In late 2017, I put a plan in place to transition from a long career in journalism to owning a digital marketing agency. While researching the tools I would need to help companies become successful, I came across Missinglttr. This allows for the creation of a social media drip campaign.
What is a social media drip campaign?
This is a campaign whereby you promote a blog post several times over the course of a year through an automated process. There are several kinds of drip campaigns (you can read more about them here), but I am going to focus on one that will raise awareness for your website and content and drive visitors to your site, My background was journalism. Reporters typically write a story and then move on to the next one. While sometimes they will write several stories on a particular subject (think of a court trial that lasts several days or a controversial local issue), the normal routine is write and move one.
This idea of moving on to the next big thing is sound advice for a journalist, but not for business owners and bloggers who are trying to drive traffic — read potential customers — to their websites. Anyone in sales understands it is a numbers game: The more people you talk to, the more sales you will close. Similarly, the more people who visit your site, the more likely it is you can sell them something, build trust, build a relationship and build authority (the process of you or your business being seen as an expert in your field).
The software service I use will look at a blog post or web page I submit and break it down into several components that include quotes and images from the page and then formulate them into nine posts to be dripped out over the course of a year. These posts include text and a photo/image. If your page has several photos, then it will grab different pictures. For example, blog posts at Wendi’s Weekend Trips & Whatnot uses a lot of photos per post. This site uses one. If your site only utilizes one photograph per page, then the good news with this software is it will create “bubbles.” Think of these bubbles as PowerPoint slides. The bubbles contain quotes and lines from the blog, but they are presented on your social media networks as images. Social media posts with images or videos foster more engagement. The drips happen on Day 0, 3, 7, 14, 30, 90, 180, 270 and 365. The service allows me to control every aspect of the drip campaign. I can use different words and photos for Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest.
5 Benefits of a social media drip campaign
- Increased exposure. Your social media feeds are illustrative of the quote about how no man steps into the same river twice because each time he is a different man and the river is different (because the flowing water is the same). Whenever you post to Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or another social media network, you need to realize there are only a certain number of people following you who will be on at the same time. While changes to the algorithms have changed when you will see posts and which of them will be in your feed, ask yourself: Do you stand a better chance of people seeing what you have to say by posting one time or nine times?
- Increased awareness. The more content you deliver to social media, the more likely it is people will see it and read it. Remember, it is a numbers game.
- Increased traffic. This is what it is all about. When we introduced drip marketing to Wendi’s Weekend Trips & Whatnot, it immediately led to more traffic. The first week, the drip campaign added what amounted to an extra day of visitors to the site. By the end of the first month, the campaign drove more than an additional week’s worth of traffic to her site. Put another way, the number of visitors who would normally come to the site in 44 days, did so in 28 days, an increase in traffic of about 50 percent.
- Increased interaction. The social media drip campaign also helped to reduce the bounce rate on the blog site. The number of people visiting were looking at other pages, reading other blog posts, learning about the author and exploring the books she wrote.
- Increased satisfaction. Let’s be honest:Â You didn’t start a business with the express purpose of potential customers ignoring you. You didn’t start your blog so no one will read you. You didn’t build your website to keep traffic away. I certainly didn’t start Wooster Media Group LLC to fail. So, let’s not ignore the fact that is meaningful when people want to learn more about our companies or our blogs and take the time to visit our websites. There’s a certain satisfaction in seeing increases in our pageviews and our unique visitors to our websites. And, that’s OK to feel good about it, after all, it’s a numbers game.
Next steps
I hope you can see that when you start a social media drip campaign, only good things can happen. The bottom line is more people will be aware about what you have to offer, whether it means products, services or blog posts.
We would love to meet with you and discuss how we can work together to create a social media drip campaign for you (book a free consult here), but if your budget does not allow for it to happen, then you have another option: Buffer. While the free version of Buffer does not allow for a true drip marketing campaign, it does allow you the ability to schedule up to 10 social media posts. This is beneficial because it allows you to carefully consider what your next 10 posts will be and how they can be used in a coordinated fashion.
Whether you use us or not, I hope that your endeavors will be successful. The fact you are reading this post … down to here … suggests to me, you are eager to learn new ways to help your business and blog — that kind of effort and determination usually leads to success. Congratulations.