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 | Aug 7, 2019
Marketing is important for anyone looking to promote their services and this is applicable to absolutely anyone; from those just starting a business, to freelancers, entrepreneurs to small or large organisations.
Many larger companies will have a marketing team where they can hire a social media manager to do the job however it’s not as easy for freelancers who are trying to make a name for their business, with just themselves to do the work.
As a freelancer you know your business better than anyone else and therefore can push your marketing in the direction that you know it will hit your audience but how do you do that well and effectively when time management can be a factor as well as understanding all the social channels in order to do a good job?
Embrace social media
Don’t think that just because you are a small fish in a big pond that social media is not important – it most certainly is. And for some freelancers it can be the main stream of marketing that brings in new clients and reaches out to even more people.
Whether you personally love or hate social media, as a freelancer you need to be using it to promote your services.
Embrace the social networks as if they were your best friends and find a channel that works well for you, and stick to it.
Which social network do you use?
This will totally depend on your type of business and who you are looking to attract. Before you do anything, you need to establish the basics.
- Who is your ideal client?
- Are you working B2C or B2B?
- What do you want to achieve from social media?
- Who is your competition and what are they doing?
By working on these basic questions, you can give yourself a basis to build your social media content around.
If you’re a B2B freelancer you will probably find that LinkedIn is a great place to discover clients. Check out our recent post on why LinkedIn is good for your business.
LinkedIn is a great place to network and build on your relationships, showcase your knowledge and expertise as well as getting your name known within the industry circles.
Facebook is good for brand awareness and building a community. Facebook is still the largest social network and one that is great for building a following. By creating a Facebook group and providing value through this to an audience that is interested in your services, you’ll build trust, reputation and loyal customers. If you’re not ready to create your own group, there are plenty that you can join and add your value to. Be sure to jump into conversations and give solutions to people’s problems. This way you become recognised as an expert and people will come to you when they need assistance. The way you manage this will determine if these people turn into paying clients.
Twitter is a place for opinions and news so this is a place to find your audience’s conversations and to offer solutions. You can search for #hashtags relating to your industry and follow trends that will lead back to your audience. Building a following on Twitter can be relatively easy if you’re prepared to put in the time to keep up the pace – but sharing your knowledge will definitely get you noticed.
If you’re love images and can showcase your portfolio or service through imagery, then Instagram or Pinterest will be the place for you. Instagram is rapidly growing and with 75 million people a day scrolling through their feeds, you have good reason to want to use this platform.
Instagram allows you to get creative so whatever you are doing, wherever you are, you can capture the moment and create content that will grab the attention of your audience. Motivate and inspire people, give them a reason to want to follow you and if they like and appreciate your creativity enough, they may even get in touch to work with you!
The same can be said for Pinterest, which has become an extremely effective search engine facility where people are searching for inspiration every day. Your images do not have to be perfect, and with Pinterest you can add text to tell your audience what you are offering. Just be super clear on what you’re offering and who your attracting and if you get the content right, people will discover you.
Pulling it all together
With all your social media efforts, there are few things that need to happen throughout all of it: engagement. The key ingredient to social media marketing is engagement. Without engagement, all your efforts, time and hard work will fall flat and will be for nothing. No one wants to think they are working for nothing, right!
With this in mind, all of your content needs to have a reason or a way for people to engage with you – on every single post or tweet. There should always be a call to action or a next step they can take. Even if you’re just asking for a ‘comment below’, the audience knows what to do next.
With so much content out there, it is so easy for a user to read and scroll past without a second look. But if you catch the eye of the audience and ask them to take action, they are inclined to do so.
In this way you build reputation, trust and expertise. People will recognise your name and your identity becomes your brand, you are building a name for your business which can grow and develop.
And when people engage with your content, be sure to engage back! Show that you are human, you have an opinion and you value theirs. Create relationships with your audience and provide value to them in every way possible.
Social media is a key part of a freelancers success and the more you do it and start to love one or two particular platforms, the more you will get to know your audience and love them too.
