Social Media Marketing For Local Businesses

Why You Need to Know Your ‘Why’ on Social Media Marketing

Want to be a big sensation on social media? Then you need to go right back to the basics and ask yourself what it is your business actually does and why it does it. It is not enough to think of your social media campaign in a vacuum. It is not enough to think of it as something separate and distinct from everything else you do. Rather, you need to look at this from the perspective of what you want to achieve and how you’re going to go about doing it.

The Golden Circle

‘Know your why’ is something of a catchphrase that has become popular among businesses and the origin of this lies with Simon Sineks’ talk on ‘The Golden Circle’. Simon explained in a TED talk that there are three different ‘layers’ to what a business does – an outer, middle and inner ring that make up the golden circle.

That first outer layer is ‘what’ your company does. Maybe you make computers, or you sell insurance. The second middle layer is ‘how’ you do it. Maybe you are a reseller, or a manufacturer. And the final inner layer is why you do it. Do you do it to make the world a greener and cleaner place? Do you do it because you love futuristic hardware? Do you do it because you believe in small business?

Whatever your reason, your why, this is your driving force, your ethos and your mission statement and this needs to lie at the center of your social media strategy!

Why

So why ‘why’? The answer is simple: people will follow you on social media if they are your fans. That means that they need to identify with your business in a way that goes beyond simply liking your products.

You might find that you use toilet paper from a certain brand a lot of the time and perhaps you like that product. But you won’t be a fan of the company unless you find some deeper meaning behind the toilet paper – like a big push for eco friendliness, or perhaps an ethos of comfort and luxury.

If you want to make fans out of your followers, build a loyal tribe and gain a huge boost in shares and likes as a result, then you need to know what it is that people can identify with about your business and how you’re going to communicate that!

How to Integrate Your Social Media Marketing With Your Website or Blog

When you think about social media and marketing, it’s important to not only think of it as a way to promote your blog. This is how a lot of webmasters and bloggers approach social media and thus their posts are all about building traffic for their main site. The point they’re missing here though, is that their main site should also be promoting their social media. Your social media marketing should in this sense be viewed as equally important as your website from a marketing standpoint and when you get this right, you’ll find that you can generate traffic much more effectively.

The Virtuous Cycle

Why? Because then you create a ‘virtuous circle’ where one aspect of your brand is helping to fuel the other, which is then helping to fuel the first! Each time someone visits your site and likes your content, they should be shown your social media and given the chance to follow. When they do that, they will then be updated with more of your content through their homefeed. And when that happens, it will lead them to then click on those links and return back to your main site. When they share the content, they bring more people to your website, which in turn brings more people to your social media!

How to Get to This Point

So what tools and strategies can you use to make this happen? The first is that you should place social media buttons – simple links to your social pages – right on your home page. This way, as soon as someone comes to your site and gets a good idea of what you are all about, they’ll then be able to click to visit your social pages and sign up for more similar content.

Another tip is to use a social media feed as a widget. This way, people can actually see your latest posts on Twitter or Facebook right on your site – and if it’s good, then you’ll get more people to sign up. Of course it’s also important to include sharing buttons in the content itself. This way, if someone enjoys a post of yours, they can then click to share it with their friends and followers, which will mean yet more people are exposed to your brand and more people come to your site.

With just three simple WordPress plugins then, you can put rocket fuel in your marketing strategy!

How to Create an Amazing Logo for Your Social Media Brand

If you want to make a big impact on social media, one of the key factors is to have strong branding and an excellent logo. One of the big roles of social media marketing is to help you promote your brand and increase visibility. At the same time though, a great logo will also help to make your brand appear more professional and it will ensure that there is consistency between all of your different channels. If the same professional looking logo is used everywhere from your Twitter account to your Facebook account, then these will become linked in the minds of your visitors and that will send a clear message. But in order for this message to be a positive one, that logo needs to look the part. So how do you go about designing a great logo for your social media campaign?

Quality

It starts by ensuring that your logo is high quality and that it looks professional. To accomplish that, you either need to have the right tools and know-how yourself, or you need to hire someone who does. One thing that is crucial here is that your logo be made with a vector file. These are files that are easy to edit and that don’t lose any quality when they are resized. It’s what will ensure your logo always looks maximum quality.

