5 Social Media Trends For The 2nd Half of 2021
As we head into the secondnd half of 2021, I've felt re-energized and excited to discuss all things marketing and social media! Hopefully, you're feeling a similar energy and looking to improve on your social media strategy. So, without further ado, let's get into 5 Social Media Trends Heading Into The Second Half of the Year.
1) Direct To Consumer (D2C) For All Brands
The pandemic caused a drastic shift in how consumers engage with brands and vice-versa. Consumers who had never ordered an item felt compelled to due to a variety of reasons. People were looking to limit the number of times they could be potentially exposed to COVID-19, and online shopping gave them a safe way to get the items they needed or wanted.
Even if you were wearing double masks and gloves while you went outside, there was such a demand for essential products like soap, toilet paper, paper towels, and cleaning wipes that you couldn't even find what you were looking for. So is it any surprise that so many CPG brands saw record profits over the last year?
Other brands that succeeded were those that were already engaging with their customers through online shopping channels. Specifically, Direct-To-Consumer (D2C) brands were not only seeing continued sales during the pandemic, but they also saw an increase in new customers as consumers looked to new brands for their shopping needs.
If you haven’t seen Magic Spoon Cereal in your local grocery store, that’s not a surprise. This D2C cereal brand grew its customer base over the last year.
When I was working at Grassroots Cannabis at the start of the pandemic, after our businesses were deemed essential, we saw a dramatic shift in consumer shopping behavior. We went from roughly 30% online orders to approximately 70% online orders within the first few months of lockdown.
There was already data showing that brick-and-mortar shopping was decreasing, and the pandemic only accelerated that timeline. So now more than ever, brands are looking to establish a D2C strategy regardless of size. From Mom and Pop shops to global brands like Nike, who recently closed wholesale accounts with department and online stores to focus on their D2C efforts.
2) The Rise of Reddit
When I first provided some social media tips in 2020 , I didn't touch on Reddit and how advertisers were already flocking to the platform. Fast-forward nearly a year later, and that still rings true.
According to Reddit research, the platform expects significant growth across its niche communities. And is fastly developing additional ad products and improving target capabilities for advertisers.
Since then, brands in various industries have allocated marketing spend to Reddit as a platform and have also executed platform-specific campaigns that have grabbed the attention of millions and achieved actionable business goals. CPG brands like Welch's, Pepsi, and Absolut use Reddit to successfully reach individuals of all ages and drive positive brand sentiment.
For Welch's , the brand utilized video assets targeted at Gen X men on relevant subreddits and enabled users to engage with the brand directly by enabling comments on their ads.
Welch’s sparked conversation and opened a direct conversation with the brand by enabling comments on their ads.
The campaign drove a higher than average View Through Rate and doubled the average Completion Rate for videos compared to Reddit benchmarks. And drove a 94% positive brand sentiment among comments in their engagement prompts.
Reddit isn't just useful for awareness-driving, top-of-the-funnel campaigns but also for driving conversions at the bottom.
A post on the MeUndies Subreddit, where a user compares the brand to another competitor, Lululemon. Nearly “identical” products, so why not go with the significantly cheaper brand.
MeUndies, a D2C online underwear and loungewear company, utilized Reddit conversion ads to drive purchases. The ads ran as promoted posts and utilized interest-based targeting, focusing on a variety of relevant subreddits. By optimizing towards CPA and ROAS goals, the MeUndies team was able to reach efficient CPAs.
By the end of the campaign, MeUndies saw a 60% lower Cost-Per-Click (CPC), a 5.6x Click-Through-Rate, and 61% more effective Cost Per 1000 Impressions (CPM)s, when compared to platform benchmarks.
When it comes to Reddit, I am an avid user and a beginner when advertising on the platform. I look forward to sharing insights and results of my first Reddit campaign!
3) Shoppable Social Will Continue To Grow
Even for brands that plan to utilize brick-and-mortar locations, retail e-commerce is here to stay. If anything, it's only going to get bigger. According to Statista data of retail sales worldwide, projections show that the United States alone will go from $374 billion to $407 billion by next year. By 2023, the U.S. alone will account for nearly 22% of global sales.
We'll see this global trend continue to shape the most popular social media platforms in 2021. For example, on Facebook and Instagram, integrated shopping already exists through Facebook Shops and Instagram Shopping. Both enable users to purchase products directly from within the app.
On Pinterest, consumers are already actively looking for inspiration and are closer to purchase than users on other social media platforms. According to platform research, 89% percent of Pinterest users actively look to purchase while on the platform.
The Pinterest business page for Parachute, a Bedding and Home company, enables Pinners to not only get visual inspiration for their products, but also make a purchase from within the platform.
And advertisers are already utilizing the platform's social commerce tools, including Product Pins and ad units that take consumers to Product Detail Pages (PDPs) or a landing page where a Digital Free Standing Insert (DFSI ) can house a coupon for a variety of retailers.
Pinterest also launched Shopify integration for brands on the platform and enabled marketers to add their products or catalogs to a Pinterest Business Page.
And according to Sprout Social data, nearly 80% of executives surveyed expected to be selling their products or services on social media within the next three years. For other platforms like TikTok, Snapchat, and potentially Twitter, engineering teams across these companies are developing new innovative ways for consumers to purchase products directly within an app.
4) TikTok Isn't Going Anywhere
Despite the rocky year TikTok had over the last year and potentially getting banned, the platform and business as a whole seem to be making the correct steps to further establish themselves as a home for advertisers.
