Today in Digital Marketing - Weekend Edition: Agorapulse Deep Dive

Episode Date: June 12, 2021

Jacob Hilpertshauser from Agorapulse joins Tod on this special weekend edition, where they talk about Agorapulse's publishing, engagement, and reporting toolsets.Agorapulse: https://agorapulse.comPricing: https://www.agorapulse.com/pricing/Disclosure: Agorapulse did not pay for inclusion in this episode. We did this as a thank you to their team spending a lot of time helping us evaluate their product for our agency's use.Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Welcome to a surprise weekend edition of Today in Digital Marketing. I'm Todd Maffin. I am joined here with Jacob Hilpert-Hauser. Did I get it right? I was practicing. Todd, you practice very well. That's fine. Jacob is with Agorapulse, which is a social media platform.

I have to say, when I was when when sort of everything started with with the internet, and there was there were no tools out there for, you know, third party tools for managing engagement and moderation and incoming comments, I kind of like mapped out on on a graph paper what I wanted my ideal tool to look like, you know, like all the channels on the left, and then I could just go in and reply to them, because those tools didn't exist. And I actually thought about hiring a developer to make me one of those. And then six months later, Agora Pulse shows up and it is exactly what I had needed. It is exactly what I was looking for in that kind of a tool. And that's what you guys do. And so we brought you on here to chat a bit about the tool set.

As far as disclosures, Agoraorapulse has not paid for this. We were in discussions with them about switching our agency over from our current provider. We are probably still going to end up doing that, but I figured in sort of respect for their time, because they put a lot of time into helping us get ready for that, we would chat with them here. So, hi. That was a big, long introduction. Hi, Jacob. Hey, just like my last name, yeah, big and long.

Ty, thanks so much. And I want to let you know on a little insight, Ty, we were actually spying on you that whole time you were doing that out. So I don't know if you noticed cars following you and people following you, but we're also hiring for more devs, always, always. So if you want to join, you got some more good ideas, we'll bring you on. We'll have you. Wait, I'll say this.

The last time I was coding, the marquee tag in HTML was popular. popular so no you don't oh okay okay all right all right for everyone out there we okay we've been dated all right um no a girl pulse like top level what does a girl pulse do and then i want to step through kind of what each of the things are yeah i i and i'll give you my my tag you know it helps social media managers have calm, no anxiety. What it really does is we can help with that efficiency in terms of your day-to-day. So scheduling our content, even creating some content with Canva integration, but managing the engagement to get in the conversations. Once you do post all that content that you spent all your time creating and scheduling. And then once you analyze the conversations, you analyze the performance of the content, you want some

reporting to see, hey, how did that work? Was that actually relevant to the audiences? So you've got reporting to follow up and make an action plan for the next month or the next quarter, or maybe stay consistent with your content. So that's kind of the high level overview of kind of all the, I guess I'd say the life cycle and the features within Agorapulse. And like a lot of tools, you're sort of broken out into sections. There's publishing, like you said, there's reporting, there's engagements. Let's kind of go through each of those phases. Let's talk about publishing. First of all, what do you publish to? And then what is that workflow like for a social media manager? Yeah, we publish to platforms like Facebook,

Instagram, LinkedIn,in twitter and you can publish to youtube as well those are the the main channels we publish to google my business and development wings so be on the lookout for that yeah yeah yeah um so publishing a good workflow at least from what a lot of the agencies and the the big and the small entities there's no there's no there's no uh social media managers out there that aren't kind of privy to these, these efficiency workflows, but integral polls, you can come in, you can work in bulk scheduling and bulk. You can come in and schedule out on your calendar and in a few different

workflows, Todd, we don't want to lock you into, you got to do it this way and you got to do this and you got to duplicate the, but yeah, no, you can schedule it out to one channel at a time. You can schedule it to all channels at a time. You can customize all channels. You can, you can work within the workflow that works best for you. So we've tried to develop a very simple yet powerful scheduling tool in that regard. And once you sort of schedule them, is it possible to see them visually on a calendar?

Of course, of course. And if you're, if you're an agency like you are, you know that the content may need to be approved by the client or at least maybe to visualize that for the client because social media is such an intangible service we offer. So you can actually build your calendar out and share that calendar with the client for approvals. One of the things that I've always thought sets the good social media platforms apart from the not so good ones is the ability to group content, you know, to be able to sort of group campaigns together. And you have like a labeling feature as well. Can you talk a bit about sort of why someone would use that labeling and sort of, you know, how it would help someone in social media? Absolutely. We kind of talked about the reporting aspect of like, Hey, taking action, what content worked well, did this campaign work? Well, the labeling is

actually very helpful to, to organize that content by category type, essentially by the campaign. So if we're going to spend all this time creating a campaign for summer, for our client, we're building videos or building images. We're executing all of that as well too. It's good to maybe let them know how that performed. And not only for them, but for us to see if we're going to run this campaign next year, you know, what performed better on Instagram in this campaign? Oh, videos worked really well here. And Facebook, interestingly enough, the blog posts work better here. So when we do this next year, instead of guessing, we actually have some intel and insight to move forward in a better direction.

