What is A Social Media Content Calendar?

Let’s say it’s World Friendship Day but you didn’t know about until you came across a competitor post about friendship and special offers. The natural thing to do is to panic because you didn’t prepare catchy content to post or a special offer for your customers. But hey, no big deal, you can still think of something… or anything!
And then you check the comments section. People are ecstatic about it, posting pictures of them with their friends or funny and memorable best friend stories.
It’s getting lots of likes, getting shared on their accounts while several friends are being tagged. The post is getting a lot of attention and is reaching more audiences effortlessly. BUT, it’s a competitor post.
The competitor is getting all the attention and you’re there anxiously thinking of interesting content to post right away. One that will grab attention. One that will bring traffic to your page.

The Power of Social Content Engagement

Apart from keeping up to date with relevant holidays, it will also help you stay active online. It makes you consistent with posting relevant, informational, or factual posts. By being consistent, you are promising to continuously feed the followers with engaging content without actually making a promise. It becomes habitual which will make followers look forward to your next posts.
It will also help eliminate the possibility of forgetting to post content on your other profiles. Because you have a calendar, you can schedule posts in advance.
Another advantage of having a content calendar is finding the right mix and tone to your posts. Don’t just post about your business, what is on sale, or what new products are your brewing. No one wants to keep following a page that only talks about the business. It becomes boring.
Add some color to your posts by curating articles, images, and videos from your industry. Talk about personal interactions with customers, answer common questions often asked by new customers, or share a screenshot of interesting follower comments from your other posts.
And more importantly, with a calendar, you are keeping a record of the published content. By doing so…

• You can avoid posting the same content which can be annoying to your followers.
• You are prepared and the posts are fully optimized to serve its purpose.

Create a Content Calendar

With a structured format for posting regularly, you’ll never miss an important date online. There can be a lot of reasons people around the world celebrate.

#NationalDogDay
#SiblingsDay
#EarthHour
#TeachersDay
#MentalHealthAwarenessMonth

Keeping track of all these special days that people love to celebrate can be difficult, this is where creating a social media content calendar comes in. This is where you plan ahead so you don’t miss out on important social events.

Social Media Audit

Before you start planning your content and posting schedule, take a look at your current strategy on social media for business. On what platforms are you active? Which ones are giving you a better audience reach? How often are you posting content in these accounts?
You need to know where you are at with your social profiles. Make sure you can access all these accounts with an active username and password. If you can’t do it, assign people you trust to handle these accounts.
These are valuable information you can use as a basis for your future planning and scheduling.

Check Previous Posts

Do away with out-of-date content. What seemed to be intriguing a few months back, isn’t as appealing now. Some content, though old and outdated, can be edited and updated. Maximize these as it will help save time and effort on your end.
Check out old posts that got a lot of attention. What was the content about? How was it presented? It will give you an idea of the content that followers are most interested in. And then, there are the competitor posts. Be mindful of the competition’s posts, it might help you create better content.

Posting Frequency

You’re done with social media and content audit. Next is determining the frequency of your posts on each social platform. Decide which post goes up on which day, on which platform. Decide how often you need to post within the day, whether some days will have more posts for the rest of the week. This will shape the bulk of your content calendar.

Content Ratio

Categorize your content. Is it self-promotional, user-generated, or curated? It can also be categorized by its type: blog post, announcement, infographic, or video. It’s all up to you and the resources you have at hand. If you want to focus on posting videos and some blog posts, then make sure that the social calendar reflects this goal. Labeling your content is up to you just be sure that they are descriptive and easy to follow.
It is a lengthy process, one that requires patience and perseverance. You have to be observant and sensitive to your followers’ interests. After all, it’s for them that you’re making a social media content calendar.
Visit the Neovora page for more fun and easy to follow online platform tips. Check out our social media services as well!

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Easy Social Media Marketing Strategy Steps

When planning your social media marketing strategy, don’t go for broad or unattainable plans. Make it brief but comprehensive. Simple but with long-term measures. Be specific so that every strategy execution is analyzed and calculated, threading through action steps already identified and decided.

For every post, re-post, like, share, or comment, make it count. Each action taken by the by existing clients, followers, prospects, or the target audience, in general, can be of an advantage to the business. So make it count. Maximize the individual potential of each audience engagement.

Where to Start With Social Media Marketing?