With nearly 700 million monthly active users and 65 million of those being in the U.S., there's an opportunity for brands to reach an active, engaged, and growing audience. A recent study shows that TikTok users spend roughly 46 minutes a day scrolling through the app, giving brands an excellent opportunity to show up in their target audience's feed.
Idahoan partnered with influencers on TikTok to help reach a younger audience for their Instant Mashed Potatoes through authentic and engaging content.
TikTok's growth seems poised to continue, with the social media company hiring key employees from other social media platforms. And more of my clients continue to ask, "Should/Can we activate on TikTok as a brand?" From an advertising perspective, TikTok has much more competitive costs when it comes to Costs Per 1000 Impressions (CPM). And advertising on the platform is becoming accessible for brands of all sizes.
From a content perspective, brands utilizing influencer marketing, and User Generated Content (UGC) continue to succeed on the platform, reaching millions of consumers.
5) Data Privacy Will Be A Focal Point
When I first started my professional career as a digital marketer for a FinTech startup working to solve a global issue, data breaches, and privacy. Little did I know that nearly a decade later, the same trends I saw back then are just as important now.
After the iOS 14 privacy update through Apple, consumers have been opting out of being tracked by advertisers. So far, data seems to show that roughly 96% of U.S. consumers have opted out of some form of tracking on their mobile device in iOS 14.5, and the impact that will have on marketers is still unknown.
Have you decided to opt out of tracking when it comes to the apps you use on your devices?
And in Washington, a bipartisan group of Senators is looking to reintroduce the Social Media Privacy Protection and Consumer Rights Act, to protect consumer data privacy when collected by large tech companies like Facebook and Google.
This is already affecting how social media platforms and if you're actively running campaigns, you've seen the updates, pop-ups, and emails from Facebook. However, when it comes to targeting on paid social, audience options are limited, and once used, audience insights and cross-channel attribution are becoming more difficult to utilize effectively.
To counter this, we could expect social media platforms to showcase new identity and tracking capabilities. For brands and digital marketers to utilize first-party data for what would now be considered "traditional" targeting a more personalized experience.
A Lot Has Changed In The Last 128 Days
On October 14th I casted my vote in the 2020 election and felt compelled to share an update on my social media channels. Little did I know that it had been 128 days since my last social post.
A lot has happened since my last Instagram post, 128 days ago. Long story short, there has to be some bad before there’s some good. I genuinely believe that some of the best moments in my life have come after a bad moment.
I launched my own website and began writing to finally bring my work and experiences to life. A couple weeks later, in August, I joined the nearly 20 million Americans this year who have lost their job due to COVID-19.
Phone call after phone call, I connected with friends and old colleagues to hopefully find my next opportunity. I applied for dozens of jobs, heard "No" plenty of times, and never heard back from some. Little did I know that all of the little things I had been doing this year would pay off.
Shortly after being laid off, I received the opportunity to continue my education and thought leadership by attending Adweek'’s Brandweek conference, listening to some influential CMOs and Marketers navigating life during COVID-19.
A few weeks later, I finally got an offer to come back to the agency side, and it's the next step for my career. I can't express how thankful I am for everyone who took time out of their day to help me, and I look forward to helping others as they get back to work.
And now, I'm joining the Board of Directors at Momentum Seekers to help make activism more accessible and impactful with less than 3 weeks to the election.
This seems like mostly good news, but plenty of bad was sprinkled in-between these life moments. There's still social unrest, racial inequality, and a global pandemic that some people choose to take lightly. And now we approach an election that is the most important in my lifetime.
All of these things pushed me to strive for something better. And as I cast my vote today for the upcoming election, I'm looking ahead.
Until then, I hope to inspire someone to keep pushing and making that leap into the unknown. Keep knocking on doors until one opens up.
Social Media Strategy
As social media best practices continue to evolve and user-behavior on the platforms shifts, brands are looking to establish themselves in the social space. With all the major social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter defining what successful content is, advertisers and marketers are actively managing consumer engagement and brand success. There is a need for brands to establish an online community that can directly support said brand's goals. I believe that brands can play a vital role in consumers’ daily lives on social media in a way that feels natural and non-invasive.
And through research on user behavior, we know that consumers want to showcase how their favorite brands play a role in their daily lives. Consumers expect their favorite brands to engage with them on social media when appropriate. They want to see brands' heart,' 'favorite,' and share their content. To truly create content that resonates with a brand’s audience, we as marketers must first understand how a brand positions itself in its respective category.
Positioning Your Brand
Think about how consumers perceive a brand in the real and digital world. There are many schools of thought when it comes to establishing a brand story. During my agency days as a Social Media Strategist, one school of thought focused on 3 Fs, Fame, Feeling, and Fluency. Let's take some time to address each of these to understand better how a social media strategy can support each F.
For Fame, this is tracked by how readily a brand comes to mind for a consumer. Fame is also known as unaided awareness and can often be an indicator used to determine the current market share of a given brand.
How do you apply the concept of Fame to your brand and its role within its respective category?
If your brand readily comes to mind when consumers are thinking of a specific category, that means it is likely the right choice for most consumers, driving Fame.
It often takes brands decades to acquire the Fame required to be a "Top 5 brand,” regardless of category. That's real equity earned day in and day out, across multiple distribution channels.
Feeling is the emotional aspect of how consumers feel about a brand. We've talked about how social media is a mixture of art and science, where we evaluate both the quantitative and qualitative performance of content.
