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Hello everyone and thanks for joining us this week for our Digitize NS Webinar.
If you were with us last week, I hope you enjoyed our Webinar on website design and building, presented from our friend Mike Tanner of One Red Cat.
As always, I hope you have been enjoying the course so far and have brought any and all questions you may have. For anyone wishing to catch up on our webinar from last week or one from previous weeks, we will be happy to provide you with a link in the chat. As with all of our Digitize NS webinars, this will be recorded for later playback if you wanted extra time with a certain section or for listening on the go.
For those who may be joining us for the first time, we’ve been exploring a fictional entrepreneur named Joe who runs a local business making sweaters.
Joe has owned his own business for over 20 years located in Downtown Dartmouth and selling at the Halifax & Dartmouth Farmer’s Markets, he is seeing a decline in business. To tackle this issue, he has decided to take his storefront online to open up his consumer base.
To date, Joe has successfully launched his own website full of content he created himself and sent his first email blast from a customer list he created.
Today’s webinar is going to focus on Joe:
Before we dive in, however, let’s refresh ourselves on where Joe left off.
When we last left Joe, he had:
Here is a diagram of Joe’s strategy with the objectives he wants to achieve outlined as Step One, Two and Three. As we said last week, traditionally these steps would have a bit more detail such as how many ‘hits’ Joe wants the site to have, or the open rate of his emails but we are letting Joe go slow.
Let’s break that down – Joe’s objectives for his strategy is to launch an e-commerce site, create an email list to reach his customers and open a Facebook page to promote his shop. He has successfully completed Steps One & Two and his ready to tackle Step 3.
When we last left off, Joe was gathering the pieces to begin building a Facebook profile – the last step in his plan.
Currently, he has gathered:
Though more is going to be needed in order for Joe to succeed. Just like the IA (Information Architecture), Joe created when he was building his website, he is going to need a strategy for his page such as what content he is going to post and how regularly he will post.
This is an important topic as posting good content that speaks to Joe’s audience, in this case, his customers, is what is going to help his page grow when he launches it. For Joe, it would be best to post photos of sales, newly arriving items, articles about taking care of sweaters and information of events happening around his shop.
While it may seem intimidating to open the page initially, much of the content needed is information about Joe’s business that he already has – such as the location and hours of his store. This not only will help later when it comes to analytics on Facebook but will allow his page viewers to quickly find their way to him.
What photos to use is also a consideration as they must meet certain sizes and be engaging. In this presentation, we’ve included the correct photo sizes to use for Facebook as your page picture, background image, and wall photos. Don’t be afraid to search online for sizing guides – they’re great to have on hand as depending on the size of your photos, they can appear too small and pixelated, or too big and cut off.
Through Pages on Facebook, you can also add in a Call-to-Action (CTA) button which can be displayed with seven different texts and link to any URL. Joe could use the ‘Sign Up’ option and link to a subscription form on his website to gather contacts for his email blasts. He could also choose the ‘Message’ option and allow page viewers to message his page with questions he may have. Finally, he could instead choose ‘Shop Now’ and link it straight to his site! There are a lot of options here, and there is not harm in trying different button options to see which proves the most useful to his customers.
It is to be said that opening a Facebook page does bring additional duties to the owner of the business and page. If people have kudos or complaints about your product, service or company, Facebook provides a chance to for them to directly post to your page. This is a double-edged sword – it will mean you need to pay attention to your page, but it also provides a chance to provide customer service over a new channel and retain customers.
Another benefit will be access to Facebook Analytics, which can assist in building your social media presence.
If you like numbers and statistics, you are really going to enjoy this next topic. Facebook Analytics is built into each Facebook page that is created and can provide valuable insights regarding what is going well, and what could use a bit of attention.
When you first enter the analytics section of your Facebook page, you’ll be greeted with a dashboard that holds some quick but informative data from the last seven days. Highlights to look at are your Page Views, which detail – you guessed it – how many people viewed your Facebook Page. You can also see how many ‘Likes’ you’ve accumulated which is important to track because when people ‘Like’ your page, they begin to see your content.
Two other metrics to watch are Reach and Post Engagement. Reach is how many unique people have seen your content through your own page, followers sharing your content and more. It is a great way to gauge just how many people your page (and brands) is getting in front of. Post Engagement goes hand-in-hand with Reach as it let’s who know who engaged – defined as clicking on the post, liking, sharing, commenting and more – with your post. Together, these numbers let you know who is seeing your content and how many of those people are engaging with your content.
