Learn how to turn the mistakes and successes of your competition into a game plan for a winning holiday strategy.
It’s nearly impossible to evaluate your brand’s social media performance without considering your competitors’ performance. Reviewing competitive information is especially helpful when planning seasonal campaigns.
By examining what’s working in your industry, you can understand social media best practices at scale. This report walks you through the four steps you can take to make the most out of competitive insights. Learn how to tackle each step and see how real brands have applied these tactics in their own season campaigns.
Is your brand ready for the privacy policy changes ahead?
Create a relevant advertising strategy as technologies ramp up consumer privacy controls
With new changes sweeping the martech industry, it’s no wonder brands are struggling to understand what it means for their future marketing strategy.
Brands are announcing significant changes to their end-user experience. These are changes that will limit advertisers who are retargeting ads or collecting consumer data to manage their digital marketing campaigns.
The Fate Of Digital Advertising
While the fate of some common advertising tactics remain unclear, there are still many avenues that can drive strong returns for savvy digital marketers.
Hear what Jason Klein, co-founder of ListenFirst, had to say on the topic. In Jason’s LinkedIn post, he shares a few tips to help brands reach their ideal audience today and in the future.
The Value of Measuring an Active Engager vs. Passive Observer
All brands are looking to spark social engagement. But inspiring consumers to comment or share your brand with their network takes thoughtful planning. Meaningful audience engagement goes beyond a simple “like,” so you need to know what content gets people talking.
Social Media Analytics Across Channels
Measuring impressions, video views, and likes are too passive when you want to understand how well your content has connected with an audience. Afterall, you could trigger an impression or a video view simply because it’s served to your newsfeed. Many people “like” so thoughtlessly when they’re scrolling that one million “likes” doesn’t mean one million people are truly interested in your brand.
If getting consumers to comment, share and reply to your content is what you are aiming at, you need a way to measure those types of social engagements across all major social channels. When a person shares your post on Facebook or comments on Twitter, you know that person saw something about your brand and was motivated to take action. It means that person stopped scrolling to talk about your content or share it with their friends or followers. That’s something!
Introducing Social Talkability
At ListenFirst, we unite billions of social signals across every social platform. Using our unique access to this data we’ve introduced a new way to measure meaningful engagements — in one comprehensive score. Social Talkability, is our new proprietary metric that provides brands with the number of social actions that are deemed intentful.
Your “Talkability” score counts comments, shares and replies across all major social channels, along with user-generated content. It compiles data from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit and TikTok.
The Social Talkability score helps brands see the full picture.
See how cross-channel social engagements took off for Netflix and Apple during pivotal campaigns.
Bridgerton premiered on Netflix on Dec. 25, 2020. That day Bridgerton got 13,385 “likes” per Instagram post. That’s almost 1,000 less “likes” than they got per post the day before. But when looking across social channels and counting the more active engagements, Netflix can see the show did get audiences buzzing on premiere day. Social Talkability was lifted 787% from Dec. 24 to Dec. 25.
April 20, 2021 was a big day for Apple as they introduced new products and updates to the market. However, they only averaged 64,032 reactions per social media post on that day. (Between January 1- April 19, 2021, Apple averaged 134,790 reactions per post.) When looking at the Social Talkability metric, Apple can see that there was, in fact, a lift in comments, shares and replies across channels, despite the drop in reactions in general. Talkability was up 213% on April 20, compared to April 19.
Get Your Social Talkability Score Today
ListenFirst customers can access this metric today in the Brand Rankings tab and in the Time Window Comparison report.
If you are not yet a ListenFirst user, contact the ListenFirst team to request a demo.
Share of Voice – How to Measure and Increase vs Industry Competitors
Watch this webinar to learn how to measure Share of Voice (SOV), a cornerstone metric that helps you understand your brand’s health and awareness in the market as it relates to your competition.
SOV gives you the overall positioning of your brand at a high level and, when done well, it also provides the details at an individual campaign, product, or release level – across all social channels. This insight is invaluable when determining performance and strategy going forward.
7 Ways Brands Most Successfully Celebrated Star Wars Day
When marketers think about planning seasonal campaigns, usually holidays like Thanksgiving or Christmas come to mind. While those should be a focus, on social media there’s also a great amount of opportunity around less formal holidays that are more playful in tone, and often build around intellectual property. May The Fourth, or the Star Wars pun that launched a thousand brand posts, is an excellent example of this type of event.
44 years after the first movie came out, fan interest in talking about the franchise has only grown and participating in Star Wars Day is an effective way to make your own brand more top-of-mind. Here are brand strategies that were most successful on social media around Star Wars Day this year.
#1. Leverage Library Content
The Big Bang Theory received 30,104 responses on Facebook for a clip of the group trying unsuccessfully to explain the May The Fourth holiday to Penny while The Simpsons got 25,552 responses to an Instagram post showing Ralph Wiggum dressing up as Princess Leia for Inspirational Women Day. If you’re a media brand and have Star Wars related content in the vault, May Fourth is definitely the day to dust it off.
