Category Archives: social media marketing

Creative ways to solve low ranking on social media

When people talk about ranking and search engine optimisation, (SEO), it can feel like a very dry subject that gets most of us glazing over. So, I’m hoping that my blog this week will help unravel those complicated articles and make it a bit clearer!

I’m not going to go into the ins and outs of SEO, but concentrate on social media SEO, which can help your small business be seen and help with your ranking on Google.

Recently I’ve talked about algorithms and how their constant and many changes effect small businesses. Creating great content is very time consuming, without even thinking about networking and the engagement that you must do to keep your business in the spotlight. But, and this is a big BUT (!), social media isn’t just about posting articles and images, and this is a huge misconception for a lot of businesses, it’s about building brand recognition, sharing valuable and memorable content, earning that all-important trust from your audience, showcasing your expertise, and driving targeted traffic to your website, shop, or blog.

What is SEO for social media?

Social media SEO is about combining social media and SEO strategies, so that when someone does a search in google for something you do, your position in that ranking is on that first page, and the key to that is optimising certain keywords or phrases that are relevant to you and your business. For example, I specialise in marketing strategy for small businesses. My target market is small businesses, specifically creative businesses. So, I use these phrases as a category or tag when I publish my blog posts to help my business get found. If you type ‘creative business marketing in Charente’ or ‘small business marketing Charente’ into google, my marketing blog (which includes my name, email address and contact details) ranks on the first page. This encourages people to click on my blog posts, which then points them to my website where they can find more information about what I do and how I can help.

Social media helps you big time in achieving this. You can include keywords and phrases in your posts and in hashtags. And you can point readers, via a link, to your blog, shop, or website.  

No matter what business you’re in, whether you’re an artist, writer, builder, dentist, beautician, photographer etc, there are billions of people out there who trawl the internet every minute of every day, searching for things they want to buy, or just generally looking for something that grabs their attention. Did you know that ALL the major social media sites now use hashtags, keywords in posts or both, to CATEGORISE YOUR CONTENT? People can follow hashtags or subjects they’re interested in; in the same way they follow accounts – every post that they engage with tells that particular social media site about their interests. Then they will automatically be shown similar content from accounts they don’t follow. And, if you’re doing all you can to rank your social media posts, that content that’s being pushed could be yours!

If just the word ‘SEO’ gets you running for the hills, screaming, and pulling your hair out, you can be assured that even though it is important, social media outshines SEO in the social aspect. SEO gets people to click into your website, shop, or blog, but it doesn’t help you engage with your audience. That’s down to you and your social media posts.

But you can use your social media posts to ask your audience questions using polls, you can engage in comments and learn a lot about their wants and needs are, as well as replying to questions and concerns. Then you can use this information to make more relevant posts – and include the keywords and phrases you know will resonate with your audience, (SEO), to encourage them to engage more, share your content and visit your website, shop, or blog. It’s kind of a big circle!

SEO really is just getting traffic where you want it and being found on google.

How does social media help your SEO?

Social media helps by:

  • Helping your content get found and enjoyed by more people – this is especially important if your business does not rank on the first page of a google search.
  • Building your brand awareness. Social media helps you expose your business to a wide audience, so when your business does appear in search results, it will be a familiar name.
  • Building your credibility – showing your expertise and knowledge on social media helps to set you up as an expert in your field.   
  • Generating trust – your followers on social media learn to trust you through the engagement they have and see with others on your page. When someone likes what you do and has a great customer experience, they will refer you to their friends and family – so they will check out your business, which may include searching for you on google.
  • Increasing local knowledge of you and your business. Local SEO, (keywords and phrases that mention your area – small business marketing in Charente), helps your content get discovered by people local to your area. This is especially important for us smaller businesses.
  • Building more links to your business – the more that links to your business is shared, the more likely you are to rank higher. Encourage people to share your content that has links to your website, shop, or blog. That will then be seen by their followers. You can also buddy up with other businesses – choose those that do something that compliments your business – and put links to each other’s business on your website. For example, if you are a hairdresser, you could buddy up with a beautician and/or nail technician to offer a full wedding package. 

It’s important to remember that business social media pages appear in google searches, and I’ve heard that Google is working with Instagram and TikTok on an agreement to index video posts.  

What can you do to help boost clicks to your website?

Although the answer to question, ‘Does social media improve my ranking on Google?’ is technically ‘no’, it plays a crucial part and is a powerful SEO tool to help boost clicks to your website, shop, or blog, which in turn helps with your rankings.

