May 29, 2020

Experimentation should be your strategy, now more than ever.

You probably won’t get it right first time

But experimentation is a crucial path to new opportunities and business growth. Particularly when there’s an uncertain road ahead.

Being experimental isn’t natural for most of us. Generally, when something unnatural happens, we deflect it. Then try to understand it in order to get back to normality. Why? Because normality feels safe. Particularly in business, no news is often good news and marketing trundles along doing the same thing it’s always done until something comes along and forces it to change.

“I don’t have time to experiment with strategy”

Well luckily, one thing we all have right now is time. The simple fact is, if experimentation isn’t part of your strategy, you’re missing out. Now, you’re probably thinking; of course you’re going to tell me to try new things with my marketing, you’re a digital marketing agency – and you’d be absolutely right.

Day in, day out, we see the impact trying new things has on all kinds of businesses. Now more than ever is the time to prioritise this to impact your business and steer it in a new direction, away from negative uncertainty.

The great marketing irony

One thing most marketing and creative agencies are terrible at, is marketing themselves. It’s not because they can’t, but because they often use the same excuse: “we don’t have time”. The reason I say this, is because we raised the same question within the Momentum team earlier this year and the results have never been more relevant. Here’s what we learnt…

Collaboration

A change in environment requires a change in strategy. Sound familiar? The quickest way to change your strategy is to consider a new perspective and the best way to hear a new perspective is to listen to someone else’s. For us, that meant realising it was time to take a more empathetic approach and help other people during a time of need. So, we teamed up with our friends at Purple Tasche to create 12 weeks of content, which could be donated to the general public. Completely free. In fact, you can download yourself right here. For you, it could simply mean reading this perspective and taking a step back to look at your own business. In fact, there’s never been a better time to try it.

Creation

The key to good creation is finding something which is efficient to create and easy to consume. So, with 500 million blogs, 30 million YouTube accounts and 800K podcasts, there was an obvious choice. Yes, we started a podcast.

OK. It was mainly because we already utilise both blogs and YouTube, but you should definitely take note of the huge surge in popularity the humble podcast is experiencing. Helped on by new consumer tech and a massive need for long-form content within consumers, 2020 is set to be the year of the podcast. Why? Because there’s no need for a huge production (you can podcast in your pants – if so inclined) so it’s efficient to create. Plus, with the eyes of the multi-screening audience already engaged, there’s a wide open opportunity to target their ears.

Communication

Less work emails = more inbox space.

There’s millions of people across the world with spare inbox space right now. Many traditional office workflows have slowed, yet we bet you still check your inbox every 15 minutes, just out of pure habit.

So, why not take advantage of this attention while it lasts? Email marketing is nothing new, maybe you’ve even tried it before… But that was in the ‘old normal’. This is the new normal, and business as unusual has created a new field of play. People are using social media more, yes. But mainly for news or entertainment. If you truly want to engage with your customer, hit them where their attention has space. We did, check it out.

Contact us for support.

March 25, 2020

The opportunities in uncertainty

Making the most out of the opportunity

Uncertain times lead to uncertain decisions. Uncertain decisions make for wrong decisions; and with wrong decisions comes failure. But not all of us are destined for failure. Uncertain times can also lead to opportunities, as long as you sell with integrity.

Take Joe Wicks for example; the fitness expert understood that everyone was self-isolating and unable to enter the gym. So, he used his social channels to host a live fitness session this week which had over 1 million people watching simultaneously. Making him the #1 trend on Twitter (ahead of Coronavirus no less).

Opportunities are everywhere

There’s opportunities for all of us. Re-pitching new opportunities to your existing and new clients will be the key to helping them show their character and building long-term value with customers.

Live streaming figures have increased 10x on average this week, so replacing live events with live streams could help fill the void left in the events industry. This is just one of the opportunities that has arisen over the past few weeks. We’re certain there’s hundreds more.

Top 5 social platforms right now

As more and more people work from home, social media platforms continue to rise in users and subsequent viewers. This makes standing out from the crowd even more important. Now more so than ever. One basic rule for any platform is to ask questions. Because:

Questions = Comments = Engagement = Relevance

Relevance = Reach + Growth

With all this in mind, there are 5 channels that are absolutely crucial for businesses and individuals alike:

