This episode is about social media marketing, and all the ways in which mastering it can help you improve your business and brand.
[00:01:22] What is social media marketing?
It’s how your business is marketed to customers through Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, YouTube, Snapchat, Pinterest, and all those other emerging platforms.
It’s the way that you can advertise your business through organic posts.
[00:01:50] How will my business benefit from social media marketing?
We’ve got to take a look at this from two different lenses.
Lens number one, we’ve got the local business owner, brick-and-mortar. Traditional lens number two: we’ve got a content creator.
As a local business owner, social media marketing lets people know who you are. Let’s say you are a spa in the salon. It puts you on the map because we know that a lot of the people that are looking for you are going to go to Instagram and take a look at maybe a spa service. Or maybe if you’re a salon and you do haircuts, you may want to show people how to do braiding.
Or you may want to show the different kinds of cuts that men can get in 2020: a trending topic. And you can use short clips, seven seconds that you can take of your customers or people that walk into your store. It’s a way for you to exemplify the services you offer as a personal brand.
If you’re a service area business or a local business, this is a great way to put you on the map so that people know exactly what you’re providing as a product or a service. If it is a good product, great. Unpack it. Let other people check out what it is.
On the flip side, what if you’re a content creator? Your business is a bit different. You create content and you are already pushing it out on social media platforms. You might already be on Instagram reels or TikTok, and that’s where you are growing your audience and you do that to generate attention to yourself. So you are already way ahead of the local business owner who already has a business and is able to operate offline.
People don’t go to your store, and in fact people won’t even find you if you don’t have content online. So that’s where you need to be posting organic content, as well as advertising.
Social media marketing is really about posting on these platforms to share information, draw knowledge, make it funny, make it entertaining and exchange information with people so that they can subscribe to you and follow you.
If you’re making short vertical-form videos or even long-form videos (something like on YouTube), the greater the experience that someone has looking at your educational content, how-to videos, or maybe something funny, the better.
The more engaging it’s going to be for them, the more they’re going to want to subscribe. And once they build up enough rapport with you on your social media, that’ll convert into more subscribers. Or maybe they’ll end up purchasing a course or product. As a content creator, that’s where you want to go.
As a local business owner, you want to focus on one or two different platforms. A place where your target persona is. If you’ve got target buyers, if you’ve got a buyer persona and you know who your customers are, find out where they shop.
Maybe they just like your voice. Maybe they just like looking at your social media content. That’s where you want to be as a local business.
[00:04:56] What social media platforms should my business be on?
TikTok and LinkedIn are hot right now, but it really depends on your business. Local business owners, you should be on Instagram and TikTok, Instagram reels and TikTok lens. Content creators, you should be on LinkedIn and TikTok.
It’s October, 2022. Why Instagram and TikTok? Because they’re hot. The algorithm is working in the best way. People love fun and engaging content. So in addition to you running any paid advertising on Google or maybe on Facebook ads, you post organic content about your services, for a lot of people who are already following you or looking for you online.
Let’s say you’re a local pizza restaurant – show different ways that you can flip the pizza or show how you put sauce on it, or you can really make it funny by looking at different trends that are happening right now on Instagram reels and just making that a part of your business.
It could be standing next to the pizza oven, or maybe standing next to the wall and sharing an idea about pizza and about your customers, about what they like. Some people hate olives, so you can kind of make that into a funny little parody, for example. Things like that make it really entertaining.
Everything that someone else would love or not love about pizza – you can share anecdotes in there and make that part of your social media content. That is going to continue building your personal brand, but it’s also going to build your business through your personal, which means you are providing the service as a local business owner, as a content creator.
LinkedIn and Facebook are really hot right now. LinkedIn is hot because everyone’s looking for jobs out there, and it’s also a great platform for marketers as well as for business professionals. You won’t be able to find everyone on there, but it helps you target audiences.
For example, your target audience is CEOs or marketing departments or marketing coordinators, you target people working the nine-to-five job and you want to sell them on a dream to join your business model. You’re going to teach them how to grow their own agency, or you’re going to coach them how to become better people. LinkedIn is going to be hot there. You want to present yourself as a leader and have people join your journey.
TikTok is hot right now too. It’s considered almost as good as YouTube. A big difference between TikTok and YouTube is monetization. YouTube pays their content creators to monetize their content and TikTok does not. So through the lens here, as a content creator, you still want to be on TikTok and you want to create great short-form content there to attract people to you.
It’s the algorithm still working to your advantage since 2020. People could jump on and generate a million views in a day – and it’s still there. It’s still a hot place.
