What did we learn about digital ecosystems and online visibility by putting up a tent!?

Way, way back in a pre-covid world, we owned a business called Baylily Bell Tents where we would erect bell tents for people to sleep in at weddings and events and I was the head of erections for the business...

Ou main marketing channels in the early days, were word of mouth, wedding fairs, social media and Facebook groups along with pretty much everyone else in the wedding industry.

However, this wasn’t moving fast enough and far enough for us..

National Growth Wanted

Around the same time, we decided that we wanted our small Hampshire business to be a national brand. So, we started going through the motions to franchise the business across the UK. We knew we could help this along by growing our marketing to a national level, way before we actually took any franchisees onboard.

After much planning, we decided to embrace an SEO optimised content driven approach to grow our business. We wanted to grow our online visibility and build a digital ecosystem, rather then some specific outbound marketing actions.

We started this by making public, a video that we were actually saving for our franchisees. We made it public because we were seeing lots and lots or people, probably hundreds discussing and asking how to put bell tents up! At the time, there was no video showing people how to do this properly on YouTube. 

So, we optimised our video and made it public…

And it grew.. It got watched, shared, referenced in groups and forums and way way more… Putting up your bell tent how we showed you even got referred to as 'doing it the baylily way..'

Online Visibility & Digital Ecosystems

We wanted to share with you some of the main learnings from publishing this video, here’s they are.

• Teaching your audience does not stop them becoming clients
• Amateur videos can get over 100k views
• You can record / edit / publish a video like this in 2hrs
• SEO / Keywords are super important for organic views
• People really do trust you after watching a video of you
• YouTube videos also rank on Google
• Evergreen content continues to work for you
• 100k views is great, but what do you do with those who have watched it
• Innuendos make me smile
• I’ve aged a lot since this video!

This video, which has now had well over 100k views, still takes traffic to our website regularly as part of our online visibility and digital ecosystem and as you can see above, it really didn’t take very long to create.

What this boils down to as you grow your online visibility….

We created a video within 2hours, that answers the questions our audience / followers / community were already asking. We then optimised it so it would appear in the rankings….

Come on, you can do this. And, if you can’t, get in touch and we’ll show you how…

Have fun always and thanks..

Emily & Alan

PS. If you fancy following our Yellow Tuxedo YouTube channel which is stuff fulled of helpful How Tos, you can by following this link - Yellow Tuxedo YouTube Channel