Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

As social media becomes less shiny, many of our clients are realizing that social media success relies on having a content marketing plan.

While we’ve been hired to come in and “do” social media, our constant gentle push about sharing stories through original content (read: the RIGHT content for our customers) is finally being felt.

Our biggest client came to us this month ready to tackle the reason social media exists in the first place: storytelling. More specifically, telling their story in such a way that the consumer aligns with, trusts, and recognizes the brand.

While putting together their agenda, I thought it may be helpful to share so everyone can get clear on their content marketing plan or agenda for 2016....

Campaign Monitor, a simple email marketing solution for businesses and professionals, has taken this bottom-up approach to building a social strategy. And we’re honored to share how they’ve done it.

Campaign Monitor is a fast-growing, industry-leading company with some really incredible ideas on growth and strategy. Their marketing team, which has grown to five times the size in just over eight months, has the awesome privilege of sharing the email marketing message with others via a big number of different channels, social media included, and has just undergone this very exercise of hitting the drawing board and coming up with a rockin’ new plan.

Here’s a bit more about how Campaign Monitor redefining their social media strategy in light of their new ambitions, and how social management tools like Buffer fit into their daily workflow....

Creating your social media strategy and tactical plan1 - Building the strategy

noun Strategy / A plan of action designed to achieve a long-term or overall aim.

First you need to understand what a strategy is, and isn’t it. A strategy should define the main aim of your social media presence and set the parameters for what it will deliver and how it will be delivered. It will be supported by a tactical plan that defines how the strategy will be delivered, including the channels, resource and budgets to achieve it.

Tip – ensure your strategy is no more than 3-4 pages long.

A strategy has to be concise and provide the governing principles that guide the plan.

Below is a summary of key content to include in your strategy document....

“How can we get more visitors to our website?”…

You’re certainly not alone, as increasing traffic is often the number one problem faced by marketers today.

The bad news? Saying “get more traffic” is easier said than done. You could write guest posts (Leo wrote 150 articles in 9 months when Buffer first launched), optimize for SEO traffic, or drive visitors through social media. The options are endless. This article focuses on the latter, though.

In this post, I’ll share the seven most powerful lessons we learned at Hubspot from running social media experiments to increase our social media referral traffic by 241%....

The content marketing space is an ever-evolving environment. Staying abreast of what’s on the SEO horizon is essential to being successful on the web. As a content marketing strategist, I need to know what works now, and what hasn’t work in the past, so I can provide my clients with the most up to date recommendations that will generate the highest value.

In reality, I’m often the go-to resource on all things SEO for my busy clients. And sometimes, I get cringe-worthy questions about marketing practices I know my clients shouldn’t be using. To be clear: These questions aren’t unwelcome because it’s a nuisance to answer them or provide information, but because it ignites a concern that marketers are investing in content marketing for the wrong reasons.

Here are five questions a strategist never wants you to ask (and what they should tell you if they’re looking out for your best marketing interests!)...

Brand messages are validated with each and every person who reads or interacts with them.

A PR professional must not only create successful content and campaigns for clients but also expand his or her personal brand through building influence among fans, followers, clients and other PR professionals.

Doing so requires just as much effort as securing your client’s news in print. Several tools and resources can make it easier to show off your communications expertise.

Here are five ways you can show off—and build—your influence online:...

This round-up of pro social media hacks comes from fourteen hard-hitting social media pros.

Use these 15 helpful and actionable social optimization tricks to boost your engagement, productivity, revenue, and following....

Q: Can social networks really drive ecommerce and retail sales? How has ADT used social networks to drive sales?  What has worked and what hasn’t worked?

A: We leverage a presence on social networks in a few different ways. First are our active profiles on Facebook and Twitter, which are positioned as communication and retention channels. Second is an ongoing campaign where we invest in ads on Facebook's displaying against target profiles such as home and business owners. The third is leveraging social networks as a retargeting platform to reengage users we’ve touched across the buying journey. This has been the most effective method for acquisition, due to the relevancy of the in-market audience’s interaction with other media touchpoints....

If you don’t use content marketing, there is a big chance your brand gets left behind, and it’s your competitors (who’re using content marketing) that run away with your customers.

You can’t afford to let that happen.

You must learn to not just survive but thrive in a landscape that is constantly changing. While there is no easy way of doing this and it is imperative you do the hard yards, there are a few not-so-clandestine secrets that can make your job a little easier.

Let’s unravel them....