How my company used social media to increase traffic and revenue — for free

How my company used social media to increase traffic and revenue — for free

PUWEB    فبراير 27, 2022   

 

Do you know who loves to give advice? Everyone. Especially when it comes to marketing. But what do you do when that advice requires a budget—a budget you don’t have? What happens then?

I’m the founder of a small sustainable, socially responsible, and zero-waste fashion label that works with a community of women single parents in North Macedonia. Operating from a country with such limited resources can be, put it mildly, challenging. I founded the company back in 2013. It started as a marketplace for local designers, which quickly expanded to cover international designers from all over the world.

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Four years into it, we pivoted to become a standalone fashion label. The shift was driven by my desire to make a change in the society I lived in. At the time, I was working with a woman-run studio, and the seamstress became a single parent. I was not only impressed by her strength but also inspired by her tenacity and an iron will to provide her child with better circumstances than she was born in.

That’s when I decided to make Bastet Noir, a socially responsible brand. And as the business grew, so did our community of women, single parents. Today, we’re proud to say that we work with five woman-owned studios, operated by either women single parents, or women micro-entrepreneurs.

What used to be a small, local business has grown into—granted, still small—a global brand with customers from all over the world.

We used every tool in our toolbox to make it happen with virtually no budget—just a pipe dream and persistence and will to make it real. Here, I want to talk about what we did on social media to make it happen.

• The power of social media for a local business

g budget was—and still is—practically non-existent. Everything we make is reinvested back into our community of women single parents, so throughout the years, we had to think of creative ways to attract customers. Social media was one of the most successful.
Even if you don’t choose to invest in social media, you should still have an up-to-date presence. One way to do this is by automating your brand’s social media, doing things like automatically sharing all new blog posts with your followers bootstrapped company operating from a country with limited

• Succeeding on Instagram without a budget

Ok, let’s rewind for a second. When we started back in 2013, Instagram still wasn’t a thing. That’s why it took us a while to get to our desired target market in the United States. When we finally got on the platform two years later, it took us almost a year to decode it and figure out a way to grow and attract the right followers.

Since we weren’t located in the U.S., our first few hundred followers were based in Macedonia. The only way to target the U.S. was to pay for ads—which we, of course, didn’t have the money for. So how did we make it work? Through a lot of trial and error, yes, but most importantly, by establishing a captivating and powerful story behind the brand.

All of our posts and stories aligned with the narrative we were trying to tell. The gist: we were a sustainable, zero-waste, and socially responsible label that worked with women single parents in North Macedonia, and we helped these women earn much more than the industry average monthly income of $300. In addition to the storyline, the feed needed to have an aesthetic that would be recognizable for our brand, so we chose several color tones that best represented our label.

We planned our content a month out, which gave us time to hone the copy and research hashtags (we found that sustainability- and small-business-related hashtags were our priority). For all of this, we used the social media planning tool Later, which helped us a lot, especially with the visual part of how the feed would look.

Next, we attempted to bridge the gap between our social media strategy and our content strategy. We began by using People Map to create a list of the women we wanted to cover on our blog. The app helped us target editors, writers, social media managers for fashion magazines, and women entrepreneurs, all located in the U.S. Once we found their profiles, we found their emails—either from their Instagram profiles or using Rocket Reach.

Note: Be sure to follow all applicable rules around cold emailing prospects and give people ways to opt-out of continued communication.

We composed an email to each woman, explaining our business and personalizing it to each recipient to demonstrate our interest (for example, we mentioned what had impressed us about them). Most of them didn’t respond, but the ones that did were more than happy to extend their selfless help: we got many women to do interviews with us for our blog series, Cool Faces of Bastet Noir.

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Since all of these women worked for publications like Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue Business, and Elle, this enabled us to gain credibility. And since most of them shared the stories on their social media accounts (including Instagram), we started getting engagement from their followers. We even got traction on our website, since they were sharing the links on their feeds and stories.

Since advertising wasn’t an option due to lack of funds, this was the only way for us to utilize the power of influencers. Our entire investment was the production of the piece and the shipping cost to send them the outfit—and all we asked for in return was a few photos of them wearing the pieces, so we could include them in our blog posts.

