Let’s be honest, the primary goal of marketing is to sell stuff. Today’s folk have adapted to the traditional marketing methods though, and nobody wants to feel like they’re being pushed to buy something. So how do you sell a product or service without acting like you’re trying to sell something? Enter content marketing. 

What is content marketing?

All marketing activities focused on producing and sharing relevant, valuable, consistent information to a clearly defined audience are classed as content marketing. 

Instead of blatantly pitching your product or service, content marketing enables you to express your expertise in a certain field and build an audience that is genuinely interested in the solution you are offering. 

Examples of content marketing

There are so many types of content marketing out there, here’s a list we created of the main ones:

• Blogs
• Videos
• Social media posts
• Podcasts
• Ebooks
• Whitepapers
• Infographics
• Webinars
• Slideshare presentations

We could go on, but we think you get the picture.

The importance of content marketing

Content marketing is giving away valuable information for free. Yes, that’s right, for free. You might be thinking that sounds a little counterintuitive when the ultimate goal is to make money, but here’s why it works.

Back in the day customers were less likely to question the expertise of a company, but today we have the internet. An endless stream of information and home to countless businesses offering the same products or services. You can judge companies by reading reviews, and you don’t have to stay local. If you want to buy a new coat you can have it delivered from across the globe, if you need a new car insurance deal you can find and compare hundreds in the click of a mouse. With so many options to choose from, customers are becoming increasingly critical in their decision making before they decide to buy something. Online researching before you commit to purchase is standard practise these days.

This is where content marketing comes in. A thorough content marketing strategy can help businesses compete by sharing their expertise and building trust in potential customers.

Here’s how it works

Say you’re currently redecorating your house. You’re trying to decide which tile to buy for your new bathroom, and so you hit Pinterest in the hope that by browsing hundreds of images of bathrooms you’ll stumble on the perfect bathroom inspo. As you’re browsing, you click on an image that takes your fancy. You’ve found it, the perfect tile. A white rectangular porcelain number. And what’s that link attached to the image? A link to a shop that sells these exact tiles…handy right? Well, that’s content marketing. This hypothetical bathroom tile business has used Pinterest as a platform to post free content of their products. 

The same company might also have a blog where they post weekly home DIY articles, an Instagram page full of beautiful eye-catching images and a Facebook page showcasing their customer testimonials. 

There are endless options when it comes to content marketing. If you’re struggling to figure out which kind of content will work best for targeting your perfect customer, check out our guide on how to create a top tier marketing plan.

Good luck!

Why is social media the best place to advertise your brand? Well, around 4 billion people worldwide use it, that’s why. And since the Covid-19 pandemic, this number is growing rapidly. 

Social media platforms are the perfect tools to tap into a huge audience and get your brand the kind of exposure that is guaranteed to grow your business. 

So, without further ado, let’s look at how to create the perfect social media marketing strategy. 

Define your audience 

Before you do anything, you need to decide who your target audience is. To do this, create a buyer persona. This is a fictional representation of your ideal customer. If you already have existing customers you can compile data from them, if not, you’ll need to decide for yourself what kind of person will want to buy from you. Consider things like:

• Age
• Location
• Language
• Interests
• Pain Points
• Stage of life

If you’re finding this stage a little tricky, have a read of this guide we wrote on how to find your audience on social media. 

Set your goals

Next, you should think about what aims you’re trying to achieve with your marketing strategy. This way you’ll be able to track your successes and figure out if your investments have been worth it. It will also help to guide your activities in the right direction if you have a clear plan of what you’re hoping to achieve. 

Here’s some examples of the kind of goals you might want to consider:

• Build brand awareness
• Grow and manage an engaged audience
• Increase sales
• Obtain customer insights
• Identify and nurture leads
• Deliver customer service

Create great content

Now that you’ve established your target audience and your goals, it will be easier to decide what kind of content you’re going to produce. 

