Stories

Briefing a marketing agency isn’t rocket science, but if the steam coming out of the ears of agency friends after a recent post I put up on LinkedIn was anything to go by, agencies are frequently on the receiving end of some pretty curly requests.

Since a strong brief delivers strong outcomes, we wanted to share the biggest bugbears we have as a content marketing agency when receiving client briefs.

If you’re thinking of briefing your marketing agency, take it from us, these are things your marketing agency wishes you’d stop doing and maybe we’re just the ones brave enough to say them.

1. Stop pretending you don’t have a budget

I have to be honest with you, in my decade of working across the government, big business, small business and now running my own business, I’ve never once met a client with a bottomless budget bank.

When an agency asks you for a budget, please remember they’re not doing it to max it out. When we ask clients for their budget expectations, it’s so we can provide you with the best product-to-budget fit.

Without sharing the budget, it’s the equivalent of briefing an interior designer to find you a sofa and then telling them you won’t be proceeding with their Jardan selection, because you have an IKEA budget.

While our content marketing is good, our mind-reading is not, so to deliver an outcome, we (and any agency you’re working with) need to know what price range t they’re working within.

Do: Even if you don’t have a budget in mind, give your agency a budget window. Knowing you’ve got $15-25k gives us a lot more to work from than mistakenly thinking you have $150k and quoting outrageously.

2. Using unrealistic timeframes

In any agency there are usually two particularly manic times of the year – one is the lead up to Christmas and the other is before 30 June.

With each peak period comes deadlines, some sensible like “we need to close down the books for the financial year” and others a little more unrealistic “we need it before Christmas” as though the world stops turning on 25 December.

If you’re not going to be using the content between 20 December and the second week of January, it pays to give your agency an extra ten days to finesse it. And trust me, they’ll want it.

Do: Tell your agency your critical deadlines. While your agency would prefer not to be working over Christmas as it’s usually their only big break for the year, they usually have some team on-call for the Christmas period for campaigns (like Boxing Day Sales) that don’t shut down. Rather than rush your agency to the Christmas finish line, give them the option of filing in the first week of January if it’s applicable for your campaign. 

3. Setting KPIs that don’t match the brief

As an agency owner, I love to set KPIs as they’re the fastest way to get ourselves and the client aligned.

It’s in our best interest to do a good job and we want to smash your KPIs so hard that you never look so much as left or right to other agencies because we’re so damn good at what we do.

But I have to be clear, where we (or any agency for that matter) can’t perform is where the brief and the KPIs (aka what we’re measured in) don’t match. We’ve been on the receiving end of KPIs for organic social media to have ‘a million followers’, which isn’t just impossible it’s downright irresponsible to promise.

Do: Get clear on what you’re asking the agency to do and ask if the KPIs align. If you’re not sure where to start with setting benchmarks or KPIs, ask your agency. Agencies have to do it all the time and they’re probably in the best position to do it.

4. Asking an agency to create the marketing plan for the project … to win the job

I don’t know about you, but RFQ’s these days seem to be asking more and more of agencies competing for the work.

One that’s been grinding my gears lately is the request to build out a detailed marketing plan for the whole project, before you’ve even won it. One RFQ we faced this year, even asked for a three-year marketing plan (my first thought: do people even plan beyond 12 months with COVID anymore?) to win the project.

To me, asking the marketing agency for their full marketing plan is the equivalent of asking a builder to build your bathroom before you decide to go ahead with their quote or not.

While you want to see evidence of strategic thinking and creative concepts, a pitch session with the right minds in the room where the agency has the opportunity to ask more questions, tease out the real outcomes and present a couple of creative directions, lands in a much better place than a static marketing plan just to win the job.

Do: If you’re in the position to do so, invite agencies in to help design the brief rather than just respond to it.

5. Not providing feedback at the end of the quote phase

We understand procurement is exhausting for all involved, but as a small business when we’ve dedicated a team member to compile our response for over a week, we really like to hear more feedback than a templated “unfortunately you were unsuccessful at this time” email.

As an agency we like to improve our performance one tender or response at a time and your feedback is invaluable to our ongoing performance.

While most clients provide access to feedback, unfortunately, many don’t.

Do: Allocate resources not just to reading RFQs but providing feedback on them too. 

Agency friends, what else have I missed?

We all know how effective a well-crafted reel or story is on Instagram, but have you heard about Instagram’s new (and more underrated) tool, Instagram Guides?

You wouldn’t be the first to have missed the appearance of the little map icon on your IG feed last year when Instagram decided to merge the best parts of a blog post and regular IG posting into a new style of content posting, IG Guides.

Here’s what we know, why we like them and why we think you should be adding them to your content marketing mix.

First things first, what’s a guide?

Instagram guides are a combination of both a carousel post and a blog (just like this one). They feature a title, introduction, multiple photos, and captions. Each guide is then populated into one neat, Instagram place.

Guides don’t appear on your feed, but rather in a dedicated map-like tab on the profile page, sandwiched between the series and tagged icons (if you’re using the mobile app). Check out our IG Guides for an idea of how they appear.

What types of guides are there?

You’ll be happy to know there’s more than one way to create a guide, with the choice of using posts, places, or products as your anchor for content creation.

While the guide works the same, your process for selecting images differs depending on what type of guide you’re making.

For a posts guide, content can be gathered from your saved folder, or directly from your feed. (Pro tip: save any images you want to use before you create the guide to save you time).

