Learn about the influencer marketing mistakes that cost brands thousands of dollars.
The global influencer marketing market jumped from $1.7 billion in 2016 to $13.8 billion in 2021 and is expected to grow to $16.4 billion in 2022.
About 49% of consumers today depend on influencer recommendations to make informed purchases when shopping online or offline. You too, we’re sure, have already tried to capitalize on the power of the influence of social media influencers. However, most brands do not understand the very basics of working with social media influencers and often get into the regular checklists of launching campaigns and burning marketing dollars.
Remember that it is not as plain simple as shelling out money to hire an influencer with a 100k or a 1Mn following on Instagram. There are brands that have built themselves ground-up using the power of social media influencers’ words, and there are many brands (including some very big names) who’ve not been able to crack anything at all with it!
Influencers can be great for driving sales, but if you don’t choose wisely, you risk alienating your customers and damaging your brand. Here’s what you need to know about influencer marketing mistakes so you can avoid them and focus on the good stuff while venturing into influencer marketing for your brand.
11 Influencer marketing mistakes for your next marketing campaign
Mistake #1: Having ambiguous influencer marketing goals
The most common influencer marketing mistake that almost all brands make is not having clear goals. Many brands just jump onto the social media influencer marketing bandwagon without clearly quantifying the success. It is usually as vague as a combination of reach and conversions. However, defining just that may not be optimal.
If you have an unclear idea of what you want to achieve with your influencer marketing campaign, you are likely to end up with a less effective campaign. This could hurt your brand’s reputation as well as the trustworthiness of your brand or product in the eyes of consumers.
The Fix: An influencer marketing campaign must have SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic & timebound) goals. If your goal is to maximize sales, go after the conversion metric and have a strategy focused on it. If the goal is simply to build brand awareness, go after massive reach as a goal within a certain period of time. Go after a combination of reach, loyalty, recall, conversions, and consumer data, and you might end up accomplishing none of these sub-goals. Center your influencer marketing campaign around 1-2 key metrics and build the whole narrative only around it.
Mistake #2: Blindly going after the followership numbers
Many smaller or newbie brands try to emulate the influencer marketing tactics of the largest brands in their industry vertical. They do this without realizing that the goals can be very different for the larger brands. Simply hiring influencers in a vertical by looking at their followership number is a classic example of bad influencer marketing. The followers could be fake, dormant, or simply unresponsive to commercial callouts. That’s what we call money gone down the drain forever!
The Fix: Look at an influencer’s engagement rate and not just the follower count. An influencer with a much lesser following may have significantly better engagement (and hence better chances of conversion). Look out for the quality of content and the influencer’s presence on other social media platforms as well. Hiring an influencer with a good engagement rate for posts on 2-3 social platforms with a decent following usually has a better ROI than paying one influencer with a massive following on just one platform with average engagement numbers.
Mistake #3: Not having clear discussions and contracts in place
Most marketers rush into influencer marketing campaigns citing the time sensitivity or life cycle of a trend or a product launch that they want to capitalize on. In this rush, they often hire influencers for barter deals which end up not showing up with the desired content. They may often come back with substandard quality content for the heck of it. In many cases, influencers may as well sue the brands if the contracts aren’t robust enough.
The Fix: Work with your legal team to create a standard contract that is simple to understand and enforce. It must have clauses on payment and deliverables along with the mutually agreed-upon timelines. All the payouts must be made dependent on the final approved content. Assuming no defaults is one big influencer marketing mistake you must avoid at all costs. The influencers are a tribe of creative folks who can sometimes be tricky to work with.
Mistake #4: Hiring the wrong influencers for the campaign
One size doesn’t fit all – it applies to the influencer selection process so much more than anything else today. A common mistake brands make while selecting influencers for their marketing campaigns is to go after the most popular names and pay heap loads of money.
The Fix: Look at things like authenticity of content, engagement rates, and frequency of activity. You can also look at the key competitor brands they may have endorsed and take a call whether you’d want someone who does repeat posts only for your brand or for competitors as well.
Mistake #5: Not diversifying the campaign to include micro & nano influencers
Nano influencers have a strong local presence and have generally higher engagement rates. These are influencers with <10k followers but are a breed that can’t be ignored. One common influencer marketing mistake is to not include different types of influencers and completely ignore the smaller ones.
The Fix: Dunkin Donuts ran several successful campaigns with nano influencers. Brands looking to establish a niche should include nano and micro-influencers in their influencer marketing campaigns.
Mistake #6: Building briefs that restrict the creativity of the influencers
Most brand marketers create tight outlines for content on social media. They go too far in sharing the exact script, location of the shoot, and even the background! This renders content generated by creators look very bland and leaves little room for them to be their authentic selves – something their followers look out for in their every post! Result? The followers are most likely to ignore such a post that is too brand-mediated.
The Fix: Share key pointers and catchphrases that must necessarily be included in the influencer’s post. Restrict yourself to sharing only sample content ideas and leave room for the influencers’ creativity in conceptualization & production. The results may surprise you!
Mistake #7: Making content unengaging by making it too direct selling-out
Entertainment-led commerce always wins over direct selling commerce. But most brands forget this while hiring influencers. They urge them to pitch the product directly and ask their followers to buy. This can be counterproductive, and many social media users call direct selling by their favorite content creators a big turn-off.
The Fix: Let the influencers work on subtle placement, organic-sounding reviews, and soft nudges for influencing product sales. Research says that 20% of consumers are actually ready to stop following an influencer should he or she fail to be up-front about advertising or sponsorships. Hence, the ideal approach is to call out a promotional post upfront but without taking away the entertainment factor from the content. It must remain as authentic as ever, the honesty is an added advantage that leads to better conversions.
