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?]()
by Karen Petrauskas | Mar 15, 2019
As a brand we hope that you are using social media in some form or another, for those that are still to discover a social media presence – we need to talk!
But for many brands, social media is the best form of marketing and advertising that their company can use in order to gain the attention of their audience.
Building a social media presence will not create a magical income stream straight away and as with anything it needs to be built upon and content carefully crafted and planned out. Businesses that hope for miracles when they post sporadically often give up at the first hurdle when they don’t see results straight away. However, building a marketing strategy that can be followed in order to achieve certain goals and increase sales, raise brand awareness and build a solid foundation for customers to get engaged with WILL get a business noticed.
As a business, you need structure and a plan – you need a marketing strategy.
Start with a SMART marketing goal
Decide what’s important to you, what goals you want to achieve and then how you’re going to achieve them.
An example of a good SMART goal for social media marketing would be something like “Increase our Pinterest response rate by 50% by the end of the first quarter.”
Specific: “We’ve specifically identified the social channel (Pinterest) and a metric (response rate).”
Measurable: “The response rate can be measured from Pinterest for Business analytics dashboard.”
Achievable: “It’s a realistic goal that with focus and creativity, can be achieved.”
Relevant: “Our goal will have an impact on our overall social media presence, making it very relevant.”
Time-bound: “The goal has to be met by the end of the first quarter.”
Now, Pinterest as an example is a very positive social channel that when used correctly can drive traffic to a website in the hundreds! We love Pinterest but choosing a platform that works in line with your business is essential for the strategy to work and be productive.
By making SMART goals for each step will give it purpose and a relevancy, aligning it with your overall core values. Does your goal fit with your business plan? Does it reach out to the audiences that you want to speak to?
Grow your audience
Now you’ve got the strategy and plan on what you want to achieve, it’s time to put that into practice and grow your audience using social media.
We may have chosen Pinterest as our example, but many brands will start off in Facebook as their chosen platform of choice, so thinking about using Facebook, what can you do to see results? The main point if anything to take away today, is that you need to ‘show up’ every single day and you need to show your audience that you actually care about them. Use your business page, create a members groups, reach out to individuals through your personal profile – as long as it’s in line with your SMART goals, go for it!
By using great content, experience, expert knowledge and advice all coupled together, it will help to build your audience. And you want to be right in front of them, to be there when they need you and ready to answer and engage at the most crucial times.
Strategy comes from vision
The idea behind putting a marketing strategy in place is so that you can achieve the goals that you set out to achieve when you started your business, these goals come from visions and dreams that you may have had for many years. Lay out all your visions, decipher your dreams into segments and create a brainstorm of everything that is important to you. You’ll be surprised at everything that comes out from a simple exercise like this! Start with one point, one idea and the rest will flow.
What lifestyle do you want to be living? Will the achievement of your dreams have an impact on your lifestyle? What financial goals do you want to achieve? Be clear on all that you dream of – it will make it so much easier to create a plan if you know what you want from it.
Ensure that all your plans align with your core values and your personal vision.
Pricing
Some people lack the confidence that they are worth what they want to charge in their business. They see the experts charging high ticket prices but when it comes to their own self-belief, can often hit barriers that do not allow them to charge their worth.
Remember that you are an expert in your niche – that’s why you’re doing what you’re doing.
From your goals you will already be aware of what you need to achieve financially throughout the year. This figure then needs to be broken down in segments of the services that you offer.
How many XX services do you need to sell to achieve £XX’s? You can have different levels of pricing / packages depending on who you work with and the level of service or support you offer but create a pricing structure that works with your goals.
You may not think that this will directly grow your business, but by knowing what you need to charge and sticking to those prices, you will gain confidence and assurance in what you are doing. When someone asks you “How much do you charge for XX?”, you will be able to answer straight back with a price, rather than lacking in confidence to quote the price you know it should be. Confidence shines through in all areas of your business and being clear on pricing is a great place to start.
Speak directly to your audience
Do you know that what you’re offering is hitting the pain points of your audience? Is it actually going to serve a purpose and create solutions? That needs to be a deciding factor on how you market your business and which direction you take it.
Everyone needs something, and researching your product or services will determine the people that are looking for you – the people that you need to reach.
Using a simple keyword tool will help you determine what your audience is searching for. When you understand specifics, then you speak directly to them and relieve their pain.
Gain customer feedback – are you approaching your idea from the right angle? Are you dealing with a problem that is real?
Even tapping into your competitors social feeds can give you insight into what works and what people are seeking.
For example, someone may be searching the internet for ways to keep up to date with social media planning. Now for us here we could dive straight into connecting with the people who are looking for this, build a relationship with them and then offer our social media planner as a solution.
