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Andy Derrick

July 4, 2017 - Andy Derrick

Have you ever wondered if your social media campaigns are actually doing anything for your business?

Social media is THE place to connect with our audiences and build our brands. We all know this. BUT, do you ever feel like you’re spinning your social media wheels unsure if you’re actually going anywhere? We’ve all been there.

Meet social media and marketing expert, Alyssa McNally. In this interview, she shares exactly how you can make sure your campaigns are making an impact by using data by learning how to set goals the right goals and measure campaign effectiveness. She also shares her favorite power tools that help her keep everything organized.

Read on to learn how to NEVER waste time or energy on a social media strategy that isn’t working!


Thank you for doing this interview! Let's jump in and start at the beginning. When did you become a social media marketer and what has that experience been like?

When I graduated college, social media had just started to become the most popular form of communication. Instagram had just launched, Twitter was picking up speed, and Grandma’s around the United States were starting to create Facebook accounts. And as the token millennial in my first job out of college, I was looked at to lead their social media marketing efforts.

I worked for several years as a marketing manager at a publishing company right outside of Chicago. They gave me the opportunities, resources, and time to really learn about social media marketing strategies. Fortunately, the projects also had budgets that allowed me to test out my marketing theories while promoting entry level authors, which always helps, right?

Alyssa McNally - Social Media Marketing Interview for HerDataMethod.com

From that job, I transitioned to Nashville where I began freelancing for a few different companies running their social media accounts and campaigns, as well as writing and editing content as needed.  

Which led me to a brief stint at a small startup called Gradient; an online magazine focused on exploring the human experience. But, as so many startup stories go, after a series of unfortunate events, that company lost their funding.

Finding myself pushed back into the world of freelance, I decided to launch my own small business. I still provide social media marketing for startups, but now I work on a contract basis with more than one company at a time. 

What is your process for choosing and developing a new social media campaign?

My business is generally comprised of two different types of projects, campaign based or brand based, and they are exactly what they sound like!

If a company hires me to execute a campaign based project there is always a very specific goal in mind for a short period of time. They usually want to raise awareness about a specific product, to grow by a certain amount of followers or to increase sales.

Brand based projects require more time to implement.  And generally, the focus is on developing brand awareness, creating higher conversion rates, and/or increasing their SEO all of which require several months of development and a lot more time to execute.

However, both types of project are very influenced by data. When I create specific social media goals and think through how I can reach them I have to know what their current customers look like before I start targeting who they hope to reach.

Campaign Based Project Image for Alyssa McNally Interview on Her Data Method Blog
Brand Based Project Image for Alyssa McNally Interview on Her Data Method Blog

Data allows me to know who is already visiting their website, who has already bought into their brand message and product. Once I know that information I can quickly deduce the kind of person I need to target. Then I begin to identify opportunities to expand into different markets.

When it comes to social media channels, I always start by collecting demographic data (information like age, gender, and location) on the existing audience. Then I look at how engaged, or active, they are on each of the client’s existing social media platforms. I have to establish a baseline first of who they are currently reaching and who is already converting. Otherwise, once I begin to grow their reach it would be impossible to measure what is working and what isn’t if I don’t have this figured out.

Once you determine who your target customer is what is your process for setting goals at the start of a new campaign?

I always 100% of the time set goals before starting a new campaign or taking over an existing account. I do this for many reasons, the first being it helps measure success and show the client progress. Throwing money into campaigns or marketing agencies with no measurable goals is pretty pointless. I just think it makes sense to start with a baseline and work towards a goal. And if I miss the clues and the audience doesn’t react like I thought they would? It’s still great information about your customers! You can’t control the data, you have to follow whatever it tells you. 

Up Graph of Growth of Social Media Strategies - Alyssa McNally - HerDataMethod.com Blog

There are parts of social media campaign that are harder to track than others — like overall brand awareness and customer comfortability — however, those things are trackable, just not easily through most traditional analytic tools. You have to dig a little deeper for those!

Secondly, setting goals helps me create measurable analytics; it helps us adjust posts, audiences, and verbiage throughout the campaign to meet those initial goals that were set.

Tell us about a time you knocked a social media campaign out of the park. What factors influenced the campaign’s success the most?

One time I had a client who wanted me to help him with three very specific, measurable goals:

Client Goal No.1 - Alyssa McNally Interview - Her Data Method

To expand their audience reach by 40% on Instagram within the next three months.

Client Goal No.2 - Alyssa McNally Interview - Her Data Method

To impress and woo large corporate brands into buying their product by developing a more sophisticated brand presence.

Client Goal No.3 - Alyssa McNally Interview - Her Data Method

To drive 100 visitors to our client’s website per month through organic engagement (not paid).

SOLUTION NO. 1

There was a little bit of trial and error on this one. But, once I got a strong grasp of how the brand was currently perceived, and then I was able to expand their audience engagement and reach on Instagram over 90 percent!

Through Minter, (see tool recommendations below) I was able to discover when their audience was most active on social media, which hashtags were getting the most traction, and what posts were attracting the most traffic and at what time of day. I kept measuring and adjusting as needed. I tested different types of posts, even tested a different language before eventually finding out what would work best for their audience.

SOLUTION NO. 2

Designing a curated feed so that large corporate brands would see a level of professionalism in their brand. Every photo and design was posted in context with the rest of the feed. The owner had other companies coming up to him complimenting him on their presence, and he was able to sign a contract with a large brand because they were impressed with his social presence.

