What The Romans Can Teach Us About Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing becomes more competitive every day, with almost countless individuals, businesses, and other organizations taking their messages to digital platforms. It’s noisy. It’s messy. It’s relentless. And while data science and analytics paint better and better pictures of our work, social media marketing can still feel like a crapshoot.

 

Times like these, we can find help in the fundamentals. I’m not talking organic vs. inorganic engagement or reputation management 101.

 

I’m talking basic principles of persuasion. I’m talking about the Romans, ancient Romans. Togas and legions. Those ones.

 

They, too, had their communication problems, and like any good writer or speaker, they stole ideas from others (the Greeks) and added a few pieces of their own. Rome’s most celebrated speaker and writer, Cicero, came up with what he called “the five canons of rhetoric,” that is, the five key ingredients to the process of persuasive communication:

 

  • Invention
  • Arrangement
  • Style
  • Delivery
  • Memory

 

These ancient canons of rhetoric can help us create, frame, and manage social media marketing strategies that are consistent yet flexible, persuasive but not pushy. No kidding. Here’s how, canon by canon.

 

Invention

 

“Invention” here means the creation of ideas, topics, and messages. Ancient communicators devoted much of their time to figuring out methods of invention.

 

What are you going to say? Who are you going to say it to? What does your audience believe in and feel? What about your company, brand, and product is unique and worth building stories about?

 

Explore these questions and much more to strategize your social media messaging. Don’t keep these core messages fixed forever, but have clear ideas and purposes when you do implement the messaging. Think before you speak.

 

Arrangement

 

“Arrangement” for Cicero and his fellow Romans meant the structure of the speech: the introduction, body, conclusion, and so on.

 

Strictly speaking, we can apply this canon of rhetoric to the individual messages we create. Is there a piece of the post that attracts the eye, a piece that first engages the reader, a piece that calls the reader to action? These are some basic building blocks of many social media posts.

 

But we can also apply the Arrangement canon more broadly:

 

How do you organize your messaging so that posts build upon each other? When does it make sense to cross-post between Facebook and LinkedIn, and when does it not?

 

Create posts that work with each other to build a coherent, compelling story about you. Build an overarching narrative to draw your audiences in and keep them around. (See why a clear Invention process is so important now? As we’ll see, these canons of rhetoric work with each other.)

 

Style

 

Style is more straightforward. It’s the tone. The feel. When Cicero spoke before a jury—he was a hugely successful lawyer—he had to make a stylistic call: sarcastic invective or stern Roman Citizen? Appeal to the gods, or appeal to the Senate and People of Rome?

 

Tone on social media is difficult, to say the very least. Strike the wrong tone and your brand could be dead in the water. Strike the right one and your brand could catch fire (the good kind). As soon as your business has a Twitter account, you’ve got the tiger by the tail. Speak well and keep it happy.

 

Your best education here is the real-world successes and spectacular failures of other brands on social media. See what audiences genuinely respond to.

 

Some companies like Wendy’s have made a success of being snarky on Twitter. Arby’s has decided to use food art, memes, anime, and video games references to sell roast beef.

 

A login screen for a video game is recreated using paper and featuring Arby's food.
This post (also cross-posted to Instagram) makes a video game reference. It still features Arby’s product, but its emphasis is on engaging  and entertaining their target audiences on these platforms (younger folks, to say the least).

 

 

On the other hand, during the viral #Laurel vs. #Yanny debate, the U.S. Air Force decided to introduce the unique sound that its A-10 Warthog makes while firing 4000 rounds/minute in Afghanistan.

 

Screenshot of a now deleted US Air Force tweet featuring an A-10 Warthog.

 

Yeah, that didn’t really jive with the vibe of the whole thing, and the post was soon removed.

 

Delivery

 

Delivery regards the performance itself. Another great Roman rhetorician, Quintilian, went to great lengths describing how the speaker’s toga should be handled during their speech. (Keep it neat at first; then, near your exciting conclusion, let the toga become disheveled to eloquently reflect your exertion.)

 

Now, no kidding, delivery is more complex—but just as important.

 

In social media marketing, delivery means deciding which messages should be pushed at what times and on which platforms. LinkedIn for B2B, Instagram and Facebook for B2C, and so on. Your chosen medium and target audience have a very close relation. “Medium is the message” and all that.

 

Delivery also means incorporating multiple media into your messaging. Mix up the medium you use to communicate. Company photos and other images, gifs, memes, infographics, good old-fashioned text, videos—a healthy social media strategy should rely on multiple channels to deliver messaging.

 

Finally, timing is a critical to delivery. The ancient Greeks had a great word for this: Kairos. It’s a word for time that expresses “the appropriate time” rather than, say, clock time.

 

Be sure to post regularly to maintain audiences and engagement. Consider having a regular series of posts that you deliver at consistent times every week or month, like the classic whiteboard Friday from Moz. Post an announcement when your company completes an exciting project. (Remember: “exciting” is defined by your audience and industry.)

