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Marketing Trends for 2023

Posted on by Nic Minter

As a general rule, marketing and digital content never goes out of style…if it’s done right! When it comes to attracting new customers and growing your business in an ever-changing and evolving consumer landscape, it is important to stay ahead of the curve and on top of the latest marketing trends. Here are our predictions for the top marketing trends for 2023 to keep you one step ahead of your competitors!

Video Content is King

You have the power to connect with your audiences on a much deeper level, but how? The answer is found in this first marketing trend…visual storytelling! 

The emergence of short form video is an undeniable trend for marketing in 2023. It provides consumers with highly entertaining, surprising, or captivating content which, in turn, drives interactivity and connection. Even the simple addition of a video to your website may increase engagement by 80%! 

So if you aren’t utilising video already, here are three reasons why it should be ruling your marketing strategy in 2023: 

  1. Captures audience attention and increasing engagement

Videos are consumed more than ever before. Whether it be for YouTube, Instagram reels, Tik Tok videos, or Facebook stories, video is a versatile and engaging content format. Not only are they great storytelling tools, they also provide you with an opportunity to relate to your target audience. 

Tip! Identify familiar situations that your audience might relate to create more of a connection and build engagement.  

  • Easy to digest 

Making sure your video content is easy for your audience to digest, aka “all killer, no filler”, is important. Respect their time through clear and succinct video content that encapsulates what they would like to know and what they would find useful. Through answering those questions and growing an understanding for your audience, the more your content will immediately appeal to them! 

  • Boosts conversions and sales 

Video is a great return on investment (ROI) and the logic behind this is simple—videos are a powerful tool to convince customers of the value of your products or services through showing rather than telling. 

If you have a product, why not post a casual video as a way to talk people through how to use it? Or a quick before and after reel to demonstrate the benefits of using your product? 

By seeing a video, your potential customers feel more confident in making a buying decision, thus directly improving your sales. 

Mobile Optimisation is more important than ever

Mobile phones are one of the most convenient ways to access the internet. As the number of smartphone users is constantly (and rapidly) increasing, it is crucial to ensure your website is mobile responsive in its design. As the 10th largest eCommerce market by revenue worldwide, Australia tremendously benefits from mobile phone technology, and so does your business! 

What do we mean by Mobile Optimisation?

Mobile optimisation is the process of optimising your website to make sure it displays correctly and functions well on mobile devices. It improves the overall user experience and supports you to achieve the highest potential for generating leads, revenue, or conversions of any sort.

Gain a competitive edge

Users LOVE to have a smooth experience while checking out products on their smartphones. Not only does mobile optimisation create a consistent experience and help your website look visually appealing, it provides a great opportunity for website users to share your product or service on social media. There are countless opportunities for shoppers to look for the products and services they need and the brand they want, so why not ensure that you are providing your customers with the easiest user experience and remain competitive within your market?

Tap into user behaviours 

According to Shopify, 69.4% of internet users report using shopping apps on phones and/or tablets. Looking at consumer behaviour trends in 2023, it is clear that there will be a rapid rise in the number of mobile phone users in Australia, making it more important than ever to optimise your sites for mobile users! 

Increase brand awareness and customer engagement through mobile optimised advertising

Small and medium businesses that employ digital strategies (such as leveraging SEO services, Google Ads or Facebook Advertising) have a better chance of gaining leads and being recognised by their ideal audience through mobile optimisation than with desktop or physical marketing-only strategies.

If you need a helping hand implementing these marketing trends into your future business plans, our team can’t wait to work with you! As your outsourced marketing team, Soqual can help your business grow through strategically improving your marketing content and optimising your website to achieve maximum results. Get in touch with us to discuss a customised digital marketing strategy for your business in 2023. 

The Fundamentals of Social Media

Posted on by Nic Minter

Social media can be a scary playing field with trends, algorithm changes, platform updates and new features appearing almost daily. How do we keep up? In the world of social media marketing, having a set of fundamentals in place and adapting them to each new change is key. It may sound like a whole lot of work, but trust us… having a consistent set of foundations will help you from losing your mind! 

When it comes to keeping your digital marketing afloat, there are five main fundamentals we live by; define your strategy, know your audience, visually represent your brand, have clear brand messaging and integrate your campaigns. 

Strategy

Say it louder for the people in the back! When it comes to your social media marketing, strategy is everything! Developing a strategy for your social media can be time consuming and overwhelming, but it sure pays off. Here’s why we recommend (no, insist!) you have a digital marketing strategy…

Direction – A strategy gives you clear direction for the weeks, months or even years ahead. Strategy can help you work out a targeted approach to achieving your goals. 

