Building The Right Type Of Following

I am often asked, “how do I build my following with the right type of people?”.

ENGAGMENT, ENGAGMENT, ENGAGEMENT! 

That is hands down, the best and most cost-efficient way of growing a really great following and an authentic following.

How do I do this?

By engaging with others. This means going out and reaching out to the type of people who you want to follow you, and engaging with their content. By observing their content, engaging and starting conversations with your perfect audience, that’s ultimately the best way to build your following.  Yes, it does take time. Yes, it’s hard work, but who cares when it comes to the fact that it’s free, it doesn’t cost anything to sit there and make some valuable and fair comments to the sort of people who you’d love to follow you.

Continue Reading

Understanding Sales and Marketing

Is sales marketing? Is marketing sales? Does sales come after marketing? Does marketing precede sales? Or, does sales precede marketing? How does it all work?

I want to really simplify it and I want to put it in the context. Here is where I believe the value is; that being how it relates to businesses and the size of the businesses, where businesses are at, and how they scale. When you’re a small business and you’re starting out, quite often you’ve got very little funds. Further, you’re self-funding and chances are you’re going to boot-strap everything you have. If that’s the case, nothing, as far as I’m concerned, beats sales.

Continue Reading

Is your business on LinkedIn?

In this blog I want to talk a little bit about LinkedIn and I want to preface this conversation by saying if you’re still wondering if LinkedIn is a channel for you, or another platform that you should be using, then the easiest way to answer this question is, you’re mad if you’re not using it.

I still hear of people that are fearful or concerned about putting themselves on LinkedIn. I know people who tried it in the early days and they didn’t like the fact that they’ve were befriended or ‘linked’ by people requesting to connect with them who they didn’t know. If you don’t know them, don’t connect with them. It’s that simple. People are becoming more and more savvy when it comes to the use of LinkedIn and I think that we can all appreciate the benefits LinkedIn presents as a networking platform for businesses.

Continue Reading

“Whats the best ratio of content for my social media page?”

When posting on your social media page for your business, it can be hard to know exactly what to be posting. I often get asked “what’s the best ratio of content to be posting on my social media feeds”, in particular Facebook and Instagram we’re talking about here. Now, this is where you need to focus on your audience, and start to think about what’s going to appease them the most. Once you get a really clear understanding of who your followers are, who’s engaging with you and why they’re engaging, you can help improve that content ratio. We see, for instance, on some sites people are there because they want benefits, they want discounts on products, they want to know what new products are coming out, they want to know what sort of stuff you’re stocking, so they’re happy to be sold to and the ratio of sales can outweigh content that is to educational or entertaining.

Continue Reading

What’s the best time to advertise?

I love this question because it actually allows us to dive into our audience and dive into the data to help make better decisions about the choices we make when it comes to our marketing objectives.

Anyone that knows me and has done business with me, and my clients will all attest to the fact that when I talk, I want to use data to make decisions and recommendations. I don’t like assumptions, I don’t like opinions, everybody’s got one of them. What I like is looking at what is actually happening out there, knowing and understanding exactly how my audience behaves so that I can make better decisions and use the data and information to direct and govern what I do when it comes to my marketing, digital and social objectives.

So, when it comes to advertising, and let’s just say your objective is primarily around Facebook and Instagram advertising, the best thing you can do is firstly go into your insights, on Facebook and Instagram and you’ll actually be able to go through and see your audience. Here you are able to see not only the demographics of your audience, but you can actually see when your audience is online.

Continue Reading

Are #Hashtags Out of Date?

The short answer is no. But I would like to elaborate as this is a trending question that I am constantly being asked. I believe this question has been raised because of the people that seem to abuse hashtags and use 20+ on every post, with tags that aren’t even relevant to their photo, which is ruining the user experience of hashtags all together. 

Hashtags are really important for finding a theme that is trending or creating a way of following your content or allowing users who are primarily on Instagram to follow your content. Hashtags could be used obviously on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook but where we see the most prolific use of them and the best use of them is on Instagram.

Continue Reading

For something that is used almost daily by up to 2 billion people the capabilities of Facebook are often misunderstood. There are assumptions made about the platform which mean that the potential for B2B marketing is often overlooked.

People assume that Facebook is only for consumers. They assume the only market available on Facebook is for a business to sell to individuals. This means businesses are only seeing half the story.

Imagine having a washing machine and not realising it had a dryer built in as well. All this time you’ve been hanging your wet clothes on the washing line or a clothes horse when you could have been doing two jobs in one place.

When we stop the myth that Facebook is solely a consumer market and embrace the fact that businesses can use it sell to other business then we can improve our marketing (and profits!) dramatically.

Continue Reading

Your social media feed is an essential tool to your business. It provides the titbits of your daily life to your followers and potential customers. It is a regular opportunity to add your personality to your product or your service.

But doing this on a, sometimes, daily basis can be a strain. To always be the happy, positive person you want to portray when sometimes you’re actually feeling the opposite is a near impossible task. Maybe you lost a client or a good lead didn’t go anywhere. Maybe you just ran out of coffee.

This is where in-app scheduling or software like Hootsuite can be valuable because when you are that happy, positive person you can smash out loads of great posts.

There is another danger though. With social media posts needing to be so regular, it can be easy to lose your personality and become robotic. This can alienate your audience because they feel they are being talked at instead of being talked with.

Continue Reading

This post was inspired by a conversation with a friend of mine who operates a Men’s Fashion startup, working as a stylist and tailor.

We were chatting about ways to help grow his business and a large part of his strategy is to produce quality content that will reach his audience of male, medium to high income earners who take pride in their appearance and sense of fashion.

The question he raised was: how polished should this content be?

Comparing himself to the big players in the men’s fashion space, such as GQ and Tom Ford, he held the perception that his content needed to be of a similar style and production quality.

Our audience almost always wants one thing above all else and that’s authenticity. They want to see and feel a connection with the real you. They want to know who you are, what you do, how you do it, why you do it. They want to hear your story.

Continue Reading