In Other News: LinkedIn makes feeds more engaging, YouTube introduces ‘popular parts’ feature & VidMob releases a three-part study to help ad creatives.

June 9, 2022 Lucy Booth In other news, LinkedIn, Snapchat, VidMob, Youtube  

LinkedIn steps up their game to keep your feed as relevant to you as possible

We know LinkedIn as the platform for all things professional, whether you’re sharing achievements, challenges, insights or job opportunities. With this in mind, there can be a very varied stream of content reaching your feed. To combat this, LinkedIn has added some new features to help you tailor your content and get the best reading experience. 

So, what are they actually doing to roll this out? 

  • If you see a post on your feed that you aren’t interested in, you can click “I don’t want to see this”. This way you can streamline your feed to only show content you want to engage with! 
  • If you don’t fancy seeing political content on your feed, you will be able to select a control “I don’t want to see political content” to reduce this 
  • With many LinkedIn users keen to hear from leaders and individuals they don’t necessarily follow, LinkedIn is set to create more ways for said users to easily follow the creators that matter to them, straight from their feed
  • With polls becoming more and more frequent on the feed, LinkedIn is looking to reduce the number of ‘irrelevant’ polls to ensure users are only shown those that are helpful to them 

The word on the street is that LinkedIn is hoping to roll out a number of updates over time based on research analysis and trends. We look forward to seeing them come to fruition! 

 

Youtube introduces a new ‘popular parts’ feature to their app 

After carrying out a trial run with their premium subscribers, YouTube has decided to go ahead with the launch of a new feature that gives users an insight into where the most replayed parts of a video are. 

In most previous cases, video creators would break down the different parts of their video using timestamps, but this new feature should mean they won’t have to. 

Whilst you’re probably wondering why this feature is remotely helpful, I guess it could be good for locating specific parts of a video to avoid watching the whole thing – especially if it’s a long one! You might be looking for the part that’s gone viral online or a specific step in a recipe, for example. 

 

VidMob reveals the creative best practices for advertising on Snapchat 

The team at VidMob have recently released a three-part study, breaking down the key tips for creating successful ads on Snapchat. Check out a run down of the top points below: 

  • Make sure your message is punchy, clear and get it across early in the video 
  • Use high amounts of contrast between background and foreground to capture attention and make your message stand out 
  • Don’t wait until the end of the asset to display your CTA – users don’t tend to wait around! 
  • Keep text to a minimum 
  • Use influencer endorsement where you can, it tends to have a better swipe rate

If you have time, I’d definitely recommend reading the study in greater detail, even if you aren’t creating an ad specifically for Snapchat. There are some great insights and tips for all ad creators. 

 

 

Make sure to follow @pfm_agency to stay up to date with all things social!

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How To Find And Target Your Social Media Audience

June 6, 2022 Lucy Booth Industry, Social Media  

We all know by now that the power of social media is immense. When used correctly and to its full potential, social media platforms can really boost your business profile and expand your brand awareness.

 

Why you should define your social media audience

Finding and targeting the right audience for your business on social media is crucial. Not only does it let you speak directly to people who are interested in your services, but more importantly, it helps to convert visitors into customers. 

On the flip side, speaking to a broader audience doesn’t tend to generate great results, although it can initially help to build a general following. If you think about it, you wouldn’t speak to a child, parent and grandparent in the same manner. By altering your tone of voice for each, you’re more likely to achieve a better response from each individual. Applying this thought process should help you to hone in on a specific audience and help you to achieve better results for your business’ growth. 

In a nutshell, benefits to targeting the right audience for your business include: 

  • Interested followers are more likely to choose you versus your competitors 
  • Your conversion rate will increase 
  • You can drive more traffic to your business platforms 
  • Creates more awareness of your brand 
  • You can build and maintain better relationships with your customers which in turn will generate reviews and build trust

 

How to figure out who to talk to on social media

Step 1: Speak to a wide target audience 

First things first, it’s good to start with a broader target audience. This will help you build engagement from a variety of users, and using the data from this, you’ll eventually be able to find a more refined target audience for your social media.

Step 2: Analyse your engagement trends 

Once you’ve got a decent number of followers from a broad pool, you can begin to take a look at recurring trends and statistics on each social media platform. When analysing engagement trends, it’s a good idea to look at different demographics, behaviours, locations – the list goes on! 