Mistake #8: Not measuring influencer marketing ROI for previous campaigns
Measuring ROI can be difficult if an influencer marketing campaign isn’t started with a clear goal metric in the first place. The correct goal metric can only be based on the ROI analysis of previous campaigns. For example, if more brand awareness was the goal, just looking at the number of impressions of the influencer posts may not be the real picture.
The Fix: Have clear goals at the start of the campaign and analyze the returns periodically so as to be able to take corrective measures in time. For example, if orders are the final goal, give each influencer a customized coupon code that they can share with their followers for a 5-20% discount. You must then backtrack to see which influencers could generate the maximum number of orders and utilize them again for future campaigns.
Mistake #9: Not using social listening & sentiment analysis
Social listening and sentiment analysis are essentially going deep into the social conversations around your brand (and the industry as well). Not using the two would mean a significant loss of opportunity to understand the true brand perception among your consumers (and potential consumers).
The Fix: Use a social media listening tool to understand the conversations, and identify patterns and keywords being used repeatedly for your brand. For example, by tracking social media conversations, you may find out that ‘expensive’ is the word featured all across. A new price strategy may come out as the best growth strategy as compared to anything purely based on what your consumers are ‘actually’ talking about.
One such tool for analyzing social media conversations and sentiment analysis is Radarr. It is a powerful social media intelligence tool that helps you easily listen to, monitor, and track online conversations. It’s an AI-powered solution that aggregates all digital conversations into a unified dashboard, making it easy to:
Understand your audience
Identify brand sentiment
Manage reputation and crises
Mistake #10: Not utilizing influencers across different verticals
One of the biggest influencer marketing mistakes you can make is not using influencers across different verticals. This means that you’re only hiring from one vertical, like fashion or beauty or travel, over and over again. Hiring an influencer who only promotes a specific industry will likely be less effective than someone who promotes multiple industries.
Why? Because the first influencer has been seen by followers as someone who only promotes a single industry, so when they promote a product or service outside of that industry, it’s seen as an unrelated endorsement rather than an extension of their brand.
The Fix: Consider diversifying your influencers’ portfolio by hiring them from different industries—this way, when they promote your product or service, it’ll feel more like an extension of their own brand than an unrelated endorsement.
Mistake #11: Focusing on the sales metric alone
It’s easy to get caught up in measuring the effectiveness of your influencer marketing campaign in terms of sales. After all, that’s what you’re trying to do! But if you don’t also measure how well your campaign is doing at building brand awareness and positive sentiment toward your company, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity.
When you focus only on sales, you run the risk of:
– Failing to meet your campaign goals because there wasn’t enough time for a significant amount of sales to come in by the end date.
– Not getting enough customers who were actually interested in your product because they didn’t see any value in it compared to what they already had or could get elsewhere.
The Fix: In order to get a good ROI, you need to measure not just sales but also brand awareness, engagement, and customer retention.
Wrapping up
Influencer marketing is a gold mine of opportunities. Influencers have better influence than celebrities nowadays for a simple reason – consumers can relate to them better. By avoiding the above mistakes, you can make your next influencer marketing campaign more impactful than ever.
It’s now time to utilize the power of social media rather than being at the receiving end of uncertain trends. Radarr is one powerful social and digital listening platform that helps brands gather actionable insights about their audience response, interests, and market trends in a fuss-free way, in real-time.
The market is cutthroat with no lack of options when it comes to brands, products, or services. The key to being a successful business in such competition is to have a strong digital presence. Brands are making every possible effort to reach their target audience and drive them to engage with their content.
But every digital marketing technique doesn’t always work.
Like Pepsi’s advertising campaign with Kendall Jenner. The commercial showed Kendall, a supermodel, leaving her photoshoot and joining a peaceful anti-discrimination protest march.
So far, so good. But then the ad shows Kendall offering a can of Pepsi to a policeman. Both characters embrace and the protest comes to an end. While the intention behind it was fine, the brand got bad publicity. People complained that the advertisement denigrates the importance of peaceful protests and shows that all it takes to resolve such serious and important issues in the world is a drink.
While such campaigns grab massive attention, audience and customer dissatisfaction are not always clearly noticeable. According to reports, 96% of unhappy customers won’t communicate their dissatisfaction to you directly but will tell friends about their disappointment. Many will post online but not tag you.
That’s why analyzing sentiment in marketing is important. It helps dig deep and collects data on your audience’s sentiment. It helps you send the right message without triggering the wrong sentiments in your audience.
In this article, we will discuss the ins and outs of sentiment mining in digital marketing and how to use it properly.
What is sentiment mining?
Also known as opinion mining, sentiment analysis in marketing is the process of using natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) approaches to examine online comments and written pieces and discover the emotional intent behind the words.
To put it simply, sentiment analysis is the process of clearly understanding customers’ attitudes towards a particular topic, brand, product, or service – be it positive, negative, or neutral.
Which sources should your sentiment analysis tap into?
Sentiment analysis is an amazing tool when it comes to quantifiably categorizing online statements’ negative or positive connotations. It gives companies a strong way of detecting the aggregate language data across all sorts of communications on online platforms.
But to use sentiment analysis in marketing properly, one needs to know the proper sources to trap into for collecting wide-ranging relevant data. Here are a few:
Audience inquiries
When an audience starts or participates in a conversation and asks about your product or services, the metrics on their overall sentiment, the length of the text and the words used can be compared to other different inquiries and mentions.
