Week 17: Wrapping It Up

 I was thinking back on the first time I have Facebook and Instagram personal account. It was just plainly for social interactions purposes. I was even so limited when it comes to posting pictures or updating my page or even accepting friends requests. It's not I'm not friendly, I was scared and skeptical when it comes to anything about online interactions and I prefer to have a private life away social media.

Even before I take  this social media marketing for business class, there were still lots of questions in my mind on how come ads keep popping on my feed? I was just searching for an item online and few days after, multiple ads related to my item searched was on my feed tempting me to click and check their site or their promotions. 

Then I started volunteering in one of the nonprofit organization here in North SD county and they experienced a problem a their social media accounts and I know I only have limited knowledge on how to use social media platforms. That's one of the reasons why I'm taking this class. I know it would be a great opportunity  for me to  learn digital marketing for business or for your organization. 

I learned that social media is not only design for social interactions only but it's now a great platforms to a successful  business if you know how to use them appropriately. Being an interactive which I'm don't used to before is also very important to monitor how that engagement impacts your business. 

Social medial for business, services and products would be my help when I 'm ready to start my future business. Aside from it has low marketing cost but it will definitely make a huge difference for your business.

My overall experience to class was great! It's not only I am learning all these social media platforms' uses to leverage your business it also help me improve my writing and composition skills which I am not good at or I've never done anymore for years and even though, it's an online class we also get a chance to interact with our classmates following and interacting to some of their posts.

I had a great semester! highly recommend this class to all students.

Week 16: Social Media Management Tools

 

Social Media Marketing is the use of social media platforms to connect with your audience to build your brand, increase sales, and drive website traffic. 

This involves publishing great content in your social media profiles, listening to and engaging your followers, analyzing your results, and running advertisement. Some of the social media platforms are Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.

There are also range of social media management tools that help businesses to get out the most of these social media platforms. They help systemize your business and help your achieve success with your social media marketing whether you build your brand or grow your business. 

Some of these marketing tools are Buffer, Hootsuite, Social Sprouts, Agora Pulse, Sendible, Friends+Me, eclincher, Social Pilot, MaveSocial, Edgar, Crowdfire, etc.

Some of them offer 14-30 day Free Trial and prices range from standard  to advanced plan. The cool thing I also like with these social media marketing tools are they support most of the social networks such as  Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Google+, YouTube and many more. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1uhsygniu7BOYnQB30hxTzZIvdK3V6_FAcL8qtpmqui4/edit#gid=0

In my type of business, I also found some social media marketing tools are designs for a childcare or early childhood education which I might also want to check out and book a demo in the future such as, Bright wheel, Hi Mama, Procare Deskstop,  and Community Pass. Since, my business is not real yet I couldn't get there exact pricing. 

These are all-in one management tools design for early educator. It has systematized registration management, self check-in/ check-out, billing and invoicing, calendar management, daily reports, employee management, and parent portal.

It is very beneficial to learn all these social medial marketing tools to save time, save money, and grow your business.

Blogpost that I've read and leave a comment:

https://csit155-sp21josephpass.blogspot.com/2021/05/week-13-part-b-developing-online.html?showComment=1621615208749#c1414605199370368473

https://csit155-sp21morganm.blogspot.com/2021/05/week-15-part-b-building-out-your.html?showComment=1621615646916#c2168037511691170363

https://csit155-sp21-harukay.blogspot.com/2021/05/week-15-part-b-building-out-your.html?showComment=1621616049988#c5434710953093031710

Week 15 Part B: Building Out Your Strategy

In this post, I've created a simple rough draft plan for my future business' social media activities. The plan scheduled time might change in the future but one thing for sure for me, is that learning these platforms' used appropriately will extremely help sustain and grow my business.

 

Week 15 Part A: Developing Your Marketing Strategy

 Learning social media marketing for business is a great opportunity for me to be knowledgeable enough in different platforms that will be extremely helpful for my business in the future. It was nice to learn different business, small or big leverage their business using social media.

I would definitely use these different platforms to channel my future business. I'm still gonna my official website page even though I could do anything with Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn etc. I just feel my business still needs to have one. I also like to use the E-newsletter. I will be so beneficial for my business to communicate with my clients as well.

Facebook and Instagram would be very helpful for me to target my potential customers demographically. Registering to my local directories; Yelp, Google map could help my business found be easily online.