For places, you can search by location and choose images from other users who have used the location too.

For products, you can search for the product you are wanting to feature and can pick from any photos displayed there, and let Instagram take care of the rest.

While you can include images, videos, and reels in post guides, location and product guides only let you use images.

Either way, Instagram includes image credits in the guide (even if it’s your photo), so your UGC acknowledgment is done for you.

So why do we think you should get on the IG Guide train?

Rather than give you one good reason, we’ve got five reasons you should add them into your content marketing mix:

1. In theory, you can use IG Guides like pages of your website. That’s right, you can collate anything to do with a product or service you offer into a single guide, almost like a little microsite without any of the associated cost of web development. ⁠Need to whip up a quick website page for a new product or service? Why not make a guide and send someone the link to it instead? ⁠

2. They’re a way to present things visually without any of the techy know-how. Limited by your skill in graphic design or photography? Show us a business owner who isn’t! IG Guides are simple with a capital ‘S’ to make and showcase information visually. ⁠

3. Guides let you tell a story without having to create a long-form blog, piece of editorial or do the planning for either. Using pictures and captions like the bumper rails to your editorial, guides make it outrageously easy to create a piece of content without feeling like you need to be a professional copywriter. ⁠

4. You don’t even need to take all the images yourself. Guides allow you to borrow other people’s photos (posts) and write your own captions against them. Guides, therefore, solve the biggest barrier most businesses face “I don’t have images to use”.⁠

5. Guides give you new touchpoints to connect with your target audience. Did you know that you can share guides to stories, find them on the explore page and there’s even a dedicated tab in the Instagram shop for guides? ⁠

With all this effort, can you report on guides?

While there is no way to track the performance of guides (yet), any impressions from photos included in the guide count as an impression on the original post, so by using your own content you are in fact increasing its performance.

That’s why we encourage you to use your own content as these views act as another place to expose your potential customers to your content.

Well, the secret is out and now you know one of Instagram’s new content marketing weapons. Just remember, with great power comes great responsibility.

Instagram has come a long way from the days of being a basic social media platform for users to share their photos with friends and family.

In fact, this year Instagram announced it’s a video platform, which means the app is putting all its video features first.

With videos (both short and long-form), Lives, Stories, and now Reels, it’s no secret many of us have feature fatigue because no sooner have you learnt the latest feature, there’s a new one.

However, Instagram’s latest feature, Instagram Reels, have gained huge momentum, thanks to influencers and celebrities jumping onboard the short-form, portrait, video trend.

Dubbed the ‘TikTok copycat’, Reels allow users to create 3-60 second videos created within the app, using a mix of text, music, stickers, and other special effects – like your own postproduction house without any of techy know-how.

But are they reely worth the hype? Read on to discover why Reels needs to be part of your business’ social media strategy.

1. Reels allow you to get discovered thanks to more exposure

If you didn’t already know, the Instagram algorithm favours early adopters of its new features, like Reels.

Currently, Instagram favours Reels by prioritising them in the newsfeed, giving them more exposure than regular posts, so your Reel will benefit from more engagement with likes, follows, comments, shares and saves than other post formats.

Choosing Reels over other post formats will also improve the discoverability of your page by giving it a higher chance of being shown in the dedicated Reels tab or Explore tab by users who don’t already follow you.

Test the theory yourself: Create and post a reel and compare the numbers you get a day after posting it against your other ‘in-feed’ videos.

2. Reels showcase your business’ values, authenticity and personality

When it comes to Reels, you want to forget about hard-sell marketing and think more about connecting with your audience authentically.

The point of using Reels is to present a “more human” side to your business or brand, with less polished but more engaging videos.

Reels are a great way to bring your voice and personality to the platform with short-form videos using a mix of text, music, stickers, and other special effects.

The result? Reels are a simple way to build genuine relationships and if you’ve read this blog already, you’ll know where you have the customer’s trust you can drive transactions.

Think like a content marketer: Be real with your audience by showing what goes on behind the scenes to showcase your product or service with a reel. And no, you don’t have to dance or look like a fruit loop to do so.

3. Reels allow for easy collaboration with other brands and influencers

If you’re getting bored of the same old ways of collaborating with other brands and influencers, you’re going to appreciate the creativity and fun you can have while making Reels.

Reels were invented out of an influencer-led trend itself, as Instagram continues to introduce new features to meet the rise of influencer marketing.

This has meant leading businesses are ditching the heavily branded content for lo-fi and relatable videos made by influencers, while simultaneously leveraging their audiences.

If you’re keen to do an influencer Reel collaboration, check out our top 10 tips for working with digital influencers here.

Find inspiration: Get a feel for what works by scrolling through the Reels feed on the Explore tab and looking at the Reels of other accounts or brands you like.

4. Reels promote your products and services differently

Not much in this life is free, but making a Reel is.

Finding originality and your niche on the platform is what engagement all boils down to and Reels are a great way to showcase your point of difference.

People who don’t follow you will see your Reels in the dedicated Reels tab and via the Explore tab, so make sure your video is eye-catching and celebrates your unique selling point.

Questions to ask yourself: What aren’t my competitors doing on Reels that I can? How can I show the difference in my product/service? What will my followers get while watching this Reel?

5. Reels are an easy way to position yourself as a thought leader

Creating educational content is one of the best ways to position yourself as a subject matter expert.

Anyone that stumbles across your Reels, whether on purpose or by default, and is educated by them is more likely to engage or want to see more of your business’ content.