In a nutshell, outline exactly who’s interacting with your content. You can often find handy social media insights on the platform itself. Nowadays, channels like Facebook and Instagram actually provide breakdowns of monthly engagement data trends which will help you understand exactly who is interacting with your content. 

Step 3: Understand why your audience is following you 

It’s handy to find out why your audience is following you. Why are they interested in your product or service? By developing a sound knowledge, you can create content that is generally more valuable to your audience and therefore continue to build a bigger following. 

With various social media platforms being used widely these days, it’s useful to learn the type of content your followers prefer. For example, TikTok tends to be for short, raw and uncut videos, whereas Facebook is often used for sales posts, user-generated content or for advertising events.  

Step 4: Refine your content for your intended target audience 

Once you have a better understanding of the audience that are engaging with your content, you can begin to refine your content. Examples of refining your content include launching targeted ads or building on your customers’ likes to make more of what they want.

Getting to know what type of content works where and refining your target audience is a great way to effectively advertise your business online. At the end of the day, if you can post likeable content for your followers, you’ll turn over more sales and visitors and generate more leads over your competitors! 

 

If you’d like to find out more about refining your target audience, drop me an email to [email protected]. I’ll be more than happy to chat!

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Why You Need Brand Guidelines

February 16, 2022 Lucy Booth Branding  

Recently, the team at Pilot Fish Media have been working collaboratively to pivot our brand and delve deeper into our why, mission and tone of voice. The importance of brand guidelines has become much more apparent to us, and in this blog, I’ll be sharing some of our thoughts with you.

A business’ brand is ultimately its most important asset. Not only does a brand reflect a company’s personality, but it also acts as a showpiece, which increases credibility and shows off your values. This is where the brand guidelines come in!

 

What are brand guidelines?

A set of brand guidelines generally consist of: 

  • The company logo and its variations
  • Colour palette, including hex codes 
  • Typefaces and their use
  • Tone of voice 
  • Imagery 
  • Icons/graphic elements 

The brand book essentially contains the ‘behind the scenes’ of the brand. Here, you’ll find finer details like recommended point sizes for type and the tone of voice for different social media platforms. You’ll also find rules set out that should be adhered to when anyone is creating content. Think of it as your brand’s ‘bible’.

 

What are the benefits to having brand guidelines? 

In a nutshell, brand guidelines help to:

  • Ensure all brand outputs are cohesive, consistent and recognisable to the public 
  • Allow your employees and clients to understand the nature of your brand 
  • Keep everyone on the same page 
  • Save time when preparing branded documents 
  • Set style standards to ensure your brand’s outputs are ✨glowing✨ 

 

On the flip side, what are the disadvantages to not having brand guidelines? 

Without a set of guidelines, your brand can be impacted in a number of ways, such as: 

  • Lack of brand consistency, meaning your brand is far less recognisable 
  • Lack of professionalism, which can potentially lead to less custom 
  • Difficulty keeping up engagement with followers/customers/clients 
  • Difficulty standing out against competitors 
  • Unclear brand vision, mission and values (which is often what will set you apart from competitors) 
  • No voice to support your brand 

 

Why use brand guidelines?

Your guidelines can be used both internally and externally to ensure consistency across all outputs. They help both the company’s employees and clients understand the nature of your brand and your creative do’s and don’ts. Often, the creative team behind the business will put together the brand guidelines, applying their design knowledge to ensure clear execution.

Brand guidelines are a valuable piece of work that will help everyone stay on track and ensure all outputs are cohesive. Without these guidelines, your brand’s message could mistakenly change at any point because a logo was used incorrectly or because an employee didn’t know to use the wordmark instead of a graphic element. 

So, if you or your business are yet to put together a set of brand guidelines, this is your reminder to get the process underway!

 

 

Want to chat more about your brand guidelines? Get in touch at [email protected] and I’ll be happy to help!

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In Other News: LinkedIn Shares Gen Z Insights, Facebook Launches Podcasts and Twitter Tests Livestream Shopping

December 8, 2021 Lucy Booth Facebook, In other news, Insights, LinkedIn, Social Media, Twitter  

Welcome back to another week of digital insights from the latest news in the digital marketing world!

 

LinkedIn Conducts Survey on Gen Z ers

This week, LinkedIn have posted their findings from a survey conducted on Gen Zers (people born between 1997-2012). The survey helps to explore engagement trends, popular content Gen Zers are consuming as well as how and why they are the most likely age group to use LinkedIn. 