Feeling focuses on the latter, the positive, neutral, or negative emotions associated with a brand. Feeling can often be an indicator of future market share. As a consumer, if I feel good about a brand, that means I am comfortable giving my hard-earned dollars in exchange for their products or services.
When looking to understand which brands evoke the most intense emotions within a category, market research analysts look to have consumers associate facial expressions with a given brand. These facial expressions are then directly attributed to specific feelings like Happiness, Sadness, Disgust, and Neutral.
Last but not least, Fluency. Fluency focuses on the cues consumers pick up on in their everyday lives, specifically, if a brand is distinctive compared to others within the same category. From a logo to an iconic tag line like "Just Do It," these distinct assets help consumers recognize a brand. Compared to Fame or Feeling, Fluency is used throughout a brand's life cycle to grow or sustain market share.
The distinctive cues associated with a specific brand drive a higher 'score' when evaluating Fluency. A brand with distinctive assets will typically have a tag line or imagery attributed to said brand. Brands with a high Fluency enable consumers to make quicker mental connections between a specific need and a brand that answers that need.
For iconic brands, often a logo or tag line is all consumers need to know about what a brand stands for. For Fireball Whisky, showcasing their iconic label or the Dragon is how consumers know it’s going to be a wild night.
How To Uncover Your Brand's Social Media Strategy
Establishing the following will provide the foundation to help your brand's social media strategy.
Brand Character/Essence: These are the words associated with a given brand, often agreed-upon internally. Think punchy, emotive words like "Bold," "Energetic," and "Caring."
Brand Personality: This is where you can provide a little more context compared to a brand's character. Descriptors like "party-starter," "old-fashioned," or "trusted friend."
Consumer Insights: Use social listening, focus groups, Google Surveys, and any tool at your disposal to uncover insights about your target consumer. What do your target consumers think about your brand?
When you have a firm grasp of where your brand plays in the space and then leverage insights based on your consumer, you can narrow down the type of content that will drive the most engagements.
Types of Content
As we navigate life during COVID-19, our behavior as consumers continues to evolve. Recent studies have shown that online consumption continues to rise, with consumers spending nearly 2.5 hours daily on social media, with almost all of those polled (98.5%) stated they use at least one social media platform daily.
Taking what we've established above with brand positioning and social media strategy, I want to switch gears to cover various content pillars that most brands can apply to their social media strategy today.
Let's dive in:
Evergreen (Branded) Content
User-Generated Content (UGC)
Activity Calendar Content
Culturally-Relevant Content
Educational/Informative Content
Evergreen (Branded) Content
Evergreen (branded) content solidifies a brand's voice and tone while using distinct assets, like a brand's logo or flagship products in the creative. All to garner brand awareness and advocacy.
Product-focused content or content not tied to a specific campaign is often considered evergreen content. Evergreen content is also known as "Always On" content. You’re leaving a piece of a creative in the digital world that tells a consumer everything they need to know about a brand or product, no matter when the content is viewed.
User-Generated-Content (UGC)
User-Generated Content, or UGC, is an excellent way to share engaging social content and promote conversations around a brand. UGC enables companies to build brand affinity and foster community growth through additional reach and engagements.
In turn, this User-Generated Content helps highlight individuals that embody a brand's essence, encouraging other consumers to share their content using branded hashtags.
Regardless of size or marketing budget, brands are leveraging user-generated content (UGC), and I highly recommend you start incorporating into your content calendars if you haven't. This cycle of consumers driving brand advocacy via engaging with UGC amplifies a brand's messaging, transforming these consumers into unofficial 'brand ambassadors.'
Activity/Holiday Calendar Content
An activity calendar can help fill in the gaps for any brand’s social media content strategy. They can be more broad, such as holidays that most brands create content around, like Memorial Day, Halloween, or the 4th of July. An activity calendar can also include more category-specific holidays, like 4/20 and the concentrate-focused holiday, 7/10, when thinking of the cannabis category.
Note that brands do not need to show up for every holiday, let alone every relevant "National Insert Your Favorite Food Day." If it doesn’t feel right, it probably isn’t.
Culturally-Relevant Content
From a cultural standpoint, what culturally-relevant moments can a brand show up authentically? This content is often reactive to whatever today's hot topic is, from the Netflix phenomena "Tiger King," to all of the playoff-magic within the NBA's bubble in Orlando.
If a cultural event sparks up across social media and other mediums, there is an opportunity for brands to join the conversation. When a brand creates culturally relevant content that is engaging but relevant, it is essentially introducing itself to consumers who might not otherwise interact with this brand. Educational / Informative Content
This increase an online consumption means that consumers are craving more content. Specifically, content that educates, entertains or inspires consumers.
Creating content that touches on these interests helps a brand build brand equity and social authority. By doing the work in the upfront so that when it's time for your target consumer to take action, there should be no doubt surrounding whether a specific brand or product is right for a consumer.
Content-driven videos are a great way to reach customers during the first two stages of their journey — "Awareness" and "Consideration." For example, hook consumers with valuable, content-driven video and then convert them with a targeted video ad that's more sales-driven.
Pinterest is an excellent platform for educational content, especially around recipes or tutorials. Recipe content is another perfect example of content that thrives on image-based platforms like Instagram and Pinterest.
Tip: Want some more content ideas? Think about how the following ideas apply to your brand:
Animated GIFs or Looping Videos
Contests, Giveaways, Sweepstakes
Prompting discussion by asking a question
Polls, Quizzes, Reminders
Spotlighting brand advocates or favorite customers
Product-specific content like this Fireball Firebox is extremely relevant during Tailgating Season. To help raise awareness and move product, we ran paid ads targeted at college and professional football fans throughout both sports’ seasons.
