News and Updates - Crystal Media

October 26, 2020 By Steph Bechard 2 Comments

Optimize Your Instagram Profile

With the most wonderful (and hopefully most active) time of the year approaching, we know your small business will be using all the social media knowledge you have gained this past year to show up where your customers are: on Facebook and Instagram. 🎁 With many customers choosing to shop online this year—but still wanting to support small businesses— local stores will have the chance to shine online! Although you may receive more views on your social media content this holiday season, you also want to be sure you drive more sales and keep your viewers’ attention. ❄️

Today we are sharing 5 ways to optimize your Instagram profile to help turn your viewers into customers.

Brand your profile.✨ With customers showing up on your Instagram page, be sure to welcome them to your profile with a clear brand image, the same way a person entering your physical store might feel. Update your Instagram Profile photo to a clear image of your logo, add a descriptive Instagram bio (including who you are and what you sell), and lastly, add Instagram Highlight cover photos that match your brand colors.
Update your Instagram buttons. ✅ This one may seem small, but it is mighty, as it provides more opportunities for your customers to shop with you! Instagram has added the option for buttons that are additional to the contact buttons. Under “Edit Profile”, click on “Action Buttons” to add buttons on your profile that include “Order Food”, “Gift Cards”, “Book Now”, and “Reserve”.
How to add Action Buttons on the Instagram page of your small business
Add a website link and update it often. 💻 Get the most out of the link in your bio by connecting customers directly to the products and services you are promoting in your content. Ask your viewers to visit the link in the bio to directly link them to your latest blog, your new product line, a wish list and more. If you’d like to add more than one link in your bio, check out LinkTree, which allows you to embed several links on your Instagram profile.
Post to your Instagram stories, and add them to your highlights. 🎥 While you have these new eyes on your Instagram page, you might as well let them get to know you in a more personal way. Instagram stories show up on your social media for 24 hours, but saving them to your highlights allows them to exist permanently. You can create more behind-the-scenes content, and quick and digestible videos of yourself or your staff talking about the store and its products. People love seeing people!
Add products to your Instagram Shop. 🛍 Instagram has released a feature that enables you to add shoppable products into your Instagram profile, where customers can purchase them directly from Instagram without visiting your website. This makes shopping a lot more convenient for your viewers, so you’ll want to make sure you update your shop often!

Social media has always been an incredible way to spread the word about your business while connecting with your audience, but this year, your small business has an entire tool kit to turn those viewers into customers!

October 19, 2020 By Jessica Austin Leave a Comment

3 Tips for Holiday Ads

It’s that time! 🎄 Hopefully you’ve been making your (marketing) list and checking it twice. ✔ Running Facebook and Instagram Ads are a great addition to any marketing plan, so we’re sharing 3 quick tips to help your holiday ads end the year on a high note.

Budget: Ads during the holidays are effective. But that means more businesses (especially ones that don’t normally advertise during the rest of the year) are getting into the game. More Santas in the sleigh means higher costs for all ad objectives. With this in mind, plan to shift more of your marketing budget to ads during the season (at least November and December) to increase your ads’ visibility. How much you increase depends on you and your business, but we’ve seen success when our clients increase their ad spend 30-60%.
Audiences: Arguably one of the best features of FB & IG Ads, Audiences can be the difference between great and so-so ad performance. First, make sure you tweak your Audiences to be holiday-specific. Are you promoting specific products or deals that can be targeted differently than your day-to-day ads? Second, did you do something last year that was successful that you can create an Audience from? For example, a client has done amazing 12 Days of Christmas videos in prior years so we created an Audience of people who watched those specific videos (under Custom Audiences) and made sure to include them in ads showing the new 12 Days.
Holiday Tools: Make your ads holiday-specific with easy-to-use tools. Facebook’s Ads Manager releases special holiday templates in their Video Creation Kit every year which include seasonal backgrounds, stickers and fonts. Canva (our go-to design platform!) is also full of fun holiday add-ons which make it a cinch to create Christmas-y content.

Whether this is your first holiday season using ads or you’re a seasoned (😉) pro, shifting your ads strategy to meet the rush doesn’t have to be time-consuming or troublesome. 🎅

October 12, 2020 By Erick Sapalaran Leave a Comment

Listings: 3 things you should update TODAY. 📝

Local SEO is essential to local businesses to stay relevant. One of the best and proven SEO practices is to keep your listings accurate and up to date. Today, we are giving you 3 things that will help you rank better in search results:

1. Optimize your “Google My Business” page. Did you know that 46% of all searches on Google are seeking local information while 97% of users searched online to find a local business? This shows how important having a Google My Business profile is so make sure that you not only claim your business listing in Google but optimize it too. Optimizing it includes, fully filling out each section, including keywords and consumer-known brands, adding pictures on a regular basis, using the Posts feature, and keeping the information up-to-date.