So that's really where the labels from our agency, from a business perspective, anyone using Agorapulse, that's the benefit they're really getting out of those. It's hard to, excuse me, it's hard to overstate that because, you know, I think being able to sort of collect things together and analyze them as a whole. And there's just a report. Can you just spit out a report fairly quickly and say, just show me how this label performed in the last, like label meaning campaign performed in the last month? Yeah, Todd, you can even just sit back and relax. If this is something you need to report on recurringly, hey, every month this report is going to be delivered to you. So you can create a consistent report actually.

So if this is a consistent campaign for the client, you need to kind of adjust as we go. Yeah, you can definitely pull that and recur at any time you need. So it can be an automated thing as well. Part of the reason I like tags or labels too is that it lets you control that, how you use them. You know, they're like,

I like the fact that you didn't call them campaigns because you could use a label for not a campaign. Like you could use it for a region. You know, if you've got four regions, you could sort of sort things that way. And that's when I talk about Agorapulse. That's kind of the thought process is,

hey, these can actually be used in different ways. If I'm working a global team, I can pull regional content and you can pull and see how those regions are performing through that same Facebook or through that same social media profile. So spot on, Todd. I'm glad you said that because that's really how the tool is kind of developed, to be able to work in different workflows and within different needs.

One of the other things that when we were sort of evaluating Agorapulse for moving away from our current provider that I really like, and I'm surprised that our current provider doesn't have this, but is that you can reschedule stuff. You could have it go out on a schedule. So if you know that once a month you want to promote, you know, a rental property of yours and you just want that to automatically cycle through, you can put it on. It's like a recurring appointment, but it just recur, it just publishes on a recurring basis.

That is correct. Except for Twitter. It's a Twitter rule. Right, right, right. Yes. But yeah, but no, Todd, you're absolutely right. So we talk about efficiency in social media, especially today. Everyone was kind of at the beginning focused on, we need to create the best looking content and still do, but we need to be that efficiently. We need to be able to schedule out efficiently. So don't worry about, I need to schedule Saturday.

No, get that busy work done because that's what scheduling is and get it efficiently created. So yeah, the recurring is definitely great for that consistent messaging that needs to be put out there. All right. Let's talk about the section of Agorapulse, which is near and dear to my heart because we are an engagement and moderation agency, is engagement and moderation. So let's talk about, I mean, you mentioned the channels that you collect on. You also collect on Facebook ads as well because those are often done differently. And one of the things I was also interested in is, it's weird, the Facebook API is such a dog's breakfast. I don't know why they don't have all comments in one, but no,

there's an API for ad comments, for regular comments. The API also doesn't support some types of comments. It's just bizarre. But you, I learned in the course of this, support comments on dynamic creative, which is a big deal, which a lot of platforms don't for some reason. Well, and I don't know why, but I believe it was maybe a newly developed. You talked about those different APIs. That's some good insight there. Yeah, dynamic creative is something really powerful for agencies because it's, it's utilizing the, and you know this Todd, it's utilizing the engagement. Oh, Hey, this person saw this, they clicked here or they saw this and didn't do anything. So when we hit them with that next ad, let's send them a different message based on their actions and based on what

they, we want to kind of guide them down. So being able to reply to conversations on those are definitely huge as well. Just in general, Facebook was always notorious, Todd. You know, whatever reason, I think it was those APIs, like you'd miss notifications, you'd go check an ad if you were doing organically, and two hours later, there's 50 comments, you're like, where was my notification about all those conversations? So the inbox, as you notice, is powerful because it's task-less oriented.

