How MyKidsTime Drove 7,000 Clicks To Their Website With Potatoes + Video Mistakes?

Jill Holtz shares her secrets to a successful marketing campaign

You’re on a tight budget, most small business owners are, but you need to get the word out about your business, your product, a campaign you are running. How can you get this done without mortgaging your house?

This week’s superhero Jill Holtz from MyKidsTime tells us about a campaign they run to promote potatoes. Seriously, you couldn’t get a more boring product. But MyKidsTime made it work big time and without spending big bucks.

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Superhero Tips – Are You Making These Online Video Mistakes?

Everyone is talking about video and how important it is for marketing your business. But when you create it, it doesn’t have the impact you expect.

What are you doing wrong?

When I work with businesses on their video strategies, it’s the same things holding them back. Look at the list below. Are you making these mistakes with your online video?

1. No hook

I remember when I made my first opening title sequence for my YouTube videos. I was so chuffed with myself. But it turns out I was doing exactly the wrong thing.

If we want people to watch our videos, we need to grab their attention as soon as they look at the screen and press play.

So forget about opening titles, forget about adding your business name right at the beginning. Start with the value.

Script your first three to ten seconds. In that time tell your audience what they will learn if they keep watching.

2. No captions

Are you like me? When you scroll through your social media feeds and see a video, you are reluctant to hit play. Maybe you don’t want the people in the post office queue, the people on the bus, your family watching TV to be blasted with the sound from the video.

If you are like me, then you are not alone. Most people watch video with the sound off. If you are going to keep them watching, you need to add captions or subtitles. This lets your viewers watch your video all the way to the end with the sound off.

More about captions here.

Everyone is talking about video and how important it is for marketing your business. But when you create it, it doesn’t have the impact you expect. What are you doing wrong?Click To Tweet

3. Looking at yourself

As humans we like to look at people when we are talking to them. This becomes a problem when we’re shooting a video into the camera and our eyes are drawn to the image of ourselves.

Our viewers will notice we’re not looking at them. We’re looking down at something else. I have a little sticker next to my camera on my phone to remind me to look at it and not me. It works, most of the time.

4. Going off on one…

Planning a video, even a live video is important. When you plan, you stick to the point, you don’t go off in random directions or get distracted. If you’re not distracted neither will your viewers be.

Choose one key takeaway for your video and stick to it.

5. Doing too much

Don’t squeeze too much into one video. Pick one idea and run with it. If you have more than one idea, that’s great, create more than one video.

6. Wrong format

I used to be so anti vertical video but times have changed. Post a horizontal format video on IGTV and your viewers will soon leave.

Choosing the right format for the channel you are posting to is important.

Vertical on YouTube isn’t great so go for horizontal. In the Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter feed go square, in stories vertical.

It’s not just the aspect ration that changes from network to network. Longer videos (8 minutes or more) go down well on YouTube but no one will watch that long in the Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn feed.

You can use different versions of the same video for each channel, just know of the specifics for each one.

That’s my top 6 mistakes and I know about them because, I’ve made them all. Have you? What other mistakes do you see people make?

Superpower of the week – Make audiograms with Headliner

Have you heard of audiograms? They are those cool images with an audio snippet, usually a clip from a podcast playing in the background with a sound wave animated on top.

I’ve stayed away from these in the past as I’ve found the tools that offer them are kinda on the expensive side. I was so glad when Donna Moritz shared Headliner App with her audience at Social Media Marketing World. With it you can make up to 10 audiograms for free a month. It’s not even expensive to upgrade if you need more.

And… bonus, it will add subtitles to your image too. It automatically translates your audio, you may need to do a small edit, but that’s all, you have an audiogram with subtitles and as we now know. They’re important.

Superhero Interview – Jill Holtz

Jill Holtz is co-founder of Mykidstime.com, an information website for parents, that has grown from a local Galway directory to a global website and one of the most trusted online brands for parents. She also runs a website all about connecting brands to parents called Digital4Sales, and is editor of Business-Achievers.com.

Prior to founding Mykidstime, Jill Holtz worked for 15 years in CRM and Marketing Support managing projects for British Gas, Royal Bank of Scotland, Barclays Bank, AIB, as well as holding product management and communication roles in several technology companies.

She has a passion for all things digital and social, having personally overseen the growth of the Mykidstime Facebook community (currently 606k fans).

Amanda Webb:

This is a really interesting one, because Jill is going to share the details of a campaign that she ran for Bord Bia on MyKidsTime. So firstly, how does that work? Do you sell advertising on the site, or was this for fun, or … How does that work?

Jill Holtz:

Yeah that’s how we make money on MyKidsTime. That’s our revenue model, so it’s advertising and sponsorship. And I suppose what we’re always looking at is how to get a message out to parents in an engaging way.

Amanda Webb:

And you chose potatoes for … Well, you didn’t. I imagine Bord Bia came to you and said they want to run a campaign around potatoes?

Jill Holtz:

Exactly. And this one, it was really one of my favorite campaigns last year. It was all about summer potatoes. And so, that was the main thing, that the summer season is out. We had done a campaign the year before, which was more autumn-y around potato week, and that was really good as well. So this one was what you call an integrated digital campaign. What I mean by that is it included a number of different pieces to the campaign.

First of all, we created recipe content. That would be blog posts. And then, we created and ran a competition. We sent an ezine mailing, and we shared everything on social media, including, and this was really fun to do, a Facebook cover image change. Sometimes I think people forget about their Facebook cover as a really good place to promote.