Customer service
Sentiment analysis of customer service interactions helps you track the way customers feel about your company or product over time. It can give you an insight into their brand loyalty and how satisfied they are with your customer service. It also helps you understand what your customers expect from you and how you can deliver those expectations.
HR interactions
Happy employees are more likely to stay. You can apply sentiment analysis to HR interactions to collect how your employees feel about those interactions and how you can make them better. It can also help you improve your recruitment efforts and attract better talent.
News and public data
This source is particularly useful for large, public companies and brands getting better visibility. Sentiment analysis can detect whether your trending news is positive or negative over time and what your audience feels about trending topics. This can help you curate a campaign that appeals to their sentiments.
How to use sentiment analysis data in marketing
We know that accurate sentiment analysis can change the face of your digital marketing strategy (for the better, of course). But for it to work, first, you need to identify the areas where opinion mining will benefit you the most.
Here are a few ways you can optimize sentiment analysis in digital marketing:
Understand what they ‘care’ about
While trends may fade out with time, cause-driven marketing helps your business in the long haul. Data gathered from sentiment mining can help you understand what topics and issues your audience cares about. It’s a fantastic way to not only give something back to society but also establish your brand as aware and sensitive.
Marketing has several benefits, such as increasing brand loyalty, boosting employee morale, positive reviews and press coverage, etc. This ultimately leads to increased sales and helps your company stand out among competitors. According to studies, 83% of gen Z and millennials say it’s important that company values match their own, and 62% of millennials have stated that they enjoy shopping from brands that reflect a positive ideology.
But finding the right cause that aligns with your brand image and influences your audience’s opinion can be challenging. Sentiment analysis can help you with that. For example, if your opinion mining data shows that your targeted audience feels passionate about environmental sustainability, you can market your brand by joining a structured campaign like donating 1% of the profits to the planet.
Based on the data, you can also identify local non-profits working towards a cause your audience is interested in. In this case, launching a co-branded marketing campaign with such non-profits for an event will increase your chances of fundraising and public support.
Marketing demands significant investment and the campaign going wrong can cause you significant loss. Thus, basing your marketing strategy on sentiment analysis data will help you prevent any blunder by choosing the right causes to collaborate with.
Better copywriting for campaigns
Good copywriting titillates your audience’s intellect and impacts their buying decisions. But today, every other brand is utilizing copywriting to boost their brand status. So to stand out in the crowd, your brand must have a unique voice that resonates with your target market.
Sentiment analysis can help you identify topics that interest your core audience. But the feature that really takes the copywriting approach up a notch is its ability to detect your audience’s mood and feelings on topics.
Artificial intelligence can detect which words are used most in negative or positive sentences. This way, the gathered data will help you to curate content addressing these feelings and avoiding any chances of hurting audience sentiment.
Opinion mining generates data that otherwise would be considered intangible but can prove to be invaluable for your brand’s marketing. To put it simply, it would allow you to personalize your content and CTA so that your audience finds them relatable and interacts more. According to HubSpot, personalized CTAs have 202% better chances of conversion.
Better visuals
To create content that helps your business stand out in the crowd, visuals are essential. Proper visuals and infographics reflect your brand and draw in the target audience.
Imagery helps make text-centric content more eye-catching, digestible, and memorable and can communicate a compelling message that speaks volumes without taking up much time.
Nowadays, millions of images are being uploaded on different social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, etc. These visuals play a crucial part in expressing the emotions of users on multiple online social networking sites. To understand what interests them, image sentiment analysis has become important in the area of online multimedia big data research. But how do you detect whether your brand’s visual imagery works for your audience?
But visual storytelling is not just about pictures. The goal is to plan your visual media in a way that’s relatable across all your platforms, and understanding what visuals are likely to trigger positive emotions is the key to that. Sentiment mining in digital marketing helps you pinpoint those relatable factors and improve your brand’s visual storytelling. The AI-powered analytics shows you the way to getting better engagement not only on content but also on your ad campaigns.
With opinion mining, you can track direct replies to those who subscribe to your content, examine replies to the comments, and compare the retention rate of each visual. You can use the results to understand what parts hit a chord with your audience and what did not work for them.
Better crisis management
In the era of social media, every post and campaign is under constant scrutiny. No matter how well you target a trending topic, the slightest miscommunication or poor representation can make your digital marketing go wrong real fast.
That’s something you can prevent by including sentiment analysis in digital marketing. AI-powered opinion mining can help you can find out if people aren’t picking up the content you are delivering. To understand it better, let’s examine the chaotic McDonald’s Brazil campaign.
During the early period of the COVID-19 pandemic, McDonald’s Brazil ran a solidarity campaign with customers isolated in quarantine by separating its iconic arches. But the Twitter users didn’t appreciate the campaign as it seemed like a set of half-hearted efforts of the brand to support people.
A sentiment analysis tool would have flagged the campaign as negative, and McDonald’s could prevent the negative coverage before it spun into a full-fledged brand reputation crisis.
This shows us the importance of constantly monitoring the sentiment of your campaigns. Sentiment analysis makes it easier. It immediately identifies spikes of negative mentions that might be a sign of a brewing controversy. Whether it’s linked to your marketing, competitors’ campaigns, news, or anything in between, you will see it coming.
Prevention is always better than cure. With sentiment mining in digital marketing, you can track your brand mentions on social networking sites and media outlets and find the root cause – be it an influencer tweet, a customer review, or something else. Mending the damage will be far easier if you know early on that there is an issue.
Segmenting audience better
Not every individual in your core audience sees or feels the same way about a topic, issue, or your product and services. Thus your digital marketing strategy needs to be customized based on segments to cater to each of them. But how do you categorize your audience in this vast sea of social media interactions? The answer is – with the help of AI in sentiment analysis.
