The Power of Purpose: How Taking a Stand Helps Brands to Win Customer’s Hearts (and Business)

Black Friday is the busiest shopping day of the year in the U.S., with more than 116 million people hitting the shops in search of a great deal.

But REI, an outdoor clothing and equipment brand, does Black Friday differently to other retailers.

For the fourth year in a row, REI closed its doors on Black Friday 2018, giving every one of its 12,000 employees the day off to enjoy the outdoors.

“There are things more important than buying/selling tents – like going outside and actually using them,” it explained on Twitter.

It might seem counter-intuitive to think that closing all your retail stores on the busiest shopping day of the year will be good for business. But that’s exactly what REI has found.

REI’s CEO, Jerry Stritzke believes that the relationships between consumers and brands are changing — whilst you used to be able to win people over with deals, you now need “something more”, he told Business Insider.

And it seems that Stritzke’s intuition has led REI down the right path.

“Since launching #OptOutside, we’ve watched more than 200 retailers go out of business,” Stritzke told BestBlackFriday.com. “We’ve stayed healthy partly because we’ve stuck with our core values — like giving our employees time to do what they love with the people they love during the holidays. It’s enabled us to add millions of new members and, most importantly, connect millions of people with the outdoors.”

According to data from Edelman, sixty-four percent of consumers around the world will choose, switch, avoid or boycott a business based on its stand on societal and political issues.

But taking a stand isn’t as simple as jumping in on a trending topic on Twitter, or sharing a quick piece of content here and there. It must run much deeper than that.

“You have to be walking the walk before you talk the talk,” Mike Dupree, Senior Manager for Media & Entertainment at Twitter, explained to me.

Mike has been working with brands on their content and marketing efforts on Twitter for over six years, and he recently jumped on a call with me to explain the power of purpose-driven marketing — the topic of his talk at this year’s Social Fresh conference.

Demonstration before communication

REI’s Opt Outside campaign has been incredibly successful since it first launched in 2015 because it’s not just a marketing front — even REI’s CEO, takes Black Friday off to enjoy the outdoors.

And Mike believes that this authenticity is key, not only to REI’s success, but to any purpose-driven campaign: “Being authentic is always critical in marketing, but when it comes to brand purpose it becomes even more important.”

“Any purpose-driven campaign shouldn’t be viewed as a short-term thing,” Mike explained. “The purpose has to be deep rooted in the company across all facets of the organisation — from marketing and customer service to communications and policy, and everywhere in between.”

“In short, it’s about demonstration before communication,” Mike concluded.

This is exactly why Opt Outside has worked for REI. For years before it launched the campaign, and communicated its “Opt Outside” ethos, it had demonstrated it through its actions. Enjoying the outdoors is a part of REI’s brand message, and over the years it has consistently supported nonprofit partners, and encouraged both employees and customers to make the most of the outdoors.

Having a purpose without being divisive, or taking sides

“We know that consumers will buy or boycott brands based on a social or political issue,” Mike explained. “So there’s always a risk when you choose to be bold.”

But to stand for something, and embrace a purpose, brands don’t need to create campaigns that choose sides on political, or social topics.

“We’ve seen numerous examples of brands taking a stand without taking sides,” Mike told me. “The key is to find universal issues that strike a cultural chord with anybody — something that everybody can get behind.”

For example, throughout 2018 brands have consistently helped out with disaster relief efforts after after hurricanes, superstorms, and earthquakes.

Verizon deployed mobile towers and generators to those regions prone to natural disasters so that it could assist with communication during disaster relief. It then communicated this by creating a campaign, #AllOurThanks, that enabled people to share their gratitude to first responders who are always there in times of crisis.

And Anheuser-Busch sent more than 300,000 cans of emergency canned drinking water to local communities in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia as the states prepared for the expected impacts of Hurricane Florence.

This action wasn’t a one-off, though. Water is incredibly important to Anheuser-Busch’s brewing process, and it has been committed to conserving water for years as part of its Better World focus. Since 2010, it has partnered with the River Network to host a series of local river and watershed restoration and protection projects.

3 steps to finding a purpose that aligns with your brand

The campaigns we’ve discussed so far (REI, Verizon, Anheuser-Busch) all have something in common:

The purpose they support is fully aligned with their brand — and that’s not an accident. As Mike explained:

“Ideally as a brand you decide to choose an area that aligns with your brand purpose that also connects with your overall brand ethos, and the product/service you offer. If you choose that well, having your brand be a part of the campaign shouldn’t be taken the wrong way.”

Here are three things to consider before aligning your brand with a purpose:

1. Does your brand have a right or role to be here?

You never want to shoehorn your brand into a conversation in which it doesn’t belong. “This can be a PR nightmare,” Mike told me.

The best examples of purpose-driven marketing are when brands connect with issues and purposes that they have long supported or played a part in. Anheuser-Busch’s water campaign worked for its brand because it has been supporting clean water-related causes since 2010 — it wasn’t just jumping in during a moment of crisis to try and grab some attention.

