Social Media Marketing

5 Top Brandwatch Alternatives

Your social media success depends on how well you are able to listen to what your audience is saying about you, your competitors and your market in general.

This is what social listening and social media monitoring is all about. 

With data and insights extracted from your social listening efforts, you are able to know your customers better and improve your marketing strategy. 

Are you using a tool like Brandwatch, but find it a little too pricey or just out of your budget?

We’re bringing you five top Brandwatch alternatives that will get you the results that you need. 

Jump Links:

1. Keyhole
2. Hootsuite
3. Mention
4. Falcon.io
5. Sprout Social

1. Keyhole

What makes Keyhole one of the top Brandwatch alternatives is that it has the same features as Brandwatch, but it’s cheaper.

Keyhole is a powerful monitoring tool that lets you monitor hashtags, keywords, URLs, topics, social media handles and more. 

Keyhole allows you to track mentions and keywords across news, blogs and forums, in addition to social media accounts.

These insights help you understand who your followers are, and who your competitors’ followers are. This way, you are able to give them content they will appreciate.  

keyhole dashboard - new branding

It doesn’t end there. 

Get social media account analytics for Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. With these analytics, you’ll know what you’re doing right and how to keep growing your accounts over time.

Spy on your competitors with Keyhole. Get to know how many followers they have, their engagement numbers and who is leading the conversation in your industry, and why.

Keyhole will also show you influencers, sentiment, and trending topics derived from the mentions collected.

Pricing: Keyhole offers a free trial and 3 pricing tiers. Keyhole’s Account Analytics plan starts as low as $29/month, and the Enterprise Suite is $999/month.

2. Hootsuite

hootsuite

Hootsuite is another one of the best Brandwatch alternatives that lets you bring all your social media marketing efforts into one dashboard.

The Hootsuite dashboard enables teams to collaboratively schedule updates to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, among others. 

Monitor how specific search terms are performing in real-time. This is especially handy if you want to see how certain keywords perform in your industry so you can add or drop them from your marketing campaign. 

Hootsuite is also handy for tracking brand mentions, campaign results and industry trends.

Pricing: Price starts from $19/mo to $599/mo depending on the number of social profiles and users. 

3. Mention

Mention will monitor brand mentions on social media. 

You can monitor your company name, your competitor, or a business-related phrase and see what people are saying – in real-time.

You can respond to these conversations right from your Mention dashboard as long as you’ve connected your social accounts. This is a good way to show your audience that you’re listening to them and build your brand reputation. 

Pricing: Price starts from $25/mo up to $450+/mo depending on the number of alerts, mentions and social profiles. 

4. Falcon.io

Want to do more than monitoring and listening using just one tool?

Try out Falcon.io. 

This is a SaaS platform that allows you to conduct social media monitoring, publish social media content, manage your customer experience and generate analytics all from one place. 

Falcon.io aims at enabling marketers to deliver more personalized brand experiences to their customers. 

Pricing: From $129 month for single users and small teams.

5. Sprout Social

Grow your social media following and increase your customer base with Sprout Social.

With Sprout Social, you can monitor your platforms, engage new and old fans, measure performance and grow your brand online.  

If you want to see how you stack up against your competitors, then you’ll love Sprout Social’s engagement feature that shows social engagement trends by day and time. It also provides you with engagement analytics from your competitors. 

Pricing: Starts from $99 per user/mo for 5 social profiles and $249 per user/mo for 10 social profiles.

Amidst all the noise online, your target audience is trying to say something to you. 

Listen to them and give them exactly what they want.

Any one of these top Brandwatch alternatives is the magic wand that you need to do this effectively!

Keyhole is a real-time conversation tracker that provides keyword and hashtag analytics for Twitter and Instagram. Get started for free and search your brand.

3 Top Meltwater Alternatives

Social media monitoring is a non-negotiable part of any successful marketing and sales strategy, and thankfully there are plenty of tools that allow you to collect and analyse social data to inform your decision-making.

Looking for a social media analytics solution that allows you to track conversations, find influencers and keep up to date with your competitors’ activities, but Meltwater is too costly?

Or, are you already a Meltwater user and looking to switch to a more affordable platform?

Below we’ve listed the top Meltwater alternatives you can use to stay on top of your social media accounts, without breaking the bank.

Jump Links:

1. Keyhole
2. Mention
3. Sprout Social

1. Keyhole

Keyhole tops our list of Meltwater alternatives as it offers the same features at a much more affordable price. 

As a specialised hashtag tracking & social analytics solution, Keyhole allows you to keep track of your mentions and analyse the conversations about your brand across the most widely used social media platforms as well as forums, blogs and the news. 

With Keyhole, you’ll be able to understand customer sentiment, identify and replicate your top performing content to maximise engagement, as well as measure the impact of your influencer marketing campaigns.

keyhole dashboard - new branding

Moreover, Keyhole enables you to keep pace with the trending topics in your industry by showing you the hashtags that are starting to gain momentum, as well as the conversations that your competitors are having online.

Best of all? You can collect all your findings in simple, easy-to-understand reports and share them with key stakeholders in your organisation.

Pricing: Keyhole offers a free trial and 3 pricing tiers. Keyhole’s Account Analytics plan starts as low as $29/month, and the Enterprise Suite is $999/month.

2. Mention

Mention is a social media listening and publishing tool that allows you to listen to online conversations and plan your posts so that they reflect the latest industry trends and audience interests.

Mention has two solutions: Listen and Publish.

Mention’s publishing solution allows you to create and manage your social media content calendar from one place. 

Mention’s listening solution enables you to keep tabs on your competition and track key metrics in your industry to stay informed of trending topics and measure the impact of your campaigns.

Mention will send you daily recaps as well as email notifications whenever there’s been a peak of mentions of your brand.

Pricing: Mention offers 4 pricing tiers, including a free plan for one user. Their individual plans start around $25/month and their enterprise plans start at $450/month.

3. Sprout Social

Finally, Sprout Social is another Meltwater alternative that allows you to monitor your brand hashtags in real-time, track post and campaign performance and uncover trends in social media growth. 

Sprout Social allows you to organise your messages and access all your social media inboxes in one place as well as manage your content calendar. You can also use the tool to benchmark your stats against your competitors’, and by getting the Listen & Inform add-ons, you can monitor and analyse topics that are trending on Twitter. 

Pricing: Sprout Social offers a 30-day trial and 3 pricing tiers. Their plans range from $99-249 per user.

Which Meltwater Alternative is the right choice for you?

These top Meltwater alternatives we included in our list are all robust tools that can inform your decision-making and allow you to understand the type of content that resonates with your audience.

As a result, this improve your chances of increasing engagement and helping to reach your other marketing goals.

So which one should you choose?

It all depends on your needs. 

Looking for a specialised solution that gives you really detailed information on your brand reputation online? Then, Keyhole would probably be the best choice. 

Want to track online conversations and plan your social media posts from one platform? In that case, you would probably try Mention. 

Want to bring clarity to your inbox and don’t mind paying extra to get a couple of social listening add-ons? Sprout Social is probably what you want. 

The bottom line is, there are a myriad of tools out there that are more affordable than Meltwater and make social media monitoring affordable to everyone – even small businesses with small budgets.

Keyhole is a real-time conversation tracker that provides keyword and hashtag analytics for Twitter and Instagram. Get started for free and search your brand.

4 Top Talkwalker Alternatives

There’s no doubt that Talkwalker is a powerful social media listening tool.

But at a hefty starting price tag of $9,600 USD for the most basic plan, it’s simply not an option for most marketers’ budgets.

Don’t worry though. There are several Talkwalker alternatives out there that offer social listening, social media analytics, and the reporting tools you need—with even better ROI for your business.

Jump Links:

1. Keyhole
2. Sprout Social
3. Brand24
4. Mention

Without further ado… here are our top 4 Talkwalker alternatives:

1. Keyhole

Keyhole is a powerful Talkwalker alternative available at a fraction of the cost.

Keyhole’s hashtag analytics and social media monitoring tools allow you to keep a finger on the pulse of your brand and your industry as a whole.

With Keyhole, you can measure the impact of your social media campaigns, hashtags, and influencers. You can also track your competitors, and any content that’s trending for your targeted hashtags and keywords.

Keyhole’s social media reports are easy to use, visually appealing, and easily shareable with your clients.

keyhole dashboard - new branding

Neil Patel says, “This tool (Keyhole) does a lot of things others can’t. And as a bonus, it’s extremely user-friendly.”

Pricing: Keyhole offers a free trial and 3 pricing tiers. Keyhole’s Account Analytics plan starts as low as $29/month, and the Enterprise Suite is $999/month.

2. Sprout Social

While a little pricier than Keyhole, Sprout Social is another affordable alternative to Talkwalker.

Sprout Social offers rich social analytics, engagement tracking, listening capabilities, and publishing tools.

Sprout Social’s collaboration and automation capabilities are a nice bonus, too.

Pricing: Sprout Social offers a 30-day trial and 3 pricing tiers. Their plans range from $99-249 per user.

3. Brand24

Brand24 is another lightweight Talkwalker alternative.

Their platform offers a live feed of your mentions to track your conversations. They also have a discussion volume chart to track unexpected spikes in brand mentions and publicity.

They also provide mention analytics, influence score, sentiment analysis, and a variety of alert options.

Pricing: Brand24 offers a 14-day trial and 3 pricing tiers. Their Personal plan starts at $49/month and their highest-tiered plan is $199/month.

4. Mention

Mention’s social media listening and publishing platform is the final Talkwalker alternative on our list.

Mention offers a feed of your brand mentions, analytics of industry audiences, and reports that allow you to measure the impact of your marketing efforts.

They also offer an interface for social media publishing and scheduling on every platform, including helpful preview tools to verify a post’s layout.

Pricing: Mention offers 4 pricing tiers, including a free plan for one user. Their individual plans start around $25/month and their enterprise plans start at $450/month.

Looking to accurately track your social media campaigns? Prove their impact and ROI? Produce beautiful marketing reports?

Start your free Keyhole trial today.

How to Get More Instagram Followers: 30 Proven Strategies

Everyone has big dreams when they start an Instagram account for their business.

But getting more Instagram followers—especially at the beginning—isn’t as easy at it seems. How do you get more Instagram followers?

Paying for Instagram followers doesn’t work. You end up with inflated follower counts that actually don’t provide any results to your business.

So how do you build an authentic Instagram following that’s relevant to your business?

Here are 30 ways to get more followers on instagram.

Jump Links:

1. Start By Strategizing
2. Research Your Competitors
3. Define Your Audience
4. Consistent Branding & Aesthetic
5. Optimize Your Instagram Bio
6. Use Relevant Hashtags
7. Create a Branded Hashtag
8. Post Great Captions
9. Post Consistently
10. Post at the Right Time
11. Post Beautiful, Professional Photos
12. Post Real People (and Selfies)
13. Ask People to Tag Their Friends
14. Tag Your Location
15. Engage, Engage, Engage
16. Share User Generated Content
17. Follow Relevant Accounts
18. Steal Your Competitors’ Followers
19. Work with Influencers
20. Collaborate With Other Brands & Accounts
21. Contests & Giveaways
22. Post Videos
23. Post Stories
24. Use Story Highlights
25. Use Instagram Live
26. Start an IGTV Series
27. Promote Your Instagram Content on Other Channels
28. Create Custom Camera Filters
29. Instagram Ads
30. Use an Instagram Analytics Tool

1. Start By Strategizing

Social media can be a huge time-waster if you don’t have an action plan. Far too many businesses go straight to posting on Instagram without any idea of why.

