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Adam Robinson
Thank you for registering and attending this webinar like Mark said, and thank you for the kind introduction. I really do love using Oktopost. I'm the director of marketing for a third party logistics company called Sarasys. We are B2B and as Mark mentioned, LinkedIn is a very big area for us to reach our target audience. And Oktopost does really, really well, not only at distributing to LinkedIn groups, but also to other social media channels as well. And so the focus of today's webinar is really on the distribution of content, not specifically on creating content, although I will touch on that a little bit today if you're interested in getting a good primer to how to plan for content or create content. We actually have a good guest blogger on the Sarasys blog yesterday. So if you go to the Sarasys.com blog, you'll see there a good primer on how to get started, especially in the B2B world with your content planning. Because unfortunately It's a catch 22 that if you don't have content well, you can't distribute that. So that's why we will briefly talk about that today. But the focus is really on how we use Oktopost to distribute our content that we create to to get results that we expect. So today's agenda is four main points. We're going to first talk about the Sarasys approach to content marketing because it's very important that you do start with a strategy and an approach that's customized and unique for your company. We're then going to talk about how you empower that content marketing strategy within the strategy. You may figure out who you're trying to reach and those kinds of things in your messaging. But you also need to know, okay, well what's the content gonna be? How do we gather some ideas for that content and what's really gonna make it work? Then we'll really go into using some of the features that I use in Oktopost to drive that large scale distribution and really be effective with that content that we're creating. Because as you know, it's not easy to create content. It takes a lot of work, but if nobody sees it, all that work is wasted. So Oktopost has some great features that I've used to get some good results. And so finally we'll then talk about those results of an effective content marketing strategy. So again, thank you for coming. I'm not wearing makeup today, but when you're on a studio camera, it's very important that there's no shine because we want people to focus on what you're saying and not the shine on your forehead. But luckily today we don't have to worry about that. So let's get right into it. Now this is the sarahsis approach to content marketing. However, before we create any content strategy, we also need to understand what are our goals. Goals are super important. If you don't know your own goals or what you're trying to achieve, you're really flying blind and you'll have nothing to measure against. So for sarahsys specifically, this is why we want to end with the results. Your goals and your results should speak to each other and if they don't, then that's how you know you need to revise your strategy and tactics. But our main marketing objectives at Sarasys are to create a consistent marketing program of brand awareness campaigns and multi channel marketing platforms, I.e. distribution in order to gain leads and sales from a more sophisticated and larger shipper of freight. So we want to also achieve market perception as a thought leader in the logistics industry through consistent content marketing. And so content marketing supports both of those main goals. Now our specific strategy is we feel that our website and our blog is the hub of our entire process. All of the other marketing elements purpose, whether it be content marketing, pay per click, even handing out business cards at a trade show with our website on it, is to build brand awareness, build a community of readers and a community within social platforms and of course drive traffic from those elements to the blog and website. And why is that important? Well, it's important because we at Sarasys are in total control of our website content, our messaging and our engagement. We are at the mercy of other social platforms. Changes, something changes there dramatically. Which if you're familiar with Facebook and you use it for marketing as a business, you know that everything's changing all the time, the way they do their algorithms, etc. So you can't depend on things happening within social media. Kind of think of it as a fishing pump. You're going out and you're joining those relevant social platforms and building up the right community and then bringing them back to your great content so you can then hopefully get inbound lead. So it's the best place for inbound lead generation. And that blog content also lasts a lot longer than any of the other posts. Like a tweet. We know how long a tweet lasts and of course it stays longer and has more value like search engine optimization and say a, a traditional channel such as advertising in a magazine and then Finally, a blog is a great place for you to share the story of your company and show your expertise because you can post as many blog posts and content as you like. And so there's no shortage of being able to tell that story. So let's talk a little bit about some content marketing and SEO. I always like to create content thinking about the content marketing funnel. So consumers of any product or service work through a process that starts with becoming aware of a need and ends with making a decision to