“If you’re already walking the walk as a brand, you’ll know what discussions to be a part of and where to stay away,” Mike explained.

2. Are you doing or just saying?

It’s not enough to simply jump into a conversation during a fleeting moment, you have to have actions that back up your communications.

“Consistency over time is important,” Mike told me. “If you want to build an enduring connection with your customers you have to have consistency over time. Both in what you’re doing and what you’re saying.”

Mike continued: “If it’s just a trending hashtag or we’re in the middle of a crisis and you want to jump in quickly to get some social media micro-wins, that’s not going to help your brand and it’ll probably hurt your brand in the long run.”

3. Will this stand up in five years from now?

This is a great question to ask yourself. When it comes to purpose-driven marketing, you need to think about how this campaign will be looked back on and how it might shape your business moving forward.

If it’s fully aligned with your business ethos and historic actions, you’ll more than likely look back on it as a positive. But if you’re just jumping into a trending topic, or something your brand isn’t fully aligned with it probably won’t stand the test of time.

Take the REI “Opt Outside” campaign. The team at REI knew that it was completely in-line with its business ethos, and the impact would be seen as positive — even if it did lose out on sales on the biggest shopping day of the year.

“REI is a retail brand that has a business interest in Black Friday. But it has more of an interest in embracing the outdoors lifestyle and culture than it does in one big shopping day each year,” Mike explained. “It believes that this approach will keep customers coming back, and build loyalty that lasts years, and years.”

You’re never too small to have a purpose

Verizon, REI, and Anheuser-Busch are huge brands. But that doesn’t mean a smaller business can’t make an impact with purpose-driven marketing.

Just look at businesses like TOMS. When TOMS first launched its shoes, its purpose was front and center: for every pair of shoes you buy, another pair will be donated to people in need in countries around the world.

And no matter your size, embracing purpose-driven marketing is a great way to stand out and build strong, lasting relationships with consumers.

“It’s never been harder for brands to stand out and make connections that are enduring if you can do that it’ll help your business [in the long-term],” Mike concluded.

“We see that 75 percent of consumers expect brands to make a contribution to their well-being, and quality of life — if you aren’t doing that you’ll be left behind. And that’s applicable to businesses of any size.”

Mike Dupree will be sharing more about the power of purpose during his talk at the Social Fresh conference. Social Fresh 2018 will be taking place on December 5-7, 2018 at Full Sail University, Winter Park, FL. Click here for more information or to book your ticket.

source https://blog.bufferapp.com/purpose-driven-marketing

Life After the News Feed: Why Facebook is Shifting to Stories (And Why Your Business Should Too)

The News Feed is one of Facebook’s marque innovations.

Rolled out to users in 2006, it became the go-to place for people to connect with their friends,  share updates about their day-to-day life and enjoy content from brands they followed. Not to mention, it also played a pivotal role in Facebook’s march to advertising dominance.

In life and business, though, change is inevitable. And just as popular culture, music, and fashion move on,  Facebook should too.

For nearly a decade, the News Feed was the jewel in Facebook’s crown. However, over the past couple of years, Facebook has been locked into a battle with misinformation, troubled by privacy issues, and found itself trying to counter a decline in original content (photos, videos, status updates) shared by users. It even admitted the News Feed can have a negative impact on mental health.

This wasn’t the way it was meant to be.

Facebook was meant to help people stay connected with those closest to them. But Mark Zuckerberg has admitted that the platform has underdelivered there. In a post on his Facebook Page back in January the Facebook founder noted:

“Recently we’ve gotten feedback from our community that public content — posts from businesses, brands, and media — is crowding out the personal moments that lead us to connect more with each other.”

And that should be a big worry for Facebook. When the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology looked into what factors can kill a social network, they found that when the bonds between users weren’t particularly strong, neither was the users’ relationship with that network.

The study also found that as networks grow, they become more cluttered, so we begin to miss out on some of the most relevant content from those closest to us. This is most definitely the case with Facebook — and was a key factor in the company’s decision to shift the News Feed to focus more on updates from people, not brands.

In a blog post about this change Facebook shared:

“Because space in News Feed is limited, showing more posts from friends and family and updates that spark conversation means we’ll show less public content, including videos and other posts from publishers or businesses.”

The rise of Stories

While the News Feed has been experiencing growing pains, a new format has arisen: Stories.

Since Snapchat debuted the Stories format in 2013, it’s gone from strength to strength and is quickly becoming the default format for content consumption and creation. In total, consulting firm Block Party estimates that nearly one billion accounts are using the Stories format daily and Zuckerberg recently shared that people now post more than one billion Stories every day.

At its annual, flagship conference, F8, Chris Cox, Facebook’s Facebook’s chief product officer, also noted that “the Stories format is on a path to surpass feeds as the primary way people share things with their friends sometime next year.” And Zuckerberg recently added that “it looks like Stories will be a bigger medium than [news] feed has been.”

