The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the lives and work of people worldwide, and the Go Fish team is no exception. The financial impact of a drastically-changed business environment of digital agencies everywhere. 

Instead of dwelling on the negatives in that situation, our digital PR agency decided to turn it into a positive by using the extra time we had to finally work on some dream tasks, improve processes, and build out internal resources. One of the big projects for the content team included improving the databases our team uses to create content campaigns, and that meant collecting new data. Lots and lots of new data.  

Related Content:

• Digital PR Services
• Content Marketing Agency
• Content Creation Services

What We Collected

So, what kind of data am I talking about? Since it is impossible to predict all the topics and tangents our content campaigns will involve in the future, what kind of information could we gather knowing with absolute certainty it will be useful and not a waste of time? 

The answer, in short, was to collect a ton of demographic data. 

Between official government data releases and sites that use millions of user-submitted data points to create accurate measurements, it is possible to gather data on population, average age, income, cost of living, and more from dozens of countries and cities around the world. If you look in the right places, you can find data so specific that it is possible to accurately compare the cost of a McDonald’s value meal in over 100 different countries. But the internet is huge, and those kinds of data sets are spread out and rarely prove easy to download in full. In the past, this meant our team had to hunt the web for these scraps of information and manually collect the specific data they wanted.

We wanted to remove that hunting step and compile all of this demographic data into a single, convenient digital space that our entire team can access and manipulate as needed, which is precisely what we did. 

How We Collected It

Some of the data we were after comes from the U.S. Census Bureau. The Census already has relatively useful online tools for finding and downloading specific information, but their new webpage, data.census.gov, has made that process more accessible than ever. For information on things like population size, average age, income levels, and more for cities and states across America, this tool proved invaluable. It not only made it easy to find and review various data tables relating to what we were searching for, but it also allowed us to download those files and upload the data into customizable spreadsheets. 

Census data was the easy part of building up our internal collection of information. Pulling global information as well as specific data relating to the quality of life and cost of living would prove to be a much more involved task. 

Sites, such as Numbeo and City-Data, have been utilized by the GFD team time and again to help us compare and rank cities against one another in campaigns. They also contain high-quality data sets that are nearly impossible to find anywhere else. This data is particularly valuable because they apply the same standards across their entire database, meaning that, when a metric is listed for two different cities, we can be certain it is a fair comparison even if those cities are on opposite sides of the earth. 

In the past, our team has manually reviewed and collected the information they need from these sites and others like them, only focusing on the specific locations featured in their campaigns. As a result, our projects contain bits and pieces of data from all over the world, but nothing comprehensive. 

To rectify that situation, we decided to scrape our way through those sites. In the past, GFD has created programs that pull or scrape specific pieces of information from websites such as Yelp. We do this when we need to collect lots of comparative data from a site, a task we generally do not have the time to do by hand. 

Recently, we decided to ramp up this scraping work internally thanks to an easy-to-use tool called Data Miner, which allows our team to design and execute custom data collection on all kinds of websites. 

We turned our scraping skills on the sites mentioned above (among others), and hundreds of pages later, we had the results we wanted. 

How We Can Use It

Demographic data is crucial to multiple campaign types that we frequently use here at Go Fish Digital, and having easier access to it only helps to simplify and speed up the process of creating those kinds of campaigns. City rankings often use multiple pieces of information included in the data sets we gathered, while having access to accurate population counts makes it that much easier for our team to create per capita evaluations that more accurately compare conditions from one place to the next. 

Beyond the campaign styles we know will benefit from having this data, our team is now better situated to explore new campaign styles thanks to the increase of the information at our fingertips. Now, our team can review the data we have collected and use what is available as an inspiration. Knowing that you have reliable and accessible information on the cost of a one-bedroom apartment or the cost of gas across the world suddenly opens our team up to the possibilities of creating a campaign around topics that might have previously been overlooked because of how daunting the data collection would have been. 

While it would have been easy to let the negative impacts of the coronavirus on our work and workloads drag us down with them, our team decided to find the silver lining in the situation. By taking the extra time we were given and using it to strengthen ourselves, Go Fish was able to remain busy and productive during the pandemic and emerge stronger than ever, with increased skills and assets (including a whole lot of new data) we can use to create the best campaigns possible for our clients both now and in the future.  

