It’s safe to say that being a sole business owner, or solopreneur, can certainly take its toll. Trying to set up and run a successful business is a challenge in itself, without then having to worry about how to learn new skills to promote yourself. Juggling so many new things at once, many businesses often don’t have the marketing know-how and feel swamped with having to work out the best channels and techniques.
However this simple step plan will help you map out how to approach your social media marketing to help promote yourself and your business.
The two key pillars to your marketing activity: who are you and who are they?
The key thing to try and tackle is what are the company’s core values – what are the messages you want to communicate about your company, service or product? How do you want other people to talk about you? Once this is clearly outlined, this will become a solid core to your marketing activity and help direct your decisions in the right path, but also prevent you from wasting your time on the wrong channels or activity.
The second thing to determine is who is your audience? By researching your audience and understanding what channels are relevant to them, you begin to narrow down the multitude of marketing choices available to you as you only choose the channels they engage with.
Planning is key
As time consuming as it can be to learn new skills, the importance of planning your promotional activity is vital as trust me it ultimately saves time going forwards. Marketing takes time and focus and the best way to ensure you’re being consistent and growing your audience or customer base is to plan your marketing activity.
To help you get started, take a look at our plan below.
8 steps to creating and implementing your social media marketing activity
- Determine your key values and messages – what is your company, why should people be interested – what are your key words you want to use in your communications, what’s the tone you want to use?
- Determine your audience – who is your customer, what matters to them, where can they be found?
- Select the channels you want to use – it is better to do fewer channels consistently rather than many channels badly
- Set up goals and measurement tools – track progress, what’s effective, what’s not
- Create a schedule for content – plan several weeks even months ahead for content, tailor make each content strand for each channel
- Make use of automation tools – schedule posts leaving you time to be more reactive
- Create assets – artwork, branded imagery, photography to accompany posts. Get noticed with imagery and increase interaction, interest and engagement with followers
- Remember social media means being social – reply to requests, posts, say thank you to your customers
The great thing about social media marketing is that it gives you a direct channel to your current and potential customers. All great relationships are built on authentic communication, honesty and likeability and these factors need to be integrated into your social media activity. You stop liking someone if they’re not honest about themselves, trying to be someone they’re not or are only talking to you because they want something. Therefore by clarifying who you are and understanding your audience and their triggers, you can steer a conversation that will develop into good rapport, trust and on to sales!
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