The case for social

Clark Quick, digital marketing strategist with Lawn & Landscape, gave attendees an inside look at the how to better utilize social media for digital advertising.  

“The number one thing is to understand who your audience is,” Quick said. “How much detailed information do you have on them?” Identifying how they respond is essential. Some audiences respond better to written activity rather than visual media.

Quick noted that Facebook is the most-used social media platform globally. “It’s push marketing, you can target people based off the activities their doing and easy to tie your brand to specific categories,” he said.

Facebook and Instagram are focused more on consumers and have quite a large reach. Quick added that advertising on these platforms is fairly inexpensive.

With YouTube, the second most-used platform, Quick said that tracking and reporting can be difficult. And is relatively expensive compared to other platforms.

“That said, YouTube can be really great in conjunction with other advertising,” Quick said. “Like, Facebook, everybody’s on YouTube.”

And while most everybody has a LinkedIn account, Quick said it’s not a platform that people are checking every day so there is less of an audience. However, your able to easy target based on a company or job level, which can be beneficial.

Twitter is another platform to utilize for engagement. “With Twitter you are obviously limited to 240 characters,” Quick said. “Sometimes it can be difficult to express an entire campaign in 240 characters.”

Quick also noted Twitter is influencer centric and is a fast-moving stream, which can help with impressions.

Having a clear, measurable goal is important when it comes to social media advertising.

“If you don’t have something in mind it’s hard to judge it,” he said. “Think about what you want to gain from this — lead generation, engagement, etc.”

Quick suggested starting small when building your social media presence.

“Do a small, week or two campaign to get some interactions and see if you get the conversions and responses you want,” Quick said reminding attendees to be patient when advertising on social media.

Another strategy for social media is repurposing content from other platforms. “The more consistent you are with your messaging across platforms the better chance of success,” he said. “People respond to content that is relative to them.”

Quick then gave a live demonstration on using Facebook Business Manager and creating an advertising campaign. Adding that targeting a specific audience and demographic will only add to the success of the campaign.

Quick also recommends finding someone who has a keen understanding of the business and its customers to be the consistent voice posting on social media. Having multiple people posting on each platform can overwhelm things.

In terms of how often to post, Quick said having a schedule can be nice but authenticity is critical. He recommends only posting when you have something clear to say.

“If you’re posting just for the sake of posting — don’t do it,” he said. “Social media is all about being genuine.”

Quick said sharing features on social media platforms are great way to get more content on your pages and gain more of a connection with your audience.

“Making things personal is the kind of content people love,” Quick said, adding that posting photos of finished jobsites or employee anniversaries are nice audience builders.