Businesses view social outreach as a revolutionary tool that allows them to expand their marketing efforts. To reach your audiences at no cost posting to the social sphere is a quick solution. However, social media channels are now inundated with content of varying quality. Making it nearly impossible to tell what is legitimate and what is not.

The value of social media used to be found in its incredible accessibility and widespread reach for free consumption. Now the value lies in meticulously designed paid ads.

Our goal here is not to convince you that organic social media is dead or useless. Far from it. Companies should circulate content organically on social media channels because it offers a direct connection to customers. While also helping you achieve your marketing campaign goals. But it’s time to face the music: for social media content distribution to be truly effective, it demands the investment.

Facebook for Business

Did you know Facebook is used by more than 1.6 billion people every day? For marketers with a B2C focus paid ads are the best option for selling merchandise.

First determine who your audiences are, where these audiences are, and what you want to say to them. With this framework, decide which strategies will best reach your target audiences.

Reach your target audience with an ad created from a post on your company page. Then strategize how you want your post to be consumed across your digital medium. You have the option to position an ad directly in the News Feed, on the sidebar or on the popular platform, Instagram. You can also customize each ad’s target audience based on characteristics. Such as location, interests, online behaviors, and even offline behaviors.

Facebook ads are easily actionable as they allow for purchases to happen directly on Facebook. You no longer need a fancy digital storefront to showcase your products.

The Ads Reporting feature allows you to manage each campaign and measure audience engagement, offering real-time performance metrics.

LinkedIn Ads

LinkedIn has over 260 million monthly people engaged on its site and continues to grow. As the go-to networking platform for professionals all over the world, LinkedIn is a fantastic resource for marketers to reach a wider audience. LinkedIn provides you with three methods for reaching your audience via paid ads: boosted posts, sponsored InMail and pay-per-click text ads.

It’s common knowledge that boosted posts are best for supporting general awareness goals. Allowing you to feature one of your selected posts in the target audience news feeds’. For more conversion-based campaigns, consider sending sponsored InMail. This approach allows you to send personalized messages with prominent call-to-actions to your targeted audience.  

LinkedIn offers a pay-per-click ad placed either in the sidebar or news feed of users’ home pages. For instance, LinkedIn is geared towards reaching business professionals. The platform is much more personalized. Allowing you to filter by job title, industry, company size, and membership within specific LinkedIn Groups.

Similar to Facebook, measure the value of your self-service sponsored content within the Campaign Manager tool. Although a bit more costly than Facebook, LinkedIn’s sponsored content is still affordable, allowing you to set a maximum budget at a minimum of $10 daily per campaign.

Are You Prepared For 2020?

Let’s face it, but social media’s paid ads are still the cheapest way to reach the best audience possible. Contact Sage Lion Media to learn more about how to take advantage of our paid media strategies and how that the cost is worth it in the end.

Sage Lion Media loves Hubspot. Hubspot makes marketing simpler for our agency and managing our clients. With their marketing automation tools, we have more time to prospect, brainstorm, and chase fresh powder after a snowstorm in the mountains.

Hubspot is always improving their marketing automation tools and this month, they announced some pretty big news. Facebook has recognized Hubspot as a Badged Marketing Partner. With this partnership, Hubspot has the ability to directly publish to Instagram!

Why Is This Big News?

Facebook is a powerful social media marketing tool with 2.1 billion daily active users. After Facebook bought Instagram, their daily active users skyrocketed. Instagram expects to hit 1 billion active users this year!

Instagram is becoming a prime marketing tool for outdoor businesses to showcase their brand and create a new community of followers. Currently, social media marketing tools have the ability to create Instagram posts and even see analytics. But it is a convoluted process to schedule and publish a post. Most social media marketing tools give you the ability to create the post in their app, but then you have to copy and paste your post directly into Instagram. For businesses with more than one Instagram account, it’s a lot of logging in and out and memorizing usernames and passwords.

With Hubspot and Facebook’s new partnership, social media marketers can save time by scheduling posts for all social networks!

