by Karen Petrauskas | Mar 25, 2020
Social media should always be part of your marketing strategy as a business owner however with the country on lock down, now, more than ever, is the time to get your message out there and to be giving value to everyone you meet ‘online’.
Without the ability to mix in social gatherings, it can become a lonely place and people are finding ways to break the boredom, frustration and changes ahead. Being online will be the first point of call for many who are trying to stay up to date with the world, stay in touch with friends and family and continue as normal as possible.
So where and how does your business fit in to the mix?
Many people are asking the questions, “Should I pull back from social media?” / “I haven’t got the money to put into marketing at the moment” / “There’s no need to promote my business at this time”. All valid questions or thoughts but at the end of the day, you have a business you believe in, the world will go on and come through the Coronavirus at the other end and you want to be in the forefront of people’s minds when that time happens. By disappearing and being unseen through these times, it will make it harder to have an impact when things start to get back to normal.
The best thing your business can do is to keep an active social media presence but perhaps change the tone of what you do. For example, how can you help your audience? How could you provide value to your audience? Could you provide tutorials or how-to’s? Can you inspire or motivate your audience or be a listening ear to the questions or thoughts they have?
There are many ways that you can still communicate with your audience online, it doesn’t have to be about selling your product or getting them to use your services, the above ideas will help to build a relationship with the people around you and to build trust and credibility. You just need to be you – YOU are your brand and the people (eventually) will buy from you when they like and trust what they see and hear.
Tell your story
Relationship building and story telling is so important throughout your marketing ventures, whether that be online or offline, people want to trust who they connect with and love what they see. Tell your story, be honest in what’s happening around you at this time. People are happy to listen and engage when it’s something real – in the long term they will not appreciate you being something you’re not and giving them false hopes of what they will get from you.
Be passionate and positive
Be passionate in everything you do, be inspirational and lift people’s spirits. These are hard time for lots of people and many are seeing their businesses fall around them. How can you be their ray of light? Even if you don’t feel like it’s going great for you, you can still take the positive mindset and believe that if you push through and do all that you are able to do, it will be ok and your business will come through the other end. Mindset has so much to do with outcomes – do you agree? The more positive you are through a situation, the better the result. And that can be applied to your business in these times of lock down, isolation and worrying days. Make the decision to be positive, to be brave, and to try new things as we go through a different way of life for a while. You may try something completely new and it works! You’d never know unless you try.
Bring your audience with you in the journey
Step out of the boat, put your best face on and be there for your audience. Explain to them where you’re at, bring them along with you in your story, make them part of the journey. Allow your audience to help guide the direction of where your business heads, your customers are your lifeline, they are the people that are going to keep your business afloat, so give them what they want and allow their reactions and decision to influence yours.
There is room for everyone online
Social media marketing is a minefield as you may well know by now, but it doesn’t mean that you can’t play the game right and fairly. The internet is a big place and there is room for everyone, you just need to know how and where you fit in. And with many businesses pulling back in their online presence there will be more opportunity for you to be heard, if it’s done correctly and sensitively. Know your audience, know when and where to post, understand them and what their pain points are, get to love them and be in their shoes when writing your copy or creating your images, be that customer and create your content as if it were for you. What would you want to hear? What solutions would help you? What inspiration would help you or guide you?
Make a list of questions that your audience could be asking and write content around these, dig deeper into the mindset of your customers and provide as much value as you can for them and let them think that you are writing directly to them.
Each of us will be going through different struggles in these unprecedented times, the country, the nation, the world is all going through it together, so you are not alone. It’s just going to be a case of what can you do now to keep your business alive and help it to come out the other side?
It’s all in the marketing strategy
Plan your marketing well. Don’t live in the hope that it might work, be strategic in your approach and use your time wisely in creating a plan that will help you achieve all that you need to, while speaking to all those you need to and by providing all the value and solutions that you are able. Be consistent, be persistent and love your audience.
If you’re looking for guidance on how to get your business through these times and showcase what you have to give, we’d love to chat with you. Feel free to get in touch and let’s talk.
Download our FREE social media 2020 awareness days calendar and give your audience something to talk about! …
by Team KJP | Feb 27, 2020
Where do you start when marketing your business online? Do you struggle with getting a relevant, interesting and authentic message across? Do you find it difficult to come up with content that doesn’t repeat everything else you say?