The harsh truth is:

Growing your Instagram follower count will require thoughtful, strategic action. Making it up as you go along won’t cut it.

Set SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Timely) goals that relate back to your business plan. 

Your goals may be related to:

  • Growing brand awareness
  • Increasing online sales
  • Boosting website visitors

Try to set a specific, realistic goal with a deadline. For example, increasing online sales by 10% within 12 months.

By establishing your goals up front, you give a purpose behind each post.

If your goal is to grow brand awareness, you may steer more towards lifestyle content.

Want to increase sales? You may post more product shots.

If you want to boost your website visitors, you may post contests or promotional offers.

As a bonus, if you have a team of multiple people managing your account, clearly defined goals means you’ll all be on the same page.

2. Research Your Competitors

There’s no need to reinvent the wheel. You just have to make yours shinier and faster.

Start by making a list of your top competitors and then checking out each of their Instagram profiles.

Ask yourself questions like:

  • What type of content are they posting?
  • What type of content are they not posting?
  • Which posts are getting the most engagement?
  • Who are their followers?
  • What influencers are they working with?
  • How are they making use of video?

Take detailed notes as you go through this process for each of your competitors. By the end of it, you’ll have a great starting point from which to build off of.

For example, you may find none of your competitors are working with influencers, exposing an opportunity in the market.

But don’t stop there. 

By using a social media analytics tool like Keyhole, you can look at the hard data to easily compare the successes and failures of your competitors.

You can unlock insights like which types of posts get the engagement, who has more share of voice, and which accounts have the most positive user sentiment.

3. Define Your Audience

It’s much easier to get more Instagram followers if you tailor your content to a specific audience.

Establish exactly who you’re trying to reach with your posts:

  • How old are they?
  • Where do they live?
  • What is their job?
  • What are their hobbies?
  • What other brands do they like?
  • What do they like on Instagram?

The more specific the better. Come up with 2 or 3 ideal customer profiles (fictional or based off of real followers) and post everything with that user in mind.

For example, if you were Nike, you could target a fictional persona “Can’t-Stop Corey”, a hard-working finance expert who goes to the gym every morning, eats healthy, and watches sports every night.

Corey may be interested in health tips, inspirational quotes, and would likely be persuaded by famous athletes.

4. Consistent Branding & Aesthetic

Surely you’ve heard the cooking expression, “You eat with your eyes first.”

Well the same goes for Instagram. People like pretty content.

Establish a consistent design aesthetic that reflects your brand and appeals to your target audience. Use consistent brand colors, photo filters, iconography, and photo styles.

Take Pantone, for example. They post several videos and images using the same color scheme to create appealing visual consistency.

Check out Pantone’s color consistency!

Pro Tip: There are many Instagram template tools out there to help you make beautiful posts every single time.

5. Optimize Your Instagram Bio

Your Instagram bio has to be your strongest sales pitch.

When someone sees one of your posts and clicks through to your profile, now’s the time to impress.

The perfect Instagram bio is made up of several key elements:

Keyword Optimized Name:
Your profile name is searchable, so target it to the most relevant keywords to your brand. That might be your brand name, but it may also be keywords that help people find you.

For example, if you were a nail salon called Chic Nails in New York, you could make your name “Chic Nails | NY Nail Salon”.

Persuasive Bio:
Tell your potential followers exactly who you are and exactly what they will get out of following you. 

Call-To-Action Link:
Give people a link to click and a reason to click it. If you’re a SAAS company, that may be a free trial. If you’re an eCommerce business, that may be a link to a sale. Try to get more creative than just linking your website.

6. Use Relevant Hashtags

Using hashtags is all about gaining visibility. 

You can post on general trends like #MondayMotivation, but you’ll gain more traction if you post with hashtags that are relevant to your product or audience.

For example, Project UROK helps spread mental health awareness by using hashtags like #mentalhealth, #mentalhealthresource, #mentalillness, and more.

Using a hashtag analytics tool like Keyhole, you can research hashtags that are used most often by your audience or are most relevant to your brand.

You can then build a list of hashtags and use them in each and every post.

Pro Tip: Posting on social media “holiday” hashtags will also put your content in front of more people. Here’s a great list of social media holidays from HubSpot.

The Four Seasons posted this photo for #WorldSleepDay!

7. Create a Branded Hashtag

Creating your own branded hashtag is even better than using someone else’s.

If your hashtag catches on, people will be creating content for you.

And anyone who clicks through to the hashtag on someone else’s post will be more likely to see your content in the search results or their feed.

Not only does that help with your brand awareness, it also makes them more likely to follow you, because you’re the source of the content they loved.

Reebok used #ClubC to celebrate their 35th anniversary by encouraging people to post their Reebok-inspired style.

Now, their fans and influencers are sharing their own Reebok shoe photos, which dramatically increases Reebok’s brand visibility.

Reebok’s #ClubC hashtag in action.

Pro tip: Keep your branded hashtag short and easy to remember.

8. Post Great Captions

Instagram isn’t just about great visuals. Your captions matter too.

In a world where authenticity is key, long-form captions will help your audience learn more about you and your unique message.

Plus, there’s evidence that longer captions result in more engagement.

Here are some great ways to keep your captions captivating:

  • Front load your content – Captions will cut off after a couple lines of text, so make sure you start with a powerful message.
  • Ask questions – You’re more likely to get lots of replies if you engage your audience.
  • Format with emojis – Emojis are a great way to break up long text
  • Leave your hashtags until the end – Hashtags increase visibility but clutter your posts. Put your hashtags at the bottom of your posts.

Experiment with caption length to see what gets the best results for your brand.

Pro Tip: Keyhole has an “Optimal Post Length” feature that will tell you the post lengths with the best engagement.

9. Post Consistently

It doesn’t matter how great your content is if your posts are few and far between.

Posting regularly will not only give you more opportunities to get your content in front of people, it also shows potential followers that you’re a great source for regular content.

Pro Tip: Aim to post at least once per day.

10. Post at the Right Time

Depending on your industry, when you post might be just as important as how often you post.

Keyhole’s social analytics tool will tell you the best time of the day to post for each day of the week based on typical post engagement.

11. Post Beautiful, Professional Photos

Instagram is first and foremost a photo and video platform.

That means you’ll gain followers much quicker if you have beautiful, professional photos and videos.

If you have the budget, consider hiring a professional photographer.

If you’re taking the photos yourself:

  • Use a professional-grade camera or a newer phone model.
  • Don’t take photos on the Instagram app. Use your phone’s native camera app.
  • Make sure the camera is focused on the photo subject
  • Take photos that would work as a square.
  • Learn how to take photos with great lighting.
  • Edit your photos or use appealing filters.

Even if your brand is focused more on day-to-day authenticity rather than super polished shots, you’ll still receive more engagement on nicer-looking photos rather than drab, out-of-focus photos.

Pro Tip: Check out this list of 29 Instagram photo hacks from the Huffington Post.

12. Post Real People (and Selfies)

As it turns out, people really like faces! And people love authenticity.

A study from Georgia Tech found that Instagram photos that feature faces are 38% more likely to get a like and 32% more likely to receive comments.

And not only that, photos and videos of real people make your brand more relatable and personable.

Think about it: would you rather have a photo of a product or a video of someone showing you how great that product is?

Authentic photos of your team, or selfies from your influencers are a great way to get free Instagram followers fast.

13. Ask People to Tag Their Friends

People love tagging their friends in content that helps them connect.

If you post something inspirational, funny, or relatable, ask your followers to tag their friends directly from the content.

BossBabe often posts inspirational quotes about women empowerment, asking their followers to tag friends that are also a #BOSSBABE.

Pro Tip: Use this technique sparingly, as using it too often can come off as spammy.

14. Tag Your Location

Tagging your location is another tool in your toolbox for making your posts more discoverable.

You can tag your posts or stories with your location—either with your city or the event venue where you took the photo or video.

Just like hashtags have their own feed, so do locations and events. You can tap a location or event name to see all photos and videos that were tagged with that event.

By tagging yourself at a location, you’re opening the door to new local followers.

Pro tip: To tag your Stories with a location, use the location sticker. Add a location tag in your post too!

15. Engage, Engage, Engage

People use social networks to be social.

So when in Rome…

Find an Instagram community that’s relevant to your brand, and then start liking, commenting on, and sharing content from members in that community.

There are three main reasons why you should be proactive with engagement:

  1. People like it!
    By liking and commenting on people’s posts, they will be more likely to notice you and follow you back.
  2. The Activity tab likes it!
    When someone responds to your comment, it will appear on their followers’ Activity tab. That can increase your potential reach.
  3. The Instagram algorithm likes it!
    Engagement is one of the main signals to the Instagram algorithm. The more you engage back and forth with people, the better.

This is really important:

Keep your posts authentic.

If you’re engaging with a community, talk like that community—as long as it’s consistent with your brand.

People are pretty quick to sniff out a brand that’s engaging in self-promotion, so make sure you’re actually contributing to the conversation.

If you’re a smaller brand, you may want to target users with fewer followers, and then work your way up to bigger accounts.

If you’re a larger brand, you may be able to target higher followed accounts right out of the gate.

Pro Tip: Don’t limit engagement to your marketing team. Your Customer Service / Success team can also interact with people directly on Instagram.

16. Share User Generated Content

Sharing user generated content has so many benefits.

First of all, it’s free content. Your users create it for you.

Secondly, it encourages people to engage with your brand, because they know there’s something in it for them (more exposure). This means more exposure for your account or branded hashtag.

It’s a win win.

The wide majority of AirBnB’s Instagram photos are credited to their users or hosts. They’re using their existing network as an extremely effective way to scale up their Instagram content and grow their follower base.

On top of that, every time you’re sharing someone’s content, you’ve earned a fan of your brand for live.

17. Follow Relevant Accounts

By following accounts that are similar to yours, it makes the Instagram algorithm more likely to recommend your account as a similar follow.

Or, you can follow key influencers, or accounts that are aligned with your target audience. Ideally, they’ll check out your feed to decide if they want to follow you back. 

If you’ve followed our other tips above, it’ll be a sure thing!

Pro Tip: Don’t follow too many accounts at once. A strong follower ratio makes your brand more credible.

18. Steal Your Competitors’ Followers

This tip takes a bit of tact.

Your direct competitors are the most likely accounts to have the followers you want.

So, follow tip #15 and start liking and commenting on the photos and videos of your competitors’ key followers.

Or follow tip #17 and actually start following your competitors’ followers. You’re bound to get a few free Instagram followers out of it.

There’s a chance you can win over their brand loyalty if you come off as authentic and relevant to their interests.

That said, you have to be subtle as to not ruffle any feathers. Don’t engage with any of their content directly relating to your competitors.

19. Work with Influencers

Instagram influencer marketing is popular for a reason: it works.

According to Influencer Marketing Hub, $5.20 is earned in media value per $1.00 spent on influencer marketing.

Working with influencers is the fastest way to create a positive association with your brand.

For example, Walmart works with fashion influencers to give a more stylish feel to their clothing lines.

You can use hashtags to identify the best influencers for your brand, or you can use a tool like Keyhole to identify users with the most influence.

If you’re new to influencer marketing, micro influencers are a great place to start. They’re more affordable, more amenable to partnerships, and most likely to be able to sway their close network.

20. Collaborate With Other Brands & Accounts

Keep in mind:

Every other brand is trying to grow their following too.

So look for opportunities to partner with non-competing brands that are a natural fit.

One of the most impactful collaborations was Barbie and AirBnb. They collaborated to create an actual Barbie Malibu Dreamhouse, which served as cross-promotion for both brands.

