In the world of marketing, there are many ways to pretend you’re doing well. You tend to interact with a barrage of statistical data on regular basis, and it can all be very confusing. Without the right understanding, a lot of managers tend to focus on the figures that are easy to understand and give them a sense of accomplishment, regardless of whether they drive business results. First of all: what are vanity metrics?

The definition differs based on the industry to which an organization belongs.

In broad terms, anything you measure that doesn’t directly relate to customer acquisition, customer retention, user experience, revenue, or conversions are vanity metrics — it only serves to make you look/feel good. These stats cannot help one make an educated decision without putting them in a larger context. Vanity metrics give very little insight into the process of achieving them or what they mean for the business.

1. Number of Social Media Followers

In my experience, these vanity metrics are given a lot more importance by lots of companies than actually matters. Besides providing proof that your community is growing, your follower count doesn’t serve much more purpose.

There are several reasons why this one metric means a lot less than most folks believe. Firstly, you have to understand that not everyone following you is your customer. Some can’t afford to, while others can’t buy from you due to a multitude of Some follow you because they’re job hunting, others to promote their own services, some simply want you to follow them back, while your competitor is following you to do some strategic stalking.

Then there’s the Almighty Algorithm. Beyond the content that goes on your Page, you get very little say on the number of eyeballs it reaches organically. This is all heavily dependent on and monitored by the platform’s algorithm.

Most social media platforms nowadays have algorithms that decide how your content gets served depending on the strength of your account compared to everyone else’s, the amount of content on the platform, your account’s engagement rate, and a multitude of other factors. The fact of the matter is that for most social media platforms (TikTok and LinkedIn being the current exceptions), less than 5% of your followers get served with your content organically.

Take Instagram for example there’s been an immense furor over Instagram’s declining organic reach, where accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers are getting half the amount of exposure that they were a few years ago. While the early Instagrammers enjoyed the advantage of immense organic reach because the platform was relatively smaller, such reach is impossible now that the platform gets millions of hourly uploads.

Such reach can only be observed on less mature platforms such as LinkedIn and TikTok currently, but such astronomical reach does not last forever. And before you complain about how unfair this whole thing is, just remember that the platforms are free to use, and are controlled by the entities that run them.

But there’s a great workaround for this: targeted ads.

With advertising, you get to define the makeup of the exact type of customer that you’re looking for, and Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, or Twitter will serve your content to them at a higher priority than most other accounts because you’re paying them to do so. Just look out for these money-wasting traps when running social media ads.

2. Total Website Traffic

How does a business profit from gaining more web traffic? Unless you are selling ads on your website (none of our clients do), total web traffic means very little to your bottom line. Just like the total number of inquiries that a business receives, Web traffic only makes a business impact when it is tied to a bigger goal. Like with the number of followers, not all website visitors translate to customers. As a matter of fact, most websites have a conversion rate depending on the industry.

Web traffic makes better sense when used as a function of your website’s Conversion Rate. By tying Total Web Traffic to Conversion Rate, you are able to understand how your marketing efforts tie to the results that you get. For example, if through testing you are able to increase the website’s conversion rate, focusing on increasing web traffic then becomes a solid plan.

3. Click-Through Rate (CTR)

Click-Through Rate (CTR) measures the percentage of clicks an ad receives compared to the number of times it was viewed. Alone, it seems like a perfectly explainable metric — especially when you see a drastic improvement or are doing better than the industry average. But it requires a little more prodding: is the traffic from the ads with increased CTR taking your intended actions and converting? or do they leave after 6 seconds? That’s worth investigating.

A simple way to do this is using UTM tracking on all links in ad campaigns to give more information on the traffic. Then you can compare the CTR of your ads with the data in Google Analytics, factoring in other metrics like Average Session Duration and Conversion Rate.

4. Number of Likes on a Post

A lot of folks ask, “My post did so well, why isn’t it making me as much money as it should?”

The number of likes on a social media post only means that x number of people derived value from that post. Period.

The same dynamics we discussed on the Number of Followers also apply here.

The most important thing to remember with social media content is that you need to be constantly creating. Put in place a system where you’re always churning out content no matter the circumstances and watch the learning unfold.

A lot of creators get demoralized when a post they spent so long work on gets little engagement, so they stop creating. On the other extreme, a lot of creators freeze after creating a post that does extremely well.

However, there’s something to be gleaned here.

A post that performs well organically tells you that it has potential for more. You can create more posts that play on the same angle or replicate that formula to produce content that gets massive engagement.

Here’s how we use this principle in practice: our current content model is quite simple: we post for our clients daily and learn from the performance of the posts. By testing 30–40 pieces of content per month, we’re able to unearth 3 pieces that we can later repurpose as ads.

5. Newsletter subscribers

Let’s be frank. Being an internet user, you’ve probably signed up (more than once) for various newsletters from organizations that you thought interesting. But do you usually read all their emails?

As your follower count, your newsletter subscribers are the folks who are interested in your brand — or whom you cajoled into sharing their email address in return for something they perceived valuable. But most people don’t read all their emails. Email open rates have been dropping since the ’90s , meaning that only a small portion of your email subscribers actually open your email, and an even smaller portion of your audience takes the action that you wish them to from the email.

Instead, focus on the metrics that measure your intended actions. Your email newsletter open rate is one such metric — think of ways how to improve it, such as using catchier email titles.

Your open rate can also boost your email Click Through Rate (CTR), that is, the number of clicks you get from your emails to the offers that you present in the email body. CTR can be improved by using more appealing language in your emails, creating customized offers for your email newsletter audience, and more — we’ll devote an entire article to this topic soon.

In conclusion

Numbers don’t lie, but some matter less than others.

When factoring a metric in your decision-making for, consider whether it only makes you feel/look good, and to what extent it ties to your business goals.

Originally published at https://kooni.co.ke on July 6, 2021.

