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First of all, wtf even is the Metaverse? Here’s what we kind of know:

The metaverse is the future of the internet.

The metaverse is a shift in how we interact with technology.

They are virtual universes that merge reality and the virtual world.

A metaverse’s timeline syncs with real-world timing.

The metaverse does not pause or end when you leave them. They continue indefinitely.

They’re a fully functioning universe that allows users to create, own, sell and invest.

Whilst it sounds quite daunting at the moment, if you put it into perspective, it’s not too far off from how we’re living right now. A lot of us already use our phones 8-10 hours a day and spend our spare time binge-watching TV or playing video games online with our friends or strangers. Whether we want to admit it or not, we are already heavily immersed in digital life.

A poll of 2,000 adults found the typical week will see 59 hours – the equivalent of more than two full days - spent using the internet. - The Independent / NordVPN


According to Meta, the metaverse they are envisioning is still 10-15 years away, however there’s no denying that things are starting to look less IRL and more VR lately.

Companies are now thrusting themselves towards virtual trends before they get left behind. So far already in 2022 we’ve seen a booming rise in VR headset sales, Gucci sold a digital bag for $4,115 (their physical bags cost $3,400 in stores), a virtual H&M clothing collection with Maisie Williams and PLT using their first virtual model.

It’s all escalating pretty quickly right?

So what does this mean for marketing in the metaverse?

The metaverse isn’t just a trend, it’s here to stay so make sure you stay up to speed with the latest updates.

The metaverse we are all imagining isn’t quite here yet (and may be years away still) but virtual trends and worlds are happening right now.

Create virtual experiences that tie in with your real-world marketing.

Could you offer immersive experiences that users can interact with?

Keep up to date with Decentraland to see what others are doing in a virtual world.

The metaverse will allow brands to reach new audiences in fresh and creative ways.

Start thinking about how and when your brands can show up in the metaverse.

Connect with already existing members and experts of the Metaverse to build strong campaigns.

Be open and willing to experiment but also aware of the challenges you may face.

Consider that the later you join, the costlier it may become for marketing efforts.

And that’s just scratching the surface! We strongly advise you jump down that rabbit hole of metaverse research so you can help to keep your brands relevant.

Are You Ready For Metaverse Marketing?

What do you want to achieve from your paid social media advertising?

First things first, work out what it is you want to achieve. You always need a clear goal for any marketing campaign, whether it’s awareness, traffic or conversions, as your objective sets your measure of success.

If you’ve run a few paid social campaigns, however big or small, then you’ve got some data to work with which is always a bonus. Use this data to help set target KPIs and calculate results based on previous spend thresholds.

If you’re working it out in the dark, things are a little more complicated. You can use paid social benchmarks for your industry to calculate what you’ll get for different levels of spend. This is a good way to kick things off, and then you can check data once everything is live and re-forecast.

We’ve put together this handy template to help you forecast your spend across several different types of paid social. See which seems appropriate for your brand and what you’re hoping to achieve.

Visit here to download our paid social budget template


Some other things to consider when setting paid social budgets…

Your other marketing activity will impact results on your paid social campaigns, and vice versa. If brand awareness is low this will push up your average costs on paid social campaigns. Paid social should be used as part of your channel mix - don’t put all your eggs in one basket and make it your whole strategy.

For example you could be tempted to funnel all your spend through Facebook, and ignore the other paid social opportunities. We wouldn't recommend this for a few different reasons. Firstly, if Facebook has an outage then all your marketing campaigns will go off with it - definitely less than ideal! But not only that, in today’s digital landscape, you want a marketing strategy that’s synergised with multiple touch points for a consumer. People rarely see one advert and convert straight off the back of it, you need to vary your channels and communications to stay front of mind.

marketer working on a paid social media advertising budget

How Much Should You Spend On Paid Social Media Advertising?

The days of caring about Instagram post likes are slowly fading into the realm of irrelevancy. Nowadays, comments, shares, and saves are what really boost engagement rates. New features on Instagram, including the ability for only the uploader to view the amount of likes their post has received, have only reinforced this. 

When planning your Instagram strategy, it’s essential to create saveable content to encourage your audience to interact with it long after it’s gone live.

Saveable content is simply content that your audience wants to view again. People saving your Instagram post is a strong indicator that your content has resonated with them, and that they found it valuable enough to save it for later. 

This type of content often includes lists, tips, recipes, tutorials, infographics and videos. When it comes to Instagram saves, perhaps a user liked your content but wasn’t ready to consume it when it was served to them, so they bookmarked it for later, or perhaps your content resonated with them enough that they want to keep viewing it again and again. Either way, the save will boost your engagement rate, telling Instagram your account is a popular one. This means your content is more likely to be served up organically by the algorithm.

