Answering Your Questions: Ask Bam

Episode 11

Show notes

On this episode, we received questions about social media marketing and strategy, tools for organisation and marketing mistakes. 

Episode highlights:

• 01:03 Question 1: Do we really need a blog for social media marketing? You always hear it’s a non-negotiable, but considered we have a very small team there just isn’t enough time to write blogs consistently.
• 12:40 Question 2: What are some common marketing mistakes business make?
• 23:16 Question 3: How can I increase my click-through rate in regards to email marketing?
• 31:03 Question 4: What tools does Bam use to stay organised?
• 38:49 Question 5: What made Bam’s most effective campaign so effective?

You can listen to or watch the episode or you can check out the extended full post below.

Got questions? 

We want to hear from you! If you have any questions about this episode, email us: podcast@bam.com.au or tweet us @bamcreative.

We're answering your questions.

Sometimes, navigating Digital Marketing can be tough.

That's why we're here, to answer your questions. 

On this episode, we received questions about social media marketing and strategy, tools for organisation and marketing mistakes. 

Thank you to Margo Pijls, Marketing Manager of BEarena for your questions.

Question 1: Do we really need a blog for social media marketing? You always hear that it is non-negotiable, but we have a small team and don’t have the time to write  blogs.

Yes and no.

Arguably, the most valuable commodity these days is time.

In a recent survey by the Content Marketing Institute, 63% of Australian Content Marketers attributed their stagnant success to lack of time devoted to content marketing, followed by 53% who said they had not prioritised it highly, which could almost be interchangeable.

Think about it.

If you don’t have time for something, you tend not to prioritise it.

Of course, this may also come from the belief that content marketing isn’t important.

Understandably, we’re talking about social media marketing here, content that you’d put on your networks. But then, we’d have to go back as to why your business needs social media marketing in the first place.

If you’re already established that it’s something you need to increase brand awareness and helping to drive people to your site, then content marketing is going to play a part in this.

Gary Vaynerchuk says that companies should grow a media company mentality, and produce content that their target audience and eventually, competitors want to read. It contributes to brand awareness, it’s marketing rather than sales. It’s the long game to the sale.

This means that you don’t actually have to create a blog, but you do need to consider looking into creating content that will be hosted on your website so that you can:

• Create the smaller pieces of content to post on your networks that lead traffic back to your business
• Control the narrative of your business
• Improve your search engine rankings
• Protect yourself, in case social media platforms close tomorrow

The types of content you create are going to depend on how your target audience consumes content.

You can create:

• Blog posts: time consuming to create and consume because it requires full attention
• Podcasts: simple to create and can be quicker than writing a blog post. Easy to consume whilst driving, at the gym or doing something else
• Video: your phone is a great video camera and there are a lot of editing tools available. Simple to create but note some people’s reservations to be “camera-ready”. Easy to consume but can require full attention if the video is instructional, otherwise the audience can listen to sound alone.

This content can then be broken up and added into your social media marketing strategy, driving it and then mixed in with curated content that you feel will be of value to your audience.

Setting up clear social media goals can help direct you in:

• What kind of content to create
• When to share it
• Which platforms to share the content on
• How you interact with your audience

This will help you better plan your time.

If you find that there are other things that might be standing in your way, then this article might be for you.

For more information, check out a couple of our recent episodes:

• Understanding Social Media Goals & Metrics
• Our Content Marketing Strategy & Results

Question 2: What are some common marketing mistakes business make?

They can’t break the cycle

If a business has been marketing one way for a long time, they might find the processes ingrained and therefore, difficult to propose something new because it’s:

• Too difficult
• Too expensive
• Time consuming
  
  

On Episode 7, we talked about how you can present a winning argument to stakeholders.

The key points are:

• Deliver the right message to the right audience at the right time: know who is receiving your approach
• Do your research. Back up your argument with facts and data.
• Show stakeholders what competitors are doing and go the extra mile by pointing out their success or results

Making decisions without a clear roadmap

A business should be on Facebook because they conducted research and realised that it was an untapped market for them or could increase brand awareness and sales, not because someone simply said, “You should be on Facebook.”.

This lacks fundamental goals and bases for being on that platform in the first place.

Everything should map back to your business objectives, and be powered by goals and results.

Knowing when to outsource and when to bring it in-house

There are times when a business needs an outsider’s perspective, and when they need to bring things in-house.

Doing this can save time and money, but also improve processes and workflow.

If your business is looking to do a complete re-brand, then it’s ideal to work with an agency because it can be difficult to do branding by yourselves and without guidance. Agencies can also help for when you’re ready to do campaigns off the back of that rebrand, because it can help you hit the ground running for future campaigns.

If you’re looking to run many campaigns at once, you’re going to need easy access to data and the campaigns. This is when a business may make the decision to keep things in-house, because you’ll be able to access this anytime you like.

Question 3: How can I increase my click-through rate in regards to email marketing?

Email marketing has been on the decline since social media. 95% open rates? Those were the days!

There are two important factors with email marketing

• Click-through rates: having people actually read and consume your email and click-through to your website or campaign
• Open rates: the rate at which your email is actually opened

Open rates are where it’s at. Also known as click-to-open, it’s all about getting the attention of your audience and actually getting them to open the email.  

How do you do that?

In Episode 9: Creating Landing Pages that Convert, we talked about some traditional copywriting techniques that can get the attention of your audience.

Open-rates always come down to the subject line. Make sure it’s something that captures attention, but that it’s also relative to the audience on the list you’re sending the email to.

Split-testing can come in handy here, as you are able to send the same email campaign with slight changes, to a single email list. This will help you determine the better headline.

Also mentioned in Episode 9, employing the AIDA model within the content of your email, will also help the click-through rates.

Once you have their attention by having them open the email, make sure you keep their attention by continuing it in the headline, and constructing the content of your email to prompt them to action.

Question 4: What tools does Bam use to stay organised?

Trello

Trello is a card-sorting app that can be used for a variety of purposes.

We use it primarily for our daily schedule, almost like a whiteboard so that everyone can see what is happening that day.

You can assign users to each card, add due dates and comments to keep track of activity and labels also helps with sorting.

Trello also has handy add-ons such as a calendar view, adding documents to a card or turning your Trello board into a GANTT chart.

We also use Trello for our Content Marketing calendar, as it gives us a glance of our content and when it’s scheduled.

Using Trello is free and you can find it here.

Other tools

Project management: ActiveCollab

Appointments and bookings: Outlook

Enquiries and sales: Pipedrive

Collaboration and communication: Google Drive and Slack

Question 5: What made Bam’s most effective campaign so effective?

One of Bam Creatives most effective campaign has actually been this very campaign.

In the 4 weeks that we had launched our content marketing strategy, we experienced:

• Traffic from Facebook grew 222%
• Traffic from Instagram grew 1800%
• Traffic from LinkedIn grew by 32.5%
• Traffic from Twitter stayed relatively the same 

It has also been effective because it has:

• Increased our brand awareness
• Increased enquiries
• Increased sales

The takeaways from this campaign is:

• Consistency. Creating and posting content to a schedule has helped us produce content regularly and contribute to regular traffic to our site
• Taking note of our data and tweaking the strategy accordingly helps us to create content that is better suited to our audience