Ad Spend and Paid Social Strategy
Paid social media is another form of advertising, like Out-Of-Home (OOH), SEM, or experiential.
As consumers increase the overall time spent looking on their devices, brands have an opportunity to invest more in paid social ads. This increase in overall screen time is also shaping us to be more comfortable with completing transactions directly within the feed using key features like Instagram's shop functionality.
Paid social content that targets new audiences on social media can help move consumers through the conversion funnel. Brands use paid social content to:
Drive conversions (mostly CPG / eCommerce brands)
Generate leads for retargeting efforts
Promote deals, events promos, or partnerships
Understanding how and why paid social media should be used, how do we apply our learnings to a brand's social media strategy?
Once you’ve established your target audience and objectives for a paid social media campaign, the next step is to establish where your social ad spend will occur.
While most brands advertise on a combination of the major social media platforms, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, there are other digital mediums where you can run paid ads. Does Pinterest or YouTube make sense for your brand more so than a platform like Twitter?
After researching your target audience and their demographics, I suggest diversifying your budget to align with that demo. For example, if one of my clients were a skincare brand, I would recommend allocating the largest portion of an ad budget for Instagram, an excellent medium for visually-arresting creative with an audience that skews more female.
Diving deeper, we can dissect how to utilize an ad budget across multiple platforms. During my time working on a particular spirit brand, we took our client's allocated budget and set up a "40/60 split" for our paid ads.
40% of our ad budget would be for our evergreen or "Always On" content. 60% of our ad budget would then be set aside for "campaign-focused" content. Think about the Firebox Backpack above.
We’ve gone over a lot today, and there’s so much more to discuss. From establishing your brand’s positioning within its respective category to evaluating what types of content to prioritize for your brand.
What other tips would you give to marketers when it comes to social media strategy?
Influencer Marketing: What You Need To Know
Like most marketing activities, influencer marketing can be very beneficial for a brand when done correctly. From helping spread word-of-mouth through a blog or piece of social content to driving an increase of overall awareness for a brand. Influencer marketing enables a company to insert itself authentically through the interests of its target audience.
When talking to my clients, they viewed influencer marketing as something only fit for well-known brands like Nordstrom, Crown Royal, and Target. But that shouldn't scare you, and I'll tell you why. Even more so during COVID-19, as consumers are switching brands at an unprecedented rate.
With 75% of consumers having tried a new shopping behavior, like one the above, this is an opportunity for brands to reach new consumers.
From a brand's perspective, the goal is to partner with influencers who fully embody the brand's personality and essence. And by working with various influencers, brands can reach new customers and increase overall brand awareness.
Real-life Examples
For one of the spirit brands I worked on, our strategic approach was to take advantage of relevant events and pop-culture experiences. In particular, this brand would use influencer marketing to insert itself authentically through its target audience's interests.
To find influencers that were already loyal fans of the brand and embodied its spirit, I recommended taking a two-pronged approach:
1) Leveraging our agency network to identify, research, and vet potential influencers in a 1:1 capacity
2) Partnering with a 3rd party, influencer marketing company to help us do the same as above, but at a larger scale
To set out for this spirit brand, we needed to establish our goals for this influencer campaign:
Drive awareness and build brand affinity for this particular spirit brand
Become the social brand with the brand’s consumer base (young adults 21-29) when they go out to the bars
Assist in driving on-premise sales and an increase in overall consumption
Inform and educate consumer base about intriguing retail activations (special edition bottles, programs, events)
During my time leading all things Social Media and Influencer Marketing at Grassroots Cannabis, our goal was similar:
Raise awareness and build brand affinity for our cultivator and dispensary brands
Increase in overall patient registrations across all dispensary locations
Drive product sell-through to consumers (share of product sold to medical patients and recreational patrons)
Inform and educate consumer base on interesting retail activations (new product releases, programs, community events,)
Identifying Your Target Audience?
Understanding your target audience will enable you to identify the right influencers for your brand. For larger brands or those in unique industries, this often means your target audience can be more complicated.
Within the cannabis industry, we had three unique target audiences;
Consumers who look to cannabis as medical treatment (think patients with debilitating illnesses)
Consumers who look to cannabis for wellness (think of the millennial mom who would rather unwind with an edible instead of a glass of red wine)
Consumers who look to cannabis in a more recreational aspect (this is when you think of your stereotypical ‘stoner’)
We wanted our influencers to appeal to at least 1 of these key target audiences. Digging even deeper into those target audiences, we also had to take into account other key demographics. For example, across the 11 states one of the dispensary brands we operate, our footprint and target consumer varied widely.
Jasyra (@Fit4Arn) shared her influencer content for Herbology Dispensary, becoming one of her most engaged (comments + likes) posts on her page.
In Pennsylvania, the median household income for those near one of our dispensaries was $36,258/yr. Less than a two hour drive at another dispensary we operated, the median household income was $72,948/yr. What this means is that we were challenged to identify influencers in Pennsylvania that would resonate with consumers at each median household income.
Switching gears to the spirit brand I worked on, our target audience was:
• Young, Legal Drinking Age (LDA) – 29, All Genders (heavier initial focus on male), Intellectual & Blue Collar
• Urban & rural – over-indexing in college/university markets
• Consumes alcohol before going out to the bar, house-parties, celebratory occasions, while partaking in outdoor sporting activities, especially in cold weather
To dive deeper into our audience, we set out to understand better which interest verticals would resonate best with them. In the agency world, using the services provided by Mediamark Research and Intelligence (MRI) to identify key interests that index highest with our target audience.
