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How to do Social Media the Right Way

Leave a Comment / Fun Stuff, Marketing, Small Business / By / / , , , , , , , , , ,

When you think about posting on your business social media pages, do you start to panic, feel overwhelmed, and just feel all around uncertainty about what the heck you are even doing? Don’t worry, you aren’t alone. The funny thing is, social media for personal use can be fun, informative, and doesn’t require much effort or deep thought – for the most part. See a lost dog post, share it. See a post looking for recommendations for a plumber – put the info for Joe’s Plumbing because you wouldn’t think of calling anyone else.

When it comes to using social media for business, it seems like there are so many rules and the information can be conflicting. But doing social media the right way can be very simple, straightforward, and dare I say – rewarding and fun. When you start to get more followers and increased engagement, you’ll agree on the last two!

Here’s some simple and easy tips to help you get your business social off on the right foot or to improve what you are doing now:

  1. Pick the right channels. The easiest way to get overwhelmed is to try to post on every single social media channel out there. And yes, I purposely used the word try. Because unless posting on social is your full-time job, it’s almost impossible to keep up with every platform. Choose the platforms that your ideal clients are on. For example, if you cater to women in the 35-55 range, yes you should be on Facebook, Pinterest, and even Instagram.
  2. Be consistent. Posting 2x a day for 2 weeks is great, but it’s not going to help you if you come to a screeching halt and stop posting for 6 months. Find a cadence that you can keep up with. 3x a week – great, start there. If you can increase to 1x a day, even better. But start small and work your way up as you get more comfortable.
  3. Plan ahead. If you post daily at 1 pm, don’t wait until 12:45 to figure out what you want to post. Use a spreadsheet and create your content in advance. Use Hootsuite or other scheduling platforms to set up all your content at least a week ahead so that you don’t have to panic at the last minute.
  4. Engage. Social is meant to be social. Engage with other people, pages, and groups. If you are a florist and you see a post in a group asking about the best plant food for roses, feel free to chime in and share your knowledge and how you know so much (because you are a local florist) and if they have any other questions, here’s how to reach you. You are being helpful, but also noting your business. If you want people to engage with you, you have to engage with them. If people comment on your posts, make sure you engage back with them. Serve not Sell.
  5. Follow others. A little quid pro quo is par for the course when it comes to social media. Want to increase your follows, start following others. If you want to keep an eye on the competition, don’t follow them from your business page, use your personal. But otherwise, follow any associations, chambers, and complementary businesses that make sense. If you are a florist, following a bridal boutique, wedding venue, and catering companies just makes sense.
  6. Always look at your metrics. I know, I get it. The metrics can be confusing and well, boring for many to look at, but trust me, you won’t know if you are successful unless you look at your metrics. How many new followers did you get? What topics got the best engagement? What timing got the best engagement? You get the idea. Does video or pictures or text get more engagement? You can look at so much data!

Hopefully, you made it this far and didn’t get stressed out. These rules are meant as a guideline. Start small and take them one at a time. Rome wasn’t built in a day so don’t expect to get 500k followers in a week. And don’t forget to have fun with it!

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Personalize your Marketing efforts

Leave a Comment / Entrepreneur, Featured, Marketing, Must Read Blogs, Sales, Small Business / By / / , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Everyone (well, most people) wants to be noticed, loved, accepted and validated. It’s human nature.  So many marketing efforts forget this very important fact when they are building out their strategies and campaigns.

Put YOURSELF into your CUSTOMERS and PROSPECTS shoes.  It’s the Golden Rule – do unto others.  When clients ask me if something they’ve done is good, or if it will work, I ask them what they would do if they were one of their customers and THEY got that email, saw that billboard, saw that ad?  When they tell me their response – I say “exactly” – good or bad.

So, what are top brands doing to increase engagement and conversion?  They are getting deeply personal.

  • Know your data, your audience, and their actions. You don’t need a multi-billion dollar budget to do this – you just need a system.  It’s important that you are looking at your email open rates, your Google analytics, and your social engagement on a consistent regular basis.  Know what’s working and what isn’t.  More importantly, you want to SEGMENT out your DATA.  Find the highly engaged followers or readers and give them more, more, more of what they are looking for.  Next, you want to do a deep dive on who those high engagers who convert to clients are – what is their demographic?  If you find commonalities, you are building your TCP – your target client profile.
  • Personalize your delivery. From simply adding a first name or company name within an email marketing campaign to redirecting email and social media campaigns based on behaviors and actions taken, to highly personalized website experiences based on previous actions or their demographical makeup.  Artificial intelligence will play a big part in all of this over the next 5 years – in fact, big brands are already using it.
  • Be real. Once again I’m preaching authenticity.  Your customers want to know that you “get them” – the only way to do that is to be on their level and connect with them.  You won’t appeal to everyone but you will appeal to those who love love love you – and don’t you want them as clients versus the ones that could give a rat’s ass about you?  Enough said on that subject 🙂

In the end, you have to connect with your clients and prospects on a deeply emotional level.  Heart and soul, transparency, storytelling, BFF personal kind of level. When you do – the magic happens.  Try to constantly be pitching and making assumptions – rarely works.