Sentiment analysis goes through millions of online conversations, images, and written pieces and pinpoints different sentiments clearly and comprehensively. This helps you differentiate the segments in your audience and shows you what to target while running a campaign that resonates with each segment.
Understanding different markets
For a scaling company, understanding the intricacies of different markets is crucial. One marketing strategy may have done really well in India but may fall flat in Singapore or Japan. Still, social media does not always have national boundaries, and sentiment analysis leverages that very universality. With proper sentiment analysis tools, you can assess what different populations from different countries relate to or feel passionate about.
Let’s say you are planning to scale your brand to European countries like Germany. Now before you run advertising or social media campaigns, you need to understand the sentiment of the people of that country. A uniform strategy does not work in every market, and that’s where sentiment analysis can help you. By applying those analytics, you will be able to gauge exactly what content will be well accepted in a particular market.
Identify influencers
No matter what we say, social media influencers are now a big part of the online buzz, and they are here to stay. Identifying influencers who can be the face of your brand on social media can be easily done with sentiment analysis.
With the help of opinion mining, you can locate the most appropriate influencers for your product by just identifying and applying keywords that are relevant and important to your business. For example, if you are a pet-food brand, you could search social media for keywords like “dog food,” “organic dog food,” etc.
Once you’ve located the influencers with a fair number of followers that use your keywords frequently (in a positive light, of course), you can further use sentiment analysis to make sure their interactions with followers are also positive. And voila — you’ve found your candidates!
Conclusion
Did you know, according to reports, 68% of customers leave a brand because they believe it doesn’t care about them? Digging deeper into your brand sentiment is not only good for your digital marketing but also beneficial for your customer support strategy. Sentiment analysis can open your eyes to how your customer really feels about certain issues as well as your brand.
But tracking the sentiments and opinions of your audience is a complicated task that needs precision. That’s why choosing the right tools for accurate sentiment mining in digital marketing is the key to running a successful campaign.
Radarr provides you with the finest features when it comes to social media marketing. The platform’s cutting-edge AI technology enables you to utilise the necessary social media intelligence services and more. This social media solution tracks and monitors every emerging trend and offers sentiment API capable of measuring human emotions behind online conversations. With its efficient services, Radarr will help you align your brand image with your audience’s expectations and prevent any downfall of the misdirected campaign.
For effective, relatable, and interactive brand marketing, book a demo today.
Learn how to make a more comprehensive ideal customer persona with social listening and analytics.
In a digital world, the competition is fierce. It’s hard enough to get people to pay attention to your brand, let alone actually buy from you.
When starting out in marketing, it’s tempting to just jump right into making ads and other content without considering who your target market is or what they want. But this approach can be disastrous for your business. If you’re not hitting the right notes with your customers, then all that hard work could go down the drain when they decide not to buy your product or service after all.
But if you want to succeed, you must understand your buyer personas better than anyone else—including your competitors. That means listening to what they say and observing how they behave. And that’s where social listening comes in.
Social listening helps you learn about your target audience through online conversations about their needs, interests, and preferences. You can use this information to build a better understanding of who they are as individuals or groups and how best to engage with them across channels like email marketing and social media advertising (among others).
So what can you do?
Well, if you want to make sure that every campaign hits its target audience in exactly the right way, then you need personas—precise descriptions of who exactly your ideal customer is and what they want from a company like yours. You also need those personas alongside a clear definition of your target audience—this helps ensure that once you’ve got them in place, they’ll make sense when applied to real-world situations.
Why should brands create buyer personas?
When trying to build a brand, one of the most important things you can do is understand who your audience is. When you’re developing products and messaging, you must know who will be receiving that message and how they’ll react to it. Buyer personas are a great way to do this.
A buyer persona is a fictional character that represents a member of your target audience. Buyer personas help brands understand what motivates their customers to better tailor their messaging to them. It should include details like age, gender, location, income level, interests, and hobbies, as well as information about their goals and challenges.
Buyer personas are important to brands and marketers because they act as a guide to understanding the voice of their customers. Buyer personas are not just important for marketing; they can be used in all aspects of business strategy and development. They can help shape everything from product design to new business models. Buyer personas can also be used by sales teams for more effective sales pitches by understanding who your customers are and what matters most to them when making purchasing decisions.
In addition to helping you understand who your audience is, buyer personas help you understand what they want, how they like to consume content, and what kind of tone resonates with them best.
You can use this information as a guidepost when creating content or deciding on strategy—for example, if you see that your persona really loves videos but hates long-form text posts, you may decide to focus more heavily on video content rather than text-based posts.
In addition to helping you create content that resonates with your audience, buyer personas can also help inform decisions about which kinds of marketing efforts are most effective for different types of audiences. If you have two different target audiences—one made up of millennials who are active on Twitter and Instagram and another that’s older and more likely to engage with Facebook—you might consider using different advertising campaigns for each group.
How can social media data / social listening help build better personas?
Social media data can help build better buyer personas because it allows a brand to get to know its customers on a deeper level. As people interact with brands online, they’re revealing themselves—their interests, pain points, and preferences—in a way that isn’t possible otherwise.
This information can be used to make more accurate predictions about what customers want and need in the future. It can also be used to create more effective campaigns for connecting with those customers.
Here are five steps using which social listening can help you build better buyer personas:
1. Evaluate your existing audience
Step 1 is to evaluate your existing audience by collecting social media data across your active social networks (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.).
Leverage a good social media listening tool to determine the attributes of your most engaged followers and characterize them by age, interests, professional title, or industry to better understand how to reach them.
