This past spring, Dimatic was contacted by the Nebraska Department of Labor, who gave us information about a program called Facebook Career Connections. After a little more research, we decided to move forward to see if a stronger online and social media presence would prove beneficial to our sales, reputation, reach, and local awareness.
We met and interviewed with Facebook Fellow Rachael Vacanti, and were quickly impressed with the extent of research she had done prior to our interview, not only learning about our company, but also in already formulating ideas in working with us. We figured if she put that much hard work into the interview, she’d be the type of person willing to put in the work to learn the industry enough to produce relevant, quality content.
Her initiative and willingness to put in the work has paid off, as she quickly learned more about Dimatic and our industry in a short time, while producing good ideas even remotely, coming up with nearly a year’s worth of blog post ideas after only 2 weeks.
Rachael’s strength of organization and communicating her ideas, expectations, needs, and progress has been key for her. The biggest time this was shown was in the first few weeks as she divided her time between truly grasping the processes at Dimatic, our customer base, and industry while trying to make progress on the online and social media side to help set us up for success when we start posting her content. This has mostly involved her creating goals in Google Analytics, completing keyword and competition analysis, researching to determine our target audience, and studying the types of content that would prove most effective.
For Rachael, it was a little bit of a different story, as she got into Facebook Career Connections just barely before the deadline. Dimatic was the first to reach out of her employer matches, and by 10:00 AM, had an interview set for 3:30 that same afternoon. This gave her about 4 ½ hours to research and get to know Dimatic, and another half hour to physically and mentally prep for her first virtual interview. When she came up for lunch, her mom laughed and said she was really working from home, as she was dressed up on top, but still wearing her sweatpants and slippers.
While Rachael liked most of her employer matches, she wasn’t sure about Dimatic. She didn’t quite click with them, had no business-to-business marketing experience, and only knew snippets about engineering and manufacturing. But she was up for the challenge, asking good questions in her interview, showing initiative and sharing ideas. Three and a half weeks later, Rachael was paired with Dimatic Die & Tool. Despite being last on her list of rankings, her interview had her realizing that Dimatic wouldn’t be that bad of a match - she had just clicked with the other employers more.
After a few emails with Ryan Drvol, an hour safety training video, introductory paperwork, getting a copy of the employee handbook, and going over the summer overview, Ryan gave her a tour of the office introducing her to everyone. Then Rachael got a walking/talking overview of the plant, departments, machines, and processes. After crashing due to information overload, she hit the ground running the next day, diving into a competition analysis, as well as looking at Dimatic’s website, keywords, and social media presence including Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube.
It took Rachael a few weeks to get acclimated. While she learned about Dimatic, their processes, products, and customers quickly, she struggled with customer relations and determining an exact target audience and keywords for Dimatic. The hardest part was a little bit of miscommunication between Rachael and Dimatic in figuring out what exactly was being wanted or expected. Once a plan was refined about 2-3 weeks in, everything became much clearer on both sides and content began to emerge at a rapid rate.
What’s been interesting for Rachael at Dimatic was her keen interest in the company. Not only was she fascinated that we were still family-owned and keeping up with major competitors, but how awed she was at seeing the processes we complete on a daily basis. She clearly enjoys not only seeing the parts being developed, but watching the process being completed and learning how the processes are completed.
In her last few weeks of the Program, Rachael has continued working hard to post ads, finalize blog posts, and create a content calendar. But Rachael doesn’t really care about what she gets DONE here with us at Dimatic. To her, it’s what she can leave WITH us. Coming into this, she knew it was only part-time, and couldn’t get everything done on the summer overview we provided. Rachael’s goal is to leave us with a content calendar with content we can consistently post, as she’s hoping that will get more people seeing our page. She’s left us a lot - drafts of website updates, definitions of keyword and traffic terms, a table of where to find things between Google and Squarespace, custom reports, goals, and social media tips and practices. We can’t wait to start seeing a return on investment on her posts and content.