Social media is more competitive today
than ever before which is why if you don't follow the 5 tips that I'm
about to share with you, you might as well, just pack it in and give up now
because you're just gonna end up wasting your time, energy and money. Hey there my
name is Adam Earhart, marketing strategist and welcome to The Marketing
Show. Now, it's no surprise that social media today is more competitive than
it's ever been and essentially, if we take a look at social media as a whole,
from that 30,000 foot holistic overview, well, it's a no secret that it's kind of
a gong show. Billions and billions of users and new people signing in every
single day it's no surprise that a lot of business owners and entrepreneurs are
getting frustrated and overwhelmed and just swearing off social media
completely before ever seeing success on any of the platforms. Well, I don't want
that for you, which is why in this episode I'm going to be sharing 5
tips that you need to dominate your social media marketing, tips that I've
learned after years and years of running a social media marketing agency, running
thousands of campaigns for hundreds of clients across all sorts of different
markets, businesses and industries.
So, with all that said, let's dive right into
tip #1: Be selfless. Now, what I'm talking about here is creating content
that is incredibly customer focused. Way too many people, way too many businesses,
create content that is business focused and essentially, really selfish content
that serves pretty much nobody other than the business or the person that's
creating it rather than really trying to get into the mind and the shoes of the
person that they're trying to serve and to connect with and creating content
that's going to resonate and benefit them.
You see, one of the biggest things
with social media today is that it's now become well, a relatively sophisticated
marketplace with most customers having seen pretty much everything and having
already heard all of the spammy and sales these tactics that so many people
have used for so many years now. This means, if you want to succeed, you've got
to flip the script and essentially, approach it like, well, a normal nice, kind
of human being would which means creating content that's going to
resonate and really provide value to your market rather than just creating
stuff that you think might be interesting to you. Now, here's the catch,
doing this way easier said then actually done which means if you're going to
create customer focused content, really content that serves and
provides value to the people that you're trying to reach, well, first you're gonna
have to deep dive into that ideal customer that you're trying to connect
with so you can know what kind of content they want you to create. Now,
there's a few different ways that you can go about this but by far the best
way is to really spend some time crafting an ideal customer avatar which
is essentially, just a fictional representation of all of the best
characteristics of your absolute best customers, the kind of people that love
you, love what you do, want to do business with you or happy to pay you for the
value you provide and want to tell all of their friends and family about just
how great you are.
So, to do this, you really want to take a look at those
common characteristics between your top customers, between the people you want to
serve, you want to look at things like their demographic details like: age,
gender, income, occupation, title, things like that, their geographic details like:
what cities, state, province or country they live in and their psychographic
details like: their attitudes, interests, beliefs and basically, all the head stuff
that goes on it.
Also, pays to really dive into what I call their miracles and
their miseries. Their miracles being all of their wants and their dreams and
their desires and everything that they're trying to get that hopefully,
your business is positioned to give them and their miseries being all their fears
and frustrations and problems and nightmares and all the stuff they're
trying to get away from that again, ideally your business is positioned to
help move them away from. Now, if you have no idea what any of these are, well, it's
time to do a little bit of research and that means having some conversations
with your customers. Also, you can take a look at what are the most common
questions you get in your business or what are the most common questions out
there about the type of business you're in
which is widely available with just a simple Google search. Now, once you've got
all that dialed in, the next step is to go about creating content, that does one
of two things or hopefully even both which is to either educate them or
entertain them or again, combine them both with edutainment.
The reason
education is such a powerful tool when it comes to marketing your business, is
because we're naturally programmed as humans to respect and essentially to
value those that teach us stuff. Now, I could go into the details and the
studies behind why this is all true but the reality is all we have to do is
think about it for just a few seconds about how we're raised and how were
brought up to kind of respect authority and respect teachers and respect people
that are imparting their knowledge on us.
Well, you want to put yourself in that
position for your customers. The other side is to
entertain them. Now, especially today when attention spans are getting shorter and
there's entertainment all around, you want to do your best to ensure that your
content is providing some kind of entertainment value to your customers.
