by Team KJP | Jan 23, 2020
Running a business takes time, energy and passion. If you’re a small business owner or solopreneur, there’s many tasks that you will be managing yourself. So how do you make time for everything?
Planning and Organisation is key. They are the fundamental ingredients to smooth running and consistency for a small business and the same rule applies when it comes to social media marketing. Marketing on any level requires planning and strategy but when it comes to creating a plan of action and engaging content for an audience to interact with, and start to learn more about your business and values, organisation becomes paramount.
Introducing a social media scheduling tool
This is when scheduling tools are most valuable and essential. Organising social media content in advance and planning what content to use is the first step but by utilising a scheduling tool so you don’t need to think about it (or panic on the day) will ease the pressure 100%. Of course there is more to social media than just posting and forgetting about it, but getting everything planned will take a weight off your mind and enable you to focus on other parts of the business.
What social media scheduling tool is best?
This comes down to preference, it’s like choosing a supermarket. You take a look at what it offers, find the best deal for you and try it out.
To name a few:
They all have their good and bad points and all have their own benefits, but let’s focus on Hootsuite as this is a popular one for small business owners and for a smaller budget.
Hootsuite
If you’re just starting out, Hootsuite offers a free version for up to 3 social profiles. This can give you a chance to try before you buy whilst giving you a feel for what it can do.
Streams
Once you’ve connected up your 3 profiles, i.e. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, you are able to see a “stream” for each profile. Just as if you were in the programme itself. For example, in Twitter you can see your home feed, inbox, tweets you’ve posted and any @mentions about you or your business. There is even a search function so you can keep up to date with your social listening, follow certain hashtags or accounts and staying current with industry news.
Calendar View
You have the ability to see a calendar view of all your content, whether that be weekly or monthly, which can be extremely helpful if you want to look back through posts that you’ve previously done. You can even use the calendar view to select specific days to post, planning as you go with regard to your posting.
Planner
This is where it all comes together, scheduling each crafted post to its individual profile and seeing a sea of posts ready to go out to the world. The pressure it will take away from you will be amazing!
What content to post on social media
Obviously you need content to fill your social media calendar with and this will vary depending on your type of business and values but the key to scheduling is to map out the content before you go to post.
In our recent Business Focus and Social Media Strategy workshop we walked through creating a strategy for your marketing content. Break down what topics and ideas you have:
- What is your audience interested in?
- What value can you offer?
- Who are you speaking to?
- Industry news/advice
- Motivational posts
There are so many content ideas within just the above that will get you thinking about how you can serve your audience, get creative!… making sure you give value in everything you post.
Analytics
If you venture into the paid version of Hootsuite you’ll gain access to analytics for your different profiles. This can help with targeting time, reaching the right people and seeing what’s working/and what’s not.
Customer Service
Having all your profiles in one place makes it much easier to stay on top of everything, including customer service. See messages all in one place when customers contact you or give positive or negative feedback. Jump straight into answering questions or replying to comments, and never fall behind in your customer service again!
When it comes to your social media marketing, organisation has got to be top priority. Plan, create, schedule >> reach your audience, grow your business.
However if it’s still too much to get your head around, we’d love to chat with you to create a plan of action that we can implement for you. Your success is our success. Get in touch today!
And if you’re happy to get started with your own social media marketing, download our free social media checklist – so you don’t forget the basics!
by Karen Petrauskas | Jun 27, 2019
What do you find is the hardest part of using social media for your business?
Most business owners will find that the hardest part of social media marketing is coming up with new content on a regular basis.
This could come down to not having the time to post, not knowing what to post or how to attract your audience with posts.
Lingering on these points alone will procrastinate your social media marketing and will slow you down. It could have an impact on other parts of your business too, if you spend too much time concentrating on this one aspect, or even if you get too stressed trying to figure it out, you run out of steam to carry on with anything else!
Creating content is not easy and it does come with practice. It’s a never ending cycle machine that needs to be monitored and fed, and also it needs some love. Finding the passion in your social media goes a long way to making it successful. It’s the same as anything, when you enjoy something, it works.
Should I just post ‘something’ to get content out there?
