My Social Media Marketing Strategy

On Sunday I’ll be Interviewing Manoj Kumar who’s a Principal Consultant at ThoughtWorks & a Selenium Conf Organiser. And I was chatting to Manoj about my marketing strategy as a tester. I’ve been fascinated about marketing (more than learning about test automation tools) and this blog post is a reflection on that strategy.

Marketing is a numbers game

In marketing, click through rates, conversion rates and eyeballs are king. You can either increase your eyeballs/views or increase the conversion rate.

E.G. You are promoting a free event, if you send an email to 100 people and 5 people sign up, your conversion rate is 5% for that campaign. It’s alot easier to increase the number of emails sent than the conversions/click through rates.

You could send that same email to 100 more people or send follow up emails to the people who opened the email but didn’t register to increase conversions. Or maybe the subject line didn’t get people’s attention?

Anyway, there’s tons of testing and iterating that can be applied to a marketing campaign.

What is your goal?

Have a think of what you’d like to achieve with your marketing campagin before starting out. I’ve structured my LinkedIn to get more views of my blog. Nearly everything I do on LinkedIn is to increase the web traffic to my blog.

My goal is to get more views/traffic on my blog

You might want to increase ticket sales for a conference, increase sign up rates for an event, etc. My secondry goal is to grow my number of followers on YouTube/Twitch.

How will you measure your goal?

I use analytics on wordpress to measure sources of web traffic. First let me tell you about my template messages and then I’ll explain how I use analytics to measure it.

Here are my LinkedIn template messages

New Connection

Hi {Insert_First_Name},

Thanks for connecting. What are some of the challenges facing you these days?

You might enjoy reading my blog on metrics and quality: https://bughuntersam.com/metrics-and-quality/ 

Is there anything I can help you with?

Regards,

Sam

They Ask for Work/Career Advice

Unfortunately it’s hard for me to refer someone who I’ve never worked with personally. I also don’t know what type of team would suit you.

Here’s my 6 step software testers career cheatsheet: https://bughuntersam.com/my-testing-career-cheatsheet/

Networking is king. I’ve gotten my last 3 job offers from networking, blogging and speaking at Meetup events.

Specific Campaign

I’ve sent the following template message to over 100 people who have QA Engineer in their title, are based in India and I’m connected to (I have up to 240 connections that meet this criteria):

Hi {Insert_First_Name},

How are you? Are you aware of the Selenium Conference in India? https://seleniumconf.in/

I’ll be interviewing Manoj Kumar, one of the organisers at 7am IST this Sunday https://www.meetup.com/Sydney-Testers/events/271598548/

If that’s too early for you the interview will be up on youtube 24 hours after the live event.

Regards,

Sam

I’ve had over 30 people respond to that last message directly over night, that’s a 30% response rate of people who’ve atleast clicked on the auto generated response message, “Thanks”.

Analytics

Using wordpress; Jetpack paid services, I can track views, where they come from and what people look at:

Yesterday I had 286 Views from 141 Visitors which is my second best performing day over the last month for web traffic.

Out of those 286 Views, 11 were on my Metrics and Quality blog, so they were probably from my New_Connections template message.

173 Views were from India (Normally most of my traffic comes from Australia) and 16 of those views came from LinkedIn. This would indicate that my blog was shared outside of my marketing efforts.

Here’s a more regular day

As a comparison, here’s a more regular web traffic day for my blog:

Newer published blogs are the most viewed (especially if I’ve shared them), Most of my traffic comes from LinkedIn and most of my traffic is from Australia, because that’s my biggest area of influence.

I can also keep an eye on my engagement in LinkedIn too, this helps me to understand if the content I’m sharing is resonating with people:

Is this useful?

Would you try/test anything from this blog post? What are your views on marketing?