Getting your business to stand out on the internet can seem like a daunting task. Especially when you see all the other established brands online that have been doing it for years and have formulas that they’ve essentially perfected to dominate their web presence.

Then there’s you: a green newbie with lofty ambitions but not entirely sure how to actualize them. It can be a little scary, but Kooni is here to hold your hand in this journey and help you put your best foot forward.

Let’s begin:

1. Create a professional website

A website is your office on the internet. At a basic level, it needs to inform visitors about your business and illustrate what you can do for them. It should also be responsive — so it formats content in a mobile-friendly way. The homepage should inform what you do, and how to get in touch with you. The homepage should have at least the following items:

• A way to contact you: phone number, email address, and a customer service chatbox
• Your location: preferably an embedded map as it contributes to your local SEO
• Links to your social media pages

Your website can also be a powerful sales and marketing tool if you incorporate it into your sales funnel. Certain elements of the website make it stand out/serve you better: copy, media, the offers you present, and how you come across.

Above all, your website needs to be good looking and easy to use and navigate. Remember, since your users aren’t meeting you in person, they will make judgments about you and your business based on the manner you present yourself on the website.

2. SEO — Search Engine Optimization

Like the age-old question poses: If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, did it fall?

If you create a beautiful website and no one visits it, what purpose is it serving you?

The next step after creating a professional website is to get people to see it. And the cheapest way to do that is by helping search engines find it — a process known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This primarily involves having your website peppered with the terms (called keywords) that people search for when looking for information provided by your website.

As a starter, you should ensure that all the relevant keywords that pertain to your business are present on your website. This can be done by having a focus keyword for every page on your site. Furthermore, you should embed your Google Maps listing on your website, since it contributes to helping people find you when doing location-based searches like “Lawyers in Kiambu” or “Pharmacy near me”.

The benefits of SEO speak for themselves: by implementing a solid SEO strategy, you position your website to rank higher in web searches, which increases the visibility of your brand and positions you as an authority in your field. This all translates to increased traffic, which can lead to massive cost savings from advertising.

3. Paid Ads

SEO is a great way to acquire web traffic over the long term, but it takes significant time and effort (especially if you’re in a competitive industry) to yield results. But what if you want results now? The good news is, you can reach your prospects for a reasonable fee on the internet using advertising platforms. At a basic level, they allow one to target their dream client based on specific criteria such as age, location, gender, interests, and other information that is known by the web platforms about them.

The most powerful online advertising platforms are Google Ads (formerly Google Adwords) and Facebook Ads which serves ads on Instagram, too. They are incredibly powerful in that you can describe the people you wish to be served with your ads down to where they live, their likes/dislikes, their affinity for your product, their purchasing power, and even their level of interaction with your business.

Of course, due to the makeup of individual web platforms, certain platforms work better for reaching certain people than others. LinkedIn, for example, is a great platform to run ads for B2B businesses, while TikTok is a great avenue to reach Gen Z and millennials. Other notable ad platforms with massive upsides are Snapchat, Amazon, Reddit, and YouTube.

With online advertising, you can reach thousands of hyper-targeted people daily for a fraction of what you’d pay for TV, radio, and print advertisements. You are in complete control of your budget, and most don’t have a lower ceiling, allowing you to start running ads from as little as $1 per day.

4. Utilize Social Media

Half the world is on social media today. Some of these people are your potential customers, so you need to get in front of them and meet them where they are. Social media is a great (and mostly free) tool to grow your brand and expand your community. By consistently communicating with your fans, you remain top of mind and forge a connection that extends beyond the transfer of goods/services for money. We have written extensively on the impact of good social media strategy on your business in the past, and we suggest you take a look at what we had to say on this matter.

Your primary objective on social media is to connect with your fans on a human level, NOT to sell to them. This means that whatever content you post provides some form of value to them, be it informational or entertainment.

You also need to engage with your fans: follow your most loyal fans back, interact with their posts, interact with those who comment on your posts (hint: avoid corporate speak and instead talk to them like you would a friend), and invite them to celebrate your wins. On occasion, you may even introduce special treats that are to be enjoyed solely by your followers. This creates a lasting effect and makes them much more loyal to your brand.

5. Content Marketing

The undoubtedly best way to boost your SEO is by posting great content — posting blog articles on your website that address issues within your domain of expertise that people are actually looking for. The content can be guided by current affairs, your FAQ, and other factors that we described in this article. On top of that, you can develop relationships with bloggers with high-authority websites who can write about your business and link to your website. This helps with improving one’s SEO rankings, as the number and quality of referring domains are considered when determining a website’s domain score.

Content marketing extends beyond blogs, though. Content is also captured through video, podcasts, pictures, infographics, and animations. Like the case of blogs, you can partner with different content creators to present your brand to their audience and tap into the benefits of that affiliation.

Every person has the medium with which they communicate best, so it is imperative to figure out what works for you. Even better yet, be present and accessible through all forms of content. However, we understand that this is not feasible for everyone. You can hire a social media marketing agency to help you develop the relevant content for your brand. This way, they ensure that you have your best foot forward on the internet, and it leaves you to focus on your core business.

6. Join and Contribute to Forums

The beauty of the internet is that it allows people with similar interests from all over the world to “meet” and discuss these interests. A lot of these forums exist within the major search engine platforms, but some have established dedicated websites and wikis for their purposes, ranging from DIY projects to gardening and fandoms for fans of anime, Harry Potter, and even slime.

What these forums do is create the opportunity to establish yourself as an authority within your domain. Take Quora, for instance: after setting up your profile and detailing your topics of interest, one can browse questions that have been posted on these topics and respond to them. Reddit also has some incredible subreddits for all manner of interests and possesses tools to label the authority contributors on a particular subreddit.

By giving advice for free on these platforms, you demonstrate your knowledgeability in the topic and if you consistently provide reliable advice, this creates the impression of trust, and can easily convert to paying opportunities since you have already demonstrated your competence.