Being active and responsive to the audience, putting out content to inform or trigger social engagement is the second half of any social marketing strategy. It always starts somewhere else, a good marketing plan.

Know Your Audience

By knowing what your audience and potential customers want to see on social media will point you in the right direction when creating content that they will comment on, like or share. It will help you conclude which product you are offering will sell to these audiences. It will also help in conceptualizing new products as the business grows and expands.

Social media analytics will help you determine what the target audience is searching for on the internet, what are the latest trends, the hottest selling products, and even which age group searches what. These tools help you refine your marketing plan and come up with better social content.

There are different analytics tools out there.

• Keyhole – It “shows you when your users are most active, so you get to see your audience’s best engagement days and times.”
• Hootsuite – “Automatically schedules and posts content for you, freeing up more time to engage with customers.”

For a more platform-based analytics tool, check:

• Audiense Connect, Followerwonk (Twitter)
• Iconosquare (Instagram and Facebook)
• Tailwind (Pinterest and Instagram)

Know Your Competition

If you’re in a competitive business, most likely, your competitors are already into social media marketing. Don’t get distracted and learn from what they are already doing to promote their brand.

Conduct a competitive analysis. It is an evaluation of what the competitor is doing well and not doing so well in their marketing efforts.

It will help you learn which platforms they are active in, what type of content engages the audience more, know what strategy is working for them to pinpoint the loopholes in your own marketing strategy. Moreover, it’s another way of spotting opportunities for growth. For example, if the competitor markets their business by posting professional photos on Instagram but isn’t doing much on Twitter or Facebook. Then you can work your way on these two platforms, instead of trying to take the audience from an already performing brand.

Take note of competitor accounts and how they use industry keywords. Over time, there may be a shift in how these mediums are used and how these changes affect the competitor’s online presence. Watch out for these changes as well for it may benefit your business or affect your marketing plans.

Know What’s Working

If you’re already using social to market your product or service, re-examine your current marketing efforts. Pause for a minute to examine what you have done and accomplished so far.

What part of your marketing plans has worked? Which ones aren’t? Which platform does your prospect use more often? Compared to your competitors, how effective is your social media presence?

By getting factual answers to these questions, you will have a better view of how effective your marketing plan is. Or if you are working with the right plan. By knowing where you are at with your strategies, you know which platforms will give you the best results, which ones you should keep improving to reach more audience, and which social is just a waste of time.

With a lot of information to acquire, facts to analyze, and numbers to digest, creating your own social media strategy plan and sticking to it can become an overwhelming task. Especially when the business is growing and in need of more online exposure.

Neovora is an expert in social media marketing. We offer businesses the opportunity to grow their business using proven strategies that produce positive results and marketing tools that target more audience engagement.

Visit https://www.neovora.com/ for more information.

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Customer Retention Strategies To Grow Your Business – Part 2

From Part 1 of this post series, let’s continue our list of retention strategies that worked for many businesses.

Company Newsletter

A company newsletter is a simple and cost-effective way of retaining customers. You can use email automation to send updates or offers to all of your customers at once. And, you can send the email using an RSS feed on a designated frequency, so you don’t have to manually update the content or remember to click “send.” Even though it’s simple, newsletters remind customers of your brand every time they open their inbox.

Deliver Your Promise

As the famous saying goes, “under promise and over deliver”, therefore, don’t promise customers what you can’t fulfill.

Not everyone succeeds in surpassing expectations, and some businesses fail to meet their customers’ expectations. When you promise something to your client, be certain that you have the means to deliver. If you say the personalized product the client ordered will be ready in a week, make it ready in five days or less. If you say a rebate will be given to the first 50 buyers in 24 hours, give the rebate just right after they make the purchase.

It’s a simple action plan, but to the customers, it exceeds their expectations. To them, you are going beyond your promise to satisfy them. That’s more points for you and your business.

Exceeding customers’ expectations will help in keeping them for good.

Listen to Customer Complaints

At a glance, addressing customer complaints is a waste of time. There are more important matters to attend to, like convincing new leads to convert to buyers or how to retain existing customers. It is the most logical business path.

But on a long-term perspective, customer complaints can open doors for business growth. Care to listen to their frustrations, their issues at hand. What made them unhappy? What did not work for them that worked for other customers?