People won’t buy from the first introduction but by creating a relationship with them and giving them a reason to trust you and your brand, it becomes a whole different story. Recommendations and word of mouth advertising is valuable and still extremely powerful. Learn to love and nurture your audience and provide value in every conversation and people will learn to love you back, and in turn recommend your services.
Positioning
One of the most important aspects of your marketing is the positioning of your brand in the market. It needs to be built into the marketing strategy not used as an add on at the end. So how do you position yourself in a busy and competitive online society?
Focus on one or two things – not multiples. It’s better to do one thing well and be successful than try to do everything and do them badly.
We’ve all heard this before but it’s true in marketing also. It’s true when it comes to your social media marketing, it’s true in your services, it’s true for everything that your business offers. Focus on what you can do well and then position yourself in the market as an expert in that niche.
Be more user friendly. A customer wants a good journey when they interact with your brand and for everything to be one click away. Searching for a button to be able to contact you, or not knowing how to find your social channels, or when they do, not gaining a response… it’s all comes down to a customer’s experience and how easy it is to do business with you. Make this a pleasant experience and one that’s easy to travel down and you’ll find more people will engage. Make everything clear and transparent, even if it looks over simplified to you. Not everyone knows the business as well as you and it’s better to spell everything out in plain sight and with clickable actions for each part of the journey.
At the end of the day, you have to love what you’re doing. You have to be able to inspire yourself to do well and to succeed. When you have a passion inside of you that just wants to see results, all the above will fall into place.
If you’re new to business and have not put a marketing strategy together before, we’re here to help and your success is our success! We want to see you grow your small business online, we want to help you implement strategies and tactics to see results.
Use our contact form to get in touch and let’s see your business booming this year!
You can also connect with us on our Facebook Page and get to know us a little better too – we hope that your customer experience with KJP Creative is a good one!
Look forward to hearing from you.
Grab your copy of our 2020 social media awareness days calendar – and get organised with your social media marketing…
by Karen Petrauskas | Sep 14, 2018
Twitter is a great resource to use for your business marketing to source potential clients and to reach out to both audiences and other business owners, not to mention influencers. It’s a platform for quick, relevant to the point snippets of information engaging a user to see your point of view.
Starting off as a microblogging platform, it still remains effective and one of the best channels to share with the world your opinions. A quick tweet telling your friends about your morning coffee, or to let others know about a great experience you had in your favourite retail place, or even to just keep in touch with loved ones across the globe. It offers a range of benefits to reach a wide range of people and businesses.
Twitter can be a place to get the latest news story and to see events unravel as they happen. Twitter is hungry for content, for information and for users to connect. Providing a way for influence to be at the forefront of our news feeds, it’s the perfect platform to establish a name and gain a following with the pure aim of growing your business.
Trends are big in Twitter and if something is big worldwide, you can guarantee that it’ll be on Twitter. Viral YouTube videos, celebrity news, world news – you’ll find it on Twitter. These can all be found on the platform by their individual hashtags that’s been assigned to the subject. Find the hashtag that you’re looking for and use the search function to find every tweet related to that subject.
Twitter for business
The same principle can be used for your business. By creating a hashtag that is relevant and recognisable to your brand and using that in all your Twitter marketing, you can keep track of all activity that relates to your business, including when users are talking about your brand or an influencer gets hold of your brand – it can all be traced back.
TweetDeck is a great place to keep track of Twitter activity without the need to fill up your news feed with content that you perhaps don’t want to see every time you open the app.
Take note of what the big brands are doing and use their examples in how to reach your audience. Big brands will almost certainly have a presence and are using it to reach out to current clients, attract new customers and to create a great customer experience. Use their @handle in your tweet and they will respond – providing a way to interact with your favourite brands at the touch of a button and receive (almost) instant response. This is a great way to up your customer service levels and to let your clients know that you care about them, and that they are valuable to your business.
Benefits to using Twitter for business?
- Quick and easy to provide snippets of what you have to offer, links to your website or articles
- Easy reach for business research
- Express your opinion or thoughts.
- Reach new audiences
- Ask for feedback, including the use of polls or questions.
- Follow others in your industry / niche
- Reach a large number of users, quickly
- Build relationships, provide customer care
- Stay up to date with latest news and trends
- Contribute to discussions and industry discussions.
So with these in mind, whatever area of business you are in, there is a way to reach your ideal audience. However to really touch deep with that audience and to be influential in that outreach, a business needs to understand who they are speaking to and who they are targeting to ensure effective results.
Twitter Analytics
This is where Twitter analytics comes in. You can dig deep by looking into the statistics the platform provides (free of charge) and start to understand your audience.