It'll bring everything in as that's made live. And then as you reply to those or as you manage those conversations, they're completed. They're knocked out. So the team is in duplicating efforts. And it's not based on a post. It's based on the live conversations as they come in. So when something comes in, a comment comes in, what can I do with that comment other

than reply to it? You cannot reply to it. You can clear it out. You can hide it. You can delete it. You can label it, which we talked about the content labeling for reporting. The labeling of conversations is also helpful reporting. Todd, are you all doing any sentiment kind of analysis for your clients or just? It's an added service. We do it for some clients. We do it for recycling clients. So we do both sentiment and topic. And that's typically what, and when I'm working with agencies, when I'm working with

anyone in general, it's building that out to do it that way. So, hey, this is an ad product, be positive, negative, or whatever that is. You can create any label, as you mentioned earlier on the publishing labels that fits your need. And then in your reporting, you can go back to your reports, whoever you need to, whether it be the client or the business and say, hey, we're handling conversations. This is real feedback from the client. And here's the distribution. We got 75% positive, but this 25% negative, it actually equals out to 20 comments and five personal message. So I want to take a look at these conversations and at least alert the team so we can adjust the content we're creating to answer that question. Or maybe we can answer these questions better and figure out a better

strategy for that. So it is insight that I don't think, well, I hate to assume, but maybe not a lot of people are thinking about those conversations on social. And I bet if the way you're labeling is both on sentiment, like you've got, we have four sentiments. We have positive, neutral, negative question. We have question as a separate sentiment in theory. And then we also label it with the topic. So I suppose once you've got that sort of structure through Agorapulse's labels, you can say, I only want to see what all of the negative comments about this topic were in the last whatever time period. And can you compare that against a previous time period as well?

Todd, now that's why we're hiring you as that idea right now. You mentioned everything right there. That was perfect. Yes. You can go back and look at those old conversations for that insight and that feedback for content for the team, but not a comparison period. I would say, Hey, these were the different kinds of conversations. There's some like community management reporting that'll let you do that, but that's more on the stats of your team. But Todd, that's where we hiring you. So perfect. You don't want me to get the coffee budget at your office would be,

it would be, Oh no, I think we got you. I don't know. I don't know. I think we got, maybe we got you the coffee budget already covered there. So there's one thing in particular that, that I have not seen in another platform that I, again, it's one of these things that I'm like, why don't these other platforms have this? And that is automated rules on incoming content. So that means that if it sees, you know, like, like, let's say that you do rental properties and there's a problem with rats, for instance. So rats are always coming up. I mean, in your tool and all the other tools, you can be on top of it and you can delete it when it comes

in or hide it or assign it, whatever. But Agorapulse, as far as I have been able to find, is one of the few affordable tools that will let you automate that. Can you talk about what you can automate, how you would use that? Yeah. We've talked about everything we can automate already. It's actually all the deleting, the hiding, the labeling. So instead of coming in and saying, okay, what kind of conversation is this and analyzing it? And that's something we should still do as they come in. You can start automating all those actions. A few others like assignment based on keywords and phrases. So we talk about working efficiently. Social media is to say the least it's, it's a very time suck if we're not creating

efficiency. So same thing with community management. Hey, Jacob, we're noticing we're getting a lot of positive comments when they come in here, but we don't need to reply to them. Well, let's pull them in. Let's set up the inbox system rule. So all that labeling is just handled automatically. And we can come in and we can see if that labeling is correct. We can also start adding in keywords and phrases to those rules as we see them. So Facebook, I always, I always say it's notorious for, for good grammar. So, Hey, you know, this is amazing. And it's spelled without an A. So amazing. So let's add that in. Cause that's positive sentiment. So let's keep building on the positive sentiment too.

So you can keep adding to those rules. And, and in addition to this sort of auto tagging, it can, or auto labeling, you can, you can say, hide it. If it has the word or can it delete as well automatically? It can, it can, it can. So, and that will actually apply Facebook and Instagram can apply to your ads as well too. All right. So, so that's publishing, that's engagement. Let's talk a bit about reporting. What, and, and we'll talk about power reports in a second, but the reporting that just comes prepackaged with a subscription, what do we get in there? It's beautiful, isn't it, Todd? So you get your page report. We call it audience report.

Those are your page insights. Instead of pulling the page insights from Facebook or from Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, you can have them automated right there. So that's one report. You have a community management report, which we talked about. So, Todd, when your team members are managing replies, how quickly are we doing it? How many actually actions are they taking? Are they letting the rest of the team answer it and this person's not? There are a good set of reports in here too, Todd, that a lot of our users absolutely love.

