Continuum Consulting Analysis and Recommendations, Nov 2020
Goal:
Continuum Consulting are innovators in Leadership, Team and Organizational Development
Their goal is to be the thought leader on successful business development by having meaningful discussions, sharing long and short term strategies, and focusing on healthy team and culture building exercises.
Assessment of current efforts
- Posting 2-3 times weekly.
- Combination of quotes, stock images, business tips
- No hashtags
- No Link in Bio
- No stories/highlights
- No contact
- Is it a business profile?
- Limited about us section
- Posting 2-3 times weekly
- Combination of quotes, stock images, business tips with direct calls to action for email list and shared articles
- No automated responses on messenger
- Minimal comment engagement
- No videos
Followers:
66% Women
55-64 most engaged
Even throughout the week
18:00 optimal time to post
- Same content/schedule as Facebook
- No hashtags
Blog - Continuum Insights
- Hard to find - Insights is not obviously a blog
- 3-4 posts a month
Email Newsletter
- Monthly digests
- Good open rates (18% + 25%)
- No custom design
- No popup
- No website connection
- No flows
Website
- Case Studies
- Toolkit
- Service
- Lots of good resources/info
Recommendations
- Create a Google Analytics account so we can monitor traffic and what is working/not working: https://analytics.google.com/analytics
2. Build out a marketing and content calendar (monthly/weekly)
- Posting schedule stay the same
- Add in stories daily (or at least 5/week!) - use other sources as content at first. You also have a great backlog of content to use. Places like canva: https://www.canva.com/ can provide great templates for this. Create highlights to organize your stories on your page (e.g. Team, Services, Leadership, Culture etc etc).
- Get more personal! Who is on the team? Weekly highlight of the people behind continuum (example, UST Gear do a great feature with their ‘storytellers’ : https://www.instagram.com/ustgear/)
- Continue with combination of quotes, stock images, but make the rotation regular so the grid as aesthetically pleasing appearance. For example: 1 business spotlight, 1 quote, 1 image.
- Use hashtags. See below
- Sign up for LinkTree - allows you to put multiple links/articles in one bio link: https://linktr.ee/ Include: About Us, Blog Posts (3), Contact Us, Sign up for emails
- Switch to a business page and connect with Facebook (I think it’s on a personal page right now?)
- Pad out your About Us section a little more. Think about including emojis or a relevant hashtag!
- Add some IGTV videos/reels of you and the team, in the office, talking about the business. Jenna Kutcher (entrepreneur) does a good job of this: https://www.instagram.com/jennakutcher/reels/ as does The Home Edit (organization service) has good examples: https://www.instagram.com/thehomeedit/
HASHTAGS
Instagram hashtags are an effective way to get more eyes (and engagement!) on your Instagram posts. In fact, a post with at least one Instagram hashtag averages 12.6% more engagement than posts without a hashtag. Using relevant, targeted hashtags on your posts and stories is still one of the best ways to get discovered by new audiences.
When thinking about hashtags, you want to pick relevant words and phrases for the image you’ve posted so your target audience can easily find it. Some examples are #leadership #teambuilding #businessdevelopment
A few things to keep in mind:
- Your profile must be public
- Numbers are allowed in hashtags, however, spaces and special characters, like $ or %, are not.
- You can only add hashtags to your own posts. You can’t tag other people’s photos/videos.
- You can use up to 30 hashtags on a post and 10 on a story.
Top hashtags ideas to use for Continuum:
Branded Hashtags
#continuumconsulting #connectwithcontinuum
Tier 1 (most popular across the platform)
#leadership #leadershipdevelopment #teambuilding #businessowner #businesswoman #businesscoach #smallbusiness #thoughtoftheday
Tier 2 (quite popular across the platform)
#leadershipcoaching #leadershipmatters #leadershipmindset #teambuildingactivity #teambuilder #businessideas #businessadvice #businessstrategy #thoughtleader
Community Hashtags - tags that unite our community and are specific to our industry
#teambuildingideas #teambuildingexercise #businessbuilding #officeculture #thoughtleaders
- Continue current posting schedule, consider sharing more articles if you come across relevant ones.
