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Case Study: How we Doubled our Client’s Website Traffic during a Pandemic

When COVID-19 hit the United States in March of 2020, it forced companies to rethink their digital marketing messages. The unknown of the pandemic and how the economy would respond was scary for brands and caused many companies to hold or press pause on their marketing campaigns. Despite the unknown, companies were leaving marketing opportunities on the table. 

Morgan & Associates is a CPA and advisory firm based in Grand Rapids, Michigan, with locations throughout the state. Their primary focus is to support business owners with expert tax, accounting, and advisory services. They provide regular analysis and insight to business owners to help them make smart business decisions throughout the year. 

Katie L Smith & Company began working with Morgan & Associates at the beginning of 2019 to increase awareness of Morgan & Associates in Michigan and drive potential leads to their website. The social media strategy was to reach successful entrepreneurs and business owners through the sharing of tax news and business-related information that was directly applicable (and exclusive) to the financial well-being of entrepreneurs/business owners through blogs and social media posts. The process would be to build trust with the target audience by first educating about current market opportunities and pitfalls.

 

Want a custom social media strategy for your business? Contact us today.

 

Establishing a social media strategy upfront (a year ago) for Morgan & Associates allowed for an immediate shift in their marketing strategy and messaging when COVID-19 made its presence in the US economy. Morgan & Associates was able to use the same social media strategy but shift it to address the current market opportunities and pitfalls that COVID-19 brought with it. We were able to reach entrepreneurs and business owners right where they were, experiencing fear, the unknown, and questions that surrounded COVID-19. We immediately started posting on topics such as: staying safe during COVID-19, what rental owners should do during COVID-19, SBA loans, sick credits, CARES ACT updates, layoffs, PPP, loan forgiveness, etc. 

While other companies were hitting pause on their social media and marketing campaigns, Morgan & Associates quickly pivoted and provided the necessary information to their target audience during an unprecedented time, amplifying their trust-building strategy. The pivot proved successful. Morgan & Associates’ website traffic immediately increased, doubling in months of March and April. 

 

 

Without a social media strategy and management process in place, it becomes difficult for a company to successfully pivot in time for a natural disaster, environment change, or an industry shift. Before COVID-19, Morgan & Associates moved their marketing from a guessing strategy into a more calculated environment, setting themselves up to be ready when their environment changed.

Don’t Fall Prey to Vanity Metrics

Don’t Fall Prey to Vanity Metrics

It’s surprising how many B2B business owners and marketing managers get caught up in the wrong social media metrics. 

And, you might be one of them. Here’s how to know…. Do you get hyper focused on a few of the public facing analytics – the number of “likes” and followers your social accounts have? Do you only look at your profile pages to judge the success of your company’s social media efforts?

If your answer is even a slight ‘yes’, then you might be spending too much time on vanity metrics.

Vanity metrics are the metrics that make you look good to others but do not help you understand your own performance in a way that informs future strategies.

Vanity metrics can be important. They are certainly important to large consumer brands (like Starbucks) and Instagram Influencers, but they do not hold much weight in B2B marketing.

We won’t say to never look at your social media account followers or post likes, but there is so much more depth in other social media analytics than in vanity metrics. Understanding the analytics that matter will help you better judge the success of your social media efforts.

 

Here are the 5 B2B social media metrics that matter:

  • Impressions – the total number of people who had the opportunity to see your content in their News Feeds.
  • Clicks – the number of times people clicked on your content to engage with it.
  • Outbound Clicks – the number of times people clicked to a blog or landing page.
  • Engagement Rate – the total number of engagements divided by the total number of impressions.
  • Leads – the number of new contacts, forms submissions, downloads, etc.

 

Focusing your social media efforts around these five metrics will help you to see past the vanity of social media and into the true power that social media provides for your company.

For example, would you rather have your Twitter post receive 1,000 likes…

  • A high number of post likes (Vanity Metrics)
  • No opportunity for people to learn more

 

…or 1,000 post clicks to your website?

 

  • A low number of post likes (Vanity Metrics)
  • High probability for link clicks and new leads; in this case 14-day free trials

 

My guess, 1,000 clicks to your website is much more valuable. That’s 1,000 potential new people to your website who took the opportunity to gain further access to your content or learn more about your products/services. And, if you have an inbound marketing strategy, that’s a HUGE opportunity to get those 1,000 people into your sales funnel.

Don’t get overwhelmed with this list of metrics. There are easy and simple ways to measure them. There is no shortage of services that help, at Katie L Smith & Company we use Traject Social.