Online Marketing | Web Design | Social Media
Here is my take, on where to start if you still want to fight for your business
THIS IS NOT about COVID-19 or the policies on how we’re handling this. THIS ARE only online business-related insights and my thoughts on this.
I’m writing this, in the hope that it may assist at least one person to shift their thinking and help move forward in this bad economic situation – and help them save their business.
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Today I walked past a $2 Shop and cringed when I saw Christmas decorations in the window. Then I though, s*** it’s only 13 weeks to Christmas. Maybe you personally don’t care much about the festive season, but if you own a business, you should be thinking about strategies to leverage the overall shopping madness. People are in the ‘buying mode’, and they don’t shop just for presents…they shop, period. So if you position what you’re selling in front of your ideal clients, you’re highly likely to make more sales, then at any other time.
The Guardian forecasts that Christmas online shopping will increase by 17% this year, so a well targeted Christmas marketing campaign will help you boost sales.
Here are some Christmas marketing tips:
1. Start Now
There is still time to prepare a good Christmas marketing campaign but you must start now. It all starts with planning. First write down what you want to achieve. Of course you want more sales, however also think weather you want to:
Your Christmas marketing campaign will need to look different depending on what your answer is. For example, the fastest way to get new customers is through paid advertising (Google Ads, Facebook Ads, etc), while existing customers will be encouraged through email campaign.
It’s important to know your goals, so that you can tailor your marketing campaign to your needs, then measure and track results.
2. Educate
There is still plenty of time to educate your audience about your services and products. Rather then pushing hard for thesale, educate your target market about the benefits they are getting with your products and services. Create awareness, excitement and demand. So that when the time comes to present your offer, your audience will be in anticipation and have a desire to get your products or services.
3. Think outside the Santa bag
Get creative! We’re all bombarded with Christmas messages but if you think outside of the standard Christmas messaging, I’m sure you’ll come up with something unique around Christmas theme that appeals to your audience. Remember the “Elf Yourself” campaign from Office Max that went viral?
The best ideas are always the ones that ask for participation of your audience. Ask them to share their images around Christmas theme or run a competition that ask for engagement. Such content always performs well as it get people to comment and share more then usual.
4. Create content in advance
If you plan out Christmas marketing campaign now, you have plenty of time to create quality content around your products and services. Think about how you can leverage the same content in different ways. For example, a review about your product can easily be broken into short posts for social media and turned into a short video about the product and how to use it.
If you prepare and schedule your content in advance, then you only need to think about driving traffic to your website to make sales. That’s much easier then doing everything whilst also enjoying the joys of festive season.
5. Be mobile ready
According to IBM, 45% of online sales during 2013 Christmas season were via mobile devices. If you’re website is not optimised for mobile, I don’t need to tell you that you may be missing out big time.
Your website should be built so that it’s responsive, which means it’s design adjusts depending on the device and size of the screen it’s been viewed on.
If it’s not and your website is build on WordPress you can add a plugin that turns your website into mobile ready website when it’s viewed on mobile, until you’re ready to get a new website with a responsive design.
If you need help, just send us an email or give us a call on 0432 698 913 and we’ll help you set it up.
Extra Tip: Leverage Social Media, especially Pinterest
It’s a no brainer, right?
Take a step further and start actively growing your fan base by identifying pages and groups, which have your target market. Then start regularly engaging with them by participating in discussion with good comments. This way your brand will be visible to much wider audience then just posting on your page.
Why Pinterest? You only need to know that:
Now, you make up your mind if this is worth your time.
A number one reason why many small businesses fail with social media is because they struggle with creating a compelling, quality content. Many blame lack of time, creativity and imagination and when challenged these reasons quickly fall short.
Many small business owners simply don’t realised that they already have awesome, compelling, quality content that can be ‘recycled’ for social media.
Here are some simple things you can do immediately and boost your social media content.
Most small businesses will have various types of brochures, presentations, product and service descriptions etc. Check for any content that gives your readers solutions to a problem. Re-use the content or use it as starting point for new content.
If you run a blog (and if you don’t you really need to start doing it), check for popular blog posts, identify content that provides a solution to a problem, break the blog post in valuable smaller chunks and educate your fans about that specific problem through sequence of social media posts. Through educating your fans base you are building authority in your own niche.
