Letterfolk, is a small husband and wife company that has modernized the retro letterboard. Each hand crafted felt letterboard comes with a full set of characters that people can personalize and showcase on their walls, use for milestones and the list goes on.  Early in their business Letterfolk took to social media to help market their products, most notable Instagram. Since their launch in 2015, they currently have 300k followers on Instagram and were recently named 5th on HubSpot’s 17 best brands on Instagram. Letterfolk follows the 80/20 rule of content marketing; using 20% of the content to promote your brand and dedicate 80% to content that interests your audience and engages in conversation. This isn’t necessarily a new strategy when it comes to social media, however, it is one that reinforces the idea that social media should be a dialogue not a platform for aggressive marketing. In a podcast for Tradeshow Camp, Letterfolk owners Johnny and Joanna Galbraith, talk about how very early they wanted their posts to feel like conversations, as if they were “injecting ourselves in an existing conversation happening between friends on Instagram.” Letterfolk excels at Instagram and Instagram proves to be an excellent platform to use for marketing your business. According to Later, Instagram users are more engaged than the average social media user. Not only more engaged but they are also more willing to make online purchases. According to a study, 72% of Instagram users report making a purchase decision after seeing something on Instagram. Embracing Instagram should be part of your marketing strategy. Lets look at other ways Letterfolk is using Instagram to market their products.

How can a 50+ years old family farming business still be relevant in 2018? By evolving at the same pace of its millennial consumers, without alienating its older clientele. Heeman’s Garden Centre & Strawberry Farm is a must for the majority of families in London, Ontario. Everyone here love their strawberries and most people are also know their garden centre, with all the plants, gardening needs and home decor essentials. When Bill and Susan Heeman’s bought the land in 1963, they got working on their strawberries field that was soon growing by 1 acre each year. Now the 3rd generation is working on the farm and on social media: Will Heeman, Chief Daymaker, is running the online presence of Heeman’s quite effectively. The family feel is really present on their social media accounts, but also during any visit to the greenhouse, making the whole experience very authentic for all their customers.

Social media marketing has become a powerful tool for businesses of all sizes in reaching prospects and new customers. No matter who you are, or what industry you’re in, your customers are already interacting with brands through social media. Great marketing on social media can bring remarkable success to your business by creating devoted brand advocates and driving leads and sales. Bottom line: if you’re not speaking directly to your audience through social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, you’re missing out!

In today’s current social media climate, older companies sometimes struggle to maintain their relevance if they are not quick to develop and sustain an effective social media marketing strategy. A product like LaCroix, with its 37 year history, proves that old brands can emerge like “brand new” again, through the proper implementation of social media marketing. LaCroix is a brand of natural sparkling water offered in a variety of fruity flavours. Despite its French sounding name, LaCroix is actually an American brand distributed by the Sundance beverage company. Although the label was developed and released nearly 40 years ago in 1981, LaCroix is often mistaken as a new, trend-setting beverage due to its ever increasingly popularity with millennials. However, this affinity between the younger generations and LaCroix did not just happen overnight, nor was it a coincidence. In fact, LaCroix came up with a very specific social media strategy in order to win over its now prominent millennial consumers.

As a brand or business, it’s not enough for you to simply “be online”. Companies of all shapes and sizes need to be on various marketing channels and utilize them effectively.  Just like radio and television, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn are now genuine marketing channels, and they require serious attention to drive real business success. Learning how to use and read metrics that are available to businesses through social media, can have a profound impact on a business’s level of success.

Over the past few weeks, I have shared how start-up Flashstock has benefitted from social media to stay engaged with customers, employees, and even improve product development and operations which all contribute to driving business performance across the company. Our marketing team has focused its efforts on using social media as it’s the main platform because of the relative ease of use, low cost, and data-rich insight. Start-ups find social media marketing really efficient. At the beginning, most brands are looking to just create community and brand awareness. With existing networks built into Facebook and Instagram, for example, and almost 2.5 billion active monthly users combined, gives marketers unprecedented access to consumers and data. The platforms are free to join and provide simple to use interfaces that don’t take as much effort as a website to manage. With all of these active users, marketers also get great access to data that tells them everything they need about their target audience.    

Social media networks connect people across the world in real time.  Sharing has now become second nature.  This new paradigm has many businesses spinning.  With the objective of building brand awareness and enhancing business growth, businesses embark on many different social media strategies. With the help of data analytics, businesses can determine which of the strategies are most successful in meeting their objectives.  The world of social media is continuously evolving.  It is becoming more and more difficult  to remember a time when the world wasn’t sharing. As a powerful tool utilized by businesses to market their business and generate sales.  Some of the key benefits include: Heightened brand awareness Increases in sales generated by successfully targeting existing and potential customers Heightened communication with customers leads to improved customer service Heightened customer engagement opportunities Social media has had a strong impact on the photography industry.   Some may argue that the impact has been negative as the high usage of photography apps with various filters has diminished the value of quality photography. On a positive note, social media has also provided photographers with an opportunity to share their photographs with the world and to establish a fan base using affordable marketing tactics.  Instagram has become one of the most powerful tools used by photographers. The social media platform gives photographers across the world an opportunity to have their work viewed by thousands, if not millions of people and fellow photographers.  Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest have become vehicles for photographers to share their works with their peer group and inspire possibilities for marketing collaborations. Another popular social media tool used by photographers to market their businesses is Youtube.  Youtube photo galleries and Youtube Channels are developed with the objective of showcasing photographic prowess and providing tutorials with valuable photography tips.  The channels provide photographers with an opportunity to build brand awareness, develop a fan base in addition to giving their followers an opportunity to share the posts and contribute  comments.

Show of hands: how many of you have poured a bucket of ice water over your head? Had I asked this question two years ago, most of you probably would have thought it was a rather bizarre thing to ask. But, I’m guessing that most of you reading this have, in fact, poured a bucket of ice water on your head or, at the very least, know someone who has. In the summer of 2014, the phenomenon known as The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge swept across social media. It was hard to go even a few hours without seeing someone on Facebook or Twitter posting a video, bucket in hand. While it might have seemed like an odd phenomenon, the beauty of this challenge, and the reason why it was so successful, was that it was for a good cause: ALS awareness and research.