A 30-Day Master Plan for Marketing Your Brick-and-Mortar Business

Many small business owners today think that owning a brick-and-mortar business excuses them from having to learn and master digital marketing.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

In fact, mastering SEO and local optimization for your locally run business will bring a higher ROI than just about any other marketing activity you use.

It’s one of the quickest ways to quickly and simply (notice I did not say easily) get your business in front of thousands of new eyes and earn customers for life. With a few simple steps, you can set yourself on the path to long term digital marketing success.

But how do you start marketing your brick-and-mortar business in the digital world? What steps do you need to take over the next 30, 60, or 90 days to successfully grow your online reach and increase sales like you have never seen before?

I’m glad you asked.

In this article, I’m going to give you a step-by-step and day-by-day plan for marketing your brick-and-mortar business.

Thirty days from now, if you follow the steps I’ve outlined below, you’ll be well on your way to having a successful and profitable local marketing plan in place.

The basics: Days 1-10

The irony of digital marketing is that the simplest steps are often the most important.

Sure, PPC advertising, advanced Facebook campaigns, and AdWords can play a huge role in boosting your sales. But what’s next?

For brick-and-mortar business owners, particularly owners who don’t think they are very “tech savvy,” following these simple steps for the first ten days alone will result in a huge increase in the number of sales they see from their marketing budget.

Step 1: Create a platform

Something I have found with many brick-and-mortar businesses is that the owners think that having a website is an unnecessary luxury.

Nothing could be further from the truth!

Having a place for all your customers and fans to congregate is one of the simplest and most important steps on your path to success.

The first step to mastering local SEO is the simplest one. Give your audience a place to find you!

Notice that almost none of these shops have websites that come up in Google…

For the first 10 days of this master plan, focus on building your website and ensuring it has a great design. After that, focus on 1-2 social media platforms.

That’s it.

Creating presence on a couple of platforms that are easy to navigate and even easier to find is the first key to your marketing success.

Once you develop your website, set up your Facebook page and a Twitter or Instagram account. Then, the real work begins.

And what is that “real work?”

Creating quality content.

Step 2: Start creating high quality content

One of the fallacies many entrepreneurs believe is that simply having a website with some on-page SEO is enough.

But that’s not how Google works, and that’s not how people work either.

If you want to attract new customers and build a loyal fan base, you need to place a premium on creating and curating high quality content.

Look at the bottom of the image above. Ramit has 241 PAGES of content on his blog.

I’ve got 162 pages of blog articles on Quick Sprout.

Content is huge.

But how does this apply to marketing a brick-and-mortar business? Here’s how…

Let’s say you own a coffee shop in Boulder, Colorado.

You take the first 2-3 days and pay to create your website—design it to look great and navigate easily. Then you set up your Facebook page.

Now, it’s time to start populating your website and your social media with killer content.

Continuing with the coffee shop example, the next step would be to start writing articles or filming videos based on your niche.

You could write an article about the best locations for growing coffee or about 3 unconventional brewing methods you can try today, or you could film a video showing people how to do cappuccino art.

The list of things you can do is endless.

By creating this content you will improve your chances of ranking on Google, and you will also start providing free value to customers, which will increase their trust and their desire to give you their business.

Step 3: Increase the number of your email subscribers with a lead magnet

Now that you have a great website and are regularly uploading content and sharing it via social media, it is time to increase your email subscriber list. That’s where the real money is made!

The key to a successful lead magnet is to offer something that a customer would be willing to pay for—but free.

An excellent example of a lead magnet is from Lucky Brand (above).

Back to the coffee shop…

A great marketing method used by many successful brick-and-mortar owners is the free giveaway.

If someone has found your site or is in your store, offering them a free coffee or pastry (which they would normally pay for) in return for access to their email is a win for both parties.

They get something free. You get a direct line to market your company.

Once you have collected the email, you can start sending updates about specials you are running, events you are putting on, and other cool things happening with your business.

Anytime you have a special event or a 2-for-1 deal, people will actually know about it. They will then take advantage of it.

Mastering local SEO: Days 10-25

Many brick-and-mortar business owners make another mistake when delving into the world of SEO. They don’t fully understand the difference between “regular” and “local” SEO.

The biggest difference is that local SEO contains a geographical aspect. This geographical information is crucial in “convincing” Google that you’re a bona fide local company serving local people.

