Get Answers: Low Instagram Reach, Advertising for Multiple Locations, Email Marketing, and TikTok
Episode Overview
This monthly edition of the podcast is all about answering YOUR questions on digital marketing and craft beer.
This month, we're talking about:
Why Your Reach on Instagram Posts is Low Recently
How To Structure Ads for Multiple Locations
Should You Care About Email Marketing
What is Up With TikTok Lately
Want to get your questions answered next month? Shoot us an email at podcast@gethoptimized.com.
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Intro/Outro Music by ComaStudio from Pixabay
Episode Transcript
(AI-Generated, please forgive any typos)
Welcome to the get optimized podcast. This is your host Chris overlay, and this is a show all about craft beer and marketing and growth. And we are back with another get answers version of the podcast where we feel the questions that we have been getting recently or have been sent to us. And we want to give you some answers to those questions to help you improve your Marketing strategies and marketing execution out there.
And today we are going to get into a few topics here. We're going to talk a little bit about Instagram reach. Um, and maybe you've seen some changes in your Instagram reach recently. So we've got some information on that and why you might've seen that. Um, we've also been getting, uh, multiple questions actually from folks about, uh, advertising to multiple locations or when you have multiple locations advertising there, or if you have like a really large geographic area, like if you're doing distribution or something like that, um, and a couple more questions I think we'll get to, uh, are a little bit about like why email marketing.
Should we even care about it? And Tik Tok, kind of talk a little bit about Tik Tok here and some thoughts we have on that, some updated thoughts on Tik Tok. So let's go ahead and jump right into it. So the question is why are we seeing less engagement or less reach really is, is really question is reach, but also engagement with our Instagram posts.
Well, um, There's a few things, probably. It's always a little bit about content and design and, and those kind of things. Um, but, recently, I just read an article, uh, from Social Media Today. It was published on May 19th, where they are quoting a, uh, recent Q& A session from Instagram. Specifically from Instagram's chief, Adam Mossery.
I might have butchered his last name. Maybe it's Mosery. Mossery. I don't know. But, he actually answered. This question i'm gonna quote this for you and then break it down So his quote is more important than watch time or like and comment counts as send rates And generally, I think the rate is more important than the count So the number of sends per reach the number of likes per reach the number of comments per reach But sends per reach correlate more in my experience with overall reach than anything else Because we are looking to help people discover content They want to connect with friends over and so sends over Is a great proxy for that sort of connection or creativity.
So what that boils down to is, and that's end quote, by the way, um, what that boils down to is that the shares, you know, people are sharing your content, they're sending it to folks. That is what is going to get you more reach and more views on things. And it kind of makes sense. Like if you. ever notice if you're on Instagram reels and you send certain stuff like for example, My wife and I we send each other stuff all the time.
But if I send over Recipe videos stuff. Maybe you want to cook some time Um, man, do I get served recipe stuff like crazy or if I send somebody's content like a certain creator? I will get served their content. And I think that's my personal use case of it. But I think that's, that's the key takeaways that sends and shares matter a lot.
Here's the thing though, is it as a business, it's real tough to try to game this organic stuff. It's always changing. It's a moving target Instagram and meta. They are. Changing the rules all the time. That's why I fall back. I'm like, if you need something, you need to get reach, use ads, boost the real, or run an ad campaign with the messaging you have in the real.
If you've got an event coming up and you really got to get some eyeballs on that thing, uh, you know, I wouldn't put that to chance with the organic feeds. I mean, put, I mean, hell put 10, 15 bucks behind the boost of a real, and you're going to get way more reach, uh, guaranteed reach and controlled reach.
So that's another thing too, is. With organics, you don't really control your target for that. So somebody could share it and you could be getting eyeballs and reach and all that kind of stuff with a bunch of people that aren't really your target audience. Maybe it's people in a different state, different location, different group of folks that aren't really necessarily into coming into your, your brewery or buying your beer.
So I wouldn't rely so heavily on the organic stuff if I needed reach. I would pay for it and I would control that target audience very very, um tightly. Is that a word tightly? Um, I would control that target audience and and that's the benefit of running the ads there So if you're worried about your reach lately Maybe consider ads but also consider what?
