Visual content marketing via social media is quickly becoming this year’s “must do” for marketing agencies. In the last twelve months, marketers who utilize visual content like videos, images and infographics report a significant increase in virtually every key metric for measuring marketing success, including social media engagement, visitor-to-lead conversion rates, inbound customer acquisition and blog readership, according to HubSpot. For example, adding a photo URL to your tweet can boost retweets by 35%. Images account for 87% of all shared interactions on Facebook. Visual content and social media are a match made in marketing heaven– until your agency has to manage multiple large-scale social media marketing campaigns, that is.
Videos, infographics and other compelling visual content take time and money to produce and, in order for them to reach the right audience at the right time, they need to be back by a fully integrated marketing campaign. With clients demanding a measurable return on their investment, the right project management techniques can make or break your agency’s reputation as a social media marketing powerhouse. The trick is to approach social media marketing like you would any other project and put a comprehensive management plan in place from day one:
- Outline deliverables with web-based project management. Social media projects have multiple phases and approval stages, including strategic planning, content creation, campaign execution and campaign monitoring/reporting. Treat these phases like you would any project by breaking down the key deliverables and deadlines. With so many moving parts, I like using Producteev, ActiveCollab or Redbooth for managing project assignments so everyone’s on the same page and nothing falls through the cracks.
- Track brand mentions. One of the biggest challenges of social media marketing is the platform’s real-time customer/brand interactions. Even if you’re not actively managing a client’s customer relations on social media, it’s still important for your agency to be on top of your client’s brand mentions and social media reputation. Knowing what your customers are saying about your client’s brand and how they’re choosing to interact with this brand impacts the type of content and marketing campaign you’ll develop. Mention is a newer tool that’s useful for visualizing a brand’s online presence; you can monitor millions of sources in real time and receive a daily email that aggregates all the mentions from the previous day. Mention also includes the ability to respond to brand mentions in real-time, which could be a critical value-add for your agency’s clients.
- Use the right analytics tools. With a new app or tracking program popping up each day, social media marketing tools can seem like a dime a dozen. Identifying the tools that are actually useful for your agency’s social media project management (and won’t cost a fortune) is a bit more challenging. I’m a fan of Buffer, a relative new comer that’s great for social media update scheduling and distribution on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+. The recently launched Buffer for Business includes useful analytics reporting for not only measuring clicks and traffic flow, but also for tracking social engagement.
Writer Bio: Erin M is a freelance writer available for projects at WriterAccess.
