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Steven: Well good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us for
today's webinar, "The Unicorn Strategy" - Using Social
Media to Drive Brand Awareness. My name is Steven Shattuck
and I'm the community manager here at Slingshot SEO and
I'll be moderating today's discussion. With me today is
Muhammad Yasin. He's the Director of Marketing over at HCC
Medical Insurance Services. Good morning, Muhammad.
Muhammad: Good morning, Steven.
Steven: Thanks for being here. So what we're going to do today is the
two of us are going to discuss how to use social media
promotion and engagement of social media influencers to
drive website traffic and brand awareness.
So, Muhammad has a short presentation that he's going to go
through this morning first, in which he'll share some case
studies from his experience building a social network of
over 250,000 followers, as well as exposing the HCCMIS
brand to over 8 million people in 12 months. He's got some
impressive data to share with us.
Then after his presentation, what we do in all of our
webinars is move into kind of a fun and casual Q&A session,
where the two of us will field some questions submitted by
folks who registered from webinar and sent them over via
Twitter as well.
If you have any questions during the webinar, if you hear
something that maybe you want clarified, please feel free
to use the chat functionality in WebEx. Send those over and
we'll try to get to them as long as we have time to do so.
So, without any further ado, Muhammad, take it away.
Muhammad: Thank you, Steven. So as Steven mentioned, HCC Medical
Insurance Services is kind of very passionate about social
media in general. One of the things that we have been
looking at is how social media as a whole and kind of the
proliferation of Internet usage is changing people's buying
behaviors.
That's something that's very important to us because we are
almost 100% web-based in the products that we sell and have
been for a long time. So, it's something we have to keep an
eye on in order to make sure we stay relevant.
Before we get started, I want to take a look at just the
state of the web in general. The world overall is home to
about 7 billion people, and a third of the world's
population is already online. This is something that I
think is growing and expanding rapidly, not only just in
developed countries like the United States or places in
Europe, but also very much so, it's exploding in these
third-world countries.
What's happening is that we have all these new users of
social media that are not only engaging in the usual
channels like Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn and those
sort of places, but they're creating brand new social
channels as well.
Overall, there are 1 billion users of social media in the
world right now and that number is growing by leaps and
bounds every single day. From those 1 billion people, there
are over 200 active social networks. So once again, we're
not just talking about Facebook and LinkedIn and Twitter.
These social networks are proliferating across the entire
world.
We have versions of Twitter that are specific just for
China or just for certain parts of the world. We have
Facebook that's extremely popular here and other parts of
the world. But there are almost exact reproductions of
Facebook with minor differences in places like Russia and
Eastern Europe and places like that. Out of all these
people, they're behaving differently.
One of the big things that I look at from the perspective
of really locating influences or even creating content
that's relevant to our customers is the fact that, out of
all these people online in social networks, about 80% of
them are only sharing one category of content during a
given month, all right?
I think this really, very much mirrors how we are in the
real world as well. We have interests as individuals. Those
interests are the things we talk about. Those interests are
the things we read about. Those interests are the things we
converse about and share with our friends. The same thing
is true online.
This becomes really important when you get to the point of
kind of promoting a product, because you need to understand
who those individuals are that are reading your content,
and they're going to engage with your brand. We'll get a
little bit more into that later on.
51% of the people that use social media actually use it to
research when shopping. This is something that I think that
many of us that are using the internet are aware of now,
especially with mobile access.
You will even see people that are in brick-and-mortar style
stores - you're standing at the shelf. You're looking at a
product, trying to make a little bit of a buying decision,
very easy to just jump online really quick and read some
reviews. Very easy to send the message out to your friends
or check with your buddy and see what they think of this
product before you make that buying decision. It's not only
impacting the decisions that people are making purchasing
products online, but it's actually bleeding into real life
as well.
I was listening to a conference a couple of weeks ago with
- Jay Baer had mentioned that two-thirds of people that use
social media actually make the purchase decisions. So not
only are they using it to research the product when they're
shopping, but they're also reaching out to their network to
find out whether or not they should make that final
decision of buying a product.
