marketing – Buzzly Media

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7 Reasons to Outsource Your Social Media Marketing

1. Social media people know what they’re doing! An outside agency is (supposed to be) staffed with people who are experts in their fields and have degrees as well as outside experience in social media management. They will find quality content to post across your social media platforms and be able to engage with your followers. If you contrast this with just having a member of your staff manage your social media, the difference is palpable. Not only will your employee be juggling the added social media responsibilities with his existing job, but he likely doesn’t have a very good idea of the job he’s supposed to be doing. Your existing employees are not experts and their work will reflect that.
2. Hiring an outside agency is often very cost effective. If you were to hire a social media manager onto your staff, you will have to prepare yourself to pay them about $50,400 a year according to PayScale. Now for a little more math. Everyone knows that taking on a new employee comes with more costs than just their annual salary. We used the Real Employee Cost Calculator to estimate how much an employee paid at $24/hour for an annual salary of $50,400 would actually cost a company. The calculator factors in the employee’s insurance, annual bonus, payroll taxes and various infrastructure costs. For our example, it calculates the real cost of your new social media manager to be closer to $100,000. Hiring a consultant at the same hourly rate costs about 60% of that.
3. Less mistakes are made. Mistakes are more likely to happen with both other options we have mentioned (giving social media responsibilities to an existing employee or hiring someone new onto your staff). Why? Outside agencies have a series of checks and balances that EVERY SINGLE ONE of your posts goes through. At least two sets of eyeballs should be checking every post for accuracy, grammar, spelling, and common sense. Can your brand afford any mistakes?
4. Social media matters. At this point you may be thinking: “Why do I have to pick any of these options? I don’t think I even need social media.” In almost every case, you would be wrong. The cost of ignoring social media is tangible. According to a report from the Pew Research Center, nearly 70% of American adults use social networking sites. Additionally, many reports have found that around 74% of consumers rely on social media to influence their purchasing decisions. Social media is not going away, and businesses that do not embrace its power will likely fall to the wayside.
5. Your social media presence will stay active. While daily social media updates may become low on the priority list for an existing employee (or even a social media manager if they have a lot of other things going on), it will never be neglected by an outside agency whose sole job is up keeping up on it. Daily updates will let your customers know that your business is active and keep them up to date on real time happenings like promotions or events.
6. Posts will consistently go out at optimal times. Things can get hectic in an office and social media posting can be pushed to the back burner. But an agency will schedule and plan around optimal social media posting times so that they can engage with your followers during the best times!
7. Analytics reports allow agencies to adapt. Most (good) agencies will track analytics across your social media platforms and constantly adjust and rework your social media strategy so that it is as effective as possible. This type of calculated planning means that resources are used on strategies that work. Rather than hoping a certain strategy will pay off, agencies track success of campaigns and use analytics to gauge whether a campaign is successful, saving time and money.

In short—outsourcing your social media can benefit your budget and your customers. Keeping a strong online presence is key, and social media managers will ensure that your brand and your voice are portrayed in meaningful ways. And before you go Google “best social media managers,” save your time and check us out! Here at Buzzly Media we specialize in analytics-driven social media strategies and we would love to create a customized one for your business.

February 6, 2020/by emma totten

6 Social Media Mistakes You Might be Making

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Social media is an alluring way for businesses to advertise, but it also comes with many pitfalls that you may not expect to encounter. Each platform has its own preferences for post types, image sizes and even search optimization. Without a pretty good grasp on the intricacies of each platform, you may be making these mistakes and making your brand look less professional and even a bit silly.

An embarrassing (and easily avoidable) mistake made by a big brand on social media.