7. Promote yourself in an industry directory

A lot of industries have trade associations and various directories exclusively for that industry like the International Association of Movers and clutch.io. Oftentimes, knowledgeable prospective clients will scour these directories first when looking for a provider of your goods/services. It is therefore paramount that you are present in these directories, for multiple reasons:

Firstly, they are authorities in their fields and have a vested interest in providing high-quality information. Trade associations for instance tend to rigorously vet their members on certain aspects like quality and standard operating procedures.

Your listing on these directories details all your contact information, making it easier to reach you.

Since they tend to have rather high domain scores, your listing on such a website will typically include a link to your website, which contributes to your SEO ranking.

Serious clients want to work with professionals, and your presence on such a directory indicates that you’re a serious company.

Trade associations usually organize training and networking opportunities for their members, which enable them to meet other players within the industry, develop ties, exchange ideas, and get business.

Lobbying — a trade association can be able to collectively push for reforms in certain matters that affect their members.

You should consider joining at least one trade association in your industry if you haven’t — the benefits are immense. If no such trade association exists in your country, consider joining a global one, or your local Chamber of Commerce.

8. Email marketing

Everyone on the internet has at least one email address. This is a direct way to reach them without jumping through hoops or doing much guesswork

While your social media pages may get hacked or banned, your email list is an asset that you possess in perpetuity and is within your control. Remember, you must play by the rules of any platform that you use, but you have a lot more control with email.

Here are a few fun facts about email marketing courtesy of oberlo.com:

1. 9 billion people used email in 2019. This is expected to increase to 4.3 billion in 2023 — half the world’s population
2. For every $1 spent on email marketing, you can expect an average return of $42.
3. 49% of consumers would like to receive promotional emails from their favourite brands on a weekly basis.
4. 81% of Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs) rely on email as their primary customer acquisition channel, and 80% for retention.
5. Nearly 9 out of every 10 marketers use email marketing to distribute content organically
6. Welcome emails have astronomical open rates: 82% on average compared to 21% for all other emails.
7. Emails with personalized subject lines generate 50% higher open rates.
8. Sending 3 abandoned cart emails results in 69% more orders than a single email.
9. Adding interactive content (eg videos) can increase click rates by 300%.

9. Analyze and Optimize for Improvement

Digital marketing work is seldom ever completely done. A lot of it involves testing ideas to find which ones reap the highest return on investment. There will always be something new, an overlooked idea, room for improvement, or some other factor that can be improved.

From advertising to content creation, you need to set time to review the performance of your activities and identify the ones that help you reach your goals, and which ones should be discontinued. Even when you finally design a killer campaign that reaps you gains for months, it only works for so long before your audience gets tired of seeing the same thing repeatedly, or your competition can reverse engineer your winning strategy.

It is therefore imperative that you are always creating, testing, analyzing, and optimizing to avail the best opportunities possible. Your best marketing campaign is only a few iterations away.

This list is in no way conclusive. Increasing your web presence/SEO rankings is an ongoing process with no clear end date. You will have to keep your eyes open for new opportunities and exercise your creativity. Furthermore, you have to keep abreast of new developments in web technology and active use of your website so as to take advantage of new opportunities, avoid undesirable outcomes, and present your business in the best light.

Should you need help crafting a social media marketing strategy, developing a website, crafting your next advertising campaign, or creating content for your website, social media, Kooni Collective is available to enable you to reach your goals by implementing disruptive and out-of-the-box ideas.

Originally published at https://kooni.co.ke on November 26, 2020.

9 Powerful Strategies to Increase Your Web Presence — Kooni Collective | Social Media Marketing… was originally published in Social Bee on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Evaluating the cost of social media marketing services is a lot trickier than most folks think for plenty of reasons: there aren’t many established benchmarks, a lot of companies aren’t very public with their pricing like SAAS, and there is so much variance in this industry to come up with a single conclusive answer. However, there is one thing we can all agree on:

There is no such thing as free marketing.

After a few years representing various clients operating in different fields, talking to other social media marketing consultants, and fair bit of head scratching, we have devised what we consider the fairest pricing model possible for Social Media Marketing — it works for Kooni, and we’re proud to share it with the world. This model takes several factors into account: the amount and quality of work done, the nature of Social Media Marketing work, Return on Investment, and several other factors. We don’t think it’s conclusive, and therefore I invite all suggestions on how to improve it, but it is a nice basis to evaluate the cost-value balance for social media marketing services you are keen on procuring.

Overarching Factors Influencing Cost of Social Media Marketing

Aside from the usual costs of running a business — office expenses, salaries & benefits, insurance, etc. — social media marketing agencies incur certain costs in order to produce effective results as detailed below:

1. Services: Put simply, different services yield different results, which attract different prices. It all depends on the scope, complexity and scale of your project
2. Software: Effective SMM is heavily reliant on software. Agencies need to purchase different SaaS products and software licenses depending on the purpose and scale of the project. The purpose of these tools ranges broadly, from analytics to email marketing, social management and content production. Some of the most popular software used for social media marketing agencies are Mailchimp, Hootsuite, AdEspresso, Premier Pro and Photoshop.
3. Nature of Work: Content is the biggest differentiator on social media. The more you produce, the higher your chances of success. It is also very easy to sink 300+ manhours in a project only to have it invalidated by an unforeseen crisis like how major firms had to campaigns after Kobe’s accident.
4. Paid Content: Like the age-old question asks — if a tree falls and no one hears it, did it happen? Online advertising helps serve the content that we painstakingly spend hours to develop reach thousands of more eyeballs than it would reach organically.

In order to understand Social Media Marketing pricing, you need to understand the core principles that any marketing unit needs to dominate for the best chances of success:

A strong social media marketing strategy takes into account what you want to achieve, and details the timeframe, and resources available/required to get there. This informs your brand’s tone, including factors like what you say, how you say it, and how it is perceived. Strategy should be reviewed at least quarterly, and can be defined by a simple question: what are you looking to achieve in the next X period?

