The Deep Dive on our Digital Strategy

Episode 12

Show notes

On this episode, we did the deep dive on our digital strategy and shared some tips and tricks that hopefully, you can incorporate into your own strategy.

Episode highlights:

Doing paid advertising
Breaking down the successes and failures of LinkedIn
Did we get in front of the Facebook algorithm?
The headline readers of Twitter
Achieving brand awareness on Instagram
The YouTube review
Other platforms to consider: Medium and Anchor?

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.

The deep dive on our digital strategy

The beauty of the Internet is that it’s changed the game for all of us in the way that we market ourselves.

In past episodes of The Bam Creative Show, we’ve received all sorts of questions about digital marketing and it always comes back to a strategy. here is a fear that stops a lot of people from going forward with a strategy.

We wanted to be honest and upfront about how we create ours, to show you that there is no one way or right way of doing things. There is no one platform that is right for your business. There is no one single post that’s going to bring you fame and fortune overnight.

This is where a strategy comes in.

Our goal(s)

All digital strategies should be created with the end-game in mind.

Our end-game?

It was all about achieving brand awareness which we hoped would turn into leads.

It’s about marketing vs sales.

We had a fair idea of how to achieve that, which was based on creating content to be a valuable source of information on digital marketing and then spread the content far and wide.

So far, we’ve managed to achieve that.

Now it’s time to change up the strategy and ramp things up a bit more.

What’s next: paid advertising?

The basis of this strategy was to do organic posting only.

We believe that you can reach the right audience with the right message at the right time, with or without an advertising budget.

It takes a lot of work and it takes time to understand how it is that people are consuming your content, but there is always enough data to inspire changes in the strategy without starting a paid advertising campaign.

We don’t actively engage in paid advertising for a number of reasons:

We don’t want to annoy people and disrupt their browsing activity on social networks or Google
We’re confident that we can reach the right audience with the right message
We’re still changing our strategy, so we’d like to spend our energy on the organic strategy, rather than creating an entirely new campaign for the purpose of throwing some dollars at the situation

If we started a paid campaign, we’d have to set up a different set of metrics to measure it’s success, dedicate more time to creating the content for it and also reporting and monitoring the campaign.

We’d much rather dedicate that time to an organic campaign, using the data as a baseline to see what content we can create and how much time to dedicate to a particular platform.

What about boosted posts on Facebook?

We’ve found that putting money on a single post on Facebook is not the ideal strategy, because our posts are a smaller piece of the larger brand awareness puzzle.

We want to be thoughtful about who will be consuming the content and how, and so it isn’t as simple as putting money on a single post to increase its reach.

You need to think about:

Creating a custom audience for the post - who do you want to see it and engage with it?
How are you going to measure the success of the boosted post, and what metrics will determine how you make changes to it?
What you actually want the user to do

This is why we’re more in favour of creating a specific paid campaign for Facebook for our strategy.

LinkedIn Wins

I’m sure we weren’t alone in dismissing LinkedIn. We had completely scaled down our posts on the B2B platform, in favour of focusing on others. For the podcast, we decided to just go for it, posting what we thought would be effective on LinkedIn and seeing where the pieces fall.

After 11 episodes of The Bam Creative Show and our digital strategy, we found:

Posting 5 times a week helped to gain us traction
The snippets about career and networking have received the most engagement
Video has received more engagement than any other pieces of content we put out

The biggest win from LinkedIn?

3 leads have come through from LinkedIn, more than any other platform

One of the more interesting aspects of the LinkedIn strategy is the way that video is performing. We didn’t expect people to be languishing on LinkedIn the way that they do on Facebook, but decided to give video content a shot.

The action plan:

Increase posts to LinkedIn
Focus on Video content with subtitles for easy consumption
Create content specifically for LinkedIn, focusing on networking and career advancement
Engaging Bam Creative employees to share the content that they feel their network would benefit from

A mixed reaction on Facebook

Facebook is growing into an increasingly interesting platform. It is of course, the mother of all social media platforms with others trying to take parts of it and capitalise on those features. But the one thing that they can’t take away from Facebook is the community that exists there, and the number of people who check it multiple times each day.

