Social Media and Marketing News, 25 October 2019

Each week we bring you a wrap-up of engaging news, tips and trends from social media and marketing technology. As you prepare or fine tune your social media and digital marketing strategy it’s important to stay on top of the latest trends in all things SEO, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and more.

How to Create Personalized Content for Your Social Media Marketing

By Lilach Bullock

Want to generate more engagement, leads, and sales? Have you considered using personalized content in your marketing?

In this article, you’ll find a plan and tools to help you create and deliver personalized content via social media platforms.

Personalized Social Media Marketing: Why and How to Get Started

Personalized marketing is a strategy where you leverage data and data analysis (as well as digital tools) to deliver personalized and individualized content and marketing experiences to your target audience, prospects, and customers.

A common and accessible form of personalized marketing is marketing automation like sending an email to a prospect after they’ve abandoned a shopping cart online or delivering personalized content to a lead based on their past behavior.

A more complex form of personalized marketing is when a website’s content changes based on the person who accesses it; for instance, showing only relevant content and products (based on that person’s past behavior) or changing the language and information presented on the website (based on the visitor’s location).

Personalization goes hand in hand with social media, as with any other platform where you’re offering content to your audience. It starts with the little things such as making sure you’re optimizing an image you used on Facebook before you share it on Twitter, ensuring the sizing is okay, and in some cases, even altering the content.

But personalization can go well beyond this, and it will continue to do so as the necessary technology becomes available to a wider audience.

One of the most notable examples of social media personalization comes from Cadbury. The company used this tactic twice in two different countries, with the goal of spreading brand awareness.

For one campaign, they wanted to introduce their Australian audience to some new flavors. They used Idomoo’s Personalized Video as a Service (PVaaS) platform to deliver a highly personalized video marketing campaign leveraging Facebook data (but only to people who signed up and gave their consent). (Contact Idomoo for a demo and pricing information.)

With the PVaaS tech, they created a Flavor Matcher app that matched users with different flavors of Cadbury sweets based on data from their Facebook accounts. Participants then received personalized videos using their Facebook profile photo, celebrating the “flavor match.”
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How to Master a Different Kind of Marketing Funnel

By Jordan Teicher

They say the happiest two times in a sailor’s life are the day you buy a boat and the day you sell it. Regardless of your sea legs, there’s something captivating about making a purchase. In the beginning, you see a product’s full potential and assume everything will work out perfectly. But after you sign the contract, you’ll inevitably find that the true experience of being a customer rarely matches up to the initial expectations.

This dropoff can happen for multiple reasons. Maybe a company overpromised on what a product could do. Perhaps the customer didn’t spend enough time researching the right solution. In many cases, brands just don’t set aside enough resources to educate a buyer once they sign on the dotted line.

Companies that get caught up chasing new clients at the expense of old ones struggle to hit their goals and keep growing. Revenue flatlines or drops since their new business gets offset by customers that churn.

It doesn’t have to be this way. In fact, studies show that it’s overwhelmingly in a brand’s best interest to keep setting customers up for success. According to the Harvard Business Review, “acquiring a new customer is anywhere from five to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one.” Additionally, improving customer retention by 5 percent boosts profits by at least 25 percent.

So much marketing advice looks at how to get new customers. But what about strengthening relationships with the customers you already have?

The second marketing funnel

We’ve written a lot about the marketing funnel because it’s a useful framing device for thinking about the customer journey. However, the traditional marketing funnel has one major shortcoming: It usually ends at the purchase.

In reality, the customer journey doesn’t stop there. You could map out a whole second part that shows the different steps for customer retention, including adoption, expansion, and advocacy.

The good news is that you don’t have to learn a bunch of new tricks to master the second part. The methods outlined in previous playbooks will mostly be the same. You just have to apply them to an audience that already knows what you stand for. When done right, a bump in retention creates momentum that boosts your whole business.

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LinkedIn Launches Events to Facilitate Professional Meet-Ups

By Andrew Hutchinson

After first announcing that it was developing its own events tool in November last year, LinkedIn has now officially launched the option, providing the capacity for members to create and organize event pages, and facilitate in-person meet-ups via the professional social network.

