Kick Off Your Digital Marketing the Right Way
Building a comprehensive marketing plan can be daunting once you factor in all of the considerations that go into one. What platforms should you invest in? Where should you spend your money? Should you get a Tik Tok? These are all important questions. At the end of the day, the answers lie in what you have the capacity for and what makes the most sense for you and your business. We'll share some tips and tools to help make the work – regardless of platform – more manageable and, perhaps, even enjoyable.
Where to Focus Your Energy
Before devising a marketing plan, it's important to understand where your most engaged audience is and the type of content they look for. You won't find ads for Super Poligrip on Instagram or Snapchat nor will you see Fortnite ads during Wheel of Fortune. Know your audience and where it makes sense for your business or organization to engage organically.
Know Your Platforms
Every social media platform is different: what they allow in terms of content, how they operate, and how users interact with them. For example, Twitter limits the number of photos you can post per tweet to four. Instagram caps photos at 10, while Facebook allows an album to hold up to 1,000 photos. Knowing these restrictions will lead to smarter, more thoughtful design. If you use all three of these platforms, try to tell your story in 4 photos or less. The same can be said for wordcounts, with each tweet limited to 280 characters while Instagram posts are limited to 2,200 characters. Adding threads has made the platform a go-to place for long-form storytelling. A shorter, more direct approach is always a good idea for marketing purposes. This approach gets you more juice out of the squeeze every time.
Take Advantage of their Uniqueness
Now that you're designing content with each platform in mind, you can start thinking about leveraging each platform's individual strengths. We've talked about divisible content – the concept of top-down content creation – before. If your content is relevant, you can use the storytelling tools that Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter provide to make it engaging in exciting and different ways.
Twitter users deploy Memes and GIFs to express emotion and connect with trending topics, while threads are utilized to tell long stories in short, informative bursts. Instagram Stories offer limitless creative options through video, animation, static imagery, and text, and Reels provides a home for long-form video. LinkedIn has its Publishing Platform that allows users to write and share articles. Good content can thrive anywhere but don't make your audience work for it. Meet them where they are and reward them for engaging with you.
One Size Does Not Fit All
While it's great that every platform is different, it isn't easy because every platform is different. This means that different image types, file sizes and image dimensions work best on each platform.
Thankfully, Sprout Social keeps an Always Up-to-Date Guide to Social Media Image Sizes for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube and Tumblr. Reference this guide when creating content for optimal viewing pleasure. There's nothing worse than spending an hour creating a graphic or image only to have the focal point cut off by awkward formatting. I'm looking at you, Twitter.
Work Smarter Not Harder
Now that you've identified relevant platforms, strategized unique content, and are designing to platform-specific dimensions, you have no time for anything else and think, "there's gotta be a better way." There is! If you're a skilled designer and like working with Adobe's Creative Cloud Suite, set up a Photoshop or Illustrator file with separate artboards for each platform's dimension specifications. Create, brand, and export your work all at the same time. If you don't have access to services like Adobe, there are countless free and low-cost web-based content creation applications.
We like Canva for its ability to upload brand kits (your brand colors, logos, and other elements), a variety of templates, and customization options. They also provide a mobile app on iPhone and Android for their base application and a separate app dedicated specifically to Instagram Stories.
Know Where You're Needed (And Where You're Not)
It's essential to recognize that while it may seem like you're expected to use every free platform at your disposal to market your business, the truth is you should only invest where it makes sense: for your time, skillset, interest level, and business sense. If it doesn't align with your business goals or feels like a chore to maintain, your audience will sense that. Your audience can only grow if you create engaging content and deliver it in unique ways.
Follow these tips and use these tools to develop a marketing plan that works for you, not the other way around.
This blog was initially written for 19ideas.com