Design

Of course the design is also very important and in an ideal scenario, you will ensure that both the image itself and the name of your company together tell a story of what your brand is about. So for example, if you are a fitness brand then you need to make sure that that’s immediately apparent. And not only should your viewers be able to see that you’re a fitness brand, they should also be able to see what kind of fitness brand you are. What’s your mission statement and ethos? What kind of person will like this?

The aim is to create a logo that when viewed with any one of your posts, makes the right kind of person instantly want to click ‘subscribe’ because they feel that it’s exactly the kind of thing that they’re going to enjoy. If you can manage that, then you should expect to see a huge increase in traffic and better engagement from the fans that you already have!

Social Media Marketing is All About Communication

Want to get more people to like your content on social media and share it with their friends? Then it’s time to go right back to basics and to remember why people use social media in the first place. You need to remember what it is that social media is, first and foremost. And what is it? It’s a form of communication.

And communication is inherently about expression of points of view. Once you understand this, you’ll be able to better understand the psychology of sharing and therefore encourage people to share much more of your content. So read on…

Why People Share

So social media is about communication, which is about expression. This holds true in real life too – when we communicate, we are largely expressing something about our views, our feelings or our personality. We love to express ourselves and in fact, most of us are pretty narcissistic. Given half a chance, we’ll almost always try to steer the topic onto something about us!

And this is also apparent when you look around someone’s bedroom or home: it will be decorated with things that say things about them. It’s about their sense of style, their hobbies and interests and their families and friends. Your Facebook profile is very much an extension of this. And the things you share on your wall and the pictures you post are all about showing people what matters to you and what you like to do (or what you’d like them to think you like to do!).

Knowing this, what is it that makes someone like a Facebook page or share a link often? Self-expression. If you write a post that’s all about the health benefits of martial arts, then who do you think is going to share it? Martial artists! Why? Because they want people to know that they agree with your statement and therefore make it a part of their identity.

Likewise, if you write something about working from home and it’s amusing or relatable, then people who work from home will post it so that their friends can learn a little more about the way they work. As you can see then, sharing content is very commonly just a way to show off different aspects of your own personality.

Sharing With Friends

And the other reason we share? That’s to show that we’re thinking of someone. When we’re not expressing ourselves, we’re usually sharing content that we think is ideally suited to someone else. So what do both these scenarios have in common? In both situations the content is aimed at a single, very specific person. Don’t try and please everyone – try to write expressive content that the right people will identify with.

How to Make People Excited to Follow You On Social Media

When we’re trying to build a big following on social media, often we will ask our website visitors and customers to follow us and thereby imply that they’re doing us a favour. “If you liked this video, then please consider liking us on Facebook – it really helps!” This is a good strategy and it can certainly lead to a few more likes and shares.

But it’s not the best strategy.

Because if you’re asking people to follow you on social media, then you’re implicitly suggesting that they’re doing you a favour and thus there’s nothing really in it for them. To get a HUGE number of followers, you need to make them WANT to follow you.

One way you can do this is to do what we’re always taught to do as marketers: to supply value. If you’re posting useful or interesting content, then people should automatically want to follow you to see more of it.
But to go further than this, you need to suggest that following you makes someone a VIP – that they are becoming part of an exclusive club or group.

People love to belong and they love to have things that other people can’t have. We love feeling like a part of a privileged group and this is why ‘Gold Memberships’ are so important. It’s not just about what that gold membership gets you: it’s about the status and feeling of importance and belonging that comes from it.

You can create this same kind of identity through your social media marketing by making your brand into more than just a product and instead making it a movement. For example, you’ll find that a lot of fitness and weight loss brands will talk about themselves as ‘The New Fitness Revolution’ or something comparable. Of course people will want to sign up to that! Who wouldn’t want to tell people they’re part of a new revolution? Or to feel like they’re a part of a big movement?

And this has another amazing benefit too: you’re making people feel as though they’re taking a step closer to their goal simply by following you. When someone makes the decision to get into shape and to look and feel healthier than ever, they will want to do something to cement that decision and to make a statement to that end. Following you is the perfect way to do this!

How to Sell the Dream Through Social Media Marketing

When you are trying to build a successful social media page that will help to sell your products and build you a big following, what’s important is to try and ‘sell the dream’. So what does that mean? It means focussing on your value proposition.