Rushed posting. One of our cringiest pet peeves is when it’s obvious that a page has posted something that was not looked over or thought out. You can end up with typos, inappropriate hashtag use or just messy-looking posts. Make it a rule that at least one other person looks over a post before it goes live, you can save yourself a lot of grief over little mistakes. Similarly, you also always want to check what trending hashtags relate to before using them in your own messaging. You don’t want to wind up with a debacle like DiGiorno’s mistake in 2014 where they used a trending hashtag relating to domestic violence to advertise their pizza. One tweet may not seem like a big deal, but if you make a mistake it can turn into bad news for your brand.
Please refer to this when you are sizing images for social media!
Incorrect formatting. Take advantage of the plethora of social media cheat sheets for image sizing. If you’ve sized a cover photo for Pinterest you’ll have to change it around for Facebook so it fits. Similarly, a long vertical picture will work great on Pinterest but looks bad on Twitter. Just keep in mind what works best for the different platforms so that your posts are as visually appealing as possible.
Inconsistent voice. We frequently see pages that just allow all their employees to have access to their social media accounts and post whenever and whatever they like. While this is a nice thought, it leads to a distractingly inconsistent voice and tone across your posts and makes you look pretty unprofessional. You don’t want to give your followers whiplash from all the different types of posts going up on your pages. Try to stick to one voice, one tone and one theme across posts. This can be achieved by having only one person in charge of the account or by hiring professionals like us to manage it for you!

Everything you post on social media should include a visual.
No visuals. If there’s anything worse than formatting images incorrectly, it’s not even having visuals in the first place. Text-only posts are boring. Facebook has tried to spice them up a bit by making short text posts bigger but the 35 character limit is usually just too short for you to get much across. If you must make a text-only post, consider adding a background to make it stand out. The only weapons left to get people’s attention are visuals. Video is taking over and posting relevant video content will always perform better. But if you don’t have a video to go with your post then at least find a license-free picture somewhere to make your post pretty! 51% of marketing professionals worldwide name video as the type of content with the best ROI. Get ahead of the curve!
Platform misuse. Pinning 50 different things to a Pinterest board every day is totally acceptable. But sharing 50 different things to your Facebook page is going to make you (and your brand!) look a little crazy. Similarly, you should absolutely be hashtagging your posts on Twitter and Instagram. But for Facebook and LinkedIn this practice is pretty much useless and it makes you look like a novice if you’re using them. LinkedIn won’t even acknowledge your hashtags and Facebook will make it look like it’s using them (they turn blue) but Facebook posts without a hashtag fare better than those with a hashtag. It’s true. Learn about your platforms before posting anything.
Some quick investigation into relevant hashtags can make it much easier for a search engine to find your content!
Disregard of search engine optimization (SEO). To piggyback off of platform misuse, we have to talk about disregarding SEO. Social media is a treasure trove of SEO. You should be researching what keywords and phrases people are using for your brand and paying attention to high-performing hashtags you can use. There are great tools for doing this, Keyhole can give you a good idea of good hashtags to use and even Hashtagify. You should save room in your tweets for at least two to three hashtags and put up to 30 hashtags at the end of your Instagram posts. Even Pinterest is hashtag-friendly! If you’re trying to reach the biggest audience possible you need to take the steps to help search engines find your content.

So there you have it. A basic overview of six mistakes you might be making on social media along with some ideas on how to fix them. If you’re still struggling with getting a handle on the intricacies of social media marketing, we offer training and comprehensive social media packages. Send us an email at info@buzzlymedia.com if you’re ready to hand over the responsibility to the experts.

June 29, 2019/by Emma

3 Digital Marketing Must-Haves for Semiconductor Companies

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47 million people follow companies in the semiconductor industry online. This means people are seeing content from these brands across platforms like Facebook and Twitter every time they look on their phones or computers. Are you reaching this audience? If not, we want to help you to get your brand in front of them, build a professional online identity and establish a base of interested followers.

Creating a comprehensive digital marketing approach can be difficult and time-consuming. We’ve boiled it down to the three most crucial things you’ll need in today’s digital age.

1. The accounts.

It’s 2018–people are looking at your company online. They need to be able to find you on all the social channels they log into every day so that they can follow you in a way that is easiest for them. This means you need to make sure that you have claimed or set up all the social accounts for your business. It’s not terribly complicated and it shouldn’t take long, and it’ll protect you from other companies swooping up your username, leaving you to use an altered form of your own company name by adding underscores or dashes to differentiate.

There is no reason not to do this right now.

Reserving the pages and usernames doesn’t mean you need to immediately start posting, but it does mean that when the time comes to post you won’t be scrambling to create accounts. If you’re at a loss for the platforms to start on, take into account that the study by Publitek on social media in the semiconductor industry found that Facebook had 65% of the 47 million followers. With 2.2 billion monthly active users, this is the largest social media platform and it’s one you should definitely be taking advantage of.