The entry into local SEO may seem a little bit more complicated than normal SEO. Why? Because it’s no longer just about the keywords. There’s an element of mystery.

The result? You may have experienced this yourself. Few businesses execute local SEO efficiently.

However, in my opinion and experience, local SEO is easier. Why? Because there is less competition!

Don’t worry. I’ll remove some of the mystery and help you understand how it works.

Here are some of the essential ways to get started on your path to local SEO mastery.

Step 1: Set up Google Search Console and Analytics

These two tools are absolutely instrumental for successful on-page SEO.

There is a ton of information you will be able to gather about your website from these tools. Using them effectively will allow you to run tests, analyze the results, and make changes as necessary.

Here’s how to set up Google Analytics.

• First, create an Analytics account here.
• Sign in to your new account.
• Select “Admin.”
• Select an account from the “account” column.
• Select a new property from the “property” column.
• Click “Tracking Info” and then “Tracking Code.”
• Copy the ID.
• Insert this number into your website’s code.

Here’s how to set up Search Console:

• Create a Search Console account here.
• Log in to your new account.
• Click “Add a site.”
• Add your website’s URL.
• Copy the ID.
• Add it to your website’s code.

Step 2: Make sure you have the correct NAP data on your site

While this may not seem like a big deal, it is one of the quickest ways to accidentally shoot yourself in the foot with your SEO pursuits.

What’s NAP?

It’s the Name, Address, and Phone number of your business.

If you do not have the EXACT same Name, Address, and Phone Number on your website that you have on your Google My Business account, you will basically ruin all the hard work you have put into mastering local SEO.

Let me give you a few pointers on doing the NAP portion right.

Make sure the phone number listed is your local number (no 1-800 numbers).

Make sure the NAP info is listed as text on the page and not as an image. You need web crawlers to read the information. They won’t be able to do that if it’s in an image.

Include the NAP info in your website footer if possible. This means it will be visible on all pages.

If you’ve had a different name, address, or phone number in the past, find the variations anywhere on the web and correct them. You don’t want to confuse users or web crawlers. NAP consistency is important!

Step 3: Optimize your meta descriptions and title tags

For on-page optimization, this is one of the most important steps you can take.

The first step is to make sure your title tag includes these three things:

1. Your city
2. Your state
3. The keyword you’re trying to rank for

It is easy for this to come across as spammy and artificial, so put some time and effort into this before you hit “Publish.”

For example, these websites are perfectly setup for local SEO success:

If you’re looking for some more inspiration, check out this article for a list of local SEO-optimized title tags.

Next, you want to optimize your meta description.

The meta description is what appears beneath your title tag. It explains a little bit about your company and what you do. The meta description appears in the SERPs to help users understand what they’re about to click on.

I recommend that you include your city, state, keyword, and phone number for maximum efficiency.

A meta description doesn’t technically improve your SEO. It’s designed for users. However, user behavior does influence SEO, so it’s still important to optimize this bit of information.

Step 4: Include your hours of operation and directions

According to one study, Google said that 54% of smartphone users who search for a local business are searching for the hours of operation. And 53% wanted directions.

The simplest thing to do is simply put an “Hours of Operations” or “Business Hours” heading and image next to your maps widget.

This will make life easier for your customers. Plus, it will make Google love you.

Step 5: Leverage the power of social proof

While it doesn’t directly influence your local SEO ranking, including customer testimonials really helps. Adding BBB ratings, integrating Yelp, or citing other highly trusted sources will build customer trust.

In the example below, The Worthwhile Company cited their “Small Business of the Year” award from the local chamber of commerce. Information like this helps local residents to feel a greater degree of trust in the business.

Social proof also decreases your site’s bounce rate, increases the views on your site, and likely increases your opt-ins—all things Google is looking for.

Reaping the rewards and keeping the customers: Day 25-30

By following all the above advice, you will likely see an increase in your SEO ranking and the number of emails you collect within the first 30 days.

Things will move slowly at first.

That’s okay.

These things take time. Slow and steady wins the race.

The final step is to continue producing great content that you can rank on Google. Educate yourself on more advanced local SEO tactics you can start implementing. Most importantly, keep your customers happy.

The more satisfied customers you have, the more people will share your site with others, the more email opt-ins you will receive, and the better your business will be.

