Social media is a fantastic tool to promote your business, to gain new leads and to engage with an active audience, however it can also be quite daunting! You may wonder – how do I set up my social, which social media channels would work for me and what content do I share?

Here’s a quick guide to social media for your brand to get you started!

Set-up: naming your social channels

First of all, an important tip is that you should see your social media channels as an extension of your digital brand strategy. When setting up your social media business pages, choose a name or a social URL that is consistent (or as close to) your website or business name. By doing this will help people find you on social and support your brand recognition.

Some channels will allow for an @ handle and a full business name, so think about how people know you and what words they use to find your brand.

For example: on Twitter my @ handle is @leodismarketing (to align with my website) and my name is listed as LEODIS Marketing & PR to align with my brand.

Remember also when setting up your social media channels you don’t want friends you want followers! What does this mean – well on Facebook set up a ‘Business Page’ and on LinkedIn set up a ‘Company Page’. Your business isn’t a person, and lots of social media channels have great tools for businesses, so if you set yourself up as a person, you won’t be able to access specially designed resources for social marketing.

Which social media channel is for me?

Every day it seems like a new social media channel is developed, however for business there’s still some more popular ones especially if you’re only getting started in this digital space. Here’s a quick guide to get you started.

Facebook

The original platform for engaging live audiences and likely the most well-known social media across all generations, Facebook is a fantastic tool for business. The benefits are that it’s free to set-up a business page (see earlier mention), the tool itself allows you to brand your page, create and share visual content, and engage with a ready-made audience.

The businesses that gain large audiences and engagement on Facebook tend to be more consumer facing. Facebook allows for you to find audiences by interest types and engage them, and most people have provided this information to Facebook. What we haven’t always done is provided our job roles and titles, so it can be harder for business to business engagement if you are using this channel alone. However, Facebook is about community – so there’s always opportunities to engage other businesses. There’s great tools like ‘Private Groups’ that you can also use to engage business audiences in a more enclosed setting.

LinkedIn

Long gone are the days that LinkedIn is all about recruitment. Yes, the personal profile is certainly very powerful, however the company page can be the centre of your business to business strategy. It’s a great way to share content that then the leaders in your business can on-share. It is also a very profession driven social media to be able to connect and engage with business people. On LinkedIn, people are much more comfortable with the business conversation.

Instagram

Simply – if you don’t have access to visually pleasing pictures and / or are restricted on how often you can take these pictures, then Insta might not be for you. Like Facebook – Insta is largely a consumer conversation, so if you’re targeting consumers this will be an important channel. If you’re targeting businesses, it may be harder and more time resource heavy to utilise this channel for gain.

Twitter

The original home of the hashtag Twitter is both consumer and business, however much more globally focused. It’s certainly harder to pinpoint a local audience. If you want to engage on a celebrity level, Twitter can be helpful (#mafsaustralia for example!), however for business it can be a great tool to engage with media, politics or to stay across breaking news!

What content do I share?

So, once you’ve got your chosen social media channels built and ready to go it’s time to start sharing some content. Variety is my biggest tip here and what I mean by that is use photos, graphics, videos, different content sources, ask questions, do a poll and whatever you do don’t be repetitive!

• Your business, product or people news
• Articles and tips from your blog
• Advice or Knowledge
• Award wins
• Pictures of your team and their stories
• Special offers
• A look behind the scenes
• Media coverage
• Industry news
• Testimonials
• Local area news story
• Research and insights
• Influencer / celebrity comments about your industry

Finally, always follow the 80/20 rule – 80% of the time tell a story, share news, don’t focus on the sale or the promotion, and 80% of the time you can sell direct. You will get more engagement and credibility for your brand if you use social media to build relationships with your customers and help them out rather than trying to sell directly to them.

Debbie Bradley, Founder and Director of LEODIS Marketing & PR is a no-fluff straight-talking professional with more than 20 years’ experience. If you want to chat about your social media activities or need help, contact Debbie today: debbie@leodismarketing.com.au

Photo by Tracy Le Blanc from Pexels

Your marketing efforts present opportunities every day to bring in new leads to the business, to convince existing clients to stay with you and to engage your audiences further with your brand.

