CREATING BUZZ
Successful social media marketing requires a combined approach that consist of a deep understanding of your targeted demographic, quality content, striking imagery, relevant information, social engagement, and depending on the platform, the right timing. Our most utilized social media platforms for business needs were Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and YouTube.
Facebook was one of our most used social media platforms to get in touch with our followers and customers. Through consistent posting and making it a priority to engage with our followers, our customers were able to feel special and feel like their voices were heard when connecting with us. This created a sense of online community and deepened our customer loyalty. Facebook is the ideal place to establish the voice of your business.
My primary focus with social media was to maintain constant interaction and engagement with customers on our account. Whether it be through post's comments, messenger, our sales channel, or even through Facebook ads, everything we posted was meant to promote shares and engagement.
With this organic marketing approach, we were able to keep a healthy flow of engagement, likes, and clicks on our account. I would occasionally create Facebook ads to drum up traffic or boost a post, but my focus was on creating quality content that would get shared organically. I would also utilize our page's accounts to interact across social media as our business page to further promote visibility.
By creating enticing content, you can rely on your followers to share your material organically. But there are times when I would like to expand our reach with a new product debut, or to drum up more traffic or sales. On those occasions I would create Facebook ad campaigns. I have experience with creating ads ranging from broad reaching campaigns, to very specific targeted audiences and demographics.
It is important to diversify and use every utility offered by each platform to connect with your followers on social media. Part of my strategy on Facebook was to share a variety of content including videos. I would also create topics of discussion, submit polls, create giveaways, and utilize the Shopify Facebook sales channel to offer visitors the ability to shop our store directly from our Facebook page and within Messenger.
One of the main platforms that we would utilize for social media marketing was Instagram. With just under 10,000 followers, we were able to amass a large audience while further solidifying the face of our brand through dazzling imagery and content.
Creating unique, alluring imagery is KEY for success on Instagram. One of my strongest talents was personally stylizing, shooting, editing, and posting pictures of our products in a way that would tell its own personal story.
A screenshot from the Sabbat Box Instagram account.
Insights from one of our many high performing posts
Implementing a diverse hashtag strategy, utilizing the Shopify sales channel, and sharing Instagram stories all helped to further our message as a brand, increase engagement, and promote visibility.
When used correctly, Pinterest has the astonishing ability to put your products and services directly in front of your targeted demographic while driving a substantial amount of organic traffic to your website.
By combining beautiful marketing imagery and keyword rich descriptions and hashtags, you are bound to acquire a large following on Pinterest. Pinterest was an integral social media outlet that we utilized to push traffic to our website and increase brand awareness. Between Eclectic Artisans and Sabbat Box, we would average 900,000 impressions per month on our posts. Pinterest was an invaluable social media asset that allowed us to reach an extremely large audience without having to pay to do so.
One of the tools that I also implemented that provided lasting positive results was the Shopify sales channel on our Pinterest account. Giving customers the ability to purchase products directly from our pins feed helped to exponentially increase traffic, increase sales, and also increase our conversion rate.
The first year's results after utilizing Pinterest for social media marketing. This was before they implemented business analytics.
Eclectic Artisans' Pinterest analytics from Jan. 2019 to May 2020. We officially closed the Eclectic Artisans website on October 31, 2019. In this timeframe we acquired 6.1 million impressions with 218,000 engagements. All organic.
Sabbat Boxes' Pinterest analytics for the last 90 days, Feb. 15 to May 15. Sabbat Box has been closed since January and yet our Pinterest account is maintaining its engagement numbers, in fact they have increased. All organic, no paid ads.
A screenshot of our homepage on Pinterest.
YOUTUBE
Another valuable social media resource that we would utilize was YouTube. YouTube offers an interactive way to showcase and highlight your products with a degree of detail that may be difficult to do with static imagery. YouTube also provides another form of community building in its own unique way.
Our YouTube channel accumulated just under 1,600 subscribers. All of the content on our channel consisted of unboxing videos with no spoken content. Our official unboxing videos allowed potential customers to see what we would curate for each box shipment as they are sent to our customers.
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We would add in cards with links pointing back to our websites for each featured product in the video. We would also promote affiliate vendor's websites with links in our descriptions.
One of our most popular videos was a simple "how to" in reference to making corn dollies with 116k views.
The Sabbat Box channel analytics for 2019. Our subscription boxes ended in July. We were able to obtain 281k impressions for the year, with only 5 videos posted for the year.
To further promote business amongst our customers on YouTube we would offer our them the ability to win a free Sabbat Box by creating and sharing an "unboxing video" on YouTube. The only requirement was for our customers to film their unboxing experiences, tell us what they liked or did not like about their box, submit a link to us on our website, and we would do a monthly drawing to pick a winner.
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This allowed genuine responses to the products inside and would allow us to gauge if we are meeting their demands while also promoting our business with their followers.
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We would also work with influencers on YouTube that had large subscriber numbers by sending them a box to do their own unboxing videos with. We would offer exclusive coupons for them to share with their viewers in order to bring about new customers.
Aside from Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and YouTube, I would also utilize Twitter and Tumblr's social media platforms in order to expand our audience and further our reach. The primary focus was on the platforms that we saw the most results from, and Twitter and Tumblr were not considered as high of a priority on our list as we didn't see as positive as results.