And that's revolving around content. Content, as you know, of course, is everything. Every time we make a post, it's content, content around content. Content, as you know, of course, is everything. Every time we make a post, it's content, content, content. So this content report, performance report specifically, in that section allows you to really pull in every single post and say, hey, our client wants as much engagement. That's our success metric here. So we can see the average, and we can pull these posts and say, hey, this post is performing the best when it comes to that engagement metric. And then we can really more so look at the stuff that's not performing the best. That's the kind of the bad news we have

to say and say, look, this content is just not working well for our audience. And it's not me, your marketer telling you that to try and sell better content, which we should be doing. And that's a good way to use that performance report too. But to let them know and really give them insight, what is a good strategy as we stand here now and what's a good strategy as we move forward and if any changes need to be made. So the content performance report is some really good value in there. And I guess you can pull all the, all the regular stuff, you know, how many, like a chart of, of your growth of Twitter followers of chart of, you know, yeah. Yeah. You also have an ROI section in there, which I've never seen on another platform. Can you

talk about how ROI reporting works? Yeah, it's a good one. It's a very interesting one too, because ROI is something very challenging to measure. In Agorapulse, we do have a calculator. Now these are measured really based on engagement stats. So for those out there that, oh, this ROI tool is going to be for me, think about your social media tools and is engagement really worth putting a monetary value to? Sometimes like clicks, those are good metrics to put a monetary value to. So you can kind of understand that first row of reporting, hey, when we're publishing, how many clicks are we getting? And if I attribute maybe a 50 cent value to that, can I show some type of ROI? So it is good in that sense, but think about

your content, think about your industry, think about what we're actually trying to do on the action items, because it may not be relevant in that regard, but it is for a lot. It gives a kind of a rough measure. You know, it's not a literal ROI, of course. I don't think anyone would believe it's a literal ROI, but it kind of gives you a measure of, you know, sort of what, like it provides a weighting, I suppose, to different types of action. It gives a great sense and a good understanding. So we at least have a knowledge that, yes, this is moving us in the right direction as far as revenue and our goals. Yeah. So I expect most people, small businesses, especially smaller agencies, would find the reporting that comes with a regular Agorapulse subscription just fine.

But you've got kind of an additional level for power users. Can you talk about what that is, how much it costs and what you get out of that that you wouldn't get in a regular subscription? Yeah, definitely. So the power reports is something that we developed last year. And really the benefit and who it's for is for anyone that doesn't want to pull any more reporting that wants to create more efficiencies. Like we said, you, you will be able to come in and custom build, and that means putting profiles together. So for one client, I want to export all profiles into one report. I want to customize what they're showing them because they don't need to see everything. Oh, wait a minute. Can you actually, and now this is important. Can you have, can you get out of it a single chart

that shows multiple channels in it, in that one chart? That's actually a good question. So there are different options in the PowerPoint. That would be done through the aggregated report, actually, Todd. Good question. So the aggregate really is that high level. Hey, you're at 50,000 followers here. Oh, you grew 20 on Facebook.

You grew 30 on Instagram and 50 on Twitter. And then that graph is coinciding. So you can see, are these spikes correlating with each other? Are they not? And does that have anything to do with our content? So that's a really good place to start. Yeah. It's hard to overestimate how important that report is because if you're just looking at sort of what most platforms offer, which is a by the channel report, then you're sort of looking at them at individual silos. There's not really any way to say, you know, like look at an entire year of community growth and then in one chart, see like, oh my God, like look at how Instagram took off in comparison to these other channels. Yeah. And then, oh shoot, do we focus more of our time

on Instagram or, oh, maybe we need to focus more time on Facebook because we want to grow that more. So it is a really good place to get good insights. And then you can always dive into the granularity and say, you know, oh, what's, what's the granularity of the content performance on Instagram and Facebook. So where the rubber hits the road for me in, in deciding on any tool, social media, ad product reporting tool or whatever, it comes down to the support. Like when, when I get into trouble and I need to talk to someone or I need to get an actual human being, not an automated link to a frequently asked questions link. You talk about what are the support hours? How many people have you got?

Let's talk about the level of support that you guys offer. Yeah, when I talk with people, I always let them know that's really my favorite feature. And I know it sounds weird to support, everyone does have support, it is, but really, that's kind of an ethos within Agorapulse. And it comes from top down with our CEO, Emrek. It really is just human values. We value human beings. We've built a really great tool, Seb and our team, an amazing tool, very simple, but very powerful and easy to use, which is great. But that human element is so important at Agorapulse and we want to offer that to our customers as well too. So Todd, yeah, we have chat support

when you're on the enterprise level, which is our larger level. We do provide some dedicated account management and really more dedicated support teams for those teams as well. So as you're a growing agency, when you get to that level, we're there for you. But the support in general for our whole teams is absolutely amazing. And everyone out there, don't take my word for it. If you need to go, go look at what people are saying about us online. There's plenty of people talking about us and just see objectively kind of what they're talking about. That always kind of comes up, Todd.

