Tag: social media marketing

Ah, summer. While the rest of the world is busy enjoying ice cream, swim parties and vacations, you still have a business to run — but that doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy your summer, too. Summer is the perfect time to have some fun with your social media. If you implement a few best practices, you’ll have enough time to go enjoy an ice cream, too.

Tip #1: Get In Step With Your Audience

Depending on the type of business you have, your sales either ramp up or slow down in the summer, or maybe they stay fairly consistent. Make sure you understand the pace at which your audience operates in summertime so you can adjust your social media accordingly.

For example, let’s say your audience is mainly moms who stay home with their kids during the summer. In this case, their social media usage habits might shift as they adopt a different routine. Consider the following:

• Maybe they’re not posting to or checking Facebook or Instagram quite as frequently during the day. Or maybe it’s the other way around. Check your analytics to understand when they are most active.
• If they’re out and about during the day, maybe they’re looking for a business like yours, using their mobile devices to search. The “near me” searches they’re conducting are opportunities to drive online and offline traffic to your business. Make sure you have a Google My Business page created for your business and optimized for local search. Check and respond to your online reviews so that as you’re discovered in search, customers see positive reviews and a responsive business owner. Read this post for more information on setting up your Google My Business listing.
• Look for ways to draw business into your location with summertime sales, offers and events that you promote on social media. Tie it in with summer holidays such as 4th of July, or in conjunction with upcoming events, like back-to-school. Boost your content and don’t forget to include hashtags to make your content searchable.

Tip #2: Warm Up Your Social Content

If you haven’t updated your content since wintertime, it’s time to freshen things up for summer. A few ideas:

Cover Photos and Highlights

Update your cover photos with a summery image related to your business. Your cover photo is often the first thing people see when they land on your Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn page.

On Instagram, you can update the Highlight cover photos with a summer theme. Highlight covers are the small icons beneath your bio where you’ve highlighted your Stories.

There are many different free apps that will let you create fun, summery covers for your best Story highlights. On that note, be sure to update your Stories regularly with local content that keeps your audience up-to-date on all your summertime events, sales, specials and behind-the-scenes happenings!

Localized Content

Focus on posting local content with a summertime flair! Make your content specific to your location to build local community, and boost any posts that get great engagement. The more hyperlocal your content is — whether in summer or anytime of year — the better your chances of earning local business.

For example, snap outdoor photos and videos with your team. Feature your team members enjoying a day at the park, the beach or the pool. Give a glimpse of what happens behind the scenes.

You can also post photos and videos of your product or service being used outdoors or in a way that evokes feelings of summer. Ask your users to post their own content showing how they enjoy your products or services during the summertime — or ask for permission to snap photos of your customers.

This post from our client Pet Supplies Plus in Adrian, Michigan, featured a customer with his St. Bernard puppy. It got great engagement and included hashtags to make the content more discoverable:

Tip #3: Invite User-Generated Content

User-generated content (UGC) is one of the easiest ways to generate engagement and excitement around your brand without you having to do much. Invite your audience to post their own selfies and other photos showing how they’re enjoying your product or service in the summertime.

Further the engagement by asking them to like, share, tag a friend and tag your brand as they post. Add your own branded hashtag, and perhaps incentivize your campaign with some kind of reward. Be sure to thank your followers publicly for participating!

Another idea is to recruit employees and influencers who can help tell your brand’s story. They’ll post to their own social profiles for their followers and expose your brand to a wider audience. According to research conducted by earned content platform Olapic, 76 percent of survey respondents said they are more likely to trust content shared by fellow consumers over content shared by brands.

A fun summertime influencer campaign might include a “Story takeover” where your influencer posts a “day in the life” to your Stories.

Here’s a great example from swimwear and undergarment retailer Aerie. The post features blogger and influencer @AliciaTenise wearing Aerie swimwear and promoting her Story takeover, where she’d be wearing all her Aerie faves. The post also invites UGC by asking users to post their own favorites using the hashtag #MyAerie.

Bonus Tip #4: Have Fun and Be Authentic

Hopefully, you’re not spending all of your time working this summer. As you’re out enjoying your life, share glimpses of it with your followers. Keep your content fun, light and uplifting. If it entertains, it’s post-worthy.