purchase or not to purchase. That's just like any standard universal marketing funnel. Because of Saris marketing efforts at any given moment in time, we will have potential customers considering our company as within various stages of that decision process. Our content marketing strategy focuses on building content that communicates with those prospective customers no matter where they are at in their journey with Sarasys. So for example, awareness content. This is the stage in which a potential customer becomes aware that your company exists. Of the content you create, 30 to 40% will be for the purposes of awareness, making potential customers aware of your company and exposing you to your target market. So for example, awareness content needs to focus on trends or education of best practices and is pretty much devoid of over salesy messaging. And so in our space we want to reach manufacturers. And if you're staying up to date with the economy here in the United States, there's an index called the ISM Manufacturing index. It's just basically a health meter on the industry. And so an awareness piece may just simply be reporting on that. We've seen great growth in manufacturing and people come to you as a resource for that kind of information in the evaluation stage. This is a stage in which potential customers are in the market for what you're selling and they're trying to formulate their buying criteria. Like the awareness stage. 30 to 40% of our content should be focused on helping the customer evaluate what you have to offer. So try and create content which evaluates your type of business versus another. A very good example of evaluation content is iPhone versus Android where you really point out the unique selling features of each and where one is successful where one is not. So you let the consumer kind of understand what are my needs? And then how does your company versus your competitor match up to those needs? Sarasys is what we call a non asset based 3 PL. That means we don't own any trucks, we, we don't own any warehouses. We are a service provider that brokers transportation and works with other carriers who own those things. An asset based 3 PL does own those things. So we wrote about the advantages and disadvantages because we want a very informed consumer and the more informed the consumer is and if they generate an inbound lead off of this information, the then you start increasing the quality of those leads. Next, we also want to create decision based content that communicates why a customer should buy from you. We don't want this to be a big part of all of our content. So this should make up about 20% of what you write or even less, maybe 10%. The content also still can't be overtly salesy. This is not an advertisement piece of content content, but it should highlight your unique selling proposition and your strengths. For example, Sarasys, we create a transportation management system that is used by companies to be more efficient at procuring freight or transportation to ship their freight. And we are also really good at less than truckload freight. That's about 95% of our business. And so in a decision based content, you may just basically talk about the benefits of those things that you offer. In general, if you actually read this post and look at it, you'll see that it's not salesy so much, but it does weave in the unique selling proposition messaging of Sarasys. And with calls to actions on the sidebar of the blog, we can then take that user to click on a link to generate an inbound lead and then talk to us about our TMS and our LTL freight management services. And then of course finally you want to create content that is other people speaking on behalf of you and their success in using your services. Kind of ironic. I'm sitting here doing an Oktopost webinar. I use Oktopost. And so the content that I'm giving you today is really fanatic content because nobody can tell your story better. And it can ring more true with your target audience if it's told not by you. Because then they feel it's a little more organic and that they too can have a positive experience just like your current customer. So that's our approach there. So now we want to talk about how do we empower our content marketing strategy. Well, first of all, we need to start thinking like not businesses creating messages, but really more like publishers. And so for example, Conde Nast, you know, they have a lot of different magazines and I'm not sure if Conde Nast actually owns his magazine or not. But let's think about Cosmopolitan, the magazine. They understand that their target audience is women. We did ESPN the Magazine. Their primary may be men, but their secondary may be women. But in the business realm, we also have to think about who is going to read our content. Obviously, we want the people who are eventually going to be a part of that content marketing funnel to make a decision on purchasing your product as our audience. If you want to have good results, you have to understand who you're trying to reach. So it's important to think holistically when considering who you're trying to reach at a potential prospect's company. Typically, your target audience falls into two categories. Primary, which are usually the decision makers, and secondary, who are influencers of those decision makers. But there could also be tertiary decision makers or influencers. These are things like administrative assistants or executive assistants who are gathering information to present to a group. This happens a lot in the B2B environment. And so