Communicating your business on social media (part one)
Hello and welcome to the first Prognessa Academy training where we will talk about social media, social networks, and how these platforms can be interesting and beneficial for your business. We’re going to talk about what all can be done within social media so that it can be useful to you, so that you can present your products, what you do, and of course, so that social media can add value, help you build your customer base, attract new customers, and increase sales.
My name is Daniel Csúr and I have worked and worked in some twelve countries, from England to Kazakhstan, Denmark and Tanzania, where I have done various things. I studied in Oxford, where I did marketing, human resources, business, business stuff, and so on. Then I moved to Copenhagen Business School, where we did finance and marketing, and then finally I worked in Kazakhstan, where I also did similar things.
Then I did research for the UN, and then I decided to come back to Slovakia, where we launched Prognessa, a digital marketing agency. During my spare time, I founded and co-founded some four non-profits working on media, leadership education, regional development and various other interesting things.
I am also a co-founder of the startup center Kruháč in Rimavská Sobota, where we tried to bring together young entrepreneurs and help them to get their business off the ground. At the moment, I’m fully dedicated to Prognesse. We are a digital marketing agency and there are about 10-12 of us. We help regional businesses move forward, and we do some development projects as part of the concept. So that’s in a nutshell about me.
As for Prognessy itself, we help smaller companies grow in the online world. That’s very important because there are a lot of agencies that focus on mega-sized companies, mega-sized corporations. But we decided that even regional companies that have let’s say 5 to 100 employees, who can’t pay the big agencies, so they need marketing, they need to be visible, but a lot of times they don’t know how to start. We provide promotion for these companies on Instagram, Facebook and Google, and in this way we help them to move forward and grow in the online world. To build a customer base and create platforms so that they can be useful and add value to them.
At the same time, we are building websites and trying to make sure that companies are visible in this respect as well. We make promo videos that showcase what those companies do. We also launched a programme some time ago to help sole traders and entrepreneurs, where we took three companies and three sole traders under our wing and helped them not to close their businesses in these difficult times, but on the contrary, to be able to develop, to get back on their feet and to be able to start working again.
We also have Prognessa Academy, which is actually a digital marketing academy, where we try to help companies start building those digital channels, those directional boards, and teach them to be able to have maybe that basic overview of different digital marketing topics. Well today we’re going to talk about social media itself.
Let’s look first at the history of social networking. They started to develop not too many years ago, when there were a couple of different platforms that came into existence at that time. The first globally successful platform that grew to some level was My Space. Many of you have heard of it, many of you haven’t. It was the precursor to the things that Facebook is doing today. It was just as successful in many countries, but of course, like in 2007 when Facebook was founded and started to be popular, My Space started to gradually fade from the market until it disappeared completely. The platform still works, but it’s not as successful or popular anymore.
The first mass, large, and powerful social network that is still functioning today and is stable is Facebook. Subsequently, Instagram was founded, which tended to target visually appealing content and young people. Gradually, it is becoming popular and starting to have a larger number of users, but it is still not that popular in Slovakia.
As far as social networks in Slovakia are concerned, the first one was Pokec, founded by Azet. It was the first social network in Slovakia, which was created before Facebook. It was even quite successful in Slovakia, but as Facebook gradually started to acquire our market, Pokec was marginalised in a very strong way, and Facebook became the market leader.
As social media gradually started to emerge and people spent more time on it, it started to become a very interesting space for companies to be visible there and for the products and services they provide and create to be interesting to potential customers. It’s from that perspective that social media has become a space where companies are talking about what they’re doing, looking for customers, and where they’re trying to fight for customer attention.
People today spend a large part of their leisure and working time on social networks. That is why, where people spend some time, that is also where they make various decisions. They decide what to buy or what to do. This is what companies have started to use in a big way. In Slovakia, it was used first by big companies, then by small ones, and now even ultra-small companies are thinking about how to target their customers using social media.
The most widespread social networks
There are three social networks in Slovakia that are active in their own way. The first one is Facebook. It has some 2.6 billion people worldwide. It is the most widespread social network in Slovakia. It is the strongest and most stable, and from the experience that we have with social networks, it can have the best yield in terms of bringing in new customers.
In Slovakia, there is YouTube, which has some 2.5 million users. It cannot be said that it is a social network, but a space where they share various videos. It is also an interesting topic as well as a space. As for TikTok, it is a fast growing platform. It doesn’t have that much traction in Slovakia, but it’s gradually becoming popular, especially among young people.
Then there’s Instagram, which already has about a million users in Slovakia. Instagram is growing fast and is starting to be powerful and interesting. In terms of market share, Facebook is getting stronger. Next we have Messenger, which is Facebook’s chat platform. It is also interesting and big enough to target ads there.
Now, we’re going to talk primarily about Facebook, Instagram, and the things that are associated with them, because when you’re starting digital marketing at your company, I think Facebook and Instagram should be the first two channels that you’re going to populate and where you’re going to post content.
What can be gained by advertising on social media?
You can increase your brand awareness. Every brand wants to be in people’s awareness. You have a brand that you produce and you want them to know about you because when people know about you, they are more likely to buy something from you.
This means that when you go into a shop and you have two products in front of you, one you know, the other you don’t. Which one do you choose? The one you don’t know, or the one you saw in an advertisement? You are very likely to buy the latter.
The second thing you can get is sharing your brand message with your target audience, what you do, why you as a company came into existence, why you have the products that you have. It’s important for you to be able to move as a company, and it’s important to tell people about that.
The third thing is building loyalty between the brand and customers. That people know about you is great, but you need to move gradually towards loyalty. That means that when a person comes into a store or an eshop somewhere, that they don’t just buy an item from you once, but that they’re able to buy it on a regular basis, and become a loyal customer for your brand. This is important because a customer who buys from you regularly is the best one. Retaining a customer is cheaper for you than building a new customer base.