Measurement – Being able to analyse your data allows you to measure the progress you’ve made towards your goals. It can also help you identify areas that are struggling, or re-allocate your budget throughout the campaign to areas that would be more beneficial for your business. Using a combination of analytics and conversion results allows you to consistently adjust your approach and make necessary corrections before it’s too late.

Consistency – A strategy can help you keep on track with your organic and paid marketing efforts. Planning and scheduling your campaigns in advance will help you build your online presence, grow your audience and get those sales flowing!

Defining your strategy 

Defining your strategy is as simple as following some easy steps… 

  1. State your mission/vision
  2. Set some measurable goals 
  3. Identify your target market and their buyer personas 
  4. Describe your content strategies; the type of content, how much of it, the channels you will distribute it on and whether you will adopt paid advertising
  5. Identify and allocate your budget
  6. Identify your competitors; What are they doing? What aren’t they doing? What’s working? What isn’t? 
  7. Outline the people who will help you achieve different aspects of your plan 
  8. Set a calendar of key events 
  9. Set a plan for the implementation of your marketing

Know Your Audience

One of our most invaluable tips for social media marketing is knowing your audience! After all, how can you market to someone if you don’t know who they are? 

 

When defining your audience, we recommend starting with your current clients. Who are they? What platforms are they using? What are their demographics? What trends are they responding to (if any)? By asking yourself these questions, you will be given a clear idea of the people who are interested in your brand, and most likely to purchase from you. 

 

From this, you can identify your ideal client or customer, developing a specific audience persona for each target market. Then when you are writing your social media content, write with these personas in mind. Ask yourself questions like “how would this person benefit from my service?”, “how can my product solve their problem?” or “how would this person like to be spoken to?”. Asking these questions and actively thinking about your audience’s wants, needs and challenges will result in relevant, high-quality content that converts!

 

The real key to connecting with your audience is knowing them inside-out! Trust us, you will reap the rewards.

Visually Represent Your Brand

Representing your brand means more than just words and a logo. When approaching your branding on social media, you need to be focusing on ensuring that every single one of your images, posts, graphics and stories are telling the world “Hello! This is me!”. Visual storytelling plays a huge part in any social media strategy, so here’s how it’s done…

 

Use branded graphics 

Your social media graphics should be showcasing your complete brand kit, including colours, imagery and fonts (as well as your logo). Including these aspects throughout your posts will improve brand recognition, consistency and recall, with customers knowing the content is yours before they even read a word! 

 

Elevate your brand with high-quality imagery 

That’s right, sometimes an iPhone image taken by a family member just… doesn’t… cut it. There is a time and place for iPhone photography, but the benefits of high quality, professional imagery are second to none! Set yourself up with a collection of professional images of yourself, your team, your products or your services. These images can be used across your social media platforms, website, email marketing and so much more. Not only will they take your marketing to the next level, they will also elevate your professionalism and boost trust in your brand. 

 

Seems daunting? It doesn’t have to be! Choose a photographer, decide on a location, grab the team and get snapping. We find creating a mood board prior to the shoot really helps with your vision and direction on the day. 

 

Incorporate video content to show your brand personality 

Did you know that viewers retain 95% of a message when they watch it in a video, compared to a small 10% when reading it in text? (Forbes). You may have noticed that video content has been on the rise in 2022, with more and more brands opting to incorporate video into their social media strategy. 

 

Engaging, moving visuals, reels and videos are favoured by both viewers and the algorithm alike. So now is the time to start capturing and utilising video content to get your brand noticed! 

Here are some different ways you can incorporate video into your strategy:

  • Meet the team videos
  • Behind the scenes shots (people love to see what goes on beyond the social media images!)
  • Video blogs or product/service updates 
  • Client testimonial videos 
  • Turn your images into a video slideshow (this is one of our favourite algorithm hacks!)
  • Informational videos on your product or service
  • Answer your FAQ’s

Brand Messaging

Your brand messaging is SO important in letting your customers know exactly who you are! And by brand messaging, we’re not just talking about social media captions. Brand messaging is the entire way you communicate your values, your offering, your personality and your voice. 

 

Setting your tone 

Your brand messaging shouldn’t be limited to one platform alone, it includes a mixture of verbal and non-verbal messages across your website, social media, EDM’s, videography, you name it! 

 

Start by setting out your mission statement, your values, your tone of voice and language. From here, you will be able to refer back to this in every form of communication your business is involved in, setting the foundation for consistent messaging and a maintained brand personality. 

 

Content pillars 

The next step? Set your content pillars! A content pillar is a topic or theme that is relevant to your audience. You can have multiple pillars for a range of different topics you regularly cover in your day-to-day content. For example, some of ours would be digital marketing tips, campaigns, educational posts, testimonials and BTS of our business. Content pillars are a great way of organising your content and making sure it fits the core categories your audience are interested in, as well as your core values. 