For example, let’s say your company sells recruitment software. You know that you’re targeting B2B customers, so your best bet is to publish content on Linkedin. Your content should be things like:

• Issues that are relevant to recruitment professionals
• Best practices that are useful to recruitment professionals
• Research within the recruitment industry

Check out your competitors

Keep a tab on what your biggest competitors are doing on social media. You can learn from what they’re doing, and compare your content against theirs.

If they’re publishing more content than you are… up your game. 

If they’re publishing content on more platforms than you are… up your game. 

If they’re creating more interesting content than you are, yep that’s right, up your game! 

Engage with your audience

Creating and publishing content is not your only job, you also need to engage with your followers. Encourage them to interact with your posts by using hashtags and CTA’s. Ask for their responses, and reply to them when they do. This will make them feel cared about, and help to build your online community and brand awareness. 

Follow these key points and you’ll be on your way to a flawless social media marketing strategy. If you need some extra help with your social media marketing, we’d love to help. 

Good luck!

Once a year your team should be sitting down and producing a marketing strategy for the following year. Why? Because without one your team is going to lack direction, and without direction it can be hard to push forward and stay on track. Plus, it will be almost impossible to put a number on the budget you’re going to need for all the projects, outsourcing and hiring to come over the next year. To make the ambitions and goals of your team a reality, a great marketing strategy is essential. 

In this post we’re going to talk you through each element of an effective marketing plan. Remember, every industry has different goals so you’ll need to personalise it to your specific company, but you can think of our guide as a template to work from.

What to include in your marketing plan

1. Business Summary

The best starting point for your marketing plan is to produce a summary of the business. It’s as simple as it sounds too – just make a brief summary of the organisation. Include the company name, headquarters, and your mission statement. 

2. Company Initiatives

Next, outline the company initiatives that are specific to the marketing department. This is a great way to map out the goals of your department; for example segment the goals of various upcoming projects and describe how these goals will be measured. 

3. Market Research

It’s likely that your company has already completed a thorough market study so this stage will be easy to complete. Split this step into two sections: customer profile and competitor analysis.

Customer Profile: Create a semi-fictitious picture of the ideal customer for your business and describe them. You should focus on their imagined traits such as age, location, goals, pain points, personal challenges, and triggering events. 

Competitor Analysis: Your customer profile should identify the challenges that your customer wants to solve. With this in mind, you can imagine the companies they might go to for these solutions. These companies are your competitors; identify them and evaluate their strengths and weaknesses and how they compare to your business. This information will help you identify gaps in the market that your company can potentially fill. 

4. SWOT analysis

SWOT is a great framework to use for evaluating your company and developing a strategic plan of action. It stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. A lot of this information can be gathered from the sections above, but be patient because it’s worth having if you want to identify your company’s future potential. 

5. Market Strategy

Think of this stage as your plan of action. Using the information you’ve put together so far, it’s time to lay out how your company intends to approach the market. If you’re struggling to figure out a strategy, think about this question: What should your company offer your ideal customer, to solve their solutions, that your competitors aren’t already offering? 

Having identified the product or solution you’re going to be offering, the next part of your plan is to create a list of the marketing channels you’re going to use to educate your buyers, generate leads and spread brand awareness. For example, if you intend to use social media channels, you can use this section of your plan to write down which social media platforms you’re going to use and how you’re going to measure their success. If you’re creating accounts from scratch, take a look at this post we wrote on how to find your social media audience. 

6. Budget

The final stage of your marketing plan is all about money. Dull stuff, we know. This step is essential though if you want to bring your marketing strategy to life. Itemise your budget by stating what you intend to spend on each individual expense, for example:

• Outsourcing 
• Software
• Ads
• Events

Establishing a budget also means you can calculate some financial projections for the year based on your ROI.

Creating a marketing plan is the best way to realise your business’ goals and put them into action. It connects everything together and makes sure that your team knows what to do, when to do it, to which audience and through the right channels. 

Good luck!

