ASMM Digital Marketing is a 4-year-old digital agency headquartered in Millersville, Maryland. As with the cobbler, we have had a focus on our clients and have let our own children go without shoes. In March of 2020 that changed in a spectacular way.
When Governor Hogan announced he would be closing many local businesses, our staff worked together to create new marketing ideas for our clients. In the process, using an interview format, we started a daily live video series highlighting our clients. We created these posts using Streamyard and streamed live to Facebook, our main page and to our channels on both Twitter and YouTube.
In addition, we made sure to recruit people within our network to create watch parties either on their personal Facebook profile, on their page, or within their groups. Some of them created watch parties in all three. By looking at the analytics you can see which ones received the most views and deduce which ones had the most watch parties.
Soon we were receiving requests from small business owners across the world asking to appear on our show, and of course, we were thrilled and happy to host.
At the time of publication, we will have recorded 38 shows that are now called Small Business Connections with Ann Brennan. By the way, Ann Brennan is our founder and CEO.
The first thing we did was to add these videos to the new Small Business Connections playlist on our YouTube channel. We bought a pro subscription to TubeBuddy and used that to optimize both our channel and each video. We will talk more about how we used social media later in this post, but with each new video, we immediately shared to Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter within YouTube Studio.
An Aside
At ASMM Digital, we believe when using any platform you should use the tools the creators have developed. When YouTube offers you end screen or card tools, you should use them. If Google Business offers you a place to create posts or respond to reviews, you should use it. If Facebook creates a new live video tool, you should use it. We have found over and over again that these companies reward users with more viewers when the user embraces the tools they provide.
Next, we created a new blog page on our website just for videos. Afterward, we embedded each of the new episodes into a separate blog post and optimized each of those posts for search engines. We then used the share tool within the website platform to blast out each of the videos again.
Podcast
Although podcasts were not in our original plan, we decided to go where business owners are. That led us to create a podcast. Using the download tool within Streamyard to download just the audio, we used the audio to create a whole new podcast publishing to iTunes, Spotify, Libsyn, Google Podcasts, and more. We used the share tools inside Libsyn to share to Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
Then, we created another new page on our website and posted the podcasts as separate posts, making sure to optimize for search engines and share using the tools available for each post.
Lately’s AI
Because we have been a big fan of the AI offered by Lately, we used their tool to transcribe the video, break it into bite-sized bits and blast each of those small bits to Twitter 4 times a day. With this tool, we were able to create an average of 50 posts per episode in a matter of minutes.
Social Media
As a Digital Marketing agency, social media is a no brainer. Although we had already shared the episodes using Streamyard, YouTube, our website, and Libsyn, we added the posts to our social media calendars to go out on a regular basis. Depending on the platform that meant older episodes were being reshared on social 1-4 times a day per platform.
Community Management
Our team has always and will always reply to every single comment we receive. We have done this religiously on all of the platforms. This is the part where we show that we are human. On the day of the original live video, we go back and answer the questions that people asked while we were live because people may have missed those answers on the video or they may want to reread them to clarify what we said. We also answered all of the other comments left on the day of and continue to answer any notifications we receive for the videos across LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.
Email Marketing
Finally, for this project, we used email marketing to create a big announcement telling our subscribers what we had been up to and linking back to the various ways you could watch or listen to our new show. As you can imagine, this caused a whole new storm of requests to be on the show.
But wasn’t that a little over the top?
We hear this from our clients all the time. They are afraid of overwhelming people with content. For years we have assured them that it is almost impossible to overwhelm people with your content. We have explained that you want to create so much content you are hard to miss and that you need to do it consistently, not just here and there, or for a few weeks.
But wait, there’s more.
Our Educational Campus
In conjunction with Small Business Connections, we began work on a brand new digital marketing education campus for small businesses. Although the project was not released until the 7th week of the lockdown, we have been able to use the podcast to promote the website.
We started by mentioning the new project in our earliest episodes. One of the ways we did this was to ask our guests about the sorts of things they were doing to create a new stream of income for their businesses. Many people talked about creating an online platform where their customers could place an order, pay ahead for services to be rendered later, or even an entire eCommerce site. This gave us the opportunity to mention that we were creating a new stream of income with our digital campus.
Social Media Engagement
Using social media, we polled our audience to ask what people were interested in learning. This way we were able to create content that was useful to our audience while building excitement around the new project.
Hiring The Experts
ASMM Digital Marketing builds websites. But as I mentioned at the beginning of the article, we have been in a “cobbler’s children” situation. In this case, we decided to hire out. We used Chrissy Rey at Pongo’s Interactive to help us create our site. This freed us up to work on the content.
Creating the Content
Although creating the content was time-consuming, it did not take excess brainpower, because Ann, has spoken throughout the past three years on the most popular subjects and was able to use these speeches as a jumping-off point for each course.
An Ongoing Project
ASMM Digital Campus is an ongoing project, as you would imagine any campus is. We currently have three courses live on the site right now. Two of them are free classes that you get by registering for a free membership. The second course consists of 19-lessons concentrating on Digital Marketing 101. Our next course which we expect to be released in the next week is, Email Marketing 101. More advanced courses for each platform will be released over the next several weeks.
We will also be working with several specialists in the field of digital marketing to create courses that fall outside the realm of our expertise. This helps us create a more rounded curriculum and also allows for cross-promotion for our partners.
So, what were the results?
The results were surprising even to us.
On Facebook, our viewership on a single video went up to over 6000 views. Each of the videos performed a little differently but we were really pleased with the results.
YouTube is still growing and thanks to TubeBuddy we are seeing a steady increase in viewership and subscribers each week.
On Twitter, our Tweet impressions went up by 30%.
On our website, we also noticed considerably more traffic. Our unique visitors jumped by 45%, our site visits jumped by 64% and our page views increased by 100%.
LinkedIn was where we saw the biggest jump. Our post impressions quadrupled, our page views doubled and our overall engagement is continuing to increase every day.
In addition to all of that, we had two big surprises. First, we received 4 times our monthly goal for new clients after starting the show. This was a very nice surprise indeed considering it came during a pandemic. Second, we have received several offers to appear on other podcasts, as well as opportunities to speak.
Our Clients
This entire experiment started as a way to increase sales for our clients. So, how did they do? Their exposure was at its highest on the day of their interview but, because we continue to share their interviews on both their’s and our social media, our website, as a podcast and on YouTube they are receiving more impressions across a much broader digital area.
Our Impressions
We often tell small business owners they can do things on their own. We explain that there will come a time when they want to work with an agency, but if they are just beginning and they want to create some social media content, they can do this on their own. We usually give them some tools to start out with and honestly, this is where the idea of the digital campus was born.
But, the amount of content we just created, a campaign of this magnitude, would need more legwork than a small business owner can handle on their own. As a matter of fact, three weeks into this process, we hired someone into our agency to help handle the workload that went with this campaign.
Was it worth it? YES! We have said for years that content is king. The right content can absolutely take your company to a new level. We proved this with the Small Business Connections project.
Be Warned
It takes two things. It takes work – hours and hours of work. Just as importantly, it takes commitment. A project like this is not for the short-term. It is a years-long project. It becomes easier as you develop processes but it will still take a commitment to remain consistent.
As an example of why you need to commit to a campaign, we are not currently monetized on YouTube. In order to do that we need to have 1000 subscribers. We are currently at 485. We also have to have 4000 watch hours over the past 12 months. This takes time and commitment. We are willing to do it because we believe in our product and services.
Even more so though, there is not an overnight solution to creating a campaign that builds a true community around your brand.
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