 

An easy way to think of content pillars is picturing them as the foundations and key messages that hold up your communication. Take a look at your social media platforms and start categorising your posts into different content groups. From here, you can see which categories are most engaged with and in turn, find out some helpful things for your content moving forward!

Integrate Your Campaigns

An integrated marketing campaign is a campaign that adopts a mixture of platforms to showcase your business. These can involve methods such as email marketing, social media and Google Ads (there are so many platforms to us) and they are a MUST when it comes to converting your viewers into customers.

Having a consistent presence and messaging across multiple marketing platforms can work wonders in creating brand awareness for your business. Sounds daunting? It can actually be quite simple! Try to think of ways you can repurpose your social media content and adapt it to suit each marketing channel. 

If you need a helping hand, our team can’t wait to work with you! Your outsourced marketing team, Soqual can help elevate your brand identity and improve your presence online.

Top Tips for Writing Killer Copy!

Posted on by Nic Minter

There’s no denying that the digital world is more competitive than ever. Whether you’re selling a product, promoting your services or simply trying to share your expertise online, standing out from your competitors and having a voice is becoming increasingly more challenging. 

But it’s not impossible! 

One of the best ways to stand out online is to nail your copy. Between social media posts, website blogs or paid advertising, words are all around us! Here are our top five tips for writing killer copy and being heard online.

Know Your Audience

Understanding your audience is one of the most important considerations when writing copy for your brand or industry. 

Knowledge around the demographic of your audience, as well as their interests and needs allows you the opportunity to be relatable. Use language that shows your audience you understand them; that you have the answers to their questions and you’re a fantastic source of information. 

Be sure to also use language that doesn’t confuse your audience! Adding fancy words and industry jargon into your captions and blogs can sometimes make a reader feel like they are out of their depth and as such, they may stop reading.

Be Specific

As a writer, it can sometimes be a little too easy to branch out on tangents and lose sight of your initial message. This is because you’re passionate and have a lot to say – and that’s great! The issue this can cause however, is that you increase the potential to lose your audience. 

Our advice? Share the main focus of your message at the beginning. Let your reader know what they will gain if they continue reading. Throughout your entire written piece, be sure to stick to key points and reference your main message, whether that be through headings, dot points or categorised sections. 

If you find you have more to say on a broad level, use that as an opportunity to create additional content for your brand in separate posts or on another platform.

Keep It Succinct

The attention span of online consumers has dropped yet again, and is sitting around 8 seconds. What this means for copywriters is that it’s more important than ever to keep your copy succinct! This doesn’t mean you can’t write lengthy pieces of copy. It just means that your copy needs to be easy-to-read. 

Our biggest tip on creating succinct copy is to keep your sentences short and to the point, reducing unnecessary ‘fluff’ words wherever you can. 

Write Naturally

Writing copy in a way that feels natural to you can provide a number of benefits for your business. If copywriting is an integral part of your business model, keeping things natural is an organic way of creating and maintaining your brand’s tone of voice (the way you want your brand to communicate with your audience). 

You will also find that writing naturally makes the whole process easier and more enjoyable for you! What’s more? Using your own voice to share your expertise, sell your products or promote your services will naturally attract the right audience and assist you in building relationships online. 

Proofread Everything!

Our last tip for writing killer copy is to make sure you, or your writers proofread everything. Typos, grammatical errors and unfinished sentences are a sure-fire way to tarnish your brand’s reputation. Taking an extra five minutes (or half an hour – whatever you need!) to dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s is a worthwhile and small investment of your time.  

Over time, your ability to write killer copy for your brand will improve, so keep going! Hopefully you can take some of these tips and implement them into your writing process to assist you in hitting your target audience and having your voice heard online. 

Of course, the Soqual team is always here to support you with your creative writing needs. To discuss copywriting for your brand, get in touch with our team today. 

Facebook and Instagram Ads in 2021!

Posted on by Nic Minter

In our line of business, it’s our job to unravel the confusion that can sometimes surround social media marketing. One of the areas that causes the most uncertainty for people is Facebook and Instagram advertising. 

The first thing to understand is that Facebook advertising IS Instagram advertising! When Facebook took over Instagram, the platforms became linked through Facebook Business Manager and you can only advertise on Instagram through the Facebook portal.

So, it’s essential to have a Facebook page and Facebook Business Manager as well as an Advertising Account as a starting point. After all, social media marketing is now a core component of the marketing strategy for any business that wishes to engage its consumers and create meaningful customer relations to drive sales and loyalty.

Let's look at the stats...

Facebook is still the most widely used platform of all with 2.45 billion active monthly users. 