I enjoyed experimenting all those different social media platforms. I can't wait for me to have a real business accounts to market digitally. I've learned a lot in this class! From creating and writing a blog a huge thing for me. Then, I get a chance to learn and how to utilize these different social media platforms appropriately.

I would probably use social media for my business at least 2-3 times a week. I would also like the idea from our reading that training my team to be social media fluent for us to be a better listener, transparent, responsive, and improve engagement for a better customer server not only in person but also online.

Week 14 Part B: What we Learn from Facebook Analytics

                                                                                                                

Facebook analytics is a free tool that you can use to see how well your business is performing. It is difficult to learn for a beginner but as you get used and understand how this tools work, it will definitely help market your business.

Since my Facebook business page is not real yet, I chose to analyzed Microsoft ABC data. This page has more than 12,000 followers. For the last  days there's recent 5 posts or actions. Latest highest number reach and engagement was posted last April 28th. Most post content that their visitors like were about live band or shows. Visitors often visits their site from 9am to 9pm, this be a great time to post run any ads or post on their page.

Facebook analytics enable us to collect information about our audience. Just like in the Microsoft ABC data's highest number of fans demographically is men aged 35-44 years old. It would be better if they will target these people specifically for more to reach and to save money as well. 

This tool is kind 'a cool because not only it will help your business grow, it will also help you learn or know your fans, followers, people reached, and people engaged data. You will get to know what country or specifically state or city are your  clients from. I will absolutely use this kind of social media platform for my future business.

Collecting information about our audience and tracking this activities in Facebook analytics allow us to know what content we can create on our business page to help us maintain a higher level of engagement.

 

Week 14 Part A: What we Learn from Google Analytics

Understanding google analytics for business would be beneficial for my business. It gives us a lot of insight into what is happening in our website. Google analytics also helps me understand my consumers. See how they're doing online, which pages are they visiting or relevant to them, and how they're engaging with my products and services.

Google analytics also gives us an idea on who should be our customer to target, what is the best time to run a campaign. Honestly, this tool is not that easy to use at first. It takes time to learn and understand all its features. One thing I like is you will be able to see the overview of the performance of your website, just like in the reports section that covers real-time, Audience, Acquisition, Behavior, and conversion where you can see the real-time visitors' activities, who are your visitors(demographic, ender), check the traffic of your site etc. 

With these features such as matrix and data that enable me to understand whether someone is enjoying or not enjoying my content and to use this information to create a traffic on my site. Tracking these activities online, It will give any business owners' a great understanding about their site, product, and services that help also decide on what makes improvement  or how my entire business doing and so on. 

  

Week 13 PartB: Developing Online Advertising

I created a short video clip promoting my business in order to generate likes, followers, and reached  potential customers. In my ads I can target families, local parents, etc. that might  be interested to click  on the different links that I also posted. They can also send us message via email, messenger, or simple just call us for more information regarding our programs and services.

My business is not real, so my post is not publish in my social media pages yet. However if it's in realization in the future I will definitely boost my marketing ads to generate traffic, increase engagement and to reach more potential customers according to my target audience. I will probably add  an email sign-up as well for them to get updates on my business if they like but of course they can unsubscribe anytime.  This way, it will help my business and improve my profit margin as well.

 

Week 13 Part A: Online Advertising - Analysis of the Marketplace

 

When running a business, we're also aware that we're not the only who does what you do. It's important to put your business out there to let your potential customer  that you offer a better service and product that your competition.

Advertising is one of the essential components in business plan because not only to let that people know that we exist and our business has something to offer,  it  also creates customer awareness, name recognition and it educates consumers about our products and services.

Advertising our business now  a days has a massive changed because of modern technologies. Can you imagine how easy is it now to advertise your business using different social media platforms unlike before people still need to create brochures, billboards, broadcast fax, publish in a local newspapers just to target your potential customers... Traditional ads can only go so far. We can't event tag those billboards to your friends. I'm guilty of this, but sometimes when I sort mails a sort next to the trash can and always put uninteresting ads straights to the trash can. 

As compared to digital advertising, it's way easier to share ads to your friends and to the people around the globe. It easier to update your ads if you have new promotions. I've been seeing different ads online, they normally used different promotions to catch viewer's attention, just like for example; Mother's Day is coming up most Ads pop on social media are related to the Mother's Day. And when you click to their link it will bring you to their specific website asking you to shop or sign-up for newsletters to get  discount on your order etc. 