This goes across all types of products whether it is a
brand new computer. Or whether it is something like, for
myself, making a decision on what type of insurance to
purchase for a trip abroad. This kind of insane, huge
growth of social media is impacting really a lot of
channels, especially for us as marketers. We no longer have
the luxury of just looking at kind of print media or
billboards or TV advertising or radio advertising.
Or even online, we no longer have the luxury of just
saying, "Oh, there are only two or three social networks.
I'm going to be really active in those. I'm going to create
a great community. People are going to follow me. I'm going
to post content and everything's going to be great." We
have a lot of changes that we, as marketers, need to make
because, as I mentioned before, social proliferation has
changed the way that we have to do business, especially as
online marketers.
But the question is, have we, as marketers and even as
content creators, kept up with the changing times? Are we
keeping up with consumer behavior and how it's changing
because of how easy the access to the internet is?
Unfortunately, I think the answer is no. For many of us,
even those that are in this space, the answer is no. We
follow this model. It's what I call "The Unicorn Strategy".
Sorry, a little bit of a bummer here, the Unicorn Strategy
is kind of the wrong way to go.
The habit we have as online marketers is that, first, we
create content. We may create a great piece of content. We
post that content to our social channels and we instantly
expect this kind of phenomenon to happen like the viral
Double Rainbow video, something where you post it and
instantly it just goes bananas online, you get this huge
brand recognition, you get tons of website traffic, and
hopefully that converts into sales.
Unfortunately, that's not reality. This only really works
when you have an enormous network of your own and you
already have established brand value where people are
coming to you, following you, engaging with you, and
waiting for you to post something epic so that they can
reshare that or engage with it.
A better way to look at it is to actually look at more of a
results-driven strategy, something where you're not posting
content to a non-existent network and literally standing in
the woods, kind of screaming to yourself about some great
content but no one can see it. Instead, create the best
piece of content you can, this epic engaging piece of
content, post that content to your own channels or some
other channels, as we'll get into a little bit later.
The next thing though, is promoting that content. This is
basically marketing your marketing. You're going to create
this great piece of marketing content but you also need to
market that piece of content that you created and push it
out. Deliver it to the people who are going to be
interested in engaging with that piece of content, hand
deliver it to them, and then you'll have the results that
you're looking for.
One of the ways to do that is by using influencers, all
right? Before we start talking about influencers though, I
want to kind of clarify what we're talking about when we
say the word "influencers", because I think there is a
little bit of a difference in some of the writers lately
between "influencers" and "brand advocates". We're talking
about, here, is really creating a brand advocate out of an
influencer.
An influencer is someone whose individual words and actions
are going to impact the behavior of others. So if they post
something, people will take action, people will reshare it,
people will click through to it, people will decide to
purchase a product, because it's been recommended by the
influencer. This is a tried and true method that has been
used for years and years and years. This is something that
we already see in traditional marketing. It's nothing new.
This is the reason that we have athletes promoting sporting
products. This is the reason why we have celebrities showing up at events. This is the reason why
we have paid spokespeople in general, to promote products,
because people trust them. People trust their opinions
on certain things, and people take action because these
people have mentioned certain brands or products.
We're talking about the same thing here, but we're talking
about doing this in a web page, where you can directly
engage with that influencer. Where you can reach a greater
amount of people through that influencer at a much lower
cost, hopefully, and where you can hopefully create just a
raving kind of brand advocate out of that influencer, who
really believes in your product and believes in your brand.
A couple of stats, we're looking here at the difference
between the endorsements of celebrities. So this is
something that's still very real. People, when asked, say
that celebrities are still an influential source or an
influential endorsement for people who are looking for
substantive advice. That's the keyword, "substantive advice".
So, you've got 12% there. We have 34% saying status
updates, and this is maybe your friends are talking about
the product in their Facebook feeds or Twitter, etc. But
then we have a nice, big jump up when we start looking at
blogs. 45% of people, they're saying that they trust what
they read in blogs when they're trying to make a decision
and they need some substantive advice.
Luckily for us, large brand influencers tend to usually
also have a web presence outside of their Twitter feed or
their Facebook feed, etc. They usually are also going to be
running blogs as well and that's something that's very
important when you're choosing an influencer. We're going
to talk a little bit about how to make that decision.
