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The Modern Marketing Show, Episode 3: How to Get Out of the Social Media Black Hole

Let’s face it – you need social media today more than ever to have a successful small business. Customers want to be able to connect with you online, and this is the best way to do it. But, there’s a lot of information out there and so much to learn! It’s so easy for anyone to get sucked down the social media black hole. Between the number of social media sites, there are, all the third-party tools to use for scheduling, automation, and tracking to the proven tactics and strategies, not to mention it’s constantly changing – it’s hard to keep up with it all. Which is why it can be difficult to see any sort of business building results when you don’t know where to start.

Watch the full episode below:

If you’re posting the wrong content, to the wrong people, on the wrong sites – you’re wasting your time. The first step to getting out of the social media black hole is having a strong foundation. When you have a strong foundation you’re able to build off of that and allow your business to grow. Now you’re probably wondering what makes up a strong foundation? Let’s break it down below:

The Foundation

The Mindset – The Social Selling mindset is essential to moving your business towards ultimate success.

Intake Form – By filling this out, you’ll be able to understand how all aspects of your business work together to form your strategy.

 Perfect Customer Groups (PCGs) – It’s vital that you understand who your perfect customer is and how to communicate with them online.

Branding – Having a consistent brand across your social media networks helps your PCGs tie content back to your business.

The Right Social Networks – You always want to be where your customer is and only spend your time on those social networks.

The Right Social Media Person – The business owner shouldn’t be the one doing the social media, finding a social media manager is the best way to make sure it’s getting done.

Marketing Calendar/Staying Organized – Using a marketing calendar is a great way to stay organized and can help your social media manager effectively market what’s happening on the calendar.

When every part of the foundation is in place, your social media manager can effectively market what’s going on in your business to your PCGs on the right social media platforms to help support your business goals – with the mindset being the key piece at the top pushing all of this forward. 

This week make it a point to get started on building your social media foundation. You can now access this free social media workshop from now until February 7th, 2018 that dives deep on everything mentioned above. Click here to access now! 

PLEASE NOTE: Social Edge Live is now going by a new name – The Modern Marketing Show. We changed the name because even though we talk a lot about social media, we’re also going to be talking about and covering other modern marketing tools small businesses need to grow and thrive this year and in the future. You’ll still be able to tune in Monday’s at 10 a.m. PST, 1 p.m. EST for new weekly episodes – mark your calendars so you don’t miss out!

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The Modern Marketing Show, Episode 2: 3 Ways To Take Back A Couple Hours In Your Week

With modern marketing tools like social media, email, video marketing and more it’s hard to manage it all and stay on top of your to-do list. If you’ve ever felt like there’s just not enough time in your day – keep reading! We want to share with you 3 things you can implement right now to take back a couple hours in your week while still getting everything done. 

Watch the full video below: 

Tip #1: Keep a digital Calendar/Planner

  • You want this accessible to everybody on your team to help keep everybody organized. Make sure to include important dates (events, promos, markets, etc.), your social media posting schedule, email blasts, and anything else relevant to your business. Highlight your goals and when you want to achieve them by because when goals are written down you’re more likely to achieve them.

Tip #2: Make To-Do Lists and Delegate Your Workload

  • You want to make sure you’re prioritizing your to-do list in order of importance. If someone on your team can do something for you then pass the task off. You can’t do it all on your own – that’s why you have a team to help you. We swear by the project management tool Asana! You’ll be able to add on your team members, create and assign tasks, and check things off as they are completed.

Tip #3: Create and Use Folders (Physically and Virtually)

  • One of the best ways to stay organized is by making sure everything has a place and categorizing everything from employee records to images to post on social. We use Google Drive and highly recommend that every business and their team be on it. It makes it so easy to share important documents and always have access to business-related information in case something happens and the business owner isn’t around.

Now it’s your turn to be an action taker! Take 10-15 minutes at the end of each day to get organized for the NEXT day. Try it out this week, and share with us how it’s working for you in the comments below! Remember, having organization allows for you to focus on the bigger, more important tasks that need to get done and you’ll be able to overcome overwhelm and stress when things are in order.

Also covered in this week’s episode…

On January 11th, 2018, Mark Zuckerberg made a major announcement about changes being made to the News Feed. In his Facebook post, he mentioned wanting to bring Facebook back to what it was originally created for – connecting with friends and family. He wants to encourage more authentic and meaningful conversations and interaction on the platform. Facebook is going to focus more on showing posts from people and groups rather than business pages. This was based on research done about the emotional state of a human and what makes people happy.

