Marketing Consultancy

Social Media Strategy: Why It Works And What It Can Do For You

In an online world with more content, networks and notifications than ever before, a successful social media strategy gives you the tools you need to cut through the noise and put your brand in the best position to meet your goals.

Whether you’re refreshing your company’s social strategy for the new year or considering introducing a strategy for the first time, PSA Marketing Consultancy is here to guide you toward success.

What Makes a Compelling Social Media Strategy?

A compelling social media strategy outlines what you plan to do and hope to accomplish on social media. There are four simple steps to creating a compelling social strategy: define your objectives, understand your audience, curate content and review performance.

1. Define Your Objectives

A quality plan has objectives that will measure its success and return on investment. Start by asking yourself what you want to gain from social media. Then, align your answers to the company’s business objectives.

Common, obtainable goals include increasing brand awareness, growing your followers, generating leads, driving traffic and boosting community engagement. While these are all important, they are broad. It’s crucial you dive deeper into these topics to set realistic objectives for your unique brand. The smaller you start, the more you can scale.

Professionals suggest two to three goals to start your strategy. Keep in mind this will determine how much time and effort goes into your social media.

2. Understand Your Audience

Your audience consists of existing followers and who you want to target as prospective followers. To identify and target your audience, you need to learn everything you can about them.

Research is key. Remember your followers are real people, so assumptions will not take you far when creating audience personas. To help with this process, there are online data tools, resources and services such as PSA Marketing Consultancy. To help you get started today, explore the following list of characteristics to consider for your audience.

  • Their most active social platform

  • The popular times and days for social activity

  • Their most liked and engaged with content

  • Demographics including age, industry, average income, location, interests, etc.

  • What are they looking for on social media? Business, connection, lifestyle, etc.

3. Curate Content

After drilling down your goals and getting to know your audience, you’re ready to start posting! Well, planning to post.

A social media content calendar ensures your curated content lands at the perfect time. Here, you’ll layout when and where your content will have the most success based on social platform, relevance and balance.

When creating content, aim for a consistent voice, appropriate platform and opportunity in your industry. Analyzing your competitors’ content will show you what’s working and what topics are missing or undervalued. Seizing missed opportunities in your industry can be a jumpstart for your content’s engagement while you master your common, day-to-day topics such as company news, product and service promotions, culture, business insights and more.

4. Review Performance

Fortunately, nothing is final. Social media will shift and so will your business.

There are many moving parts in a successful strategy. To maximize its performance, it requires constant monitoring and maintenance. If something isn’t working, tweak it and try again. Social media is a trial-and-error process. Measuring your objectives and making small changes can lead to big wins!

How Does a Social Media Strategy Benefit My Company?

Following a social media strategy and content calendar is less time consuming and less daunting in the long run. If your company lacks the bandwidth to devote staff to social media, a strategy and calendar make it possible to run successful company profiles without sacrificing valuable time.

USAV and PSA’s Marketing Consultancy offers social media strategy and services, so you have more time to focus on your business while simultaneously generating growth on social media. If you’re interested in a custom strategy or want to learn more about our offerings, schedule a FREE consultation today!


Michaela Austin

PSA Marketing Coordinator

Designing A Digital Storefront That Converts

With all the distractions demanding our attention these days, first impressions are crucial to making a lasting impact on potential leads. There are almost 2 billion websites on the internet so it’s important to make sure yours stands out from the crowd. With smart branding and design techniques you can ensure that your website is catching the attention of your potential leads.

Take a screenshot of your website above the fold as it appears on your website before any scrolling occurs. Show the screenshot to someone for three seconds, then ask the person what your website sells. If they can’t answer correctly, you have work to do.

Functionality

What is it that you want your website to do? The first step to a successful web design is ensuring that your website solves the established problem. Maybe the primary function is an ecommerce site where shoppers can review items and ultimately make a purchase. Another common functionality is to fill out a form or schedule a demo. Do research on what your competitors are offering and consider what affects not offering those will have on your company. Decide what it is you want your website to accomplish and make sure your site solves for that.