when there's four or five people in the mix, those folks are vetting you before it gets to maybe even the secondary or the primary decision maker. For example, with sarasystems, the people who use our products and services who are in our primary audience are transportation managers. They would use our technology, but their boss, the C suite, is also our primary decision maker because they write the check. But both of those people have to be bought in in order to get our services. So if you have a really long sales cycle, it's very important for you to understand the nuances of how who uses your product, who makes the decisions, et cetera. Another way to think about your target audience is by broad categories. So think of different verticals that you support. For example, Sarah says, we're really good in the automotive aftermarket, we're good with industrial manufacturers. And so we kind of understand you're starting to hear keywords or key things that you can use to think of your target audience. But let the categories also be your guide later. And we'll talk about this in a second when you're joining digital communities or even when you're writing your content to then further distribute into these communities. And then another way is job titles. So next, I really found it very helpful as a marketer to make the sales staff my best friend. Ask the sales staff who they typically talk to in order to get to a signed contract. And then who are those job titles who are gatekeepers in the way of getting to that final person? This may be a CFO of a manufacturing company or a manager of some sort. And then also ask not just the salespeople, but the customer service reps or the operations people who fulfill your service or product offering who they deal with. At our customers companies, for example, it may be account manager that they deal with and then finally continue to ask if there are other job titles that make sense. You can use these job titles for a lot of things later. And then next you want to look at search engine key phrases. If you do any SEO to complete your list of target audience, go to Google and search some of these job titles to find related job titles. And and usually if you go to the bottom of the page, you can find related searches on your search result page and check that out. But you can also use if you're familiar with AdWords, you can use the Google Keyword Planner tool to plug in the job titles and see if there's any related ones. And so what you can use this for is then further research to see what kind of content is relevant to these job titles industries in preparation for your content planning session. So you can also use it to identify popular news sources, people and blogs from which you may draw inspiration, establish key relationships for future guest blogging or networking, and of course in curation of content of value to your target audience to spur community growth and engagement in platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Google or Twitter. Now let's talk a little more about how we can get content now that you know your target audience. So again we want to categorize our target audience by industry. And you know, for example, our industries that we can speak to at Sarasys are manufacturing, distribution, supply chain, logistics and transportation. Our job function is the C suite managers and employees. So we want to make sure that we cover those industries. But then when we're creating content, we want to make sure that we create content that speaks to our three different levels of job functions. Now when you're generating these content ideas, I found it really helpful to hold internal interviews and brainstorm. So sit with each department head and some key employees and hold a brainstorm session. Ask them open ended questions relative to your market research that you've already done. Ask what the employees, the managers and directors are hearing from their dealings with customers or what the employees are seeing in the industry's marketplace and they can really give you a lot of good ideas. For example, our customer service department handles our freight bill auditing. It also handles our freight claims. And so I held two separate brainstorm sessions about freight auditing and customer service as well as then a freight claim session. And I was able to generate anywhere from 20 topics that I could write to from each department and combined that's 40 and we still have six other departments to speak to and so that way you can start really categorizing your content. I also use using my research, my job titles and the key phrases that I found in my market research. I use an RSS aggregator. I use Feedly. Currently, I've mourned the death like most of you of Google Reader, but Feedly really did a good job of importing my Google alerts and all of the different blogs that I subscribe to. And that really helps me generate content ideas because you can start seeing if a multiple number of big news sources are writing about the same thing. It might be something that you should write about too, because your audience would be interested in it. And then finally, just be active in social and notice things that are most shared. So if you're in LinkedIn or Twitter or Pinterest or wherever you're at and you're seeing things pop up time and time again, then that's clearly something that's resonating with your target audience as long as you're doing your due diligence and joining the right communities. And we'll talk about that here. So excuse me, it's very also important for you to understand