Reels are a great way to share recommendations, FAQs, tips, how-to tutorials, previews to products and services coming up, announcements and news.

This is the kind of content your target audience will value and make them want to save, share, and engage with it.

Struggling with educational content ideas? See our cures for Instagram caption-block here.

Start content creating: Get an employee to answer one or more questions you’re usually faced with at work day-to-day. You’ll be pleasantly surprised with how much content you’ll come up with.

Until the next IG-feature release, happy creating!

So you’ve got your business’ Facebook and Instagram accounts down pat – but what about LinkedIn?

A LinkedIn account is basically an online business card with tremendous sharing power and massive reach across thousands of industries, which is why we encourage all our clients (particularly those in professional services or appealing to a professional target market) to get active on this channel.

What’s the difference then between LinkedIn and other social media sites?

While people sign up to most social media platforms for personal reasons, LinkedIn, however, is an ocean of professional networking opportunities and draws a specific crowd; users looking for valuable information, leads for jobs, and industry updates.

Put simply, there’s customer demand on LinkedIn and you could be supplying it with information.

With over three million users now banking on LinkedIn’s nine billion impressions per month, this business-orientated site is one you don’t want to forgo.

Read on for seven reasons why this channel should be a major part of your strategy.

1. Searching and targeting

Although Facebook and Instagram are among the most popular social media sites worldwide, LinkedIn holds a much smaller, but more targeted, audience of professionals.

Because people tend to build their profiles on the platform like resumes, you have the ability to run in-depth searches and generate lists based on different demographics and detail for a more refined audience.

LinkedIn offers a clear-cut way of searching for people by job title, skills, companies they currently work for, as well as companies they used to work for, interests and more.

Idea: Try searching your target market by job title and connecting with them. For example, we work with a lot of Marketing Managers. A quick search of this job title reveals over 100 pages of potential new leads (but who is counting!).

2. Strategic positioning

You wouldn’t pass up a great networking opportunity in person, so why would you pass up one you can access anywhere, at any time?

Discover the power of positioning your business among other professionals and brands using LinkedIn in a networking capacity.

Due to its business emphasis, the newsfeed algorithm favours insights, business updates and information, giving your company an opportunity to showcase their expertise in the field.

With almost 750 million members and over 55 million registered companies signed up to LinkedIn, it’s never been easier to find, reach and position your business among clients and influencers in your industry.

Research indicating, LinkedIn has helped at least 45% of marketers with customer acquisition as they use the platform to establish credibility, influence and develop relationships with clients.

Build a community and optimize your profile positioning by sharing content that fits with your message and branding.

Idea: Don’t just post those blog posts and thought leadership whitepapers on your website. Serve them up on LinkedIn too.

3. Plenty of posting options

Have you ever posted something to social media which has tanked in engagement? Don’t worry, us too.

Enter LinkedIn, your holy grail when it comes to ‘getting likes’ because it has one of the lowest percentages of content production compared to other sites.

This means, if you post, you’ll be seen, unlike other platforms (*cough* Facebook), where you won’t receive a peep out of your posts without paying.

While other sites have been made for personal photo, video and event sharing, LinkedIn offers brands an opportunity to showcase work and milestones through a variety of posting options fit for businesses.

Give your brand more visibility by sharing content like blogs, infographics, webinars, podcasts and more with multiple posting options that can link directly back to your website.

Whether you post in networking groups, job posts or even promotions – you can customize anything you put on this platform.

Idea: Create a content calendar and show up weekly on LinkedIn for a month and see what happens? Our bet? Heaps of new sales.

4. Generating leads and driving website traffic

What if we told you LinkedIn beats Facebook by a whopping 277% when it comes to generating tangible leads?

Since the people who choose to sign up to LinkedIn are generally more interested in furthering their education and bettering themselves, they’re more likely to fill out lead generation forms and less likely to unsubscribe from consequent emails.

We can also bank in you being pleasantly surprised at the traffic, which has a high chance of converting into leads and eventually sales, that comes through to your business website when using LinkedIn.

Don’t believe us? We’ve experienced it first-hand, with Media Mortar’s LinkedIn driving more than 60% of our website traffic.

You can also boost this by using LinkedIn Ads, designed to target specific professionals by job title, function, industry, and more.

Idea: Take a look at your analytics and see how much traffic LinkedIn is driving. If it’s significant like us, it’s time to put down your IG Reels.

5. Becoming a thought leader and tapping into industry news

If we were to guess the social media buzzword of the decade, it would be “authentic”.

With 66% of professionals more likely to recommend a business if they followed a company executive on social media, becoming a thought leader to show your authenticity clearly has merit.

Become a thought leader on LinkedIn by communicating your purpose and showing up for your audience.

This is a great way to showcase your expertise, educate and give followers the content they’re chasing.

It’s also important to keep tabs on other professionals and brands by following their activities and staying on their radar.

Simply scanning the newsfeed can give you valuable insights and data as well as perspectives from other professionals using the platform.

Idea: Start writing an opinion piece! If you’re serious about becoming a thought leader, see how to start a blog for your business here.

6. Growing your network by optimising LinkedIn groups

Have you heard the saying when you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room? Well, LinkedIn gives you plenty of smart rooms to find yourself in.

LinkedIn groups are a handy tool to maximise your opportunities to network with people you might otherwise never get the chance to meet.

