Christmas comes early on Facebook: How will you maximise your #smm?

November 16, 2016

Christmas comes early on Facebook: How will you maximise social media during this busy period?

social-media-sales-christmas

The countdown to Christmas is now officially on…only 39 more days. Can you believe it? Each year consumers say the same thing: the build up to Christmas gets earlier and earlier. Audiences are surely switching off from the Christmas messaging….or are they?

 

During the run-up to Christmas, new research released by Facebook actually shows that consumers are more interested in consumer products and messaging in this busy pre-Christmas period. (Source: Facebook)

 

As a social media marketer, you may be asking yourself:

  • Did our Christmas campaigns hit the mark last year?
  • How can I beat my competitors during this Christmas period?
  • Is my agency doing the best possible job with my Christmas budget?

 

So, before we look into how to improve social media marketing in the busy pre-Christmas period, let’s have a look at what Facebook had to say:

  1. Christmas conversation begins on Facebook on October 24 (yes, October!).
  1. Black Friday, November 25, is the biggest shopping day of the year for women on Facebook.
  1. Last year Cyber Monday, November 28, online spend totalled £968m in the UK.
  1. The build up to Christmas and last minute shopping takes place within the period from 8-31 December.
  1. Boxing Day is topical on Facebook throughout all of December with an amazing 21.6m interactions related to it.
  1. The first two weeks in January can offer some of the best value CPMs seen all year on Facebook.

 

How can we use this information and insight in our social marketing to enhance our Christmas campaigns and capitalise on the increased spend?

agency:2’s Christmas marketing advice:

a) It’s always important to stand out from the crowd as this is a very busy period on social – 32m pieces of content are posted to Facebook every day over Christmas! Your brand will need to be the best e.g. use video to boost audience reach.

b) You can widen your audience by adding grandparents, uncles and aunties, as they are the true Christmas buying audience for anything over £50.

c) Increase reach further through audience insight tools such as the Social Insight Engine. For example, by using our unique ad serving software we can select parents with siblings in a similar age range, and therefore sell more to the same user. Overall, this will improve return on investment.

d) As it’s such a busy period, clever targeting is important to get your message in front of the right people at the right time. Linking targeting to consumer behaviour and interests is a great way of making an emotional connection, which can lead to strengthening purchasing intent.

e) It is also important to connect social media activity with offline behaviours, PR and other marketing activities.

f) Use Facebook’s unique abilities – for example, friends can tag each other in comments e.g. ‘this is the one I wanted you to get for my daughter’. You can’t do this as easily with other marketing channels so make the most of these features.

g) Make sure your posts are mobile friendly as 86% of Christmas posts are shared on mobile and 88% of all videos are shared on mobile.

Here at agency:2 we have already applied these strategies to our social media marketing for some of the world’s leading brands, achieving fantastic ROI for our clients. Find out how you can take your social offering to the next level. Call us on 0203 567 1380.

Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn marketing: Social media targeting capabilities revealed

October 28, 2016

Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn marketing: Social media advertising targeting capabilities revealed

Digital marketers face an ever expanding list of options when it comes to choosing the best channel for their social media marketing campaigns. This infographic compares the reach and targeting capabilities of three main social channels: Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

As we work with some of the world’s leading brands, we have gathered enough data to select the most popular targeting criteria which are applicable to both B2B and B2C brands. Our expert team have then rated each channel’s ability to target and deliver brand messages to the desired audience using this established criteria.

 

social media advertising targeting

social media advertising targeting

 

Key social ad targeting takeaways:

1.Social marketing success is partly driven by testing. Without requiring major cost outlays, you can effectively measure, refine and improve your campaign’s targeting and creative approaches to achieve favourable results. So don’t be afraid to experiment with a new channel – as long as you believe the targeting options are suitable for your brand’s desired audience.

2.Work with a specialist agency to ensure that you fully maximise the marketing opportunities each channel offers. This will allow you to benefit from the agency’s experience of working with similar brands to yours and all the additional audience insights this offers.

3.LinkedIn works well for B2B audiences and we have rated the targeting capabilities as outstanding, especially as users regularly update their own data. But be mindful that it takes time to grow a company’s follower base and that LinkedIn advertising is relatively expensive.

4.Twitter’s advertising offering is still somewhat limited. But its users hugely enjoy the conversational / mini blogging style it offers. It also lends itself well to engaging with key influences in your sector. So if this suits your brand story, we recommend that Twitter is a must have addition to your marketing mix.

5.If you need to get in front of a new audience, Facebook advertising offers especially cost-effective ways of achieving this and it lends itself well to capturing UGC and highly creative ad formats. Add to this smart targeting techniques, and you can achieve game-changing campaign results using Facebook marketing.

