MARKETING
Be Careful Where You Put the Emphasis on ‘Do More With Less’ [Rose-Colored Glasses]
“Do more with less.”
That’s a phrase most in marketing have heard like a drumbeat over the last 20 years. Interestingly, it doesn’t matter whether budgets are going up or down, the message is still “let’s do more with less.”
The only question is which word to emphasize – more or less.
How do you switch the emphasis when economic or other headwinds are present?
Institutionalizing degraded experiences
I’ve noticed conflicting behavior encouraged by this recent unique combination of economic conditions and the transformational challenges coming out of the last two years of lockdown.
Talent is hard to come by, but it feels like we’re headed to recession. While business profits are at an all-time high, austerity exists in the delivery of customer experiences.
It’s almost as if instead of improving the customer experience, many brands are doing less. It’s almost as if companies are using this confusing time to see how much of a degraded experience their customers will tolerate.
I recently checked into a four-night stay at a brand-name hotel. Its prices had gone up markedly in the last 18 months. I was informed upon check-in (and in the app and on the website) that my room would not be cleaned during my stay unless I requested it, and only on the day that it was requested. Further, if I needed things normally replenished during a housekeeping visit (e.g., towels, soap), I should call housekeeping to make the request.
Now, I get it. The pandemic has left many hotels short-staffed and challenged with creating a more efficient operation. (I will note that this hotel chain had a 34% increase in revenue from 2020 to 2021 and a 103% increase in revenue in 2022. Yes, really. But let’s put that aside.)
My problem isn’t that they didn’t plan to clean my room. My problem is the redesigned customer experience. Why are they purposely institutionalizing a degraded experience? They put the onus on me – the consumer – to not only pay more but to deal with more hassle than I did earlier. Why don’t they use this opportunity to redesign a better communication (experience) to the check-in process?
“Hello, Mr. Rose. Thank you for your loyalty. We’re trying to do better for the environment and our natural resources. Can you tell me on which days of your four-day stay you would prefer your room cleaned? We can clean it once, twice, or not at all.”
Imagine if hotels communicated their no-housekeeping-unless-requested policy so as not to degrade the customer experience. Presentation matters, says @Robert_Rose via @CMIContent. Click To Tweet
The hotel’s service model is unchanged, but the presentation of it to the customer is. Now, take that simple change and think about how the hotel could transform its content. This customer-focused messaging could be delivered on the website and incorporated into the content strategy. I can even see how it could play an important role in branded editorial.
So why isn’t the hotel chain doing this? Because it’s easier, that’s why. Instead of doing more with less, they are doing more with less.
It’s a subtle but important difference. Instead of moving toward more creativity and innovation in a reality where they have fewer resources to work with, they are more actively using much less energy or resources.
Content team follows do-more-with-less mandate
I’ve seen this same thing happen to content teams as well. I recently worked with a team at a company where it was in growth mode last year. At that time, the team was charged with building an innovative thought leadership program with no increase to their marketing budget. The plan was to work with select subject matter experts to produce a small number of high-quality e-books (one per subject matter expert). The plan worked brilliantly.
Despite that success, management changed and this year’s mandate to the team was to create the same or more assets with the same budget. Everything would be judged on whether they met the budget of assets produced vs. dollars spent. They also executed this perfectly.
But the business results this year have been much less inspiring.
What happened? Both years, the team was told to do “more with less.” But the difference was all in which word was emphasized. The team institutionalized a degraded set of experiences.
Measuring more or less?
If you are always told to do “more with less,” and your success isn’t necessarily correlated to having fewer resources, then how do you avoid institutionalizing a degraded experience?
One of the biggest indicators of where the emphasis is placed – more or less – is how frontline marketing and content teams are measured. In heady, growth-oriented times, marketers are often measured on their ability to provide differentiated experiences, draw more leads, create more highly engaged customers, and inspire more brand awareness. Metrics tend to influence manager behavior that favors more creativity, innovation, and content creation to create remarkable experiences. You do more with less.
On the other hand, in leaner – or more stressed – times, companies often switch measurement for marketing and content. The pendulum swings to efficiency: Do more with less. Metrics center on “how inexpensively we can achieve more activity or tasks” or “how we can perform the same function we did last time with fewer resources.”
If content teams are measured purely on efficiency, it’s only a matter of time before the content will fail the business, and a senior executive will ask, “Do we produce too much content?”
Followed by this reply: “Yup. We sure do. We continue to do more with less.”