This gives you a chance to see things you haven’t considered before. Complaints need your attention, so attend to them now.

Hire people to power your customer care department. Train them to be flexible, welcoming, knowledgeable, and most importantly, they must know how to pick up the root cause of every complaint. Use their dissatisfaction to your advantage.

Customer Education

Knowledgebase… community forums… These are some of the tools a company can use to openly laid down accessible and useful information to the customers. It is a long-term investment.

It is an extension of your products and services. It is going beyond your promise. Customers can use these tools when they need help, when they want answers but are too tired to call customer support or when they need simple solutions that can be found in Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) page on your website.

Customers are active and participative when they know they can gain valuable information from you, and not just from your product or service.

Get Started Now

Businesses in the online world compete to get more leads, convert more prospects, or become one of the best brands out there. Getting your hands full of things that won’t give you a definite road to grow your business is a waste of effort, money, and time.

Know where to invest your resources in. Neovora can lead you there. We have social media posting services and other marketing strategies that have worked for many businesses. Visit our page!

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Customer Retention Strategies To Grow Your Business – Part 1

What’s better than acquiring one new customer?

It sounds like a trick question, but the answer isn’t “acquiring two customers.” It’s actually retaining an existing customer.

While there’s a certain allure that comes with capturing new customers, keeping customers coming back will continually result in a greater ROI — and it costs 5-25X less.

But how do you create a customer retention strategy that keeps your current customers engaged and happy?

We’ve broken down customer retention strategies that the biggest brands are currently using to boost retention. These are elements of any customer success team or marketer can take and test today:

Receive Feedback

It’s hard to improve your business if you don’t know how your customers feel about it. You need a process for obtaining customer feedback and sharing that information with the rest of your organization. This is where a customer feedback loop provides a system for collecting, analyzing, and distributing customer reviews and surveys.

There are a few ways to collect customer feedback. The most common way is with a survey like Net Promoter Score®, or you can ask customers to participate in user testing and focus groups. Using a few of these methods regularly should provide your team with ample and relevant customer feedback.

Once gathered, you should analyze your survey results by looking for trends in customer behavior and areas to enhance the user experience. Then, share this information with teams that will benefit from it most.

For example, send product reviews to engineers and development teams so they can address flaws in their design. Using this system, your business can efficiently address criticism and improve customer experience.

Give Them A Calendar

Even if your customers aren’t reaching out with feedback, your team should be proactive with its communication. If customers haven’t interacted with your brand for a while, you should reach out to them and re-establish your relationship. Consider adopting a communication calendar to manage customer engagements and create opportunities to upsell and cross-sell.

A communication calendar is a chart that keeps track of customer communication. It tells you the last time that a customer has reached out and alerts you when existing customers haven’t interacted with your brand. This makes it easy to launch promotional offers and proactive customer service features that remove roadblocks before customers know they’re there. For example, if a customer’s subscription is set to expire, you can send out an email letting them know they need to renew their account.

Thorough Onboarding

Onboarding is a customer success function that teaches new customers how to use your product or service. Rather than learning by themselves, customers are taught by a company representative who personalizes the training according to their needs. This way, customers not only save time but also understand how the product can help them achieve goals.

Onboarding is an effective customer retention tool because it prevents defection. When users are first working with your product, they may get frustrated if they don’t understand how to use it. Customers have deadlines and they can’t afford to spend time learning how to master your product. Onboarding ensures customers know how to utilize your products or services so they can complete their goals on time.

This is the first part of our two-part post on customer retention. Rember, retaining old customers and keeping them loyal to the business is as important as acquiring new customers. Read the second half of this right here.

Visit our Neovora page for more information or check out the social media posting services we offer.

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Trends in Social Media Content – Part 3

This is the 3rd post in a series that offers new ideas for local businesses. Engaging audiences with fun social media posts is difficult, so we’ve collected the best ideas and are presenting them here. Check out the Part 1 and Part 2 of this post for more fun ideas.

9. Throwback Thursday

ThrowBackThursday is most popular on Twitter and Instagram. It’s used to show some memories from days past. Use it to recycle some old content, an event, an award, anything worth reposting.

#TBT is the hashtag that people use to mark the fun or unique memories they have. Here are some ideas of what to post on #TBT.