 

Here at agency:2 we’re passionate about social media and we work with some of the world’s leading brands. By selecting the best channel for your brand, together with optimum timing, creative execution, smart targeting criteria and techniques, we will ensure that you maximise the ROI of your social campaigns.

Are you ready to take your social media marketing to the next level? Call our social media experts on 00 44 (0)203 567 1380

 

 

Discover how to supercharge your Facebook marketing with videos

October 6, 2016

Supercharge your Facebook marketing with videos

We all know videos obtain high organic reach and boost the reach of Facebook marketing campaigns significantly. But is that the case for all video content?

What can we do to improve the reach of the videos we post to achieve better results for our social media campaigns? Here are our top 4 tips for making videos work on Facebook.

 

1 – The content must be easily shareable

Videos should inspire sharing; either by tagging friends or sharing the content on newsfeeds. This will occur only if fans find a video useful, interesting or ‘cute’. Shareability is a key component for increasing Facebook reach.

As getting Facebook users to ‘click to play’ a video is rare, the message should be transmittable without sound. Thus, subtitles are extremely useful or animated text within the video is also effective.

 

2 – The video must be short and catchy from the start

Users of Facebook typically scroll through their newsfeeds and don’t spend a lot of time on any one piece of content; retaining audience attention for longer than 30 seconds for an advert is challenging to say the least!

Additionally, attention spans tend to be shorter on mobile, so story-telling should ideally be told ‘back to front’, revealing the key message in the opening 3-6 seconds. That way a user can see the beginning of a video only and extract what they need without watching to the end.

 

3 – Offer fans an immersive experience

Even though you may have caught a user’s attention, keeping that attention can be challenging.

In order to retain your audience, showing videos that are quick and original, contain smart video editing, and / or tell a story can accomplish this. The video has to give something back to the user such as: relevant knowledge, an emotional feeling, an explanation or a sense of community.

 

4 The message must speak to a specific audience and build on the power of targeting

A message resonates best when it is told to a clearly identified subset of the target audience. Establishing a feeling of affinity within this subset will allow the audience to then be expanded via advert targeting abilities.

For example, if the message of the video is geared towards mums of infants using emotional content, then tailoring this content specifically to this audience will improve its relevancy. The video’s likeliness to go viral will also then increase, as that audience is much more likely to share the content, and so on, and so on.

 

5 Need to increase traffic and conversion rates? add a call to action button

If you follow the steps above, you will generally find your cost per view decreasing and your view-through-rate increasing. In addition, the videos can then also be very suitable to drive traffic and conversion by adding a call-to-action button. Facebook has recently changed the CTA button placement for videos, making it visible at all times – as a result, we have seen CTRs increase from 0.01% up to 3.95%. It seems the days where video can only be used for generating awareness are in the past – at least on Facebook.

 

agency:2 has been working with video content across global brands for years; we believe in the power of this type of content for successful Facebook marketing and anticipate seeing videos grow rapidly in use over time.

Stand out from the crowd: Reactive marketing for brands

June 9, 2016

With the advent of Netflix and Amazon binge-watching, gone are the days of water cooler conversations discussing the latest finales or releases. Instead, daily chatter is focused on social media conversation: who’s tweeted what, broken up with whom and what’s featured on the trending stories on Facebook.

It even goes one step further. Brands are now expected to keep up to date with reactive marketing, the practice of tailoring your content to the topics of the day, hour or even minute. Keeping up is essential to remain current and relevant. If done well, reactive marketing can vastly improve your target reach and audience engagement.

Reactive posts are a great way to make some noise and show that a brand is listening to the social conversation by providing relevant content to its communities. Reactive posts show brands getting involved in the dialogue around particular issues / stories in an interesting way.

However, brands must be careful not to overstep or mis-step. Reacting can often be a knee-jerk reaction, and runs the risk of not being aligned with brand philosophy, creating a social media firestorm or creating bad publicity for a brand.

Reactive posts should be:

  • Timely e.g. same day as trending
  • Relevant to the brand e.g. consistent with brand values
  • Engaging e.g. interesting to the community
  • Avoid being too political or controversial in any way (unless this is part of a brand’s strategy, tone of voice or guidelines)
  • Have a clear objective for posting e.g. should not be random or look like the brand is jumping on a bandwagon

If you follow these guidelines and keep on top of your reactive marketing, your brand is sure to shine on social.

How will you be part of the #moment?