Twitter had the second highest number of followers at 15%, and while that number doesn’t come close to Facebook’s followers, it’s the channel that semiconductor companies are most active on. Twitter had 37% of activity, compared to 13% for Facebook. This is a great place to follow what other companies in the industry are posting about because you can follow hashtags that are relevant to your business.

Bottom line–if you don’t currently own the Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn accounts for your company, go and get them–and do it now.

2. A plan. (Otherwise known as a strategy.)

This may seem like an obvious one, but we see aimless posting across all industries and it breaks our social media hearts. Yes, it is relatively easy to post something online. All you need is an internet connection and you can broadcast any message you would like. But we beg you to dig a little bit deeper than that.

It’s always obvious when a company is just posting for the sake of having content. It ends up feeling desperate, disjointed, and unprofessional. Your digital marketing strategy needs to have outlined goals matched with relevant social media metrics so that you know exactly what purpose each piece of content serves and you can keep an eye on your analytics to make sure you’re heading in the right direction.

From increasing brand awareness to driving traffic to your website, there’s a lot that social media can do for your business. It’s worth taking the time to sit down and decide what you want it to accomplish.

Your plan should include company specific content related to applications, products and technical information, industry information that is relevant for your target audience, and of course, some fun stuff – content that includes people / faces. If you do this right, you should be able to construct a content calendar with a rolling 3 – 6 month outlook and a final detailed posting plan with a four week outlook.

3. Someone to manage it.

We will keep repeating this until the end of time: companies need a dedicated person or team to create content and manage social media channels. This is a huge undertaking for anyone and it’s really not something you can just tack onto the job description of someone already working for you. Social media platforms constantly change and add new features, so a knowledgeable social media team that keeps up with the latest trends is essential to maintaining a strong online presence.

Now of course, we’re a little biased in who we would recommend to help you with this undertaking.

At Buzzly Media, we only employ the top experts in digital marketing and hold ourselves to a very high standard.

We are proud of the work we put out and would love to talk to you about growing your online presence.

We provide free consultations, create customized social media strategies, and offer a variety of social media content creation and management packages. Fill out our contact form, email us at info@buzzlymedia.com, or come hunt us down at SEMICON next week–we’d love to see you there.

You can also follow us on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn for updates and our latest advice on digital marketing!

July 3, 2018/by Emma

What Can Social Media Do for my B2B Company?

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Leaving a comprehensive social media strategy out of your marketing efforts is a big mistake for B2B businesses. In today’s digital world, the sales process is shifting online for the majority of industries, with one study finding that “most customers are 57 percent through the buying process before the first meeting with a company representative.” The same study found also found that “61 percent of all B2B transactions now start online. And 58 percent use social media as a research channel.”

Consumers across all industries are becoming less responsive to cold-outreach and more independent in their research on companies they might do business with, and products they might purchase. Social media channels like LinkedIn and Facebook, and social media service providers like Buzzly Media offer B2B companies many valuable ways to reach customers online. salesperson shaking hand

Social media virtually eliminates the learning curve and gives your customers an almost immediate idea about your brand and your brand’s values before they even make contact with a sales person. This is valuable in the sales cycle because customers who have some interest in your brand (but not enough to convert) may be searching for your company online to learn more before they commit. Social media will offer them softer, more relatable content to ease them into your company culture and let know what to expect when they do decide to reach out.

Social media is one of the best tools available to strengthen your brand’s status as a thought leader in your industry. By connecting with influencers, posting timely industry news updates and weighing in on relevant issues, your brand’s credibility will rise dramatically over time. Brand-building, however, is just one element of a social media campaign and should reflect that customers like to see educational content that is more informational than it is brand / sales-centric.This builds trust and will help them remember your company when they are ready to make a purchase.