Once in Twitter analytics you will see a menu of options, choose the ‘audience’ tab which will direct you to a page full of follower growth data. By scrolling down you can establish your audience’s interests, demographics, lifestyle interests – even down to which mobile carrier they are with!
Understanding what type of content your audience enjoys or reacts to will drive your social media marketing and content strategy – what’s the point in sharing if people are not engaging?
The information available in analytics is important to establish whether you are reaching your ideal audience or attracting users who would not be a potential customer.
If either case, it may be time to return to your marketing strategy and learn more about who you want to target and who you need to attract in order to grow your business. A marketing strategy will outline what you need to do, in order to see successful results. By coming away from a good strategy, it will have implications on your business growth.
Within the ‘followers’ tab, you are given data that allows you to really get to know your audience. Are they mostly male or female? Which countries do they reside in? What are their top interests? Understanding these will help in your marketing drive. By speaking directly to your audience and providing content that they enjoy to see/read and will engage with and share or comment on, will help boost your engagement and provide a better way to grow your audience – and your business.
If you’re looking to implement a marketing strategy or need advice on how to target your ideal audience, please feel free to get in touch.
by Karen Petrauskas | Feb 2, 2018
In today’s society it is a must for any brand to be using social media to grow their business. With literally billions of people worldwide that currently have an active social media account, it is a means of marketing that cannot be missed if you’re looking to truly expand your business and add value where it counts.
Harnessing the power of social media is a necessity to see business growth, if you’re not currently using social media for your business, you can be assured that your competitors are and you will miss out on many opportunities to reach your customers.
There is no end to the opportunities that are available to you as a business owner when it comes to social media and managing it properly with marketing campaigns. If you are not yet in a place where your business is using social media, it’s time to start working on your first campaign and embracing the online marketing world.
You may have a fantastic product or offer excellent services – but how are you reaching new clients to be able to increase your sales? Social media is an extension of word of mouth advertising and an avenue that is essential to any business and marketing plan.
So how can you be consistent and get the best out of your social media marketing?
Discover your best networks
There are many channels for social media available, but we believe that to market your business well, you need to focus on the channels that best fit your customer. Spreading yourself thin and trying to post and keep up to date with every platform going will not only be bad for your health (time and pressure wise), it could reflect badly on your business and professionalism may slip.
Take time to research the different social media networks and see where your ideal audience is present the most. Follow conversations and trends that relate to your industry and then where you find the majority of your audience, that’s where you need to be! From there you can put real focus in directly targeting the people you want to reach and provide value to them in their comfort zones.
Create mind blowing and creative content
We all know that social media can be pool of never ending posts and images, and many of these will pass people by without thought. Therefore, you need to create content that is eye catching and meaningful, showing your audience that you care and are passionate about your values. What do you want to showcase? What does your business believe in? Use the answers to these questions to create posts that people will aspire to and will want to engage with.
It’s fine to share other people’s posts and to get on board with other causes but remember that you too have something to offer that is of value and worth sharing. Always have in mind that with every post that you create – it needs to add value to someone, somewhere. You are trying to reach a potential customer in a busy chaotic world, so speak loudly and with authority and be seen and heard above the rest.
Just remember that there is no such thing as social media marketing without content!
Be consistent
We have seen it so often that people start a business social media account, keep it going for a few weeks with some great content, but then everything stops. A few months later there may be a few more sporadic posts, and then it stops again.
When it comes to social media, you need to be consistent. Yes it can be time consuming and yes it does take effort to manage effectively – but when performed correctly, it will have massive benefits to your business. If you’re struggling for time to manage social media, consider hiring a social media manager to lighten the load. The cost of hiring a social media manager will be balanced out and then cancelled out by the brand awareness and business growth that you will see going forward.
Plan and schedule and create a marketing plan that reflects your business. Post regularly to your networks and be interactive with your audience. This is a great way to provide an outstanding customer service experience that may at times be lost when a business is not consistent on social media.
Engage with your audience
Social media is all about engagement. It’s about understanding what you clients are looking for and giving them solutions. Social media is not a place to sit back and watch the world go by! People want to know that there is a human behind the business and by engaging and interacting with individuals and providing a great user experience, people are more likely to buy from you or to recommend your services. Networking and building relationships builds trust and loyalty. Understanding your audience will enable to you reach them and to target their specific needs. That’s when they will see your value and know that you really do want to help them.
Just like any part of a business, marketing is an important aspect and for it be effective, it needs to be done correctly. Online marketing is often over looked or pushed to the back burner but if you consider what power social media has to drive your business forward and to increase your bottom line, there is absolutely no reason why any business should not be using it!
If you’d like assistance in getting started or putting together a marketing strategy that fits your business model, get in touch, we’d love to chat with you.
