In the Loupe
In the Loupe
Crafting a Marketing Symphony: Social Media Strategies for Every Platform
Unlock the secrets to creating a harmonious marketing strategy with our latest episode, "Marketing Symphony." Each channel has it's own unique language and requires a slightly different approach. Discover how to tailor video content to suit the unique quirks of platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn!
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Welcome back everybody to In the Loop. I'm calling the symphony. I'm going to be talking about all of the different channels that you can promote through and some of the benefits of them, and I'm also going to be drawing comparisons to a few of Punchmark's recent campaigns that have hit every single channel, because recently we kind of did a exercise where we tried to hit every single one with one campaign. I'm also going to explain how you can set up your accounts on each of them and maybe some of the benefits for each. Without further ado, let's just jump into it and learn about the Marketing Symphony.
Speaker 2:This episode is brought to you by Punchmark, the jewelry industry's favorite website platform and digital growth agency. Our mission reaches way beyond technology. With decades of experience and long-lasting industry relationships, punchmark enables jewelry businesses to flourish in any marketplace. We consider our clients our friends, as many of them have been friends way before becoming clients. Punchmark's own success comes from the fact that we have a much deeper need and obligation to help our friends succeed. Whether you're looking for better e-commerce performance, business growth or campaigns that drive traffic and sales, punchmark's website and marketing services were made just for you. It's never too late to transform your business and stitch together your digital and physical worlds in a way that achieves tremendous growth and results. Schedule a guided demo today at punchmarkcom. Slash go.
Speaker 1:And now back to the show Okay, everybody. So the reason why I'm referring to it as a symphony is because it's not just one leading player. I think it is a concoction or this chemistry and synergistic effect that happens when you're marketing a message through a lot of different channels, and one of the things that I've learned is that every channel has a different kind of vibe or a different sort of dress code, you might even say, when it comes to what actually plays. Well, when I'm referring to different channels, one of the ways is these ones in particular Facebook ads, instagram, real and boosting them, tiktok, and you can boost those as well YouTube videos, youtube campaign ads, which is linked, linkedin, and then different Facebook postings through pages in particular. So those are kind of the different aspects of the symphony. So those are kind of the different aspects of the symphony. And you'll notice that I didn't really talk specifically about Instagram posts, because you should be doing that, but Instagram reels are going to replace that. They are sort of like posts, but since they're video content, they do actually perform quite a bit better, especially with the current Instagram algorithm. And the reason why I wanted to do an episode about this is because recently, punchmark did a little campaign in the quieter season and this was, I believe, from end of September or, I guess, very beginning of October, for the entire month of October and even the first, it was just about the first week of November.
Speaker 1:And we strategized this whole thing. We created a Google Sheet. We had a couple different members, we had Hope involved, we had Ross involved, savannah, our designer, and it was a real all-team effort and we were using these assets that we created at the client workshop back in, I believe in April. And there were these video assets that we had had and I kind of wanted to use them right away. They were testimonial videos that we recorded one-on-one during some of the downtime for the client workshop. And we had a few of our clients four with Cole and Caleb, alex and Lee and if you haven't seen these videos, you can actually check them all out on punchmarkcom slash why punchmark? And it's a really cool set of videos. I'm so proud of how they turned out.
Speaker 1:Ross did actually a lot of the editing, I did the interviewing, hope came up with the marketing strategy and Savannah created a lot of the editing. I did the interviewing, hope came up with the marketing strategy and Savannah created a lot of the assets and the way that we strategize this is first we identified how much content we had and we looked at it and we decided we had just about four good videos and then a fifth one if we really wanted to squeeze it. And we talked with Hope and one of the things she had mentioned is that there is a diminishing effect when you market over and over into the same channel. If you were to run a campaign, for example, for six months, it's fair to say that you've probably squeezed the lemon as much as possible after one month and then maybe you're just kind of wasting money, maybe you're going to reach a fair number more over that time, but the costs and results are going to be diminishing results over time. So Hope was like you know what? Let's do four weeks, or four posts over the course of four weeks, and then we'll have this fifth one ready to go, and we actually just posted it a little bit later. So we took about a month off and then we posted it and I can explain a little bit more about that.
