Week 2: Can You Say Technical Difficulties Or What
Overview
This was the first week of fully embarking on the project I outlined in this post last week. It was truly a rollercoaster of a week—unexpected lows, unprecedented highs, and an adrenaline-filled mixture of joy and nausea.
The initial plan for the week was to release a Valentine’s Day themed video ad for my mom’s artisan bread subscription, The Weekly Loaf, gain twenty new subscribers (a truly arbitrary number but I thought it was doable), and then create a mini-tutorial video or post about using Facebook ads/pixel.
What I did
I did create the ad, and though prospects looked bleak initially, we did gain some new subscribers. Three is not quite twenty, but I’m still counting it as a success! Historically speaking, the only time that we’ve had more than three new subscriptions in such a short span of time was when we first launched the program more than a year ago. Other than that, it’s been a slow climb (because that’s what you get when you’re a small business and you don’t market consistently).
I believe part of the reason for the lower-than-hoped-for number of subscribers was partially due to the fact that the majority of my time leading up to launching the campaign was spent on resolving technical issues within The Back 40 website. One in particular (users actually being able to access their accounts) was deemed as absolutely necessary to have in order before campaigning to get new subscribers.
How I did it
This would be a good time to mention that recently I’ve started tracking my time in a Google sheet (called The Praxis Progress Tracker Snacker—I named it at 3am during pre-program and it is a true work of art). I do this to 1) keep myself on track when I have the tendency to go on rabbit trails of learning new things, and 2) document what I’m doing/feeling to make reflection a lot easier. This short clip accurately sums up my feelings regarding the first part of the week:
- “I’ve spent the majority of the week attempting to resolve issues in the website for the farm and it’s been like banging my head against a wall of ignorance and helplessness with no sign of a light at the end of a tunnel.”
- “Google’s going through a freaking midlife crisis and is taking it out on me personally.”
- “Someone on The Internet said that our hosting is the equivalent of internet-terrorists holding you hostage til you pay for their stupid crap and they’re right.”
So, as you can see there was a fair amount of frustration involved with the technical side of things. In the end, after spending hours talking to various support people, pouring over every forum known to man, watching videos, and asking The Lord for divine inspiration, I ended up figuring out a workaround that I didn’t think would actually work…around, but it did. So now everyone can access their account, the ad was launched, and all is well.
Once I started working on the ad itself, I had an absolute blast. My mom (who was the one being filmed) graciously allowed me to put her way outside her comfort zone, and she absolutely crushed it (although it was a little bit of a process for the both of us, we made it through it).
I did two variations of roughly the same post, but one was built out with the Facebook Instant Experience (a mobile landing page you can design to beef up your post a little). I wanted to see whether people liked the simplicity of a standalone video, or if the extra stuff would really seal the deal.
Unfortunately, our pixel was apparently not configured correctly and didn’t register any of the people who did sign up. Part of the reason for this was that the Facebook Pixel Helper Chrome extension was not working at all on my browser, or any of the other ones I tried installing it on. So that was unfortunate to say the least, but I was unable to find any documentation on it online and the ad needed to go out (because Valentine’s Day doesn’t stick around forever, thankfully).
The end results
So, in the end, I succeeded in enabling users to regain access to their accounts instead of being caught in an infinite loop of redirects, I launched the ad, people signed up, and we received amazing feedback and support from our current subscribers. It’s encouraging when almost half of your current subscribers are willing to share a post and tell their friends to also join the party, with no incentive to do so (they weren’t entering in a contest to win something—they just really like the bread).
I’m learning so many things during this project already, I don’t know if my brain can handle another two weeks of it (just kidding, it definitely can). How to do research, how to talk to people efficiently in order to get to the root of the issue, how to figure things out in a way that works for me when the pre-established ways aren’t working, how to film an ad, how to not film an ad, how to encourage my mom when I’m not feeling the encouragement, and so many other things. It’s been a journey.
What's next?
Next week I plan of shifting gears a little bit, due to the fact that some of the technical issues with the site weren’t resolved and they need to be. I may rebuild it from the ground up, get a fresh start, and not make the same dumb mistakes as were made the first time around (at least make different ones this time). So I’ll plan on starting that process this week, focus on getting the list of pizza venues compiled and contacted, so that I can hit the website hard during my final week of the month.
So that’s about all for now, folks! If you have got any advice for me whatsoever, I will be much more than happy to hear even the slightest insight in regards to fixing any of those technical issues. And just general thoughts and feelings are good, too.
Until next time!