Community.com – Soon to be launching in the UK, this platform is SMS in power and SMS in nature. Celebrities/Brands can speak directly to their audience without algorithms blocking their advances: allowing leaders to text with direct, organic and meaningful communication at massive scale
Podcasting – One of the best ways to create a meaningful connections with your audience is to use a podcast. This can be done in the comfort of your own room with pretty much any laptop or computer. Podcasts stimulate deeper conversations and quite simply create more leads
Facebook Groups – As more people and brands saturate the newsfeed, time will eventually come where groups lead the way for business interaction and lead generation. Facebook is focusing on connecting people in a real way. So, now is the time to create sub-networks that bring the community closer to you and your brand
Instagram – Gone are the days of short, snappy captions. The algorithm now determines if a post is useful by ‘view time’. Meaning longer captions = more view time. But as always with Instagram, Consistency is key. Make sure you’re active daily to achieve the best results
LinkedIn – This is quite simply the golden era. The channel is yet to be completely monetised like Facebook and so rewards users who are active daily. Always respond to every comment to help play the algorithm and increase your engagement with other users. It’s also quite clear that company pages don’t perform as well as individuals. Therefore making it important to ensure all your employees are active and commenting on each other’s posts to increase reach tenfold

If you’re wondering which opportunities to capitalise on, our experienced team is always on-hand to offer support. Chat to us today!

March 4, 2020

Case Studies

December 30, 2019

Key Things to Consider When Strategising for 2020

We’re at the end of 2019 and what an eventful year it has been! Especially in social media’s realm, with hundreds of updates and changes to platform rules and regs. Although 2020 is right around the corner, there’s still time to revisit social media strategies to boost performance next year. With this in mind, we discuss notable predictions from social experts and thought leaders to gauge how best to move forward.

Granted, were basing our advice on the predictions we feel to be most likely. However, we’ll know more as the year starts to pan out, so stay tuned for blog updates on how best to revise marketing strategies. Anyhow, Emarketer suggests social media is currently used by 90.4% of Millennials, 77.5% of Gen X and 48.2% of Baby Boomers. Meaning your demographic is on social, but what current predictions might hint on how best to target them?

Our top 2020 predictions

The New York Times hints Facebook’s planning to integrate messaging functionalities on Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp. Enabling users to communicate between the apps, whilst integrating cross-posting via their Stories tools. This broadens the opportunities for marketers to connect quicker and easier with their audience.

Furthermore, Instagram look to maintain its current course with focus on user health and wellbeing via ‘like hiding’. This looks set in stone as an official feature for 2020. Coupled with a further shift towards monetisation, influencer marketing will continue to dominate in the new year. Businesses aught to improve their marketing spend on influencer marketing as it can be cheaper and more effective than running paid ads. So moving forward, marketers should look to work with multiple smaller influencers, as opposed to singular celebrities.

SocialMediaToday offers realistic views on AR, VR and their impact on socials’ future. AR filters like on Snapchat are gaining popularity, with digital overlays offering creative alternatives to standard content, upping user engagement. Alternatively, VR looks to be the future of social interaction, with Facebook already heavily investing in Oculus. It’s safe to say their’s plenty of potential to gear a marketing strategy towards these trends in 2020.

Happy New Year from the Momentum Social team. Contact us with any questions, we hope our insight kick-starts your 2020!

Insight-led video featured - Momentum Social

November 14, 2018

Insight-led video strategy; understanding an audience

Insight-led video strategy involves learning audiences’ motivations, targeting them with effective, reliable content. Video is essential to content marketing. In fact, over 80% of online marketers use videos. Therefore, gaining insight into an audience’s thoughts and actions is important to deliver engaging and relevant content. With this in mind, we discuss building an insight-led video strategy. If you’d like to discuss the strategy further, get in touch with us here.

Insight-led research

Researching insights beats un-researched assumptions. Knowing an audience means learning their interests, preferences and needs. Insight knowledge then lets us empathise with them. This allows us to produce video campaigns that resonate on an emotional level. In addition, insights show audience activity, which lets us post relevant content in the right place at the right time. Proper research will reduce the guesswork, promoting emotional resonance with them. Therefore, what they’re seeing is relevant and targets their interests, boosting engagement and post reactions.

The steps to strategy success

The first step is to collect primary or secondary market research on audiences’ interests and preferences. Primary research gained first hand will provide authentic, original data. This is possible through focus groups or questionnaires. On the other hand, secondary research that’s already done is easier to gather. However it can be unreliable and may lack validity. Both numbered and written insight data will work, although written data will give more of an in-depth view; usually done through interviews. Analysis is then necessary to find key themes that will provide insights.

The second step is to develop ideas from the data and create sample content; to refine, measure and revise once posted. The way the audience engages and reacts to the content provides valuable insight. These insights can guide future pieces of content, highlighting shortfalls and posts that resonated best with the audience.

An insight-led video strategy will provide valuable insight into audience preferences. Video content is then relevant and more targeted towards their needs. Engagement and reactions are likely to improve as the content resonates with their interests. Remember research is key, whilst creating, refining and measuring posts is important for analysis and future content.

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