Category: Marketing Automation

Online shoppers are notoriously fickle, and why shouldn’t they be? There are so many options and avenues at their fingertips that there’s no sense in wildly committing to the first products they see. The multi-step checkout process allows them to toy with potential purchases — chalk certain items down as likely buys while they look…
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Keep your email marketing calendar busy all year round with these fresh and creative newsletter ideas + get inspired by some fantastic examples from our inboxes

For any company, building and maintaining a social media presence is a key marketing strategy for reaching more potential customers. A company’s social media profiles also act as a space where anyone can get to know your company much better, helping to build a stronger online brand. While we know a lot of small business owners who manage their own social media profiles and love doing it, for some it makes more sense to bring on a dedicated social media manager to free up their time and creative energy.
I’ve recently been going through the process of hiring a social media manager for Buffer so I wanted to share what I’ve learned so far to help anyone else who wants to bring on a social media manager for their team. I’ve broken it down into five sections: writing a job description, crafting a custom application, promoting the role, and the interview process. Plus, I also included our entire job description at the end. Feel free to grab any part of it that you might need for your own listing!
Let’s dive in! ✨
1. Write a Thoughtful Job Description
The first step in any hiring process is writing a strong job description. While this is necessary for promoting the job, it’s also an exercise in defining exactly what you want out of this role.
Take the time to really dig deep into your business needs, asking questions like:

How much experience do I want this person to have? A mistake I see many business owners make is outsourcing social media to an intern or junior hire to save money. This can work if you’re prepared to provide training and support, but if you aren’t, then you should aim to hire someone with more experience.

What resources will I be able to provide? Expecting a social media manager to run social strategy and create videos and visual elements and write copy and do customer support and run ads and report on analytics—as you can tell, it’s a lot. Think about what your key needs are and what resources you have to help cover some of the other bases.

What channels do I want them to focus on? I always recommend brands focus on their social media marketing on one or two channels, rather than trying to be great at them all. Given how many specialties there are in social media marketing, you should also look for candidates with specific experience in those channels. It’s also important to consider whether you want someone with more experience on paid or organic since those are such different skill sets.

At Buffer, we ultimately decided we wanted a candidate who is skilled at organic Twitter, who has specific experience in our industry, and who is strong in community management (but not necessarily customer support, since we have resources for that).
Check out our final job description at the end of this post, which you can adapt to your own needs, at the end of this article.
2. Craft a Custom Application
In addition to asking candidates for a resume and cover letter, we included custom application questions, which can help you quickly get a good sense of which candidates are right for your company.
Ours were:

Share your Twitter account:
If you don’t have a Twitter account, describe your experience on Twitter: (In 280 characters or less.)
Share the link to a tweet you’re proud of that you sent from a brand account as an example:
Why did you choose that tweet? (In 280 characters or less.)
Share the link to a social media graphic or short-form video content that you created:
What’s your favorite social network? Why? (In 280 characters or less.)
What do you think is the future of organic social media? (In 280 characters or less.)
How would you respond to the following tweets as Buffer’s Social Media Manager? (In 280 characters or less.)

Some things to consider when writing application questions for your brand:

Hone in on the platforms you’re focusing on. Again, it was most important to us that we find someone great with Twitter, so many of our questions were aimed at understanding their experience there. If you’re spending more time on Instagram, you might ask questions like: What are your favorite Instagram features? Which do you think would be strongest for our brand? If TikTok is a focus: What’s an example of a TikTok you created for a brand? What TikTok trends do you think are aligned with our brand?

Request responses in social media format. Because Twitter is so key for us, I limited responses to 280 characters or less, and I’m glad I did. For one, it made applications much faster to review. But it also helped me test whether applicants could communicate succinctly, which is critical for social media. If you’re hunting for an Instagram or TikTok pro, you might get creative, asking them to create short-form videos in response.

Put them to work for your brand. Including a very small assignment as part of the initial application can help you get a quick gauge if a candidate understands your brand voice, which can be hard to teach if it’s not already aligned. We chose to ask people to respond to a few sample tweets.

3. Promote the Role on Social (Of Course!)
My biggest piece of advice for getting your job listing in front of the right candidates is to promote it using social media, given that’s where they’re already hanging out. If you’re looking for a Twitter pro, make sure to tweet the job posting—both from your brand account and the personal accounts of teammates related to the role.
We have a newsletter that goes out to anyone interested in jobs at Buffer when we open a new role, and in addition to that, I personally shared the listing on Twitter and LinkedIn. It got a ton of traction on both platforms and made it easy for other folks both from Buffer and from outside of Buffer to easily share it, too.