This doesn't mean you need to be funny or have really long drawn-out stories or
be overly creative, it just means that you need to keep them interested and
keep them engaged with whatever content you're creating. Basically, just try not
to be boring and you'll do okay. The final point on tip number one of being
selfless, is just to try to give more than you ever intend on taking and
ideally, give with no intention of ever taking knowing that by simply giving
away content and providing value, well, the receiving for you it's gonna come
naturally.
Alright, my next tip to dominate social media is to double down.
What this means is to really deep dive into your metrics and your analytics and
find what works best for your business so you can do more of that and less of
the stuff that doesn't work. Now, I know, this isn't the sexiest topic
to talk about. After all, metrics and analytics math and numbers there it's
not a lot of fun, especially when it comes to social media where we're often
sold on the promise of artsy and creative and making funny pictures and
gifts and things like that, but if you want to succeed and if you want to
dominate social media, you're gonna have to dive into the metrics and into the
analytics. Fortunately, the platform's whether we're talking about Facebook or
Instagram or YouTube or whatever, well, they've made their analytics dashboards
way more user-friendly than they've ever been before, making it a lot easier to
get the high level overview of exactly what type of content is resonating best
with your ideal target market. If you've never looked into the metrics before,
can't seem a bit overwhelming at first but it's okay to start with really high
level metrics like: what kind of content gets clicked on or gets more likes or
gets more shares it gets more comments, these are all vanity metrics which don't
necessarily, pretty much never, equate to actual monetary returns but there's
still a pretty good place to start when kind of getting your feet wet and
getting used to the whole metrics dashboard.
If you're a little more
advanced or have the functionality to track exactly what type of content leads
to more sales, well, then this is kind of a no-brainer. You basically want to do
more of that stuff. This is where the 80/20 principle or Pareto´s principle
really comes into play. Essentially, 20% of
your content is likely to get 80% of all the likes and comments and shares and
probably revenue which means, you really want to keep focusing in on that top 20%
that's giving you those 80% returns. Do more of that so you can get more of that.
Over time as you create more and more content, well, again you can take the top
20% of your top 20% which again is going to give you exponentially greater
returns then by just kind of looking at everything and just doing whatever.
Overtime you're gonna find themes about what kind of content resonates best with
your audience and what they want to see more of.
For example, on my channel, well,
anytime I create content around social media or Facebook ads or Instagram ads,
well, it tends to perform incredibly well. Contrast this with a couple of years ago,
when my highest performing content was around content marketing and how to
write great content. So again, you've got to stay tuned in to your market and to
their wants and their needs and their desires so you can make sure that you
stay kind of up-to-date and give them exactly what they want. The takeaway
point with tip #2: hunt double down, is you want to find what works and then
do as much of that as possible. Alright, and that leads me perfectly into my next
tip which is that quality comes from quantity. Now, essentially when you're
just getting going and even if you've been going for a long period of time,
well, so many people overanalyze and scrutinize and strategize and really
really try to dial in the type of content they're gonna make which gives
it the greatest chance of success.
Now, in theory this sounds fantastic and I'm all
for strategy, in fact I think you should be strategic, but not overly strategic if
it's starting to hinder or to get in the way of you actually creating content. The
biggest reason for this is, especially when it comes to social media content,
well, you can have a rough idea of what type of content is really gonna resonate
and really gonna get you good results but you can't be sure, in fact the best
thing you can do is take a pretty good guess and then go for it.
Again, using my
channel as an example, some of what I believe are my absolute best videos, full
of my best strategies and stuff that would pretty much only share with my top
tier VIP clients, well, I'm giving it away for free in videos that maybe only got a
few hundred or a few thousand views. On the other hand, stuff that I put out that
I thought is pretty common knowledge that I wasn't really sure was really
gonna resonate, well, that gets tens of thousands, even a hundred thousand views,
which to me is kind of crazy but it's important to understand
this is how social media and the algorithms and essentially the free
market works.
So, how do you find those good things? Well, it's by creating a lot
of not-so-good things and knowing that the good things are gonna come through
as well you're not gonna get to those good things unless you can kind of get
all the bad things out of your system too.