All that’s left to do is sit back and reap the rewards of a job well done.

And of course, keep on hustling.

Conclusion

To many entrepreneurs, SEO seems like a black box. And local SEO? It’s even more of a mystery.

Often, it’s viewed as something to be feared, something far too complicated to get involved in, and something that you sure as heck don’t have the required experience to excel at.

My hope, however, is that after reading this article, you’ll realize that SEO is just like any other skill. With a few simple tweaks, you can massively improve your local business’s results for years to come.

So, take this advice, and implement it. You’ll see the results for yourself.

What’s your experience with using digital marketing to drive a brick-and-mortar business? Share your worst mistakes or best tips!

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How To Refocus our Social Activity: Starting With the Subconscious

There is a great quote that I came across today that seems to really “say it all” when it comes to those down days when we may find ourselves wondering where we are at with ourselves, our companies, and our brand. After all, when it comes to something like social media marketing, it helps if […]

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A Culture of Cultivation: Baking Continuous Improvement into Your Company

The concept of continuous improvement seems simple enough: Get better, every day. So what is it that makes a change better? How do you make that change? How do you do it in such a way that it will be consistent, logical and sustainable for your organization? There are no one-size-fits-all answers to those questions. […]

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Surprising Things You Need to Put in Place in Order to Save Thousands of Dollars on Digital Marketing

It wasn’t that long ago when an entrepreneur’s marketing options were limited to flyers, tacky magazine ads, or expensive TV commercials.

However, with the advent of the Internet, the number of marketing options available to both budding and experienced entrepreneurs has become staggering.

Sometimes, when I’m surfing the web—it’s what I do a lot—I find myself thinking, “Wow! So many tactics! So many choices!”

If I were just getting started in digital marketing, I would be in a total freakout mode. Where do I start? Which one should I pick? What do I need to do first?

But it gets worse. Few businesses have the luxury of trying a lot of tactics. Marketing costs money—quite a bit of it, actually. And if you’re just testing out a bunch of tactics, you’ll run out of money before you run out of tactics.

Thankfully, with a little bit of know-how, you can achieve more marketing success than you ever imagined, even on the tightest budget.

How do you go about shaving thousands of dollars off your digital marketing costs without sacrificing the quality and results of your marketing campaigns?

Seems like a tough call, right?

Maybe not as tough as you think.

I’ll show you how.

First, some ground rules

Before I delve into all of the juicy strategies for increasing the success of your digital marketing while saving money, I want to discuss the most important principle of this whole article.

Here it is: less is more

The ultimate goal of all the points I list below is this: eliminate the fluff from your marketing strategy, and focus only on the things that work.

This is why I recommend minimizing your approach and using the 80/20 rule. This rule dictates that

80% of your results come from 20% of your marketing.

You need to understand that this means that you’ll have to give up good marketing opportunities—but only so that you can take advantage of the great ones.

If you are looking to save thousands, you want to put your focus and your money only into the opportunities with the highest yield. That way you can not only save money but also increase your results.

With that in mind, let’s begin.

1. Create a rock-solid strategy

I know that the title of this article promised to teach you “surprising” things you need to put in place for a great marketing strategy. Some of you may be scratching your heads right about now, wondering why I put something so seemingly obvious as a rock-solid strategy as the first point in this article.

Quite simply, I put this first because most people don’t do it!

We live in an era when entrepreneurship has such a low barrier to entry that many first-time business owners and online marketers just throw stuff at the wall to see what sticks.

They don’t ever take the time to develop a proven plan of action with contingencies, review processes, and clearly defined goals.

Sure, it may not be the most exciting part of digital marketing, but it sure is the most important.

Before you even begin to try to save money on your digital marketing, you need to have a clear strategy in place.

Are you wondering how to create a strategy? Here are some questions you should ask yourself:

• How much will I spend? This question is essential since it prevents you from spending money on low yield opportunities.
• What are my goals? Do I want increased traffic, sales, SEO ranking? Everyone wants revenue as the ultimate goal. Back down from this top-level goal, and figure out what KPI-related goals will get you there.
• What competencies do I have that can help me determine which channels to use? Am I good at SEO, copywriting, ad design? Use your existing skill set and resources to determine which marketing channels you’ll be focusing on.