the difference between your content ecosystem, between things like digital assets, social media platforms, and online communities. And so when I talk about activation, I'll be talking about how we enter into those communities in a moment. So digital assets are online environments you create from scratch. Digital assets are often created using a technology framework, a hierarchy of navigation, your company logo, custom graphics, and professional copywriting. The major digital assets you should consider when getting ready to activate your content marketing strategy are websites, company blog and posts, any landing pages, any videos you might have, podcasts, white papers, case studies, things like that. Now, social media platforms in general, most social media platforms you set up require you to amass a following in order to be effective. There are some platforms where the entire reason you establish it in the first place is to build followers and then add value in the way of posts or messages or use to distribute your original content and remembering the hub and spoke strategy in order to lead them back to your desired digital assets. So your website and your company blog. Some social media platforms obviously include LinkedIn, but only the company page and profile. Twitter, your Facebook page, your Google page and profile, Pinterest, YouTube and Instagram. And that's what I consider social media platforms, things that you must have to build a following in order for them to see the posts that you're distributing. Now we talk about online communities and this is where we get really effective with distribution. And I think a lot of people forget about the difference between a platform where you can build followings and communities. So unlike digital assets and social media platforms, online communities allow you to tap into your target audience and not be at the mercy of having to amass a followers or say you should not try and attract members of the community to your company. But you can think of online communities where you can use content of relevancy as bait to reel them back into your controlled environments and established pages in order to support your overall marketing and business goals as laid out in your content marketing strategy. And so the following are the main online communities which allow you to join and then reach out as opposed for people to coming to you. Those are things like LinkedIn groups and we can all join 50 of those Google communities, things like Quora and Reddit, those are communities you can join. But remember, the biggest thing when it comes to these kinds of communities is joining the right communities. And so remember all those keywords and all those job titles and the search key phrases and the categories, those are very important for you to gather in the market research phase. And here's why. When you go to somewhere like LinkedIn, I understand that I want to reach manufacturers, so I'm going to type manufacturing in LinkedIn and I'm going to go to groups. So I can either hit search or I can choose groups right from here. And then you can choose groups. And then you can see all of these different types of groups you could join. So definitely click into them, check out how many members they have. A good indication if they are really a good group or not is to check this little info area. And then you can look at group statistics. I always like to look at activity. How many comments were there last week? How many discussions? Because you don't want to join groups that aren't allowing discussions to go through. You also want to make sure that the group is kind of growing healthily over time, which this one is. And then finally you want to take a look at demographics and do they match up to your environment. For example, we only do business in North America, so if this group's primarily not in North America, which Detroit, Chicago, Boston, New York, it primarily is, then I may not want to join it. And so definitely take a look at those things and see if they work for you. You also may not be aware of Google communities. So if you're on Google, you can go to communities. Same thing with LinkedIn, you can search by keyword. So I'll search manufacturing. And as you can see here, it kind of gives you a number. It doesn't quite yet offer much in the way of analytics here, but if you just take a scroll through, you can kind of see how many discussions there are and if there's good engagement or not. I typically haven't found yet that Google Communities is giving the engagement rate that I'm seeing from LinkedIn. I personally feel that the main reason is because of the way LinkedIn sends a daily or weekly digest when it comes to the groups. So that brings me to the next point. We're going to talk now about how we get more out of our distribution by using Oktopost to drive large scale content distribution. So you know the first thing you want to do when you sign up for Oktopost is you want to add your social networks. Of course when you sign up it'll ask you to do that and then you want to create a campaign. So you would go to campaigns here on the main homepage, create a new campaign and get that all set up the way you like. Now I want to first talk about how we first distribute our first post through Oktopost. Now when you go to Oktopost and you're in our campaign, we're in the Sarasys campaign. Now you would click schedule post. Today I'm going to make my focus on LinkedIn groups. Although you can publish into many LinkedIn groups, you want to look at LinkedIn as your way of large scale