How to optimise your personalisation efforts with segmentation

Most companies are exploring personalisation as a marketing strategy, but many are finding it difficult fitting it into the marketing mix.  

Here is one interesting way to do it.

Econsultancy recently held roundtable discussions in Jakarta, Indonesia about The Rise of Customer Experience & Customer Journey, sponsored by IBM.  

Client-side marketers brought experiences from many different companies and industries and they openly discussed their success stories and challenges with the group.

One of the three tables discussed personalisation and arrived at an interesting way in which marketers can implement their customer experience strategy.

Why personalisation?

At the table, participants first discussed why companies were so interested in personalisation.

They determined that one of the marketer's most important roles was to engage with customers through the whole customer lifecycle.  

With so many communication channels available, though, it is hard for companies to grab and keep their customers' attention.

Attendees agreed that by personalising communications, marketers were far more likely to be able to maintain a high level of engagements, so personalisation was a very useful strategy for marketers.

Barriers to personalisation

But in order to deploy a new strategy, marketers need to convince management of its value. 

One participant noted that it was particularly difficult to do this with personalisation as implementing it is resource-intensive and expensive.

First off, personalisation requires creating a single view of the customer which means tackling the data silos in place at most organisations.

Next, marketers had to do some channel automation so that the personalisation initiative could scale to their whole customer base.

And finally, there is a non-trivial amount of data cleaning and testing required so that your efforts to greet your customer using their name does not fail spectacularly.

Participants agreed that even simple email personalisation can be difficult to implement with a large customer base.

How to overcome barriers

One marketer described, in detail, their approach.

First off, he suggested, marketers need to look at their customers in three segments which typically fall into a normal distribution, or bell-curve.  

The horizontal access is the size of the customers typical order and the vertical is the total revenue you get from the customer.

This allows you to segment your customers into three 'value areas' so that you can use the best strategy for that particular group.

Small customers: Content

Customers who only buy a small amount occasionally will on the left. Because their orders are small and infrequent, the revenue gained from them will also be small.

Because of this, it is not worthwhile to spend extraordinary effort on marketing to them.

Instead, as one participant noted, use a broad content strategy to keep them aware of the company and encourage them to buy more frequently.

Bread-and-butter customers: Automation

Customers who makes significant purchases regularly will be in the middle. This is the largest group of customers and the strategy is to get them to stay where they are.

Participants argued that offering discounts, offers, and special treatment were all useful ways to keep a company's mass market buying more.

Another suggested that marketing automation including recommendation emails based on past purchases are good strategies for this group.

Elite customers: Personalisation

Finally, on the right you have customers who have large orders, but only buy occasionally. 

Because they are not frequent buyers, the total revenue gained from them is not nearly as much as you get from bread-and-butter customers.

When they do make purchases, though, they 'move the needle' on revenue and profit, typically.

Participants noted that this is the group which should be the focus of personalisation initiatives.

Because one buyer's individual contribution makes a difference to the the top-line performance of your marketing, it is worth tackling the barriers to deliver a personal service to them.

Initiatives can be as simple as including their name and other personal details on all communications and as extensive as offering a concierge service with a unique contact number and named representative.

The purpose of personalisation for this group is to make the customer feel special, so extensive effort will need to be made to do so.

The ROI of such strategies, one participant noted, must still be measured and considered, however.

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9 Best Tools to Manage Social Media Posts

Savvy social media marketers are a force to be reckoned with.

We’re always tweeting, posting, writing, sharing, creating, curating and engaging.

Managing communities across many social media platforms is a fundamental component of our work.

It's an art to master and maintain a consistent presence on all those different platforms. And it takes time to build our communities.

Sure, there’s a strategy behind our work. There’s also a skill that requires creativity and deliberate effort at any given time.

What’s behind our success as social media professionals?

The key is finding the best tools to manage social media posts. We use those tools to craft a workflow that's realistic and sensible.

Identifying the best tools enables us to optimize, automate, and rock it in a seamless manner.

In recent years, social media management tools have morphed from publishing and scheduling -- to providing sophisticated campaign information.

This is indicative of how important social media is in the digital marketing sphere.

So what's the tastiest recipe of software, dashboards, scheduling tools, and publishing tools? How do we use those tools to juggle multiple accounts?

Here’s my list of the 9 best tools. I use these tools to manage social media posts and content for clients that range from startups to cities.

There's something here for everyone. We'll cover classic tools, popular tools, free tools, paid tools and platform specific tools. 