If you’re looking for collaboration ideas, you can participate in Instagram Stories takeovers, tag each other in content, co-host Instagram Live videos, or execute full marketing campaigns together.

For example, if you’re a local business, you could collaborate with a travel account who’s going to be in your area. From your account, you can share pictures and stories from their visit, and from their account, they can promote your business.

Both sides win.

21. Contests & Giveaways

Contests and giveaways are a surefire way to boost engagement quickly.

Instagram contests are easy:

Ask people to follow you, comment on your photo, and tag a friend for a chance to win free products or services.

The cost of the giveaway is often far, far less than the cost it would have taken to grow your follower account through organic marketing.

But remember:

You need to keep your target audience in mind. Winning empty followers that only follow you for giveaways won’t boost your business long term. Keep the giveaways relevant.

Keep running contests on a regular basis so that users don’t feel compelled to unfollow you.

Pro Tip: Collaborate with influencers or partner brands to extend the reach of your contest.

22. Post Videos

After launching in June 2013, video content has found its place on Instagram.

While videos receive fewer likes on average, videos receive more comments than images.

Another consideration: many businesses simply don’t want to go to the effort of posting videos, so it’s a chance to stand out from the crowd.

Here’s an example from Jamie Oliver, who turns a simple book launch into a nice-looking promotional video:

Need a few video ideas? We’ve got you covered:

  • How-to videos
  • Product demos or explainers
  • Teaser videos
  • Time lapse or behind-the-scenes videos
  • Influencer or user-generated videos
  • People talking!

Pro Tip: Start small. Even simple videos can help you stand out.

23. Post Stories

After their success on Snapchat, Stories launched on Instagram in 2016, and now, 500 million Instagram users post at least one Instagram story every day.

The most successful influencers typically post 6-7 stories per day.

So while stories can feel temporary and fleeting to businesses, users love them. There’s also evidence they produce results. According to Instagram, 1 in 5 stories results in a direct message.

For tons of Instagram Stories tips, check out this blog post.

Pro Tip: Turn your longer pre-produced video content into multiple stories to increase engagement.

24. Use Story Highlights

Don’t forget:

You can pin your top Instagram Stories to your profile.

Some accounts take the route of using their Story Highlights like a website navigation: to highlight their key products, services, or content categories.

Take Huda Kattan for example, founder of Huda Beauty, who uses her Story Highlights to showcase what type of content she puts out.

Others use their Story Highlights screen space to highlight their most recent campaign.

Nike, for example, uses their Highlights to showcase their most recent influencers.

Pro Tip: You can set covers for your Instagram Story Highlights to create a consistent aesthetic. Prada does a great job:

25. Use Instagram Live

Here’s a great tip for any social media platform:

When a platform adds a new feature, they really want you to use it. Because of that, they’re likely to reward your use of their new features in the form of increased algorithmic visibility.

Instagram is making a huge push for video, so use video!

Yes, Instagram Live was launched in 2016, but their push towards video isn’t slowing down.

Instagram Live is a feature of Instagram Stories that lets you stream live to your followers. A ring will show up around your profile picture to let your followers know you’re live.

Instagram Live is great because there’s a sense of closeness with your followers. They can ask you questions while you’re live and you can answer them in real time.

Need some Instagram Live video ideas to get you started?:

  • Behind-the-scenes look at your company
  • Product demos
  • Influencer takeovers
  • Answering questions about products or sales

26. Start an IGTV Series

IGTV is basically Instagram’s answer to YouTube. It’s available within Instagram or as a standalone app.

Whereas Stories are for short-form content, IGTV is long-form videos from a few minutes up to an hour in length. It’s designed to be a modern take on the traditional TV experience.

You can post vertical and horizontal videos, so you get more of the traditional YouTube feel.

It’s still early days for brands on IGTV, so it’s a great chance to stand out early on.

IGTV, like Instagram, is primarily an entertainment platform, so you’ll have to create content that is funny, educational, or downright addicting.

So Yummy has a great IGTV channel where they post 1-4 minute food recipes with stunning visuals.

27. Promote Your Instagram Content on Other Channels

It’s crazy how many brands skip this step.

If you’re making great content on Instagram, promote it on your other channels! 

Don’t just add a tiny Instagram icon link in your email newsletters, actually showcase your Instagram content like you would promote a blog post or a landing page.

Don’t just include a link to your Instagram in your blog, embed your Instagram content in your blog posts.

Sending your customers from other marketing channels to Instagram is perhaps the most underutilized follower growth hack.

28. Create Custom Camera Filters

We’re getting into high-effort territory, but creating a custom camera filter is a fast way to get tons of engagement and promotion for your brand.

Using Spark AR by Facebook, you can create your own AR (augmented reality) filters that are directly tied to your brand.

Then, users will use your filter, along with your branded hashtag, and you can re-post their user-generated content as your own. It’s like a self-sustaining content engine!

Gucci creates filters and asks users to share with the hashtag #GucciFilters, which they share back on their profile.

29. Instagram Ads

While everyone’s looking for free Instagram followers, the paid route isn’t always a bad option.

But don’t buy followers. Pay to promote your content instead.

If you’re looking for fast, efficient exposure, Instagram ads may just do the trick.

30. Use an Instagram Analytics Tool

Today’s marketer has to be data-obsessed.

No matter which of the above tips you decide to follow, it’s smart to always be evaluating whether or not your strategy is working by using data.

Using Keyhole, you can create:

  • Hashtag reports
  • Social campaign reports
  • Influencer reports
  • Brand monitoring reports

It’s fast, accurate, and easily shearable.

To get the data you need to grow your Instagram following, start your free Keyhole trial today.

The Top 5 Social Media Strategies For Marketing Success in 2020

What activities do you need to include in your social media strategy to stay on top of your game in 2020?

We’ll reveal the top 5 strategies you can implement into your current marketing tactics for success throughout the year.

Jump Links:

Social Media Strategies in 2020

1. Use Contests to Get and Stay on the Radar
2. Create Deeper Connections with Video
3. Boost Sales with Augmented Reality (AR) 
4. Get on the Micro-Influencer Marketing Bandwagon
5. Go Beyond Twitter, Facebook and Instagram

Social Media Strategies in 2020

According to the latest statistics, there are 3.8 billion active social media users as of January 2020. This is a 9% increase compared to the same time last year. 

Translated into numbers, last year alone, 321 million new users have joined social media platforms worldwide. 

With social media exhibiting an upward trend several years in a row, it’s clear why brands invest a lot of time and effort into creating an effective social media strategy. 

Effective social media strategies consist of a series of steps that reflect your goals and what you plan to achieve on social media. 

Noting down your goals into a comprehensive social media strategy will allow you to track your success and identify areas of improvement. 

Naturally, for a social media strategy to be effective, it has to take into account the latest social media trends…

… which is where we come in.

Below, we’ll share a couple of social media tips that will help you run more effective marketing campaigns, build better customer relationships and ensure that you make the most out of your social media efforts in 2020.

1. Use Contests to Get and Stay on the Radar

You’ve surely stumbled upon a social media contest in the past, or maybe even organised one yourself. 

Social media contests are a proven way to get the word out, get people interested in what you offer, and boost your followers count.

Over the past couple of years, social media contests have been especially effective when done in a collaboration with an influencer.

In 2020, things are going to change.

As more brands make the shift towards enhanced customer service and two-way communication, contests and giveaways will remain as relevant as ever, but their main goal will no longer centre around increasing the number of likes and followers alone. 

Instead, brands are actively starting to use contests as another way to provide something of value to their audience, and not only get on the radar of potential consumers – but stay on the radar as well.

Social media contests can help you:

  • Increase brand awareness and remembrance 
  • Grow your email list
  • Drive more traffic to your website/blog/social media platform
  • Get to know your audience
  • Educate your potential customers 
  • Increase sales
  • Get people to test your products 
  • Reward your loyal customers

… and more!

Most importantly, you do not need to sell physical products to be able to organise a contest. 

Are you a growth specialist helping people that want to start their own business to go from idea to execution? You can offer a free 30-minute consultation call, or free access to your mini-course.

Or maybe you’re a public speaking coach helping people to grow their business through speaking? Why not run a contest and offer some of your resources for free to the lucky winner?

Best of all is, although you give away some of your products/services for free, contests create the perfect opportunity to gain more trust and upsell potential customers when they already have your attention.  

You can use several contest formats including, but not limited to: follow to enter, tag a friend to enter, like to enter, comment to enter, share to enter, vote to enter, take a photo to enter, or any combination of these call to actions.

Neil Patel has discussed this into more detail, so make sure to check out his blog How to Use Contests and Giveaways to Get User-Generated Content.

2. Create Deeper Connections with Video

You’ve surely noticed that various social media platforms have started kicking off more features allowing you to share video updates with your audience. 

YouTube is huge right now, Instagram encourages its users to share instant updates with Instagram Live, and longer form content with IGTV, and of course, there’s the rising phenomenon – TikTok. 

It’s always been widely accepted that visuals drive more engagement, and video enables you to talk to your users directly and make a deeper connection.

It also allows you to share the same information you would otherwise share in written form, in a much more engaging way.

One of the most powerful ways to drive more engagement and get immediate reactions/feedback is live streaming on social media.

Live streams allow you to cover events, pick or announce contest winners in real time or create buzz around a product during its launch phase.

Social media users appreciate the “raw” quality and “realness” of social media videos, so today, everyone can become a content creator, even without the support of a team of professionals.

Check out how one of the leading project management apps Asana, are using videos to show their users and potential customers ways to use their tool to improve productivity and performance.

And of course, many brands who are marketing to younger audiences have already started adopting TikTok.

Take Guess, for example: their #inmydenim campaign targeting Generation Z has gone viral with 41.3M views.

3. Boost Sales with Augmented Reality (AR) 

Social media platforms have made the shift from being a place where people can keep in touch with friends and family to a place where users hang out to stay up to date with the latest developments, get inspired and discover new products.

We all know that social networks influence what people buy online – buyers can easily compare products, read user testimonials and browse new items using social media platforms. 

However, over these past couple of years, social networks have started kicking off new features that allow users to shop on social media as well.

Pinterest’s Shop the Look feature allows users to get instantly redirected to the checkout page, where they can immediately turn their inspiration into a purchase.

Similarly, Instagram leads the way allowing brands to not only sell on social, but also to pair social shopping with influencer marketing.

Check out the following Shoppable post by Revolve:

According to Civic Science’s Trend Adoption Tracker, the number of people who shop through social media “has increased by 8 percentage points since Q4 in 2018”.

At the same time, everyone seems to be talking about AR and how it will shape the future of shopping.

Up until now, a lot of people were visiting stores to see, touch and try on the products before they go back home and order them online, resulting in a complex path to purchase consisting of several touchpoints both in physical and online stores.

This trend among shoppers who are still used to seeing the products before buying them online has been affecting the way retailers do business. 

In the future, we can expect that a lot of retailers will transform their brick and mortar stores into showrooms, where people can see and try on the products, and then buy it online. And second, the latest developments in AR will allow customers to get the same experience – online.

In the past, Facebook and Instagram have launched AR filters, allowing users to try on products from selected advertisers to see how they fit before they make a purchase decision.

These AR tools have been limited to the platforms’ early partners in the cosmetics and eyewear industry, including NARS, Mac, Warbly Parker, and Ray Ban. 

These AR tools are still in the testing phase and are limited to some advertisers. 

However, it’s now possible for anyone to create their own filters using Spark AR Studio, so go ahead and download the app to get acquainted with what it can do, and see if there is a way for you to leverage AR to make your consumers’ online experience more engaging and fun. 

