by Karen Petrauskas | Jan 13, 2020
Another year gives new opportunities to reach new goals, set new targets and create even more success in your business than you ever have imagined before.
It’s the perfect time to revisit your business plan and the marketing strategy that you have been following over the past 12 months and to see what new strategies you can put into place for the next 12 months ahead.
If you take a step back and think about where you were this time last year, how much have you progressed or achieved in those 12 months? You may even surprise yourself, not realising that you completed so much, evaluating can be a great process to go through in order to set new goals and achieve even more in a given timeframe.
Start with business goals and objectives
If you have one long term objective for your business, what would that be? Now break that down into achievable goals that you can work towards in smaller bite-sized periods.
- What steps do you need to make in order to reach each goal?
- How can marketing help you get there?
SMART goals
The most essential ingredient in making sure your marketing will have a positive effect in your business goals and objectives is to ensure that you are making your goals SMART.
- SPECIFIC – Focus on one clearly defined metric. Set concise goals that sum up what you want to achieve, how you will get there and by when.
- MEASURABLE – Have a way to measure the outcome of your actions.
- ACHIEVABLE – Make the goal achievable, attainable and realistic.
- RELEVANT – Ensure the goal is going to benefit your business, relevant to your overall plan.
- TIME-BOUND – Set a time that the goal should be achieved by, in line with business objectives.
When you’re setting out your marketing goals, filter them through the SMART process and direct them through each of the key points in order to create a goal that is in line with your business’s overall plan, it has benefit and purpose, it can be measured and it will maximise the impact when it is achieved. The more specific you are with your goals and how you’re going to action them, the bigger the impact will be when you get there.
When we break down each goal and step, we can give it proper recognition and attention. Our marketing efforts can then be broken down even further to match our goals and ensure we give each point its own marketing funnel.
Make social media marketing fun!
The clue is in the name “social”. Your online marketing should be enjoyable, not a chore, and play a part in showcasing and allowing potential customers to discover who you are, along with getting to know more about you.
- What do you love about your business? Shout about it!
- What do you want customers to know about you? Share it!
When you put real life emotion and authenticity into your voice, people get to know the person behind the brand, giving them opportunity to love what you’re about – eventually getting into your sales/lead funnel that will help you grow your business.
Make social media engaging
When you’re having fun and sharing what’s important to you and the business, entice people to engage with your content. And this often needs to be spelled out – they don’t necessarily know to take action, unless you ask them to.
Ask them to click through to your website, to drop a comment, to give feedback, to give opinion. People are more likely to engage when they’re invited to do so. And think about what you want them to do when they do engage, where do you want them to end up and what expectation do you have from them seeing your post?
Social media is all about the engagement. You could have 100 likes on a Facebook post just because an image looks pretty but are they actually engaging with the message you’re giving and are they ready to take action from that piece of content? How can you change the way you say something or the look / feel of your content to catch their attention for the better, and reach your ‘ideal’ audience?
Create a social media strategy
In everything you do or produce within your marketing remit, there has to be a plan or strategy behind it. A marketing strategy will help you pull everything together, give you direction and clarity on who you’re targeting, who you want to reach, why you’re doing it and how you’re going to perform the actions. A strategy guides and keeps you on track and gives you the opportunity to measure results, whether successful or not and steers the path to a better result by a given time frame.
The idea behind a strategy means that you get to know, understand, love and add value to your audience. It means that you’re not wasting time doing something that has no goodness for your business but gives you the steppingstones to really dig deep into your audience, your target market and can give them exactly what they are looking for. You can provide solutions to their pain points and provide value into their situations, even when they don’t know they need it!
So, if you’re looking to start this year with a plan, purpose and a mission, how are you going to get there? Can you put strategy into your social media marketing and give this year the opportunity to take you to new heights? Yes! We love to help you get there. Contact us and let’s talk about making this year, YOUR year for business success.