Uh, the Instagram folks are saying about shares as shares are seemingly important right now Who knows what's going to happen next month that could be back to comments and engagement. Who knows? Uh, okay. So another question we have is um, uh, what about advertising for multiple locations? Um, and i'm going to take this a step further and say, okay What if we have a really big geographic area?
Well when you have multiple locations really what you need to do inside of your Your advertising account is you need to split up your ad sets by location. So let's say you've got a couple of taproom locations or imagine you have a large geographic area where you're distributing, uh, over the course of like, you know, multiple cities, or even if your city is really densely populated, like Chicago or Atlanta or Denver, one of these ones, you don't just want to target one big geo area.
Uh over all of Denver or especially over like all of Chicago, right? What's going to happen inside that ad account if you do that if you just blend everything together Is the ads are going to favor placements in the most densely populated? areas They know that's where they're going to get your results your reach your impressions your engagements, whatever and although that may be helpful to an extent It's not really spreading your ad dollars around to all of your geographic zones.
So let's say you're distributing throughout your entire state. If you just said, Oh, I'm going to target my whole state. I'm going to spend a hundred bucks on ads in that state. What's going to happen is, is your main, you know, two, three, four, whatever main populated cities in that state. They're going to take all the ad budget, all the reach when you, as an advertiser, as a marketer, you may be thinking, well, I need coverage.
In the other zones too. So what you got to do is you have to break apart those ad sets and create like segmented audiences based on geolocation. And we do that with zip codes. We might pop in certain cities. Um, we might pick a handful of, of cities or zip codes or regions per. Uh, area and call like, Oh, we're going to call this the Northwest region or the East or the West or the South or whatever.
And, um, you break that apart and you split your budget between those zones. And then what happens, you get more equal distribution with your ad dollars and more, you know, distribution with your ad coverage in those zones. And you can report back on that. So if you break this all up into different ad sets, you'll have, you know, ad set one for the West zone, ad set two for the East zone, so on and so forth.
You can look and see your reach, impressions, engagement, whatever, uh, per ad set. And it's the same thing if you have. Multiple locations that you're you're running. So if you got multiple physical locations, you're going to want to separate those audiences per location so that you can allocate dollars better and that you can monitor performance and Ad coverage in those zones, but it's all about breaking them up.
You got to be organized keep them labeled appropriately in there You know, you don't want all of a sudden be looking at reporting like which one was ad set one ad set, you know A I don't remember label them accordingly so that when you get that reporting back, you can, uh, you can monitor that and, and, uh, and review that.
So, uh, that's a quick anecdote for you for multiple locations. Um, uh, another question we have here is around, Email marketing. So, uh, this one we get commonly enough, and I don't think we've done any answers on it yet, is, is email marketing worth it still? Is it dead? Should I be doing it? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
And the answer is emphatically, absolutely yes. Email marketing is mega important, and I'll kind of explain why. So, first and foremost, this is like, one of your best, if not the best, audience for ROI. These are people that have raised their hand and said, please send me your marketing material. You can't beat that in terms of eyeballs that are people that are paying attention to you, right?
So that's a huge one is this is an opt in. Yes. Send me marketing material audience. Also you own this audience. So unlike with social media, you don't own your Instagram following. Anybody who's listening to this, who has, Um, who has, uh, had their Instagram hacked or lost passwords or something like that to you had to start from ground zero, you know, for sure, you don't own that following.
So, and you can't send direct messages to every single follower, right? So, um, social media, you know, only has so much value. Now there's still value in your following. Absolutely. Email you own. So you have all those contacts, you can send them messaging, so on and so forth. So there's two big reasons out the gate, you own it.
And these are people that are highly relevant to you. Now, I'll take it even a step further for you. Um, if you think about your, uh, best opportunity for repeat business. And when we, when we think about that, it's really about lifetime value of your customers, getting them back in, more orders, more purchases, uh, inviting their friends, all that kind of stuff, email.
