[May is one of our work-from-home mommy writers. This is her first post here on the Spiralytics blog. Say hello!]
Stepping into the marketing arena was one of the most terrifying things I’ve ever done in my professional life.
I tried to avoid it at all cost back then because, well, I felt that selling was not my thing (I’ve proven this time and time again, and yes, I know by now that selling and marketing are two different things). And because I didn’t want to be blamed for bad results that I felt were bound to happen when I take the job.
But somehow I became one.
A little back story for you
A little more than two years ago, I was desperate for a good-paying online job and a friend recommended me to her Australian employer for a position that opened in their company.
I was very truthful during the Skype interview. I told the employer that I didn’t know anything about SEO and even said something as dumb as, “I don’t even know what algorithm means.” (Ugh, can I bury myself now?)
I was granted the position on the merits of my “conversational” writing skills. I was going to be a Content Writer and Social Media Manager which didn’t sound so intimidating. Why would it be when all I had to do was update our official Facebook and Twitter pages, and publish marketing and tech blogs for our company website?
A couple of weeks into the job, while reading and researching articles for the blogs I had to write, I realized that the position I was in was more than just updating the posts and writing content, I had walked right into a marketing position!
I rolled up my sleeves and got to work, terrified that I’d get kicked off my job for underperforming posts. All me, of course, my employer just shook his head and chuckled at every panic attack I would experience since then.
But being in marketing for the first time had me committing a lot of silly mistakes on the job. Let me just share with you five of them.
1. I invited all my friends on Facebook to like our company’s business and product pages
In my head I thought I was doing our business pages a favour by collecting so many likes and impressing my employer with the number.
At the time I came in, the pages already had about a hundred of fans and some interaction, but I felt I boosted up that number well by inviting my Facebook contacts; after all, my personal page was well-received by the same people.
Those I invited, most of whom were Philippine-based, liked our pages, but I noticed that hardly any of them engaged in our posts. Why would they when most everything we posted was targeting Australians?
Then Facebook announced a change in its algorithm and began penalizing low quality content in 2013.
It was a disaster!
Not only did our business page falter, our product page, which was getting more engagement than our business page, began losing interactions. Our reach dropped from a hundred or so to less than 10.
It was an awful way to learn and understand the value of organic likes and Facebook ads.
2. I joined comment exchanges – you know, I’ll comment on your post if you comment on mine
There are plenty of Comment Exchanges on Facebook, and while I honestly think that it doesn’t harm my personal blog, I didn’t consider the fact that its purpose is so much different from that of our company blog.
I’ve seen so many SEO professionals and digital marketers join our comment exchanges so I thought that perhaps it was a good idea to do the same.
It was not.
Most of the people who were in our comment exchange threads were from either Asia or the U.S. We seldom had an Australian blogger join the roster.
Google may have most likely marked us relevant in these areas instead of the locations that we were actually targeting if there was any significant effect at all to this silly move.
Our blog pages were cluttered with comments from bloggers who were not at all interested in the actual content or the services we offered, and we were certainly not making clients out of any of them!
3. I spent time doing multiple content syndication
Syndicating content is not bad in itself. In fact, it’s done a lot of businesses good, especially when you’re sharing information that’s valuable and relevant to your readers.
However, when you’ve put up several blog sites and post the exact same content in all of them, all because you’re hoping that web users will click the link that leads to your site, you’re violating the very reason why Google changed the way it ranks sites which is to highlight quality content.
This was exactly what I did. After months and months of syndicating content in this way, I gave up on it.
I never really found out if it compromised our website, but I’m pretty sure I wasted a lot of hours that I should have devoted to doing other tasks, along with all the hours I spent commenting back on the blog posts in our comment exchange thread, hah!
4. I fell for click-baiting and other tricks
Yes – tricks, that word again. And don’t forget -“desperate.”
I posted memes and jokes, used questions for captions, introduced our blogs exaggeratedly, and bugged my boss to host a contest on Facebook, to which he relented.
Did we get likes? That was the only goal in my head that time, so yes, we did get some, especially when we had a contest.
But everyone disappeared after we announced the winners and our Facebook page’s reach suffered even more.
You see, I learned later on that the ratio of your page likes to the number of engagement you are getting directly affects your number of reach on Facebook.
5. I likened our target audience to my blog audience
I wasn’t active in the blogosphere prior to my previous employment. But as soon as I realized what I’ve gotten myself into, I set up my social media accounts on my blog and started blogging more. My intention then was to try out strategies using my blog and then apply the effective ones to our company blog. Again, I missed the point.
My blog readers are totally different from our target audience. For one thing, our company was targeting Australian business owners, while mine is intended for families, most of who are locally based.
Marketing 101
There’s no getting around marketing.
You don’t only have to keep up with the trends that keep evolving almost every single day, you have to know what your brand stands for and diligently study your market. Otherwise, you’re just shooting empty bullets.
If you don’t know who the audiences are and what they need, how do you suppose you can offer them anything that would be of value to them?
Marketing is exciting, but it’s rewarding too. Because of technology and the internet, you can help usher people through open doors and opportunities with what you do.
What many marketing experts have been saying about today’s marketing had been right from the start: It’s not about you.
Not all of it, anyway.