How We Utilize Data To Improve Our Marketing Campaigns During COVID is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

Related Content:

• Digital PR Services
• Content Marketing Agency
• Content Creation Services

While promotion is what we use Reddit for the most, we have found the site to be a versatile tool that can be used a number of additional ways to improve, create, and conceive top-notch marketing ideas. Here are three of the ways our team uses Reddit and its user base to do our jobs as digital marketers to the best of our ability. 

Finding Inspiration 

We have a lot of clients at Go Fish, and for the most part, there isn’t much overlap between the core business identities and fields from one client to the next. As a result, our team has to be able to come up with ideas for any number of topics that relate back to what our clients do, and that frequently means we have to acquire at least a passable level of knowledge on these topics just to be able to brainstorm potential campaign ideas.  

In these instances, Reddit can be incredibly useful. As we have outlined in the past, the upvote system that Reddit uses combined with the ability of users to create and subscribe to niche subreddits dedicated to their interests means that our team can find ideas related to specific topics that are already well-received and trending in just a few clicks. 

Being able to go directly to a community of fans and subject matter experts to see what they are enthusiastic about helps us more quickly understand what appeals to them. From there, we can work forward or backward to produce a new and unique campaign idea that plays off of what we know audiences enjoy. When it comes time to brainstorm content ideas for an industry that we are largely unfamiliar with, taking some time to peruse the right subreddits can make all the difference between coming up empty and hitting a home run with your campaign ideas. 

Refining Your Campaign Strategy And Approach 

An old adage on the internet is “Never read the comments,” and in most cases, we would be hard-pressed to disagree. When used as part of an on-going revision process, however, the comments on Reddit can be an absolutely unrivaled asset when it comes to creating quality content.  

Anyone who actively participates on Reddit can tell you that its users are opinionated. People who take the time to participate in the comment sections on Reddit are rarely shy when it comes to giving their opinion, and thanks to the anonymity of usernames they almost never hold back from revealing their true feelings.

In most corners of the internet, this combination of anonymity and the relatively minor punishments that can be handed out for poor behavior would only produce a digital space to stay away from whenever possible. For digital marketers, however, that exact combination is what makes Reddit a perfect proving ground for your content. 

Being able to anonymously submit early-stage content pieces to Reddit allows marketers to receive quick and honest feedback directly from Redditors so they can pivot and improve campaigns before they are officially released to the general public. The dark side of Reddit’s commenting community will not be afraid to tell you that they hate your designs and why, or rip apart the validity of a dataset you have compiled. It’s important for us to remember that, in every pile of over-the-top negativity, there is a nugget of truth to their criticism, and extracting that nugget and acknowledging however much validity there is behind it can lead to making major improvements to a final product. 

Collecting The Right r/SampleSize 

Speaking of surveys on Reddit, that is the final way our team utilizes the platform to create great content. Surveys and their results have been of interest to people around the world for decades. After all, who doesn’t want to know what other people think and see just how similar or different the consensus opinion is from our own? 

Reddit has a few major advantages as a pool for survey respondents. First, it is possible to create your survey and post it for free using programs like Google Forms. Second, there is no limit to how many responses you can gather, whereas services like Pollfish charge more money for more responses. Third, you can identify and target subreddits where people are both inclined to participate and opinionated enough about a survey topic to make the results worthwhile. 

To those final two points, our team has begun using Reddit to collect survey answers more and more recently when it makes sense, and have used this approach to earn average survey response numbers that double what we used to gather through paid sources. While getting 600-1,000 responses is the norm for those paid options, surveys posted to Reddit regularly see us with a base of 1,500-3,000 respondents, with one recent success even clocking in at over 13,000! While gathering all responses from a single platform like Reddit can add some bias to the data, these bigger sample sizes improve the study’s overall validity in the eyes of reporters and readers, making them a major asset to the overall success of a campaign.       

In digital marketing, there are countless tools and resources out there that help us do our jobs and craft campaigns. While it is easy to get caught up in shiny new pieces of software or get lost exploring a previously undiscovered data source, it is always worth remembering that at the end of the day, we are trying to create things that appeal to other people, and Reddit just might be the best place on the internet to find out what other people like and dislike. Properly utilizing the Reddit platform and user base can go a long way towards taking your content from good to great, so why not use it?      

Does your team use Reddit as a way to strengthen your content campaigns? If so, how? If not, why not?

Let us know down in the comments!

