Tag Archive for: effective branding

How to Generate Content Ideas for Social Media

Are you feeling stuck with what to post on your social media?

Keeping a creative and fresh feed for your brand can be tiring, especially if you feel uninspired.

We have a strategy that can help you to consistently produce high-quality, engaging content that serves your audience.

This strategy is simple and involves using content pillars. Content pillars are topics or ideas that are the foundation of your social media strategy. Each pillar should represent relevant topics designed for your target audience. The pillars can be used to create a variety of content such as blog posts, videos and photos. Generally, the four pillars should entertain, inspire, educate and sell.

Content pillars ensure that the content you are producing is holistic and adds value for your audience, but they also provide clarity and direction with posting relevant content.

Once you have created content pillars that are able to sell, educate, inspire and entertain, you can start generating content ideas for each pillar.

Here are some examples:

Entertain:

  • Run a contest or giveaway
  • Take advantage of trending topics

Inspire

  • Repost User Generated Content (USG)
  • Post Behind-The-Scenes content of your business

Sell

  • Share customer reviews
  • Share accomplishments of your business

Educate:

  • Answer FAQ about your industry or expertise
  • Post a question box or allow your audience to ask you questions

It is important as a brand to post a variety of content in different formats. Written content such as blog posts allow you to be more technical and detailed, whereas photos and videos allow you to be more creative.

If you are still struggling with your social media strategy or content ideas, contact Savvy Creations. As social media management specialists, we provide services that generate valuable results to ensure you are optimising your digital presence.

Social Media Monitoring and Social Media Listening. What is it and how can you use it to benefit your business?

Wouldn’t it be nice to be a fly on the wall for all the conversations happening about your business?

There are many ways that you can gain extra intel on what people are discussing in relation to your business online! Understanding how people are talking about your business in the public sphere can be immensely beneficial in advancing your business prosperously.

Social Media Monitoring

Social media monitoring is a process that includes the analysis of metrics and conversations about your brand on social media. This may include the evaluation of mentions, hashtags, competitors and industry trends for your business. Monitoring these aspects online, will allow for investigation into the messages related to your business and in turn, allowing for a rapid and appropriate response to occur, to prevent any further implications to your brand and your customer.

How do we do it?

A number of key phrases and terms are determined in relation to your business and these terms are then observed to develop a strategy that will help you access the important messages for your brand. The strategy is further developed to provide responses to messages, both positive and negative to allow for a rapid two-way communication between your business and the customer. Which in turn enhances your brand reputability and sentiment.

By failing to monitor social media, there leaves an opportunity for potential issues and crises to occur. Social media monitoring is used as a preventative strategy to avoid PR disasters and allow your customers to feel valued within the business-customer relationship.

Social Media Listening

Social listening differs from social monitoring in that it refers to the analysis of conversations about your brand on social media. This technique requires not only investigating the metrics and information that analytics present; it requires an understanding of the overall attitudes, mood and themes surrounding discussions of your brand.

Social media listening allows for stronger decisions to be made in your business. Understanding the theme of the discourse surrounding your business will assist in knowing the strengths and weaknesses of your business. For example, if there is a theme surrounding negative discussions of customer service for your business online, social media listening will allow for this to be brought to your attention and will allow for the issue to be rectified.

5 Key Benefits of Social Media Monitoring and Social Media Listening:

  1. Issue and Crisis Management

The faster an issue is brought to our attention, the quicker we are able to work towards resolving the issue and preventing it from turning into a crisis! Monitoring social media will allow for a rapid response to any concerns online and resolving the issues in a manner that remains out of the public sphere can be beneficial.

  1. Engage with Your Customers

There is nothing customers love more than feeling valued by a business they are engaging with. Social monitoring and listening allows for your business to be prepared to respond to your customers with any inquiries, issues and providing them with what they are wanting to gain from your business.

  1. Track Your Competitors

Knowing your competitors is one crucial aspect of effective business management. Being able to track and be aware of the happenings of your competitors will assist in your own learning and growth. Every business is going to make mistakes at times, however, tracking your competitors will help you to learn from their mistakes and endeavour to not make the same ones.

  1. Discover New Opportunities

You never know what will spark inspiration for your next big project. It might even be a post that someone shared on social media last week. Discovering what people are saying about your business may help you discover the next opportunity for your business.

  1. Improve Marketing and Development Decisions

Social listening allows you to further understand your target market. Understanding exactly who and where to find your potential customers is a crucial skill. Listening to the discourse on social media surrounding your brand and brand goals will assist in enhancing your marketing strategies to ensure that you are executing your business in the right places. You will also be able to discover areas for improvement and development. Customers provide valuable information on social media, so using it to your advantage is a must!