We’re hiring for some fun roles on @buffer’s Marketing team: 👩🏻‍💻 Social Media Manager 👩🏻‍💻 Community Manager 👩🏻‍💻 Product Marketing Manager Buffer is: 🌏 Fully distributed 💸 Transparent with pay ❤️ A great bunch of folksMore ⬇️https://t.co/d6LqiEL38r— Hailley Griffis (@hailleymari) November 29, 2021

Ultimately, we promoted the role for three weeks and ended up with 704 candidates. We expected a large pool of candidates for this role since this is our industry. Depending on your size and how much you’re promoting, I’d recommend giving it at least four to six weeks to give people time to apply. You can always review candidates on a rolling basis, too.
Learn more about using social media to hire for your business from Buffer’s Director of People, Nicole Miller.
4. Structure the Interview Process for Success
Interview processes can vary wildly depending on your style, the size of your company, and more, but there are a few practices that have helped us identify the right candidates:

Consider a test assignment. We start our interview process for roles with a lot of applicants with a take-home assignment, which is helpful for us to further narrow down candidates. Even if you have a smaller pool, it can be a valuable way for you to test other skills. For instance, if you got a sense of their content creation in the initial application, you might test their strategic abilities by asking them to create a content calendar for one week.

Dig into soft skills. By the time you sit down to talk to a candidate, you likely have a good sense of their social media abilities and qualifications, so spend the interview digging more into the soft skills that are important for success in this role. Will they be able to collaborate with different teammates? Are they flexible enough to adapt as social channels change? Do they thrive on interacting with people online day after day?

Include questions around culture and values. We always have an entire values interview as part of Buffer’s process, but smaller companies may just want to integrate a few values-related questions into the interview. One of my favorites: To dig into the Buffer value of “improve consistently,” we’ll often ask what someone has done recently to improve their skills in a certain area. Questions like this should help you find a candidate who is excited to work for your company and who will seamlessly fit into the ways you work.

Once you decide to hire a social media manager, you probably want to bring someone on quickly, but it’s worth taking the time you need to find the right person. This is an important role—essentially a spokesperson for your company—so it’s not the place to cut corners. By going through the process thoughtfully, you’re sure to find a hire who will not only take social off your plate, they’ll scale your channels to new heights.

Have you hired a social media manager before? If so, I’d love to hear your experience with it! Or do you have any questions I didn’t cover here? Reach out anytime on Twitter.
As promised, here’s the full job description we used recently. ⬇️
The Buffer Social Media Manager Job Description
As a Social Media Manager, you will own Buffer’s social media channels. In practice, this means creating written, video, and visual content across social networks, maintaining a content calendar and coordinating across teams to ensure that our social presence reflects what’s happening at Buffer. You will also be a key person in our existing community on social media, helping to make sure it is healthy and thriving and taking it to the next level through active engagement on social media. This is a key role for us as a social media software company as our social profiles are a massive part of our brand and one of the first things that our customers see and get to know us through. You’ll work closely with the rest of the Marketing team to create social media content on a weekly and monthly basis, as well as work closely with our Customer Advocacy team to keep them aware of upcoming planned content. Day-to-day, you’ll work hands-on scheduling posts, following industry trends, gathering insights, plus engaging with our community and customers, building relationships, and surfacing trends from within our community that can impact our overall strategy.
Who You’ll Work With
In this role, you’ll report to the Head of Public Relations. Day-to-day you’ll work closely with other marketing teammates as well as the agencies and freelancers that work with our marketing team. As a member of a marketing organization, you will help shape Buffer’s overall brand through exceptional social media posts and maintaining a strong brand voice and presence across platforms.
Responsibilities

Own creating social media content. Coming up with ideas for ways to promote upcoming content pieces, product launches, and any other announcements ensuring content resonates with the customer and the brand. This includes creating written content, graphics, and videos ranging from several seconds to several minutes.

Own the social media content calendar and planning process. Planning, managing, and coordinating the content calendar, researching upcoming relevant news, events, or holidays. Leading weekly or biweekly social content brainstorming sessions.

Own community management. Responding to and engaging with our community across social media platforms, primarily Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, as well as responding to tickets in Zendesk.

Experiment and use data to inform strategy. Extract insights and learnings from each social channel and from your time engaging with our community, use these insights to inform our social strategy.

Advocate for our community. Within Buffer you are aware of our social media community’s perspective on various things from our product and culture and act as an advocate internally to make sure their perspective is taken into account.

Keep up to date with industry trends. Ensuring to keep on top of changes and new features across platforms and easily share those updates with Buffer’s audience on social media and within the company.

Be a strong Buffer voice: Adopt Buffer’s voice and tone across content work and ensure that anything published on any social channel is a good fit for Buffer’s brand and voice.