Here are three quick tips that can help you with your social media content to help boost those clicks:

  • Cut down on word count. This is a very controversial statement, and I must admit not one that I adhere to all the time! The ideal length of a post varies depending on the social media site, but generally less is more. According to Neil Patel, his research shows that the click-through rate on paragraph-long Facebook posts is 2-6 times lower than updates that are approximately 40 characters long. 16 Tips To Improve Your Social Media Conversions (quicksprout.com)
  • Tell your audience what you want them to do next…include a call to action (CTA). Use words or phrases such as, ‘check out’, ‘like’, ‘follow me for more….’ Don’t leave anything to chance – if you want people to read your blog post, ask them by giving a link; if you want them to check out your shop or website, tell them how they can do that. Be clear and concise.
  • Give your audience a reason to click away from your social media post. Don’t just sell to people, help them. Ensure that your content solves a problem or pain point that you know is common to your customers. If your products or services help solve that problem, pointing them to your website or shop for the solution will help your click-through rate.

Conclusion

I hope that this article has helped you see how your success on social media can influence your SEO results. In short, if you use your social media channels and posts to distribute helpful content to your audience, build your brand awareness and point people to your website, shop, or blog to gain more traffic, it will always impact your SEO rankings, and you’ll nail it!

I help small businesses with marketing strategy and social media marketing strategy, so please feel free to contact me. I offer a no-obligation 30-minute consultation. Email me at cindymobey@outlook.com

Alternatively, you can follow my marketing blog, which gives heaps of marketing tips every week – cindymobey.blog

Take your marketing from mediocre to marvellous

The one thing that most small business owners have in common is the dream about what their business has the potential to grow into. They want it to be a success and know they can do it if they work hard.

However, sometimes it’s hard to focus on what is important and you sometimes lose the focus on the future and how to keep moving forward. How many times do you find yourself wondering if it’s all worthwhile? How often do you feel like just jacking it all in and doing something else?

You know that in this digital age, especially since Covid raised its ugly head and everyone had to find more innovative ways to reach their customers, that having quality content online that engages your audience is crucial. But that really is only half the picture. You also need to ensure your audience is exposed to this content, and that means building a successful content strategy beyond social media posts.

This week’s blog looks at how you can work ON your business, NOT IN your business, and take it from mediocre to marvellous.

Resolve your mediocre marketing

Mediocre is quite a depressing place to be in marketing. Lots of businesses pay more attention to how they look than what they’re saying, or how they’re saying it. I’m not saying everyone does this, of course, but instead of focusing on what makes us unique, we are all guilty at some time or other of saying what people expect us to say or do.

So, what can you do to resolve your mediocre marketing?

All small businesses have lots of balls in the air. Not only do lots of you have a family to look after, but you also have everyday things to keep on top of too. Some of you are running your small business as a side hustle, as well as holding down a full-time job, and you can find yourself being pulled in all directions. This can lead to a mindset of ‘hoping for the best,’ which in turn can lead to you being unproductive – and it’s exhausting!

One of the answers is to work smarter instead of harder. Here are some things to think about:

Have a plan

If you read my blog regularly, you will know what I’m going to say; you need a marketing plan.

At this point, you might just switch off. Is it because you find the thought of having to plan a bit overwhelming? It’s probably the last thing you want to hear…again!

But not having a marketing plan makes your job harder and juggling all the harder to handle.

If you have a marketing plan, you can focus on the things that are necessary. In ‘The Trend Report: Marketing Strategy 2022, reported by CoSchedule, it was found that people who have a plan to market their business are 313% more likely to report success than those who don’t.

And, although it may seem very overwhelming, it really isn’t.

What should a marketing plan contain?

For starters, it doesn’t have to be 100 pages long – that won’t help you at all. It needs to be clear and short, realistic, and repeatable, as well as easy to understand so you can tweak it as you see fit in future months.

It needs to show:

  • Your Vision/Mission statement
  • The four Ps – products, pricing, place (where you’re going to sell what you do), and promotion (how you’re going to sell your products or services).
  • Market analysis – look at your competitors
  • Target market – who you are aiming your products/services at
  • Your goals or objectives
  • Your promotion strategies
  • What budget you have if any
  • How you’re going to measure the success of your plan

If you would like a simple to follow marketing plan, sign up to my email and receive your free ‘Marketing your small business workbook.’ This will help you get on the right track.

Don’t try to do too much

Trying to do too much can also cause you to do less. For example, I know businesses that are on five or six social media channels. It’s good if you have the time to manage them all, but my experience is that you’re likely to lose your motivation and abandon them one by one.

Trying to be seen everywhere is not easy to maintain long term, especially if your business is just you. So, I would always advise to focus on just a couple of social media, or online channels and do them well.