SOLUTION NO. 3

The client’s online traffic increased and an average one hundred people visiting his website every month due to the actions that were implemented for steps 1 and 2, which was tracked by Google Analytics.

Now, what about a campaign that didn't go so well? What did you learn from that one?

I was working on a team that a company hired us to do a LinkedIn campaign. They wanted to increase awareness before a conference they were attending. While the client was actually extremely happy with the work we did, we were underwhelmed with the results and felt that we didn’t hit the mark.

The main reason we felt like we didn’t make much of a difference was that we started the project with very little knowledge about the client’s customer base. They did not provide any statistics, or understanding of how their target audience was spending their time online. We had to make educated guesses and launch with the information we had to work with. So, case in point, right? It’s all about the data! 

Social Media Campaigns - Alyssa McNally - HerDataMethod.com Blog

What tools do you love for social media management, data and analytics?

Other than the obvious analytic tools that are built into each individual social media platform and Google Analytics, here are three that I love…

Social Media Marketing with Impact - Alyssa McNally - Her Data Method
grum.co – Great for scheduling Instagram posts (from your computer!!)
Social Media Marketing with Impact - Alyssa McNally - Her Data Method
minter.io – Minter has the best Instagram analytics!
Social Media Marketing with Impact - Alyssa McNally - Her Data Method
sproutsocial.com – Awesome analytics for every social platform!

What one piece of advice would you give to a woman looking to start or improve her social media marketing efforts?

My biggest piece of advice is…don’t have social media accounts just for the sake of having them. Create realistic goals for your platforms, post with purpose and take the time to understand how it is valuable to advancing your brand.

Where do you think social media marketing is going? Where should people be looking in the future?

A few things…

Everything will be more live, more authentic. Think about how your brand can be live, present and active with your target market.

Sales are going to just continue to move online, Amazon is changing the game, and it is cost effective for businesses to move their products online. And as a result, social media will continue to be oversaturated with sales, which will keep forcing social media marketers to figure out how to stand out.

At the end of the day, learn how to tell your story and focus on being authentic with your audience.

Data Matters! HerDataMethod.com Nashville, TN

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*This post contains affiliate links. Please know that we only recommend products or services that we genuinely enjoy and have gotten great results with for our own business.

Filed Under: Interviews Tagged With: analytics, data, planning, social media

April 5, 2017 - Andy Derrick

How to Grow Your Business With Data

Any entrepreneur knows that figuring out how to grow your business is challenging in the beginning, no matter how amazing your idea is. For my business, ArtSquare, a platform designed to help visual artists sell their work online by creating beautiful digital portfolios, it was no different.

As the marketing guy, I was on a mission to find the right channels and messaging that resonated with the artists we were trying to reach. And we tried everything. Paid ads on social channels, search engines and websites that attracted visual artists. We advertised on big artist bloggers’ email blasts. Basically, anywhere we thought we could grow our customer base, we ran ads, and all these efforts produced mixed results. Our business was starting to grow, but not quickly as we needed to early on.

We shifted our focus to growing our social media following to reach more artists, tweaking our messaging to increase conversions. We tried email marketing to grow our list. Again, some success, but not the type of growth we needed.

Bottom line? We knew that to prove the viability of our idea to future investors, we needed to find more significant user growth. And the key to that growth was data and using it to steer our marketing and product development efforts.

How Data Helped Us Grow Our Business

With critical investment talks looming on the horizon and a very small marketing budget, we could only afford to put our energy into things that mattered. We revisited what had actually helped us grow and re-evaluated what we should focus on. We doubled down on our efforts to understand our customers with daily phone calls, emails, surveys and experiments, all geared towards getting a clear understanding of their needs. In this time, something we already vaguely knew became crystal clear: Artists desperately needed to be educated on how to be business owners.

We designed several experiments around solving this problem and were hyper-intentional about tracking it all. We set up funnels in our analytics software, used tracking links for any and every link, monitored all data in a shared Google Sheet and followed a strict protocol for analyzing the results.

Our hypothesis: If we create useful, educational business content for artists, we will grow our influence and increase our email and product signups.

“Be generous” became our mantra. And it worked.

All marketing efforts shifted to creating free educational content through offers on our blog, as well as through guest articles on other websites with large artist audiences. We hosted monthly webinars, created free guides and wrote practical how-to articles. The single goal for everything created was to be certain that all of our efforts led people back to our signup page or email list.

The data from these experiments began to reveal the types of content that was resonating with our target audience. It also became clear which traffic channels had the best reach and where we needed to spend more time and energy on engagement efforts.

Here are some numbers that illustrate what I mean:

  • In 3 months, monthly blog traffic grew from an average of 400 to 30,000 views (7,500% growth)
  • In 6 months, email subscribers grew from 150 to 6,000 (4,000% growth)
  • In 6 months, our three most popular articles were shared by artists over 1,600 times each
  • In 6 months, users of our product grew from 300 to 3,000 (1,000% growth)

That is the power of data and experimentation. All of the above growth was done with almost no marketing spend — we tested and let real world results determine our next steps. And that’s exactly what you can learn to do with Her Data Method, which offers an easy and approachable method to data collection and interpretation you need to help your business thrive.

Good luck! You got this — just follow the data. It doesn’t lie!

If you’re not willing to leave the growth of your business to chance, and you need help learning how to collect data, sign up for the Her Data Method course here. The course will be released in Summer 2017; early signups get discounts, access to free resources and the opportunity to have their business spotlighted as a featured case study.

Data Matters! Her Data Method Course

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Filed Under: Case Studies Tagged With: data collection, Growth, planning, strategy

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