Using MRI, we could then deduce key thematics within each category. As we evaluated potential influencers, we will see which influencers align with the potential verticals listed here.
How To Identify Your Potential Influencers?
We know who our target audience is, and now we need to identify potential influencers whose content would resonate with. What that means is each influencer you partner with has to embody the brand's personality.
These influencers need to reside in and can execute against priority markets. You can identify influencers that fall under specific verticals (e.g. interested in Punk music, Tattoo Enthusiasts, Gamers, Sports Fans) with the help of a 3rd party influencer marketing like Popular Pays or Tagger.
Finding influencers on a site like Popular Pays that have a specific interest, we could then select influencers with specific demographic traits (e.g., African-American, Hispanic, LGBTQ+)
Partnering With A 3rd Party Vendor
Have a small team running your influencer marketing efforts, or are you leading things on your own? Executing on influencer marketing is both labor and time-intensive, and most likely, you're working on multiple brands at once. To help agencies or brands scale their influencer efforts, an ecosystem of influencer marketing companies have sprouted up to do just that.
One of the key players in the space is Popular Pays. Popular Pays has worked with various brands, including Google, Macy's, New Balance, and many more. Including three brands I've personally worked on throughout my career.
Kevin (@turnone) shared his influencer content following a visit to one of the Pennsylvania Herbology locations. This visually-stunning creative was made possible in thanks to Popular Pays.
Working with Popular Pays, our agencies would partner with influencers across multiple verticals to create content for our clients' initiatives. Similar to how an agency operates, Popular Pays works by having agencies or brands create a brief, detailing the brand’s influencer marketing goals and objectives.
After creating a brief, these influencers will be vetted through an application process and shared with Popular Pays 6,000 + content creators. For more information about Popular Pays, you can visit their website by clicking here.
1:1 Partnerships
In conjunction with partnering with a 3rd party like Popular Pays or Taggr, working with an influencer directly, in a 1:1 capacity will help you achieve a brand’s influencer goals. Think of it as catching fish with a large net (Popular Pays) compared to using a fishing line (1:1 relationships). Both are capable of catching fish, but you might end up catching fish you may not be looking for using a large net, however.
So what does 1:1 influencer marketing involve? From start to finish, we’re talking about:
Identifying Influencers - Similar to how Popular Pays operates, you will need to search across social media to identify potential influencers. These individuals may already be following or tagging said brand in their personal content. As marketers, do some digging and look for other influencers who might not know of said brand yet but would be fans of their product or service.
Influencer Outreach - Once those influencers have been identified, there then needs to be some outreach to start a conversation with each influencer. If you genuinely think they're a good fit for the brand, engage (like and comment) with their relevant content.
Influencer Negotiation - Once identified and having started a conversation with these influencers, look to set up a meeting so you can get to know each influencers on a personal level better. And at the same time, express to these influencers why partnering with them makes sense for said brand. Look to schedule follow-up meetings to help negotiate contracts.
Influencer Management & Coordination – This is everything from negotiation contracts, product fulfillment, reviewing the social content they'll create for a brand, and the most crucial part, fulfilling all obligations for compensation.
Influencer content we put together for Oscar Mayer, where we identified food influencers, like HellthyJunkFood who specialized in unique recipes.
A recent report regarding influencer compensation has shined a light on influencer compensation, based on respondents in the Sub-Saharan African influencer industry. The report was put together by PLAQD, and some of the insights can help marketers across the globe regarding influencer compensation:
Nearly 95% of influencers listed they would rather be compensated for their time (to cover travel costs + expenses) over an all-expenses-paid trip with no cash compensation
Roughly half (53% ) of influencers surveyed said they would not work with competing brands following a partnership with another brand
Nearly 70% of brands surveyed reported they manage their influencer campaigns in-house. This figure is up 25% compared to last year, according to a 2019 SocialPubli survey
70% of brands reported that they would increase their influencer spend to end the calendar year
TIP: When working with influencers in a 1:1 capacity, many digital marketers adhere to the one cent per follower (or $100 per 10K or $1,000 per 100k followers) rule. Note this is only a starting point and compensation can change due to the size and length of the campaign.
Forms of Collaboration
Now the fun part, how to collaborate with influencers to create unique content and reach a new audience. There are 3 general ways brands can partner with influencers:
Posting Content - Posting organic content to raise overall awareness is one of the most popular ways to collaborate with influencers. Depending on your goals, this could be a single Instagram post or a series of social posts over an allotted amount of time to promote whatever event or product the brand wants to push. It is an endorsement, but the risk comes when picking the correct influencer to partner with.
Posting content in this manner tends to hold less monetary risk due to the investment level, and is extremely scalable.
Content Takeover - Takeovers can work multiple ways; either by inserting the brand into an influencer's content/blog/live show, becoming a partner. Or by allowing an influencer to take over a brand’s content for an allotted period (mainly around live events or campaign launches).
Content takeovers are a great way to shake up a brand and what is usually associated with it. They can also be used as a temperature test if a brand wants to go further with a particular influencer. If the influencer’s content takeover is driving more impressions or engagements than other sponsored content, there might have a good fit for the long-term.
Content Series/Digital Endorser - This level of collaboration is the most in-depth as it gives brands a voice outside of their traditional marketing channels. These influencers help with creative direction and content production by being a leader. Becoming the centerpiece within the content, alongside the product. This type of collaboration is typically a much longer relationship compared to the other types of influencer engagement relationships mentioned above.
