The Found Gen

Marketing That Works.

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Do More Followers Lead to More Business?

The math is simple in theory: more followers = more business. Right? Not so fast. 

An equation usually has two or more parts, and we’re missing a few here. It’s something more along the lines of “followers + engagement + brand loyalty = more business.” 

Yes, follower numbers are front and center, so it’s easy to get caught up in how big or small your audience is. However, your follower count doesn’t mean much if you don’t have the engagement to back it up. Engagement (such as likes, shares and comments) may be considered the most important metric for evaluating the success of a social media strategy. Nowadays, there are more bots and fake accounts than ever, which don’t contribute to your engagement. 

The good news is that, with the right strategy, building trust with social media marketing is not only possible, but a key component of your campaign that dramatically reduces your cost per lead and increases your conversion rate.

When it comes to doing social media marketing right, it’s not about reaching “everyone”, it’s about reaching the right audience and creating engaging content. The goal of your social media marketing strategy should be helping, informing, and listening to your audience, not accumulating the “most” followers. 

At The Found Gen, we understand the importance of creating quality content marketing that helps for potential customers to find you, get to know, trust you, and purchase your products. If you are looking for a team to manage your social media presence for your property or business, get in touch today.

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Which Data Points Are Worth Tracking and Which Are Not?

We hear it all the time from businesses embarking on their social media marketing journey, “how can we get more followers?” And while large follower counts might look impressive, they’re all but irrelevant if they’re the wrong audience or not engaged. It can be easy to get lost in the appearance of big numbers, but what really matters is data that tracks your impact with impressions, clicks and click-through rates

There’s a ton of KPIs out there, but here’s the ones we recommend looking closely at:

  • Impressions
  • Email Engagement
  • Spend
  • Clicks
  • Social Media Engagement
  • Webpage Views
  • Sales (unit/dollar volume)
  • Cost per Client
  • Cost per Lead
  • Return On Advertising Spend (ROAS)
  • Return on Investment (ROI)

Analyzing these metrics will tell you how successful your strategy is, and they’ll help you craft even better content for even better results. They can help you understand your traffic performance, readership engagement, and lead generation.  After all, the more you know, the better you can target and reach the people that really matter to your business needs.

Despite how overwhelming it can feel to track, manage, and interpret, data can guide some pretty big and important decisions when it comes to who you target, how you target them, and the most effective ways to continue to engage them.

If you’re ready, we can help ensure that your metrics and marketing stay perfectly aligned for growing your business. Take the next step today by getting in touch with us at The Found Gen.

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Can Too Much Data Analysis Hinder Your Marketing Strategy?

Data analysis is the living heartbeat of a smart digital marketing campaign. If you’re sending out a bunch of content without measuring its effects, you’re going to be missing out on A LOT of important insights. Analytics can help you understand your traffic performance, readership engagement, and lead generation. 

So, with that being said, what data should you actually be tracking in your digital marketing campaign?

It’s not uncommon for businesses to opt to view success through their amount of followers on social media, website clicks, and other metrics. However, those metrics only paint half the picture.

At the end of the day, the success of your marketing campaign isn’t whether you get more followers on social media or more traffic to your website. A smart digital marketing campaign drives leads that convert into clients. 

For us, the most important two metrics are your cost-per-lead and your cost-per-client (aka Customer Acquisition Cost or CAC). If you are seeing your cost-per-lead and your cost-per-client go down, your marketing is working. 

This isn’t to say you shouldn’t check your engagement rate based on time of day and type of post, nor to say tracking the change month-over-month, quarter-over-quarter, and year-over-year isn’t worth your time. It absolutely is. We look for seasonal swings that can inform our strategy to drive more quality traffic to you and build better relationships with human beings.

But if those improvements in your engagement rate on social (or reducing your bounce rate on your website) don’t improve your cost-per-lead or your cost-per-client, something isn’t working properly. 