The shift to stories is coming

From making the status composer default to the camera to encourage Story creation on mobile, to adding Story preview tiles to the top of the feed, Facebook is constantly running tests and experiments to familiarise more of its user base with Stories.

Over on Instagram, 47 percent of users find that Instagram Stories helps them be more authentic in their communication with friends and family, something Facebook would love to encourage on its flagship product too.

In short, it feels safe to say that Facebook is pivoting to Stories. But when your platform is the size of Facebook’s, no change is ever simple.

The roadblocks ahead for Stories

The biggest hurdle for Facebook’s move to Stories is revenue.

Right now, the majority of Facebook’s advertising revenue comes from the News Feed. As Zuckerberg recently share in a post on his Facebook Page:

“Another challenge is that we’re earlier in developing our ads products for stories, so we don’t make as much money from them yet as we do from feed ads. We’re following our normal playbook here of building out the best consumer products first and focusing on succeeding there before ramping up ads. I’m optimistic that we’ll get ads in stories to perform as well as feed over time, and that the opportunity will be even bigger because it looks like stories will be a bigger medium than feed has been.”

Though Facebook has rolled out Stories Ads, it will need to reinvent mobile video ads for this to be a success. Pre and post-roll video ads within Stories is fine for now, but if Stories are to become as profitable as the News Feed, Facebook needs to think outside the box and develop a brand new ad product from the ground up, like it did with News Feed ads five-or-so years ago.

The second hurdle is ensuring users buy into Stories.

300 million daily active users across Facebook and Messenger is great — it’s probably even more daily active users than Snapchat has on its own Stories (according to data obtained by The Daily Beast). But Facebook has 2.2 billion monthly users and the vast majority don’t use Stories yet.

Like it or not, Stories will replace the News Feed

When it comes time to shift away from the News Feed, it’s more likely that users will just have to deal with the hand they’re dealt.

When the News Feed launched, Facebook users had no choice about adopting it, and it wasn’t instantly popular — a group called “Students Against Facebook News Feed” was even formed, reaching more than 280,000 members at its peak.

Despite the pushback, Facebook persisted knowing that no matter how loud or vocal people were in reaction to the change, they would still likely continue to use Facebook anyway.

The same Swiss Federal Institute of Technology study I mentioned earlier found that when left with only two available coping strategies: to accept change or to leave, the vast majority will accept change and continue to use Facebook.

And in a 2006 post about the News Feed, then TechCrunch editor, Michael Arrington noted that: “If this feature had been part Facebook since the beginning, their users would be screaming if Facebook tried to remove it.” Eventually, I believe we’ll look back at Facebook Stories in the same way.

Stories might not be welcomed by all. But one thing is for certain: however you feel about it, it’s time to start preparing for life after the News Feed.

4 ways your business can embrace Stories

Stories are an essential part of a modern social media strategy.

Block Party’s research found that nearly four in five (79 percent) of businesses use Stories on Instagram. Instagram also found that more than one in three said that they have become more interested in a brand or product after seeing it in Instagram Stories.

As the user numbers continue to grow on Facebook Stories, it won’t be long until a large number of businesses start moving to post there too. But we’re not quite there yet.

Block Party found that only nine of 100 accounts it tracked on Instagram Stories, also posted to Facebook Stories. “All but one of those exclusively syndicated their Instagram Stories to Facebook,” it said. However, some early adopters have already started seeing better results from Facebook Stories than the News Feed.

Here are four ways you can begin to use Stories for your business and ensure you’re riding atop the next big social media wave.

1. Take your audience behind-the-scenes

Stories offer a perfect way to share unfiltered, authentic content with your audience.

Design agency AJ&Smart uses Stories to provide an authentic look at what’s happening at the business day-to-day and tries to show as much of that in real-time as possible.

For example, in its Stories, you might see behind-the-scenes at a client workshop or the team traveling to a client meeting.

The Guardian also found that, on Stories, “less polished” content performs better than heavily produced videos, so you don’t have to worry about the production quality of your content. Instead, just point and shoot with your phone and focus on creating a compelling narrative.

2. Cross-post between Instagram and Facebook

If you’ve linked your Instagram account to your Facebook page, you can cross-post your Stories content at the tap of a button, or even set your account to automatically publish all of your Stories from Instagram to Facebook.

To do this, tap your profile icon in the top-right corner of Instagram, then open your “Account settings” and choose “Story controls”. From here, tap the switch to turn on auto-posting to Facebook:

Cross-posting the same content to Instagram and Facebook might not be the best long-term strategy as your audience on the two platforms might prefer different content. But this is a great way to get started, and learn a little about what your audience enjoys on both platforms.

3. Experiment with Stories ads

Stories ads are a new addition to Facebook’s ad inventory and enable brands to share image-based or short video ads. At Buffer, we started testing Stories ads a few months back and now we’re seeing clicks to our website from Stories for just $0.06!

It’s super simple to get started with Stories ads and we’ve just launched Stories Creator, a simple tool to help you design thumb-stopping images for your Stories ads.

