Email Marketing
Describe your vision for improving and expanding our email marketing, including the following items:
What segmentation would you consider and why? I would consider different audience segmentation for influencers, partners, past attendees, and social media audiences to deliver more targeted and relative messaging that engages these audiences into ambassadors combined with new transactional emails, welcome emails, confirm appointments, and recap meetings. Create evangelists using email to provide exclusive access, give customer discounts, and create a referral program. Build separate lists for your subscribers, leads, and customers based on their buyer persona. Create lists based on engagement: blog visitors in the last 90 days, all leads who have visited your journey landing page, all leads who have opened an email in the last 30 days, and all leads who found out about you through Instagram. Create lists that measure email health such as your contacts who have unsubscribed, contacts who have bounced, all ineligible contacts, or contacts who have not opened an email in the last year. Buyer personas are segmented by company-related segmentation (company size, company type, industry. ole-related segmentation by department, seniority, and function) and Behavior-related segmentation (conversion events, email opens, and page views. Marketing intelligence-related segmentation includes social media data, original source, web analytics, contact information, company information, form submission, and surveys).
What strategies would you utilize to improve the open rate, click through rate, and unsubscribe rate. Ask for the Opt-In, Improve Email Content, Get The Timing right, Nail The Call To action, interview with speakers, feature a TedxMileHigh Instagram influencer every week, and segment emails to different audiences. Segmented email campaigns should improve opens, unique opens, clicks, bounces, abuse reports, and unsubs. Lifecycle marketing is visits, leads, marketing qualified leads, sales accepted leads, opportunities, and customers. Setup different email tests by segmenting your database, identify opportunities in your funnel, design experiments, and prioritize the experiments. Shoot for a goal of 95% emails delivered, 10% open rate and 1% Clicked. Find weak points in a marketing funnel and figure out what is causing the funnel to narrow. Think about a good solution and apply it in a controlled test environment where you record the open rates with variations to lists, day of the week, time of day, subject line, and preview text. Elements that affect click rates are email body copy, email body design/layout, email body images, Email CTA, and email signature. Integrate your social media images into your emails.
What project management tool and approach would you use to map out the calendar and content?
I would use Trello as a project management tool and Hubspot as an email marketing automation tool integrated with social media and CRM. I have my Hubspot Inbound, Hubspot Email Marketing, Hubspot Inbound Sales, Hubspot Sales Enablement, and Hubspot Content Marketing certifications. I would use google calendar, Google sheets, and Gmail to stay organized within the G Suite. If budget allows, I would use Hootsuite as a social media management tool for scheduling and automated publishing. I would set weekly calls with the entire marketing team with assigned tasks in an on-going Google Doc to make sure projects are communicated correctly and transparent for all teams.
How can the website design, configuration, and content be optimized to support the growth of our email marketing?
Google Analytics goals and landing pages needed to be created to target specific audiences for videos and value offers. Galvanize, Bear Fox marketing, Koios, Boettcher Foundation, Rogue Productions, Guidebook, Yellow Dog, FEMA, Kaiser Permanente, and Tiaa. The integration of Email marketing is still so effective because it’s a channel that’s connected to your contact database. This allows you to create a personalized and contextual message. Having your contact database have all social media handles to send timing with social media marketing personalized and contextual messages. Create a Lifecycle marketing system to communicate with your contacts – from their first point of contact all the way through their lifespan as a paying customer.
How would you integrate our blog and our newsletter?
Your email newsletter would include your most read blog articles and local TedXMileHigh events. You can create ads to target blog users as they are already interested in your products and services. You can further create a customized remarketing list to track which users visited which particular pages or what things were clicked on in the newsletter as a content marketing road map.
Ambassador/Influencer Program
Describe your plan for building a successful influencer program. Include how you would engage past speakers, exhibitors, long-time attendees, and other collaborators, as well as how you would engage those not yet connected to TEDxMileHigh, but who have large followings.