At Savvy Creations, we provide services to maintain effective management of your social presence and social discourse to enhance your communication with your consumers which will inevitably provide valuable results for your business. Social media monitoring and social media listening deliver insight into your customer base and will help grow your vision to turn it into reality.

Effective Branding: A Case Study of Coca-Cola

I’m sure you’ve heard how important branding is for a business. It is hailed as the make or break of a business which has the potential to grant you longevity in your industry or leave you trailing in the wake of your competitors.

But what does effective branding look like?

When first hearing this question, it seems almost insurmountable. There is too much that goes into successful branding to summarise and convey it all in one coherent answer. But I’ve since come to the realisation that to understand effective branding, it’s better to show rather than tell…

…And what better way to show this than through a little company called Coca-Cola.

Coca-Cola was founded in 1892 and from the get-go they firmly established brand values tethered to instilling happiness and community among consumers. From this point, Coca-Cola built an empire that continues to thrive over 100 years later all due to their consistent and effective branding paired with the company’s adaptable relevancy.

With that being said, let’s take a deeper dive in to how Coca-Cola’s branding made it one of the most iconic, successful and recognisable brands in history and answer the question on everyone’s lips: what does effective branding look like?

Brand Voice

Coca-Cola has an unshakable brand voice that has stood the test of time. A brand voice encompasses the words and language you choose working in tandem with selected images and other visuals which produce a brand personality. The brand personality is infused into the core of what your business projects to consumers. It makes your brand identifiable.

Coca-Cola’s brand voice is achieved as they approach all of their marketing material with the goal of projecting a persona that is positive and down-to-earth.

Their language they use can be classified broadly as light, kind and joyous, as if a friend is talking to you.

Their imagery varies greatly in terms of the subject matter, but the mood presented is always similar whether it’s celebratory, exciting, cheeky, youthful and/or fun.

They are true to their brand identity in all of their marketing content as in some shape or form they are always showing the happiness found in life.

 

Brand Slogan

Coca-Cola uses their slogans to leave the main message of the brand in the consumers mind. The slogans are typically used in marketing content to reinforce this core idea over and over again of what the brand is all about.

Coca-Cola has gone through an array of slogans (understandably, I might add, due to their long life as a company). Some examples include:

o Coca-Cola… Makes Good Things Taste Better

o Have a Coke and a Smile

o You Can’t Beat the Feeling

o Official Soft Drink of Summer

o Open Happiness

A common thread amongst all these slogans is that the company isn’t talking about the product, they are focused on the feeling the product evokes in people. It plays up the benefits of the product, not the features.

Coke also uses these slogans to evoke a positive feeling about the brand—associating joy, holidays, smiling and general happiness with their product.

Brand Story

Storytelling has always been a way for humans to connect. If a brand has a good story, a narrative that audiences can connect to, people are more likely to engage with their products. Coca-Cola has built a cohesive narrative for themselves which runs through most of their advertising and continues to draw people in. Coke is always presented as something that unites people,

encourages sharing and brings about joy (rather than just being a delicious fizzy drink). This is their story.

The Senior Manager of the marketing team at Coca-Cola has explained that there are four archetypes that they use to build this narrative where Coke is either the object of desire, embodiment of an attitude, social connector or functional offering/benefit.

No matter the means through which they go about telling this story and the specific role Coke plays in it, the overarching narrative about what Coke delivers is consistent. With consistency, over time this narrative becomes intrinsically known by the audience, whether they realise it or not.

Brand Associations

I can say with an unwavering sense of confidence that whoever is reading this blog right now can picture the Coca-Cola logo clearly in their mind. The reason this visual is able to be conjured so easily for us is because the company has been consistent and repetitive. The logo featuring distinct cursive writing and the colours red, white and black used in all of their marketing content is so strongly associated with the company and brand that it eventually reached a point of global recognisability. Even slogans that Coca-Cola has used tend to stick around for a couple years and become associated with the brand and company identity. In 2009 “Open Happiness” became the official slogan for the company and remained this for seven years. The phrase became uniquely linked to their brand and helped with recognisability to the point that anytime anyone says this phrase, Coca-Cola will spring to mind.

Though effective branding is clearly dependent on finding and sticking to your business’s message, values, look and voice, it is vital not to get too rigid in the everchanging world around you. You must remain relevant.

Coca-Cola has maintained a consistent brand identity but has adapted over the course of its 128 years. They have remained topical and used popular culture to their advantage time and time again. For example, the Open Happiness slogan stemmed from a time of great economic recession whereby the brand remained consistent to their identity but moulded it around a global issue. Additionally, due to climate change and environmental activism reaching new heights, Coca-Cola broadened their values (and thus, brand identity) by placing an emphasis on sustainability and recycling.

Hopefully, that helped answer the question: what does effective branding look like?