If #content teams are measured purely on efficiency, it’s only a matter of time before the content will fail the business, says @Robert_Rose via @CMIContent. Click To Tweet
In lean times, you often prioritize the “less” resources but still produce more content. You influence the behavior of your marketing and content practitioners to create more, cheaper, and less creative and innovative content.
Think of it this way. It’s as if you are a movie studio and have a budget of $100 million. In growth times, you hear “do more with less,” so you focus on quality, creativity, and innovation. You spend $100 million on the talent and marketing of 10 movies.
In lean times, you hear “do more with less,” so you focus on frugality and efficiency and spend $100 million on the talent and marketing of 20 movies.
It’s rare that the latter provides a better long-term business result.
Author and famous business strategist Eli Goldratt once said, “Tell me how you will measure me, and then I will tell you how I will behave. If you measure me in an illogical way, don’t complain about illogical behavior.”
As you enter what may be challenging times – you may see executives, colleagues, or even yourself tempted to transition from measuring your ability to create more value by doing more things as inexpensively as possible. This transition sometimes comes with a preface that says, “Don’t worry, it’s just transitory. We’ll be back to growth soon enough.”
If you don’t want to behave illogically and institutionalize bad content experiences, be wise to be aware and redouble your efforts on more innovation and more creativity in the reality of fewer resources to do those things.
You may actually get to a point where you learn it’s not about doing more with less but rather less is more.
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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
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MARKETING
How To Master Your Hashtags on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram
Remember in The Little Mermaid when Ariel sits in the grotto pulling petals off her underwater flower, wondering if Prince Eric loves her or loves her not?
That about sums up my relationship with hashtags.
I love them for their contribution to social posts’ organic reach and visibility. I do not love seeing brands use them willy-nilly, stuffing them like King Triton’s magic trident into their captions to fix a failing social profile.
Hashtag success doesn’t come from hoping you land on “they love me.” It depends 100% on your hashtag strategy.
Let’s break it down by platform so you can go from #TheyLoveMeNot to #TheyLoveMe hashtags in 2023.
Hashtag success doesn’t come from hoping you land on the “they-love-me” petal, says @coastlinemktg via @CMIContent. #SocialMedia Click To Tweet
Hashtags on Twitter can be a powerful tool for boosting your brand’s visibility, encouraging engagement, and expanding your network with like-minded individuals.
According to Twitter Business, tweets with relevant top hashtags can generate a significant lift across the marketing funnel, such as +18% message association, +8% brand awareness, and +3% purchase intent. These tips based on Twitter’s best practices and my experiences can help you get started:
Quantity matters
One or two relevant hashtags in your tweets are the sweet spot. Could you add more? Sure. Should you? Probably not.
Consider relevancy
Look for frequently used hashtags and engage with those posts to increase visibility. Don’t shy away from hashtags specific to Twitter chats (like #CMWorld). These forums are great opportunities to meet potential clients, make connections, and grow your knowledge base.
Go niche
Think beyond the broad hashtags and get granular. Often, you’ll find some of those RAQs (rarely asked questions) Andrew Davis talked about during his 2022 Content Marketing World keynote to position yourself as a thought leader on the platform.
Follow @DrewDavisHere rarely-asked-question advice and get granular with hashtags to position your brand as a thought leader, says @coastlinemktg via @CMIContent. #SocialMedia Click To Tweet
Test everything
Don’t base your hashtag success on like counts. Use Twitter Analytics to track tweet performance and look for correlations and patterns to see which hashtags get the most engagement so you can replicate that process.
LinkedIn is all about connection, whether you’re building a personal brand or marketing a brand. And much like Twitter, if you want your content to stand out among LinkedIn’s 500-plus million members, an appropriate hashtag strategy is key.
When used correctly, adding relevant hashtags to your posts and articles will help you connect with new audiences, establish credibility, expand your reach, build a community around your organization, and promote your brand and its products.
Here’s what I recommend:
Count the quantity
LinkedIn suggests including no more than three hashtags per post and using broad and niche hashtags for increased exposure (e.g., #marketing vs. #contentmarketing).
Three hashtags are sufficient if you target them appropriately for the target audience.
Consider hashtag placement
When possible, insert your hashtags organically into the post caption so they become a natural part of your story. Clumping them at the bottom not only looks clunky but distracts from the purpose of the post.