We have put together some key points below that have been picked up by the data analysts: 

  • Gen Zers believe LinkedIn is trustworthy and they feel safe posting/interacting on the site 
  • The content they see on their feed is mostly relevant to them, no nonsense! 
  • 80% of Gen Zers say they are interested in following more businesses/organisations on LinkedIn and they are more likely than other age groups to follow people like Melinda Gates, Bill Gates and Jeff Weiner 
  • 75% say that businesses/organisations post valuable content 
  • For networking, learning and research purposes, Gen Zers say they prefer LinkedIn over other platforms 
  • Gen Zers are highly focused on their career 

The results show Gen Zers believe LinkedIn to be the safest site. This is likely to be because it is one of the most ‘professional’ platforms we use and people really do get hired via LinkedIn! With the content said to be mostly relevant to the user, this would suggest there are less time wasters applying for jobs outside their field if people are only really seeing content they are interacting with. The study concludes that Gen Zers are quite highly focussed on their career path and are keen to learn tips and tricks for presenting/bettering their digital marketing skills. 

 

Facebook Launches New Podcast Feature 

With podcasts becoming more and more popular recently, Facebook has published a new guide on how to link and promote podcasts on the platform using Facebook’s features. 

Creators can now add and promote their podcast on Facebook. They can build direct connections with fans so their content is seamlessly distributed to their listeners as and when new episodes are released. At the moment, this feature is only available to select content creators in the US – presumably whilst they test it! 

The new update allows listeners to engage in conversation with one another in the comments section whilst still listening to the podcast. This feature should allow podcast creators to branch out through another platform to engage more listeners whilst giving them a space to stimulate conversations with one another. 

 

Livestream Shopping Being Tested on Twitter 

Twitter have recently revealed they are following in the footsteps of Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest & Tik Tok by carrying out a livestream shopping feature.  With the rise of online shopping during the pandemic, Twitter carried out their first live shopping event in collaboration with Walmart in a bid to keep up with the latest trends. This new feature creates a pathway from viewing a product, discussing it on the Twitter timeline to then being able to head straight to the check out. With the Shopping feature enabled, users can browse products via a carousel, read more about them and finally purchase the item – all within the Twitter app! In retrospect, this probably means whilst all social media platforms offer similar features, they still need to fight against one another to stay relevant and remain somewhat unique all whilst pushing the social media trends. 

 

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How to Choose the Right Digital Marketing Agency for Your Brand

November 29, 2021 Lucy Booth Insights, Small business  

Finding and choosing the right digital marketing agency for your brand can sometimes feel like a dreaded or daunting task. With the sheer power of social media nowadays, it’s super important you spend time digging through agencies to find one that suits your needs. A solid marketing campaign can lead to business-changing results. 

 

We’ve put together some top tips for you to consider to help you find the right digital marketing agency for YOU. 

 

1. Build your foundations 

Whether it’s a mind map or a bulleted list, brainstorm your business’ needs and aspirations. What are your core values? Think about your digital marketing goals. Are you keen to increase your following? Perhaps you want to target a different audience and form more of a community amongst your followers. You may even wish to generate more leads and sales by jumping on the paid ads wagon. There are a variety of ways in which the right digital marketing agency can elevate your brand. However, it is key that you think about your own business needs first to ensure you find an agency suited to you and your brand. 

 

2. Research 

This is often the most tedious step because the internet is FULL of so many different digital marketing agencies. The best way to go about this is to filter your searches. You’ve done the first bit, you know what goals you want to achieve so try to find an agency that supports this. Have a look through their previous work, have they worked with brands similar to yours? Even if the brand itself bears little resemblance to yours, they may have similar aspirations. Dig around the agency’s social media content. How do they run their own social media platforms? Finally, ask around. See what your peers think and stimulate conversation. Perhaps they will have an agency in mind that you can explore! 

 

3. Communicate 

Once you have narrowed down your choices, the best thing to do is reach out to the agency and speak to them. Make sure you tell them who you are (ie. what’s important to you) as well as what you are hoping to achieve and take away from the partnership. Prepare a range of questions to ask them – this will help you to compare answers against the other agencies and make your final decision. 

 

4. Meet the Agency 

Holding a meeting with the agency in person is the most effective way to find out if they are the right fit for you. This will give you both a chance to understand each other’s strengths and determine whether they are the one for you. 

 

 

Start the process today and get in touch with us to see if Pilot Fish Media would fit your brand today at [email protected]!

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