Be consistent, add plenty of value to your customers and have a goal – what you expect to achieve from your social media activity.

One of those online channels doesn’t have to be social media – it could be email marketing. To build a lucrative email list, it’s advised to have a lead magnet that entices people into subscribing to your email. I realise that email isn’t for everyone, but if your business is steadily growing, you engage with your audience regularly online, (and may be finding this is taking up too much of your time), the next option is to create an email subscription, where you can talk directly to your customers every week or month.  

  

Not everyone is your audience

I know I’ve posted about this recently on my social media pages, but one mistake that lots of small businesses make is to try to sell to everyone. Not everyone is your target audience, and by trying to target everyone, you risk selling to no one.

You need to know your audience, build a couple of buyer personas and tailor everything to them.

Don’t spend too much money

The word ‘budget’ is something guaranteed to send fear into most small businesses hearts. It’s not one of our favourite words, but it is important. Having a budget, no matter how small, can help your business.

There are so many digital marketing apps it is all too easy to keep subscribing to new apps. But while they might be individually cheap, they add up.

Look very carefully at what you spend your money on. Do you spend a lot on app or analytics tools? I do subscribe to Canva, and it’s worth every penny as I use it every day, but I have recently stopped subscribing to a few, as they were just a waste of money.

It is worth spending money on things you will use and will help you make your business more successful.

Here are a few ideas on what you can spend your marketing budget on:

  • A website (some people prefer to spend on things like Etsy or Shopify rather than a website as lots of the marketing can be done for you, but I feel it’s better to have your own website with built-in e-commerce, as you own it yourself
  • A registered domain
  • Training – so you learn more about things associated with your business
  • Paid ads – this needs very careful consideration to get the right kind of ad
  • If you are service based, you might want to invest in scheduling and measurement tools
  • Hire some professional help, such as a marketing coach, someone to help you with your business/marketing/social media strategy, or someone who can build your website, write blog posts, or set up your email marketing.

Don’t forget about your existing customers

Did you know that your existing customers are your biggest sales opportunity? Happy customers are loyal customers and are five times more likely to buy from again, and four times more likely to act as referrals.

Looking after your existing customers is worth the effort as losing customers who are no longer engaged or hear from you, are more costly. It’s harder to find new customers than it is to keep existing ones.

Keep your customers engaged with your business by offering them gifts, or discounts, listen to their feedback and act on it, or maybe think about creating some sort of loyalty programme.

Stay up to date with technology

This is a hard one, but most of what you do as a small business will be routine. There will be some daily tasks that need to be done to keep your business running smoothly. The more effective you become in completing these tasks, the more time you must work more on your business. For example, instead of physically posting on social media every day, batch make your content for the week and schedule it. You then only have to do this once a week.

Keeping up with the latest tools you can use to help you can ultimately save you time and money.

Mix up your marketing activity

Check out your insights on social media to find out what kind of posts work best for you and what doesn’t. Change the type of posts you do, try, and include things like reels and video, as well as short and long posts. Post your blog articles, and remember to use posts that entertain, educate, engage, and inspire your target audience, as well as selling posts.

Take a step back

In this article, I’m not telling you what to do, but what I am trying to encourage is to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. It gives you time to assess what works and what doesn’t work for you.

It’s very easy to fall into the trap of doing the same things, just because that’s the way you’ve always done it, or because that’s what everyone else does. But in business, time is precious and it’s good to remember to:

  • Create a clear marketing plan so you can focus on essential activities
  • Only concentrate on the social media platform that you love and that you enjoy
  • Sell to a targeted audience rather than trying to sell to everyone
  • Make your budget work for you in the most efficient way
  • Make your existing customers your priority. They will be the ones to buy more, give reviews, and are more likely to refer you to their friends and family

This is basically what a marketing strategy is all about and will help your business go from mediocre to marvellous! If you need help in pulling together your strategy, please feel free to take advantage of my free 30-minute discovery call, where I can give you some tips to help your business

How to increase engagement on social media

Social media engagement is the measurement of the likes, comments and shares your social media posts get. However, it’s not just about the numbers, it’s about how engaged your audience is with your posts, videos etc. It’s about quality, not quantity.

For example, let’s say you hold a big BBQ at your home and invited loads of people – some you know and some you don’t. They all turned up, but all just sat around silently. Nobody spoke to each other, nobody danced, no fun and games. If you were just looking at the numbers game, your BBQ would be a huge success…after all, shed loads of people came. But was it really a success? Did your guests enjoy themselves? Did they like the BBQ food? You don’t know if you don’t speak to them and ask.