To help you create Facebook and Instagram Stories ads that’ll get you results, here are three tips for creating great Stories ad creatives and the exact steps to creating Facebook and Instagram Stories ads.

4. Share user-generated content to Stories

User-generated content is incredibly powerful on Instagram. In fact, it helped us to grow our Buffer account to over 40,000 followers.

And Stories offers businesses the chance to repost content from their audience at a more frequent pace than in the feed. For example, Kettlebell Kings regularly shares one or two user-generated posts to its feed each day, but by using Stories it can share 10-12 posts from followers.

This content is incredibly engaging for its audience as people who follow Kettlebell Kings love to see workout examples and techniques. It’s also incredibly rewarding for those featured and it encourages more and more customers to share their content on Instagram.

Over to you

What are your thoughts on the future of Stories on Facebook? Has your business started posting Stories? Let us know in the comments below — excited to join the conversation.

source https://blog.bufferapp.com/life-after-the-news-feed

24+ Sites to Find Free Images You Would Actually Use for Your Marketing

Here at Buffer, we think a lot about visual content.

We’ve shared our own study on the importance of images in Twitter posts for more social sharing. We’ve explored tools that help anyone create visual content. Our social media management tool incorporates image posting because we know how important that element is to engage your followers and fans.

But there’s one question we get asked quite often: Where can you find free images that are high quality and cleared to use for your blog posts or social media content?

It’s a question with a lot of different answers and caveats. Nearly every image created in the last 30 years is still protected by copyright—a protection that gives virtually every author the exclusive right to use or reproduce their work. But you can find a public domain photo, use a Creative Commons image that might need attribution, or even create your own image from scratch.

In this post, we’ll share more than 20 different sources and tools for free images, covering searchable image sites, create-your-own-image tools, and more.

(Related: If you are interested in learning how to pick and use such images, you might like our complete guide to using stock images in your marketing.)

Understand these terms before using any free images

A few things to know before we get started. The following terms will come up often as we discuss free image sources. Read over the terms and conditions of each site you try so you know exactly when and what type of attribution is required.

What is Creative Commons?

Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that enables the sharing and use of creativity and knowledge through free legal tools. There are various types of Creative Commons licenses that range from allowing any type of use with no attribution to allowing only certain uses and no changes.

What is public domain?

Works in the public domain are those whose copyrights have expired, have been forfeited, or are inapplicable. Finding something on the internet does not mean it is in the public domain.

What is royalty free?

Royalty-free images aren’t necessarily free. In most cases, you’ll have to pay a one-time fee to obtain the rights to use the image. Then you can use it as many times as you like. The “free” in “royalty-free” only means that you do not have to pay royalties to the owner of the image every time you use it. For a comprehensive read on royalty-free images, check out this guide by Amos Struck.

24+ websites to find free images for your marketing

To better help you evaluate these sites, I performed the same search, if possible, on each using the term “happy people.”

1. Unsplash

Unsplash has its own license, which essentially lets you use the images for free, in any way you like, except for using them to create a competing website. (We are huge fans of Unsplash here at Buffer!)

2. Burst (by Shopify)

Burst is a free stock photo platform for entrepreneurs by Shopify. The images are both free and royalty-free. (Burst has a cool section of business ideas, with tips and high-resolution images for getting your business started.)

3. Pexels

Pexels also has its own license, which states what you can and cannot do with the images. You can use and modify the images for free for both commercial and personal use without attribution.

4. Pixabay

Images on Pixabay are licensed under Creative Commons Zero (CC0), which means you can use the images without asking for permission or giving credit to the artist (though it’s always appreciated). Pixabay provides a gentle reminder to check that the content depicted in the images doesn’t infringe any rights.

5. Free Images

Free Images provides over 300,000 free stock images under its own license. The license allows a very broad range of uses, though it does list several restricted use cases (which are quite common for most free images sites).

6. Kaboompics

Kaboompics uses its own license, which is similar to Creative Commons Zero except that you cannot redistribute its photos. There are two things that I love about Kaboompics: one, it allows me to search by color, and two, it provides a complementary palette of colors in the photo.

7. Stocksnap.io

Stocksnap uses the Creative Commons CC0 license so its photos are free to download, edit, and use for both commercial and non-commercial projects.

8. Canva

Canva is an online graphic design tool that also offers free stock photos. One advantage of using Canva is that you can quickly turn an image into a custom graphic to use on social media or your blog.

9. Life of Pix

Life of Pix lists free high-resolution photographs and partners with Adobe Stock for more (paid) stock photographs.

10. Gratisography

Gratisography also has its own free photo license, which lets you do “almost anything you can think of”. While they have a rather limited number of images now, many are high-quality images that I would use.

11. Flickr

Flickr is an image hosting platform where you can find images that can be used and modified for commercial purposes. Select “Commercial use & mods allowed” under the “Any license” filter to find those images, and remember to check the license for each image as they vary.

