4 ways to boost your social media presence with DAM

The blog is back! Hopefully so are you after a great vacation. We're kicking off the new season by giving you this blog post on how to craft great social media campaigns - and how DAM will help you do it!

Just before the summer, we launched our social media plugin to QBank 3. It allows you to publish your assets directly to platforms such as Facebook, Youtube or Flickr. If you’re interested in hearing more about the plug-in, or maybe want a free consultation and demo, we’re here for you!

Anyhow, to celebrate the launch we invited our clients to a breakfast seminar where we demonstrated the plug-in and shared some tips on how to succeed with social media in general and how DAM can help them.

So, social media might not be the latest buzzword - but it’s certainly not going anywhere.

Disclaimer: We certainly don’t claim to be social media experts, but here goes! We stumbled upon a study by Warc that studied the most successful marketing campaigns in order to single out what factor made them so successful. We’ve been inspired by this study and decided to apply it to a social media campaign. Here are some of the key takeaways:

Show me the money

This probably won’t come as a shock to any of you, but the campaigns with the biggest budget were also the most successful. The common factor for all successful campaigns is that they all let them take a substantial part of their marketing budgets. Naturally whenever we see one of these amazingly successful viral campaigns it sparks the thought “Well, I could’ve done that too if I had a ton of money!

We don’t all have Coca-Cola-sized budgets to spend, but the point is to give social media campaigns the budget they deserve. Just because it’s free to publish your posts (unless you’re paying for ads that is) it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to get away with free advertising on social media. To be successful with your social media campaigning, you need to treat it as any other campaign, and thereby giving them the budget space needed.

Meet your customer everywhere

The more channels you use, the more places to reach the customer. When it comes to social media, the different platforms and channels are almost endless. Chances are your target customers are using a variety of social media platforms and not just the one, so make sure you map out every channel and craft your message to suit the format. Engaging your customer at every available touch point will increase your chances of becoming top-of-mind with your target group. So if you’re thinking about starting a campaign through Instagram, start thinking about how that campaign can be adapted to other channels such as Twitter, Facebook or Snapchat.

In Warc’s report, the choice of channels is the section where the successful campaigns stood out by using online video to far more extent than the average campaign. It might require more resources to produce high-quality video, but it also pays off. Video is a powerful format with the ability to convey your message while engaging your customers with emotions.

If you want tips on how to create great brand-videos, check out this guide!

The longer, the better

The average campaign last around 0-3 months, but here the successful campaigns set themselves apart by letting campaigns run from 3 to 12 months. Like the budget-space, it’s all boiling down to giving your campaign the time it deserves. It’s easy to think that you’ll just create a quick Instagram-drive to boost followers, but if you don’t spend enough time on your campaigns, chances are your customers won’t either. By committing to your campaign instead of producing short bursts of smaller campaigns it will show that you’re dedicated to truly grabbing your customers’ attention.

Turns out, traditional creativity still rocks

No matter the platform, channel, budget, or campaign length, the study shows that traditional creativity is still the key to winning over your followers. Tools such as emotion, humor and storytelling are all powerful tools in creating a great campaign. Which it always has been. So as you can see here, there is no special secret key to creating a great social media campaign. The main takeaway here is simply that if you try to cheat and create a quick and cheap campaign, it’s probably going to fall flat. Companies that approach social media marketing as they would any other campaign and give it the time, money and resources it needs are the ones walking away as winners.

So if we sum up all these takeaways we can see what makes a campaign successful: start with a message that speaks to your audience with emotion and storytelling, bringing it to life by creating high-quality videos, images or ads and lastly, making sure the message can be converted to fit every platform! As we’ve tried to illustrate, there really is no difference when crafting a social media campaign from any other campaign.

So social media isn’t that special after all?

Oh, but it is! The great, great thing about having your brand present on social media is that is offers you a direct dialogue with all your customers at once. This presents the unique opportunity of engaging them into your campaign. What better example than the incredibly successful campaign of the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge that saw countless people joining the cause?

So how can DAM help you boost your social media presence?

A successful campaign requires not only time, money and a great idea to take off, but it also needs an efficient and organized workflow. And this is where Digital Asset Management comes in. By making sure you have all your images and videos at the same place, you have a great way of overseeing where and when you assets will be published and always in the right format and version. If you’re thinking about getting a DAM software to help organize your social media presence, these are some the functions that will benefit your workflow:

• Finding and categorising your images and videos with categories and metadata
• Schedule and publish automatically to your social media channels
• Media templates that converts your image or video to the correct format, without creating several versions
• Usage rights details
• The ability to embed metadata to your files in order to protect your assets
• Statistics to keep track of usage and views

If you have further questions on how DAM can help you with social media, send us a quick e-mail and we’ll help you out!