You would also be strongly advised to consider social media marketing if you are trying to drive valuable traffic to your website and landing pages. Buzzly Media clients have had great success in generating leads through the careful development of laser-focused landing pages. It’s a great way for someone to engage with your brand without committing much time. The easier you make it for people to hop in your sales funnel, the more leads you’ll have overall.

customer doing online search Social media will also help your website’s ranking by increasing the number of sites linking in, otherwise known as “backlinks.” These tell search engines that your website must have valuable information on it if others are spending time putting your links in their content, and it’s great for boosting search engine optimization. Remember, “94 percent of business buyers do some form of online research” when looking over their options.

And finally, the best part of social media is that it’s social! Having digital presences for your brand and its executives will allow you to connect with valuable industry contacts and start building relationships online. We know that “more than 90 percent of decision makers never respond to cold outreach.” A great way to move right past the cold outreach part of the sales cycle is to network online and give your potential customers a face to your brand. This will make you and your company seem more familiar when the time comes to sell.

The most important thing about establishing a digital presence for your brand is having the right information available to people at the right time. You never know how or when customers are searching. If it’s on Google (which is quite likely), then you want to make sure you are ranking high for generic industry keywords and have the social media profiles to back it up. If it’s late at night (or in a different timezone) when a potential customer can’t make contact with a human salesperson, you want them to get that same personalized experience through your social media.

A comprehensive social media strategy is the way to take your B2B business to the next level in today’s digital world. When you decide it’s time for a thoughtful and effective dive into social media marketing, let the fabulous people at Buzzly Media know! We’re always ready to help and will respond to your request with surprising speed.

Already have a social media presence and want help to improve it? Sign up for a free audit with Buzzly Media on our site and our experts will deliver their recommendations.

June 13, 2018/by Emma

Are your Social Media Efforts Paying Off?

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One of the most common questions we receive about social media marketing is, “How can I tell if it’s working?” It can be hard to measure the success of social media because it can be a challenge to track goals like brand awareness and credibility. We offer our clients complimentary analytics reports every month to show them exactly what their social media efforts are accomplishing for them and how they can quantify the return on their investment–but if you don’t have an awesome team like ours measuring your success, how can you be sure you’re doing the right thing?

There are several things you should take into account when doing an audit of your social media marketing efforts. They will, of course, depend on your goals as a business, but there are many standards that apply across industries.

The first thing you should think about: is my audience hearing from me frequently and consistently? This is an important thing to take into consideration whether you are trying to establish yourself as a thought leader in a certain field or attract customers to your diner. If people are following you on social media it’s because they want to hear from you. Providing regular updates is a big part of keeping your following happy and informed.

The next thing to check out is your branding across platforms. We see brands having major troubles with consistent branding. If you are on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, your users should be able to identify you by a username pretty close to your business name and a logo that looks the same (but hopefully cropped and resized according to different platform requirements) across all your accounts. This helps users quickly identify that they are looking at the correct person/business/organization and cannot be understated in importance.

Another aspect of social media posting that we focus on is post appearance. All social media is visually-driven and there really isn’t room for silly mistakes like bad formatting and incorrect grammar. Formatting posts across platforms is not something that comes naturally to anyone–it’s a matter of knowing the intricacies of each platform and tailoring the posts to look as visually appealing as possible. Contact us if you need formatting help, we have a beginner’s guide that will show you everything you need to know!

The last element we’ll cover in this blog is engagement. Many people think that as long as they reply to comments and messages on social media then they are doing their part in engaging with their audience. But really, engagement encompasses a lot more than that.

The power of social media is its social aspect. Just posting to your profile is usually not enough to spark high levels of interaction with your customers, and for good reason! People like profiles they follow to chime in on conversations they care about, not just promote themselves all day long. This means joining in on relevant Facebook groups, Twitter chats, LinkedIn groups, trending Instagram hashtags, etc etc. If you aren’t interacting on social media then it’s unlikely that people will be interacting with you!

Sometimes it can be hard to step back and critically evaluate what you should change about your social media marketing efforts. That’s where we come in! Sign up here for a FREE, full social media audit so that our team of professionals can give you some expert insight into what’s working and what isn’t.

April 7, 2018/by Emma

3 Creative Pinterest Campaigns to Replicate

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Here’s an industry secret: looking at the strategies and campaigns that are working for other brands is one of the best to brainstorm what will work for yours. While Pinterest is often overlooked in social media marketing strategies, it actually has a diverse audience, can improve your site’s SEO and it drives a significant amount of ecommerce activity.

