This month’s column is very different from most of my topical social media columns and I will apologies in advance for being a bit on the technical side at times.
The reason for discussion your website’s speed has a direct link to your social media marketing. It’s like this, all the effort you do online with your social media marketing is meaningless if your website visitors come to a site that loads slowly. It’s a known fact that visitors will wait for at the most 5 seconds when visiting a site before moving on to another when doing a random search.
The other day I was with a client who is very social savvy. He's one of my students from a social media course from RACC and credits his continued knowledge from our frequent conversations. These are his nuggets of knowledge. That's what he calls them. I found it interesting that he was so observant to see that Google had changed their platform from Google+ to Get Your Business Online. Yes, they made a very good change.
One of the biggest issues I hear from business owners about being involved with social media and marketing as a whole is, “I don’t have time.” My answer is to take time to plan — which is three quarters of the work.
It’s all about planning.
This year, in an effort to help our clients focus on planning, we created a Marketing Calendar. It includes marketing ideas for a variety of focus areas: marketing with your clients or employees; marketing through social media, your website, through print and outdoor signage; and finally through networking.
Search Engine Optimization or SEO for short is one of those mystifying marketing pieces for business owners. In fact, one of the interesting emails I receive from clients is when they forward me an email that says, “We have noticed that your website needs help in being found when searched on Google.” They wonder if they need to do anything. I always ask them this question, “With the millions of websites online, how did they find your website?” There is usually dead silence on the other end while that question computes.
What is all this hype about Big Data and how can our businesses capitalize on Big Data?
As I was doing some research for a presentation about the trends for 2017, this was mentioned more than once. I was curious as to what it was all about.
Over the past few weeks I've been hosting workshops on Planning Your Marketing and have found the workshops very informative not only for those attending as well as myself. In an effort to extend the reach of our Aha Moments at the workshops, I've included three of the ideas discussed in hopes that you can take advantage of these in building your client base to market your business.
One of the biggest issues I hear from business owners about being involved with social media and marketing as a whole is, “I don’t have time.” My answer is to take time to plan — which is three quarters of the work.
It’s all about planning.
This year, in an effort to help our clients focus on planning, we created a Marketing Calendar. It includes marketing ideas for a variety of focus areas: marketing with your clients or employees; marketing through social media, your website, through print and outdoor signage; and finally through networking.
It’s that time again. Time to take a look at your marketing program for 2016 and create a plan for 2017. One of the things we do with our Pick Your Own Marketing Plan clients is meet with them in November or December to look at any change they may want to do for 2017. We discussed their goals and plans for growth? We review what is currently working and tweak what may not be working or needs improvement.
They are the magic that can make the difference for your site to be found on the tenth page of a Google search or the first page. Blogs are the most powerful tool to building a site found on Google.
Ok. So, you’ve spent all this time setting up Facebook, Instagram, or whatever platform you’re on. You have all the relevant information about your business on your page. Now what?
You need to think about what message you want to convey and how you go about it. Yes, you want to let people what your business, but no one wants to be sold to all the time. If all you are doing is trying to sell, you’re probably not seeing a lot of engagement on your social media. You want to give them the answer to “why” they should be doing business with you.
When creating a logo specifically for your business, it is very important that you brand your logo to be able to stand alone and reflect the mission and vision of your business. If you haven’t worked on the mission and vision of your company, that needs to be worked on first. Once you have the mission and vision, it’s a matter of visualizing what your logo should represent because a logo speaks for you when there aren’t any words to tell them about your business.
It is important that your Instagram account is set up as a business profile. With that you will have access to Insights, a tool to help you understand your audience and the effectiveness of your posts. That information will help you grow.
Check out your Insights to see how your posts are preforming. Here are some things you can see there:
What is IGTV? IGTV is an app associated with Instagram that allows you to create a channel for posting and sharing long form videos. Think of it as YouTube for Instagram. There are several different ways to promote your business on IGTV. This is helpful if your ideal customer is primarily on Instagram.
IGTV can be used to recycle previously published video content, like material that you have already used on other platforms. Videos should be vertical as they are geared toward mobile devices. If your content is horizontal, you will need to convert it.
You can’t make a plan for the future without an understanding of where you are right now. Before you put together your strategy for the New Year, let me give you some quick audit tips. Then, you will have a better understanding of where you need to focus your efforts.
Some things that you need to look at across all accounts.
Do you have a social media plan for the holidays? Now is the time to plan and schedule it. Pull out a calendar and decide what dates are important to your holiday sales strategy. Some dates that you may want to include are Black Friday- 11/23, Small Business Saturday-11/24, and Cyber Monday- 11/26. What other information might you want your customers to know? Do you have special hours and holiday shipping deadlines?
You are probably wondering why I am saying “Change Your Password!” instead of, “You want me to change my passwords? Really?”
The reason for this month’s column is to encourage you to get into the habit of changing your passwords on all your accounts. Why? There are a multitude of reasons which run the gamut of malware, ransomware, spam, hackers, and the list goes on and on.