98% of the people say that they trust the advice and
information that they get from blogs. This is a really big
deal to us when we are doing our marketing activities
because we're trying to find influencers, hopefully brand
advocates, that already have a strong presence on the web
in the form of a blog or some sort of website. This not
only helps us from the perspective of building brand
signals via social that will, in the long-term, help with
our SEO efforts.
But also from a pure SEO standpoint, obviously helps us to
be able to make sure that we get brand mentions on websites
that are relevant to our industry, relevant to our
products. Hopefully out of that as well, really, really
valuable links that not only are valuable in the eyes of
Google, but also valuable from the perspective of these
being links on pages where people that are going to turn
into customers are going to see them and hopefully click on
those links because they trust the person that they're
reading this from.
So let's look at a couple of case studies and the results
of what those were. This first one that we're looking for,
this was kind of a rich media blog that we had put on our
website. It's a mixture of kind of traditional infographics, really great written content,
some video content and some other things on one page
all around the topic of backpacking abroad.
This is one of our very big market segments of people that
we sell the product to. It's a travel medical insurance
product. There are a lot of people that are backpacking
abroad. Obviously there are some risks involved in that and
we offer insurance for that trip.
This was not a piece promoting the product so much as it
was a piece really providing information to these people
that are traveling, lots of tips about backpacking, destination information, where you needed
to go, what you needed to do, video about how to pack their
backpacks, all these types of things on one really well-laid
out page.
What we did to promote this was we actually placed it with
one very influential person on StumbleUpon. I use
StumbleUpon because they've got one of the places that
people immediately look at is places like Twitter. There
are lots of other channels as well. Like I mentioned
before, we have over 200 different social networks that are
active across the world.
One of the main things to look at before you decide where
you're going to place your product is or your marketing
piece is, where are the people that are going to buy my
product at, where are they engaging at and with this piece
of content that I have, what's the network that best fits
the content that I am trying to promote?
In this case, StumbleUpon was a great fit for us. We placed
it with someone that had been proven to drive some really
great results because they had a very engaged network and
this is about maybe three weeks' worth of activity out of
that. You have 43,000 views, which means 43,000 visits back
to our website of people that are engaging with the
content.
Not only were they reading it on StumbleUpon, breezing past
it and leaving, these people are actually staying on our
website for an average of about seven, seven and a half
minutes apiece. These people were reading multiple pages.
These people were, after they were done with this piece of
engaging content, reading through product pages, sharing it
with their friends, etc. This was something that was
extremely valuable to us as a company.
The next one we're looking at is for Pinterest, all right?
So, in this instance, we had a relationship with an
influencer that was very, very active on Pinterest, over a
million followers. However, we didn't have a great piece of
content for that individual. This is something you need to
look at when you're developing an influencer program.
In one case, we have a piece of content that we know is
really great and we're placing it with someone that we know
can do great things with it. In this case, we have a
relationship with someone that we know can produce results.
However, we don't have a piece of content that's going to
relate really well to that person's audience.
This influencer is a make-up artist, a stylist, very high-
end. As a travel insurance company, we didn't really have a
whole lot of content out there that made sense for her
audience. They were used to getting lots of tips about make-
up and style, and fashion, and those sorts of things.
But we were able to sit down and say, "Okay, where's the
overlap here where we can actually create a really great
piece of content for you? Something where you are going to
feel great about sharing it and something where your
audience is really going to say, 'Yes, this is why I follow
you for.'"
So what we did was actually create a video as well as a
blog post around tips for packing the perfect travel make-
up kit, very niche, very meant for this influencer, very
meant for her audience. But also relevant to us because it
was something that was valuable to our consumers because
they come to us for travel tips.
We gave it to her. She posted this on Pinterest. Within two
hours, 300 repins of this particular piece of content. We
had over 1,000 visits to our website within those first
three hours and the traffic continued ongoing for the next
several weeks. It has turned into one of our best pieces of
content and continues to drive traffic for us even now.