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Become a Social Media Master in 20 Minutes a Day

Leave a Comment / Marketing, Uncategorized / By / / , , , , , , , , , , ,

Are you a social media master? Do you spend hours creating a powerful intro, put together the perfect plan, and then post at exactly the right time? Have you conquered Facebook, brought Twitter to your heel, and gotten LinkedIn under control?

At RBC, we live, breathe, and eat social media (yes, our meals are mostly differing shades of blue logos…) And we know that one thing business owners don’t have much (read “any”) of, is spare time. So, here’s a super simple guide on mastering your social media marketing in less time than it takes to cook a delicious Facebook soufflé.

Plan your social media ahead of time. At the start of the month, you’re going to plan what you’re going to promote on social media. Look, we know it’s more fun to wing it, but trust us on this. Look through all of the content you have — Blog posts, articles, videos, image galleries — All those things you’ve put time, effort and a little love into creating. Decide on the marketing themes for each part of the month, and the main points you want to get across.

Put together a social media calendar. Once you know what you’re going to promote, you need to work out the when and how. That means you need a social media calendar. On each day plan out:

  • What you want to promote.
  • How you’re going to promote it.
  • The channel(s) you want to use.

The trick is to strike a balance between posting enough to build momentum, and not posting so much you’re over saturating. The best way to do this is to post your own stuff and also share other useful articles, links, and content from others. That could be through retweeting, sharing, repinning, etc.

Write your social media posts.This one is key — Write your social media posts ahead of time. You can be much more consistent, use similar language, and get into the right mindset to get all the important information across. Remember to slightly repurpose your posts for the social media network you’re using. Your LinkedIn posts are probably going to be a bit more formal than your Facebook ones. Twitter means you’ll need to limit yourself to 140 characters.

Automate your social media posts. You don’t want to sit at the computer waiting for a specific time to post your content. Use an automation suite like Buffer or Hootsuite to automate your social media for you. Now, you shouldn’t completely rely on automation, so switch it up with some personally curated and posted updates as well. Engage people in conversation, and help others feel involved. Make sure you respond to @mentions properly.

Track your social media results. You’ll want to know where you’re getting the most visibility and traction. This means looking at when visitors are coming to your website and responding to your social media marketing. Use Google Analytics and similar tools to see what’s working for your audience, and tweak your marketing approach.

Get a social media expert to help you out. This probably doesn’t come as a surprise, but here at RBC, we’re experts at this stuff. If you don’t have the time, let us do the hard work for you. We’ll audit all your content, put together the perfect social media calendar, promote the heck out of your products and services, and get lots of lovely visitors over to your website.

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It might be time to fire your salesperson

Leave a Comment / Culture, Sales, Uncategorized / By / / , , , , , , , , , ,

No-one likes to talk about firing people. Modern business is all about giving staff opportunities, helping them excel in the right role, and incentivizing your employees to do their best. But, sometimes, despite your strongest efforts, they just aren’t stepping up to the plate.

When that happens you need to make a tough decision — Do you continue to provide opportunities in the hope they’ll change, or do they get the pink slip? One area where it’s vital to make that decision fast is in your sales department. It’s your sales representatives who create your revenue, so when they’re underperforming, you need to take decisive action.

Here’s how to tell if you should show them the door.

Look at the sales metrics of the salesperson. There’s nothing like hard data to help you make a decision. Look at the evidence on how your sales teams are doing. Explore the individual measurements and performance data for specific employees. Review this information in context — How do they compare to other individuals or teams? What are the industry averages and benchmarks? This data is the first step in identifying weak performers.

Read through one to ones and personnel reviews.Your business should be holding one to ones and formal reviews with your employees. Take a look at their feedback reports, how their peers and managers view them, and how they present themselves. Keep an eye out for warning signs and indications they’ve been offered previous opportunities to improve.

Talk to their sales manager – or have a chat with yourself if it’s you! The next step is to speak to their line manager or team leader. Find out what they think of the salesperson and whether they have the potential to improve. Learn about the subtext of conversations they’ve had in the past. Find out if their lack of performance is due to their attitude and approach, an absence of skill and training, or for some other reason.

Summarize the key factors behind poor performance. Following your review process, establish the main cause of their poor performance, it could be for one (or more) of several reasons:

• Attitude and approach – They just don’t have the right interpersonal skills, autonomy, or approach to be a good salesperson.
• Lack of experience — They don’t have enough history and related experience with sales to be able to close deals.
• Lack of skill — They may not have the correct level of training to make the most of any natural talent they might have.
• Process issues — They don’t have a proper understanding of the sales process in your business.
• Issues with other team members — There might be friction in your teams with other people or interactions that are impacting their ability to sell.

Speak with your HR department – or this may be you again! When you know the background for the poor performance, it’s time to speak to HR. Learn if there are potential steps you can take to improve performance, or if they’re simply a “lost cause.” In some cases you might just need to provide more training and support, in other cases, the best thing to do might be the dismissal process.

Make sure you follow the dismissal process. You likely have strong policies and procedures around dismissal. Make sure you follow them to the letter and get HR support in place so you meet all your commitments as an (ex) employer.

If you\’re experiencing a decline in your sales figures, it might be down to one or two individuals. It’s important to take a rational, objective approach to learn what’s going on and why. If you do find out it’s due to individual performance, ensure you understand the background and context. Then, you can involve HR and make sure you treat both your employees and your business needs fairly.

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