2. Check if your NAP is consistent online. NAP stands for Name, Address, and Phone Number. These are the information that your customers and search engines look for. This is why it is important to make sure that this information about your business is always accurate and consistent as much as possible. You’d be surprised how many businesses we come across that don’t use a consistent business name.

3. New Products and Services. Whenever you are carrying a new brand or offering a new service, it is ideal that you add these to your listing. Posting about it across all of your listings including your social media accounts helps in promoting these products and services by getting more visibility online. If you carry popular consumer-known brands you want to show up when people are searching for them near you.

In summary, in order for you to be more visible locally, it is important that you maintain all your listings accurate and updated. However, as a business owner, this might be too complicated and time-consuming to implement on your end. That’s why our Get Listed service is perfect for business owners like you. We’ll take care of optimizing your listings so that you can focus on your business operation. If you’d like to learn more and see how your business listings look, click here to run a free scan.

So, are you ready to stand out in searches?

October 5, 2020 By Steph Bechard 2 Comments

3️⃣ Best Practices to Boost your Content in the Instagram Algorithm

Instagram can be tricky with ever-changing rules, best practices and algorithms. Lucky for small business owners, you have Crystal Media’s team of social media experts here to keep you up to date and give you all the best tips. You could be getting more engagement and views out of your Instagram posts with only spending a little bit more time on each of your posts, and this has nothing to do with the content itself. 🔑 Today I wanted to share 3 Best practices to boost your content in the Instagram Algorithm, and teach you some posting strategies to optimize your social media.

1) Post while most followers are active. 📊 If Instagram notices your post is getting a lot of attention within the first 30 minutes of being posted, the app will believe this is a post of interest and show it to more viewers, in hopes of keeping them on the app longer. A good way to get the most attention while your content is freshly posted is by posting while most of your followers are active in the Instagram App. This information can be found under your Audience Insights. To get here click the main menu on your Instagram Profile, then click Insights -> click Total Followers -> scroll down to Most Active Times -> the view Hours

2) Make Edits in the Instagram App. 📷 While posting a photo on Instagram, you have the option to Edit your photo, in the posting portion right before you add a caption, location, and tags. Instagram tends to reward content that uses their features, so be sure to make some adjustments to your photo within the Instagram app, even if it’s just brightening and sharpening your image by 1-5%.

3) Write a detailed caption. 👍 Writing a detailed caption adds more to your post than just a photo. Be sure to include emojis, a question, and a CTA in your caption to help invite engagement from your audience.

If you’d like to read more Best Practices to boost your content in the Instagram algorithm, check out our Post Anatomy free resource, which includes 12 tips to create high performing Instagram posts.

To growing your audience, and your social media knowledge,

Steph

September 28, 2020 By Madeline Goode 2 Comments

How to Scale Your Store using Social Media and Advertising

Growth: It’s what everyone is working towards. We want to see sales and revenue skyrocket! 📈But that kind of growth doesn’t happen in the blink of an eye. Like Crystal always says, the overnight success was 7 years in the making! You’ve got to build your business from the ground up, but with hard work, dedication, and will-power, you’ll be the next “overnight success” in no time. 😉

You might be wondering, “How? Where do I start?” The answer is to get in front of your customers and show up where they are. Where are they? SOCIAL MEDIA.

Your customers are on social media every single day. So BE THERE. Post a good mix of relevant content to Facebook and Instagram (or others like YouTube or Snapchat if it makes sense for your business), at least 4-5 times a week. Relevant content can include product and sale info, educational/”how to” content, FAQs, new product arrivals, humor, employees and customers, and more! Post content that will be of value to your customers and post consistently enough that you’re showing up and staying top of mind. 📱

***PRO TIP: If you really want to stay in front of your customers and at the top of their minds, post to your Facebook and Instagram Stories daily! Stories disappear after 24 hours, but they show up at the very top of the newsfeed when someone opens the FB or IG app, so it’s a great place for limited-time content and to ensure you’re showing up in front of your customers every single day! (Especially with the holidays coming up, hint hint!)

Once you’ve nailed a strong social media strategy, take the next step by advertising on social. Promote your FB and IG posts via the Most Recent Engagement campaign in Ads Manager to ensure your posts are pushing through the clutter. Then, you can create a Reach campaign to help increase in-store foot traffic, a Traffic campaign to drive people to your website, or a Page Likes campaign to increase your Facebook likes/social media following. The best part of all of this is that you don’t need a big-box budget to do these things. Posting to social media is free and you can advertise on social for as low as $1/day! 🤑

Start small and work your way up. Our clients see the most success when they commit to a solid social media strategy and back it up with advertising! Consistency and commitment are key. Commit and you’ll start to see more and more growth! And remember to be patient- the overnight successes are 7 years in the making!

Share in the comments which strategies have helped you grow your business!