So, we looked at a couple of examples of some case studies,
how it can be relevant to you, how you can create content
that drives traffic and drives conversions back to your
website. Let's go through some tips on how you can do this.
First, this is actually the easiest step, locating
influencers. I say this is the easiest, because if you're
looking for influencers on a particular topic and you're
searching through social channels to find them, they tend
to be very hard to miss. The reason that they're very hard
to miss is because they are prolific creators of content.
They are prolific sharers of content, and they talk a lot.
All right?
These are going to be individuals, where if you do
something, even as simple as going into Twitter's search
feature and typing in a term, and you keep doing that every
couple of days, you will see these people popping up in the
stream over and over and over again. You will see people
resharing their content. You will see people replying to
their content. They're hard to miss. That's what makes this
kind of the easiest part.
However, one of the things you need to do is - going back
to this whole idea of make sure that they're active on kind
of the social channels. But also have a valuable web
presence as far as a website or a blog. We need to actually
evaluate, what is the value of their blog? There are
obviously some very traditional tools that you can look at
like PageRank, Domain Authority, things like that that
you're probably already looking at when you're evaluating
websites where you hope to get links placed.
When you're looking at a social influencer, you are going
to look at those types of factors. But you're also going to
look at things like the actual social sharing related to
that person's site. So the tool we're looking at here is
Social Crawlytics. It's actually a free tool, still kind of
in early beta versions. But it is a free tool. What you do
is you put in the website that you're looking at.
So, here, we're looking actually at Slingshot. This is from
a couple of months back. It will crawl the site for you,
and what it does is yanks back what social channels that
website is most influential in. So, when people are sharing
their content, where are they sharing the content at?
This allows you to say, "Okay, I've identified this
influencer. I've crawled their site. But when I give them a
piece of content, what channel should I maybe try to push
them toward sharing that content in?"
In this situation, I'd probably push Slingshot towards
LinkedIn. I'd try to maybe get something posted through
their LinkedIn profiles, maybe through their Twitter
profiles if they have some good engagement there as well.
Maybe not so much for StumbleUpon or maybe a Pinterest or
something like that. The engagement is not quite as high
there, which means your ROI is not going to be quite as
high as it could be.
The second thing that it looks at is it actually pulls back
a list of all the pages, so it'll dig and then you can set
different levels of crawl depth that you want for the page.
But it'll yank back all the pages and list out the social
shares for each one of those pages.
So, here we're looking at different blog posts and we've
can see from there what types of content... So, we've
already determined these are the channels. But what types
of content do people share the most on this website? The
reason this is important is if you are trying to either
place a piece of content with an influencer or you are
trying to create a piece of content for an influencer, you
need to determine what's the best piece of content for that
person. This is the way to do that. Crawl the website, find
out what people are already sharing, and then create more
of that type of content for the influencer to share with
their network.
Next step after you've determined who these influencers
are, you've evaluated them, ranked them, determine who
you're going to go after, is to actually build the
relationship. This is actually the hardest part of the kind
of process. Because this is the part, where you have to
approach an individual who is probably being approached
constantly by marketers both traditional marketers and
online marketers, and may be a little bit jaded towards the
whole idea of being pitched to. All right?
Realize that you are trying to build a relationship that is
going to last. You're not trying to build a relationship
where you get a piece of content placed and successfully
get some results off of that. You're trying to build a
relationship that creates a brand advocate out of this
influencer and is long-lasting so that you, on an ongoing
basis, cannot only place content with this individual. But
hopefully they will also take the initiative to talk about
you on their own and share the content in their own words,
on their own time.
That's where you're going to get the real value out of it
versus doing all this research, building all this
relationship, closing a deal, placing a piece of content
that maybe rushed, and then burning that relationship and
never having that again. Realize that every time this
influencer shares your content after the first time, it's
going to have more and more authority and trust behind
that.
It's not going to be something where the audience sees it
and says, "Oh, this is a one-off thing. All right. I'm
going to pay a little bit of attention to it." That second
time that they see your name pop up again they're going to
pay attention to you just a little bit more and say, "Yeah,
you know what? This is actually legit. It looks like
they're actually endorsing this product. This is some great
content. I saw it last time and I loved it."