Is the best for this. I mean, you could take email and kind of say, okay, let's also group in like maybe SMS, like text messages or app folks. Like if they've subscribed to your app. You have a loyalty app or something like that. It's all kind of in the same bucket because you have a direct line of communication with these folks.
And because of that, you can send them very targeted messages about the stuff that's going on in your brewery. These are people that are probably you're most likely to buy your merchandise to buy your special Memorial Day, July 4th, whatever sales promos, um, they'll buy their gifts from you later in the season.
They're also likely to book events. When they're doing their work parties, you know later in this year when we start thinking about holiday parties and all that These are the folks that are going to do it. So keep an open line of communication with uh folks on email and uh, our recommendation for email is like Um, we send probably one a week is our pacing, you know, if you're doing two a month That's probably about as light as you want to go one a month is too light I think I think you got to send at least a couple of these emails out a month One a week is fine.
Sometimes multiple per week is okay If you really have something important to say then okay, but break it up by a couple days You know, don't send it like back to back days and that pacing is even slower with sms You don't want to be blasting people with like text with text text messages like all the time now It's a little different if it's transactional.
I think if they show up They commit an action, right? They actually break the barrier to get a higher reward. Then, yeah, maybe there's an automated message that goes right to them. But, uh, you know, at that moment in time, maybe that happens multiple times. You know, a month or whatever. So the automated thing is a little different, but with text messages, you probably want to pace that out.
Maybe a couple of those a month is okay. And make sure that there is a lot of value in those text messages. Give something special to folks when it comes to tech, the text message thing, because they've given you a special bit of contact information in your email. You know, there's like promo filters in there.
People don't always check their email every day or every hour, but man, you get a text message. You're looking at that thing right now. So if, if you're not giving value and not, you know, being annoying with, uh, Or if you're not giving value and you are being annoying with your text messages people opt out and you could even do damage to Your brand, you know, they'll be like, oh my gosh, they suck.
I don't want to go to them They're driving me crazy with these text messages. They're too thirsty for my business. You don't want that, right? So keep it sparse with the text couple of them a month is good. Automated stuff is good. If you have an app then And you can, you can use those a lot, like email, those push notifications.
That's like a big benefit of the apps, right? And I'm coming around to the apps. I've had a couple of really great conversations with folks. I really like what tap wise is doing with their app system and their, how they're building out a loyalty programs there, I think it's really awesome and a great way to ROI on the app as well.
And a big part of that is that they have push notifications you can put out and say hey We have a new beer coming up or hey, you're really close to a reward the next loyalty tier or whatever Um, that's all possible via the app And again, you you own that audience in a lot of ways there if you've built your own app now I'm not talking about like the untaps And uh, you know some of the crackums and some of those other ones in the world their push notifications operate the same way But you don't necessarily own that audience On a third party app that you didn't build or you didn't get the opt in on one more point I'll make about email marketing and really this kind of push notification stuff in general is You want to have an opt in strategy with this stuff?
Um, you got to have something going on in the tap room Or you've got a qr code where people can sign up you want to have this on the website for people to sign up I'm a fan of Of having the Wi Fi gateway systems, you know, if somebody comes in, they want access to your free Wi Fi. Well, okay, go ahead and join.
Um, when you join, you're going to be asked to, you know, jump on our, our loyalty program, you know, it's free to. To get access and all that stuff but join our loyalty program to access the wi fi That's all good stuff You'll gain emails like gangbusters with that type of system and it's all automated and by the way with the wi fi gateway systems You can send automated messages with this based on frequency of visit so it almost becomes An extension to maybe those point of sale system automations that you have if you don't have those then maybe a wi fi gateway Can be that for you.
And, um, it's really cool stuff. We have a link on our website to beam box. We're fans of beam box, like a laser beam, or you can go get like a free device for a free month, um, of that service just by, by using our link on our website. And that's that wifi gateway system. So check that out. But overall, absolutely.
Email marketing is mega important. Have a strategy. And, uh, these are your, your super, you know, low funnel, high quality, audience members in that zone. So, okay. All right. I'll shut up about email. I could go on about email for forever. Um, let's talk a little bit about tick tock. So, um, we get asked pretty frequently whenever, whenever I get asked, whenever I'm doing a presentation on social media marketing in general, people like, well, how do you think about tick tock?
