SOCIAL
M ED IA
FOR SMALL BUSINESS
SOCIAL
M ED IA
FOR SMALL BUSINESS
M A R K E T I N G S T R AT E G I E S
FOR BUSINESS OWNERS
FRANZISK A ISELI
First published in 2021 by John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd
42 McDougall St, Milton Qld 4064
Office also in Melbourne
Typeset in Kepler Std 10.5/15
© John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd 2021
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
ISBN: 978-0-730-39032-9
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the Australian Copyright Act
1968 (for example, a fair dealing for the purposes of study, research, criticism
or review), no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, communicated or transmitted in any form or by any means without
prior written permission. All inquiries should be made to the publisher at the
address above.
Cover design by The Business Hood
Disclaimer
The material in this publication is of the nature of general comment only, and
does not represent professional advice. It is not intended to provide specific
guidance for particular circumstances and it should not be relied on as the
basis for any decision to take action or not take action on any matter which it
covers. Readers should obtain professional advice where appropriate, before
making any such decision. To the maximum extent permitted by law, the
author and publisher disclaim all responsibility and liability to any person,
arising directly or indirectly from any person taking or not taking action
based on the information in this publication.
Contents
About the author
vii
Dedicationix
Prefacexi
Part I: The power of social media
1
1 Why social media?
2 What is social media?
3 The MAVERICK principles
3
7
11
Part II: Always start with strategy
15
4
5
6
7
8
What is marketing?
Building your marketing machine
Creating your brand strategy
Social media content strategy
Your social media plan
17
23
37
57
67
Part III: Social media channels
73
9 Facebook
75
10 Instagram
107
11 LinkedIn
131
12 Twitter
155
13 Pinterest
173
14 YouTube
191
The beginning
213
Index215
About the author
Franziska Iseli is a maverick entrepreneur, award-winning marketing
and brand strategist, mad adventurer, author, and the co-founder of Basic
Bananas, The Business Hood, Oceanlovers, and Moments of Humanity.
Franziska’s mission is to make a positive impact through entrepreneurship.
Franziska is a board member at the global Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO),
where she advises on communication, marketing and branding. She also
launched an impact initiative called EOcean to inspire entrepreneurs to be
more sustainable. Franziska also sits on the judging panel for Singularity
University and has run think tanks at the United Nations to address the UN
Sustainable Development Goals through entrepreneurship.
She is the co-author of two bestselling books—Bananas about Marketing and
Perception—and author of The Courage Map (which includes a foreword by
Sir Richard Branson).
Franziska is regularly featured across the media, including Inc. magazine,
Forbes, Business Insider, Virgin Inflight Entertainment, Marie Claire,
Cosmopolitan, SmartCompany, Dynamic Business magazine, BRW, 2UE and
Channel 9.
vii
Social Media for Small Business
A Swiss-born Australian (or Swaussie) with a sharp-witted humour and the
ability to speak five languages, she’s known to make up words, which keeps
everyone amused.
The key to Franziska’s success is her down-to-earth attitude, infectious
energy, integrity and courage to take the lead. She is an idea generation
machine and her brain seems to work at double speed.
In her spare time Franziska loves going on adventures, spending time in
the ocean, playing music with her band Salty Lips, learning new things and
spending time with family and friends.
On one of her recent adventures she rode her motorbike from Switzerland
to Kazakhstan along the Silk Road (12 000 kilometres), which made for
interesting tales.
Connect with Franziska on social media:
Facebook: www.facebook.com/franziskaiseliofficial
Instagram: @franziskaiseli
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/franziskaiseli/
YouTube: www.youtube.com/franziskaiseli
viii
Dedication
I’d love to dedicate this book to the brilliant, brave and bold business owners
in the world: you!
It takes courage, determination and focus to run a business and stay the
course while gracefully holding on to the ‘sometimes’ rollercoaster ride.
Running your own business can be an incredibly challenging, yet infinitely
fulfilling, impactful and rewarding journey.
Entrepreneurship is one of the best ways to make a positive impact in the
world. And social media can not only help you amplify your message, but
also scale your business exponentially and create positive ripple effects all
around you.
A special shout out to the businesses in our marketing mentoring programs
at Basic Bananas. Thank you for letting me share your practical examples
with my readers. Your generosity inspires, motivates and elevates fellow
business owners.
ix
Preface
The purpose of Social Media for Small Business is to support you in unlocking
the potential of social media to grow your business. The book is jam-packed
with marketing and social media strategies, tactics and hot tips that I’ve
collected over more than a decade of running successful businesses, including
Basic Bananas, a global marketing mentoring organisation.
My aim is for you to understand how to leverage and maximise your social
media efforts for your business. To this end, I give you the best strategies
and hacks to help you select the right networks, publish content to grow
your audience and move people from being ‘followers’ to becoming loyal
customers.
Who is this book for?
Social Media for Small Business is for business owners, their team members
and marketers who want to take their social media game to the next level.
It’s for you if:
•
you want to have a social media strategy and plan in place to grow
your audience and attract more customers
xi
Social Media for Small Business
•
you know you have a great business, product or service and want to
get noticed by more people
•
you want to amplify your message and increase your impact.
The strategies and lessons I share in this book work across all industries. It
doesn’t matter whether you run a products- or services-based business or
whether you are business to customer (B2C) or business to business (B2B)
because ultimately it’s all person to person: there’s always a person behind
the screen interacting with you.
This is one of the most important, yet most neglected lessons for business
owners: when you create any type of communication, always remember that
you are talking to a person, not a business, regardless of whether you are
in the B2C or B2B space. It’s really important to keep in mind that there’s a
human at the other end of your communication.
Who is this book not for?
It’s not for anyone looking for a quick fix, hyped-up advice or a magic pill. It’s
also not for anyone who doesn’t care about their products or services and
doesn’t want to add value. No marketing strategy will make a business wildly
successful if the products or services are below average.
How to use this book
It’s almost impossible to implement everything I share in the book. So instead
of feeling overwhelmed or adding too much to your already very long to-do
list, prioritise and focus on implementing the parts that are going to bring
you the biggest returns in your business right now.
The book has three parts:
•
xii
In part I you’ll discover how social media can be one of the most
powerful marketing strategies for growing your business because
Preface
it is exponential and has the ability to tap into social proof. I also
introduce you to my MAVERICK marketing principles, which are
foundational to your approach and will help you to get the most out
of your efforts.
•
Part II is all about strategy—because it’s your strategy that will
set you apart. One of my favourite things in life is to find the most
effective and efficient ways to do things. Part II will teach you
the most effective and efficient ways to use social media for your
business without all the fluff. It’s in this part that I introduce my
brand strategy, The Brand Alchemy Method ™.
•
In part III I walk you through several social media networks and how
you can use them to market your small- to medium-sized business.
For your business to be successful using social media, you don’t
need to use every social network out there. Focus on the ones that
are most relevant for your business. I only ever teach what I and my
social media team have tested and proven and I use the six networks
I share with you in this book: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn,
Twitter, Pinterest and YouTube.
New networks emerge all the time and some of them will catch on like wildfire
(one example is TikTok). Social media channels take time to be of benefit to
businesses as they often start as a ‘social’ tool before turning into a powerful
business tool and ads platform.
If any of the networks discussed in part III don’t apply to you or your business,
please feel free to skip that chapter entirely. Or come back to it when you feel
like learning more about that network.
It’s highly recommended that you don’t skip parts I and II as this information
is crucial for getting the most out of your efforts. As a business owner you
must always understand and keep an eye on your strategy, even if you choose
to outsource the implementation of it. I’m a big believer in playing by your
strengths and outsourcing your weaknesses.
xiii
Social Media for Small Business
My promise to you
There’s one thing I promise you: this book is written in a way that’s straight
to the point, relevant, practical, actionable and applicable to your business
because I want you to get results by implementing what you learn.
Pro tips and activities are dotted throughout the book to help you achieve
these results. I’d love for you to feel motivated and inspired to create excellent
social media content for others to consume! The world needs more useful,
valuable, insightful, enlightening content!
Most business owners have a very scattered approach to marketing, which
makes it really challenging to get a positive return. Many don’t even know
what’s working and what’s not, often wasting money on stuff that doesn’t
work.
I’d like you to walk away with a clear strategy and action plan in place,
focusing on the most important key elements that will have the most impact.
And I’ve got more great news for you; you don’t need to implement all of the
social media tactics yourself. Once you’ve got your strategy sorted, you may
have one of your team members, a friend, intern or mother-in-law help you
implement it.
Please feel free to share this book with anyone you’d like to invite to help you
with the implementation of your social media strategy. Also share it with any
fellow business owners you are cheering on!
Bonus resources and website
The social media world is changing quickly, so in order to help you stay up to
date, I’ve created a whole bunch of resources to support you on this journey.
You can find them at basicbananas.com/socialmedia. Whenever I refer
you to ‘my website’ in the book, head over to this site.
Over more than a decade of running Basic Bananas, I’ve found that the
best way to mentor businesses and teach marketing strategies is through
xiv
Preface
frameworks because you can apply them to any type of business and
situation. So throughout this book—and on the website—you’ll find useful
templates and frameworks you can use over and over again.
On the website you’ll also find videos explaining some of the details outlined
in this book, including behind the scenes and screen-share videos. We’ll keep
this site updated, so make sure to check back when you feel like a refresher.
Visit basicbananas.com/socialmedia and create your own members’ login to
get access to these resources. This is free for readers of the book. Just use the
password: socialmedia.
If you’d like to connect with me personally, or with my team at Basic Bananas,
you can find me on most social networks under Franziska Iseli @franziskaiseli
and my team at @basicbananas.
Franziska Iseli
xv
PART I
The power of
social media
It’s highly likely that a majority of your customers use social media channels
to connect, communicate and shop, which makes social media a very
powerful tool for business owners. The purpose of these platforms is for you
to connect with your customers, network with potential strategic partners,
attract prospects, build relationships, collaborate with brands, create
communities and share brilliant content to build authority, which leads to
trust and increased sales.
Despite this, very few businesses use social media in the most effective way.
Social media goes far beyond the pretty ‘snap’, sharing cat videos or showing
off the latest yoga pose. If used right, it’s one of the most powerful tools for
growing your business exponentially.
1
CHAPTER 1
WHY SOCIAL
MEDIA?
Why should you even care about social media?
More than 60 per cent of the entire population own a smartphone. Almost
half of the world’s population uses social media. More than one-quarter are
online shoppers. And these numbers are accelerating fast.
The leverage principle:
exponential vs linear
The good news is that there are countless different marketing strategies out there
that can help you grow your business. Some of them have a more linear growth
effect; some are more exponential. Linear means the rate of growth is more
constant. Exponential is rapid growth, increasing by multiples. Both are great.
Social media is one of the marketing tools that can have an exponential effect on
your business’s growth and become an incredibly effective and omnipotent tool.
The reason for social media’s exponentiality is that it takes advantage of the
leverage principle: if you publish great content on your social channels, your
followers might share it with their friends and their friends might share it
with their friends. You suddenly go from broadcasting to only your audience
to your followers broadcasting your content to their followers, and so on.
This creates an exponential effect on your exposure.
3
Social Media for Small Business
This is also why some smaller brands have been able to scale exponentially
and compete against big brand names on a tiny budget. It’s not the big
budgets that slam small ones anymore. The power is in the hands of the
people.
Social proof
Social media also taps into the power of social proof, a term first coined by
Robert Cialdini in his book Influence: The psychology of persuasion. Social
proof describes the psychological and social phenomenon of people copying
the actions of others. If a business gets a lot of positive attention on social
media, others will follow and assume that
Social proof
this business must be great. You see this
describes the
principle in action all the time. Imagine you
psychological and
walk past a row of restaurants. If you see one
social phenomenon almost empty and one with most tables
of people copying
busy, which one will you choose? Most likely
the actions
the seemingly ‘popular’ one. That’s the law
of others.
of social proof in action.
Social proof is inherent on social media and all social media tools have
in-built ways to tap into this principle by way of shares, likes, comments,
reviews, recommendations, and so on. If you invest in adding value,
being helpful and publishing great content, your audience will do the
work for you.
The power of small
The good news is that you don’t need a huge audience for social media
to be effective. A small, yet loyal following is way more powerful than a
large, disengaged one. If you have a few loyal sneezers—aka people who
love your business, cheer you on and tell everyone about you—you will
4
Why social media?
increase your brand awareness and ultimately attract significantly more
customers.
The challenge
Unfortunately, social media is not all rainbows and unicorns and also comes
with a few challenges—including a distorted portrayal of ‘real life’, which
leads to unrealistic expectations. That’s why it’s so important for us to be
real and share both the struggles and the triumphs. People connect with
authenticity more than they do with fakery.
When it comes to social media for business,
there are also a lot of subpar and abandoned
social media accounts out there, so rather
than joining the noise, make sure your
social channels are representing you and
your business honestly and you will attract
a loyal following.
If you invest in
adding value,
being helpful and
publishing great
content, your
audience will do the
work for you.
Another big challenge businesses have when it comes to using social media
is the lack of a strategy. They just randomly post content without a plan,
which makes their approach very scattered and unorganised. After a few
months of non-results, many give up with a big sigh, saying that ‘social media
doesn’t work for my business’. It’s not that social media doesn’t work for your
business; it’s more likely that you didn’t have a plan and gave up too early.
No magic pill
‘Franziska, just give me the magic pill!’ I hear that a lot. There is no magic
pill. Sorry! I’ve seen too many business owners look to social media as
the magic pill, the solver of all their problems, the one thing that will help
them grow their business or become famous. Even though social media is
one of the most powerful tools for your business, it’s not the magic pill. It’s
5
Social Media for Small Business
one piece of your entire marketing puzzle. In chapter 5 I’ll share my Online­
Eco-System™ with you so you can see how the puzzle pieces fit together. The
other important piece for your business to grow and succeed wildly is that
you have a great product or service you believe in.
###
Before we dive into your marketing strategy, let’s look at what social media
is exactly.
6
CHAPTER 2
WHAT IS SOCIAL
MEDIA?
Social media is defined as ‘websites and applications that enable users to
create and share content or to participate in social networking’ according to
the Oxford Dictionary.
Social media is a way for people to share ideas, thoughts and information, to
network virtually, and to build communities. There are two key elements to
social media that are important to understand: ‘social’ and ‘media’. Let’s look
at each of these.
Social
Social comes from the Latin word socius meaning ‘friend’.
A ‘social’ person is someone who enjoys
being with others, seeking and enjoying
the companionship of people. Social
media is a way to connect with people
and network virtually.
Social media is a
way for people to
share ideas, thoughts
and information, to
network virtually,
and to build
communities.
Most importantly, just like in ‘real life’
social interactions, social media is a twoway street. You know the guy you meet at an event who just won’t stop talking
at you? You don’t want to be that guy. To use social media as a business tool
7
Social Media for Small Business
it’s important to engage and interact with people rather than just talking at
them. There has to be a balance between listening and sharing information.
And don’t worry, even if you don’t see yourself as a ‘social’ person, or if you
are more of an introvert, you can still excel at using social media for your
business. You might even find it easier to be social on your social networks
than in real life.
And lastly, there must be a reason why social media is not called ‘narcissistic
media’, although some people may act like it should be called that.
Media
Media is a channel for broadcasting and publishing content. What’s different
and pretty cool about social media is that compared to traditional media
channels such as TV, magazines and newspapers, anyone can share their
ideas, thoughts and opinions in an uncensored way. In that sense, social
media is a lot more democratic and transparent.
Social media channels are digital tools that allow anyone to share
information.
Many movements have been able to gain traction and find a platform to
voice their thoughts on social media without being censored or skewed by
mainstream media or those in power.
Think #ArabSpring and #BlackLivesMatter—both movements were
fuelled and amplified thanks to social media, which ignited worldwide
action.
Before the dawn of social media, it was a lot more challenging for people to
get news out fast. Nowadays, social networks provide a brilliant platform for
both businesses and individuals to reach a larger audience.
8
What is social media?
An opportunity for small businesses
Social media is not just a tool for happy snaps; it has become an incredible
opportunity for businesses.
More than a decade ago, when I was working in advertising, ‘big budgets’ was
the name of the game. It was really hard for a small business to get noticed
on a small budget. Our corporate clients by far outspent smaller businesses,
which made it so much harder for them to stand a chance at gaining media
exposure and attracting customers.
Thanks to the popularity and fast growth of social media channels, small
businesses now have a chance to get noticed on much smaller marketing
budgets. In fact, many of my members at Basic Bananas—all small business
owners—are using social media marketing as one of their key strategies to
accelerate growth.
The big don’t beat the small anymore. Money does help, but money is just a
magnifier of things. If your content sucks, money will magnify that. If your
content is amazing, then money will magnify your brilliance. As mentioned
earlier, if you produce great content, your followers will help you amplify
your message sans money.
Social media must be part of your marketing mix—I can’t think of one
business that wouldn’t benefit from using at least one channel explained in
this book.
###
I think you’re ready to rock! Let’s start with your overarching marketing
strategy, which will tie everything together for you. Marketing is the oxygen
of your business and unfortunately not many business owners get this right.
In chapter 3 I’ll run you through the marketing principles that I use.
9
CHAPTER 3
THE MAVERICK
PRINCIPLES
Throughout this book I will refer to a few important principles that apply
to all social media networks. Together, the first letter of the names of these
principles spell MAVERICK. Let’s take a look at them.
#1 Momentum
Like most worthwhile things in life, getting amazing results from your social
media efforts takes time, consistency and focus. Don’t give up too quickly.
There’s no such thing as overnight success or a magic pill. Be consistent and
you’ll gain momentum.
#2 Audience
Always have your audience in mind. Remember that there’s a human
on the other side of the screen. Be ‘social’ and create content with your
audience in mind.
11
Social Media for Small Business
#3 Value
Lead with value. The fastest way to build trust and connect with your
audience is to add value. Quality, not quantity.
#4 Enjoyment
As a business owner you’ve taken many risks to get to this place and as a
reward you get to make the calls. Choose the social networks you enjoy. If
there’s a social media channel that would be great for your business but you
don’t enjoy at all, outsource the implementation of your content strategy on
that channel.
#5 Relationships
Focus on connecting with your audience and building relationships. It’s
called ‘social’ media for a reason. Be social.
#6 Improvement
The best way to get the most out of your social media efforts is to continually
improve your content, campaigns, and so on. Look at your analytics and
observe what’s working and what’s not.
#7 Consistency
Social media is a brilliant tool for your brand to get noticed by a larger
audience. Make sure there is brand consistency across all your channels and
create content that reflects your brand strategy.
12
The MAVERICK principles
#8 Kindness
Always respond with kindness. There is enough gossip, badmouthing and
trolling going around. Don’t join in. Kill it with kindness.
###
Embrace the MAVERICK principles and keep an eye on your strategy.
Here’s to growing your business leveraging social media—and having
fun doing so.
13
PART II
Always start
with strategy
As with any worthwhile cause, having a brilliant plan is half of the equation.
Most businesses lack a marketing strategy and don’t know where or how
social media fits into the bigger picture. In fact, there often isn’t a big picture
at all. This lack of strategy frequently results in a massive waste of time
and money.
Strategy is something you as the business owner must understand, help
create and keep an eye on, even if you outsource the implementation of it.
Ask yourself: what would you like to achieve with social media for your
business? What would you like to accomplish after reading this book? What
does success look like for you?
There is no one-size-fits-all. For one business owner success might mean
getting started with social media, doubling their sales in the next 12 months,
growing their personal profile, getting really good at online networking, or
putting together a social media plan and having someone else implement it.
Write down two or three goals for yourself and then check in along the way to
make sure you are hitting your objectives. You might even adjust your goals
as you become a social media pro.
15
CHAPTER 4
WHAT IS
MARKETING?
Before coming up with a marketing strategy, you need to understand what
makes great marketing. Let’s start by defining what marketing is not. Great
marketing is not sleazy, pushy, boring or disengaging.
Great marketing is engaging, educational and sometimes even entertaining.
The purpose of marketing is to attract more customers to your business, keep
them coming back for more and get them to recommend you to their family
and friends.
Marketing is very much like dating. When
Great marketing
you meet a prospective partner for the
is engaging,
first time, you don’t generally expect them
educational and
to sleep with you on your first date. The
sometimes even
dating game may have changed slightly with
entertaining.
the birth of dating apps, but in ‘old-school’
dating courting came first. You might go for a coffee to get to know each
other and if that goes well you meet for dinner, then maybe a few more lowkey dates before you ‘convert’. You make an effort to build trust, which may
eventually lead to a ‘sale’ if you ‘get lucky’.
Marketing works the same way. The purpose of marketing is to help you
attract the right people to your business so you can build trust by ‘courting’
17
Social Media for Small Business
them and sweeping them off their feet. Once your prospects trust you, they
will choose you to do business with.
Social media is a brilliant way to meet prospects, nurture them to create
familiarity, gain authority and build trust. Your ‘dating game’ starts with
publishing great content for new prospects to discover, like and engage with.
You might then move to direct messaging, a phone call, a meeting or any
other touchpoint that moves the prospect closer to a sale.
Some people are very quick at making buying decisions, while others take
a lot more courting. That’s why it’s so important for your business to have
systems in place that capture all types of prospects instead of only going for
the low-hanging fruit—that is, the easy sale. I’ll walk you through how to
create a marketing system—the Online Eco-System—in chapter 5.
One more important thing to consider is that if you’re attracting the
‘wrong’ people—those who are not a great fit for your business—they
may never ‘convert’. Attracting the wrong market is one of the biggest
challenges businesses face. In chapter 6 I’ll introduce you to the Brand
Alchemy MethodTM, which will help you position your business to attract the
right audience.
The four types of marketing
There are four types of marketing businesses commonly use. The first three
are the least effective ones for a small business.
The fourth type is the one I recommend you focus on and embrace as your
overarching marketing approach.
If you are currently using any of the first three types, don’t worry; it’s very
easy to adjust your course. This is why you are here: to improve on all of your
marketing so you can get a better return from your social media efforts and
ultimately fulfil your mission.
Let’s briefly look at the four approaches so you can avoid the ones that are
not the most effective for you.
18
What is marketing?
Mass marketing
Mass marketing is one of the oldest and most well-known types of marketing.
It’s when a business broadcasts its marketing messaging to everyone without
segmenting its market into different audiences. The challenge with this
approach is that when you broadcast your message to ‘everyone’, you spend
a lot of money with very little return. This approach works for big marketing
budgets and awareness campaigns.
It’s a lot more effective to tailor your campaigns to each market segment. This
way your audience will feel understood and can connect with your message.
The more specific and tailored your marketing, the more likely your potential
customers are to pay attention to your business.
It’s also cheaper to run niche-market vs mass-market campaigns. I know it
can be very tempting to want to reach ‘everybody’. And it can be scary to
‘leave out’ people by focusing on micro-markets; however, you will get a
much higher return on your investment by doing this.
In our marketing mentoring programs at Basic Bananas, we see a lot of
amazing examples of businesses going from a mass-marketing approach
to taking the steps to be more niche. The results always speak for
themselves.
For example, a chiropractor who went from being a generalist and targeting
‘everybody’ in his marketing communication decided to specialise in highperformance individuals. He’s never looked back. He even got called to work
with Tony Robbins, all because he had the courage to specialise and become
known in this space.
Another example is a gym owner who went from marketing to anyone who
wanted to get fit to turning his garage gym into a ‘surfers’ gym’. Before his
change of focus, competition was incredibly fierce with fitness studios at
every corner, some of which had much bigger marketing budgets than he
did. Being an avid surfer and as the gym was located near surf breaks, his
new niche was perfect! Now his surfers’ gym focuses on helping surfers get
fit to perform better in the ocean. The move from mass to niche marketing
allows him to use the right channels to attract surfers.
19
Social Media for Small Business
Instead of doing mass-marketing campaigns, focus on micro-markets. Social
media is a brilliant tool for this, and you’ll do better with a specific message. (I
look at how to truly understand your audiences and their emotional triggers
in chapter 5.)
Hope marketing
‘If you build it, they will come’ is a common misconception that doesn’t really
apply to marketing. You’ll see this type of marketing in action when a business
owner buys a shopfront or invests in a fancy website and thinks people will
flock to their business in droves. Unfortunately, this often doesn’t happen.
In order to grow your business, you must be proactive and invest in building
a marketing machine that attracts customers.
I’m sure you already have a never-ending to-do list and marketing is often
pushed to the end of that list, or to the next day, and then the next, and so on.
The reason for this is because most business owners just don’t know how to
go about marketing or where to even start. Throughout this book I will show
you how to prioritise your marketing and help you focus on strategies
that work.
Make marketing
a priority.
Block out a few hours in your diary each
week to focus on your marketing activities.
Make marketing a priority.
Hunting vs farming
Another very common type of marketing is ‘hunting’. I’m not only against
this approach because I’m vegetarian but also because it’s not sustainable
for a business long term. In this approach, business owners go hunting for
customers when they’re starving because there aren’t enough customers
coming through the door. Hunting often includes activities such as cold
calling, searching for the next customer all over the place and trying to
convince people to buy from them so the business can make it through the
next season. When they stop hunting, the customer flow stops too. This
approach is exhausting, stressful and no fun at all.
20
What is marketing?
Instead of hunting, focus on ‘farming’, or relationship-based marketing,
which is not only the most sustainable option, but also the most effective
one. Social media marketing helps you to move away from ‘hunting’ and
instead plant seeds to harvest for a long time to come.
Relationship-based marketing
Make relationship-based marketing, or ‘farming’, your overarching approach
to growing your business.
Focus your marketing efforts on nurturing your prospects so they choose you
over everyone else when they are ready to buy. With this approach, rather
than only going for the low-hanging fruit—that is, prospects who are ready
to buy—you invest in nurturing prospects who need a little bit more time to
make a purchasing decision.
You do this by courting your prospects, sharing great content and winning over
your connections. With this approach you’ll not only build trust, but create
loyal followers and fans who will shout your business name from the rooftop.
This approach may take a bit longer to gain traction; however, if you commit
and persist, you’ll soon have a constant flow of customers coming through
the door without having to go hunting when times are tough.
###
Social media is a fabulous way to farm, nurture, build relationships and
create an audience of interested people who will eventually become happy
customers.
As mentioned earlier, most businesses have a very scattered approach to
business growth. The Online Eco-System, which is the topic of chapter 5,
will help you put your ‘farming’ approach into a neat system so that all the
cogs are working hand in hand. Your social media channels are one very
important cog in your marketing system.
21
Social Media for Small Business
Activities
•• Block out time in your diary to focus on marketing activities every
week. Even just one or two hours of pure focus every Monday
morning will make a big impact.
•• Make relationship-based marketing your over-arching marketing
approach to grow your business. Review your marketing
communication and ask yourself, Is my focus on building and
nurturing relationships? Is my marketing engaging, educational and
sometimes entertaining?
22
CHAPTER 5
BUILDING YOUR
MARKETING
MACHINE
As we have seen, many business owners tap in the dark when it comes to
marketing their businesses, without having any structure, which makes their
approach very scattered and ineffective. In this chapter we’ll get working on
building your entire marketing system, a cohesive plan taking into account
all the elements needed to grow your business.
Understanding your audience
Before you build out your entire marketing system, let’s deep-dive into
understanding your audience first. Without this knowledge, your marketing
funnels won’t be as effective.
The best marketing communication is when
your words equal your ideal customers’
thoughts. Truly understanding your
audiences is one of the most important
elements of your social media strategy.
Rather than tapping in the dark when
publishing content, hoping that something
Truly understanding
your audiences is
one of the most
important elements
of your social
media strategy.
23
Social Media for Small Business
will stick, you must know who your people are, what they are interested in
and what makes them tick.
The Desires vs Frustrations Matrix
A brilliant way to research your customers is to use the Desires vs Frustrations
Matrix (see figure 5.1). The goal of this framework is for you to understand
your target markets at a deeper level so your content connects with them.
This research may take some time but it’s absolutely worth the effort, so
please don’t skip this section. Start by filling in the matrix and then keep
adding to it as you gain more customer insights. You can download the
matrix from the website.
Use the matrix to write down any customer desires and frustrations
that your business can potentially solve. Most businesses stay at a very
superficial level when doing this research. To make your social media
and all of your communication engaging, go deeper into your customers’
emotional triggers.
UNSPOKEN
SPOKEN
DESIRES
Figure 5.1:
24
Desires vs Frustrations Matrix
FRUSTRATIONS
Building your marketing machine
Ask yourself the following questions:
•
•
What problems are you solving for your customers?
•
What are some of their unspoken desires and frustrations? What are
they secretly worried about?
•
What are their emotional triggers? What makes them tick?
Why are your customers coming to you? What outcomes are they
hoping to achieve?
The deeper you go and the more you understand your audience at a
psychological level, the easier it will be to create social media content that
will resonate with them.
Keep adding to your matrix as you gain insights. This is a valuable document
that will keep evolving as your business and audiences evolve. So keep this
document updated and if you have team members, get them to collaborate
on this. At Basic Bananas we keep adding to our matrix so we can provide
content that is relevant, desired and useful for business owners.
How to research your audiences
There are many ways to get audience intel and to discover people’s emotional
triggers. Here are my three favourite ones.
Speak to people
Speak to people? Yes! This is one of the best ways to get customer intel! Pick
up the phone and speak to your customers. It’s also a great way for you to
show that you really care about them.
Here’s a possible phone script:
Hi Rudy, it’s Jodie here from xyz. Thank you so much for working with us/buying
our product/service. We are always looking for ways to provide even more value,
so I was wondering if you could help me with a few quick questions:
– What do you love most about working with us? Why do you use our products/
services? What outcomes do you get?
25
Social Media for Small Business
– What are you most frustrated about when it comes to <insert industry>?
– What is one thing we could improve?
This information will come in very handy when you create your brand
strategy in chapter 6.
Pro tip
When listening to your customers, pay attention to their language and
use their words. Don’t summarise or paraphrase your findings in your
matrix. Write their thoughts down exactly as you hear them and then
use their language.
Surveys
Surveys are another great way to find out more about your customers. Use
a free survey tool such as SurveyMonkey.com to set up your questionnaire.
When using a digital survey, make sure to make it really easy for your
customers to fill in. Don’t ask too many open-ended questions and be
very specific.
A question worded as What is one thing we could do to improve? will get you
a much better response rate than What could we improve? Anyone can think
of one thing.
You can use the questions shared in the phone script above in your surveys too.
Analytics
All social media platforms have really great in-built analytics that show
you where your audience is located, their age groups, interests, and so
on. This information is powerful and will not only help you understand
who is attracted to your business but also what kind of content works for
your business.