There are a couple of easy ways that you can kind of get
ready for this approach to the influencer. One of the
things is actually mining their social profiles. So look at
their Twitter feeds, look at their Facebook, look at their
Pinterest accounts. All these accounts really are a
reflection of the personality of the individual or a
reflection of the interests of the individual and as a
result, you'll be able to find out exactly what they're
interested in and therefore, tailor your approach to them.
I'm not saying that you're going to be fake and discuss
something with them that you're not interested in. However,
you might find out there's something that they're very
interested in that maybe someone else on your team also is
passionate about and maybe you're not the best person to
reach out to them.
Maybe there's someone else in your group that maybe should
speak with them because they have common interests. That's
what you want to build on before you get to the point of
starting to place some content with them.
So, after you've done that, you've engaged with this
person, you've made some really great relationships, now
you can actually start making those rainbows. You can
actually place that Double Rainbow video with them or that
piece of content.
One thing you want to look at first, though, is you need
some overlap. So obviously you have some business need
around placing this piece of content and around kind of the
marketing goals that you want to result from it. However,
you also have this kind of vanity factor related around the
influencer.
You need to not only create a piece of content that is
going to get you the results you need. But you need to
create a piece of content that is going to make this
influencer look great, something where they are going to be
excited about sharing it because they are going to look
good for giving this to their audience. That's where you're
going to get the overlap that's extremely valuable for both
of you.
So, after you've done that, you've created a piece of
content and you've shared it, measuring of the results is
obviously critical. This is how you are going to justify
the efforts that you've put in because this is a very long
process, especially the part where you're building the
relationship with them. You need to make sure that you can
measure the results you had to make sure you met your
goals.
At the very basic level, you're going to want to do
something like giving the person an individual Bitly or a
certain URL that you can track the results on. However,
what you really want to do is go a little bit of a step
further. If you're using Google Analytics - or any other
analytics software that's kind of a little bit higher level
than Bitly or a URL shortener - you're going to have
options like link tagging that are available to you, where
you can give an individual influencer a link that is
specifically tagged to show that the traffic came from that
person.
This is an example of a spreadsheet that we use internally
where we will tag each of the influencers individually so
we know who was the source of that traffic? We'll know what
channels that they were sharing the content in. Then, we
will also create a custom Bitly link. The reason we do that
is because that way we can provide the influencer with a
link that's shortened versus having the possibility of them
getting rid of some of the link tagging that we've put on
that very long URL.
The benefit this gives us is that on the tail-end, we can
then see the direct results that are attributed to the
placement of that influencer. So this is kind of some dummy
data that we're looking at here, where on the previous
spreadsheet we were giving this to Shelby, Danielle, Jarred
and Kristen to push a piece of content in different
channels.
If you're tagged that way, then you can on the tail-end see
the exact kind of engagement that they drove on your site,
the number of visits that individual influencer drove on
your site, the path those people took to the website. How
many pages they visited, even all the way down to how much
money did that particular person make you, because people
that visited ended up turning into customers on the tail-
end?
This is something that is extremely critical because, once
again, you're going to put a lot of time into building
these influencers and building the relationships. If you
can't justify the effort you've put in on the back end and
you can't measure against the goals that you had as a
marketing team, then there's really going to be a lot of
trouble kind of justifying the investment in doing this
again.
On the other side, this is also a really great time, once
you've had the results, to go back to that influencer.
Talking about this vanity metric again, really going back.
Thanking them. This is a big thing. Once they do it, go
back and thank them for having done it and share the
results with them.
With the Pinterest example, that evening I was very pleased
with those results. The first thing I did was pick up the
phone and call this person and say, "Hey, you drove over
1,000 visits to our website in the past two hours. That is
really awesome. Thank you for that." That's the sort of
thing that will continue to cultivate that relationship and
make sure it's not a one-sided thing, make sure that you
are showing the appreciation to these influencers. So I
think with that, we'll go to some of the Q&A items.
Steven: Awesome, Muhammad. That was great, lots of good data, good
advice in that presentation. I hope the listeners got
something out of it. We've got a few questions here, a
little bit of time left. Muhammad, since the Unicorn
Strategy ended up being a bad thing, let's talk about -
well, we'll call it the anti-Unicorn Strategy, so the right
way to do it.
