How keep your Instagram Uniform

engaging with customers

The key to creating content that will be valuable to your perfect customer

In my next blog I aim to answer a question that came in from a local business owner, Laura, who wants to know what type of content she should be posting to enhance engagement from her target audience. 

“I’ve read everywhere that I should publish content that is valuable for my target audience. But it seems that what is valuable to my target audience is not really connected with services offered by my company. So, what should I publish on the company’s page?” – Says Laura, a start-up business owner.

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Instagram story at music festival

The 3 Platforms to be using in 2018

What are the three biggest trends for social media in 2018?

I would like to start this blog by noting that each of the social media platforms available all have their own features and benefits, each with the attention of a different type of demographic.  Obviously, the dominating platforms are Facebook and Instagram, with Snapchat on the rise,  and from a professional perspective, LinkedIn.  But the three I believe your business or personal profile should focus on are  Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. And within these different channels or platforms, I want to highlight the different features that you should be taking advantage of in 2018.

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Mens K1 200m at Penrith Regatta Centre 2017

A guide to athlete sponsorship

A guide that explains how athletes can approach companies asking for sponsorship, and how businesses can leverage sponsorship to their advantage.

I am writing this blog because I had a great question come in from a professional athlete who wants to know how to use social platforms to gain sponsorship. This question came about because he wanted to know if Instagram is enough to be gaining attention from potential sponsors, or whether he should create a website with a blog and generate attention this way.

And it’s a great question because when it comes to personal brands and when it comes to leveraging that personal brand for sponsorship and understanding where and how to play is so important. I would recommend that the first thing you do is to put yourself in the eyes of the potential sponsors. So, I would like to start by touching on this from the perspective of the potential sponsor.

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how to overcome marketing mistakes

1 Key Strategy I Teach My Clients To Overcome The Common Marketing Mistakes Businesses Tend To Make

The 3 common problems in business…

When I wrote my book ‘I Just Want It To Work, A Guide To Understanding Digital Marketing And Social Media For Frustrated Business Owners, Managers and Marketers’, I researched over 40 businesses ranging from around the $600,000 in revenue mark up to just over $600 million in revenue. And what I found so interesting was that regardless of the size of those businesses, whether they’re at the smaller end of the spectrum or at the larger end of the spectrum, they had three problems in common.

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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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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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