You don't need to be an 'investor' to invest in Singletrack: 6 days left: 95% of target - Find out more
I have been trying to come to terms with what it means to support myself via peripatetic teaching these last few years, and the next few months are going to prove crucial for me and my family.
The thing is, I have had real difficulty trying to get a response from the public through social media (Facebook & Twitter in particular, but also Instagram). I know I am not the most proficient user of these things, but neither am I completely useless. I understand that what I have to offer is going to be focussed on a very particular constituency, and I try to target them, and although I get some response, it is not at the levels I would like and need.
So I was looking at the services offered by people on Fiverrm, and see that there are services offering tailored email lists, as well as social media marketing, and I got wondering about how efficacious these routes might be.
Does anyone on here know about email marketing, and how effective a tailored email list can be? WHat about the social media marketing end of things? Are there surefire ways of increasing engagement?
I have a whole bunch of questions, really, but hopefully this post can garner a few responses that can then lead into other questions.
Regardless, thanks in advance for your input.
I don't know if I'd go as far as to say there's a surefire way, but for every business there will be stuff that works and stuff that doesn't. The difficulty is in finding what that is for your audience. So first question you need to ask yourself is who your audience is and what problem you are solving for them, then you need to work out where that audience go and where they might be looking for information that you can help them with/sell them something.
It might be social, it might be email, but you need to work that out yourself. I'd certainly not be using someone from Fivrr to do email marketing, at best it will be wasted effort spamming people who have zero interest in your product, at worst you end up with a list of names with no way of knowing if their details have been collected in a GDPR compliant way. Email has worked best for me when it's to existing customers who have proactively opted into some sort of mailing list.
I’d certainly not be using someone from Fivrr to do email marketing, at best it will be wasted effort spamming people who have zero interest in your product, at worst you end up with a list of names with no way of knowing if their details have been collected in a GDPR compliant way. Email has worked best for me when it’s to existing customers who have proactively opted into some sort of mailing list.
^^^ I do email marketing for a job and agree 100% with all this.
Email is good for communicating with people you already know. In fact it's great, so if you can build a list of contacts/previous customers and mail them occasionally, then that can definitely be useful.
And definitely don't buy any contact lists. It's not effective and it's not legal under GDPR (it's legal in the US, AIUI, although largely frowned upon).
+1 on don't buy email lists.
Social media and email is not really a replacement for building relationships and reputation in your industry. I spend a reasonable amount of time meeting people at every opportunity - from conferences or similar, through to coffee/visit with prospective clients, through to making sure that our name is out there in press and social media as we can. Despite having a (mainly digital) comms team, my boss and my efforts probably achieve more than they do long term.
I’d certainly not be using someone from Fivrr to do email marketing, at best it will be wasted effort spamming people who have zero interest in your product,
Every day I get targeted emails for products I have absolutely no interest in!
You'd just be paying to spam a load of people who delete the email without even opening it.....
Email lists can make it look as though you are having success as you are sending to lots of people but unless you are being rigorous in getting rid of non responders as soon as possible you are wasting your time and money
You might be better on Facebook. You can market more tightly so your money might be better spent. Remember though that you are only buying leads and you need to sell to them which means tracking how they arrive, what they are interested in etc. Spending money is the easy bit. I pretty much never open spam emails but do occasionally follow Facebook stuff that looks interesting
Though I can't figure out what is your field of expertise from the post, I have some basic knowledge of SEO, so perhaps you'll find some use for these next few lines.
Set the foundations for your 'brand' - even if it's just you, writing-blog-about-education"blog and update it regularly with new articles about your field or the best teaching/learning techniques in general. This is a time sink, mind you, but note that whatever you put here will act as a sales pitch for all future scenarios. So, the more authoritativeness you manage to present there, the better. To increase your chances of getting noticed on random Google queries, aim to produceeasily readable and scannable content.
At the same time, don't neglect to participate in social groups as you mentioned doing. Try to provide substance with each and every post. Highlight the fact that you speak from experience, but also be relatable. On occasion, try inserting a link to an article on your blog, but be careful not to get banned from said group. Thus, set up your posts so that they do provide solutions (and your blog is only a more detailed take on that solution) - you'll dodge the tag of self-advertising that way.
On that note, I'll advise you to allow comments on your blogs, just so people can ask follow-up questions, which also doubles as UGC (user-generated content), again feeding back into your blog's overall SEO metrics. Of course, you'll have to spend time combing through the comments and even deleting one or two, but that's life 🙂
Next, you can further build your blog by inspecting which keywords (like, ' I need help with calculus/history/German language'...) related to your field people often Google about. You can do so with SEO tools. So, you'll have to 'compete', more or less, depending on those keywords' difficulty. Also, if your blog starts getting hits, you may also receive offers for ads (like brands asking for a small space of your blog to put a code made which is ultimately good for you. In time, you'll probably figure out the best ways to stylize your page's UI and create awesome clusters of articles via internal links.
Hope at least some of this was what you were looking for. Best of luck moving forward!
We get far better results from Facebook than we do from e-mail campaigns. But they have to be super focussed on a niche. We crate an event - live legal clinic for Islamic Wills, Young Mothers, Parents of disabled children. Invite loads of people from special interest groups. Do the clinic, answer their questions live and then share the recordings back to the special interest groups. We normally get between 5 & 10 people watching it live and average about 1500 views when the clinic gets shared to groups.
The trick is to play it straight, answer the questions and no selling. Not so much as a 'I can help you with that'. Just some contact details at the end. Works every time.
E-mail only works for us with existing customers and prospects who have actively opted into something.