Don’t just ask these questions. Answer them. And write your answers down.

There. Now you have a strategy.

Remember, like the Navy SEALs say,  “The more you sweat in training, the less you bleed in battle.”

Or in our case, “The more you plan in marketing, the less you spend on useless garbage and experimentation.”

Trying out new marketing tactics like Kim Kardashian tries on new outfits will only waste time and money.

Get your strategy in place, and the smart tactics will follow.

2. Hire a team of experts for your niche

While it’s common sense to allocate a sizable amount of your budget to hiring experts and consultants with experience in digital marketing, it’s paramount to hire the right experts.

Who are the right experts? People who have experience in your specific niche.

Just because someone is good at digital marketing doesn’t mean they are the best fit for your company.

Remember, you need to find the best options, not just good ones.

How would you like to have the guy in the middle working with you on your music label?

If you run a copywriting firm and are looking to rank higher on Google, what should you do? Hire an SEO expert with a portfolio full of previous clients from copywriting firms for whom they were able to boost rank and quantifiably improve results.

This will ensure you are hiring someone who not only knows the trade but understands how to optimize in your niche as well.

3. Set up a tiered approach to your marketing

It’s easy to get caught up in pursuing all the latest marketing fads and trends. The result, however, is not fun. You spread yourself too thin instead of focusing on one thing and mastering it.

This is why I recommend a “tiered” approach to marketing.

What exactly does this mean?

Basically, create a list of 3-5 digital marketing mediums where you have a certain amount of strength and expertise or affordable access to people who do.

Next, decide what strongest one is—the one you believe will have the highest ROI based on the data for your industry.

Master that one.

I mean really master it. Don’t be content with a novice status. You’ve got to nail this thing!

Once you master the first medium (I’d say Facebook Ads), you can move on to the next one.

Keep doing this until you have mastery over several forms of digital marketing.

If you take this approach, you’ll be able to understand the best practices for each medium, know how to optimize your investments within each medium for maximum ROI, and automate your marketing systems.

You’ll be amazed at the impact. Not only are you gaining solid ROI, but you’re also building a foundation for future marketing efforts.

For example, let’s say you own a landscaping company in Tennessee. You understand Facebook marketing, AdWords, and have a basic grasp of SEO.

Your approach may look something like this:

• Master Facebook marketing with a budget of $1,500/month and an ROI goal of $2,250 a month.
• Once you hit your ROI goal and have created systems or hired experts that allow you to continue this marketing, move on to AdWords.
• Using the ROI from Facebook, invest into AdWords marketing with a budget of $750 a month and an ROI goal of $1,500.
• Now, you have mastered both mediums. Plus, you’ve been able to boost your ROI within each. You are now spending a total of $2,000/month for digital marketing between the two mediums but netting $5,000/month. You’re already winning. But don’t be content.
• You can now systematize both your Facebook and AdWords marketing based on the mastery in each field. Use a set amount of the profit from the marketing to fund your next step, maybe SEO.
• And on and on it goes until you start dominating each marketing medium.

You see, most people (myself included) dive into a new project and focus on far too many things at once, blowing their budgets and diminishing the potential for their ROI.

By limiting yourself to a single medium at a time, you’ll be able to master each one and save yourself time and money in the long run.

4. Analyze your metrics, and be willing to adjust

If you’re familiar with Murphy’s Law—”anything that can go wrong will go wrong”—you understand the struggle many digital marketers face.

Even if you have a rock-solid strategy, completed an 80/20 analysis of your business, have a team of experts at your disposal, and you are focusing on one medium at a time taking a tiered approach, you can still fail at your digital marketing efforts.

Which makes this point the most important.

Analytics.

And pivoting.

Marketers must know their numbers. Become BFFs with Google Analytics or whatever analytics platform you choose. Know your numbers. Understand them. Interpret them.

The only way you can make smart marketing decisions is with data!

For example, if you have an analysis system in place, you’ll be able to see why your conversion rates significantly increased between the 15th and 22nd of June. Then, you would be able to replicate the process moving forward.

You wouldn’t know any of that if you aren’t tracking your progress and monitoring your analytics!

To be successful in digital marketing and save yourself thousands of dollars, you need an efficient way to analyze your efforts.

This happens through knowing data.

