"Marketing"
Strategically aligned Digital Marketing fuels growth and furthers business goals
We help organizations leverage high impact strategic communications and marketing techniques to solve their most difficult challenges and activate growth opportunities.We partner with our clients to gain competitive differentiation, forge new paths in the marketplace, and transform audacious goals into reality.
We combine strategic and creative thinking with a process-driven approach, continuous innovation, influencer relationships, and the purposeful execution of actions that quickly deliver meaningful outcomes.
Whether you’re a small marketing team looking to boost your strategic and execution capabilities across the marketing and communications spectrum or you’re looking for a partner to advance a specific initiative such as media and influencer relations, content marketing, brand communications, or social media and digital engagement, we can help your organization achieve its most important objectives
We help organizations leverage high impact strategic communications and marketing techniques to solve their most difficult challenges and activate growth opportunities. We partner with our clients to gain competitive differentiation, forge new paths in the marketplace and transform audacious goals into reality.
We combine strategic and creative thinking with a process-driven approach, continuous innovation, influencer relationships, and the purposeful execution of actions that quickly deliver meaningful outcomes.
Whether you’re a small marketing team looking to boost your strategic and execution capabilities across the marketing and communications spectrum or you’re looking for a partner to advance a specific initiative such as media and influencer relations, content marketing, brand communications, or social media and digital engagement, we can help your organization achieve its most important objectives
Steps in creating marketing strategy
- Identifying goals
- Knowing audience / consumers / clients
- Creating service / product story and message
- Defining budget
- Determining channels
- Execute
- Monitor
Why Does Digital Marketing Matter?
Modern consumers live online — whether at work or at home, the core audiences for virtually every business
and every product can be engaged online.
To be sure, an omnichannel approach takes effort. The means and channels for online engagement with consumers are vast. The options that exist to maximize those channels are complex. Even the language that exists around digital marketing is dense enough to get lost in — CRM. SEO. SEM. Programmatic. Static. AI. BI. Cloud and clicks. The list goes on. These tactics aren’t, in and of themselves, innovative — more and more, they are table stakes. But the ways you leverage and combine these online and offline tactics is what drives the effectiveness of your omnichannel marketing strategy.
The question no longer is whether online engagement is necessary. Instead, it’s finding the best approach. Digital marketing is the strategic discipline that brings sense to it all. Which channels are right for your business? What do your customers need to hear? Where can you get the most bang for your buck? The right strategy will consider these questions, and more, to meet your audiences at the right time and with the right message.
Our Approach to Digital Marketing
As both strategists and people who live in the world, we operate with a practical understanding of the increasingly digital nature of consumer experiences. Even purchases that may resolve in person can begin or evolve online. That’s why we believe in robust and cohesive strategies that bridge the gap between the many mediums and channels of communication between brand and consumer.
Our digital marketing team understands that successful online marketing strategies lie not in throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks. But rather, in the fusing of customer data and analytics, targeting and conversion optimization with creative work that connects and engages with prospective customers. We leverage data-driven insights to plan and execute digital touch points and experiences at every stage of the customer journey.
That means finding the right balance among a staggering number of moving parts. Digital marketing encompasses everything from CRM software selection to subject line choices to the positioning of products and services on a website.
Defining a strategy might mean identifying where to place paid social spend, what to tout in an email marketing campaign, how to fine-tune a landing page for conversion optimization and how to approach SEO strategy, among other things. That’s why deliberate digital marketing takes partnership and an understanding both of the 10,000-foot view of your business goals as well as the granular behavior of your audiences.
Contextual Digital Marketing for a Cohesive Strategy
Consider this: some elements of digital marketing live in their own universe, but most blur the lines with other disciplines and factor into other areas of the marketing landscape. Content Marketing, Website development, Social media strategy and Public relations all feel the impact of digital marketing. And vice versa. Ultimately, the strong foundations in traditional and digital marketing tactics work together to elevate the strength of the overall strategy.
This blending of disciplines is true across the board. Whether the challenge is B2B outreach or a local SEO campaign, the overall strategy would have to find a way to balance digital marketing activities with other initiatives. Ultimately, the reality is that every element of the campaign needs to work together.