Don’t clump hashtags at the bottom of a @LinkedIn post. Insert them organically into the #content, says @coastlinemktg via @CMIContent. #SocialMedia Click To Tweet
Optimize your pages
Choose up to 20 specialties to add to your company page that represents what you do and what you post about. Think of these as “hashtaggable” keywords to help your page be found more easily on the platform.
Use hashtags in comments
You can add hashtags when you comment on a post or article. This good community management tactic can help increase your personal and brand searchability.
Test everything.
Keep a record of the hashtags you use and look for correlations with your overarching goal (i.e., engagement, post clicks, reach, etc.).
Because many users’ profiles are set to private and an abundance of topical groups exists, getting audience members to engage and interact with hashtags on Facebook can be more challenging.
I don’t recommend spending time on Facebook hashtags, but before you opt out, monitor relevant and branded hashtags to make sure your audience isn’t the exception to the rule.
You can do this search by adding the keyword or hashtag at the end of the URL facebook.com/hashtag/_____.
If no one has used the hashtag in years, don’t invest time in creating a Facebook hashtag strategy. However, if you find the hashtag does engage an audience, use no more than two to three hashtags per post to see if they perform for your brand.
Do hashtags help you improve your brand’s reach on Instagram in 2023? This is the current question circling the social sphere. According to Instagram’s head Adam Mosseri, hashtags aren’t as effective on Instagram as they once were.
So, what now?
Social media search engine optimization enters the hashtag conversation.
Hootsuite experimented to see if posts with hashtags performed worse than those that prioritized relevant keywords.
The results? Keyword-focused captions saw 30% more reach and increased engagement over those with hashtags.
That’s not to say that hashtags don’t still have their place. They’re just not the priority on Instagram that they once were.
Armed with this data, here are my Instagram recommendations:
Minimize hashtag usage
A few months ago, I would have recommended a max of 12 hashtags. My current recommendation is no more than four targeted hashtags on any post.
Don’t use more than four targeted hashtags on @Instagram posts, says @coastlinemktg via @CMIContent. #SocialMedia Click To Tweet
Use relevant and descriptive keywords
Think of caption writing as just another form of content writing. Incorporate relevant and descriptive keywords. Keep it short and sweet when possible. People scroll so quickly that crafting clear, concise captions makes sense to get the maximum impact.
Tag topics
As the Topics icon indicates, topics are the next iteration of Instagram’s hashtags. They help you reach people who share an interest. You can add up to three topics to your post right before you publish it if you have the feature in the share menu.
New! Instagram lets you add ‘Topic’ tags to Reels
h/t @TSbyJacki pic.twitter.com/TVqdmH5bNa
— Matt Navarra (@MattNavarra) September 5, 2022
Check out the competition
You probably have competitor accounts you emulate for their content. Do a deep dive into what’s working for them on the platform and use what you learn to inform your strategy.
Maybe they use some targeted keywords you hadn’t considered to reach your audience or maybe you walk away with a renewed sense of creative vision. Either way, it’s a win.
Keep it fun
Social media is supposed to be fun. It’s where you get the chance to show a brand’s personality and give audience members a look behind the curtain. Don’t take a hashtag strategy to the extreme, and stop interjecting humor and personality into your posts.
So when it comes to a hashtag strategy for social media, keep it specific, concise, and fun. Happy hashtagging.
Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
MARKETING
How Social Media Can Supercharge Your SEO
When working in social media, it can feel like you exist worlds away from SEO. And as an SEO, social media may feel like something that isn’t quite relevant in your day to day. But as with all things marketing, both of these digital marketing tactics have the potential to boost collective success. As a Social Media Manager, I’m here to tell you how you as an SEO can collaborate with your social media team in order to help supercharge your SEO efforts.
What is a social media strategy?
A social media strategy is a document that outlines your organization’s social media goals, along with how you will achieve them, both through top-level strategy and on-the-ground tactics (i.e., what you actually do). A strategy is the foundation of how your organization approaches being on social media.
Social media vs. search engine optimization
Social media involves owning accounts and having an active presence on social media channels like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, and YouTube, with the goal of driving brand awareness and engagement, or increasing traffic and conversions. On the other hand, search engine optimization (SEO) is a set of practices designed to improve the appearance and positioning of web pages in organic search results, resulting in increased website traffic and exposure to your brand.
Do links from social media improve your SEO?
Links from popular social media platforms such as Facebook are “no-follow” links, meaning they do not send link authority directly to your site. PageRank is Google’s algorithm that ranks web pages based on the quantity and quality of external backlinks. However, gaining no-follow links from high-quality domains is still extremely important.
