Hello all, this week I will be continuing the Identifying and Amplifying Growth Channels review of CXL’s Growth Marketing course.
Link to the course: https://cxl.com/institute/programs/growth-marketing-training/
Link to CXL website: https://cxl.com/
Continuation of Identifying and Amplifying Growth Channels…
Developing a Coherent Message Strategy on social media
It’s important to develop a coherent messaging strategy, taking a look at your brand and the specific channels. So how you would, as a brand, speak to your customers on Facebook, in an email, or writing a blog post, being an influencer in that space, it’s important to understand that this all ties together and social media marketing is essential. The tutor Sophia says that the beauty of social media marketing is to quickly know what is working and what is not.
Sophia also gives a great example of how well a social media marketing plan can turn out to be. During the third quarter of the Super Bowl back in 2013, there was a massive power outage that caused the entire Superdome to go black essentially, for 34 minutes. Oreo was the one brand that actually seized the moment and created a visual graphic that had an Oreo in the dark with a light shining on it. And it said that you can still dunk in the dark. And that, within a few minutes went viral, they took advantage of the hashtag, they took advantage of the moment and the message caught on immediately. And the secret behind that was a 15-person social media team at Oreo who was ready to respond to whatever happened online in response to the Super Bowl.
She also gives an example of Go-Pro and their social media game where they share moments of their users on online platforms. Social media is really fun and it allows us to be creative and observe our audience. Sophia also gives us few bad examples of using social media for marketing. Bad examples about, social media marketing is responding too quickly sometimes and not actually having a strategy, and responding reactively. Another bad example of social media marketing is not taking advantage of the time that you’re given to create the hype or the virality that’s available to you. And also, if you’re slow to respond to your customers, you’re allowing them to control the narrative and you’re not able to respond to them at that moment. And anything that lives on social media lives forever. Even if you delete it, someone has taken a screenshot of it and that will go viral rather than your response. Another example of not seizing the moment is Red Lobster. And when Beyonce just released her new single video and had mentioned Red Lobster, they took days to respond and missed the moment. And in fact, missed it so bad that even their audience was even telling them that they were missing a moment.
So trending topics and hashtags are a great way for companies to leverage the hype and the build-up of the conversation that’s going on. Another incident that turned to be a disaster was for DiGiorno Pizza. The hashtag “why I stayed” actually was for a woman explaining what made them stay in an abusive relationship. Unfortunately, DiGiorno Pizza did not do their due diligence and do the research before they decided to capitalize on the hashtag and they wrote that hashtag because I stayed was because you had pizza. They quickly realized this, actually after four minutes, and they tweeted an apology that said they had not been aware of the significance of the hashtag.
To get the social media game right, we have to know which time works for our audience and post them accordingly. This ensures that the post reaches our target audience effectively. Another test is changing the CTA (Call To Action) of the link in your profile. So, from a business’s Twitter profile, from your Instagram link, just test out the CTA and what works and the call to action. You can also test the length of the URL. So, whether it’s a long-form URL or a short bitly link, see what users are clicking on and I see this test done on Facebook posts for recipes. I see the short link and the long link and I know that someone’s testing.
MYTHS ABOUT SEO
The first common myth about SEO is that we shouldn’t focus on SEO because Google should be able to crawl a site and figure it out. But the reality is actually different. For Google to crawl your site there are a couple of things that Google looks at. So the domain authority, which is how your site compares against the other sites in your industry, your page authority is how well your site is set up for success, for crawling, a content schedule, so how frequently do you post and frequently do you update and add pages to your website, and the popularity of your website, you know it’s a combination of site traffic, click-through rate, time on site, looking at bounce rate and all of these contribute to a higher frequency of crawling for your site. We can do few things to resolve this issue. There’s a fetch it functions that you can do within Google webmaster tools, you can also create Google sitemaps within your website, and within Google Analytics you can also give them an edge as well.
The other myth is having to rank number one for a certain keyword, when the truth is actually that keyword, that one keyword that you’re finding has a high search volume may not necessarily be the keyword that’s going to get your users to convert in your funnel. Good traffic you’ll find that is often found in longer tail keywords which have lower search volume with more focused content which is engaging, it’s educational, you become the influencer for your customers and they’re more likely to get the knowledge and you become the authority for that.
What one can do to look for what keywords are good for their business is looking at your competitors and what they’re doing, and often times they are, they’re in your industry, they’re in your space, do some research on those keywords and then take a look at what are the longer tail keyword terms are.
To be continued…..
I will continue my learnings from this module next week and so far the insights that the tutor Sophia Eng presented were so insightful. See you next week. Till then. Take care and Stay Safe!