To that end, 36T Marketing approaches digital marketing for every client with fresh eyes. We let data, business goals and customer journey insights guide our approach. Then we get to work leveraging the channels and tactics necessary to reach audiences and move the needle.
Our digital marketing services include:
Programmatic Paid Media Marketing
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Social Media and Paid Social Media
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and SEO Copywriting Services
Website Development and Landing Pages
Online Reputation Management
Business
Intelligence
Content
Marketing
Business
Intelligence
Mobile
Marketing
CRM
Marketing
Marketing
Automation
Digital Marketing Strategy = Right Audience, Messaging and Time
Modern consumers communicate and share experiences online. What this ultimately means is that consumers have as much control over a brand’s online presence and reputation as do the people who sit in the boardroom. If your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room, the internet is the rumor mill that can turn a small win into a triumph and a slip-up into a disaster.
But don’t despair. Brands aren’t helpless. In fact, every perceived challenge in the digital marketing space is a business growth opportunity. Another chance to engage your audience by targeting the right customer at the right time and converting that attention into something more.
Social Media Marketing
How to Market on Social Media Effectively
Learning how to market on social media can help you increase sales while promoting your brand. Social media marketing is an inexpensive yet effective way to reach more people across different platforms. You can attract a wider audience through social media by developing quality content.
Having a social media presence is necessary. Not only do your customers expect it, but it’s a great tool for learning more about your target audience and connecting with individuals online. With the use of organic social media marketing, you can get to know your followers and find better ways to promote your products and services.
However, you can also learn how to advertise a small business on social media with a limited budget to help your content reach more potential customers. Social media platforms have many options for reaching more customers; it’s just up to you to create engaging content that makes prospective customers want to learn more about your business and brand.
What is social media marketing?
Social media marketing involves using platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and TikTok to effectively reach a wider audience and communicate with customers. Social media marketing is necessary for any small business marketing strategy and requires a robust plan. Your customers expect engaging content and the ability to communicate with you through direct messaging and comments.
Effective social media marketing for small businesses gives you the unique opportunity to humanize your brand and drive traffic back to your website. With social media advertising, you can also generate leads and sales while increasing brand awareness. Many small businesses even use social media for customer service, allowing customers to message them directly to have issues resolved and questions answered.
How to market your business on social media
Social media is integral to any marketing strategy, but it may seem daunting for small business owners who don’t know how to use different platforms. Luckily, social media marketing is fairly easy to learn and doesn’t require too much time or money. Any budget can support a robust social media marketing strategy as long as you get to know your customers and can create engaging content regularly. Here’s how to promote your business on social media.
1. Identify your audience
Many businesses make the mistake of trying to reach everyone. But understanding and organizing your audience can help you send the right message to the right people and more effectively meet your marketing goals.
This begins with identifying your target audience. The details about who these people are should be based on the audience data you already have, as well as your market research.
To find your target audience:
- Compile data. In order to reach your target market, you need to know what they’re like. It’s important to know things like your audience members’ ages, locations, and engagement patterns to market effectively to them. While it may seem daunting to gather this information, customer relationship management software stores and sorts this data and makes it easy to put into action.
- Use social media analytics. Many platforms, like Facebook and Twitter, have built-in analytics that can tell you about your followers, including when they post, where they post, and other interests. Plus, these tools are free to use with business accounts.
- Check the competition. Understanding your competition will give you insights about how to talk to your audience. You can look at what your competitors are doing wrong to fill any gaps in your current strategy.
Many businesses make the mistake of trying to reach everyone. But understanding and organizing your audience can help you send the right message to the right people and more effectively meet your marketing goals.
2. Define your goals and KPIs
To excel in social media marketing, it’s important to create goals that guide your efforts. The SMART goal strategy provides a helpful framework to create foundational goals and meet your overall objectives.
SMART stands for:
- Specific: In order to measure and meet goals, it’s important to be clear about precisely what you hope to achieve. This is especially important for getting your team onboard as you work collectively towards the goal. A specific social media goal, for example, might be to increase your Twitter followers by 20% this quarter.
- Measurable: You need to know definitively whether you’ve reached your goal or not. Measurement makes that possible. By using metrics to track your progress, you can also pivot your goals if need be. For instance, if you find that likes and follows don’t lead to website traffic, you can change the metric to something that will help you achieve your goal.
