Marketing Archives - Page 8 of 8

How your Content Strategy Can Help your Social Media and Traditional Marketing.

September 1, 2015February 3, 2017Anthony

I was recently asked if I would be a conversation starter for the Social Media Roundtable discussion at the PR Council of Lake County meeting this upcoming Thursday. I use to be the chair of this amazing group of people, so it is always a privilege to share my knowledge with the group and learn what they are working on and how we can help each other. Anytime I start a topic on Social Media, marketing, blogging, etc, I always start by asking, who in attendance has a Content Strategy.

When I ask this question, I get a good feel for the attendees knowledge and expertise level, but I usually receive a 50/50 response to sometimes 3/4 of the audience saying they have one. Which is good but is it working with their social strategy is the next thing that is on my mind. Read more →

A Behind the Scenes look at the Visit Lake County Song Search

August 21, 2015September 25, 2016Anthony

You are only as good as your last month, or in this case your last year. A year ago, I was thinking of was to generate and create more awareness before our summer season and I got it stuck in my head that I could pull off a lip dup. At the time, it was probably my favorite this to work on. We created a music video tailored to Lake County, Illinois to the song, Best Day of My life by American Authors – https://youtu.be/iphhBSYiE44

Visit Lake County Song Search — Dylan Kroll and friends around a bonfire filming a scene for the music video.

Flash forward a year, well I definitely out did myself and launched a “music video that has gone viral with 74,000 views on Facebook and YouTube”, according to Bill Geist. Well, it was not as easy as that. It started out like any other passing water cooler talk in the office, “What are you going to do now to top Best Day?” I did not know at the time and wasn’t sure how to take that concept to the next step. I attended eTourism Summit last October and decided to sit in a music video session. Speakers from other destination spoke about what they did and how they used music to sell their destination. I took notes and wrote down some ideas that came to me. When I returned to the office, I told my boss I came up with idea to top ‘Best Day’, that included a way to generate website views during out off-season and increase the music section on our website. The idea sat with my until January, I then talked to my boss again, and this time I had the while idea flushed out. Granted there were some obstacles and hurdles along the way, otherwise, I thought it was a great idea. Read more →

Events Bring Revenue to Communities

August 17, 2015September 25, 2016Anthony

People move to a certain city / village for various reasons. Community festivals and big events brought to the city are a boom to the area and helps improve the quality of life. It bothers me when someone says there is nothing to do in this city, or all this traffic can leave my sleepy town now, or that new PGA golf course doesn’t benefit me. I hear things like that all the time and being a Destination (Tourism) Marketer, it is disheartening.

The PGA Championship was in my hometown area of Sheboygan County, at Whistling Straits in Kohler, WI. An event like this is huge for any area, as it brought in over 200,000 people to the area and generated over $100 million in local economic impact. Yet, the naysayers still complained about all of the traffic, doesn’t benefit them, and another other excuse as to why this was not a good thing. Well guess what, tourism does benefit them (you and I), as it saves each family over $1,000 a year in taxes. Yes, over $1,000 dollars a year in taxes! I don’t know about you, but I don’t like paying taxes, so to have people visiting my area, spending money and generating tax revenue is great!

Facebook Organic Reach still Achievable

December 19, 2014Anthony

If my memory serves me correctly, in roughly the spring of 2014 Facebook changed their algorithm. Well, they change their algorithm it seems like once a quarter, so last spring is what I am going with. As we have all witnessed and read, Facebook’s algorithm chnaged drastically that only 1 – 2% of your brand’s likes will see your posts. In this Blog post, I am going to discuss on the Facebook Organic Reach is still attainable and how one of my brand’s posts did it.

I believe that if you build the right Facebook audience you can achieve more than the 2% organic reach. The right audience is key. Remember, what works for me may not work for you and your brand. Facebook has good analytics, so be sure to utilize those and they will help you with feature postings. On our page we currently have 29,700 likes, which isn’t a whole lot when compared to the bigger brands. Each day, I try to reach 2,000+ people organically with our posts. If my math is correct, that is about 8% of our total likes. Not a whole lot in the grand scheme of things.

I started out the first week of December with this post about a Lake County restaurant being featured as 1 of the 17 best burgers in Enjoy Illinois by Thrillist. I knew going in, that these types of posts typically do well. I was expecting this post to organically reach anywhere between 5 – 6k people. I did not expect it to hit 13,400 organically, with 148 likes, 10 comments and 113 shares. People like food, they love trying new places to it if the restaurant is highly rated, so overall, this was a solid post from the start. I made sure to tag our local restaurant, the state of Illinois Tourism, Enjoy Illinois and put the link in the status. I also made sure the photo showed up as a link as well, so people could click on the link in the status or the picture to be taken to the article. People then started tagging other people in the comments.

The next day, I thought I could have a high organic reach day again with a post about Ravinia Festival announcing it’s first performance of next summer of Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga. In the past Ravinia posts have a done ok, nothing to write home about. The post did not do as well as I thought it would have.

Then came Wednesday. From my website Google Analytics and my Social Media stats I know that Wednesday starts the include of people looking at our site and researching things to do for the upcoming weekend. That upcoming weekend, there was the Canadian Pacific Holiday Train coming through the area. I was excited about it personally because my 2 1/2 year old son is into trains and we had went the previous year. With this event being on a Sunday, I knew it would attract a good crowd. So I found an engaging picture of the holiday train and a made a post that tagged the Canadian Pacific Holiday Train page, the Gurnee Park District page where the train would be arriving and put a link in the status to the event description on our website. What then happened, was something that I never imaged would happen for me. 212 likes, 36 comments, 347 shares and 23,912 people reached organically. The posts reach kept growing each day through Sunday. People where tagging people in the comments and the shares continued to rise. I had hit a sweet spot with this post with my Facebook audience.

The next step now is to look at the analytics, see why this post did so well, figure out what my audience wants and try to recreate it. I am a digital marketer for a family tourism destination, so my audience wants unique family events. Things that you can not do every day and something the entire family can enjoy.

What I have realized is that this type of reach is achievable no matter the size of you Facebook page, as long as you have the right audience. Also, lucky for me, I do have some Social Media Ambassadors who do consistently like and share my posts, so that did with this specific one. By giving your audience the right content that they are looking for and properly timing the information, a post can successfully reach a large amount of people organically.

Does your company have a Social Media Strategy in place?

August 18, 2011September 25, 2016Anthony

I was honored to speak a few weeks back, at a Chamber of Commerce event on Social Media Marketing. The audience was small business owners and marketing and public relations professionals looking at incorporating Social Media into their marketing plans. What I found interesting was how many people were using Facebook and Twitter, but they were not tracking their online activity or did not have a Social Media strategy incorporated in their marketing plan.

The first thing that I tell business owners and marketing professionals is to make sure they have their Facebook page set-up as a business page and not as a personnel page. I still still a lot of business who have it set-up improperly and it is a pet peeve of mine. I cringe every time I see a person become friends with a business on Facebook instead of “liking” them.