12. The Jopwell Collection (by Jopwell)

The Jopwell Collection contains several albums with hundreds of images featuring people in the Jopwell community. The images are free to be downloaded and used as long as you visibly attribute Jopwell. (You can read the story behind this collection here.)

13. WOCinTech

This is an album of photos of women of color in tech, started by Christina and Stephanie, the founders of #WOCinTech Chat. The images can be used as long as you attribute #WOCinTech Chat or wocintechchat.com. (While the team isn’t updating the album anymore, there are over 500 images to choose from!)

14. CreateHER Stock

CreateHER Stock’s team has manually curated more than 200 high-quality images of women of color, which might be used for personal use only. (Do check out their license here.) You can also receive new free images every month when you sign up to their newsletter.

15. Death to Stock

Unlike most websites mentioned in this post, Death to Stock doesn’t have a gallery of images. It sends you 20 new photos every month when you sign up for its newsletter.

16. Getty Images

This might come as a surprise to you (as it was to me). You can use images from Getty Images on your non-commercial websites for free by embedding them. Downloading an image and uploading it to your website is still a no-no—you’ve got to embed it. An embed is slightly more intrusive than simply adding a photo into your post – the embed keeps its own frame, share buttons, and branding. Still, for many blogs, it’s an option worth looking into.

17. PicJumbo

PicJumbo offers a variety of free images for any kind of use—free of charge with no registration required. You can also get new free images by subscribing to their newsletter. (If you have the budget to spare, do check out their premium photo collections such as this, which looks amazing to me! It even has vertical images for Stories content.)

18. Crello

Similar to Canva, Crello is a free graphic design tool by Depositphotos, which has many free images for you to use.

19. Depositphotos

Depositphoto offers a sample of free images, vectors, editorial content, and footages, which is updated every week. You can also sign up for an account to get the free stock files every week.

20. iStock

iStock releases a new batch of free stock files every week when you sign up for a free membership.

21. New Old Stock

New Old Stock is a collection of vintage photos from the public archives, free of known copyright restrictions.

22. Superfamous

Superfamous houses the work of Dutch interaction designer Folkert Gorter, whose photography is available under the conditions of a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. This means that you can use the work for your own purposes — including commercial use — as long as credit is provided.

23. Google Advanced Image Search

Google Advanced Image Search is a method of finding free-to-use images through Google’s own search tools. Here’s a quick guide.

24+. Facebook posts, Instagram posts, tweets, and more

It’s also worth noting that you can embed Facebook posts, Instagram posts, tweets, YouTube videos and even Slideshare decks to your blog post.

Pinterest boards are a little trickier to embed, but it can be done by using its widget builder and copying and pasting the code into your blog post. (For WordPress users, I noticed that I have to publish the blog post while in the “Text” editor mode after pasting the code for this to work.)

Often, readers can engage with embedded posts more deeply than static content by following users, liking, or commenting on the posts.

Consider replacing screenshots with embedded posts so that readers can engage with your examples.

Schedule your images with Buffer

Thanks so much for reading all the way to the end of the blog post. As a thank you, I would love to share a nifty feature that we have built into Buffer to help you share your images as quickly as possible.

Whenever you share your blog posts or marketing websites with Buffer (either through your dashboard or the browser extension), we will automatically pick up images from those websites and suggest them to you for your social media posts. You just have to click on your favorite image to add it to your social media post.

(Note: When sharing images from others’ websites, it’s always advisable to check with the owner of the website or image first.)

Over to you

What free image sites did I miss? What tools do you like the most to find or create images? I’d love to keep the list growing in the comments!

P.s. If you are looking for background music for your videos, you might like our collection here.

source https://blog.bufferapp.com/free-images

How a Branded Hashtag Campaign Helped Tommy’s Superfoods to Reach More Than One Million People

When Tommy Williams was growing up in Austin Texas, he probably didn’t think his love for cooking and local farmers markets would lead to starting a nationally-recognized food brand.

But that’s exactly what happened.

Williams began to embrace his entrepreneurial spirit after college. As a graduate, he started selling a variety of salsas and spice mixes in local retailers — and this is where his passion for promoting a healthier way of eating really came to the fore.

In 2014, Tommy’s Superfoods was born. The company sells non-GMO verified, seasoned frozen vegetables and its products are now available in popular retailers such as Costco, Bristol Farms, Kroger, and more.

However, as any business in the consumer goods industry will tell you, it can be hard to stand out next to thousands of other quality products.

Tommy’s Superfoods needed a way to simultaneously increase brand recognition and brand loyalty. The resulting campaign helped the business to reach more than one million people on social media and grow its email list by 22 percent.

Here’s how the campaign generated these impressive results…

Creating a movement to help achieve business goals

Wondering how to go about increasing its brand recognition and growing its email list, Tommy’s Superfoods turned to Road Warrior Creative, an agency that specializes in food and social good marketing.

The campaign — #ThinkVeggiesFirst — was focused on teaching people to start each meal by choosing the vegetable component first, as a healthy way of eating.