Social media is the same – engagement with your audience is crucial to build a rapport, to develop relationships with your followers and potential customers. It helps you to build customer loyalty and trust.

How do you engage on social media?

It’s all about interacting with the people who like and follow you. It’s about building those relationships, getting to know them, and showing a genuine interest in them and their business/family or whatever they talk to you about.

  • When a person comments on your posts, ALWAYS reply.
  • If they ask a question, answer it, and go that extra mile to give them the information they need – and more.
  • Depending on your post or the question asked, you can answer jokingly and have a bit of backwards and forwards banter.
  • Thank people for commenting; if you get a new follow-on Instagram, DM to say thank you and introduce yourself and ask about the person who has followed you. The same applies for Facebook – send a private message to say thank you and interact with that person – even if it’s just saying hi and asking them how their day has been.
  • Try and avoid talking about your products or services in these first contact messages – just be friendly, show your personality and be genuinely interested in your new contact.

These points are basic, but they do work.

Grow your followers!

Grow your followers

So now, we need to look at how to grow your followers – the more followers you have, the more engagement you’re likely to get. But please, DON’T buy followers and don’t do ‘follow for follow’ or ‘like for like’. Only follow or like someone or their business, if you are genuinely interested in them, if you genuinely like their business or their page, or are interested in the content they put out.

  • Be consistent – I know, I bang on about this all the time, but it really is important. You don’t have to post every day, but post regularly so that your audience know when you look for content from you.
  • Create unique content – don’t just copy what other people do. You can use ideas from other peoples’ content but make it your own. You can use Canva to make posts – there is a free version, so you don’t have to pay to start on this site and it’s extremely useful, with lots of different templates to help you. It’s also super easy to use.
  • If you share someone else’s post, make sure you always credit them with it, so people know who created it.
  • Use a mixture of posts, such as quotes, gifs, memes, jokes, video, hints and tips, ‘how to’ posts, informational posts, educational posts – the list is endless.
  • You can also do ads for your business/products/services as a post but keep these to a minimum. Apply the 80/20 rule – 80% of posts to engage, entertain, educate, or inspire and 20% selling.
  • You can do paid ads to increase your followers, but you don’t have to do this.
  • Have a consistent look and feel to your page posts – this comes down to your brand – what do you want your posts to look like? How do you want people to feel? What colours do you use? A theme could be the look of your content, the type of content your share (funny, educational, inspiring) – this will largely depend on what you do. For example, if you’re a mindset coach, you might post inspirational quotes or tips to improve mindset, so this is worth spending some time thinking about what you want to portray to your audience.
  • Use images in your posts.
  • You can also collaborate with other businesses to help grow your followers. It’s best to collaborate with other businesses who have a similar audience to you but sell or promote different types of products or services. For example, if you are a hairdresser and you do hair for weddings, you could collaborate with a make-up artist who also does weddings – you can recommend each other when you get a booking. You can put links on each other’s social media pages and websites.
  • A collaboration could also include a contest or giveaway, a blog post promoting their products or a post on your social media pages…and vice versa.  
  • Set up a Facebook group. These are great for increasing social media engagement as they tend to be more social than pages as the members can post questions or comments at any time. It also means your customers can communicate with each other and get to know other like-minded people. It’s important that you are active in your group every day, several times a day – you need to keep an eye on things to make sure any disputes or differences of opinion don’t get out of hand…and moderate posts to avoid spam. And of course, engage with your group members by posting something of value every day.   

Measurement

As with everything, measurement is important. If you don’t measure what you do, how will you know if things have improved or if you are successful?

So, before you start any new engagement campaign, look at your insights on your various social media pages. Take a note of your followers, look at the type of posts that are popular. Then, when you embark on increasing your engagement, you’ll be able to see how you’ve done against what you did before. You’ll be able to see which posts people like and don’t like, what kind of posts get comments, which ones get shared, and which ones produce tumbleweed! 

Most of all, enjoy your social media – there’s a clue in the name! It’s about being sociable with others, engaging with them, building relationships, gaining trust, and making new friendships and business contacts, as well as new customers.

If you have any more tips, please let me know in the comments.

If you’d like to have more marketing tips delivered to your inbox, (once a month only – not loads of spam emails!), please sign up to my newsletter, by clicking on the sign-up link below. I’m giving away a FREE Marketing Strategy workbook, which takes you, step by step, through the marketing strategy process. Hope to see you inside!

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How Social Media Marketing benefits your business

Social Media is probably the widest used platform on the internet. There are so many different platforms to choose from, and they all have millions of people using them every single day. For many of us, social media is the first thing we log into when we get up in the morning, and the last thing we check before we go to bed at night.