Speaker 1:So to talk about each one just a little bit more, one of the places we marketed on was with Facebook ads and these we wanted to make sure that we did. And what's fascinating is I had never used Facebook ads in this way before, with video assets, and what was interesting is we had Ross create these videos. And a lot of the times when you edit things on a laptop, you are naturally editing in a landscape mode. So this landscape creates a, you know, a horizontal video, you might say. And those horizontal videos do much better on desktop, of course, but some of these social medias are starting to lean into vertical video, which I've done an entire video about that last year, and also with Facebook, they actually want a lot of times square crop, which is so crazy to me. I think that square crop videos are not it. I think that they. I'd much rather it either be vertical and take up my entire screen, or be horizontal and let me turn my phone sideways. Vertical and take up my entire screen, or be horizontal and let me turn my phone sideways. I just hate square crop, but that's a side tangent.
Speaker 1:So when we posted to Facebook, one of the things that we did is we also put a little bit of money behind it. I can't quite remember exactly what the budget is, but it was like. You know, I think we did $100 a week for each of these ads just to boost the audience and get preferential treatment from Facebook, and that it would push it. And what's also really interesting is it kind of combos pretty well with Instagram. So Facebook is where a lot of the times, our clients are. It's, you know, it's where we convey most of our information through the Facebook Punchmark community. It's this closed group that we have all of our Punchmark clients on. I post in there, you know, pretty much every day. And also it's where we have the most consolidated jeweler audience, and what you can do with that is when you create a really strong jeweler, you know, I guess, audience that's centered around a specific thing, such as retail jewelry. You can also create lookalike audiences from there. So basically, you know, we have this audience of 400 people that are on this group. Can you expand this and extrapolate it to be a thousand people or 2000 people, based on these similarities, and it's actually pretty effective.
Speaker 1:You do lose occasionally some money because your ad will be displayed to, like, you know, some random person and then that always sucks, but I think that that's just what you have to get used to at some point. But then we also used Instagram Reels and Savannah has been doing a really great job. She has been posting on our Instagram, you know, weekly, if not more all year, and Savannah, you know, took it by the reins. And when you don't have any momentum, it can be a little daunting because you don't, sometimes you're losing followers for a little bit, but I think the important thing is just remembering that follower count a lot of times is a vanity metric. It just makes you feel good about yourself and what's actually important is getting your message in front of eyeballs.
Speaker 1:And I wanted to run this campaign in October and a little bit of November or late September and October, specifically because it was a dead period and no one else is making any noise and also, with these next gen advertisements, we also weren't selling anything in particular. This was purely just an awareness campaign, and I wanted to run this mainly because normally when we sell things, when we run campaigns, it's all about discounts, and I was like you know what, why don't we sell or push this campaign that talks about our value propositions and also shows people enjoying our product? And I thought that it was a really, you know, nice change of pace for us to be able to promote why we're great and, you know, have people talk nice about us instead of just oh, you can save some money if you get with us now instead of later. So the Instagram reels. One thing that we did ahead of time is we wrote all of our copy way ahead of time, and this was a lot of work. This was my responsibility is I wrote copy for every single post. So the posts are different depending on which channel. So, for example, facebook ads here's one of them, and this is the same post. The title for our Facebook ads was build your jewelry empire online with a sparkly emoji and then underneath it, the description says your jewelry deserves to be showcased on a platform as luxurious as your creations.
Speaker 1:We design and develop easily managed custom websites that not only dazzle but convert. Boost your sales and brand presence with a site that sparkles. And then we put a sparkle Okay, so that's like very casual. We are assuming you don't know anything about us. We also don't put the word punchmark in there. We are emphasizing the punchmark branding in the video, but not in the messaging. We also included a click-through that went back to punchmarkcom slash whypunchmark? And that was one version.