“We decided to build the campaign as a monthly challenge,” explained Amber Hinds, Creative Director & CEO of Road Warrior Creative. “We challenged people to eat vegetables at every meal – even breakfast!”

The campaign initially ran for the month of February and aligned perfectly with the time of year when people are still thinking about New Year’s resolutions. “We made it a ‘movement’ that people could engage with and participate in,” said Amber.

Amber and her team needed a way to not only inspire people to eat more vegetables but also build awareness of its products and drive signups to Tommy’s Superfoods’ mailing list.

To do this, Road Warrior Creative worked alongside Tommy’s Superfoods to create a ton of added value for people who signed up to its email list.

“We created a branded landing page where people who joined the email list would receive a free printable meal planner download, coupons for buy one get one free on Tommy’s Superfoods products, and could enter to win 100 free packages of Tommy’s.”

Building a successful multi-channel marketing campaign

With the #ThinkVeggiesFirst concept in the bag, Amber and her team then needed to figure out how they could generate awareness of the campaign, and drive traffic to the landing page.

To do this they first looked at what they could learn from other campaigns in the healthy eating niche. “We began researching similar ideas and learning about the types of content that would work best for achieving campaign goals,” Amber explained.

Creating a content plan

Next, it was time to put everything they learned from their research stage into a cohesive content plan, looking at when they would publish blog posts and email newsletters as well as Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest posts.

Mailchimp made it simple for Road Warrior Creative to set up a bunch of email messages to send subscribers during the challenge.

The email campaigns focused on keeping new signups on track during the 28-day challenge. For example, around half-way through the campaign they shared a bunch of fun, veggie-first meal ideas:

When it came to social media content Amber and the Road Warrior team focused on creating content native to each platform: sharing beautiful images of veggie-first meals on Instagram, saving recipes to its boards on Pinterest and posting videos on Facebook.

And with Buffer’s social media publishing tools in their corner, it was simple to get the whole month’s content scheduled across Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram in one go.

Data point:
According to data from Meltwater, Tommy’s Superfoods’ #ThinkVeggiesFirst content on social media has reached more than one million people since the campaign started in February.

Complementing organic content with paid ads

Paid social media ads also played a part in the #ThinkVeggiesFirst campaign. Road Warrior set up various audiences within Facebook Ads, targeting people with an interest in healthy eating and custom audiences containing recent website visitors.

Amber says the largest social media success during the campaign came from Facebook ads. “We saw greater engagement and conversions from video ads than ads with still imagery,” she noted. “And greater success with retargeted ads than those to a defined audience.“

Encouraging user-generated content

They also used the sweepstakes component of campaign — the chance to win 100 free packs of Tommy’s Superfoods vegetables for joining its mailing list — as a way to encourage user-generated content. Every person who signed up to the mailing list received an entry to the sweepstakes, then, for additional entries, they were encouraged to post their own ‘veggie-centric’ meals on Instagram, tagging Tommy’s and #ThinkVeggiesFirst in the photo.

Over the course of February, each email sent to Tommy’s Superfoods subscribers featured a reminder about the campaign:

And the hashtag has now been used more than 600 times on Instagram:

Amber also focused on generating links back to the landing page from popular healthy eating and sweepstakes websites. “A large number of signups were also generated by link building efforts — all unpaid, more of a matter of time and effort put in than cost — and getting other websites to talk about and share the sweepstakes with their followers.”

Building towards long-term success

At the end of February, Tommy’s Superfoods had grown its email list by 22 percent in just 28-days.

And what started out as a month-long campaign has become a staple part of Tommy’s Superfoods marketing strategy.

Once February was over, the #ThinkVeggiesFirst campaign didn’t end. Instead, the landing page was updated to remove any mentions of the sweepstakes, and it continues to be a regular source of email subscribers for the brand.

On social, #ThinkVeggiesFirst has also remained a key part of Tommy’s Superfoods strategy with the hashtag being used on each of its Instagram posts, and it has also begun working with micro-influencers to encourage people to eat healthily and help keep its products top-of-mind at meal times.

If you’re looking to learn more about how you can create multi-channel marketing campaigns, and grow your business using email, social media, and more, check out our new series: The 5-Part Small Business Marketing Playbook.

Over the course of five days, you’ll receive top tips, strategies, and best practices around making the most out of your small business marketing and social media campaigns. Proudly brought to you by the folks at Mailchimp, Square, WooCommerce, and Buffer.

source https://blog.bufferapp.com/tommys-superfoods-hashtag-campaign

Introducing Stories Creator: Quickly Create Thumb-Stopping Content for Stories

As a social media marketer, a big part of your job is to build awareness of your brand and drive conversions on various social channels.

This could mean creating an engaging video for Facebook. Planning out and scheduling your tweets for the week. Writing a thought-provoking article for LinkedIn Pulse. The list goes on…

You do all of this because you want to use the unique, native features of each channel to connect with your audience. You want everyone to have the best possible experience every time they interact with your brand.