In the past, marketers ignored “no-follow” links, as they did not have any impact on organic ranking, but the “no-follow” attribute isn’t completely useless. A well-balanced backlink profile consisting of both followed, and no-followed links will appear more natural to Google and other search engines.
Another benefit of “no-follow” links is the referral traffic that they can provide. Although search engines will not follow links with the attached HTML “no-follow” attribute, users can click them to reach your site, giving you more traffic!
While no-follow links do not provide the same boost to your site’s backlink profile as followed links, Google still likes to see them as a part of your site’s backlink profile, and they offer a valuable source of referral traffic.
The SEO benefits of increased brand awareness
The primary SEO benefit of brand awareness that your social media strategy can drive is the boost you can see in “branded” organic search volume and clicks.
Not every user encountering your brand on their Instagram or TikTok feed will click through to your site — in fact, most won’t. Most people will mentally file away your brand name and products only to perform a Google search for your company name or products after the fact, i.e. a branded search. This is especially true if your social messaging is solid and memorable.
For many sites, especially newer ones, a branded search can represent a large portion of your organic traffic.
5 ways social media can improve your SEO
There are five ways that a robust social media presence can help improve your SEO:
Amplify website content through social channels to reach new audiences
Your website content may be great, but you need to drive eyes to it somehow! Sharing your content, like blogs or guides, on social media is a win-win-win:
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You’re building positive brand sentiment by providing content that answers people’s questions.
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You’re driving more users to your website.
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The positive response toward your content on social media sends signals to the social algorithms and therefore often shows it to new people.
One way we do this at Moz is with this very blog! Anything the Moz Blog publishes is promoted on our social media channels, which not only drives traffic but puts valuable content right in front of our audience for them to get immediate insights from.
Create and share infographics in social posts and blog articles
In my experience, people love nothing more on social media than a classic infographic. Sharing information in bite-sized, colorful, and visually appealing ways will result in shares, engagement, and traffic to your website. Plus, they’re versatile — include them in your blogs, and you can use them on your social media posts! Every Whiteboard Friday episode that we publish here at Moz gets its own accompanying infographic. This is a great way to resurface a well-loved episode, and give people more value up front.
Build relationships with customers
One of the core tenets of social media is that it’s a two-way street. As you get started, you as a brand need to provide valuable content to your audience without asking them for anything in return. Once you’ve cultivated goodwill with your audience, you now have a relationship in which you provide value, build that favorable currency, and then you’re able to cash in on it in exchange for traffic or follow-throughs on your CTAs.
While our social media philosophy is that everything we put on social media has some form of value to our audience, we also make it a point to create content that doesn’t explicitly ask for anything, like clicking links or purchasing our product. Sometimes that’s providing them with information, and sometimes that can look like making them laugh.
Optimize your profiles on social channels and lead audiences toward your website
A simple but effective way to lead audiences to your website is to make it easy to get to! Ensure you optimize your social channels and keep a link to your website in each profile. If you need to house multiple links, use a “link in bio” service, but always make sure a quick shortcut to your website stays front and center.
This strategy is something we use on our Instagram. Instead of constantly changing the link based on what we’re promoting that day or just wasting the opportunity the link in bio provides, we have a link in bio tool through Sprout Social that lets us showcase all the links that are tied to each of our posts.
Target users who are more likely to convert to your site. Conversion and engagement metrics are great for SEO!
With social media, you should always know who you’re trying to reach and how you’re going to do so. One audience you should target on social media is people you know are ready to convert. Have different posts for different audiences as a part of your content mix, and include more mature leads further down the funnel. These become easy wins because they convert and engage once they hit the website, which is helpful for SEO metrics.
We know that the majority of people are coming to Moz for beginner SEO education, so we make it a point to really highlight those resources, such as our Beginner’s Guide to SEO or our How to Rank Checklist, knowing they will always see a lot of traffic and engagement.
Build relationships between your social media and SEO teams
A strong relationship between your social media and SEO teams is crucial. You can trade information about high-performing topics that can inform strategy on both sides or allow you to make reactive changes to your tactics based on opportunities. Schedule a monthly one-on-one with your respective counterpart in your organization to connect and fill each other in on pertinent information.
With this information, you’re now armed to go out and make this happen for yourself! Take this as an opportunity to connect with your social media team and find new and innovative ways to collaborate and drive results for both social media and SEO.
MARKETING
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