To be honest, I found some Ads annoying when it just pop-up in the middle of your reading  or while your watching some video and there's no way for you to skip the add. But I would say digital advertising is way more effective to use when it comes to target potential customers. It is cheaper and  has faster reached and in our modern world it is important to think local but act global when you're in the business industry.

Week 12 Part B: Business Specific Tools

 

Technology has rapidly transform the marketing industry. Being knowledgeable on this online tools helps our business keep running.

 It is important to adapt in todays consumers mindset. We live in a content first world that people will read some information first before they buy your products or services.

Now a days it is now necessary to use these marketing tools to help businesses grow. One of them is LinkedIn. I consider this social media platform a very good to use improve your business strategy. 

To be honest my personal LinkedIn account is never been an active ever since. But when update my profile because of this class I found it really cool and a really great platform for personal or business purposes. I requested to join in some pages or groups that are related to my business type like; Childcare Centers, Preschools, Daycare, Montessori Schools-Owners and Entrepreneurs, Childcare Network, etc. Joining their is also a great opportunity for me to learn and to connect to different topics such as Marketing, How and where to advertise on the web, How social media should use, Curriculum, Business opportunities in childcare and a lot more...

I would love to sign up for YELP account but unfortunately I am not able to create an account as of the moment because my business is not real yet. This marketing tools is also great for my business. It like a local directory like google maps that helps people find your business easily.

It is a great opportunity to have these resources on how make traffic online and in order to sell your product and services and the best part of it is we get a chance to show people how our products and services can help them solve their problems and fulfill their desires and needs.

Week 12 Part A: Business Specific Online Tools

Online marketing tools  are significant means to enhance each process with your business.  As estimated there were about 59.5 % internet active users worldwide and this is one of the reasons why small business or any company should seriously think about using a digital marketing tools in order to get customers and to make sufficient profit for their business.

It is very beneficial for us to learn all these digital marketing tools. For my future business, I believe most all of these digital marketing tools that we've learned are also great for me to use.

 I will definitely create an active website as one essential tool for being discoverable online and for the parents to learn more about my business. In addition, I will also post my business in our local directories; Google maps, yelp, etc.  along with the customers reviews so, my business could easily be found by people who needs our services. 

Aside from that, we could also join in a local parent groups in Facebook or connect to these group of people in LinkedIn the way it'll give us an idea on what matters to parents locally.

I also learned that there different types of marketing platforms, one example is  "Marketing 360". It's a type of marketing tool for small business. It also uses multi-channel marketing, email, and text nurturing. Every thing is digitalize which we understand parents would like at their convenience. 

This type of marketing software could help increase my childcare's enrollment but still want to do more readings on how reliable this platform is. The only thing I like is, for a childcare business you got a free account tools such Customer Relationship Management (CRM) that will help my business for an easy registration, payments, forms, etc. 

 

Week 11: Marketing with Twitter, LinkedIn, Social Influencers

 

Marketing your business online is a big deal these days. It massively affects how people purchase products and interact with businesses.

  

Social media platforms became the best tool to connect with and influence those potential customers online

Businesses use LinkedIn to make quality connections and find potential customers. It is considered a professional and trustworthy source of information that we can used to build brand awareness in the community. Using this platform to post and share any business announcements, relevant articles etc., may help drive traffic to our other online media accounts such as website and blog.

 Aside from that, with LinkedIn we can keep our business updated on the latest news, tips, and trend within  the industry that may help us edge on our competition and gives more ideas to boost our marketing strategy.

Twitter brings businesses to a wide range of audience. As what we've learnt from our previous lessons, using hashtags in twitter is also best strategy to reach and appeal your target market. To be honest, I am not really active in Twitter but I can say this platform is one of the best resource for gathering feedback from my customers.

Social influencers would be tough to jump into but I think it's an absolutely effective marketing strategy as well. Using word of mouth, referral programs from an influencers who has millions of followers is a big plus to your branding. Just like a certain product that was promoted by an influencer, since people follow and trust this person, they will buy the same product. 

As of the moment, I am not that active in my LinkedIn and Twitter accounts, but if I have my business  I will definitely use these social media platforms as well to boost my business.