Whether you’re a newbie to the field or are an experienced digital marketer in need of a refresher, getting the lingo down can be tough. That’s why we’ve created this handy digital marketing glossary from A-Z of the most useful buzzwords all digital marketers need to know.

Audience

The demographic you are targeting your ads at in order to convert them into customers.

Backlink

A link that connects one website to another. Also called “inbound links” and are very important SEO tools. 

CTA – Call to Action

A word or phrase used in content to persuade the audience to perform a specific action, e.g. “buy now”

Domain Name

Part of a URL that identifies it as belonging to a particular company or organisation. E.g. in www.byter.com, the domain name is ‘byter.com’

Email List

A collection of emails used in email marketing. Each email address may represent a potential customer, business or outreach lead. 

Full-Stack Developer

A web developer or engineer who is capable of producing both client and server software. They work with both the front and back end of a website or application.

Google Analytics

A web analytics service provided by Google that tracks and measures website metrics such as which search engine was used to land on the site, where users are located, how many users have visited the site, how long they stayed on each page, and more. 

Hashtags

A metadata tag that is prefaced by the hash symbol, #. Hashtags are used for widespread content sharing, usually on social media platforms such as Instagram and Twitter. 

Impressions

Impressions measure how often your ad is viewed on-screen by members of your audience.

Java Script

A programming language primarily used for building interaction-based applications on websites or digital devices. 

Keyword

A word or phrase that is entered into a search engine. For the purpose of digital marketing, keywords are popular/ common words or phrases that are used in content to optimise a site’s ranking position. 

Lead

A lead is a potential customer, someone who may potentially or may have already shown interest in your product or services. 

Marketing Automation

Technology used for the purpose of streamlining marketing efforts to make them more effective. 

NoFollow

An identifier tag that tells search engines not to increase the ranking of the webpage it is assigned to.

Organic Listing

A natural or unpaid listing of a website on a search result page. The point of SEO is to optimise organic listings. 

PPC – Pay Per Click

An advertising method where advertisers will only pay for their adverts each time a user clicks on them. 

Quality Score

A metric used by Google, Yahoo and Bing! To measure the quality of ads. 

ROI – Return On Investment 

Measures the return on an investment relative to its cost. In digital marketing, calculating the ROI will tell you whether marketing and campaign efforts are contributing to revenue growth.

SEO – Search Engine Optimisation 

Increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results. For example, practising SEO can increase the visibility of your website on google search results. 

Traffic

Number of visitors to a website. 

URL – Uniform Resource Locator 

A web page address. E.g. www.byter.com is the address for Byter’s website. 

Vlog

A video blog. 

White Paper

An in-depth report or authoritative guide that educates an audience about a particular issue or problem.

XML Sitemap

A list of URL’s for a particular website. It is used by search engine crawlers to easily identify all of a website’s available content. 

Youtube

An online video sharing platform. 

And for Z….well, we’re not sure there is one. Please let us know if you have one!

Good luck!

What is a social media manager? The Social Media Manager is responsible for a brand’s online presence, with an emphasis on social platforms. The Social Media Managers job can scale from being the only person in charge of a small brand’s entire social platform presence, creating all of the content and posting it; to managing huge companies online presence. In recent times more and more companies are understanding the vital importance of having an effective online presence, making SMM (Social media manager) one of the most sought after professions in digital marketing. 

What does a social media manager do?

Social Media Managers are in charge of the maintenance of the businesses online presence. So what are the responsibilities of a Social Media Managers? Some of a SMM’s tasks are monitoring, moderating and responding to audience comments; manage social media partnerships with other brands; and creating and posting sharable content such as videos and images. So what makes a good SMM? Communication, good copy, creativity and time management are all great skills to have as a Social Media Manager. This article gives a deeper explanation of the each skill set a SMM should have! Great read too!