Understand that no post is random, and that every step taken online should be a deliberate and calculated effort to meet businesses’ strategic objectives. The reason why a time limit is necessary for strategy is that social media by its nature is very transient. Every now and then management will have to convene and brainstorm/decide on the marketing direction for the next period or in response to market conditions.

With visual design carrying such a large emphasis on social media, it is crucial that you put your best foot forward on the visuals front. Content creation takes up the most time for any serious social media marketing agency and for good reason:

The biggest factor that sets all social media users apart is content. The math here is quite simple: the more content you post, the higher your chances of success. This is especially true with social media advertising. Since the cost of advertising is significantly lower compared to traditional media, advertisers on social media can create dozens (even hundreds) of pieces of content for one ad campaign and test them out to find the most effective in helping them reach their goal.

Costing for creative is a particularly contentious issue, since there are multiple considerations required for high-quality results:

• The cost of capturing content: From hiring a photo/videographer to grace the event/having them on retainer and catering for their per diem, room and board, plus other incidentals like fuel. The standard is to have a set hourly rate or daily fee. Some social media marketing agencies factor this in their retainer.
• Stock photography/stock videos because you won’t always have the content you need at hand, or is not financially feasible to capture.
• Production & editing is expensive because it is time-consuming (videos will often take longer in production than during filming) and subjective to the client’s taste.
• Software is also necessary for a multitude of creative work, from the likes of Photoshop and Canva Pro to Premiere Pro, After Effects and the myriad others you have to employ to produce quality content.

Over and above, you need to consider how the content you’re collecting ties to your overall objective. You also need to give thought to how you’ll repurpose the content for other uses further down the road. Repurposing comes in many forms, from Then & Now compilations to b-roll and mashups.

The words you use to speak to your audience make a huge difference in the success of your campaign. Consider all the memorable adverts you recall from way back when. There’s no doubt that the brands behind them used skilled copywriters who are so crafty you often recited the words when they played on TV (maybe you still remember them). Such skill does not come cheap, but the results speak for themselves.

In the digital world, copywriting is really important since words make up a huge chunk of the online experience. You need to ensure that every sentence you put out embodies the brand’s values. Copywriting is also widely extensive: wit, pun, and thoughtful pieces drive mass appeal with the right audience, which gets your posts shared, and the words in your paid and email campaigns need to get your audience taking your desired action.

Blogging is a powerful tool for generating free web traffic and positioning your brand as an authority, but research usually takes a disproportionate amount of time in the creation process. A 1200-page article can take 4–7 hours in research and formatting before it is ready for publishing. Interestingly, most readers only spend an average of 4 minutes on a well-written 1000-word article. However, a timeless piece is an eternal asset that will serve you for long after it is published.

After years of experience, we at Kooni firmly believe that your social media efforts are for naught if you don’t spend any money on ads. A social media strategy without an ad budget is like a car without wheels — it’s not going anywhere.

In the social media world of today, there’s multiple ways to spend money to drive traffic and increase brand awareness. Advertising is the most popular and easiest to achieve results. At a basic level, every marketer should understand the most common online media buying strategies and be familiar with the major online advertising platforms — Google Ads and Facebook Ads at the least. They should understand which campaigns should be run on which platform(s), and attach contextual creative that brings value to the platform. Each platform is comprised of different demographics and presents a different experience, so it’s important to know which ad you should run on YouTube, and which ones to run on LinkedIn, and which ones to run on TikTok.

There are other ways you can make your money work for you online. For instance, partnering with influencers on Instagram and YouTube is so commonplace that both platforms actually have features for labelling paid partnerships natively. Viral challenges are another way to get your brand seen by millions of eyeballs. A lot of popular challenges in recent years develop organically, but some of them usually involve an initial push to get the challenge going.

Community management

With all social media activity, consistency is everything. One post won’t make you an internet sensation, but if you keep innovating, creating, posting, and engaging with your fans, the results compound over time. Then when you post that one piece of content that’s shared by half the world, they’ll have a lot more of your past posts to enjoy.

As pertains pricing, there are two major factors determining a client’s retainer: size and scope. Pages with significant following (over 50,000 fans) need much keener attention than those with less. It may require dedicating one or more full-time staff to post and engage with fans 24 hours a day.

The number of social accounts under management also affects the cost since each page has to be handled independent of the others, with its own unique content. Our pricing plans also reflect the number of accounts that the client needs managed. Each account needs its own unique content, which requires a great deal of time as accounts increase.

The most expensive part of community management is content curation. If you’re to use video (which we recommend since video greatly outperforms still images), it comes with significant productions costs: capturing the video might be relatively cheap, but editing takes up a significant amount of time. For instance, a 10-minute clip with high production value may take between 12 to 60 manhours to put together. Sometimes, filming takes hours or even days just to capture the scenes necessary to tell the story in 10 minutes.

And do not forget that despite all the time and hard work it takes to create winning content, it can all be dealt null and void by a crisis or natural disaster.

RETURN ON INVESTMENT (ROI)

Unlike other costs that businesses regularly incur, marketing is actually a direct investment for growing your business.

Think about it… what is the ROI on your office rent?

Does your lease agreement require your landlord to provide you with a steady stream of prospects?

How many more people could your business reach by spending an equivalent of your rent on marketing? How many extra leads would you generate?

How many more customers would that translate into?

How much would that translate in short term revenue and customer lifetime value?

This is the true benefit of a good marketing strategy. Remember, marketing is fuel for your business. While most folks raise their eyebrows at the cost, few take the time to consider the effect that exceptional marketing can have on their business:

…and what all this does for your bottom line.

