Today's Guide to the Marketing Jungle from Social Media Examiner... | Presented by |  |
Tomorrow is 🍅 Fresh Tomato Day, Alluser! Two pieces of 🍞 toasted bread, mayo, salt, pepper, and thick-cut tomato slices… so good.
In today's edition:
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Today's 👉 Tip of the Day is for Facebook
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Holding onto your 🔥 best marketers
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🤩 A guide to company-wide marketing
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4 steps to 🤝 💰 converting on Instagram
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📱 Instagram Blend in testing
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More 👻 Snapchat create features
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Apple 🎙️ podcast placement
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New Meta ads 🎯 audience
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Facebook's new 📱 video experience
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New YouTube 📊 analytics
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📣 Additional industry news from LinkedIn, Threads, X, and more
Are you looking to maximize the impact of your Facebook ads, even with a limited budget?
The first step is to establish how much you should spend on your Facebook ads based on whether your business is in maintenance mode, growth mode, or hyper-growth mode.
Determine Your Ideal Facebook Ad Budget
For brick-and-mortar businesses, aim to spend 5% of revenue if you're in maintenance mode, 10–15% for growth mode, and 15–20%+ for hyper-growth.
Service-based businesses should allocate 3–5% for maintenance, 5–10% for growth, and 10–20%+ for hyper-growth.
Online businesses like course creators and eCommerce stores should budget 10–15% for maintenance, 15–30%+ for growth, and 30%+ for hyper-growth.
Today's tip is inspired by Tara Zirker, a featured speaker in the Social Media Marketing Society.
Struggling to Produce High-Quality Content on LinkedIn?
Consistently keeping up with a content calendar can be challenging. But what if there was another option?
Learn practical strategies for using LinkedIn Live to engage with your audience from LinkedIn Pages expert Michelle J Raymond. Discover how to create one live video that can be easily adapted into a variety of content types, helping you fill your content calendar much more efficiently.
This training is only available to members of the Social Media Marketing Society. Join today, and you'll get access to over 100 training sessions—including this one on April 9.
I'm ready to make my content creation easier.
How to Retain Top Talent on Your Marketing Team
Whether you're heading up a marketing team or are a business owner, losing your best marketers can be costly in terms of time and resources spent on hiring and training new team members and the impact on your team's overall performance. The following tips will help you create a work environment that encourages your best marketers to stay.
Create a Culture of Psychological Safety
To retain top talent, creating a culture of psychological safety is essential. This means fostering an environment where people feel comfortable bringing their whole selves to work and expressing their thoughts and ideas without fear of negative consequences. When team members feel psychologically safe, they're more likely to take risks, be creative, and collaborate effectively.
As a leader, your actions and behaviors play a crucial role in shaping the work environment. By demonstrating vulnerability and admitting when you don't have all the answers, you can foster a stronger connection with your team and enhance problem-solving capabilities. Encouraging open communication, seeking feedback, and valuing your employees' opinions and concerns are all essential steps in creating a workplace where everyone feels heard and respected.
Encourage and Respect Work-Life Balance
Respecting your employees' boundaries is key to retaining top talent. While it's tempting to expect your team to be available 24/7, especially in the fast-paced world of marketing, it's important to remember that you're only paying for their professional hours, not access to their entire lives. Expecting your employees to be constantly connected and responsive can lead to burnout, decreased job satisfaction, and higher turnover rates.
Encourage your team to maintain a healthy work-life balance by setting clear expectations around communication outside of work hours. Avoid sending messages or pings during their time off, as this can make it difficult for them to disconnect and recharge fully. Instead, consider using tools like scheduled messages or waiting until they're back in the office to discuss non-urgent matters.
Additionally, be mindful of the workload assigned to your team members. Ensure they have the resources and support to complete their tasks within a reasonable timeframe and be open to adjusting deadlines or redistributing work when necessary.
Offer Meaningful Benefits and Perks
While compensation is important, smaller businesses cannot always compete with larger companies in terms of salary and benefits. However, you can still offer meaningful perks that show your employees you value their well-being and personal growth. These benefits can make your team members feel appreciated and invested.
Consider offering flexible work arrangements, such as working from home or having a more flexible schedule. This can especially appeal to employees with families or those with long commutes. Giving your team members more control over their work environment and schedule shows that you trust them to manage their time effectively and deliver high-quality work.
Provide Ways to Grow and Develop
To retain top talent, provide your team with ways to grow and develop within your agency. This can include giving your team members the autonomy to pursue challenging projects and take on new responsibilities. Employees who feel like they're learning and growing in their roles are more likely to stay engaged and committed to your agency.
Encourage your employees to attend industry events and conferences to network with other professionals, learn about the latest trends and best practices, and bring new ideas back to your agency. Be willing to invest in their professional development through training and certification programs that align with their career goals and your agency's needs.
Today's advice is provided with insights from Jonathan Jacobs.
