Partnering with an individual can be a great way to help build brand awareness, announce a new service, or introduce a product to new audiences. Having a process in place - a checklist of sorts - before asking an Influencer, Ambassador, or Affiliate to work with your brand will help make it a smoother process.

“Influencer” has become a murky catch-all for folks who contract with brands to promote products or services. Depending on your marketing strategy and sales goals, contracting with Influencers, Ambassador, and/or Affiliates can help further brand awareness, attract and educate new and current audiences, and increase sales.

As someone who has crafted numerous editorial calendars based on an strategy, posting outside the plan can be tough. On the flip side, with more and more people changing up how they view brands and use the platforms, involving HR can be both an incredible recruiting tool and a refreshing way to share a brand’s story. And you know what? Boom. Content made and problems solved all in one.

It doesn’t have to be an exact match - introducing new voices can be very helpful in reaching new audiences, but you should feel confident you can slide their content into your feed without causing a massive jolt to your audience.

I take three actions with his posts: 1) swipe through the pics or watch the watch the video, 2) tap to read all the content, and 3) ‘like’ the post. Three points of fairly consistent engagement and I’m delivered his new posts in a very consistent manner whenever I hop into the app. This is the algorithm working and working well. (And note: no saves, no shares - just watching, reading, and liking. Basically the algorithm thinks we’re friends - and who am I to correct that?)

Are there times you should push sales content? Absolutely. That’s the 20 of the 80/20 rule - make the pitch why your product or service fills a need or solves a problem - but the rest of the time, focuse on meeting folks where they are, listening to their needs, and offering content to help solve problems they may be facing.

The key difference from the social platforms: we ‘google’ with an idea of what we want or need, or have a question we’d like answered. Using the market example: we go to a farmers market to get food and support local farmers and producers; not to buy an airline ticket. Same goes for when we use a browser - we have a general idea of what we’re looking for or a question we’d like answered.

High-level daily content themes are basically post prompts to help further branding consistency. They’re not the priority for posting; these are purely content fillers to be used between announcements or whatever other points you wish to share with your community and followers on social media. It’s important to think of daily content themes as ways to further brand awareness, build community, or offer social listening.

Digital Empathy is a necessity for brands in 2020 and beyond. It’s no longer a lofty goal. If we fast forward from my talk in early March to today, it's never been clearer how much brands desperately need to make Digital Empathy the center-point of their strategies, especially as we're squarely in the Conscious Consumer Era and rethinking how to best approach our audiences.

Using those super popular hashtags aren’t helpful at all. Why? The higher the use rate, especially anything over 1M+ uses, means your content will be pushed down all the faster in that specific hashtag’s feed. For example: when writing this article, #donuts had over 8 MILLION uses, which means, on average, that hashtag is used 4,500 times per day.

While the immediate blow was hard, it took a willingness to be creatively agile to answer those questions. The willingness to adopt truly made a difference for so many. brands. What else did they do? They reviewed their message to ensure it best fit with their key audience.