Right now, you can join up to 50 interest-based LinkedIn Groups, all while improving your business’ branding, visibility and credibility.

Keep informed in top conversations, interact with other members in your field, and gain valuable insights into a particular topic or industry exclusively.

Did I forget to mention, I’m connected to Richard Branson? Yeah, he’s in my networking circle.

Idea: Start by following your favourite authors and see what they have to say.

7. Finding new clients and recruitments

If you’re not hiring new team members via LinkedIn, what are you doing? With 40% of members logging into the professional networking platform daily, it’s easy to see why 90% of recruiters use the platform.

Attract your next recruit (or top client) via the platform and discover everything you need to know about them.

LinkedIn’s next-level search tool can also help head-hunt potential recruits, clients and like-minded professionals.

For example, wanting to hire an event coordinator? Search Events Coordinators and hit that follow button to your heart’s content.

Utilise the dedicated tool or free features to search for potential candidates and promote advertisements through your business page, profile or group.

LinkedIn provides a number of useful tools, free and paid options worth discovering, for businesses to connect with top candidates.

Take it from us – we poached our last two Media Mortar recruits through LinkedIn.

Idea: Become your own head-hunter (minus the crazy recruitment costs) with LinkedIn’s search tool.

People often ask me, “what’s it like running a business”? My answer for the past four years is always the same – it’s hard.

It’s both the hardest and most rewarding work I’ve ever done, and the most analogous situation I’ve found to it has been mothering a child.

Despite what it might look like from the outside, the hours are long and the praise short, but the good days far outweigh the hard ones.

Since Media Mortar turned four this April, I wanted to share four of my biggest learnings in running it, because we’ve come a long way since I wrote this post two years ago.

Whether you’re in the small business trenches already or are thinking of starting your own business, sink your teeth into my biggest learnings so far.

1. Hire for attitude not aptitude

In small business, attitude is everything because there is no place for it to hide.

Bad moods, fatigue, frustrations are not diluted by the other 150 people in the office, instead, they’re as contagious as the flu to a small team where a person’s energy is everything.

In hiring for our team, I’m proud to say we’ve only got it wrong once. I hired the wrong attitude by favouring aptitude and it didn’t end well.

When you hire with company values (which let’s be honest, in a small business are usually the owner’s values), you’ll end up with a team that’s excited to do their work.

It’s always been my view that you can teach skills, but you can’t teach a personality – and if I’m going to spend more time at work than I do at home, I damn well want my team to light me up and inspire me.

To hire for attitude, I recommend personality testing your new-hires and going deep down the referee-check rabbit hole.

2. Treat your employees how you’d like your customers treated

Richard Branson famously said ‘the way you treat your employees is the way they treat your customers’ and as usual, he’s spot on.

I always endeavour to give my employees the things that made a difference to me when I was an employee – birthday cakes, work anniversary presents and bonuses you don’t have to ask for.

For most of my career, a simple thank you from a senior level of management would have sufficed, let alone the bright shiny stuff.

What I’ve seen firsthand is when you treat your team right, they mirror that behaviour to your customers.

I’ve found that our client’s birthdays are remembered, their wins become our wins and there’s a more collegiate relationship between our agency and the client than you’d normally find.

3. Set boundaries as the owner but know when it’s OK to cross them

As a small business owner it’s easy to work 24/7. In fact, until I had my beautiful daughter Penny, I probably would have continued happily burning the midnight oil.

In fact, the first time I ever put an out of office on since opening the business was to go into the labour ward and I turned it off two weeks after her birth.

As a small business owner, it’s important to know your boundaries and police them or you’ll fall into the business burnout that so many self-starters trap themselves into.

A simple google of ‘business-owner fatigue’ reveals over 32 million war stories aka search results with a similar tale.

It’s therefore SO important to know your limits and stick to them. If you don’t want to be working on weekends, DON’T. If you want to log off at 3pm, DO IT.

But just as important as holding boundaries is knowing when to fold them. The boundaries you make for yourself can also be the boundary to your business’ growth.

After all, when you don’t do the work, there’s always someone else willing to do it. Don’t ever forget that.

4. Read red flags and listen to your intuition

I’ll let you in on a secret – of all the clients who didn’t work out with us, we saw them coming.

As you get better in business, you can spot a red-flag-client a mile off. In fact, client red flags are hardly discrete.

“We don’t have money to pay you, but want you to guarantee all your results” is as direct as they come.

Picture red-flag-clients more like a grenade whose ring-pull starts counting down to detonation from the first phone call.

And yet, from time to time, we make the mistake of letting these clients through the doors when logic gets in the way.

If I could give you one piece of advice, it’s to quieten down the logical noise – “we need the work” … “it’s not a long job” … “they’d be great for the portfolio” – and listen to your intuition when a client doesn’t feel like the right fit for the business.

What are the common red flags we see in our industry? You’ll find most of them in our 5 reasons to not outsource your social media management post.

And if you’re after some light reading, check out our social media post where we asked our audience what red flags exist with clients in their industry. Go on, have a chuckle @mediamortar on Facebook and Instagram.

Looking for more business advice like this?

• Download our FREE recommended business reading list

With over 500,000 million people interacting with Instagram Stories, or Instastories, every day, the question isn’t whether you should be on Instagram Stories but rather, are you doing enough with them?

If not, you’re missing out on a key part of consumer’s purchasing patterns, with research indicating 58% of consumer’s purchase decisions are made by something they’ve seen on Instagram Stories.