distribution. So you could post into Facebook, Twitter or Google. So I want to go through each section as a best practice and then we'll talk about how to create a really good post to be more effective. And so first I want to talk about, whenever you create a message here in the subject line, where does that show up? Well, that shows up here in the digest as the main message. And so when you're first starting out, let's say you just joined a bunch of groups and you've added your profiles, you want to make sure that you start out first with some open ended questions. The reason you want to do that is so you can build up your trust and your influence and really start getting a lot of engagement. So we asked an open ended question here. What is the best piece of business advice you ever received? And then we got some good engagement here. What we really want to see is that when we're in groups, by doing that we're going to raise our profile. In that specific group. And if you look at a LinkedIn group here, you can see that Steven Rao of Sarasys, who also uses Oktopost and uses these tactics, is a top contributor in this group. And so your picture will be featured here in the top of the group. So it's a great way to build connections with people from your target audience. Because you're highly engaged in a LinkedIn group, one of the great features is being able to ask open ended questions. So I really suggest before you start putting in links of your content that you spend about 30 to 60 days asking open ended questions and really engaging in LinkedIn to build up your profile. Because if you start just putting in links right away, you'll disenfranchise some people. A lot of folks are kind of leery about you putting your content, even if it is relevant, into their LinkedIn group. Some of them even call it spam just because it has a link. You're going to get some of that, but don't be deterred by that. If you think about it, this group has 1100 members, but some of these groups have 300,000 people. And if one of 300,000 is speaking up, that percentage is not big enough for you to worry about having confidence that your content is relevant. But remember, the most important thing is relevance. So let's actually go through working on a post after you've built up your trust and influence for about 30 to 60 days, we want to then start putting in some content. So we just put in a new post here about marketing. We have different categories that speak to the different kinds of groups that we have. We join manufacturing, supply chain, transportation and logistics and freight groups. So if you, in your content management system, if you write blog posts, try to categorize them to match your, your LinkedIn groups that you joined. So let's isolate just manufacturing posts. And so there's that post I was talking about. So what I do when I'm creating a new post over here is I like to take, if I can take something from within the post and maybe ask a question with it. So this is now in the sixth month of growth. But at the end of mine I typically try to put an open ended question here to spur engagement that matches the content. So that way all I have to do is copy and paste it and put it in my new post. And then I like to take the summary of the post which kind of talks about why we're writing about it, and put it in here. You can either do the summary or another good trick or good tactic to use is to put your other questions in there. So we'll take this question. Sorry guys. And these questions, these are more general questions and we'll just add Some bullet points because as you know, that'll go in the little area here. So then we'll click click our profile. I would suggest then putting your link for your post in the message section. Now it's going to load the thumbnail and you want to make sure you select a thumbnail. That makes sense. We'll select that one. A little bit of patriotism. I do not like to include the link in the message or in the subject line because I feel that people look at that as spammy and will decrease the amount of people clicking on it. People will engage and click through when you do an open ended question. So you select your profiles and then because this is about manufacturing, I can select all my manufacturing groups and anything that has to deal with that and I can hit schedule. Then I can just go through my different categories and I can make sure that I create extreme relevance by doing that. So if I were in a supply chain group, which I have many over here, about seven to eight of them, I can then reach them as well and that's going to increase your engagement. So again, relevance is key. Now let's talk a little bit about times and dates here. When it comes to LinkedIn groups, one of the things I noticed is that if you post today, your post most likely won't be seen by the members of that group until tomorrow. And that's because the Daily Digest doesn't come out and cover the posts until the next day. That's not always typical and it's actually improved since LinkedIn started staggering. The Daily Digest. They used to come all in the morning, but I always try to post early in the morning, around 6 to 7am and then I'd like to post on Monday through Thursday, actually Sunday through Thursday. So that way I have posts going out Monday through Friday and then I may post on the weekend. But typically if you post on the weekend, your Monday traffic day is going to be much higher because people won't be reading emails on the weekends. Some will, but a majority of them won't. And they'll get three days worth