9 Best Tools to Manage Social Media Posts

1. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a tool that enables anyone to manage almost all aspects of social media posts. This tool offers social media managers the ability to:

• Publish and schedule content, including auto-schedule
• Research and identify engaging content
• Engage with community  
• View many aspects of engagement with multi stream view
• Analyze progress and analytics

What's Hootsuite missing?

Social media managers need to create visuals. Hootsuite doesn’t offer that option within the platform. For me, Canva is critical.

Pro Tip: Be sure to integrate the pic.twitter option to enable social media visuals to look native in the Twitter stream.

More reasons I like Hootsuite:

• Excellent customer support
• Their #Hootchat and the associated community.
• Their UTM analytics option

With the UTM analytics feature, Hootsuite synchronizes with Google Analytics.

(Image source: Hootsuite)

An important feature on Hootsuite is the bulk publisher tab. It allows a calendar view of scheduled updates.

You can bulk schedule content by uploading a .csv file to Hootsuite. Add your social messages along with the dates and times.

You can use HootBulk (the must-have pro version of Hootsuite) for a simpler bulk experience. 

Hootsuite platforms Include:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• Google+ (profiles, not pages or communities)
• LinkedIn
• YouTube
• Instagram
• Foursquare
• WordPress
• Mixi (Japanese social networking service)

Unlike many social media management platforms -- Hootsuite is mature. It's been around since 2008. They’ve developed, tested and improved along the way.

All in all, Hootsuite is one of the best tools to manage social media posts.

2. Post Planner

Efficiency is key in social media management.

As a busy social media professional, I look for this when deciding on the best tools to manage social media posts. Efficient is the word I think of when I use Post Planner.

Originally, Post Planner was an app optimized for Facebook. It helped brands deliver the most relevant content to their communities.

These days, Post Planner is a tool for finding, planning and posting content for Facebook and Twitter. There's also a light Instagram and Pinterest integration.

The Canva integration within Post Planner makes the entire process seamless and efficient. This makes Post Planner an absolute winner in my book -- especially when juggling clients.

Here's an example. Recently I wrote a post about Twitter possibly moving to 10,000 characters. (don't get me started)

First, I put the link into their scheduling tool. Rather than use the default image on the blog, I decided to create one on Canva. I was able to do that without leaving Post Planner.

Boom! I had a piece of optimized, branded content -- scheduled and automated.

A few more things I like about Post Planner:

• I can identify trending content for sharing
• I can recycle content for optimal sharing (great for evergreen blog content)
• I can do a competitive analysis by searching audience-tested content from other Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts. (I use this to see if I can repurpose or recreate that same type of proven content)
• I can find suggested status update ideas (15,000+)
• I like the analytics (they make data interpretation easy)

What's the downside of Post Planner?

It doesn’t allow for engaging with users or being able to follow a stream from within the platform.

Savvy social media marketers know that there's a gray area in which some of these tools overlap.

One social media expert, Tabitha Philen, combines the features of Hootsuite and Post Planner. She explained to her audience why this is important:

3. Buffer

Buffer's simple design and UX make scheduling, posting and collaborating an intuitive process. Simplicity is Buffer’s value prop in the industry.  

Social media platforms that can connect to Buffer:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Pinterest
• Google+

What Buffer and Post Planner don’t offer is Instagram scheduling. That’s a clear advantage for Hootsuite.

But let's face it -- the Instagram scheduling feature within Hootsuite is more of a pre-scheduling and reminder service. I’ll be covering other Instagram scheduling solutions later in this post. 

Buffer offers a branded visual solution with Pablo. But it’s not nearly as robust as the Canva integration within Post Planner.

For Pablo to work well, the social media manager needs to know what size images work best for each platform.

The interface within Buffer is clean, simple and easy to understand at a glance. Again, simplicity is their strong point.

What are the real differences between the top 3?

Like we've already mentioned, social media managers often overlap their tools. They use features from one to optimize their results with another.

A broader comparison between these 3 social media management tools would be:

Hootsuite focuses on the medium

Hootsuite looks at the entire process of social media management -- from scheduling to engaging to direct messaging. Hootsuite dabbles in it all.

Post Planner focuses on the content

While Post Planner is also a scheduler, it was built for engagement. And the easiest way to get more engagement is to post proven, audience-tested content.

Buffer focuses on the scheduling

There's no doubt that Buffer is a great social media management tool. It enables a quick and simple way to ‘top off’ content at pre-selected times.

Now let's get into some of the other best tools to manage social media posts.

4. Tailwind

For managing Pinterest -- Tailwind is the perfect tool for social media managers.