For example, let’s say you have gone against my previous advice and are trying to master Facebook marketing and AdWords at the same time.

After you’ve run a few campaigns and been investing for a couple of months, you decide to take stock of your efforts.

Let’s say you are spending $10 on AdWords a day and are earning back $10.50. That’s a positive ROI. Great!

But when you look at your Facebook marketing, you notice that you are actually losing money on the ad campaign. You’re earning more likes but seem to be hemorrhaging more money.

This presents an interesting conundrum.

On the one hand, logic would say to ditch Facebook marketing and double down on AdWords. However, depending on your niche and your vision for your company, those likes and views may be worth more than the pennies you are earning from AdWords (especially if you earn money from affiliates or sponsorships).

Without a clearly defined goal and an understanding of your ultimate vision for your marketing, you’ll be like a ship in a storm with no anchor, getting tossed around by the waves of emotion and confusion.

That’s why it’s important to know your numbers, analyze your data, and make strategic pivots based on what you discover.

Once you’ve clearly defined your goals and selected a marketing medium to pursue, don’t be afraid to discard other campaigns and move on.

If you are not seeing the results you want after a reasonable amount of time, pivoting is your best option.

5. Build a personal brand

I’ll let you in on a little secret:

People rarely buy from a company; they buy from a brand.

Others have made this point and even written books about it (so maybe not that much of a secret, after all).

It’s true.

A company is about profits, losses, products, management, revenues, and shareholders. How boring is that?

A brand is about excitement, engagement, smiles, experiences, and personality.

You’ll understand this dichotomy if you recall the old Apple ads.

Think about it: there are thousands of companies failing every year. While there could be a great number of reasons for their demise, one of those reasons is poor branding.

People like to buy from people they trust.

I want you to take a look at the branding behind 3 SUPER successful online entrepreneurs.

Here is Pat Flynn of Smart Passive Income:

Here is Ramit Sethi of I Will Teach You to be Rich:

And here is, of course, the 4-hour emperor, Tim Ferriss:

Do you notice anything in particular about these blogs…other than the fact that the owners are multi-millionaires?

All of them are about PERSONAL brands. They are focused on the face behind the site, not some ambiguous logo that people can hide behind.

I’m not saying that every business needs to have a figurehead like Ferris or Sethi. What I am saying is that your brand needs personality.

Before you invest a cent into digital marketing, you need to make sure your brand has attitude, emotion, and an authentic feel.

And then, by all means, build your personal brand too—the brand of you.

As an ambassador for your businesses, you can use your personal brand to drive your business.

The better you brand yourself, the less business-focused digital marketing you’ll need to do. People will find you, and they will want to buy from you without needing to be persuaded to do so.

I’ve spent thousands of dollars on courses and seminars I knew very little about. Why? Because I trusted the person selling it and knew their track record as a top performer.

Conclusion

Saving money with digital marketing is more straightforward than many “gurus” would want you to believe.

To have a bigger marketing impact you don’t need a bigger budget.

What does it take instead?

It takes discipline.

It takes discipline to pick a single marketing medium at a time and stick to it.

It takes discipline to invest all your money into your personal brand and continue doing so even when you aren’t seeing an immediate ROI.

It takes discipline to develop a strategy, hire the experts to execute it, and then trust them to do their jobs even when results aren’t coming as fast as you want.

Like most things in life, mastering digital marketing on a budget is simple but not easy.

If it were easy, everybody would do it.

Tactics are tempting, but it’s the rock-solid strategy—driven by experts, strategically structured, backed by data, and built upon a personal brand—that will get you places!

How have you learned to save money while also improving and expanding your marketing reach?

from Darlene Milligan http://ift.tt/29gHwZS via transformational marketing
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Boy’s Lost Stuffed Animal Goes Viral

Photoshoppers Give Lost Stuffed Animal Trip Around the World Redditors are here to restore your faith in humanity. A young child tragically lost his prized stuffed elephant. What a catastrophe! We’ve all had that one prized possession as a child that we couldn’t bear to lose, so it’s not hard to imagine his devastation. Reddit […]

from Darlene Milligan http://ift.tt/298g8gd via transformational marketing

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Snapchat Geo-Filters: Design, Map & Buy

  When Snapchat allowed geo-filters to go “on demand” it was the coolest thing for both consumers and brands. It allowed everyone to show their creativity and to have a chance at creating filters that shared their message and allowed people to be apart of their “story.” Why should brands care: It allows brands to create […]

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How to Manage 60 Social Profiles – and Drive More Traffic and Sales to Each

I often think I have a lot to do with managing my own social profiles. But managing 60? (mind blown)

The team at Creative Click Media manages 60 social profiles for their clients, driving big results in traffic, leads, and sales with their team of three.