A value proposition is the way in which your product or your service can change people’s lives for the better. What is it that people should get from your product if all goes well? The old saying goes that you don’t sell hats, you sell warm heads! This is to say that people don’t buy hats because they want to wrap fabric around their heads – they buy them for an end goal that will make life a little more comfortable. Your product and your service are more than the sum of their parts.

The Emotional Hook

The value proposition becomes even more important when what you’re selling has an ‘emotional hook’. The ideal example here is the infamous ‘Make Money Ebook’. This is just a PDF with lots of words, which in itself doesn’t offer that much value. So the value proposition is tied to what those words can do for the person. And of course this means that you’re going to help your readers to become richer. More than that, you’re going to help them end the stress of debt and you’re going to help them to be more attractive to the opposite sex. They can go on lots of holidays and buy nice watches that make them feel more confident!

That’s the emotional hook and if you were trying to sell the product on a sales page, that’s what you’d focus on. In social media, you don’t want to be so sleazy. Instead, your objective will be to focus on the lifestyle that is associated with the product you’re selling and to promote this through your channel.

How to Sell the Lifestyle

So how might you do this? A quick look on Instagram will quickly show you how people are selling fitness products and clothing: they do it by creating a lifestyle and sharing images and videos of themselves working out, or just looking generally attractive in their clothes. And this helps to gain them followers who want that lifestyle too and who want to live vicariously through them. And it also generates a lot of sales – more effectively than any sleazebag marketing attempt!

Why You Need to Provide Value to Have a Great Social Media Marketing Plan

Want to build a big social media page with thousands of followers? Hoping you can use this to build awareness for your brand and drive traffic and sales? Great! But if any of that is going to happen, then you need to ensure that you’re approaching social media marketing in the right way and that you understand the secret to success. The good news? That secret is very simple and easy. And we’re going to share it right here…

The One Thing That You Need to do to Succeed

When you’re trying to succeed on social media, there is just one thing you need to do and that is to provide value. In other words, you need to make sure that you have a social media account that is offering something useful to the follower. That might take the form of jokes, quotes and entertainment, it might take the form of inspiration and encouragement, or it might take the form of useful links and posts.

But whatever the case, it needs to be actually useful. And a good way to know whether you’re accomplishing that is to imagine that your social media posts were to get taken down tomorrow. How would people react? Would they be genuinely disappointed that something they enjoyed reading or found useful is no longer available?

Or would no one care?

If you answered the former then well done: you’re on the right track!

What a Lot of Businesses Do

But unfortunately, a lot of businesses just don’t do this. That’s because they think the purpose of social media is simply self-promotion. Sure, it is in a way, but if that’s all you’re doing, then what incentive is there for anyone to follow you?

A lot of small local businesses will create social media pages and then all they’ll post is the occasional statement like ‘We Make the Best xxxxxxx in the Area!’ or ‘Find out why we’re number one… call today!’.

But ask yourself: if you followed a page like this, would you stick around for long? Or would you eventually unsubscribe? Most people would say the latter. Not only that but using this kind of approach will just make a business look out of touch and outdated – they appear to not understand how to use social media! So think differently and start asking what your followers would want to see from you!

How to Create an Interesting Social Media Page for a Boring Niche

If you look for advice on how to create a buzzing social media channel, you’ll find that the general consensus is to try to offer something of genuine value. Your aim is to try and create something that people will be entertained or informed by and that way to think of your social media page almost as a product or as a service in its own right. The aim is to make a page that people will be excited and eager to check in on.

That’s easy if you have a business in fitness. All you need to do is to regularly post inspiring quotes, workout tips and pictures of people training. Job done! But what if you work in life insurance? Or accounting? Or a Funeral Service? How then are you supposed to come up with a channel that people can relate to?

Being Tangential

In these scenarios, the simple solution is to make a social media page that is not directly about the niche or industry that you’re focussed on but rather one that is tangentially related. A great example of this for example might be a company that sells lightbulbs. Now this is a pretty dull (no pun intended) product and it’s not something people will want to read about every day! But what’s tangentially related here is interior décor. People have lightbulbs in their lamps, and lamps are a key part of our decorating.

So you can therefore create a social media page that’s about decorating. A great example of this would be a Pinterest board where you collect inventive and creative ideas for interior décor. This could include ‘hacks’ for storage or beautiful home-made designs.

Either way, you now have a page that’s filled with unique ideas that homeowners might want to check out for inspiration and you’re providing a service. You can use this way to build a big following, get lots of shares and only then occasionally try and promote your lightbulbs!