PRICING STRUCTURE

Popular Pricing Models

The majority of agencies model their budgets in 3 ways:

1. Success-based: the more they achieve, the more they earn. This is preferable for smaller companies but exposes the agency to high risk
2. Media spend percentage: the agency works with an advertising budget, and they get a percentage of total ad spend. Basically, the more they spend, the more they earn. This may lead to the agency spending more than necessary in order to earn more.
3. Flat budget: The client and agency agree on a monthly retainer. This is the preferred model at Kooni Collective.

Larger agencies vs smaller agencies

Digital marketing agencies charge differently, mostly based on their size/scale and the scope of the work they will perform. For larger agencies, they may charge based on the number of people/resources required to work on the account either as dedicated personnel, or give a set amount of time. Smaller agencies will generally ask for a retainer in exchange for dedicated execution of a wide range of services. At Kooni, we use a blend of both and then some, depending on the nature of the account, because we understand that every client is different.

How much does it cost for Kooni Collective to run your social media marketing activities?

We have gone to great strengths to design pricing structures that are fair to both the agency and the client: the client is only charged for work done, and the agency gets reimbursed for their productivity. As a principle, we ensure to give at least 3x the value that we receive from our clients.

The first thing we have to do is understand the client’s needs. This includes:

• What services exactly do you need? The fees quoted are different depending on the service. For example, Web Development, Email Marketing and Community Management are quoted at different rates.
• What objectives are you looking to achieve? Is it to obtain sales through an ad campaign, increased brand awareness, drive traffic to your website, or get more installs for your app?
• Timeline: do you want to engage us for a one-off campaign or are you looking for a longer commitment?

These questions help us to design a package that is specifically designed with your needs in mind, the breakdowns for which are included in the quote that you receive.

For management engagements, we offer a slew of services at a set retainer. This varies depending on the number of Marketing Streams (social media accounts, email, etc.) and their size as well. Some special pricing mechanisms can be applied in certain conditions such as where an account has over 50,000 followers (we’ll need to dedicate a full-time account manager to oversee all your socials and engage with fans) or if we’ll be taking up managing your YouTube (standalone fee of $2,500) — video is an expensive and intensely time-consuming activity.

For advertising, we’ll take an agreed-upon amount for a set number of hours, and any additional work carried out will be charged at an hourly rate.

We offer one-day strategy sessions and in-house corporate training. Pricing is available upon request.

Retainers and commissions

As a fundamental rule and in accordance with our Media Policy, we ensure to spend 20% of every Community Management client’s retainer on advertising activities. We provide the client with snapshot reports for all advertising activities undertaken each month. If the client wishes to extend the reach of their ad (which we encourage), they can supplement this budget at an additional fractional cost.

While we charge most of our clients a monthly retainer for social media marketing services rendered, some opt for a combination of a reduced retainer in conjunction with a commission structure. Smaller businesses typically find this favourable as they pay less upfront, and they pay us in proportion of how much money they make.

Commission varies largely depending on the nature of the client’s industry, and the extent of our participation in driving business results.

There’s no upper limit to what SMM can cost. And with Social Media Marketing playing a PR role in today’s world, having the right social media marketing on your side is critical to your success. As crazy as some of the fees may sound, it is still a drop in the ocean compared to what corporations spend on their PR and general marketing activities.

Why hire a Social Media Management Agency?

The most immediate win with hiring the right agency is that it allows the client to focus on their core business while the agency worries about getting them seen.

A SMM agency like Kooni Collective avails all the necessary marketing skills to you without you having to go through the stress of recruiting/overhauling an entire marketing department. They can also plug in very nicely with your existing marketing department to augment areas that need attention.

A social media marketing agency understands what is necessary to produce effective business results, and have the necessary manpower required to achieve them. This is some extensive work that requires the involvement of multiple disciplines. Creative work can also be very taxing, not to mention that it’s very rare to find someone gifted in say, both Creative (handled by the right side of the brain) and Copy (left hemisphere).

A reputable agency should be able to provide a steady stream of reports that enable you to have your finger on the pulse of your business at all time. Furthermore, with time, we are able to provide insights into your customers and audiences based on findings on the data we collect. This helps greatly in understanding your clients further.

Bookmark this page and revisit it next when you’re hiring a social media marketing agency.

In a nutshell, you want an agency that factors the clients needs in the pricing. Such an agency provides customized pricing and can come up with flexible pricing models that take into account the client’s size, timelines and objectives.

Most importantly, find a Social Media Marketing Agency that CARES.

Originally published at https://kooni.co.ke on October 31, 2020.

The True Cost of Social Media Marketing in 2021 was originally published in Social Bee on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As I was doing some research into the digital services tax introduced in Kenya, I stumbled upon a realization: a distressing lack of up-to-date content on the issue. See, I naturally started my search on YouTube, then Google, but the information was scanty and most of it outdated or irrelevant to Kenya. I did eventually find something that gave me an idea, but I still don’t have the full picture — the information is simply not online. Maybe it was in the newspapers, but I haven’t bought one my entire life. Which leads me to my point:

Kenyan professional services firms are conspicuously absent online. I’m referring to Lawyers, Management Consultants, Accountants, Architects, Doctors, and the like. This is a truism that generally holds across the globe, but firms in developed countries seem to have awoken in the last few years. Yes, you may have a website and social presence, but for most firms those are just channels to inform the world what they do and how to get in touch.

And therein lies the opportunity.

With more and more people looking for information online, and with such few players providing it in a timely and relevant manner, the cake is anyone’s for the taking. Most of the information available is from news sources (if applicable), but very little from authoritative practitioners.

With regular content covering specific and relevant issues, you can in a relatively short time dominate search rankings for your industry and literally get millions of eyeballs landing on your website every month.

How do you do it?

CONTENT

And before you get on my case about how content is hard to create, take the time to do these 4 activities that should enable you generate at least 50 topic ideas:

1. FAQs

What are the most common questions that clients ask? Get at least 20 questions, and develop content that addresses them exhaustively. Some questions only need short answers, but others will require multiple articles in order to fully address the topic. This serves a double purpose in that it shortens your customer acquisition process since they’ll be searching for that exact information online, and since you offered such an informed answer, you’ll be the first person they’re inclined to hire because your expertise is evident.