Once you’ve started compiling this information, use the notes in the Desires
vs Frustrations Matrix to create social media content. Remember, you want
26
Building your marketing machine
your words to equal your market’s thoughts. If you manage to do this through
your communication, your followers will connect with you at a deeper level,
stay loyal and hopefully tell all their friends about you.
Pro tip
A major mistake many people make when it comes to marketing
communication is that they ‘talk’ or write to a business instead of a human.
Any type of communication is always human to human, not business to
business or business to human. When creating content, remember that
there is a person behind the screen reading your words. Write with
that person in mind.
The Online Eco-System
A lot of businesses have a ‘leaky bucket’, which means customers are
abandoning the business before getting to the point of purchasing its
products or services. Instead of becoming your customer, they buy from
someone else.
The Online Eco-System is a proven framework for helping you create a
marketing machine for your business without holes in it so you get the
most out of your social media efforts. The Online Eco-System framework is
illustrated in figure 5.2 (overleaf).
As part of your Online Eco-System, there are four key marketing funnels I
recommend setting up:
•
•
•
•
opt-in or lead funnel
nurture funnel
sales funnel
reactivation funnel.
You can download examples of these funnels from the website.
27
Social Media for Small Business
The Online EcoSystem is a proven
framework for
helping you create a
marketing machine
for your business
without holes in it
so you get the most
out of your social
media efforts.
I have highlighted the funnels in bold for
you below so you can see how they fit in as
you go through the Online Eco-System. And
don’t worry, you don’t need to manually send
any pieces of communication. A databasemanagement or customer-relationship
management system (CRM) can help you
automate parts of this process. If you don’t
have a CRM yet, I highly recommend you
get one. It will make the implementation of
your marketing system and tracking of your
activities so much easier. There are many great CRM systems out there, so
just use what works for you. You can find the one we use in our businesses
on the website. You’ll also find the Online Eco-System video program there.
Let’s walk through the Online Eco-System to help you avoid the ‘leaky
bucket’ syndrome.
There are five major parts to the Online Eco-System: your website, traffic,
conversions, relationships and reactivation.
TRAFFIC
WEBSITE
Paid
Sales
INCREASE CONVERSIONS
RELATIONSHIPS
REACTIVATION
Nurture
Funnel
Promote
Sales Funnel
Email Sequence
Opt-in Funnel
Free
Leads
Email Sequence
Ad
Ad
Ad
Ad
Re-marketing
Figure 5.2:
the Online Eco-System
Your website
Your website is the centrepiece of your online marketing strategy. Every
business needs a great website to inform, educate and engage with current,
28
Building your marketing machine
past and future customers. And by great I mean visually appealing, userfriendly and functional.
You want your website to work for you even when you’re busy sipping
cocktails at the beach.
Here’s what your website should do for you.
Inform, educate and engage
When people hear about your business, what’s often the first thing they do to
check you out? They go to your website. Potential customers visit your website
to get informed. So your website needs to focus on engaging the ‘right’ kind
of customer and helping them make the decision to work with you.
Your website is like a hub of great information that connects with your
audiences and moves them closer towards a sale with you. It’s often the first or
second point of contact and the start of, hopefully, a long-lasting relationship.
One of the biggest mistakes most businesses make is to use their website to
merely talk about themselves without ever mentioning who their customers
are or what problems they are solving for them.
When writing or rewriting the copy for your website, focus on your customers.
Grab your customer matrix and ask yourself: What are their needs? What are
their frustrations? How do I help them solve those needs and frustrations?
Generate leads
Another very important function of your website is to generate leads—that
is, to identify potential future customers. The best way to do this is by
providing valuable content, insights and information your ideal customers
want to receive.
Your website is a brilliant way to capture
Your focus on
people’s details in return for something
providing helpful
valuable so that you can then nurture content and building
that relationship. Remember, marketing
goodwill will help
is similar to dating: some people will need
you to convert
more courting than others before they trust
prospects into
and buy from you.
customers.
29
Social Media for Small Business
Your focus on providing helpful content and building goodwill will help you
to convert prospects into customers.
Drive sales
Some websites are set up as e-commerce sites with the option to shop straight
on the site. However, not every business is able to sell its products or services
on its website. Think higher end offerings where customers generally take a
bit longer to make a decision and require more high-touch communication.
An average sales conversion on an e-commerce website is only around 2 per
cent, depending on the quality of the traffic. What happens with the 98 per
cent of people who are not ready to buy just yet? Rather than missing out on
them, you should offer them a ‘first (low-key) date’ or ‘opt in’ (which I talk
about further down under ‘Conversions’), which provides value and is a first
step towards building trust and staying top of mind.
Re-market
Have you ever visited a website and admired those really cool high-top sneakers
but didn’t buy them because you’ve already got five other pairs? So you abandon
the website with the best intentions not to buy them, but suddenly see those
same sneakers pop up on other websites only to remind you of how cool they are.
That’s called re-marketing. It’s a very effective marketing strategy because
you are only showing your ads to people who have already shown interest in
your product or service.
Re-marketing is highly targeted and can yield very high returns. When
someone visits a specific product page on your website but doesn’t buy,
they are shown an ad highlighting the benefits of this product.
Setting up re-marketing ads is relatively easy. We use a tool called Perfect
Audience. If you’d like to play with this tool, visit our website and type in
‘perfect audience’ and you’ll get $100 credit.
Traffic
A website without traffic or visitors is not very useful and won’t help you to
grow your business. It’s like having a shop without anyone coming in. And
30
Building your marketing machine
even if you have the most stunning website in the universe, it’s not guaranteed
that people will swing by unless you drive traffic.
There are many different marketing strategies you can use to drive traffic to
your website, both free and paid. Social media is a brilliant way to get people
to your website.
Other marketing strategies that can work well for businesses wanting to
increase traffic include direct mail, strategic partnerships, Google advertising,
native ads, re-marketing, free publicity, content marketing, sponsorship and
influencer marketing.
Just like foot traffic coming into your shop, it doesn’t help if potential
customers merely look at your products without buying. For your business
to survive and thrive, you need prospects to become customers.
Conversions
Once your visitors are on your website, your next aim is to convert as many of
the ‘right ones’ as possible into either warm leads or customers.
Your first date (or ‘opt in’)
Many prospects will need more time and nurturing to fall in love with
your business. So rather than missing out on everyone who is not willing
to purchase straight away, you need to add value. Stay in touch and be
in front of your prospects in order for them to build trust and ultimately
buy from you.
The purpose of your ‘first date’ or ‘opt in’ on your website is to provide value
in return for someone’s email address. You might wonder, but aren’t emails
dead? Far from it! Email marketing is still going strong. But there’s a big but!
A first date or lead magnet only works if you have something worthwhile to
share. Nobody wants to receive annoying emails or newsletters.
Social media is a brilliant tool for generating leads and moving people from
those platforms into your own eco-system.
What would be something you could give away to your prospects that would
be of amazing value for them?
31
Social Media for Small Business
Here are a few examples of first dates that are working really well for
our members:
•
an e-commerce business that encourages first buyers by offering a
voucher. For example, ‘Download your ten-dollar voucher to redeem
on your first purchase’ or ‘Join the xyz fashion club to receive a 10 per
cent discount on all of our products’
•
a travel agency giving away a travel guide on the 10 most amazing
and secret travel destinations
•
•
an author offering the first chapter of their book for free
a fitness studio gifting intro passes.
First dates help businesses to stay in touch with and nurture prospects.
Someone might download an intro pass at a studio and then take a few weeks
or even months to muster the courage to finally join the gym. Being able to
stay in touch with prospects and providing valuable information is what will
make them choose you over your competitors once they’re ready to commit.
You want to own the decision-making period.
To automate this, create an opt-in funnel in your database-management
system.
Sales
As mentioned earlier, if you have an e-commerce website, a small percentage
of your visitors will buy your products and services. A small percentage of the
ones that don’t buy will opt in and potentially come back to purchase later.
This is where you need a sales funnel.
Relationships
Business is all about building relationships, regardless of whether or not
people buy from you now or in the future. Once you’ve got someone in
your community, provide so much value that you blow their minds and
they will never want to leave. You want them to walk away from every
interaction thinking that your business is so amazing that they want to tell
everyone about it.
32
Building your marketing machine
This is where you need a nurture funnel to help you stay in touch with your
prospects and customers. The focus here is on adding value and sharing
content that is useful to your prospects.
Depending on your business, your touchpoints can include emails, text
messages, phone calls and direct mail.
A very common question I get asked is ‘How often should you stay in touch
with your audience?’ Only as often as you have something to say. Quality over
quantity. Don’t just send your contacts stuff for the sake of it. Before hitting
‘send’ on an email or calling someone, ask yourself Is this adding value? and
Would I appreciate receiving this piece of communication if I were a prospect?
There’s enough noise out there. Don’t add to it.
Another question is ‘How long should you stay in touch with your audience?’
Forever! Or until they decide to opt out of your communication.
Reactivation
In the previous step, your focus was on nurturing and building relationships
by providing value. Every now and then you need to invite people to spend
money with you.
Use the 80/20 rule here: 80 per cent of the time, provide value; 20 per cent of
the time, let your customers and prospects know that they are welcome to
buy from you.
Let them know when you have a new product launch, a customer event or a
special offer. Invite them to work with you.
This is where a reactivation funnel comes in handy. Map out your
reactivation campaign and put it into a funnel.
###
As you can see, social media fits in at the top end of your Online Eco-System.
Your social media channels will help you to gain exposure, engage with your
audience, drive traffic to your website and increase sales. Instead of dropping
the ball or having a ‘leaky bucket’, move people through your eco-system to
get the maximum return on your investment.
33
Social Media for Small Business
Understanding this is so important. You need an integrated approach with
each piece of the puzzle working hand in hand so you can gain momentum.
The customer journey
One more concept I’d like to share with you before I introduce you to the
Brand Alchemy Method in chapter 6 is the customer journey (see figure 5.3).
Every future customer treads a slightly different path from the moment they
first find you to the time they begin spending money with you. This is what
we call the customer journey, and social media can play a big role in this.
For example, a prospect might find you on Facebook, check out your website,
then read some of your recommendations on LinkedIn and sign up to receive
your emails before they decide to do business with you. By having the Online
Eco-System in place, you can avoid the ‘leaky bucket’.
Someone else might find your business through a referral, then go to your
website, click on your social media pages, and so on.
Figure 5.3:
the customer journey
Every customer journey is different, and they vary in duration depending on
three things:
•
•
•
34
the person’s buying behaviour
the urgency of their need
your type of business.
Building your marketing machine
A prospect who has back pain, for example, is likely to move through the
customer journey very quickly when looking for a chiropractor.
On the other hand, a prospect looking for a
property buyers’ agent might take longer to
decide which agent to choose. They might
read case studies, download ‘first dates’
and read agents’ monthly emails and after
a few months of looking at different options
decide to work with a particular agent
who has ‘owned’ the customer journey by
adding value at every touchpoint.
In order to leverage
and optimise your
social channels you
need a smart brand
strategy that helps
you be consistent
across all customer
touchpoints.
The businesses that are really good at ‘owning’ the customer journey by
making every touchpoint consistently reflect their brand and add value are
the ones that generally get the business.
Pro tip
The more often your customers are exposed to your brand, the quicker
you will build familiarity. Some people claim that your customers need
to see your brand seven times before they buy. That’s not entirely
accurate as it depends on your business offering and the urgency
of their problem. You do, however, want your customers to see you
‘everywhere’.
One more thing to consider here is that sometimes a prospect might see
your advertisement on Facebook, but then connect with you on LinkedIn.
This might make you think that Facebook is not working for you and that
LinkedIn is. Or someone might see your update on LinkedIn but then
convert from an ad on Instagram. There are different journeys leading
them to a sale, so don’t be too quick at dissing a channel.
Many prospects will find and stalk you on social media and then decide
whether they want to continue the journey with you or someone else. That’s
why it is so crucial to have an amazing presence on social media. In order to
35
Social Media for Small Business
leverage and optimise your social channels you need a smart brand strategy
that helps you be consistent across all customer touchpoints, which leads to
choose to outsource the implementation of your social media plans.
Activity
Map out the four important funnels for your business and start
implementing them one by one. Use a database-management system
to help you automate parts of your funnels. To access the CRM we use
for our businesses, please visit basicbananas.com/ontraport.
36
CHAPTER 6
CREATING
YOUR BRAND
STRATEGY
Brilliant branding will help you differentiate yourself and stand out in the
social media crowd. Your brand strategy will guide your communication and
ensure you have consistency across all touchpoints, which leads to brand
familiarity, trust and increased sales.
I’m a big believer in building brands that move hearts and minds. Brands
that motivate people to take action.
What is a brand?
Branding not only includes your visual appearance; it’s also how you make
people feel, your tone of voice and how you communicate on your social
channels, your differentiation and how people perceive you. It’s up to you
to take control of how you are perceived. Branding creates perception. And
perception creates reality. Own your and your business’s reality.
I co-wrote a book (called Perception) on the topic of perception because it’s
such a crucial part of making your personal and business brand irresistible.
37
Social Media for Small Business
I mentioned earlier that marketing is not very dissimilar from dating. If
marketing is asking someone out on a date, great branding will help you to
get them to say yes.
Branding helps you to position and re-position your business. Imagine you’re
walking down to the markets and a lovely lady is selling hand-knitted scarfs
that look a bit wonky. She can either brand them as ‘wonky or faulty’ and
hence discount them or she can promote them as ‘handmade, unique, oneof-a-kind’. Which do you think is better positioning?
Once you’ve got clarity on your brand, your social media channels are a great
tool for amplifying and magnifying it. You want your audience to see you
‘everywhere’, or everywhere they are.
Personal vs business brand
Every single person and business is given an identity depending on how you
are perceived by others. It’s your job to make sure the perception others have
of you and your business is what you want it to be.
Your personal brand is how you want people to perceive you as a person—
this is different from your business brand.
On social media you may choose to focus on only your business brand or both your
business and personal brands, depending on your goals. Some business owners
prefer to stay a bit more anonymous, while others use their personal brand to help
grow their business. There is no right or wrong—choose what works for you.
It goes without saying that your personal brand needs to be authentic
and real. Too many people use social media to portray a different image of
themselves, which must be exhausting to maintain. People connect and
engage with realness and honesty at a much deeper level than with fakery.
My Brand Alchemy Method can be applied to both your personal and
business brands.
At our brand consultancy, The Business Hood, we get to play with brands all
day long so as I take you through this framework, I’ll share some practical
examples to get you inspired.
38
Creating your brand strategy
The Brand Alchemy Method
‘Don’t judge a book by its cover’ is a common idiom. Well, unfortunately,
people do! Especially in business. Prospective customers will absolutely
judge a business by its brand appearance, whether that is on social media,
a website, a brochure or any other communication channel. We form an
opinion in the first few seconds of being exposed to a business.
Every brand has a certain perception and I wouldn’t leave it up to chance. As
a business owner you must proactively create and influence the perception
your audience has of your business.
Keep in mind that it might take some time to create or refresh all the pieces
of your brand strategy, so don’t feel disheartened if you don’t crack all the
pieces straight away. Just get started and keep coming back to this chapter to
refine and rework your strategy.
We recently created a brand strategy for a sock As a business owner
subscription business that the business then you must proactively
gave to their social media agency to ensure create and influence
consistency of branding and messaging across
the perception your
all channels. The agency reached out to us to
audience has of
let us know how much they love using this
your business.
document to guide their content. Use your
brand strategy when creating social media content, whether you do this inhouse
or outsource it. It will ensure your communication is coherent and consistent.
There are four key parts to a brand strategy—brand foundation, positioning,
messaging and engagement—each with its own components. You’ll see
these components outlined in the Brand Alchemy Method model presented
in figure 6.1 (overleaf). Brand Foundation is made up of Brand Purpose
and Brand Principles, the inner two rings of the circle. The next ring is
Brand Identity, Differentiation and Positioning Statement, which form
the Brand Positioning aspect of the method. The outer ring of the model
represents Brand Messaging and comprises Brand Promises and Stories.
And lastly we see Brand Engagement being delivered both with Internal
Brand Activation and External Brand Activation. Let’s take a look at each
of these components in further detail.
39
Social Media for Small Business
AND
PROM
IS
B
B
PRINCIP
ND
LE
RA
S
POSITIONI
NG
NT
ME
TE
BRAND
PURPOSE
DIF
ES
NTITY
IDE
ND
RA
ST
A
BR
F E R E N T I A TI O N
STORIES
BRAND ENGAGEMENT
Figure 6.1:
the Brand Alchemy Method
Brand foundation
The first part of your brand strategy is your brand foundation. The purpose
of your foundation is to help you make decisions aligned with your business
and create social media content that is engaging the right audiences.
There are two key components of your foundation: brand purpose and brand
principles.
Brand purpose
Your brand purpose is the core foundation of your business and drives your
messaging.
Its job is to guide your decisions, motivate you when you are not ‘feeling it’,
align your teams, set the tone for your culture and get you, your teams and
your customers excited about your business.
40
Creating your brand strategy
An example of a strong brand purpose is Oceanlovers’ to inspire and motivate
the masses to save our oceans.
This purpose statement guides our content on social media as much as it does
our decisions. On our social media channels you can see a lot of educational
content around ocean awareness and conservation among product updates.
Another example is Basic Bananas’ purpose, which is to create positive
ripple effects for business owners around the globe by providing marketing
mentoring programs.
Again, our social media team knows that if the content we publish fits into
this purpose and is making a positive impact, we are on the right path.
You can also apply this to your personal brand. My personal purpose is to
make a positive impact through entrepreneurship. Having clarity on my purpose
helps me to make the right decisions aligned with it. So when I was asked
to write this book, I said yes (even though I didn’t intend to write another
book so soon after my last one). It fits into my purpose to make a positive
impact. On my personal social media channels I mix personal content with
entrepreneurial wisdom and insights.
As you go through life, different priorities may emerge, which means that you
and your purpose may change and evolve. It’s okay to revisit your purpose
statement every now and then and adjust it to reflect what you’re setting out
to achieve.
Activity
Can you see how a strong brand purpose forms the basis of great
social media content?
Summarise, in one sentence, what your purpose is all about. Here are
a few questions to get you thinking:
•• What’s the purpose of your business?
•• What’s the biggest problem you are solving?
•• What impact are you making?
•• What legacy do you want to leave?
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Social Media for Small Business
Brand principles
Next up are your brand principles or values. While your brand purpose is
your destination, or North Star, your principles are your compass to make
sure you are taking the right path aligned with your purpose.
You’ve just read Basic Bananas’ and Oceanlovers’ brand purposes, so now
let’s look at how the principles and purpose work together.
Oceanlovers’ brand principles include:
•
•
•
adventures: Be courageous, be adventurous, be awesome
•
sustainability: Care deeply about ocean conservation.
collaboration: Together everything is more fun
respect: Respect nature, the ocean and every living being including
sharks, plankton and seahorses
You can see how these values are all supportive of the brand’s purpose to
inspire and motivate the masses to save our oceans. Both are part of the
brand’s DNA and help us to create content for our social media channels
that is coherent with what we stand for.
Basic Bananas’ brand values are outlined in figure 6.2 and include:
•
simplification: Anyone can throw around fancy words; it takes genius
to simplify. You are a genius
•
•
•
•
realness: Keep it real and focus on stuff that truly matters
playfulness: Sprinkle playfulness generously
infinite growth: Stay curious, make mistakes and keep evolving
positive ripple effects: Leave everything and everyone better off.
Again, these values are supportive of the bigger picture: to create positive
ripple effects for business owners around the globe through marketing mentoring
programs. They also guide our social media content as we aim to publish
updates that are real, playful, simple (understandable) and with a focus on
helping businesses to grow.
42
Creating your brand strategy
Figure 6.2:
Basic Bananas’ brand values
We also make sure our team knows and lives our values so we can keep
growing an amazing team culture people want to be a part of.
When creating social media content, look through the lens of your principles.
This will help you differentiate yourself and make your content uniquely you.
If you’re also growing a personal brand on social media, use this same
framework for your personal values too.
And remember, your values may evolve and change over time. So just pick
some that represent you right now and if you need to adapt them later, that’s
perfectly okay.
Pro tip
When selecting your principles, stay away from the ones everybody
else throws around like it’s their job, such as ‘professionalism’, ‘expertise’
and ‘integrity’. These should be a given in any business.
Once you’ve got clarity on your brand values, use them as a checklist for
your social media content. At Basic Bananas we ask ourselves, Is this content
following the principle of simplification or are we overcomplicating? Is it a little
bit playful? Are we being real? Is it focused on making a positive impact?
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Social Media for Small Business
Activity
Revisit or create your brand principles. Aim for three to five of them. If
you have too many, you won’t be able to remember them all.
Here are three questions to ask yourself to get started:
•• What’s important for you in your business (or life)?
•• What do you stand for?
•• What do you stand against?
Brand positioning
Part I of your brand strategy was your foundation; in part II we will define
your brand positioning. This is crucial for a business to succeed on and
off social media. Yet brand positioning is often completely overlooked due
to a lack of knowledge on how to go about it. The purpose of your brand
positioning is to leverage your strengths and ensure you are attracting the
right audience by way of brand identity and differentiation. You’d rather have
a smaller social media following comprising your target audience than a
huge following of people who are not the right audience.
There are three key elements to help you define your brand positioning: brand
identity, differentiation and a positioning statement. When going through
each of these, keep your perfect customer in mind.
Brand identity
Your brand identity is the first pillar of your brand positioning. I mentioned
earlier that every single brand has an identity: a perception that creates reality.
As the business owner or marketer, you need to be in charge of the perception.
Clarity on your brand identity will also ensure consistency across your
marketing communication, including your social media content. It will
inform both your visual representation and the words you use. As you know
so well by now, consistency leads to familiarity, which leads to trust, which
leads to increased sales.
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Creating your brand strategy
Ask yourself the following three questions to craft your brand identity:
1.
How do I want to be perceived?
If your business were a person, how would you describe them?
When you answer this question, use adjectives or descriptive words.
Only pick three to five characteristics and make sure they are a blend
that can be unique to you. Avoid vanilla characteristics such as ‘high
quality’, ‘experienced’ or ‘professional’—again, these should be a given!
Examples of characteristics include modern, young, conservative,
European, irreverent, impactful, cheeky, edgy, funny, brilliant, innovative,
old-school, retro, playful, romantic, wise, insightful and helpful.
At Oceanlovers our brand identity is ‘adventurous, educational and
mindful’. At Basic Bananas it’s ‘generous, playful, down-to-earth
and smart’.
2.
How do I want people to feel when interacting with my brand on
social media?
The best content makes people ‘feel’ something. So when creating
social media content, keep the desired emotions you’d like your
audience to have in mind.
Examples of emotions include optimistic, joyful, supported,
acknowledged, celebrated, educated, inspired and motivated.
At Oceanlovers we want people to feel inspired and motivated to
help save our oceans. We also want them to feel like they belong to
a community of like-minded people. For Basic Bananas we want
people to feel optimistic, guided and supported as part of a strong
business community.
3.
What do I want to be known for? What space do I want to ‘own’ in
my industry?
Play by your strengths and ‘own’ a space in your industry. Become
known for something.
Harley Davidson is known for ‘freedom’. Volvo is known for ‘safety’.
Apple is known for ‘design and innovation’.
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Social Media for Small Business
What are you known for? What are you already really good at that
you could magnify?
Focus on one or two things so much you become known for them.
At Oceanlovers we are known for sustainable products. At Basic
Bananas we are known for marketing mentoring—that is, making
marketing strategy accessible, practical and attainable for
business owners.
Activity
Ponder the following questions.
•• If your business were a person, how would you describe them?
•• How do you want people to feel when interacting with your brand
on social media?
•• What space do you want to occupy? What do you want to be
known for? What do you want people to say and remember about
you or your business?
Differentiation
The second pillar of your brand positioning is your differentiation. The
purpose of this is for you to stand out in a sea of businesses and millions of
social media accounts fighting for attention. The more you differentiate, the
easier it will be to attract and engage an audience.
Pro tip
Your differentiation might not be one single thing you do. It’s most likely
a combination of a few elements that make you unique.
There are various ways to differentiate:
•
46
Audience: Are you servicing a specific audience? The more specialist,
the better.
Creating your brand strategy
•
•
•
•
Pricing: What is your pricing model? Are you high, mid or low end?
•
Communication: How do you communicate with your customers?
Is your marketing approach more amazing than anyone else’s in
your space?
•
Extras: Do you offer a warranty, free trials or guarantees?
Products: Can you differentiate through your product offering?
Design: How about your packaging and design?
Customer experience: Is your customer experience above anyone else’s
in your industry? Think ease of doing business with you—for example,
free and fast delivery, excellent customer support, and so on.
Looking at these categories, how can you differentiate across some of them?
Another brilliant question to ask yourself is What are people in my industry
frustrated about? And then see if your business can overcome this frustration.
For example, they might be frustrated about expensive delivery fees, long
waiting lines or lack of parking.
Most importantly, play by your strengths. What do your customers already
love about you? Ask them. You might be surprised how the things that
are ‘normal’ for you are highlights for your customers. Make a list and
communicate your strengths across your social channels.
For example, at Basic Bananas people love our focus on making marketing
understandable, practical and exciting. It’s our core strength so that’s what
we focus on. Amplify what you’re already good at.
Activities
Go through the above categories and look for ways to differentiate.
Also ask yourself:
•• What are people frustrated about when working with my industry?
•• What am I really good at? Can I amplify that?
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Social Media for Small Business
Positioning statement
Your positioning statement, or tagline, is incredibly useful for sharing with your
audience what you are all about. It’s a summary of what you want to be known
for. It’s also one of the more challenging things to crack because you’ll have to
work out how you’re going to summarise your positioning in just a few words!
Your tagline often sits integrated with your logo so when people see your
brand on social media, they can understand straight away what your business
is all about.
Some well-known brands have paid advertising agencies thousands if not
millions of dollars to come up with their statements. For example, Airbnb’s
belong anywhere has come out of a lot of research to get to the core of what
Airbnb is all about for its customers.
Sometimes when your brand name does not explicitly state what you do,
you may choose a bit more of a straight-forward tagline. That’s what we did
at Basic Bananas. Our tagline is quite boring, but it shares exactly what we
do: marketing mentoring for business owners. When people first see the name
Basic Bananas they may not know what we’re all about, so a descriptive
tagline helps with that.
Here are a few examples from our marketing mentoring program members—
the Clever Bunch—to get you inspired:
•
•
•
•
•
A physiotherapist: Get in. Get fixed. Don’t come back
A car mechanic: Cuddles for your car
A hairdresser: Your friend in fabulous hair
A restaurant: Real food. Good vibes
A campervan accessory business: Accessorise your next adventure.
Activity
Craft or rethink your own positioning statement. Can you summarise
your positioning into a short and memorable few words?
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Creating your brand strategy
Add your positioning statement on your social media channels to
attract the right audience.
Don’t worry if it doesn’t click straight way; just like with your brand
values, your positioning statement may evolve and change along the
way. So don’t get stuck on this: just pick something that works right now
and then refine it later.
Brand messaging
We’ve looked at your brand foundation and positioning. Now let’s look at your
brand messaging. Part 3 of your brand strategy will be incredibly helpful when
writing content for your social media and other marketing communication.
There are two parts: your brand promises and telling your story.
Brand promises
Your brand promises are your key messages: they outline the promises you make
and hold for your customers. They must resonate with your ideal customers.
Your promises can also turn into really great advertising angles when setting
up paid digital campaigns.
When creating your brand promises, write them with different personalities
in mind. Think about your most common customers and write a promise
that appeals to each. Putting yourself into the shoes of different customer
types will help you capture a larger audience.
Let’s look at four customer personality types most businesses have.
1. THE IMPACTEUR
The impacteur wants to know what impact you are making. Write a promise
around your impact.
At Basic Bananas we talk about our vision to create ripple effects for
thousands of business owners all around the globe. These business owners
then create a positive impact in their own communities.
2. THE VISIONARY AND BIG-PICTURE THINKER
The visionary wants to know the bigger picture instead of every tiny detail of
your offering. What is the key outcome a customer gets from working with you?
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Social Media for Small Business
At Basic Bananas we have a promise that our customers not only get
increased revenue and profit, but also a better lifestyle and a systematised
approach to marketing.
3. THE DETAILS PERSON
The details person wants to know every detail of your product or service.
How does it work exactly? Write a promise explaining the details.
At Basic Bananas we talk about how each mentoring program works: the
inclusions, the content modules, and so on. Big-picture thinkers usually
don’t care too much about these details. They just want to know the bigger
outcomes and don’t really care how they get there, as long as they do get there.
4. THE CHALLENGER AND THE SCEPTIC
The sceptic wants to know if your product really works. Who has it worked
for? Share facts, figures, case studies and testimonials.
At Basic Bananas we share our proven frameworks and step-by-step approach
for growing a business. We also share case studies that show how thousands
of businesses have applied the frameworks with incredible results.
Gaining clarity around your core brand promises will support you in creating
social media content that appeals to a broader audience, not just people who
think like you.
Activity
Write down four to five core promises. Take the different personas
outlined above and write a promise for each of them.
Remember these will then become part of your social media content.
Telling your story
Storytelling is incredibly powerful when it comes to branding and sharing
your message on social media. Storytelling goes back thousands of years.
Ancient civilisations painted their stories onto walls to communicate and for
new generations to learn from and evolve. Stories connect people and ideas.
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Creating your brand strategy
They engage us emotionally, make us feel a part of something and help us
make sense of the world. Humans are wired to remember stories a lot more
easily than data, facts or figures. Storytelling is also one of the most powerful
means for leaders to inspire, influence and teach.
At our brand consultancy, The Business
Storytelling is
Hood, we undertake a lot of experiments incredibly powerful
and tests to see how people behave online.
when it comes
One thing we’ve found is that the majority
to branding and
of people click on the ‘about us’ page on a
sharing your
website right after visiting its homepage.
message on
The reason for this is that people want to
social media.
know who is behind the business. They want
to work with people they like: someone they connect with.
Pro tip
When writing your bio for your ‘about us’ page, add something
personal or quirky about yourself. This can be a fun fact or a secret
passion you may have. Doing this will make you more memorable.
For our team at Basic Bananas we’ve included a fun fact for each
team member.
For example, Aga loves baking and is always on the lookout for the
perfect baking tray. And Julia can often be found sitting cross-legged
meditating!
Social media is such an incredible way to show your humanity, share who is
behind the business and tell your story. We have also found that on social
media ‘behind the scenes’ content is one of the most popular types of
content. More on that in chapter 7.
Share your story. Here are two questions to get you started:
•
•
Why are you doing what you are doing?
Was there a significant event in your life that motivated you to solve
this challenge?
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Social Media for Small Business
If you have permission, you can also share customer stories and the
transformation they’ve gone through because of working with your business.