Since launching in 2010, Instagram Stories have provided a welcome rugged and raw alternative to the polished pictures found on Instagram feeds.

Before you start uploading your photos, videos or GIFs to your Instagram Stories, check out these eight ways to lift your Instastory game.

1. Create and design your Highlight Reels

If you’re going to invest time, energy and potentially moola pimping up your Instagram Stories, you’ll want to have somewhere to put them proudly on display.

Enter the Highlight Reels aka the row of circles that live below your bio, where Instastories can be saved on display forever rather than disappearing 24 hours later.

So how do you determine what type of content should live in your Highlight Reels?

Depending on your brand, you could group these based on your content pillars, different services, locations or products sold.

For example, a café might design its highlight reels around key services like breakfast, lunch or dinner, while a fashion boutique might opt for spring/summer and autumn/winter.

Remember – you need to upload an image as an Instagram Story before creating a Highlights Reel. If you get stuck, you’ll find a step by step plan in our Social Media Handbook.

Psst – don’t forget to revisit your Highlight Reels each quarter to ensure the content is still relevant. There’s nothing worse than an outdated highlight reel.

2. Create an Instagram Stories storyboard prior to posting

If you’ve been following Media Mortar for a while, you’ll know we are passionate storysellers and truly believe the power of stories is what drives sales.

Just like blogs, website copy and social media posts, Instagram Stories rely on 98% preparation and 2% actually posting.

When planning Stories for our clients, we storyboard on a Word document or PowerPoint to ensure they have a start, middle and end like a real story.

For example, if we are planning Stories for a tourism operator, we would pick five to eight images from one service and support each image with a short caption about what a visitor can experience.

By doing this, we’re taking the customer on the journey through the region and showing them (rather than just telling them) what they can experience.

The goal is to use short, sharp and informative copy to help paint the picture in the customer’s mind and let the image do the heavy lifting.

3. Schedule your Instagram Stories

“I don’t have time to do Instagram Stories” – said every small business owner ever.

But there is an easier way.

If you’re not yet scheduling your content, we recommend reading this post before you scroll any further.

For those already in the practice of pre-planning your content calendars, pre-planning Instagram Stories works almost the same way – if your scheduling tool allows it.

We use Later to manage all of our client social media accounts, and this platform allows us to plan Instagram Stories – including the selected image and copy.

While it’s not fully automated, we receive a notification when an Instagram Story is scheduled to post. In a few clicks, the image is downloaded to our phone along with the copy (caption), ready to be uploaded to the client’s social media account.

Top Tip: we recommend resizing the image to 1080px by 1920px before scheduling them in Later. This ensures your images are the perfect size when downloaded to your phone ready to post.

4. Understanding the different types of Instagram Stories

What kind of Instagram Stories are you telling? One that’s curated, re-shared or behind-the-scenes?

While curated and planned Stories are great for educating your customers or sharing key messages with them (these will likely be saved to your Highlight Reels) don’t forget about how Stories all started – unfiltered, unedited and authentic BTS images and videos.

These are a great way to get your face in front of the camera too – whether it’s popping in to say Happy Friday to your followers or sharing a snippet of your team in action.

Don’t forget possibly the easiest Stories of all – re-shared Stories. Each time your brand is tagged in an Instastory, you have the ability to reshare this to your feed, which brings us to our next point.

5. Community Management is key

Just like any organic or paid social media content, community management is essential for Instagram Stories too.

Think about your own experience, have you ever tagged a brand or business in your own Instagram Story and they either re-shared or responded? How did you feel?

I love when Brendan Pang from MasterChef responds to Stories when I’m making dumplings from his cookbook or when a restaurant re-grams my photo of dinner and drinks while I’m eating it.

You have the same power to make someone’s day by double-tapping, responding or resharing their content to your own Stories when they tag your brand or business.

6. Get creative with Instagram interactive tools

Want to engage with your community through Instagram Stories? Get them tapping with polls and quizzes.

Interactive tools (all built into Instagram Stories) can not only boost engagement with your followers, they can be used to learn more about your customers and their preferences.

If you’re a café owner and looking to try a new menu item, why not ask your audience using polls in your Stories to gauge interest in the new dish.

Seriously, brands used to have to pay good money for a focus group as effective as what you’ll find on Instagram Stories.

7. Reshare on Facebook Stories too

Do you only post your Instagram Stories to Instagram and not Facebook? Like the Old El Paso ad, “Porque no los dos?”

Since the platform allows for automatic sharing to Facebook Stories, there is zero additional work required to extend the reach of your stories to your Facebook followers too.

Facebook Stories may not be as widely used as Instagram ones, but who is going to say no to free exposure?

8. Share the workload between your team

We’re not going to sugar coat it, Instagram Stories can leave you feeling like you’re tied to your phone – but you don’t need to bear the burden of Stories alone.

Why not share the workload between your team members?

Create a weekly, fortnightly or monthly roster for posting and community management – whichever is best for your organisation.

After all, a problem shared is a problem halved.

Do you have any other top tips for Instagram Stories? Share them below.

Move over Zoom and Microsoft Teams, Melbourne just hosted its first IRL conference since COVID and the energy in the building was electric.

While the Victorian Tourism Conference was titled “Shaping the future of Victorian tourism” the presentations and conversations also provided a platform to reflect on learnings from the past year.

