Author: Franz Malten Buemann

When it comes to social media strategy, most brands know some of the top strategies: Post high-quality content, monitor your brand perception, engage with your audience.

But ever wonder if there are some strategies your social media team has been overlooking?
In this article, we’ll cover some strategies you may not have considered, with some data to support their effectiveness.
1. Leverage small, nano, and micro-influencers.
A 2021 State of User Generated Content report revealed that most marketers (93%) agree that consumers trust content created by people way more than brands.
People trust each other considerably more than they trust brands, and that’s why 75% of marketers are working with small to micro-influencers with followers ranging from 500 to 25,000, according to the study.
Why not mega influencers with millions of followers? Well, besides cost, some brands worry that as influencers become more celebrity-like and grow in popularity, they lose some of their influence – ironically enough.
As a result, brands are working more with small, blue-checkless content creators with great engagement and true influencers in their community. In 2018, an eMarketer study revealed that micro-influencers (between 10K-100K followers) were considered most effective.
User-generated content (UGC) will continue to be a great lead and revenue driver on social media. However, the shift toward smaller influencers may be the more effective (and affordable) way to increase brand awareness.
2. Stick to platform-specific content.
With so many different platforms to post on, it’s very easy to get overwhelmed.
Brands often try to batch-post their content by posting the same content on multiple platforms at once. For instance, the same video may go on Facebook, Instagram Reels, and TikTok.
While it may be a time-saver, it may hurt your brand in the long run. The competition between each social media platform is fiercer than ever before.
In Feb. 2021, Instagram announced it would deprioritize Reels with the TikTok trademark in it.
The trademark shows up when a TikTok user saves a video that was uploaded to the platform. Because TikTok is a direct competitor to Instagram Reels, the brand wants to promote the use of its own short-form software and keep users on its network.
This speaks to a larger effort from social media platforms to differentiate themselves from one another. In that same spirit, brands should follow a specific strategy for each platform, as consumer behavior differs from one site to the next.
3. Show the people behind your brand.
When I went on vacation a few weeks ago, my friends and I spent an hour discussing our favorite Black-owned brands, as Black women do.
One brand I highlighted was the luxury purse brand Anima Iris. I hadn’t even purchased from the brand but I was already loyal and I was eager to spread the word.
A few weeks later, I noticed that one of my friends kept sharing new content from Anima Iris with me. I mentioned that I loved how invested she became in the brand.
She responded, “It’s because I’m invested in her.” The “her” she was referring to is the company’s CEO, Wilglory Tanjong, who was incredibly visible on the brand’s social media.
In fact, the majority of the brand’s social media posts feature the CEO and her journey. Tanjong shares everything from new leathers she’s considering using to her struggle in raising capital.
What’s the point of the story? Well, brands often underestimate the power of transparency.
Back in 2018, a Sprout Social study revealed that 70% of consumers feel more connected to a brand when its CEO is active on social. They listed three reasons why:

It feels like there are real people behind the brand.
Consumers like learning about the leadership team.
Consumers feel the CEO offers valuable insight into the brand itself.

This transparency has helped Tanjong build a community of loyal followers who are invested in her brand and engage frequently with her content.
Marketers often think of data privacy and social responsibility. But it’s also company culture, employees, processes, and everything in between.
In a 2020 study by Havas, consumers shared that they (58%) want brands to be more transparent and honest and their company, including their processes and products.
Transparency builds trust and allows you to speak directly with your audience. What’s better than that?
4. Focus on community, not promotion.
Social media builds brand awareness, true. However, too often, brands focus on output without considering community building.
Annabelle Nyst, senior content strategist on the HubSpot social team, encourages companies to create a community-focused social strategy.
“So many brands see social media as a vessel for promoting themselves and their owned content, without really giving too much thought to engaging or growing their community,” said Nyst.
She adds that brands should be proactive about participating in conversations, finding their facts, monitoring their brand perception, and celebrating UGC.
Takeaway: Get your audience invested in your brand and you’ll have an easier time getting them excited about your products or services.
5. Go live.
Live streaming allows brands to connect with their audience in real-time. In some instances, consumers prefer it over other content channels.
Back in 2017, Livestream found that 80% of consumers prefer watching a brand’s live video than read a blog post or see a social post.
In 2021, 28% of marketers planned to use it in their video marketing strategy, according to Wyzowl.
Other reasons to go live include:

The ability to repurpose the live content into other posts.
The ideas you get generate from connecting directly with your audience.
The trust you can build by showing the faces behind your brand.