It goes without saying that it’s important to share your stories authentically
and to not make stuff up.
Activity
Write or rewrite your story in a compelling way and share it on your
website. Also share snippets of it on your social media channels.
Do so in the most authentic and real way and your audience will
connect with you.
Brand engagement
The last part of your brand strategy is brand engagement. This is where social
media plays a big role in the activation of your brand strategy, both externally
and internally.
External brand activation
Your external brand activation or engagement is where you activate
your brand across your touchpoints.
Remember the customer journey we
Make sure that
spoke about earlier? Make sure that
your brand is
your brand is reflected across your
reflected across
your communication communication points so your audience
feels a sense of familiarity every time they
points so your
‘see’ your brand.
audience feels a
sense of familiarity
every time they
‘see’ your brand.
Let me share one of my favourite activities
with you for when you go about your
external brand activation:
1.
Make a list of all of your communication pieces and touchpoints you
have with your customers.
2.
Brainstorm ideas on how you can amplify your brand across
each of them.
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Creating your brand strategy
Here’s a list of touchpoints most businesses have. Social media is right at the
top of it:
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
social media channels
website
email signature
invoice templates
proposals
company profile
packaging
signage
phone answering message.
Here are a few practical examples of external brand engagement to
inspire you.
•
One of our Clever Bunch members, Dannie (the founder of GDL
Automotive Services), sends out handwritten postcards to amplify
his charismatic, honest and customer-focused brand (see figure 6.3,
overleaf).
•
Another member, Rita, who is a business consultant, wants to be
known for innovation. So she amplifies her innovative approach by
including facts and ideas on some of the latest business innovations
in her proposals.
•
A fitness studio is using its social media channels to amplify a
focus on ‘realness’ by not only posting perfect ‘poser’ photos, but by
keeping it real.
•
At Basic Bananas we amplify playfulness and approachability across
multiple touchpoints including our email signatures, out-of-office
auto-responders and social media channels.
Make activating and amplifying your brand across your social media
channels a focus.
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Social Media for Small Business
Figure 6.3: an example of Dannie’s touchpoints – handwritten postcards to
customers using his greasy fingerprint to draw cute animals
54
Creating your brand strategy
Activity
1. Download the ‘external brand engagement’ worksheet from
the website.
2. Brainstorm ideas for amplifying your brand at each of your
touchpoints.
3. Implement one of your ideas per month.
4. Celebrate and be proud of the amazing brand you’ve created.
If you have a team, involve your team in this activity. They’ll most likely
have some brilliant ideas too.
Internal brand activation
If you have a team, internal brand activation is just as important as external.
Your team are your best brand ambassadors, so make sure they’re well
equipped to represent and amplify your brand.
Two of my favourite ways to activate your brand internally are appointing a
team happiness rock star and creating a culture book.
APPOINT A TEAM HAPPINESS ROCK STAR
For a small team, you don’t need to hire a full-time person for this very
important role. Just ask your most empathetic team member if they’d also
like to be in charge of team happiness.
At Basic Bananas, Aga, who is also our marketing manager, is our team
happiness legend. As part of this role she ensures our team feel happy,
aligned and supported. She also ensures that they understand our brand and
how we’d like to be represented internally and externally.
CREATE A CULTURE BOOK
Creating a culture book or company guide for new and existing team
members is a great way to share your brand’s history, core offering, target
audiences, team perks, code of conduct, brand strategy, and so on. It’s a
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Social Media for Small Business
helpful tool for your team members to not only understand your business
and its culture, but also to share content about your business on social media
that is reflective of your brand.
You can check out our Basic Bananas culture book on the website.
###
That’s it! You’ve just gone through the steps to creating a brilliant brand
strategy by using the Brand Alchemy Method. This will support you in taking
your social media game to a whole new level!
Many businesses dive straight into social media without having a clue
about their brand and marketing strategy. The ones that have a wellthought-through brand strategy are the ones that stand out!
With your brand strategy in mind, let’s get working on your social media
content strategy.
Activity
If you have a team, appoint a team happiness rock star and compile a
culture book to support your team members in doing their best work—
work they are proud of.
56
CHAPTER 7
SOCIAL MEDIA
CONTENT
STRATEGY
The most popular social media channels are the ones with the best content in
line with their brand strategy. In this chapter we’re going to create your social
media content strategy. The purpose of this is for you to have a plan to avoid an
unorganised and inefficient approach to content creation. Your social channels
will be a lot less ad-hoc and more likely to draw a crowd. The right crowd!
As mentioned earlier, creating and understanding your strategy is the most
important role of a small business owner. Even if you choose to outsource
the implementation of your social media approach, always be involved in
strategy and keep an eye on your metrics. I’ve seen countless businesses hire
social media experts who didn’t understand the brand and the return on their
investment was below average. There is nothing wrong with outsourcing if
you keep an eye on your results.
A clear social media content strategy enables you to have others collaborate
on the content creation and publishing while ensuring consistency. This is
how we go about our social media marketing efforts at all of our businesses.
I’m involved in the strategy part and different team members are in charge of
content creation, publishing and community management. They then report
our results weekly and we can see very quickly what’s working and what’s
not working.
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Social Media for Small Business
If you are a one-man or one-woman band in your business right now handling
all the different aspects of social media, a content plan will make your efforts
a lot more efficient and effective.
The content bucket method
Content themes—or the content bucket method—are a brilliant way to
help you create content and put together a practical social media plan for
your business.
You want your social channels to be a fountain of engaging content for
people to come back to. One of the biggest mistakes a lot of businesses make
is just talking about themselves on their channels all day long, which can get
a bit boring for your audiences.
But what else could you talk about? This is where the content buckets come
in. The content bucket method will help you to diversify your content and
share information that is relevant and helpful for your audiences.
The content bucket
method will help
you to diversify
your content and
share information
that is relevant and
helpful for your
audiences.
Think about what your audiences are
interested in, other than your business.
Write down a whole list of potential
topics. Some of these will then become
your content buckets. The purpose of your
content buckets is to ensure your content is
interesting for your audiences so they want
to follow you. This framework will also help
you with an abundance of ideas and bring
structure into your social media approach.
Here are a few examples and must-have content buckets for your business.
Authority content—how to
This type of content is very popular. The purpose of authority content is to
share your hottest tips and knowledge in order to build your authority and
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Social media content strategy
credibility. This type of content will help you demonstrate your expertise and
build trust with your audiences.
Here are a few examples:
•
•
Hairdressers: How to style your hair in five minutes or less
•
Consultants: How to put together your business plan with these three
simple steps.
Interior designers: The five interior design hacks that will transform
your living room
Industry news and trends
Industry news and trends are another essential content bucket for your
business. This is where you share information and the latest news in your
industry. What are the latest trends? What does the future look like? What’s
happening right now that might be of interest to your audiences? This type of
content is especially popular on LinkedIn.
Here are a few examples:
•
•
•
Chiropractors: The latest innovations in biotech
Restaurants: Food trends of the year
Graphic designers: The colour of the year.
Behind the scenes
Behind the scenes content is one of the most popular content buckets.
People absolutely love seeing behind the scenes of a business because it
shows your humanity—so make sure you keep it real. This type of content
includes introducing team members, showing your audiences your
workspace, a tour through your offices and a picture of your team at team
dinner or movie night.
At Basic Bananas, our behind the scenes content pieces always have some of
the highest engagement.
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Social Media for Small Business
User-generated content
User-generated content is content other people have published about you.
This could be someone sharing a picture of your product or service in use.
We often get people to share selfies of themselves attending our virtual
marketing workshops or showing off their own workspace. This is pretty
awesome as it creates community and we get to cheer them on. Sometimes
we then share some of their content on our channels to give them and their
businesses a shout-out. For my latest book, The Courage Map, a lot of readers
posted pictures of the book with their key learnings, which helped with
exposure to a larger audience.
You can encourage user-generated content by way of competitions or just
asking your biggest fans if they’d like to share something about your product
or service. User-generated content is powerful because other people talk
about how amazing you are—similar to customer reviews.
Product reviews
Another content bucket could include reviews such as book or product
reviews and comparisons. They are very popular on our YouTube
channels.
Our team once published a review of our favourite tech tools and it’s
still one of our best performing pieces of content. You can check it out
here: basicbananas.com/our-favourite-ten-tech-tools-for-busy-businessowners.
Pro tip
If your business is often compared to a competitor and there is
confusion about the differences, write a compelling product review
where you share the differences of your offerings without, of course,
talking badly about your competitor. Just an honest review outlining the
key differences. This will help your ideal customers decide whether you
are the right fit for them.
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Social media content strategy
Promoting your business
And of course don’t forget to share information about your business and
invite people to buy from you.
Remember the 80/20 rule in the Online Eco-System? The same applies here.
Eighty per cent of the time provide useful, informative and engaging content.
Twenty per cent of the time share promotions and let people know how to
work with you.
This can include information about your products and services, special
offers, product launches, event invitations, and so on.
Invite people to work with you. Just don’t overdo the promotional content.
Curated content from other sources
I’ve got some great news for you! You don’t need to create all of your content
by yourself. There’s so much amazing content out there already that people
have spent hours and hours producing. Find credible sources of information
that are high quality and relevant to your business and audiences. Look for
content from publications, bloggers, industry associations, and so on; then
reshare the best content, always crediting the source.
At Basic Bananas, we sometimes reshare useful articles from Inc. magazine,
Forbes and other publications that provide great content our followers can
benefit from.
When sharing other people’s content, personalise it by adding your five cents’
worth—your perspective on the topic—and always credit the source.
Pro tip
Here are two free tools you can use to curate content easily:
• Feedly is a news aggregator app that helps you compile
newsfeeds from a variety of online sources.
• Google Alerts is another great option for receiving notifications on
selected keywords or topics you want to keep an eye on.
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Social Media for Small Business
Anything you share needs to be brilliant so that people come back for more
and you become a trusted source of relevant information.
Bonus content tips
Once you’ve defined your content buckets, you’re ready to put them together
into a neat social media plan. Before we look at creating your social media
plan (in chapter 8) I’d like to give you some bonus content tips.
The content checklist
Ask yourself the following questions about your content:
•
Is my content piece worth sharing? Quality is a lot more important
than quantity: less is more. Poor-quality content can really hurt your
brand, so don’t post something just for the sake of it.
•
Does it reflect my brand? Is your content in line with your brand
perception? Does it reflect your brand voice and imagery? Is it
consistent?
•
Is it engaging, educational or entertaining? Content that is either
engaging, educational or entertaining (or a combination of all three)
works really well. Don’t be boring.
•
Is it honest and real? Have you seen my Instagram picture of my
private jet filled with Dom Pérignon vintage champagne? Oh wait, I
don’t own a private jet and also didn’t rent one for a shoot to show off
how cool I am. Because that’s lame and not real. Point made.
•
Is it human? Write from the heart. Honesty is refreshing. This doesn’t
mean you need to overshare or pour your heart out on social media
(unless you feel like it). Sharing a failure story and what you’ve
learned from it will most likely resonate with your audiences.
•
Is it relevant? Make sure your content is relevant for your audience.
Too many pictures of your favourite cars might not be so relevant for
a business, unless you’re in the car industry.
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Social media content strategy
The anatomy of a great piece of content
Each piece of content generally consists of three parts: text; image or video;
and discoverability—although you may sometimes only have text without
the other two elements.
•
Text: Your copy or text can be long or short depending on the channel
you use. I recommend testing different lengths as we have found that
long copy can work really well on Facebook even though many experts
advise against it. If you publish a video, your text might be super short:
just a catchy headline to make people want to watch your clip.
•
Image or video: Your images or videos need to be relevant and
support your message. Select creative that fits into the channel. For
example, on Instagram the image needs to be high quality and fit
into your channel design (more on that in chapter 10). In general,
avoid creative that looks too stock-standard and ‘marketingsy’.
•
Discoverability: Your discoverability includes hashtags, keywords and
geotags that help others find your content.
Play by your strengths
There are different types of media you can use for your content: written,
audio or video. I’ll share the best types and examples in part III of the book;
however, as a general rule of thumb play by your strengths. You might find it
easier to create video content than to write an article. Or you might not like
being in front of the camera at all. That’s okay. You can either learn to love the
medium or get someone else to represent your business if video is a great
medium for your company.
Remember, I’m all about finding the most
Play by your
effective and efficient ways to do something. strengths. Outsource
If you don’t enjoy writing, record your
your weaknesses.
content and then get someone else to draft
your articles for you.
At Basic Bananas we use a variety of media, including videos, written articles
and audio through our podcast. We leverage different team members’
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Social Media for Small Business
strengths so they can collaborate and contribute in a way that is enjoyable
for them. Play by your strengths. Outsource your weaknesses.
Repurpose content
While we’re on the topic of efficiency and effectiveness, let’s talk about
repurposing your content. If you invest in creating high-quality content,
you want to make sure you leverage it across a multitude of channels in
different formats.
Here’s an example of how you can repurpose your best content.
1.
Write an insightful article for your blog on your website to
drive traffic.
2.
Turn your article into a short video clip to share on YouTube.
3.
Take a few key snippets from your article and share them on Twitter
with a link back to your article.
4.
Post a short summary of your article on Facebook with a link back to
your post.
5.
Take an image that represents your article’s theme and share it on
Instagram with a link back to your post.
6.
Turn your article into an infographic and share it on LinkedIn.
7.
Pin an image with key highlights onto your Pinterest board.
You get the gist. The point is to create really great content and then distribute
it across various channels in formats that suit the channel to reach a
larger audience.
Use emojis
Have you noticed some people communicating through emojis? I’ve had
whole conversations on my messenger using emojis, most likely not really
understanding the whole conversation.
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Social media content strategy
Use emojis in your posts as they make your posts stand out more.
Also have some fun with giphys, but don’t overdo it! You can find a library of
giphys at giphy.com.
How to find your keywords
Finding relevant keywords for your business is usually something I teach
when looking at ways for businesses to rank higher on search engines.
However, keywords are also useful on social media as they can be used
as hashtags, tags on your YouTube videos, in your LinkedIn profile,
and so on.
Here are three ways to find relevant keywords for your business.
1.
Ask yourself: What are people searching for when looking for your
type of business? Write anything down that comes to mind. If your
business is dependent on a local audience, make sure you include
some local keywords too—for example, ‘florist North Sydney’.
2.
Ask your customers: Your customers are your best resource since you
want to attract more of them. Ask them ‘What would you type into
Google to find us?’ Add their answers to your list.
3.
Ask Google: Go to Google and do two things:
• Add each keyword or key phrase from your list into the search
engine. You will see a dropdown with other suggested keywords.
For example, if you type ‘chiropractor Sydney’, it will also show
you ‘chiropractor Sydney CBD’, ‘chiropractor Sydney price’, and so
on. Add them to your list.
• Scroll to the bottom of your Google search page and you will find
more suggestions under ‘searches related to . . .’ These are the key
phrases people most commonly use. Add the most relevant ones
to your list.
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Social Media for Small Business
Pro tip
Some of the keywords on your list might also inspire you to write
articles on these topics.
Now you’ve got a whole list of keywords for your business. Prioritise them
in order of relevance and use the most important ones across your social
networks as you read about each channel in part III.
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CHAPTER 8
YOUR SOCIAL
MEDIA PLAN
In this chapter I’ll walk you through how to put together your social media
plan. You can then build on it as we go through the social media channels in
part III of the book.
Make sure to download your social media planning template from the website.
Objectives
Always start with the end in mind. What are your overarching goals for social
media? What does success look like? Do you want to drive more traffic to
your website, build and grow an engaged community, be seen as a thought
leader in your industry, increase your sales? Or all of the above?
As we go through each channel, you will set your objectives for each of them.
Audiences
Remember to always create content with your audiences in mind. Go back to
your customer matrix and write down all the different audiences you want
to attract. Make sure you define subgroups instead of targeting ‘everybody’.
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Social Media for Small Business
This will come in very handy when you run paid advertising campaigns as
the targeting of these platforms is incredibly advanced.
For example, one of our Clever Bunch members—a wellness clinic—has
chosen two key audiences: athletes and health-conscious women aged
between 30 and 50 who want to look and feel their best.
Another example is a restaurateur who wants to appeal to residents of their
neighbourhood and overseas visitors coming to town. With those audiences
in mind they can share content that is relevant to both.
Social media channels
Next let’s pick the right channels for your business. The good news is that
you absolutely do not need to embrace all of the channels outlined in part III.
Phew! Instead focus on a select few and excel at them.
At Basic Bananas we use all the channels explored in part III, but only so we
can test different approaches and then share our results with you. For any of
our other businesses, we only focus on two to three channels.
So how do you choose the right channels for your business to focus on? Ask
yourself the following two questions.
1. Where are your ideal target markets
hanging out?
This is the most important question. You only want to use the channels your
audiences are on. Except, of course, if you’re using social media for personal use.
For example, if one of your target markets is women aged between 20 and 40
and your business is a product business, you will want to focus on Instagram.
If your business is a consultancy and your audience are CEOs, you will want
to focus on LinkedIn.
For each social media channel outlined in this book, I’ve added the key
demographics at the start of the chapter. If one of them doesn’t have your
audience, you are absolutely welcome to skip to the next chapter.
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Your social media plan
2. Are you having fun?
This question might seem a bit random. However, I find it very important
because fun is fun. And fun leads to more happiness, which leads to more
productivity. If you have limited time and you are not outsourcing your
social media efforts, focus on the channels that are enjoyable for you
to maintain.
For example, I don’t enjoy Twitter much, so for my personal brand, I hardly
use Twitter. Prioritise what gets you the best results. And make sure you keep
having fun: you are your own boss, so be kind!
And if you don’t like social media altogether, I highly recommend you
hire someone who can run your channels for you, even if it’s just for a few
hours per week.
Content
Once you’ve got clarity on your objectives, audiences and channels, it’s time
to map out your content. There are two components to your content: tone of
voice and content themes.
Tone of voice
You’ve already got this! Remember to refer back to your brand strategy when
creating content. What tone of voice best represents your brand identity?
Friendly, conversational, cheeky, courageous, innovative, nurturing, funny?
If you have team members or an outsourced social media agency helping you
with content creation, make sure you give them access to your brand strategy.
This will be really helpful for them to ensure consistency of communication.
Content themes
Remember your content buckets from the previous chapter? Once you’ve got
your content buckets, it’s easy to create content pieces that cover a range of
interesting content.
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Social Media for Small Business
Your content themes might include:
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
behind the scenes
reviews
promotions
how to
customer stories and case studies
industry news
user-generated content.
My favourite content planning strategy is to give your days a certain
flavour or topic using your content buckets. This will make it so easy to
put together your content schedule and even easier if you outsource it to
someone else.
Let’s look at what a weekly social media agenda could look like.
•
•
Monday: Motivation Monday. Share something motivational.
•
•
•
•
Wednesday: DIY Wednesday. Share ‘How-to’ videos.
•
Sunday: Chill-out Sunday. Reshare content from credible sources.
Tuesday: Promotion Tuesday. Introduce your business, products
or services.
Thursday: Behind the scenes. Share insights from the team.
Friday: Good News FriYAY. Share happy news.
Saturday: Discover Saturday. Share news, trends and industry
innovations.
Pro tip
We use software called Airtable for our team members to collaborate
when creating our social media content. We create content one
week in advance by compiling each post in Airtable, where it can be
approved before publishing.
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Your social media plan
Create content one to four weeks in advance
to avoid a last-minute scramble. Any longer
than that and your content might not be as
timely and relevant because things change
so quickly in today’s fast-paced world.
You can find a video on how we’ve set up
Airtable to work effectively on our website.
Remember: content that is educational,
inspirational or motivational works
really well.
And always come
back to the question
‘Does this add
value?’ This is the
best question to ask
yourself to decide
whether to publish
a piece of content
or scrap it.
And always come back to the question ‘Does this add value?’ This is the best
question to ask yourself when deciding whether to publish a piece of content
or scrap it.
Don’t hesitate to ditch content that isn’t up to scratch with your brand.
Activity
1. Define your content buckets.
2. Map out your week by giving each day a theme.
3. Create content for the next week following your content plan.
Publishing
The last part of your social media plan is publishing your content. You can
either publish your content daily or use publishing tools to schedule your
posts. Most platforms now also have in-built publishing tools, which makes
this part really easy. Publish content one to four weeks in advance and you
can almost ‘set and forget’.
If you schedule your content, then you really only need 10 minutes per day
on social media for community management, responding to comments and
messages, and so on.
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Social Media for Small Business
As mentioned earlier, you don’t need to publish something every day. As
a general rule, only publish content that is valuable. The ideal frequency
of content updates also varies from channel to channel. For example, on
YouTube you might share one weekly video, on Facebook and Instagram you
might publish something every day, and on LinkedIn you might post two to
three times per week. Choose a schedule that works for you and that you
can maintain.
As you work on each channel, keep adding to your plan. By the end of this
book you will have your social media plan completed and ready to rock!
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PART III
Social media
channels
In part III we’ll delve into some of the best social media channels for business
owners: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest and YouTube. The
good news is that you absolutely do not need to be on all of them. Pick the
ones that will work best for your business and that you can do a great job at.
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CHAPTER 9
FACEBOOK
Fast facts
• Launched in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg to help college and
university students stay in touch
• The largest social media network and still growing with almost
three billion active users per month
• Used regularly by almost one-third of the world’s population
• Has an advertising platform that is a very effective tool for
business owners
• Mostly accessed from mobile devices.
Why Facebook?
Since the dawn of Facebook, its user demographic has shifted from college
students towards a more purchase-powered audience, which has made
Facebook one of the most potent tools for business owners.
Facebook is very likely here to stay. Zuckerberg is making sure the network
grows by continually investing in feature upgrades and buying up other
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Social Media for Small Business
companies such as Instagram and WhatsApp to maintain Facebook’s
incredibly strong position in the market.
With the launch of the Facebook advertising platform in 2007 this network
has become an amazing marketing machine. In fact, many highly successful
businesses credit Facebook for their fast growth. Some companies rely only
on Facebook and Instagram advertising for their business—not something
I would recommend as I’ve seen many businesses hit some major bumps in
the road with Facebook continually changing and updating its algorithm.
Rather than relying on one marketing channel for your success, make sure
you use a multi-channel approach.
Who is Facebook for?
Put your hand up if you use Facebook personally? How many people do you
know who don’t use Facebook? Let me guess: less than a handful. This tells us
that your audience is most likely hanging out on Facebook.
If you only choose one social media network for your business, Facebook
might be your tool, no matter what industry you are in or whether you are
B2C or B2B—remember: your communication is never business to business,
it’s always person to person. So even if your target audience is ‘corporations’,
you want to connect with a certain person within a corporation and they are
most likely on Facebook. This is not to say that you will ‘convert’ them on
Facebook—you might have a much greater chance connecting with them
on LinkedIn—but it helps if they’ve already had some kind of exposure to
your business. The more exposure someone has to your brand, the more
familiar they will feel. However, don’t use Facebook as a website. Use your
Facebook page to drive traffic to your website.
Set-up and definitions
Facebook has three types of pages: personal profiles, business pages and
groups. Let’s briefly go through them so you can choose which ones will be
most useful for you.
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Facebook
Your personal profile
You most likely already have a personal profile to connect with your ‘friends’,
stalk ex-partners, stay in touch with your extended family’s shenanigans and
share your own life updates.
Do not use your personal profile as a business page. Your personal profile
is for you as a person and it’s really bad practice to name a personal profile
after your business name. That’s why Facebook created business pages in
2007.
In order to set up a business page, you must have a personal profile that
‘owns’ your business page. But if you don’t want to use your personal profile
and don’t want to be found, that’s okay; just use a variation of your name.
If you do use your personal profile, make sure you add a short bio with a
personal twist to make it more memorable and a link to your website. For
example, mine says:
Swiss-Aussie. Adventure addict. Eternal optimist. Social entrepreneur.
FranziskaIseli.com
List your business in your intro with a link to your Facebook business page.
Your personal profile can become a great tool to promote your business.
Even if your friends are not your ideal audience for your business, you never
know who knows who.
Contrary to your LinkedIn profile, on Facebook you can feel free to post
anything you like, from family pictures and holiday adventures to business
lessons—although I wouldn’t overdo the business talk on your personal profile.
But it’s okay to make occasional announcements about your business or share
resources and then link back to your business page or website for more.
Your business page
Facebook created business pages for businesses to have a specific place to
talk shop, get customers and run ads from.
Spend some time adding all the relevant information on your business page.
If you’ve implemented the Brand Alchemy Method from earlier in this book,
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Social Media for Small Business
you’ve already got all you need with regard to messaging. Just package it all
up nicely to fit onto your Facebook page.
Profile image
For your profile image, use your logo or icon, if you have one. For Basic
Bananas we use our iconic banana because this helps with brand
familiarity.
Description and products
Welcome your new followers by adding a short description of your business.
On our page we say something along the lines of:
Welcome to Basic Bananas, a global marketing mentoring organisation
supporting small business owners in growing their businesses. We’re so happy
to have you here!
The characters in your description are limited—however, there is a space
further down where you can add a more detailed description of your products
and services.
Category, website link and address
Add your category to help people find you. Also add a link to your website
to drive traffic. And if you have an office or headquarters, share your address
and opening hours.
Settings
Under settings, you can edit your page information, connect to Instagram
and assign other page roles, and so on (see figure 9.1). Add team members
who help you with such things as content publishing, setting up ads as ‘page
admin’ so they can log in through their own Facebook profile.
Don’t use Facebook
as a website. Use
your Facebook page
to drive traffic to
your website.
78
One more quick thing about Facebook pages:
since the dawn of Facebook advertising,
organic reach for your content has gone
down substantially. So for your content to
be shown to more people, Facebook wants
you to use Facebook advertising.
Facebook
Figure 9.1:
an example of the Edit Page Info page under Facebook Settings
Pro tip
I’ve overheard marketers give business owners the not-so-amazing
advice to not worry about building a website and instead only have a
Facebook page. That’s not very smart because you don’t want to rely
purely on Facebook to grow your business. And if Facebook decides
to make changes or people stop using it, this could be detrimental
for your business growth. Use your Facebook page to drive traffic to
your website.
Facebook groups
Facebook groups are especially great for community building, to rally people
together around a common cause. You can find groups started by fitness
fanatics, comedy fans, grammar nerds, dog owners, designers and anything
in-between.
You can make your groups private, ‘by invite only’ or public. At Basic Bananas
we have a private group for our members and a public group open for all
small business owners and entrepreneurs.
To curate your group with the right people, you can also set up a questionnaire
people have to fill in before joining.
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Social Media for Small Business
Here are some practical examples of our members leveraging Facebook
groups.
•
A fitness business owner uses her group to share recipes, additional
virtual fitness classes and special announcements. It’s a supportive
environment for her studio members to feel even more part of a
community.
•
A coach set up a group to build a community for his clients, answer
questions and share exclusive information.
•
A fashion store owner uses her group for her VIP customers, giving
them access to early release collections, special discount vouchers
and invitations to VIP events.
Pro tip
If you run a public Facebook group to engage with potential customers,
use your keywords in the group name so you can be found.
For example, instead of ‘The Sharp Gardeners’, call it ‘Garden
Enthusiasts by The Sharp Gardeners’.
You may wonder, should you have a group or a page, or both? I
suggest you definitely have a business page because that’s where you
will run your paid advertising campaigns from.
If your customers and prospects would benefit from being in a community,
then also consider a Facebook group. Groups lend themselves better
to building a community. In a group, your announcements are also
more likely to be seen than on a page. It does take time and effort to
start, grow and maintain a group, but once you hit a certain number of
members, the group sometimes takes on a life of its own, with members
supporting each other.
We have a private Facebook group for internal communication with
our team. Inside the group we share good news, celebrate each other,
make announcements, give gratitude, share funny memes and share
company updates.
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Facebook
Activity
Decide whether a Facebook page or group, or both, works better for
your business and set it up or refresh yours in line with the above tips.
Content strategies
Remember your content buckets from chapter 7? Let’s grab them now to help
you create engaging content for your Facebook page. Remember to diversify
your content so you keep your followers engaged.
Before diving into content creation, remind yourself again of:
•
•
your audience: who you’d like to attract and connect with
your brand strategy: your tone of voice.
Let’s see how your content buckets look in action on your Facebook page.
Behind the scenes
Facebook is a great place to show some behind the scenes content featuring
your team, showing people around your offices, introducing team members,
or showing a product or service in action. Use photographs, videos and Lives
to do this.
How to
Share ‘how-to’ tips either via video or text to demonstrate your authority and
add value for your audience.
Customer stories
Storytelling is key when it comes to sharing customer stories. Yes, you can
totally just copy and paste a customer’s testimonial but you will get so much
more engagement if you tell their story.
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Social Media for Small Business
One of our Clever Bunch members, a high-end wedding dress designer,
shares a monthly love story of one of her brides. She also features her brides
in her nurture funnel. Her audience absolutely love the stories.
Content curation
You may also share content you’ve found interesting created by other people.
Make sure it’s relevant for your audience.
For example, one of our members, a fashion store, shares the following
content on her Facebook page, posting five times per week:
•
•
•
•
•
new product releases
the latest fashion trends
customer stories
meet and greet your styling team
invites to exclusive in-store events.
For one week she also ran a special promotion, with a new clothing item on
sale every day.
Another one of our members, a car mechanic, posts three to four times per
week. He has truly applied his brand strategy to his social channels with a
focus on very charismatic and honest content, including:
•
•
•
funny behind the scenes shots of him hanging off a hoist
information on different car models
DIY tips.
One of our accountants focuses on LinkedIn as his main channel, but he
uses Facebook advertising to generate leads and posts two to three times per
week to ensure his Facebook page doesn’t look abandoned. He duplicates
most of his content on LinkedIn.
His content includes:
•
•
82
‘how-to’ information related to accounting
links to helpful resources
Facebook
•
de-jargoning fancy accounting words and explaining them in
simple terms
•
•
interviews with business experts
content from a business consultant he has a strategic partnership
with, on topics such as how to put together a business plan and how
to increase profits.
###
So how often should you post on Facebook?
I’m going to repeat this rule for pretty much
every social network: only share content if
you’ve got something interesting to say. If
you are posting because you ‘have to’ and it’s
just not that amazing, then don’t post!
Once a day or four to five times per week is
ideal for Facebook.
Only share
content if you’ve
got something
interesting to say.
If you are posting
because you ‘have
to’ and it’s just not
that amazing, then
don’t post!
Activity
Once you’ve determined your ‘buckets’ for Facebook, grab your social
media plan and put together your weekly Facebook schedule.
If you haven’t already, download your social media plan from
the website.
Growth strategies
The best Facebook growth strategy is Facebook advertising. Since the birth of
the advertising platform, it’s very difficult to grow your audience organically.