Like Post Planner, Tailwind lets you ‘spy’ on your competition and see trending content.

With Tailwind you can also identify influencers. You can then use that data to target your content.

How does Tailwind help you manage your Pinterest posts?

It saves you time

• Whiz through pinning on multiple boards
• Drag-and-drop content into the calendar
• Use the shortcuts baked into the platform to save time

It maximizes your reach

• This optimized system detects the times when your Pinterest audience is most engaged. Hello, autopilot at the perfect time!
• It measures your success
• It provides deep insights into your published content. This info provides data to make future content even better!
• It turns you into a Pinterest scheduling master
• The browser extension lets you create multiple pins from any site with one click. (pretty nifty!)

The Tailwind dashboard makes it easy to interpret your Pinterest data. It provides info about followers, likes and dislikes, and even trends of pinning habits.

It's all right there on the interface.

Social media professionals can use this data to learn what resonates with their audience. (from keywords, to topics, to types of images)

Once you’ve identified the influencers, the next step is to leverage their followers to promote a brand or product. This brings us to our next best tool to manage social media posts.

5. Loop88

Loop88 is another outstanding tool for Pinterest lovers.

The company is like a digital bridge between Pinterest influencers and brands that want to spread their message on Pinterest.

I know many social media professionals addicted to pinning. They do it with passion, care, and creativity. Of course, these same social rockstars are also bloggers.

Loop88 leverages that niche content with visually rich context and transforms it into an influence opportunity.

In other words -- on Loop88, brands collaborate with Pinterest influencers and amplify content.

It works well for brands looking to be the cool kid at a party -- but they never got an invite. Loop88 is the invite with access to the right friends and community.

But if that was all Loop88 offered, it would be just a service platform. There's much more...

They take their pinning seriously by quantifying the value of influence with data-driven metrics.

Once the parameters are set, Loop88 can also predict the likelihood of interaction on a pin. That’s taking content, context, data, influence and wrapping it all into a gorgeous UI.

Check out their interesting Pinterest case studies for inspiration. They also have a free Pinterest bootcamp going on now in case you're in the mood for some Pinterest pushups!

6. TweetDeck

I couldn't put together a list of the best tools to manage social media posts and not include TweetDeck!

Sophisticated Twitter marketers know it's necessary to manage multiple Twitter conversations across many accounts. And in one place.

That's where TweetDeck shines!

What else is great about TweetDeck?

It’s free. It’s owned by Twitter. Ok, that might not mean much now, but at the very least, it’s backed by an authority.

Big fail on their part -- no mobile app. Don’t worry their owner isn’t amazing either. Tweetdeck is clearly influenced by Hootsuite's UI.

The scheduling and DM feature on TweetDeck is much more intuitive than on any other Twitter platform I've used.

A clear advantage of Tweetdeck is its RT/ Quote RT feature.

You can retweet tweets from any of your connected accounts, unlike Hootsuite which doesn’t allow that option.

Yes, that’s a big feature to me.

Every social media pro finds content on one stream and looks for its relevance to another -- so this option on Tweetdeck is a total value add.

The next tool on my list of the best tools to manage social media posts is for those who love Instagram!

Before I get into this tool, I want to give you some background info to provide context.

For Instagram, the challenge is scheduling content and watching the stream in a logical manner. Latergramme is definitely the most popular tool.

You can use Latergramme to schedule posts from either the browser or your mobile iOS app (sorry Android users). With this tool, you can only upload individual images.

I used Latergramme religiously for a while -- but then these disadvantages became too inconvenient:

First, the posts don't post themselves

Yes, the main component of the pre-scheduling is done. But the Latergramme push notification before it posts is not an optimal solution for an automated workflow.

Next, you can't manage multiple Instagram accounts.

This is even more annoying than the posting limitation.

So I went on a hunt for a better solution. I needed something that would allow me to automate the process.

That's when I discovered the next tool on our list of best tools to manage social media posts...

7. Onlypult

Scheduling Instagram content isn’t easy because of its API.

Onlypult figured out the secret sauce. You can create (filters and words), schedule and manage Instagram content on multiple accounts.

And you can do all that from within Onlypult's easy to use web platform.

Since it's web based -- content creation is easier. You can just grab your images from whatever image creation tool you might be using.

What are Onlypult's limitations?

• Creating new content has to be done before uploading to Onlypult. 
• Doesn't support video
  
• Doesn't offer bulk posting
• Doesn’t allow brands to comment or engage from within their platform

But the fact that it will publish on Instagram without sending me push notifications still makes it one of the best tools to manage social media posts.