So it’s still worth jumping on the content and building yourself a number of prompts where you can talk about your services or your content to bring people to you. This could be educational content, it could be how-to content, it has to be valuable. It’s got to be a way for other people to be interested in you.
[00:09:22] What should I keep in mind to ensure my business thrives on social media?
High-end quality, clarity and entertainment for people to watch your content. You need prompts. In fact, you need a couple hundred prompts so you don’t run under ideas. The one thing that people miss is consistency. They get to a point where they run out of things to say, and that’s something that you have to keep in mind to thrive on social media.
Every day you have some sort of content to post and you can look at other people, you can look at other channels, find out what’s trending, and just do some research and really take a look at what other people are doing, and then mimic that content as your own content.
For example you are a massage spa salon or a pizzeria owner. Find interesting ways where you can use trending content. And it doesn’t need to be a silly dance on TikTok. What you can do is find ways where you can use trending topics that are both how-to and entertaining.
Your business can thrive on social media because you have entertaining content, and for that to happen, you’ve got to ask yourself a couple different questions. What does your business do? How do you want to translate that into visuals? How do you want to translate that into text? What is your brand identity? What are your buyer personas? You need to strategize and find a way to turn those interesting concepts, those things that happened within your business into content.
The point of social media marketing is it’s kind of like water-cooler talk with everyone. Different people keep joining your water-cooler talk as you’re talking there. Some people may leave, but other people may enter, and that’s why you’ve got to be out there on Twitter, on TikTok, on Instagram reels, on Facebook, YouTube, YouTube shorts, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Pinterest.
Different platforms are different for different businesses. You’ve got to know who your target audience is. You’ve got to know what they’re interested in. And you’ve got to know: what do they want to connect with you for? And you won’t know that until you start posting content, observing it, finding out how it does, and finding out how people react to it.
Going through a bit of trial and error, or working with an agency that has these prompts that can help you with the next steps – that’s what you’ve got to keep in mind. This is so your business thrives on social media and has the consistency of more subscribers, more followers, which will then lead to converted visitors or to phone calls, to book deployments, or to leads.
[00:12:51] What is a social media calendar?
Using the social media calendar is a battle plan or a game plan.
A game plan would be something that will set you up for your entire week. So in the beginning of your week, you make a game, just like any basketball coach is planning for the week to take his team to fly to another area. If you’re any coach for any kind of team, you’re always planning for the week ahead.
Where are you going? What are they doing? When is practice? When is the actual game? When is the debrief? So much like in a social media calendar, where we want to have a game plan for the week, and a daily battle. It helps you stay focused on what you need to be doing that day without wondering: what should I post today?
That’s where most people fail. They have no idea what to post. They get up with no battle plan for the day, and they wonder: well, it’s six o’clock in the morning, I guess I really should post some content today, I don’t know what to post, maybe I’ll just figure it out, maybe I’ll go to Google and type in some things, I’ll go to Google, I’ll go to TikTok, I’ll find out what’s trending.
By the time they know it, two hours have passed. They still have no content. They get discouraged, and then no content gets posted. Don’t be that person. A social media calendar will help you visualize your business and how it’s going to appear on social media.
So focus on one or two platforms at first. You can focus on Instagram reels and then reshare that on TikTok. They’re both vertical formats. In fact, you can probably make Instagram reels, TikTok and YouTube shorts of priority and post that same content, whether it’s seven-second content, fifteen or even a minute. As long as it’s engaging.
The more that you can visualize the content and come up with prompts, the more you can prepare, and that way you’ll have your speaking points for that day, for that week, for that month, for that quarter. When there’s a special holiday coming up, you know what’s coming up and you’ve got a number of prompts that are going to help you out – things that will, that are proven to work.
So you’ve got to find out what those are. You can either do some research online on Google to find out what those prompts could be, or you can look at trends on TikTok and on Instagram. Or you can work with an agency like us and we’ll tell you, we’ll give you some guidance and that will be a good start for you to give you that visual to queue you in.
Once you get into that consistency of creating good content every day, whether you are a local business owner or a content creator, that’ll set this machine up in motion, you’ll be much more consistent with your social media content. And that content will lead to more eyeballs, more views, more followers, which will then lead to more conversions.
Conversions are what you want because you want people to book your services. You want people to book your time, make appointments with you. And now you know in the long run that that is your ROI, building that attention. The value added there is all your content, because once you eventually build enough rapport on social media, people will gravitate toward your service.
If you can show people that you have got an amazing service, they’re going to come in and visit.