Each one of your pins should included a branded hashtag and a link back to your website–that way you know that every person that sees your pin has been exposed to your brand name and has the opportunity to convert to web traffic on your site.

Pinterest boasts an impressive 150 million users, 87% of which have purchased something that they have seen on the platform. Pinterest users consist of mostly women (45% women to 17% men), but 40% of new signups are actually male.

Every once in awhile, we see a campaign that really takes advantage of the benefits Pinterest has to offer. Below are three campaigns that have inspired us and might do the same for you!

Campaign 1: Mastercard – #AcceptanceMatters

It all began with NYC Pride in June of 2013, when Mastercard used a sort of play on words with “acceptance.” Mastercard has been accepted everywhere for over 25 years, and they wanted to make the conversation around acceptance more dynamic by asking their customers via social media to tell them why #AcceptanceMatters.

“Our idea was straightforward and organic to the platform: Develop inspirational word art that evoked the spirit of #AcceptanceMatters and partner with some of the platform’s most prolific pinners to spread the content,” wrote the marketing team behind the Pinterest campaign. Mastercard kept their content simple yet aesthetically pleasing, making sure that it resonated with the already-active Pinners.

mastercard in woman's wallter The result was incredibly successful. They had 13,000 repins in just nine weeks, and their Pinterest board gained 171 followers. The pins continued to circulate through 24 levels of repins, and 15 influencers shared their content. People throughout the world connected with Mastercard’s message of tolerance and acceptance. Not to mention, the pins were a perfect addition to the thousands of “inspiration” boards already out there!

Even if your brand is much smaller than Mastercard, you should still be able to identify a core value that will resonate with people. Remember, when Mastercard began their campaign on Pinterest, they had no followers. Influencers played a huge part in helping to spread their message throughout the site – your brand can find influencers, too!

Campaign 2: Uniqlo Hairdo

Uniqlo Hairdo Campaign example Uniqlo is a Japanese clothing company who took to the feminine appeal of Pinterest to market their fall and winter 2014 fashion line in a unique way. DIY hairstyles have always been an incredibly popular topic throughout the Pinterest world, and were also a hit with Uniqlo’s target audience. With this in mind, they created 16 DIY hair tutorials and paired the end result with the clothing that they thought best fit the look.

The board gained nearly 15,000 followers by assimilating a trending topic into their content. Lovers of hair and fashion came together to follow and repin their Hairdo board. It became what their marketing agency called a “social style catalogue” and helped women think of “head-to-toe outfits.”

Although Uniqlo doesn’t sell hair products, they combined an aspect of Pinterest that already had high popularity with their clothing line to gain more views and repins. Staying up-to-date with Pinterest’s trending topics, from DIY ideas to Star Wars, can be incredibly helpful for your business to find new content opportunities and capitalize on relevant trends. Get creative!

Campaign 3: Honey Bunches of Oats, Happy Mother’s Day – The Pinterest Way!

Honey Bunches of Oats has always promoted kindness. In their Mother’s Day Pinterest campaign, they continued on that path by giving Pinterest users the option to give their moms the gift of a personalized Pinterest board.

To begin, they created boards full of fun Mother’s Day graphics, such as quotes, different ways to say Mom, designs, flowers and even a board of 250 popular names so that users could add Mom’s name to her board! Additionally, they provided a unique service: if a user didn’t see their mom’s name in the board, they could send a note or email to Honey Bunches of Oats and they would create the graphic. Once users populated their own unique Mother’s Day boards, they were encouraged to send the boards to their moms.

This brand created over 300 requested name pins and provided something of value to their followers. It was not overt advertising, but giving something in the spirit of a holiday. If you have the resources to offer something digital and/or customized to your audience, you can give back to your followers in the same way. Bonus points if you can tie in a holiday relevant to your brand!

Here are some of the top interests of the Pinterest audience to get you started!

Unique Pinterest campaigns are a great way to get organic followers for your brand. Pinterest users appreciate well thought out and visually appealing content, so if you have developed an idea that will resonate with your audience and can tie in with the current trends on Pinterest, you can create a hit!