Speaker 1:But then on our Instagram reel, the same post, which is it was vertical crop instead of square crop, but that doesn't really matter is this is the exact same thing, but we wrote something different here what a few of our clients have to say about choosing Punchmark as their jewelry website platform for their retail jewelry store. And then we include a really nice quote from Cole Rowland. He's been on the podcast before and we attribute it to him. And then we have the call to action Learn how to improve your digital presence with a guided demo from a Punchmark representative and drive new traffic today. Visit the link in our bio for more. So you'll notice that the call to action CTA is different based on the platform because of the way that people interact with those platforms. So, for example, in Facebook ads, you click through a button that appears there, and on Instagram Reels, they need to navigate to our profile and then to a link in bio and then to the link. So there's more steps, and how you encourage people to you know, take action on them should be reflective. If you say link in bio and you're on Facebook, that's a clear red flag and shows that you did something different. But Instagram Reel and TikTok are very similar. I think that the copy is, yeah, identical. It is, and that's because TikTok and Instagram Reels are pretty much identical.
Speaker 1:If we're being honest, we also did a YouTube video post and that is with the landscape crop, and the reason why we did that is because it's more evergreen. The videos are on our you know, on our YouTube page and we hope that they'll slowly build up views and even if they don't, we have an evergreen write-up. It doesn't refer to our campaigns, so it's nothing about like until this date. It's only talking about how beneficial we are. And the other one that we did is then we boosted them and we ran it as pre-rolls. So a lot of the times our videos were pretty short. I think that they were all below 30 seconds and a lot of them were below 20 seconds, and this was strategic. We wanted to make sure that people they could run as pre-roll ads for YouTube and also appear more places and improve listenership or, I guess, watch through or retention. So that's important.
Speaker 1:And the final one I wanted to also talk about is we did LinkedIn. We're B2B, so this might not be applicable to you if you're a retail jeweler. B2b, meaning we are marketing to other businesses and the way that you do that is, I guess, unfortunately, on LinkedIn. I'm a little bit of a naysayer when it comes to LinkedIn. I think I got pretty burnt out on it in college because we're encouraged all the time to be super involved on LinkedIn and now in the B2B world, I just think it's a little cringe a lot of the times, but maybe that's just me. So those are the main ones I want to talk about, and what we did is we created a spreadsheet with all of the channels predetermined and then we had columns for each of the videos and each video was different. So we pumped out kind of a lot of assets. So maybe you're going to be doing something like this, but what I really want to encourage people to do is pay attention to how you're marketing on the different channels.
Speaker 1:So, for example, facebook. The audience on Facebook ads is going to be much older. The people who typically are using Facebook are trending to be older. Honestly, it's one of the few social media platforms that actually does have a pretty good adoption rate for people over 35, for example. But the way that you talk about stuff needs to be reflective. For example, on TikTok, the average age for TikTok is much lower.
Speaker 1:The other thing about TikTok is that a lot of times you're not reaching anywhere and we don't. We created a TikTok account specifically for this. Go, give us a follow on TikTok, that'd be hilarious. We don't know if we're going to keep using it, but I think it's good that we created it and we might throw videos on there very occasionally when we have them. But we figured, you know, we encourage you guys to make TikToks and have one, and you know what? Who are we to not do the exact same thing? And I think it's really important to just also identify the lifespan of these things. Facebook ads are going to stop showing the second you turn off the ads. Instagram Reels will live in your feed for longer and, honestly, people go to our profile quite often and they'll go back and find these quality videos. Tiktok. No one really goes to our profile and those things aren't getting even recommended very often, unless it's to another jewelry store account, which is not very common.
Speaker 1:But YouTube videos those are the evergreen ones and I think that, out of everything that we did, putting our video on YouTube is probably the most beneficial thing that we've done. I'm just going to quickly look. But looking at our video that we embedded we used an embed for our video and on our landing page and, looking right now, it's already got 5.7 thousand views and you know it's been up for two months at this point. But that's a lot better than we normally do and I think that it's also important to think about what is the general thrust of your campaign. So are you running a campaign for a specific date? You know a sale or something like that?
