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Social media isn’t just for friends & family anymore. Even though it is awesome to photo share and check-in with your close-knit network, successful entrepreneurs realize that digital marketing is more than fun and games. They are using this electronic medium to sell products and launch businesses.
“You don’t want to blur your personal reputation with your company’s brand.”
The number one mistake small business owners make is to run their business account through their personal social media account. The real heavy hitters and entrepreneurs who wish to start-up a company understand they must have a separate site for their business. You don’t want to blur your personal reputation with your company’s brand. These days it doesn’t take much to create a brand; organize a campaign, go live, and within hours, entrepreneurs have an audience and are chatting back and forth with customers in “real-time”.
These days it doesn’t take much to create a brand; organize a campaign, go live, and within hours, entrepreneurs have an audience and are chatting back and forth with customers in “real-time”.
So many channels, so little time…
With so many different platforms to choose from, it can become overwhelming to know where to start. Google and Yelp help with reputation management; Instagram posts are embellished with a pretty photo, geotags & hashtags; Facebook is chatty and targets an older demographic. These are the basic 4 social media outlets.
Customers and colleagues expect a successful entrepreneur to have a LinkedIn profile but be careful not to post the same content that you post on your social media sites. And please don’t forget that LinkedIn is not the place to post your family vacation photos. LinkedIn is for hard-core commercial news and a place for others to review your company brand.
Live by the 5-B’s
Get a structured plan together with your marketing agency to organize your target market and begin creating rich content that will present a memorable launch for your business. Once you go live with your brand, don’t forget your audience will be viewing you morning, noon, and night, so be prepared to answer questions, give feedback and have pricing ready. Don’t forget, also, that you need a plan to ship your product as well. Tell your story succinctly and remember the following words, the 5-B’s:
- Be Responsive; always respond within 24-hours
- Be Consistent
- Be On Trend
- Be Relevant
- Be Truthful
Put together rich content that is helpful and transforms into business leads and ultimately sales. Join network forums that will relate to what you are selling. Follow others and they will follow you. Be open and share information.
LURK Competitors
Social media allows CMA to lurk our competitors and to see how they are telling their story and to improve ourselves by viewing other perspectives we may not have thought of before.
Lurking shares competitors’ client bases and reveals how clients view them. When have we marketers ever been able to get inside our competitors’ heads like this before?
Once your business has established a brand, you will be able to target and customize your audience, engage with them one-on-one and understand their likes and dislikes. You will also soon learn their buying habits and be able to create content specific to your targeted audience.
Customers want to be heard. They want things to be simple to understand and to manage. Not only does content have to be rich, but the photos also must tell a strong story. Don’t forget you have to geotarget and fence your audience and manage other factors like hashtags and tagging. Once you’re up and running, commenting and follow-through becomes vital to growing the audience. At CMA we are open to training our clients on how to manage their social media on their own, but most often they return to our company, happy to pay our agency to manage all of this for them as they realize that managing social media is a full-time job.
After the brand launches, then comes the work to keep up all the platforms and manage the online reputation. It is an ongoing job to audit monthly each listing to confirm information is correct and reviews are being answered. The goals are to see that your reputation maintains a 5-Star status.
Find your voice, tell your audience to share your content, don’t forget to comment on every single voice on your feed and show genuine interest.
Remember bigger isn’t always better with social media/digital media—smaller budgets can have a BIG return if you remember the 5-“B’s” ????
Source: Gary Henderson #GaryClub
AUTHOR
Kim Kelley, Marketing Guru
Kim Kelley is the Principal at Creative Marketing Arts. With over 30 years in the Shopping Center industry, Kim offers creative ideas blended perfectly for REIT Advertising and Marketing. With an eye for perfection and creative flair, Kim offers all clients Out of the Box solutions.