Many business owners fall into the trap of just posting ‘something’ so it looks like they’re on top of their social media. Anything is better than nothing, right?
Not necessarily. If you’re churning out content with no engagement or reactions, no new followers, no comments or shares – it’s not working. You are simply spending time creating content that has absolutely no impact on your business at all, wasting your precious time and causing you stress when you can’t get ‘something’ posted.
How do you know what to post on social media?
This is the part that you need to figure out – and this should only be a handful of things, preferably not the same content posted on every social platform out there. Once you’ve worked out what it is that works well, the rest will fall into place. It’s much better to do one or two things well and to see results from those actions, than to try and do lots of things not very well. One of the reasons we lose followers or people unsubscribe from our mailing list is that they are either bored with the content, or they feel that it’s not relevant or adding value to them. The key is in providing the value so the people are going to want to continue to listen and ask for more.
Therefore, to be able to post something well and make it relevant and with value, you must enjoy what you are posting about. When you don’t enjoy it, neither does your audience. The positive energy and the vibes that you give out from your content is an important factor in your social media marketing. You need to make your brand stand out from the crowd, make your content unique and by adding in your personality and spice you’ll give it an edge – the whole reason people choose to follow you rather than another business. 
What should I be posting about on social media?
When you’ve discovered what you’re enjoying and what makes you smile when you’re creating it (along with more and more people engaging with the content), that’s when you’ll know that you’ve found your sweet spot. Now it’s time to focus in on this and to make it the best it could be.
You’ve tried Facebook and managed to get a little engagement. Perhaps your friends and family still support your business page and like your posts, but the community isn’t growing. You post two or three times a day, spend ages creating beautiful images with captions. Share all the latest articles that you come across and even add in some of your blog posts… but still no engagement.
You jump over to Twitter and again share all the best news stories and retweet a few posts that you like the look of. Perhaps even follow a few more people in the hope that you get some love back. Tumbleweed… nothing.
So you head over to LinkedIn in a last attempt to get a little attention, perhaps you might get one like on a post and feel like you are still appreciated.
After all of this you are absolutely exhausted, completely overworked and have not achieved very much – sound right? So what have you done wrong?
Niche down and specialise
You’ve not done anything wrong per-se but you’re not giving your business the chance it needs to dig deep and find its perfect clients. After all your posting and content creation, you need to work out which is the right platform and what type of content fills you with joy; you’ll know when both are right when the content you create gives you a buzz every time you create it and you just love to talk about it and share.
This may mean that you’ve got to niche right down, you may even think that this will cut out half your audience and you’ll lose people, but that’s ok. As when you do specialise in a particular area and have a focus on your ideal clients, not a general overhaul of everyone you can imagine in a ‘just in case’ mindset, then you’ll start speaking directly to the people you want to reach.
Being too general can have a negative result even though it can seem the best thing to do to reach as many people as possible. As a young business, a startup trying to build a business, you need all the positivity you can get – and nailing down to a smaller specific audience will be beneficial and help with the success. When those ideal people start to see that you are sharing a solution to their specific problem or scratching their itch, they’ll start to follow you and engage in what you have to say. When this shift happens, you’ll discover the people that want and need your services and they’ll begin to share your content and recommend you to their communities too.
When you dig deep down, you may only find one social platform that suits your audience. For example if you are a B2B, LinkedIn might be a great place to connect with other business owners and to build relationships and to show your expertise. This will build trust and a familiarity of your brand. And when they realise that your services will give them value, they’ll come to you. No more hard-selling, no more pushing and knocking on doors. When you build a reputation for being an expert and offering value to those who need it, your business will grow organically.
What about the other social platforms?
We’re not saying that you have to dump every other social network that you’ve ever used and totally disappear from these sites. Customers are still searching for you on their favourite platform and having a presence is still a good idea. But why not spend 90% of your time focused on the platform that works for your business and 10% keeping up appearances on the rest? 
Using a scheduling or management tool for your social platforms will help with time management and give you a freedom to spend more time on the platform that you enjoy being on and communicating with the people that are more likely to become clients. If you realise that Pinterest or Instagram are your platforms of choice, we recommend Tailwind – you can try for free too!