Speaker 1:Then some of these are not going to be as attractive to you. For example, if you're having like one of those hyper sales 60% off the store for six hours or whatever then YouTube might not be as beneficial to be promoting on, because YouTube is more evergreen and people might find those videos longer because of the algorithm. But you know, instagram Reels might be good. You can pump those bad boys out and get on there. Or Facebook ads you can put a lot of money into Facebook ads and have it show a lot more often.
Speaker 1:And if you're doing something, that's more brand awareness for your store. For example, maybe you are involved in a charity or you donate or you do a feel good event, like David Douglas's Dazzling Diamonds for Mom. If you are involved in any of those, then, honestly, a YouTube video would be so good because you'd be able to point back to it for every year. Maybe you shoot a video for one of those in-store events and you'd be able to capture that, do a little bit of editing, put it up on your YouTube and then when you come around to promoting the same event next year if you have a marketing calendar that repeats, then suddenly you have some of your asset work done for you already, and I think that one of the things that I would encourage you to not focus on as much is what everybody used to be focused on is hashtags.
Speaker 1:They're not as strong anymore. One of the things in particular that shows that they're not as strong is on Instagram, you can't even follow hashtags anymore. You used to be able to follow hashtags and they would show up on your feed, and now you can't, so the power of them and showing them to other people is not as prevalent, though a lot of times, people used to anguish over oh, which hashtag should I be using and how do I do the best hashtags? Honestly, I think it's about having good material that is watchable, which, that was our main goal is we wanted to really create something that we were proud of and also we kind of saw it as like the the, the opportunity to really like blow the dust off of every uh you know pot and pan in the kitchen, um for one big uh bake sale, just to know where everything is. And that's what I kind of feel like every jewelry store should try out next year is identify one event or one you know feel good moment and go and hit every single one of them. Put a Facebook ad up and learn how to do it. Put an Instagram reel up, or two or three. Make a TikTok and post one video. Make a YouTube video and then try to run it as a campaign, which I got, to be honest, that is the most advanced part of it. The YouTube campaign ads was definitely blew my mind a little bit. And then, well, I don't know if LinkedIn is going to be great for you, but I would recommend you try it out. I feel like retail jewelers not as common on LinkedIn, but who knows? That is probably what I would say for the first part of this video.
Speaker 1:I think that we recently learned so much about it and I think that the real value from this was what we learned along the way, and we had a what we call a post-mortem meeting where we, after the campaign ended, we had a meeting about a week or two later after the whole thing had wrapped up, and we had everybody bring statistics about what had happened and we brought what went well and what didn't go well and we took a whole bunch of notes and we sort of had a moment where we were just like you know what? That went well, nice job, high fives, we got this many views, but did we get any sales off of it? No, that was not. The real point was not the sales, it was to have everybody kind of stretch and try all the different channels and do their job all together and then, who knows, maybe we run this exact same thing better. But for something else.
Speaker 1:I think that next year, when we have the client workshop, we're definitely going to film more content, more spots, and what we learned is that, for example, we didn't have our B-roll and our conversation didn't super match, because a lot of the B-roll was of people who weren't in the one-on-one interviews.
Speaker 1:They were just of the crowd, and what we should have done is focused the B-roll of, like us at. We always go for cocktail hour afterwards on this rooftop bar. It's really beautiful. We should have shot more B-roll of the people we interviewed and really had a variety of choices, but instead we had a lot of B-roll of, like, all the other people that attended, which is not a problem, but we noticed that being, you know, kind of limiting as we were making the videos, so I always talk too fast. That was a good start. I'm going to take a quick break and then we're going to do a little instructional, a quick tip demo on how you should be creating your account, and when we come back we will kind of go through those things. So stay with us everybody.