Qualifications

Must have prior experience creating social media content for a brand, preferably a software company.
Must have experience creating social media graphics and short-form video content, like Instagram Reels or TikToks.
Must have experience using tools to plan and collaborate on social media posts with several teammates.
Must have prior experience engaging with a community on social media and building relationships online.
Excited and energized at the prospect of spending the day-to-day creating, scheduling, and posting content as well as engaging with our community on social media.
Outstanding written and verbal communication skills: You care about producing content that will resonate with a broad global audience.
Ability to create engaging content and ensure a consistent brand voice.
Strong understanding of important social media metrics and data.
Bias towards action with an ability to have a high output in the form of creating social media posts.

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Win over new customers and your loyal audience with these happy new year email samples and best practices. Read on to make your new year email worth clicking.

Choosing between ConvertKit and Mailchimp? Have a look at our in-depth comparison and pick the best software for your business’ needs.

Enabling web push notifications for your ecommerce website can be an effective marketing strategy that will help you drive more customers and grow your revenue. Continue reading to find out how to get it right!

As a marketer, we’ve been talking about personalization and responsive advertising for some time now. And that trend isn’t going away.
In 2019, 72% of display ads were responsive (more than double what they found just two years previous).

Additionally, the ways people search are changing. Google found that 15% of search queries every day are new searches they’ve never seen before.
That’s why starting June 30, 2022, responsive search ads will be the only search ad type that can be created or edited in Google standard search campaigns. The goal is that this change will help simplify the way you create search ads and make it easier to drive performance.
To prepare for this upcoming change, let’s discuss what responsive search ads are and the best practices for creating them.

The goal is to show a different combination of titles and descriptions for different users depending on their unique queries and search history. Google will alternate between the titles and descriptions, showing 32,760 different versions of the ad. Then, the search engine will find the most effective title and description combination and use it the most often.
Responsive search ads are a simple and strategic way to create an effective PPC marketing strategy. You can boost your engagement and reach more potential customers with the most effective version of your ad.

 
Responsive Search Ads vs. Dynamic Search Ads
While they’re similar, responsive search ads and dynamic search ads are different. Again, responsive search ads are when you create multiple versions of your title and description, and Google will alternate between them.
On the other hand, dynamic search ads are when Google itself issues a headline for an ad — one you didn’t write — depending on the content and search query.
Responsive search ads are great to use for brand awareness and lead generation, while dynamic ads are helpful for content and keyword-based pages.
Now, you might be wondering what the benefits of responsive search ads are — let’s review below.
1. Personalized search ads.
One of the main benefits of responsive search ads is personalization. Since 90% of U.S. consumers find marketing personalization very or somewhat appealing, it’s important to make your ads as personalized as possible.
Responsive search ads are displayed based on a user’s search history, past clicks, device type, and search query (keywords used). Google will use the title and description you wrote that is most relevant. Additionally, responsive search ads can be tailored depending on a user’s current location, regular location, or location of interest.
This means that with responsive search ads, you’ll benefit from a more personalized ad experience.
2. Optimized search ads depending on the device type.
Similar to the point above, when a user is searching on their mobile device versus the computer, the size of the device is different (shocking, I know).
This means they can see less of the title and description of your ad. With responsive search ads, you can allocate smaller-width headlines and descriptions for the mobile experience.
Ultimately this can help you have more room to share your message and will hopefully increase your click-through rate (CTR) on all device types.
3. Simple A/B testing.
As discussed, with responsive search ads, Google will use thousands of variations of your search engine ads. This means that Google will automatically be testing the different versions of your ad, so you don’t have to micro-analyze CTR or impressions anymore.
Interestingly, according to Google, responsive search ads have also resulted in 6% more clicks and 5% higher CTR. This ad type will save you time since Google will do the testing for you, and drive higher results.
4. Compete in more auctions and reach more customers.
With more headlines and descriptions, your ads will compete in more auctions, match more queries, and ultimately reach more customers. Increasing your reach while also increasing your results is one of the main benefits of using responsive search ads.
So, now we know that responsive search ads are here to stay and can help change your PPC strategy. But, how can you write the best responsive search ads to guarantee results? Let’s look at some best practices below to help you get started.