A content series like this can also includes costs that are on the higher end of the influencer campaign scale, with pay being closer to that of a brand ambassador.
Mike Malcolm (@mikegdagod) of WeedTravelFood, created sponsored content (in-feed and Story) for Grassroots Cannabis, visiting a Windy City Cannabis dispensary.
What To Monitor For
We've set our goals for an influencer marketing campaign, identified what type of influencers we should be looking for (similar interests to our audience), and we've established how we're going to partner with these individuals (3rd Party partners + 1:1 relationships).
Once an influencer's content goes live, analysis and measurement come into play. Here are a couple of tips you can use when reviewing your influencer's content:
● Look at the conversations from each influencer's following and community to use as inspiration for creative ideation to better target your audience with a brand’s owned content
● Each piece of content created is an opportunity to insert your influencer's content into your brand's feed as organic content. Not only does this help fill out a content calendar but also extends the lifespan of the influencer's creative by exposing it to a brand's audience
● If the brands is a chain or has multiple locations, leverage influencers' local influence to promote a specific locations by creating paid ads with their creative, this can also avoid showing favoritism
Measuring Success
When looking to report on the success of your influencer's content, there are usually 3 leading key-performance indicators (KPIs) that you will track.
● Engagement Rate: That includes all likes, reactions, comments, retweets, shares, video views for each piece of content, compared against the reach garnered
● Brand Sentiment: Using a social listening tool, like Crimson-Hexagon, or even just manually looking at the comments in-feed to see how people talk about your brand in the digital world. The goal is to monitor to see any lift during the timeframe of the campaign
● Reach: This looking at the number of times your influencers' content is viewed in feed
You will most likely have additional KPIs that are specific to your brand or industry.
During my time at Grassroots Cannabis, the KPIs we established for our dispensary brands included tracking the number of new patient registrations. For our cultivation brand, another KPI was to track product sell-in to the dispensaries we partnered with (share of our product sold to various dispensaries).
As we head into the final months of 2020, it seems as if marketing efforts, specifically around social media and influencer marketing, are increasing. And yet, we've barely scratched the surface when it comes to influencer marketing, and I look forward to sharing more industry insights.
For more ways to improve your social media efforts, check out this blog post to maximize your organic and paid social media efforts.
Organic vs. Paid Social Media: Part 02
Last week, we dove into all things organic and paid social media, highlighting each's pros and cons. And that you need to utilize both to some extent to maximize your social media efforts.
For organic social, think of that as the content that will entertain and inform your existing followers. And paid social will be used to reach potential customers or clients. Today, I'm going to dive into exactly how one can implement an organic and paid social strategy.
Turning an organic social media post of mine into a paid social post.
Let's level set with some useful guidelines to follow regarding social content, both organic and paid:
You Don't Need to Promote Every Organic Post
I get it, budgets are tight, and we're asked to run lean as marketers, even more so now during COVID-19. Whether you have an established budget for paid ads or just looking to get your feet wet, know that you don't need to promote every post.
A good rule of thumb to follow is to look to run ads when you genuinely believe they will help achieve your business goals and are not just looking for more engagements on your post. For example, if you are announcing something new, paid ads are great to raise awareness around a new product or recipe.
Your current followers and customers will already be interested in what's coming next for your brand, so now you need to focus on reaching people who aren't aware of the great news you have to share.
You've likely seen many brands, big and small, pausing their ad spend in June due to social unrest and the misinformation campaigns occurring on those very same platforms. However, almost every brand is still creating and publishing organic content.
A piece of top-performing content on Windy City Cannabis shot at my home featuring a Grassroots Cannabis pen.
During my time at Grassroots Cannabis we still created content to go out live organically. Nevertheless, we put a more refined lens on the message we were sending out with the hope of reaching new medical patients and recreational customers.
While you shouldn't go chasing Reach or other metrics like engagements to pad your metrics for the month, if you're not seeing the key performance indicators (KPIs) that you're expecting, paid social media may be able to help.
How can you do that?
Boost Your Top Performing Organic Content
Let me give you a little insider tip. If you are either strapped when it comes to creative resources for new creative for your paid ads or aren't sure what you should put money behind, look at your top-performing organic content. You already know that this content is well-received with your current audience, and if your product or brand is right for a potential consumer, it should resonate positively with whoever new you reach through paid social.
And because it is high-quality content, you should not have to pay as high of a cost per click (CPC) or cost-per-1000 impressions (CPM).
For instance, I put $15 behind this Instagram post, highlighting my speaking engagement at SocialRock Conference 2019. It's now the most engaged post on my feed, and I hope it lends to my credibility as a subject matter expert when someone views my profile.
One of my top-performing pieces of content on my Instagram page organically. I later put $15 behind it as a paid ad to increase it’s reach.
Things to try: Look at the top-performing content (engagements and impressions) for the last three months and see if there are any clear posts that you think would resonate with your potential customers or clients.
Target Your Ads to People Similar to Your Target Customers
Alright, you know what content you want to promote. Now the real question is, how do you reach the individuals who are similar to your target customer, but are unaware of your brand?
Leverage the information you already know about your ideal customer and create 'lookalike' buyer personas for this paid social. You already know useful data like "How old are they?" "Where do they live?" "What are some of their other interests?" Now you need to fill in the blanks.