That's interesting you brought that up as one of our more favored items within our Agorapulse suite and partnership. I think it's the most important. I really do. You know, it's, and when we were sort of chatting about moving us over, we were getting, you know, I had a couple of questions and I was, I sent off the email and then about 10 minutes later, I got an email back, but I was upstairs in the kitchen

and I thought, well, it's 10 minutes later. It's just, it's one of those ticketed automatic, you know, we've received your ticket, don't reply above the line. But it was actually this really detailed, like a human being like read my support request had like legitimate things. It was clearly not boilerplate text. It was, you don't get that from, from anywhere else that I've found.

Yeah. Maybe one day we'll do a behind the scenes. What we're bringing in Todd, cause it's, it's, it's, there's a lot of stuff going on behind to craft that message and finding all that information and and to your point I always feel I brought this up earlier social media is a is an interesting time to be in it because a lot of people don't really understand like what what it means to do and manage social media so the social media manager I always felt was it's a very lonely position and when you have a problem when you have trouble if you're working for a company or an agency, sometimes when you ask your boss, well, you are usually the expert. So you need to figure it out yourself. So that's where our support comes in. We're really there to help

you when you need it and lift you up as that social media manager. All right. Brass tacks. How much does it cost? It depends. Our premium plan is $199 per month. And you do have annual discounts on that plan that allow you to bring it down to $159 per month if paid annually, which is $1,908. Now, the beauty for anyone that is not a good fit and larger for that premium plan and started that premium plan, the pro plan, we're always here for that growth. So if you need to start small, we're here for you. There's a pro plan for $99 a month as well, too. We base these plans on basically a package we put together with profiles, users, other features like shared calendars added in, power reports as an add-on in the premium. And when we look to build the enterprise plan out,

that's purely custom. So those are typically included within the enterprise plan. But the beauty, Todd, and what we actually talked about was growth, growth, growth. Are we growing? Are we changing? Is our team changing? We want to hear and understand that because we want to make sure that it's an easy growth. Hey, we're signing a client. Okay, how much is our tool cost so that when we're building out this retainer for the client, we can just put in these prices here and we can build in our margins. And those margins are going to help us grow as an agency.

That's the whole goal. So that enterprise plan is truly custom, Todd. So anyone out there that's needing maybe more than 40 social profiles managed, more than a team of eight, that's typically where that enterprise plan falls in. Yeah, it really was. You and I worked together on it for a while, and I was able to sort of craft our own tool out of it to be able to say we need 50 accounts for our clients. We need this kind of reporting. We need that thing. And then we sort of settle that. And honestly,

the only reason we're not there is that we're locked into an annual contract with our current people. And I'm not going to do annual contracts again as a result, but we don't, we don't, we don't lock anyone in. I feel, and we feel that social media is it's, it's changing. So your business may change. Your needs may change. And you know what, if that changes the need you have for a tool, that's great. That's okay. Your business is changing and we want to help you with that. So yeah, no, no clauses, no lock-ins like that. And yeah, we're very much a human people company. We want to help in terms of pricing as well to say you can grow as your

business. Is there any big thing about your tool that's different from the others that you think you do uniquely best that we haven't covered here? People, the people, you know, when we look at tools todd you know they publish they do inbox stuff they manage reports we have a very powerful and i said very simple tool and powerful and simple together is is always a challenge when it comes to development so i think the combination of that along with the growth that we usually put together for pricing i think those kind of combinations just to kind of cut through all the nonsense and the BS that's all out there. It's just helping me get my job done. So I mean,

we just want to get, we want to get our stuff done. We want to do it efficiently and we want to, we want to save our time. So we have that peace of mind and get rid of that anxiety that we may have dealing with the content, the conversations we're managing. So yeah, I think it's a combination of a few things that I just mentioned there, Todd. If people want to kick the tires, do you have a way of trying it out for seven days or is there a refund after 30 or free trials or how does that work? Just this month only Todd, we've got a special ad going on where you can buy now. Yeah, we've got a, we've got a free trial always. Um, my, my thing is, you know, when you talk to us at Agorapulse, you know, I work for Agorapulse. So I'm, we try to be as objective and helpful as possible because our goal at the end of the

day is that, Todd, you find a solution. And if that happens to be maybe not the right fit with Agorapulse, that's okay, Todd. You're going to find the right fit. So free trial the heck out of it. Use that and really see, does this work within our workflow as everyone is saying? So definitely there on our website, available for anyone. Jacob Hilpert-Hauser is with Agorapulse. as everyone is saying. So definitely there on our website, available for anyone. Jacob Hilpert-Hauser is with Agora Pulse.

Join me today on this very special weekend edition. We're back to regular episodes, of course, on Monday. Jacob, thank you. Todd, thank you. It's been a pleasure.