However, there are a few things you can do to get noticed by more people and
to move people off Facebook and towards working with you.
I’ll go through Facebook advertising in extensive detail shortly, including
some of the must-have campaigns for growing your audience and business.
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Social Media for Small Business
But first, here are three other ways to not only grow your following but also
attract more customers.
Create and manage Facebook groups
I mentioned Facebook groups earlier. They can be quite helpful for growing
your network.
Consider joining relevant groups where your audience hangs out. For
example, when we launch into a new market, our country partners join small
business groups in their locations to connect with business owners.
Make sure you don’t join groups and then just go on promoting yourself. That
will get you thrown out pretty quickly. Instead, focus on providing value,
answering questions and being helpful and people will be attracted to you.
One of our brilliant Clever Bunch members, Michael—who runs a property
advisory business—focused on adding value and being generous with his
knowledge for the first 12 months of starting his business and he is now one
of the most sought-after experts in his field.
Some of the bigger groups also allow you to run paid promotions to their
audience, which can work for some businesses. One of our members, Katja—
an acupuncturist—joined a local mummy group and pays a monthly fee to
the group owners to be allowed to share a weekly promotional piece in that
group, which pretty much gets her fully booked.
Run Facebook Live
Facebook Live is a live video-streaming function that launched in 2016 and
has gained a lot of popularity among users. Lives generally get a lot more
viewers than just uploading pre-recorded videos does. Your followers will be
notified on Facebook when you are live so they can either watch your content
in real time or come back to it later.
One of the reasons Live is so popular is because it can be so much more
engaging to watch someone in real time without the pre-recorded video
being super polished. Viewers can engage with the content, ask questions,
leave comments and cheer you on.
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Facebook
Live can be run on both your personal profile and your business page. To gain
more exposure, start Live on your business page and then share it across to
your personal profile.
Pro tips
1. Don’t spend the first 20 minutes of your Live greeting people and
sharing nothing of value. Nobody wants to sit through 20 minutes
of ‘Hi Karen, how is your dog? Hi Jodie, let’s catch up again
soon! Hi Robert, I loved your picture of your dinner last night! Hi
Julia, how have you been?’
Do acknowledge people, introduce yourself, say hi and then get
into something valuable to keep people engaged and coming
back next time you are live. Also encourage your viewers to ask
questions you can answer live.
2. Unlike Instagram, where you can invite guests onto your Instagram
Live, Facebook doesn’t have that function just yet. However, if you
wish to livestream an interview with someone or have a panel
discussion, use Zoom to run the discussion. Zoom has a function to
simultaneously livestream to your Facebook page.
Run a Live on a topic that is relevant to your audience and related to your
business (unless you just do it for fun, of course). A lot of people have become
Facebook Live chefs, yoga instructors and coaches lately and that’s all great,
but if you want to grow your business, focus on content that has something
to do with the business and that may lead to more customers.
Here are some examples to get you inspired:
•
•
•
•
a restaurateur running a weekly cooking show
an interior designer walking people through their latest spaces
an e-commerce business sharing fashion trends
a travel agency going live on tour in a wildlife park in South Africa
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Social Media for Small Business
•
a dentist sharing hot tips straight from their practice. One of our
Clever Bunch members did this by showing people around her clinic.
Her video got a lot of engagement and new clients through the door
•
an author sharing snippets from their latest book. I did this for the
launch of my last book, The Courage Map. People loved it as it gave
them insights before purchasing a copy.
Be creative! And stay with it. Remember MAVERICK principle #5
(Relationships): it might take a while to build up your audience, but if you
commit to it and ‘go live’ regularly people will start to pay attention. Provided
your content is worth watching.
At the end of your Live, have a call to action. What do you want people to do?
Tell them. Get a copy of your book, book in for a discovery call, come to your
restaurant, download a free giveaway, use a discount voucher on your site?
Use DMs to move people towards a sale
Your direct messages, or DMs, are a great way to move your followers from
being followers to becoming customers. More and more people are using
Facebook Messenger as one of their key communication tools. So, just like
with email or phone communication, use Facebook’s Messenger to advance
conversations.
For example, you might post a product update or the announcement of
an event with a call to action to send you a DM if anyone would like more
information.
Facebook advertising
Facebook wants you to spend money with them, so organic reach on Facebook
is incredibly low. This means that unless you put a little bit of money behind
your content, you won’t reach more than 10 per cent of your followers.
Facebook ads are the only way for fast growth on Facebook. So it’s worth
spending some time and money on running ad campaigns if your audience is
on Facebook.
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Facebook
Facebook advertising is one of the most
potent advertising platforms for small
businesses. Launched in 2007, it has
become better and better over the years.
However, competition has also increased
very rapidly since its launch, which means
that to get a great return, you have to put in
a bit more effort.
Facebook
advertising is
one of the most
potent advertising
platforms for small
businesses.
Here are five reasons why Facebook advertising is effective for business
owners:
•
Facebook’s targeting is amazing: you can target by interests,
location, age, job roles, actions on website, engagement, status,
activities and more.
•
You don’t need a huge budget to be successful on Facebook
advertising. Start small and work up from there.
•
The ads platform has some great tracking and analytics so you can
see how much you are paying for conversions, page clicks, and so on.
•
The platform is quite easy to use. However, if you do outsource your
campaigns, make sure you keep an eye on your returns. I’ve seen
some very heart-breaking examples of businesses paying $16 000 per
month in ads management fees alone with very little return. Set your
targets and keep an eye on those metrics!
•
It can be an incredibly cost-effective way to generate leads and then
convert them into customers if you have the right funnels set up. I’ll
share some examples of the most important campaigns below.
Use Facebook Business Manager to run your ad campaigns from. You can
then set up and monitor your ads for both Instagram and Facebook in
Business Manager. Go to business.facebook.com.
How to create successful ad campaigns
Now let’s look at how to set up successful ad campaigns. Before you start
spending any money, have a roadmap or strategy in place so you don’t shoot
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Social Media for Small Business
from your hips. We’ve created a campaign map that helps you to map out
each campaign.
There are five key elements to think about. Download the campaign map
from the website and follow it step by step, as outlined below.
Objective: What does success look like? What do
you want to achieve?
First, think about what you are hoping to achieve with your ad campaigns.
Here are a few examples of objectives to get you started:
•
•
Capture leads: generate leads you can then nurture.
•
•
•
Re-market: show ads to people who have already seen your content.
Increase sales: get people to purchase your product or service. An ad
straight to a sales landing page works best for entry products that
are below $200, unless your audience is already familiar with you.
Increase video views: get brand awareness by increasing video views
Increase followers: increase your page followers for a wider audience
to build a relationship with.
Audience: Who do you want to reach?
Next, think about who you want to reach with your ads. This is where your
customer mapping comes in handy again. I highly recommend testing
different audiences on Facebook to see what gets you the best results.
There are four must-have audiences for you to set up and test:
PEOPLE WHO LIKE YOUR PAGE AND THEIR FRIENDS
This audience consists of your followers and their friends. The reason why
this audience can be quite effective is because these are the ads that say ‘your
friend liked xyz’. This gives you instant social proof.
LOOKALIKE AUDIENCES
Facebook allows you to create lookalike audiences based on lists you already
have. Yup, Facebook is pretty clever. Upload a CSV file of customers or
prospects into your ads manager and ask Facebook to create audiences with
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Facebook
people who are similar to this audience. This is one of the best audience types
because now you are targeting people who are similar to people who are
already working with you, have liked your page or have watched your videos.
INTEREST AUDIENCES
Interests are another brilliant targeting function within the ads platform.
You can show your ads to people based on specific interests. Think about
your ideal customers again. What are they interested in?
For example, a yoga studio could run ads targeting people who are interested
in yoga, fitness, spirituality, mindfulness and meditation.
An accountant could run ads targeting people who are interested in business,
small business, business publications, business systems or leadership.
RE-TARGETING OR RE-MARKETING AUDIENCES
Now let’s turn to an even warmer audience: people who have already shown
an interest in your business.
This audience consists of people who have visited certain pages on your
website or engaged with your Facebook page, liked a post or watched a video.
Re-marketing is very powerful because you are showing your ads to people
who are already familiar with you.
Pro tip
An audience size on Facebook is around 100 000 to 500 000 for very
localised campaigns and 500 000 to one million for non-geographic,
larger audiences.
Budget: What is your ad budget?
How much should you spend on Facebook advertising? This is the forever
question. The answer really depends on the return you are getting from your
campaigns. That’s why it’s so crucial for you to know your numbers. Start small
and slowly increase your budget if a campaign is performing well. As long
as you are making a positive return and you can fulfil the other campaigns,
there really shouldn’t be a budget limit. If you are only just getting started
with Facebook ads, begin with a small daily spend and scale up from there.
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Know your numbers and monitor them closely using the Facebook pixel. This
is a code you can place on your website to collect data, know your conversion
costs, build up an audience of warm leads and re-engage your warm leads.
You must use the Facebook pixel to track your campaigns and optimise your
ads so you get the most bang for your bucks. So before you start setting up
campaigns, add the Facebook pixel on your website. Your website developer
can help you with this.
Remember MAVERICK principle #1 (Momentum): don’t say ‘Facebook ads
don’t work!’ after trying for only a week or two. It sometimes takes time and
a few reiterations of your campaigns to yield positive returns. The good news
is that you’ll learn by doing and get better and better at it. Or if you don’t like
doing this stuff, outsource to someone who does, but always keep your eyes
on your ad strategy and numbers.
Pro tip
Sometimes you might have a ‘loss leader’, which means you sell a
product or service at a loss to gain customers whose lifetime value
outweighs the initial loss. For example, you might spend $100 to acquire
a new customer who spends $70 on their first purchase. Understanding
your customer lifetime value, you know that they generally come back
and spend on average $500 in the first year. You lose money at
acquisition, but make it back later.
Ad: What is your ad copy and creative?
Okay, now let’s look at one of the most important parts of your campaign
map, the ad itself. Your objective, targeting and budget are of no use if your
ads are not amazing. And by amazing I don’t mean they have to be super
high-end, expensive productions. In fact, we’ve found that ads that are more
real and less ‘trying so hard’ perform better on Facebook and Instagram. The
best ads are the ones that are authentic and not pushy or salesy.
Each ad consists of two components: the copy and the creative. Copyonly ads tend to perform a lot worse than those with imagery or video
accompanying them.
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THE COPY
To write great ad copy, think about your perfect customers, tap into their
desires and frustrations, and write authentically.
Test different copy angles depending on your objective.
For a brand awareness campaign, your copy could be an educational piece
where you share ‘how-to’ tips.
For a re-targeting campaign, you might offer a special or share more details
about the product.
You can also craft different angles for different audiences. At Basic Bananas we
run industry-specific ads talking to dentists, fashion retailers, accountants,
lawyers, tradespeople, e-commerce business owners and restaurateurs,
among others. The copy changes to something that is useful and relevant for
each industry.
Grab people’s attention by way of a catchy headline or image—something
that makes your audience pay attention as they mindlessly scroll through
Facebook’s infinite scroll.
And remember, always have a call to action. What action do you want your
audience to take? Do you want them to buy a product, visit your website, send
you a direct message? Tell them what to do next or they won’t do anything.
Pro tip
Test long and short copy ads. I’ve heard a few consultants advise
businesses to keep their copy super short for a Facebook ad to work.
That’s not necessarily true for all ads. Some of our most successful ads
are more than 400 words long! That’s pretty much the size of a blog
article. It all comes down to your objective and audience. We’ve also
got very short ads that work well. Test different approaches and you’ll
find your own secret formula very quickly.
THE CREATIVE
Use creative to support your message. Your creative can be an image, image
carousel or video.
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Make sure your image or video is relevant to your copy. Relevancy is a big
deal on Facebook. Facebook even gives you a relevance score for your ads
because it wants to show the right content to the right people. To increase
your relevance score, which will also bring down your ad cost, make sure
your ad is not misleading. Your copy, image and landing page all need to be
aligned. Bait and switch tactics are very short-lived. For example, if you run
a campaign with the objective of getting more bookings in your restaurant,
using a cute cat video that has nothing to do with your message is just cute,
but not very effective and your low relevance score is going to make it very
expensive to run.
The good news is that you don’t need to spend a lot of money to produce
expensive creative. The more ‘real’ the content, the better. Ideally you want
your ad not to look like an ad, but like something a friend would post
on Facebook.
Image carousels work particularly well to show off a product from different
angles or in different settings, or to showcase a few customer testimonials or
a step-by-step ‘how-to’ process.
Placements: Where do you want your ads
to show?
In Business Manager you can manually choose where you want your ads to
show up: all devices, Instagram only, Facebook only, both channels, Newsfeed
only, mobile only, both, and so on.
There is also an option for automatic placements that tends to work really
well. Unless you are doing a campaign only for Instagram users or one that
will work better on desktop, try the automatic placement setting. Facebook’s
delivery system will then show your ad across multiple placement options
based on where it’s likely to perform best. Facebook wants you to succeed so
you come back and spend more advertising dollars.
The four CORE campaigns
Now that you understand the overall Facebook ads strategy, let’s look at the
four CORE campaigns every business should run: Capture, Offer, Re-market
and Educate.
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For each of the four types, create a campaign map as outlined in chapter 8.
These four campaign types are ideal for small business owners to get started.
They pretty much cover anything you need to know to run successful ads.
I’ll walk you through each campaign type using the campaign map. This will
help you with a tonne of ideas and inspiration for your own business.
Capture campaign
The purpose of a capture campaign is to generate leads. This can be done by
capturing people’s details through a ‘first date’. Remember the Online EcoSystem from chapter 5? Facebook ads are a great way to grow your database
of prospects so you can then nurture them.
Here’s an example of a campaign map for a capture campaign:
•
Objective: collect leads by giving away something of value to
your audience
•
Audiences: test all four types—people who like your page and their
friends, lookalikes, interests and re-targeting
•
•
Budget: $10/day
•
Placement: automatic.
Ad: free trial of your product or service, a downloadable resource, a
discovery call
An example of a capture campaign we’ve run that worked really well is shown in
figure 9.2 (overleaf). Go back to your Online Eco-System and test different ‘first
date’ ideas.
Pro tip
Facebook is a great testing ground for your ideas. Put a little bit of
budget behind an idea or campaign and you will find out very quickly
whether people connect with it or not.
Offer campaign
The purpose of an offer campaign is to drive traffic to a sales page with the
objective of converting visitors into customers.
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Figure 9.2:
an example of a capture campaign
This campaign works better with warm traffic—that is, people who have
already engaged with you, including people who have opted in to your
‘capture’ campaign. However, depending on your product or service, you
should also test other audiences.
Please note that these kinds of campaigns mainly work for lower priced
products below a few hundred dollars. If your offering is high-end it will be a
lot more challenging to generate sales through a Facebook ad and a few more
‘nurture’ steps will be required—although it’s not completely impossible. We
once worked with a boating company that sold a boat after running an offer
campaign! Yup! That’s very rare though.
Here’s an example of a campaign map for an offer campaign:
•
•
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Objective: sales
Audiences: people who have opted in and who have engaged
with your page
Facebook
•
Budget: set your budget per conversion. How much can you afford to
pay for a conversion? This is where you must know your numbers
For example, an e-commerce shoe store might sell a pair of shoes
for $120 with a profit margin of $80. Most customers only buy
one product per year so they need to generate a profit on that
first sale. An ideal budget per conversion in this case might be
around $40 depending on the sales volume, cost of running the
business, and so on
On the other hand, a business consultant who uses an offer
campaign to invite people to a business-planning seminar at $97
per ticket knows that 15 per cent of the businesses attending their
session will buy their higher level consulting at $2000 per month. So
they can afford to lose money on that first seminar and their budget
per conversion might be around $150 per event ticket sold. This first
product is a loss-leader for them
•
Ad: depending on the business, an ad for an offer campaign could be
educational and show the benefits of the product or include a coupon
to redeem something on the sales page
•
Placement: automatic.
An example of an offer campaign we’ve run that worked really well is shown
in figure 9.3 (overleaf).
Pro tip
With coupons, make sure you set a ‘use-by’ date so people are
encouraged to take action instead of sitting on the fence. Also, give
your offer a reason—for example, a launch offer, Xmas special or
summer holiday sale.
Re-marketing campaign
A re-engage or re-marketing campaign can yield some of your highest
returns as you re-engage people who have already shown an interest in
your business.
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Figure 9.3:
an example of an offer campaign
Run capture and offer campaigns first to build up an audience of engaged
people you can then re-market to.
For a re-marketing campaign, adjust your copy to reflect that your audience
is already familiar with your products or services.
One of our members, an e-commerce homeware business, set up re-marketing
ads targeting people after abandoning a certain product page without
purchasing it. The ad says something along the lines of ‘Did you forget to grab
<insert product>?’ with a picture of the product. As you can imagine, this
campaign massively increases their sales conversions.
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Here’s an example of a campaign map for a re-marketing campaign:
•
Objective: increase your conversions
Audiences: people who have visited your lead or product pages or
initiated a checkout
•
Budget: similarly to the offer campaign, set your budget per
conversion. How much can you afford to spend on a lead or sales
conversion? Know your numbers and work backwards
•
Ad: customer testimonials and case studies, product explanations,
free trials and special offer coupons work really well for
re-marketing campaigns
•
Placement: automatic.
Some examples of re-marketing campaigns we’ve run that have worked really
well are shown in figure 9.4.
Figure 9.4:
a couple of examples of re-marketing campaigns
Educate campaign
In an educate campaign your entire focus is on providing value by sharing
educational content with your audience. The purpose of this is to turn cold
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leads into warm ones by establishing your expertise and nurturing. This is a
bit more of a brand awareness type campaign so you won’t see a direct link to
conversions. However, you will gain exposure, engage people and collect an
audience you can then re-market to.
Take your best content and set up educate campaigns, sharing your content
with your ideal audience. Once people have seen your valuable content, set
up a re-engage or remarketing campaign to anyone who has watched your
videos, commented on your posts or visited your blog page. Since you are
creating goodwill, they will be more receptive to an offer. This is quite a nifty
little strategy. Just make sure to keep an eye on your budget.
Here’s an example of a campaign map for an educate campaign:
•
Objective: the purpose of this campaign is to gain exposure to a larger
demographic and grow your audience of warm leads
•
•
Audiences: lookalikes, interests
•
Ad: share ‘how-to’ videos or articles to build your authority. You
can still include a call to action asking your readers or viewers to
comment, share your content or visit your site. But don’t be too
salesy. Remember, marketing is like dating: go on a first date, sweep
them off their feet and they’ll say yes to a second and third date
•
Placement: automatic.
Budget: in an educate campaign, tracking your direct sales is more
difficult so just set a daily budget you are comfortable with and make
sure you are increasing your leads and sales over time as you build
up your audience
An example of an educate campaign we’ve run that worked really well is
shown in figure 9.5.
Facebook ‘likes’ campaigns
One type of campaign I haven’t mentioned is ‘likes’ campaigns. These
have the objective of growing your follower base. They are okay to run
in the beginning if you have a very low number of followers. However, I
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Figure 9.5:
an example of an educate campaign
wouldn’t spend too much money on these as you really want people to
take some sort of action, whether that’s to opt in, watch your videos or
make a purchase.
If you run a ‘likes’ campaign, set a small budget—for example $5 per day—
and then spend the rest of your budget on one of the above CORE campaigns.
You ultimately want people to spend money with you since you can’t go to
the shops and pay with followers!
Wanna keep it simple? Hit ‘boost’
If all of the above just seems too much right now but you do want to tip your
toes into the Facebook ads waters, just hit ‘boost’ on your best performing
posts. Go to your business page, select the update you’d like to show to more
people and ‘boost’ it right then and there. That’s the easiest and fastest way
to run an ad without using Business Manager. In fact, as part of your social
media strategy, look at your content and find the updates that are already
performing well organically. Put a little bit of money behind them to be seen
by more people. This is part of your ‘educate’ campaign.
When posting a piece of content on your Facebook page, respond to the first
few comments quickly. Facebook will then see that this is a popular post and
is more likely to show it to a wider audience.
If you have trolls commenting on your ads with irrelevant or rude comments,
you can block people who are just there to make your life harder. If it’s a real
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customer complaint, make sure you respond to them and turn them from
grumpy into happy and loyal.
When posting a
piece of content
on your Facebook
page, respond
to the first few
comments quickly.
Facebook will
then see that this
is a popular post
and is more likely
to show it to a
wider audience.
Here’s the good news: you don’t need
to spend your entire life on Facebook
advertising. I know you’ve got other things
to do. So for smaller ad budgets of up to
$1000 per day, set up new campaigns once
a month. For campaigns that are highperforming, keep them running.
For bigger budgets, you might need to set up
a new campaign once a week to get results.
I know this section on Facebook advertising
is quite lengthy. I really wanted you to
understand the strategic part so you have a
solid approach and can test what’s working
for your business. The same principles I’ve explained above also apply to
Instagram advertising. As mentioned earlier, the ads are all run from the
same ads platform.
Pro tip
If you need some inspiration, check out the Facebook ads library:
facebook.com/ads/library.
The purpose of this free tool is to provide a comprehensive collection
of all ads currently running on Facebook and Instagram. It’s brilliant
to see what other brands are doing and to get ideas from different
industries. You can even look at what your competitors are doing. Don’t
copy them though—do it better!
Once you get started with Facebook Business Manager, it will get easier
and easier. Remember MAVERICK principles #1 (Momentum) and #6
(Improvement): stay with it even if you don’t get a high ROI straight out of the
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gate. Keep testing and measuring and you will grow your business if that’s
where your audience is hanging out.
Before you get started, make sure you know and understand your numbers.
I’ve seen businesses make hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue each
month thanks to Facebook advertising only to go backwards because they
didn’t monitor or know their numbers. Their ad spend outweighed their
product margins. Not a good place to be unless your business strategy is fast
scale at the expense of profits.
Let’s look at what kind of metrics you absolutely need to keep your eyes on.
Metrics
I don’t want you to get overwhelmed with metrics or spend your energy on
vanity metrics, so here are the most important numbers.
Cost per action
This metric will tell you how much you are paying for a lead, a page visit, a like
or a sales conversion, depending on what the objective of your campaign is.
For example, you may be paying $1 for a new follower or $32 per sales
conversion. I can’t tell you whether that’s good or bad—it depends on your
business—that’s why you must know your numbers.
Cost per click
Cost per click tells you exactly how much you are paying for someone to click
on the link in your ad.
Don’t look at this metric in isolation. For example, you might pay $1.50 per
link click and on average convert 10 per cent into a sale on your landing page.
Or you might get super cheap clicks for 30 cents a pop, but nobody makes a
purchase. In this case, revisit and upgrade your landing page or get better
traffic to increase conversions.
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Pro tip
Don’t judge the ad performance alone. Make sure your landing pages
are optimised to get people to take action. If you are getting a lot of
clicks but no conversions, it’s highly likely that it’s not that ‘Facebook
isn’t working work for me’, but that your landing page is not converting.
Or you are attracting the wrong people.
Frequency
This metric shows you the number of times an ad has been shown to a Facebook
user. If you keep showing your ad to the same person over and over again,
they might start ignoring you and your ad budget is wasted on people who
aren’t interested. Monitor at what frequency your cost per action increases.
Generally, at above four times, switch up the ad or target a new audience.
Pro tip
The best way to figure out and get to know your numbers is to work
backwards.
For example, let’s say your website converts 5 per cent of traffic into
an average purchase of $100. So, if 100 people visit your website,
five people will spend $100, or a total of $500. Your product margins
are 50 per cent; that means you are making a $250 profit from 100
visitors. Knowing this, you can spend up to $50 per conversion to
break even. Got it? Sorry to go so mathematical on you here, but I
don’t want you to waste your money.
Test, measure and adjust
your campaigns
You really can’t get lazy here or you’ll blow your money. You need to forever
measure, test and improve your campaigns.
Split-test different elements of your campaign: audiences, copy angles,
placements, creatives.
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To get accurate results, only test one element at a time so you know what’s
working best. Then reiterate your ads to increase their performance.
For example, you might test three different types of copy with the same
image. Then take the best copy and test three different images. Or you might
run the exact same ad but to three different audiences.
You’ll be a pro in no time!
Activity
It’s time to put all of this into action!
1. Download your campaign map.
2. Take one of the four CORE campaigns and map it out in your
campaign map.
3. Set up your campaign.
Hot tips and tools
There are so many great tools to help you get the most out of your social
media efforts. Here are some of my favourite ones for Facebook:
•
Facebook Shops makes it easy for business owners to set up an
online store for customers to access within the platform. It’s a
free tool.
•
Facebook Creator Studio is a free tool for managing all your
posts, insights and messages for different pages all in one place. It
shows you your Facebook and Instagram accounts. It allows you to
schedule posts to both tools, which is amazing because you don’t
need to use third-party software to schedule content ahead of time.
You can also track your engagement metrics per post and respond to
comments and messages from Creator Studio. Pretty awesome and
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they keep updating the features in it too. Remember, Facebook wants
to keep you on its platforms rather than have you use third-party
social media management tools.
•
Scheduling tools help you to schedule your Facebook content. The
best option is to either do it straight on your Facebook page or to use
Facebook Creator Studio. There are also many third-party scheduling
tools such as Hootsuite, SocialOomph, Meet Edgar, Sprout Social
and Buffer. The advantage of these is that you can connect different
social networks. However, Facebook prefers it if you stay within
its platform.
•
Promo Image Resizer is a free image resizer that helps you to resize
your images to suit any image size—for example, story, page cover,
event cover, profile image, newsfeed image, vertical post. This tool
gives you all the necessary size options across Facebook, Instagram,
Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest and LinkedIn.
•
Emojis can be copied from various sites. They explain meanings:
does this expression mean sad, concerned, disappointed, angry? Two
of my favourite sites are getemoji.com and emojipedia.org
•
ManyChat is a great Facebook Messenger bot tool (a software
application that runs automated tasks on the internet) that helps you
automate and customise your Facebook messages to get more out of
your Facebook experience.
•
Heyo helps you create sweepstakes, contests, giveaways, hashtag
campaigns and the like.
•
ShortStack is another popular contesting software that helps
you create landing pages, run contests, send emails and analyse
your results.
•
AdEspresso is a popular Facebook ads management tool for creating
and managing your Facebook campaigns. I personally prefer to use
Facebook Ads Manager. However, the benefit of this tool is that you
can manage Facebook, Instagram and Google ads all from one place.
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CHAPTER
SUMMARY
Facebook is an omnipotent tool for business owners due to its large user
base and powerful advertising platform.
If your audience is on Facebook, I highly recommend you give the Facebook
advertising platform a really good go to generate leads and increase sales.
If your focus is on working with larger corporations and your ideal customer
is the head of HR or IT managers, for example, then LinkedIn will work
better for you.
Use the frameworks provided in this chapter to map out your campaigns to
avoid a scattered approach. You can apply these frameworks to your digital
ad campaigns across all channels.
A week in the life of a Facebook pro looks like this:
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Post updates two to three times a week.
Interact in relevant Facebook groups once a day.
Run a weekly or monthly Facebook Live.
Respond to DMs and comments daily.
Send DMs to potential partners, brand ambassadors, and so on.
Use Facebook advertising to run CORE campaigns.
Look at Facebook Analytics weekly to keep improving content.
CHAPTER 10
INSTAGRAM
Fast facts
• Launched in 2010 as an iPhone app
• Is an image-sharing platform; it’s all about the snap
• Was bought by Facebook in 2012 for one billion dollars
• Users mostly follow business profiles
• Has more than one billion monthly active users
• Advertising is very effective for some businesses
• Is predominantly used on mobile devices.
Why Instagram?
Unlike other social platforms, Instagram is very unlikely to go out of fashion
any time soon. The numbers of Instagrammers has been steadily growing and
Instagram is making sure not to lose people to other platforms by continually
adding new features to compete with other social networks. Think Instagram
Stories, Instagram Live and Instagram Reels. Instagram is staying versatile
and relevant.
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Many Instagram
users use Instagram
as a shopping tool
to find products
and services to
purchase, which
makes it a powerful
tool for businesses.
Many Instagram users use Instagram
as a shopping tool to find products
and services to purchase, which makes
it a powerful tool for businesses.
A majority of Instagrammers also
follow business accounts, not just their
personal friends.
Who is Instagram for?
The majority of Instagram’s demographic is under 35 years of age, which
makes the audience slightly younger than that of Facebook or LinkedIn.
However, since Instagram is such a popular network, a big percentage of
other generations are also active on Instagram.
Instagram works particularly well for businesses that are able to visually
portray their products or services. It works for a large range of industries,
including the more obvious ones such as fashion, hospitality, education,
retail, sports, entertainment, architecture, design and beauty.
Set-up and definitions
Instagram has some brilliant features beneficial for both personal and
business profiles. Let’s look at the most important ones for you to leverage.
Name and username
If you use Instagram to grow your personal brand and because you want to
be found, use your own name as the Instagram username.
For your business, use your business name as your username and potentially
a few keywords as your name. Names are also searchable.
Pro tip
For your business, make sure you convert your profile to a business
account so you get access to a few Instagram business-specific tools.
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Instagram
Bio
Instagram bios are fewer than 150 characters in length so use them wisely.
You can have a bit more fun here than with a LinkedIn bio. Add a few short
bullet points about you or your business and most importantly add a link to
your website.
Pro tip
If you have more than one link you want to add, you can use a great
software tool called Linktr.ee to add multiple pages.
Add a few emojis to your bio too. And remember you can update your
bio whenever you see fit. To give you an example, my bio currently reads
(as shown in figure 10.1, overleaf ):
Swiss-Aussie
Creator @basicbananas @the_businesshood @oceanlovers.global
@moments_of_humanity
Adventure Addict
Eternal Optimist
www.franziskaiseli.com
To add line breaks on your Instagram bio, either use the desktop app or copy
and paste your bio from your notes on the phone.
Pro tip
Add your business username to your personal profile as this will create
a clickable handle and help you drive traffic to your business profile.
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Figure 10.1:
an example of an Instagram bio using emojis and line breaks
Profile image
Your profile image will be very small, especially as most people use Instagram
on mobile only. So upload an image that looks good in a small size.
For your personal profile, use a close-up headshot. For a business profile,
your logo or icon works best.
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Direct message (DM)
Instagram allows you to direct message anyone, even people you don’t follow.
DMs to or from ‘strangers’ will pop up as message requests, so make sure you
check your ‘other’ inbox.
A DM can be a great way to engage your audience.
Use your DMs to engage your followers and advance a relationship. We
often use DMs to get people re-engaged. For example, we might have a free
virtual event for business owners coming up and instead of posting the link
to register, we invite our followers to ‘DM us to receive the link’. Remember
MAVERICK principle #5: focus on building relationships.