People in our industry are referring to the changes as “Facebook Zero,” meaning zero reach and engagement for business pages. Our take on the announcement is that yes, free reach on Facebook is going to drop, but not necessarily go away completely. Here are some tools you’re going to want to integrate in your social media strategy, if you aren’t doing so already, to overcome the changes that are coming:

  • Facebook Ads
    • Business are going to need to pay to get their content seen.
  • Live Video
    • Live video prompts for conversation in the moment. People tune-in to a live video because they want to know what’s happening in real time.
  • Groups
    • Groups are a great way to build an online community and prompt conversation between other members in the group.
  • Event Pages
    • Make sure you’re creating an event page for any and all in-store events and even sales and promotions. With the release of the Local App by Facebook last year, this is going to be a place for you to show up for people looking for something to do in your area.
  • Messenger Bots
    • Use a messenger bot in order to automate your customer service and make it easy for people online to communicate with your business.
  • “See First”
    • Train your customers to click and add you to their “see first” notification list. This is going to be an important way for business pages and brands have their content show up to their customer’s newsfeeds. Urge customers to add you to their in order to stay up-to-date and get the latest information from your business.

PLEASE NOTE: Social Edge Live is now going by a new name – The Modern Marketing Show. We changed the name because even though we talk a lot about social media, we’re also going to be talking about and covering other modern marketing tools small businesses need to grow and thrive this year and in the future. You’ll still be able to tune in Monday’s at 10 a.m. PST, 1 p.m. EST for new weekly episodes – mark your calendars so you don’t miss out!

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The Modern Marketing Show, Episode 1: SMART Goals and Your Social Media Strategy

January is always a time to reflect on the past year and to turn your focus to the year ahead. Goal setting is a great way to keep yourself accountable which is why we’re going to be talking about SMART goals, why they’re important and how you can reverse engineer them in order to build your social media strategy.

Watch the full episode below:

If you don’t already know what a SMART goal is exactly, we’ll break down the acronym for you below. NOTE: There can be slight variation in peoples interpretations of what each letter stands for based on industry. This is our interpretation.

  • S – specific
  • M – measurable
  • A – achievable
  • R – relevant
  • T – timely

Here’s an example of a SMART goal a small business can set about increasing their Instagram following:

Increase Instagram audience size by 25%, of local women, ages 20-40, within 60 days.

This single statement has a clear objective that applies directly to their business, that can easily be measured and isn’t so far out of reach that they’re going to set themselves up for failure. It also has an exact timeframe in which the goal can be met. 

Setting a timeline is important because if you don’t set a timeline chances are you’re less likely to reach your goals. Or, you don’t give yourself a reason to celebrate your achievements because you reached something but didn’t realize you had. 

So why set SMART goals at all? When you have your goals laid out you’ll be able to then reverse engineer the strategy behind it. Having a strategy is key because it’s going to help you stay organized and accountable when it comes to reaching your goals.

Now it’s your turn to take action! Set aside some time this week to come up with 3-5 SMART goals you wish to achieve in the next 60-90 days. Share them with us in the comments below, we’d love to hear what you have to say!

PLEASE NOTE: Social Edge Live is now going by a new name – The Modern Marketing Show. We changed the name because even though we talk a lot about social media, we’re also going to be talking about and covering other modern marketing tools small businesses need to grow and thrive this year and in the future. You’ll still be able to tune in Monday’s at 10 a.m. PST, 1 p.m. EST for new weekly episodes – mark your calendars so you don’t miss out!

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Social Edge Live, Episode 33: 2017 Recap

What a year 2017 has been for social media. Although we didn’t see any new platforms emerge there were quite a few changes and updates to the sites we know and love. Let’s recap some of the most notable changes below:

  • Snapchat introduced the SnapMap and context cards
  • Facebook integrated stories across its entire platform (personal profiles, business pages, groups, and event pages)
  • Twitter increased its iconic character count from 140 to 240
  • Instagram introduced Story Highlights and Archives

Watch the full episode below:

Outside of changes made to the platforms, there were some key social media trends worth talking about that emerged in 2017. To recap, video reigned supreme. We saw major enhancements in video quality and there are a number of video tools out there to help small businesses and retailers to help improve your video marketing efforts. Live streaming videos have some of the heaviest weight on Facebook, and this trend doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon.