More importantly, for most of the 800 people in attendance, it was a chance to move beyond the computer screen and connect with industry partners face-to-face, some, for the first time.

With over 20 presentations at the Victorian Tourism Conference, there was a bucket load of learnings and lightbulb moments – here’s our top 11.

1. Live more in rainforests than banana plantations

While futurist and keynote speaker, Chris Riddel, may have been the final presentation of the Victorian Tourism Conference, his lightbulb moment – rainforests are dangerous places but banana plantations are predictable – was one of our biggest takeaways.

He explained you can walk into a rainforest, be bitten by a venomous snake and never come out alive. However, rainforests are also where you could find a small, yet-to-be-discovered spider that could cure cancer.

In business terms, rainforests are where entrepreneurs live, because it’s where you can break all the rules, where you seek fairness, not advantage, and where you can experiment and learn (to name a few).

On the other hand, banana plantations are predictable – each one is the same and the mentality and physical requirements to create a banana plantation follow the same guidelines.

Too many businesses live in banana plantations, where you have to be right every time, be perfect, and be great at your job rather than having the authority to rethink everything and innovate.

2. It’s time to be strategic

Throughout the conference, there was one theme that echoed through each presentation: 2020 was the year of agility. 2021 is the year of strategy.

Speakers shared how last year forced them to stay agile and be open to change rather than follow one strategic plan.

Craig Tilley – CEO of Tennis Australia – shared how he swapped the word strategy for scenarios, planning for what could happen rather than having one specific strategy for hosting the Australian Open at the start of 2021.

As an industry, now is the time when tourism organisations can start to put a strategy in place, after spending over 12 months being reactive to the ever-changing tourism industry.

3. Traveller confidence is growing

The words every tourism organisation has been dreaming to hear – traveller confidence is growing!

Michelle Levine – Roy Morgan CEO – shared how consumer confidence to travel is moving along the same trajectory as the intention to travel.

However, Matthew Burke – Regional Manager for Pacific, STR – pointed out current lead times are still sitting at around 14 days.

So, while traveller intentions and confidence are growing, don’t expect a flood of bookings for three, six or 12 months in advance.

4. Ask your customers what they want

Ever thought to ask your customers what they want when planning new products, services or experiences?

That’s exactly what Shane Delia – Restauranteur and Founder of Delia Group and Providoor (aka Maha, Biggie Smalls) did when he had to rethink his business when lockdown hit.

Unsure where to take the direction of his business when he closed the doors of his network of restaurants, he reached out to his database and asked them what they wanted.

The result: Providoor. A mulit-million dollar e-commerce business (delivering food from Melbourne’s best restaurants to consumer’s doors – and a saviour through Melbourne’s lockdown).

5. Rethink how you communicate with your customers

Tourism operators, listen up.

Want to increase pre-booked services at your establishment (think dinner, tour or spa bookings), limit the amount of pre-arrival questions from guests or generate reviews?

This is exactly what a Victorian-based accommodation provider achieved using timely emails.

Want an insight into what they did?

• Seven days before guests arrived, they sent an email to advise customers about the other services they offered, such as in-house dinners or tours and saw an uplift of 30% in pre-booked dinners.
• Three days before the guest arrived, they sent a pre-arrival email advising them of check-in procedures and what to expect upon arrival. This resulted in a 90% reduction in pre-arrival questions and queries.
• At the end of the stay, they sent a thank you email with a direct link to invite guests to leave a review, which resulted in a 26% increase in reviews.

Simple, right?

6. You heard it at the Victorian Tourism Conference first – Instagram is becoming a search engine

Hot off the press in the tech world, Instagram has been upgrading its search functionality where users can search by keywords, not just hashtags. Hello, social media SEO.

We’ve been told it’s still work-in-progress, so there’s no need to re-write your content marketing strategy just yet, but something to keep in mind with captions.

We did some further research on this, and you can read about it here.

7. Don’t underestimate your story

“Nothing is interesting about our [place/product/service],” *overheard* from way too many tourism operators or destinations we’ve worked with over the years.

As a marketing agency, we have heard this more times than we’ve ordered I Heart Brownies, and anyone following our social media knows that’s a lot.

During a panel discussion, Shae Keenan – CMO of Visit Victoria – reminded the room that “your story is interesting, don’t think your story doesn’t count”. Praise be Shae – thank you!

8. Be more like a brown rat

Ever heard of a Rattus Norvegius?

Commonly known as a brown rat or common rat, this mammal is known to eat the weakest of her litter to ensure longevity for the rest.

Speaker Mark Ritson believes businesses and brands should adopt the brown rat mentality to their products, services or experiences.

Rather than having an extensive offering for your customers, why not focus all your marketing efforts on the best performers and cut the rest.

He spoke about how Unilever adopted this approach – from having over 4,000 products in the portfolio in the 80’s to now just 400, they remain one of the biggest companies in the world.

9. Your strategy should fit on a single page

Throw out the 40-page document. It’s time to rethink strategy.

Develop three or four smart and simple objectives to lead your strategy.

Apply the same Rattus Norvegius approach to your strategy and keep it tight with fewer things carrying more impact.

*Marketers block your ears* Mark Ritson went as far as to say forget looking for a USP and focus on two things: awareness and association.

What are you doing to create awareness and what are you doing to help your customers feel connected (associated) with your product, service or experience?

10. Victorian Tourism Conference says don’t turn off the lights

This is something we witnessed a lot through COVID, brands and businesses turning off communication and going dark.