Stories
When Snapchat became popular with its short clips that disappear after 24
hours, Instagram paid attention and launched Instagram Stories. This has
become one of the most popular features of Instagram.
Stories are a great place to show your audience behind the scenes of your daily
activities without cluttering your profile. They only appear to people who tap
on your profile picture and they disappear after 24 hours. You can also use
@mentions to tag people in your Stories.
Stories are also a great way to road-test some
of your content and see what gets the most
engagement and excitement. Watch out
for Stories that are popular—that is, ones
people engage with. They will most likely
make great content on your profile too.
Stories are also a
great way to roadtest some of your
content and see
what gets the most
engagement and
excitement.
As much as your main content needs to be
well curated and high quality, your Stories can be a lot more low production.
Your followers will love the down-to-earth, personal approach to sharing
behind the scenes content.
Play with the many features of Instagram Stories, including funny filters,
drawing tools, stickers, location stickers, boomerang, rewind and superzoom
modes, interactive questions and music.
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Story highlights
Story highlights are a way to showcase your story content without it
disappearing after 24 hours. They appear as small circles above your photos
(see figure 10.2).
For your highlights categories, you can also use some of your content buckets:
behind the scenes, product features, how-to, customer stories, and so on.
Figure 10.2:
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showcasing content using story highlights
Instagram
Instagram Live
Instagram Live is a feature inside Instagram Stories and is similar to
the popular Facebook Live function, which allows you to livestream a
video to your audience. Your followers will see a ring around your profile
picture at the top of their Instagram feed right next to all the Stories when
you are Live. This notification is great because it will engage more of your
followers.
The reason Lives are so popular is because the content is not edited—it’s
real, including flaws and all, which makes it so much more entertaining for
people to watch.
Once your Live is complete, Instagram will show your video for 24 hours,
unless you save it to your Instagram TV, where it will stay forever or until you
delete it.
IGTV
IGTV was launched in 2018 to allow users to upload longer form video
content up to 60 minutes in length. For more exposure to your videos, share
them to your Instagram feed. Make the first 60 seconds engaging as this is
what will appear on your feed as a teaser. Then your audience has the option
to click on ‘more’ to watch the entire video.
When you upload your videos to Instagram there are a few options you can
use to enhance them, such as adding a filter or removing any ‘shaking’ by
using the ‘cinema’ mode. Pick a thumbnail that catches people’s attention
so they want to watch your clip. For more exposure, also share it to
your Stories.
Add a title and caption that makes people want to watch your video.
Include hashtags in your caption as they are searchable. And lastly, add
a call to action with a clickable link to drive people to your website if
it’s relevant.
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Activity
Set up or revamp your Instagram profile using the above key ingredients:
•• update your bio
•• upload a great profile shot
•• add story highlights
•• upload some videos to IGTV
•• play with Instagram Live.
Content strategies
People do judge a book by its cover. Especially on Instagram. Instagram is all
about the looks—and you want your account to turn heads. This is another
reason why I’ve been banging on about the importance of your brand
strategy. Go back to chapter 6 and think about how your brand can best
be reflected on your Instagram channel. Ideally you should come up with
a specific ‘look and feel’ for your channel. For example, for @basicbananas
we play with a lot of yellow and black, which are our brand colours. At
@oceanlovers.global we focus on ocean imagery. At @the_businesshood we
use clean, simple, white-space imagery. Each account has its own style to
reflect the brand’s essence.
Pro tip
Use the Preview app to do a few test layouts of your feed and see what
works best.
The anatomy of a post
There are three elements to a great Instagram post: image, caption and
discoverability.
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Instagram
Image
As mentioned earlier, Instagram is all about the snap, so use your best photos.
Luckily, most phone cameras are really sophisticated nowadays so you don’t
need to go and buy any fancy equipment.
One of Instagram’s most popular features since early on is the variety of filters
and photo editing tools inside the app you can use to enhance your images.
Play with different editing styles and then land on a type that works for your
brand. You want your channel to have consistency, so once you’ve found your
‘style’, stick to it.
Make sure your Instagram grid looks consistent and is appealing to your
ideal audience. Use aspirational images that showcase your ideal audience’s
desired lifestyle in action. Quality over quantity applies here too—for
example, don’t share blurry images unless you have a suitable caption such
as ‘it was all a bit of a blur . . .’
In 2017 Instagram launched a multiple image function that allows you to
upload up to 10 photos in one post. Use a variety of images to tell a story,
or to show before and after images or a step-by-step process. Here are some
examples of multiple image posts:
•
A fitness trainer shows before and after images of body
transformations.
•
An interior designer shares images of the space they have worked on,
including behind the scenes.
•
•
A nutritionist shows step-by-step meal preparations.
A fashion store showcases its latest collection.
Something else that has been taking off on Instagram is people doing a
comparison of photos showing the perfect ‘Insta-posing’ shot first and then
a second photo showing ‘real life’, flaws and all. For example, you might see
the perfect handstand and then swipe to see how long it took to hold a onesecond handstand. Or a perfect-looking, neat office and then the contrasting
reality of a heap of paperwork. Why not try something like this for a bit of
fun? Your followers will appreciate your realness.
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Caption
Each photo should come with a caption. Even though Instagram is all about
the snap, the copy supporting the image does matter.
Your captions can be up to 2200 characters long, although only the first 125
characters show without clicking on ‘more’. Try a variation of both short and
long copy and make the first 125 characters engaging.
As always, use calls to action to encourage people to watch your video, click
on a link in your bio, drop a comment or send you a DM.
Pro tip
Links within captions are not clickable so people will either have to
copy and paste your URL or you can add the link to your bio and say
‘link in bio’. This is a very common Instagram practice.
And remember to use emojis!
Discoverability
There are two key ways to increase the discoverability of your Instagram
posts: geotags and hashtags.
Geotagging your photos—which means adding the location—can increase
your discoverability, especially if your audience is in a specific geographic area.
Hashtags are the best way for your posts and account to be found (see figure
10.3). More on this under the heading ‘Growth strategies’.
With regard to frequency of posting on Instagram, once per day is ideal but
even three to four times per week is great if your content is valuable.
Pro tip
Instagram has a limit of 2200 characters in a caption, so if your
caption is longer than that, you can either trim the post or continue it in
the comments by letting people know ‘continued in comments’.
You can also use your comments to add hashtags so they’re not as
prevalent in your captions, taking up space or aesthetically changing
your post. They’re still just as effective as if they were pasted in your post.
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Instagram
Figure 10.3:
examples of using hashtags to increase discoverability
Niche content
There are so many Instagram accounts, some of which never take off. Own
your space and be specific instead of generalist. This doesn’t mean talking
about your own products all day long; share content that is useful and
relevant to your ideal audiences.
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Social Media for Small Business
For example, at Basic Bananas our key focus is on marketing education
for small business owners. The topic and the audience are very specific. At
Oceanlovers our focus is on ocean conservation and sustainable products
for, you guessed it, ocean lovers.
To curate your content, go back to your content bucket list again. Some of
your content buckets might include:
•
stories of both you and your customers using multiple images to
share an experience
•
behind the scenes content such as introducing your team members
and showing your workspace. One of our top-performing posts is a
picture of our team having a pizza party! Go figure!
•
content your fans and followers have posted about your product.
Get your customers to take happy snaps using your products
or services. This is an amazing way to showcase your products
through the eyes of your customers. This type of content also
fulfils the principle of social proof, where you have other people
talking about your business. Encourage your customers to
share photos using your branded hashtag. At Basic Bananas we
often ask attendees of our virtual live workshops to take selfies
of their workspaces so we can ‘see’ them. By using the hashtag
#basicbananas we can give their businesses a shoutout, which they
always love because it also helps them to gain more exposure for
their businesses
•
re-sharing of other people’s content, acknowledging the source and
adding your own spin. Only share content that fits into your channel
visually. Not to be vain, but remember the visual component of
Instagram is so important.
Pro tip
The ‘swipe up’ function is available to accounts with more than 10 000
followers and allows you to add clickable links into your Stories, which
makes it a very potent tool for driving traffic to your website.
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Instagram
Asking questions and running polls are brilliant ways to interact with
your audience and get customer intel. We regularly run polls around what
type of content our audiences love most or questions they would like us to
answer on IGTV.
Use your Stories to let your followers know about your latest blog post,
podcast interview or video on YouTube.
Activity
Grab your social media planner (downloadable from the website)
and map out your Instagram content using your content buckets from
chapter 7.
Growth strategies
It takes consistent effort to grow your following on Instagram and even
though paid advertising can accelerate your growth, it’s possible to grow
without paid ads using the strategies I outline below.
There are a few ways an Instagrammer may discover your profile:
•
•
•
•
Someone @mentions your account in their own post.
•
You pay for your content to be seen with Instagram advertising.
Someone shares your content.
A user finds your content by browsing hashtags or geotags.
A user discovers your account because you follow them or
commented on their posts.
Given this basic understanding, let’s now look at how you can grow your
audience using these five ways to be discovered.
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Following and unfollowing
Following and unfollowing is a very popular growth strategy on Instagram.
It’s my least favourite one. What you do here is follow your ideal customers
in the hope that they will follow you back. If they don’t follow you back after
a few days, you can then unfollow them again. Just seems a bit petty to me,
but it does work for some people. What I do recommend though is following
your customers to show them your support.
Remember, engagement is more important than the number of followers you
have. So don’t get too hung up on your follower numbers. You’d rather have a
small and highly engaged audience than a large disengaged one.
I don’t recommend using software that does automatic following, liking and
commenting on your behalf. I’ve seen this go pretty wrong with the software
commenting on posts you certainly wouldn’t endorse. Also, because the
comments are automated, they sometimes don’t make sense or are very
generic. It’s obvious that these comments are automated and they hardly
ever lead to any real engagement.
Engaging with people’s content
A better approach for making friends on Instagram and attracting followers
is to engage with your ideal customers’ content by way of commenting and
liking their updates. When commenting, say something genuine and avoid lazy,
generic comments! Show real care and they will want to come and check you out.
Encourage mentions and reshares of your content. Publish great content and
your followers will hopefully engage with it.
Pro tip
Find your ideal audience by going to other business accounts that have
your customers and clicking on their followers.
Or use hashtags.
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Instagram
Hashtags
Hashtags work really well on Instagram because people use them to find
content. For example, you might look for inspiration on a dream travel
destination by using the hashtag #dreamdestination. Or you might search for
vegan recipes by using #veganrecipes.
Hashtags are very popular and powerful
on Instagram and they are one of the best
ways to grow your account. It’s just a matter
of finding the right hashtags to attract the
right audience.
How do you find your hashtags? Here are
some ways to come up with a whole list of
hashtags for your business.
Hashtags are
very popular
and powerful on
Instagram and
they are one of the
best ways to grow
your account.
•
Look at other Instagram accounts. What hashtags are people in your
industry using that get a lot of traction?
•
Think about your ideal audience. What are they most likely to search
for when looking for a business like yours?
•
Use your keywords as hashtags.
•
Look at related hashtag suggestions on Instagram. Type one of your
hashtags into the Instagram ‘search’ function and you will see a
drop-down with other options.
•
Use a free hashtag generator such as www.all-hashtag.com.
Use a mixture of popular hashtags and less popular, more specific
ones. Examples of broader and more popular hashtags are #vegetarian,
#gardening and #motorcycle. More specific ones are #vegetarianrecipes,
#vegetariancurry, #plantaherbgarden and #motorcyclessydney.
You can use up to 30 hashtags per post on Instagram; however, we have found
that around 10 works well for us for increasing engagement. Test a variety of
hashtags for your own business and see what works best for you.
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Pro tip
One way to make your post look ‘cleaner’ and not too distracting from
your message is to either add your keywords in the first comment under
your post or add a few line breaks below the update. We use a few
dots to create line breaks in our posts.
Here are three bonus ways to get your customers to use your branded
hashtags and help you with exposure:
•
Events: If you run virtual or live events, create an event hashtag or
encourage your attendees to use your general business hashtag to
share their insights and thoughts at the event. This is a great way for
you to interact with them during and after the event.
At Basic Bananas, we run a lot of workshops for business owners
and at the start of each session, we encourage participants to use
#basicbananas and sometimes an event-specific hashtag to share
their thoughts. It’s a brilliant way for them to connect with each
other and for us to connect with our audience. Nothing makes me
happier than to see their excited faces and the positive impact we get
to make for business owners.
Make sure you engage with and leave a comment for everyone who is
using your hashtags so they feel heard and acknowledged.
•
Competitions: Use hashtags in Instagram competitions (more on
this below).
•
Featuring your products: Get your customers to use your branded
hashtag when using or wearing your products. This works
especially well, but is not limited to product businesses. Encourage
the use of your hashtag on your packaging or include a personal
‘thank you’ note asking them to share a photo of the product
in action.
If you want to give someone a special shout out and you like their content,
re-post it with their permission. We do this a lot with @oceanlovers.global.
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Instagram
Many of our followers post incredible photos and then tag us with
@oceanlovers.global and by using the hashtag #oceanlovers. We then reshare
the images that fit into our channel design. They always feel super special
and appreciated and we love their support in achieving our mission to save
our oceans.
Pro tip
You can follow specific hashtags on Instagram. They will show up
in your feed. As a minimum, make sure to follow your own branded
hashtag so you get a notification when someone uses it. For example,
I’m following #basicbananas so I can engage with our audiences.
You can also follow hashtags that bring up content from your ideal
customers so you can connect with them.
To follow specific hashtags, search for a hashtag and click ‘follow’
at the top.
Activity
Make a list of hashtags for your business, both specific and more
broader ones, and then save them in your phone notes so you can just
copy and paste them into your updates. Play with different types and
quantities of hashtags to see what works best for your business.
Run Instagram Lives
Instagram Lives are another amazing way to grow your following. They work
so well because as soon as you go live on Instagram, the followers that are
active on the app at the time get a notification, which increases your chances
to engage with them. Lives also appear at the beginning of Instagram Stories
so they are highly visible. To get more viewers, announce your upcoming
livestream on your feed.
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Similarly to Facebook Lives, use these to share valuable information, do a
Q&A or give people a tour of your business. One of our members, a business
consultant, runs a weekly ‘ask Roger’ segment on Instagram Live to engage
with his followers, offer insights and build authority. With a growing audience,
this is a great way to nurture his prospects and grow his network.
If you have a call to action, a link or something for people to download, post
it in the comments and then ‘pin’ it at the top so it stays there for the duration
of your video.
Pro tip
One of my favourite hot tips for growing your Instagram following is to
invite people to join you on your Lives. Either run an interview or allow
your followers to ask you live questions. The brilliant thing about going
live with someone who has a big following is that their followers will also
be notified about your Live. This can result in some big exposure for you!
Once you are live, you can invite people who are watching your Live to
‘go live with’ you. The screen then splits in two so both faces are visible.
It’s an amazing Instagram function! Check it out and have fun with it!
As I already mentioned, once you finish your Live, you have the option for it
to appear in your Stories section for 24 hours. If you want to keep it on your
channel for longer, post it directly onto IGTV. This is a great option for getting
more exposure if the content is relevant. All the views and comments will
reset once uploaded to IGTV.
Pro tip
I assume you’ve figured out by now that I love to find the most efficient
ways to do things—leverage is the name of the game! So, when you
set up an Instagram Live, livestream on Instagram and Facebook
simultaneously to reach more people. Set up your computer for
Facebook Live and your phone for Instagram. There are also apps that
enable you to multi-stream to YouTube, Facebook and LinkedIn. Check
out StreamYard.com or Restream.io.
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Run Instagram competitions
Instagram competitions are a popular and clever way to grow your following
and exponentially increase your reach. The purpose of a competition is to
have your followers ‘do the work’ for you.
These are my five steps to growing your audience using competitions.
1.
Define your competition entry ‘rules’. These can include a ‘follow’
of your account, tagging a friend and/or re-sharing your post to
their Stories.
For example, you might encourage people to like your competition
post, tag three friends, follow your account and for a bonus entry
share your post to their Stories.
2.
Offer a prize that makes people want to enter. This could be one of
your products, a product from a strategic partner or something you
purchase for your followers.
3.
Announce and promote your competition to encourage participation.
For more exposure, promote it across your other social channels.
4.
Announce winners publicly on your Instagram channel. This will
create more buzz and make the competition super transparent.
5.
Rinse and repeat. Make competitions part of your social media
strategy if they work for you. Maybe you could run a competition
every season or twice a year.
Also consider partnering with other businesses to pool efforts. One of
our members, a dental practice, partnered with other local businesses to
run a seven-day competition on Instagram with a daily giveaway from a
local business. This not only helped to increase exposure for all businesses
involved, but the dental practice formed strong ties with its local community,
which led to powerful strategic partnerships.
Use DMs
I mentioned direct messages earlier in this chapter—they are also a
terrific way to grow your business. Use DMs to connect with prospects
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individually. Remember, you ultimately want to move your followers towards
working with you.
Here are a few brilliant ways to do so:
•
Make contact. When sharing updates on a new product or upcoming
event, instead of posting the link in the post, say something along the
lines of ‘send us a DM to get the link’ or ‘send us a DM to receive the
invite’. This way you can start a conversation with them.
•
Welcome new followers. Send new followers a personal welcome
message to make them feel special. Include any useful links for them to
check out or a welcome message that includes a few helpful resources
for business owners. It’s a nice way to start building a relationship.
If you want to get even more personal you can also record a
15-second personal video message.
•
Give your superfans some loving. Send a personal thank you message
to your superfans—the ones that comment on everything, share
your posts, tag people and help you spread your message. Loyal fans
are amazing and if you give them some love, they will be superfans
forever! You might even reward them with a little gift or first dibs at a
new product or service every now and then.
•
Answer customer questions. Use your comments to answer customer
questions or move to DM if someone has a more personal question.
Use DMs to advance your relationship and ultimately get prospects to
become customers.
Beat the bot
Instagram’s mission is to show the most relevant content to its users so they stay
engaged on the platform. One way to show Instagram’s bot that your content is
relevant and worthy to be shown to more people is to get early engagement
on your posts. As I’ve touched on already, engagement is super important on
Instagram: the more people who comment on and like your posts, the higher
the odds that your content will be featured and shown to a wider audience.
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Instagram
Look at your Instagram Analytics to
see which posts are getting the most
engagement and do more of that.
It goes without saying that it’s worth every
minute to respond to all of your comments.
Not only will this make your followers feel
appreciated and encourage them to keep
commenting, but your comments will also
count towards the engagement factor.
Engagement is
super important
on Instagram: the
more people who
comment on and
like your posts, the
higher the odds that
your content will be
featured and shown
to a wider audience.
Influencer marketing
Another quite popular Instagram growth strategy is to partner with influencers
or micro influencers. For smaller businesses, micro influencers—that is, people
who have fewer than 100 000 followers—are usually more affordable.
Here are the steps to getting started with your influencer marketing strategy.
•
Make a list of people who:
•
•
have your ideal audience
have between 5000 and 10 000 followers. These accounts are a
great sweet spot for small businesses as they will often do a post
in return for a free product or service.
•
•
Approach possible micro influencers with your proposal.
•
Get your influencers to share your product or service with their
audience and welcome new followers and sales.
Negotiate a deal and set out the parameters. Influencers generally get
paid per promotional post, but you might also be able to do different
deals. Larger accounts will want to get paid for partnerships.
Make sure your influencers are a great representation of your brand. For
example, if you sell a health product or service, you’ll want your influencer
to look healthy and vibrant. Your brand association and reputation
matter a lot.
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Pro tip
In your Instagram search function, go to ‘places’ at the top and find
micro influencers in any area. For example, if you are looking for
someone to use your products in Los Angeles, you can find influencers
via the ‘places’ tab and then connect with the ones that would be a
great fit for your brand.
Instagram advertising
Since Instagram is owned by Facebook, they both use the same advertising
platform, which makes it very handy to set up ads for both accounts. I detailed
a paid advertising strategy in the Facebook chapter, so I’ll keep it short here.
Instagram advertising is very effective for some businesses. If your audience
is on Instagram, give paid advertising a go. It can help you to drive traffic to
your website, increase sales and generate leads.
One of the ad placements on Instagram is in Stories. They show up in-between
people’s Stories and can be quite effective as they are right in front of someone’s
eyes. For Stories ads to work you need to grab people’s attention very quickly
so you don’t get ‘skipped’. Since you only have a few seconds, be concise with
your message; keep it natural and simple. Brand your Stories ad to increase
brand awareness. And encourage viewers to ‘swipe up’ for a specific call to
action. If it’s a video of you talking, a hand movement to swipe up or an arrow
pointing at the place to swipe up will encourage people to do so.
As with all of your campaigns, test different angles, copy and creative. Look
at what type of content works best organically and then put some money
behind it.
Hot tips and tools
There are so many great tools to help you get the most out of your social
media efforts. Here are some of my favourite ones for Instagram:
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Instagram
•
Instagram Shops. Instagram Shops is similar to Facebook Shops. It
launched in 2018 to support businesses in selling their products and
services through the app. To see all the features and get set it up, go
to business.instagram.com/shopping.
•
Linktree is the app I mentioned earlier that allows you to add
multiple links in your Instagram bio. Update your links whenever
you have something coming up such as a special promotion, product
launch or event.
•
Boomerang from Instagram is a free Instagram tool that enables
you to create engaging short clips.
•
Iconosquare is an analytics and social media platform that allows
you to get in-depth information on followers, hashtag analysis,
engagement and other metrics. This information is really helpful for
you to do more of what works.
•
Unfold is an app that enables you to create Stories videos that
are engaging.
•
SocialRank is a tool that helps you understand your audience.
It manages, identifies and organises your followers so you can
identify your most engaged followers. It’s a great tool for getting
customer intel.
•
Later.com, Hootsuite.com and Buffer.com are all popular social
media management platforms for managing, scheduling and
publishing your posts to various channels from one platform.
•
Instasize photo editor and video editing toolkit is an app that
allows you to edit your photos and videos to suit your channel
design. Instead of having to adjust each element of your photo—
such as exposure, brightness, shadows, contrast and sharpness—
individually, this app offers professional, photographer-inspired
filters to choose from.
•
•
VSCO is one of our team’s favourite photo editing apps.
Repost is a tool that allows you to easily reshare usergenerated content.
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CHAPTER
SUMMARY
Instagram is a potent channel for businesses with a slightly younger audience
than Facebook. If you or someone on your team loves snaps and telling
your story, sharing business updates and creating content in a visual way,
Instagram is your tool.
Always remember the MAVERICK principles, especially audience, value and
consistency.
A week in the life of an Instagram pro looks like this:
•
•
•
•
•
•
Post updates three to four times a week.
•
•
Use Instagram advertising to increase your sales.
Send welcome direct messages to new followers.
Engage with potential prospects’ content to get noticed.
Run a weekly (or monthly) Instagram Live.
Respond to DMs and comments daily.
Send DMs to prospects, potential brand ambassadors and anyone
you want to connect with.
Look at Instagram Analytics weekly to keep improving content.
CHAPTER 11
LINKEDIN
Fast facts
• One of the most underrated and underutilised social networks
• Launched in 2003
• The biggest professional networking platform
• One of the best social networks for building relationships
• Has content that is rated very highly and is a great way to
establish authority, credibility and trust
• Is a great relationship-building tool.
Why LinkedIn?
LinkedIn is probably the most underutilised and underestimated social
media platform.
There are so many great opportunities for business owners to leverage this
network, including connecting with customers, finding people to collaborate
with, meeting global partners, attracting prospects and staying connected.
I was recently asked to run a private strategy workshop for a law firm with
30 lawyers. The objective was to share how to grow their law practice in
today’s world. A decade ago, lawyers would grow their networks by attending
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LinkedIn is not
only a powerful
lead generator, it’s
also a brilliant tool
for building and
maintaining business
relationships.
Think of LinkedIn
as your electronic
networking
platform.
events, or taking potential clients or referral
partners to fancy long lunches or to play golf.
In an age where this is not always possible,
they need to get really good at connecting
with people and establishing trust digitally.
LinkedIn is an amazing tool for this.
LinkedIn is not only a powerful lead
generator, it’s also a brilliant tool for
building and maintaining business
relationships. Think of LinkedIn as your
electronic networking platform. I use
LinkedIn as my personal virtual rolodex of
contacts. When meeting new people at speaking events, in line at the post
office or at a friend’s birthday dinner, rather than collecting business cards
I suggest we connect on LinkedIn if we choose to stay connected.
LinkedIn is also a great virtual networking tool for connecting with people
you might otherwise not meet. The key is to start with a virtual connection
and then move offline. More on that process below.
Another great benefit of LinkedIn is that you can connect with anyone, bypassing the gatekeeper. Let’s say you’d like to connect with the CEO of a large
company: instead of going through their gatekeeper, you can message them
directly via LinkedIn. It’s not guaranteed that they will respond, but you can
increase your chances by following the suggestions in this chapter.
Google your name and see what comes up on the first page. If you have a
LinkedIn profile, that’s most likely what you’ll see. LinkedIn is incredibly
optimised to rank high in search engines. If someone wants to ‘stalk’ you,
that’s most likely where they’ll go to find out more about you, see your
credentials, your experience, and so on.
Compared to other social networks you will find a lot more valuable industry
insights and content on LinkedIn than pictures of yoga poses or dogs (there’s
nothing wrong with those—they just don’t belong on LinkedIn). Many people
use LinkedIn as a learning tool.
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LinkedIn
And lastly, LinkedIn is also a great traffic source to your website if you publish
useful content for your audience; its organic reach is so much better than
that of any other platform. This means your content is seen by a lot more
people without paid ads.
Okay, that’s a lot of reasons why LinkedIn is so powerful! Now let’s look at
who should be on it.
Who is LinkedIn for?
Almost everyone! Other than Facebook, LinkedIn is the only other network
I highly recommend for almost everyone to join with a personal profile.
I really can’t think of anyone who shouldn’t join LinkedIn (except maybe
someone who doesn’t want to be connected with people online). The thing is
that this is kind of the future — connecting with people virtually first.
Since you are reading this book, I have a feeling you are already a convert, so
let’s get working.
As you dig deeper into LinkedIn, ask yourself what you would like to get out
of this platform first. Here are a few options:
•
•
•
•
Establish yourself as an expert in your industry.
•
•
Find team members for a growing team.
Increase brand awareness for yourself and/or your business.
Generate leads and increase sales.
Build relationships with possible strategic partners, leaders, business
owners, and so on.
Build and grow a community.
Set-up and definitions
LinkedIn has some incredibly useful features to help you establish your
expertise and get noticed for all the right reasons. Let’s look at how you can
make use of them.
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Personal profile
The power of LinkedIn really lies in your personal profile. This is where
LinkedIn is a gold mine. So I highly recommend you set up or update your
personal profile. This is more important than a business page.
As mentioned earlier, LinkedIn is often the first place someone will find you
thanks to its amazing search results on Google. LinkedIn is often also the
first place people will go to check you out or connect with you. Plus a great
profile will increase your chances of a successful outreach. So let’s make sure
your personal profile is doing you justice!
Before we go through each element of your personal profile step by step, here
are three important things to remember:
•
Completeness: Make sure you fill out all the parts and don’t leave
any gaps. It just looks lazy and unprofessional when people have
half-hearted profiles.
•
Relevance: Add the most relevant information. You don’t need to add
all of your past experiences if they are not relevant to what you are
currently doing. For example, if you were a dog-walker or window
cleaner as a teen, you don’t need to add those in your ‘history’ unless
you run a dog-walking or window-cleaning business now.
•
Keywords: Use your keywords in your headline, ‘about’ section
and descriptions so that the right people can find you through the
LinkedIn search function.
Must-have core elements for a complete
LinkedIn profile
Let’s look at the main elements that I suggest you include in your
personal profile.
Title and headline
Your headline is often the first thing people see when looking at your profile.
Use this part to reflect your expertise and make it specific to differentiate
you. What do you want to be known for?
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Pro tip
Use the LinkedIn search function with your keywords to see what else
comes up and how other profiles compare to yours. Make yours stand out!
Make sure you include some of your keywords in here—for example, ‘innovation
specialist’ or ‘graphic design artist’ or ‘speaker and author of xyz’. You can also
test different headlines and monitor how many views your profile is getting.
Profile image
It goes without saying that your profile image needs to be professional and not
from 10 years ago. You know when you meet someone for the first time and
they look absolutely nothing like in their photos? First impressions count and
if you’re seen to be ‘lying’ about your appearance, that’s not a great way to build
trust! The picture of you with your cat, keep that for Facebook or Instagram!
Since your LinkedIn profile picture is very small, and even smaller on mobile,
a close-up image of your face with an inviting smile and a sparkle in your eyes
works well. And in order to not distract from your beautiful smile, make sure
your background is faded or at least not messy.
Header image
LinkedIn allows you to customise your header background image (see
figure 11.1, overleaf). This is prime real estate most people don’t use! Your header
image is the perfect place to share something about your business, a summary
of your expertise, an invite to your next event or an announcement of your
latest product release. Make sure you include a call to action and a link to your
website. Update this image whenever you have something new to announce.
If you have team members, invite them to update theirs too. This will increase
exposure for your business and drive traffic to your website.
Website links
In your contact information, there is a space to connect up to three clickable
website links. Make sure you use them all. Even if you only have one website,
add links to different pages such as your home, products and ‘about’ page.
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Figure 11.1:
the header background of your profile is prime real estate
Personalised LinkedIn URL
Claim and personalise your LinkedIn URL so it’s easier to send people to it
from a bio outside of LinkedIn.
If your name is already taken, add your initials or a number at the end.
About
Your about section is where you share your story. Write your story in the
first rather than the third person to make it more personal—it is a personal
profile after all. This section is very important as people can find out more
about you, your passions, your experiences, your expertise, who you work
with, the positive impact you are making, and so on. I highly recommend
adding a little bit of sparkle here—something people will remember—not
just a dull bio that sounds like everybody else’s.
I know writing your own bio can be challenging, so here is a great structure
for you to follow. This will make it a lot easier to write about yourself ! If you
just can’t bring yourself to write your own ‘about’ page, jot down a few bullet
points and get a friend to help you draft it following this structure:
•
Intro:
•
•
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Who are you? What do you do?
Who do you like working with?
LinkedIn
•
•
•
Why are you passionate about your business?
What differentiates you?
What are your strengths?
How can you demonstrate credibility (any awards, media
features, qualifications)?
Personal information:
•
•
•
Why are you doing what you are doing? Tell your story.
Credibility:
•
•
How did you end up here?
Strengths:
•
•
•
What are you currently working on?
Journey:
•
•
•
•
Who are your ideal customers?
What is something personal about you?
What do you love doing in your spare time? Include something a
little bit more personal—people often remember this part the most.