And in 2018 and beyond, there’s a good chance this means you’re also creating content for Instagram and Facebook Stories. More than one billion people use the Stories format each day, meaning it’s an amazing opportunity for your business to reach your customers on social media.

However, creating fresh content for Stories can be incredibly time-consuming — and there are only so many hours in each day.

We’ve been there.

At Buffer, we create new content for Stories daily and we know how the seemingly simple task of creating a Stories advert, highlight cover, or graphic soon becomes incredibly daunting.

So we wanted to make it easier for you to create your Stories content in a quick and lightweight way.

Today, we are launching Stories Creator

Right now, we believe that Stories are the biggest opportunity for small businesses to connect with customers on social media and we wanted to give you an easy way to create Stories content.

Instead of needing various, professional design products and doing a bunch of work to create a story, Stories Creator gives you the freedom to create thumb-stopping graphics in minutes.

When building this tool, we wanted to focus on the foundation of a good story — the simple elements that keep our attention. This simplicity is what Stories Creator is all about.

The fastest way to create thumb-stopping Facebook and Instagram Stories

Social media users are used to tapping through Stories as a fast rate and, as a marketer, you only have milliseconds to grab someone’s attention in Stories.

It takes something special to make people stop in their tracks and pay attention.

Designing these thumb-stopping graphics can be hard work, especially if you don’t have a designer on hand to help. Stories Creator allows anyone to quickly create Stories that catch your eye and make you want to take a closer look!

With this free tool, you can create the foundation of your Stories with text, graphics, and a background image or color. When you’re ready to post your Story to Instagram or Facebook, you can upload it, add in any other content you’d like (stickers, location tags, etc), and then send your post out into the world.

It’s as easy as one-two-three

Here’s how you can use Stories Creator to design an image for your Instagram or Facebook Stories in three simple steps:

Step 1: Add a background image or color

First, start with the background of your image. Within Stories Creator you can upload a background graphic from your computer, or set a background color from your brand color palette to keep your design consistent with the rest of your brand.

Step 2: Add your text and graphics

Next, add graphics and text to your design. Stories Creator enables you to add up to three blocks of text to your image. You can choose from over 25 fonts, edit text size, change the font color, adjust alignment, and even add a background highlight to make it stand out.

You can also add additional logos or graphics to add extra flair to your design. To add additional graphics, upload any PNG or JPG images from your computer and adjust the sizes to fit your design.

Step 3: Download your image and post to Instagram

Stories Creator features an Instagram Stories UI overlay to show you exactly how your post will look when it’s posted to Instagram. This means you can check that none of the important content will be blocked by the Instagram Stories UI features (such as your account’s profile image) when you post it.

If it all looks great, click ‘Download’ and your perfectly sized graphic is ready to share on Instagram or Facebook Stories.

Get started with the free Stories Creator tool today!

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3 ways you can use Stories Creator to up your Stories game

1. Make your Stories stand out with custom designs

Currently, many businesses simply roll out their existing Facebook Ads to Instagram or Facebook Stories by ticking the ‘Stories’ placement options within Ads Manager.

And we get this. We’ve done it ourselves. When you’re just testing out a new advertising channel or ad set, you don’t want to spend hours crafting a design when you can click a button and Facebook will automatically share your ads to Stories.

But when we started using custom designs for our Stories ads, our results completely changed. We’re now seeing clicks to our website from Stories for just $0.06!

Here’s a look at one of our generic Stories ads compared to a custom-designed ad:

It’s hard for businesses to stand out from the crowd when all adverts look and feel the same. Your Instagram and Facebook Stories ads could be much more effective with unique, full-screen (9:16) content.

To help, we’ve even built some neat templates to help you use Stories ads to drive awareness of your latest blog post or promote any sales and offers your business is running.

2. Add covers to your Stories Highlights

Instagram Story Highlights allows you to showcase Stories on your profile, even after they disappear. Highlights appear directly below your profile photo.

One trend we’ve seen crop up since the Highlights feature was released is adding custom covers to your highlights.

For example, Nodo Cafe displays a bunch of themed highlights on its profile and, when you tap a highlight to view its content, you’ll see the cover image first:

Using Stories Creator, you can quickly put together a bunch of eye-catching covers for your evergreen Stories Highlights to ensure your profile looks great and to encourage people to tap on your highlights.

3. Drive engagement and action from your day-to-day Stories

Stories vanish after 24 hours, so you need to ensure you’re posting engaging, thumb-stopping content each and every day.

For example:

Purewow uses its daily Stories posts to promote content on its website:

Chilly’s Bottles uses Stories to showcase new products:

And Airbnb uses simple Stories graphics to run fun quizzes for its followers:

By using Stories Creator, you can mix in custom graphics alongside your point-and-shoot photos and videos.

