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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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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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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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?

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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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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If you were going fishing and wanted to find a new spot, what preparation would you do? Firstly, you would find out if there are any fish to be caught right? You’ll want to find the type of fish and whether they were worth catching.

It’s the same with your new business’s marketing strategy. Firstly, you’ve got to fish where the fish are. Which sounds obvious, but you’ve also got to understand your audience.

Who is your ideal customer? Is it a guy or a girl or is it a business?

What’s the ideal age range? Teenagers? 30-50? Over 50s?

Where do they live? Urban or rural?

What is their behaviour? How to they react? How do they think?

In marketing speak these are called, geographic, socioeconomic, demographic and their psychographic.

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Your social media feed is an essential tool to your business. It provides the titbits of your daily life to your followers and potential customers. It is a regular opportunity to add your personality to your product or your service.

But doing this on a, sometimes, daily basis can be a strain. To always be the happy, positive person you want to portray when sometimes you’re actually feeling the opposite is a near impossible task. Maybe you lost a client or a good lead didn’t go anywhere. Maybe you just ran out of coffee.

This is where in-app scheduling or software like Hootsuite can be valuable because when you are that happy, positive person you can smash out loads of great posts.

There is another danger though. With social media posts needing to be so regular, it can be easy to lose your personality and become robotic. This can alienate your audience because they feel they are being talked at instead of being talked with.

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Very few people feel completely comfortable on social media. Whether we are conscious of it or not, what we choose to reveal to the online world is a very carefully managed affair.

This is also true of your business. You’re are trying to portray a certain image and a brand that, once you hit ‘Publish’, will be open to public scrutiny.

For some people the challenge and excitement this brings is what they thrive off. For others, the thought of putting your business on social media is enough to send you crawling under your desk. After all it’s become your world, right? It’s too precious to expose it to the ravages and savages online.

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Managing your time efficiently, especially if you’re a small business, is an ongoing challenge.

Regularly posting to your social channels should be something you have built in to your week, whilst also allowing for spontaneity with as-they-happen posts.

I’ve been asked if it is better to allocate an hour every day to post and create content, or if posting and production should be staged throughout the day.

Firstly, I would be allocating a set time each week, not day, to create content, say a few hours on a weekend or week night and utilise the many scheduling tools that exist to set them up to feature throughout the week.

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