of Daily Digest by the time Monday comes around. So they'll get a lot of posts from you. So that's why over posting is very important to pay attention to. I would say you don't want to post more than once or twice per day in each group. And if you're going to post once or twr twice, I'm sorry, make sure one is a link and one is just a simple open ended question without a link. Otherwise you're going to hurt your future success. Because people won't want to read your post because they feel like, oh, this guy just posts all the time. He's not really trying to be engaging. And it's going, you may get traffic now, but that's going to die out over time. And the goal of content marketing is to create a sustainable, organic, engaging presence. So that's best practices when it comes to creating a post. So let's talk about the other features of Oktopost, which really help me stay on top of the game and get more, more success. So let's first talk about the analytics section, one of my favorite sections for sure. So the first section in the analytics is the message performance. It's a great way to see what of your message assets perform the best. And this is great for you to see what content resonates with your target audience. So you can analyze that content, replicate it, or expand upon that subject in later campaigns. You can then repurpose that content and get more distribution benefits such as increased web traffic from your target audience. As new people do join groups all the time. So something I post today, I I should think about posting in six months, especially if it was popular. Because for example, in this group, if you look at the statistics and we look at growth, in July there was only 465 members. Today there's 1100. So that's 700 new people almost. If you would have posted in July, may not have seen that. I wouldn't post something once a month. I would probably wait 30 or 60 to 90 days to post it again. You can see here one of our top posts. If you do that, you can reuse that content, reach new people and you spend a lot of time writing it. So make sure you get the most out of it. Now the LinkedIn group performance is one of the places that I think has been the key to success for Sarasys, probably the ultimate key to success. So let's take a look at that. I use this feature to see which groups let our posts go through and which ones don't. So when I see that our posts are not going through due to a low number, there's a very cool trick or thing that I do that helps me get my post through. So you can kind of see here, okay, this group let through 344. I can see down here that there's a group that's only let 137. And in this one there's only 82. So I can kind of isolate and see real quick that this group doesn't let my post go through as much as some other groups. And so what I would do is I then go to that specific group and you can click on this little information and settings. Well, first of all, I apologize. Let me back up. When you're in the home page of the group, you then want to first go to your activity. And if you see in the pending submission section that you have a whole bunch of pending submissions and the group manager is not approving things, that means they're probably not letting your post go through. And that may be for a variety of reasons. Maybe they just are having trouble managing the group. Maybe they're just busy. Maybe they think your content's not relevant enough. Maybe they're a competitor, I don't know. And so click on the owner of the group after clicking on the information. And I found this very successful. On this little arrow here, you can send a message and I usually say the name of the group and I type out, hey, Group Manager, I saw that my posts aren't going through. I was wondering if it was because you were busy. Is there something I'm posting that maybe you don't like? Or if you're busy, I even ask if I can help manage the group. And by using that One little tactic, Sarahsys now manages something over like 300,000 members of all the groups we manage. And so now that we manage about five to six groups with over 300,000 members, we can assure 100% that all of our posts go through because we're managing the group itself. So that's a very powerful tool of Oktopost. If you can go in and then manage your posts better and know which ones are going through and which are not in these groups and communicate with the group manager, typically they'll change you to approve to post, which just simply means your post won't be moderated and they don't live in the pending submissions area. Or maybe you can even become group manager, and that way you can really make sure your posts go through. That's been very successful here at Sarahsys. The LinkedIn Group Performance Area. And the next is the top post area. This is an area to judge the performance of a group. You can use this information to see which ones are effective for you and which are not. Even if your posts are being seen, if the content doesn't resonate with your target audience, you should think about joining different group. So if you're not seeing a bunch of likes or comments or things like that or clicks, you may want to change groups as well. Remember, you can only be in a total of 50 groups, so don't let a lackluster group take up one of those valuable spots. The goal is to try and see if you can get all groups performing well. So use the analytics section to really help you get a lot out of your content marketing efforts, especially in LinkedIn. Now let's talk about Auto Poster. This thing is really cool. It's a real great