Evaluating the Canmore Marketing Hub. So, the Canmore Marketing Hub Trial is over. We sure learned a lot from our trial clients when it comes to providing affordable social media for mountain towns. We’d like to share some of our findings and thoughts with you.

 

 

We trialled the Canmore Marketing Hub with four unique local businesses: One independent fashion and art retailer, one gym, one independent mortgage broker and one self employed Yoga instructor. Our clients were all Canmore locals themselves, and had a variety of reasons for using the trial.

 

 

Our job during the trial was to provide a steady stream of social media for our clients by creating a content bank of tweets and Facebook posts. Our default scheduling was x6 Facebook posts per week and x10 Tweets per day.

What did we learn? Well we learned, with the right input from our clients, our searching code works REALLY well. Our trial clients told us what they wanted from their social media, they told us what their interests were, and so we were able to find hashtags and content that suited them. We realised early on that clients want content that has some personality, that reflects who they are or their business, so we began to edit our content to include personal touches. Our clients also gave us images and links to share, which helped make the content engaging. This was an important discovery; when creating social media content for businesses, especially those who have a local customer base, it needs to be clearly personable and engaging for their clients. That’s because, more often than not, clients of local businesses are also friends, and what friends think matters.

Our clients all agreed that use of CMH increased their social media engagement and impressions across all platforms, particularly when content was bespoke to the business and not obviously third party, as discussed previously.

We also learned that our Marketing Hub system works really well for promoting time-limited events and brands. For example, our retail client often had guest artists in store and our Yoga client had particular workshops she wished to promote a couple of weeks ahead of time. Creating a content bank around these events was easy, gave us a defined start and end period of the marketing process and allowed for clear, relatable content to be created.  We think the Canmore Marketing Hub is a great tool for running hard hitting and effective social media campaigns centred around brands and events. 

We can back up this claim with data. Our analytics during the trial showed all our clients significantly increased their reach on all social media platforms and gained followers. With the average tweet only being visible for 20 minutes on Twitter, and the average Facebook post having a life of around 6 hours, it makes sense to have tweets and content repeating on a monthly basis. More tweets and posts means more reach, and more reach certainly means an increase in followers.

Best of all, our trial not only helped us identify what kinds of content clients are likely to need, but it also gave our clients some awesome benefits. Our clients told us that they’d learned about what kinds of social media content they should be posting for their business, by seeing which of our scheduled content pieces engaged with their customers. We discovered that the Canmore Marketing Hub is a great process to help develop social media awareness. As we publish content and explore what works for our clients, they learn and save time. It’s win-win. 

The Canmore Marketing Hub Trial taught us a lot. We believe that automated and scheduled content is a fantastic way to increase social media reach and engagement whilst saving clients time. Right now we’re taking some time to reflect on what we’ve learned and explore ways of developing bespoke content banks that are also affordable for small businesses. This may end up moving the Canmore Marketing Hub away from its original business plan, but our trial has shown us that personable and bespoke content that can be created quickly and scheduled effectively would be incredibly useful for small businesses. We’re getting right on developing that. Watch this space.