Why we say this: it’s easy to manipulate the data – you can post something controversial on social and see engagement skyrocket or stuff links into your highest trafficked pages to see your bounce rate go down. But if it doesn’t lead to more revenue, you’re still at the same point you were before the change. 

In short: you want to focus on the right data instead of spending time on the fluff. Analyzing the right data will tell you how successful your strategy is, and they’ll help you craft even better content for even better results. Learning how to analyze marketing data is undoubtedly one of the most important aspects of running a successful marketing campaign.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed by data analysis, give us a call  – we’ll take a look at your data at no cost and let you know what we think.

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The Death of the Social Media Influencer

Influencers and micro-influencers have been taking social media by storm for years. We’ve all seen the videos of an enthusiastic social media icon unboxing toys, reviewing products, or even giving their own take on current events – expertise be damned! Influencers have proven their ability to shower a business in awareness with their audience, but how valuable is it really? 

There’s been a shift in the way consumers use social media – namely on Instagram. Now more than ever, people want to dig behind the online facade to see the real people behind the captions, hashtags, and sponsored content. Influencers like Emma Chamberlain have pioneered what’s known as “casual Insta”, which is, well, exactly what it sounds like. Instead of the perfectly framed avocado toast and yoga pics, Instagram users are shifting over to posting more relatable and imperfect content.

After everything that’s happened over the past few years in the digital world, people are tired of being sold to on what they should want and where they should spend their money. For the most part, they are going to social media for entertainment and escape.

So will this spell the death of Influencer Marketing? Yes, in the way it has worked for the past few years.  

So, what comes next for Influencer Marketing?

With any luck, we’ll stop seeing videos that start with, “Hey Guys!…”

The truth is no one knows. Relatability is back in style, a new breed of influencer has evolved: the genuinfluencer. Genuinfluencers are sort of like influencers, but their motivations tend to revolve around education, as opposed to engagement.

“Genuinfluencers are less interested in promoting products, and more interested in spreading ideas and truth,” says Evy Lyons, VP of marketing at influencer-marketing platform Traackr. 

For brands that have been leaning heavily on Influencer Marketing, expect to see diminishing returns on what has worked in the past. Focus your marketing dollars on reaching your audience still, but center your campaign on showcasing the value your brand provides – how do you make their life better? Educate them. 

So, while the era of unboxing videos, ads, disingenuous content may be coming to an end, there seems to be a light at the end of the tunnel for education-oriented social media celebs.

#notsponsored

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How to Get Your Business Less Reliant on Facebook

Let’s not mince words – Facebook built the world’s largest social media platform, a digital town square with billions of users. Then they built the most powerful ad platform on top of it. Then they broke it. 

Over the years, we’ve seen the dramatic rise of Facebook and what now may be its fall. Back in 2011, business owners thought it was a crazy idea to promote your business on Facebook. In 2015, organic reach started to plummet and ads became vital to maintain a presence on the platform – and it worked. 

Now, after Apple’s privacy updates (and Google’s that are coming soon to Android), Facebook as that a crossroads. Many businesses that were buying $20,000+ a month in ads have seen revenue plummet. So when it comes to sustaining your business’ lead flow, now may be the time to start seeking out alternatives to Facebook. Here’s our advice:

Build a Brand, Not a Presence

Building a presence on a social media platform creates more value for the platform than it does for your business – at least over the long run. 

Instead, focus on using a platform to connect with individuals – build a network of actual human beings instead of a following. 

When you connect with people and build a brand, your presence can move platform to platform relatively easily. 

Start Blogging

There are only two parts of your online presence that you fully control – your website and your email list. For long term success without platform risk, those are the two components that should get the majority of your resources. 

Blogging is an essential component of your website – it gives potential clients immediate access to your expertise and represents your brand, company, and style in exactly the way you want it to. And did we mention it is the crucial component to supporting and driving great SEO?