- Calls to action are great!
- Add in automated responses on message (Thank you for reaching out to us! We’d love to connect. Email hello@continuum… and we’ll get in touch as soon as possible).
- Monitor and engage with comments.
- Consider making/adding videos to the page
- Share your case studies and services pages
What to post?
Images are performing better than links (engagement, on average) NOTE: Slightly skewed as more images than links.
Top 3 posts by impressions (since May):
https://www.facebook.com/continuumCS/posts/2953896658056184 (28%)
https://www.facebook.com/continuumCS/posts/3340816592697520 (28%)
https://www.facebook.com/continuumCS/photos/a.2819807734798411/2865351710244013 (27%)
Reach: the metric we use to define the total number of people who interact with a post published
Impressions: the metric we use to define the total number of times people have been exposed to the post published.
E.g If your Instagram post was displayed 500 times on social media, but only 200 people interacted with it, your REACH would be 200, but your IMPRESSIONS would be 500.
We want to focus on reach. Whereas ads are measured by the number of people who see them - their impressions - reach provides a good landscape of how many organic and valuable interactions you are having with your posts.
Ideas for posts keeping this in mind:
- Current topics and themes - diversity, challenges of covid, leaders in history, social media, how to adapt, anxiety, kindness over hate etc etc.
- Striking visuals
- Mimic efforts on Facebook.
- Continue asking questions
- Use hashtags
- Join LinkedIn groups in your field, comment and engage with their posts
Blog - Continuum Insights
- This is great and your material is awesome.
- Consider copying blogs over to a publishing platform such as Medium (https://medium.com/) and changing the titles with a little more click-baity approach.
For example, instead of ‘Are you Leveraging your Superpower?’ it could be ‘5 Ways to Harness your Superpower at home AND in the workplace’. Or ‘Appreciative Voice in Turbulent Times’ could be ‘Dear Community, I appreciate you and here’s why’
Email Newsletter
- Add email signup popup to website
- Connect the website
- Set up flows (1. Welcome series (3 emails Hallo! / Testimonials / Blog), 2. We miss you (1 email)
- Add in a second monthly email - highlighting 1 blog and company spotlight/service.
- Monitor open rates (keep over 15%)
- Create custom design. Canva can also be a great resource for this too (https://www.canva.com/newsletters/templates/) or places like Fiverr if you have software to edit it monthly (https://www.fiverr.com/). Or me (ha!)
Website
- Consider adding blog articles to the bottom of your home page
- Add banner at the top ‘Ready for a challenge? Let’s go! View our FREE toolkit for teams and leaders’
- Add Who are we images of founders to home page
- Add calls to action under services (Click Here! / Read More)
Additional Items (the future <3 months)
Podcast
- You have the content, you have the personalities, the next step is a podcast! Podcasts are actually relatively simple to set up and manage, and include a minimal investment in just a good microphone and some hosting services. I’m happy to work on an additional plan/proposal for a podcast if it is of interest.
Public Relations
- I remember you wanted to position yourself as thought leaders in your field, and a great way to do this is to look for some earned media opportunities. Things like guest appearances on podcasts, features in relevant magazines/blogs, local news opportunities. Anywhere where you’re able to talk at length about your journey and your expertise.
Conclusions/Next Steps:
In taking in a deep dive, it looks like there are lots of little tweaks we can make without making big sweeping changes and harnessing the organic traffic you’re already working on. You’re off to a fabulous start!
I would recommend working your way through this list, and revisiting in 3 months to see what is working and what is not. Make sure the very first thing you do is create and link a Google Analytics account to your site - without this it’s a little tricky to see what’s going on behind the scenes traffic wise.
For the additional items (podcast/PR), I see those as more bigger picture items to sink your teeth into after your social, email and blog changes have been made.
Thank you so much for this opportunity! Don't hesitate to send any questions my way 🙂
Natalie
828.280.1910
Natalie DeRatt
Founder
Jack Carballo
Account Lead/ Researcher