2. Current Affairs

Keep an eye out on developments in your industry. Google Alerts is a nice way to keep abreast of topics that interest you. With each development, create content that seeks to inform the players that will be impacted in a simple and understandable manner. Most people don’t understand legalese, and others struggle with accounting — make it easy for them to understand and they’ll thank you immensely. The content can be in the form of blogs, podcasts, or even reaction videos to matters that you consider to be of great importance or that you feel passionate about.

3. Use Google Trends

Google Trends is a website by Google that analyzes the popularity of top search queries in Google Search across various regions and languages. The website uses graphs to compare the search volume of different queries over time.

Here’s a Google Trends analysis of the topic that inspired this article:

Clearly, now is the perfect time to publish information about the Kenya Finance Act 2020 since a lot of people are searching for it.

Apart from a bird’s eye view of users’ interest in a topic, Google Trends also provides other useful features such as related topics and related queries. If you treat these as suggestions for further content, you find that the process of generating topic ideas goes waaay faster.

4. Publicly publish top research findings

Yes, it sounds crazy to simply give away valuable information that you probably acquired at great cost and effort. However, that information locked away in a room somewhere serves a lot less people (and hence attracts less interest in your services) than it potentially could. This part requires a lot of discernment as to what you can afford to give, but I reiterate here as I always do about the power of giving free content.

If executed properly, this one tip alone can change your entire marketing focus and grow your business faster than you thought possible. I have noticed that the Big 4 Accounting Firms (particularly EY) tend to do this a lot. You don’t necessarily need a press conference to tell the world about your discoveries. Disseminating this information to the right people is how you unlock its value, and it serves as a really sweet lead magnet.

Content Format

From there, the question is, what medium to use to disseminate your information. Blogs are a nice way to start, but I like a multi-pronged approach. This depends on the resources available to every organisation, but ideally what you want to do is capture the content in multiple formats:

Follow up your blog with a podcast (film it too) where you discuss topical issues, like Valuetainment. Invite guests who are experts/authorities in their fields to talk on the podcast too. Post these videos on YouTube, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Then condense the contents into an infographic that you can share on LinkedIn and other socials.

Give your most exclusive content to a select group of fans. Ideally, the best channel here is your email newsletter or paid subscribers, and this grows your list of leads for potential business. The best lead magnet is a PDF containing some very valuable information that you give them for free in exchange for them joining your email list.

Remember:

In the world of marketing, Content is still King 👑. The more useful and relevant, the better it is as a marketing tool. There is virtually no competition on the Kenyan front for any firm/consultant that wishes to grow the authority of their domain online, but this opportunity won’t last forever.

And if you need help designing your content marketing strategy, we are here to help 😊

Happy creating.

Originally published at https://kooni.co.ke on July 9, 2020.

5 Actionable Content Marketing Insights for Professional Firms & Consultants to Grow Traffic and… was originally published in Social Bee on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Every time there’s an economic recession, companies tend to reprioritize their spending, and media/advertising usually takes a hit — the social media marketing industry hasn’t been left out during these times of COVID-19. Luckily, and the biggest online advertising platforms have responded appropriately, creating resource centers and lowering CPMs. However, another factor comes into play: brands are hesitant to advertise since they do not know what exactly they should be saying during these times of crisis. The million-dollar question, however, is what social media marketers can do to remain relevant during these confusing times and weather — maybe even thrive through — the coming storm?

1. Lower your fees

This one is quite obvious. With the economy showing the first signs of recession, it is past time to revise your social media marketing consultation/agency charges.

2. Charge on commission basis

Most social media marketing agencies charge on retainer basis with separate fees for consulting. Your agency should consider creating a second pricing plan based partly on commission and present that to your prospects as an alternative to exclusive retainers. The second plan allows you to charge for a smaller retainer but can still be supplemented by commissions from successful client campaigns. In a cash crunch, clients will appreciate an agency that charges them less upfront, and commissions incentivize them to find creative ways to drive up revenues.

3. Offer more value for the same price

If you’re not keen on lowering your fees, you will have to justify your prices through other means. You can do so by offering free consultancy to your clients on other services that they’re not paying you for, or extending the current scope of your work by a set margin. Every agency is different, so you’ll have to decide what you can offer more that won’t cost you so much.

Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook ~ Gary Vaynerchuk

I’ve always been a big believer of “under-promise and over-deliver”. While the freemium model has been around for quite some time, our current time requires us to give more. Some prolific internet marketers are already doing it, with Neil Patel making more features of Ubersuggest available for free, and the likes of Tai Lopez bundling multiple offering at a discounted with invaluable free bonuses to boot.

4. Give services/resources for free

We may not own proprietary software like Neil Patel, but every marketer worth their salt brings something unique to the table. There are numerous ways you can share your knowledge with the world, and you need to start doing so.

One such way to do so is to publish a white paper on an area that you’re an expert on — share it on LinkedIn and start a dialogue around it. On the backbone of that, you can start an exclusive monthly newsletter where you share your insights in a 6-page PDF that goes deep into the topic you’re detailing.

Another way is to share your knowledge in video format. Start with three 5-minute videos a week of you simply talking to the camera where you drop one gem on every clip. Share these on YouTube and LinkedIn, and keep at it. When done consistently, this kind of marketing works as a very powerful form of branding that brings massive returns over time. You won’t see the results now, maybe not even in a year, but once you hit critical mass the sky is the limit.