Use images you take or ask people to use stock images, meme generators or alter an existing image that without question is not trying to copy another image. Regram images from past speakers, exhibitors, attendees, and other artists that have posted directly on Insta and have influencer in their handle and give them credit. You need to do a better job of quantifying your exposure possibilities for attendees and speakers with numbers of TedXMileHigh social media community.
Describe your plan for building our Instagram following and how this would tie into the influencer program. Please include ideas on how to convert Facebook followers to Instagram.
Grow your instagram with automated organic Instagram following tools. Activate is a great option for the company with an in-house team that needs an extra layer of customer support and studio (execution) support. Casting decks are a helpful feature for creating and customizing pitch decks for influencers based on readily available data. The more legitimate engaging with the top communities on Instagram such as fitness, cooking, dating, and entrepreneurialism. Run Ads in Instagram Stories Limited-time opportunities (e.g. seasonal, sales), product inspiration, product launches, exclusive experiences, promotions, how-tos, behind the scenes, and use deep links to achieve traffic, conversion, and install objectives. Ads in stories also use the same targeting and measurement tools as Facebook and Instagram. You can use a print-on-demand service to print and ship your own t-shirts, pillows, coffee mugs, wall art, etc or sell digital products such as courses, ebooks, or design templates in your Shop. You can start selling your own original products, or even a book to recap this year’s event. An influencer marketplace can connect TedxMileHigh to influencers in similar industries or social channels. Some influencer marketplaces have the added benefit of being part of larger influencer platforms and marketing tools, making them full end-to-end solutions. There are many out there like Tribe, influence.co, amongst others. Having a media kit PDF with more info from micro-influencers, like Benjamin Kepner, helps to create word of mouth marketing and allow your brand to become more than just sales. Alternatively, you can pay for a “shoutout” where you provide the creative and the copy for the post and pay only for access to the influencer audiences. In 2019, Instagram launched Checkout, an easy way to purchase products from Shopping from Creators, which allows influencers, artists, and celebrities to add shopping tags to their posts. Their followers can then click on the shopping tag, and purchase the product (ticket). Now, a “select group of Instagram creators” will have access to Facebook’s Brand Collabs Manager, which is an influencer marketplace that was previously limited to Facebook creators. Instagram creators can share their analytics and engagement rates with brands, identify topics that they are interested in creating branded content for (such as travel or beauty), and both brands and creators can search for partners and reach out to each other. Instagram can now help “source new deals, manage partnerships, and automatically share insights” about sponsored content with brands, instead of having influencers send over screenshots. Instagram Live isn’t trending and would re-allocate your “live” resources towards investing in video content for your feed, stories, or IGTV instead. Gives you direct access to influencers or their representatives.
Answering one of the two items below is definitely not required, as I want to ensure this project doesn’t require an overwhelming amount of time. However, if you finish the above two items relatively quickly and would like to share more, please share your initial thoughts on one of the following initiatives:
Paid Search and Website Optimization
Describe your ideas and strategies for optimizing our paid search and website traffic with a focus on selling tickets, building our email list, and building our overall level of engagement and community. You need to do a Google Keyword Analysis first of your marketplace and competitors to identify Google Keyword Search patterns. Make sure you have all your green lights optimized in SEO Yoast plugin for WordPress SEO and have submitted the sitemap to Google Search Console. Update Google My Business and increase link building tactics with all your partners and featured speakers to increase your domain authority. I would start with Search Network with Display Select – All Features. Add More Keywords (Normally 10-15 Keywords) for each Ad Group It is imperative to have quality keywords around to enhance performance. Use Search Term Report to identify new keywords based on your product or services and Change your keyword match types from broad match to broad match modifier to mitigate irrelevant clicks and increase quality clicks for your business. Increase bid (Max. CPC) amount for keywords that have “Below first-page bid.” Create multiple ads that utilize the majority of your keywords in each of the headlines and descriptions as this will likely improve both- keywords and ads quality score. The more your keywords are utilized in your ads, the higher the chances of improving the quality score as long as they are redirected to the relevant page(s) on your site. Based on the last 30 days click analysis, see if ads are most effective on Mobile and Tablet Devices (screenshot) with higher Click Through Rates (CTR), Lower Cost per Click (CPC) and adjust the bid amount (increase) to serve more to Mobile and Tablet Users. Take advantage of Ad extensions to show additional information Sitelinks extensions, Call extensions, Callout extensions, Structured Snippets, Reviews extensions, App extensions, Setup Conversion tracking, Setup Remarketing to track users on your site. Link Google Analytics and your AdWords account.