For example, if you run a skateboard shop in San Francisco, CA, that also makes online sales, and you're looking to expand your customer base, here's what you could do.
You obviously will want to create an ad set that focuses on adults (18-35) that live in California, to hopefully grow your local footprint and stay top of mind through Word Of Mouth Marketing (WOMM). However, just keeping your ad set focused in California, you are likely to pay more per user due to competition for that specific audience.
We also know that there are skateboarders across the United States, but to make our job easier, we add the "Top 5 cities for skateboarding" to our ad set. Not only will this help us reach new potential customers, grow our brand awareness in markets you're not active in, and reduce the CPM due to a broader ad set.
Optimize Your Posts By Running A/B Test
In my recent blog post covering additional social media tips, I championed the fact that we can test social content as if it was a science experiment.
A common way to test a specific piece of creative performance is to run an A/B test as paid social ads.
An easy A/B test to run is to use the same creative but different post copy on two paid social posts, which you can run with a smaller budget and targeted a much smaller audience. This way, you can see which post copy appears to resonate most with your target audience, and then run your actual campaign with the superior-performing copy.
You can also run A/B testing as a continuous effort, sometimes known as race tracking, where you're using those paid ads' performance to determine which has the best creative to run long-term. For example, if you have Post A and Post B run during October. The winner of October's paid ads would then be up against November's 1st paid ad.
Leverage Retargeting Ads
In my blog post covering organic vs. paid social content, I mention how paid social content can be utilized for retargeting efforts. Retargeting ads are a great way to "show up in your audience's feed when they least expect it."
Specifically, they are a low-cost option because we know the people you're targeting are already somewhat interested in your products. They can be either current customers, those who are at risk of falling out of the funnel, or even just those who engaged with your content or visited your website.
Your paid ads for this specific ad set should be focused on staying top of mind with these individuals and getting them to visit your page or website to take action.
Review Data, Draw Conclusions, Make Changes
During my talk at SocialRock Conference 2019, I mentioned how fortunate we are to be in an industry where trial and error are not only accepted; and championed when done correctly.
While I wish every ad campaign or piece of content we launched were a complete success, I'd be lying if I said it was. Unlike other forms of art, social media performance is judged quantitatively and not qualitatively.
What I've found to be most useful when trying to reach our target audiences is to "Show up where your consumer least expects it."
What that means is showing up in-feed, often as paid ads or even through influencer partnerships. Can you guess what we're going to cover next?
Social Media Tips: Continued
Following my first blog post covering platform-specific social media tips, I want to touch on an aspect of social media that a lot of my professional and consulting clients ask about, influencer marketing.
Like most marketing activities, working with influencers can be very beneficial for a brand when done correctly. From helping spread word-of-mouth through a blog or social content to driving an increase of overall awareness for a brand. Influencer marketing enables a company to insert itself authentically through the interests of its target audience.
Let me guess when you think of influencer marketing, you think of well-known brands like Nordstrom, Crown Royal, and Target, but that shouldn't scare you, and I'll tell you why.
One of my content shoots from 5411 Empanadas, a Chicago restaurant with multiple locations.
One of my former consulting clients is a co-owner of a multi-location, quick-service restaurant in Chicago, 5411 Empanadas, and was interested in influencer partnerships to promote a new product launch. But it needed to happen with a limited budget in mind. With some determination and social listening, I was able to do just that for my client.
I did it by identifying and reaching out to up and coming food and beverage influencers in Chicago with smaller follower counts; we're talking less than 3,000 on Instagram, similar to a micro-influencer.
In exchange for a free meal and the opportunity to capture some photo and video content at one of the restaurant's locations, my client received User-Generated Content (UGC) to share on their restaurant's social channels, and we earned additional reach through the influencers' social channels as well.
To wrap up this section on influencer marketing, I wanted to share a more tactical approach to building brand advocates for small businesses.
Brand Advocates
Like user-generated content, brand advocates are low-cost, and if you're lucky, a free marketing tool can help your business. Brand advocates are your most faithful and intense customers, who will take action if asked. The customers leaving positive feedback on a brand's comments or the Amazon review section are brand advocates.
Most small to midsize businesses lack the resources to either hire a large client success team or pay for chatbots to handle the heavy lifting. An absence of either can result in lost leads and lost sales, but you can level the playing field by utilizing brand advocates. They can be vital to the success of businesses, especially those with limited marketing budgets. Here's how:
Unlike influencers or brand ambassadors, brand advocates engage with a brand because they genuinely love it. These brand advocates can have a sphere of influence themselves but on a much more micro level.
A Fireball Whisky brand advocate, excited about our “Surprise & Delight” kit we sent him.
Like this Fireball Whisky fan above, brand advocates are people who find a way to talk about their experiences and satisfaction with your brand, no matter the scenario. Brand advocates often lead to new customers through word of mouth marketing (WOMM).
They can help build brand affinity, increase overall awareness, and assist in supporting new product launches.
So let's talk about the benefits of a brand advocacy program in the real world and how it can benefit your business. I think a brand that does a great job at building brand advocacy is the shoe company Toms. Those who don't know the company, Toms started in California with both a unique style of shoes and a great category differentiator.
How Toms continues to do social good, even during COVID-19.
Tom's will donate another pair of their shoes to a person in a developing country for every pair of Toms shoes purchased on their site. Even now, during COVID-19, Toms is finding ways to take their profits and turn it into a social good by purchasing personal-protective equipment (PPE).
When thinking about what "reward" your customer could receive for buying your product, it can be something tangible like a coupon for a future visit or points towards a loyalty program. But it can also be something intangible, something that evokes an emotional feeling.