When it comes to brand building, it’s vital a business or brand keeps the lights on – even during a pandemic.

Why? Because keeping the lights on allows for achieving long-term brand-building strategies.

It’s fair to re-evaluate short-term brand-building strategies, such as promotions or marketing activations, but staying visible is key to reaping the rewards of a strong brand awareness years down the track.

11. Get your digital assets in order

Let’s talk about websites.

If you’re serious about SEO or improving your ranking on Google, there are things you need to do to move up the ladder organically.

Catherine and Stephen Toms from the Digital Marketing Institute shared some essentials every business needs to have in place if it wants to be visible organically.

• Make sure your website is secure. If your web address doesn’t start with HTTPS then you need to make this a priority
• Your website needs to have a fast load time – attention spans are reducing to two to three seconds
• It needs to be easy to navigate
• It needs to be mobile friendly – with 79% of people now searching on mobile
• You need to beef up your backlinks – which third-party or partner websites are linking back to your website?

In addition to how responsive your digital assets are, My Business should be every business’ best friend.

Don’t neglect to respond to those reviews as Google will give you a virtual frown and affect your ranking.

Psst – for ideas on how you can develop your organic assets, check out these resources we prepared earlier:

• 3 reasons organic content is not dead
• Our marketing asset audit
• How to create a customer avatar

 Were you at the conference? Let us know below what were your main takeaways from the two-day event?

As a content marketing media agency, you’d think we’d be the first to say outsourcing your social media management is always a good idea, but truth is, for some people, it’s a disaster.

And while we could take your money and run, we’d rather be honest and save us both the headache if you’re not ready for outsourced social media management.

In our experience, the reason most businesses look to an outsourced social media solution has very little to do with social media as a skill, but rather the time it takes to manage a social media account.

And while social media is time-consuming, it’s not always the best time a business should outsource …  especially if you fall into one of these categories.

1. You don’t value social media management

We don’t mean to get all truth-bomby on the matter, but if you don’t value social media management, you’re never going to value the work your agency (whether it’s us or another) does for you.

In turn, you’re not going to be happy about the invoices that float across your desk for social media management if you didn’t value why you needed to do it in the first place.

We’re not saying you need to be a prolific social media user (after all, that’s why you’re outsourcing social media), but you do need to know why it’s important for your business.

While it’s your agency’s job to prove to you why social media works through their return on investment, it’s not their job to justify the craft you asked for in the first place.

2. You don’t let the reins go

The corollary to the client who doesn’t value social media management is the business owner who doesn’t want to give it up; they want to still tightly hold onto the social media reins as though they were still running the channels themselves.

Usually this is the person who’s been running the social media accounts forever and regrettably doesn’t want to hand it over. They spend their days nit-picking every picture, post and hashtag with their own preferences you’d have to be a mind reader to know.

While accuracy is always important and you’ll always have a round of review as a Media Mortar client, if it’s a constant game of tom-ay-to / tomato, you’re probably best to keep running your channels yourself. In fact, we’d rather you did.

A better option would be to outsource something else that you’re not so tightly connected to.

3. You don’t review your posts or read your reports, ever

The flip side to the above, is the client who doesn’t check their social media or read their reports, ever.

While a silent client could be every agency’s favourite client, it’s very difficult to tell whether you like the work they’re delivering.

It’s important you keep an eye on the feed and provide constructive feedback of what you’d like to see more of. This way your agency can keep kicking goals for you.

4. You want everything go, go, go but can’t sign off things in a timely manner

Time is always of the essence on social media, you don’t need to tell your social media agency that.

We frequently have clients who want things turned around quickly (too easy!) but can’t sign off on said activity quickly enough for it to be relevant.

When it comes to social media, there are situations when you have to be timely. If you can’t clear your schedule for a single contact internally to green light the post, you can consider that social media post tomorrow’s digital fish and chips wrapper.

One clear line of approval and an escalation plan for any posts that require it is what your agency needs to manage social media effectively on your behalf.

5. You have unrealistic follower expectations

The amount of followers a business has is usually of interest only to the CEO.

Everyone with a marketing scroll knows it’s all about engagement and driving customers through the doors. That doesn’t mean every agency isn’t being assessed by vanity metrics by the person who ultimately pays the bills.

The CEO usually wants to know two things; how many followers do we have? How do we compare to our competitors?

All we’d say is if you want 1 million followers, you better have 4 million dollars to throw at the situation.

You don’t hire an agency and suddenly overturn the algorithm Facebook and Instagram have spent so long protecting. It doesn’t work like that. It never did and it never will.

Follower growth is slow and steady, and most brands with millions of followers should be commended for starting their channels eons before you did.

Looking for more social media tips and tricks?

• 6 reasons you should schedule your social media
• How to use social media to market your event
• How to report social media marketing

Every year as a business owner, I like to pull together a cathartic report of the year as I pen my new year’s resolutions for the business.

As I sit here in the first week of January 2021 starting on my reflection of the year that was – like most people, I don’t even know where to start.

2020 was something else; the highs were insurmountably high and the lows unfathomably low, like a rollercoaster where even the flat parts made you want to scream.

But importantly as I sit to write this reflection, what’s overwhelmingly important is that we live to tell the 2020 tale – something so many small business owners in Australia don’t have the pleasure of doing this morning.

And for that, we’re eternally grateful for our 2020 lessons.