The Facebook cover image became a key part of the campaign.

Amanda Webb:

And what was that cover?

Jill Holtz:

They had a fun character, so we just incorporated it. We used our graphic designer to make a new image for our Facebook cover that had the potato character image, and our own branding. So it still looked like our Facebook page, but it included their branding as well.

Amanda Webb:

When somebody like Bord Bia comes to you, what are they looking for from you? Obviously they want all the content, but probably they’re looking for measurable results as well. So what are they looking for, and then what are you looking for?

Jill Holtz:

They’re really looking for, in that instance, as much reach as they can get. So can we get the message out as far as possible to people?

We might run different campaigns for different reasons. One might be brand awareness, another might be lead generation, and maybe getting people to take action and click onto site. In this instance it was really about getting the message out as much as we could to mums about summer potatoes through the recipe content.

Competitions are really effective for engaging people on a particular message, because you can set up the competition and have the question for entry be something about the campaign. Maybe it’s watch a video, or go click on a page that you’ve set up.

Amanda Webb:

So what was the competition for the potatoes?

'Competitions are really effective for engaging people on a particular message, because you can set up the competition and have the question for entry be something about the campaign.'Click To Tweet

Jill Holtz:

We gave away these portable picnic containers. The idea was, the two recipe pieces we did were tasty potato recipes for family picnics and BBQs, and then the other one was sensational summer potato recipes that the kids will love. So it’s about using the content, and then the tie in on the competition was portable picnic containers. We got them to tell us what was recipe number five on the picnic content.

Amanda Webb:

Ah, so they had to go actually visit the blog to-

Jill Holtz:

Exactly. So you’re using the competition to tie into the blog as well, or whatever your main kind of message is. We also sent an email out to our subscriber list.

The thing that we did there was rather than just going out with the central ‘potatoes are good for you’ message, which is obviously the message Bord Bia want to get out, is just to say right, here are some recipe ideas, here’s a nice video that we embedded.

It was a multimedia ezine, if you can think of it that way. It had recipe links, it had a video on it, because they have all sorts of brilliant video content on their potato.ie website. So we were able to embed a video there on the ezine straight away from their phones. And then the competition, and lots of links, and lots of things to click on in a kind of interesting way.

MyKidsTime used an eZine to help get the word out

Amanda Webb:

Okay. And how long did you run the campaign for, before we get into the results?

Jill Holtz:

Well, we ran it for two weeks, and really the results were fantastic. We had over 7,000 views on the recipe content.

Amanda Webb:

Wow.

Jill Holtz:

In the advertising industry there’s a benchmark of trying to get 2,000 people to view any blog content, so if you can get-

Amanda Webb:

Yeah, seven is a lot.

Jill Holtz:

Seven is really good.

Amanda Webb:

And did you spend on that, or was that all organic?

Jill Holtz:

We put a little bit of spend on Facebook aside the organic posts, but we’re very fortunate we still get organic reach on our MyKidsTime Facebook. I think what is happening is the ad budget’s helping to amplify that and get people over.

Amanda Webb:

Yeah. So 7,000 page views on the-

Jill Holtz:

On the recipes-

Amanda Webb:

On the recipes. Fantastic.

Jill Holtz:

And 3,000 people went onto the competition. We had two of these portable picnic container sets to give away. And again, in my experience, of course the big huge prizes do really well. You know, the weekend break to New York. But actually giving away two small funky prizes often really works better because I think people feel they have a better chance of winning.

People had to visit the website to enter the competition.

Amanda Webb:

I agree. I was having that exact conversation with someone the other day. I think we feel it’s accessible. So that’s great results. Was there anything else then?

Jill Holtz:

Well, the social reach was great as well. We reached over 105,000 parents with 1,000 engaged users…
Amanda: And for a country the size of Ireland that’s phenomenal. I think often we compare ourselves to places like the States, where they’ve got such a large population. But that’s amazing for Ireland.

Yeah. No, it is really great, and it was brilliant because it was exactly the target. That’s the brilliant thing about social media, you can target to who you want to see the message as well. Yeah, we were thrilled with the results and Bord Bia were very happy we’re pleased to say.

Amanda Webb:

That’s great. So that’s a really interesting integrated marketing campaign that hopefully is going to inspire some of our listeners, particularly those I think that have advertising as part of their income stream, because it can be hard to come up with creative ideas. So that’s fantastic. You are a superhero Jill.

I think the main thing I would take away from it for anyone listening is that if your content solves a problem for your target audience, then you're really on to a winner.Click To Tweet

Jill Holtz:

Thanks. I think the main thing I would take away from it for anyone listening is that if your content solves a problem for your target audience, then you’re really on to a winner. So first of all, there’s thinking about your content for your campaign, any blog posts you write, but tying in your competitions and your ezines to that. And don’t forget about your Facebook cover image. In fact, really what you should do is a fun video on there, shouldn’t you?

Amanda Webb:

Yeah. Actually, I haven’t seen any results, or I don’t know any stats about how many people watch those videos, but it definitely is eye catching when people visit the page when you see one of those videos, so that’s definitely worth thinking about. That’s great advice. Thanks so much Jill.

What I love about Jill’s campaign is it’s simple. Yes there were a lot of elements but it’s something we can all do on a low budget. I don’t know about you but I’d love some traffic like that to my site.