What we need to understand during this time is that you shouldn’t stop your marketing activities. Yes, it’s a good idea to take stock of your expenses and cut back where necessary, however marketing and advertising your business should be TOP priority. 

Have a think about everyone who is self-isolating. They’re stuck at home. Where do you think they will be spending most of their time? You guessed it – online. You need to ensure that once this is all over, your business recovers and to do that you STILL need to stay front of mind with your target audience and customer base.

Here are some key tips that you can implement TODAY, that don’t cost a cent.

Social time.

If you’ve been procrastinating about social media for your business, now is the time to get set up, plan your posts and start connecting with your audience. A large percentage of your audience will be online and the easiest way to connect with them is on social media platforms. Let them know who you are and what you do, and how YOU can help them through this challenging time.

Provide value.

By providing value to your customers and clients, they’re likely to remember you over your competitors in the future. What can you bring to your customers via online channels that can help them?

Connect in different locations.

Not everyone consumes content in the same place, so plan ways in which you can connect with your current customers and your potential customers across different channels. How can you reach them? Newsletters/EDM’s are a great way to touch base with your current client base to let them know you’re here for them. Social media and blogging along with strong website SEO can help reach new audiences, in particular, those searching for alternatives.

Whatever you do, use this time wisely and make sure you keep your business visible.

Want to get more hands-on guidance? Check out Nicola’s Weekly Column on Coastbeat, Outspoken Intel, or book a free online consultation with her!

About the author:

Nicola is co-owner at Outspoken Entourage. Bringing disruptive design to the Coffs Coast, Outspoken Entourage offers a range of services including graphic design, logo and branding, website design, digital marketing packages and social media workshops for business.  Marketing and business strategy services are also available through their affiliate, One Fine Day Consulting. Find out more at outspokenentourage.com.au

The post Outspoken Intel – Keep marketing during lockdown (3 tips that won’t cost you anything!) appeared first on Coastbeat.

In essence, digital marketing is the use of digital technology to achieve business and marketing goals. And the use of this technology PULLS your target audience to your business and website, hence the term ‘inbound’ marketing. The whole idea is that rather than pushing your message out to all and sundry (and close your eyes, cross your fingers and hope that it reaches your target audience) you can actually create valuable content that draws your audience to you.

So, how do you do it? While it does take a bit of planning, below are some ways you can draw your clients to your business. And remember, inbound marketing is a long game. It’s like losing weight – slow and steady gives great gains, quick fixes give a short-term result, but you end up back where you started. 

Blog, baby!

The whole idea of blogging (and creating content in general) is to build brand reputation, awareness and affinity. Start writing down different areas of your business, then drill down deeper to words associated with that area of your business. For example, if you’re a personal trainer, you could write down strength training, then dive deeper with weights, resistance, form, anaerobic, supersets, etc. Then you’d write a blog about each of those words, rather than strength training. It’s about making your content last longer!

Create different forms of content. 

So yep, you can blog, but you can also create things like ebooks, videos, infographics, a white paper and more! With so many options, you can mix, reuse and repurpose content into various formats. Going back to my personal trainer example, you may have written 10 blog posts on all those keywords associated with strength training. Then you could put together an Ebook about Strength Training, and all you need to do is repurpose the 10 blog posts into the Ebook format. Easy, peasy!

Use social media. 

A great way to get the content that you’ve created out to an audience is through your social media channels. Use social media to draw people BACK to the blog on your website, or the ebook available for download on your website. Ultimately, we want to get your audience BACK to your website, where, hopefully, they find your business SO FREAKING INTERESTING that they spend loads of time on there, with a view to engaging your services or purchasing your products.

Google Ads / PPC.

Pay per click (PPC) is another great way to get customers to your website. When you’re searching on Google, you’re in the market to buy, so your business needs to take advantage of that! If someone types in ‘personal trainer in Coffs Harbour’ you’d want to be coming up organically on the first page of Google, while also getting your paid advertisement coming up too. Don’t miss out on an opportunity to capture someone who is in the market to buy, by not having Google Ads.

Paid Social Campaigns.

In another blog, I’ll explain in more detail the difference behind Google Ads and Social Media campaigns, but in the meantime, paid social campaigns are a great way to create awareness of your business. We all know that Facebook and Insta algorithms change all the time, and your organic posts may not get shown to a large portion of your followers. By creating a campaign, and allocating a budget, you can select your audience and know that your message is getting out to the right people. They may not be in the market to buy right now, but they may be in the future.