You can start small even on social. To help, here are three workflows that can help you automate your Instagram for a Business account so you can focus on the more personal parts of marketing.

Using Reddit for marketing

Reddit is a bit tricky because many of the communities prohibit advertising and, of course, anything they consider spammy, like sharing discount codes, links to your website, and even introducing your brand. That means you need to engage with the community on another level. Start a conversation, answer questions, and show that you’re an authority on the topic. Then, if they’re interested in learning more about your brand, you can share links. If you do it before someone asks, you risk being banned from one of the most engaged internet communities.

Reddit

We joined a few subreddits, including r/findashion, r/ethicalfashion, and r/Etsy, but r/FemaleFashionAdvice was the most important one for us. This community has 1.7 million members that we knew would be interested in our brand. We started talking with people on various threads, mostly giving them styling advice. This gradually evolved into me posting photos of my outfits, wearing Bastet Noir of course. People started asking where I got some of the items, so I shared links to the website. And that did the trick: we saw a tremendous increase in traffic, and orders started rolling in.

How to use YouTube for free marketing

We only started working with YouTubers at the beginning of 2020. I guess you could say we arrived a bit late to the party, but in our defense, we truly believed that we weren’t able to afford their rates—which was true to a point. A YouTuber who has more than 10,000 views on a video charge at least $3,000 for a 30-60-second brand mention. And that’s just for a mention, not a dedicated brand video. For a brand like ours, it’s way too expensive.

Instead, we decided to see if anyone would like our clothes enough to promote them for free. First, we prepared a list of hundreds of YouTubers whose styles we believed matched our brand aesthetic. We found them by searching on YouTube for keywords like “minimal style,” “ethical fashion,” and “environmentally friendly fashion”—and several variations. Most of them didn’t even respond, which makes sense. But the ones that did were so taken by our cause that they selflessly offered to cover our brand.

Here’s an example from Chloe Kian and one from Cat Creature. These reviews and their support helped us bring in more traffic to our website and create brand awareness—and as a result, we saw increased revenue.

Using Pinterest for eCommerce marketing

Pinterest is the best social media platform for discovering new things to buy. Since the platform itself is highly visual, people usually go there to organize their shopping lists—that makes it great for any eCommerce brand. And if your store is on Shopify, you can use the Pinterest app to get what they call rich pins, which means that the description and price on Pinterest will be pulled directly from your website.

The best way to increase followers and get repins is to use shared boards, community boards made usually by Pinfluencers (yes, that’s a thing). And how do you find these boards? You can do a little Google search, or you can use PinGroupie as we did. PinGroupie lets you find and filter boards according to categories, number of followers, and other criteria.

• If you decide to lean into Pinterest for your marketing, here are 5 tips for using Pinterest for business.

We’re currently members of about eight boards. The most important one for us is called Fashion + Friends, and it has more than 600k followers. The beauty of these boards is that, once you’ve been approved by the admin, the things you post appear on the feed of every follower on that board. That means millions of potential customers around the world—without investing a single dime. These boards sent traffic directly to our site and also helped us rank higher on Google.

One tip: go for boards with more than 10k followers. Boards with fewer followers probably won’t do you any favors—they’ll just sit on your profile and collect dust.

And there you have it: that’s how we used our no-budget social media strategy to increase traffic and get sales.

This article by Daniela Milosheska was first published on the Zapier blog. Find the original post here.

Nick Clegg is doing the same dirty work for Meta he did for the UK’s Tory party

Nick Clegg is doing the same dirty work for Meta he did for the UK’s Tory party

PUWEB    فبراير 27, 2022   

 

In what many saw as a surprise move, Meta has promoted former UK deputy prime minister Nick Clegg to its president of global affairs. According to Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s founder and CEO, Clegg is now “a senior leader at the level of myself … who can lead and represent us for all of our policy issues globally”.

What should we make of this? It is too optimistic to think that Meta’s culture of personal data mining and manipulation might finally be coming to an end?

Meta, formerly known as Facebook, has long been criticized for its data privacy and policy practices. As far back as 2007, only three years after its founding, Zuckerberg had to apologize for informing users’ friends of their purchases. In 2011, the company agreed with the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) that it would undergo independent audits every other year in the face of charges that it was sharing people’s private information with third-party apps.

