareness and increase visibility, then macro-influencers are the better choice.
Macro vs. Micro-Influencers: Affordability
Macro-influencers offer a magnificent amount of reach. But despite that, the cost of working with them does not always fit in the budget of startups and small businesses.
The New York Times published a report that said Youtube influencers with 3-7M followers charge $187,500 per video. Instagram influencers with the same number of followers charge somewhere around $75,000 per post.
But in the case of micro-influencers, the cost of an influencer marketing campaign is pretty low. For an Instagram or Facebook post, more than 80% of micro-influencers charge under $250, which fits into the budget of almost every small business.
So what do these differences in cost tell you?
Let’s say an Instagram influencer with 500k followers charges you $1500 for one sponsored post. By paying the same price, you can work with 5-6 micro-influencers who have around 100k followers. You not only get the same reach, but because they are micro-influencers, the engagement rate will also be high.
Macro vs. Micro-Influencers: Relevance
One of the biggest benefits of working with micro-influencers is that their post reaches a highly-relevant audience, improving the ROI of your influencer marketing campaign.
Because they are followed by users who are actually interested in their content, therefore, they generate highly-qualified leads too. They make conversion easier for you compared to macro-influencers.
For example, if you’re a restaurant owner with a high budget and want to promote the place and the menu, collaborating with someone like Amanda Cerny (actress) or Jordan Peterson (Author) would be a huge mistake.
Their audience doesn’t follow them to see food or restaurant reviews. They follow them for completely different reasons. So the campaign will most likely be a failure.
Instead, you can collaborate with micro-influencers like Jack’s Dining Room. They don’t have as many followers, but all 6,708 of them follow the account to see food-related content. It’ll cost you way less and make your campaign a success.
Micro-Influencers vs. Macro-Influencers: Trust and Authenticity
According to a report by TapInfluence, influencer marketing campaigns generate 11 times more returns than traditional advertising. The reason it works so well is that customers trust other customers more than a brand when it comes to making purchase decisions.
When influencers reach the macro level, they become somewhat of a celebrity. And brands have been using celebrity advertising for a decade. But now, it just doesn’t work like it used to. People are more likely to buy products that are endorsed by a non-celeb influencer.
However, this doesn’t imply that macro-influencers are inauthentic. They are still a better option than going with celebrities.
So both in terms of trust and authenticity, micro-influencers win the race!
Who Should You Work With?
Now, we have seen the pros, cons, and differences between macro and micro-influencer marketing. So which should you go with? The below factor in mind while picking one:
Consider brand goals
You need to consider what you want to gain out of the influencer marketing campaign.
You might want to increase the brand visibility, awareness, reach, or traffic. Or you might be looking for more conversions and sales.
Suppose it’s the former, then macro-influencer marketing is good for you. But if you want to drive more sales, then micro-influencer marketing will be a better option for you.
Keep your budget in mind
End of the day, even if you think macro-influencer marketing would be good for your brand’s success, but your budget doesn’t allow you, then there’s no other option.
So before you start shortlisting your influencers, know that your budget is one of the most critical factors that decide who you get to work with.
Consider your audience
You must consider the audience you want to target with your influencer marketing campaign.
If it’s a niche audience, for instance, painters, a micro-influencer will produce better results for you. It’s because when a painter sells to other painters, the conversation is more relatable. They know that it’s coming from a reliable source.
But let’s say you’ve just launched a beverage for all ages. Then what you want is brand awareness. If people don’t remember you, they won’t ever buy you. In such cases, macro-influencer marketing is a better option.
The Verdict on micro-influencers vs macro-influencers
In this blog, we discussed what micro and macro-influencers are. What are the pros and cons of macro vs. micro-influencer marketing, what are their differences, and who should you work with?
You have to know your audience. When you know who you want to target, you can pick the type of influencer that best hits the target. You also need to consider who’s more relatable for the audience.
With Radarr’s social listening feature, you can reach the influencers who are already talking about you. And by using sentiment analysis, you’ll be able to identify the ones who are sharing positive reviews about you.
Want to know more about finding the right influencer for your campaign? Read Here!
