In the last month I have had some tasks in which I had to research tools and got to know some really interesting tools. More and more I am learning how important it is to keep track of the, let’s call it the lifecycle of a customer. It is not enough to know whether or not they bought something on your e-commerce site. There are many applications that help you with the analytics and data science portion of the equation. They usually help you with tracking the acquisition of the site’s users, whether they are new or returning, and how many active users a site has at any given moment. They can also show you, which page they have landed on, called a landing page, from which referral site for example. Something really interesting to know is where users leave your site, do they leave right after landing on it, or go through several pages before dropping off? Tools such as Crazy Egg let you watch how people navigate your site, where they get stuck with heatmaps.
Through the new acquaintances from the fellowship program I have also started to hear about more opportunities for learning about several topics. For example the last event I went to was about Influencer marketing, which is of course a key part of marketing and public relations nowadays. Nanushka has done very well with influencers these past few months, with one of their products especially, so I was very interested in the topic. Influencers picking up a brand can be accidental but nowadays there can also be a lot of planning that goes into it.
It is very important to know what your goals are when managing your social media accounts. It might sound straightforward but a lot of planning goes into what a brand posts on its different social media platforms. You have to decide for example whether your want to build brand awareness, drive traffic to your website or get more followers. It is key to be prepared, like planning your posts in advance, for a week or even a month.
There are also many platforms that can help with the planning element of your social media posts, such as Planoly, which allows you to upload the pictures you want to post on Instagram, order them, give them their descriptions and even schedule when to post them. Another platform is Falcon, which lets you add Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, etc. channels to it. You can upload what you want to post on Facebook for example, choose when you want it uploaded and in the case of Facebook or Twitter it will even publish it for you. There are many tools for Pinterest as well, such as Tailwind or Buffer; the former lets you design your pins in advance.
But lets be real, it is all well and good to create a schedule in advance but life sometimes has other plans. The person who oversees the schedule has to be up to date with what is going on in the other departments of their organizations. If production suddenly announces that a product will not be ready on time they have to review the schedule and adapt accordingly. However, if the copy is ready for the posts in advance, it is easier to just shuffle it around, even though sometimes you have to redo the whole thing anyway.