Where do you go from here?
It’s all about using a working marketing strategy that you can work alongside and adapt as time goes on. Setting goals and targets, understanding your business objectives and knowing what you want to achieve. When you can answer these questions, finding the platform and creating the content will be a lot easier.
Don’t forget that we’re not all good at everything – we all have our own creativity inside but not everyone knows how to express that into social media marketing. If you’re looking for guidance and a creative spirit to come alongside your business and help you tighten the reins, we’d love to chat with you. Get in touch to start the conversation.
Why not start off with our social media checklist, giving you an idea of what you can achieve on a daily, weekly and monthly basis before you get started? Organisation is a good habit to get into! Best thing is, it’s free! Download now…
by Karen Petrauskas | Mar 15, 2019
As a brand we hope that you are using social media in some form or another, for those that are still to discover a social media presence – we need to talk!
But for many brands, social media is the best form of marketing and advertising that their company can use in order to gain the attention of their audience.
Building a social media presence will not create a magical income stream straight away and as with anything it needs to be built upon and content carefully crafted and planned out. Businesses that hope for miracles when they post sporadically often give up at the first hurdle when they don’t see results straight away. However, building a marketing strategy that can be followed in order to achieve certain goals and increase sales, raise brand awareness and build a solid foundation for customers to get engaged with WILL get a business noticed.
As a business, you need structure and a plan – you need a marketing strategy.
Start with a SMART marketing goal
Decide what’s important to you, what goals you want to achieve and then how you’re going to achieve them.
An example of a good SMART goal for social media marketing would be something like “Increase our Pinterest response rate by 50% by the end of the first quarter.”
Specific: “We’ve specifically identified the social channel (Pinterest) and a metric (response rate).”
Measurable: “The response rate can be measured from Pinterest for Business analytics dashboard.”
Achievable: “It’s a realistic goal that with focus and creativity, can be achieved.”
Relevant: “Our goal will have an impact on our overall social media presence, making it very relevant.”
Time-bound: “The goal has to be met by the end of the first quarter.”
Now, Pinterest as an example is a very positive social channel that when used correctly can drive traffic to a website in the hundreds! We love Pinterest but choosing a platform that works in line with your business is essential for the strategy to work and be productive.
By making SMART goals for each step will give it purpose and a relevancy, aligning it with your overall core values. Does your goal fit with your business plan? Does it reach out to the audiences that you want to speak to?
Grow your audience
Now you’ve got the strategy and plan on what you want to achieve, it’s time to put that into practice and grow your audience using social media.
We may have chosen Pinterest as our example, but many brands will start off in Facebook as their chosen platform of choice, so thinking about using Facebook, what can you do to see results? The main point if anything to take away today, is that you need to ‘show up’ every single day and you need to show your audience that you actually care about them. Use your business page, create a members groups, reach out to individuals through your personal profile – as long as it’s in line with your SMART goals, go for it!
By using great content, experience, expert knowledge and advice all coupled together, it will help to build your audience. And you want to be right in front of them, to be there when they need you and ready to answer and engage at the most crucial times.
Strategy comes from vision
The idea behind putting a marketing strategy in place is so that you can achieve the goals that you set out to achieve when you started your business, these goals come from visions and dreams that you may have had for many years. Lay out all your visions, decipher your dreams into segments and create a brainstorm of everything that is important to you. You’ll be surprised at everything that comes out from a simple exercise like this! Start with one point, one idea and the rest will flow.
What lifestyle do you want to be living? Will the achievement of your dreams have an impact on your lifestyle? What financial goals do you want to achieve? Be clear on all that you dream of – it will make it so much easier to create a plan if you know what you want from it.
Ensure that all your plans align with your core values and your personal vision.
Pricing
Some people lack the confidence that they are worth what they want to charge in their business. They see the experts charging high ticket prices but when it comes to their own self-belief, can often hit barriers that do not allow them to charge their worth.
Remember that you are an expert in your niche – that’s why you’re doing what you’re doing.
From your goals you will already be aware of what you need to achieve financially throughout the year. This figure then needs to be broken down in segments of the services that you offer.
