Matt Erickson is the Marketing Director for National Positions in Westlake, California, which is a 15 years old SEO company that has added to its marketing stack over the years to content, social media, marketing automation, and even virtual reality.
Before entering into the marketing industry, Matt did his MBA from California State University Sacramento and worked with CPG and Information Security companies. In a talk with Matt, Jagruti Bhargav gathered important insights on social media and its importance in making a marketing campaign a success.
Listen to the insights shared by Matt Erickson.
Q: National Positions predominantly started off as an SEO company, and moved on to everything marketing. What do you think is the importance of social media when it comes to running or planning a marketing campaign?
A: The first thing of all is attention. When it comes to social media, everyone has a level of denial depending on who they are – whether they are boomers or genZ-ers or genX-ers. But the fact is that people everywhere are on social media. So if you try to block it out as “my audience isn’t there”, you deny yourself a lot of attention that you could otherwise get.
Therefore, if you are a B2B business, you may go to LinkedIn to get that attention. If you are trying to capture empty nesters, go to Facebook. Also, if you want to target millenials from the zeros, choose Tiktok or Instagram. Integrating a social approach into your campaign – whether it is in the form of content distribution, engagement, finding audiences, or pushing your content at scale – you are missing a huge opportunity.
Something similar was happening with our company. If we stayed only doing SEO, we would limit the kinds of companies we could work with.
Q: How do you think social media is making the world smaller, as we can connect with people from across the world?
A: With the emergence and growth of social media, news stories or information has started blasting from one side of the earth to the other. Also, it’s consumed quickly. However, it is easily forgotten too. So it’s a double edged sword. Social media has made it a smaller world, but it has also resulted in our smaller attention spans.
Q: Around the holiday season, the ad spends get expensive. So what organic activities can small businesses do with a limited marketing budget?
A: If you are trying to get eyeballs on social media, you must know that it’s a pay-to-play platform. But one thing that is often overlooked is how social media provides value in terms of engagement, which costs you time. You may have limited amount of content that you may think of putting out organically. However, if you have a small business with 300 followers, and your business page is not hitting a lot, you can follow certain strategies for a wider organic reach:
- Live videos are the biggest buzz, which take nothing but guts. Just turn on your phone and you are ready to go. Don’t worry about being perfect. A year ago, there were indications that doing live videos, image posting or just posting, Facebook received a positive signal and pushed that content further.
- Look who’s engaging with your content and engage back. Comment back and go to profiles that you want to connect with. Comment on the content that they put out.
- Creating targeted content with a niche product for a niche location, your CTM will be dictated in terms of the audience size on Facebook and Instagram.
- For Instagram, Garyvee had a $1.80 strategy, where he brought 2 cents of knowledge in the comment 100 times a day and it helped you spread your content. Yet, if you don’t have the budget and a tonne of content to produce, you can again go for live videos and comment on the content of the people that follow you. This is the way to keep the relationship going and walk them through DM to push your marketing further.
Q: In the two years that you have worked with National Positions, have you seen any success stories or has there been a personal win for you?
A: Initially, our branding was very SEO-centric. My team and I had marketing interests other than SEO such as social, reviews, video testimonials or content. We integrated our thoughts into other managers’ thoughts. We knew that SEO was not going to take us to where we wanted to be. Using these other strategies and tactics on social creates a bigger, faster and more tangible impact, regardless if we are still doing SEO. It’s another way to market where there’s clear correlation over a one to one or one to two on a marketing investment. That has been a nice win, which helped us get a bit bold and get up of the times.
On the social side, I had a fight to do for Facebook marketing. We had been running around campaigns for over a year now. And last month, we tested the audience and then optimized, after which we were able to show that everything you do with Google PPC or optimization on Facebook and Instagram, we could do it faster. We could find out after 3 weeks what was working and what not. So it was our biggest month as we could see actual inbound form filling and information filling on our Facebook ads. We kept everything within the Facebook ecosystem and our results drastically improved.
Read the full interview and more actionable insights from other marketing experts and influencers in our Ebook – Actionable Strategies for Your Holiday Campaign. Click here to read the Ebook.