Call to action:
•
What do you want people to do next?
Remember to make this relevant to what you are currently doing. To make
your bio easier on the eye, add bullet points, sub headlines and other features
so it’s not just one big block of text. Skim readers will love you for that too.
If you don’t feel like writing your own bio and your friends don’t want to help
you, hire a great copywriter. Why not use the LinkedIn search function to
find someone you’d like to work with. Make sure they walk the talk and their
bio is amazing.
Pro tip
The first few sentences are the most important ones to make visitors to
your profile want to read more.
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Featured
Under your ‘about’ section, there is a ‘featured’ section you absolutely must
use to showcase your best content (see figure 11.2). This could include a
video of you presenting, a program you are running, an article, links to your
website, publicity you’ve received or anything else relevant.
LinkedIn allows you to use rich media such as video, PowerPoint and
documents that can make your profile even more impactful because you
get to demonstrate your expertise. It also makes you stand out since many
LinkedIn users don’t go the extra mile.
In addition, you can upload your PowerPoint presentations onto SlideShare,
which is owned by LinkedIn and is another great way to gain exposure.
For video content, you can either link to your clip on YouTube or upload
directly onto LinkedIn. Other files that might be useful for your profile
viewers could include templates, company profiles and brochures.
Figure 11.2:
some examples of featured content
Experience
Under ‘experience’ is where you add your professional experience, businesses
you’ve started and current and past positions, including board positions, or
work as a podcast host or mentor. As I’ve said before, add only information
that is relevant. If you were an intern at a Swiss bank 20 years ago (I was. So
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cliché for a Swiss, I know!) and your current business has nothing to do with
banking, you don’t need to list that.
In your descriptions, use your keywords and add a call to action. For example,
if your current position is as director of a business, let people know who you
work with and how they can get in touch.
Additional information
Below your experiences there is a space to add further information on a
variety of topics, including:
•
education or courses you’ve done, including your high schooling
and university degree. For example, adding that you went to Geneva
University is great not only for credibility but also to reach out to
fellow university graduates. If you mention this commonality when
connecting with people, they’ll be more likely to want to chat
•
volunteer experience you have done. Show off your kind heart and do
more of it!
•
•
organisations and associations you belong to or are involved in
•
publications you’ve been featured in, which is another great way to
establish your authority.
any other impressive accomplishments. In this part you can add
languages you speak, courses you’ve created, awards you’ve won,
certifications you’ve got or publications you’ve been involved
in. Show off anything that is relevant and makes you and your
mum proud!
Skills and endorsements
The skills section is quite important because you will show up in searches for
people who are looking for your skills, so make sure you add the things you’d
like to be known for. Use the keywords you’d like to be found for.
People can then endorse you for those skills that give you extra clout because
someone else is saying how amazing you are. Add the three most important
skills you’d like to be known for at the top of the list.
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Pro tip
Get someone to spell-check your LinkedIn profile. A profile filled
with spelling mistakes is incredibly unappealing and unprofessional.
Especially if you are seeking attention from reporters and journalists to
feature you—they are often quite the grammar police, understandably!
Recommendations
Recommendations are one of LinkedIn’s best features and something that
will help people who are considering working with you to choose you over
someone else who doesn’t seem to be as brilliant as you.
The reason recommendations are so powerful is because they are ‘real’ and
written by people you have worked with. Each recommendation shows up
with the name of the person who wrote it, so you can’t fake them. Which is
why they carry so much weight.
To receive more recommendations, ask people who are raving about you
if they would be so kind as to write a LinkedIn recommendation for you.
Anyone who sends you a message telling you how amazing you are, ask them!
Instead of just saying, ‘Could you please leave me a LinkedIn review?’, make it
easy for them to do so by highlighting a few points they could write.
Here is an example of a request message:
Thank you so much for your kind message. It really means a lot. We absolutely
loved working with you too. Could I ask you a small favour? I’m currently in
the process of upgrading my LinkedIn page. Would you be happy to leave a
recommendation on my profile? That would be amazing! Thank you so much!
Ask them while they remember and love you.
The more specific a recommendation the better because it will seem so much
more real. So rather than just saying:
I loved working with Franziska and her team. They are so lovely.
A better recommendation would be:
I recently engaged Franziska and her team to create a brand strategy for
my new business. We went through their Brand Alchemy Method and they
came up with an amazing brand identity, differentiation and messaging
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for my business. I am so happy! The whole process was engaging and
enjoyable and I’m proud of what we’ve created. The brand strategy
document I got at the end is so helpful and something I will be using to
grow my business. I will be back to do more work with Franziska!
Activity
Go to your LinkedIn profile and make sure you have the above elements
incorporated before moving on to your company profile.
Your company profile
Similarly to Facebook, LinkedIn also allows you to create company pages
where you get to share information about your business, industry trends,
authority content and insights, job openings and more (see figure 11.3
overleaf for an example of a company profile page header).
Rather than being a personal connection on a LinkedIn business page, people
can ‘follow’ your business to receive updates.
Pro tips
As with all of the channels, add a link to your profiles on your website.
Add the business page to your home page and link your personal
profile in your ‘about’ page.
Add a compelling overview of your business in the ‘about us’ section,
outlining your purpose statement, differentiation, core promises and a
product overview including calls to action. Again, use your keywords
so that your company page is more likely to show up in a search.
You may also choose to follow a few companies from whom you’d like
to receive the latest updates. If you are looking to work with someone
within a business, go to their business page where you can see their
employees if they’ve added a link on their personal profile.
If you have team members, make sure they add your company in their
profile too so your business gets more exposure and your company
page more traffic.
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Company profiles are great—however, you’re more likely to build relationships
through your personal profile. People connect with people. So if you only
have time to maintain one profile, leverage your personal one.
LinkedIn Analytics are great for gaining insights into your audience, checking
your follower growth and seeing what kind of content is working best. As
with all of your social analytics, check your analytics regularly to see what
type of updates are getting the most engagement and then do more of that.
With regard to content on your company profile, the same rules apply: use
your content buckets and lead with value!
Figure 11.3:
an example of a company profile page header on LinkedIn
Content strategies
Okay, now let’s talk content.
As mentioned earlier, LinkedIn’s organic reach is a lot better than that of any
other platform. You can post an update or article and a lot more people will
see it without paying for advertising than on any of the other channels. It
works across all types of industries.
LinkedIn not only enables you to add updates, as on any other social network,
but through LinkedIn Publisher you can also publish entire articles. This
is a great tool for demonstrating your expertise. It’s similar to publishing
articles on your blog. Your content will stay on your profile for people to read.
It’s such a great way for people to see how brilliant you are and for you to
demonstrate your expertise. Your connections can also share your content
with their network, which gives you more exposure.
When it comes to topics, refer back to your content buckets. Write articles
on any of your buckets: industry updates, trends or anything else that adds
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value for your audience. You can also repurpose content you have already
written for your blog. Take your best performing articles and share them on
LinkedIn Publisher. Amplify the good stuff.
Here are some ideas for content in your regular LinkedIn updates (again,
your content buckets will guide you):
•
•
•
•
•
•
post a link to an article you found insightful
•
reshare other LinkedIn users’ content if it’s useful for your audience
and add your own spin on it. Follow specific hashtags to find relevant
content you can reshare
•
ask questions to engage your audience and get some intel. Questions
are a great way to start and engage in a conversation. Ask openended questions such as ‘What’s your favourite ice-cream flavour?’
or ‘What’s your biggest challenge right now?’ rather than closed
questions such as ‘Do you like ice cream?’
share industry news
upload the latest podcast you’ve been featured on
upload a how-to video
invite your audience to an event
post a job position in your business. One of our Clever Bunch
members, a recruitment firm, regularly posts job vacancies on
its LinkedIn profile and manages to fill most positions using this
powerful network alone
Questions will increase engagement, which helps with organic reach. Respond
to every comment, even if it’s just a short ‘thank you for sharing your thoughts’.
Pro tip
Become a scroll stopper! Make your content visually appealing to
make people stop scrolling and pay attention to your content. Updates
with images or videos get a lot more engagement than text only. You
can even add files to your updates.
Make your opening sentence of a status update attention grabbing so
that people will want to click on ‘more’.
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Remember, LinkedIn
is not the place for
cat videos, as much
as we do love them.
Remember, LinkedIn is not the place for cat
videos, as much as we do love them.
Hashtags also work on LinkedIn, so add
three to four relevant hashtags in your
updates for a chance to be discovered by more people.
Publish great content consistently and you’ll become a reliable and relevant
source of information for the right people—and you’ll grow your audience
organically. It’s worth the effort.
Activity
Grab your social media planner and put together your weekly or
monthly LinkedIn schedule.
Growth strategies
LinkedIn is like your virtual networking platform. So once you’ve got your
profile looking super pro, focus on growing your network by connecting with
the right people.
How to find, be found and connect
There are five main ways to find people, be found and connect with people on
LinkedIn: use the search function; find shared experiences; upload a CSV file
with your database; publish great content; and join relevant groups.
Search function
LinkedIn’s search engine is a great way to find people either by name or
using keywords.
Shared experiences
Shared experiences are a great way to connect with others—for example,
people who went to the same university or worked at the same company as
you—who have commonalities you can highlight.
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Upload your database
By uploading a CSV file of your database, LinkedIn will share with you who
is on the platform.
Publish great content
One way to grow your network is by reaching out to people. The other way—
and my favourite way—is by being found. When you publish great content
and are getting known in your industry as an authority, people will naturally
want to connect with you.
Pro tip
Get introduced! One of the best ways to connect with someone who
doesn’t know you yet is to find mutual connections and then get introduced.
So instead of ‘cold connecting’, ask a mutual friend if they could introduce
you. Your chances of this person wanting to chat will increase massively.
To make it easier for your mutual friend, offer to write a short paragraph
they can use. Here is an example:
Hi David, I trust you are well! I wanted to introduce you to my friend
Jenny. She is involved in a few interesting projects I thought might be
relevant to you. Jenny, please meet David. David, please meet Jenny!
Over to you two!
I’ve been introduced to many people, some of whom have eventuated
in collaborations, interviews, and so on.
Similarly to Facebook and Instagram, like, share and comment on other
people’s content to engage with your connections, show support and get
noticed. And, as mentioned earlier, use hashtags for your content to be found.
When you ‘accept’ connection requests, be selective and don’t accept
everyone. There are a lot of spam profiles on LinkedIn: a marriage proposal
from a Tsar might not be as good as it sounds; someone promising you the
magic pill to all of your problems might not either. Keep your connections
‘clean’ to avoid an inbox filled with spammy messages.
The good news is that you can always remove a connection. I sometimes
remove connections that fill my inbox with spam messages.
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Pro tip
To grow your audience and get more engagement both on your
personal and company profile, @mentions work really well. Only
@mention and tag people who have something to do with the content
though. Don’t just do random @mentions as that’s super annoying and
not great LinkedIn etiquette.
Join relevant groups
LinkedIn groups are a great place to find like-minded people and your target
audience. More on that coming up below.
###
For some of your connections, you will want to ‘advance’ the relationship
and move the conversation from online to offline, which might lead to a new
customer, a strategic partner or even a spouse (though I’m not sure how
many LinkedIn courting messages lead to success—you might want to keep
your LinkedIn pro and stick to Tinder to find a romantic partner. But hey, I’ve
seen some creative messages on LinkedIn).
Activity
Grow your network by connecting with the right audience. Spend a few
minutes each day growing your network. Once you’ve got a few hundred
or thousand connections, you will gain momentum and grow organically.
From connection to relationship
Business is all about relationships, which makes LinkedIn such a powerful
tool. LinkedIn is not just about ‘collecting connections’, it’s about truly
connecting with people.
A LinkedIn connection often starts off with a message to or from someone.
If that person is someone you want to collaborate or work with you need
to slowly move them from an initial connection to a mutually beneficial
relationship using four steps:
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1.
Connection
2.
Nurturing
3.
Conversion
4.
Relationship.
1.
Connection
Every relationship starts with a connection. On LinkedIn this is usually
a personal message. The keyword here is ‘personal’. When connecting or
reaching out to someone via LinkedIn, customise your message to the
person. To increase your chances of a great first impression, don’t ‘copy and
paste’ standard messages.
In order to do this, look at the other person’s profile and find something
interesting you can comment on. This could be a thought or compliment on one
of their articles, or something you may have in common. Make it about them
first; don’t start a message with how amazing you are and why they should give
you money. So many LinkedIn users think it’s cool to send a first cold message
pitching their services. It’s not cool. Remember the dating analogy from earlier
in this book? It’s like asking someone to jump into bed with you before they’ve
even met you. Remember, this is LinkedIn, not a dating app.
First impressions count, so don’t ruin it with a lame message. Again, it’s about
the quality of your connections, not the quantity.
In short: don’t jump straight into selling something. You’ll destroy any chance
to move the relationship along if you don’t lead with value and you make it
all about you.
2.
Nurturing
Back to MAVERICK principle #3 (always lead with value). Here it is again! The
most successful networkers add the most value.
Once you’ve connected with someone and you want to advance the
relationship, focus on nurturing. Remember this step from your Online
Eco-System earlier in the book? The same principles apply here. For each
connection you’d like to advance, ask yourself how you can support them.
You might do this by sharing an article they could be interested in, sharing
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their updates on your profile so they gain more exposure or sending them a
nice message. Get creative!
You can also be helpful by introducing people. This is a great way to get some
brownie points. LinkedIn is a fantastic tool for introducing people you think
would benefit from knowing each other with a quick mutual message.
A focus on nurturing will help you build trust with your network so you can
move to the next step.
Pro tips
Sharing resources that are not your own can be very useful as it doesn’t
come across so self-promotesy.
Treat your LinkedIn messages like your emails—respond quickly. Don’t
let them sit there for weeks on end. I must admit I’ve been a culprit of
this, but I now have one of my team members filter through my LinkedIn
messages so I can get back to people.
3.
Conversion
Once you’ve built trust with someone, they might ‘convert’ online or offline
and become a customer, or a collaboration partner, or agree to a virtual or
‘real life’ meeting. Always think about the next small action step you’d like
them to take that might lead them closer to a work engagement.
As much as meeting someone in person is nice, virtual coffee chats can be
very effective to further your relationships. And you have access to a larger
geographic area—the entire world!
When asking for business, ditch the conventional sales script. Be helpful, not
pushy. Ask questions, stop talking. That’s the basics. You’ve got this.
4.
Relationship
This step is the same as in your Online Eco-System. After someone has worked
with you, partnered with you or introduced you to someone, don’t drop them
like a hot stone. Keep the relationship alive by staying in touch, checking in
occasionally and being helpful.
Got it? Excellent!
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Activity
Apply the above four steps to moving your connections from just a
connection to a win–win relationship.
1. Go through your connections and look for people you’d like to
‘network’ with and get to know more.
2. Send them a personal message and focus on adding value.
3. Invite them to a virtual coffee chat to find out how you can support
each other.
4. Repeat and see your network and business grow.
LinkedIn groups
As I touched on earlier, another great way to meet like-minded people and
potential customers is through LinkedIn groups. You can pretty much find a
group on any topic. The best way for you to network using LinkedIn groups is
to join groups your audience is in.
For example, if you are a dog trainer, you’d want to join dog lover groups. If
you are an IT consultant you might join IT manager groups.
As an example, when we first launched Basic Bananas in Los Angeles we
had very few connections there so we used LinkedIn Groups to meet local
businesses by joining LA business associations, chambers of commerce and
other small business groups.
If you just want to stay up to date with and share industry news, groups with
your peers can be helpful too.
Once you’ve joined a group, make sure you don’t just go in there and be all
self-promotesy or spam members—that’s the fastest way to lose friends you
haven’t even made yet. It’s like rocking up to a birthday party and talking
about yourself to everyone. Not cool.
Instead of self-promoting, be helpful. Answer questions where you can add
value. Demonstrate your expertise by adding value and people will flock to
your business without you even having to pimp yourself.
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You can also start your own group, if you are up for curating content and
fostering relationships to get it going and keep it alive. Running your own
group is another way to position yourself as a leader in your industry.
Another benefit of running your own group is that you can send a message
to the entire group once a week. It’s like having another database of leads at
your fingertips. Just don’t spam them!
If you do set up your own group, make sure you have clarity on:
•
•
the purpose of the group
•
what keywords you’ll use in the group description to be found
•
who is going to run it
•
what type of content you’ll share
•
what type of conversations would be useful for your members
•
what ‘group rules’ you have for participants. For example, no selfpromotion, focus on support, no spamming
•
what your welcome message is.
who it’s for
To grow your own group takes effort. People most likely won’t just flock to it.
A few strategies to get people to discover and join the group include:
•
•
having an enticing group title using your keywords
•
sharing your group URL in your LinkedIn updates with a short
explanation of the purpose and benefits of the group
•
using the right keywords in your description so people can
find the group
•
sharing the group link on your Facebook and Twitter profiles
•
encouraging your members to invite their connections.
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sending virtual invitations to people you’re already connected to by
hitting ‘invite others’
LinkedIn
LinkedIn groups also allows you to set up message templates that can be
automatically sent to people interested in joining your group. They’re a great
way to share the purpose of your group and introduce new members to any
insightful resources you have created—another opportunity to add value,
establish your expertise and drive traffic to your business.
In short, join groups to expand your network, but be selective and pick the
most relevant ones. Only create your own group if you have the time to
maintain and grow it.
LinkedIn events
LinkedIn events are similar to Facebook events. If you run events or webinars,
set them up in LinkedIn, share them in your personal and business updates,
and invite your connections. You can also have conversations with attendees
and stay in touch with people after the event within LinkedIn events.
People who have ‘joined’ the event can also invite their own networks to
attend, so encourage them to invite their friends to reach a wider audience.
Run events people absolutely love; the more you run them, the more you’ll
gain momentum with people sharing your goodness with their friends.
LinkedIn Premium
LinkedIn also has a paid premium option with some extra features such as
InMail and advanced search functionality. InMail is the most known benefit,
with the option to send direct messages to people on LinkedIn without being
connected to them and without knowing their email address.
Many business owners and especially service providers use InMail very
successfully to connect with people they’d normally not have access to.
LinkedIn Premium also enables you to see who looked at your profile in the
previous 90 days. With a free account you can only see the last five people
who visited your profile.
In addition, Premium gives you access to a library of LinkedIn learning
courses on every topic imaginable.
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LinkedIn advertising
Just like any of the other platforms, LinkedIn has paid advertising. I’m not
going to lie to you: we’ve been finding it really challenging to make LinkedIn
advertising work for us. Cost per clicks, cost per impressions and cost per
conversions are incredibly high. For our businesses we’ve been getting much
better results with Facebook and Instagram advertising.
This is not to say that LinkedIn advertising won’t work for you. If your perfect
audience is on LinkedIn, I definitely recommend giving it a go. Start with a
small budget, test different angles and track your results.
LinkedIn ads can be run either as newsfeed ads, ads that are placed around
the site or message ads sent into people’s inboxes. Here are some examples:
•
Sponsored content is similar to boosting a post on Facebook and
helps you increase the reach of your status updates. It appears in
your audience’s feed.
•
Text ads are similar to the ads you see on the sidebar on Facebook.
They are located to the side of LinkedIn’s feed and only work on
desktops. These work best for awareness campaigns, when you’re
showing your content to a larger audience.
•
Sponsored InMail lets you send private messages directly to your
chosen audience’s inboxes. These can work well if your message
doesn’t come across as too spammy. Think about the next small step
you’d like people to take and add a call to action with a clickable link
or button.
The targeting is very similar to other platforms and is really good. You can
target by degree, skills, age, company name, industry, job function and more.
To help you get started, LinkedIn has audience templates you can tap into
depending on who you’d like to reach. LinkedIn also allows you to create
lookalike audiences.
Setting up campaigns is relatively easy. LinkedIn organises your ads into
campaigns. You set your daily budget and targeting at the campaign level
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and then set up a variety of ads to test. I suggest you test two or three ads per
campaign to see what works best for you.
Pro tip
Look at your LinkedIn Analytics to see what type of content resonates
with your audience and then put money behind content that already
works well organically to expand your reach.
Hot tips and tools
There are so many great tools to help you get the most out of your social
media efforts. Here are some of my favourite ones for LinkedIn:
•
LinkedIn for Small Business is LinkedIn’s effort to support small
businesses.
•
LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a paid relationship-building tool that
helps you connect with prospects by offering advanced algorithms to
find prospects, sales insights, and so on.
•
LeadFuze is a prospecting tool that allows you to create lists of leads
including people’s emails and phone numbers.
•
Discover.ly is a Chrome browser extension that provides you with
information on what other social media your connections are on.
•
Rapportive is a free add-on tool for Gmail account users that
brings LinkedIn profile information into your Gmail. You can
view everything about your contacts without leaving your inbox.
It also provides you with a person’s LinkedIn profile, shared
connections and more.
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CHAPTER
SUMMARY
The power of LinkedIn lies in leveraging your personal profile.
Focus on building your network, nurturing relationships and providing
insightful content and you will tap into MAVERICK principle #1 (Momentum).
The more you consistently put in effort, the more you will get out of LinkedIn.
This could become one of your most powerful networking tools.
Focus on these three priorities:
•
Revisit your LinkedIn profile and spruce it up by going over the
above steps.
•
Find and join relevant groups and engage with people you’d like to
connect with.
•
Publish weekly content that adds value to your network.
A week in the life of a LinkedIn pro looks like this:
•
•
•
•
•
•
Connect with new people and people you’ve met in real life.
•
•
Join relevant LinkedIn groups.
Accept connection requests if they seem legit.
Send personal messages to your connections to nurture them.
Respond to messages.
Post status updates or an article on LinkedIn Publisher.
Review notifications and respond to comments, and engage with
your connections.
Request introductions where relevant.
CHAPTER 12
TWITTER
Fast facts
• Launched in 2006
• A microblog that allows you to ‘tweet’ short updates. Its initial
purpose was for people to communicate with each other using
only 140 characters—the length of an SMS. The maximum length
of a tweet has now increased to 280 characters
• Has more than 300 million active users
• Was the first social network to adopt the hashtag when it was
introduced in 2007
• The most popular social network for news consumption
• Used by Barack Obama, who has one of the most popular
Twitter profiles.
Why Twitter?
A majority of Twitter users follow their favourite brands, which can make it a
very effective tool for businesses.
As a business owner you can use Twitter to:
•
grow your network of connections and connect with people you
might normally not have access to
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•
look after your customers by providing an amazing customer service
experience
•
build your authority by sharing content that is valuable to
your audience
•
research trends and get news. A lot of reporters and journalists use
Twitter as their source for uncensored content. You might even
become one of their sources if you publish insightful content. Twitter
is also a great tool for combating fake news because you can get
information straight from the source
•
tweet at events to connect with and share insights with other
event attendees
•
stay on top of trends and keep your eyes on the conversations
happening in your industries. I like using Twitter as a research tool
to get customer insights and find out what people are discussing in
my industry
•
use hashtags to find out what people are talking about.
For example, at Basic Bananas we are curious to see what
entrepreneurs are struggling with so we can support them with
the right content. In order to monitor this we track hashtags
such as #marketingchallenges, #smallbusinessmarketing and
#marketingideas
•
keep an eye on what people are saying about your business by using
your own branded hashtag. Hopefully they are loving you!
And why not check what people are saying about your competitors?
This might give you some great intel into what people are looking for
or complaining about so you can do a better job. I highly recommend
never ever putting anyone down, even your worst competitors.
You might have a little whine in private, but don’t do so publicly.
Badmouthing never makes anyone look good.
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Twitter
Who is Twitter for?
Again, ask yourself if you can reach your ideal audiences on Twitter and also
if it’s a platform you will enjoy.
Personally, Twitter is not one of the top three social networks I focus on.
Remember MAVERICK principle #4 (Enjoyment). Focus on a few key social
networks and do a really great job rather than using all of them only halfheartedly. If Twitter works for your business but you don’t enjoy it, outsource
it to someone who does.
Set-up and definitions
Twitter is very similar to Instagram with regard to its profile set-up. Let’s look
at the most important elements of your Twitter account.
Username
You can use Twitter for yourself and your business. For your personal
account, use your name as your Twitter handle—don’t try to be too clever
with your username or people won’t find you. For your company, use
your business name as this is another great way for people to find your
business online.
I use @franziskaiseli across all accounts, which makes it easy for people to
find me across different channels.
If your username is not available anymore, just add a middle name or
initials. For your business you might add something like global or official.
For Oceanlovers, our handle wasn’t available any more so we went with
@oceanlovers.global. Your username also becomes your Twitter URL. For
example, my Twitter URL is Twitter.com/franziskaiseli.
Just get started and then you can always rename your channel if you come
up with a better idea.
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Bios
Twitter bios can be up to 160 characters long so make sure you use this space
wisely. Share who you are and why people should follow you. The vibe on
Twitter is a lot more conversational and less
The vibe on Twitter
corporate than on LinkedIn so feel free to
is a lot more
be a bit playful here. If you’ve already got a
conversational and great bio for Instagram and Facebook, feel
less corporate than free to copy it to Twitter.
on LinkedIn so feel
free to be a bit
playful here.
Humanise your personal profile by adding
something about you. For example, mine
includes that I love adventures and the ocean.
If you have a personal and business profile, include your business handle in
your personal profile. And lastly, include a link to your website to drive traffic.
Your profile image
As for your other channels, upload a close-up picture of yourself for your
personal channel and your logo or logo icon for your company profile.
Twitter is mainly used on mobile, so your picture will be tiny. A scenic shot of
you climbing up a mountain won’t work so well.
For your personal account, definitely don’t use your company logo. Even if
you only use a personal account, it comes across as very impersonal.
Your header image
Customise your header image to invite people to do business with you. Use the
same suggestions as for the LinkedIn banner image I shared earlier. Use this
space to share information about a specific promotion, your business or an event
and include a call to action. Keep it simple and neat (see example in figure 12.1).
Followers and following
On your Twitter homepage you can see who you are following and who is
following you. Twitter also gives you suggestions on who to follow based on
your interests and people you are already following.
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Twitter
Figure 12.1:
an example of a header image on a Twitter profile page
To get started, here are a few ideas on how to find people to follow:
•
Friends: Why not start off by following some of your friends? There
is a ‘find friends’ function on your homepage under ‘who to follow’.
They’ll be most likely to follow you back too.
•
Future friends: You can also find new connections by browsing by
interest. For example, if you’d like to connect with fellow business
owners, search for ‘entrepreneurs’ or ‘business owners’. Future
friends could also include potential future partners. Give them
some love by sharing their content. Retweeting their posts might get
you noticed.
•
Customers: Follow your customers to give them some love and have
them follow you back. If you publish great content, they’ll hopefully
fall in love with your business and stay with you forever.
•
Journalists: Follow reporters and journalists not only to be in the loop
of what’s going on but also to foster relationships and hopefully be
featured when you have an interesting story angle.
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•
Publications: Follow industry publications and channels your
audience might be interested in so you can reshare their best content.
Content strategies
Twitter is a very fast-moving platform and your tweets will disappear down
the page pretty quickly. It’s not uncommon for Twitter users to publish
the same or a variation of the same content a few times at different times
during the day to reach more people. Tweeting two to three times per day is
completely normal on Twitter, and it’s one of the reasons this network is not
one of my favourite ones.
Let’s look at different types of content that work really well on Twitter. The
following types of content will cover your bases:
•
•
•
•
evergreen authority content
curated content
daily updates
promotional content.
Evergreen authority content
Publish your greatest content on Twitter with a link back to your website.
Remember, you always want to drive people back to your website so you can
inform them about your business’s offerings and collect their details to build
a trusting relationship.
If you already have blog content that is doing well, share it on Twitter. Create
a few different descriptors for it so you can share the same link several times
at different times of the day to reach a larger audience.
To save time and maximise your efforts, schedule this type of content to go
out a few times a week.
Ideally you want your followers to retweet (RT) your content to gain exposure
to a larger audience. Just focus on publishing valuable content and an RT is
unavoidable. Content that fosters conversations, discussions and ponderings
will increase your engagement too. The more you give, the more you’ll get.
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Twitter
Pro tip
Test different headlines with a link back to the same article before
picking the best-performing one by looking at which one gets the most
engagement on Twitter.
Curated content
Curated content is where you retweet (RT) other people’s articles and posts.
Curated content is useful because it helps you avoid being too self-promotesy
with your content.
Put together a list of Twitter accounts
with content your audience would find
interesting. When retweeting someone’s
content, add your own thoughts or
highlights to show that you’ve actually read
the content and make it more personal.
On Twitter, it’s
totally okay and
normal to share
your thoughts and
opinions a few
times a day.
At Basic Bananas we’ve got a list of sources we find relevant for business
owners so we have an easy go-to list for valuable content.
Retweeting is also a great way to give someone some love and potentially get
their attention.
Daily updates
Once you’ve set your evergreen and curated content, fill in your calendar
with daily live updates. On Twitter, it’s totally okay and normal to share your
thoughts and opinions a few times a day.
Pro tips
Don’t do a Donald Trump on Twitter and make sure your spelling is
immaculate. Oh . . . and respectful and tasteful. You are reflecting your
brand after all, so do it with style.
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Use Twitter threads to connect tweets and refer back to something
you’ve shared earlier. For example, you might share something you are
working on and then give updates on your project in the same thread
so newbies can see the history of the conversation.
Promotional content
Lastly, you’ll also want to let your followers know that they can work with you
by sharing promotional content with an invite to work with you.
Twitter Cards enables you to attach sign-up forms, videos and photos to your
tweets. They are great for driving traffic to your website or a specific landing
page for people to take action. There are different types of Twitter Cards
for different purposes, including lead generation cards to collect people’s
details, photo cards that feature photos, summary cards that include a title,
description and thumbnail, offer cards for special offers, and so on.
You can also pin important tweets to the top of your feed to increase visibility.
If you have any special announcements—a product launch, an event invite or
anything else you want your followers to see—pin it to the top.
Pro tips
Even though most tweets are copy only, tweets with imagery and GIFs
generally get more engagement than ones without. Twitter enables you
to upload up to four images per tweet. Similarly to Facebook’s carousel
and Instagram’s multiple image posts, use multiple images to tell a
story, feature your products or share a step-by-step lesson.
Visit Analytics.Twitter.com and use the Twitter Analytics dashboard to
look at what’s working well for your business and what’s not working
so well. Your analytics will show you the engagement rate on your
tweets, plus link clicks and follower information, including location,
gender and interests, which can be very informative, especially for
your Twitter ad campaigns.
Do more of what’s working and less of what’s not. Very simple!
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Growth strategies
There are several strategies you can use to increase your audience and attract
more customers on Twitter. Let’s run through them.
