3 Marketing and Social Media Trends Worth Sharing
In today’s blog post, I’ve got three marketing and social media trends worth sharing. Today, we’ll cover HubSpot’s 2022 Instagram Engagement report, insights from how small businesses are doing marketing differently, and the evolution of D2C brands. For more of my writing, you can find my latest blog post here.
HubSpot 2022 Instagram Engagement Report
In Hubspot's newest report on Instagram and how to create an engaging social media presence, we wanted to share some highlights from this report. Including:
Benchmarking Engagements: In both North America and the UK, the average engagement rate for Instagram was 5.21%. Given the challenges we face as a cannabis brand, our content on Facebook and Instagram received an average 5% engagement rate (ER) for Sunnyside in Q4.
Steps to a strong caption: Stay true to your brand voice. The post copy we create is the perfect place to let it speak loud and clear, as it's a chance to talk directly with our followers., Always lead your caption with the most important, compelling information. Because Instagram will clip your caption when it appears in users' feeds, they'll need to click 'see more' to read the whole thing.
How Small Businesses Are Doing Marketing Differently
While the cannabis industry is nowhere near considered a small business, most marketing teams run lean and scrappy. So seeing how digital marketers with truly fewer resources succeed can inspire digital marketers like myself. Some highlights from Buffer include:
Finding Influencers Who Align With Your Business: With shifts in consumer privacy and the growing trend of shoppable content, brands are shifting their marketing spend toward partnerships with Instagram influencers overpaid ad strategies. Given that we cannot leverage paid ads as an industry, influencers are critical in helping us reach our target audiences at scale.
Rewarding Loyalty and Word of Mouth Marketing (WOMM): We've talked about the value of WOMM before, but with discussions around ways to improve loyalty in our industry, it felt right to share this. Brands already lean on their brand advocates to help spread the word, and an advocacy engine can be created and become self-sustaining by investing in incentives to encourage consumers to do so.
The Evolution of D2C Brands
eCommerce continues to evolve, with Direct To Consumer (D2C) gaining larger market shares across multiple industries. Traditional brands with brick & mortar locations are now looking to tap into emerging e-commerce trends. 2PM partnered with Deloitte to release a report covering eight trends; some of our favorites include:
Brands to drop 3rd-party retailers: To better control inventory and customer experience, traditional CPG brands will focus on their own distribution channels. For example, Nike has committed to selling 70% of its products directly by 2027.
Apple's privacy changes: We've talked about this before, but Apple's consumer privacy changes will have a long-lasting effect. The change has significantly impacted Facebook's ad tracking and prompted Apple to begin building its advertising platform.
Rising customer acquisition costs: It is more challenging for brands to stay top of mind with their target audience than ever and forces companies to invest in their own content to reach future customers. More prominent companies like HubSpot are acquiring popular newsletters like The Hustle to help supplement their content library across digital marketing channels, including social, web, email, and more.
Let me know if any of these insights were useful! Where are you finding new inspiration when it comes to social media and digital marketing? Until next time