For more information on the current use of AR on social media, as well as the benefits brands can expect to see from incorporating AR into their branded experiences, check out the key takeaways from Business Insider Intelligence’s AR in Social Media Report.

4. Get on the Micro-Influencer Marketing Bandwagon

Despite what naysayers claim, influencer marketing is on the rise, and is expected to grow even more in 2020. 

To stay relevant and get discover by new audiences, brands need to start partnering up with content creators who are loved and trusted by their communities.

But how can small brands afford to pay influencers?

This is a common objection raised by businesses who still equate influencer marketing to celebrity endorsements, while in fact, an influencer can be even someone with 1000 followers.

There are 5 influencer tiers: Nano, Micro, Mid-Tier, Macro and Mega influencer.

You can see the number of followers an influencer needs to belong to a particular tier on the infographic below: 

Source: MediaKix

Lately, many brands have started stepping away from mega influencers and instead, they’ve started to collaborate with smaller creators who have an audience between 10K and 100K followers.

Unlike mega influencers, who have such a large following that they’ve reached a celebrity status, micro influencers have a more genuine relationship with their community and as a result they have a lot of true fans that trust them and their judgement.

One great example that illustrates how successful a strategy based on micro-influencer collaborations can be is Swedish watchmaker Daniel Wellington. The brand’s strategy centres around partnering with micro influencers from all across the world.

The results?

Daniel Wellington has become one of the most well-known brands on social media. 

Daniel Wellington are also encouraging their customers to share pictures of their Daniel Wellington timepieces to get a chance to be featured in their #DWPickoftheDay. This is a great example of a contest where the brand doesn’t offer a physical product, and still manages to incentivise their followers to enter by offering them exposure.

On our blog, we’ve been talking about influencer marketing a lot lately, so if you wish to explore the topic into more depth, here are a couple of resources to consider:

5. Go Beyond Twitter, Facebook and Instagram

The key to staying relevant is keeping up with your audience, their interests and habits.

One of the things that you need to track are the social media platforms where your target audience spend the most of their time. 

Although there are a lot of new social media platforms appearing, and it’s impossible for you to be present everywhere, you need to assess which platform has the biggest potential based on your line of business and audience. 

For example, a lot of brands focus on the most widely known social media networks: Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, while overseeing other networks like LinkedIn, Pinterest and as of recently, TikTok.

Depending on your brand and what you sell you might want to consider experimenting with some other platforms which might not be that popular in terms of advertising but may prove to be very effective for you and help you reach new, engaged audiences.

Pinterest, for example, is a great platform for interior design companies, since a lot of people browse Pinterest for home décor inspiration. 

TikTok, on the other hand, has an algorithm that allows for a large organic reach, even if you’re just starting out.

LinkedIn has also rolled out some new features, including banners and CTAs and is a great place for brands who are looking to provide extra value to their audience, since LinkedIn’s algorithm is tailored in favour of long, informative content. 

That’s why we’ve been seeing a lot of B2B and SaaS brands focusing on LinkedIn as the core of their social media strategy. 

Whatever social media platform you use, you need to talk to your audience and make the shift towards a two-way communication. You can do this by using videos, organising contests, throwing events, or simply by sliding into your consumers’ DMs.

Final Thoughts

The social media landscape is changing every day, and with new features kicking off and new social media platforms gaining popularity it can be hard to develop social media strategies.

However, if we take a better look, all these changes and features have one thing in common: they’re developed to help brands drive more engagement, start conversations and provide more value to their customers.

So if we have to sum this up and give you a single tip to follow in 2020, it’s this: 

Be creative, but do not follow trends blindly, and instead, invest in those things that are in line with your brand and are appreciated by your audience.

Keyhole is a real-time conversation tracker that provides keyword and hashtag analytics for Twitter and Instagram. Get started for free and search your brand.

The Top 15 Instagram Analytics Tools [+ Metrics that Matter]

15-instagram-analytics-tools-and-metrics-that-matters

Updated on March 19th, 2020.

Instagram is a huge platform, so you definitely need to know how best to engage your target customers on it. And Instagram analytics tools are your best bet when it comes to doing just that.

But there’s a plethora of these tools out there, which becomes a huge problem for many social media marketers — as picking the best Instagram analytics software can be difficult.

Here’s a list that will help you out — 15 Instagram analytics tools and their different features, followed by metrics that may influence your decision: 

Jump Links:

1. Keyhole
2. Owlmetrics
3. Brandwatch
4. Hootsuite
5. Iconosquare
6. Pixlee
7. Minter.io
8. Quintly
9. Rival IQ
10. Social Bakers
11. Sproutsocial
12. Squarelovin
13. Synthesio
14. Unmetric
15. Union Metric

1. Keyhole

Keyhole helps you track relevant accounts and generates a visually rich report that shows you how to optimize your instagram marketing for better results.

For instance, it can show you when your users are most active so you can improve your efforts for increased engagement.

Neil Patel describes the tool this way: “This tool (Keyhole) does a lot of things others can’t. And as a bonus, it’s extremely user-friendly.” There are other great features it possesses as well.

It helps you monitor sentiments around your brand and oversee your overall brand health. Plus, you can also track web mentions.

Even more, it lets you track the influencers sharing Instagram posts with certain keywords or hashtags, the sentiments around those posts, the impressions and reach they generate, and even other keywords and hashtags users use alongside your searched terms.

This way, you can spot out the best influencers for your brand and see their engagement rates, reach, etc.

keyhole dashboard - instagram tools

For example, here is the Instagram dashboard generated from Keyhole that the watch brand Audemars Piguet could be tracking.

Price: Starts at $179 USD per month — custom pricing.

2. Owlmetrics

Owlmetrics is Instagram analytics, simplified.

This tool shows real-time Instagram analytics, allowing you to reflect on marketing results instantly with actionable insights.

It also helps you measure traffic from Instagram to your website, and dives deeper into audience insights.

Price: $25 — $199 USD per month

3. Brandwatch

Brandwatch provides you with data on conversations about your brand, competitors and industry.

This tool searches the entire Internet for reviews, comments and articles around your business. It also helps you see, particularly on Instagram, how you stack up against your competitors in terms of the volume of mentions you’re getting compared to theirs.

brandwatch

With Brandwatch, you can receive email alerts about critical Instagram conversations so you can quickly spring into action when needed.

Price: Contact Brandwatch to discuss a unique plan.

4. Hootsuite

Besides helping you publish Instagram content directly, Hootsuite also let’s you see critical analytics about your market on Instagram.

hootsuite

Like similar tools, it helps you keep track of your customers, competitor and brand performance on Instagram. You get to see visual reports of what’s working for your business on Instagram and what’s not.

Price: $29 USD per month — custom pricing.

5. Iconosquare

This tool shows you your community growth on Instagram over specific time periods — how far you’ve grown from period A to period B.

iconosquare


Iconosquare shows you where your Instagram users come from and the languages they use. It also reveals the number of impressions and reach you get from your Instagram posts and stories. Pretty much like most of the other tools, it tells you what works and what doesn’t for your Instagram audience.

Price: $29 per month — custom pricing.

6. Pixlee

Pixlee is a platform that allows you to collect, curate, and share user generated content from happy customers and influencers.

The “Measure” aspect of their platform tells you in one glance how customer content performs.

You can also build and export customized reports for more detailed insights.

Price: Contact Pixlee to request a demo.

7. Minter.io

As shown in the image below, Minter.io provides you with Instagram metrics like most of the other tools mentioned in this list.

minter.io

The tool gives you a bird’s-eye view of how your hashtags and keywords are faring on Instagram, the best performing content types, the most engaging photo filters and even the best times to post.

You also get to track how much Instagram traffic is sent to your website and the engagement levels your stories get. You can also export your data in a visually appealing format that allows you to easily keep other stakeholders informed about your Instagram marketing performance.

Price: $99 to $399 USD per year per account

8. Quintly

Quintly offers you an Instagram analytics feature that helps you measure the follower growth of your Instagram account and that of your competitors. This indicates how many unique consumers are finding your brand on the platform, compared to your competitors.

quintly

The software also provides an Instagram content analysis feature, where you can see which content types perform best so you can always replicate success.

Price: from 300 USD per month.

9. Rival IQ

With Rival IQ, you can run your Instagram competitive analysis in minutes.

You’ll see the speed at which your competitors are gaining followers, how often they post, what their engagement rates look like, and their most engaging Instagram content.

rival IQ

The tool also alerts you when a main competitor starts spending ad money on a post. Brands mostly boost posts that are already gaining success organically so this feature tells you what content performs great for your fellow industry players.

Price: $199 — $499 USD per month.

10. Socialbakers

Socialbakers helps you monitor and listen to conversations and topics your audience care about. This lets you know which content to create and how best to engage your audience and spike the right actions from them.

socialbakers

Like many other Instagram analytics tools mentioned here, this tool also helps you identify positive or negative sentiments around the posts on your searched keywords, hashtags or accounts. You can categorize posts by sentiments as well so you always understand where to look and respond to first.

Price: Starts at $200 per month – custom pricing.

11. Sprout Social

Sprout Social provides an Instagram analytics tool that gives you quality insights about your market and audience.

sproutsocial

This tool lets you compare follower and engagement stats between brands on Instagram.

You get unlimited reports and data about specific posts, hashtags, keywords, audience and competitors.

With all this information, you can better create and execute Instagram marketing strategies that really move the needle for your business.

Price: $99 — $249 USD per month. Listening Suite as an Add-on.

12. Squarelovin

Squarelovin is another great Instagram analytics software.

squarelovin

The tool lets you track and compare engagement rates, follower numbers and content performance. It also lets you see what times your users respond to images the most with likes and comments.

Price: Free.

13. Synthesio

This tool provides you with social listening and audience insights.

synthesio

Synthesio has a robust metadata about the content, author, and tone of mentions in its social listening platform – and can easily be filtered. This means it provides an intelligent platform that analyzes conversations and figures out the sentiments around them.

Price: Contact Synthesio to discuss a unique plan.

14. Unmetric

Much like all the Instagram analytics tools featured in this piece, Unmetric provides you with critical data about your Instagram market.

unmetric

It shows you which content performs best in your space, discovers branded content almost as soon as they hit Instagram and helps you benchmark all your data against that of your competitors so you can measure your efforts on Instagram.

Price: Free — $1000 USD per month.

15. Union Metrics

Union Metrics provides you with real-time insights from major social networks including Instagram.

union metrics

This tool provides similar analytics like most other Instagram analytics tools — showing you impressions, reach, best performing content, new ideas for content and more.

Price: $49 — $199 USD per month.

Important Instagram Metrics to Measure

Besides pricing and features, you want to ensure the Instagram analytics tool you’re buying or at least trying out measures the metrics you want to measure.

Related Topic: Reach vs Impressions: What’s the difference and why is it important?

Here are basic explanations of some important metrics to measure:

A. Profile Analytics

keyhole - instagram analytics - measuring follower growth

Follower Growth: The increase in an account’s follower number after deducting unfollower numbers.

Engagement Rate: The total amount of likes, comments and reshares that posts receive, divided by the total number of posts. This rate is restricted to given time periods.

Optimal Post Time: The best time to post depending on which times the highest engagements happened in the past.

keyhole - Optimal post time Instagram analytics

Optimal Post Filters: The ideal filters to use, typically based on which ones generated the highest engagement rate.

Optimal Hashtags: The best hashtags to use depending on which ones got the highest engagement rates before.

Optimal number of hashtags instagram analytics

B. Audience Analytics

Sentiment analysis Instagram Analytics

Top Followers: An account’s most followed and engaging followers.

Follower Age: The age ranges an account’s followers fall into.

