While social media marketing has come a long way over the last decade, its goal remains the same: to foster interactive platforms for individuals to share, discuss, and co-create content.

When done the right way, social media has big-time potential to build your community, grow your customer reach, boost engagement, and drive traffic to your website (and conversions too!). In fact, according to Sprout Social, when consumers follow a brand on social, 87% say they’re likely to visit that brand’s site or app.

Social media is no longer just a “nice-to-have” for enhancing your online presence. After all, it’s where your existing and potential customers and buyers hang out the most. But sometimes, your social media efforts can do more harm than good if you’re not sending the right message, participating on the channels in a meaningful way, or are failing to collect and track data effectively.

Do any of these not-so-rare social media cardinal sins sound like you?

Are you:

• … guilty of throwing content out into the universe without a clue of who you’re talking to? You might be a Community Crapshooter.
• …employing a “more is more” strategy (or lack thereof), by posting as much as possible in an attempt to stay relevant? You might be an Over Sharer.
• …using social channels as a soapbox for your brand and failing to truly engage your followers? You might be an Anti-Social Ghost.

If so, you may have fallen into an impersonal social media vortex that many brands find themselves in. Fortunately, we have some tips for how to break the cycle and put the “social” back in your social media.

It’s no secret that personalizing your customers’ experience boosts satisfaction, loyalty, and sales.

Successful personalization delivers a consistent and seamless customer journey across channels (email, website, social, etc.). In fact, according to Salesforce, 75% of consumers expect consistent experiences across multiple channels, with 73% likely to switch brands if they don’t.

To help you get started, we’re sharing three tips for connecting your website and email personalization strategy for delivering relevant, memorable experiences that build brand loyalty, motivate action, and increase sales.

This week, we welcome a guest post from our Marketing Account Manager, Lea Howland.

Lea works with our clients to maximize their website and email strategy, guiding them on how to leverage digital technology to achieve their goals. She specializes in creating and implementing strategic roadmaps for client success – translating best-in-class digital tactics into actionable plans.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) is a popular marketing automation software enabling marketers to target and track interactions using the powerful data capabilities of Salesforce.com (SFDC) CRM, right out of the box. Combining SFMC and SFDC ensures all leads receive the attention they need through targeted, automated marketing and your sales team—leading to a more efficient, effective, and aligned sales process.

Any tool that helps get sales and marketing alignment is a win in our book! In fact, Salesforce found that “62% of marketing leaders say individuals and teams in their departments are more aligned with each other than ever…and the more aligned they become, the better they perform.”

Today, we’re covering a few tips to help Salesforce Marketing Cloud users maximize tools within the platform to better support their sales team and marketing efforts, while growing ROI.

Shopping on social media just got a whole lot easier.

Last year, Instagram released shopping tags, enabling brands to create hybrid marketing and advertising content with tags that display product and price details directly on posts. But the much-loved social media platform has taken it to the next level.

Instagram announced that it began rolling out a new in-app checkout feature that makes it easy-breezy for ‘grammers to shop their feed and favorite brands.

This is a big move for Facebook, the parent company of the popular photo-sharing app, into becoming a full-fledged commerce business. Although direct checkout is currently in limited testing with 20-something top brands, Instagram plans to extend the feature to more businesses in the coming months.

Want to know how you can get in front of your brand’s biggest fans? Learn how the checkout feature works, how to get started, and what it means for your devoted followers.

The Gift and Home Industry is changing – what can you do to keep up? To stay competitive, buyers and vendors must transition their business from old world commerce to new world commerce – fast.

Meet Pharos – an affordable, mix-and-match product suite built to enable Gift and Home companies to amplify and personalize marketing efforts across channels, deliver proactive customer service, deepen customer relationships, and increase sales.