1. Write unique titles and descriptions to create variation.
Since one of the main benefits of responsive search ads is the variation in writing 15 headlines and four descriptions, it’s important to make those titles and descriptions unique.
The goal is to have as much variation as possible. Test different CTAs, call out different features, include different keywords, have different header lengths, etc. Having unique titles and descriptions (instead of very similar ones) will drive higher results as Google can see which ones are more effective.
2. Experiment with different header lengths and types of descriptions.
As we discussed above, it’s important to experiment with different header lengths. You’ll want to include shorter versions of your titles for mobile devices, and longer versions for those on a desktop.
Additionally, you should experiment with different types of descriptions. These can include descriptions that have special offers, discount codes, savings, or product benefits and features.
3. Entice users with different offers in your descriptions.
Using offers and discounts is a great strategy for responsive search ads. You can test which special offers or discounts work the best by using several different ones in your descriptions. Depending on which performs better, Google will begin showing that description more than the other versions.
4. Have concise and straightforward CTAs.
The best responsive search ads have concise and straightforward CTAs. These should be short-form CTAs like “Save Now,” “Get Free Shipping Now,” or “Why Pay Full Price? Save 70% Today!”
Short and concise CTAs tend to perform better on PPC ads in general, so it’s important to continue using those types of CTAs for your responsive search ads.
5. Include keywords, product features, and benefits, where you can.
To drive results with responsive search ads, it’s important to include keywords in your headlines, and add product features or benefits to your descriptions. This will help you match several different queries, increase your reach, and ultimately drive more results from your responsive search ads.
6. Use existing content from high-performing ads.
You’ve most likely already done PPC advertising before this. Look for your high-performing ads, and use some of that existing content in your responsive search ads. This is the best practice for many types of PPC advertising, and it’s no different with responsive search ads.
Responsive search ads are becoming more popular and more important in the world of search engine advertising. Think about how you can implement these ads to drive results and improve your PPC strategy.

Your employees know your business processes well. They understand your brand messaging and vision and feel a general sense of connectedness to your organization.
Given this, many businesses choose to insource and have existing employees undertake new tasks rather than hiring freelancers or other agencies that don’t have an existing connection to your business.
In this post, discover exactly what insourcing is, the benefits it can bring to your business, and examples of scenarios that would cause you to use the strategy.

Insourcing brings a variety of benefits to companies, like:

Having more control over the decisions that go into tasks and projects because everything is kept in-house.
Existing employees are experienced with brand messaging and the brand experience, so you don’t have to spend extra resources getting others up to speed.
Communication isn’t tricky as you don’t need to reach out to third parties.
You don’t need to share critical business information with external sources.

However, insourcing can also become costly if it requires hiring new talent or creating new departments to be responsible for specific tasks and projects. Employees can also become burnt out if they are assigned a heavier workload to accomplish projects, so some businesses elect to use outsourcing.
Insourcing vs. Outsourcing
Insourcing and outsourcing are opposites.
With outsourcing, a company hires an external third party, like a public relations firm, to complete a task, project, or take over a continuous function for the company. With insourcing, all tasks, projects, or continuous processes are done by internal employees, even if it means hiring new talent or creating new departments.

A common use case for outsourcing is payroll needs. For example, if a business is smaller and doesn’t have the resources to create a payroll department, or nobody on staff is trained in payroll needs, they may outsource the task to an experienced payroll firm.
Businesses may choose to use outsourcing over insourcing for a variety of reasons, like:

Eliminating the costs associated with hiring new employees,
Reducing workload for internal teams to avoid burnout,
Allowing employees to focus on core business functions while external parties cover less critical operations,
New needs that arise due to scaling.

A business may choose to use insourcing over outsourcing as the ladder often requires handing over internal systems and processes to a third party, which can pose a significant risk when dealing with sensitive information, and communication can sometimes be challenging to navigate.
Insourcing Examples
Let’s go over some examples of insourcing that may provide additional insight into the practice.

A business is scaling to different territories, but its current marketing teams aren’t familiar with the language in the new area. So, it hires a new team in the territory that is familiar with the language and will be responsible for creating marketing strategies that speak to the needs of the new audience.
An organization wants to expand its line of products, so it works with internal product teams to brainstorm new ideas and bring them to fruition instead of outsourcing the work to an external unit. This ensures that teams working on new products have expertise on current business practices, and confidential systems don’t need to be shared with outside sources.
After scaling, a business CEO can no longer be responsible for payroll as it is a more significant task than before. So, instead of hiring an external payroll firm, the business hires new talent experienced in payroll duties and creates an in-house payroll department.

Over To You
If you want your business to undertake new projects or scaling has required you to need new processes, consider using insourcing if your overall goal is to have everything done in-house.
Your internal teams, or newly hired talent, will take ownership of new tasks, bring them to fruition, and contribute to your business success.

Email marketing can be your best friend when it comes to promoting your eCommerce business. But to make it happen, you need to make sure you’re doing it right — and that you’re taking advantage of all the various email opportunities available to you. There are four billion email users around the globe, and that…
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