Categories
Case Study

Dealers Experience 53% Faster Social Fan Growth

Period over period, Retailers who onboard with Thumbstopper see greater social growth

Between hard costs and time costs, social media content is often neglected by the very businesses that would see the greatest impact for that content: small independent retailers or dealerships.
With ThumbStopper handling the syndication of high-quality social content on a consistent basis, retailers on ThumbStopper’s Brand Manager™ software see large improvements in key social metrics like fan growth and organic reach.

In this case study, you’ll learn:

  • Retailer benchmarks in terms of social posts, organic reach, and fan growth
  • What effect ThumbStopper’s Brand Manager software has on retailers’ social presence
  • Retailer data analyzed directly before and after on-boarding with ThumbStopper

Categories
Infographic

A Multi-Channel Approach Is Key for Your Shop’s Social Media Success

Retailers have more choices than ever in how they spend their marketing dollars. Because of this, it’s helpful to understand the part that social media plays in a consumer’s buying decision. This helpful infographic lays out how and why social media should become a key component of your retail location’s multi-channel marketing approach.

A Multi-Channel Approach Is Key for Your Shop’s Social Media Success

Download the high res PDF here

Consider channels like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and even your Google My Business listing when developing your retail store’s social media strategy and be sure to incorporate them all to unlock the path to marketing success for your business.

Categories
Blog

Using Organic Reach to Your Advantage

As a business owner, traffic is vital to your company’s success. But recent events are already bringing entire operations to a screeching halt.

As a business owner, traffic is vital to your company’s success. But recent events are already bringing entire operations to a screeching halt.

While the COVID-19 crisis continues, many owners are struggling to cope with the virus’s impact on their business and their employees’ livelihoods. And for those not bearing the brunt of the impact just yet, it’s become difficult for businesses to bring traffic to their cause.

If you are cutting back on your business’s operation while adjusting to the ramifications of the new normal, you may be stressed trying to generate buzz for your products or services. But with more eyes on social media, there isn’t a better time to start crafting organic relationships with your consumers at a fraction of the cost.

It’s time to use organic reach to your advantage.

Finding a Better (Cost-Effective) Way

Organic reach is a common metric used in social media marketing to track the number of unique individuals viewing your content without paid advertising. A strong organic reach can directly benefit your sales funnel by generating leads via authentic individuals who view your content without utilizing paid media strategies like boosting.

Unfortunately, organic reach on Facebook and Instagram has declined in drastic fashion over the past few years, due in part to greater competition for ad space on users’ news feeds and changes to their respective algorithms. As a result, many companies have turned to paid media out of necessity to build their social presence.

But there’s still hope! Organic reach is still a fundamental metric on social media that can generate traffic and engagement with the right approach. With a bit of strategy and creativity in your content strategy, your business can stand out and create unique connections with your target audience.

Whether your business is on Facebook, Instagram, or another social platform, here are some tips on mastering organic reach and maximizing your content’s thumbprint on a budget:

Understand the Algorithms

Each social platform has undergone changes to its respective algorithms, tailoring content to specific users based on the platform’s specifications. To ensure you’re achieving strong organic reach from your content, make sure to understand the ins-and-outs of each social platform’s algorithms to effectively reach your target audience.

For instance, Facebook’s algorithms have adjusted in the past few months to correspond with its paid advertising measurements. Ranking well with these algorithms is also dependent on various factors, including who a user typically interacts with, the post type, and the popularity of the post itself.

By understanding each platform’s intricacies in greater detail, you can equip your business with vital knowledge on how to best position your future content.

Post Consistently

Consistent posting is key to growing your business’s organic reach. Businesses that post consistently see higher engagement rates, which in turn leads to higher organic reach.

Posting once or twice a month is like being open for business once or twice a month, and then wondering why customers are flocking through your doors. If you post infrequently, your potential customer will begin to form an opinion about your business. Think of restaurants with little or no patrons… Do you want to eat at a restaurant when you’re the only customer there? 

Quality and Timeliness Matter for Content

Using Organic Reach to Your Advantage

Consider the type of content you’re posting on social media, and consider the trending topics of the day and how your business can ride the wave of increased engagement. 

As an example, author Jeff Goins loosely incorporated ‘The Walking Dead’ into his social post while the topic was trending to benefit from the trending topic for his book launch.

Resist the Bait

Don’t get caught using deceptive social practices. Social platforms have begun cracking down on baiting tactics, ensuring that users follow the platform’s rules or pay the price.

Using paid followers, spamming irrelevant content, and using engagement bait are just a few instances of practices that can be detrimental to your business’ social media strategy and reputation among your followers.

Automate and Elevate Your Content Flow

Sometimes, you can also leave your social media content flow to the pros. Enter ThumbStopper.

At ThumbStopper, we work with thousands of business partners to automatically post high-quality, brand-curated digital content for the retailers that sell their products. This, in turn, has contributed to a 22% average organic reach among our retailer subscribers.

If your company is looking for digital content that makes an impact on a budget, we’ve figured out the ins-and-outs of maximizing our partners’ social thumbprint and helping them focus on engaging with their consumers.

Whether your business has or hasn’t been affected by recent events, it may be time to pivot your social media strategy to address organic reach. With a mix of strategy and creativity, you can cut back on costly techniques that don’t secure the right audience and focus on building authentic, organic relationships with your consumers through organic reach.


Categories
Blog

Don’t Panic: Understanding Facebook’s Changes to Organic Reach

Last week, Facebook announced an update to its methodology for measuring organic reach among businesses using its Pages feature.

