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New Year, New Goals To Grow Your Business

New Year, New Goals To Grow Your Business

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!

Grow your business in 2019 with our top 7 tips. New year and a new start - easy steps to follow to see success

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.

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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!Learn how to maximise your business to see growth this year. Top tips to growing a small business

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!

2020 awareness days calendar free download

 

How To Use Video Marketing To Grow Your Business

How To Use Video Marketing To Grow Your Business

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.

Video marketing is a powerful way to grow a business and increase brand awareness. Check out our top tips

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.

Use the right type of video for your video marketing - social media marketing for business growth

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. 

 

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