5. Look for bigger clients

Like I pointed out in the beginning, companies tend to spend less on marketing during a recession. That doesn’t mean that marketing stops entirely. The unique advantage with the social media marketing industry is that we currently have a few things working for us:

Yes, a lot of small companies are ceasing advertising activities, but so are the larger corporations. The difference is where they spend their money. SMEs generally favour guerrilla and digital marketing because of cost implications, while corporations have larger budgets which they have been spending on traditional media for decades. The challenge for any decent Social Media Marketing Agency is to convince some of these larger companies — those whose marketing budgets have shrunk from 100 million to 10 million — that social media is a viable channel for them to not just connect with customers, but grow their business as well.

Above all, never forget that that marketing is always a priority for any serious organization. As a Social Media Marketer, if you can deliver your clients results — increase revenue & brand awareness — there is no reason why they shouldn’t hire your services.

Originally published at https://kooni.co.ke on May 26, 2020.

Surviving a Recession as a Social Media Marketing Agency/Consultant was originally published in Social Bee on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

If you’ve been on LinkedIn long enough, you’ve received plenty of solicitous messages from new and potential connections. They usually look something like this: “Hello, we at XY Company offer the following services…”, “Hello, I recently graduated and am seeking a job at your company…”, and more recently, “Hello, promote me by subscribing to my channel…”.

If you’re like me, you give them a cursory glance: 2–5 seconds, then move on with your business… Until you open Instagram and see your friend’s business’ page spamming your timeline with posts “advertising” their products — you want to be a supportive friend, but it’s the third time in a week and it’s getting on your nerves now.

Why do these things grind our gears so much? These two examples highlight a phenomenon that takes shape in a myriad forms. Put simply, the problem with these people/businesses is that they try to take before they give. And our brains don’t like that — no one likes to be finessed. See, humans are inherently selfish — it’s a necessary element of self-preservation. When we encounter new opportunities, we think “Hmmm, what’s in it for me?” We analyse the benefit to us — even the most altruistic of humans still consider the benefit to them and/or those whom they are serving.

Knowing this, it honestly puzzles me why anyone would start a DM by talking about themselves. Do those DMs actually work? I’ve never sent one like that, so I don’t have the data. But I have done a series of sales-y posts for an eCommerce store, and I can freely tell you that they actually hurt your business.

If you give it away, they will come

No ones goes on social media to be sold to. We want to be entertained or informed, and being sold to is only a part of the experience, not the main draw. So if all you do is “sell” on your social media, that’s something you should correct with immediate effect.

What can you do instead?

It’s really simple: GIVE AWAY YOUR BEST CONTENT

Seriously. Stop asking so much from your connections or followers, and instead focus on improving their experience on the platform. LinkedIn is easy: inform more. If you are to DM someone, stop asking for them to open their wallets, but instead seek to educate them on how you can help them achieve their goals. It has to be organic as well. I am more likely to read something like this:

“Hello Felix, I read your article on the future of Kenyan agriculture and I had some thoughts, starting with how small-scale farmers can position themselves to take advantage of this opportunity…”

Give at least 3 times as much as you ask

The benefits of this approach are immense. Here’s a few examples who have used this strategy to great effect:

Oberlo: One of the most widely used Shopify plugins. Their Facebook page offers tons of insight into the world of eCommerce, and they’re constantly educating their followers about trends and changes in that sector via their YouTube.

Tai Lopez and Gary Vaynurchuk: These two gentlemen have been able to create multi-million dollar marketing machines by giving away information for free. Information that some consultants would charge you an arm and leg for. I literally get excited whenever I receive an email from Tai’s newsletter. Think about that — how many of your email subscriptions do you look forward to hearing from? How many do you actually open? If you’ve never heard of either Tai or Gary, I dare you to look them up on YouTube and watch their videos for 20 minutes — you will learn at least 1 powerful thing.

Giving away your best content is a powerful strategy that’s used by countless businesses to reach their goals. From increasing loyalty to creating awareness and growing email lists, there’s so many opportunities for growth. It serves two purposes simultaneously: you build up a fan base, and you get to show that you’re actually an expert at what you do. See, your audience will try out the ideas you give. If they do work, you create a community of loyal fans who are always looking forward to your next post. And when you do ask something of them, they will respond with overwhelming positiveness.

It’s a known fact that most leads aren’t always ready to purchase, but who do you think your fans will approach when they need the services that you offer? Whom do you think they will refer to their friends? Think about the organic shares as well… the kind of authority you build. In the process, you also preemptively address a lot of the objections that your customers may have.

This is simply is the best marketing strategy in today’s world. It’s transactional: you give, give, give and give some more, then you ask. Most people do the opposite though — taking before they give — which is why they are also quite frustrated with their results.

If you are strategic and employ a long-term approach in your delivery, you can unlock a world of unexplored opportunity for your business.

How is your business educating the world? Are you giving away your best content? What free information are you giving away without expecting anything back? You’d be surprised how much profit you can realize by giving away valuable information for free.

Originally published at https://kooni.co.ke on January 24, 2020.

How To NOT Do Social Media Marketing was originally published in Social Bee on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Social media marketing can be a daunting task.

Especially when you’re starting off.

At face value it looks easy, but it’s not until you’re in the thick of it when you realize all the teeny tiny details that make a difference require an investment in the form of time and energy. It can overwhelm you, leave you feeling out of your depth because these tasks require different skill sets and disciplines.

Here’s a few tools that will ensure that you don’t get bogged down by the minutiae when growing your social media presence:

1. Buffer and Hootsuite

Over the last month, we have assessed the social media profiles of various small and medium sized companies. The most recurring problem the respondents have reported is that they find it hard to carve out the time daily to post on social media.

They feel that on top of doing their regular duties, growing their companies, meeting their targets, being parents, keeping their homes in order… they just don’t have enough time left in their day to craft good content for their social media. At least not regularly. Once in a while they’ll post up something well thought out, but on the most part it’s a quick update posted on irregular intervals.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

Facebook has a feature that allows the admins of a page to schedule their posts. Buffer and Hootsuite enable someone to bring all their social media accounts on one dashboard and schedule their posts for later times. Just using one of the two apps reduces your workload by half.

