University of Lincoln - Individual Project Final Post
- Josh Clarke
- May 1, 2019
- 7 min read
Introduction
This is the concluding post to my individual project conducted for the University of Lincoln digital marketing module that contributes towards my Msc International Business degree. This post will highlight what I aimed to achieve and what my purpose of creating this blog was for. The post will also bring to light some of the challenges that i encountered throughout the project and what i have learnt from these situations that i would change in future practises.
1) Aims and objectives
My purpose for creating 'For The Love Of Food' was to establish a single website centred around making peoples choices easier when it comes to cooking for themselves or looking for somewhere to eat out. Content would be made up of different kinds of recipes that users could try and reviews of restaurants detailing first impressions of atmosphere, the restaurants appearance and most importantly, the food. The aim was to make the blog feel like a community for site users in which they could interact with one another to share opinions, ideas and personal views on the content.
My target market was men and woman aged between 18 and 40 as people of that age are generally being introduced to cooking their own food and tend to be more social, therefore more likely too dine out of the house. My promotion efforts were going to be on Instagram (see section 4) as I wanted to use the platform for its feature of sharing images, in my case images of food rather than sharing text.
The two main objectives i set to achieve were:
Objective 1 - After 2 months, achieve at least 15 viewers on each of my blog posts
Objective 2 - After 2 months, grow the subscriber list by at least 5 people
2) Analysis of metrics
One main limitation I identified whilst using Wix to create my blog for this university project is its freemium business model. Wix offer limited features to users when they are not paying for any of the upgraded plans. In the future I would choose a site that offers more analytical features in order to monitor my blogs performance more accurately over time. I managed to install an external visitor analytics service towards the end of the project so I conducted an analysis of my blog using metrics based on one day’s results after a promotional post on the Instagram page I created For The Love Of Food. The results are as follows:
Total Visitors – 11 (All from the UK)
Total page views on the day – 18
- Home page – 4
- Blog – 5
- Viewed a blog post - 9
Bounce Rate – 72%
1 Subscriber
No likes or comments on blog posts
Instagram page insights:
5 Followers gained
68 photo likes
On that day, the blog attracted 18 visitors however, only 9 of them went on to view one of the blog posts. The bounce rate recored on that day was 72% meaning that a high number of people were leaving after viewing one page. In order to combat this, I suggest finishing future blog posts with links to other relevant material featured on my blog that related to the initial post. This should grab viewers attention and increase the likelihood of them viewing more than one page before leaving.
Referring to the objectives, both were unsuccessful. Although establishing a consistent number of views on my blog posts, none of them reached 15 views. Over the 2 month period I only gained 1 subscriber to the mailing list. This may be as a result of some of the challenges i faced throughout the project.
3) Reflections on challenges faced
As mentioned previously, I experienced a number of problems using Wix to run my blog. Although it was the most user friendly platform to design, create and write posts that i tried, its business model of limiting users ability to use certain features without paying for upgraded plans hindered me.
On top of the lack of metrics and insights analysis tools, visitors to my site had to create an account in order to like or comment on any of my blog posts. This could explain why i achieved no interactions on my posts as the sign in was a deterrent for my viewers. In the future, i would find a new platform to use that is more user friendly for the viewer, as well as myself. This would reduce the barriers between post interactions and the viewers, and hopefully make viewers more inclined to share their thoughts through likes or comments.
Another challenge that could surface in the future is the ease of viewing content and the blog section of the website becoming cluttered. I had the ability to create multiple pages for my posts in order to categorise them and make them easier to find for the visitors. I had three categories: 'All posts', 'Eating in' and 'Eating out'. However, as the blog would inevitably fill with content in the future, a drop down menu from each category would be more appropriate, making sure old content doesn't get lost and to make content more accessible for consumers with a specific search preference. For example, the 'Eating In' category could be broken down into a sub-menu which would then be split into sub-categories in a drop down box such as: desserts, pastas, healthy and vegetarian. This would improve the users online experience and make the blog much easier to navigate to the viewers personal preferences. If users have a pleasant time using the site, they are more likely to become regular viewers and potentially become subscribers.