Don’t spread yourself too thin
This is one of the hardest things to stick to, there are many great social channels out there and sticking to one or two can be a hard discipline to get into the habit of but it’s much better to do a few extremely well than to be on all networks but do them all not-so-well. Your reputation is at stake with every post that you create. With every piece of content that you produce, it needs to be clear, to the point and be focused on your ideal audience. You can set up personal channels if you want to talk about things irrelevant to your freelancing business. Your business is your focus and yes you want to be ‘you’ but you also need to come across as professional and approachable. First impressions count when it comes to potential clients. Make that first impression good wherever they find your services.
Do you have a website?
Social media is great for promoting your services and shouting about what you can do, but do you have a landing page on where they can go to find you? This landing page or website is as important as your social media profiles. If someone finds you on Facebook and clicks a post to get in touch with you but is hit with an out of date, old website, they will move on to the next freelancer. Spend some quality time updating your website (or landing page) and ensure that it’s always up to date. If you change your prices or a service that you provide, update your website. Simple.
Time management
All the above should be workable if you manage your time well. As a freelancer, your time is most valuable as you only have one set of hands! (Unless you outsource your social media marketing of course!) But the fact is that you can only do what you physically have time to do. Planning and organising your time is important for any business owner, so the need to factor in your social media marketing is something that should be a part of that plan.
Social media should be fun and never a chore – planning ahead and being in front of your time is the best piece of advice we can offer and always know what’s coming up so there are no big surprises.
If you’d like help, we’d love to chat with you about how to go about putting a strategy and plan in place for your social media marketing and to get the most out of it for your business. Get in touch today!
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.
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by Karen Petrauskas | Apr 10, 2019
The world of social media is forever changing, and forever will be! It evolves as people find new ways of connecting and communicating with others and as technology develops.
There are new platforms popping up all the time, so where do you begin? Do you spread yourself thin and try to be active on all social platforms or do you choose just one? And how can you keep up with the social channels as a business looking to reach out to an audience and build brand awareness?
First off, if you’ve got a marketing strategy, and more specifically, a social media strategy to adhere to, you’ll know your end game and the targets you’re trying to reach. But if you’re a small business, or are just starting out you may not be that far along the line as yet. That’s ok (although we do suggest creating a marketing strategy), you need to first understand your audience and where they are most likely to ‘hang out’, then establish what you are looking to achieve when you’ve grabbed their attention, and then use the social media networks that are most relevant to them.
If you think about a group of people, say your friends or your colleagues, you would act or speak differently to your best friends than you would with the person you meet at the coffee machine. You’d also have a different rapport with your friends than your clients. The relationships are all different and need to be nurtured in a different way.
Many people think of all social networks being equal – but they’re not. They all have their own specific purposes and all have the job to do in the ways of networking. Understanding their purposes and what to use each channel for will give you a better understanding of how to use them for your businesses and which social network will work best to engage with your customers.
So let’s look at the different social media channels – what are they about and what are they mostly used for?
Facebook
Whether you like Facebook or not, your customers are most likely to be on there in some shape or form. It is the biggest social media network with Facebook had 2.32 billion monthly active users.
Not only do people use it for personal use, it is now becoming an advertising platform for businesses across all industries and sectors.
For business use, Facebook is a place to share company news, updates on offers or promotions along with interspersed industry news. People will come to your Facebook page to find out more about your business and your company culture and values.
With Facebook being the biggest social networks, it is important to have a presence on the platform. Many people looking for a service or product will search through to find a Facebook page as it’s a place that’s familiar, that feels safe and allows a person to take a peek with no pressure.
Always keep your audience in mind with all content that you post. Are the posts fitting with your business, do they match your culture, are they things that your audience will want to see or hear?
Once you’ve established a small audience, you’ll get to know what kind of content they prefer to see as engagement rates will go up and you’ll get more response to your posts. Use Facebook as a way to link your customers to your business and to show the reasons why they should trust your brand and buy from you.