Follower Gender: The gender ratio an account’s followers make up.

Follower Interests: The interests — ranging from sports to business — an account’s followers have.Follower Location: The geographic locations an account’s followers have listed in their profiles. Depending on the tool, tracked locations can range from country to city-level.

C. Hashtag and Keyword Analytics

keyhole dashboard - instagram tools

Activity Volume: The number of posts, over a given time period, made with a tracked hashtag or keyword.

Impressions: The number of times a post is displayed to users. A user can see a post more than once, meaning he or she can be responsible for many impressions.

Reach: The number of unique people who received impressions of a post.

Engagement: The number of likes and comments a post containing a tracked hashtag or keyword has earned.

Top Users: The Instagrammers who generate the highest reach, impression and engagement numbers per post using a tracked hashtag or keyword.

User Demographics: The gender, location, device use and other characteristics of users posting with a tracked hashtag or keyword.

Related Topic: 7 Important Instagram Analytics You Should Know.

The Final Verdict

It’s important that you pick the tool that not only suits your wallet but also tracks the main metrics you need. Try the tools out before deciding to pay for any of them and make a well-informed decision on the one that’s best for your Instagram marketing strategy.

16 Marketing Automation Tools for Marketers to Streamline Repetitive Processes

Marketing automation tools keep cropping up as customers’ needs continue to evolve. 

The sharp marketer or business owner knows the value of keeping up with new trends. Unfortunately, while this keeps your marketing effective, it takes so much of your time that you have no time to focus on other important functions that need your attention. 

What is a small business without huge marketing budgets to hire big teams supposed to do?

Using marketing automation tools is the answer to doing it all effectively. 

As marketing evolves, so have the marketing automation tools. 

To help you pick out the best marketing automation software, here are 16 tools that you should try out if you’re looking to ease up on some of your marketing functions.

Jump Links:

1. Hubspot
2. Constant Contact
3. ActiveCampaign
4. InfusionSoft / Keap
5. Zoho Campaigns
6. Campaigner
7. Autopilot
8. Marketo
9. Dialog Tech
10. GetResponse
11. LeadSquared
12. Drip
13. Mautic
14. Salesfusion
15. iContact
16. MailChimp

1. HubSpot

HubSpot’s inbound marketing tool will turn your outbound leads into inbound ones. 

What makes HubSpot great is that it’s powerful enough for the expert marketer and easy enough for someone just starting out in marketing. 

How is that so?

Thanks to the simple visual board, you can craft as simple or as sophisticated automation conditions as you want, from setting simple email list autoresponders to setting up your sales funnels. 

Better still, you can integrate your blogging and content tools with HubSpot marketing and automate your content creation so you can delight your customers with the content they want.   

Marketing analytics are also available to view on the platform, so you can tell whether your marketing efforts are paying off or not. 

Pricing: There are three packages; the Starter package at $50/mo, the Professional package at $800/mo and the Enterprise package at $3,200/mo. 

HubSpot marketing automation tool is the solution you need to scale your marketing efforts. From attracting visitors to your blog, converting more leads, to making more sales. 

2. Constant Contact

Looking to automate your email marketing? Check out Constant Contact. 

This tool comes with unique features that will make your email marketing do so much for your business.  

Already have a list of leads saved somewhere on an Excel sheet or your Outlook and want to reach out to them?

Upload them into Constant Contact in a matter of seconds. 

In addition, you can use Constant Contact’s email list-building tools to build up onto your email list in-person, from your website, from Facebook, and more.

Once you upload your contact list, you can set the tool to handle autoresponders, unsubscribes, bounces, and update inactive emails automatically. 

Here’s the best part…you can send as many emails as you want every month. 

You also have access to real-time tracking tools that will give you reports on who’s opening, clicking, and sharing your emails.

Pricing: There are two plans; EMAIL starting at $20/mo and EMAIL PLUS starting at $ 45/mo.

Constant Contact takes your email marketing beyond the inbox. You can do more including online surveys, events, give away coupons, and more all from the same platform.

3. ActiveCampaign

Imagine sending fewer emails than you are right now, but getting twice the results. 

ActiveCampaign will help you do exactly that through its site messages feature. This feature lets you send targeted messages to your website visitors as soon as they interact with your website.

ActiveCampaign allows you to automate your contacts and manage your email list within its CRM system, ‘Deals’. You can add notes to contacts, set up appointments and send direct messages to your contacts all from Deals.

Pricing: The Lite plan is $9/mo, The Plus plan is $49/mo, The Professional plan is $129 /mo, and the Enterprise is $229/mo.

ActiveCampaign is one of the most flexible all-inclusive email marketing automation tools. It brings together your marketing automation, email marketing, and customer relationship management, all in one place.

4. InfusionSoft / Keap

Tired of using one tool to manage your leads, another to send emails and yet another to send your monthly or weekly newsletter?

Bring all these tasks into one place with InfusionSoft, now Keap.

This tool is useful for small businesses and solopreneurs looking to increase leads, revenue, and customer acquisition without having to spend so much time—or many different tools—to do it.

With InfusionSoft you can automatically collect leads and keep in touch with them based on their behavior.  For example, you can set the tool to send email reminders to customers who added items to their shopping cart but did not checkout.

Move your leads along your sales funnel using InfusionSoft pre-defined automatic marketing campaigns such as sending out birthday offers and re-targeting old customers with new offers.

Pricing: Price starts at $79/mo to $199/mo depending on the number of emails you want to send.

InfusionSoft will help you save time by having all your, CRM, email marketing, eCommerce and marketing tasks in one place.

5. Zoho Campaigns

Zoho Campaigns may be the new kid on the block, but it’s fast becoming a bigwig in the world of email marketing automation. 

Zoho Campaigns has beautiful email templates, an easy-to-use editor, and fantastic automation tools that will make it easy for you to build your audience, run targeted email campaigns and increase your reach.

Zoho Campaigns is fast becoming popular among marketers because it’s easy to use. You get a checklist of what you need to do to create your first email campaign. The checklist updates with each task you complete.

Pricing: You can pay based on the number of emails (from $3/mo for 500 emails) or the number of subscribers (from $5/mo for 500 subscribers). 

Automate your entire email campaign process including performance reports with Zoho Campaigns.

6. Campaigner

Nurture your leads and increase your sales with Campaigner. 

The better you nurture your leads, the more repeat customers and brand advocates you’ll have. 

This is certainly no mean feat even for the expert marketer. But with Campaigner, you can automate this process through triggered campaigns and events. 

The tool has an Experiment feature that lets you test your subject lines, conduct A/B testing and test the effectiveness of the contents of an entire email.

Once you’re sure what will work best, use the tool’s intuitive drag and drop builder to create powerful emails and automate functions such as email scheduling and auto-responding. 

You can also connect your eCommerce store to Campaigner and drive more sales.

Pricing: Price starts at $19.95/mo for 1,000 contacts, $40.95/ mo for 5,000 contacts, $119.95/ mo for 25,000 contacts, and $449.95/ mo for 100,000 contacts. 

Campaigner is a good tool for a small business that is trying to make a name in the industry and increase sales in the process.

7. Autopilot

Autopilot stands out as one of the most visually appealing marketing automation software in the market.

Keeping up with your customer journey can be quite tasking, but with an automation tool like Autopilot, it can soon be a breeze. 

With Autopilot you can capture new leads from your website, blog or app then create personalized messages to nurture these leads. 

Autopilot makes it possible to automate repetitive tasks such as assigning leads, booking appointments, following up on leads, and educating subscribers.

Pricing: Price starts at $49/month for 2,000 contacts, $149/mo for 5,000 contacts and $249/mo for 10,000 contacts.

Autopilot will let you take your customers through the journey from the moment they become a lead until they are an advocate. 

8. Marketo

Acquiring customers is one thing, but building a relationship with your customers in order to retain them is another. 

Marketo is a good tool for the marketer looking for an easy way to manage leads and build a good relationship with their customer.

Pricing: Prices are available on request. However, Marketo offers a free trial that you can take advantage of to get a feel of the tool. 

From acquisition to advocacy, Marketo will take care of all your marketing automation needs quickly and easily.

9. Dialog Tech

Wouldn’t it be nice to know how your leads react to your marketing messages as you engage them on the phone, Skype or other voice technology platforms?

Previously Ifbyphone, Dialog Tech is a unique voice-based marketing automation tool that lets you automate all your voice interactions. It makes possible to track how these interactions are beneficial to you. 

This tool has features including keyword call-tracking, conversation analytics, in-call scoring, phone surveys, caller-profile data, geolocation routing, reverse lookup, voice broadcasts, SMS, and more.

These features will help you boost ROI with call automation and analytics.

Pricing: Get in touch with Dialog Tech to get a quote.

You no longer have to track calls manually thanks to Dialog Tech. Now you’ll be able to easily tell how many leads you got in touch with via the phone and how those customers reacted after hearing certain keywords.

10. GetResponse

GetResponse is an all-in-one marketing automation software. Think email marketing, webinar hosting, landing page creation, automated sales funnels, and CRM in one dashboard. 

There are some pretty nice features that will make automating your email marketing and autoresponders pretty simple. 

You can also automate your CRM, eCommerce store and list building. Creating automated landing pages is also simple. 

GetResponse is a powerful marketing machine that will help you grow your audience, promote your services, and sell your products.

Pricing: Price starts from $15/month for a list size of 1,000 contacts, to $1,199/mo for a list size of over 100,000 contacts. 

GetResponse is an easy-to-use excellent all-around marketing platform for any small or mid-sized business. 

11. LeadSquared

Tired of your leads falling off halfway through your sales funnel? 

Then consider using LeadSquared to align your marketing and sales efforts to reduce your lead leakage.

LeadSquared will take your leads down your sales funnel faster through an automated lead capturing process, responsive landing pages, drip marketing and segmentation. 

Understand your leads better through behavioural insights, and marketing insights collected through LeadSquared.

Pricing: Plans start at $200 for 5,000 contacts, $600 for 25,000 contacts, and $1,800 for 100,000 contacts.

Make lead collection and engagement easier by using LeadSquared and increase your conversion rate.

12. Drip

Running an eCommerce store is hard work. There’s just too much work to be done. But, you can automate most of this work. 

Drip is one of the few marketing automation tools that focus mainly on eCommerce stores.

You can use Drip to put any eCommerce marketing strategy in motion including email marketing, multi-channel marketing, A/B testing, email campaigns, one-off emails, among others. 

Pricing: Price starts at $49 for 2000 contacts. 

Drip is great when you want to personalize your eCommerce marketing campaigns. The analytics feature is also quite useful.

13. Mautic

Mautic is an open-source marketing software that’s relatively new in the market, but still compelling. It’s especially a favourite among high tech companies.

Mautic has three major features geared to make lead generation easier. The social media marketing feature allows you to interact with audiences on various social media platforms, conduct social listening and collect leads from social mentions, hashtags and keywords.

The email marketing feature enables you to send personalized emails to your business leads. You can use it to create forms so that you can build your email list. 

Develop drip marketing and manage your campaigns using the campaigns feature. This feature also automates your lead nurturing process.  

Pricing: Price is available upon request. 

Mautic lets you integrate and personalize all your digital properties and channels so that you can provide your customers with a seamless customer experience. 

14. Salesfusion

Any marketer working with funnels will appreciate Salesfusion’s ability to create custom digital conversations. These conversations can then be used to convert leads into customers.

Popular Salesfusion marketing automation features include lead scoring and nurturing, media planning, social media marketing dashboard, email templates, marketing analytics, SEO analysis, incoming traffic tracking and more. 