And as a free gift to you, we’d like to offer our free downloadable social media checklist, just in case you’re happy to go it alone. We’d rather give you a little step up than send you away with not knowing where to get started. Enjoy 😊
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 | May 18, 2019
What are the benefits of using social media for business? What impact can it have on your brand and is it worth the effort long term?
These may be questions that you ask yourself over and over again, but consider this – there are 2.77 billion social media users around the globe, that’s not something to take lightly. The people on social media are engaging with brands and businesses, they are following celebrities or influencers and they are making their purchase decisions right from the social platforms.
If your business is not on social media, you could be missing out on huge potential and the chance to engage and build relationships with many customers in an extremely cost-efficient way.
Let’s take a look at the benefits to using social media for business.
1) Brand Awareness
We all want to see our brand grow and become established. As a business owner you need to reach your customers where they are and to be where they hang out. With the large global number of people on social media, your audience is going to be on there somewhere. The more you post, the more active you are, the more times you push your business out into the social media world – the more chance there is of people seeing and hearing about you. When someone discovers and likes your brand, they will tell others about you, and the awareness and journey of your business begins.
2) Become a Thought Leader
Whatever niche you are in, there are people searching the web for answers. The more you assert yourself and provide valuable content, the more content there will be available to be found by people looking for solutions. Social media allows your brand to grow and become established within an industry niche. It’s a way to build trust and relationships, it’s a way to engage with consumers and for them to know that you’re a ‘go to’ place for information.
If you’re looking to establish your brand in this way, LinkedIn is a great place to start. Network with people relevant to your industry. Provide answers in comments that can solve issues or problems. Give people a reason to trust and like you and you’ll soon become recognised as a thought leader if you are consistent and reliable in your approach.
3) Increase website traffic
When you create killer content, you want it to be seen by as many people as possible, otherwise what’s the point, right? Once you’ve created your content, you can use your social channels to promote it. Blog post, article, press release, offer, new team member – whatever it is that you want to shout about on your website, you can use social media to do it more effectively.
Not only do you need to create the killer content on your website, you need to write just as well on your social channels in order for people to want to click through to your site. And once they’re there, you want people to stay there for a little while. Although the incoming links and shares from your social accounts aren’t as great as authentic links from high-quality sites, they are still important for SEO purposes and help to rank your site on the search engines. And you want to rank high to be found!
The best way to think about using the two platforms together is by using both your website and your social media accounts to direct traffic from one to the other. Great content on website, promote it on social media. Great post on social media will drive a consumer to your website.
4) Generate and increase leads
What’s the point of getting a consumer to click from social media through to your website? The ultimate goal is usually to gain sales. The more leads (people) you have that discover your site, the more chance of them being interested in what you have to say along with liking your brand. If they like your brand, there is a higher chance of them purchasing from you.
Not only thinking about the sales aspect of your business though, the exercise of generating leads is extremely important. It creates a database of people that are interested in your brand. It’s a resource that you can tap into when you need to. Most of the social media networks provide paid advertising ways of providing lead generation – and always worth a try if you have the budget to do so.
5) Faster and easier communication
Communicating via social media is great for responding to customers in a quicker and more effective manner. People are after ‘instant’ and that applies to questions they may have about your brand, about your product, or anything… if they can’t get an answer, it’s just as easy for them to go to the next business on the list. Many businesses miss out on opportunities when they either do not have a social media presence, or they have it and are not using it effectively.
Now it’s even easier to contact a business, file a complaint or provide a positive feedback experience. As a business you have a responsibility to be where your audience is and communicating with them on a level which they feel comfortable on.
6) Great customer service experience
As with the above point, having a faster and easier communication line going, customers can have a better journey with your business. The user experience is an important factor to get right. Lose the customer on the first hurdle and it could be hard to get them back.
By using social media for business, you are providing a way for them to communicate with you at any step of their journey with you. When they first hear about you, when they want to ask about your services, or if they have something to discuss – providing great customer service goes a long way. And if a person is happy with your services, they are more likely to recommend you to a friend. Loyalty and trust are built on relationship, use your social media as your customer service help desk.