We’re almost halfway through 2019, and if you haven’t already taken a good look at your social media strategy, now is definitely the time. And never fear if you’re feeling behind — or if you’re lacking a strategy altogether. Today’s post is filled with social media growth hacks to help propel your franchise to the next level for the remainder of the year.

Growth Hack #1: Post and Boost Local Content

This isn’t the first time we’ve talked about posting local content. Your franchise location absolutely needs to be posting local photos and videos if you want to grow. Photos of behind-the-scenes activities and events, office parties, employee spotlights, customer testimonials, and product or service highlights or how-tos are all examples of local content.

This type of content out-performs corporate content and will help you gain more engagements and followers. As your following grows, expand your reach even more by boosting content to get it in front of more eyes. Even a modest budget will help you reach more of your target audience, driving traffic and sales to your location.

Growth Hack #2: Empower Your Employees

Employee advocacy is a huge part of social media today, as more and more employees take to social to post photos about their employers. It’s the kind of user-generated content that gives your brand social proof and builds trust with your audience. It also creates the kind of local content you need to boost engagements and follows.

To help encourage employee advocacy, for example, our Rallio mobile app allows users to give employees limited access to their social pages. They can simply upload photos, and then caption them and post to their social pages. We include a release form that travels with each photo so that any featured subject can sign off on the use of the photo.

Growth Hack #3: Study Your Analytics

You have to know what’s working and what’s not in order to create more of the kind of content your audience wants to see. Taking a microscope to your analytics pulled in from your social platforms and those displayed on your Rallio dashboard will help you continue to fine-tune your content as well as the audience you’re reaching through boosted ads.

Sometimes, something as simple as changing your call to action in a caption and in your boosted ads is enough to change your results for the better. Or maybe you play around with the time of day your posts go out so you can schedule them at more optimal times and days, when your audience is most likely to be online.

Growth Hack #4: Go Live

Even the most mundane events can become exciting when you go live with them on Facebook or Instagram. Are you unboxing a new product? Have a big announcement to make? Going live gives you a platform to tell your audience all about it. Invite questions and comments, and get interactive with your customers. You can also simply post videos, which many people prefer over text content, either via native videos or by uploading to YouTube and then sharing those assets to your social pages.

If you’re feeling camera-shy, recruit an outgoing employee to go live for you! As mentioned in #2, empowering employees to be brand advocates is a great way to build trust, and many employees will love the opportunity to be in the spotlight. Just make sure that employee is knowledgeable and prepared before going live!

Growth Hack #5: Make It About Them, Not You

The majority of the time, your social media should be just that: social. Avoid being overly promotional, and instead make your posts about your audience. If it informs and/or entertains, you’re in good shape! If it sells, you’re probably going to drive customers away.

There are a few exceptions — say, if you’re running a contest or a giveaway, or if you have a great promotion that will benefit your audience. In that case, keep the social aspect of your content by inviting users to like, share and comment on your posts. For example, for a BOGO, offer, you could say, “Tag a friend who would love to get a free burger with you.” Always look for creative ways to present your offers that allow them to still feel social and personable rather than salesy.

Growth Hack #6: Respond to Your Online Reviews and Engagements

Have you ever left a review about a brand and not gotten a response? Kinda makes you not want to buy from them anymore, right? Whether a review is positive or negative, it’s imperative that you respond to all of them. It demonstrates good customer service and accountability, and it makes your customers feel like you value them. The same is true if a customer comments on a post or asks a question.

If you don’t already have a system in place to respond to your customers online, make it a priority.

Growth Hack #7: Employ Facebook Messenger

Facebook Messenger has come a long way in recent years. It’s no longer simply an inbox/outbox for conversations; brands are now using them to promote special offers, pre-screen job candidates, answer questions via customized bots, and handle a lot of the heavy social lifting for them.

Growth Hack #8: Snoop on Your Competitors

Check out your competitors’ social pages to see what they’re doing, what’s working and the type of audience they’re engaging with. This strategy works well on Instagram and Twitter, where you can easily click on their Followers tab to see who’s following.