How many XX services do you need to sell to achieve £XX’s? You can have different levels of pricing / packages depending on who you work with and the level of service or support you offer but create a pricing structure that works with your goals.
You may not think that this will directly grow your business, but by knowing what you need to charge and sticking to those prices, you will gain confidence and assurance in what you are doing. When someone asks you “How much do you charge for XX?”, you will be able to answer straight back with a price, rather than lacking in confidence to quote the price you know it should be. Confidence shines through in all areas of your business and being clear on pricing is a great place to start.
Speak directly to your audience
Do you know that what you’re offering is hitting the pain points of your audience? Is it actually going to serve a purpose and create solutions? That needs to be a deciding factor on how you market your business and which direction you take it.
Everyone needs something, and researching your product or services will determine the people that are looking for you – the people that you need to reach.
Using a simple keyword tool will help you determine what your audience is searching for. When you understand specifics, then you speak directly to them and relieve their pain.
Gain customer feedback – are you approaching your idea from the right angle? Are you dealing with a problem that is real?
Even tapping into your competitors social feeds can give you insight into what works and what people are seeking.
For example, someone may be searching the internet for ways to keep up to date with social media planning. Now for us here we could dive straight into connecting with the people who are looking for this, build a relationship with them and then offer our social media planner as a solution.
People won’t buy from the first introduction but by creating a relationship with them and giving them a reason to trust you and your brand, it becomes a whole different story. Recommendations and word of mouth advertising is valuable and still extremely powerful. Learn to love and nurture your audience and provide value in every conversation and people will learn to love you back, and in turn recommend your services.
Positioning
One of the most important aspects of your marketing is the positioning of your brand in the market. It needs to be built into the marketing strategy not used as an add on at the end. So how do you position yourself in a busy and competitive online society?
Focus on one or two things – not multiples. It’s better to do one thing well and be successful than try to do everything and do them badly.
We’ve all heard this before but it’s true in marketing also. It’s true when it comes to your social media marketing, it’s true in your services, it’s true for everything that your business offers. Focus on what you can do well and then position yourself in the market as an expert in that niche.
Be more user friendly. A customer wants a good journey when they interact with your brand and for everything to be one click away. Searching for a button to be able to contact you, or not knowing how to find your social channels, or when they do, not gaining a response… it’s all comes down to a customer’s experience and how easy it is to do business with you. Make this a pleasant experience and one that’s easy to travel down and you’ll find more people will engage. Make everything clear and transparent, even if it looks over simplified to you. Not everyone knows the business as well as you and it’s better to spell everything out in plain sight and with clickable actions for each part of the journey.
At the end of the day, you have to love what you’re doing. You have to be able to inspire yourself to do well and to succeed. When you have a passion inside of you that just wants to see results, all the above will fall into place.
If you’re new to business and have not put a marketing strategy together before, we’re here to help and your success is our success! We want to see you grow your small business online, we want to help you implement strategies and tactics to see results.
Use our contact form to get in touch and let’s see your business booming this year!
You can also connect with us on our Facebook Page and get to know us a little better too – we hope that your customer experience with KJP Creative is a good one!
Look forward to hearing from you.
Grab your copy of our 2020 social media awareness days calendar – and get organised with your social media marketing…
by Karen Petrauskas | Jan 23, 2019
We’re well into January now, a new year and are you ready to grab it by the horns and get stuck into goals and targets for the year ahead?
There are many things that go through your mind as the year begins but planning and getting organised is key to ensuring that your year goes to plan. What do you need to do to get your business headed in the right direction and geared towards your core values, reaching the audience that have grown to love and adding value every step of the way?
Get started with the basics and make sure that your online presence is how it should be right from the outset. When people see you online, this is often the first impression they get of your business, of your brand, and what they see will have an impact on their first impression of you. Will they like what they see? Will they be able to relate to you? Are you offering value or solutions to their questions? Are you easily contactable or easy to find on social media?
What can you do to ensure that your online presence is ready?
