Lessons Learned from BAMA513 – Reflective Learning Paper

Introduction

Though we only had five classes in total, I have learned a significant amount of knowledge of e-marketing from BAMA513. The course was well-organized in that first we were introduced to the fundamental concepts of e-marketing then were given an opportunity to use these concepts to improve a client’s online marketing program. By applying what we learned in class to real-life situations, we managed to truly understand what positive impacts e-marketing has on a business. In what follows, I will summarize my learning from the group project experience.

Project Overview

Our group has decided to work with a client called “Lens of Aladdin” which is a company that is soon-to-be founded by some of the members in the group. The ultimate goal of the company is to connect pro to semi-professional photographers with those who are in need of high quality photographs, especially headshots, at low cost. In order to achieve this goal, first we needed to build brand awareness and identify people who are interested in our product (i.e. professional headshot at an affordable price). Therefore, we decided this project’s objectives to be 1) growing a user subscription base by collecting email addresses of people who register on website and 2) creating brand awareness by achieving a following on Social Media platforms.

Google AdWords

As we were still in the process of developing the website, we did not have enough content to qualify for Google Adwords. For this very reason we decided to try using it on one of our team members’ website “My Seven Chakras”. We learned the important of:

  • Using niche and targeted terms – When the chosen words are too broad, the results will be disappointing as apparent from the tests we conducted for this project. We must select words that let us know whether those who click the ad are actually interested in our services.
  • Using industry specific phrases – As apparent from the fact that the phrase “Thoughts are things” boosted our CTR in comparison with the previous phrase “Do you want to change”, it is important to use industry specific phrases (in this project, the industry was Yoga) to get people’s attention.
  • Leveraging authority in phrases – We found out that clients and customers are naturally gravitated towards such terms that signify authority. Using phrases “advice from experts” or referring to famous people in the industry can entice our potential customers.
  • Having a clear Call to action – Through testing, we found out that it is extremely important to use phrases that have a clear call to action such as “download”, “purchase”, or “book”.

Email Campaign

The purpose of the email campaign was to determine the most optimal combinations of email content and style that would increase viewer footprint and eventually result in recipients signing up for the first headshot session. For this purpose, we carried out two sets of A/B testing with our email campaign. By doing this campaign, we learned the importance of:

  • Knowing what you are going to communicate with your audiences (announcement, update, or stay in touch)
  • Defining clear target audiences/receipts
  • Setting up email distribution strategy and schedule
  • Customizing content base on setting strategy (e.g. short and clear subject, professional key visual, clean and tidy layout design worked well for us)
  • Monitoring email performance (open rate, CTR, spam report, etc.) and learning from the report to adjust campaign strategy

Social Media Content

In order to achieve the two objectives mentioned above, we created social media accounts for the business and use KPIs such as likes on Facebook page, following on twitter, and engagement on each Facebook and Twitter posts to measure our objectives. The key takeaways from the testing are:

  • Text posts on our business got low reach and engagement. Though the low reach was mainly due to the fact that we did not have too many following on social media at the time, we also believe that these posts were not very engaging in terms of content.
  • Informational videos that were fun to watch did not generate interest from audience and thus the engagement and reach on the videos were on the same level as the text posts.
  • Informational repurposing of content together combined with the power of hashtag allowed us to generate high interest from audience on twitter. E.g. The post “Social media expert Scott explains the importance of #profilepics for #jobhunt, social networking and #dating. “
  • High quality headshots of some of our followers had the highest engagement and reach. This proved the important of sharing content that our following can relate to in order to have high numbers of engagement, reaches, and likes for the page.

Hootsuite/Social Media Scheduling

The primary advantage to using Hootsuite is its ability to connect more social networks and allow us to monitor and schedule multiple streams, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Linkedin, in one single page. That said, through using Hootsuite for our project, we realized that some features (such as tagging people, hashtag suggestions, and high quality photo upload) that are available on Facebook and Twitter are not offered through Hootsuite. In conclusion, we learned that though it may be helpful for some businesses who own multiple social media accounts, Hootsuite may not work for other businesses, including Lens of Aladdin, that need to use every feature each social platform has to offer (e.g. tagging and high-rez photo uploading).

Google Analytics – Conclusion

By analyzing the correlation between the traffic to the website and social media/email campaigns we conducted, we were able to understand:

  • Which social media/email campaigns generated traffic to the website
  • When (time/day) people tend to visit our website
  • Who our main audience are
  • What activities our audience engaged in on our website

Having identified what worked and what did not worked for this project, we can customize our e-marketing strategies to engage more audience. As we learned from this group project, it is important to keep trying out new campaigns and analyze their performance while taking note of what worked and what did not work.