Growth Hack #9: Always Evolve

There’s a danger in stagnation. Don’t get so comfortable with your current strategy that you fail to see what might need tweaking or anything you can do more of. Give yourself a solid month or two to get comfortable with implementing the strategies above, but then re-examine your strategy to identify opportunities to improve.

What are some other social media growth hacks you’ve tried and recommend? Let us know in the comments. As always, we’re available here at Rallio for all your franchise social media needs.

This much we know: Social media is no longer simply a “nice to have” in your business marketing plan. Your audience is already online, checking out your social profiles and online reviews, as well as conducting mobile searches for nearby businesses. You either ramp up your social presence or get left behind by your competition.

You get it. Other marketers get it. According to one survey of CMOs, marketers said they are spending 12% of their marketing budgets on social — a number that’s expected to rise 20% in the next five years.

What’s not so clear is how to justify the spend on social media marketing. The survey also notes that 44% of those same CMOs say they haven’t been able to measure the impact of social on their business. Although it’s simple enough to track followers, likes, shares and engagement, it’s not quite as easy to equate those numbers with sales or other metrics of success.

Before you throw your hands in the air and think social media isn’t working for you — or, on the flipside, that it is working just because you have a large number of followers — take a deep breath. Know that there are ways to measure your social media success, and you can start today — even if you’re among the 44% of marketers feeling cloudy about the kind of impact you’re having on social media. Read on for four steps to measure the effectiveness of your social campaigns.

Step 1: Define ROI

To measure your social media marketing success, you’ll need to do two things:

1. Define your goals and tie them to outcomes. Your returns are the various outcomes that you determine are necessary for your brand.
2. Identify what exactly your investment is, aka your budget you wish to spend overall and for each initiative. You dedicate time, resources and dollars toward social media — that’s your investment.

Together, your investment and the resulting returns (or outcomes) are your ROI. Some possible goals with desired outcomes and investment options include:

Your goals can vary based on any particular campaign, its platform and its associated budget. Some outcomes can be clearly measured in terms of money, such as an ad campaign that ties directly to an offer (more on this in Step 3). Others, like brand awareness, are more difficult to quantify but are still important to your overall marketing plan. The value of outcomes will need to be defined according to your unique business, leading us to Step 2.

Step 2: Assign a Value to These Goals

Let’s look at a hypothetical example to estimate the value of your outcomes. Imagine one customer is worth $100 monthly (you can insert whatever numbers are meaningful to you here, such as the lifetime value of a customer, or the average value of a purchase as a result of seeing an ad). Then you’ll compare that value against the social media marketing costs associated with lead generation through social.

Use the following formula to calculate ROI: return minus investment, divided by investment, expressed as a percentage. In the example above, let’s say you spend $100 on social media marketing in a month, including the time, resources and ad spend needed, and then you get 10 customers who made a purchase, totaling $1,000 in value.

$1,000 – $100 = $900

$900 / $100 = 9

9 x 100% = 900%

In this case, your return is 900%, which is a great return. You would probably want to repeat the same efforts, maybe even increase your spend, but again you have to look at how all your efforts are working overall and consider all angles. For example, what is your average close ratio when you talk to prospects non-digitally? Establish a “social close ratio.” How many engagements do you need to earn every day that equate to one engaged follower? How many engaged followers do you need to impact your bottom line?

Step 3: Continually Monitor Your Analytics

Your Facebook or Instagram promotion insights and Rallio dashboard give you a detailed view of post reach, post engagements, page followers and more, including both organic and paid efforts. While it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the many types of metrics available to track, you have to pick and choose which ones are meaningful based on your goals. For instance, if your goal is brand awareness, you might look at an increase in followers and engagement as an indication of growth. Other campaigns can be more easily attached to sales, such as boosted special offers that include unique tracking codes or those that incorporate Facebook Messenger as a sales tool.

For example, recently I saw an ad on Facebook for a buy one, get one free pizza at a local pizza place. I clicked the button to get the offer, and I received the offer as an auto-respond in my Messenger. The message invited me to opt in to email by replying back to the message. It also included details about any exclusions, participating locations and the expiration date. Best of all, when I use this offer, the server is supposed to click the “redeem” button in my Messenger app. How’s that for tracking ROI?

