Whether you’re a small business owner or internal marketing manager, consistency is key in communicating your brand’s unique message. Unifying your digital marketing platforms – your branding, website and social media presence – will strengthen your identity and help you deliver your message to audiences with clarity.
During webinar with the HdK team, you will learn:
- Why consistency is so important
- Steps you can take to ensure your branding and website are as strong as possible
- How to roll this out across social media, including tips on creating polished content, a social media strategy and scheduling content in advance.
Watch the full webinar here.
To download the presentation, please fill out the form below.
Q&A Session:
- Would you recommend having a different ‘role’ for each platform or to post the same content across all three?
Each social media platform serves a different role and often a different audience demographic.
Even those that use multiple platforms go to them for different reasons:
* Facebook – for information and updates
* Twitter – to connect and discuss
* Instagram – to be inspired
Therefore, think about each of the platforms as offering a unique experience to different audiences. Keep this in mind when you are posting content and make sure that you are utilising each platform to its best capacity.
- How often should you update your strategy?
If you’re creating a strategy for a brand – rather than a specific campaign – we would suggest doing a new strategy once per year. At intervals during this period, you can review your progress and make any necessary tweaks.
If you’re working on a campaign by campaign basis, we would suggest having an overall strategy document that you can use for 3-5 years based on your brand’s long-term goals, but creating small campaign plans within this to ensure you approach each one with a fresh perspective – while still adhering to key brand priorities such as voice, colours, hashtags, etc.
- How long should a strategy be?
This is really dependent on the time and resources you have available. The analysis section is what can end up being a really meaty section and sometimes this can really pay off. However, remember that you want this to be a working document you can refer back to if you need to, so aim for anywhere between 10 and 30 pages. It’s quality over quantity – the strategy needs to serve you.
- Social media can be hugely time-consuming, do you have any tips on how to do it well without it being a full-time job?
Make sure that you plan your content in advance and develop a social media schedule. In addition, there are tools like Hootsuite and Sprout Social where you can schedule posts in advance. This saves time day-to-day.
- How to create a unified voice when your projects vary significantly in tone?
Ensure that your overall brand personality or tone is reflected in your social media captions. You could also overlay your logo on images and use brand hashtags alongside campaign hashtags and key messages, so that your overall brand is still present in the content.
- How often should you post on your social platforms about one particular topic or area? For example, reminding people about an event or performance.
Variety is key in social media – if you post too much on one thing, especially selling something, people will start to switch off from it. However, if you know you need to do heavy promotion, think about a variety of ways in which you can do this. For example, if you have a dance event with a company from Texas with a notable female Artistic Director from a particular community (this is a fictional example), there’s a huge amount of genuinely interesting content you can pull from this that isn’t just pushing ticket sales or sharing event reminders – talk about the dance pieces, the influences in the dance, the choreography process, the music, the set design, the artistic director’s background, the importance of representation for that particular community, who the dancers are, etc. Get creative to keep your audiences engaged.
- What’s your opinion on sharing the same content on all channels occasionally? I know you need to optimise to specific platforms and audiences but sometimes if we spend ages editing a video etc. We want to post it on all platforms. Is it better to do this on the same day or across different days?
It is sometimes appropriate to post the same content across social media platforms – for instance, if you have some hero content you’ve put a lot of time and resources into, that you want to ensure gets the reach and engagement it deserves. When this is the case we would recommend posting the content on the same day, but be aware of timings that work best on each platform. We would also suggest using your captions to help tailor the content to social media channels. In the rest of your content, it’s really best to vary it as much as you can.
- Am I right in thinking that you can’t schedule an Instagram post and that you can’t tag someone in a scheduled post on Twitter?
You can schedule Instagram posts using Hootsuite and similar platforms. In order for it to be posted automatically, your profile needs to be set up as a Business profile, which is very quick and easy to do (you can find lots of basic guides online – it takes under 5 minutes). You can also tag people on Twitter when scheduling on such platforms.
- Do you think it’s imperative to have a blog embedded in your website or as a separate WordPressy effort, with a link from your website. I’m with SiteBuilder and it is technically restrictive at times!
We appreciate how tricky SiteBuilder may be but we highly recommend keeping the blog on your website instead of using a separate domain. This will help your improve search engine ranking, as it will show search engines that you are a source of growing, valuable content. It will also keep your search traffic up by keeping people on your website for longer.
If you feel that SiteBuilder isn’t helping, it can be quite straightforward to change platforms. First, you would need to export your SiteBuilder data, normally as a spreadsheet or .csv. You can then import this data into another content management system, such as WordPress or Squarespace. WordPress is the best platform for blogging and can be quite cheap. Squarespace is great if you have a higher budget and want to use smart templates. Both of these content management systems have import facilities, allowing you to import data from SiteBuilder. Depending on your plan with SiteBuilder, you should be able to ask for support in this matter.
Alternatively, feel free to reach out to us. We migrate websites all the time.