Speaker 1:Punchmarket is so excited to announce the launch of our email marketing campaigns crafted specifically for jewelers. Take your jewelry store's marketing to the next level with Punchmark's email marketing service. We created tailored data-driven campaigns that will not only engage your customers but also boost your sales. Whether you want to be hands-on or prefer a fully managed service, we deliver everything you need to stay connected to your audience and increase your sales. Whether you want to be hands-on or prefer a fully managed service, we deliver everything you need to stay connected to your audience and increase your ROI. Let's grow your business through the power of strategic email marketing. Learn more at punchmarkcom slash email dash marketing. Again, that's punchmarkcom slash email dash marketing. And now back to the show. Okay, everybody, we're back.
Speaker 1:So I wanted to run through creating a couple of these accounts, and I think everybody knows how to create some of them. You might even already have an account for your store already, but I do want to kind of go through them really quickly and I would highly recommend, highly, highly, highly I can't stress this enough make your accounts with a centralized email address, that is not one person's email address. There you go. That is the number one tip. I probably should have put that at the front. The reason why? So we have everything attached to our generic email. So, man, I don't know if this is doxing us, but you know what? I don't think anyone listening will dox us, but we have everything tied to info at Punchmark. That's our generic email, that one goes to our main Punchmark, that's our generic email. That one goes to our main inbox that we can handle for ticketing. And the reason why we do that is because we wouldn't want to make our TikTok under like Michael at Punchmarkcom, because suddenly it's tied to an employee.
Speaker 1:And let me tell you it's not as easy as you expect to run that back. I one time was attached as the admin for a jewelry store for their Facebook group back when we used to do social marketing for jewelers, and their store didn't have any other admins. And I still cannot leave that Facebook group because there are no other admins for that Facebook group. It literally will not let me leave. It is a real pain in the neck, to say the least. So that's the number one thing I'd say.
Speaker 1:But to set up an account for YouTube, it takes two seconds. You're going to use a Gmail account or a Google account and you're going to go through going to youtubecom in the top right. You're going to sign in and create a channel and then choose a name for your store. I highly recommend that you use your channel name or your store name and you try to use that in as many places as possible. And if you can stick the word jewelry in there, or jewelers, it might help a little bit more. Ours is just punchmark. And then finally I think this is where the real devil is is I would love for you to customize your channel, so add some channel details. It just takes two seconds.
Speaker 1:In the beginning part of this this I used to charge for branding when I freelanced and I used to charge so much money for this part because no one wanted to do it, but it really made the site or the channel set up. Sing Write a little about us section and honestly, I would write it different. I would just write it from scratch or have ChatGPD help you and make a nice compelling description. And then I highly recommend you link your other social media platforms and you create this little network in more like a kind of like a web and add a banner and a logo. And the biggest thing about your logo is. It's going to appear round a lot of the times. Do not put any words in your logo, in your social media logo. Use just your mark. If you have a mark, if you don't have a mark set up, if you don't have one, that's simplified reach out to Punchmark and have us set you up one.
Speaker 1:We'll do one special and then I recommend you publish your first video. A good version of this could be just a very simple, you know, gem light box video shot on your phone, whether that's horizontal or vertical, created as a reel super easy. There's a million ideas out there. Honestly, I would just look at another jewelry store and get a couple of ideas from them and then put your own spin on it. Make your own version. Maybe you do you get on a trending type of video. For example, you find TikTok or YouTube trends and you're like, do you use a trending sound? And then you make a couple of you know, quick cut videos. It's not as hard as you expect and I think that one of your employees will love to do this. It doesn't have to be you. If you run the store, it can be an employee and then I recommend you're not done there yet.
Speaker 1:Is. You need to put a thumbnail on your video, and I think that's where the devil is, in the details. This can be a little hard if you don't have a designer on staff. Punchbob can help, but we charge for this service. I would recommend you just get a great photo and you put it on top, but that one might require a little bit more work. Okay, that was YouTube. Let's do TikTok, and I promise we'll wrap this thing up relatively quick.
Speaker 1:So with TikTok, you're going to need to download the app. That's the hard part is pretty much everything runs off the app. It also limits a lot of what you can view when you don't have the app. If you've ever tried opening up a TikTok that your friend sends you, it hates it when you don't have the app. I deleted the app off my phone because I realized it was very distracting. So you know, open Pandora's box, if you will. So download this onto your phone or onto whoever is going to be managing it. The phone Sign up.
