A startup’s social media journey
Prior to joining The Startup Buddy, I did a short stint as a marketing intern at an online car review company. It was my first internship and I really wanted to be part of the oh-so-glamorous marketing industry and considered the internship as my stepping stone to a life as a marketer. Needless to say, in those 6 weeks, I was exposed to all things digital marketing including writing blogs, postings on social media and google analytics. Everything was as glamorous as I thought it would be until I actually started working on a project and saw the impacts for it.
The impact might never be indicative of the effort that you put into your marketing campaign.
What I mean by this is that you might find that even if you put in a lot of effort into a campaign, it might do very poorly as compared to something you did in 10 mins. This actually happened to me a few times, where we were testing the impact of various Facebook ads and the results were personally shocking since the ads I spent the most time on always ended up doing the worst. For a karma believer, this wasn’t something that sat well with me. I wanted to feel that the effort I put into a campaign was worth it. And that’s why the glitz and glamour of marketing weren’t all that enticing to me anymore and I decided to hone my skills in something else (which ended up being product management).
But that all changed when I started my first full-time job in The Startup Buddy. I knew that I would be dealing with all things creative, and that included marketing.
Prior to me joining the company, there wasn’t anyone handling the marketing, and most of it (especially social media) was neglected. But we still sent out monthly newsletters (albeit ugly ones) but the purpose was achieved.
Our users knew we were alive and that’s the most important part of marketing.
But being alive isn’t enough for a startup that’s growth is tied to their user base. We needed to thrive and project an image that was reflective of The Startup Buddy brand. So my first task was clear; to come up with a comprehensive and organic marketing plan. This had to include social media, collaborations, events, articles and optimising our web platform and a way to track how users come into our sites and what they do on it. You might be wondering where the paid marketing campaigns are in this plan. We believe that organic ways to grow our reach are our best bet to sustain our growth. Paid ads work great in a short-term boost for your targets but it becomes difficult to sustain it without pumping in more and more money (something that we don’t have in abundance).
The first thing I focused on was something that was completely neglected; social media. And these are some of the things that you should consider when you come up with a marketing plan.
The endless loop
Have you ever decided to watch a 5-minute youtube video that turned into a 45 minute one where you watched video after video? Well, this is the marketer’s dream. The endless loop where you just continue engaging with the content that you create. This is all in the hopes that they would eventually end up converting into a user/customer. That is what you want to achieve from your social media campaigns as well.
This means that you need to give your audience a call-to-action (CTA) to do or read something and it can’t be the same CTA all the time. If not, people get bored and then they won’t get into this endless loop that converts them. A simple picture post, with just a caption, doesn’t do much in terms of converting the users. They don’t have a CTA and they would just scroll by. And that’s why I decided that we should club the articles we write along with our social media posts.
These articles should entice our audience to read and they should always link to your end goal of converting them into users/customers (depending on your business).
Things that you can use to make life easier
For you to truly understand what is working, and even which article is doing the best in terms of converting your audience, you need to be able to track where the users are coming from to your platform. There are many tools out there, but the most popular one would be Google Analytics. You just have to look at the ‘Source/Medium’ tab in “Acquisition” for you to get all the data on it. But it won’t tell you specifically where the user came from and only that they came from Medium for example. But what you can do is use Campaign URL Builder to specify where the users came from by creating a unique link to your platform. For example, all the links to The Startup Buddy in this article would be https://thestartupbuddy.co/?utm_source=medium&utm_medium=TSB's%20SM%20Journey, so that when analysing Google Analytics, I can know which article actually worked the best in converting our users.
Quality vs. Quantity
I was told back in 2014 that you just had to post things, it didn’t have to be original and it didn’t have to be quality content. It just had to be frequent and it had to be posted on our own platforms. Keeping to this, I came up with what I thought would be a great marketing strategy to grow our user base. I wanted to post something every day (including the weekends) and every alternate day, the post would be tagged to an article written by us. The rule for the articles was that it would follow a theme for the day and it can be just rewritten from existing articles on the internet (we still credited them!).
Guess what, this was a strategy that only worked in ancient history apparently. We saw an initial increase in engagement numbers (by like +10) but it soon went back to the same abysmal stats that we were used to. And executing this marketing strategy wasn’t easy. We would be writing up to 4 articles a week and creating 7 posts (captions + pictures) and it was all not paying off, which was depressing, to say the least. And to me proved my quote above.
After a month, it was evident that this was not working out and my boss (thank God) urged me to come up with a marketing strategy that would require less work while increasing our user engagement. I realised that the type of users we wanted to attract weren’t simply looking to read re-written articles they could already find. They wanted quality articles about topics that could actually help them in their startup journey. And we were clearly not delivering that.
We decided that to truly write original, quality content, we would have to each work to our strengths. And there are only 4 of us, each of us would have to write an article related to their expertise. We will be posting an article once every 2 weeks for our users on topics like business, operations, UI/UX, tech and marketing (aka this article) for our users to better understand what they should be doing in their own businesses.
This article schedule was something that would be more manageable (especially for me) since the workload was shared and we would be giving our audience what they actually wanted to see; insightful and useful content from people that have already done it.
It wasn’t just the articles that we cut down on. We cut down on the number of posts as well. Looking at our analytics dashboard, it was evident that posting on the weekends was futile. I mean that makes sense as well since everyone is busy with their family and friends. So we had the weekend to post on and most of the days had equally high (low) engagement rates for our post. So we decided to post every day except Thursdays.
Tools that you can use to make your life easier
Back in 2014 (really should call it the dark ages), we used to have to schedule posts individually on each social media platform. But 4 years later, we have platforms like Hootsuite that will let you schedule the same post to multiple social media platforms at the same time. Amazing right? The only downside is that the connection between Hootsuite and Instagram isn’t the most stable so I would suggest you particularly check whether your post has been successfully posted on Instagram especially!
So this was our social media journey. We went through a lot of ups and downs but something that you should always keep in mind is to consider your limits.
Whether it’s time or budget, marketing plans can get excessive (like our first iteration) and it might not lead to the results you hope for.
So manage your expectations, work off the analytics you have and do what you can!