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The trouble with Facebook and data privacy has only continued, however. This ranged from a bug that revealed private information in 2013, to admit it was secretly doing mood manipulation experiments on users in 2014, to collecting information about private users through third-party sites in 2018.

Most notoriously, this was also the year that Facebook acknowledged it knew about massive data harvesting in the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The FTC went on to find the company a record-breaking US$5 billion (£3.7 billion) over the scandal. The commission declared that:

If you’ve ever wondered what a paradigm shift looks like, you’re witnessing one today … the settlement requires Facebook to implement changes to its privacy practices, its corporate structure, and the role of CEO Mark Zuckerberg that are seismic in scope. Simply put, when it comes to the business of consumer privacy, it’s no longer business as usual at Facebook.

Since then, the company has come under special public scrutiny as a force for using people’s data to spread viral misinformation. Most recently, it was condemned for attracting users by becoming a space for far-right extremism and COVID-19 fear-mongering.

These worries have only been heightened by the announcement of the company’s vision of the “metaverse” in October 2021. On offer is an almost completely virtual future reality hosted and controlled by Meta. There would be seemingly little stopping the company from completely violating and exploiting people’s data for decades to come. So is Clegg going to stop this from happening?

A new era of protection?

Clegg’s hiring in October 2018 as vice president of global affairs – essentially a well-connected lobbyist and spokesman – was meant to publicly allay all the fears surrounding the company. The former Liberal Democrat leader has emphasized his status as an outsider to Silicon Valley who cut his teeth by making difficult compromises as the junior partner in David Cameron’s coalition government of 2010-15.

He argued that there’s an analogy here when it comes to regulating extremist content on social media platforms. For example, he has advocated for a bipartisan approach to data protection in the US that would include setting up a new digital regulator. Overall, however, many have wondered whether Clegg has changed anything at Meta beyond a slight change of image.

With his promotion, Clegg is now supposedly being given carte blanche to ensure Meta adheres to and promotes an ethos of data fairness and protection. Yet this announcement sounds similar to Google’s pledge to reduce its systemic social biases in its algorithms, where search results reinforced prejudices around issues like race and sometimes drove users to extremist content. In 2018, it hired the brilliant computer scientist Timnit Gebru to help address and solve this problem. Yet it very publicly fired her when she sought to bring about real changes to the company.

It is unclear if this could be Clegg’s fate as well if he seeks to be a genuine reformer at Meta – the suspicion is that he would not have been promoted had he fought for real change over the past three years. If that sounds cynical, it would certainly be in line with a broader trend in the corporate world towards “ethics washing” – using PR to make the public think you are being ethical without meaningfully altering your behavior.

Examples abound, perhaps most famously in companies making cosmetic appeals in their advertising or public statements to the need for sustainability while continuing to pollute and push back against stronger regulations. Similarly, firms have taken public stands again racism without necessarily practicing what they preach. Scholars such as Professor Carl Rhodes, with whom I have written a book, refer to this as the era of “woke capitalism”.

Clegg-washing

Ironically, Nick Clegg has gone through his early political version of such “washing”. As part of the coalition government, Clegg and his party had hoped to use their position to fight for lower university tuition fees and environmental sustainability. In retrospect, Clegg was arguably part of a Tory branding exercise, giving them cover to impose economic austerity.

As far as Meta is concerned, what has to be acknowledged is that the company’s problems are not the result of a few “bad apples”: violating people’s data privacy to sell back to advertisers and ensure they continue using the platform has been fundamental to the business model.

The language of the statement announcing Clegg’s hiring was telling. Zuckerberg declared that:

Nick will now lead our company on all our policy matters, including how we interact with governments as they consider adopting new policies and regulations, as well as how we make the case publicly for our products and our work.

The emphasis was on shaping public policy and perception, not necessarily creating stronger measures for protecting people’s data rights.

Ultimately, Clegg’s hiring shows the power of public pressure, even for a huge tech conglomerate like Meta. The debate about the extent to twhich our digital society should be publicly owned and democratically controlled will most likely grow even stronger in the years to come. But if Meta does not change with Clegg’s elevation, we will look back on this as just another example of ethics washing – but this time around privacy? The Conversation

Article by Peter Bloom, Professor of Management, University of Essex

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.