8. beaverQ

This Israeli startup is still developing some of the components of their Instagram tool, but even in its current state, it's still one of the best tools to manage your Instagram posts.

They’ve researched the challenges of existing tools and then created their own kickass, comprehensive platform.

Things I like about beaverQ:

• I can see all of my posts in one stream
• I can comment
• I can research followers
• I can filter by influencer
• I can sort profiles for optimized content and scheduling

While Onlypult offers filters to an image, and BeaverQ offers a much more comprehensive analytics dashboard -- neither of them allow the creation of images on their platform.

I guess we have to go back to Canva within Post Planner for that. :)

9. Zoomph

Strategic efforts are more meaningful on social media when they can be reviewed and revised in real-time.

The deepest component of social media is real-time engagement and influencer marketing. For this, there’s no better tool than Zoomph.

Zoomph is a new kid on the block -- but they’ve definitely done their homework. It’s a simple yet sophisticated tool for tracking, viewing, and leveraging social media data.

Zoomph pulls content from Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. It then relays real-time analytics (down to the emoji) to measure success and engagement.

Let’s use Super Bowl 50 for an example of what Zoomph can do.

It’s no secret that social media enhanced the conversation around the big game, from play-by-play to the commercials.

Let's say we want to know the male/female breakdown of the social media users based on a hashtag:

View image on Twitter

 Follow

Amir Zonozi ‎@Zonozi

Think the @NFL is just men? Here's the male & female breakdown of #SB50 via @Zoomph #SuperBowl

1:35 AM - 8 Feb 2016 · Reston, VA, United States

 
•  22 Retweets
 
•  11 like

Or the dominant age group of those social media users:

View image on Twitter

 Follow

Amir Zonozi ‎@Zonozi

Millennials are running #SB50 conversation

1:33 AM - 8 Feb 2016 · Reston, VA, United States

 
•  11 Retweet
 
•  22 likes

Brands can capture this detailed data surrounding real-time social media content. They can then use this data for:

• Determining parameters for their influencer marketing campaign
• Determining which users to engage with
• Determining the real-time success of niche content
• Determining which users are involved in specific conversations
• And much more

You can even filter your audience's locations by country, language, hashtag, significant terms, social network, etc.

What will be your challenge with Zoomph?

The set up.

With multiple dashboards and an array of useful analytics -- it’s tough to follow it all. Luckily, the customer support is excellent.

Final Thoughts

So there you have it -- a review of 9 best tools to manage social media posts.

Ultimately, the ones you decide to use will depend a lot on what your goals are -- along with some personal preferences sprinkled in.

Regardless of your industry, you probably want tools to do these things:

• the ability to switch between platforms easily while engaging with users in a meaningful way
• find proven, engaging content to post without spending a ton of time looking for it
• the ability to track, analyze and tweak your strategies with easily accessible data

Doing all these things often requires a combination of tools, as Tabitha explained in the video above. She combines Hootsuite with Post Planner.

Content on social media is becoming more visual. Ephemeral content is becoming more popular. (think Snapchat)

The management tools listed in this post will help reduce the tasks involved in automation.

In the end, we all know that there’s only so far automation can go before real-time engagement is what matters most.

Which tools do you think are the best best tools to manage social media posts? Did I miss any good ones?

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Can You Promote A Blog Post Automatically

I get this question a lot, particularly after someone reads through all of the steps I recommend for promoting a new blog post. And I understand. To promote a new blog post thoroughly takes a lot of time. Time to do the promotion, of course, but even more time up front establishing all of the tools and accounts and the receptive audience that you need to make it worthwhile.

And at the same time, you're supposed to be running your business and focusing on your day-to-day tasks.

So how can you speed things up? How can you automatically promote a new blog post?

Frankly, I think my answer is going to disappoint.

If you review my blog promotion checklist, you'll find social media, email, and other techniques for spreading awareness of your latest post. It looks like this:

Let's walk through the important aspects and see what can and cannot be automated.

Tools

While you have lots of choices in tools... Hootsuite or Buffer, SocialOomph, SocialQuant, MailChimp... the list goes on and on. You will still need to take the time to evaluate and sign up for each tool individually, and connect whichever profiles and services you wish to use.

Hootsuite, for instance, will require a few minutes to set up your initial account, and a few more minutes to connect whatever social profiles you have.

The good news is that, in most cases, once you get through the initial setup, you can then proceed to simply use the tool and there will be little to no maintenance time required.

Social Profiles

Similarly, you're going to have to go through the process of creating profiles and pages yourself, manually, one at a time. There's no way to automate the creation of Twitter profiles or Facebook Pages.