 

 

A Social Ad Technology Case Study – Top Toy Shop Retailer

April 19, 2016

View the video below to see how our social ad technology achieved £10 Revenue on  every £1 spent on Facebook Advertising, through the following advanced targeting:

  • Reached a larger, more active audience
  • Included advanced audience interests
  • Utilised trending content
  • Implemented demographic social data into the campaign

 

 

If you’d like to speak to one of our social media specialists today, why not get in touch on 0203 567 1380.

Facebook moves closer to being a full-fledged Periscope competitor!

April 7, 2016

Yesterday Facebook announced a dedicated video space on its mobile app in the hope that brands and consumers will broadcast and watch more videos live.

facebook live stream video

With Facebook Live you can use your phone to share a moment instantly with friends, family, colleagues, consumers and fans all over the world.

So how will this help Brands as well as consumers?

agency:2 believe live video will transform the relationship between brands and their consumers. The power of Facebook Live is colossal, with endless opportunities for brands to capture the here and now.

It will allow brands to promote their products and services by broadcasting a live stream, to tap into the consumer’s emotional and psychological motivations.

We’ve compiled a small list of how we see brands adopting Facebook Live in the future:

  • New product launches and demos
  • Consumer video testimonials
  • Live international sporting events
  • Fashion catwalks
  • Property viewings
  • 360 views inside retailers shops
  • Holiday destinations and hotels
  • Live showcase events
  • Live corporate conventions and exhibitions

We’d love to hear your opinions on how your brand will be adopting Facebook Live streaming.

#TheDollEvolves

February 25, 2016

Mattel | Barbie

In January 2016, Mattel revealed the evolution of their iconic doll Barbie with the announcement of  three new body types – tall, curvy and petite. The response has been exceptional, with social media leading the conversation.

Having worked with Mattel for over a year establishing their social media presence on Facebook across seven European countries, agency:2 was responsible for activating the social campaign for the launch of the new range, providing responsive and always-on social advertising, community management and sentiment reporting.

To elevate the campaign, agency:2 promoted content on Facebook across relevant markets, using their proprietary Social Insight Engine ad technology to hyper-target specific audiences and extend reach.

Joel Davis, Director of agency:2 says ”agency:2 prides itself on pushing boundaries and leading the way in social media. My team and I are proud to be part of this momentous moment for the Barbie brand, supporting the next innovative step in the brand’s evolution.”

 

 

 

Check out the new Facebook Reactions!

February 25, 2016

 

 

facebook reactions for brands 2016 likes

 

Everyone’s had that post show up in their News Feed where they think “I want to respond in some way, but ‘like’ doesn’t feel appropriate at all”. Until now, there’s been no other option on Facebook, something which has changed as of yesterday (24/02/2016).

 

After a lengthy period of planning and development, Facebook has finally released their expanded ‘Like’ button “reactions” to much excitement. Although there is no dislike button as was once predicted, these new Emoji icons are more expressive and show a wider range of response.

 

To bring up the new reactions, “love,” “haha,” “wow,” “sad,” and “angry,” users can hover over the traditional like button and the 5 emoticons will appear as choices. While a total number of likes appears for each post, there is the option of establishing which reactions have been chosen, again by holding the mouse over the reaction.

 

At agency:2, we feel this is a positive step forward and expect to see richer user engagement rates resulting from our clients’ Facebook activity.

 

What’s your reaction to the new reactions?

 

The Power of Video in Social Media

December 4, 2015

Mobile video is set to become a key investment opportunity in 2016 due to the high promise it offers; we have seen video budgets increase by over 18% since 2014.  (Source: aol.platforms)

The following chart highlights how different social networks have adopted video promotional content in the last year and how they plan to run video campaigns in the forthcoming year.

 

 

social media video 2016

social media video 2016

Source: Mixpo Survey – 2015

 

You can see from the data, it is predicted that advertisers plan to run video ads on Facebook more than on any other networks.

According to a report by Cisco, video will account for over 80% of global Internet traffic by 2019.

With online video quickly becoming key towards social media users obtaining information and fulfilling entertainment needs, our social display media planners at agency:2 are of the opinion that businesses failing to include video in their marketing strategies correctly will do so at their peril.

When it comes to potential reach, video is unrivaled. Will your marketing strategy include more video content in 2016?

Digging out the data

November 13, 2015

Our founder Joel Davis spoke at the DMA offices about applying social data for brands. Key take home points included: 1) Facebook pushes brands to pay for increased reach; this is made more significant as bigger pages experience lower organic reach 2) 62% of CMOs rate creating more engaging, high quality content as extremely important and high up on their marketing priority list 3) Creating brand loyalty is essential and can be increased through driving engagement, encouraging consideration, high levels of support and driving conversion

Social media at the DMA

social media at the DMA

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