In order to develop a specific plan for the company Stop’n’Stay that would help it optimize its digital media impact, an analysis of the current situation is a must. As a team focusing on improving digital impact, we need to understand the digital environment that the company has created so far. This way we can apply our procedures and detect flaws and KPIs that have a potential for improvement. To get an idea of what results in each of the channels (in this case Facebook, Twitter, and Linked) produce, we use analytics tools to get the most specific, categorized, and helpfully processed data. For Facebook, it is either the Facebook Analytics tool or Hootsuite, which is a brilliant software measuring social media impact. It creates synoptical dashboards, gives us a complete overview of the key metrics, creates unlimited real-time reports, and shares custom reports to prove social ROI (these reports can be easily delivered to the marketing team). To get the most data out of Facebook, which I consider a strong social media domain for the Stop’n’Stay agenda, Hootsuite is our biggest helper in this issue. It offers a 30-day trial as well, and therefore I would strongly recommend the company implement it to keep track of its Facebook trace even after our intervention. Our team can help the company to embrace this tool in the most effective way possible. The Twitter life of the company will be evaluated by using a tool called Tweriod. It tells you when is the best time to tweet, what are the most click-through hashtags, and many other valuable information. LinkedIn can be very well understood and evaluated by an analytic tool called Klipfolio, which is a cloud data platform creating dashboards and reports. It clarifies the life of your LinkedIn data, metrics, and KPIs. It tracks every like, comment and share in real-time, keeping you updated on what are the best steps in meeting your goals in this digital domain.
Analyzing the current digital media impact should give us an idea of a common customer path in order to come up with such a plan that would help the company to optimize its interaction with the public and to direct its marketing efforts time and cost-efficiently. When analyzing the vast amount of data, we take into consideration absolutely everything. Likes, comments, shares, re-sent links, and tags are just the beginning. We try to understand where and why customers stop their path at digital platforms, what the dropout reasons; what posts, phrasing, imaging, and timing are the most effective. It is a large scale of factors that play a role in creating an overall thorough picture for us to work with. Our team usually takes a week in order to put together a highly accurate analysis, from which every other step evolves.
Create a framework for developing and testing the strategies.
a. Take into account the customer journey.
Nowadays, it can’t get any easier to track and understand a customer journey. We look into absolutely everything. What channel do the customers prefer? How long do they stay on a website, and what is their path over there? Do they respond to call-to-action advertisements? What times are the best ones to post in order to get the most click-throughs from social media? What particular call-to-action steps turned out to be the most efficient? It is a large net of social media and website interactions that creates a customer journey, which we work with. After collecting all this data, it depends also on a company’s budget made for channel optimization, content strategy, and cross-channel campaigns. We need to keep up with the changes in customers’ online behavior and regularly adjust our digital media activities to meet their expectations. The tools mentioned above help us to take efficient steps to deliver the company’s message in the best way. The timing and phrasing are everything. These tools help us to target the campaigns correctly. Weekly analysis can be delivered to the marketing team in the form of visually helpful dashboards. This way of understanding collected data is easy to work with as it shows the progress in a clear and simple way. Visual form is always better than just numbers. Regular customer data overview is a key step in creating sales strategies, focusing on what may result in the most conversions. Increasing conversion rate is the number one goal of all companies, and sometimes it takes a village to get these results. Understanding your customers makes this task easier.
b. What tools might you use to maximize customer engagement and why will you use them?
The need to raise the click-through rate (CTR) is because a higher CTR positively determines Quality Score (Relevance Score), which helps the company to save on cost-per-click rates and gives the company better positioning and visibility on the Internet. It all starts with higher CTR, but effective digital marketing needs to have also a rising conversion rate.
Facebook
In order to get more traffic from Facebook (click-throughs from there) we focus our plan on a few tweaks to help us with that. Clickable images within the wall posts are a good place to start. Using only eye-catching images and an appropriate headline length is the way to do so. If you add a call-to-action button to the image, you win. Canva is a smart and easy graphic software that can help you with creating such visually interesting pictures. Another piece of advice is to share your thoughts when posting a link or an image. Being personal and having something interesting to say is always highly valued by your audience and it strengthens their trust in you as a company. Also, choose the right color for your images. Studies have shown that using white, grey, and blue colors in Facebook posts generates the most clicks. Figure out the best timing and frequency strategy. In the case of Stop’n’Stay, I would suggest posting every second day after 3 pm, as this time has turned out to be the one with the most clicks. Last but not least, never forget to engage. Reply to interaction in your wall section, comment, and get involved in the discussions, so the customers and prospects see that you are actively interacting and present.