Sometimes when a marketing message goes stale, we need to take a step away to refresh, recharge and revisit our mission statement. What we think we are saying, what we really say and the way that message comes across can be completely different things. Do you find yourself in the trap of repetition and regurgitating the same content over and over again? It’s time to freshen up!
Go back to basics
Go back to the drawing board, it’s time to brainstorm.
Start at the very beginning of your mission statement and the values that you hold, the things that are most valuable to you and your business. What is it that drives you forward, that gives you the motivation to do what you do? These are the fundamental elements that glue your business together and make you want to succeed. And these are essential parts that your audience need to know about when getting to know who you are and what your brand about.
Start the storyboard
Moving from your mission and values, start to set the scene and tell the story of where you’ve come from to where you are now. Everyone loves a story and for you to be authentic and unique will set you apart from the competition. Get the story rolling by sharing the heart behind your mission, the thought process of why you do what you do, the emotional angle of what’s precious to you. And then you can move on to the services you offer, why you offer them, what products you have, what value you give, what people can get from you and everything that physically makes up your business. By now your brainstorm should have lots of parts to it, all different aspects relating to the make up of your business.
Now you can start to link them together and begin to pull a common thread through it all. All these things together are what you’re going to share with your audience. You don’t just have one message to share but lots of multifaceted aspects that make up your brand.
Your message will not have a chance to go stale when you constantly go back to the basics, revisit the drawing board and brainstorm regularly to bring new ideas and visions to the table.
New content with new ideas
Once you have the ideas flowing and you’ve got everything that says what your business is about, you’ve got an opportunity to create some new content to go with it.
- Blog posts
- Newsletters
- Ebooks/Books
- Social media content
- Webinars
- Podcasts
- Videos/vlogs
How can you put your message into the above types of content? It’s about getting creative and sharing your message in different ways. Jump behind the scenes and share a video about what’s happening/ what’s going on/ your team/ your network/ your office. Interview people or create a podcast, this could give an opportunity to work with industry professionals – it’s not necessarily you doing all the speaking but it’s giving value and a variety to your audience. How much more engaging can a video or podcast be rather than a simple blog post? Both varieties have their merit but by doing both blog and video you automatically have two types of content that you can use across your social media, which you can then re-purpose and use again and again.
Once you’ve written a blog post, how many images or types of posts (i.e. infographics / how tos etc) can you create that share a similar message which you can use across your channels? Re-posting the same blog image could get repetitive but 5 or 6 different images that relate to the same thing will give a variety to your readers and your audience.
Complacency
It’s easy to get stuck in a rut of what’s always work should always work – but that’s simply not the case, especially in a fast paced online world where there is so much competition and fight for attention. There is no place for complacency. You may be comfortable, you may love what you do, but are you seeing measurable results from it? If the answer is no, you’re just wasting valuable time that could be better invested in your business. Try not to sit on the fence hoping that something will change ‘soon’, if it’s not working, something needs to give. Go back to the drawing board and figure out what your message is truly about and give your marketing some fresh substance for people to get a hold of.
At the end of the day, your message needs to be fresh, consistent, inline with your values and mission and giving value to your audience. If it doesn’t meet these needs, you’re going to struggle to make it work. Use this opportunity to get creative in your marketing, to relight the fire and passion about what your business is about and to think of new ways of getting the attention of your audience. What is it they want to see, what do they want to hear that will solve their pain points? Be there in the forefront of their minds, show up when no one else does and give purpose to your brand. If you love it and share that zeal, then other’s will catch on and be there with you.
If you’d like to chat over your marketing plans or strategy or simply know that it’s time to outsource your social media marketing to a team that want you get results – and know how to get them!, we’d love to talk. Contact us today for an initial consultation.
In the meantime if you’d like some inspiration on what to talk to your audience about, why not download our FREE 2020 Awareness Days Calendar – and start the conversations today!
by Team KJP | Feb 13, 2020
In order to understand how content marketing can impact a business, we need to understand what content marketing is and the benefits it can have on business owners.
What is content marketing?
According to the dictionary, content marketing is defined as: A type of marketing that involves the creation and sharing of online material (such as videos, blogs, and social media posts) that does not explicitly promote a brand but is intended to stimulate interest in its products or services.