For example, if you’re a luxury brand that targets millennials, you’ll want to know what kind of content they like on Facebook and Instagram so you can better target them in paid ads.
2. Analyze competitors’ audiences
The easiest way to get started with social listening is to find out what your competitors are doing and how they’re doing it by analyzing data from competitors’ channels (and other sources). This can include looking at what content they post on Facebook or Twitter, how they engage with potential customers, whether they use influencers, and more. You can also analyze what people say about your competitors to identify opportunities for improvement or growth in their marketing strategies.
If you’ve never done any market research before, it might seem like a daunting task, but there are tools that make it easy for you to analyze your competition’s data.
One of the most useful free tools is Google Alerts, which allows you to set up alerts for specific keywords or phrases related to your business. For example, if you have an eCommerce store selling women’s clothing, you could set up alerts for things like “women’s clothing” and “trendy women’s fashion.” You’ll get an email anytime someone shares content about those topics on social media networks like Facebook and Twitter.
This allows you to learn more about what kinds of people are interested in your products or services—who buys them? Are they mostly female or male? Do they shop online or in-store? What kinds of articles do they read? By answering these questions, you can start building buyer personas that better reflect the customers who actually buy from you!
Also, good social listening tools allow you to discover everything from engagement trends to message sentiment and audience demographics from your competitor’s data.
3. Discover customer pain points and goals
Social listening is a powerful way to discover what your customers are saying about your business, the products or services you offer, and the competitors they use. It can also help you learn more about their pain points and goals—what they care about most. The more you know about these things, the better equipped you’ll be to develop buyer personas that reflect what customers need and want.
Understand your customers’ real problems and what they want to accomplish with your product or service. You can find this information by listening on social media channels, such as Facebook and Twitter, where your target audience is likely discussing similar topics. You can also use tools like Google Trends or BuzzSumo to see what people are currently interested in and posting about online.
Recording what customers say online can help uncover patterns or trends in their behavior. For example, notice that many of your customers are asking about how to use one of your products in a particular way. It might be an indication that there’s room for improvement in how you present this information.
Or if many of them mention needing help with something related to using the product (such as setting up an account), then it could mean there’s room for improvement in how easy it is for people to access support when they need it.
A good social media listening tool can help you discover all positive and negative brand or product mentions across social media to understand how your customers view your offering and what drives them to buy. The tool also helps you monitor mentions and hashtags, along with monitoring your branded keywords (e.g., brand and product names) on social media. You can even use this tool to monitor your competitors’ branded keywords to compare their public sentiment to yours.
4. Gain insights from customer support
Customer support is a goldmine of information about your customers. It’s also the most accessible source of data for social listening.
Use it as a starting point to learn more about your audience by looking at the types of questions they ask, their interests and concerns, and what they like about your brand. This will help you identify pain points and opportunities for improvement, as well as give you insight into how customers view your product or service.
A lot of customers use social media to voice their concerns. A social media listening tool can help you identify them and respond appropriately—not only do you get feedback on how your product is performing, but it also helps build trust with your customers!
5. Create your buyer persona
Cumulate all the information you’ve gathered in the above steps and use it to create your buyer persona (or multiple personas).
Your marketing and sales teams can use these personas to engage their prospects and customers.
Your marketing team can use your buyer persona(e) to tailor their messaging and marketing materials to appeal specifically to the needs of each persona. They’ll also be able to understand where each persona is in their journey toward becoming a customer, so they can make sure that every piece of content is relevant for that stage in their conversion process.
Your sales team should also use these personas to guide their interactions with prospects—for example, if a salesperson knows that a particular persona has already tried and rejected one of your competitor’s products, then they’ll know not to waste time pitching those products during an initial call with them!
Conclusion
When it comes to business, there’s no substitute for understanding your target market.
Social listening is the best way to understand your target market and ideal customer persona. It helps you create an accurate buyer persona, which in turn leads to better marketing campaigns.
And this is especially true when you’re trying to sell a product or service that isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution and has a specific use case. With the right tool, social listening is easy and affordable.
If you’re looking to improve your marketing campaigns, we highly recommend using Radarr as a social listening tool. It allows you to run social listening in real-time, lets you optimize your buyer personas better, and creates a better understanding of your target audience. This means that you can create better marketing campaigns for your business.
Interested in taking your social media listening capacity to the next level?
A detailed comparison on Vimeo vs YouTube for video marketing.
Did you know that an average spends 100 minutes per day on average watching online videos?
The netizens are consuming more and more videos every day. This has made video content an invaluable element of modern business marketing strategy.
For effective video marketing, long and short-form content should be the focus. Even when reels and TikTok are the most talked about, long-form content still delivers sufficient ROI.
State of Video Marketing 2022 report shows that 86% of video marketers cite that video has been an effective method for generating leads. This number went up another 2% from 2021 and up 5% since 2019.
So it goes without saying that a proper video marketing strategy drives profit. While YouTube has consistently been the primary choice for marketers. But for social video marketing, Vimeo can be an excellent option too.
In today’s article, we will discuss which one is the best video marketing platform – YouTube or Vimeo.
What is Vimeo?
Launched in 2004, Vimeo is a video-sharing platform with over 80 million creators. The aspect that makes it stand out from YouTube is its artsy aesthetic and creators.
But Vimeo is more than just a simple video-sharing platform. It lets users–
Collaborate in different video projects
Edit their videos
Host high-quality videos.
While the 3rd feature is quite common, the other two are distinctive to this platform, making it different from YouTube.
What is YouTube?