What Else?

Hubspot offers a robust, analytics feature for social media accounts. It’s simple to track engagement, clicks, contacts, and more. They also make it simple to manage different accounts and stay on top of the latest social media trends and best practices. Hubspot will incorporate these same features with Instagram making it easy to track, monitor, and manage all of your social media marketing efforts. Hubspot has also added some new features with Facebook.

• Hubspot now allows you to host, upload, and publish Facebook videos with their social tools.
• Marketers can dive even deeper with Facebook Ad targeting by syncing Hubspot lists with Facebook Audiences.
• Integrate Facebook Messenger in Hubspot so you can monitor all messages from one app.

Hubspot Loyal

Hubspot has been a lifesaver for our agency. We are able to stay ahead of our client’s needs and provide detailed analytics with their software.

If you’d like to learn how Sage Lion Media can help you get started with an effective social media strategy, contact us today.

We are 3 months into 2018 and a lot has happened with social media. From Kylie Jenner costing Snapchat $1.3 billion to Facebook potentially slapping businesses in the face with its new algorithm. Let’s look at what’s been going on in the world of social media marketing. And I promise to make no more Kardashian/Jenner references.

Facebook Algorithm Change

Mark Zuckerberg wants to get back to the roots of Facebook. Connect people with people. Several users have been frustrated with the number of posts from brands, businesses, and media so Facebook is changing its algorithm. Users will now see fewer posts from pages and more posts from friends and family.

So what does this mean for marketers? Everyone is still unsure of the new algorithm’s impact on business but here are some ways to continue standing out.

1. Quality content has always and will always be king. Facebook wants “meaningful interactions” which means, comments. When brands and businesses post on Facebook, share content that is engaging. Facebook will prioritize these posts.
2. Facebook loves video content and will continue to include them on user’s homepage. But Facebook loves live content even more. In his post in January, Zuckerberg said, “Live videos often lead to discussion among viewers…live videos on average get six times as many interactions as regular videos.” Live videos create a conversation and that’s what Facebook wants.
3. Brand ambassadors have been trending for social media marketers. Instead of focusing on the “big fish,” start connecting with real people. If a brand ambassador has a personal Facebook page, ask them to share content on there. Have a diehard fan with a lot of Facebook friends? Surprise them with a bunch of free stuff and have them review it on their personal page.

Other News for Facebook

• Facebook is seeing a decline in users. Last year, they lost 2.8 million users under the age of 25! Social media platforms like, Snapchat, are swooping up Gen Z.
• And finally, some good news. Facebook is making it easier for businesses to see how their Page is performing. Post views will now be based on viewable impressions. Previously, reach was defined as a post showing up in a users News Feed. Post views will now only count when the post enters the user’s screen. This will give businesses a more accurate view of their post views even though they might see a dip in reach.

Twitter

A decline in daily and monthly active users has plagued Twitter for a while but there might be some bright light. Even though the US has seen a 2% drop in daily active users, people who use the app are spending more time on it and engaging more. Why? In November of 2017, Twitter upped its character count in a tweet from 140 to 280. This has made it easier and faster for users to tweet. Tweets that reach the 280 character limit are also being liked and retweeted more often. These users also have more followers and mentions.

Twitter has also improved their ads which has seen a 75% increase in engagement from 2016 to 2017. Rumors of Twitter being on its deathbed have echoed around Silicon Valley but businesses looking for quality engagement with their fans might want to think twice. There are over 67 million Twitter users in the United States. Majority of those users are 18-49 which means they have buying power. While other businesses are pulling back on Twitter, we’ll stay in the conversation with the apps engaged Tweeters.

Anything Else?

The world of social media is evolving for better or worse. One of the better changes is Hubspot’s new integration with Instagram. As a valued Hubspot Partner, we are ecstatic about this!

And as an inbound marketing agency, we want to help your business attract the ideal customers and convert, close, and delight them so your outdoor business can prosper. Social media is an amazing tool and we understand the work that goes into it.