Now, you can take steps to speed up that process.

First, define which platforms you want to focus on, and what your needs are for all of the platforms on which you want to have a presence.

Next, create a standard Bio in a Google Doc that you can refer to and copy & paste each time you're creating a new social profile. Every platform is a little different in terms of text allowed, so you might go so far as to create short, medium and long versions of your Bio. Taking the time to craft an excellent Bio that grabs a prospects attention is time well spent!

Finally, use a tool like Canva to create yourself a set of social media profile images and cover photos. This will ensure that you have a consistent, branded message and image across platforms. You'll find all of the image dimensions and requirements here.

Email Marketing

Unfortunately, here too, there's no shortcuts to getting started. You will need to take a few minutes to evaluate available options (i.e. MailChimp or Aweber), sign up for an account, and set up your initial list.

And that initial setup might be the most time consuming part of all.

In order to be effective, your Email Marketing needs to:

• Provide incentive for someone to subscribe
• Provide ongoing value and funnel movement
• Provide consistent branding and user experience

What does all that mean?

First, while every website should allow visitors to subscribe to a mailing list, that's generally not sufficient to see real growth. Instead, you need to offer a targeted piece of information to use as incentive for signing up. Think about a common question or target audience has, address it in an article, and offer that article in PDF format to new email subscribers. This gives them a reason to sign up, and by nature of the topic, tells you that a new subscriber is interested in that area.

Next, once you have a subscriber, you need to keep them interested, and if you have products or services to sell, keep them moving through the sales cycle. This could be in the form of regular newsletters, or perhaps automated emails that you would set up in advance to 'drip' out to new subscribers over time. The more time and creativity you put into setting up your email marketing, the more effective it will be.

And finally, you're going to want to make sure that your email marketing continues your brand and messaging, which includes initial signup, opt in email, confirmation page, and ongoing email messages. That means you'll need to spend a little time customizing the appearance and messaging of those elements within your email marketing provider.

The good news is that, again, once you've taken the time to set all of that up, it can work somewhat automatically. Your lead generation content and forms will feed subscribers into your list, and your automation will provide them with desired content.

Promotional Activities

So, once you've got your tools, social profiles, and your email marketing set up, it's time to actually promote the new blog post.

Sorry, not too much to automate here either.

If you're like most bloggers, your blog and website is based on WordPress, and there are quite a few plugins which offer automated sharing of new content to Facebook, Twitter, and so on.

DON'T DO IT

Automatically posting new content to social media like that is nothing more than broadcasting, and that's just a step above spam. There's no investment there, no call to action... no invitation to engage. Just, "here's my new blog post, go read it." And that doesn't work.

Instead, as I discuss in Blog Promotionology, the key to successful social media marketing is to create an interesting commentary for your new content. An introduction that entices a potential reader to click through.

Automated posting also precludes you from using Hashtags, Mentioning others, and any additional formatting or styling you might have chosen to add to the post. Not to mention the fact that if it fails to post, how would you know?

One difference is when you use a plugin like CoSchedule to schedule social media shares of a new blog post in advance. Suppose that you finish a blog post late one evening and schedule it to publish the next morning. With a plugin like CoSchedule, you can also schedule some of your social shares, and customize them as though you were sharing live. If that's the kind of automation you're looking for, you're in luck!

But ultimately, you're still writing custom introductions and crafting individual shares, so the time spent is the same as if you were doing it live. And that's a good thing.

If you go through each and every one of the promotional steps I outline, it's likely no more than 30-45 minutes, after which you will have shared your latest post to many, many social networks and directories. And that's a wonderful thing!

Now, the one step here that you might be able to automate is email. It's easy to set up an RSS Feed delivery system that automatically emails your list a title, image, teaser and link to your new blog post. It's something I encourage you to test. Your audience might appreciate the timely delivery of your new posts... or, on the hand, they might prefer a more personal message. Give it a try and monitor your Open and Click rates for improvement or decline, and then adjust accordingly.

Back To You

If you've made this far, and are disappointed I wasn't able to offer some neat time-saving tricks, I don't blame you. You spent all that time creating a piece of content, you're probably sick of it and just want to publish it and move on.

But here's the thing. I promise you that if you take the time to promote your new blog posts as I outlined, if you become a dedicated student of Blog Promotionology, your content will perform far better, and your reach will grow. I think that's worth the additional investment of time.

Disagree? Have some wonderful tool that you use to automate that you think I need to consider? Let me know in the comments below.

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