Pricing: Starts at $1000 per month for 10,000 contacts.

Salesfusion will provide you with the right tools to help your marketing team send the right messages to the right leads at the right time without spending so much time on it.

15. iContact

iContact is a fully-fledged marketing automation tool that lets you do so much for your company. 

With this tool, you can easily automate your email marketing, let it build your landing pages and provide you with comprehensive marketing analytics. 

You will also love the social media automation tools that make it possible to automate your social media management tasks.

A unique feature that stands out is the access to strategic advisors who can help you optimize your email sending strategy and inbox delivery to maximize your conversions.

Pricing: iContact has two packages Base and Pro. The base price starts at $12/mo while Pro starts at $25/month for 500 contacts.

By automating most of your marketing tasks with iContact you’ll be able to grow your business and stand out from the competition.

16. MailChimp

MailChimp provides businesses with awesome email marketing features to take away the stress of building emails on the fly.

MailChimp is effective for contacting your prospects and keeping in touch with customers in a bid to increase sales. 

With this tool, you can easily automate your welcome emails, use in-built email templates to personalize your emails, monitor how your leads and customers are engaging with your emails, and target specific behaviours. 

You can also use the tool to create targeted ad campaigns, send postcards, build landing pages and collect reports and analytics.  

MailChimp allows you to set trigger emails based on specific actions such as the sign-up date and website activity.

Pricing: MailChimp is free for up to 2,000 contacts. Paid plans start from $9/mo to $299/mo depending on your total number of subscribers.

Mailchimp is a dependable tool for the marketer looking to automate their email marketing campaigns effectively. 

These are just some of the amazing marketing automation tools that exist to make marketing easier for you and your team. 

Of course, you don’t need them all. So before you settle on any of these tools, determine which marketing tasks you need to automate. 

By automating your marketing, you’ll have more time to focus on other efforts that will increase your company’s ROI.

Keyhole is a real-time conversation tracker that provides keyword and hashtag analytics for Twitter and Instagram. Get started for free and search your brand.

15 Social Media Branding Strategies to Capture and Retain Your Target Audience

Updated on March 5th, 2020.

As competitors strengthen their online profiles, the need to differentiate your brand’s identity on social media grows.

Building a recognizable brand known for its positive qualities will help gain and retain followers. Successfully executing branding strategies can help win customers, too.

But developing a powerful, branded social media presence is a challenge you can’t quickly overcome.

Consider using these 15 social media branding strategies to do the job help you achieve a strong social media brand presence.

Jump Links:

Influencer Marketing:
1. Connect with Influencers
2. Get an influencer to Takeover

Consistent Messaging
3. Optimize Your Bio and Your Profile
4. Develop Your Voice
5. Be Consistent with that Voice and Your Topics
6. Post Regularly
7. Embrace Visuals

Continuous Engagement
8. Share User Generated Content
9. Create Groups or Communities
10. Join Chats
11. Avoid Platforms Unpopular with Your Audiences
12. Promote Your Profiles Beyond Social Media
13. Offer Users More than They Expect

Ongoing Analysis
14. Monitor Constantly
15. Measure Your Efforts

Influencer Marketing

For those who’ve built a respectable social media following, many strategists consider influencer marketing a next step in building brand recognition.

By getting an influencer who closely aligns with your target image to promote your accounts, audiences should associate your brand more closely with that target image.

For example, many consumers associate Under Armour with athletic strife and excellence because Steph Curry is its biggest spokesperson.

Though your brand may not be able to contract an NBA superstar, there are almost certainly influencers in your industry who can deliver branding benefits.

To identify influencers based on the hashtags and keywords they post with, make a search for those terms:

1. Connect with Influencers

The first step in executing an influencer marketing campaign is identifying suitable influencers.

Of course, they must have large audiences. But those audiences must be engaged. Some studies show the average engagement rate on Twitter is between 1 and 2%, so anything higher is suitable for an influencer.

The next step is building a relationship with an influencer who matches your criteria.

You can start by following target influencers on their main social channels, interacting with their updates and sharing their content.

Once you’ve built some rapport, pitch a campaign that builds your brand’s image while benefiting the influencer. The next section covers an example of how to do so.

2. Get an Influencer to Take Over

Getting an influencer to run your social channels for a day entices their fans to follow you, while giving him or her another avenue to showcase wit and knowledge.

For example, comedian and diehard Boston Red Sox fan Rob Delaney ran the MLB Twitter account on May 7, 2013. The profile gained about 20,000 followers, as Delaney tweeted baseball “facts.”

Influencer Marketing - 15 Social Media Branding Strategies - Influencer Takeover for the MLB

What’s more, the takeover helped MLB build a reputation on social media that many sports organizations aim to achieve: being funny and relaxed.

Consistent Messaging

The core of brand building on social media largely involves creating themes — or, messages — and regularly demonstrating them through text and visuals.

Whereas influencer marketing campaigns may be best executed once you’ve grown a sizeable following, consistent messaging should begin when you join a social channel.

It may take trial and error to see which kinds of content best resonate with target audiences.

But once you’ve figured that out, being consistent in your messaging should reinforce your brand image.

3. Optimize Your Bio and Profile

Your social profiles should encapsulate your business and its main messages, acting as a pitch for those who visit.

Summarize the benefits of using your products or services in your profile description, including applicable keywords to make your account easier to find for audience members. You should also provide another method of contact for serious business inquiries.

Consider emulating these profile descriptions:

Profile Optimization - 15 Social Media Branding Strategies

Depending on the platform, you can also alter your background, profile picture and theme colours to reflect your logo and match your website.

By doing so, consumers will begin to recognize your brand assets.

4. Develop Your Voice

Establishing a common posting tone makes your updates distinct and easily-recognizable. This can also help build a connection with your target audiences, especially if your voice is in tune with them.

Take IHOP as an example. On Twitter, the pancake house appeals to its young demographic by piggybacking off popular phrases among teens and writing without punctuation — similar to what you’d see in instant messaging.

Develop a Voice - 15 Social Media Branding Strategies

If you’re unfamiliar with relevant phrases or jargon, monitor your main social channels more closely. You’ll likely identify niche terms you can use to develop your voice.

On a surface level, using a distinct voice increases IHOP’s engagement. Deeper, it encourages followers to associate IHOP with a laid-back dining atmosphere.

5. Be Consistent with that Voice and Your Topics

You must be consistent with your voice — and the topics you post about — to build an authentic connection with your target audience, influencing them to keep your brand top of mind.

Otherwise, that voice you’ve worked hard to create may seem forced and disingenuous.

Deviating from core topics can also compromise brand tone and messaging.

Going back to IHOP as an example, its social media strategists don’t post about government food sanctions. Doing so could damage how the audience perceives the restaurant.

Stick to your voice and main topics to enforce your brand’s image.

6. Post Regularly

Since social media branding centres on influencing your audience to easily recognize and remember you, irregular posting damages your efforts by keeping you off user newsfeeds.

Posting frequency depends on audience activity and how audience members engage.

For example, you may realize that tweeting in the morning earns more replies than doing so in the evening. You could also earn more engagement by posting twice a week instead of five times to a given platform.

This will take some experimentation to determine.

However, an optimal posting schedule helps keep user attention while potentially earning more followers.

7. Embrace Visuals

Images can be powerful tools to encapsulate your brand’s identity and messages, instead of seemingly-random pictures with your logo tacked on.

Visual content should reflect:

  • Themes your brand stands for
  • Your brand’s unique or differentiating values
  • The topics your audience is interested in

Take this image from Red Bull’s Instagram account as an example:

Use Visuals - 15 Social Media Branding Strategies

It shows Red Bull’s connection to extreme stunts and appeals to its high-energy audience.

As well as engaging fans, visual content of this quality builds and solidifies brand identity.

Continuous Engagement

Frequently engaging fans, followers and other audience members allows you to constantly communicate and demonstrate your brand’s core values.

You can engage audiences by sharing original and third-party party content that ties into brand messages, or running contests and social events related to them.

For B2C brands, replying to users also exemplifies favourable traits such as friendliness and helpfulness, especially when answering questions and helping solve issues.

As a bonus, regular engagement helps keep your brand at the top of consumer minds. This can potentially boost sales and other meaningful actions.

8. Share User-Generated Content

Like posting testimonials on your website, sharing user-generated content that positively depicts your brand can strengthen its identity.

Consider that more than 90% of consumers trust earned media — characterized as word-of-mouth from impartial sources — more than all other types of advertising.

Take a plus-size clothing company for example.

To reap the benefits of word-of-mouth on social media, share similar user-generated content.

9. Create Groups & Communities (or Participate in Them)

Creating, or participating in, groups and communities helps overcome many networks’ low organic engagement rates.

This helps generate buzz around your brand’s content. You can reach users who are interested in your industry or offerings, avoiding crowded timelines that constantly update and bury your posts.

For instance, an analytics company may create, moderate and promote a group about data mining. Not only does this give the company another method of engaging target audiences, but it furthers branding efforts.

That’s because, in the eyes of group members, the company aligns itself with images of research and analysis.

10. Join Chats

Similar to groups and communities, Twitter chats let you directly engage members of your target market to create buzz around your brand’s ideas, opinions and content.

Use a chat’s hashtag to interact with industry players — ranging from prospects to other businesses. You’ll likely build your follower count as you answer questions and interact with fellow participants.

Twitter Chats - 15 Social Media Branding Strategies

This type of direct conversation and engagement allows you to demonstrate expertise and helps build brand reputation among active industry voices.

11. Avoid Platforms Unpopular with Your Audiences

You may waste time and resources attempting to engage audiences on each major social network, as your target audiences may not be active on all of them.

LinkedIn may not be ideal for brands that target teens and young adults, whereas Snapchat likely won’t yield noticeable results for B2B companies.

What’s more, as developers create hyper-specific social media platforms, it may be advantageous to focus your efforts on ones that cater to your target audiences.

For example, many cosmetic surgery clinics favour niche forums over Google+ and LinkedIn:

Niche Platforms - 15 Social Media Branding Strategies

That’s why committing to a group of social platforms — slowly expanding it when appropriate — can help focus your engagement and branding tactics.

12. Promote Your Profiles Beyond Social Media

As your profiles act as engagement and branding hubs, it’s worthwhile to promote your accounts outside of social media to grow their followings.  

You can grow your social media presences by:

  • Participating in Industry Events
    • Run a booth to promote your products. Create valuable physical content to distribute. Strike up a conversation with attendees. As more people learn about your brand, you should gain more attention on social media.

  • Including Handles in Stores and on Products
    • For businesses who drive sales through physical locations, posting images of social networks lets customers know on which platforms you’re active.

By drawing offline attention to your social media profiles, your online branding tactics are likely to reach more users.

13. Offer Users More than They Expect

The bulk of users solely expect to receive status updates, albeit ones with original content, as they follow your social accounts. But offering perks can work to strengthen brand image.

For example, send a private message to new followers that contains a free coupon. It can use your brand slogan, colours and general information, encouraging them to visit your store or website.

They’ll be exposed to more branding tactics — whether physical or online — as a result.

Perhaps most importantly, giving customers more than what they expect influences them to link your brand to a positive experience.

Ongoing Analysis

As with any marketing activity, you must regularly analyze your social media branding efforts to ensure to your tactics are working. Otherwise, you lack insight into your performance.

The worst case scenario? You devote countless hours and a sizeable part of your budget to strategies that don’t yield desirable results.

The best case scenario? Your strategies effectively establish a brand identity, yet you ignore data that can help further establish this identity at a faster rate.

These two scenarios depict why ongoing analysis is crucial to successful branding on social media.