YouTube is a social video networking platform. Thus, most of the appeal of YouTube depends on the interaction between its audience and the creators. This free platform has effectively replaced television and has become one of the primary sources of modern entertainment for millennials and Gen Z besides OTTs.
Youtube has a diverse and massive audience base. More than 2 Billion users tune in to YouTube every month and consume more than 5 billion videos every day, according to statistics.
Youtube offers interactive live streaming and is the second-largest search engine after Google. That’s why your content must be SEO optimised for better visibility.
Vimeo vs YouTube: What is the difference?
Both platforms primarily function on video hosting but are different in various aspects. The distinctive features were the approach to video content, the audiences, the functionalities, and the monetisation varies greatly.
Let’s examine the differences to gauge which platform suits your brand better.
Audience
A marketing strategy’s effectiveness depends on its audience. Even if you produce enticing and informative content, it will fall flat if you don’t target the right audience.
The viewers and users of Vimeo and YouTube differ from each other. Here’s why:
Vimeo was created by a group of filmmakers. So surely enough, the platform primarily caters to creative professionals and experienced video producers. Its features accommodate artistry. Thus, it is the preferred video hosting site for visual artists, art directors, videographers, editors, and other professional video creators. That’s why it is the niche platform for creative video marketers.
Another aspect that drives users to Vimeo is its non-rigid policy on censorship when it comes to sensitive areas like nudity, controversial topics, use of copyrighted materials under Fair Use articles, etc. With Vimeo, users get to express their artistic freedom.
Another aspect of its popularity is the enhanced privacy of users’ data. Vimeo explicitly states that it does not sell user data. So people who are worried about Internet security and surveillance are more likely to use this platform.
Although Vimeo has a strong user base, it is still a community-driven and smaller platform. YouTube has a massive audience base, making it much more competitive. YouTube delivers both entertainment and education. Thus it has a much more diverse audience base.
YouTube is the main platform for vloggers, who, in turn, become influencers. If we were to compare, Vimeo thrives on creative content, whereas Youtube is more personality-driven.
Features
The functionality of the two platforms differs significantly. Vimeo’s features are based more on the professional use of the video. The platform offers video creation tools, templates, a database for video pros, and stock footage. Vimeo also allows you to create content for different platforms.
Vimeo also provides its users with several features accommodating collaboration on video production. It allows users to leave notes on the video and add teammates. It also has file-sharing features.
The platform also offers corporate use of video. That includes different levels of access to the video library, screen recording, hosting virtual events, etc. All these features facilitate video production for corporate relations.
On the other hand, YouTube is a social video networking site. Its main feature is its recommendation algorithm. Your preference for video content decides what content will show up on your main page, what videos will be shown on the sidebar, and what videos you’re most likely to come across elsewhere on the website.
Another prominent aspect that highlights the dissimilarities of the platforms is social engagement features. Users on YouTube can leave comments under videos and community posts. The platform also enables the users with different ways to support creators.
Another feature that sets YouTube apart is its live video streaming capability. After Twitch, it is the second-largest live streaming service. Users have several live video options that enable their audience to interact with the stream differently.
YouTubes features add to its social aspect, while Vimeo focuses on the professional side of video creation.
Advertising and monetisation
Vimeo allows limited display of ads on their site depending on the type of account a user has, but it does not support pre-roll, post-roll, or overlay ads. The advertising on Vimeo works like this:
Vimeo Basic members and viewers who are not logged in see banner ads on all Basic and Plus members’ pages. Such users also see ads that will appear on their pages.
Vimeo Plus members are not shown any banner ads. However, ads do appear on their pages.
Vimeo PRO and Business members neither see any ads nor will any ads appear on their pages.
It shows that Vimeo’s primary earnings come from membership sign-ups.
On the other hand, as YouTube is a free platform, it profits from running ads. That’s why we see advertisements all over the platform. YouTube offers an advanced and user-friendly ad platform for advertisers. Moreover, when someone spends $10 a day on ads on the platform, they offer personalised support from a “YouTube Advertising Expert”.
Which channel should you use, and how to choose
According to reports, 96% of customers increased their video consumption in 2020, and 9 out of 10 viewers stated that they would like to see more video content from brands. Thus it is clear that video marketing works.
Now that we know the features and other distinguishing basics of the platforms, the next step is to see how you can choose the best one for your video advertising requirement.
Let’s discuss the specifics you need to consider before choosing the best video marketing platform for your business.
Define your audience
For an effective video marketing strategy, thorough audience research is your first step. When you know what your audience likes and interacts with frequently, you can effortlessly pinpoint the platform that will bring you the maximum ROI through video marketing. Knowing your target market is only integral for advertising your brand but also for curating the right content.
Once you have defined your core audience, the data will show you where they interact the most and which content successfully grabs their attention. Then you can choose the right platform for your social video marketing strategy.
Define your video marketing goals and objectives
After identifying your target audience, you need to clearly define your video marketing goals. How you want to portray the campaign will decide which platform will suit you the best. For example, if you choose to curate creative videos for marketing, Vimeo would be ideal for you. On the other hand, if your video marketing goal is to appeal to the social side of the video marketing platform, YouTube is hands down the best option.
Use social listening
For proper audience research and content creation, social listening is the way to go. Investing in an efficient social listening tool like Radarr will help you target your audience based on –
Sentiment analysis goes above and beyond the typical marketing techniques. It gauges the inner meaning of conversations on social networks, digging out the opinions and suggestions of your targetted audience. This helps you improve your video marketing strategy by telling you what content is working for your audience and what’s not.