Branding & Design

With the ultimate goal in mind, move in to articulating your brand. The home page should clearly relay what your company does and who they do it for. Being able to articulate your company’s mission, vision and values is essential to making an impression on your prospect. Your web design should be uniform. Fonts, colors and photos all align to display your brand and make a lasting impression. That impression left is your brand. If your website looks and feels unorganized or even dated, that sends a message to your viewers about your brand, and you’ve potentially lost your lead. Remember that web design is about more than making your site look pretty, it’s about inspiring your viewers to take action.

Site Structure

With a cohesive design and goal in place, you’ll find that your leads are sticking around. Now that you’ve made a lasting impression, make sure that your website converts. Begin by laying out your most important landing pages and make them easy to access in your navigation. Common landing pages include a products or services page, a page for each industry served, testimonials and case studies, a blog and a contact page. Along with your navigation, people will expect to see a company logo and accessible phone number for quick conversions as well. Your contact form should be easy to locate, high up on a page and tested often.

Page Structure & Content

It may seem obvious but having an intentional page layout is key to successful conversions. In today’s digital world viewers have expectations, and every little detail matters when it comes to meeting them.

The header is the quick indicator where viewers will assess your site. They expect to see your logo and page navigation with a quick path to high traffic areas of your site. Viewers will look here to find the answers to questions such as what services do you offer, is shopping available on this site, where are you located and how can they get in touch?

The body of each page is where the main message is communicated. Keep in mind that viewers are not there to read a book, make it succinct and get your message across efficiently. Make updates to your content regularly to make sure that you are answering your viewers’ questions. Check your Google Analytics metrics to learn how long viewers are spending on your site, and what content is making the most impact.

Call-to-action. Call-to-action. Call-to-action. Think of your website as a flow. Things are unfolding and pulling the viewer in, and just as you’ve inspired them to convert… there’s nowhere for them to go. It should be obvious to your viewer what you want them to do. Choose a call-to-action (or CTA) and repeat it throughout the site. A viewer in every stage of the sales funnel should have a place to convert.

The footer is a great place for secondary CTAs. It is located at the bottom of each page, meaning they have already passed your initial CTA. This is the place for a secondary navigation, additional ways to contact you and additional conversions such as inviting the viewers to follow you on your social channels or to sign up for a newsletter.

As more and more websites continue to pop up, having a converting design is imperative. Formulating the right recipe can take time and multiple revisions but achieving conversion victories is oh so sweet.

Contact PSA Marketing Consultancy to get started today!


Hannah Schultes

Marketing Manager

Why You Need to Know SEO

You need to know SEO. Here’s why!

You already know that your presence on the web is no longer optional. Today’s digital world is moving quickly and having a single brick and mortar business means your company is being left behind. Luckily, creating a “digital storefront” is easier than ever to do! The hard part? Making sure your business is easy to locate. That’s where search engine optimization, or SEO, comes in!

Imagine an end user who is looking to integrate new innovative technology into their business or looking to update their equipment. Taking their research to the web and they search “best audio-visual equipment for my business.” If your company doesn’t appear in the search results, it’s time to improve your SEO. The whole reason for creating your website was for people to find you!

What is SEO and how do I improve it?

To fully understand SEO, you need to first know how search works. There are over 1.7 billion websites on the internet. Every time a user completes a search, Google crawls those billions of webpages and ranks the best results for the searcher by using an algorithm. The searcher might see something like this:

The first listings that appear are designated by Google with an “Ad” tag. This indicates the companies that paid to be placed at the top of your search. This is a short-term solution for improving your search results. Below the ad listings, you will see the organic search results. These are the results Google designated as the top results for the searcher based on its algorithm. SEO is improving your ranking in the organic listing, the long-term solution.

We know three key factors in Google’s algorithm: relevancy, quality and authority. Your webpages need to meet all these standards before Google picks you for its top rankings.

Relevancy

To rank for relevancy, not only does the content on your website need to be relevant to the search in question, but your business also needs to be located near the searcher. An end user who searches “best audio-visual equipment for my business” in Des Moines, Iowa, won’t see the same results as a user searching in New York City, New York.

Quality

Quality is determined by having useful answers for searchers. Google is looking for content that provides the best solution to the searcher’s query. Make sure your content isn’t full of typos or misinformation and that you are providing the answers your potential leads are looking for.

