Digital & Social Media Emphasis

Project Summary

DirtSlayers Garage is an off-road vehicle fabrication shop located in Idaho Falls, Idaho. They do everything from installing light bars and rock lights to swapping an engine. They can help you with whatever you need to build your dream off-road rig.

Robert, the owner, knew he needed to do something with social media, but didn’t have time to put his full attention into developing a strategy and creating content for it. That’s where I come in.

My goal was to develop tools and processes that would help DirtSlayers Garage become a driving force in the vehicle fabrication industry at least here in Idaho, non pun intended.

I accomplished this by developing a 3 step system: Strategy, Content, and Analysis. I believe these are the three most necessary steps to developing a rockin’ social media plan.

Social Media Content Pillars & Content Calendar

After creating the templates for the social media strategy and the content calendar it was time to get filming. I coordinated 4 content shoots with DirtSlayers to capture the content necessary for the goals I had in posting content once a day!

Check out the content I filmed for their Instagram account below!

Below is the build highlight video I filmed and edited for their YouTube channel. As mentioned above, I used this video project as a way to learn Adobe After Effects and Premiere Pro, specifically motion graphics tracking and basic color correcting.

Key Takeaways

The design process for creating the content calendar and outlining the content pillars they can create content around was the easy part. The hardest part of the project was the coordination between the client and myself to film content.

The most important takeaway from this project was this – Learn to communicate clearly with your clients in the beginning and don’t be afraid of their feedback. It will make you better and create lasting relationships for the future.

I was able to achieve my goals for this project. Although the content posting was delayed due to coordination hiccups with the client, I was able to still produce high-quality content daily for the last 7 weeks and gained over 150 followers for their Instagram account in 7 weeks. Additionally, I created a YouTube video highlighting one of their prized builds – The ToyVette.

The reason I mention this was that this was my first time diving into Adobe After Effects and learning motion graphics tracking. I took it as a personal project and was able to learn new software that I had only toyed around in before. Now, the trendy edits for social media have become second nature to me and I continue to learn more each time I use it.

Content Analysis

As seen in the above graphic, these posts had the highest performance based on the 3 key metrics we were tracking – shares, comments, and views.

Some gurus may say views is a vanity metric, but for a small business just starting out on social media, it is an important metric for analysis.

After our initial consultation with Robert, the owner of DirtSlayers Garage, we determined the biggest way to grow their social media presence was to build a community in the southeast Idaho region. To do this we need eyeballs on the brand, discussion, and new customers. Those 3 principles correlate with our key metrics – views, comments and shares.

Key Outcomes

Without demeaning the above graphic I wanted to add a few words to support it. We saw a 13.2% increase in followers, 59.8% increase in accounts reached, and 44.4% increase in accounts engaged on the Dirt Slayers Instagram.

They also had multiple followers reach out and compliment them on their social media “game” recently and some wanting to work with the person behind it, which was awesome for me of course, but shows the effect quality and consistent content can have on a company.

Below is a time account of my project. As was mentioned above, I learned a lot of new ways to edit, so naturally editing was the sector that took up most of my time.