We were unsure of how Facebook would take on The Bam Creative Show, so we created a base strategy to create our baseline.

We usually share the full length video of the episode the day it goes live, which received almost zeroengagement. It’s something we already knew or at least had a good idea, but we needed to be sure:

People did not want to consume long video content on Facebook.

They loved the shorter clips, particularly ones where we goofed around which are mainly outtakes from before or after the video recording of an episode.

And just like LinkedIn, it’s ideal to add subtitles to them for easier consumption.

Posting every weekday has actually helped us to increase engagement and also traffic through to the website, so it begs the question: is it worth posting more?

Only doing this will reveal the answer!

The headline readers of Twitter

Would it greatly affect our strategy if we took Twitter out of the picture? It’s interesting, because we don’t actively engage in Twitter and we have a few interactions with the community, but not a lot.

The simple fact is that Twitter content is as quickly consumed as it is posted. The pieces of content must be concise, valuable and engaging in a compressed space, which is what cultivates the headline-reading community.

We found that while Twitter was bringing in the most amount of traffic through to our website, we received no leads at all and it may be due to the disposable nature of the platform.

Moving forward, we’ve decided to switch things up by:

Making sure we’re visible by posting 5 times a day during the week
Incorporating more personal posts to open the conversation
Reposting older posts, which seems more acceptable on Twitter than other platforms

Overall, the time spent creating specific content for Twitter will be reduced, so we can place the time and effort into LinkedIn and other platforms.

The power of Instagram

Instagram has been growing from strength to strength and we’ve incorporated it into our strategy to build brand awareness, rather than expecting leads or traffic through to the website.

We started off simply sharing video clips of our content, mixed in with candid studio shots. We’ve noticed that overall, our engagement on Instagram has absolutely exploded since we changed our strategy to incorporate:

Posting 5 times a week
Using relevant hashtags
Liking and commenting on other people’s posts, but commenting is where the biggest return comes from

We’ve decided to make the following changes to help improve engagement with our video content:

Give people a reason to engage with the content by creating a descriptive thumbnail that helps the user understand what kind of content it is which helps them decide whether to consume or not

Set a cover photo!
Candid shots and outtakes from before and after the podcast recording, gets a lot of engagement for us and helps in increasing brand awareness

Moving ahead with YouTube

We never set out to become YouTube stars, but we understand the importance of sharing our content across different platforms by using different pillars of content, to understand how our audience consumes content.

What we found was that even though the core pillar of content is the podcast or audio, video content was receiving the most engagement across the board. The YouTube channel wasn’t our primary drive for video content.

In fact, sharing clips to other suitable platforms and then simply uploading them to YouTube for the backlink to the show notes on our website alone, is worth the time and effort for creating the content in the first place.

Other platforms

We’ve been focusing on the big 4 for our content distribution, but reviewed some other platforms and how we would incorporate them into our strategy moving forward.

Medium

An awesome platform for creating long form articles, Medium is quickly growing as a way to share shareable information to what is relative right now.

With the amount of content that we have available from the 12 episodes alone, we can repurpose the content to write original pieces for publication on Medium to increase engagement.

Anchor

Recently raising $10 million in a fundraising round, Anchor is quickly ramping up as a podcasting-on-the-go app, and we’ve even dabbled in it here and there.

It is based on social sharing and interaction and it’s a requirement for people to create content as well as engage with others in order to gain traction.

Anchor’s limitation of 5 minute segments means that we would need to create specific content for the platform every day, listen to related Anchor segments from others and engage with them. The time spent to do that doesn’t seem to be particularly worth it at this stage.

The next steps

With any experiment, a strategy is ever-changing and evolving. We need to be able to do something to figure out how to build and improve.

It does take time, it does take effort but the reward is and has been worth it.