Authority

Ranking for authority is a lot like citing your sources. When you write a paper with someone else’s information, you cite your source. If other web users find your content accurate, informative or useful, they will share and link to your content. Google looks at the number of sites linking to yours and counts that as part of your authority on the web.

The kicker? Google’s algorithm is constantly changing. In fact, it is estimated that the algorithm changes between 500-600 times each year.

Good SEO means being found on the internet, bringing more traffic to your site. GREAT SEO means bringing the right people to your site at the right time, giving you a higher conversion rate. High conversion rates tell Google that users going to your site find what they are looking for, giving you an even higher ranking in the ever-changing algorithm!

What does an SEO strategist do?

Now that you understand how search works, it’s time to implement strategy. Enlisting the help of an SEO strategist makes optimizing your site much easier. An SEO strategist will focus on key areas of optimization including technical SEO, off-site SEO, user experience and contextual SEO. This involves things like making sure your site is easy for Google to find and crawl, optimizing your content with relevant keywords that users are searching for, or that your competitors are already ranking for, and making sure that your website is associated with other digital assets on the web such as your social media channels, Google my Business, review pages, etc.

USAV’s Parent Company, PSA, offers SEO in their new program, Marketing Consultancy. This includes recommended optimizations to improve organic relevance based on an analysis of key metrics on your site. Contact PSA Marketing Consultancy to get started today!

Hannah McDermott

Marketing Manager

Simple Steps To Update Your Digital Presence

For any business in 2021, your presence on the web is as important as your physical location’s appearance. With a new generation of decision-makers, online appearances are more important than ever. So where does a systems integrator even start? Perhaps you have a large marketing team dedicated to ensuring your website and social channels are in tip-top shape; realistically though, many integrators don’t have a team dedicated to marketing, brand and demand generation. This is exactly why we decided to launch the PSA Marketing Consultancy.

In addition to offering low-cost, high-quality and customized marketing services, we will also be giving free tips and tricks to our network on “low hanging fruit” that can drive results right away. So, let’s talk about your digital storefront. Sure, your website might need an update and that takes planning and budget to achieve, but there are also things you can do today that will help with your overall web presence without a huge investment.

#1 – Harness the Data

Make sure you have Google Analytics and Google Search Console set up for your website. If you do not currently have Google Analytics, you can create a free account. Once you’ve done that, you can link to the Google Search Console. What should you do once you’re set up?

  • Review your Google Analytics

    • Be sure to set the proper date range in the top right-hand corner

    • Review the amount of traffic that comes to your website each month

    • Check where your traffic is coming from

    • Evaluate what your greatest traffic sources are. This is an insightful exercise that can help you understand how and where potential customers find your website

    • Under “Search Console” and then “Landing Pages” you can review what your most popular pages are on your website as well

#2 – Ensure your Site is Secure

Have you ever visited a website and seen “Not Secure” in the web address bar? That doesn’t instill confidence in the visitor that the organization is reputable. When this occurs, it means the site doesn’t have an SSL certificate installed. Luckily, it’s an easy fix! Depending on the platform your website is built on, there should be quick options to remediate this issue. SquareSpace automatically establishes SSL certificates while WordPress has a plugin you can install. Knowing which platform your website is built on will assist you; then you can quickly Google how to install an SSL certificate for that platform.

#3 – Demand Generation is the Name of the Game

The ABCs of selling also work for your website: Always be closing. In digital form, we call this a “call to action.” Throughout your website, you should have places where a visitor can contact you, schedule an appointment, or order a product. It’s great to have a “Contact Us” page, but you also need call-to-action buttons throughout your website so that potential clients can reach you ASAP.

#4 Prioritize your Content

We just designed a new website for PSA. As we determined what content would go on the homepage, we spent a lot of time going through our Google Analytics to determine the most visited pages on our site each month. This helped us determine what we would prominently link to from the homepage. It’s also important to take into consideration what you want to accomplish with your website: Garnering new clients? Selling product? Showcasing partners? These business priorities all play a role in your website’s layout as well.

If the above steps still seem overwhelming, or you’d like assistance accomplishing these and other digital updates, schedule a free consultation now with our digital strategist to learn more about the PSA marketing consultancy.


Candice Aragon

Vice President of Marketing & Events