Swwim’s Top Tips for Generating More Instagram Saves

We’ve got four tips to help you create saveable content for your audiences:

Writing longer, more in depth captions is a great way to make your post saveable. If you can't add the saveable content you want into the feed image, add the detail to the caption instead. They are essentially then saving the caption to come back to and read, not necessarily the image itself.

Encourage your audience to save the post with a call to action in your captions! Phrases like, ‘save this for later’, or ‘come back and tell us...’ are great ways to get your audience engaging with your posts.

Evergreen content is content that retains its relevance over time. Things like motivational quotes, calendar events for the year or checklists are great ways to get your audience to save content that will be relevant to them for weeks or months to come. See our blog post on 

For your actual feed post to be more saveable, use formats like infographics, lists, tutorials and tips to make content that your audience wants to come back to. For example, if we turned these tips into an Instagram post, it would be a great way to get our audience saving!

person viewing instagram saves on their phone

Are Instagram Saves Important?

Although there are varying opinions and number scales, a micro influencer can generally be described as an influencer with under 100,000 followers. Brands are starting to realise that there are many benefits to working with influencers with a slightly smaller following. The main reason is often the lower costs compared to their more pricey peers, but there are many other reasons why micro-influencers are a great call, and a necessity to your marketing strategy. 

Working with macro influencers can be amazing for your brand. They’re able to reach more people with their wealth of followers, and can use their influence to affect consumer purchase decisions, increase website traffic and follower growth. However, brands often make the mistake of choosing to work with influencers purely based on their numbers. While this can be necessary depending on your goal, it usually is not the most important factor when it comes to choosing influencers.

Why Micro Influencers Need to be Apart of your Social Strategy

Where users with bigger followings get countless offers and deals in their inbox every day, smaller influencers often have more time and budget to say yes to more projects.

With bigger influencers, often companies will count themselves lucky if they get a mere story mention. Where micro influencers may have more time to spend on products, they often go above and beyond content expectations.

Nowadays, it's becoming harder and harder to gift to bigger influencers as they receive so many products and service offers every day. With smaller influencers, they tend to have fewer offers and therefore are more likely to accept gifting and share content in exchange.

A macro influencer is unlikely to post about a brand organically after being paid to do so previously, as they know they can still get more money and essentially would be giving away free advertising. Micro influencers often need content to share with their followers and want to build a good relationship with brands, so are more likely to revisit and share products more than once.

Audiences you may not have reached before, and in more niche categories can be targeted in a more focused and personalised approach. With bigger audiences from macro influencers, sometimes you can end up showing your products off to people who aren’t interested. 

Establishing relationships early on with micro influencers can be beneficial for the future. A lot of accounts will grow exponentially over time and this enables you to grow with them, so they remember you and your brand when they are in the ‘big leagues’.

Of course, the most obvious benefit to working with smaller influencers is their lower prices. This can be convenient when you have a small budget to spend but need to raise brand awareness. Additionally, a lot of micro influencers will be open to gifting in exchange for coverage, saving you even more.

Most macro influencers work with a manager or team who deals with their PR requests and collabs. This can be great in most situations, but sometimes it can be easier to get through to them about your product and service when you can pitch it directly to them, and cut out the middle man. It also allows you to begin to build genuine, personal relationships with them.

micro influencer taking picture for a brand

What Are The Benefits Of Micro Influencer Marketing?

Use Instagram analytics and 3rd party software to track and monitor the best times to post from your accounts. Sites like Hootsuite, Later and Iconosquare can tell you the most engaging times to post every day, and when your followers are most active so you can target them while they are online. You can also select times based on the content of your post, for example if you are posting a recipe idea, try sharing in the afternoon so it can serve as dinner inspiration for your followers and encourage them to engage.

Make the most of Instagram’s features and use story stickers to open up conversations with your followers. There’s a Q&A feature, polls and quizzes that can be added to your stories to help open up a two-way stream of conversation between you and your followers, so you aren’t just talking at them all the time, but with them. Also including prompts in your captions can get discussions going in the comments - make sure to reply and engage to keep them interested!

According to research, the most popular caption length in 2020 was over 400 characters! And these posts were found to have more engagement. So make sure to pack all your info into the caption and keep your audience interested.

Instagram saves are a great way to boost engagement. To increase post ‘savability’, create content that your followers will want to revisit. This can include ideas, inspiration and tips, like if this post appeared on Instagram! Check out our blog post on 

Views are an extra source of engagement for Instagram posts, so try to get lots of video content on your feed. They generally tend to perform better with audiences and can be fun to make! Instagram reels are also a great way to be experimental with bite-size content in a creative way. If you’re wary about broaching the Tiktok world, this can be a good taster.