By having a robust blog strategy, you are able to cultivate a strong presence online where you (bonus!) provide great information to potential clients who are more ready to buy or hire you from the start. If you think you have an SEO strategy in place but aren’t blogging, you don’t have an SEO strategy. 

The best part about blogging? You write one post and it lives on forever, continually driving traffic to you for years whereas a Facebook post stops creating impressions (at best) a day or two after you write it. 

Consider Hiring Content Marketers

Content marketing often becomes a full-time job that few small businesses can handle on their own. It requires a high level of planning and creating new innovative ideas and ways to share content. If you feel like handling your own content marketing could put a strain on the other work you have to take care of, hiring a content marketing team may be a good idea.

At the end of the day, the decision to reduce your business’ reliance on Facebook is up to you. There are plenty of alternatives to Facebook available, and every social media site has a solid demographic core. Find the site for your best customers and stake a claim there – odds are it’s the one you already have.

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What is The MetaVerse and Why Zuckerberg Has Gone Off the Deep End

Ah, Zuckerberg. 

It’s hard to believe that nearly 20 years have passed since a college kid with a bankrolled pivot on “Hot or Not” became a household name. A name that has since created such a reverberation across pop culture. 

Let’s face it (pun intended), the man shifted social media onto its current course. And, he got a movie out of it. 

Zuck is back in the news (did he ever leave?) but this time for re-positioning and re-branding his Facebook empire to something entirely different. 

So, what the heck is this MetaVerse?

At this point, not much. Let us explain:

The Internet Brought to Life

The term, coined by science fiction writer Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel “Snow Crash,” refers to a virtual world that coexists and overlaps with the physical one, with people interacting as avatars. Zuckerberg has described it as an extensive “virtual environment” you can go inside of, instead of just looking at a screen. That world doesn’t exist today on anywhere near the scale Zuckerberg envisions, but a small version can be found in gaming, especially with virtual-reality (VR) headsets like Facebook’s – or, Meta’s — Occulus.

There are “multi-billion revenue opportunities,” Bank of America analysts wrote. “For example, 50-yard line seats for the Superbowl, taking a hitting class with [Major League baseball player] Buster Posey or shopping for sunglasses with virtual try-on may all be possible in the metaverse,” they said. 

Zuckerberg is going all in on what he sees as the next generation of the internet because he thinks it’s going to open up a large new digital economy that sometimes runs in parallel with the tangible world and other times far surpasses it. “Ads are going to continue being an important part of the strategy across the social media parts of what we do, and it will probably be a meaningful part of the metaverse, too,” Zuckerberg said in a recent company earnings call.

But will it though?

Our Thoughts

Ironically enough, one maxim we’ve always shared with our clients is to think about the internet as if it were the real world. Building a web presence is synonymous with real estate development. In that analogy, social media is akin to high-end retail space – high foot traffic, but also high rent and most importantly real estate you don’t own.

When you approach it that way, you don’t overinvest in your Facebook (or Instagram, or TikTok, etc) presence because the owner of the real estate can change the rent on you with a snap of their fingers (in this case, by limiting organic reach and requiring you to buy ads). 

It’s always best to invest in the real estate you own – your website and your email list, the two things that no one can take away from you.  

Zuckerberg did a great job building extremely valuable real estate and got a ton of users – but they also built their ad platform on data they got from people’s phones. So when Apple (and now Google) change the privacy settings, all of a sudden it looks like he built his empire on someone else’s real estate. 

The Metaverse is his shot to change that. Will Facebook –er, Meta – succeed? Only time will tell. Until then, we remain skeptical and wouldn’t recommend anyone to invest heavily in building a presence on a platform they don’t fully control. 

In short: keep an eye on it, but don’t go all-in. Zuckerberg is investing in visions of life-changing technologies, while he can’t even sort his main (and only successful) business out. Creating the metaverse will also be arduous and expensive, and the financial payoff is uncertain – so if it fails, it will likely be the biggest failure in the history of the internet.