For Toms, the reward is knowing that your purchase will help someone in need with every shoe you purchase. Toms’ brand advocates then take that brand story about why this particular shoe brand is such a great company, and they tell everyone they can, their friends, family, co-workers, and even the person they sit next to on the plane.
Those individuals happen to be potential customers for Toms. Now in an ideal world, those potential customers will go out and purchase a pair of shoes as soon as they hear about how great Toms is as a company, creating new revenue streams.
Leveraging Word Of Mouth Marketing (WOMM)
As a marketer and consumer, there's often some lag time between when someone hears about an exciting product or company and acts on it. We’re talking about multiple touchpoints before a consumer becomes a customer. Sometimes you may not get a direct sale through your brand advocates, but you will gain word of mouth and hopefully convert later.
If you dedicate time to building a brand advocacy program, you also can provide a baseline of customer support without adding to your bottom line, requiring additional resources. For one of my previous agency clients, when we'd see a customer leave a negative comment about issues with their products on Facebook, other users, aka brand advocates, would come out of the woodwork and provide advice or tips to remedy the situation.
One example of a successful brand advocacy program that sticks out in my mind to this day was from a book I read when I was first starting in advertising called "Fizz: Harness the Power of Word of Mouth Marketing to Drive Brand Growth" by Ted Wright.
Fizz: Harness the Power of Word of Mouth Marketing to Drive Brand Growth by Ted Wright
In his book, Ted talks about how his marketing agency in Atlanta, Fizz, helped the U.S. Dairy Association through brand advocates and word of mouth marketing. One of their goals was to get pre-teens and teens to keep drinking milk through high school. And to do that, they needed a story worth telling. That story was a research study concluding that chocolate milk was the best drink following strenuous activity for recovery. Better than Gatorade, water, and everything in between.
Now they needed to change how their potential audience, pre-teens, and teens think about chocolate milk. And who leaves a more significant impression on middle schoolers more than anyone? High school kids. So now, Ted and his team needed to identify and partner with brand advocates who have an authoritative voice on this particular subject, fitness. When it comes to fitness and playing your best in high school, most students look to the football coach for guidance.
Through direct mail, leveraging the study and benefits of chocolate milk, and partnering with professional athletes, the agency convinced coaches in Ohio that chocolate milk should be their players' post-workout drink of choice. Over time, more and more coaches started recommending chocolate milk to their players. Those players then asked their moms for it at home, driving purchase intent at the grocery store. And before long, that local Ohio story gained national coverage, increasing overall sales of chocolate milk.
Takeaways
What are some takeaways from a brand advocacy program, albeit at a much larger scale, that applies to marketers, regardless of skill:
1) Identify your existing brand advocates; they're the people talking about your brand constantly on social or online. You probably already know a couple and could identify more easily with just a little bit of time
2) Establish your goal for partnering with these brand advocates. Is it direct referral, is it app downloads, is it product reviews?
3) What is the creative way to reach those goals? For example, for direct referrals, what can you offer more exciting than a basic "Earn $5 for each referral?"
4) Monitor test and learn. Regarding reporting and analyzing content, we're fortunate to be in an industry where trial and error are not only accepted; and championed when done correctly.
Follow these four takeaways, and as a bonus, you'll be able to build an emotional connection with these potential brand advocates, while also establishing a trusting relationship with your brand or your client's.
With these takeaways, you can create a brand advocacy program with the ability to scale up or down as necessary, that can assist from a content creation standpoint and help you receive product feedback or reviews if your business requires that.
Looking Ahead
We've gone over a lot in the past few weeks, and yet, we've only scratched the surface of the current social media ecosystem. Social media is ever-changing and requires a mixture of both art and science. You need to understand both the qualitative and the quantitative when reviewing content and understanding performance.
And even as social media continues to evolve, we still know that consumers across all of the major social media platforms want to share aspects of their lives and engage with the brands that make it possible for them to do that. So how can your business or your clients engage with its consumers in a natural and non-invasive way? ‘
In my career, we typically mine for insights across the Internet and in the real world, discovering how a brand's products live in everyday consumers' lives. We do this to ground our social strategy in actionable insights.
From a cultural standpoint, what culturally-relevant moments can my brand show up authentically? When thinking about our business category, are we seeing any trends that seem to separate some businesses from others within the category?
Next, we look from a consumer perspective. Can we do social listening to uncover any insights relevant to our brand?
And from a company standpoint, what's truly different about our brand, and how can we maximize that advantage across every relevant media?
During my time at The Escape Pod Group, we took a four-step approach to our social media process. That involves listening to our community, our target audience, and the competitive set for any insights.
1) We look to create original branded content per an editorial calendar.
2) To help supplement that content, we curate and share user-generated content and 3rd party testimonials.
3) We then look to connect with influencers, micro, and macro, to help grow our social following and raise overall awareness.
4) Finally, we take a look back to measure and analyze our results to optimize future content. Like any campaign or activation, review how your content is performing throughout the campaign for better success.
That includes everything from an A/B test using the same creative but different post copy on two paid social posts, all the way to flighting several pieces of content over a more extended period and having them compete against each other.
This A/B testing is sometimes known as race tracking, where you're using the performance of those paid ads to determine which has the best creative to run long-term.
Next week, we're going to continue looking at the organic and paid social content.
Can’t wait and want to learn more about organic and paid social media? Check out my “Organic vs. Paid Social Media: Part 01” blog post.