Know Your Why

We already touched on this, but it’s also important to know the reason that your business exists and what drives it. Why do you do what you do? What is your value proposition and how do you make the world better?

Once you know this, you can find that ‘through line’ that connects your topics. So for example, if you sell life insurance, your mission statement might be to create happier families. And if that’s your mission statement, then a Facebook page about ‘fun activities for families’ will serve the same end goal and be a perfect marketing strategy!

How to Write Titles For Your Social Media That Will Generate 3x More Clicks

What is it about this title that made you want to read it? If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say that specifically it was the ‘three times’ part. That’s the hook because it is very specific, sounds very impressive and yet is believable. In reality, I can’t guarantee it will get you that much extra traffic but the tips we’re going to share can certainly lead to a significant improvement, which can also lead to some big increases in turnover and profit for your business! So what are these tips?

Think Like Clickbait

The key is to think like a clickbait title. If you’re not sure what clickbait means, it is essentially any title that uses psychological tactics to make you click it even if you normally wouldn’t. Often, this in turn means that the title will sound emotive and that it will include some element of mystery. A good example is something like this:

“Learn this one weird trick that is making men transform their muscle growth!”

What works about this is the ‘one weird trick’ part. Not only does it sound believable (rather than claiming it’s a supplement, which sounds money-motivated) but it also sounds interesting and people will want to know what that one mysterious factor is. And finally, you have the ‘transform muscle growth’ element which is very emotionally charged for anyone who would like to be stronger.

The combination of these things makes the title very effective at generating clicks!  Another example would be:

“10 ways to massively increase traffic to your website. Number 3 will shock you!”

That last statement here is what drives home the mystery and makes people want to find out what number three is all about. Meanwhile, the ’massive increase’ is emotionally charged and makes people imagine what that could do for their site.

Learning the Difference

Those two titles get clicks whereas titles like:

“How to build muscle from home”

Or

“10 SEO Tips”

just don’t. Those two titles are far too similar to things we’ve seen too many times before to be interesting. And that’s the point really – you need to imply that you’re offering something new, something exciting and something potentially life changing.

And you know what the very best way to do that is? To actually offer all of those things! Come up with something amazing and then your title will automatically become ‘clickbait’.

How to Take Great Photos That Tell a Story for Your Social Media Accounts

Being successful with social media marketing is all about storytelling. It’s all about being able to paint a bigger picture than the one you actually include – and it’s about implying a lifestyle and an ethos. This is something that many Instagram celebrities do very well. What immediately springs to mind are the women who post photos wearing outfits provided by sponsors. They earn millions of dollars but how did they get to this point?

Simple: by posting photos that make them look highly attractive, while also showing off a glamorous and desirable lifestyle. They’ll post pictures stepping out of luxurious cars, or running down the beach in a beautiful frock. Perhaps working out with immaculate makeup!

These images might not be true to life but they sell an ideal and a way of life. And their followers buy the dresses because they believe that by doing so, they can accomplish that way of life too. To a lesser extent, this is what you’re trying to do with any photos you post on social media to promote a brand.

How to do It

So how do you do it? A good place to start is with a better camera. A good camera will make everything look better and especially if you use features like macros in order to bring the extreme foreground into focus while blurring out the back. Learning to take good photos will also help. There are many aspects to this but the basics are to think about lighting (actually position yourself to get the best Rembrandt lighting on your subject) and consider composition. Think about how you can create a sense of movement, of depth and of scale and think about how you can frame the shot and the subject matter in a way that’s interesting and dynamic.

You also need to think about what the lifestyle you’re trying to promote is and everything that comes with that. You can start by thinking about your target audience and what it is that they want. What are their hobbies? How do they dress? What inspires them? Who are their heroes? You can then integrate this seamlessly into your photos.

One way to do this is by making a photo just a single piece of evidence, left by a much bigger event. What’s more powerful – a photo of a big party? Or a photo of empty lipstick-stained-glasses the next day?

Now that you have hopefully got your head around why social media marketing for your local business is so important, you might want to check out our recent post on the dark social media traffic and why it is so important to know about what it is and how it affects your social media marketing. And if you have any questions about social media marketing for your local business, or marketing in general, don’t be afraid to hit us up and ask us via our ‘Pick our Brains’ page or contact us for a free consultation (up to one hour).