14. Monitor Constantly

Enacting a social media monitoring strategy helps ensure you don’t miss opportunities to build brand identity.

For example, as consumers may forget to tag you or misspell your handle, you can monitor company-related keywords to pick up on their posts and strike up a conversation.

Tracking industry keywords can also uncover engagement opportunities and openings to discuss your business.

Social Media Monitoring - 15 Social Media Branding Strategies
This Twitter live-stream sample is from a Keyhole real-time tracker.

This is beneficial for both branding and public relations because it opens doors to resolve issues and answer questions, exemplifying your business’s positive characteristics.

Finding these opportunities should accelerate your social media brand-building efforts.

15. Measure Your Efforts

Measuring social statistics such as reach and engagement can help refine aspects of your branding strategy.

Assume that using specific hashtags is a key part of promoting your initiatives and products. However, you discover that few users search for — and view posts containing — these hashtags.

Likewise, checking ad performance statistics may reveal they’re not reaching target audiences.

Word of your brand may not be spreading quickly enough as a result.

By measuring these social tactics either manually or with a tool, you can determine if it’s worthwhile to alter your strategies to build brand recognition among prospects more effectively.

Final Thoughts About these Social Media Branding Strategies

It’s important for digital marketers to ensure their activities — ranging from influencer campaigns to active social media monitoring — help establish a clear brand identity.

This means you shouldn’t post for the sole intention of getting shares and winning followers. Instead, think about how your actions can support brand goals and perception.  

The shares and followers will come as you work to build a unique reputation that resonates with your target audience.

Keyhole is a real-time conversation tracker that provides keyword and hashtag analytics for Twitter and Instagram. Get started for free.

Influencer Marketing ROI: Calculate ROI and Maximize Your Social Impact

It can be difficult to link your marketing spend back to calculating influencer marketing ROI.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock or haven’t been actively participating in the digital world, you have no excuse whatsoever to not be familiarized with one of the most effective and accessible marketing strategies to date.

Put simply, influencer marketing is a form of marketing where a content creator with a sizeable follower base endorses a product or a brand in exchange for some form of compensation. 

Yet, influencer marketing is so much more than teaming up with an influencer, sealing a deal, and promoting your brand. 

Leading ways influencers are compensated for their involvement in marketing campaigns in the United States as of March 2018. Source: Statista

In reality, it’s a marketing strategy that requires detailed planning and proper implementation. 

And while you may be great at crafting a goal-driven influencer campaign, you might struggle with calculating your influencer marketing ROI just like many others. 

Suggested Read: Influencer Marketing: An Expert Guide On Marketing’s Next Big Thing

Jump Links:

The Significance of Influencer Marketing
What Metrics Can You Track?
Initial Investment Costs
Tools to Calculate Influencer Marketing ROI
Influencer Marketing ROI Formula

The Significance of Influencer Marketing

While calculating your influencer marketing ROI may seem like a daunting task (and we don’t deny that it can be!), and this discourages you from using influencer marketing in your marketing strategy, allow us to change your mind. 

Why?

Well, influencer marketing can be one of the best digital strategies that has ever happened to your brand – if done correctly. 

But if you want to understand influencer marketing and influencer marketing ROI, you have to understand influencer marketing statistics first. 

Let’s take a look at some of the key findings from the “Influencer Marketing 2020” report: 

  • The majority of consumers express a preference for influencers who create authentic, engaging content.

  • 90% of marketers say proving authenticity is critical to the future of influencer marketing.

  • 85% of marketers say engagement data is the biggest metric of success for influencer marketing.

  • ‘Fake followers’ ranks as number one concern within influencer marketing.

  • 100% of marketers agree that ‘relevance’ is the most sought-after attribute in influencers.

  • Proving the ROI of individual influencers is a big challenge for 84% of marketers.

Indeed, influencer marketing can be one of your most valuable tools – a social media post or a video by an influencer can boost your brand’s sales in the wink of an eye.

In turn, this affects your social media ROI, as well as your overall brand image and reception. 

What Metrics Can You Track? 

What makes influencer marketing so versatile is its ability to suit the needs of both new and well-known brands. 

A successful influencer campaign not only leaves the influencer and its target group happy, but it generates a satisfactory ROI for the brand too. 

Data shows that on average, brands are making $6.50 for each $1 spent on influencer marketing.

So, how can you make sure that you’re getting the influencer marketing ROI you aim to capture? What metrics can assist you in getting there?

Determining Campaign Goals 

An influencer marketing campaign without predefined campaign goals is a campaign not worth pursuing. 

Measuring your campaign’s success along with your influencer marketing ROI is impossible if you don’t outline your campaign goals first.

Here are a couple of KPIs you can set while planning your influencer marketing campaign:

Brand Visibility 

Influencer marketing is an amazing way to promote your brand and increase its visibility. And what better way to do so if not by collaborating with an influencer suitable for your brand’s niche? 

No one can create more buzz around your brand and products than an influencer can. 

Want to get people talking about your brand?

All it takes is for an influencer to post an image of your product, or mention it in an Insta story!

Influencers have the power to both turn new brands into overnight success and strengthen the power well-known ones already have. 

It might sound too good to be true, but practice shows that influencers are able to help a brand boost awareness and deliver tangible business value. 

Don’t take our word for it – check out this list of 5 brands that became famous thanks to influencers.

Noticing the impact an influencer campaign has had in terms of brand visibility is easy: all you need to do is monitor your traffic, engagement, and follower count 24 hours after an influencer has published new content (about your brand, obviously).

Social Engagement 

Collaborating with influencers can drastically boost your social media following. This in turn may very well impact your social media ROI as well. 

Let’s say you’re selling notebooks and planners, it’s December 2019, and one of your key upcoming products is a 2020 planner. You partner up with an influencer who might organize a planner giveaway on Instagram, for example. 

The influencer will most probably link your Instagram profile too or even your official website, so that you get extra exposure and website traffic. 

The increase in social engagement will get your brand on the radar of people who haven’t heard about you before, and show you how your potential audience perceives your product. 

To see the actual value an influencer provides in terms of audience engagement, divide the total compensation an influencer receives for a campaign by the number of interactions generated by a specific piece of content.

Conversions & Sales 

One of the most important aspects of any digital campaign is its ability to drive sales. 

Influencers are authority figures in the digital world, so when a particular influencer promotes a specific brand, the brand gains greater importance and validation.

If a well-known influencer wears a specific hat – the followers want to have the very same hat; if the influencer eats at a newly-opened place, the followers want to visit the same place; if the influencer promotes a new face cream, the followers want to have it as well. 

You get the point. 

It goes without saying that an influencer’s endorsement is highly valued, and getting one is one of the fastest ways to 1. get more people interested in your products, and 2. get more people to buy. 

Suggested Read: Writing Instagram Captions that Convert: Content, Formatting, and Hashtags

There are a couple of ways you can track the effect an influencer has on your sales:

  • Provide them with a custom discount code. 
    The influencer will share this code with their followers, offering them extra discount if they use it when making a purchase. Usually, these codes last for a certain amount of time (a week, two or a month), and allow you to see exactly how many people bought a product after learning about it from an influencer.
  • Create a unique affiliate link.
    Usually, when buying through an affiliate link, the buyer doesn’t get any discount, but the influencer will receive a commission for every purchase made through their link.

  • Set up a landing page unique to the influencer.
    This works similarly to affiliate links – you set up a unique landing page for the influencer that the audience uses to make their purchases.

It goes without saying that understanding the impact an influencer has on your engagement and conversions is the only way you can determine if the campaign costs are justified. 

It’s also the only way you can compare between influencers and choose a partner that makes you more money than you spend…

… which takes us to our next point: the costs of running an influencer marketing campaign.

Initial Investment Costs 

Time 

Influencer marketing campaigns are some of the most time-consuming campaigns you can undertake. 

Not only does the actual planning take a lot of time (and a lot of nerves too!), but what comes after the actual campaign is over (calculating your social media ROI, for example) can be an equally daunting task. 

Influencer Compensation 

Figuring out how much you should pay an influencer can be quite a challenge, especially because the expected monetary sum seems to constantly be changing. 

On the one hand, you might want to be generous to those promoting your brand, but on the other hand you also don’t want to break the bank now, do you? 

If you’re not sure how much of your budget you should allocate to influencer marketing, take a look at the following blog that gives a brief overview of influencer rates on different platforms:  Influencer Marketing Pricing: How Much Does It Cost in 2020?

Product Supplies

Besides paying influencers for promoting your brand, you might also give them a free sample product.

What a lot of brands usually do is they give influencers a fixed budget and they’re allowed to choose products up to that amount. 

So, if you’re selling sports leggings, for example, you might allow the influencer(s) you’re collaborating with to choose leggings (of their own preference) up to a certain sum of money. 

Marketing Agency Expenses 

If you’ve contacted a marketing agency to help you find adequate influencers for your campaign, you also have to pay them for the service. 

This puts off many people from actually contacting a marketing agency. However, partnering up with a marketing agency could prove to be useful in the long run – marketing agencies already have prior experience with certain influencers, and they might even offer you package deals. 

Tools to Calculate Influencer Marketing ROI

If you’re running an influencer marketing campaign, chances are sooner or later you’ll realize you need extra tools to assist you in the process. 

Indeed, human communication is key when it comes to influencer marketing campaigns, however, human planning is simply not enough. 

Luckily, there are more than enough tools to assist you, and while some may be better than others, there’s something for everyone’s needs. 

Here are our top three picks: 

1. Google Analytics:

A great tool to have even when you’re not running an influencer marketing campaign.

What makes Google Analytics so amazing is that it gives you absolutely free tools that allow you to closely analyze your business data – you can do so in one place, which makes it a super user-friendly tool.

Besides, tracking your social media ROI using Google Analytics is now easier than ever. 


You can use it to track your referral traffic along with track lead and sales conversions. Tracking your referral traffic is especially significant, as that’s the component that shows you which influencer is responsible for driving the most traffic to your site.

What’s more, Google Analytics has five standard campaign parameters you can use in each social post’s URL: 

  • utm_campaign 
  • utm_medium 
  • utm_source 
  • utm_content 
  • utm_term

A fun fact: did you know that there are at least  29,134,826 live websites using Google
Analytics?

2. Keyhole:

Yes, we’re also a great asset to your influencer marketing campaign!

Influence your influencers is our motto, and we can help you fully understand how much each influencer you’re collaborating with impacts your campaign on the whole. 

More specifically, we focus on calculating how much each influencer contributes to the engagement, reach, as well as the impressions that your brand and the overall campaign are receiving. 

Our user-friendly dashboard outlines each aspect, and you’ll know where you stand at any given moment.

Plus, making use of our Influencer Tracking feature will help you gain valuable insights into your influencers social media accounts. What’s more, we help you discover not only new, but highly relevant influencers for your niche. 

A fun fact: we even offer a free trial! Try it here.

3. Snovio:

One of the most useful tools in finding contacts you need, but don’t have.

It allows you to be in complete control over your lead generation process by offering the following features:

  • Domain Email Search 
  • Email Verifier 
  • Email Drip Campaigns 
  • Email Tracker for Gmail 
  • Professional Email Search 
  • Technology Checker 

A fun fact: Snovio currently has more than 370,000 active users on board!

Influencer Marketing ROI Formula 

Okay, now that we’ve established what the costs of influencer marketing are and some of the KPIs you can track, let’s talk about calculating the overall ROI of your campaign.

Calculating ROI is by no means simple. 

In fact, it’s the most challenging aspect of the whole influencer campaign. However, there are simplified ways to approach it and measure it. 