How do they pull it off?

Adam and Amanda from Creative Click were kind to share their workflows and processes for driving these results: everything from how they save time with social media management to how they iterate on blog posts and top tweets. Keep reading for our full interview with Creative Click, and learn some of their top secrets for success on social.

Kevan, Buffer:

I’d love to learn how you view social media and what have been some of the key approaches, from a high-level, for Creative Click Media.

Adam Binder, Creative Click Media:

Social media is so vast and ever-changing. There’s so much that goes into it and so much time that is required to get it right.

Buffer as a tool — and really the word “buffer” — is great. It serves as a buffer and a bridge between the complete authenticity of being online 24/7 and also planning everything to a T.

I love the fact that social media can be scheduled. It really helps us stay authentic while also being able to grow our business, scale our business. Scheduling really helps us bridge the gap between automation and authenticity. You can tell with a lot of accounts that it’s scheduled and it wasn’t done with care, but Buffer really allows us to accomplish both authenticity and efficiency.

Kevan:

Are there any specific tactics that you try to make things authentic? 

Amanda Erdmann, Creative Click Media:

We really use the team members section of Buffer to involve the clients, so they know what we’re posting and we know what they are posting. That helps a lot.

We are able to post a lot more with Buffer. We’ve expanded Twitter usage, and posting more on Twitter definitely helps brands be more active and engaging on there. We’re saving a ton of time by doing that. I would say working with the clients is probably the best way we stay authentic and using several team members here to post different things so that you get those different voices while also sticking with the brand.

Adam:

We’ve got the really large Buffer for Business account with 25 users. We’ve added some of our more savvy clients as users so they can work in real-time to collaborate with us.

One good case study would be the Jay and Linda Grunin Foundation. They are a non-profit. They do wonderful things for the local community. We work with them to come up with an overall strategy, and we come up with content. We put it in Buffer, we schedule it out, but their day-to-day operation is very nimble. They are doing a lot of things. They are out and about, and because they have access to Buffer they can move our posts around. If they have something more timely or pressing, they can switch things around to put out the current stuff immediately.

Teachers design the project, students create the solution. https://t.co/vMoVt7fCMq #Arts #Education #STEAM

— Grunin Foundation (@JLGrunin) June 1, 2016

Some clients are doing a lot on their own, and some clients may have busy moments. For the most part, we manage everything, and then they feel comfortable having the access to review what we have and to move it around if something pressing comes up. It allows us to be really nimble.

Kevan:

I’d love to learn a bit more about how social fits within your business plan or structure at Creative Click? Looks like you offer a lot of different, amazing services. How does social fit within that larger ecosystem of everything that you provide?

Adam:

Social media is really becoming very intertwined with SEO which is very intertwined with web design. Really, it all works together. I like to make an analogy with an electrical circuit. You can’t break it or else the whole thing won’t work. Social media is expanding rapidly. It is a ranking factor for Google now. Social signals definitely affect SEO. We can see, for the clients who opt in for our social media services, that they are definitely getting better benefit from SEO.

And social is great PR. Done correctly, it really can enhance your brand and it can boost your bottom line.

Creative Click Media started as a web design agency, and social media followed very quickly after. Then when we added everything else: social, SEO, videos and now PR. We’re going to continue to grow and I say diversify our portfolio of offerings. Everything is changing so rapidly.

Kevan:

That’s great. I’d love to learn a bit about how your team structure is set up. How many are on the marketing team and how many touch the social media channels ?

Amanda:

I’m the project manager, and I oversee everything; then I have two writers for various accounts for social media. They have access to Buffer. I have access to Buffer. Adam has access, too.

We use the analytics to find the optimum times to post, and we set the schedules for the clients. When it makes sense, as Adam mentioned before, we add the clients themselves if they want to see what we’re doing or if they want to schedule posts around them. We really work together because they have a lot of events so it makes sense for them to see and prioritize which events should go out.