Speaker 1:I recommend using the same email address that you had used before and then switch to a business account. I would recommend that will allow you to run ads. I think you can run ads normally, but they operate slightly differently than when you're a business account and it'll also treat you slightly differently. So I would choose either retail or jewelry as your business account kind of verticals or categories that they let you choose. I'd probably choose jewelry. I think it's a little bit more of like a niche market. Retail can have you in there with, like, t-shirt people and clothing people, so don't do that. And then I want you to optimize the profile. This is similar to the YouTube one, and once you create a good square crop of your logo, just use it everywhere. So make sure you put that in your profile picture and then put a little bio in there.
Speaker 1:It's super important that you add your website link or a link tree. Link trees are super easy to set up. I use one on my Instagram. You can put links to all your social media and then only provide one link which is what they allow you to do to all your social media and then only provide one link, which is what they allow you to do. So I'd probably recommend a link tree, but I'll link back to your website. I'll give you that as points as well and then publish that first video.
Speaker 1:Nothing worse than going to a business that you love their social media account. You find it or they comment on something for you and you go over and they got no videos posted. I feel like it's such a tease. Go in there again. It can be a little silly or it can be really cheap. I recommend just go in, make a 10 or 20 or 30 second video vertical and see where it takes you. Maybe you get 10 videos or maybe you get 10 views, maybe you get 400, who knows? But we learned a lot from it. We had a lot of fun with the TikTok. I'd recommend it as well for you.
Speaker 1:I'm not really going to go over the Instagram one and Facebook, because the odds are really good that you have one and you need to have a Facebook account in order to set up your business account. So odds are very strong. Unless you've been living under a rock, you already have a Facebook account or had one, or someone on your staff does. So I think that's where we'll stop. But we went over YouTube, tiktok and Instagram Reels or YouTube and TikTok, and I would highly recommend that you go ahead and bring this into the start of next year.
Speaker 1:You make those two video platform accounts and just sit on them, have the name at least, and take the domain. And then, who knows, maybe you set your goals small and you try to post one every month. If you can do that, I think that that is guaranteed to drive more awareness. I would highly recommend it. It can only take so long and once you do them, you get way better at them. I try my best to post one video every two weeks on my Instagram for my watercolor business and it's pretty manageable, but I've also curled it back a couple of times in how often I post if I'm getting busy. Set something manageable for your business and then go ahead and figure out how to adapt.
Speaker 1:If you want to do more and grow Again, I just encourage you not to only look at your followers or your subscriber count. You not to only look at your followers or your subscriber count. It's just a surefire way to go a little crazy. I recommend that you focus on views and reach and also engaging with the right people. If someone comments on your stuff, you need to comment back. That is the most easiest way to encourage engagement. Make sure you stay on top of that and just give it to someone on your team Next year in January, have those two accounts be created and assign it to one of your staff members.
Speaker 1:That'd be a great way. Okay, that is, I think, enough. That's about the symphony. All these different channels can work together and really boost your online presence. I think that the best way or the best result is brand awareness, but it can also drive some sales, and those sales are going to happen usually from your website, and that's why having your website link be easily findable through a link tree is so important, because you don't want them guessing. So just do those best practices and hopefully you can learn from our recent why Punchmark? Campaign.
Speaker 1:Go check it out. It's punchmarkcom slash. Why dash punchmark. We're really proud of it and I hope you have an awesome holiday season. I'll talk to you all next week. Cheers Bye, All right, everybody. That's the end of the show. Thanks so much for listening. This episode was brought to you by Punchmark and produced and hosted by me, michael Burpo. This episode was edited by Paul Suarez with music by Ross Cockrum. Don't forget to rate the podcast on Spotify and Apple Podcasts and leave us feedback on punchmarkcom slash loop. That's L-O-U-P-E. Thanks. I'll be back next week, tuesday, with another episode. Cheers Bye, thank you.