  • 70% of all adults are Facebook users
  • 74% of high-income earners have a Facebook account – even more than LinkedIn
  • 1.62 billion users visit Facebook daily
  • More than 40% of active Facebook users follow brand pages for product updates
  • Facebook ads influence online shopping decisions for 25% of active users every day
  • Facebook has the highest referral to e-commerce sites at 80.4% compared to Instagram’s 10.7%

Of course, which platform you use the most depends on your target audience and your product or service. Instagram has a huge Millennial and Gen Z following, so if your product or service appeals to a younger demographic, it has distinct advantages over Facebook. Additionally, as it is a highly visual medium, it traditionally works best with products that depend on visuals such as fashion, beauty, food, design, etc.  

Instagram is the king of all social media platforms when it comes to social engagement. 

  • Engagement rates of branded posts in Instagram are 4.3% compared to Facebook’s 0.15%
  • Over 1 billion people use Instagram every month
  • In 2019, more than 1/3rd of Instagram users made an online purchase using their phones with their average spend being 15.4% greater than Facebook’s
  • 80% of Instagram users follow at least one business with 60% seeking out new products
  • Instagram users spend an average of 30 minutes every day on the platform
  • 90% of Instagram users follow a business

Why you should use Facebook Advertising

The primary benefit of using Facebook advertising is the ability to target and refine your audience for a reasonably low investment, and if done correctly, is perfect for small businesses. It is not enough to establish your social media profiles and regularly post engaging content – that organic content will only get you so far. To truly grow your base, you need to find and engage with new audiences and Facebook advertising can help you do that. 

Boosts vs. Advertising

Don’t make the common mistake of thinking that boosted posts are the same as advertising. Boosts have limited targeting options. You can’t target people based on behaviours or multiple matched interests and you can’t optimise your boosts based on what your objectives are – more page likes, post engagements, website clicks etc. You also can’t test your advertising when you’re boosting. Boosts are for widening the reach of your post but you have little control over how it’s done.

Benefits of Facebook Advertising

Business Objectives – you can get super specific with your business goals and create ads that can help you reach these goals.

Targeting – you can refine your audience by demographics and multiple matched interests to home in on your customer base.

Testing – one of the biggest advantages of Facebook advertising. Every advertisement should be tested to be certain that you’re spending your money in a way that will bring the best ROI possible. In Facebook Business Manager you can test audiences, the creative, the call to action, the headline, long or short copy, the graphic – just about any aspect of the ad and its delivery.

Control – advertising through Facebook Business Manager gives you control over your campaigns with the ability to continually optimise and control placements. 

Need Help?

Facebook run a Facebook Blueprint course that’s free, and teaches you how to use your Business Manager, but if that sounds like a step too far for you, then we can help! If you’re keen to DIY your social media, we can assist with a one-on-one meeting to give you a few tips and pointers specific to your business. In addition, several times a year, we run social media training courses – sign up for our regular newsletter so that you know when the next one is running. Finally, if you simply want to hand it over for an expert to take care of it, we can help with that too. Give us a call to discuss where you’re at. We’re happy to help!

We Are Soqual!

Posted on by Nic Minter

Today, I’m so excited to announce our new company name, Soqual, and what it means for us as an agency moving forward.

As social media platforms have changed, our agency and services have evolved right along with them. We’ve built our new brand identity to reflect this, and this is why we chose our new name to be Soqual. “Aligning quality businesses with quality social media.” We value you – our community, and want to show our appreciation for being part of the journey with us so far.

But firstly, I’d like to mention our continuing commitment to our clients’ success and want to thank you for your partnership and loyalty during these trying times as we navigate Covid-19. These past few weeks have seen a huge amount of change, and we’re feeling it right along with you.

It may seem a weird time to be launching our new business name. Still, we want to show you, our community that it’s okay to take risks, to keep moving forward and try something new when things feel like they’re falling apart. We champion authenticity and creativity because it’s what helps us, and our clients, stand out. We hope to inspire everyone to be bolder and take risks in their branding efforts as their businesses evolve over the next few months.

As many of you know, So Social Online started back in 2015. Social media marketing was my side hustle to my full-time job in fashion management. I’d always had a keen eye for style and wanted to explore more of my creativity in the digital space. From the moment, I got my first opportunity to work with clients, I was hooked. I knew I had found my passion and So Social Online was born.

I spent the first year educating myself on everything social media marketing. I learnt how to represent brands visually in the ever-changing digital landscape. Working in an industry that is ever-changing, staying educated and up to date is still such a crucial part of my job. I would go as far as to say I am a Social Media Marketing nerd. Leadership skills came into play when I hired my first social media strategist, Abbie, who is still with us today. Fast forward to 2020, and we have grown to a team of 6.

I can’t wait to see where the next 5 years takes us as an agency and a business! Thanks for being apart of the journey so far!

Nic xxx

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