Social media is a beast that isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Don’t be afraid to experiment, as that will help you better understand your audience and identify effective strategies.

As email marketers, one of the key metrics we use to determine if our audience is actually reading our content is the open rate.
Tracking email opens allows us to determine whether our subject lines are resonating with our audience. If we can’t get them to open an email, we can’t get them to click and move further along the buyer’s journey.
With the rollout of Apple iOS 15’s new privacy protection features, our open rates are in jeopardy. But is that a bad thing?
Let’s start with some information about how this new feature will work.

How Apple’s Email Privacy Protection Feature Works
After updating an iOS device to iOS 15, upon opening the Apple Mail app you will see a popup asking whether you’d like to “Protect Mail activity.”
If you select the “Protect Mail activity” option, Apple will first route your emails through a proxy server to pre-load message content, including tracking pixels, before it makes it to your inbox.
What does that mean for you?
According to Apple, “Mail Privacy Protection hides your IP address, so senders can’t link it to your other online activity or determine your location. And it prevents senders from seeing if and when you’ve opened their email.”
What does this mean for email marketers?
Mail privacy protection affects any email opened from the Apple Mail app on any device, no matter which email service is used such as Gmail or a work address. However, this will not affect other email apps used on Apple devices like the Gmail app on an iPhone for example.
If you’re an email marketer, you might still be wondering how this change will impact your strategy. To help, we decided to highlight the steps our email team is taking to adjust our strategy and process around these email privacy protection features.
Here are a few of the steps we’re taking and we encourage you to join us
How HubSpot Email Marketers Are Responding to iOS 15
1. Take stock of current processes.
Before Apple’s iOS 15 changes went live, we audited all of our existing email programs.
To begin, we wanted to understand the potential impact this change was going to have on the business. Using HubSpot’s email reporting tools we were able to assess the portion of our database that uses Apple Mail clients. Understanding this number is important to gauge how big of an impact these IOS changes will have on our ability to see accurate email performance data moving forward.
Next, we documented which subject lines resonate best with each of our personas.
While we follow email subject line best practices, as most email marketers know that only gets you so far. Things like character count and action-oriented language are only guardrails used to guide our subject line writing. From there we’ve experimented heavily with language, structure, and yes — even emojis — to find what resonates with each of our personas.
This documentation provides my team with a library of subject lines and guardrails that we can use moving forward in a world without accurate Open Data.
Finally, we documented email benchmarks for all of our programs. While the privacy update will only impact Opens, that means all other metrics utilizing open data will be impacted too — such as clickthrough rate which is measured by total clicks/total opens. These benchmarks will enable us to measure the impact that this IOS change will have across all of our email metrics.
2. Open up email reporting.
When reporting on email performance one of the first metrics considered is open rate. How successful were we at getting our recipients to open our email? Well, that’s about to change.
Email marketers are going to have to shift their focus to stable metrics like clicks, click rate (clicks / delivered emails), and conversion rate moving forward. This is our plan.
While this change may be painful, we believe it’s the right course of action. Looking at clicks and conversions is much more closely tied to how your database is engaging with your email programs.
Driving action via a CTA click and the following conversion is the ultimate goal of most emails sent today. Focussing on clicks and conversions will enable marketers to better optimize their programs to drive real engagement for their database.
However, open rates will not be going away. They will just be — different. It will still be important to track open rates over time for your email programs. We will need to establish new benchmarks after the IOS update is rolled out broadly. From there we will still be able to do subject line testing and see if we can improve Open rates over the new benchmark.
3. Stay the (automated) course.
While a few things are changing for us in how we think about reporting and subject line experimentation, our overarching strategy doesn’t follow suit.
At HubSpot, we’ve never relied on open data to segment or personalize our automated email programs. I know this goes against the tried and true drip campaign logic, which relies heavily on whether a contact opened an email. We instead focus our segmentation and personalization on the behaviors our contacts are taking on our website and within our app.
We’ve found this behavioral segmentation to be the most successful when trying to connect with our audience.
Take our email onboarding experience for example.
We have a welcome email that we send to every contact when they sign up for HubSpot that is filled with getting started resources.
The next email contacts receive is not based on how they interacted with our welcome email but rather how they have interacted with our product. Depending on the tools they have (or haven’t) used, we will send them a personalized email suggesting the next tool to explore.
We will stay the course here and focus on behavior over email interaction.
4. Understand the impact on your strategies.
According to Litmus, if Apple Mail audiences opt into Mail Privacy Protection, marketers could face the following issues:

Any audience cohort, segmentation, or targeting based on the last open date would be rendered useless — especially critical for purging unengaged contacts.
Automated flows and journeys that rely on someone opening an email would need to get re-engineered.
A/B testing subject lines (or anything else) using opens to determine the winner or to automatically send out the winner won’t work anymore.
Send time optimization would become inaccurate.
Countdown timers might show outdated times as the cached version was pulled at email send time — not opened time.
Other content powered by opens such as local weather or nearest store location also wouldn’t be accurate.
Some interactive emails that reference external CSS might not work.

5. Weigh alternatives.
Although some elements of email marketing will be more challenging with IOS 15 in play, marketers can still use some creative alternatives to continue to send subscribers interesting and engaging content.
For example, although you might not be able to optimize for send time as well without proper open-tracking, you can still manually analyze email performance based on send time, or send emails based on send times that receive the best global performance across industries.
Additionally, while you might not be able to automate location-specific banners or weather reports for Apple users, you can still use zip code information that they’ve submitted on previous forms to send them location-based content.
While these alternatives might not be perfect or easy to streamline with automation, they can still give your audiences a somewhat personalized email experience.
6. Explore additional tools.
While HubSpot’s product team is continuing to watch and respond to how iOS 15 impacts email marketing tools, there are also additional tools and integrations you can use with HubSpot’s email platform to create stunning emails.
For example, Litmus is a paid tool that allows HubSpot users to track their HubSpot emails. According to a recent post from the company, it allows users to view “reliable opens” as well as the total number of Apple-privacy-impacted opens, which can help email marketers determine how big the impact of Apple’s IOS changes are.
 Image Source
What’s Next?
First and foremost, don’t panic! While iOS 15 will force email marketers to pivot strategy and process, it most certainly does not mean that email marketing is going away.
Apple’s launch of iOS 15 and its Email Privacy Protection Feature is indicative of a larger shift that we’re seeing in the digital marketing space. More and more Individuals are taking a larger interest in how their personal information is being collected, stored, and used. We will continue to see this trend grow as more businesses put protections in place for their customers.
As email marketers, it’s our responsibility to honor the inbox of every contact in our database with a personalized experience. With iOS 15, personalization has become harder.
As data protection continues to grow and evolve, personalization will become even more difficult. The best thing we can do moving forward is to stay informed and adjust our strategies accordingly. Because at the end of the day, email marketing is really about providing value to the Human’s on the other end of that Inbox.
Want to get more background on Apple’s privacy move? Check out this post. To learn more about how this move could impact your processes within HubSpot’s email tool specifically, follow this community thread.

Unstoppable! The Squid Game has stormed to first place in the Amazon category! Many keen sellers have firmly grasped the IP fever and quickly derived the same products and peripherals and made a lot of money in a short period of time. First, “Squid Game” exploded worldwide and became the bestselling goods. I found, on the Amazon platform as long as you enter “Squid Game”, about the show’s clothes, sugar cookies, wooden alarm clock and countless other products. Previously, categories such as masks and costumes also shot up to #1 and #2 in Amazon’s small categories with no reviews. Is chasing a hot IP honey or poison? When I searched a lot of products related to “The Squid Game” on Amazon, I found that there were common features among them. ▶ These products are the props in the “Squid Game”, no comments, as usual, can still become Bestsellers. ▶ Almost all of the sellers of these products are overseas sellers, and the shipping mode is all FBM. ▶ The stores selling “Squid Game” peripheral products such as wooden girl alarm clocks, ponzu molds, helmets, masks, and Squid Game costumes are all new stores or small stores. From the above points, we can see… ​ Well, this article is too long to write it down here. Click on this link to read the original article.
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Last Updated on October 16, 2021 by Rakesh Gupta Big Idea or Enduring Question: How do you deploy Flows or Processes using Workbench?   Objectives: After reading this blog post, the reader will be able to: Understand how to use Workbench retrieve change set Understand how to use Workbench to deploy flows
The post Getting Started with Salesforce Flow – Part 75 (Deploy Flow(s) or Process(es) Using Workbench) appeared first on Automation Champion.

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