Hopefully these top tips have inspired you to create more engaging content. If you're looking for more help and advice, 

How To Increase Instagram Engagement

You’ve probably heard the term ‘evergreen content’ being thrown around when it comes to your content creation strategy, but what is it and why do we need it? To sum it up in a sentence, it’s content that stays relevant, valuable and isn’t time-sensitive. Long after it’s published, evergreen content continues to drive traffic. Read on to learn more about this valuable content type and how you can benefit from it within your business.

To help us understand what constitutes evergreen content, it is helpful to know the sort of content that is 

Content created around a specific topic season e.g Christmas gift guides, or New Years Resolution tips

Articles or content focused on current hot topics or trends

This sort of content may be popular at the time of posting, which has its own benefits. However, as time passes, it’s possible the content will fall ‘out of style’. Evergreen content, on the other hand, includes:

Lists - featuring a series of facts, tips or quotes. Also known as 

Including one of these formats in your content creation won’t automatically make it evergreen, however, these formats lend themselves nicely to evergreen content. For example, a practical ‘How To’ video on how to use a product is likely to continue to be useful for the viewer after the original publication.

How can you make your content more evergreen?

For example, we created a blog post for our clients Alpha Crew providing tips on how to 

begin a career within the security industry

. This post is unlikely to become irrelevant due to the fact that it’s an industry that will continue to offer job opportunities, with people continually seeking more information about this career path. Therefore it’s likely that this post will continue to drive traffic over a long time frame. This type of content will help Alpha Crew to stay relevant within their industry.


People are always seeking information and will continue to do so indefinitely. Good information is invaluable and by producing content that aims to teach people something new, you are likely creating something that will continue to be engaging for months to come.

“How to setup your exercise bike to ensure good form”

“How to write an engaging email newsletter”

“How to plan the perfect 30th birthday”

Consider what your target audience may be looking to learn and use this as a great starting point for creating valuable How-To content.

Whatever your business, FAQ posts are super valuable for your audience. They’re one of the easiest ways to acquire new customers whilst also saving time answering repetitive questions. Whilst being timelessly valuable, FAQ pages also drive new website traffic. This is down to the fact that Google’s main goal is to answer questions, so by putting your text in a Q&A format, you’re doing half the search engines work. To keep FAQ content evergreen be sure to update the post with any relevant new information.

Here are some ideas of content to include within your FAQ page:

Information to help customers choose the right product e.g how to choose the right size

Any unique selling points that might influence the customers buying decision

Common myths about your product/industry - Fact vs Fiction

Building trust with your audience is a great way to encourage conversions. A “Meet the Team” post helps potential and existing clients alike get to know the people behind the business, which in turn builds relationships and trust. This type of post is a great example of valuable evergreen content, as learning more about who makes up your business is something that will remain beneficial to the audience indefinitely.

How are you going to use these tips to make your content more evergreen? If you’d like to chat with us about our content creation services please give us a shout at 

What Is Evergreen Content, And Why Do You Need It?

When you think of Pinterest, you wouldn’t be alone in associating it with moodboards, wedding planning and your go-to source of hair inspiration. Perhaps one of the last things you would think of is it being a money-making machine. But as all evolving technology seems to do, Pinterest breached the world of commercial sales.

Through increasing brand authority and awareness, and now being able to sell products directly on the app, Pinterest is quickly becoming more and more popular with brands who are discovering that it can benefit their store in more ways than one.

How you can use Pinterest to drive traffic to your ecommerce store

Often left behind when competing with the likes of Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, Pinterest is another social media site that can help brands connect directly with existing and potential customers.

By sharing aesthetically pleasing pins and pinboards that match branding and create synergy between platforms, companies can establish more trusting relationships with their audiences, therefore helping drive traffic to their websites.

However, this more ‘organic’ method is not the only option anymore when it comes to traffic driving from Pinterest.

Last year, Pinterest partnered with the popular e-commerce software, Shopify. This collaboration has allowed customers to buy products directly from Pinterest with ‘Buyable Pins’, making the site an additional sales channel and a valuable asset for brands.

Promoted content has higher success rates on the Pinterest app, making paid campaigns worth the ad spend. But don’t just take our word for it, the stats speak for themselves! 1 out of 2 Pinterest users have made a product purchase after seeing a brand promoted pin, and a whopping 

 of users use the platform to plan their purchase decisions. With more than 

 monthly ‘pinners’ it comes as no surprise that Pinterest is the number 2 overall source of social media traffic to Shopify stores.

It’s clear that for brands seeking e-commerce store traffic, Pinterest is quickly becoming an essential and popular business tool. Have we got you ‘Pinterested’? Reach out and see how we can help you make money on Pinterest!

Stat Sources - Pinterest Business and Shopify

How To Make Money On Pinterest

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