Tag Archive for: #business

How To Use Social Media To Grow Your Business

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Every business needs a presence on social media – this is now a fact.

The size of the business doesn’t matter. You can own a multinational company or a home based shop, but you still need to establish an online presence for your business. Social media marketing should be one of the most significant factors in your overall business marketing strategy.

Social media platforms allow you to connect and interact with your consumers, improve brand awareness, and enhance your sales and leads. With billions of people all over the world using social media every day, the engagement and users on the leading platforms continue to increase.

If you are wondering how to use social media to grow your business, then here are some useful tips that will get you started:

Setting Goals and Objectives
You first need to establish clear goals and objectives to create a strong social media strategy. It is ideal to follow the SMART goals framework to create specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and timely goals.

Your goals should be based on the factors that would have a major impact on the business. For instance, you want to increase your sales instead of just getting more likes on the posts. Use a social media calendar to create a proper content strategy by creating the right content for the right platform.

Using the 80-20 rule can prove effective, where 80% of the content would be used to entertain, educate, and inform your audience and the remaining 20% would be used for brand promotion and selling your products or services.

Identifying the Right Platforms
Don’t just assume about which platforms your target audience spends the most time on. You need to first understand who you are targeting and find the latest data about where that target audience is spending more time.

If you are targeting Gen Z, you might focus more on TikTok and Instagram instead of Facebook. However, data has highlighted that around a quarter of users on Facebook are between the ages of 18 to 24 years.

Remember, selecting the platforms doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing approach. You can still use the leading social media platforms and focus more on one or two to meet your business goals.

Staying on Top of Your Competitors

Believe it or not, social media is an excellent means of keeping an eye on all your competitors. It allows you to get some inspiration from their performance and monitor their progress. While what works for them might not necessarily work for you, your business can still identify the trends in your industry and use them to your advantage.

It is a great way to learn from other businesses and determine what makes their performance better than you. Never copy their posts and idea. Instead, get inspiration from them and make them your own. There are various tools that can provide you with a competitive analysis on social media.
It is crucial to self-analyse and monitor your performance and where you stand in the industry.

Keeping Up To Date on Trends
Keeping up with social media trends is a great way to stay relevant and get the chance to go viral. However, it is essential to understand that not every trend or viral meme would be right for your business. Therefore, keep an eye out for the ones that would work well with your business strategy and your brand image.

However, it is still a great idea to stay updated about all trends to determine what content your target audience likes and interacts with more. It will help you in creating more relevant content for them to attract them toward your business.

Establishing Brand Recognition
Raising brand awareness is usually a top goal for many small to medium businesses. It is due to the fact that customers prefer to purchase from the businesses that they recognise. Social media can help you in building brand recognition for your business.

Compared to other media, social media platforms place your brand front and centre easily and faster. With every post, your target audience views your logo and brand name, which increases your brand recognition.

You must invest your efforts and time in coming up with relevant content and posting it with relevant images. Be sure to have the business logo as the display picture and also add your business name or logo strategically in the content and images.

Remember to avoid putting your logowhere it could be overwhelming or distracting. Do focus on the visual elements of the brand.

Quality Over Quantity
With countless social media marketing strategies available for businesses, it can get overwhelming. The good thing is that you don’t have to use all of them. Just find a few strategies that work well for your business.

The important thing to remember is to produce more quality over more quantity on leading social media platforms to make an impact. Make sure all your posts offer some kind of value to your target audience and followers. If you only try to sell, people might not want to follow your brand.

Provide them with something useful, like how-to posts, tutorials, tips, and other motivation posts. It is more about building a lasting relationship with your audience. Social media platforms even allow you to ask your target audience what they want to see through pools and questions. Use them to your advantage.

Monitoring and Refining Performance

When you implement the social media strategy, the work doesn’t stop here. It is crucial to monitor the performance of your campaign to determine what is working and what isn’t working for your business. This will help you in finetuning your strategy and enhancing the results.

Use the analytical tools available on social media platforms to monitor the progress and the results. These tools will help you in tracking the performance and modifying your strategy accordingly.

 

Social media platforms, when used in the right way, can drastically improve the performance of your business. It can enhance your brand recognition, help you build lasting relationships with your audience, and keep you in control of your marketing strategy. If you are looking for assistance with developing your social media, get in touch with us today [email protected].

How to Generate Content Ideas for Social Media

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Are you feeling stuck with what to post on your social media?

Keeping a creative and fresh feed for your brand can be tiring, especially if you feel uninspired.

We have a strategy that can help you to consistently produce high-quality, engaging content that serves your audience.

This strategy is simple and involves using content pillars. Content pillars are topics or ideas that are the foundation of your social media strategy. Each pillar should represent relevant topics designed for your target audience. The pillars can be used to create a variety of content such as blog posts, videos and photos. Generally, the four pillars should entertain, inspire, educate and sell.

Content pillars ensure that the content you are producing is holistic and adds value for your audience, but they also provide clarity and direction with posting relevant content.

Once you have created content pillars that are able to sell, educate, inspire and entertain, you can start generating content ideas for each pillar.