- Achievable: All goals should be within reach of your business. If you set goals that are unreasonable, you risk discouraging your employees and creating friction in your business plan. As you set specific, measurable goals, make sure to adjust if it seems like you aren’t reaching them.
- Relevant: Your social media marketing goals should ladder up to your larger business objectives. For example, if it’s your objective to build brand awareness, you could set a goal to get 100 social media followers to click through a post to a landing page that describes your offerings.
- Timely: To keep yourself accountable, goals should have a time limit. Instead of creating a goal for some undefined time in the near future, make sure to set a specific cadence to check in and ensure you’re staying on track.
Though social media marketing has many moving parts, SMART goals give you a starting point, as well as a means to check in and make changes as needed.
3. Allocate your resources wisely
For small businesses strapped for money and time, sometimes social media tasks get arbitrarily offloaded onto whoever is available. But social media management requires unique skills, like:
Strategic thinking
Organizational skills
Branding expertise
If you have the means, hiring an expert to handle social media can pay off. But if you don’t have the budget for an on-staff social media manager, you can still invest in advertisements on social platforms, which can boost brand awareness and expand reach.
4. Use multiple platforms
Consider the multiple social media platforms your customers use daily. Ultimately, your strategy should allow you to reach as many people through social media as possible, and you can’t do that by focusing on only one platform.
Depending on your audience, many of them may use Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok throughout the day, giving you three opportunities to get your content in front of them. Social media apps to know include Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, and Twitter. However, investing in a strategy for all of these platforms isn’t necessary. Instead, consider the apps your customers are most likely to use.
5. Post relevant content regularly
Success on social media is a matter of posting compelling, engaging content consistently. Not only will this help make your business look dependable, but it also shows that you have timely knowledge to share and that you care to be in conversation with your audience.
Social media platforms change their algorithms over time, but the rule of posting regularly holds true: This practice helps your content show up in newsfeeds. By focusing on consistent, relevant content, you show the algorithms that your posts are worthy of showing up in various newsfeeds and ultimately, will attract followers to your page.
6. Interact with followers
Social media users enjoy interacting with brands, and as a result brands experience benefits like:
Social proof of your business
Expanded market reach
Boosted brand awareness
- Cost-efficiency
The opportunity for a high return on investment (ROI) is huge—83% of customers value customer experience, and that includes social media interactions in which businesses make their audience feel seen, heard, and understood. Social media allows you to monitor conversations in real-time and answer questions or concerns from your audience promptly.
This can take many forms, like:
- Asking questions relevant to your offerings
- Creating a Facebook Group for your audience
- Using GIFs, videos, and emojis to spice up messages
- Utilizing platform tools, like Instagram Live to start discussions
A good strategy is to allow 1 hour a day to communicate with your audience on social media. However, if there are pressing concerns, you should always take the time to respond promptly.
7. Always maintain professionalism
It’s important to remember that as you post on social media, you are always representing your business. Posts are taken out of context all too often, which can lead to conflict and upset followers. If your social media responsibilities are allocated to other staff members, consider creating a social media policy to guide their posts and conversations.
Typically, a standard social media policy will include:
- Clear expectations about what to post
- Instructions on how to respond to negative posts
- Platform laws and rules to follow
- Brand considerations
- Security protocols
By investing in a social media policy, your business can be ready for any scenario. It’s important to remember that at the core of social media, you are implementing your customer service philosophy.
8. Reflect your brand identity
Brand identity is what helps people connect to your business and sets you apart from your competitors. This means that all marketing, including print, digital, and social media, should be consistent.
Brand consistency can be challenging for businesses, especially when you’re just getting started. But it’s important across channels, and that certainly includes social media. As you are posting, you’ll want to think about:
How you talk to your customers, otherwise known as a brand voice
Posting similar visuals across the various platforms
Focusing on your unique selling point.
Not only will a consistent brand identity make it easier to know what to post, but it can also help increase brand loyalty.
9. Prioritize quality over quantity
Instead of posting multiple times a day on as many platforms as possible, you should focus on delivering consistent, quality posts. In fact, some social media sites may penalize your account and mark you as spam for too many low-quality posts. Additionally, posting could become overwhelming and problematic whoever handles your social media, whether that’s you or a teammate, and that could wind up hurting your strategy rather than helping.