There are many tools of digital marketing to support your business and here’s how you can utilise them.

Website

Your website is your digital shop window representing your business – the minute a customer steps into your digital platform – it’s an opportunity to gain a new customer or make an impression – and first impressions definitely count. Whether you are starting out building a website or reviewing an existing one – put yourself in the customer or prospects shoes.

• Does your website quickly inform them who you are, what you sell and what your stand for?
• Is it visually pleasing – do you have both copy and images? Is there a balance?
• Do all the links work?
• Is it mobile friendly?
• Can they easily find a way to contact you via your phone or email?
• Is the navigation simple and the website easy to navigate?

If you’ve answered no to any of the above, you could be losing customers or leads.

Some other important elements on your website to check off are:

• Testimonials – customer recommendations and case studies will go a long way into convincing customers to take that final step to work with you.
• Videos – dynamic content is a great way of keeping people engaged.
• News and articles – not a blog, but news and updates on your business is content that will help with SEO and keep customers coming back for more.
• Social media – add all your social icons to the homepage so people can engage across multiple channels. If you’re active on social, you may want to integrate your Facebook, Twitter or Insta feed directly into your homepage.
• Meet the team – adding a meet the team can give a personal view of the business.

Blog

A blog is a great way to share advice, tips and knowledge with your audience. Adding regular content to your website or to your blog is also an important search engine optimisation tool to gain more traffic to your site.

The art of blogging is not to make the content too salesy. Consider what your audience might learn or take away from each piece of content. What do your customers want to know from you? What are you expert in?

Sometimes I will ask reception, or call centre staff – what are customers asking you about when they call? This can lead to a vast amount of potential blog topics that will be relevant and informative to your customers and may take the burden away from your front-line teams.

When creating your blogs, try and add both imagery and copy, or if you’re a video whizz – why not try a v-log (video-blog)!

Email marketing

It’s got a bit of a bad rap in recent times, especially as we all struggle to clear our inboxes of hundreds of emails, but email marketing can still be effective.

The first step is to have a cleansed and up-to-date database – the success of your email marketing really relies on this. If you can go that step further and have a database that has additional information about your customers, such as interests and some demographics you can really start to think about personalising your email marketing, which will always increase engagement.

Some simple tips for creating good email marketing are:

• Use a reputable email marketing system.
• Create email marketing templates that are designed to display your brand and can accommodate both images and copy professionally (no distorted pictures, mis-matched content and wonky font sizes).
• Make the subject line engaging – ask a question, be quirky and interesting.
• Make sure the intro connects with the subject line – it can be really frustrating if you have set the expectation and once the user opens the newsletter it doesn’t connect.
• Give a short summary in the newsletter and link through to more information on your website
• Measure the clicks, and see what content your audience is most interested in
• Share your blogs in your newsletter, add a variety of content
• Don’t share a newsletter for the sake of it – have you got something new or interesting to say?
• Don’t make it all about the sales message
• Add in different content types – videos (you can’t host them in email newsletters, but you can use a visual to entice a click-through
• Include your contact details and links to your social media

Social media

There are many different social media channels out there for businesses to use for free – you don’t have to use them all. Choose one to start with and do that one well. It’s not good for your reputation to have customers on your social channels where content hasn’t been shared for months on end.

Some top tips for utilising social media are:

• Brand your pages – make sure they look good and align with your brand on your other digital channels.
• Be live – answer questions, respond to messages and comments, and be an active user.
• Share content regularly and change it up with videos, pictures, graphics, questions, polls, news, case studies etc. (once week posting might work until you grow your audiences).
• Engage with your audience – comment on other businesses pages, respond to comments, report and share other peoples or businesses posts.

Debbie Bradley, Founder and Director of LEODIS Marketing & PR is a no-fluff straight-talking professional with more than 20 years’ experience. If you want to chat about your marketing activities or need help, contact Debbie today: debbie@leodismarketing.com.au