In your two examples - the Pinterest example, the
influencer was a part of the content and in the other one
it was a rich media piece where the content was a little
bit separated from the actual influencers that you had
identified. So the question is, when in the process do you
think about the influencers you want to target? Is it
before creating the content? Is it after or is it maybe
during? Maybe walk us through the timeline of the anti-
Unicorn Strategy?
Muhammad: Actually, there's a little bit of both. For those of you that
already have a lot of really great pieces of content that
are on your site, they may be new or they may be some older
pieces of content that continue to get some traction or you
think are really great. In those cases, you're going to
have content first and then you're going to reach out and
try to find an influencer that fits with that piece of
content. All right?
However, there are times when just through your social
interactions or through other kind of chance meetings you
are going to find an influencer that you did not intend to
find or through your research, you're going to find someone
that you're going to say, "You know what? I know I'm
researching this piece of content, but this person is
really great. I'd love to have some sort of a relationship
with them." In that case, you may have to create a piece of
content for that particular channel.
Steven: An influencer, just to clarify, it can be a human, like in your
examples, but it can also be a brand, right? So I'm
thinking maybe a mommy blogger reaching out to a brand that
makes baby products and treating that brand as an
influencer. Are there some examples that come to mind to
you when you think about using brands as influencers?
Muhammad: I think that's absolutely right, that the influencer could be
an individual but it could also be an entity. So for us,
one example of that is we had another kind of mixed media
piece that we were promoting and for this particular piece,
we did use some individual influencers, but we also tried
the tactic of basically building our own influencer on
Facebook.
So, this was a community that we grew over a period of time
that was geared towards sharing adventure travel advice,
adventure travel tips, and a whole community that was
speaking to each other around adventure travel. So we
basically created an adventure travel influencer so that
when we had a piece of content ready, we were able to place
it in that channel and instantly get results.
Within the first week or so we reached over 1.5 million
people with this piece of content because we had taken the
time to build up an influence channel of our own that was
built around a concept versus an individual person. It was
very valuable for us because not only did we have a channel
that worked for that piece of content, but we had a channel
that we owned forever and could continue to distribute
content through.
Steven: Great. Well, we've got probably time for one more question. I
know folks probably want to rush off to lunch so we don't
want to keep them. I'm really interested in the content
that works, right? So, in the examples that you gave, the
content you made didn't really have anything to do with
insurance per se. They were sort of related to travel in
general, if that's sort of a fair statement to make.
We kind of do the same thing at Slingshot where we're not
making content centered around our deliverables. We're
making content about SEO, about in-bound marketing, about
content in general. Is that the right way to go? I don't
want to speak in absolutes, but should you never make
content around your product? Is there maybe a good balance?
How do you approach that?
Muhammad: I think you absolutely have to find the balance. Creating
content that is kind of around the periphery of your
industry or your product is valuable because it shows kind
of good will towards individuals and it gets you an
opportunity to get your brand in front of people that may
not have otherwise seen it. However, from a marketing
perspective, you have to have some sort of balance there
where you're also spending some time talking about your
product, your company, and those sorts of items.
That balance may be different depending on the company. You
may have a company where your product is really, really
very exciting. Unfortunately for me, I work in insurance,
not the most exciting of topics.
Steven: Well...
Muhammad: However, we do have to get to it from time to time, absolutely.
Steven: That's good. Good answer. Well, we're about out of time. I know
there's a few questions still coming in the chat. Please
reach out to me or Muhammad on Twitter. I'm sure you'll be
willing to answer anything that we didn't have time to.
Muhammad: Absolutely.
Steven: I feel like we could talk about this all day but we do have to
go. So, Muhammad thanks for joining us again today. We'll
post a video replay of this and maybe we'll get some
conversation going there.
Muhammad: Absolutely. I look forward to hearing from all of you. Thank
you for having me, Steven.
Steven: All right. Thanks again for all of you for joining us. Hope you
enjoyed it and have a great rest of your Tuesday.