As you can see from the video, LinkedIn users will now be able to create their own event pages via the Community panel to the left side of the News Feed in the mobile app.

As explained by LinkedIn:

“You need to provide a description, a date and time, a venue, and then invite your connections using filters such as location, company, industry, and school. We also recommend you share the event as a post to leverage the power of the feed to reach relevant attendees. From your event page, you can easily track attendees and invitees, post updates and interact with other attendees.”

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Why you remembered that YouTube ad

By Google

New research on using narrative structures to tell better stories and create more effective ads

Transforming the traditional ad spot

Like the TV experience it was originally designed for, the forced 30‑second ad spot doesn’t fit the way people watch today — entirely on their own terms, seamlessly shifting between devices and channels. Video ad sequencing updates the traditional model, allowing you to serve up a planned sequence of ads that tell a story to customers across their purchase journey. New technology makes sequencing manageable and offers gains for marketers. It’s proven to be more memorable than the 30-second ad spot.

5 tested sequences

We’re all wired to remember great stories. Video ad sequencing lets marketers show ads on YouTube in an order based on the most compelling and memorable story structures. There are a lot of structures to explore, so we tested five sequences to understand their influence on three key metrics: brand awareness, ad recall, and purchase intent.

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How to Show Up In Google Maps: A Google My Business Optimization Checklist

By Jeremy Lawlor

When it comes to getting new inquiries and sales for your local business, local SEO is found to be extremely effective.

In fact, a recent article from Search Engine Watch shows that “there was a 20.1% increase in clicks to call, clicks for directions, and clicks to a business’s website” with Google My Business (GMB) interactions when comparing stats from 2017 and 2018.

This is HUGE!

But in order to generate these clicks, your website’s GMB profile needs to be visible to interested searchers.

To give your business the highest probability of showing up in Google Maps for searches relevant to your business, we have provided a checklist below of GMB optimizations to help you achieve this.

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How to Build My Network on LinkedIn? Here’s 15 Ways to Grow Your LinkedIn Network

By Neal Schaffer

Who to connect with on LinkedIn in order to build a network is a question I often get asked. Every time someone invites me to connect with them, I always send out a reply thanking them and also asking them to contact me should they ever need any help with LinkedIn.  I have had so many people, either directly or indirectly, help me that I thought I should give something back to the community. Well, not everyone asks me a question, but by far the question that I get the most is “How can I grow my network on LinkedIn?”

As I have seen my network grow from a few hundred to a few thousand connections over the past several months, I believe I have the experience to be able to help you effectively grow your network to meet whatever objective you might have.   That being said, there are many ways to achieve this and you will need to be the judge as to which methods you use.

So, what are some specific ways in how to build my network on LinkedIn?

First of all, I think it is necessary to understand why a large network on LinkedIn is important.  I believe that the main purpose in using this social networking for professionals is TO FIND AND BE FOUND.  In order to do this, you need to use the Advanced Search functionality, which will give you the top 500 results based on whatever search terms you entered from within your network.  Your network is defined as your direct connections (1st degree), your 1st degree connections’ connections (2nd degree), and your 2nd degree connections’ connections (3rd degree).

When you first joined LinkedIn, any search you did may not have given you a total of 500 results, but as you grow your network, you will realize why some people pay to get 1000 instead of 500 results.  A good example is when I was looking for people in the Staffing and Recruiting industry (headhunters, etc.) who might be working in my field of specialty (IPTV). Enter the keyword IPTV and select the Staffing and Recruiting industry and voila! I would get 70+ people that popped up. I just checked now for the first time in a month and the number is up to 90+. The larger the network, the more you will find and be found.  A side point is that your search results will always change as your network grows, so make sure you do regular searches for finding people that are important to you and do not get frustrated if nothing shows up on your first search.

Now that we know why it is important to grow our network, let’s look at some of the common ways of how to build my network on LinkedIn.  There are two types of ways to achieve this: 1) an active way, utilizing one’s invitations, and 2) a passive way, hoping that people will find you and invite you to their network.

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