#2. Lead With A Creative Visual
Compelling visuals are never a bad idea, but considering how much of Star Wars is communicated visually, many brands were able to stand out with their May The Fourth content without having to say too much. For example, WWE had 163,869 responses to an Instagram gallery where they edited lightsabers into photos of their wrestlers fighting, Jimmy Kimmel Live received 34,550 responses to an Instagram picture of Yoda and Leia cosplay, and John Deer got 16,737 responses to Instagram concept art showing what the John Deere version of a Tauntaun would look like.
#3. Force A Force Joke
Dating back at least to Mel Brooks proclaiming “May the Schwartz be with you!” in Spaceballs, jokes about “The Force” have been ubiquitous, and Star Wars Day isn’t the context you’d expect restraint. The Muppets had the best performing Force related social media post, getting 33,396 responses on Facebook, with Kermit and Miss Piggy in Star Wars outfits, wishing “May the Farce be with you.” Additionally, Callaway Golf’s Force video post scored 12,212 responses on Instagram, sharing a trick shot and showing that anything that defies explanation can be re-contextualized as a Jedi trick.
The rest of Force related posts that got engagement followed a fairly rigid formula. Accenture got 4,010 responses to an Instagram post showing an Accenture hat with Yoda ears with the explanation “the force is strong with this one” while Avid got 3,366 responses to an Instagram video showing Baby Yoda using The Force to edit on a soundboard. Meanwhile, Shake Shack got 3,179 responses to an Instagram photo of their fries levitating with the caption “The force is strong with this one.” with Buffalo Wild Wings receiving 3,052 responses to a Tweet about their wings explaining that “the sauce is strong with this one”.
#4. Promote The Merchandise
When the first Star Wars movie came out, the only merchandise you could buy around the film were action figures, with Kenner only having to pay $100,000 for the toy making rights. The marketing empire around the franchise has scaled considerably since then.
In a crowded field, Lego had the most successful merchandise related post on Star Wars Day, getting 151,928 responses on Instagram for photos of a set featuring The Mandalorian and Baby Yoda. Other merchandise focused posts that performed well included Build-A-Bear getting 4,536 responses to a post showing a Baby Yoda plushy in cap and gown as a suggested graduation gift, and Williams-Sonoma receiving 4,465 responses to an Instagram Gallery showing off their Star Wars collection, such as a Millennium Falcon waffle. Meanwhile, Barnes & Noble got 3,640 responses to an Instagram post sharing a pile of Star Wars related books.
#5. Run A Contest
Bribing the audience is a marketing strategy as old as Yoda. GameStop had 43,708 responses on an Instagram post offering a chance to win a Star War prize pack in exchange for leaving Likes and Comments.
#6. Say You’re Making a Star Wars Meme Without Saying It
Slim Jim got 51,037 responses to an Instagram post explaining that they’re not going to “force” a lame ass May Fourth meme because they’re “rebels”. For brands with a more irrelevant tone, there’s enough saturation around brand posts around Star Wars Day and other social media holidays that playfully announcing you won’t be participating is an effective way to stand out.
#7. Curate Content From Others
E! News got 32,631 responses to a Regram of Billie Lourd showing her infant son in a Princess Leia onesie watching his late grandmother in Star Wars. While you’re going to have to compensate the content creator if the repost isn’t being used in a news context, around holidays there are going to be unique takes that are poignant and emotional that can’t come from the voice of a brand. Sometimes amplifying the voices of others on your social channels makes more sense.
3 Ways To Optimize Your Digital Marketing Without Third-Party Cookies
Just like with the expression “you can attract more bees with honey than with vinegar”, the disappearance of third-party cookies from browsers is actually an opportunity for brands. Third-party cookies were never popular with consumers and now that they’ll be going away as a retargeting tool, marketers can focus on connecting with digital audiences using content they do want.
Let social media marketing extend your reach
Social media is a far more welcoming context for the audience to interact with brand content. For example, on social media the audience actually opts into following their favorite brands. With third-party cookies, companies are doing the following, and behind people’s backs.
Plus, with the right analytics, you can build a strong marketing strategy that extends beyond the audience you reach with third-party cookies. Below are three ways you can use social media to more effectively target your marketing to the right audience, and with the right content.
#1 Understand what content is actually moving the needle and engaging users.
Third-party cookies track what users have viewed online, which is valuable in terms of retargeting but provides a narrow understanding of your audience. Gain extensive insights into your owned and competitive audience demographics to craft the most tailored content strategies possible. This will help you make informed decisions before spending your limited marketing dollars.
#2 Expand your reach by partnering with the right influencers
Let’s face it, some people just have it. There are personalities across social media that have a loyal community of followers that are always eager to engage with their latest post. These influencers often attract very niche audiences. When their audience looks a lot like your target customer, there’s incredible opportunities for everyone. Check out a recent webinar from ListenFirst on Measuring the Impact of Influencers to understand how this strategy can work for you.
#3 Review marketing content from your competitors and see how it performed
Combine historical campaign performance with competitor intel and a clear understanding of trending topics and you have the elements you need to build a successful campaign. When you have access to this data on an ongoing basis, team creativity flourishes. Watch our webinar on Using Competitive Information to Plan Seasonal Campaigns to learn more.
As you beef up your social media strategy, you’ll notice it’s more effective and not so intimidating. Plus, a data-driven social strategy will be more engaging, and your audience will appreciate that you catered to their interests without infringing on their privacy.
Ready to see how ListenFirst can help you leverage social media to its full potential? Request a demo today.