• Share an old event you hosted
• Old business cards, logos, offices or storefronts
• Post baby photos of your team
• Photos of past projects
• Repost old advertisements
• Post customers having overcome obstacles (with their permission)
• Fun and relevant fact about your business
• Awards or recognition

10. Video Testimonials

Having your clients and customers advocate and promote your brand is the best form of marketing. Your prospects are looking for reviews and confirmation that you are the correct choice, and videos are atop the list of things that help convert them.

Ask satisfied customers if they would help you grow your business by recording a quick testimonial about why your brand is the best option among the competition. You can shoot them on your phone, a camera, and make it a quick thing if you like.

Or you can have it be more professional and have a tripod, a nice backdrop or something that you are proud to post and display on the web and on social platforms. Good locations can also be industry events, conferences, or right in the middle of you delivering the product of service.

11. Social Media Takeovers

A takeover is a fun option for brands that have access to influences, industry experts and others within your community with a large following.

The person who takes over your account will make posts, stories, videos, or anything that is their style to highlight your products or services.

This is fun because it shows your business from an outsider’s eyes, allowing for new avenues of communication. It also can bring your business into the eyes of more people who would otherwise not notice you regularly. These work extremely well on Instagram.

Examples could be:

• A local celebrity taking update posts on Instagram stories for a spa
• A professional athlete taking over the social media stories for a local gym or supplement store

When selecting this option, here are a few key steps to making sure it is successful:

1. Decide who is going to take over- Are they famous/popular? Is their network a crossover of yours? Does it bring new audience into your sphere?
2. Select the network. In what type of media does this person excel?
3. Set criteria. Establish objectives, develop an outline, determine content material, set limitations.
4. Set permissions for their access.
5. Align goals. Make sure both parties will benefit from the arrangement.
6. Promote the event. Ramp up the excitement, tell your followers what is to come so that you can have people waiting for the event.
7. Monitor the results. Was it a success? Did you get above average engagement? Conversions? Followers?

This is the end of our three-part series. Hopefully, you get some social media ideas for local business. These trendy and innovative tools are a great way for you to develop your following and increasing engagement and ultimately conversion into clients.

Find out more about Neovora and the social media posting services we offer.

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Page Title: Trends in Social Media Content – Part 2

Trends in Social Media Content – Part 1

How to Get Onto Social Media – Quick Strategy Guide

We all know social media is here to stay and needs to be a big part of your strategy to get new customers and build relations with existing ones. If you aren’t already working with social platforms, and are wondering how to improve social for your business, the best time to start is now.

Here are some tips if you find yourself in the situation of wanting to increase your presence online.

1. Decide what networks to use.

There are hundreds of social networks out there, and you probably already know what is ideal for you, especially if you are in a niche that is rare or sequestered. But for the most part, you want to be on the most popular, to get the biggest potential audience. Consider visiting these networks:

• Facebook: Most users, best advertising platform, highly specific audiences you can target with some work. It helps to generate leads easily and comes in an affordable package.
• LinkedIn: Business networking. It’s good for B2B and lesser for B2C. Allows you to build trust and authority.
• Twitter: Perfect for businesses whose major audience is younger and when you want to break time-sensitive information.
• Pinterest: If your business is visually based. Things like restaurants, clothing, travel, anything attractive in front of a camera.
• Snapchat: Has the youngest audience. Use it for special offers, granting exclusive access, and using influencers to drive sales.

2. Have an objective in mind.

Perhaps you want to get more sales, have better relations with customers, get more prospects, get more reviews, generate client photos and content, have more web traffic, or go viral.

Start with the end in mind and work backward with a plan to get there.

3. Strategize.

Once you know the end goal, devise a plan to get there. What are your competitors doing? What are their objectives? How are they going about it?

• Assign roles. Who will be involved? What do you need to do? How often will you be engaging on social media, where, and how? Who controls that?
• Develop a calendar. What do you already have that you can use? What will you need to develop? What will it cost? How long will it take?

Know who your targets are and what they want to see.

4. Device content plan.

Make a plan for your strategy. Plan weeks and months ahead, this way you have a unified message and can deliver it seamlessly. You won’t look at your clock and say “Oh, I need a post at 3 pm, what to do?”

Themes are followed, messaging is differentiated and continuous, and you will have lots of foresight.