How to Help Everyone in Your Business Market Your Product or Service
Want more customers? Wondering how to empower anyone on your staff, not just the marketing team, to respond to and nurture prospective customers?
Follow these steps to create a sales playbook that puts your entire company on the same page so they can help grow business.
Align Internal Stakeholders
The first critical step is to bring together key stakeholders such as sales, marketing, service delivery, and executive leadership for a workshop. The primary goals of this session are to:
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Get everyone aligned on your ideal target audience. Who can you serve better than anyone else? Narrow down firmographic criteria like industry, company size, and location, as well as psychographic and behavioral attributes.
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Agree on the core business goals and objectives your sales playbook will support. What are the quantitative and qualitative outcomes you want to achieve in the market?
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Surface areas of market misalignment and open questions that require further research and validation.
Gather External Buyer Insights
Armed with initial hypotheses about your ideal audience and value proposition from the internal workshop, the next step is to test those assumptions with real buyer insights. There are two key types of buyers to engage through interviews, whose feedback is invaluable:
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Current and past customers who know and love your business. Seek to understand why they chose you, what specific outcomes they achieved through the partnership, and how they view your unique strengths.
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Prospects you lost to competitors or no decision. Uncover why they didn't select your business, what they were looking for that you didn't provide, and what they ultimately bought instead. If you can't get direct interviews, reviewing loss reports from the sales team can provide useful data points.
In addition to interviews, analyze quantitative data from your CRM and marketing automation systems to identify commonalities in your most successful customer accounts and leads that didn't convert.
This external research aims to validate or refine your target audience hypotheses, surface new pain points and objectives, and collect proof points demonstrating your unique value. Look for patterns and language you can incorporate directly into the playbook.
Assess the Competitive Landscape
Now, analyze how your top competitors are positioning themselves in the market. Review their websites, content marketing assets, and any publicly available case studies. Talk to your sales team about which competitors come up most often and how they succeed.
The goal is to understand the general narrative in the market so you can differentiate your approach through how you package and communicate your positioning, the unique perspective you bring, and the vertical or use case specialization you highlight.
Capture the key themes, proof points, and language competitors use so you can thoughtfully choose where to align and where to stand apart in your own messaging.
Prioritize and Build Consensus
By this point, you should have a robust fact base from internal and external sources to guide decisions about your sales playbook strategy. It's time to narrow that down to the most essential elements through a structured prioritization exercise.
Bring the internal stakeholder group back together to review what you've learned and test the initial target audience and positioning hypotheses. Facilitate an objective discussion of the pros and cons of different opportunity areas and push the group to prioritize the most compelling two or three to execute first. For each area, build the business case for why it warrants investment and the specific use cases you'll focus the playbook on supporting.
Socializing these recommendations across the organization and building consensus is key to a successful rollout. Develop a crisp presentation highlighting the market feedback, data, and rationale behind each recommendation. Meet with your internal stakeholders and influential voices individually to get their input and buy-in, then roll your playbook out to everyone in your business.
Today's advice is provided with insights from Samantha Stone.
How to Audit and Improve Your Instagram Marketing
Are you looking to grow your Instagram account but unsure where to start? In this article, we'll share Instagram strategies to avoid and give you one strategy that works today.
Outdated Strategies to Stop Using
If you haven't changed your Instagram strategy in a year, it's likely outdated. Some outdated Instagram growth strategies to avoid include:
The Follow/Unfollow Method: This involves following many accounts, hoping they will follow you back, and then unfollowing them later. This strategy is seen as spammy and disrespectful to other creators.
Engagement Groups or Pods: These groups of people agree to engage with each other's posts to boost their engagement rates. However, Instagram can track this behavior and penalize your account.
Certain Giveaway Strategies: Giveaways that require people to follow many accounts to enter are essentially the same as buying followers. These followers are often only interested in the prize and won't engage with your content in the long run.
Untargeted Engagement: Commenting on posts from random accounts to get them to follow you back is not an effective strategy. Instead, focus on genuinely engaging with your target audience.
4-Step Strategy to Grow and Convert Your Instagram Audience
By strategically leveraging Instagram Stories and Reels, you can improve your reach, engage your existing audience, and convert viewers into loyal followers and email subscribers.
Step 1: Attract Cold Audiences With Reels
If your goal is to reach new people, focus on creating Reels.
When crafting your Reels, remember to always include a clear call to action. This not only guides your viewers on what to do next but also ensures they are well-informed about your offerings, whether it's more tips or signing up for your email list.
You can add a call to action to your Reels by including text on the screen or saying it out loud in your voiceover. For example, you might say, "For more Instagram tips, make sure to follow me @yourhandle" or "Tap the link in my bio to sign up for my free Instagram masterclass."
Step 2: Gain New Followers With Stories
Consistently posting to your Instagram Stories helps you stay top of mind with your audience. When a potential new follower visits your profile, seeing an active story with a colorful ring around your profile picture makes them more likely to watch it. By posting engaging Stories regularly, you can draw in potential followers and give them a reason to follow you for more content.
