Leverage major events and hot topics to your advantage on social media.
By Kristin Pitzer
On August 17, 2019, fans crowded into the South Point Arena and watched, along with a broad online audience, as Cade McCutcheon and Craig Schmersal slid to a tie for the first-ever Run for a Million championship under the bright Las Vegas lights. It was the culmination of a season’s worth of buildup for followers of The Last Cowboy, a reality show that showcased reining at the top level.These entities—the TV show and the Million Dollar Invitational, with their huge global presence—brought reining to more non-equestrians and non-reiners than any event before them. The resulting social media buzz from both the TV show and the event sparked an unprecedented wave of interest in the sport—a wave that professionals, even those who weren’t involved with either event, could—and should—take advantage of. From the Run for a Million and beyond, major horse events that have everyone talking are great ways for you to boost your own training businesses through social media and digital presence.
In this series of posts, we’ll discuss how to leverage these types of events, even if you’re not in the main spotlight. Topics include:
Part 2: Bettering Your Content
Beyond Social Media
While social media is a great way to build a following, email remains a powerful tool to reach that audience, and finding a way to capture email addresses of your followers will give you a wider group of people to market to. Nowadays, email can be paired up with Facebook to give you a custom audience to direct your campaigns to.
“Facebook is often able to match 80% of email and phone files to actual Facebook records,” Gauger said. “You can market an event on Facebook in a way that is in many ways as direct as email, but is much more likely to expose a larger percentage of your audience to your marketing message.”
Your website is another useful instrument in the marketing toolbox. Learning to use Search Engine Optimization (SEO), or the way to increase website traffic by increasing the visibility of your website to a search engine’s users, is a big step toward directing more people to your web page and social media profiles. This can be especially helpful if you’re creating content around a big equine event in an effort to claim some of the attention being focused on it.
If you’re creating quality content around one of these events and posting it to your website, it’s important to ensure that you’re using SEO best practices such as renaming and using images and alt text, as well as setting focus keywords.
While SEO is mostly geared to websites, the search engines do still pay attention to social media platforms. For instance, if one of The Last Cowboy stars with an influential presence shares a link from your Facebook profile, search engines will classify your page as valuable and rank you higher in searches.
Optimizing your social media profile will also help search engines to rank you higher so that when a prospective client searches for a “reining trainer,” you appear on the first page. Gauger recommended filling out every descriptive field in your profile and using keywords that relate to your specific profession.
While digital platforms can seem like a huge beast to tangle with, getting your pages in front of an interested audience is a great way to build a business. In fact, when big events like the Run for a Million take place, the attention generated from them is like free advertising for the sport. It’s then up to you to use that publicity on your own social media accounts and get your name out there.
“The door’s been opened; they’ve exposed people to [reining] who haven’t ever been exposed to it,” Hutchins said. “Now it’s our responsibility to keep it going. We’re looking at ways we can build customers out of it, not waiting for them to come to us. It’s something we’ve all sat around and talked about for the last 10 years—how do we make this sport grow? I think this has been the best thing I’ve seen in a long time to help it grow.”
Read the rest of this article at the links above.
