Sports Card Strategy Show

We've been bullish on Instagram since early in 2017 when we realized the sheer volume of active users and the amount of attention those users are giving to the platform. We're big on building up your company's content strategy, then deploying pieces of it consistently on Instagram. But more and more useful marketing tools keep popping up within the platform, for example, when a post is performing well, Instagram will show you a message in your feed to promote it. There are four main options to promote your post on Instagram now.

Attention WordPress Developers & Marketers: Data Driven Daily Tip 189 - Our WordPress Development Team (special thanks to "Chris Tooma"), has been on top of this one for a while now, and today I woke up to write my daily blog and saw this message in my WordPress Dashboard after a recent upgrade to WordPress Core version 4.9.8. AKA - Gutenberg is HERE! WordPress Content Managers and Content Marketers Don't Need to install it yet, but CAN install it if they're on WP v4.9.8 like all of our clients are.

Data Driven Daily Tip 188: One more important one that the data says is extremely important is - when posting Instagram Stories, each :15 story post should have a relevant hashtag in it. It should be done via the Hashtag Sticker within stories. We randomly decided to start using the hashtag sticker in our stories, and the data shows that the visibility of our stories exploded from around 20-25 people viewing our story to upwards of 450 people viewing our story. While location stickers can also help increase your story's visibility, you can't always control your location. But you can control how strategic you are with your hashtags!

Believe it or not, the number one excuse (after "we don't have enough time to do that") from brand marketers and small business owners as to why they don't consistently post on Instagram is: "we don't know what to talk about, we're not that interesting." This is AFTER they've finally realized that the data overwhelmingly proves that their target audience is in fact on Instagram. So the helpful, strategic and tactical response to their excuse is, let me put something in context for you and show you something cool. 1. The context. If you have a business, you have an interesting value proposition and story to tell against it. If you don't tell that story, then you for sure have frequently asked questions. You have questions that you ask to your co-workers, and you have questions they ask to you, and you have questions that your clients or customers ask about your company or to someone specifically in your company. This needs to be part of your content strategy. 2. The something cool.

Data Driven Daily Tip 186 - Have you ever sent someone a link to a video on YouTube and then explained to them that they need to skip to the 50 second mark, or wait to watch or pay attention until a certain point in the video? Did you know there's a simple way to simple edit the end of a YouTube URL so that it automatically drops the user to a certain point in the video? See the =50s at the end of the URL below? that's telling it to drop the user to the 50 second mark of the video upon click/page load.

Data Driven Daily Tip 185: For months I was podcasting about once or twice a month, very long form, interview style. It was a good start, and gave me some stuff to talk about, however recently I decided to change my strategy to see if listenership improved. I increased frequency to basically daily, or at least 4-5 times per week, and made the episodes shorter, like 2-5 minutes in length. See how the data shows the listenership skyrocketed? Not only do you need to start a podcast, but you need rework your strategy. It's not what's next, it's what's NOW.

Data Driven Daily Tip 184: What Is Medium.com? It's a free place to blog from daily to weekly to monthly, but as long as you're doing it consistently, it will do your business well. As of 2016, more than 60 million active users were on Medium, and we have reason to believe that audience size has close to tripled in the last two years. On top of that, our own web data shows that companies who blog on Medium regularly see the most qualified website traffic from it as a referral source, with more than double the average engagement from web visitors vs. other backlinks. Translation: Blogging on Medium.com regularly with a byline backlink to your website results in more engaged users to your website, which will eventually mean more qualified sales and leads. We recommend Medium.com to all of our digital strategy roadmap clients. Now, here's a key way to grow your following on Medium.com. Listen to find out!

What’s the difference between the Facebook Ads metric “Website Conversion Value” and “Website Purchase Conversion Value?” A heart attack, initially. 🙂 I kid. You see, when you go in to analyze the performance of your Facebook Ad in terms of generating sales to your eCommerce website, you need to go in and click the blue “plus” (+) icon to the right of your columns and “Modify Columns,” then you always need to add two columns. 1. Return on Ad Spend. 2. Website Purchase Conversion Value. You see, if you add “Website Conversion Value” you get a MUCH BIGGER NUMBER, that does not represent your actual eCommerce Sales, but rather an arbitrary potential number defined by your Facebook Tracking Pixel Set-up. If you want to customize this more mid-funnel number, it’s not a bad idea, here is some discussion. But you don’t have to do anything, you just have to add the correct column. 🙂 Hit me up with any questions on Facebook Advertising at paul@datadriven.design.

I'm HUGE on what the data says is working for your marketing strategy. The data doesn't lie. So this may seem confusing, but I'm really not concerned with the headlines recently that Facebook lost $125 billion last quarter. It's really irrelevant to your marketing strategy, especially when Facebook Ad - when done correctly - result in the lowest cost per customer acquisition and highest return on ad spend across all media channels, let alone digital media channels. I have a ton of respect for the AdHawk Blog and Newsletter, but they got a little overboard in giving so much love to this article, which says "only" 2.23 billion of Facebook's 3 billion users are (active on the platform). Seriously? Only 2.23 billion? Name me another marketing channel that you can reach your target audience for $1 or less per, that has a prospective audience of 2.23 billion? LOL. It's freaking laughable. IGNORE THE HEADLINES. Be a practitioner.

ATTN MARKETERS: (from CMOs to Small Business Owners) Whenever social media platforms start launching features to combat one another (feature wars), it's usually an amazing opportunity for marketers. In 2015 it was Instagram adding "Stories" to copy Snapchat. User attention FLOCKED to Insta Stories, and hasn't wavered since. Now, it's the launch of IGTV to dominate YouTube. Well, less than three weeks later, YouTube launched a very subtle "messages" feature to help extend organic reach of videos, and keep people native on the platform. Here's how to marketers, from CMOs to Small Business Owners, should use this.