DealNews -
demand generation strategy and execution
CFD reached 10k+ Instagram followers and increased the engagement rate for a comparison shopping website
The Brief
DealNews is a comparison shopping website where users can find the best deals on a variety of consumer goods. They boast 14.5 million visits per month and have been in business for over 22 years.
Careful Feet Digital worked with DealNews for over two years to develop and refine a social media presence that improved brand awareness, drove traffic to the website and ultimately increased sales.
APPROACH
When Careful Feet Digital started working with DealNews, they had no cohesive social media or visual strategy. Furthermore, much of their following consisted of bots and fake followers. The content that lived on their channels was generic and often low quality, and didn’t perform well. Careful Feet Digital established a social media strategy and overhauled the visual aesthetic of DealNews’ social media channels.
To generate engagement, we published funny and relatable content such as memes and employee features, as well as high-quality editorial imagery that tends to perform well across all the social channels.
Our aligned visual and content strategy meant that users began to recognize the DealNews brand and they reacted positively with the posts (either on the social media platform or by clicking through to the website).
RESULTS
Traffic to the DealNews Website
CFD’s primary objective was to send traffic to the DealNews website through social media posts that grabbed potential customers’ attention and made them click through to the site.
DealNews’ site traffic from social increased 146% within the first five months of working with CFD. Further, conversions from social media rose significantly; in the same timeframe, conversions from social media rose 33%.
Social Media Visuals
After establishing DealNews’ target audience, CFD created a look and feel that appealed to the desired audience and led the creation of custom images that were optimized for social channels. Most of the visuals CFD prepared were focused on the channels where shopping consideration and purchases happen: Instagram.
Follower Growth
As Instagram was the predominant channel of focus, 10,000 followers quickly became a goal to unlock all Instagram features necessary to engage an audience.
CFD established a new community management strategy that involved interacting with users who followed carefully-selected relevant and trending hashtags on Instagram (#couponing, #deals, #giveaways, #discounts, #freebies, #savings, #sales, #frugalliving…), but who weren’t previous followers of DealNews’ account.
This strategy made DealNews’ account visible to a larger audience and ensured a larger profile reach in new pools of users, and a possible subsequent increase in user retention.
After implementing the new strategy, the account saw a continuous positive rise in followers averaging at around 300 new followers a month, all from organic efforts.
Followers weren’t the only metric that increased. The following metrics also improved:
CFD did not see any significant or persistent drop in account reach and impressions, indicating not only growth in the number of accounts who follow DealNews, but in number of active and engaging followers.
Social Media Engagement
To generate engagement, CFD published funny and relatable content such as memes and employee features, as well as high-quality editorial imagery that tends to perform well on social channels. Engagement on social channels grew beyond 1% of overall following.
One way to attain consistent social media engagement was through various events and holidays. These provide not only a great way to get engagement, but give followers a way to interact with DealNews on social media.
For Get to Know Your Customer Day, for example, CFD posted questions that were both fun and data-driven across Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. Asking followers if they liked Pizza or Tacos, followed by a question about what deals they’d like to see, improved engagement and was entertaining for followers while providing real business data back to DealNews.
An aligned visual and content strategy allowed users to recognize DealNews’ content on social channels and engage with it, both on the channel and by clicking through to the website. With a cohesive visual and content strategy on social media, DealNews increased its social following to beyond 10k while Improving brand awareness, traffic to the site and sales.