So, there you have it! See how you go implementing the above and see what comes in!

Want to get more hands-on guidance? Check out Nicola’s Weekly Column on Coastbeat, Outspoken Intel, or book a free online consultation with her!

About the author:

Nicola is co-owner at Outspoken Entourage. Bringing disruptive design to the Coffs Coast, Outspoken Entourage offers a range of services including graphic design, logo and branding, website design, digital marketing packages and social media workshops for business.  Marketing and business strategy services are also available through their affiliate, One Fine Day Consulting. Find out more at outspokenentourage.com.au

The post Outspoken Intel – 5 ways to pull clients to your business with digital marketing. appeared first on Coastbeat.

Heel and toe, and away we go!

Facebook & hashtags

I’m starting you off easy here. Best practice is, don’t use hashtags on Facebook. If you’re a clever little peanut that pushes their Insta posts through to Facebook, then just make sure you jump onto Facebook and remove the hashtags after you’ve posted.

Instagram & hashtags

You MUST hashtag on Instagram. Okay, it’s not enforced (I’m not going to pop around to your place, hold your hand and type those hashtags in for you….) BUT, it’s how you get REACH. And with reach comes followers. The more people you reach, the more people have the chance to view your profile and hit that ‘Follow’ button. If you don’t hashtag, you’re never going to get anywhere fast.

Hashtag selection

This is important! You need to be strategic with your hashtags. If you jump into Instagram and type in a hashtag, you can see how many people have posted with that hashtag. You want to get a selection of hashtags that include hashtags that have large number of posts and those that have a smaller number of posts. And they need to be specific to your industry/what you do.

Specific hashtags to the post

When posting, make sure you use a set of ‘core’ hashtags that are relevant to your business – maybe say 10 or so. Then, ensure you post another 3 – 5 that are SPECIFIC to that post. For example, if I posted a picture of a dog, we’d post the following hashtags along with our core hashtags: #dog #italiangreyhound #dogsofinstagram #doggoneday. Ya get the gist?

So in summary…

If you’re at the Hashtag Hoedown, you’d see Facebook decline any Hashtag’s offer to dance, Instagram would be dancing with lots of Hashtags, but being quite selective with WHICH Hashtags, and Facebook would probably be sitting in a corner, thinking about spiking the punch and wondering why they bothered to turn up.

Want to get more hands-on guidance? Check out Nicola’s Weekly Column on Coastbeat, Outspoken Intel, or join her at one of their upcoming Workshops. See our What’s On Events page for more information.

About the author:

Nicola is co-owner at Outspoken Entourage. Bringing disruptive design to the Coffs Coast, Outspoken Entourage offers a range of services including graphic design, logo and branding, website design, digital marketing packages and social media workshops for business.  Marketing and business strategy services are also available through their affiliate, One Fine Day Consulting. Find out more at outspokenentourage.com.au

The post Outspoken Intel – The hashtag hoedown. appeared first on Coastbeat.

“But hang on a sec”, we hear you say. “You are always telling everyone to post consistently and now you’re saying that we shouldn’t post if we don’t have a plan?!? OE dudes, I’m confused!”

Don’t be! Yes, for social media to be effective you DO need to be consistent, BUT (there’s always a but, right?!) there’s no point just posting for the sake of posting. It won’t get you anywhere fast.

No plan usually means no objective either. What’s the point of posting if you don’t know what you want to achieve from social media? Is it brand awareness? More followers? Driving website visits? Or better engagement? Without a plan, and objective, how can you measure that what you’re doing is getting the results you want?

But you CAN become a social media machine, with a little planning.

Thing #1

Set an objective for the month. What do you want to achieve with your social media? Have a think about your products and services and perhaps decide on a theme for the month. You can then look to create your content based on that theme.

Thing #2

Get yourself a content calendar (and we’re feeling generous, so you can download your content calendar HERE) so you can plan a week, 2 weeks or even a month in advance! It’s also a great way to get an overview of your posts for the month.

Thing #3

Use a third-party scheduling software, such as Sprout Social, to schedule the posts on the days and times you want them to go out. Once they are loaded, you can quite literally sit back and relax, knowing your posts will go out each day and you can focus on other business tasks.

Want to get more hands-on guidance? Check out Nicola’s Weekly Column on Coastbeat, Outspoken Intel, or join her at one of their upcoming Workshops. See our What’s On Events page for more information.

