Nelio Content Marketing Plan X – Social Media and Emailing

Translated by Núria Adell.

This is the last post of the series I’ve been writing about our initial marketing plan to make a success of Nelio Content. Here you have the links to all of them in case you forgot to read any of them:

You might remember that, as I discussed when I defined our strategic objectives, we want to reach a monthly recurrent revenue of $4,000 in 6 months with Nelio Content. I also said that our hypothesis is that 80% of these sales should come from users who have previously visited our website and 20% from users coming directly from the WordPress directory (people who first downloaded the free plugin and then ended up subscribing). Finally, we also made a breakdown of the volume of visits we believe we have to reach to achieve the desired number of subscribers (you can find the table further down).

Today I would like to talk about why we thought it was important to design a social media plan and a strategy for email marketing.

Plan for Social Media on Social Networks

You will find a lot of interesting articles on how to create a plan for social media. But the first thing you must do before embarking on this adventure is define what objectives you want to achieve with this plan. There are so many things that one can do on marketing and so many resources to spend that, as any other decision-making process, you first have to identify the problem and define it.

In our case, the problem is clear: we have just launched a new product on the market, Nelio Content, and either we reach returns of $4,000 in 6 months or we shut down the party.

Thus, in terms of social networks, what do we actually want to accomplish?

1. Objectives We Want to Achieve

On one hand, we had the hypothesis that we had to reach 12,500 additional visits to our website per month and that 10% of these should come from social networks.

Therefore, if we want to reach the suggested volume of sales, what do we actually want to achieve through our social networks?

a) Getting new users

increasing our community,
making our content viral,
obtaining a substantial volume of visits to our website.

b) Branding

increasing the visibility of our brand,
providing satisfactory experience and attention to our users/readers
improving our reputation online.

c) Increasing sales

incentivising the desire and necessity of using our services,
incentivising the purchase.

This is all very well, but here comes the key question: how are we going to measure this? If we’re not able to measure it, how will we know whether we are following the right path? Don’t worry, I’ll explain this later on. Let me tell you first on what channels we have decided to work and the actions we want to carry out on each of them.

Nelio Content

I’m so happy about Nelio Content that I will sound like a payed advocate… but here’s why you’ll love it: it works as promised, its auto-scheduling feature is top-notch, Nelio’s value for money is unmatched, and the support team feels like your own.

Panozk

WordPress.org

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2. Channels

Wanting to publish and chat on all social networks can be a very arduous job. This is why, considering your objectives, target audience, and resource limitations, it’s important to determine the social networks that are the most relevant for you.

Source: Social Media Channels by Neil Patel

In our case, we have decided to work mainly on the following social networks: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Plus, Quora, and Pinterest.

For us, the key has been to use Nelio Content, which allows us to be very efficient in the publication on social networks.

3. Actions Carried Out on Each Social Network

Next I discuss how we got organised to systematically publish and talk on each social network:

Client Acquisition and Interaction

One of the most laborious jobs on social networks is to manage to continuously increase your circle of readers (your audience).

Initially, it’s annoying because no one knows you and even if you start following a lot of people, this does not guarantee they will follow you back. Then, if you receive a lot of invitations from people who want to connect with you and you want to be selective with who you accept into your network (which we recommend on LinkedIn), you have to individually check each person’s profile to decide what’s convenient.

And then comes the task of actively posting on each social network and controlling who mentions or messages you. This job can also be very demanding.

Keeping in mind that it’s only three of us with limited time, we distributed the responsibilities by social networks, one partner is in charge of three and another one of the other three.

Obviously, at a personal level, each of us participates on our individual social networks whenever we can.

Promotion of Content

For us it’s key to be able to attract more visits by promoting all our content on our social networks as we publish it on our blog.

Thus, we plan all social messages related to the publications of the content on our blog while we write each post. Using Nelio Content to do this is critical for us, since it guarantees efficiency and regularity in the publication. But not only this, the power of planning promotion actions in advance allows us to better organize other tasks and to be able to go on holidays with the homework done ⛱ .

Editorial Calendar in Nelio Content — **Editorial Calendar.** The Editorial Calendar shows all your published and scheduled posts, as well as other elements related to your marketing strategy.

We currently publish one social message on each of our social networks every time we publish a post. In the case of Twitter, we plan a minimum of 10 additional tweets for each post.

And this is where we got to so far. What do we have left? Plenty of things!

Being much more participatory on all our networks to get more followers,
doing some offers of our services on social networks,
doing competitions with prizes,
doing advertising campaigns on different networks,
improving our communication by contacting all the people we mention on our articles,
etc.

If there’s one thing that’s clear is that we could perfectly have one person exclusively dedicated to being a community manager…

4. Degree of Scope

What interests us the most is knowing the consequences of our actions and their percentage of success. And thus knowing whether the resources we dedicate to this are profitable.

In order to measure the scope of our client acquisition, our key tool is Google Analytics. With it, we measure the visits to our website, the visits to our pricing page, the average time spent on that page, our conversions, and the funnel of sales from these conversions. We use the data from the reports in Google Analytics and some Dashboards we have imported to see the information more easily.

Moreover, we combine these figures with the following information: downloads of the plugin from WordPress.org, the most active sites, and the conversions to our paying subscribers.

Finally, in order to analyze the conversion of each social network, we use the tools provided by each social network itself for now.

5. Resources Dedicated to our Social Networks

In terms of social networks, you have already seen that our hypothesis is that 10% of our sales come from them. Being coherent, this means that no more than 10% of our marketing resources should be allocated to working in social networks. Thus, for the moment, the most important thing to us is to make the maximum dissemination on our social networks in the most efficient way possible.

The use of Nelio Content is what is allowing us to have a sufficient presence in the social networks in the most efficient way.

Email Campaigns

When we established our KPIs, we also estimated that around 6.5% of the visits to our website come from links on emails we sent to our readers (either via newsletters or personal emails).

Our priority in sending Newsletters to our subscribers is (again) the efficiency of the whole process. This is why we created a template in MailChimp that automatically generates a newsletter with the publications on the blog of the previous two weeks.

And we compile the information on the impact that the newsletter has through the reports that MailChimp and Google Analytics directly give us.

Direct Emails

Additionally, we have a list of contacts classified by categories: influencers or potential clients to whom we send personalized emails to promote Nelio Content.

Sending personalized emails is very time-consuming. Therefore, we only dedicate it the free time we have left from the endless number of other tasks we have to do, even if we know it’s probably what generates the most conversions.

Conclusion

We know that the promotion of content on social networks and through emails is important in any marketing strategy. Our priority with the launch of Nelio Content has been to carry out a set of actions that can be efficiently executed, generating the maximum impact with the minimum effort. This is why we have focused on doing all those tasks that can be automated as much as possible.

Carrying on with Marketing

So this makes it 10 posts in which I have talked about all those actions that we initially decided to include as part of our launch of Nelio Content.

From here onwards, we’ll keep doing a lot of marketing developments to achieve our objectives: Adwords campaigns, affiliate programs, videos to promote our product.

And, of course, we’ll keep you updated through our posts on the blog—in a few months, we’ll let you know how we progress with the objectives we have set to ourselves…

The excitement is guaranteed!!

Featured image by Rachael Crowe.