Anyway, I think you get the point but just to make sure, the point here is that
when it comes to dominating social media, especially with the competitive
landscape, the secret is more. Alright, so on the topic of more, let's move on to
the next tip which is to invest. Now, what I'm talking about here is investing in
education, investing in assets and resources and possibly team members or
even new gear, essentially, taking social media marketing seriously and investing
in it accordingly.
You see, a funny thing happens when we start talking about
social media marketing and people tend to focus on the social media and they
forget about the marketing which is essentially, the proven marketing
fundamentals, the principles, the concepts that have been around for decades if not
hundreds not thousands of years, really, the things that influence human behavior
and persuasion and influence and all the things that are essentially going to
lead to you making a sale. This is why as much as I talked about not overthinking
things when it comes to the quality from quantity, well, you do need to think at
least a little bit, you're going to need to be strategic, you're gonna need to
have an ideal customer avatar in mind, you're gonna need to have a business
direction or goal or objective or something you're trying to accomplish, so
you can make sure that you're in alignment with the content you're
creating. Now, when it comes to social media marketing, there's kind of two
different camps and two different things that you're gonna need to study in order
to stay on top of the situation: number one is the fact that social media
changes constantly.
There's new algorithm updates, new channels that get released,
new ways of doing things, new features, all the stuff that you're going to want
to be aware of so you can take maximum advantage of it. The other side of course
though, is those proven marketing fundamentals, those concepts, those
strategies, those theories that have been around for as long as people have been
making buying decisions. If I had to make a recommendation, I'd say spend around 70
to 80% of your time on the fundamentals and those proven strategies
and then around 20 to 30% of your time on the tactics and on the
platforms because tactics and hacks and platforms and channels, they're going to
come and go, but those proven fundamentals, well, they're gonna last you
a lifetime.
Lastly, when it the social media marketing, whether you
choose to outsource it or delegate it to someone on your team or hire marketing
agency or whatever, well, the best way to learn and to really
dominate is to be a practitioner first, because otherwise you're not gonna
really know what they're doing and if it's effective or if they're just
wasting your time and money. Alright, and that ties in perfectly with tip
#5: choose the best channel. Now, I've talked about this a lot before but
I'm all about avoiding what I call "the marketing wasteland".
Essentially, the
marketing channels and platforms where none of your customers are active or
present on and yet are hyped up as the newest and latest and greatest marketing
strategy or marketing channel and social media network or whatever that you just
"have to be on". No, you don't have to be there. In fact, being there is terrible,
terrible advice. You should pretty much only be where your customers are active
and present on. It sounds like totally common sense, you'd be amazed how many
times I see businesses that have no business at all being on certain
different social media channels and yet they're there simply because they
thought they had to be doing everything and trying to be everywhere, is probably
the worst marketing advice ever, you only need to be where your customers are and
this means looking at probably some of the major players like: Facebook,
Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn which are pretty much gonna cover most of your
bases.
In fact, I can probably almost guarantee that most of your market is on
at least one of these four channels. Now, once you've identified which one or two
or maybe even three of those channels they're on, you can start looking at
other options like: snapchat and tik-tok and Pinterest but they're going to be
very niche specific and really relevant to which customers are sort of active
and present on them.
So, make sure to do your due diligence and do your homework
on that ideal customer avatar and where they're spending their time online.
Fortunately again, all it takes is a quick google search on social media
network, demographic, usage statistics, so just Chuck a bunch of words like that
into the search bar and you'll come up with all sorts of different graphs and
charts and data telling you exactly what type of person is on what type of
network. Then you just really have to align up the pieces: your customers and
the right network.
If you're at a loss though and you still really don't know
what to choose, well, there's two great channels that have already mentioned but
I want to reiterate them here because they're just that valuable: number one
being Facebook and the second being Instagram. Two great places to start.
That's why the very next thing you're going to want to do is check out the
video I have linked up right here on Instagram marketing for small business.
So make sure to check that out now. Thanks so much for watching and I'll
catch you next time on The Marketing Show.