Another thing is to increase brand credibility. The more well-known a brand is, the more credible it is. But there are also a lot of brands that are quite well-known, but maybe not so trustworthy. What you need is for customers to trust your brand and quality. That way customers are closer to buying something from you. You are able to gain sympathy from the customer.
You can direct people to sell your products, services and tickets. That means using your Facebook as one big digital highway that an awful lot of people go to, and you need to route your services on that digital highway. That’s like you’re driving on the highway between Bratislava and Zvolen, and you’ve got a sign saying that the gas station is on the left. This means that on the digital highway you need to direct people to your products and services. If they don’t know about you, they can’t buy anything. You can direct them to come to the website and be able to buy something from you.
Let’s take a look at what can be shown through social media advertising. We tell those customers what we do and how we do it. For example, when we were doing a shoot, we took a picture of us doing the shoot and we said we’re doing a campaign to help entrepreneurs, we’re dedicated to that campaign, we’re trying to help the entrepreneurs that we’re going to pull up to some level, and we’re going to show people that through digital marketing you can climb out of the bad times, and you can move forward that way.
Then we bought some equipment that we use for production, to show our customers and partners that we have some new things. That’s how we communicate in some way. What should that communication be for your brand?
Let’s look now at very specific examples, and what are those things that you should use when you’re communicating on social media towards your customers. The first thing that is very important is creativity. This means that you need to look at things differently than your competitors are looking at it in order to be memorable with your customers, and a lot of times less is more. Don’t try to put everything into one Facebook post. Why? Because you have to realize the fact that if you write a long text unnecessarily, the customer is unlikely to read it. That customer sees the first few words on the graphic you put out. He reads maybe the first words in your copy. Don’t try to push a lot in there. Rather, make it so that you communicate with them on a regular basis.
The second thing, which is about creativity, is wordplay. It is about the way you compose words, the way you create slogans, which are very important. Those are the things that get ingrained in your head. For example, “If you love it there’s nothing to solve” – Kofola. Do you have a phrase that you can attach to a particular brand.
The other thing is that you can communicate the same content in different ways, especially when you’re starting out in this topic and you’re moving up, so communicate the same content in the same ways. Put one post, then some other post with slightly altered words or different structure, and see which ones are better or more interesting to you. Facebook can also do what’s called AB tests, meaning you delete two graphics. They can be different graphics, or you just change some small things in there and see which one of those campaigns performs better. The one that performs worse you turn off, and the one that performs better you repromote with more budget, and you can move with that over time.
The other thing that’s very necessary for you when we talk about creativity is that you still have to show your customers why you’re different, why you’re better, what you’re more unique in. Why those customers should come to you specifically, you might know that, but those customers of yours don’t always need to know that. And that’s why you need to use Facebook or Instagram to be able to communicate with them.
Advertising must be functional. That is, it must be clear at first. Let’s take a small example. We have a boilerplate with the headline “Declare a boycott of cold showers”. We automatically know that when the water is running cold, there’s probably going to be some problem with the boiler. This is just the space to advertise the fact that you have a boiler and that you are promoting it and trying to help those people who have or will have that problem in the future to solve it. People are signing up that brand to call you in the future and have you solve it for them.
With this content or content we monitor the fulfillment of some KPIs ( Key Performance Indicators). For those of you who don’t know, a campaign has indicators for the number of impressions, for the number of visits, for the turnover or new customers we want to get from it. This means that you still keep track of some goal that you set. It’s very important to track those things, but track them in a way that’s realistic, meaning when you’re doing your campaigns, set those expectations realistically.
The last thing is that you have to do it round and round. That functionality has to meet something called regularity, because the regular things are the ones that work. Once you tell a customer that if they have a problem with their boiler, come to us, you know what the customer will do? Absolutely nothing. He doesn’t care at all. If you show him something once, chances are he’s going to notice it or not even notice it at all.
You need to interact with that customer on a daily basis. You need to tell them that this is what we do and this is what we are better at. That’s the kind of value-add we do on a regular basis and all the time. If you think you’re being annoying and that it’s unengaging, it’s not. By being in a certain circle of people, you are certainly not annoying. You have so many people you can reach that you don’t have to worry about being annoying.
Communicate functionally and regularly in a way that has some pizzazz and then Facebook campaigns will work.
Trends
If you check out this post, this is how we did the campaign for the carwash. You can see that the woman who’s there has some kind of drape on, and that means that we were highlighting why our carwash is better than another carwash in these times. The handles were sanitized regularly, all those touch surfaces and so forth. That’s where our client is better than all the other clients are. That said, there was a social trend that we jumped on, and we tried to use that trend to our advantage as much as possible. Whether it was a positive trend or a negative trend you’ll find out by whether we were able to bring you customers.
Look for ways to bring in new customers and interact with your target audience. For example, when there was the Covid pandemic, simply instead of stopping all communication altogether, it was very good and beneficial to communicate with customers about the things that they wanted, needed and wanted to hear at that moment. The other thing is that social media trends are changing. They change and they shift, and so it’s very good to keep an eye on those trends. Whatever is trending, try to use that to your advantage. Try to look at how you can use that momentary wave of whatever trend that’s out there to your advantage so that those customers know more about you.
Try to react quickly to these things. It’s a thing that’s coming, that’s here. Construct some sort of Facebook post and put it out there straight away. If you’re one of the first ones, it’s going to have a very good and positive effect for you because those people, when it’s some ridiculous thing, they want to laugh at it. When it’s some topical thing, they want to know more about it. So you be the ones who are the leaders in marketing when it comes to jumping on the various waves of trends and events.