All of this data is tracked and Facebook will provide statistical percentages to give you an idea of the change week over week, 28 days later and even between quarters. I should also mention that the data will be presented in two ways – as organic and paid. Organic means any metrics you receive just by posting and without paid advertisement via boosting. Paid is, well, the metrics you received from paid advertisements across Facebook and by boosting posts. For now, the data we will be speaking to will be all organic but when the time comes, Joe may consider paid advertisement.
Facebook tracks nearly everything to do with your page, so we encourage you to really dig into the different page of insights – much, if not all of the data, is represented in visual graphs so you can get a very thorough understanding of what is happening on your page.
A new feature we would like to point out is the ‘Local’ insights Facebook pulls. This page uses the first three letters and digits of your postal code mixed with data from Facebook users in that area to form insights ‘locally’. These insights include the top age group around you, the hours when it is busy around you and even the day of the week that sees the most traffic.
Why is this data so important? It lets you better target your messaging and posts to specific times and audiences so you get the most value for the content you are creating.
Now as Joe works on getting his Facebook page ready, he also takes the time to look at his newly launched site’s analytics.
If you tuned into last week’s session, you will remember about how important website analytics are when it comes to making changes and examining the ‘health’ of your site. For those unfamiliar with website analytics, they are statistical data that provides vital insight into how users are finding, navigating and using your site – among other things of course.
Many site-building softwares have built-in analytics but it is found to supplement them with outside tools, a popular one being Google Analytics.
The item Joe notices is that his site has had 201 unique visitors – that metric means 201 unique people viewed his website. His overall website hits are 324, means that he has had some repeat visitors at all.
Another metric he looks at is bounce rate – the bounce rate is displayed in a percentage and represents a number of users who come to the website and leave after only viewing one page. While one may assume a high bounce rate is a negative statistic, it all depends on the layout of your site – if the bulk of the information your audience is looking for is on the first page, that is not a bad thing. There are even some sites built entirely on one scrolling page.
That’s where average session duration – this analytic allows you to understand how long users are staying on your page. This is a fantastic metric to compare with your bounce rate: if your bounce rate is high and your session duration time is low, that may be a sign you need to revamp landing page.
In Joe’s case, his site visitors are visiting his pages for around 3 to 4 minutes and his bounce rate is less 50%, so not bad at all.
Joe can also find out what the geographical location his website visits are coming from – the vast majority are coming from Nova Scotia with a few from New Brunswick, PEI and Newfoundland. He has had a view visits from the EU region and the United States, but it is important to keep in mind that these geo stats need to be taken with a grain of salt. It is not uncommon for internet users to use software that can make their location for various reasons such as privacy, but nevertheless it is good information to know.
Another statistic, if available through the website builder being used, is behavior. This data lets you see where your site visitors are going, letting you see what they find more important. For Joe, a lot of his visitors are looking at a new sweater he recently started selling – this gives him two ideas: he can plan to put a sale on this sweater in the future, and he can also link to it from his homepage so it is easier for visitors to find it.
Now, let’s talk about referrals. Referrals, essentially, are how people are finding your site – whether it is through social media, direct links (www.joessweaters.ca), articles or pages from other websites or anywhere someone can link to the website. When Joe looks at this statistic, he sees that so far, the vast majority of his traffic has been direct (most likely) from his emails. Another source is a recent article his local Business Association did on his new site, which has pulled more traffic as well. By analyzing this statistic, Joe can find out where his traffic is coming from – allowing him to dedicate more time to that source. If it was for example – his Facebook page when it gets up and running, Joe may want to post more deals and content there.
Finally – let’s talk about conversions. Conversions are when a user’s actions turn into tangible actions such as a download or a sale. While all of the data we have discussed so far is valuable, this metric allows us to better understand if Joe’s tactics and site are working. For Joe, his conversion metric is having people buy his clothes online and so far, there have been five orders placed and paid for.
Ideally, Joe will set a goal of what he would like his monthly conversion to be and can even include it into his daily shop’s conversion downtown. If you are not an e-commerce site, and are say – a charted accountant, conversion for you may be a number of times someone books a session with you. If you are a job hunter, it may be when your resume is downloaded.
Joe is well on his way now. He has almost finished his three-step strategy and is becoming more at home with the tools available to him. Next week, we’re going to keep following Joe as he:
Until then, please put any questions you may have in the chat or feel free to email me at jay – J A Y @ Simplycast.com.
Have a great week and enjoy this week’s course. If you would like to watch any of our previous webinars, we’ll put the link in the chat now for you.