7) Create engagement
Social media allows you to engage directly with your customers or followers. It’s a safe place for them to interact with your brand and to provide a two-way street between you and them. Unlike offline communications where often it can be one-sided, social media provides a way to have a dialogue or to engagement with you as a business.
This allows them to get to know you, what your business is about and if you can provide them with value. If they engage and interact, if they share your posts or like and respond to comments, you’re creating people who respect your brand. The more engagement that happens, the more changes there are of building on that relationship and in turn, building your business.
8) Learn about your customers
The more a person engages with you, the more information you can obtain about them. Social media generates a lot of information about a person, the longer they use the channels and the more they interact with posts and brands.
By utilising the analytics functions on all the platforms, you can create a picture of your audience and angle your content directly towards what they are looking for. If you tailor your content to what the audience wants, you’re providing them with value. When a customer sees value, they start to trust you.
Encourage your followers to engage in your posts, ask them questions to gain responses and insight, learn more and more about their needs – and then use the data to create a perfect environment for them to take a step forward if they want to.
9) Keep on top of competition
You’re not the only brand out there doing what you do! Even if you think you are, there’s probably more competition than you realise. Social media gives great opportunity to keep an eye on the competition and to see what they are doing. If you can see that what they are doing works, use their ideas. Note, we didn’t say ‘copy’ their ideas! But if something has been tried and tested and it works, there’s no reason to reinvent the wheel.
It’s also good to know what people are saying about your competition. If you find someone complaining about a service they have receive or a product they have bought, there is your opportunity to swoop in and let them know that you’re there to help.
Social listening is great for hearing about new product launches and offers and generally anything that relates to your brand. If you can stay up to date with the competition, you can stay ahead of the game.
10) Tell your brand story
Using social media is perfect to tell about your brand’s story or journey. It’s a place where you can be completely open and honest, share the heart of your business and its core values and mission and be transparent to your audience.
Every business has a story. Every brand has a journey. Social media gives you a platform to share that story and to make your brand unique and stand out from the crowd above all the other competition that is out there.
You can use different social platforms to tell the story, you can use one form of medium to tell the lot, but be consistent in whatever you choose and allow you potential customers to get to know and love who you are and what you stand for.
You can also share the stories of people who buy your products or services, again building on brand awareness, customer service and engagement to create a fuller picture of what your business is about. 
People love a story, what’s your story?
KJP Creative is an online marketing agency, specialising in social media management and there to help business of all sizes grow their online presence. If you’re looking for guidance in creating a social media strategy for your business or help managing your social media, we’d love to speak with you. Get in touch and let’s talk!
You can also download our social media checklist to ensure you don’t miss the basics when it comes to your social media marketing. A daily, weekly and monthly checklist to help you grow your business using social media.
Did you enjoy this post? Please comment below 👇
by Karen Petrauskas | Nov 20, 2018
Social media video marketing can benefit your business – did you know that? It’s an essential part of any online marketing plan in today’s society.
There is no doubt that video plays a huge part in social media marketing at the moment. This is part of a long-term content marketing strategy and is what is driving the online world today.
More and more people are utilising video marketing and incorporating it into their online marketing strategies, with great success. Video is being used to connect with a target audiences whilst building relationships and increasing engagement. It’s much easier to achieve this through video than it has been through traditional ways of marketing.
People are hungry for video, which makes it the perfect medium to speak to an audience who are already looking for content.
Video marketing is available everywhere, social media platforms are embracing video more than ever before and it can be discovered wherever you look. Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and of course YouTube. Video is in demand and a business needs to get on board if they want their online marketing to catch the wave.
Social media needs to be incorporated into a wider marketing strategy to grow a business. What goals are businesses looking for in their marketing? What does a business hope to get out of their social media efforts? Most goals or targets can be met through video in these 3 ways:
Engagement
Posts and articles that encourage engagement and that achieve this, are more likely to be seen and shared by other people who have similar interests. These posts spread and become viral because people are engaging.