Other skills you can work on to optimise your SMM skills:

• Literacy, and the ability to understand analyse

An obvious one. As a social media manager, you live in a world made of photos, but also of words. You have to be able to have a good command of the language, create engaging and interesting copy quickly. Another aspect you need to be aware of is your grasp of the language your brand uses to be aware of implications or be able to play with it. You will also need to know how to quickly research and analyse data, both from yourself and your competitors. being able to successfully analyse events and situations will allow you and your brands to keep up with trends.

• Being able to understand the various social media platforms and their analytics.

As a Social Media Manager, your sole job is to increase the effectiveness of your and online presence. There are four main sets of social media metrics that aid in evaluating the success of your online presence. 

Conversation rate – The number of conversations per post. On Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn comments and on Twitter replies.

Amplification rate – The number of re-shares or retweets per post.

Applause rate – Retweets, Likes, +1s, etc.

Economic value – The sum of short-term revenue, long-term revenue, and cost savings.

Evaluating the success of posts depends on the purpose of the post. Some posts are aiming to have a high reach. Other posts aim to have high link clicks or signups. 

• Being able to use at least one graphics package

This is another obvious one, you are working in the area of brands and branding is a heavily visual art. There are plenty of graphics packages out there, ranging from the simple, like Canva to the complex such as the Adobe suite.  You have to be able to make effective visual displays for your online presence. 

• The ability to plan.

When you are running social media for brands it is very important to have a plan for your content. This prevents you from posting low-quality content, running out of content to post, being unprepared and being unable to reach goals, or even have useful goals. When working for a brand, you have to plan your social media ahead of time so you can show it to your client for approval and have enough time to revise and change it. The interesting thing about social media marketing, unlike normal sales,  is the appearance of being new, unplanned, fresh and up to date. Social media managers have to hit a careful balance between appearing new, fresh, and off the cuff, to the customers and being carefully planned and true to brand with the company.  

• SEO knowledge.

Search Engine optimisation. This is thrown around as mysterious hard understand. It isn’t, it is mainly to do with websites and blogs. There are even plugins to sites such as WordPress who will help you with it. It is less important if you are only running on social media platforms like Twitter or Instagram.  

The best social media manager is someone who understands the platforms, the brand, and is flexible enough to mould both into a successful and engaging presence. It is a modern much more fast-paced version of traditional sales.  

• Being flexible/ spontaneous

As much as we have mentioned the benefits and importance of planning, we have also mentioned the necessity of also being a little spontaneous and taking risks. Sales live off this, you might accidentally create a viral trend, and become very important, or you could terminally embarrass your boss and be forced to put out an apology. Again here experience will help.  

• Valuable content 

Lastly, this is maybe not a skill but more of a statement, this is where social media sales is different from traditional sales. There are a lot of different marketing rules, but there is a general rule which is the 80/20 rule. This rule is 80% useful content talking about something other than yourself, and 20% talking explicitly about yourself. There’s another rule 70/20/10 rule. This rule is a refining of the 80% rule to help you narrow down what you need to post. 70% value, 20% promotion, and 10%, human. 

So, 70% of what the brand is going to post should be of value to its audience. Educational, funny inspiring etc. 20% promotion, discounts, sales, promo codes, giveaways etc.  10%  is the “personal touch”. These posts are often about things the brand cares about, brand values, or seemingly relatable personal things. (a good example of this maybe would be Wendy’s Twitter account when its creator took to roasting people for a few weeks).

In conclusion, a Social Media manager is a person who is responsible for a brand’s online presence. They are a combination of creatives, organisers and salesperson. The job is a flexible multi-faceted sales job, they must be able to understand the basics of advertising, like what campaigns are, but they must also understand the day to day stuff that goes into running a social media presence.

You can be your own social media manager as a business owner, but often that work can get too much for one person to handle. At Byter we specialise in Social Media Management, from content creation, strategy, management and audience engagement. If you need to alleviate some of your work load with social media marketing, don’t hesitate to give us a call or email (Contact page) 

You can also reach out to us on any of our Social Media platforms, we are more than happy to have a chat!