With Radarr’s advanced Sentiment API, you can use software that helps you accurately measure human emotions behind online conversations. With such data, you can constantly improve and adapt according to the need of the market and use marketing platforms accordingly.
Social media trends have become the key to increasing brand visibility. Thus, very few social media strategies work as well as trendjacking. This method will allow you to identify the trending topics more relevant to your business. You can create content on those trends and market it on a site where your target audience lies.
Understand the nuances of each platform
Each platform has its intricacies. Understanding those nuances is crucial to identifying which platform serves your interest better. While YouTube provides a diverse audience base, Vimeo allows better artistic freedom.
Figure out essential elements like SEO, analytics, and when and how users of a particular platform consume and interact with videos.
Audit available resources
You can audit the data you already have to see which platform has worked better for your competitors. It is a sound way to align your marketing strategy according to your chosen medium. You also need to see what type of videos worked best for your brand, how long it took to produce, etc.
Create a content calendar
Based on the previous consideration, you can create a content calendar to manage your marketing strategy better. If you are trying out both platforms in the initial stages of your marketing, it will help you remain consistent.
Conclusion
As we discussed, both Vimeo and YouTube offer distinct services and features for your video marketing strategy. While audience bases drastically differ, there is no harm if you choose to make the most of both.
Each platform has its pros and cons. So it can be confusing to understand what type of content would appeal to your audience on a particular platform or how to optimise these platforms for increased ROI.
This is why social listening is critical for an effective video marketing strategy, as it pinpoints where the targetted audience interacts the most.
That’s where Radarr comes in.
It redefines your marketing strategy with advanced sentiment API by providing accurate insights on required improvements and changes. It digs deep and extracts trends you can use for your video content. With real-time visualisation and content tracking, Radarr will take your marketing strategy to a newer height.
Brand marketing has evolved with time, and in the current landscape, it mostly depends on media impression. This means it is the result of the number of people who have seen or heard about your brand within a specific period that decides how relevant and popular it becomes.
Marketing now needs to be creative, catchy, and brief. But it also needs to clearly showcase how a particular product of your brand fits in the picture. In a world that is constantly online, social media trends have become the sweet spot of brand awareness campaigns – and that’s exactly what trendjacking is.
In this article, we will be discussing what trendjacking really is, what makes it work, and what benefits you can expect from it.
What is trendjacking?
Trendjacking is the method of noticing something gaining traction and using it to increase the visibility and value of the brand and gain profit. Brands use trendjacking to capitalize on exposure by participating in a current conversation or trend.
It is an efficient marketing strategy to gain followers and attention. Trendjacking works just as the term suggests — it hijacks an existing trend and exploits it to strengthen the brand’s connection with its core target audience.
Trendjacking vs. newsjacking: Is there a difference?
While they sound pretty similar, newsjacking and trendjacking have very different approaches and platforms. The goal is the same, i.e. brand marketing and exposure, but the methods are different.
Newsjacking is a technique where marketers insert their ideas or brands into a breaking or sensational news story to gain recognition in the media and increase product popularity.
Let us look at an example:Prince Harry and Meghan Markle announced that they are stepping back from the positions of senior members of the British Royal Family. Shortly after that, Madame Tussauds Wax Museum also made headlines by removing Harry and Megan from a wax display of the royal family.
This method of grabbing headlines can be considered newsjacking.
The primary difference between newsjacking and trendjacking is that while the former jumps on stories that have already hit the news, the latter takes advantage of already existing trends to gain traction.
Here is one of the most notable trendjacking examples:We all remember the black/blue or white/gold dress that caused an explosion on the internet. While netizens were in a frenzy debating over the original colour of the dress, Dunkin’ Donuts jumped in on the trend, decorating two donuts with the now-iconic colours. They tweeted the picture with the caption, “Doesn’t matter if it’s blue/black or white/gold, they still taste delicious. #thedress.”
The use of hashtags allowed the users to interact better with the tweet.
The aforementioned example embodies everything your trendjacking approach should be – lighthearted, adaptable, and the center of internet frenzy.
What are the benefits of trendjacking?
In the world of the internet and social media, many PR campaigns fall flat on their face due to the lack of relevancy at that moment. But trendjacking is actually producing impressive results for brand marketing campaigns for many businesses.
It is arguably the most potent moment marketing method, giving platforms to creative and innovative ideas and attracting the audience’s attention to your products. But what exactly are the benefits of trendjacking?
Let us take a look.
1. Better brand visibility
The primary goal of moment marketing is boosting your brand’s visibility among your target audience. Trendjacking uses upper-funnel marketing techniques and campaigns that reach users before they know about your brand, product, or service.
If your brand is new, leveraging an already existing trend leaves a memorable impression on the audience’s mind, ensuring your campaigns are not just a fluke. Trendjacking makes the awareness stage, which is the most volatile in the marketing funnel, efficient and easy.
In this stage, you only have a few seconds to grab attention. Joining in on the trend and curating innovative posts is the fast-track way to build better brand visibility.
2. A quick win
Unlike other PR campaign methods, trendjacking does not deal with jargon-laden language. It offers brands an easy, simple, but catchy way to publish content. Jumping on existing trends eliminates the need to drum up netizens’ interest in the topic, as there is already enough traction for them.
An elaborate marketing campaign takes hours to craft. On the other hand, trendjacking only leverages the right time to put something out and choose the perfect response to the trend, grabbing the attention of your target market quickly.
3. Drives conversions
The whole point of boosting brand visibility is to bring increased conversion rates. Trendjacking grabs the attention of the audience who are interacting with a particular trend and drives more traffic to your site. This helps in gathering leads, and if you take the right approach to these new visitors, you can eventually turn them into customers. This way, trendjacking increases sales conversions.