Not only did I request the special offer, but I agreed to ongoing communications from the restaurant by opting in to email. Before I have even set foot in the door, they’ve got my email address and have given me a reason to visit: free pizza!

As a side note, in this article, I discuss Messenger as being a major tech trend for franchise locations to utilize this year. With the hyper-local targeting you can implement with boosted ads, you can send out special offers that get seen by people in your community and contribute directly to your ROI.

Step 4: Adjust as Needed

What works on one platform or for one goal isn’t always going to be the same. It’s important to continually check your ROI so you know what’s working and what isn’t — and then adjust your strategy accordingly. Understand, too, that certain goals take longer than others. It could take several weeks to grow your following, while an ad campaign might last just a few days and can be easily measured afterward.

Your goals should be working together all the time to produce the outcomes you want. Understand, too, that you can’t always see the direct path from prospect to conversion — for instance, a new follower or a comment can’t necessarily be tied to a sale. However, the only way to start converting prospects to customers is by getting in front of them every chance you get — through social media, through building a local community, through paid boosting of your content, and through creating confidence and loyalty in your brand.

Over time, you’ll learn which campaigns work best and which areas deserve the most investment. The key is to have a robust online presence, combining both organic and paid efforts, that shows people you are a trusted brand. This way,  when they do come across your page, they’ll want to buy from you — whether now or after the 10th or 100th time they see you. Keep tracking your efforts and investing, and you’ll see the returns in time.

When Gary Vaynerchuk speaks about social media marketing, it’s best to sit up and listen, especially if you feel like your brand could use some help maximizing its online reach. The CEO of VaynerMedia was among the featured guests on a recent episode of MODRN Business Podcast, hosted by Rallio’s own Ryan Hicks, Vice President of Business Development.

In the episode, which was recorded before his keynote at the 2019 International Franchise Association Annual Convention in Las Vegas, GaryVee offers several tips to help franchisors and their franchisees get started in social media marketing. Read on for a look at a few of his top tips that any franchise system can undertake to make an immediate impact on social media.

Give More Than You Take

“People are often self-serving on social media,” says Gary, and that approach doesn’t do anything to win over your target audience. “Your content needs to bring value to the audience at no cost so they can go and do something with it.”

The most successful social media accounts serve up content that either informs and educates or entertains rather than going for the sale, says Gary. He adds, “There are no accounts doing well on social media that don’t do one of those two things.

Pro tip: Don’t over-promote. Promotional posts have their place, such as when you’re paying to boost a post or you have an exciting offer to share with users. You can’t post them every day, however. Keep the focus on them, not you, with the majority of your posts, and they’ll be more receptive when you share a special sale or promotion. If you need more ideas for daily content, see our post, 31 Days of Social Media Ideas.

Read more: Why Your Franchise Location Needs Social Media

Make Local Content

Franchisees need to be producing local, engaging content like the post you see above. Why? “Because they want their business to grow,” quips Gary. “If you’re not making contextual content, you’ve lost.”

By contextual, he means that simply pushing out the same corporate content across all locations isn’t effective in terms of broadening your local reach. If you want to do business with people who actually live in your area and are likely to frequent your establishment, then you need to speak to them directly.

The “Hugo” post above from Pet Supplies Plus in Naperville, Illinois, does double duty by pushing out a locally focused post featuring a “neighbor’s” canine companion. By also asking its audience to post pet photos of their own, the post invites engagement and, because Facebook’s algorithm favors this type of content over generic posts, is more likely to be seen in newsfeeds.

Pro tip: Find your unique voice. Specifically, find a voice that exudes casual friendliness. Social media is not the place for business speak, stodgy words and sales pitches. The very term “social media” gives you a clue as to what kind of voice you need to have. You’re just a bunch of friends chatting it up.

Read more: 5 Tips for Improving Your Writing on Social Media

“That whole concept of vanilla from corporate doesn’t work,” Gary continues. That’s a tough lesson to learn for many new franchisees, who often join a franchise system because of the perceived structure. They may think that corporate will handle everything for them, including their local marketing, when in reality that’s a task they must undertake just as an independent entrepreneur would.