The “Wisdom” Of The Crowd: 3 Ways To Use Reddit As A Campaign Resource is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

When it comes to creating content, especially content for your company or client, it can be easy to narrow your focus and limit your sources of inspiration. We’ve all caught ourselves putting on mental blinders that only allow us to think about content ideas related to hyper-specific topics. Even though it does happen, it doesn’t mean we should just accept that as the normal course of business.

There are so many different ways content creators and marketers can invigorate their brainstorming processes to avoid the pitfalls that come with limiting ideas and sources of inspiration you might consider (either consciously or subconsciously) as “acceptable”. And it would take a lot longer than this blog post to cover them all. Instead of attempting that, I just want to focus on one idea that can help creatives produce great content.

Related Content:

• Online Reputation Management
• Digital PR Services
• Content Marketing Agency
• Content Creation Services

Look to your own personal passions for inspiration in your marketing efforts.

Using something you love, whether it be sports, a TV show or movie, your favorite store, or anything that you have a passion for as a source of inspiration can produce incredible results. If you are able to marry passion to a relevant topic for a client or company, the final product frequently shines.

There are obvious benefits to this approach:

• It’s easier for you to come up with a way to tie whatever you personally love to your client or company’s message in a way that will make sense and appeal to other fans, since you have the same perspective and know what content you would like to consume relating to your favorite thing.
• You are also more likely to immediately recognize and correct errors in the content thanks to instinctively approaching it from the same angle as other fans, which are your target audience.
• The entire process of putting your campaign together can be more enjoyable than a typical campaign or content piece because you’re researching and creating something that surrounds what you genuinely enjoy.

These benefits only serve to improve the quality of the final product, and that would not be possible (at least not on the same scale) without the inclusion of your personal passion for the subject of the project.

As an example of how this concept has benefited clients in the past, I want to talk about one of the very first projects I worked on at Go Fish Digital. I joined the company in late 2017 with a background consisting heavily of work in the sports industry.

I graduated college with a degree in Sports Communication and spent years in college and after working in that industry, including time spent with NBC covering the Super Bowl and a season with a Major League Baseball team. So, as you can tell, I love sports. A lot.

When it was time to participate in my very first brainstorm of potential campaign ideas for a client, I used my deep love and knowledge of sports as a source of inspiration. The client in question specializes in global relocation services where they help companies transition employees from one office to another in a different country.

So, how do you tie sports to that idea in a way that makes sense while also being newsworthy enough to earn coverage?  At the time, the 2018 Winter Olympics were just months away and I remembered something I had read about previous Games. Some athletes compete in the Olympics for countries other than the one they were born in.

This idea of athletes relocating themselves and their allegiances from one country to another seemed like a perfect fit for the client given the business they were in. While the story had been covered in the past, I knew it was mostly done in bits and pieces. No one had ever done a full analytical review of the athletes.

We pitched the idea of collecting data on every athlete representing a country other than their native land and analyzing it a number of different ways to the client, which they approved. Our team then spent weeks pouring over athlete biographies and official team announcements from different National Olympic Committees. This prep work allowed our team to have data finalized and ready for design the same day as the official cutoff for roster announcements, a little over a week before the Games began.

Without an increased knowledge and interest in sports, we might not have known the best places to look for the information we needed. We almost certainly could not have had it all ready in time.

Thankfully, we were able to get everything squared away, including creating a series of graphics breaking down our findings. I like to think the expertise and passion that my love of sports contributed to the project shone through and made it more appealing to sports fans and journalists alike.

The results back it up, as this campaign – born out of a personal passion applied correctly to a client’s business and interests – was covered by more than 50 outlets from all around the world, including CNN and ESPN. Additionally, it accounted for more than half of the overall traffic on the client’s site during the Olympics.

And that’s just one example of how and why the idea of bringing your passion to work can help you achieve incredible some incredible results. Since that time, I have seen our team utilize this concept to create incredibly successful pieces of content around their own favorite things – from Game of Thrones to Trader Joe’s grocery stores to astrology and the zodiac and so much more.

At Go Fish Digital, we refuse to check our personalities and interests at the door. At the end of the day, it helps us expand our focus and seize some opportunities that could be home runs. If we didn’t, these opportunities would pass us by. So remember to take off your mental blinders and let your passions guide your brainstorming content creation ideas.

Don’t Be Afraid To Bring Your Personal Passions To Work is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.