How many #Hashtags should we use per post?

 

hashtag

Now that Twitter and Instagram have been around for several years, I’m sure most people are familiar with the concept of Hashtag. For those of you who do not know what it is, according to Wikipedia a hashtag is “a type of label or metadata tag used on social network and microblogging services which makes it easier for users to find messages with a specific theme or content”.

Nevertheless as the two images above clearly illustrate, some people just seem to overuse it. To tell you the truth, I have used multiple hashtags in a single post hoping that would lead to more leads and traffic. Now let’s learn together how many hashtag we should be using in one post so we don’t look needy/desperate and simultaneously get higher engagement from our audience.

Twitter

Twitter’s own research into hashtags concludes that there is significant advantage to using hashtags since individuals can see a 100% increase in engagement while brands can see a 50% increase by effectively using hashtags.

That said, Buddy Media found out that one of two hashtags per post appear to be the max. As a matter of fact, when you use more than 2 hashtags, your engagement actually drops by 17%!

Facebook

Since Hashtags were introduced to Facebook in 2013, there are some people out there who do not know that this function is available on this social media platform at all.

Though posts without hashtags outperform those with hashtags on Facebook back in 2013, the research conducted recently concludes that posts with 1 or 2 hashtags averaged the highest interaction of 593.

Instagram

Now what about Instagram? Well the data comes from a set of users with 1,000 or fewer followers shows us that interaction is in fact the highest on Instagram posts with 11+ #hashtags!  So even if your post looks like the below image, you are doing nothing wrong:)

hashtag2

Hashtag for Twitter/Instagram vs Facebook

  • On Twitter, hashtags allow you to see all tweets about a particular topic. Instagram also allow users to include hashtags as a filter to find information on specific topics.
  • Twitter and Instagram users are much more likely to be interested in finding content around a certain topic which increases the value of hashtags.
  • Facebook uses their rules and algorithms to determine what is seen from a click on a hashtag. Facebook is said to take into account factors such as how popular a post is, how closely you’re related to the page that posted it, and how often you interact with the poster before showing you what is seen from a click on a hashtag.

Make sure to keep what’s discussed in this post when you use #hashtag in your posts!

Read article on hashtag for multiple social media platforms here:

https://blog.bufferapp.com/a-scientific-guide-to-hashtags-which-ones-work-when-and-how-many

Read article on hashtag for Facebook here:

https://www.postplanner.com/how-to-use-hashtags-on-facebook/

Read article on the differences in hashtag searches here:

http://www.marketergizmo.com/a-beginners-guide-to-hashtag-use-on-facebook/

Next Big Social Media Platform

Ever wondered what the next social platform will be? Though there are many cool social media platforms out there, for me Quora stands out among the rest.

Quora

For those of you who have never heard of it, in a few words Quora is so-called a Q&A platform. There’s a unique benefit to the kind of social interaction available on Quora that is not available on other social media platforms such as Facebook or Twitter.

As a Q&A platform, Quora’s main feature is to let users ask and answer questions. In addition to the asking and answering, users can follow question threads and vote on the best answers.

What I really like about Quora as opposed to other social media platforms is the fact that it originates from the idea where people helping out others. In short, it is built on altruism.

Currently experts and professionals from numerous industries are on Quora simply to lend their experience and insight into the community’s questions! As Neil Patel of Forbes discusses in his article,  “your answer might be upvoted by Ashton Kutcher,answered by Facebook’s co-founder, or bandied about by Mark Cuban” How cool is this?

As more and more businesses are showing interest in giving back to society through the concept of corporate social responsibility, I believe that Quora has the potential to become the next big social media platform.

I strongly recommend you to ask and answer questions on Quora in your field of interest. As I mentioned in my blog post about evergreen content, educational content has a high possibility of becoming immune from being obsolete. By answering or asking questions, you may be able to generate traffic to your website or business.

Read the article on next 5 big social media platform here:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/neilpatel/2015/09/28/5-underrated-up-and-coming-social-media-platforms-you-need-to-join-right-now/2/

Optimal Length for Social Media Post

Okay let’s face it. People these days shorter attention span than goldfish!

In fact researchers surveyed 2,000 people in Canada and studied the brain activity of 112 others using electroencephalograms. Alas the results showed the average human attention span has dramatically fallen from 12 seconds in 2000 (around the time the mobile revolution began) to 8 seconds (see reading at the bottom of this post for details).

