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.

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