Here are some examples:

Entertain:

  • Run a contest or giveaway
  • Take advantage of trending topics

Inspire

  • Repost User Generated Content (USG)
  • Post Behind-The-Scenes content of your business

Sell

  • Share customer reviews
  • Share accomplishments of your business

Educate:

  • Answer FAQ about your industry or expertise
  • Post a question box or allow your audience to ask you questions

It is important as a brand to post a variety of content in different formats. Written content such as blog posts allow you to be more technical and detailed, whereas photos and videos allow you to be more creative.

If you are still struggling with your social media strategy or content ideas, contact Savvy Creations. As social media management specialists, we provide services that generate valuable results to ensure you are optimising your digital presence.

How COVID-19 has impacted digital transformation in today’s business world.

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It comes as no surprise that the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the world we live in, in more ways than we ever expected. Overnight, we began relying heavily on digital technology to allow us to continue our lives as best and as ‘normal’ as we could.

Digital marketing has become the saving grace for many businesses throughout this time. Consumers are trusting the use of digital platforms to gain information about products and services, more than ever before. From online shopping to business networking, the use of online platforms have allowed businesses to continue to flourish despite the unprecedented changes that occurred and continue to occur.

It has become a crucial element for your business to enhance your digital strategy. In a time where focusing on the digital elements of your business may have been an area lower on your priority list. It suddenly became the most important step in assisting in your businesses survival. However, the implementation of these strategies will develop long-term benefits for your business.

Interacting with your clients and customer base has reached a whole new level through this digital transformation. With more people becoming well-versed in the digital space, there are new opportunities for you to reach, network and grow your audience and business. A number of studies have shown that the business world has digitised far more rapidly than previously projected due to COVID-19 and it has raised the bar for the development of a digitally inclusive future.

A survey conducted by Mckinsey and Company determined that businesses are three times more likely to say that at least 80 percent of their customer interactions are conducted within a digital landscape. Research has also displayed that on a global scale business digitisation has accelerated by approximately 7 years.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, we have all become well acquainted with online shopping, (it’s just a little too easy isn’t it!). In fact, in Australia since the outset of COVID-19, total online sales saw a rise of 67.1% throughout 2020.

The transition to enhancing the use of the digital space has required businesses to invest heavily in specific strategies whilst managing the security of the business. With the processes and investments that are required to do so, businesses have chosen to invest in this area for the long term.

It is now, more than ever an extremely beneficial opportunity to invest in the digital world of your business. This space has grown rapidly in the past two years and will continue to rise in importance and value.

Here at Savvy Creations, we provide the services to assist your business growth in the digital world. Feel free to reach out to our team of specialists to help you ensure you are getting the most out of your digital presence!

The Ying and Yang of Social Media

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Social media is a world unlike any other.

It’s still new to us, especially if you consider how it seems to be everchanging with each new phone update.

Life would be made much easier if only there was an extremely specific recipe to success for all small businesses on all social media platforms. A recipe that needed just a splash of engagement, a cup of killer content and a beautifully cohesive brand identity as the cherry on top. Then, BAM. You’ve got yourself a tsunami of eager customers for life.

In all seriousness though, I wish there was a simple recipe you could follow step by step that would unlock the secret to a successful social media presence… sadly there isn’t.

But, there are many methods that are proven to work that you can try out and modify for your specific business, product and audience. You can navigate your own way to social media success and create your own unique recipe to get there.

Something that will have to be figured out on this journey to a successful social media presence is where your fine line is for various topics. What is to too much and what is too little? What is smothering your followers and what is neglecting them? Where is the line between sticking with what works and boring, repetitive content?

Here are a few examples for you to consider:

  1. Over Posting and Under Posting

Finding that sweet spot in terms of how much you post is a vastly underestimated aspect of social media. It is commonplace for upstarting small businesses to believe they must post everyday (sometimes multiple times a day) in order to keep the interest of social media users.

This is false.

In fact, posting too much will likely annoy your followers who will have a newsfeed oversaturated by your content. It may negatively impact the view of your business and the number of followers you can maintain.

On the flip side, you don’t want to make your content scare so that you lose the opportunities social media provides for conversion and leads. Your acquired followers may also unfollow you if they don’t feel they are receiving the amount of valuable content they signed up for.

2. Over Selling and Under Selling

To sell or not to sell? That is the question!

This is probably the hardest area to pinpoint in terms of what is too much and what is too little on social media. Of course, it is important to promote your products and draw awareness to your website and other business materials. That is why businesses use social media in the first place, to market their brand and products.

However, too much selling can sometimes repel audiences as they begin to feel bombarded by efforts to get them to the checkout. Your business will lose its personable side.

In amongst content which promotes and sells, there should be content that is educational, motivational or prompts casual engagement with your followers in order to create a feeling that there is a person behind the brand.

I suppose you can say there is a fine line drawn between selling and building relationships. Strike the perfect balance between these two things and you’ll end up with trusting customers who are not only engaged with your product, but they are eager to support your business.

3. Finding Followers and Finding Customers

It’s true. It looks good when your social media pages have a large number of followers. Visitors to your page may be impressed by the numbers and opt to join the extensive list of followers. A large following has potential to increase engagement and the sharing of your content to an even greater audience of people.

