Five panelists and a moderator. VancityBuzz is officially IRL announcing it’s changing to The Daily Hive
Mat Boyer is the moderator
Alicia from Flightcentre is up first. Doesn’t drink coffee, drinks tea, wants to travel to Sri Lanka. Side note: if you tweet @Flightcentreca with where you want to travel this year, they’re giving away a gift card and luggage.
Janelle from Blenz: Prefers a coconut latte with coconut milk, wants to go to Italy as she’s Italian. If you tell her what your fave drink is, hashtag #Blenz, she’s giving away a $100 gift card and a $50.
Zane from the Daily Hive head of video content: #ThisIsDailyHive is their hashtag. Shot of espresso, green tea, vodka water, and wants to go to Japan.
Lindsay from SpudDelivers, two iced soy lattes and is going to Japan.
Meredith from the Province. Wants to travel to Cuba, drink French press coffee.
Marketing strategy and go-to platform:
Meredith: to build community and give a voice to other artists. She loves Instagram, Twitter’s not so great for visuals. On Instagram if you shared a family heirloom that touches your heart with this hashtag and #OdinGallery, you could win a $75 gift card.
Linday: giving away an enormous gift basket if you hashtag #SpudDelivers. We’re an ecommerce site, our entire business is online. We also focus on scaleability. We need planning since we’re not hiring but we are expanding. We need templates in order to maintain our standards.
Zane: I have the challenge of growing the Daily Hive’s presence. We don’t do well on YT, but this week we have an interview with Ellen Page, and it got 30k views on Facebook, and 33 on YouTube. We work with other providers too, producers helping us put things up. We like FB because they help us push it out, whereas YouTube doesn’t help you push things out. I’m Batman but the Daily Hive is the Justice League. Partnerships build up your network and get your content out there. Uniting with other people is key.
Janelle: digital strategy is different from the store marketing strategy. We have to have a really clear understanding of our online target audience. We’re a local BC company, and are involved in all the BC community events. On Instagram we partner with Pemberton music festival, and we’re giving out some tickets next week. The online community is younger, interested in these things.
Alicia: we have a similar blended approach, a very mixed bag in the stores. We need to understand the audience and for us this is through the data. Running contests gives you tons of data and we take all that data and use it to market to those people on FB etc afterwards. There’s also the human element. We have a thousand agents, and they travel. We have people who aren’t just selling travel, they’re travelers, they have been there. We can connect you with someone who has been there. Some people want to phone, e-chat, email, in person, whatever. We make ourselves available to them however they want to contact us.
Audience question: how do you bring your organization onboard? Alicia: we do courses on running social from a local perspective and from a personal perspective, turning employees into ambassadors. Otherwise it’s really hard to sell your orgs on cool social stuff. Janelle: show them that it does something. Show them you can bring people into the store with social media. If they can see the ROI it’s hard to not be on board.
Mat: Measuring conversion of the customers, what do you focus on?
Zane: It’s my job to make the video and get it seen, and the sales department’s job to get it out there. We did a Caesar post a few days ago. we should have partnered with a vodka company. That video got us 200,000 views. It’s a matter of setting the foundation so you have the metrics so the next time people want to jump on that.
Lindsay: One of the things is we’re not measuring what they’re hitting before they come to our store, eg FB etc. We use the data of what’s in your basket and speak to people based on what they’re buying. The data is very specific to their particular choices.
Meredith: we’re looking at driving traffic back to our website. We can see where they come from and see what they look at when they come to our website. We take that forward and use it to build strategy.
Alicia: we use conversion pixels and track things on Facebook, etc. There is always going to be a loss of data when people come into the store having seen something online. Sometimes we do things where people have to show up in person, advertise locally, and give them gift cards when they show up. Very big payoff as long as you target locally.
Janelle: you can have a social media ONLY promotion, and that tracks who your audience is online. That is in addition to anyone else who was going to come in to your store.
Mat says to tweet him any more questions and he will hunt down the answers later and post them.