One of the biggest problems i encountered initially was my domain name 'https://joshclarke12343.wixsite.com/mysite-1'. From an SEO point of view, the domain name had no relevance to my blog and the content i was producing. Again, was a disadvantage of using Wix as the ability to connect a domain, wether it was through Wix or a pre-owned domain required an upgraded account. This will have contributed to the failure of meeting my objectives i set prior to starting the blog. Without strong SEO set in place, potential consumers will find it difficult to find you my site and it will be initially very low in search rankings. I would change my domain name to incorporate the name of my website 'ForTheLoveOfFood', this way people searching for those terms are more likely to discover my blog compared to a domain name that is completely irrelevant. In order to improve my SEO on google, I made my website name prominent in the title of my Google listing followed my a clear description of what the blog offers.
(Figure1)
4) Promotion Efforts
The platform I used in order to promote my blog was social media platform Instagram. The reasons behind using this as my main advertising outlet was for the specific focus on the visual promotion aspect rather than advertising through text. Given that my blog was centred around food and cooking, I wanted to advertise in a place where the sharing of these images is popular. Instagram has around 1 billion active users, 500 million of which are active daily. The platforms demographics also capture a large proportion of my target market with 59% of internet users between the ages 18 and 29 use Instagram and also 33% of users between the ages of 30 and 49 (Omnicore, 2019).
(Figure 2)
Figure 2 to the left is a screen shot of ‘For The Love Of Foods’ Instagram page. The pictures of the food are there to attract the eyes of consumers who they best appeal to while browsing their explore page. The description was short and straight to the point of what my blog is about and what they can expect in order to get the message across quickly to the reader. I put the link to my blog directly underneath the description in an attempt to grab the viewers at a point when they are most intrigued to find out more about what the blog is.
(Figure 3)
Figure 3 to the left is a screen shot of one of my promotional posts as an example of how my posts were displayed. I was using multiple pictures in my promotional posts to maximise the opportunity of selling my blog to the viewer. Normally the pictures were made up of the final product and a picture of the ingredients needed for recipes, and for restaurants, the pictures used were of the place itself and the food. I used the description area to describe the pictures in the post and the recipe or restaurant that I was blogging about. I then attached the most popular hashtags around my topic area below in order to reach more people interest in the topic area. The post in figure 3 for example was promoting an omelette recipe, so i used hashtags such as: #foodie (120,974,312 posts), #instafood (144,075,431 posts) and #breakfast (84,600,000 posts).
I also used email marketing to promote my blog. I created an email in order to start building a mailing list and designed email templates to be sent out to new subscribers once they join, and emails to promote new posts on the blog, which I then automated. In order to promote subscription to my mailing list I used a light box pop up on the home page of my website (see figure 4 below).
(Figure 4)
I set the the pop-up window to appear after 30 seconds from the point the viewer enters the site. This gives enough time for the viewer to have a glance over the content to see if it appeals to them and avoids putting them off by being too quick and 'straight in their faces' upon arrival.
Figure 5 below demonstrates the template I created for a 'Thanks For Subscribing' email that is automated to be sent out to new subscribers of the blog. Figure 6 below demonstrated that the email was received by the subscriber and converted into views of the blog from the link embedded into the email.
(Figure 5)
(Figure 6)
Figure 7 below is an email i sent out to my subscribers advertising a new blog post. The post included a direct link to the featured blog post that week just under the pictures of the food. The rest of the post included links to previous blog posts that the receiver may also like and that work in conjunction with the featured post of the email. For example, as this email was promoting a blog post about an Italian restaurant, I included links to Italian inspired recipes on the blog as well. As figure 8 demonstrates, the email was successfully received and viewed multiple times, and the embedded links were used to view the posts advertised.
(Figure 7)
(Figure 8)
Conclusion
To conclude this final post, and my project. I have enjoyed producing content on a weekly basis to put online for anyone interest to have a read. The project has provided me with first had experience of the challenges and complications that can arise in the digital marketing process and management of a blog in specific. From my experience, flaws in a digital marketing strategy, such as SEO in my case, can severely impact your chances of reaching your target audience effectivley, hence why my objectives may not have been achieved.
Comentarios