BUT…

Obsessing over numbers should not be your objective. Finding people that will have a genuine interest and customer potential should be the objective.

There’s no harm in having a couple of empty followers (those which add to your follower count but will not contribute more to your business) but the core base of your following should be made up of people that are beneficial to your business. These people can be obtained through targeted advertisements, use of relevant hashtags and searching the follower lists of competitors.

It is up to you to walk that fine line between having a larger following that looks impressive to visitors whilst still having quality individuals that make up this list.

4. Doing What Works and Making Content Varied

On social media, you track and measure the success of your content. When a post skyrockets and does ten times better than all your other posts, it’s exciting and you feel like you’ve finally cracked the code. All you have to do is keep posting that kind of content, right?

Unfortunately, that’s not how it works.

It’s important to know what your audience responds positively to and engages with but, you should endeavor to keep your content varied. Social media audiences will not tolerate copy-paste content, they appreciate variation and innovation.

Sure, if posting a “Tip Tuesday” is your thing and your audience is positively responsive, keep it up. If you have an adorable dog that your audience goes wild for, include them in a post every now and then. Take advantage of what works, but don’t let your content become too repetitive and stale —your audience won’t thank you for it.

Turning a Negative into a Positive: How to Handle Negative Reviews

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Let’s be honest, we’re all human and we’ve all made mistakes. Some are the big type, some are the small type and some are the “I forgot my lip balm today” type. They can conjure feelings of guilt, embarrassment and can tinge your cheeks an unflattering shade of red. Yet, these mistakes usually pave the way for us to learn and move on.

Unfortunately, if you’re standing at the helm of a business, any mistakes that are made are a little harder to face internally and to gracefully leave behind you. This is because your mistakes are publicly scrutinised online through the accessible medium of negative reviews.

Though we wish everyone could forgive, forget and leave a review on our Facebook page praising our efforts, the reality is that sometimes we make mistakes and people will speak out about them. A negative review is far from ideal, in fact one negative review is shown to drive away 22% of prospective customers. However, the way in which you manage and respond to this review can significantly improve the perception of your business.

Respond quickly:

If you see a negative review, you should respond promptly. Leaving it is like leaving a parasite and allowing it to infect the reputation of your business. Some businesses choose to reach out privately to negative comments (through social media direct messages) to provide a more personalised, in-depth response. However, a prompt public reply should also be provided acknowledging the mistake and outlining what is being done in response. This ensures other readers know you are taking positive action and are responsive to all feedback.

Responding with haste will narrow the window of opportunity for individuals to view the negative comment in its isolated form and improve your chances of gaining new customers. Ideally, no one will see the negative comment without your empathetic, apologetic response tethered to it.

 

Don’t Delete:

It may be tempting to delete the unflattering or incriminatory words of a disgruntled customer, but this will do more damage to your reputation. You may gain new customers through the absence of the negative review, but you’ve lost a customer and any future customers they could have referred to you. By deleting their comment that they took the time to leave, you are communicating that their feedback is not valued and that you don’t intend to improve on whatever they found dissatisfying. If you delete it, you are simply adding fuel to the fire.

In the unusual circumstance of inaccurate reviews (pertaining to products or services you do not provide) or that resemble a misleading or fake review (made by competition, a former employee  or someone who has never been an actual customer), these reviews can and should be removed.

 

Empathise:

Often, you won’t agree with a review or perhaps what went wrong was completely out of your control. For example, when there are shortages of a certain product in a clothing store due to a sudden spike in demand, this is not exactly an avoidable situation. However, it is important to try and understand why the customer has posted what they did and how they might be feeling.

Imagine if someone had been saving up to buy an item of clothing and comes in-store to buy it only to find there are none in their size. Now, imagine that due to the upcoming line of clothing this item would no longer be in production. Understandably, they are disappointed. You may want to frantically explain the facts of the situation to justify the circumstances, but it is far more important to understand the customer’s feelings and show you care. You can explain without disregarding their experience, making excuses, or avoiding responsibility. This is far more likely to achieve a successful outcome.

 

Be Polite and Professional:

What’s worse than a negative review? A negative review accompanied by a rude, dismissive response. This is a recipe for a tarnished reputation.

It is imperative to remain polite and professional when addressing customers, but especially when responding to a customer who is unhappy with your product or service. This is your opportunity to make amends and prove your quality as a business and therefore, this should never involve insults, slander or flippancy.

A professional format for your response could look like:

  1. Introduce yourself/greet them.
  2. Thank them for their feedback.
  3. Apologise for the negative experience they had.
  4. Explain if there had been a misunderstanding (do not avoid responsibility)
  5. Outline what their concerns are and (if possible) how your business will change/avoid future occurrences like this.

 

Learn:

As mentioned above, there are ‘mistakes’ that are beyond your control. If a negative review brings to your attention an area of your business that could be improved (through employee development, improving phone/website service, technological developments, altering prices etc.) this feedback could be invaluable to the progression of your business. View negative comments as opportunities to learn, grow and gain insights that ensure future reviews are positive.