If you’re easing back into the work year, grab yourself a cuppa with our Media Mortar highs and lows of 2020.

High 1: We connected with more of you on a regular basis

Like most content marketing agencies, our own marketing efforts consistently sit at the bottom of the pile, shoved aside in favour of a deadline or whichever squeaky wheel is squawking the loudest.

But when life throws your business a global pandemic – you focus your energy on yourself and what’s inside your control, which for us, was what we do best, make content.

This involved launching a podcast, CONTENTious, and feathering our SEO nest with blog posts like this one you’re reading now.

Rather than keep feeding the content wheel, we found more ways for our content to work harder for us.

We made a rule that in order for a piece of content to go live, every piece of content had to have an efficiency plan built around it. Every blog post became an Instagram caption (or three), a module within an eNewsletter, podcast transcript or webinar. We suddenly became more resourceful with our time than ever before thanks to the pandemic.

Deep dives into our analytics, which I talk about in this Marketing Mentor episode also revealed we were placing our emphasis on the wrong channels, which became our impetus for a serious LinkedIn content plan.

Key learnings:

• In times of crisis work within your sphere of control
• Play to areas of your strength
• Get thrifty with anything you’re making and find ways to repurpose it

Low 1: Losing 80% of our revenue in three days in March

There were three god awful days in March where the phone didn’t stop ringing, only I didn’t want to answer, because the only people calling were delivering bad news.

“With this COVID thing, we’re not really sure what’s happening so we’re going to need to put you on pause” was a recurring conversation, I got pretty good at fielding.

We were officially in free fall along with the rest of the tourism and events industry and I had to make hard calls, fast, to ensure the future of the business.

I still consider COVID a crash course in putting on my big girl pants and hardening up and without a doubt it taught me more than my two university degrees ever did.

Unfortunately, to weather the storm, I had to make a new starter who was already proving herself to be a wonderful addition to the team redundant and step the rest of the team back to three days a week, reducing my own hours and pay as well like any good leader should.

But behind every dark cloud were some silver linings, and the fact we were hit so hard so fast, meant we were one of the first businesses to start our recovery-race.

As every other industry felt the grips of COVID and had to offload staff, contractors and expenses, we’d somewhat already been there and done that and were working on the comeback.

Key learnings:

• When crisis hits, act fast. There’s no point putting your head in the sand
• You’re only as protected in a service agreement as the termination clause you set
• Difficult conversations are always difficult, even in a global pandemic

High 2: Hustling to find new clients in new industries

A dear friend of mine who runs a law firm has a rule, you should never let a client be responsible for more than 30 per cent of your revenue.

I like her rule, but raise her my COVID take on it, that you should never have an INDUSTRY responsible for more than 30% of your revenue. A lesson, I didn’t need to lose my clients to appreciate, but here we are anyway.

Our resolution coming out of COVID was to diversify into new industries, taking our same content marketing approach we’ve honed in tourism to other more diverse industries.

We started with a pitch list of potential targets to reach out to from industries we thought might not be hurting as hard as our friends in tourism and worked through them methodically.

The team adopted sales targets and worked their magic, reaching out to new industries and contacts in an environment where they were hit with more no’s than resounding yes’s.

Anyone who’s tried to drive new business in a pandemic will know exactly what I mean.

Key learnings:

• Write a list of potential targets and work through them methodically
• Sales is a game of numbers, the more offers you put out, the higher your chance of getting someone to say yes
• Pitching to new clients is a helluva lot easier when you have an active Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn pumping with high value content to assist people and support your position as an industry expert

Low 2: Watching dear clients have to make hard decisions and clients get made redundant

Not only did we need to live through our own redundancies and stand downs at Media Mortar, we had to watch our clients do the same in far greater scale than our small business.

When you’ve worked with the same clients for three years, as naff as it sounds, their pain becomes your pain.

Many of our colleagues, friends and contacts within businesses took redundancies (voluntary or otherwise), which was hard to watch from the outside looking in.

Key learnings:

• You know your clients mean the world to you when you feel their pain
• COVID didn’t discriminate between businesses large or small – the largest companies we work with had some of the largest impacts

High 3: Creating more profit across all areas of the business

There’s nothing quite like a clean out of clients to make you reassess your profit margins and price structure.

We put the downtime to good use with a new pricing structure for new clients across social media management and paid ads.

The pandemic ended contracts with a handful of legacy clients we’d been over servicing for years, freeing up the mental bandwidth and space for new and exciting industries to come along.

We also got crystal clear about what services we do and don’t offer at Media Mortar, which has brought instant profitability into what we’re doing for 2021 and beyond.

Key learnings:

• Sometimes you need space to see what’s really working, and what’s not
• Just because you’ve always done something doesn’t mean its profitable

Low 3: The fatigue is real

As a team who previously worked in the marketing of holidays, I can tell you we’re also good at taking them ourselves.

But when Australia shut its borders and no one could travel, the workplace felt even more fatigued with nothing to look forward to.

They say even just planning a holiday or meal out gives you a shot of oxytocin (the love hormone) so with all of our favourite things shut, it made personal lives that little bit harder – especially for Rochelle in our Melbourne office who spent most of the year at home in lockdown.

The result? We all limped through to December feeling that bit more tired than we’d normally feel.

Key learnings:

• Annual leave is there for a reason – we saw firsthand what fatigue can do to people
• We tried to turn fatigue around with a mental health day in October, which was so successful we’re going to implement them quarterly