Another way of looking at it, is how the Content Marketing Institute put it: Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience – and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.
The main thing to remember is that content marketing is about being educational and not all about selling a product.
What is content marketing good for?
The reasons we look to content marketing is not ultimately to promote a product but about building a brand and reputation. Here are some other reasons:
- To build an engaged and interested audience – making sure that you’re taking the people that you want to speak to and not generalising at anyone that will listen.
- To educate customers – teaching your customers or potential customers about your business or industry.
- To increase sales in the long-term.
- To build a loyal customer base and create a brand that people will know, love and trust.
What do people know about your brand?
If you search Google or the search engines for you / your business, what do you find?
This can be a great exercise as you get to see what other people can find out about you.
Do you like what you find? Are you surprised by the results that you find?
By building on your content marketing, you can start to create a base and substance for what people are going to find when they do their due diligence and research your business. You can start to get control over the content people find about you. And the more good content you create, the more reputable your business will become.
Practice – Patience – Persistence
It can be easy to get worked up when you don’t get it right all the time but that’s just part of the process (and a part of life!). Not everyone is good at creating great content, but you will get better if you keep practicing, have patience and are persistent in your approach.
Results will happen when you have patience. But you have to be consistent and persistent. Don’t forget that if you really find that you’re not great after all at content marketing, there are people there ready to help. Outsourcing marketing is a common occurrence and just means that you’re looking after the interests of your business, focusing on what you do best and allowing an expert to take care of the other stuff.
Understand your business goals
Producing content for the sake of it will not get you anywhere fast, it will just increase stress, workload and worry about not producing results. Every piece of content should be created with a business goal in mind. Although this may seem a long process, for everything you produce, ensure that it aligns with a business goal and establish how it is going to benefit your long or short-term goals.
Consider your business goals, where do you ultimately want to get to, and think about how your content can contribute towards achieving them…
- Raising brand awareness
- Build an email list / customer base
- Provide a good customer journey and experience
- Upsell existing customers
- Help customers to be an advocate of your brand
Understand your mission and values
Just as you did with your business goals, each piece of content has got to be in line with your mission and values. There is absolutely no point in creating content that goes against what you believe, or doesn’t sit right with the people you want to reach, or even with the values that you promote. Your content needs to true to what your brand is about.
Consider your values or mission and how your content can contribute towards aligning with these:
- Who can you help the most with your content?
- What type of information can you provide?
- What is the desired outcome with the content that you’re producing?
What type of content can you use?
There are a wide range of resources that you can use to create your content marketing ideas, way to many to list but back to what we said at the beginning, all content must be educational or informational – not selling a product. Therefore the list can begin with:
- Books / ebooks
- Webpages / websites
- Infographics
- Podcasts
- Videos
- Blogs
- How to’s
- Surveys
And the list can go on. There is so much content that you create to build your brand, without directly selling.
But the question may come down to what you love to do, what you enjoy doing, what makes you smile and sits right with you personally. Looking at the list about, what jumps out at you and makes you think “yes I can produce that”? These are the things you need to start with. It doesn’t have to be hard, it just has to be true to your brand.
The more you start to think about writing or creating content that adds value rather than selling, the easier it will become. In all you do, the audience should feel like they’re receiving value, or being looked after.
Implementing the process
Once you’ve established what content marketing is how you can add value to your audience, it comes down to implementing it into your marketing strategy. Social media plays a big part in today’s society in reaching a wide and engaging audience and is often the best way to market to your customers. Build your content ideas into your social media strategy, creating a solid foundation for your business to gain respect, become reputable and trusted within your chosen niche. The more solid and authentic your content is, the more people will become to trust you, in turn becoming loyal and valued customers.
As we mentioned before, great content can increase your brand awareness, it can help build an audience that is interested in what you are about and ultimately it can lead to long-term sales and business growth.
If you’d like to get started with content marketing but are still unsure of how to get off the ground, or would like to look at outsourcing, we’d love to chat with you. Contact us today – let’s talk marketing!
And in the meantime if you’re looking to create engaging content around some of the issues that are important to your audience, why not download our free 2020 Awareness Days Calendar – it’s always good to have new ideas to share!
We look forward to hearing from you.
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…