Website content
Make sure that your website content is the very best that it can be. This is your shopfront and the place where people come when they want to purchase your services. If you walked into a shop and found spelling mistakes on signposts or offers that didn’t match what being shouted about, or the branding was wrong, you wouldn’t trust them. The same goes for your website. Everything that is on your site needs to shout ‘your brand’, it needs to speak your voice and portray the message that you speak about on your social channels. Try not to give mixed signals or conflicting advice.
Take a step back from your website and visit it as if you were a customer. Do you like what you see? Does it make sense? Do you have good SEO in there? If you search for your business name in Google, what appears? Would you trust and buy from your site?
Check all your copy, check grammar and spelling. Ask a friend to check also if it gives you peace of mind, a second pair of eyes is always a great idea!
Social media channels
Social media marketing is here to stay – fact. It’s not going anywhere and it’s only going to grow moving forward. A business needs to be using social media to market their business. By all means use other forms of advertising too if you are confident that the ROI is worth it, but social media needs to be your first choice.
Have you got social channels in place? Are you using them? Do you have a strategy in place to ensure that it’s all reaching towards goals and targets?
Make sure that all your social channels are branded and are linked to your website – make the customer journey as easy as possible to jump from one place to another. Customers are looking for answers and instant fixes – can they get that from your channels?
Also, the message that comes across from your social channels needs to be inviting and informative and consistent with the content on your website. If you’ve got offers coming up on your website – share them on social! Tell a story with your social channels, use them to show behind the scenes of your business and how everything comes together. Understand your customers and what they are looking for – and give them value on your social media.
Blog for business
If you don’t already have a blog on your website, now is the time to start. People are hungry for information. There is an influx of content available online and yes this does cause competition but it’s a way to really engage and reach your audience in a way that’s relevant to their needs. This is a chance to stand out from the crowd and offer more than your competitors. It’s the easiest way to keep fresh content flowing from your website and a way for search engines to know that you’re active and engaging. Be sure to incorporate SEO keywords into your content and posts. Do your own research: If you were searching for a particular topic, what keywords would you search for on Google? Use these keywords in your blog post and add them to titles and tags.
Marketing In Your Car – Listen Now!
You may not be great at writing, and as with anything, writing comes with practice. You may even find you enjoy it after a while! Set time aside on a weekly basis to write. In this new year, schedule time in your calendar specifically for this. It’s often a task that gets put on the back burner but it is so important to raise brand awareness and great for your business.
You can even outsource this task if you think it’s too much for you to commit to, just to ensure that it gets done.
Define goals
As you start the year, you may have in your mind where you want your business to go but putting everything down into a business / marketing plan that you can action and measure results against will benefit you much more. This enables you to set goals that you know you have complete. This helps you when you hit a brick wall and are stuck on where to go next. It helps you stick to schedule and complete tasks that may otherwise be forgotten. Your marketing strategy needs to be a big part of this. Clearly mapping out a strategy and plan on where you want your business to be this time next year and how you’re going to achieve that within your marketing will give you direction and clarity. Plans can be adapted along the journey and goals tweaked or extended but direction is key. Schedule goal updates on a quarterly basis to align all that’s taken place and what’s next. Plan and map out your social media marketing along with any paid advertising or content creation that needs to take place.
If you need help with social media management, just ask!
Optimise your customer experience
The journey that your customer goes on when they’re interacting with your business needs to be smooth, exciting and helpful for them. They need to feel their worth and know that they’re getting value from you. If they feel they’re just another number, they’ll go elsewhere. Take time to create great customer service plans and procedures should you need them. This year make it about creating outstanding customer service and smart solutions that drive business values. Provide reliability being on hand to customer when they need to, responding to all enquiries in a timely manner. Social media is a great tool for this and gives instant access to any potential customer – make your impression count.
Build a community
When your brand is known, you’ll gain trust and loyalty. You can build an online community with your customers by engaging and encouraging them on a regular basis. Ensure that you’ve got a sign-up list on your website or social channels, so you have an email address to be able to get in touch with them. This is so important for growing your business, providing snippets of value at the simple drop of an email. Email marketing will grow your business – is that what you’re looking in 2019? Great content speaks volumes. It’s not just what they can see from your website or social, it’s about adding a little extra after they’ve experienced that.