Twitter
Twitter is extremely fast-paced and on the go but it is a great way to establish an audience. It’s an easy and simple platform to use and with 326 million active monthly users, it’s not one to miss! The microblogging platform provides a user to give a status or update in 240 characters and is a sea of information. The platform can be used for news updates, company updates, quotes or inspiration but with the limited number of characters allowed, it’s vital your copy is inviting, enticing and relevant to ensure that people click through to the place you want them to.
Twitter is great for polls, to gauge audience reactions or opinions and to raise brand awareness in bite size snippets. You can post using polls, images, gifs, videos or plain links and as long as you can get your information into the small tweet box, you’re ready to go!
Be sure to respond to comments or new followers, thanking new followers is a great way to build relationships, perhaps asking them a question in return to get to know them a little better. When you know your audience, you can service their needs and add value.
Pinterest
Often Pinterest is a platform that is missed off the social media strategy but we have found that it is an extremely important network to utilise for business. It’s all about eye catching visuals that entice users to click through. The visuals need to show knowledge or expertise, they need to have something to offer and be offering something that another person is looking for.
Content is king, it’s the way that you get people to click through from Pinterest to your website. Therefore you need to ensure that your content is spot on target with what your audience is looking for. Provide the visuals and content that people are searching for and the people will find you.
A great take-away for Pinterest is to offer a freebie in order to get people to click through to your site. Once they’re on your site, they need to know that you can help with their problem but if your website doesn’t match your Pinterest content, you’ll lose the customer.
The pins on your Pinterest account can all be re-purposed from the content already on your website, if you have a blog, create a multiple number of different images to link back to the blog posts.
To make Pinterest work properly, you need to be posting on a very regular basis which is where scheduling tools come in handy. We recommend Tailwind which can be accessed for free to start with and can be free for forever if you want to keep it at the basic level. Definitely a tool that necessary to make Pinterest work properly.
Don’t forget to actually engage with followers as well on Pinterest, it can be easy to get overwhelmed with posting, but the engagement is also a big part of the marketing strategy in order to grow your business.
Instagram
Instagram is another visual platform and if you love photography, real life images or grabbing the moment, Instagram is for you.
These images should be to a high resolution and to a good standard, as Instagram is all about an account being beautiful and attractive. Although it does help, Instagram is more about telling the story behind your brand and letting followers know what you are about and what makes your business tick. You are able to engage with local people, relevant hashtags and people interested in your niche. There’s a whole range of ways to interact with brands on Instagram and now you can even shop directly from the platform!
In order to use the shopable feature on Instagram, you’ll need to have an active shop in Facebook and your account will need to be set up as a business account.
Individual posts do not allow links in the copy so it’s a good idea to make sure your website link or preferred link is in your bio, you can then ask your audience to connect with you via your bio link in each post. You can always change that link to different landing pages if you’re running a campaign or you’d like to direct your followers to somewhere different – this is changeable at all times.
LinkedIn
If you’re a B2B business, LinkedIn is a great place to be. It’s known as the professional social network and it’s a lot easier to build professional relationships and gain new B2B clients from this channel.
LinkedIn has 590 million users and 260 million monthly active users. It performs better when it comes to lead generation conversions at a rate of 277% which is 3 times higher than Twitter (.69%) and Facebook (.77%). 80% of B2B leads come through LinkedIn.
The type of content on LinkedIn is usually business or company related. If you want to share about what’s happening in your business, the new employees, the company culture, that you’re hiring, milestones and such like. All this is great for company pages.
To build the engagement on these company page posts, it’s a good idea for business owners and employees to share the updates on their personal profile. If you’re a business with many employees, encourage them to share and comment on company posts.
When it comes to using social media for your business, there are many choices and opportunities, so you need to find what works for your clients. Don’t waste time on platforms that don’t work – understand and know your audience and hang out where they are.
If you’d like help in putting together a social media strategy or you simply haven’t got the time to invest and would prefer to pass the task onto an expert, we’d love to help. Get in touch for a free consultation.
Don’t forget you can download our FREE social media awareness days calendar for 2020 to help plan out each month in one swift document! ![What is the difference between the big social media networks and how can you use them to grow your business?]()