 

In addition to scheduled deliveries, remain flexible enough to respond to any relevant current events and trends. Doing so can be enormously helpful, making your social media strategy more organic, and organic engagement is almost always better. Just wade carefully. Watch that tone!

 

Memory

 

And finally, we arrive at Memory. For Cicero, this was simply remembering what he had to say. He and many other speakers over the centuries have had many mnemonic devices to remember their speeches accurately.

 

For social media marketing, Memory is the part that drives us a little crazy, makes us a little paranoid at night.

 

Memory is the structure we build to ensure that all our good ideas and plans actually get implemented. It’s the “management” part of social media management.

 

You have to keep a handle on your Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram—each of which has the potential for great reach and engagement, each of which has the potential for a digital faceplant. You might as well be juggling career-ending katanas.

 

Thankfully, we have tools to manage our social media presence across different platforms. Hootsuite. Buffer. Sprout. Myriad others. Each has its advantages. Research them. Determine which is best for your business and audiences. Use one, lest your campaign sputter out and join the littering remains of countless social media initiatives on the internet.

 

 

Social Media Marketing with the Five Canons

The art of rhetoric, i.e. the art of persuasion, is very old. Above anything else, rhetoric experts have always emphasized the adaptability and dynamism of effective persuasion. These Five Canons blend with each other and are most definitely not a Step 1, Step 2 process.

 

If you never come back to Invention, your strategy will fail. If you never adapt your tone for the situation, your strategy will fail. Think on your feet. Never stop reading the room. Have a plan, but be willing to throw it out. Social media marketing is a crapshoot. Knowing some rhetoric will help. Smart speakers and writers have been discussing how to best persuade audiences for millennia. Don’t leave all that learning on the table when you sign into Facebook.

 




 

 

Manufacturing Marketing Essentials: How to Develop an SEO Strategy

Effective search engine optimization (SEO) for your manufacturing marketing needs a craftsman’s approach: methodical, deft, patient.

The target audiences of SEO are always people, not algorithms, as some people think at first blush. You provide real value to your audiences, and the search engine will recognize that and reward your website with a higher relative ranking.

The problem:

People make slippery targets. There’s no way to precision manufacture persuasive messaging like you can gaskets. There’s a reason Aristotle called persuasion a craft rather than a science.

Here are the three basic steps to craft a worthwhile SEO strategy for your manufacturing marketing strategy:

  • Keyword Research
  • Content Creation
  • Backlinking and Citations

Below you’ll find how these abstractions can be applied in manufacturing marketing.

Although you simply must know the technical foundations of SEO, always remember to think about people before you think about algorithms and analytics.

The sales cycle in manufacturing is long. Decision-making is deliberate and rational. Smart SEO will attract visitors and, along with your other marketing, help nurture leads into conversions.




 

Keyword Research for Manufacturing Marketing

Keyword research is the process of analyzing your audiences, your own company, and your search-result competitors. At the end, you should produce a document that lays out the keywords most worth investing your time and resources into.

Do it right, your website will rank highly for keywords relevant to your business’s services. That means higher quality leads.

Long-Tail Keywords

Develop a keyword strategy that targets what SEO experts call “long-tail” keywords. Long-tail keywords are longer keywords that are more specific queries, e.g. “motorcycle helmet” vs. “bluetooth motorcycle helmet.” “Bluetooth motorcycle helmet” receives considerably less search traffic, but someone searching for it has a better idea of what they want and so is likely further along the sales lifecycle.

 

 

Long-tail keywords receive less traffic, but they convert customers more effectively because the person using a specific keyword has a specific purpose in mind. These keywords are also easier to rank higher in search engine results because there’s typically less competition.

Let’s take an example relevant to manufacturing:

“CNC machining” vs “CNC machining services” vs “5 axis cnc machining”

Using a keyword analysis tool like those from ahrefs, we can see the search volume for each of these keyphrases:

 

Search volume is monthly, e.g. 6600 searches nationwide/month for “cnc machining.” “KD” is keyword difficulty, a metric created by ahrefs to estimate how difficult it is to rank highly for the keyphrase. “Clicks” refers to how many of the clicks on results users performed for the given keyphrase.

 

Think about the people behind these searches:

Anyone from a first-year engineering student to a fan of How It’s Made, could be searching for “CNC machining.”

Someone who’s searching more specifically for “cnc machining services” or “5 axis cnc machining” is more likely to actually be searching for the service. That makes these phrases efficient targets for search optimization.

If your company can provide 5 axis CNC machining services, then ensure that keyphrase is a part of your keyword strategy.

Research long-tail keywords that are relevant for your services, and use them on your site’s metadata, in your website content, and in any other content (like blogs) you publish.

 

Competitor Analysis

While you figure out which keywords will best represent and drive traffic to your services, you also need to analyze your competitors for which keywords they rank highly with.

Ranking is always competitive. There’s not an abstract quality you must reach to rank high in search results; you just have to do better than the people ahead of you.