You can calculate your ROI using the following formula:

ROI (Return on Investment) = Profit Return /Investment x 100

Let’s say you’re running an eCommerce platform selling cosmetics and you decide to invest $5,000 in an influencer marketing campaign. 

You make the plan, you find a proper influencer to partner with, you decide on the social media platform you’re going to go for, and eventually you generate $10,000, which looks like this: 

ROI = $10,000/ $5,000 x 100 = 200% ROI  

We’re aware that this is a rather simple example, and in practice measuring your ROI can pose a real challenge. 

However, each new influencer campaign will demand a new ROI approach anyway, and while it gets easier with experience, you’ll always have to adjust to the current situation. 

Final Thoughts on Influencer Marketing ROI 

Whether you’re supporting it or not, influencer marketing is here to stay.

And while calculating your influencer marketing ROI may be tough, it’s absolutely worth it. 

Most influencer campaigns transcend the traditional social marketing strategies that deliver more or less expected results – with influencer campaigns all it takes is to forget the digital rules and simply have a leap of marketing faith.

It’s been alleged that 17% of companies spend over half their marketing budget on influencers.

What about you? How are you spending your marketing budget this year?

Keyhole is a real-time conversation tracker that provides keyword and hashtag analytics for Twitter and Instagram. Get started for free and search your brand.

20 Social Media Tools: Automation to Save Time and Outperform Competitors

Use social media tools to automate some of your tasks. 

Not only will you be able to do everything and then some, but you’ll also be able to have an even bigger impact on social media than you are having right now, and do it in less time. 

There’s always so much to do in a day as a social media manager. 

You’ve got to create social media posts, design graphics, post content across ALL of your platforms, see who liked your previous content, respond to the angry client on Facebook, find out who is talking about you and update your boss on how everything is working out. 

Don’t you wish you had a few extra hours in your day?

Your stress levels are rising. Something needs to get pushed back but everything seems important.

Automation allows you to write and design your content in advance and schedule it to share at a later date.

By automating some social media tasks, you’ll be able to complete and schedule your work at one go and eliminate the tedious, manual busywork.

Jump Links:

Benefits of Automation

Quick Tips on How to Use Social Media Automation

What Metrics To Automate

20 Social Media Tools for Automation

Social Media Scheduling Tools
1. Buffer
2. Hootsuite
3. Tailwind
4. CoSchedule
5. MeetEdgar

Social Media Analytics Tools:
6. Twitter Analytics
7. Facebook Analytics
8. Keyhole

Content Creation and Curation Tools:
9. BuzzSumo
10. Scoop.it
11. Pocket

Social Media Monitoring Tools:
12. Sprout Social
13. AgoraPulse
14. Google Alerts
15. Falcon.io

Social Media Tracking Tools:
16. SocialFlow
17. Socialert
18. Brand24
19. Mention
20. Meltwater

Benefits of Automation

Forget the naysayers who claim that your automated content will be penalized. According to a study by Buffer, posts from third-party tools do not receive less engagement than natively posted posts.

It’s also not true that automated social media marketing is impersonal because it takes a personal touch to write your messages and design the visuals you’ll share. 

That said, there are plenty of benefits to social media automation, including:

  • More control over your accounts
    • Social media tools give you better control of your social media accounts. You are able to control the kind of content to be shared, when and how often. You are also able to post more content on multiple platforms with more ease. 
  • Saves you time
    • The biggest benefit of automation is that it saves you A LOT of time. Instead of spending hours on end curating content and posting it manually on individual platforms. Automation tools enable you to share content to multiple platforms at the same time from one dashboard. 

Quick Tips on How to Use Social Media Automation

Once you start implementing social media automation and the use of social media tools, keep a flexible schedule.

Leave room for timely updates that cannot be scheduled ahead of time. Automation does not mean that you should never do ad-hoc posts. 

Another important tip to keep in mind is timing.

While you’re free to schedule your posts to go out anytime you want, consider the time your audience is most active on each platform. This will ensure that your content gets optimal engagement. 

Once you have an automation system going, monitor and then evaluate it.

Use analytics to see how your content performed since you started automating it. This way, you’ll know how to tweak your automation process.  

Lastly, not everything should be automated. It’s still important to have meaningful conversations with your users and this cannot be achieved via automation. Such conversations have to be done in real-time. 

What Metrics to Automate

As mentioned, not everything should be automated. So what should you automate?

1. Content Curation and Creation

Sharing relatable third-party content is part of a successful social media strategy. However, finding the right content can take up all your time. 

Automating your content curation process will make it easy to find current content and post it consistently. 

2. Non-Urgent Social Media Posts

Not every content that you have needs to be posted immediately. Think about your evergreen blog posts, quotes, retweets, and third-party content. These can be shared at any time. So feel free to schedule them.

3. Your RSS feeds

Automate your RSS feed to keep sharing your new blog content as soon as it is posted. However, remember to keep an eye on comments and reply to them in person. 

In addition, DO NOT automate other people’s RSS feeds as you might end up sharing content that is irrelevant to your brand or promote other people’s products. 

4. Social Media Leads

You don’t need to manually collect every lead you get from your social media marketing efforts. You can automate this process and save yourself some time that you can use to follow up with the leads collected. 

5. Analytics

To know the value of the effort spent on social media marketing you need reports showing how your platforms performed over a given period of time.

Trying to generate these reports manually can be an uphill task. Instead, use a social media reporting tool to do it.

6. Social Listening

It’s important to know who is talking about your brand online and what they are saying. It’s near impossible to manually find every mention of your brand. There are tools, however, that are specially designed to do this. 

20 Social Media Tools for Automation

Successful automation depends on using the best tools available. There are thousands of automation tools available but not every one of them will be best for you.

To guide you on what tools to use, let’s take a look at the best tools for each of the social media tasks that you should be automating. 

Social Media Scheduling Tools

1. Buffer

Buffer is a popular social media scheduling tool. 

It allows you to schedule your posts across Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and Pinterest. 

You can have a preset schedule and your posts will be added to it automatically when you create them on Buffer. 

2. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is another powerful yet simple to use, content scheduling tool. 

Hootsuite is best for scheduling posts in advance on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. 

The tool has an added analytics tool that enables you to measure content engagement, so you understand how your content is performing.

3. Tailwind 

Creating Instagram and Pinterest posts on the go can be quite consuming. Tailwind is by far one of the best tools to use for your Instagram and Pinterest posts. 

You can use it to pin multiple boards on Pinterest at once, bulk upload, and schedule posts. 

Its drag-and-drop calendar makes scheduling content very easy.

4. CoSchedule

CoSchedule makes social media scheduling on different social media platforms easy allowing you to manage multiple accounts stress-free. 

You can schedule over 60 posts at once on CoSchedule. You can also use it to directly answer queries from its interface.

5. MeetEdgar

MeetEdgar allows you to build a library of content that you can share across different platforms. The tool then automatically schedules it for you—including repeat posts. 

Better still, it will write variations of your posts to keep things fresh.

Social Media Analytics Tools

6. Twitter Analytics

You have access to Twitter Analytics as long as you have a Twitter profile. 

This free tool allows you to measure the performance of your Twitter marketing campaign. 

It will show you how many likes, comments, and retweets your tweets get. This way, you are able to see how people interact with your content and adjust your campaign accordingly.

7. Facebook Analytics

Facebook Analytics comes with your Facebook account. It’s a simple free tool that allows you to see how people are interacting with your Facebook content. 

It also goes further to show you who these people interacting with your content are and where they are. This enables you to create content that is targeted and most relevant to your top fans. 

8. Keyhole

Keyhole allows you to monitor hashtag campaigns, keyword tracking, account tracking, and mentions.

You can view your brand or campaign’s performance on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube in an in-depth visual representation. 

In addition to monitoring your social media performance, you can also monitor sentiments around your brand. You also get to monitor your competition and compare your brand accounts and campaigns against major competitors.

Content Creation and Curation Tools

9. Buzzsumo

Want to find out what is currently trending? Use Buzzsumo. 

Buzzsumo makes it easy to search for viral and trendy topics related to your industry. Simply use a relevant keyword to automate your research. 

You can filter the results on the basis of location, industry, platform, etc.

Buzzsumo is also a great tool to find social media influencers. 

10. Scoop.it

Use Scoop.it to curate content from other sources and then add your opinion and share it on your platforms with the push of a button. 

It has a smart content calendar that you can use to publish your own posts as well as the content you curate.

11. Pocket

Think of Pocket as Pinterest for content. 

It is a free Chrome extension that allows you to save any content you come across on the web. 

You have access to the content you save in your Pocket account anytime and anywhere, at your convenience. You can even access it on your phone through its iOS or Android app.

Social Media Monitoring Tools

12. Sprout Social

Sprout Social is an all-in-one social media marketing tool that makes it easy to coordinate and delegate tasks to team members.

In addition to helping you curate and create content, you can use it to schedule, analyze and monitor your content. 

13. AgoraPulse

AgoraPulse has both basic scheduling and analytics features to help you schedule posts and create reports. 

It also allows you to run contests, quizzes, and promotions and measure how they performed. 

In addition, you can see how your social media marketing campaign measures up against your competitors.

14. Google Alerts

Google Alerts is a really good basic monitoring solution.

The tool scans through the web and sends you alerts whenever your brand or product gets mentioned. 

You can choose which sources you want to be alerted on such as blogs, news sites or forums.

15. Falcon.io

Falcon.io is another great social listening, customer engagement, content marketing and audience management tool.

It supports all the major social media such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn and Twitter. Using it will help you stay on top of your trends. 

You can use this tool to monitor influencers and directly engage with them. 

Social Media Tracking Tools

16. SocialFlow

Want to monitor your brand as the bigwigs do? Use SocialFlow. 

SocialFlow is a favourite of big brands like The Washington Post, Mashable, and National Geographic.

This tool tracks conversations in real-time and gathers insight on your behalf. With these insights, you’re able to tell the content that works and the best time to share it. 

17. Socialert

Socialert makes social media listening effortless and comes with tons of added features.

Use this tool to track hashtags and keywords on a real-time basis. It will alert you whenever a particular keyword is mentioned. 

This way, you’re able to collect user-generated content, perform brand monitoring, find industry-related influencers, and so much more.

18. Brand24

Brand24 shows you all the instances your brand has been mentioned anywhere on the internet.

You also get to see the mentions from your niche and competitors helping to know how you stack up against your competition.

The tool can also help you identify and reach out to influencers within your industry so that you can strike a good relationship with them and help your business gain more visibility. 

You can also use Brand24 to track hot or relevant discussions, topics, and trends so you can have fresh content ideas. 

19. Mention

Mention ensures that you never miss a conversation on social media. 

The tool lists all your brand mentions instantly on your dashboard. This gives you a good opportunity to conduct brand monitoring, competitor analysis, and so on. 

A good added feature is the ability to use it to get in touch with your customers and resolve their queries on the go.

20. Meltwater

Meltwater allows you to track brand mentions, monitor campaigns and keep abreast of critical conversations about your brand on social media.

This tool helps you listen to relevant social media conversations. With this kind of information, you can then make intelligent marketing decisions. 

Additionally, you can also use Meltwater to schedule posts to publish later.

Are you ready to automate?

Social media automation is an important social media marketing process that is sure to save you time in 2020.

But it’s not merely a set and forget strategy.

You still need to make time to regularly visit your social media accounts and engage with your audience– this is what it means to be truly social.

Let these social media tools do repetitive work for you and free up your time for more meaningful social interactions!

Keyhole is a real-time conversation tracker that provides keyword and hashtag analytics for Twitter and Instagram. Get started for free.

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