Step 3: Convert Followers With DM Automation
Use Direct Message (DM) automation tools to deliver freebies and grow an email list. With ManyChat, for example, you can set up automated DMs that provide a freebie or lead magnet when someone messages you with a specific keyword. This allows you to deliver value and grow your email list on autopilot.
To set this up, create a keyword for each of your freebies, such as "GuideXYZ" for a specific downloadable guide. Then, set up an automated response in ManyChat that delivers the link to that freebie anytime someone messages you with that keyword. Promote these keywords in your Instagram captions and Stories to drive more signups.
Step 4: Spotlight Products With Highlights
Highlights appear below your bio and allow you to save your best stories for future visitors to view. Consider creating Highlights for your most popular blog posts, products, or freebies.
Use clear, branded cover images for each highlight and customize them to match your brand colors. This creates a cohesive and professional look for your profile.
Keep your highlight titles to one word each, such as "Freebies," "Blog," or "Products," because you have limited space before the title gets cut off.
Today's advice is provided with insights from Millie Adrian.
🗞 Instagram Tests Blend: Some users are receiving invites to Blend, a feature that showcases Reels recommendations based on the Reels users share and their Reels interests. Source: Alessandro Paluzzi via X
🗞 Snapchat Features: The creative and personalization options include: templates for easier high-quality video and Snap creation; longer video uploads (up to five minutes) for Chats, Stories, and Spotlight; advanced Camera mode with editing tools accessible via a simple swipe; artificial intelligence (AI)-powered Lenses offering festive themes and styles. Additionally, Snapchat+ subscribers can now enjoy Friendship Profiles, allowing users to pose their avatars alongside their friends' Bitmoji and a "Bitmojify" feature that creates unique avatars for users' pets. Source: Snapchat
🗞 Apple Podcast Rank: According to a recent Semafor report, Apple has been actively encouraging independent podcast creators to join its Apple Podcasts Subscriptions program, launched in 2021. While some executives have stated that the subscription service is not a significant source of revenue, they believe it is worth participating to secure a prominent placement in the Apple Podcasts app's top carousel. The company's podcast team handpicks shows for the top slots, including some that are not part of the revenue-sharing program. However, an Apple insider revealed that the company designed the app to offer more features and benefits, such as reserved slots in the top carousel, to shows that opt into the subscription service. Source: Semafor
🗞 Meta's Engaged Customers Audience Segment: The feature is found within Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns and enables users to target people who have shown an interest in their products or services but have not yet made a purchase. Source: JonLoomer.com
🗞 X's Grok 1.5: Grok now has improved reasoning capabilities and a context length of 128,000 tokens. This latest model will be available to early testers and existing Grok users on the X platform in the coming days. Source: X
🗞 Facebook Fullscreen Video Player: Facebook is launching an updated fullscreen video player that will provide a consistent design for all video lengths, including Reels, longer videos, and Live videos. The upgraded player will feature new controls such as a fullscreen mode for horizontal videos, a slider to skip around in longer videos, and the ability to tap on the video to access additional options like pausing and jumping back or forward 10 seconds. The updated video player is initially rolling out on iOS and Android in the United States and Canada, with a global release planned in the coming months. Source: Meta
🗞 New LinkedIn Ads Solutions: LinkedIn has announced new ad solutions to help businesses target and engage with their audiences both on and off the platform: LinkedIn CTV Ads: This offering allows businesses to launch campaigns and scale them across LinkedIn's network of publishers, including Paramount, Roku, and Samsung Ads. It aims to help businesses reach the LinkedIn audience through high-quality, streaming television content on connected sets. LinkedIn Premiere: In partnership with NBCUniversal, this managed offering in Campaign Manager helps businesses target decision-makers in the United States across NBCUniversal's premium streaming content on CTV. Live Event Ads: This new, global format helps businesses promote their company's live events before, during, and after they take place, dynamically adjusting based on when the event occurs. Source: LinkedIn
🗞 Threads Bonus Program: Instagram confirmed it is testing an invite-only Threads bonus payout program. Source: Instagram
🗞 X Explore Page: X is set to introduce a revamped Explore page that will showcase topic summaries created by its Grok AI chatbot. The updated Explore page will prominently feature ongoing Spaces. Source: @xDaily via X
🗞 New YouTube Metrics: This week, YouTube introduced several new features for creators. First, live streamers will now have access to real-time analytics that show the number and type of reactions viewers had during their live streams. Second, a new filter has been added to YouTube Studio analytics in advanced mode, allowing creators to see the number of impressions broken down by new and returning viewers. Finally, creators can live-stream to YouTube in HDR using the latest OBS 30.1 release. Source: YouTube
Did You Know?
The feathers, beak, feet, and meat of the Ayam Cemani chicken are black. Weird.
id: 2024-04-05-12:54:23:021t
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