You know what this means? This means that whenever you post something on your facebook, twitter, or blog, we must keep the content short and concise. Furthermore, the content must be easy to must be quickly and easily!

How do we know what’s too long or short for our social media updates?

Thanks to Kevan Lee from buffer social, there’s an answer to this question:

length

Interesting isn’t it? These numbers were actually data-backed (read the article on optimal length for social media update for details) and based on countless numbers of research.

Although it can be argued that what’s really right for some people in terms of ideal length might not be exactly what your specific audience needs, it’s always a good idea to use data as a starting point for your own testing.

What I found particularly interesting about the above finding is the fact that optimal length for a Facebook post is actually shorter than that of Twitter (i.e. 40 characters for Facebook vs 71-100 for Twitter). Though sometimes it may difficult to keep your post really short on Facebook, since posts at this length (i.e. 40 characters per post) tend to receive higher “like” rate, comment rate, I strongly recommend you to try to keep it concise.

What do you think of these so-called “ideal lengths” for social media updates? Any alignment with your own social media experience? Let me know what you think in the comment section below!

Read the article on attention span here:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/11607315/Humans-have-shorter-attention-span-than-goldfish-thanks-to-smartphones.html

Read the article on ideal social media update length here:

https://blog.bufferapp.com/optimal-length-social-media

 

Evergreen Content for Dummies

If you are a marketer or into marketing at all, I am pretty sure you have heard of the phrase “evergreen content”. Evergreen content, to simply put, is the content that does not date and instead retains relevance to an audience over a long period of time.

An example of evergreen content is an educational article Google analytics dashboard. Its content is always (at least as of 2015) relevant to an audience. It delivers traffic, leads, social shares, and helps us keep good search positions.

Okay, assuming that you find this concept somewhat intriguing, you may have started wondering how to produce it.

According to Graham Charlton of Econsultancy, below are the factors that are important in producing evergreen content:

Quality, an eye on SEO, shareable content,  catchy headline, relevance to audience, and alignment with the goal of blog/website. 

Though all the factors mentioned above are important, I think the last two points are particularly important. Though technically speaking you are not selling your website/blog content to your audience in exchange for money, you should always treat them as something you intend on actually selling. In order to effectively sell your product or service, you need to fully understand the following:

Value proposition, target segment, market size, and competitors of your product

Instead of writing content for a random audience with a wide range of topics, simply ensure that you understand  your target audience (e.g. via target segmentation exercise) and provide them with what they want (e.g. by writing out your positioning statement), which they cannot find anywhere else (e.g. by conducting competitor analysis).

Just as the article says, “don’t be afraid to go niche”!

Read the Econsultancy article here:

https://econsultancy.com/blog/65455-why-you-need-an-evergreen-content-strategy/

 

Most Effective E-Marketing Channel

There’s a lot of stuff you can do to promote your service or product on the internet. But what is the most effective internet marketing medium? Social media? Email? Blogs or website? I believe these are one of the questions many readers of this blog have been seeking answers for.

Unlike the 90’s when e-marketing was simpler, things have gotten complicated with the rise of social media, blogs, search engine optimization, and new technologies in general. Though we should definitely be grateful for having many e-marketing tools such as mentioned above, I think it is fair to say that this abundance of choice is truly overwhelming.

Luckily we are not the only ones who are struggling with this problem; a company called Ascend2 and its research partner conducted a survey of global marketers to find out which marketing channel is most effective.

Email-Marketing-Charts-screencap

As the chart above clearly illustrates, the global marketers said they consider email to be to be the top rated channel by ROI (even ahead of SEO and content marketing!). Though possibly the simplest tool, directness and straightforwardness of email marketing cannot be ignored.

The other interesting factor to consider when choosing your own e-marketing channels, as you can see from the chart, is how difficult a channel is in terms of execution. Despite their effectiveness, social media, website/blog, and SEO are considered difficult to be executed. This, however, may change as new technologies come about and make them easier to use.

What do you think about the survey results? Do you agree or disagree? I would love to hear your take on this interesting topic.

An article on this topic is available here: http://www.forbes.com/sites/steveolenski/2014/09/26/email-marketing-most-effective-mobile-marketing-most-difficult/

Review: Success factors for online music marketing

Assignment#1: Article Report

Title – Success factors for online music marketing – eTransformation: from the four Ps to the four Cs.