Follow, unfollow
A common Twitter strategy to grow your followers is to follow others and
then hope that they will follow you back. If they don’t follow you back,
unfollow them. I personally find this strategy a bit lame even though it does
seem to work. It’s similar to the Instagram one I shared earlier in this book.
Make sure you don’t just follow random people—you want your target
audiences to discover you. Find your target audience by going to a competitor’s
account and following their followers. Be careful not to go too nuts on this
strategy as Twitter might deactivate your account if you follow and unfollow
hundreds of accounts every day. If you use this strategy, set a daily target for
you or one of your team. For example, follow 30 new people per day.
There are companies that ‘sell’ followers but I highly advise against using
them. It’s not worth it as they are fake accounts that won’t add any value.
Remember it’s not about the size of your audience but how engaged they are.
Engaging followers
As on any other social network, engagement is important. There are various
ways to increase your engagement on Twitter:
•
Tag people. You can tag up to 10 people in your images. Don’t just tag
random people. Tag people who are in the image or have something
to do with your content.
•
Use calls to action. By this I mean inviting your followers to take
action, whether that be to visit your website, comment on your tweet
or retweet your tweet.
•
Use video replies. If you want to blow your followers’ minds, use video
replies in your comments. This also adds personality to your brand.
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•
Do a livestream or similar. This is another great way to engage with
your audience.
•
Do Twitter Q&As. These can be used to engage your followers, nurture
your relationships and connect with new people.
•
Use hashtags. Encourage people to use your branded hashtag to gain
more exposure.
Hashtags
Hashtags were first used on Twitter to help users connect to a particular topic,
categorise information, make it easier for people to join the conversation
and connect people with the same interests.
We already discussed the hashtag function and how to use it in chapter 10
(Instagram).
Hashtags are common practice on Twitter and users are very used to using
them to find content. Include one to three tags on your updates. Don’t
overload since you only have limited space.
You can also use hashtags to find accounts to follow, people to engage with
and content to share. Just like with your keywords, search for hashtags
related to your industry and add value to the conversation where you can to
create connections, build trust and get noticed.
Competitions
Competitions are another great way to generate buzz around your business
and get your followers working ‘for you’. I’ve already shared about this in
chapter 10. The same rules apply here.
Outline your competition, the prize and how to enter in a tweet and get
people to retweet it for their chance to win.
Use a specific competition hashtag so you can monitor the conversation. An
example of a competition is asking people to retweet, enter their details on
a landing page and follow your account to enter into the draw to win. This
allows you to collect leads and grow your Twitter following at the same time.
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Or you can keep it more simple and only ask for a follow and retweet to grow
your audience and expand your reach.
Building relationships
As mentioned earlier, Twitter can be very useful for making new connections.
If there’s someone you’d like to meet to discuss business or a brand
collaboration with, Twitter can help you get noticed by them.
Remember the dating analogy and think about what the next small step is
you could take to advance the relationship.
Engage with their content first, respond to their tweets, say nice things, be
helpful. Don’t ask for a favour straight away. Just as with LinkedIn, focus on
being helpful first and then asking for a coffee catch-up.
I’ve had this happen to me a few times when someone was being kind on a social
network, sharing my content, engaging and then eventually asking if I’d be open
for a meeting. I must admit I most often than not felt obliged to say yes. Some
of it has led to collaborations, podcast interviews and other positive outcomes.
Direct messaging (DM)
On the relationship-building note, Twitter is another great tool for not only
making new connections but also building relationships.
There are three great tools for getting someone’s attention: @replies, direct
messages (DMs) and @mentions.
@replies and @mentions are public for anyone to see. DMs are private and go
straight into the person’s inbox.
Always respond to DMs, @replies and @mentions as quickly as possible. You
obviously don’t have or want to be on Twitter all day; just check in once or
twice per day to engage and respond. Especially if you are using Twitter as
a customer service tool, you really want to get back to people quickly.
You can also set up notifications so you don’t miss anything.
Remember to respond to customer complaints quickly and kindly too so they
don’t blow out of proportion.
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Pro tip
If you want to take it to another level, you can even respond to a
customer complaint from your personal account to humanise your
approach. Imagine getting a personal apology from the founder of
a business. That would be pretty impressive and most likely diffuse a
complaint quite quickly!
Advanced search
Twitter is a brilliant customer service tool for not only listening to what your
customers are saying about your business but also for supporting them by
responding to their requests swiftly.
Twitter is a brilliant
customer service
tool for not only
listening to what
your customers are
saying about your
business but also for
supporting them by
responding to their
requests swiftly.
Besides setting up notifications for
@mentions, @replies and DMs, use Twitter’s
Advanced Search to find tweets with a
mention of your business name without
using your @username.
Twitter’s Advanced Search is also useful if
you’re looking for people to connect with or
conversations to join. For example, if you’re
a business consultant you might want to
search for key phrases such as ‘looking for
a business consultant’ or ‘business mentor
recommendations’.
Activity
Pick one of the growth strategies and focus on it for one week. Then
pick another one for the next week and see what works best for you
and your business.
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Twitter advertising
Twitter advertising is another great way to grow your followers and
your business.
We get much better results with Facebook and Instagram advertising—however,
Twitter advertising might work for your business. The Twitter advertising
platform is pretty straight forward. To get started, go to Ads.twitter.com.
Make sure to go back to the in-depth paid advertising section in chapter 9
(Facebook) as the same principles apply.
Objectives
Start by picking your campaign objective. You can pick different objectives
including:
•
tweet engagement: this is similar to ‘boosting’ a post on Facebook with
the aim being to increase the visibility of your tweet. This objective
could be useful for a tweet with a specific call to action such as an invite
to trial your products, access a downloadable guide or attend an event
•
increasing your followers: this is similar to a ‘likes’ campaign on
Facebook. I wouldn’t spend too much money on this one as you really
want people to take action towards being in your funnels (I looked at
funnels in chapter 5), such as downloading a lead magnet or making
a purchase, rather than just being a follower
•
website traffic and conversions: in these types of campaigns your
objective is to drive traffic to your website to either get people’s
details so you can then nurture them and build trust or to
generate a sale.
Audience
Twitter targeting is very comprehensive and includes:
•
demographics: you can target your audiences by location, language,
gender and other demographics
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•
interests: this again is where your avatar research comes in handy!
What are your ideal customers interested in?
•
•
keywords: target people who engage with specific keywords
•
custom audience: this is the same as on Facebook where you upload
your own customer lists.
followers: you can also target people based on who they follow.
What accounts do your ideal customers follow? This could be your
competitors or other accounts with similar audiences to yours. Start
by adding a few Twitter accounts and related suggestions will pop up
for you to choose from
Ad creative
The major difference between ads on Twitter and Facebook is Twitter’s ad
creative. On Twitter you need to master the art of getting people excited in
very few words.
You already know the drill: always have a call to action. What do you want
people to do? Keep it simple—for example, watch a short video, do a free
trial, buy your product or download something.
Metrics
As with any of the digital ad platforms, keep an eye on performance. The key
metrics to look at are the same as those outlined in the Facebook advertising
section in chapter 9.
Budget
Adjust your ad budget depending on your ROI. Again, there should be no
limit to your ad budget as long as you are getting a positive return and you can
fulfil your orders. Use the conversion tracking pixel to track the effectiveness
of your campaigns. It’s best to start small and then slowly increase your
budget on the campaigns that are converting well.
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Hot tips and tools
There are so many great tools to help you get the most out of your social
media efforts. Here are some of my favourite ones for Twitter:
•
Twitter for websites. Twitter has a whole range of tools for bringing
Twitter content to your website to increase your followers, including
embedded tweets, tweet buttons and follow buttons.
•
Click to Tweet is a free service that helps you create clickable
tweets. The purpose of this is to encourage people to retweet your
most inspiring quotes and updates to increase engagement. When
someone clicks on [Tweet This] it will automatically pre-populate
their status update with your quote. Make sure you include your
username in the original tweet so that people can see where the
quote originated from. Highlight quotes on your video or blog article.
You can also use this epic little hack on your sales pages. When
someone purchases a product on your site, encourage them to [Tweet
This]: ‘I just purchased this sustainable swimsuit! Let’s support
sustainable!’
•
Twitter Advanced Search. I mentioned this earlier, but wanted to
add it here again as it’s such a great tool for customer and industry
intel. Use Twitter Advanced Search to find information by location,
date and keywords. A great strategy is to search for your keywords
and find people in your target audience who are talking about
specific challenges you may be able to help with. Again, don’t go in
pushing for a sale. Just be helpful. Use this search function to look up
any mentions of your business.
•
Twitter Lists. These help you organise and see content from
people you add to the list. So instead of scrolling the infinity of
tweets from people you follow, you can select the accounts worth
reading and put them into your list. Their tweets then appear in
a separate feed. Create different Lists for different purposes—for
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example, publications whose content you can retweet, prospects
to engage with, journalists to foster relationships with for future PR
opportunities, industry associations for news, influencers in your
space or inspirational accounts for a rainy day. You can make your
lists public or private. Public lists can be followed by anyone. You
might even find useful public lists to follow yourself.
•
TweetDeck. This is an application by Twitter to help you manage
your accounts. One of the biggest benefits of this app is the ability to
organise your Twitter audience into groups. You can also do searches
on a variety of topics or hashtags. And if you have multiple Twitter
accounts, you can manage them all from TweetDeck.
•
Social media management tools. There are many tools on the
market to help you manage multiple accounts. Some of the most
popular ones for Twitter include Hootsuite.com, Socialoomph.
com, Buffer.com and Tweetdeck.com. These tools are helpful for
monitoring your activity: see @replies and @mentions, scheduling
tweets and setting up search results on a variety of topics you want
to follow.
•
Tweriod. This is a free tool that can review your activities and give
you recommendations on the best times to share tweets to maximise
engagement and reach more people.
•
Warble Alerts. This is a free tool that compiles a list of keywords,
phrases, hashtags and mentions you want to track and sends them
straight to your inbox.
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CHAPTER
SUMMARY
Twitter may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but if it is yours, embrace
MAVERICK principle #1 (Momentum). Put in the effort daily or weekly to
gain momentum and get a return.
Twitter is more of a daily kind of tool, so if you can, spend a few minutes
every day working on your Twitter efforts.
A week in the life of a Twitter pro looks like this:
•
Follow a few people who either inspire you or are in your target
demographic daily.
•
•
Share a personal daily Twitter update.
•
•
•
Engage with your followers daily.
Curate content by resharing other people’s updates two to three
times per week.
Focus on building a few key relationships using DMs.
Give Twitter advertising a go.
CHAPTER 13
PINTEREST
Fast facts
• Was founded in 2010
• Functions more like a search engine than a social network
• Is like an online scrapbooking tool
• Can be one of the best website traffic sources
• Has more than 400 million active monthly users.
Why Pinterest?
Pinterest is a secret gold mine for some businesses. It’s an incredibly powerful
platform when it comes to driving traffic to a website or blog. Depending on
your products or services, it can be one of your best traffic drivers. It allows
you to grow your audience by reaching new people you might not otherwise
get access to on other platforms. And ultimately Pinterest can help you
increase sales by generating leads to your online store.
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What is Pinterest?
Pinterest is not really that ‘social’. Compared to other social networks,
Pinterest is not used to socialise that much. Instead it’s used more like a
search engine to search for and collect information and inspiration. It’s a
visual discovery engine that enables users to post or pin images.
Many users use Pinterest to find ideas and inspiration in different areas:
health, home, design, fashion, lifestyle, DIY, and so on. It’s a place where
people consume, curate and share content they are interested in.
Imagine an electronic tool for scrapbooking or creating vision boards. That
was the idea behind Pinterest: to make creating boards easy and to allow
users to pin ideas, content, products and images to save for later, organising
the information on mood boards. Pretty nifty idea!
Who is Pinterest for?
Pinterest is not for everyone. It works especially well for aesthetics-driven
e-commerce sites such as health and wellbeing, fashion, jewellery, beauty,
interiors and food.
Pinterest is more popular in the United States than any other country, so
if you are in any of the above industries and your audience is US-based,
Pinterest should absolutely make it into your social media plan.
Even though the majority of Pinterest users are female, more and more men
are starting to use Pinterest. They are mostly looking for DIY projects.
The majority of Pinterest users are higher income earning individuals, which
makes it a great tool for businesses.
I wouldn’t worry too much about Pinterest if you run a business that
doesn’t work so well in a visual way—for example, trades businesses,
law firms and accountancies. But then again, you can get creative pretty
much in any business. As always when deciding whether to give Pinterest
a red hot go or not, come back to the question ‘Is my audience using this
platform?’
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Pinterest
As with most things in life, Pinterest is all about what you put in. It takes
time and consistency to grow your reach, increase your traffic and ultimately
drive sales.
Set-up and definitions
You can set up a Pinterest profile in your name or a business name.
If you are promoting your business, it makes more sense to set it up as a
business profile.
For example, I have a business account and a personal one. I mainly use the
latter to collect inspiration on certain topics such as dream destinations,
home inspiration, and so on.
The main difference between a private Pinterest account and a business
account is that for your business account you will be able to use the
Business Hub, which will give you access to several tools. One of them is
the scheduling tool, which enables you to schedule your posts for up to two
weeks in advance. Another benefit of a business account is that you can
promote pins and create shopping ads. The detailed analytics section will
help you understand your performance and give your audience insights. I’ll
share more information on some of the most beneficial Pinterest tools for
your business in this chapter.
Setting up your account
In your profile setting add your business name, a profile picture (this could
be your logo), a short description of your business and a link to your website.
Make sure you use a few of your keywords in your bio.
Use the space for your profile cover photo to share something about your
business, announce the launch of a new product and invite people to visit
your website. If you don’t upload a custom image or video, Pinterest will
create a collage cover photo of your pins.
Connect your other social media accounts and maybe even a link to your
Etsy account if you have one.
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Creating boards
Boards are the ‘albums’ where you add your pins. Pins can be linked to a
website, which makes this tool so powerful as this is an easy way to drive
traffic back to your website. When you click on a pin, you are automatically
directed to the website that is linked to it.
Pins can be linked
to a website, which
makes this tool so
powerful as this
is an easy way to
drive traffic back
to your website.
Pinterest users can also re-pin posts,
which is the same as a reshare on other
platforms.
You can make your boards public or keep
some private, so only you can see them.
You can also choose to share some of your
boards only with your teams. We have a few
branding boards at Basic Bananas that we
use for our internal communication only.
And you might keep some private boards where you save recipes,
fashion inspiration, haircuts, travel destinations . . . anything that takes
your fancy.
Give your public boards clear and descriptive titles that include your
keywords so they can be discovered.
For each of your boards, choose a cover image that reflects your brand.
You can invite specific people to collaborate on boards, which can be
useful for customer projects. For example, if you are a wedding organiser,
you could get your brides to collaborate on inspiration boards. Or
if you are an interior designer, you could share specific boards with
your clients.
In addition to this you can also create sub-boards inside your boards. For
example, you could have a board called Fashion and then add sub-boards
with different collections.
As soon as you have more than one or two boards it’s important to make
sure your strongest boards are featured at the top of your profile. Visitors
to your profile will see those boards and pins first and decide if it’s worth
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Pinterest
staying on your profile and checking out the rest of your content. You can
easily reorganise your boards by dragging and dropping them.
Pinning
A pin is an image or a video you share on your Pinterest profile either from a
website or uploaded from your computer. Pinterest decided to give its users
a special name: pinners. It’s a lot nicer than calling people users!
Pinning is the act of sharing images on your own boards. This can be done
from any website. Make sure you also pin from your own website in order to
drive traffic.
Pinners can reshare or re-pin your content to their own boards, which
gives you more exposure. Or you might re-pin someone else’s content that’s
relevant to your audience.
Ideally you will want to create great images and content linking back to
your website that people want to share as this will help you gain exposure
exponentially.
The anatomy of a pin
Here’s what to put on your pin:
•
Copy: Add a short and catchy title and description including
keywords and hashtags. They will help your pin to get discovered in
searches. You can use up to 100 characters for your title and up to
500 characters for your description. Put the most important in the
first sentence as this is what fellow pinners will see first. Make your
copy engaging and intriguing so people want to know more about
your business, product or service.
•
Creative: Upload either a picture or a video. Pinterest is
predominantly a visual tool, so choose eye-catching, high-quality
imagery showing your product’s or service’s best features. Use text
overlays to explain the content, highlight features, and so on.
Short videos are another great way to get people’s attention. Use
captions to make sure people get your message even if they have the
sound turned off.
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Pro tip
As the majority of pinners use Pinterest from their mobile device, use
vertical creative with a 2:3 aspect ratio.
You can even include your logo on the photos using the Pin Editor to
ensure your brand doesn’t get lost in the re-pinning process.
•
Link: Remember, Pinterest is an amazing tool for driving traffic
to your site, so make sure to include your URLs. Add a link that
corresponds with your pin’s content. For example, if you’re pinning a
specific product, link to that product page, not the home page.
Different types of pins
There are different types of pins you can use (figure 13.1 shows some examples):
•
Normal pins: These are the ones explained earlier with an image,
copy and website link.
•
Story pins: These are pins with multiple images or videos attached
to one pin. They are great for telling a story, showing a step-by-step
process, before and after images or tutorials, or for showcasing a few
products in one pin.
•
Rich pins: This type of pin automatically syncs information from your
website to your pins.
•
Shop the Look pins: As mentioned before, Pinterest works incredibly
well for e-commerce businesses. You can add tags to your photo or
video of the products to make it possible for pinners to purchase
them right then and there. This format even offers real-time pricing
and availability to make sure potential customers don’t click on the
link to discover that the item is sold out. You can even add more than
one product to one pin and showcase an entire collection.
•
Promoted pins: You can pay to promote a pin just as you can
with Facebook or Instagram advertising. Promoted pins have a
‘promoted’ label on them so that pinners can see that they are
advertisements.
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Pinterest allows you to schedule your pins within the platform, which is very
handy. This can be especially helpful if you would like to pre-create your posts
and schedule them for the same time on all social media channels.
Figure 13.1:
examples of pins on Pinterest
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Finding accounts to follow
Use the Pinterest search function and keywords to find accounts you’re
interested in. You can either follow an entire profile, which means you will
automatically follow all of their boards, or only follow specific boards you are
interested in.
Activity
1. Set up your business Pinterest account.
2. Set up your first few boards using your content buckets.
3. Start adding pins, both from your own website and others.
Content strategies
Pinterest is very much about collecting, categorising and organising content.
Start by creating a few different boards on your profile. You can edit your
boards any time, so just get started.
For your personal use, you might have a board collecting ideas for your next
hairstyle, fashion aspirations, holiday destinations, craft ideas for your kids,
art pieces you like or recipes.
For your business, create boards both for internal use only—including mood
boards, team activities, company principles, and so on—and public boards
showcasing content that adds value to your ideal audiences.
Remember your content themes (in chapter 7)? A clever way to create boards
is to use your content buckets. For example, you might have one board with
behind the scenes images and videos and another one with customer case
studies or ‘how-to’ videos.
A clever way
to create boards is
to use your
content buckets.
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Continue adding pins from both your own
website and others and focus on saving
content that your target markets are
interested in.
Pinterest
Pro tip
Pinterest is a very visual tool, so pin images that are visually appealing
and reflect your brand. Brand consistency creates familiarity, which
creates trust and increases sales.
Boards
Here are some examples of boards to get your creative juices flowing:
•
Inspirational boards: for example, travel destinations, design styles,
mood boards, quotes
•
Instructional boards: ‘how-to’ boards where you share
your knowledge
•
Collaborative team boards: you can work collaboratively on boards,
which can be great for your team. Team boards could include such
things as a wish list of team activities or design inspiration for your
office. Team members can react to pins with an emotion so you can
see what gets the most hearts, for example. You can even sort your
pins according to their reactions
•
Related topics boards: think about what else your audience is
interested in and create boards around certain topics. For example,
a wine brand could create a board called ‘Food pairing: the perfect
meal with the perfect wine’; a campervan company could create a
board called ‘Our favourite camping sites’; or a gym could create a
board that reads ‘Workout outfits that make you work harder and
look hotter’
•
Product in action boards: to show potential customers how to use
your products, curate a board filled with content of customers using
your products
•
Business principles boards: why not share your business principles
or values on boards, including photos of or videos showcasing the
principles in action. For example, if one of your business principles is
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‘kindness’, add images and videos of team members and customers
living the principle.
At Basic Bananas we do a quarterly ‘crowning of the unicorn’. The
team member who has been living our values the most receives
a unicorn crown that they have to wear at our monthly all-team
meetings. This makes for great pictures too! Or try these:
•
team member feature boards: if you have a team and especially
if your team are communicating with your customers, create
a team member feature board where you introduce your team
members and let them share their stories
•
Q&A boards: put commonly asked questions about your business
on a pin and then answer them in the description. This is a very
clever way to answer your customers’ questions before they even
come up and a great way to overcome objections early
•
trend boards: to show your cutting-edge, innovative side, curate a
board with industry trends.
Pro tip
Use the Pinterest 100 trend summary to see what’s trending at the
moment. It’s a summary of the current 100 trending searches from all
around the world. Use these trends to plan your content and connect
with your audience’s interests, and use keywords that fit both your
product and the trends.
Remember MAVERICK principle #7 (Consistency). To get the most out of your
Pinterest strategy, pin content regularly, whether that means once a week or
once a day. Use the scheduling tool to create enough content in advance if
you don’t have time to post daily or weekly. And remember to reflect your
brand strategy.
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Activity
Grab your social media content planner and add your Pinterest
content ideas.
Growth strategies
As we’ve seen, Pinterest is mainly used as a search engine for discovering
content. Pinners are often actively looking for ideas and products such as
DIY activities, hairstyle inspiration, recipes, fashion and design ideas.
The great thing about Pinterest compared to other networks is that pinners
are more likely to leave the platform and read information on the linked
website—hopefully yours. They are also more likely to buy from brands
they’ve discovered on Pinterest.
Because of this, content matters more than
followers on Pinterest. Focus on shareable
content rather than gaining followers. You
might have a smaller number of followers
on your Pinterest profile than on other
platforms, but thousands of people will visit
your website from your pins. So don’t obsess
over growing your followers, obsess over
creating shareable content that then drives
traffic to your website.
The great thing
about Pinterest
compared to other
networks is that
pinners are more
likely to leave the
platform and read
information on the
linked website—
hopefully yours.
Let’s now look at three ways to be discovered, increase your re-pins and grow
your traffic.
Use keywords
Just as with Google, you need to optimise for keywords to be found. The good
news is that it’s much easier to rank high on Pinterest than on Google. There’s
a lot less competition and the algorithm is more basic.
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So the first step to win in the game of Pinterest visibility and discoverability
is to find the right keywords for your business. Use the Pinterest search
function to see what people are searching for. Just as on Google, when you
type in a keyword, Pinterest will suggest other related terms people are
searching for. For example, you might type in ‘abs workout’ and the search
engine might suggest ‘abs workout for beginners’, ‘abs fitness’ and ‘abs
inspiration’.
Make a list of possible keywords for your business and then use them in your
profile title, profile description, pin image, pin descriptions, board titles and
board descriptions.
For your profile title and description, you can be a bit more general with your
keywords. For example, you might use ‘fitness studio NYC’ or ‘fashion for
women’ or ‘pet grooming Australia’.
For your pins and boards, use specific keywords to increase your chances to
be found by different audiences with different needs. You will encounter less
competition for specific key words. Put yourself into the shoes of your ideal
audiences. What would they search for?
For example, instead of naming a board ‘Cutie-pie fashion’, name it ‘Cute
children’s clothing’; or instead of ‘Yoga transformation!’, name it ‘The best
yoga poses to reduce stress’.
Just as for other search engines, pinners tend to type exactly what they are
looking for into the search box and you want to show up for them.
Activity
Go through your Pinterest account and make sure your pins and boards
are keyword optimised.
Create shareable pins within your account
Create pins that are so good people want to re-pin them. Add your logo or
icon to your own pins to increase brand awareness.
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Pinterest
While quote images are not my favourite type of content, they are one of the
best performing ones. They work a treat. Pinners go nuts over them and repin them. So use them. You don’t even have to come up with your own quotes.
The best performing quotes are often those from celebrities, historical figures
and famous entrepreneurs. By choosing quotes from different people and
different areas you can reach a more diverse audience too.
Humour works really well on Pinterest too. Add some fun and humour to
your content. You could find a quote that will make your audience chuckle.
Infographics are also very popular on Pinterest and there are a few tools—
such as Canva.com and Infogram.com—that help you create your own
infographics in a low-cost way.
Pro tip
Turn your articles into infographics. Facts and figures do not have to
be boring. In fact, if beautifully presented they can make your message
engaging and memorable.
Add shareable images to your blog posts
If you already have a blog on your website, create two or three Pinterest
images to link back to your blog post or video content. The purpose of this
is so that people share content straight from your website to their boards,
which will help you drive traffic.
Activity
1. Review your website and add ‘pinnable’ images to your article and
video content.
2. Add descriptions to your pins.
3. Pin the images to your Pinterest boards with links back to your
website.
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Pinterest shopping
A large majority of pinners make purchases based on content they see from
brands on Pinterest. This is one of the reasons why Pinterest can be such
a great business tool. People are not necessarily here to socialise—they are
here for inspiration and to spend money.
Pinterest shopping is a great tool for businesses to set up product pins and
catalogues and for using shopping ads to increase sales.
Product pins are enriched with metadata to let pinners know they are
shoppable. They contain information such as pricing and availability.
Using Pinterest Business, your e-commerce website can be directly linked to
your Pinterest product pins. An alternative to this is using rich pins, which
display your product information. The downside of this is that you can’t use
shopping ads for rich pins.
Use shopping ads with pins to get your product pins in front of more people.
All you have to do is select a product group you want to advertise and
Pinterest will automatically show your ads to the right target audience. The
ads are marked with a price tag that pulls in real-time pricing information,
availability and the product description. So don’t worry about changing the
ads if you change the information in your online store—it’s all connected.
Once the consumer decides to buy your product or service they will be
redirected to make the transaction on your website.
Pinterest will step you through the entire set up: business.pinterest.com/
en/shopping.
Pinterest advertising
Pinterest advertising works in a similar way to Facebook and Instagram
advertising. Setting up campaigns is relatively easy.
The good news about Pinterest advertising is that this space is still relatively
uncrowded compared to Facebook.
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Pinterest
There are different formats you can use when it comes to setting up your ads:
standard image, video or shopping ads. And you can also use carousel ads.
You know these from Facebook and Instagram already. Carousel ads allow
you to add more than one picture to one pin so pinners can swipe through
them. These ads work really well to showcase your products.
You can either turn existing pins into ads or you can use the ads manager to
build and edit campaigns, set up ad groups and custom target.
Select a budget and know your numbers so you can turn off ads that are not
working well. Make sure you use the conversion tracking pixel for this. Again,
start small and test and measure your approach.
When it comes to targeting, there are a few tools Pinterest offers. One of
them is the automated targeting that picks an audience based on details
from your pin.
Or you can pick your own audience using demographics, interests, keywords,
your own lists or actalike audiences, which are similar to lookalike audiences
on Facebook.
Choosing an audience by topics they are interested in works really well too.
For example, a beauty company that wants to advertise its new natural lip
gloss could select an audience that is interested in beauty, natural cosmetics,
makeup and fashion.
Don’t forget to include your keywords in your pin description as well—just
because you pay for your pin to be seen doesn’t mean that you should forget
about all the other tips for normal pins! Leverage all you can to increase
your returns.
Pro tip
In addition to your Pinterest Analytics, also check out your Google
Analytics to see how much traffic is coming from Pinterest.
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Hot tips and tools
There are so many great tools to help you get the most out of your social
media efforts. Here are some of my favourite ones for Pinterest:
•
Tailwind is a Pinterest management tool that helps you with
scheduling, analytics including analysing competitors, discovering
trends and more.
•
Buffer is a social media management tool that allows you to pin
images from any site and add them to your schedule with the Buffer
browser extension. In your Buffer dashboard you can see all the stats
from your pins including likes, comments and re-pins.
•
PI Button WordPress plugin is a nifty WordPress plugin that
makes it easy for your website visitors to pin any of your content by
adding a small Pinterest button in the sidebar of your blog posts.
•
Piktochart and Infogram are tools to help you design your own
infographics. Canva also has Infographics templates.
•
Over is a free app you can use to enhance your images, add text
overlays and edit your images.
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CHAPTER
SUMMARY
Pinterest is an especially powerful tool for e-commerce businesses. So if you
sell products online and especially if they are visually appealing, Pinterest
might become your best friend.
Even if you choose not to use Pinterest for your business, you could play
around with it for your personal use or collect inspiration for your content
on other social media channels.
A week in the life of a Pinterest pro looks like this:
•
•
•
Follow people and boards that inspire you.
•
Create shareable content on your website and then pin it to
your boards.
•
•
Use infographics to share some of your blog content.
•
•
If you sell products, use the Pinterest shopping tools.
Create a new board weekly or monthly.
Pin new content to your own boards daily, both from your site
and others.
Collect inspiration for your business and social media content on a
private board.
Play with Pinterest advertising to drive traffic and increase sales.
CHAPTER 14
YOUTUBE
Fast facts
• Founded by three former employees of PayPal in 2005
• More than two billion monthly active users
• Bought by Google for US$1.65 billion in stocks just 18 months
after its launch
• The second largest search engine after Google
• Can be navigated in more than 80 languages
• The world’s largest video hosting platform.
Why YouTube?
With more than two billion active users monthly, YouTube is successfully
competing head on with traditional TV. More and more eyeballs are
moving from traditional TV to YouTube, which makes it a very powerful
tool for business owners. While TV advertising is a lot more expensive, less
targeted and less effective for small business owners, YouTube and YouTube
advertising have become a gold mine for some personalities, businesses and
even cats. YouTube star Grumpy Cat earned more money than some Oscarwinning actors.
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YouTube is also the second-largest search engine after Google. Where do you
turn to when you need to solve a problem? I recently wanted to add a phone
charger to my motorbike and since I have zero bike maintenance knowledge,
I asked Google and found the perfect video walking me through exactly how
to connect the cables to my battery.
More and more
eyeballs are moving
from traditional TV
to YouTube, which
makes it a very
powerful tool for
business owners.
Video views have been going up over the
past few years and this upward trend is
unlikely to change anytime soon. Some
of the biggest music artists have been
discovered thanks to YouTube—think Justin
Bieber and Ed Sheeran. No comment here!
Whether you want to be the next Justin Bieber
or just want to grow your business exponentially, sharing your knowledge, tips
and insights in video format can also make your message more personal than
only in written form. If you are not using this medium for your business yet, it
might be time to get started.