If you get stuck, or need help coming up with a creative Pinterest strategy unique to your brand, contact us! We’re happy to help!

February 5, 2018/by Emma

5 Myths About Public Relation’s Impact on Journalism

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1. Myth: Journalists and public relations (PR) people are opposing forces.

Fact: The roles of PR people and journalists are very similar in nature.

Often, a PR person will do much of the journalist’s work and simply hand over what they come up with. This could be an idea for a story, essential facts of a story, pictures, multimedia and sometimes even a fully written article. When journalists are working with PR people they trust, they have no problem taking the content provided by a PR person, vetting it for accuracy and fairness, and printing it. In this way, journalists and PR people are really complementary in nature. One is on a deadline searching for relevant and interesting stories, and the other is working for companies that often are part of relevant and interesting stories.

2. Myth: With pressure from PR agencies, all the content getting published will be advertising in disguise.

Fact: A good PR agency would not try to pitch a journalist advertising and a good journalist would make sure that what they are publishing is truly journalism.

Reputable journalists abide by the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) Code of Ethics. The code mentions that journalists must “take responsibility for the accuracy of their work,” “resist internal and external pressure to influence coverage, and “distinguish news from advertising and shun hybrids that blur the lines between the two.” So fear not, citizens. The future of journalism is safe as long as journalists abide by these ethical guidelines. Additionally, PR agencies do not seek to corrupt journalism and expect the story ideas and press releases they submit to journalists to undergo rigorous scrutiny and fact checking before being published. And believe me, if a PR person sends any reputable editor a press release that resembles advertising it is promptly deleted.

3. Myth: PR people outnumber journalists almost 5 to 1 and will soon have complete control over the marketplace of ideas.

Fact: That metric is already questionable and when citizen journalists are included there is no way that PR people outnumber journalists that much.

The outnumbering ratio of 5:1 has been widely reported but actually originates from a report put out by the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Occupational Employment and Wages for May of 2013. It measures the number of reporters and correspondents (43,630) against the number of PR specialists (202,530). This amounts to a roughly 4.6 to 1 ratio that has been rounded to 5 to 1. Note that the number of reporters and correspondents does not include writers or editors for media outlets, which would add another 189,680 people to the journalism number. This would mean that journalists actually outnumber PR specialists slightly. But regardless of the ratio, journalists are still acting as the gatekeepers in the marketplace of ideas.

The first job of a journalist as outlined by SPJ is to “seek truth and report it.” A professional journalist would never just perpetuate an idea that isn’t true to benefit a PR agency. One of my journalism teachers in college said that the truth has a way of getting out. There is a free market for the truth. If something is not backed up by fact then people won’t be buying it. So even if there were some large conspiracy between professional journalists and lying PR agencies, citizen journalists would still find the truth and a way to get it out.

4. Myth: With more PR people pushing a positive spin on things and fewer journalists around to challenge them, we will be inundated with press releases-turned-articles.

Fact: An ethical journalist would have several issues with just printing a press release.

The SPJ Code of Ethics specifically prohibits advocacy of something without labeling it as such. They also warn that “neither speed nor format excuses inaccuracy.” A good journalist would not just toss out a press release and call it journalism — no matter how pressed for time they are. Sponsored content should be labeled as such and native advertising should be labeled and used very carefully.

5. Myth: This is the collapse of journalism! PR is taking over!

Fact: The rise of PR is enhancing journalism and helping journalists who are pressed for time and ideas. There will always be a market for good journalism; you’ll just have to figure out how to know it when you see it.

Content on the Internet should always be inspected for accuracy, anyone can post anything on there, you know. And with the 2013 Pew Research Center State of the News Media reporting that 82% of Americans said they got news on a desktop or laptop in 2013, it’s clear that we need to be careful what we believe. Journalists are very aware that our trust as readers is hard to come by. They will continue to diligently label sponsored content and you will continue to make sure what you’re reading is true. Based on Website Traffic Spy findings the top myth-busting website, Snopes.com, sees roughly 5,335,182 unique users each month. Regular consumers of news are already suspicious; this is not the era for journalists to try to be sneaky with what they publish.

March 3, 2016/by emma totten