Build a Facebook group where you can provide even more content and value than you already offer from your Facebook Page. This can be in the form of a closed group where people can come and ask questions that they may not want to do publicly, it can be a place where you can closer with your customers, engaging with them on a higher level providing expert knowledge and advice – all of which will set you apart from competition. If people like what they see and hear, they will recommend your business, and you’ll experience business growth.
This year, build community into your marketing plan and make it a goal to grow your business through community.
Stay up to date
Trends and marketing tactics develop and grow year on year. It’s important to stay up to date and keep in line with what is happening online. What was working 2 or 3 years ago may not be the best plan of action for 2019. It’s even more important for small businesses to stay up to date so they can stay in line with larger businesses who have more resources. Small businesses can grow too! And 2019 is your year to grow. Make sure you research. Perform social listening. Set yourself up for Google alerts. Listen to podcasts. Watch the trends on Twitter. Read, read, read. There is so much you can do to learn and understand what’s going in the digital world around us. Tap into this and use it with your targets for the year. Adapt your marketing strategies as trends change, social channels appear and tactics shift.
What are you going to this year to make your business grow and stand out from the crowd? Are you going to make 2019 your year for success and business growth? You may have been holding back in years’ past, you may have been focusing on other things, on growing yourself and ensuring that your mindset is right, you may have other commitments that are surrounding you.
Whatever situation you find yourself in, it’s time work out what you want for your business, to set your goals for how to achieve them and to give 100% to your business plan. Only you have the power to make it happen. Only you have the motivation to make the shift and put in the effort. If you’re ready to see results, you’re ready to stand up and been seen.
If you’re looking for help in social media marketing for the new year, we’d love to chat with you. Feel free to get in touch and let’s start a conversation.
You can also download our FREE social media awareness days calendar – to get you organised throughout 2020. Enjoy!
by Karen Petrauskas | Oct 31, 2018
If you’re a small business, you probably have a small marketing department, (if it’s not just you on your own trying to fill all the roles yourself) and it can be rather confusing or overwhelming at times. Not only does it require time and effort, but it can be frustrating if you’re not seeing results or growing your online presence.
Even though it can be a frustrating, it is a necessity in today’s digital world and the need for your business to be out there and seen is ever more important.
Many businesses are seeing a shift away from the conventional way of marketing and offline material and heading towards a variety of online marketing means. This gives way to much competition and the need to promote your brand as best as you can. Social media is the main marketing tool for most businesses and brands are seeing great results from well-managed marketing strategies and plans.
If you’re a small business trying to catch up with the larger organisations, you’re not alone and there are many things you can do to give your online marketing the best outcome possible, if you follow the best tips of how to get going on social media.
Build a commendable reputation
This isn’t as difficult as it sounds. Learning to connect with the RIGHT people will help your business get noticed in a better light, rather than just connecting with anyone for the sake of it. This starts with brand awareness. And this is best done by creating an online presence that represents your whole brand and who you are both online and offline. This powers down from every little thing you use to market your business, from your logo and tagline to your visuals, social media posts, blog posts and website. The design and feel must match your persona and core values.
If you’re not good at the design side for your business, don’t be afraid to outsource this to someone that it. Having a logo designed professionally or your social media profile started with professionalism will set the standard of what your brand stands for and that you mean business.
Be where your audience is
When we mention that you need to connect with the RIGHT people, that means to be where your audience is, and to focus on their needs and not a generalised version. Who are your ideal clients? Which social platform can they be found mostly on and can you reach out to them? What solutions are they looking for?
If you generalise in your marketing, you’ll find things very wishy-washy and hard to build a solid business. If you focus down and discover your niche and the audience within that, even though the amount of people you are reaching is probably a smaller percentage, they will be more dedicated to your cause and open to what you have to say.
Don’t spread too thin
The worst thing you can do when running a small business (or big one, in fact!) is to spread yourself too thin. Everything has its place and everything has its priority. Marketing should be high in those priorities but there are other things too that have a place in the to-do list. Therefore working out the best place to spend your time on social media or online that will benefit your business, is where you need to market. It can come with some trial and error and yes that can take a bit of time, but establishing the best place for social media marketing rather than splashing posts all over the place that have no relevance will be better in the long run.