To mitigate these risks, consider implementing a social media calendar. These calendars can help you plan posts in advance while ensuring you stay organized. Categories including when to post, post caption, post visual, and which platforms to post on can help marketers keep track of the various moving parts of social media.
Another way to prioritize quality posts is to ask yourself the following questions:
- Does this content help my followers?
- Is this original?
- Is this actionable, inspiring, or entertaining?
- Does the content have cited sources, if needed?
All of these questions can help you create quality content that will engage and attract followers. Learning about the top social media content to create for each platform is key to helping you reach more people online.
10. Measure your results
There are many factors that affect social media marketing, and that’s why it’s important to analyze and measure results. Analytics come in handy because they can help:
Optimize campaigns
Create new goals
Assess tracking metrics
Before you start tracking, though, you should identify which metrics are most important to your marketing goals. The most common metrics are:
- Reach
- Engagement
- Impressions
- Mentions
- Post clicks
- Video views
11. Develop a unique strategy
You might have the impulse to post on as many platforms as possible, but this could actually derail your social media marketing strategy. For example, if you’re trying to target people who are over 50 years of age, you’ll find that most of your audience is on Facebook, so it’s not as worthwhile to prioritize Instagram.
When creating a social media strategy, focus on:
- Where your audience is
- Where your competitors post
- What your metrics tell you
Additionally, you’ll want to think about how to best use each platform, based on what it was created for and the content that does best there:
- Facebook offers quality video streaming, like live video, as well as a high-functioning messaging platform that allows brands to interact with their followers one-on-one.
- Instagram supports more visually compelling posts and creative short videos.
- YouTube is best for longer informational or entertaining video content.
- Twitter allows for real-time conversations, news updates, and alerts.
- LinkedIn works well for long-form written content, like blog posts.
- Pinterest lets users discover content and relies on visuals to catch their attention.
Depending on your social media strategy, you may realize that you don’t have to use YouTube if your users are primarily on Facebook. Or if you find that you can say more with pictures than you can with words, Instagram might be more useful. Make sure to research the best strategy for each platform you use to get the most out of your marketing efforts. While there are many tips to grow your small business, social media can help you discover and retain new customers.
12. Partner with influencers and industry leaders
Partnering with influencers can help you take your social media marketing to the next level by leveraging their talents to help you grow your business. Influencers have their own personal branding and followers that trust their expertise. Working with influencers in your industry can help you build brand awareness and increase sales. Since influencers are real people, they’re more easily trusted by customers, allowing you to use that to your advantage.
13. Livestream occasionally
Live streaming can help boost your organic reach on social media. Because live streaming taps into your followers’ fear of missing out (FOMO), you can reach more people at a time. Live streaming also allows you to be more personal with your audience and give them insight into your business and its products to build trust.
14. Post at the best times
Creating quality content can ensure you reach more people and engage your audience. However, if your customers aren’t active on social media when you post, they likely won’t ever see your content. You can find the times when your audience is online by looking at your social media analytics. Many social media management tools also give you insight into the best times to post based on when your followers are typically online. You can also experiment by posting at different times of day to determine how it affects engagement and reach.
Benefits of marketing on social media :
Every small business should invest in social media marketing to promote their business and boost online visibility. A few benefits of social media marketing include:
- Cost-effective. Social media marketing and advertising is cost-effective. If you want to post content organically, it may only cost you your time. However, advertising your business on social media is one of the most cost-effective advertising solutions available for small businesses. You can set a budget for as low as $1.00/day on Facebook.
- More exposure. Marketing your business on social media allows you to reach more people. Engaging content will likely be shared, helping you increase your online visibility.
- Boost brand awareness. Social media is a great tool for increasing brand awareness by boosting online visibility. However, if you want to take advantage of social media to raise brand awareness, consider creating advertisements that expand your reach.
- Drive traffic to business websites. Your social media marketing should drive traffic back to your website, where customers can complete actions like filling out forms or making purchases.
- Support customers quickly. Social media allows you to handle online customer service requests quickly and easily. When someone messages you directly on social media, you can answer their questions in real-time, giving them a fast response that improves their experience with your business.
- Increased credibility. Posting engaging and educational content can increase your credibility, helping new customers learn that you’re a thought leader they can trust.