About the author:

Nicola is co-owner at Outspoken Entourage. Bringing disruptive design to the Coffs Coast, Outspoken Entourage offers a range of services including graphic design, logo and branding, website design, digital marketing packages and social media workshops for business.  Marketing and business strategy services are also available through their affiliate, One Fine Day Consulting. Find out more at outspokenentourage.com.au

The post Outspoken Intel – If you don’t plan, don’t post (and 3 things you can do about it). appeared first on Coastbeat.

Social media. Love it or hate it, it’s here and it’s not going anywhere.

Social media marketing does a number of things for business. It allows you to create brand awareness of your business. The most important part of business is letting people know your business even exists. Social media can accomplish this in very small, easily digestible snippets suited to the shortening attention spans of today’s disposable culture.

A successful social media stream, be it Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Linked In or Pinterest, not only creates brand awareness, it is also instrumental in increasing your website traffic and in turn your search engine visibility and ranking.

So how do you successfully navigate social media for your business?

Here are the 5 steps you need to take: 

Step 1

Set up your social media accounts with your business branding, logo, website links etc.

Step 2

Create a social media plan – this will ensure you know what type of content to post and when.

Step 3

Post regularly and keep your posts on brand, good quality and helpful to your followers. Give them a reason to link back to your website. Ie blog post.

Step 4

Engage your followers by replying to post comments, direct messages and stories.

Step 5

Invest in boosted posts or paid social media campaigns as and when appropriate.

If your customer knows you exist, when they need something you offer, you have a better chance than if they have never heard of you at all.

Want to get more hands-on guidance? Check out Nicola’s Weekly Column on Coastbeat, Outspoken Intel, or join her at one of their upcoming Workshops. See our What’s On Events page for more information.

About the author:

Nicola is co-owner at Outspoken Entourage. Bringing disruptive design to the Coffs Coast, Outspoken Entourage offers a range of services including graphic design, logo and branding, website design, digital marketing packages and social media workshops for business.  Marketing and business strategy services are also available through their affiliate, One Fine Day Consulting. Find out more at outspokenentourage.com.au

The post Outspoken Intel – 5 easy steps to social media for your business appeared first on Coastbeat.

Below are just SOME of the reasons your Facebook ads don’t work (and what you can do to combat it!)

1.You’re not solving a problem

Audiences know when they’re being sold to. There’s no point listing the ‘benefits’ of a product or service – you’ll fall on deaf ears. Instead, focus on reasons why someone would need your product or service? Solve a problem that your target audience is having and you’re more likely to convert.

2.You’re not using the audience targeting facility correctly

The whole benefit of using social media to advertise is so that you can really drill down and target your ideal demographic. You now have the ability to drill down to include job title, interests and behaviours as well as age, gender and location.

3.Please, please, PLEASE put some effort into selecting an image or video that will capture the attention of your audience! 

You have so many options with the creative, from slideshows to carousels to videos that you can create directly in Facebook Business Manager. And when it comes to your copy – you need to grab someone’s attention in the first 2 – 3 seconds or they will keep on scrolling. Some excellent options include a customer testimonial specifically on the post you’re promoting, addressing a pain point OR injecting some urgency into the offer.

4.Your offer isn’t enticing enough

If you really want to generate action, you need to make the offer good enough that someone will click through and take advantage of it! For example, if you’re trying to move stock and you only have 5 of that product left, look to move those 5 products by offering a substantial discount for 24 hours only. Your potential customers will know they have to act fast to take advantage of the offer.

5.You’re not using funnels

Funnels are definitely the best way of targeting the correct audience and guiding them to a conversion. Creating specific ads for different stages of the buyers’ journey and using custom audiences to move your audience along that journey, from awareness, to consideration to conversion. This does require you to set up a Facebook Pixel on your website.

Want to get more hands-on guidance? Join Nicola at one of their upcoming Workshops. Check out our What’s On Events page for more information.

About the author:

Nicola is co-owner at Outspoken Entourage. Bringing disruptive design to the Coffs Coast, Outspoken Entourage offers a range of services including graphic design, logo and branding, website design, digital marketing packages and social media workshops for business.  Marketing and business strategy services are also available through their affiliate, One Fine Day Consulting. Find out more at outspokenentourage.com.au

The post Outspoken Intel – 5 reasons your Facebook ads don’t work appeared first on Coastbeat.