Talking about your products & services doesn’t mean hard sell. By using messages that are educative, creative and ‘non-selly’ you can raise awareness about them and by that create a need for them. Provided you are talking to your actual target market, this is the best way of advertising to them. Use images, create stories around use of your products and services and how they helped resolve problems, that your fan base might be experiencing.
It’s true that peoples’ favorite topic is them. However they do like to hear great stories. Social media is all about sharing. Start sharing stories about your business, how it started, what drives it, successes, awards and challenges. You’ll be surprised that people read this sort of stuff and engage more when business becomes personal. And you know any small business is a personal affair.
People like to feel inspired and they love looking at images. By sharing what inspires you, you are building rapport and connecting with your fans. This helps you build trust, which in turn helps you make more sales. If they have a choice, people will always buy from a person they know over the one they don’t – even if that means paying more for the same service or product.
I hope this gives you some inspiration for creating content for your social media activities. Remember, the overarching rule: Keep it relevant, engaging, cut back on sales and promotion talk and be yourself. It’s the thing you know how to do the best J
I’m looking forward to hear some ideas about how you overcome ‘writer’s block’ moments. Let us know in comments below.
Until next time
Are you using them or have you at least noticed them?
I’m talking about Facebook hashtags…
I’m sure you are at least aware that Facebook introduced hashtags earlier this week. (read about it here).
In my last post blog I talked about what hashtags in Facebook mean for business. This time I would like to show you how to use them and why you should be using them in your online marketing.
The most obvious reason is
Reach bigger audience and expend your fan base
Research shows that approx. 88-100 million people are engaging on Facebook during primetime television. By strategically using Facebook hashtags you will expand you reach to a wider audience. Bigger reach means more exposure and more exposure means growing your fan base. All that whilst watching TV – sounds good or what?
With strategic use of Facebook hashtags you will increase your visibility and engagement with your brand. When people click on hashtags and go to a page of content specific to that hashtag, they are more likely to engage with this page, as it is relevant to something they like or find important. This means more likes, more comments and also potential clients.
Everyone likes to know that there is a ‘real’ person behind a Facebook page. Especially if you are a small business owner, people want to meet you. With Facebook hashtags you can show your interest, what you stand for, what inspires you…Make it personal; yet stick to your branding. Don’t let the hashtags bite you!
Using relevant Facebook hashtags in your posts as well as monitoring conversations about your brand helps you create a buzz, respond timely on any adverse conversations about your brand and stay on top of what people are saying about your brand.
Create specific Facebook hashtag for your event and encourage attendees to engage. This will boost visibility of your brand, products and services and number of likes. This kind of ‘likes’ are likely your potential customers. They are already at your event, they liked you, so they are interested in you and what you have to offer. With a bit more schmoozing…you have them J
I hope this sparked some ideas on how to use Facebook hashtags on Facebook for business. I also know that there are some people who hate them and resist using them…are you one of them?
I’m interested to know if you like them or not and why? So don’t be shy…get the debate flowing….
The months old dispute whether hashtags work on Facebook or not is finally resolved – so far they haven’t, however Facebook announced today that it’s launching ability to follow conversations via hashtags.
The Facebook admits that this is not an innovative function and further explains that “every day, hundreds of millions of people use Facebook to share their thoughts on big moments happening all around them…— people on Facebook connect with their friends about what’s taking place all over the world. …To bring these conversations more to the forefront, we will be rolling out a series of features that surface some of the interesting discussions people are having about public events, people, and topics. As a first step, we are beginning to roll out hashtags on Facebook.”
Facebook statement indicates that hastags will be rolled out gradually and we’ll also see some other new functions of this sort.
From a practical perspective this means that once rolled out, any hashtags you add to your posts will now be clickable. The search bar at the top of the Facebook homepage will also allow users to look for hashtags, and hashtags on Facebook will also tie in to those from other social media platforms such as Pintrest, Twitter, Instagram and Tumblr.
This will allow you to add context to a post and indicate that it’s part of larger discussion. By clicking on a hashtag you will see a feed of what other people and pages are saying about a topic or an event.
But there is a big difference in using hashtags in Facebook and it relates to Privacy settings.
From a privacy perspective, hashtags will work similarly to Facebook Graph Search. You’ll only see the comments that you’re authorized to see. This means that if you include a hashtag in friends-only post, only your friends will be able to see it in a hashtag search.
Considering that hashtags are already widely used on other social media platforms and commonly visible on Facebook already, it is highly likely that users will embrace this new add-on. And that can only be positive for Facebook Business Pages as well.