Video allows a follower to feel part of what is happening, to see more than just an image and become part of the story. A video can be interactive and help brands connect with a different variety of audiences.
Brand awareness
A video will make a follower sit up and notice a brand. Small businesses now have an opportunity to compete with larger organisations by getting their name, face, brand out there and noticed by more and more people. Brand awareness grows a business. When people know who a business is, they will start to engage and relate to it. If someone likes what they see, they are more likely to share and recommend.
Brand awareness can be hard to measure when it comes to marketing goals but the grow of a business will help determine this fact. Social listening can be a great tool when it comes to recognising results from brand awareness to see the impact it is making.
Increase website traffic
An ultimate goal with many social media plans is to increase web traffic. To divert a potential customer away from social media and onto their website. What better way of jumping on board with video marketing and showcasing what’s behind a business and why a follower should purchase from them. Video can be the bridge between social and website for any brand. People may not be looking for specific products or services in their search engines, however by capturing attention on social media allows the watcher to be influenced by what a brand has to say and why they may need a certain product. Sales tactics can be clever and extremely effective when performed correctly, video content is no different and can be added to the mix.
How can a business use video marketing effectively?
Make the first 10 seconds count
If the beginning of a video is not engaging or eye-catching, a follower will switch off. There is plenty of video content out there, skipping one video makes no difference to people. However, if a video grasps a follower in those first split seconds, there is more chance of them finishing the video. Presentation counts. Sound counts. Visual counts. How can you catch the eye of the watcher?
Choose the right type of video
According to research, there are 4 types of video:
- Explainers
- How-tos
- Product Demos
- Testimonials
You don’t need to focus on just one of these but for each purpose of using video marketing, determine which type of video would be best to achieve your goals.
Choose the right time to broadcast video
If you’ve gone to trouble of creating a video, you want to do your best to make your audience see it! Therefore, make sure you have already worked out what times of day your audience engage more. Each industry is different and you’ll need to spend some time looking at the analytics behind your social media platforms, but for each channel, there will be an ideal time of day to post. You want to be publishing at the peak time of day when your audience are online and being interactive.
Customer Service
Once a follower has started to make contact or engage with a business, it’s vital to retain that communication and follow it through. That first observation of the video is the start of a whole new customer journey – it needs to be given priority. By providing great customer service, a potential customer will be more inclined to come back for more.
The overall goal of your video marketing can come down to 4 main points:
- Catch the attention of your target audience
- Connect with them using valuable content
- Pitch them a relevant offer by the end
- Convert them into a lead or sale
Are you ready to drive your business forward and to see successful results? Be creative and get videoing!
Need help establishing a social media strategy for your business? Get in touch, we can help. 
by Karen Petrauskas | Nov 9, 2018
Looking for more followers on Pinterest? Are you wanting to get discovered by the many thousands of people are using Pinterest every day to search for their next product buy?
Yes? Read on.
What are the benefits of Pinterest?
Pinterest can:
- Rapidly grow your website traffic
- Increase email subscribers, through increased traffic
- Provide free marketing for your business
- Build credibility and authority
- Influence potential buyers
The more followers you have on Pinterest, the more repins, likes and engagement you will get, boosting your brand awareness which will help drive traffic to your website.
Gaining likes, comments and impressions builds engagement rates, which gives you opportunity to build relationships and provide great customer service. A win win situation!
In a recent post we looked at how to use Pinterest for business, now you’re using Pinterst, it’s time to get more followers. Here’s our top 9 tips to get you started…
Add Pinterest to your website
An important first step is to add the Pinterest button to your website as this will divert website visitors to your Pinterest page, which attracts followers. If you have a high volume of traffic on your website, this can be extremely effective.
You can add the button throughout your website, it doesn’t have to just be in one place. You can achieve this easily by using the Pinterest widget builder function. These widgets can be weaved throughout your site to make it easy for visitors to get to your Pinterest page.