4. Humanizes your brand
One of the biggest perks of trendjacking is that it makes your brand relatable to the population. Usual PR campaign solely focuses on promoting the brand and its services and lacks personalization. Trendjacking, on the other hand, talks to the audience about the brand but bases the conversation on something they are already interested in. This way, it allows your potential customers to identify with your brand on a human level.
How to get started with trendjacking?
Here are 8 simple steps that can help you get started with trendjacking:
1. Leverage social listening
To optimize the ongoing trends, you need to be aware of them in the first place. Leveraging trendy topics will only work if you jump on with a trend as soon as it gets traction. But the internet is a vast space, and keeping up with every trending topic seems almost impossible.
Every week or month, Google Trends dedicates an entire page to analyzing a popular search trend, whereas Twitter regularly updates the trending topics to the side of the page’s timeline on a desktop view.
Getting notifications as soon as a new trend starts to turn up gives you a better position to react and keeps your brand on top of your game. That is where a proper social listening tool can help your moment marketing strategy. Keeping up with every relevant trend is the best way to leverage social listening. With Radarr’s AI-powered solutions, you can listen, monitor, and track online conversations across all channels.
2. Define your goals and objectives
Before jumping on the bandwagon of moment marketing, you need to point out what exactly you want to achieve via a trendjacking campaign and how it would help you. You can focus your approach on building your brand name or promoting a particular service or product.
Identifying the objective will help you filter through numerous trending topics and target those that align with your brand. However intricate your goal is, a clear idea about it is crucial for trendjacking to work in your favour.
3. Understand the trend
Using trends without knowing the relevance or the topic properly is a recipe for a marketing disaster. Without a clear understanding of the root of the trend, the reason for its popularity, or the meaning behind specific hashtags, your responses and interactions may seem kitsch, desperate or tone-deaf.
Lack of comprehension of the popular topics when it comes to trendjacking has two likely outcomes. At best, the audience just dismisses or ignores your brand’s attempt at joining it. At worst, it can spark a controversy encircling your company, putting off people in your target audience and even your existing customers.
Thorough research into a trend also helps you to gauge when it is time to get involved. The timing needs to be perfect – too early, and it will not be understood by enough people, but too late, and you will be considered cringe old news.
4. Evaluate if it suits you
Just because a trend is gaining maximum traction does not mean it will work for you. You need to evaluate if an emerging trend is in alignment with the goods and services your brand is offering. Topics do not have to be from your exact industry, but the hashtags must serve some relevance linked to your brand.
Your brand’s participation in a totally unrelated or poorly linked conversation will confuse your audience about your image. So, make sure you examine the potential of every trend you pick before settling on the ones you intend to use.
5. Put your own spin on it
A repeated joke does not sound funny, no matter how loud you yell. Similarly, no matter how robust your trendjacking strategy is, if you are not bringing something new and unique from your competitors, it will not work with your audience. You may even get called out for it on the internet.
While understanding the root of a trend is vital for such moment marketing, you must put creativity that is unique to your brand. Trendjacking posts need to be witty and catchy – giving you a lot of room to be bold with them.
You need to remember that trendjacking is only a marketing strategy for brands to get exposure, and everyone knows this. So, make it a point to ensure your addition is actually interesting.
6. Don’t sell
Like usual marketing methods, a content marketing approach like trendjacking does not straight away focus on only promoting a product or service of your brand. The whole point is to make marketing relatable to your target audience, and boring campaigns do not cut the chase anymore.
That is where you need to focus while mapping out your trendjacking strategy. The best course of action here is throwing the spotlight on the conversation while subtly hinting at your product or services.
Trying too hard diminishes the cool factor of trendjacking. Your audience will be able to see through it if your posts are too sales-y. This makes the campaign seem inauthentic and thus loses all of the potential benefits.
7. Make it worthwhile
While exposure is the primary goal, your brand’s trendjacking process does not necessarily need to be only about that. If you have managed to grab someone’s attention, you need to maintain their interest in your content to convert them into clients and customers.
Adding links to specific landing pages of your website in your social account bio or a quick link at the end of the conversation can keep your audience engaged with your page. Dedicated pages that are set up and optimized to target keywords relating to the trend can also drive increased interaction from viewers. You can hire SEO experts who will guide you to the best way to increase conversion rate with on-page keyword optimization.
The bottom line is – when a person spends time on your page and interacts with your posts, make your content worthwhile for them.
8. Encourage action
Study the trends properly and find out points that would link your brand to the topic. Your trendjacking posts should drive your audience to not only interact but also take action by opting for your services.
Never leave your trendjacking posts open-ended. Be it the graphic, the video itself, or the caption, always include calls to action.
Conclusion
Trendjacking can be an effective way to connect with followers and be a fun part of the conversation. But that does not mean that it would suit every type of business. The outcomes depend on your brand’s goal, objective, and the crowd you are targeting.
If you carry it out well, trendjacking can prove to be a powerful tool, allowing you increased brand visibility, more lead generation, and secure placements for your clients.
But, like everything else, it is not immune to potential problems and roadblocks you may face. This is why a proper social media guide is important to enable the quick-thinking trendjacking requires.
Keeping track of every emerging trend is not humanly possible. And that is what technology can help you with. Radarr’s cutting-edge AI technology will enable you to experience the best possible social media intelligence services. This AI-powered social media solution tracks and monitors every emerging trend, provides a sentiment API that is capable of measuring human emotions behind online conversations and redefines your approach to trendjacking.
For a better presence on social media and improved profits, choose Radarr as your personal trendjacking buddy.