The update, first reported by social media commentator Matt Navarra, aligns the platform’s organic reach metrics to correspond with its paid advertising measurements. However, the update has left many businesses uncertain as to whether the changes will decrease their organic reach.

Here’s the breakdown of what to expect as Facebook’s changes roll out through the end of the week.

Focused on What Matters

Every time you pass by a physical billboard on the way to work, you are contributing to the total number of impressions that board receives. However, the total reach is not increased every day, since you are the same person driving past the billboard. Impressions and reach for your digital content work in a similar way.

Unlike billboards, however, each time a user logs into Facebook, there are thousands of pieces of content vying for a spot on that user’s news feed. Facebook’s relevancy algorithms score content pieces and determine how relevant and how often that piece of content appears in a user’s news feed.

The greater the relevance, the more often that content piece will be displayed. But if you scroll past the same piece of content during a single session, you aren’t increasing the content’s reach – just its impressions.

Facebook’s new update is designed to adjust organic measurements by preventing repetitive page impressions and adjusting the timeframe in which organic impressions are calculated from a single person.

This method contrasts how Facebook has historically calculated reach – counting the number of times a post appeared in a user’s news feed. Instead, the platform will adopt a “stricter definition that only counts reach once a post enters a person’s screen,” according to Facebook’s business website.

Same Reach, Different Way

So, will your brand’s or retailers’ organic reach be affected by the change? Probably not.

Your business’ impressions are expected to decline from the new updates. But according to Facebook, your reach – the individual, unique Facebook users that view your posts – and other engagement metrics will not be affected by the update.

In Facebook’s announcement, the company notes the update will not affect distribution or any other engagement metrics. In addition, the company is offering businesses the ability to use the platform’s old measurement system over the next few months to transition into the new system.

So don’t be overly concerned: The changes will not negatively affect your content’s organic reach. For our brands and retailers connected to the ThumbStopper platform – which receive between 12 to 37 percent organic exposure on average – they won’t see changes from Facebook’s updates either, due to the unique approach we use to segment and post content.

To learn more about our unique posting strategies that maximize organic reach for your brand and retailers, click here.

Categories
Blog

70% Keeps Popping Up!

Do you ever have a number or word that keeps popping up in your daily activity? For me, the number 70 has been on my mind over the past few weeks.

But why? I am seeing it in a variety of statistics like the ones below:

The Buyer Journey Begins Online

More than 70% of a consumer’s buying journey takes place online BEFORE they ever step foot into a retail location.

The potential consumer is spending a lot of time online before ever being introduced to your product by somebody who is trained on selling your product. This is a powerful statistic that should have you, as a brand, thinking of ways to increase your digital marketing game.

Social Media is a Game-Changer

70% of consumers state their buying decisions are influenced by social media!

What are their friends saying about your brand and products? What are their friends saying about their experience in one of your retailers/dealerships? Are people “liking” posts your brand is producing? Are they seeing ads on Social Media that seem to be catered directly to them? Ads that help them make a positive buying decision?

Remember, 70% are influenced by Social Media. That’s crazy!

In a recent survey, 70% of consumers felt that brands who create custom content or lifestyle content and deliver it through Social Media are making a concerted effort to connect with them. Isn’t that what good marketing is all about?

At our core, we are driven to building a customer relationship and, if we do a great job, create a customer for life.

Adoption Rates are Sky High

Here at ThumbStopper, a SaaS digital marketing solution, we see retailer adoption rates at 70% and above.

Brands we work with use ThumbStopper as the conduit to establish the connection to take their brand’s digital assets – video, imagery, UGC, etc. – and connect and distribute them to their independent retailer’s Social Media pages. There, those 70% of consumers who are influenced by Social Media, as we learned earlier in this article, can be influenced positively. Now that’s amplifying a brand’s message!

I hope these statistics help you in whatever you are doing from a marketing perspective!

Categories
Blog

Digital Ad Spend Eclipses Traditional Ad Spend

Check this out:

A February 2019 eMarketer article expects digital marketing ad spend to eclipse traditional marketing ad spend for the first time in history this year.

What’s amazing is that digital ad spend won’t just pass by – the resource predicts $129 billion of digital ad spend will surpass $109 billion in traditional ad spend. This stat is remarkable and a game-changer for brands and marketing executives.

Additionally, it’s crazy how quick the shift is happening. In 2015, a bit more than three years ago, the total annual digital spend was less than half of its traditional counterpart. Now, it’s $20 billion more!

The marketing resource also forecasts that two-thirds of ad spend will be digital by 2023. But who’s leading the way?

As of now, Google and Facebook are leading the trend, but other social platforms are dominating in capturing their digital spend. So get with it now: Allow your dollars to shift from traditional platforms like TV and billboards to digital outlets.

Another area that may need to shift is your brand’s co-op and marketing development funds (MDF).

Your retailers are in need of aerial support in this rapidly changing battle for customer attention. Their ability to utilize co-op dollars on social and digital platforms is mission critical to their success and yours. Empowering your retailers to shift those dollars to digital and social media outlets will prove effective in the long run.

So, how do you gain the edge against the competition? Attack social media with a left-right combination of content marketing and advertising. Leverage technology to automate social content for your retailers, many of whom are still nervous and overwhelmed with managing their local social media efforts. Also make sure to help your retailers with social and digital platforms – that’s where your buyers are impressionable.

When digital marketing is done right, it’ll create customers for life.