Take Stories Creator for a test-drive

We’re incredibly excited to share Stories Creator with you today and we’d be honored if you’d be up for taking it for a spin and letting us know your thoughts and feedback.

source https://blog.bufferapp.com/buffer-stories-creator

Why Personalization is the Next Big Opportunity in Social Media Marketing

Social media marketers are always looking to uncover the “next big thing”, and as we head into 2019 personalized social media engagement is becoming the latest must-have strategy for businesses of all sizes.

According to recent Epsilon research, 80 percent of consumers are more likely to do business with a company if it offers a personalized experience.

And this applies to social media too. Today’s social media users want to interact with brands on a personal level and be treated as individuals.

But how exactly do you go about creating personalized social media experiences?

Look no further than Kimpton Hotels and Restaurants. Kimpton truly understands the importance of personalization on social media and has built a team that’s focused on delivering “ridiculously personal experiences” to customers both online and offline.

How Kimpton provides personalized social media experiences for customers

Director of Social Media at Kimpton Hotels & Restaurants, Whitney Reynolds has spearheaded its shift towards a more personalized social media strategy and Kimpton now uses social media as a way to provide surprise and delight to everyone the business interacts with.

“At Kimpton, we believe that heartfelt, human connections make people’s lives better. That’s why we go out of our way to create what we call ‘ridiculously personal experiences’ both on property and online.”– Whitney Reynolds, Director of Social Media, Kimpton Hotels & Restaurants

For example, when one customer tweeted about the great in-person experience they’d received at a Kimpton hotel in Nashville, its social team continued that experience by sharing an additional recommendation to enhance the customer’s stay:

The Kimpton social media team is also keen to ensure that these one-off, in-the-moment interactions aren’t lost:

“We ask a lot of conversational questions so that we get to know more about each guest every time [we interact on social media], and we use a social CRM to make note of the interesting things that we want to remember about you.”

So if you were to share that you love pugs, have four kids, or fundraise for a particular nonprofit, Kimpton will make a note of it ready for your next conversation.

“We treasure this information,” Whitney said. “It means we don’t have to start from scratch with every conversation on social. We’re picking up with our followers where we left off.”

The importance of human-to-human interactions

While technology plays a part behind-the-scenes, Kimpton’s social media personalization strategy is powered by humans — and Whitney sees the team as the most important part of this strategy.

Kimpton’s social media engagement is handled by its Social Listening Desk, a team that responds to social chatter 24/7/365 across all its social channels.

“We hire for heart. Technical writing skills and knowledge of social platforms are important, but the most essential qualities we look for in a Social Listening Desk team member are empathy, heart and a sense of humor.”

“For our social media team, it’s really about finding the right people from the start – the ones who innately go out of their way to connect with each person, and get a real kick out of doing it.”

The Social Listening Desk team are also encouraged to go out of their way to make people feel special in each message:

“If there’s an opportunity to make someone’s day by really personalizing an interaction, our Listening Desk is empowered to act on it. We even have a mechanism for surprising and delighting our followers that anyone on our social team can activate as they see fit.”

How user-generated content can enhance the personalized experience

As a business that puts so much focus on its customers, user-generated content also has a huge role to play in Kimpton’s strategy — both across social media and its website.

“We’re fortunate to have hundreds of beautiful guest photos coming in via hashtags, geo-tags, and mentions each day from our 148 hotels and restaurants,” Whitney explained.  “We love that, often, a guest’s first instinct is to pull out their camera phone and post a picture of their experience to Instagram or Twitter, and we don’t take it for granted.”

To encourage more sharing, and reward those customers who do share their Kimpton experiences on social media, the Social Listening Desk team will ‘Like’ posts featuring their hotels and restaurants.

But to take things a step further, Whitney encourages the team to comment on guests’ photos to thank them for posting, often calling out a specific detail of the photo that they loved. And sometimes, they’ll ask to repost their favorite content:

Kimpton also features social content and guest photos on hotel and restaurant websites as well as having dedication pages for user-generated social media content on KimptonHotels.com:

“We know that our followers would rather see real photos from real guests, especially during the research phase of the booking process, so we rely heavily on user-generated content for telling our brand story and the stories of our hotels,” Whitney explained.

How you can harness the power of social media personalization

Reaching your audience with personalized messages and experiences can work wonders for your business. But if I could pick out one key takeaway that you can use for your business right away it would be this:

Social media personalization isn’t really about your content — or how big your budget is — what really matters is the way you communicate with your audience.

People on social media want to be seen as individuals with their own likes, habits, and personalities. If you can tap into this, and deliver each message with care, your audience will respond in-kind.

And what’s even more exciting is that social media personalization is still an under-the-radar strategy, so there’s a huge opportunity to get ahead of the curve.

Whitney Reynolds will be sharing more about the power of personalization during her talk at the Social Fresh conference. Social Fresh 2018 will be taking place on December 5-7, 2018 at Full Sail University, Winter Park, FL. Click here for more information or to book your ticket.

source https://blog.bufferapp.com/why-personalization-is-the-next-big-opportunity-in-social-media-marketing