time saver. And let's say if you're not able to be as involved in your content marketing due to resources or maybe you're at an agency and you have multiple clients, well, you can take a profile such as Sarasys and you can choose how many LinkedIn groups want to be included in a single post. I really recommend not going over 10 because this is auto posting. The more you do it really, the more I think you look spammy. But basically it takes all your message assets and you can choose which ones you want to put in there. You can have them all or you can unselect them, but it's a real great time saver and then you can choose the time frame in which you want it to go out. So let's say you just want you've created a lot of content, you know you're going to be busy. You can have them scheduled nine to five and then it generates the schedule and then it allows you to continue to stay top of mind even while you're working on other initiatives. Let's say you got a big trade show coming up or like me, I'm a marketing department of one. It really allows you to stay on top of things and so that will generate for you nice and easy. Speaking of those message assets, here's where you can add in new message assets to your campaign or manage and edit any current ones. So let's say you found a post in your top posts analytics that didn't resonate very well. Maybe you can just simply change the wording of it, change it to an open ended question and those kinds of things. Then also the calendar is very helpful. It's nice to see what's coming down the pipeline and as you can see, you can use this as good reporting tools to your management or you can see yourself what you have coming in the near future. And then finally the social inbox is pretty invaluable here. You could go into LinkedIn and you could manage it by email and get a whole bunch of email, but why not just go into Oktopost and save a whole bunch of time and Respond to people right from within here. That way you don't get a whole bunch of email. It's very, very nice and handy. And so this will aggregate all of your, even Facebook, Twitter, any kind of engagement upon the information that you send out through Oktopost. So those are really great time savers. So that's how we use Oktopost to maximize our presence here in LinkedIn and use our content to be more effective and distribute in a very large scale fashion, but still remain effective. So what has our results been as we've engaged in content marketing strategy with Oktopost? Well, a little background of Sarasys. Our company started formal marketing for the first time in October of 2012. So the company was in business for 16 years before they did any really formal marketing. They had little brand awareness, they were not thought of as a thought leader. But the company still grew well by referral. We started using Oktopost in spring of 2013. Just like I told you in the best practices for the first few months we used open ended questions to establish influence and trust in our content marketing where we first started publishing blogs. And those things started in May of 2013 and that's when we started including links in our distribution strategy. So to date we've in Oktopost put out 16,199 posts. That's generated 21,233 clicks. Our top message was the 3pl versus 4pl which we were able to see in our analytics. And in analytics we also were able to see what our top group is so we can make sure that we continue to stay engaged in that group as it pays off now really at the end of the day, what are the stats when it comes to our own website? Well I did a benchmark study here and this is just using Excel. When we first started Sarasys in September of 2012 before we started formal marketing had about 5,000 visits per month on average because of our content distribution. And you can kind of see here in May when we started launching content with links. Excuse me, we grew to in October almost having 20,000 visits which is about 345% increase. They didn't have a blog before and we went again in May when we started distributing our content. We went to almost 14,000 visits for the blog and from social media 8500 and search, as you know the search engines really love those social signals and social shares has increased from about 711 to now 4300. So when you're able to effectively distribute content at large Scale, it will pay off in the way of visits and that valuable search. Now, when it comes to engagement, you kind of take a look at this. We went from not having a presence in LinkedIn to now generating over 1239 comments in LinkedIn. And we're able to measure all of that through Oktopost. Our monthly mentions and retweets went from 0 to 2300. So by distributing our content effectively in Twitter, we've really been able to engage that and that's a monthly mentions. So we had 2,300 mentions or retweets in October. And in Google we've had 2001 1s. And if you know anything about Google and the search value, that's a pretty powerful number. Now, finally, that's great. All that traffic, all that engagement, what does it really mean? Well, from our content marketing, these aren't all the leads we've received from marketing, but just from content and inbound leads. We've received 109 leads, total conversions of 20. And the revenue, because of our business model, it takes time for us to see the total revenue from those conversions. So effective content distribution pays off and it really helps achieve your goals. So I would definitely recommend using Oktopost to do that. So thank you for your time and I hope you learned a lot in this webinar.