The solution is quite simple. Instead of adding to your daily duties, I suggest you allot some time weekly — an hour or two — to plan out your posts for the week and queue them. Regular posting will increase your brand visibility, and the social media algorithms love users who feed them.

2. Canva

Canva is a graphic design software that is an alternative to using stock photos. It’s a free tool that allows you to create designs and presentations with a strong visual impact. This tool contains dozens of social media marketing templates for making all sorts of designs that you may need: from posters, Twitter headers, website headers, Ad creative, blog images, YouTube thumbnails, all the way to business cards and fliers.

The best part of it is that despite deploying some pretty sophisticated functions, it still remains an obviously easy app to use. The interface is simple, and everything works the way you expect it to. You can edit a photo, edit the layout, add clip art, play around with text… it’s quite easy to use, and a lot cheaper than Photoshop. If you want to create conspicuous images that communicate, Canva will get the job done.

3. Fiverr & Upwork

Say you need a logo for your website. Or you need to edit a video clip to use for your Facebook ad.

But you don’t know the first thing about video editing. And the only logo you ever designed was your signature.

The good news is you can tap into a vast database of freelancers through these two websites. You can reach professionals from all sorts of disciplines: copywriting, survey design, email marketing, web design, virtual assistants, ad managers, accountants, you name it! All starting from $5 in the case of Fiverr. And you pay once you’re pleased by the work done. Both platforms have got protection features for their users, mediation and friendly customer service to handle any issues that may arise.

By outsourcing certain tasks, these two toolswill help free up your time, allowing you to focus on working on your business instead of just working for it.

4. MicroWorkers

Oh, this one’s a gem. And grossly under-priced. The workaround to most online marketing challenges.

What’s the simplest way to get real people to upvote you on Reddit/YouTube or to share your Facebook post? Why, pay them, of course.

MicroWorkers enables you to find people to do micro tasks for you on the internet, and it gives you control over the quality of the work done. You can assign people from specific countries only or exclude specific countries or regions. It allows you to collect proof of work before you approve payments to your workers. You post the task that you want done, select the number of workers you need, and set your budget.

And did I mention how cheap it is? One-click tasks like upvotes cost $0.09 per user. Retweets and Facebook shares start from $0.23. Every order has a minimum of 30 workers, and you can even set standards for eligibility such as the minimum number of followers required to do the task. $7 seems pretty cheap to boost your reach by 30x, don’t you think?

And it’s not just for social media. The site has powerful features that you can use for building backlinks, testing an app or service, generating traffic, and many other tools to cement your place on the internet.

5. Telegram

For most people, Telegram is just another messaging service like WhatsApp but with cloud-based storage for your messages.

But we know better.

The most attractive feature of the app is its channels. Channels work a bit like WhatsApp groups, except only the admin can create content, and other than viewing content, the subscribers do not contribute anything, except maybe take part in the polls that admins may post. It’s really that simple. The beauty of it is that if your channel has interesting content, getting subscribers shouldn’t be hard. And good Telegram channels do blow up rather quickly. With such a personal connection with your audience, Telegram can help your business grow in bounds, as long as you keep on producing high quality content. Here’s a few of my favourite channels: t.me/googlefactss , t.me/bestmemes, t.me/WallpapersGram, t.me/WorldWideHipHop.

The other BIG thing that Telegram brings on board is engagement groups. Did you ever have one of those Instagram groups whose main purpose is to engage with each other’s posts? Engagement groups are like that on steroids. Instead of buying likes or followers, users use them to find real people who will engage with their content. The concept is simple: users post links to their Instagram posts, and other users engage with their IG posts.Every group has rules. For example, if you’re in a “dx20 L+C” group, then you have to like and comment on the last 20 posts in the group, before you can post a link to your Instagram post. Most of these groups are managed by bots (Telegram’s a jungle), and if you fail to give the required engagement you are penalized. Here’s a few groups so you can see how it works: t.me/Boostchatinfluencers, t.me/d8boost, t.me/BoostGramDx30

One thing I’ve noted is that the guys at Telegram have been working hard at this app, bringing in new features and pushing the limits with each new update. They’re regularly bringing in new exciting features, not just fancy social media tricks, but features that are useful for other aspects of your business such as reporting and receiving payments.

6. Jarvee & Everliker

So, you’ve been reading our articles and have decided to start an Instagram account for your business. You’ve consistently posted content with a high VRIN score, but your notifications are as dry as the Sahara. You’ve asked your friends to shout out your new account, but you’re not getting your ideal kind of followers. You could buy followers, but we all know that doesn’t work…

Here’s a simple hack:

Look for influencers in your industry and follow them. Go through their posts and follow the users who engage with their content. Reciprocation is big on Instagram, so if your profile looks appealing enough, that should be enough to pull them into your ecosystem. Engaging with their content comes with two benefits: increased exposure for your brand, and an awareness of the latest trends. The later of which is crucial to surviving on social media. If you do this for 20–30 minutes daily your Insta is bound to skyrocket.

Or you can automate the whole process: Jarvee and Everliker enable you to target users by hashtags or accounts they follow. They can then follow them and like their posts, unfollow, etc. you just need to give the program your instructions.

A bit of caution: Don’t go crazy with the bots and follow and unfollow a thousand people per day; don’t use them to do something a single human isn’t capable of doing. The guys at Instagram won’t like that.

I should also point out that while engagement groups and bot accounts are a good way to get your brand in front of people, they’re just simple hacks and not a strategy to running a sustainable business. They’re good for getting some traction when starting off, but past some point they won’t be enough anymore. The sure way to grow a business online is by providing value and connecting with customers — never forget that.

Originally published at https://kooni.co.ke on October 2, 2019.

9 Social Media Marketing Tools Every Marketer has to Know — Kooni Collective | Social Media… was originally published in Social Bee on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.