You want to see what they’re doing to rank well. If the top-ranking pages are mostly pages with 1000+ word content with images, links, or other elements, then you know you’ll need in-depth content to have a shot at ranking up with them.

Looking at your competitors’ high-ranking pages will inform how your team approaches content creation to beat them. Which brings us to…

Content Creation

Once you have a solid keyword strategy, you need content to execute it. If you’re serious about SEO for your company, you need to make quality, keyword-optimized content the backbone.

Competitor research also helps determine the kind of content you create. You need to put out better stuff than the high-ranking competitors.

Say your company does precision machining parts here in Minnesota. Check out the top 10 results for “precision machining.”

 

Screenshot showing the top 4 results for the Google search "precision machining"
Results are based on our Rochester location, so you’ll see different results depending on your location.

 

Read through each of the competing pages to see what kind of content they have to help rank this high. What’s the word count? How do they organize their information? What keywords are being used in titles, headings, content?

 

Content That Helps You Rank

Remember to keep your audiences at the forefront of manufacturing marketing strategy at all times. The smart use of keywords will attract searchers, but the job of good SEO doesn’t stop there.

The content on your site must keep your visitors engaged and satisfy whatever purpose they had for visiting in the first place. Google’s eternal quest is to track user satisfaction with their search results, so if you optimize a page for “5 axis cnc machining,” it better have the substance to back it up!

When your visitor comes to your website through a search result and sticks around for a while, we call that “the long click.” Google loves the long click because that (more likely) means the user is satisfied with their search and result. That means Google wants to keep your site around, and higher, in their results for that search.

Consistent content creation also matters for optimization purposes. The more you add useful content to your site, the more you signal your website’s credibility and authority. It can also provide more entryways to your website.

For example, if your website has a well-written post about “thermoforming vs injection molding,” you can rank highly for that phrase and pull in that traffic to your site – generating more leads for customers who are earlier in the sales lifecycle and trying to decide which service to choose.

There’s much more to know about content creation for manufacturers, but we’ll cover that in a future post and stick strictly to the aspects of content that relate to optimization here. (This post will be updated when the new post on content drops.)

High-quality content creation is essential for manufacturers—it takes a lot of time and resources to switch suppliers, so you need to make persuasive arguments.

To sum it up for SEO’d content: satisfy user intent!

 

Backlinks and Citations

A Brief Explanation and Example

Backlinks and citations refer to other websites referring to your website and your company. It could be a link to a page of your website (a “backlink”) or name-dropping your company (a “citation”).

See our earlier post for an in-depth explanation of citations.

Other sites linking to your site lends your site more authority. Essentially, a backlink is another site stating its confidence in your site.

Backlinks are essential to building your site’s authority in Google’s eyes.

Here’s an example from one of our clients:

Northland Fastening was featured in a commercial by North American Banking Company. North American Banking Company also included a write-up on their website about their long relationship.

 

 

This link here lends the banking site’s authority to Northland Fastening System’s site.

 

How to Get Backlinks

When you pursue backlinks from other sites—and yes, you should invest time doing outreach if you’re serious about SEO—it’s best to get links from high-authority, credible sites who aren’t competing for the same keywords.

Some backlinks come from directory sites. For example, if you’re an industrial supplier, you’re going to want a listing and a link from www.thomasnet.com, a longtime name in the industrial marketplace and a website with good authority.

You also leverage high-quality content to get backlinks and references to your site. This veers into content marketing, which can’t be reasonably covered in this post.

Essentially, you want to create high-quality content about your business, your services, your industries, your people. Create informative content to become an authoritative, trusted. Publish content about your people and your teams to humanize your company.

After posting on your website, your best content must also be shared in appropriate platforms for different audiences. It’s easiest to share on social media—and you should do so—but it’s not guaranteed to drive traffic to your site.

You can do some outreach to relevant organizations and people in the industry. For example, if your company has expertise in plastics manufacturing, you could reach out to https://www.plasticstoday.com/, a “community for plastics professionals.”

Their website has a domain authority of 60, which would make them a great domain to get a link from.

You also want to do competitor research again. Use a link analysis tool (like from www.moz.com) to see where your keyword competitors get their best, most authoritative backlinks. Try outreach to get backlinks from the same and similar sources. If you have the right purposes and right content, classic sources of high-quality backlinks are news and education websites.

 

SEO for Manufacturers

Effective search engine optimization will boost your manufacturing marketing and increase quality leads. This post has focused on keyword research for content creation and distribution. However, there are other critical factors to SEO, like your site’s metadata and other more technical aspects.

It takes time and effort to build and maintain a working SEO campaign, and the information above is just the basic starting point.

To do it well, your team needs skills in research, analysis, writing, and (some) coding. SEO needs a craftsman’s approach. It’s unique for each business, and it takes a set of specialty skills; don’t count on a quick-and-dirty approach to get sustainable results.

If you’re looking for a team who’s got the skills, tools, and time to develop and maintain an SEO strategy, learn more about MLT Group or get in touch with us today. Contact us and we’ll get a site audit to you in 48 hours or less.