Kevan:

When it comes to finding the best times to post, how are you finding out that data

Amanda:

We mostly use optimal timing on Facebook. Twitter is kind of trial-and-error, though the Twitter accounts tell you now when you get the most activity. We’ve been trying to look at that more. We’re trying to work with Facebook more also, to find those optimum times. I love that Buffer lets you set one schedule and keep it. It makes everything very consistent which is definitely one of the best things about it.

And Buffer tells you the optimum time to post to an account, which definitely makes things easier.

Kevan:

When it comes to analytics too, I’m curious to learn a bit about the reporting relationship you have with clients. How do you communicate with them how things are going on social?

Amanda:

Other analytics tools we used before were really pretty and graphical, but most of our clients didn’t understand what they were looking at. I like that Buffer very much simplifies it. You can compare two different things at once which is really awesome. You can show them exactly, “You gained this many likes and this is how your engagement also went up.” We try to keep it simple with clients and show them their best so they understand exactly what’s going on.

We do this with screenshots, mostly. We will make reports. I will export the Excel file to really find the best post that the client had, and we will try to optimize those, to recreate them so we can use them again.

Adam:

One thing we’re looking into is creating custom infographics for clients, but it takes a little time to get that right. I think that would be a very boutique way to deliver the results and we’re working on it.

Kevan:

Have there been any kind of challenges that you find with doing social media for clients? 

Adam:

I think finding the brand voice is a big one. It’s something we’re very good at, but it’s a moving target. As clients’ businesses evolve, constant communication is really important.

I think images are always something that is needed.

Time is the number one resource that we seem to never have enough of.

Amanda:

I was just going to say, Buffer has helped us save a lot of time which is one of the main reasons we switched over to it. Scheduling with our previous tool, you had to do one post at a the time. Now we can upload a ton at once. We have 60 social media accounts on Buffer all for different clients, so being able to have one schedule and stick to it and upload as many as posts we want to has helped us save a lot of time.

We use Bulk Buffer for the bulk upload, and it works great with Buffer.

Kevan:

Where do you tend to pull those bulk updates? Is there a certain workflow that you use?

Adam:

Most of the updates we share for our clients come from content that we’ve created on our clients’ blogs. Basically, the blog feeds the social media.

We don’t only share our own stuff or our client’s stuff. We mix it up certainly and are careful to follow the 80/20 rule or better. We’re not overly promotional because that never works. We try to mix sharing of other people’s stuff, but a lot of the stuff, a lot of the social content, comes from the blogs.

We are careful to dissect the blogs into bite-size pieces for social media and we drive a lot of traffic that way. This is really why it intersects with SEO and why it’s so critical for SEO success. We drive a lot of traffic through Twitter. We don’t drive a lot of sales through Twitter, but I know it’s very helpful for SEO. We drive a good amount of traffic and leads and sales through Facebook.

Kevan:

How have those numbers grown and evolved for you since you switched to Buffer?

Adam:

Twitter has exploded for us because we’re able to post 8 to 10 times a day instead of 1 to 3. The life of a tweet is 12 minutes, I read somewhere, maybe even shorter now. it’s probably old data. Your timeline just flies so quick. We drive a lot of traffic from Twitter, and Buffer has been an integral piece of that.

Kevan:

What other tools do you find useful with your social media efforts for your clients?

Adam:

We use Canva for graphics. We use hashtagify.me for hashtag research. Bulk Buffer for bulk uploads.

Facebook ads we do right in Facebook.

I’ve tried Twitter ads a couple of times for myself and for clients. They’re okay. I think the thing with the Twitter ads, like I said, we don’t really get a lot of leads from Twitter. I just think it’s the nature of the platform. Things are going by so quickly, but it’s great for sharing information and driving traffic. Again, I’m saying no one that contacts us says, “Hey, I found you through Twitter.” That doesn’t mean that they haven’t. They kind of got hooked into a piece of content and then followed us for a little while. We’re really not too sure about that. I know that the Facebook ads are huge, and they are definitely a revenue driver.

For lead tracking, I’m using the HubSpot CRM, which lets us track pretty much everything. We always keep detailed notes on everything. We always make sure that we ask our clients, if it’s a phone call, how they found us. A lot of times it is through our website — and they could just say website, but really it was the website via Twitter.

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