Building the right type of following

How to build an online following

Building the right type of following

Building The Right Type Of Following

I am often asked, “how do I build my following with the right type of people?”.

ENGAGMENT, ENGAGMENT, ENGAGEMENT! 

That is hands down, the best and most cost-efficient way of growing a really great following and an authentic following.

How do I do this?

By engaging with others. This means going out and reaching out to the type of people who you want to follow you, and engaging with their content. By observing their content, engaging and starting conversations with your perfect audience, that’s ultimately the best way to build your following.  Yes, it does take time. Yes, it’s hard work, but who cares when it comes to the fact that it’s free, it doesn’t cost anything to sit there and make some valuable and fair comments to the sort of people who you’d love to follow you.

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Small business owner researching the difference between sales and marketing

The difference between Sales and Marketing that every business owner needs to know

Understanding Sales and Marketing

Is sales marketing? Is marketing sales? Does sales come after marketing? Does marketing precede sales? Or, does sales precede marketing? How does it all work?

I want to really simplify it and I want to put it in the context. Here is where I believe the value is; that being how it relates to businesses and the size of the businesses, where businesses are at, and how they scale. When you’re a small business and you’re starting out, quite often you’ve got very little funds. Further, you’re self-funding and chances are you’re going to boot-strap everything you have. If that’s the case, nothing, as far as I’m concerned, beats sales.

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is your business on linkedin

Is Your business on LinkedIn?

Is your business on LinkedIn?

In this blog I want to talk a little bit about LinkedIn and I want to preface this conversation by saying if you’re still wondering if LinkedIn is a channel for you, or another platform that you should be using, then the easiest way to answer this question is, you’re mad if you’re not using it.

I still hear of people that are fearful or concerned about putting themselves on LinkedIn. I know people who tried it in the early days and they didn’t like the fact that they’ve were befriended or ‘linked’ by people requesting to connect with them who they didn’t know. If you don’t know them, don’t connect with them. It’s that simple. People are becoming more and more savvy when it comes to the use of LinkedIn and I think that we can all appreciate the benefits LinkedIn presents as a networking platform for businesses.

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content on instagram

What’s The Best Ratio Of Content?

“Whats the best ratio of content for my social media page?”

When posting on your social media page for your business, it can be hard to know exactly what to be posting. I often get asked “what’s the best ratio of content to be posting on my social media feeds”, in particular Facebook and Instagram we’re talking about here. Now, this is where you need to focus on your audience, and start to think about what’s going to appease them the most. Once you get a really clear understanding of who your followers are, who’s engaging with you and why they’re engaging, you can help improve that content ratio. We see, for instance, on some sites people are there because they want benefits, they want discounts on products, they want to know what new products are coming out, they want to know what sort of stuff you’re stocking, so they’re happy to be sold to and the ratio of sales can outweigh content that is to educational or entertaining.

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What’s The Best Time To Advertise?

What’s the best time to advertise?

I love this question because it actually allows us to dive into our audience and dive into the data to help make better decisions about the choices we make when it comes to our marketing objectives.

Anyone that knows me and has done business with me, and my clients will all attest to the fact that when I talk, I want to use data to make decisions and recommendations. I don’t like assumptions, I don’t like opinions, everybody’s got one of them. What I like is looking at what is actually happening out there, knowing and understanding exactly how my audience behaves so that I can make better decisions and use the data and information to direct and govern what I do when it comes to my marketing, digital and social objectives.

So, when it comes to advertising, and let’s just say your objective is primarily around Facebook and Instagram advertising, the best thing you can do is firstly go into your insights, on Facebook and Instagram and you’ll actually be able to go through and see your audience. Here you are able to see not only the demographics of your audience, but you can actually see when your audience is online.

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how to effectively hashtag

Are Hashtags Out Of Date?

Are #Hashtags Out of Date?

The short answer is no. But I would like to elaborate as this is a trending question that I am constantly being asked. I believe this question has been raised because of the people that seem to abuse hashtags and use 20+ on every post, with tags that aren’t even relevant to their photo, which is ruining the user experience of hashtags all together. 

Hashtags are really important for finding a theme that is trending or creating a way of following your content or allowing users who are primarily on Instagram to follow your content. Hashtags could be used obviously on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook but where we see the most prolific use of them and the best use of them is on Instagram.

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social media trends 2018

Instagram Tips for 2018

Instagram Tips for Businesses in 2018

In my latest blog I would like to give away 4 tips to enhancing your Instagram to build an authentic following of the perfect audience for your business.

1. Imagery – The Importance of Good Assets

Firstly, if you want to build a really authentic brand on Instagram, the first thing you want to do is get your imagery right!  Take your time when doing this, try different types of photos, angles, videos etc. The aim here is to capture the attention of your perfect audience while they are scrolling through their feed. By having really great imagery you stand more of a chance of stopping people while they scroll. On average, you have a 1.2 second window to grab someone’s attention while they are ‘snacking’ on content. So, keep this in mind when you are uploading posts. It is also important that your photos show the personality of the business, and represent your business.

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how to set goals

My Guide on Setting Goals and Achieving Them.

How to Set Attainable Goals

Christmas has come and gone, we counted down to 12:00am on December 31st, the holidays have come to an end and we are now starting to go back to work and getting ready for the year ahead. We’ve all heard about New Year’s resolutions, and some of us have given up on making them because we have set unattainable ones in the past. But I think it is important to set a list of clear, attainable goals to guide us on a journey of success for the year ahead.

So, how do we best achieve this without overwhelming ourselves, or setting ourselves up for failure which will ultimately result in feelings of guilt or self-doubt? 

What I believe is so hard about long-term goals is the fact that there are no immediate results, which often leaves us feeling disheartened and beaten. You’ve been eating healthy for weeks, going to the gym 3 times a week… now 2 months on and you can see little to no results. So, you give up and you’re back to your old ways. This is why I came up with a hack to achieving your goals: by listing these goals and pairing them with rewards! 

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Seasonal Marketing

Christmas is upon us, and another year is coming to an end. Which means It’s that time of year again, the Melbourne Cup has come and gone, and traditionally things have now started to slow down. Businesses and people start to change focus. This also means, businesses are getting ready for the Christmas break, and looking to the new year, and although this planning creates a busy time for most, it is also a time where people want to be able to relax and unwind.

I often find that businesses struggle with their preparation for the seasonal break, therefore I find that they get their priorities wrong. Have you ever questioned how you can be better prepared for this time of year, in order for you to hit the ground running in the new year?

Firstly, let’s start with the basics. Are you service-based business or a product-based business, because they really need to be treated differently during this time of year.

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Is facebook only for consumers?

For something that is used almost daily by up to 2 billion people the capabilities of Facebook are often misunderstood. There are assumptions made about the platform which mean that the potential for B2B marketing is often overlooked.

People assume that Facebook is only for consumers. They assume the only market available on Facebook is for a business to sell to individuals. This means businesses are only seeing half the story.

Imagine having a washing machine and not realising it had a dryer built in as well. All this time you’ve been hanging your wet clothes on the washing line or a clothes horse when you could have been doing two jobs in one place.

When we stop the myth that Facebook is solely a consumer market and embrace the fact that businesses can use it sell to other business then we can improve our marketing (and profits!) dramatically.

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