You could put the same post up across all your social channels and fill a slot for that day, but does that speak to your audience or does it show laziness and not much thought process? Of course if it’s something that is relevant for all channels then that is fine, but be sure to tweak your posts to engage with the audience on that platform, along with creating images that fit correctly. It looks unprofessional for the same text and image size to be slapped on all platforms.
We suggest thinking about brand awareness, relationship building / networking, value, sales. Which social platform gives you better opportunity to reach your target audience in these categories? This may be Facebook, it may be Instagram, it may be LinkedIn – or it could be a combination of a couple of social channels. But if you’re managing this yourself, try not to spread yourself too thin by doing all of them at once. Not only will you burnout, your marketing efforts will be less effective and you’ll miss out on potential opportunities trying to keep up with it all. Establish a solid presence on one platform, then move up to two if you feel you need to, and gradually build from there. If you’re listening to your audience correctly, you’ll know where they are and where you need to be focusing your marketing.
Follow your plan
As with anything, it’s good to start with a plan – and to stick to it! When you started your business, (hopefully) you put together a business strategy/plan to build your targets and objectives into. This is the same for your marketing. You need a social media marketing strategy to keep focused and on track to ensure that you’re meeting goals and heading in the right direction. When you fall away from plans, you lose sight of what you’re actually doing. It can be very easy to digress or go off on a tangent, but if you have a marketing plan to bring you back in line, you’ll be ok!
Another reason for following a plan is that you are able to physically see when something does not work. This is a good thing! It can help you be more productive and efficient by allowing you to tailor your social strategy to what does work! All your ideas and thought can go into the brainstorming part of the plan and be incorporated as the plan progresses. Always be open to trying something new, if you don’t take risks, you’ll find yourself in the same place years down the line.
Be engaging – get social
Social media is all about being social and engaging with your audience. You need to really relate and get to the heart of what your followers are looking for and speak their language! Understand them with as much research as possible and start engaging with them in the places that they love and in the way that they communicate. This is where your ideal social platform comes into play – you need to be engaging where your audience is.
Facebook’s algorithm likes engagement. If you create a post and no one engages, it will not push it onto other people news feeds. However, if you create something that is really engaging and people start to comment or interact, Facebook will see this as a ‘good’ post and will show it to more people’s news feeds. Facebook favours friends over pages and businesses, so it can be worth asking your friends to like your posts to get some interaction started.
The key is to ask questions or create a post that engages the user and for them to want to comment or share. An eye-catching image with a question in the status above can grab the attention of your audience and boost your marketing efforts.
Be appreciative
Many large businesses can get carried away with the sales that they actually forget to thank people and be personable. This is your chance to stand out from the crows and appreciate everyone that engages. Even if you just like their comments or give a quick reply, they are aware that you’ve taken the time to read what they have written and it makes them feel appreciated.
Social media is not all about selling. In fact selling should only be about 20% of your content, the rest should be made up of other types of content to add value to your audience.
If people see ‘sell, sell, sell’, they are going to get bored very quickly. They will know that you’re not really interested in what they want, just about what you want to get. Therefore use your social channels to give value, as we mentioned before, and build relationships with the followers you have. They will notice!
Have a clear goal
The most important aspect to your online marketing as a small business owner, is to ensure you have a clear goal in mind. Having a goal gives you direction. Direction gives you a path. And following that path allows you to reach success.
However you manage your business is down to personal preference but always have your goals in mind in everything that you do.
Here at KJP Creative we work with small and medium sized businesses to provide online marketing services in the form of ‘virtual assistance’. You don’t need to hire a marketing assistant to be in the office with you throughout the week – just pay for the service you need. By working with specialists in social media, you can have peace of mind that you’re in good hands and keeping up with latest trends and requirements. Give your business a boost and get serious about your social media marketing – it’s not an add-on to your business, it is the future of your business.
If you’d like to talk about your marketing strategy or need advice on how to manage as a small business, please get in touch, we’d love to chat with you.