Social media sites can be accessed by any device that has an internet connection, including PCs, mobile phones, tablets etc. Some of the most popular sites are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Snapchat. It’s a huge advantage to any business, big or small, to be on some of these sites in order to grow business, and social media marketing is a bit part of that. 

So, what are the benefits of social media marketing?

The Time Factor

It can take as little as an hour a day to increase traffic to your sites, make sales and get your brand out there. Social media gives a massive amount of exposure to your business and social media sites are an important part of any marketing plan.  

Create social media profiles for your business on your chosen sites and start engaging with potential clients. Invite your friends, family, employees, business partners – in fact anyone you know, to like and share your page. Just having people interact with your page and your content will increase your brand awareness and start to build your brand reputation.   

More traffic

Social media marketing – posting and engaging with your followers – will help you reach many more people than if you ignore social media. Every single time you post, you are giving your business another opportunity to get a new customer. Join more than one social media site, as different platforms serve different people and different ages. Different people search differently and also like different types of posts, so mix it up with your posts – don’t stick to just selling. You also need to engage, entertain, educate and inspire your followers. The 80/20 rule is useful – 80% engaging, entertaining, educating and inspiring and 20% selling.

Social Media also gives you access to followers from all over the world, and engagement at all times of the day and night.

Search Engine ranking

Search Engine ranking

You will get seen more on social media, but of course, there is more to it than just posting every day. Search Engine Optimization is also important to get your page ranked higher with search engines, such as Google.

To give your business the best chance to be seen and found, create good quality content, use keywords and phrases, and use good quality images.

If you write a blog, share it to your social media page, do video, infographics, include the odd case study and give business information. Don’t forget the fun stuff too – show where you work, your hobbies, employee photos, stuff you do at weekends or for charity. This all helps to not only improve your ranking, but goes a long way to show that you are human and real to your customers.

Conversion

Once your business is more visible, you’ll have more opportunities for your posts to convert into customers. People like to know who they’re buying from, and social media allows them to see your personality, to engage with you on things other than business and have a little insight into the person you are outside of work. People prefer to deal with real people, so social media serves this purpose. The more of an impression you make on a new follower, the more likely they’re going to think of you when they need what you offer.

Customer satisfaction

As the name suggests, social media is about being sociable. It’s not just a business networking platform, it’s also a communication and social network too. When customers comment on your posts, make sure you reply and try to strike up a conversation. Showing that you reply to each comment personally proves to your customers that you care and value their opinions. This gives them a good customer experience and so they’ll be more satisfied.

Sometimes you will get a complaint or get asked difficult questions. It’s even more important to answer these comments – don’t ignore them. The fact that you take the time to respond publicly to a complaint or question will make the customer see you in a much better light, especially if you can turn it around and make the complaint into a compliment!

Brand loyalty

We all want to have shed loads of loyal customers who love what we do , how we do it, and who want to come back and buy from us time and time again. Social media can help with that. Customers love social media and love to interact with the company they’re buying from – they often see social media as the place they can communicate directly with you and your business. And research has shown that customers are more loyal to brands that directly engage with them on social media.

When customers see you engaging with your followers, they’ll start to see you as an expert – and regularly posting different kinds of posts makes you also appear credible. Interacting with customers shows you value them, and care about them. This will result in them recommending you to family and friends, they’ll mention your business on social media and, if they see someone asking for what you supply, they’ll put your business forward.  

 It doesn’t cost much

Social media marketing is probably the most cost effective form of marketing. You can join all platforms with a business page for free. You can post, engage, get new customers, and interact with them…all for free. It’s only when you decide to advertise on a platform that there is a cost, but the costs are really quite low compared to other forms of marketing.

Being on social media and having a huge following with loads of customers for free, gives you a bigger budget for other kinds of marketing or for investing in your business.

Market insight

This is one of the best things about social media. You can monitor and measure the activity on your sites – using the page’s insights. By interacting with customers and looking at how they react to your individual posts, you can gain valuable information about your customers.

You can find out what their interests are, what their opinions are, what they like and dislike. All information that can help you understand your audience and what they want from you.

Be an expert

I touched on this briefly earlier, but by posting well written content, quality images, and video etc., your audience will start to look to you for information and you will become an expert or leader in your particular field.

Social media platforms are the idea place to set yourself up as an expert. Being able to directly speak to your customers also creates a rapport with them, a relationship that you will both value. This could lead to you becoming an influencer.

Conclusion

Social media marketing needs to be done correctly and consistently. If you follow all the points mentioned in this article, you will find that you increase your brand awareness. Your followers will see you as an expert, will enjoy the interaction they have with your business and they will become loyal followers and customers