Livestream
Describe your plan for how TEDxMileHigh can build a livestream initiative across the state that allows high schools and universities to organize their own watch parties (i.e. to livestream our content in real-time in their own auditoriums or other venues). What approach to relationship building, marketing, and content would make this initiative successful:
Colorado Livestream Strategy:
- YouTube Live (For Highest Quality/Search/Monetization)
- Facebook Premiere Maine TEDx page tagging relevant brands, universities, + venues that gets Facebook live video benefits
- Facebook Watch Party of video published for specific facebook groups/local pages for additional engagement and boosted organic reach
- Turn YouTube Live into Instagram TV Series and feature Instagram Mentos in stories.
- Repurpose YouTube Live on Linkedin and Twitter to further extend the reach of the content to different social media audiences.
Contact the career center for all the universities across the state and high schools and the Marketing Advisor to create a brand ambassador internship program for students to get real-world event planning and marketing experience with live stream Q&A sessions and events. Facebook Live allows for instant engagement with the audience and the ability to answer their questions in real-time on the air. An easy way that you could do this at your own company is to set-up your iPhone on a tripod (I have an iPhone X and tripod) and do a quick Q&A with someone else in your organization. More advanced tools include a camera, microphone, encoder, internet, and live streaming software. If someone leaves a comment during the stream then you can engage with them verbally or use their questions for your next Livestream topic. Do Facebook Lives of QA and live interviews, market research, product launches or press releases, behind the scenes, and breaking news. You can create a Watch Party from your News Feed or timeline, in a group, on a page, or from any video you’re watching (Admin/Editor access needed for the page). Create YouTube playlists such as Q&A or interviews live from a conference, Giving a tour of your venue Walk-through of the event. If you have an event-based live stream, you may find that Facebook’s reach is unrivaled and boosting the post is ideal. YouTube will send out an email as soon as your stream goes live but Facebook will send out multiple notifications such as going live in 1 hour, going live in 20 minutes, going live in 1 minute. Facebook Live Map allows users to find live streams on a map of the world. Facebook Watch Party is useful for hosting Q&As, sharing behind the scenes details of a video, swapping tips and tricks, showing makeup tutorials in real-time, learning new things like a workout technique, and inviting special guests to join their Watch Party. Schedule a Watch Party on a Facebook Page in advance to create an announcement post where your followers can opt-in to be notified when your Party starts! Replays allow you to reach a wider audience, bringing more value to your Page. Provide brand ambassadors free VIP access and custom vanity promo codes to share the codes during the Watch Party with their followers to track the performance of each individual code. Brand ambassadors at each school can also reach out to the venues directly to do co-hosted watch parties and co-hosted events to the watch parties. Go after big Facebook page groups at the Universities and high schools as well to segment better. Think ticket sales groups, sorority/fraternity groups, or intramural sports teams Facebook page groups. Leverage the TEDxMileHigh Community Group on Facebook. YouTube is giving creators better tools for monetization and Facebook is giving users better tools for audience engagement. You can see the Google trends for all these spikings in Colorado due to the recent coronavirus and stay home mandates by governors and mayors as well as the shutting down of many businesses and events. You can also have people record their screen and webcam at the same time using a tool like Screencastify.