Adds Gary, “The reason so many people lose in the franchise world is that people think they’re in the turnkey business and they’re not.”

When corporate content doesn’t generate any engagement, leads or sales for them, they may think social media simply doesn’t work for them as a marketing medium. However, the solution is not to abandon social media, but rather embrace local, location-specific content. That is, original content that’s contextual to your five-mile radius is always going to disproportionately outperform generic content that isn’t meaningful to your local audience. “Like, you know the pothole on your street — that’s the joke you should be making,” says Gary. “The hot new yoga studio [in town], the principal in town who just celebrated her 50th anniversary — that needs to be your post.”

Pro tip: Don’t be a social media hater. The conversations are happening with or without you. Additionally, on social media, you have an opportunity to let your personality shine, inspire confidence in customers, entertain and educate your audience, and build customer loyalty. Lastly, you can better serve customers. Nowadays, when people have a complaint about a company, they take to social media to vent. The more engaged you are in the conversations happening about your brand, the more responsive you can be to their needs.

Read more: Why Your Franchise Location Needs Social Media

The key takeaway? Customers want to see that there are real humans behind the local social profile. Again, ask yourself if a post either informs or entertains. If it fails that litmus test, then it’s not providing value — and it’s probably not going to get any online engagement.

Furthermore, pay attention to what happens after you post. If people are asking questions, commenting, liking, sharing and leaving online reviews, you need to be involved in that conversation. When they engage with you, they expect to hear back — and quickly — especially if they’re voicing a complaint. Be polite, be engaging and be present so your customers know you’re listening.

Pro tip: Respond to both positive and negative online reviews. In either case, it’s important that a customer feels heard. With positive reviews, thank them for taking the time to leave a review and mention something specific about the customer if you can, such as, “It was great seeing you as always, Jessica, and we look forward to your next visit.” With negative reviews, be sure to acknowledge the concern, address it without getting defensive, and take it offline if necessary. An owner’s response to a review has the ability to either generate trust in a brand or demonstrate lack of concern.

Read more: Not Responding to Your Online Reviews? You Need to Read This

Pick Your Platform

With so many different platforms, from Instagram to LinkedIn, how do you know which one will give you the best return on your marketing investment? While you don’t need to limit yourself to one platform, you can take a look at your demographics to see where they are spending their time the most, but don’t ignore other opportunities to branch out into other platforms. “LinkedIn has helped me quite a bit because it’s broadened my reach,” says Gary.

Pro Tip: It’s called “social” media, so be social. Your audience doesn’t want to see stock photos. They’ll scroll right past them! Instead, include snapshots (with permission) of your employees, customers, office environment and other real-life photos. Include not only special events such as birthdays and holiday celebrations, but also simple “day in the life” photos showing what happens in your office.

Read more: Franchise Social Media Best Practices: a Roundup of Our Best Tips

Bonus Tip: Get Your Employees Involved

A common barrier for franchisees is they lack the time and/or desire to post to social media, engage with their audience and respond to their online reviews. One solution is to let someone else do the work.

That might mean employing an agency such as the Rallio Local division to handle posting custom, local content and responding to comments and reviews. Not only does our team bring life to local pages, but they also help boost locations’ online reputation by ensuring timely responses to their online engagements.

You can also empower your employees to be brand advocates. Did you know that most employees are already posting comments, images and videos about their employers? Rallio technology allows you to give employees limited access to your mobile social profiles so they can do some of the legwork to snap great local photos and upload them to our platform.

Does your franchise use social media marketing to make a local impact? Why or why not? Drop your comments below.

Marketing experts and executives interested in being featured on the MODRN Business Podcast may reach out to Hicks at ryanh@www.rallio.com. To be featured or for guest blogging opportunities on the Rallio blog, contact karen@www.rallio.com. Additionally, for product or service inquiries, contact ryanh@www.rallio.com or support@www.rallio.com.

About Rallio: Rallio is a powerful combination of social technology and local agency. The Rallio team empowers local operators to ignite their social presence, with easy-to-use mobile technology that turns employees into brand advocates. Rollup analytics provide brands with complete control over their local social media and reputation presence and clarity into which locations and operators are performing the best.