47:27
Mark
That was fantastic. I hope you guys got as much out of it as I did. We're going to go ahead and do a quick Q and A session here. You know, I've had a few questions throughout the, throughout the presentation here. So, Adam, I'm just going to go through them, you know, but the order I got them in. The first question, Adam, was, I think when you were going through, posting a link through LinkedIn on the schedule, a post window there, I think there was some confusion about you were saying something about not putting in the title, but then you also mentioned about how you put the link in the message box as well, but then you delete it. So maybe you can be a little bit more. Explain it a little more because I think some people are a little bit confused about that.
48:15
Adam Robinson
I'm sorry, could you repeat that? I guess I didn't understand the question.
48:19
Mark
Okay. During your presentation, when you were going through LinkedIn, you were showing posting through LinkedIn and your best practices in terms of posting the URL. And you said that you didn't like to put it in the title itself, but you did put it in the message box. And so I think that we wanted you to expound a little bit on your strategy. There and why you do it and then you delete it.
48:47
Adam Robinson
Oh yeah, maybe a little bit more about that. Gotcha. Yeah. Well, what happens is in order to generate the thumbnail and the link through portion, you do have to first put the link in the message body section. So Oktopost will take that information and then turn it into a link that's clickable with a thumbnail. But then you delete that link. But don't worry, that link will still show through. When you go to LinkedIn, it's the preview link. I don't know if you can show that on your screen or not, Mark, but essentially people can still see the thumbnail, the title and your detail summary and a link preview. But it's not in your title of your LinkedIn post or your message of your LinkedIn post. But it's still clickable. I hope that makes sense.
49:45
Mark
Yeah. Thank you. So I have a few more questions here. Some interesting questions. Here's a good one. What is your number one challenge that you face as a marker in your in your industry scale?
49:58
Adam Robinson
Time. Time and resources and money. Like I said, sarahsys didn't start marketing until a year ago and I'm still a marketing department of one. And content is going to make us successful. We know that search is a big deal for us and brand awareness is a big deal. People don't go and decide to hire a logistics provider until they have a problem or until they have a dire need. And when they have that need, we want them to have us top of mind. Or when they're searching online, we want to show up in search results. But in order to make that happen, we have to create a lot of content. And so it requires a lot, using a lot of good tools like Oktopost to stay efficient so you can continue to get that content out there and stay top of mind. If I had to spend all this time posting each day and not being ahead on my posting schedule, I would never have enough time to sit down and content plan and actually create that content. So just finding time and resources to create the content is the biggest challenge.
51:11
Mark
Great answer. So we have another question from our friend Tom Martin, who's in attendance today. He asks if you see a difference between clicks and conversion activity when your posts are placed in the discussion section of a LinkedIn group as opposed to the promotion section?
51:28
Adam Robinson
Yeah, absolutely. When it comes to a daily digest, the promotion section is not included. I'm a big believer that a majority of users get looped back. And this is just from data when I post it in promotion, I rarely get any clicks when I post it. In discussion I do get clicks, but the trick is that you need to create content that's not too promotional. If you do have content that's promotional and you want to post it as a discussion, you need to make sure that you are influential in the group, that you've built up trust and that people are ready to receive promotional content from you. If you haven't built up that trust and influence and you have something that's very promotional, I would abide by the community's rules and put it in the promotion section. It will decrease visibility and click throughs. But it's better to play by the rules and stay a member of the online powerful community than to get kicked out or hated by everyone. So if you're going to be promotional, build up clout, build up influence and build up trust by engaging for a long period of time. Or if you're going to post something promotional in the discussions, at least try and do it as an open ended question.
52:48
Mark
Okay, great. So it looks like we're actually over our time here. There are a few questions that are still remaining, unfortunately I can't get to them, but we're going to try to get to the questions offline on a one on one. If you have any questions that I wasn't able to answer, please email me. My email contact information is right here on the last slide there. I wanted to thank Adam for the amazing presentation. We are actually going to have this video up for you to watch as soon as possible so you can check it out, watch it again and we're going to be putting on these webinars on a regular basis where we have Oktopost users share their best practices. So we look forward to seeing you guys again soon and thank you and have a great day.