5. Use Tools and Automation.

You’re busy. We’re busy. Minimize your workload and find tools and automation that makes it easy. Spending lots of time on social media will ruin your brain.

Postplanner, Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Buffer, BuzzSumo are among the ones we recommend.

6. Seek engagement.

Everything you post must have a goal of prospect and client engagement. Seek for them to:

• Reply with photos
• Reply with anecdotes, stories
• Share information
• Converse with one another
• Answer questions
• Make suggestions or recommendations
• Tag friends

7. 80/20 Value/Sales

80% of the time you are delivering value: tips, tricks, news, and posting photos. 20% MAXIMUM of the time, you are saying “check our site”. Telling them about your new products, etc.

80/20 rule.

8. Don’t stop.

You will not go viral overnight. You will not increase sales by 100% in a week.

Social media is a slow game and needs to be perpetual. Be reliable, offer something for all of your future prospects, and monitor your channels every day to ensure you are following up on opportunities.

Tip: One to two posts per day on Facebook, as many as you want on Twitter, and about 10 on Pinterest all work.

9. Monitor the numbers.

Keep track of click-through rate, engagements, website visits, even overall sales and conversion. You will certainly increase all of these via social media, and you want to know which avenues deliver the most bang for your time.

About Neovora

We are social media experts and know how a strong online presence can spur growth. Get more information on social strategy and the best methods to increase conversion rates.

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Branding on Facebook – Social Media Quick Tips

When it comes to a Facebook branding strategy, there are a million routes, plans, and strategies that you can take. All will help you engage clients online with the purpose to deliver more revenue and increase client lifetime value.

Sometimes, marketing for small businesses can be hard with a small budget, and when you are busy running everything yourself. These best practices will help you manage your time better, and make sure they are more impactful.

If you’re currently not active on social media, or just looking for new ways to engage or new things to post, here is a quick list of business page tips to get the creative juices flowing.

Start Now

We all know the importance of Facebook as a social media platform. It has 2.4 Billion users, that’s like almost one-third of the world. But this post is not about that. How many people in your target market are on Facebook? Lots! Accept the fact that you need to be on Facebook now more than ever so draft a plan and get started now. Your page might not be viral, it may not make you a millionaire, but it’s the best way to market yourself online.

Get Real Voices On Your Page

Get your loudest, most vocal, happiest proponents onto your page. You want real people there having discussions or liking things so that prospects see there is some kind of action, community, or history of services you provide.

Get as many people to like your page as possible, and have something posted that they can engage with, if possible get their pictures too!

You can alert your clients about your new page or goal to increase your presence online with an email, link from your website to your Facebook where opportune, and give a reason for them to follow you online.

Be Friendly

Users are now hyper-aware of ad-speak, propaganda, and calls to action. Don’t be sterile, don’t be a business. Be more personable in your content, posts, and photos.

Use a brand voice, one that is familiar and respectable, but not overly so.

“Content is King”

It’s the most popular phrase online these days. Provide value in your content, and provide lots of it! The content you share should prove useful to your prospects and clients alike. Tips, industry updates, facts, knowledge base, news; anything that they might want to glance at or read more about are ideal.

If you’re a dentist, provide reminders to get cleanings, to brush often, and especially to floss and reasons why they should. A chiropractor can post stretches, poses, reminders to sit straight, things that are easily consumed. Try lots of things and see what gets more response.

First Look

Make your page a place that followers can get access to special deals, a first look at updates in your business.

Block Bad Vibes

If the Page is getting off-topic, or people are posting non-relevant content, links and comments – remove it! Be quick to “report and remove” followers that are not helpful or spammy.

Two Per Day

Keep posts, photos, updates, anything to two times per day. Beyond that is too much. You want to be a gentle reminder, not a barrage of info and sales.

Invite User Participation

Encourage followers to engage with your page. Ask open-ended questions, invite their photos, comments, posts. A dentist can ask, “Braces wearers! If you could go back in time, what’s the one thing you would tell yourself prior to getting braces?” An HVAC company can post a photo of their cat laying over a heating vent, then ask, “Is our cat the only one that lays over the vent? Reply with a pic if yours does too!” Make them responsive.

FB Page should be a push and pull. Push them info and posts, pull and extract commentary and insight.

Learn more about engaging prospects on social media, or visit our homepage to learn more about what we do. We also have more blogs you might be interested in.

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