Hey Guys, its Jeff with rampmetrics, I hope you had a great summer and are still soaking up the last few rays of summer fun.
Over the summer, I visited my sister Sara in Waco, Texas. Waco is home of Fixer Upper, Vitek’s BBQ, Milos All Day and my sister’s new really cool store named Gather.
As a card carrying Marketer, I asked Sara how she does her Marketing and her response was “we mainly use Instagram and some Facebook” but its mostly about Instagram.
Of course, I couldn’t help myself from rambling on about how I had recently done some video advertising on Facebook and how I had created a custom audience using our email list and how great it was. But the record breaking heat was calling us back to pool so enough about marketing for now and back to vacation.
Later that day, while stylishly avoiding the record breaking heat ;-), Sara starting cooking up some dinner for the restless troops and simultaneously checking her Facebook with the greatest of ease.
I noticed her Facebook post had a little blue “Boost Post” button at the bottom.
“What does is that button do?” I curiously asked.
Sara said, “I just click it and it allows me to boost my post and create a custom audience”.
She showed me how to boost in about a minute and how easy it was. Her post was a beautiful Instagram worthy photo of her custom made pottery line made by Black Oak Art. Sara’s custom audience consisted of people who are fans/followers/likers of other similar local businesses in the Waco area. She is friends many of with the other local business owners so there is a natural like mindedness already going on outside of Facebook.
Right there in the kitchen it hit me, I realized in some ways my sister knows more about Digital Marketing than I do.
So I started to investigate whether my “advertising approach” to Facebook advertising was possibly the “big company way” and my sister’s approach was the “small company way”. I wasn’t completely sure but I definitely thought doing digital advertising from your kitchen in one minute was very attractive compared to the amount of work that I had spent creating a custom audience, making an ad, etc..
So I started boosting. Here’s one of my first post that I boosted:
I found the process of boosting to be super easy and actually fun. I’ve never really enjoyed paid advertising in the past because its such a pain to setup and manage. But the boosting experience was pretty great.
So far my learnings from this experience are along these lines:
– Create content not Content Marketing – When you start with content and then do things like boosting to get the word out it forces you to think about what matters most content not “your pitch”… There’s a subtle difference in what my sister does than what B2B Marketers call “Content Marketing”. It really works better when your content is just great content, created from a place of beauty and not a method to wrap your sales pitch in the form of content. Patagonia comes to mind as a company that I admire in this area. Patagonia shares and promotes how much negative environmental impact their products have and how they are working everyday to close the gap. Think about that, “our sales pitch” is about how much damage our product is making. Smart or not smart, right or wrong, one thing you learn about Patagonia is their pursuit for authenticity. (I’ll come back to this topic in later because this may take a few blog post to really nail down.)
– Just try it – What I love about “small business” people is they just try stuff. They don’t get caught up with analysis paralysis they just try new things and see what works. In the “bigger business” world the “just try it” mentality has been washed with fancy phrases like “test and measure”, “co-hort analysis”…
– Don’t over complicate – Sara was asking how we could better tell if the Facebooking and Instagraming was directly leading to store traffic which she already knows it is but it can be hard to calculate. I told her that big box stores have cameras, automated door counters, in-store path analysis software and POS systems to analyze purchase trend lines. Sara’s gracious response to my “pigs to the rescue” idea, was I can just have our team keep track of the number of people that come through on paper so we can compare days when we boost vs. days when we don’t.
I’ll keep carving on this post but definitely give boosting a try and let me know about your experience.
jeff