Facebook wants to provide the best user experience possible which is why the platform has to be strategic about who sees what when. Facebook’s algorithm makes it extremely difficult to get your content seen, but ads can be a workaround which is crucial for marketers. Having a pixel set up is beneficial for remarketing to people who have interacted with pages on your website. Groups have become more popular. This is because people are more likely to see the content posted in the group than on the business page. They also help create an online community and can be extremely high value when it comes to providing the best customer experience.

We’ve seen experience marketing emerge as a way to overcome online shopping. The better the experience a customer has with you not only online, but offline the more likely you’ll be able to keep them as a loyal customer.

Now let’s take a look at some things you should be looking out for in 2018:

  • Offline Conversion Tracking
    • This feature built into Facebook Ads helps track if someone saw your online ad and came into your story and bought from you. It’s still in its early stages but can be crucial when reporting on the effectiveness of your Facebook ads.
  • Messenger
    • This tool allows for automation in certain areas of your business and can provide an enhanced customer experience and customer service.
  • Video
    • A Facebook exec stated that the platform would be completely video within the next 5 years (and this statement was made a couple years ago). If this rings true it’s time to get started on using it and to get comfortable because it’s not going anywhere.
  • Back to Basics
    • This has everything to do with your social media strategy.  Everything you do on social media needs to connect back to your business goals. If you don’t have a solid strategy then it’s time to take a step back and really set up a plan for your success.

Social Edge is making some major changes in 2018. We’ve been very retail-specific since we started 5 years ago, but we felt everything we were teaching could be applied to all types of small businesses, so we decided to widen the net in order to help as many types of small businesses as we can. So be on the lookout for the newly redesigned Social to Sale – this training is meant to help build a social media strategy that can help support your business goals in the New Year.

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Social Edge Live, Episode 32: Facebook Ads Made Easy Plus Tips For Success

It’s not a secret that Facebook Ads can be one of the best tools small businesses can use to grow their businesses online. When done the right way they can even increase sales and engagement online and offline. But they’re time-consuming, technical, and can we hard to learn/understand which is why Social Edge can help make running ads easy for you.

Watch the full episode below:

For those of you currently running Facebook ads here are some important factors/tips to remember:

  1. During the holiday’s Facebook Ad costs are higher and overall reach is down.
    • There’s an influx of people trying to advertise this time of year. More competition means more people bidding over limited advertising space make it harder to get in front of your audience.
  2. Use video to help reduce ad costs.
    • Video is here to stay. Clients we work with see some of the best results when they use videos in their ads. It allows for more free, organic reach and more engagement across your social media platforms.
  3. Create and promote online events, like 12 Days of Christmas campaign.
    • Online events and sales can be fun to run because they create buzz and something to talk about. You create a sense of urgency for people to take part so they don’t miss out on the latest deal.

Social Edge offers Facebook and Instagram Ads management for qualifying businesses – taking all the hard work that comes with running ads off your to-do list. Below you’ll find an overview of what this service offering entails and how we can help.

  1. You need to advertise, your customers are on Facebook – but you don’t have to be the one to do it. Your focus should be on the daily operations that come with running your business and focuses on helping your customers.
  2. We become an extension of your marketing team. Your Ad Account Manager will take a look at your social media and overall business goals in order to come up with a content and ads strategy that is catered to reaching those goals. They’ll provide you with post/event ideas, tips, and inspiration in order to help jumpstart your efforts, save you time, and have it be strategic.
  3. Allows for some accountability to post on social media consistently. We provide you with the ideas, but it’s your responsibility to implement and execute them.
  4. Bringing in QUALITY LEADS versus sales. While we can’t guarantee sales, our ad clients have had record-breaking sales days within days or a few weeks of working with us. Ads help get people through your doors and then it’s your job to sell them while they’re in your store.
  5. One client said, “I really feel safe knowing you are always looking out for me.” This is true because we’re in your account daily making sure make sure everything is running smoothly, checking ad costs to make sure they’re where they should be, as well as making adjustments to your ads when needed to make sure they’re fulling optimized and performing well. It’s all about having peace of mind in knowing you’re being looked after. 
  6. Our ads management service works if you work it – you need to participate, but the results will be worth it. It’s all about teamwork because we can only do our job if you’re implementing our strategy. Your account manager will check in with you to see how everything’s going and to see how sales are. You can provide them feedback and adjustment will be made accordingly.

If you’re interested in having us run your Facebook and Instagram ads for you in 2018? You must go through our application process to be considered. Click here to learn more.

You can catch new episodes every Monday at 10 a.m PST on our Facebook Page. Replays will be available on the blog each week.