Twitter
To embrace your Twitter influence and rise CTR, try to write really persuasive tweets that attract attention and force reaction. Fire up curiosity in your followers and make them easy to read. If you are mentioning a link (connected to your website or Facebook post, etc.) try to place it in the first third of the text. Use the right keywords and use hashtags thoughtfully. Same with Facebook, try to post at the time when a majority of Twitter users are online and adjust your posts to a particular day in the week. Posts uploaded on the weekends have turned out to have a higher CTR, and therefore post more important tweets on these days. Write tweets within a word range of 120-130 characters and don’t be shy and use words encouraging clicks (e.g. “Please”, “Check”, “@addthis”, “via”, etc.). Tag your customers who don’t mind being mentioned. Share your customers’ positive experiences with your services. And don’t forget to do an analysis (e.g. using Tweriod) of your click-through rate to see if you are heading in the right direction. Dashboards of such data are easily understood and visually simple to be delivered to your team in order to come up with adjustments and further strategies.
LinkedIn
Online PR in the form of LinkedIn must not be underestimated. The profile needs to be always updated, transparent and interconnected with the company’s other active digital domains. The visual part of the profile is crucial. Try to involve only high-quality images, with high resolution and clear messages. Make the company’s message clear. Provide short but detailed enough information, so your prospects wouldn’t leave your profile due to lack of data. Key steps to increasing CTR are to post pictures, ask questions, answer your visitors’ questions, pay attention to the people interested in you, and especially focus on the possible messengers of a good mouth word. Post around 9 and 10 am, as these times have turned out to be the most effective. LinkedIn is considered as a serious social media platform and therefore it is viable to focus on delivering only high-quality content. You don’t want to lose ratings over some shoddy post. The last piece of advice would be to post only in the right LinkedIn groups where people have similar interests and it can give you a better response rate.
c. Who will you involve in this process and why will you involve them?
It is important not to hesitate to contact experts in the process of creating customer-centered and optimized digital media strategies. Have a designer creating you such visual content that will to a higher conversion rate. It is definitely worth it in the long term run. It is also very rewarding to approach your happy customers and ask them to provide you with feedback on your social media platforms that can be seen by others. Another level is to make cooperation with bloggers valuable to your purposes. These days social media is full of travelers, it can’t get easier to get them to spread the word for you. Offer them free stays in exchange for their social media influence. Try to get more homestay providers on board by making clear how easy it is to become a member in the regular posts. The correct call-to-action content is the way to get this done. Same as with the bloggers offer your newly incoming homestay providers special offers. Motivate them to get involved. These investments are necessary to gain more followers, turn them into prospects and finally make them customers. The objective is also to make your customers the company’s ambassadors.
d. What channels will you use and why will you use them?
As I have mentioned before, in the process of implementing strategies that are supposed to optimize interaction within the company’s digital background, my team focused on Facebook, Twitter, and Linked In. These are social media already implemented by Stop’n’Stay. They are very well established and therefore we focused on how to get the most out of it by using data withdrawn by analytics tools. In the plan created for the company’s purposes, we provide the marketing team the information on what are the most efficient days and times to post, and what images and wording attract the most customers - all related to click-through rates. Once our custom-designed plan is implemented, the company should expect a rise in traffic on its website. Newly signed up homestay suppliers should be amongst the public approached by smarter targeted posts and by being offered special free services in exchange for their membership.
Show how you will:
a. evaluate the impact of digital media and assess the effectiveness?
To assess the effectiveness of the implemented plan described above, we will monitor the digital situation across channels by using the analytics tools mentioned earlier - Hootesuite, Tweriod, and Klipfolio. We will focus on every single click-through in order to see the customer behavior pattern after making changes in the online advertising strategy. Based on the regularly extracted data, we will clearly see how the traffic on the website has risen and where from the click-throughs came. We expect a rise in the CTR by 20% based on the current number of followers, subscribers, and prospects. Hopefully, the click-throughs will come from all the social media platforms. Our bets are especially on Facebook and Linked, which are seriously taken among the wider public and generally considered as trustworthy. By more thorough engagement with people on the social media platforms and by providing high-quality content on one and each domain, the results should be visible within the first two weeks. If the implemented plan turns out to be successful, the strategy will be set as temporary, yet open to any further changes. As an external analytic provider, we will stay in touch with the company to provide it with any consultation or further employee training if necessary.
b. How might this impact future strategies?
When the Stop’n’Stay company asked us for help with its online marketing, it already expected us to come up with a plan that will maintain the previous idea but go deeper into understanding customer behavior. Therefore the company will implement the new tactics as an official online marketing strategy. It will organize a meeting of the marketing team where the plan will be presented to everyone by one of our experts. We will make sure everyone on the team is on the board with us and we will definitely welcome any further future suggestions. We don’t want to make the Stop’n’Stay marketing team feel as if its work is not enough. Our goal is to show these people how to improve their workflow and help them wrap their heads around the analytics tools they might don’t know about or don’t know how to take full advantage of them. We want to show the company the direction to take and leave all the initiative up to it.