And, you know, rewind the clock six, 12 months ago, I was like, ah, I'm kind of out on tick tock because we just didn't know what was going to happen. And we're still a little bit uncertain. Uh, at the time of this recording, it's the end of May here, uh, in 2024. Um, we don't know what's going to happen with, uh, legislation for TikTok.
Right now they're in the middle of this like, oh, we're banned, we're not banned in the United States. Um, but my personal opinion is that I think that TikTok, or really it's ByteDance, I think they're going to figure it out. And somebody, a really great colleague of mine, she reminded me that, Um, ByteDance has already done this before with an app called Grindr.
It's like a dating app, um, and they did this same exact thing. They went through, uh, not, I guess you can't call it same exact, but very similar process where they had to get, you know, they had to become a U. S. company and all this kind of stuff. And so it's not unfamiliar. And if it wasn't ByteDance that owned that, it was a very similar company, a Chinese owned company that did that.
So I might be misquoting that a little bit there, but very similar situation happened. And, uh, so it has been done before. And there's too much money on the table, I think, for TikTok to not be in the United States. Although, who knows? I've been proven wrong before. So my, my personal image is I think TikTok's gonna figure it out.
Now, what does this mean for craft beer? Well, so far, TikTok has really only been an organic play. You can't run ads for alcohol on TikTok. And honestly, TikTok is a little touchy about alcohol content in general. You know, sometimes you'll post organically. I've heard stories where it's like you're getting shadow banned or blocked or whatever because your content is promoting alcohol.
Um, in general, but I tell you what seems to be working on tick tock for alcohol. Go do a search on Tik Tok for XXL Moscato. Maybe you've heard of this. You will see a massive amount of content for this brand. And what's funny is that their main channel, like the XXL Moscato account has like 21 followers on it.
But what they have done is they have gotten their product in the hands of like tons of influencers out there. And all of these review videos, people doing videos about XXL Moscato, That's where all the content's being driven. So they have like a massive amount of, of awareness and engagement on their brand.
Um, and it's, it's all, it's so much of it's influencer and user generated content. So if you're going to take an anecdote from that, and they're not the only ones, there's other brands out there that are doing similar stuff. If you're going to take a page out of that book, you know, there is an organic slash influencers slash user generated content play on tech talk that may be worth it, especially for a regionally distributed brand or bigger, right?
Your local brands, you're going to have to find local folks, local influencers to, to take part in. Maybe you've got some of those that come in and they're like, Oh, I'm an influencer. I want to get people to your brewery or whatever, and give me a free tab or something like that. If they've got a decent amount of following TikTok, it might be worth it.
Same with like Instagram reels and all that stuff too. But. If I were going to pick a horse right now on TikTok, I'd say, well, you're probably going to do an organic influencer play there. I'm not sure what they do with ads. I hope they open up ads. Eventually. Reddit did. Um, Reddit used to not be alcohol focused.
They did open that up. Um, Google was similar and now you've got opportunities in Google and YouTube. Um, and, uh, and so on and so forth. So I think there's a lot of money in the alcohol advertising world and as the audience. of users ages on TikTok. We probably see some of that happen too. But, uh, and again, this is all prediction land here.
I mean, who knows? In six months, TikTok could be out. And I'm gonna, like, read back this and go, Well, I was totally wrong about it. So I was out, and then I was in, and then I was out. Who knows? But, uh, yeah, so that's my thoughts on TikTok. Um, and I think that'll probably Wrap it up for today a little short one for you, but uh, some really good thoughts and questions out there If you have questions, you're going through some stuff.
You're struggling with your marketing strategy You're not really sure which direction to take in the fork in the road. Shoot us a message We'd love to answer the the question here on the podcast um Heck man, we might even bring you on and do an interview with you If you got a really cool story or you want to go through some stuff together I'm not opposed to that.
We can do a live get answers With somebody let's do it. I'm down Um, but for now, we'll let you go Thanks a lot for checking us out share this with somebody you think would get some value from it And we'll catch you next time. See you