Authors – Cornelia C. Krueger, Paula M.C. Swatman, and Nhiem Lu

Link:http://www.researchgate.net/publication/228607822_Success_factors_for_online_music_marketing-eTransformation_from_the_four_P’s_to_the_four_C’s 

Introduction

As a part-time busker and an MBA candidate who specializes in product and service management, I have always looked for ways to utilize what I learned in classes, especially those that are marketing related, in delivering my own music to as many people as possible via internet. As music produced by professional musicians can be easily obtained freely over the internet it has become extremely difficult to sell music online and make a profit even for major record companies. The article “Success factors for online music marketing – eTransformation: from the four Ps (price, promotion, place, and, product) to the four Cs” carefully looks at the implications of the four Ps and the changes the internet brought to the four Ps. Furthermore, the article talks about the newer concept of four Cs (customer solution, customer cost, convenience, and communication) and how it can dramatically help music retailers and musicians with their online sales.

Synopsis

The article talks about three main points:

First, having mentioned that the marketing mix (i.e. the four Ps) is an integral part of marketing strategy as it defines the marketing instruments used to achieve the company’s marketing goals, the article goes on to argue that its focus on “product” can be considered a weakness in an eCommerce environment and that in today’s more customer centric environment, “pull” approach instead of “push” approach, in which producs are created to cater to people’s needs, is the key in successful marketing strategies, with products being created to suit customers’ expressed needs.

Second, the article argues that the four Ps should be redefined into the aforementioned four Cs (customer solution, customer cost, convenience, and communication) in order to ensure success in eCommerce. Appendix A summarizes the differences between the four Ps and the four Cs.

Third the article goes on to analyze how Amazon.com uses the four Cs effectively in order to boost their sales and how musicians and music retailers on the other hand fail to do the same. Based on this analysis, the article discusses the so-called success factors for online music marketing. Appendix B summarizes these factors. 

Review

Overall I truly enjoyed how the article applied the concept of the marketing mix to its search for the success factors for online music marketing, and how the article successfully sheds a light on a very important fact that in this age of internet, it is indeed the customers who get to choose what, when, where and how they consume in a strike. In other words, the music industry should not dictate the four Ps in this new economy but instead should try to treat potential customers as partners and place them at the centre of the new marketing mix. Having said that, there seem to be a few flaws in its arguments.

First, though the idea of decriminalizing peer to peer by making people pay for streaming services has been implemented by companies such as Spotify, it does not seem to help major record labels and musicians with recovering displaced revenue. According to the analysis done by Aguiar and Waldfogel (http://www.cnbc.com/2015/11/04/does-spotify-hurt-the-music-industry.html), Spotify is revenue-neutral. In other words, Spotify barely maintains the royalty rate (i.e. around $0.007 per stream goes to the musician or record label) that meets the traditional sales displacement rate (i.e. one’s streams effect on track sales) as seen in the appendix C. Even if streaming somehow boosts sales, that is because it indirectly promotes the music (which in turn may generate sales increase).

Furthermore its argument that there are many similarities in concept between selling music online and selling books or CDs online (e.g. Amazon) and that the recorded music sales would increase when the four Cs are carefully taken into account sounds somewhat farfetched. Though it is true that many companies such as Spotify and Apple implemented the four Cs following the Amazon’s success (Appendix D) and managed to switch to subscription streaming services from the traditional downloading distribution in order to secure their revenue source from online music distribution, the fact that the recorded music sales either via downloading and streaming are nearly 50% below their peak in 2000 is indisputable (http://www.wsj.com/articles/itunes-music-sales-down-more-than-13-this-year-1414166672). The increasing availability of free music (e.g. Youtube) clearly has been eroding the demand for digital music download as apparent from the fact that global revenue from music download has been declining. On the other hand, according to Apple’s iTunes sales report, the demand for movies, apps, and books download is increasing. What this implies is that implementing the four Cs does not necessarily lead to sales increase for record labels and independent musicians.

In conclusion, although most of the success factors for online marketing, namely “customer as an allied”, “De-criminalise P2P networks by making them pay”, and “use the Internet technology to make customized offers”, can be said to be effective in promoting music online, the key success factor “concentrate on selling digital music as a core competence” does not seem to work for increasing digital music sales as apparent from the declining volume of digital music download in the new economy.

Appendix

Appendix A: Putting the marketing mix into practice – the four P’s vs. the four C’s (Sources: Strauss/Frost, 2001; Chaffey et al., 2000)

Screen Shot 2015-11-14 at 10.14.18 PMScreen Shot 2015-11-14 at 10.14.45 PM

Appendix B: Success Factors for Online Music Marketing

Screen Shot 2015-11-14 at 10.44.20 PM

Appendix C: Sales Displacement Rate

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Appendix D: Implementation of the four Cs on Amazon.com

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