Post original content
Did you realise that 80% of posts on Pinterest are repins? This means that posting eye-catching original content is a great way to stand out. Create your own branded posts that are attractive to your audience and will gain engagement due to the fact that they are exactly what the users are looking for. Infographics are a great way to create this, they stand out and are unique to your brand.
If you don’t think you’d be able to create an infographic for Pinterest, Canva is a great place to start, they have some great templates ready for you to use.
Follow other people
Another way to get noticed is to follow other people. This is a simple fact, the more people you follow, the more people will follow you back. Just a small number of followers can make a huge different to the engagement on your posts – try it, it works!
As we mentioned in a previous post, you can look at your domain on Pinterest to find people who might be interested in following you. And then you can r
eplace the URL with competitors’ and follow users who are following their boards!
https://www.pinterest.co.uk/source/YOURDOMAIN.com/
When you discover a pin that fits with your brand and is a popular / viral pin, look to see who has already posted it and the followers associated with them.
Share – a lot!
The more you share, the more your posts have a chance of being seen. If you post one post, it may gain attraction. If you post thirty posts, they stand a much better chance of being seen. Those pins will bring people back to your page where they can see your business details below the pin.
Share other people’s posts. When you share a lot of pins, Pinterest will suggest people for you to follow who share similar posts to you. This is your chance to find high-engaging posts. Share these posts as they are already gaining engagement, by adding your name to the list, you gain a chance for people to be drawn back to your page or your boards, and often then will follow you if they like what they see.
You need a lot of content when it comes to Pinterest and it’s near-on impossible to keep up to date with it by manually posting on a daily basis. So why not use a scheduling tool! But there’s a difference between a scheduling tool and Tailwind! Tailwind is THE tool to increase your engagement, raise your profile and get people to share your content. The more shares you have, the more followers you’ll gain and the more chance you’ll have of traffic directing to your website = increased sales.
Use hashtags
You’re aware of keywords in your pin and board description but are you using hashtags as well? The use of hashtags is important as it will help you reach out to a bigger audience. The hashtags you use will appear in searches, allowing your content to get in front of your ideal audience.
Comment on pins
When you find posts that have high engagement, a great tip is to comment on them. Don’t just go for two word comments like “great post”, offer something that is of value which will make people want to click your profile to see more about you.
Tip: Don’t over comment, as you may get classed as a spammer, so worth doing this a couple of times a day; little but regular.
Join collaborative boards
You can collaborate with other people and popular audiences by getting involved with group boards that have a large number of following. This will allow other members of the boards to view your pins too. You will need to be invited to join a group board, so use your social skills to build a little rapport with the owner of the groups and once that has been established, ask to join.
Revive older pins
Often we get so focused on creating new pins that our old content gets forgotten. It’s vital to keep content alive and recycled on Pinterest.
How can you revive older pins?
Try re-pinning them to group boards or even your own boards. Especially if you have a lot of content on your boards, re-pinning them will bring that back to the forefront.
Another way is to create many pin for the same post.
Always keep putting your best content in front of people, you never know when your pins are going to go viral – so the more you put out there, the more chance you have of getting noticed and increasing your followers.
Pin for your target audience
This goes with any social media channel and is no different for Pinterest. Create your pins with your audience in mind. Try not to go off on a tangent, you can create a personal account for that! Or you could create secret boards, which is a great way to keep hold of all the pins you like or want to take note of, but your followers will not see them. All your pins need to be relevant to your audience.
To split your content up, create different boards, all of course with great keyword descriptions, and allow the colours of your creativity to flow through each of those boards.
Fill the boards up with a mixture of your content and other people’s content too. That way, if you’ve re-pinned a popular pin to your board, other people will discover your pins too – with your content on.
Remember that everything you produce needs to be in line with your brand, so that goes for your pins, boards, board description and your profile bio. Keywords are important if you want to be discovered.
Do you want to take your Pinterest marketing to the next level? Follow these simple tips to get started and make an impact on your Pinterest community. If you’re looking for a little help or guidance on getting started, we’d love to help.
