Today I worked on my exhibition some more. I got a graphic printed, and practiced. I'm still not going to spoil it for you! Really that was today. It was good to say everything out loud, there were a few things that I needed clarification and or correction on. Good day, got a lot done, just not a lot of individual tasks.
Today was prep for my exhibition. I'd tell you about it, but I hate spoilers! Beyond that, I finished up the slideshow for the bi-annual RMCF convention. Beyond that, ugh. 896 Mb of ram.
Today was spent looking over the results of my second set of posts. They were, in some regards disappointing. In other regards, they were awesome. Mostly, the posts themselves were disappointing. I think that this was because I chose a rather overly goofy blurb to accompany them, and because I did a poor job of seeing which locations were into what monetary class, and instead did a blanket campaign and treated all of the locations the same way. However, there was a high point to the campaign: one of the pages, that of Aspen and Snowden, had a total of 14 redemptions, which totaled to approximately $200 in sales. The rest of the day was spent using the analysis to craft this week's posts.
Today my mentor was out of the office. I planned out my blurb and came up with an idea for my offer, and I made sure that I was ready to launch an ad to try and get more online offers. The rest of the day was spent hashing out how I am going to present what I learned to people at the exhibition.
Today was spent continuing to refine my ad campaign. I settled on a blurb, and set the parameters for the image to accompany the post, and decided what to offer. I then did more work on my slideshow, since it will be used at a large event, it needs to be pretty polished. I think that the big lesson of the day is, when making slideshows, there can be maximum four points on a slide.
Today, I analysed what was happening on our Google+ page. It needed a facelift, new images added, because Google changed the layout multiple times. I checked out some other Google+ pages like Theo and Godiva Chocolate companies. I did research on how Google+ hashtags work, and found that they are made by use thereof. I know that it seems like my posts are getting shorter, but really what is happening is that I am using knowledge, not learning such vast quantities of new information.
Today was awesome. I got to see the results of my work, and as it turns out, my ads had enough redemptions that they were paid off by the profits. Woohoo! The rest of the day was spent analyzing the differences between the ads target groups, age, location, gender, and what the ad was offering, to see which ads did best and why. As it turns out, we were targeting the wrong demographic. We had been targeting women age 18-34, but there was significantly more response from 18-24 year olds. I then started to plan this week's ads, based off of the data that collected earlier.
Google+ is probably the most often overlooked social networking platform. In explaining why, I will be sharing what I did today. Google is all about data. If you give Google your data, they can use it for their search engine. This is called Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. Google+ is a place where you can put your data into Google's data banks, and from that point, you will make your way to the front page of Google. This is huge. When you are on the front page of Google, it means you are a big game player. The only way you will get to the front page of Google is through SEO. So what exactly is it? On normal websites, "crawlers", algorithms that scan websites will catalog the website. The website is judged based off of the content, verbal content only, to be precise, and will rank it based off of this. If a website has more traffic, this will get noticed as well. Google+ is the shortcut around a lot of this. Take the +RMCF page for example. It has content, has followers, and has engagement with the content by the followers. The Cadbury Chocolate page is another example of a page that is used properly, though more company focus has been placed here, than has previously been placed on RMCF's page. Cadbury has a large following and is benefiting from this. But how are these pages assisting the companies? The answer to that question is two fold. First, Google is analysing the engagement with the pages to judge their relevance. You might ask how much relevancy there is from Google+, isn't it a pretty small pool of people? There are about 18 million people on Google+, which is not small, and Google is all about data. It has a pretty good idea of which non-Google+ers will be interested in the things that Google+ers are interested in, so even though Google+ has a relatively small pool of active users, Google has applied the data that it gathered from Google+ to all the people who use Google search and Gmail so that its pool of data resources is actually larger than any other social media site. Now that we have that out of the way, the reason the Google+ is important is that Google knows what the majority of America wants. So, if you search for "Chocolate" on Google, depending both on where you are and what you are interested in, you will probably see RMCF on your top results page. The second reason that Google+ is important is that it is a great social media site. On Facebook, you can target people based off of their age and gender, and a tiny bit off of their interests, but you cannot identify demographics for your audience nearly as well as Google automatically does for you. I will leave off here for now, lest I risk saying something I don't actually know.
March 5: I wrote my ad campaign for week one. I needed to know the profit margins for various products so that I could write up the script for the ads. I also read more about when and what to post. I would outline what I learned here, but based off of what I did March 6, that would be redundant.
March 6: I made a slideshow of all the information I have learned so far, and filled in some holes in my knowledge that were due to RMCF already having a Facebook page up and running. The slideshow is meant to be a basic guide to starting and running a Facebook page. I will let it speak further for itself:https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1NGqCVHkhcFzDjGrPN9DS3y1esgRe-ELgL0r2sVaPoIw/edit#slide=id.p
Today, I worked on doing more research on the franchises that will be benefiting my wonderful advertisement skills! After identifying the correct target audience for each city, I began Googling them to find out what sort of town they are. I was looking for the social class of each town. For example, Valencia, California is a wealthy planned community. I decided that I would advertise supplies for pool parties. The store that is in Albuquerque NM is in a more family oriented middle class community, so I decided to advertise caramel apples, which are one of that store's staple items.
The million dollar question is how Facebook ads and promotions affect the in store sales. Currently, RMCF is working to create a loyalty program where data like that can be collected. I have gotten data on hourly customer count after promotions, but I need a benchmark. Still working on this.
I will be creating 1 to 2 ads per week, probably one this week. I still need to figure out a promotion for each store, but it is starting to fall into place.