The purpose of YouTube is the same as for Google: to provide the best answer
for a specific search. You want to be there to provide that best answer for
your potential customers to discover you. Videos are a brilliant way not
only to reach a larger audience but also to build trust and ultimately turn
prospects into customers.
The other great news about YouTube is that some of your best evergreen
content might attract viewers for years to come.
Who is YouTube for?
Most businesses should consider setting up a YouTube channel, even if it’s
just to host a few videos that are also on your website’s blog.
Here are a few examples of different kinds of businesses using YouTube:
•
•
•
192
a plumber sharing DIY tips
a florist explaining the different flowers and how to look after them
a fashion store sharing the latest trends and how to accessorise
YouTube
•
a recruitment agency sharing videos of positions available and
getting their connections to help share the opportunity. This can also
work really well on LinkedIn
•
•
a financial advisor sharing their best finance tips in short weekly videos
a restaurant doing a weekly live cooking class.
Set-up and definitions
Even if you don’t want to actively use YouTube, you can still create an
account, claim your business URL and then use it to host videos. You make
your videos private, public or only visible to people you share the video URL
with. We often use this function for video messages in emails to our database.
Let’s look at the most important elements needed to set up your YouTube
channel for success.
Channel name
You can either give your channel your personal name, if you use it mainly
to grow your personal profile, or your business name. I have a channel for
Basic Bananas and another one for Franziska Iseli, where I also publish more
personal videos such as clips from my motorbike adventure around the world.
Choose your YouTube URL
Make sure you pick your YouTube URL so that it’s easy to send people to
your channel using a memorable link. Preferably use your business name, or
a variation of it if it’s already taken.
Your header image
Use your header image on YouTube wisely. It’s another great place to promote
your business and represent your brand.
Your header image will also appear in search results, so use it to share
your latest product launch, a call to action to work with you or any other
important information.
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Make sure your creative reflects your brand and make it stand out so people
want to visit your channel.
About
Use your YouTube ‘about’ section to share all the relevant information about
your business including calls to action and links to your website and other
social media pages.
Also use your keywords so users can find you.
And lastly, make your first few sentences stand out as this is what will be
visible in the search results.
Channel keywords
Add your keywords to your channel settings to help users find you.
Channel trailer
On your YouTube homepage you can add a channel trailer at the top that is visible
to anyone visiting your channel (see figure 14.1). Use this as an opportunity to
introduce yourself or your business, get people excited about your channel and
invite them to subscribe. Keep your introductory or trailer video short.
Activity
Set up or revisit your YouTube channel, making sure you’ve got the
above elements covered.
Content strategies
With so much new video content uploaded onto YouTube every minute, you
need to have a great strategy to stand out and make people want to come
back for more.
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YouTube
Figure 14.1:
channel page
an example of a pinned channel trailer at the top of your
As with any other social media channel, always have your audience in mind
when creating content. What do they want to watch? What adds value to
their lives? What would make them come back over and over again?
Pro tip
Find inspiration on what people like on YouTube by checking:
• the YouTube trending page
• channels that are doing really well both within and outside of
your industry.
Don’t copy them—just look for what’s working with regard to style and
content and do it better! Oh, and don’t go down the YouTube rabbit
hole and spend hours and hours watching cat videos when you could
be growing your own channel!
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The best videos: 5 key ingredients
There are a few core ingredients that will make your videos more engaging.
Use any or all of these five in your videos.
1.
Emotion: Make people feel something. When filming your clips,
ask yourself, how would you like your viewers to feel? Motivated,
inspired, excited, fulfilled?
Make them laugh or make them cry, preferably the former unless
they are tears of laughter, and they will remember you and hopefully
come back for more. Humans remember how we made them feel, not
what we said.
2.
Education: Valuable, insightful ‘how-to’ videos are some of the most
popular ones on YouTube. Educational videos work really well for
businesses because you get to share your knowledge and build your
authority.
3.
Entertainment: Tap into your inner playful alter-ego, if you have one.
Entertainment comes easier to some than others—don’t force it.
Do use your charisma. The more practice you get in front of the
camera, the easier this part will come.
4.
Reality: This one seems pretty obvious, right? Yet there are so many
‘trying too hard’ kinds of clips. All you need to do for people to
connect with you and your business is to be real and not worry about
your eventual video ‘failures’. It shows your humanness. So the good
news is that you don’t need to edit out all of your ‘ahhms’ or any other
slight imperfections.
5.
Consistency: The most successful YouTube channels follow
MAVERICK principle #7 (Consistency) when it comes to frequency of
content, uploading a new clip on the same day every week or month
and consistency with branding to create familiarity.
If you publish a weekly video, share it on the same day every
week so your subscribers can get excited waiting for your content
to be released. Treat it like a TV show fans get excited about
when it drops.
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YouTube
Ultimately you want your videos to be shareable to increase your reach. If
you include the above ingredients, your videos will become more shareable,
which means exponential exposure.
Video content
Some business owners think they’ve got nothing to share or talk about. You
absolutely do! Remember the content buckets from chapter 7? Use them to
get inspired for your YouTube videos to promote your business.
On your YouTube channel you can also create playlists to group your content into
categories. This is helpful for your subscribers to find relevant content. It might
also encourage your viewers to binge watch some of your videos in one category.
Pro tip
Use your content buckets and main keywords as playlist labels. For
example, on my personal channel I’ve got the following playlists:
marketing & brand strategy, entrepreneurship, leadership, expert
interviews, motorcycle world tour, adventures and music.
Let’s look at a few examples of how to apply your content buckets to your
video content. Some of these should sound very familiar by now.
How-to videos
As mentioned earlier, how-to educational videos are some of the most
popular ones on YouTube. And they work really well for businesses. They are
also the easiest ones for you to shoot without spending too much money on
production.
People search for all types of DIY videos: ‘How
to look after my orchids’, ‘How to kiss’ (one
of the most searched phrases on YouTube!),
‘How to increase sales with YouTube’, ‘How
to set up a YouTube account’. YouTubers
pretty much have the answers to everything,
not that all content is equally useful.
How-to educational
videos are some of
the most popular
ones on YouTube.
And they work
really well for
businesses.
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To come up with an abundance of ideas for your own how-to videos, here are
a few tips:
•
Go back to your ideal customer map and write down your customers’
desires and frustrations.
•
•
Write down all the questions your customers frequently ask you.
Write down what your customers might want to learn when it comes
to your industry.
Voilà, now you’ve got a whole list of ideas for your how-to videos.
As an example, one of our members, a dog trainer, uses how-to videos to get
noticed by dog lovers and her clips include topics such as how to teach your
dog to wave, how to stop your dog from barking in the middle of the night,
what to feed your dog for the perfect fur and how to read your dog.
Case studies
Another great type of YouTube video is case studies and testimonials. I prefer
case studies because they are a bit more interesting and helpful than straightup testimonials.
Here is a great structure for case studies:
•
•
Challenge: What was the initial challenge? Why did they come to you?
•
Outcome: What was the outcome?
Solution: What was your solution? What did you do to overcome the
challenge?
And if you want to turn it up a notch, tell their story—or even better let them
tell it themselves! Stories are so much more effective and impactful than
just listening to someone’s testimonial. Storytelling also taps into people’s
emotions: it’s real, entertaining and sometimes educational.
Expert interviews
Video interviews with industry experts can be a great way to add value and
tap into someone else’s knowledge. You will take advantage of the law of
association. By positioning your brand next to someone highly regarded,
their reputation will naturally rub off on you by association.
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YouTube
You can also use expert interviews to share the latest trends and industry news.
At Basic Bananas we run a weekly virtual PJ Party session to support business
owners through various challenges with a focus on marketing. For these
sessions we often invite experts on a specific topic and then broadcast them
via YouTube and Facebook Live.
YouTube Lives are similar to Facebook and Instagram Lives, where you
livestream content to your subscribers. For livestreaming on mobile, your
channel needs to have at least 1000 subscribers. If you have fewer than that,
you can still livestream from your computer.
FAQs or Q&As
Answer your audience’s most commonly asked questions. Get them to
submit questions, or answer questions you get asked a lot. This is a great
way to make them feel heard and included. Give subscribers a shout out
for their brilliant questions. Q&As are also a great way to overcome buying
objections. For example, if a common objection your prospects have is ‘Does
this product work for my business?’, answer it with a video.
Product or service demos
In this type of video you share product or service demonstrations or
instructions for your customers to get the most out of working with you. When
someone buys your product or service, send them a few helpful links to get the
most out of their purchase. This will also help you increase your subscribers.
Presentations or keynotes
If you just did an amazing keynote or talk that was captured on film, share it
on your YouTube channel to demonstrate your expertise. Maybe you’ll even
get invited on more ‘stages’.
Sales videos
Don’t forget to share videos that invite your prospects to buy from you.
A great video structure for a sales video is:
•
•
Hook: today I’m going to share
Who: here is who this is for
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Social Media for Small Business
•
•
•
Benefits: why you can’t afford to miss this (the benefits of working with you)
Social proof: case studies, testimonials or stories
Call to action: here is how to get it.
Behind the scenes
You’ll remember this one from earlier in the book: people go absolutely nuts
over behind the scenes videos, especially the most candid ones. If you have
team members, feature them and their stories.
Publish team videos showcasing your amazing culture to attract the best
talent in the world.
Activity
Grab your social media content planner and add your YouTube
content strategy.
Brand your videos
You want people to get familiar with your brand and see you ‘everywhere!’,
so don’t miss out on the opportunity to brand your videos without being too
much in your viewers’ faces. One way to do so is to add a small watermark of
your logo in the corner of your videos (see figure 14.2).
Your video watermark can also be clickable, another easy way for people to
subscribe to your channel.
Activity
Go to your YouTube studio and under the ‘customisation’ tab you’ll find
the branding section.
Add subtitles
Inside your YouTube studio you can also add subtitles in different languages.
Go to your studio and find the subtitles tab on the left.
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YouTube
Figure 14.2: on our Basic Bananas channel you can see our banana icon
pop up in the corner
Repurpose your content
Here’s an extra hot tip! Since you’re putting so much effort into creating videos,
leverage them as much as possible. After sharing a video on YouTube, also post
it on your website’s blog or vlog. YouTube gives you a code you can use for the
video to appear on your site. But don’t stop there. Google can’t ‘read’ videos, so
to help you with search engine optimisation, go to rev.com and get your video
transcribed. Then upload that transcription as text below your video on your
website. Not many people will read the full transcription—that’s okay. The
purpose is for you to support Google in helping you rank higher. Google loves
fresh content and this is a smart strategy for adding new content to your website.
Tools for recording videos
You might read all of this and think, well this is all nice and good but you
don’t have the budget for some high-end video production. The good news
is that you don’t need a huge budget to do a great job. In fact, depending
on your business, very low-key selfie videos might perform even better than
high-end production ones. We’ve found this to be true for many industries.
People connect with real people, faults and all.
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You can use your iPhone to shoot pretty decent videos. Just get a tripod
and microphone for better sound quality. Don’t skimp on the sound. Sound
quality is important. If there is too much wind or any other loud noise in
the background, it can be very distracting and viewers will abandon your
channel very quickly.
If you want to get more fancy than an iPhone, Canon makes some
great cameras.
In regards to lighting, make sure the screen is not too dark or too light. It’s
preferable if your viewers see your face without dark shadows on it. If you
shoot a lot of videos, invest in studio lights.
Pro tip
Set aside a few hours per month to shoot your videos and complement
that with more spontaneous videos when you are ‘feeling it’.
I personally often record videos on the fly on my iPhone when I have
something interesting to share—videos are even better with a great
backdrop. We’ve found that the more candid, less staged videos are
most popular with our subscribers. Changing up the background also
keeps them interesting.
Video length
I’m not going to tell you how long your videos need to be other than, make
them as short as possible and as long as necessary. There is nothing worse
than sitting through a 20-minute video filled with blah blah that could have
been done in five. The video length really depends on your type of video. If
you are filming a live video with an industry expert, your video might be 30 to
60 minutes long. If you are sharing a short and sweet how-to video, you might
aim for around 2 to 3 minutes.
You can also add chapters to your clip by time stamping it. This will help
people skip to a specific part in your videos and is especially useful for longer
videos. Just add the time and a short sentence to your description and the
time will turn into a clickable time stamp. Here’s an example:
0:55 How to map out your one-page marketing plan
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1:25 Your ideal audience
2:03 Your differentiation.
Pro tip
Start your video strong. Don’t spend the first 60 seconds introducing
yourself. Instead of doing that, add your name and position as an
overlay on the video and get straight into the valuable content. The first
few seconds are the most important part of your clip, so don’t lose your
viewers at hello. Hey, I’ve been the culprit of this too!
Tools for editing videos
When it comes to editing your videos, I’m all about outsourcing (in fact, I’m
all about outsourcing for most things you can outsource and are not amazing
at). Unless you enjoy this process. There are many great video editing tools
out there. Here are some of the most popular ones:
•
•
•
•
•
•
iMovie
Shakr
Animoto
Loom
WeVideo
Camtasia.
Pro tip
Add a start and end slide to your videos. On your start slide add the
title of the video and your branding. On the end slide add a call to
action. After all, you want people to take action after watching your
clips, whether that’s to visit your website for more, to book in for a
consult, to download a free trial or to purchase your products.
If you get confused about any of this, go to YouTube and search for
‘how-to videos’. You’re guaranteed to find someone who will walk you
through how to use video editing software or whatever it is you need.
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Activity
Write down at least 10 video topic ideas for your channel. Then grab
your diary and block out two hours over the next week to shoot your
videos. Remember, they don’t have to be super high production.
Strategies for growing subscribers
and attracting customers
YouTube is such a powerful tool not only for growing your audience but also
for driving traffic to your website. It’s also a brilliant platform for turning
‘cold’ leads into warm ones.
Let’s look at some ways to not only grow your subscribers but also your business.
Use keywords
When you upload a video on YouTube, there are a few places you can add
your keywords for that specific video to be found.
You’ve already compiled a whole list of keywords earlier in this book. You can
also use YouTube to search for your keywords and see what else comes up.
Type a few words and see what the search engine proposes. This will give you
ideas of popular search terms.
Title
Make sure your title shares exactly what the video is about. Make it
descriptive, engaging and something your audience might want to click on.
Sometimes titles that are too clever don’t work as well as straight-up ‘this is
what this video is about’ kind of titles.
For example, ‘How to grow your lemon tree’ is better than ‘Lemon
tree loving’.
You may also want to capitalise the first letter in your title to make it
stand out more.
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Description
This is where you can go into more detail of what the video is all about.
Here you definitely also want to add some of your keywords. YouTube will
only display the first few words in the search results, so make sure the first
sentence is engaging.
And most importantly also add a call to action. For example, ‘To buy your
own lemon tree, please visit . . .’
Add relevant links in your description. Google and YouTube are all about
providing relevant content to people. Lengthier descriptions using keywords
will have a bigger chance of making your content show up. Invite people to
subscribe and link to your other social channels.
Make sure you add http:// so that your links are clickable.
Tags
The purpose of tags is to categorise videos so that people can find relevant
information when using YouTube’s search engine. Remember, YouTube’s
mission is all about connecting users with the right information. So make
sure you add a few relevant tags to each of your videos.
You can add as many tags as you like using a combination of more broader
ones, such as ‘entrepreneurship’ and ‘business growth’, and more specific ones,
such as ‘how to grow your business’ and ‘small business growth strategies’.
Pro tip
Before you shoot a video, think about what set of keywords you’d like
to rank high for in this particular video.
Use hashtags
Even though hashtags are not as much in fashion on YouTube as on
Instagram or Twitter, hashtags do work on YouTube. Use them in your video
descriptions but keep them to fewer than 10.
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Select your video category
When uploading your video, YouTube asks you to pick a category that most
represents the content of your video. Make sure you pick the most relevant
one so your content shows up for the right category. The ‘how to’ category is
very popular on YouTube.
Invite viewers to subscribe
Invite your viewers to subscribe to your channel. At the end of your videos
let them know that you publish new content weekly (or however often you
choose) and invite them to subscribe so they don’t miss out.
Pro tip
If possible, publish your videos on the same day every week so your
followers can get excited for new content to come.
Encourage engagement
Engage with your community and respond to all comments. First of all,
people will feel appreciated and ‘seen’ and secondly it helps you increase
your engagement, which YouTube loves to see. The more engagement, the
more YouTube thinks your video is worthy to be shown to more people.
Share across multiple platforms
Share your videos on your other social networks as soon as they are published
on YouTube. This will help with early engagement. Leverage your audiences.
If you send a weekly or monthly update to your database, include your latest
video if it’s relevant to your audience and adds value.
Use YouTube cards
YouTube cards can be used to direct your viewers to your website. They are
clickable calls to action and a great way to drive traffic to your site. They also
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YouTube
add a level of interactivity throughout your videos and you get to promote
your other content within videos.
For example, if you are talking about a great resource or article you could have
a clickable pop-up card for people to download the resource from your website.
Optimise your thumbnail image
After you upload your video, YouTube gives you a selection of thumbnails to pick
from. Instead of picking a random one, customise them to your channel using
your brand strategy (see some examples in figure 14.3). These are important as
they are often your first impression when your video comes up as a suggested
video or in the search. You want something that catches people’s eyes.
Come up with a look and feel that represents your brand and then stick to it.
For example, you might use big, bold fonts on a yellow background, if that
fits into your brand strategy. Be consistent so your fans will recognise you!
Figure 14.3:
some examples of thumbnail images
Use the community tab
The community tab is only available for channels with more than 1000
subscribers. You can find it on top of your channel next to your videos and
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playlists. The community tab replaces the old discussions tab and instead of
only text-based updates, you can use text, images, GIFs, run a poll to ask for
feedback, and so on.
This functionality allows you to interact: engage with your subscribers, have
discussions, ask for their thoughts, and more.
Add the YouTube icon to your website
Add a link to your YouTube channel on your website homepage. There are
different YouTube website plugins that will work for your site.
Use your end screen
In your video manager, YouTube enables you to add an end screen with a call
to action. Use this to get people to subscribe to your channel, watch another
video or drive traffic to a specific page on your website.
If you add a ‘subscribe’ end screen, YouTube will add your profile picture with
a clickable link to subscribe. This is a great way to grow your audience and
encourage people to subscribe to your channel.
To see which end screens are performing best, check out your YouTube
Analytics.
Activity
Write down your top three growth strategies and implement them on
your channel.
YouTube advertising
YouTube advertising is another incredibly potent tool for business owners
to use to attract more customers. Since YouTube is owned by Google, you set
up your YouTube ads via Google Ads at google.com.
The same rules apply here as for Facebook.
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Here’s a quick summary:
•
Setting your objectives: What are you hoping to achieve with
your campaign? Increased website traffic, conversions, brand
awareness, leads?
•
Ad types: YouTube offers a variety of ad types, including:
•
display ads: these are clickable images or animations that appear
to the right of the video on a desktop. They can be up to 30
seconds long and are only viewable on a desktop
•
overlay ads: these are the ads that appear as banners on the
lower part of a video. They are clickable images that only appear
for desktop users
•
skippable video ads: these are the ads that play within the video
player before, during or after the video. They can be between
12 seconds and 6 minutes in length. Viewers can skip the video
after 5 seconds. You pay for viewers who watched past the first
30 seconds. These need to be engaging so people don’t skip them.
They’re also great for brand awareness as your brand is right
in front of people even if they skip the first few times. You can
customise these with calls to action and text overlays to guide
people to your website
•
non-skippable video ads: these are . . . well . . . unskippable by the
viewer. They appear before, during or after a video. They need to
be less than 15 seconds in length. These are great for getting your
viewers’ full attention for 15 seconds
•
bumper ads: these are non-skippable ads under 6 seconds in
length. You can’t really share much in 6 seconds, but they make
great complements to longer video ads. They are also great for
brand awareness
•
sponsored cards: these are similar to overlay ads and can be
used to show relevant content on your main video including a
call to action to visit your website. They are great for advertising
offerings within your videos.
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Experiment with a combination of different ads and see what
works best for you and your business. Just keep an eye on
your metrics in your AdWords account so you can turn off the
campaigns that aren’t working and turn up the ones that are.
Also check your Google Analytics to see where the traffic to your
site is coming from.
•
Targeting: You can target people by such things as location, language, age
and gender. You can also target them by interests and search history—
for example, ‘interior design tips’ or ‘the best artwork in Australia’.
•
YouTube Analytics: YouTube Analytics is very thorough but can
also be confusing. Here are the most important metrics to keep
your eyes on:
•
Average view duration per video. If you can get this above 60–70
per cent that’s great and means that your videos are engaging
and making people want to continue watching your content. Do
more of what people are watching.
•
Engagement in your comments, shares and likes. Engagement is
key for your videos to show up more in searches.
•
YouTube’s demographics report. This shows you who is watching
your videos segmented by age, gender and geography.
•
Subscriber growth. Your subscribers are your loyal followers who
will receive notifications when you launch a new video.
•
•
Traffic sources. These show you how viewers found your videos.
Keywords. These show you the most popular keyword searches
used to find your videos.
Hot tips and tools
There are so many great tools to help you get the most out of your social
media efforts. Here are some of my favourite tips and tools for YouTube:
•
210
Don’t worry about trolls. Unfortunately some people get a real buzz
out of being lame and disrespectful on social media because it’s easy
YouTube
to hide behind a screen. Don’t engage with trolls and don’t let them
discourage you.
As your business becomes more visible and you gain more traction,
it’s quite possible that someone will leave a distasteful comment
on your channel. Don’t worry about it, unless of course it’s a fair
customer complaint that you need to deal with.
You can delete comments that are not relevant. We’ve had some silly
and irrelevant comments such as ‘her feet are sexy’ (thank you!) or
‘this is boring’ (well, go back to watching cat videos then!).
I wouldn’t delete relevant comments but instead respond
respectfully, always taking the high ground.
•
YouTube Studio is a great YouTube-owned app that is perfect for
managing your channel. It also works well on your mobile device.
You can monitor performance, respond to comments and more.
•
Royalty-free music. The YouTube audio library has a bunch of
royalty-free music.
•
TubeBuddy is a free browser extension that allows you to run
tests to improve your content. You can test titles, tags, thumbnails
and descriptions. It’s a great tool for helping you figure out what’s
working best.
TubeBuddy also tracks your ranking and evaluates how you are
performing in comparison to other YouTube accounts.
•
vidIQ is another way to monitor your YouTube audience analytics.
Among other things, you can check who is watching your content,
identify influencers and manage comments. It also enables you to see
the top keywords and tags used by other channels.
•
Tubular Labs (formerly Tubular Insights) helps you keep up to date
with the latest trends. This tool tracks all video content across all
platforms and breaks it down by trends.
•
Spectacle is another brilliant website you can get video inspiration
from. On this site you can see how other companies use video to build
their brand—from product videos to customer stories. Get inspired!
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CHAPTER
SUMMARY
YouTube is one of the most powerful platforms for businesses and its
popularity has continually increased over the past few years. It can be an
incredibly powerful tool for helping business owners to build authority by
sharing valuable insights, gaining trust and ultimately attracting more
customers.
If you choose to use this network—and I highly recommend you do—
remember MAVERICK principle #1 (Momentum). Commit to a publishing
schedule, even if it’s one video per month to start off with, and stick to it.
Don’t give up if your views and subscribers don’t increase immediately. It
takes time to grow your audience. Once you’ve found your rhythm, stick to it
and you will gain momentum. Embrace MAVERICK principle #3 (Value) and
you’ll soon have a loyal following.
The good news is that once you’ve published your videos, they will stay there
and keep attracting viewers and potential customers.
A week in the life of a YouTube pro looks like this:
•
•
Publish a weekly YouTube video.
•
•
•
•
Shoot a monthly or quarterly case study video.
Watch a few YouTube clips to get inspired (set a timer so you don’t
waste all day!).
Add the video content onto the website.
Distribute it across other social channels.
Use YouTube ads to drive traffic and increase sales.
The beginning
Congratulations—you’ve made it to the end of the book!
And this is just the beginning of an amazing journey of leveraging social
media to grow your business and reaping the rewards of your efforts for
a long time to come. Social media is very likely here to stay. The channels
and their functionalities may change, but the same core marketing and
communication principles will apply.
There are so many lessons and hot tips in this book, it’s impossible to
implement them all at once. Prioritise and set aside an hour or so per week to
implement the ones that you feel will work for you and your business. Then
come back to this book whenever you need a refresher.
Remember: it’s better to excel at a few select channels that are relevant for
your business than doing a half-hearted job at all of them.
Since the social media world is changing so fast, keep referring back to the
resources at our website, basicbananas.com/socialmedia. We’ll keep this site
updated, so you’ll find the latest and greatest in social media there.
And lastly, always come back to the MAVERICK principles and you really
can’t go wrong!
You’ve got this!
213
Index
ad campaigns
— audience 88–89
— automatic placements 92
— budget 89–90
— capture, offer, remarket
and educate (CORE) 92–98
— copy 91
— and creative 91–92
— objective 88
— test, measure and adjust
your 102–104
ad creativity 168
advertising
— Facebook 86–101
— Instagram 128
— LinkedIn 152–153
— Pinterest 186–187
— Twitter 167–168
— YouTube 208–210
authority content 58–59
behind the scenes content 59, 81
Brand Alchemy Method 39–56
brand differentiation 46–47
brand engagement
— external brand
activation 52–55
— internal brand
activation 55–56
brand foundation 40–41
brand identity 44–46
branding 37–38
— Brand Alchemy
Method 39–56
— personal vs business 38
brand messaging 49
brand principles 41–44
brand promises 49–52
brand purpose 40–41
brand your videos 200
bumper ads 209
business branding 38
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Social Media for Small Business
capture campaign, 93
capture, offer, remarket and educate
(CORE) campaign 92–98
community tab 207–208
competitions
— Instagram 125
— Twitter, 164–165
content bucket method
— authority content 58–59
— behind the scenes 59
— checklist 62
— curated 61–62
— discoverability 63
— images or videos 63
— industry news and trends 59
— product reviews 60
— promoting your business 61
— text 63
— user-generated content 60
content checklist 62
content creation
— Facebook 81–83
— from other sources 61–62
content curation 61–62, 82–83, 161
content strategies
— behind the scenes content 81
— content bucket method 58–62
— content curation 82–83, 161
— daily live update 161
— evergreen authority
content 160
— Facebook 81–83
— Instagram 114–119
— keywords 65–66
— LinkedIn 142–144
216
— Pinterest 180–182
— promotional content 162
— repurpos 64
— sharing customer stories 81–82
— social media 69–71
— tips 62–64, 81
— Twitter 160–162
— use emojis 64–65
— YouTube 194–204
content themes 69–71
cost per action 101
cost per click 101
direct messages (DMs)
— Facebook 86
— Instagram 111, 125–126
— Twitter 165
display ads 209
educate campaign 97–98
emojis 64–65
evergreen authority content 160
external brand activation 52–55
Facebook 75–76
— advertising 86–101
— business pages 77–79
— content creation 81–83
— cost per action 101
— cost per click 101
— and definitions 76–80
— direct messages (DMs) 86
— groups 79–80, 84
— growth strategies 83–86
— hot tips and tools 103–104
Index
— ‘likes’ campaigns 98–99
— Live 84–86
— personal profile 77
— set-up 76–80
hashtags
— Instagram 121–123
— social media 116
— Twitter 164
— YouTube 205
hope marketing 20
hunting 20–21
IGTV 113
influencer marketing 127
Influence: The psychology of
persuasion (Cialdini) 4
Instagram 107–108
— advertising 128
— competitions 125
— content strategies 114–119
— and definitions 108–114
— direct messages (DMs)
111, 125–126
— following and unfollowing 120
— growth strategies 119–128
— hashtags 121–123
— hot tips and tools 128–129
— influencer marketing 127
— Live, 113, 123–124
— set-up 108–114
internal brand activation 55–56
keywords 65–66, 183–184, 204
lead funnel 27
LinkedIn 131–133
— advertising 152–153
— content strategies 142–144
— core elements for 134–141
— and definitions 133–142
— events 151
— groups 149–151
— growth strategies 144–151
— hot tips and tools 153
— premium 151
— set-up 133–142
marketing 17–18
— desires vs frustrations
matrix 24–25
— funnels 27
— hope 20
— hunting vs farming 20–21
— mass 19–20
— Online Eco-System 27–36
— relationship-based 21
— researching audiences 25–27
— understanding your
audience 23–24
mass marketing, 19–20
MAVERICK principles
— audience 11
— consistency 12
— enjoyment 12
— improvement 12
— kindness 13
— momentum 11
— relationships 12
— value 12
media 8
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Social Media for Small Business
Niche content 117–119
non-skippable video ads 209
normal pins 178
nurture funnel 33
offer campaign 93–95
Online Eco-System 27–28
— building relationships 32–33
— conversions 31–32
— customer journey 34–36
— reactivation 33–34
— website traffic or visitors 30–31
— your website 28–30
opt-in funnel 32
overlay ads 209
perception 37
personal branding 38
pinning 177–179
Pinterest 173–175
— advertising 186–187
— content strategies 180–182
— and definitions 175–180
— growth strategies 182–185
— hot tips and tools 188
— set-up 175–180
— shopping 186
positioning statement 44, 48–49
product reviews 60
promoted pins 178
promotional content 162
reactivation funnel 33
relationship-based marketing 21
remarketing campaign 30, 95–97
218
repurpose content 64
rich pins 178
sales funnel 32
shop the look pins 178
skippable video ads 209
social 7–8
social media 7
— audiences 67–68
— challenge 5
— channels 68–69
— content strategy 69–71
— exponential vs linear 3–4
— goals for 67
— hashtags 116
— leverage principle 3–4
— plan 67–72
— power of small 4–5
— publishin 71–72
— small businesses opportunity 9
social proof 4
sponsored cards 209
story pins 178
tagline 48
target markets 68
tone of voice 69
Twitter 155–157
— advanced search 166
— advertising 167–168
— building relationships 165
— competitions 164–165
— content strategies 160–162
— direct messaging (DM) 165
— followers 163–164
Index
— growth strategies 163–166
— hashtags 164
— hot tips and tools 169–170
— set-up and definitions 157–160
— unfollow 163
URL 136, 150, 157, 193
user-generated content 60
videos
— content 197–200
— editing tools for 203
— length 202–203
virtual networking 132
website traffic 30–31
YouTube 191–193
— advertising 208–210
— and attracting
customers, 204–208
— channel keywords, 194
— channel name, 193
— channel trailer, 194
— content strategies 194–204
— hashtags 205
— hot tips and tools 210–211
— keywords 204
— repurpose your content 201
— set-up and definitions 193–194
— subscribers growth 204–208
— tools for recording
videos 201–202
— URL 193
— video content 197–200
— video length 202–203
— your header image on 193–194
YouTube Analytics 210
219
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