The Philosophy of our Social Media Marketing Team

Today, being present on social media is essential for every single brand and there seems to be a lot to think about when trying to come up with a perfect way of representing a brand on different social media channels. From setting up goals to coming up with a creative concept and monitoring the work — there are many different aspects one needs to be careful about.

Read all about how we from Degordian’s Social Media Marketing team organize our work when setting up a perfect social media presence for each of our brands.

The goal

The first question we ask ourselves, no matter which brand we’re working on, is: what’s the goal this brand is trying to achieve through its social media accounts? Although it’s true that in today’s day and age almost every brand has a presence on social media, that doesn’t mean that every brand has to have the same presence. Without this crucial first step of setting up a goal, we might be losing time and energy on something that doesn’t do our client any good. Is it brand awareness or website conversions? With a goal in mind, we can optimize the content, channels and post types for a specific goal we’re trying to achieve.

Creative concept

We’re strong believers that you can’t have a social media strategy without having a creative concept first. One might think that coming up with posts that represent a brand might be easy, but after months and months of creating content for social media, we wouldn’t know what to do without a creative concept to keep us on the right track and to keep it interesting.

Let’s take Okusi Italije (The Tastes of Italy), the creative concept we’ve come up with for Galbani, one of the brands we’re working on. The strategy is to showcase all things Italian on Galbani’s Facebook page — from Italian fashion, nature, history and music to delicious Italian recipes – everything we can connect directly with Galbani products. With this creative concept in mind, we always know where to look up ideas when creating monthly social media plans.

Having a plan

As I mentioned before, we’re creating content for our brands based on monthly social media plans. We believe that preparing materials in advance is crucial because it gives us a perspective of what our brands look like on their social media pages, it helps us carry out the creative concept we created for the brand and it helps us keeping everything organized and under control.

Of course, there can always be a situation when we’re creating a post for that specific day because there’s some new and interesting situation we’d like to connect our brand with, but it’s also important to have a strategic plan of publishing content throughout different social media channels.

The right channels

It’s important to distinguish which social media channels are significant for each brand. Today we can choose from more channels than ever before, so this step becomes more important than ever. We don’t want to lose energy on a channel that doesn’t fill out our brand’s goal. And which channels do we want our brands to have a strong presence on?

Easy, whichever channels their target audience has a presence, also. Today, most of our brands have a multi-channel presence. For example, we have a Facebook, Instagram and Twitter account for one brand, each with a specific type of content and a different goal we’re trying to achieve.

Visual identity

This one’s really obvious, right? Although a visual identity seems like an obvious thing, it’s vital to sort out what will the brand’s posts look like on each of the social media channels they’re present on. Coming up with a brand’s social media visual identity means incorporating the brand’s logo and colors in a unique way for each channel. It also might mean that on Facebook we will incorporate the brand’s logo on each visual, while on Instagram we will get rid of all branding so that posts could look as natural as possible.

The right tone of communication

Each brand has a unique tone of communication, so, one of the basic tasks of a Community Manager is communicating with the fans in a voice specific for the brand they’re working on. Some of them are formal and professional, while others are relaxed and humorous.

It’s important to create social media posts and communicate with the fans in a specifically defined tone of voice because social media is just one of the many ways that the brand is communicating with its audience, so the communication in that aspect has to be the same as the general message that the brand is trying to carry out.

Keeping an eye on the competition

Yes, we like to keep an eye on the competition, and not in a copycat/stealing ideas kind of way. We want and have to keep up with what’s going on in a market we’re working on. Tracking the ways that brands are implementing new trends is equally important as monitoring the trends themselves. Also, having an eye on the benchmark can only inspire us and help us setting up standards that we’re striving to achieve.

Backing it all up with research

Deciding on which channels we want our brand to be present on, which creative concept will work the best with our target audience, which part of the year to go with different types of posts and content… Everything has to have a backup in research. This means looking up numbers, newest studies, trends, blogs and indicators that’ll tell us which decision is the right one.

This gives us the foundation that every decision is based on and a direction we want to go with. The most important thing is that every decision has to be based on facts — whether deciding between carousel or canvas posts or coming up with a brand new strategy for a new client.

Having cool activations

Every once in awhile our fans need a little boost to engage with our brands more. That’s why we always love to come up with different social media activations whether our goals is to spread brand awareness or showcase some new product. One of our clients, Bosch Home, wanted to showcase their new line of vacuum cleaners, and instead of creating a series of Facebook posts that communicate their features, we’ve created a short quiz that made our fans look up and learn about new features from the brochure.

Also, we’ve created an activation in which our fans had to look for differences between two different pictures that were displaying the products in a modern and homey setting. Both activations boosted the engagement on our Facebook page, all while our fans learned about new Bosch products.

Tracking the work

If we don’t know how our posts are performing, how could we know which types of posts and content should we create next? After the end of every month, we investigate how each of our social media pages performed. We check if our goals were achieved for the month — if there were enough website clicks, if we gained new followers, achieved bigger organic reach and engagement… All with having our main goal in mind. That way we can track which type of content performs best and can optimize our strategy for the following month.

Keeping it fresh

Having a cool social media strategy for each brand is essential because this way we always know in which direction to go when creating new content. But every now and then, every strategy needs some fresh ideas. Social media channels are changing on an almost daily basis, so we always want to implement new technologies that became available. This sometimes means changing the way we work. When canvas became available, we created new Lufthansa ads.

When Instant Articles arrived, we looked up how could we publish articles in a new way. Now Instagram Stories let us mention users and use Boomerang videos — so we’re already thinking of creating new posts that use those new features. New ideas are not always technology logy innovations.

Sometimes, a little shift in an existing creative concept means fresh content and posts interesting to our target audience. For example, we decided to have new themed posts for our client Camping Village Šimuni, a series of “Meet Me Monday” Facebook posts that talk about their employees, followed by a series of “Would you rather Wednesday” posts that give our fans two interesting options and ask them which one would they prefer.

All of this can give you a basic idea of how our Social Media Marketing team works. We always think about a bigger picture for each of our brands and try to get to some utopian stage where everything we imagined works perfectly. With keeping up with trends, optimizing the content we’re working on and building a community around each of our brands, we think we’re getting pretty close. Working with a young and passionate team only makes it easier. 🙂