Back when I first started using Social Media as a tool, I had no plan and no strategy whatsoever. This was long before Instagram was a thing and the platform I started using was Twitter.
This was back when I was with the Beer Store, a beer retail and logistics company in Ontario and I was using Twitter to promote our Returns for Leukemia Bottle Drive. I used Twitter so we could get people to the events we planned that would tie into the Bottle Drive.
After a couple years of just doing a simple Bottle Drive held at the stores, I decided to do something different and model what a local company was doing with wine. Windsor Eats is a company here in Windsor that had an event they called the wine trail ride, where they biked to local wineries to taste wine with food pairings.
The Wine Trail Ride was very successful and I wanted to plan an event that did something similar with Beer. I reached out to them and we started to get to work. They worked to get the restaurants and the food lined up while I took care of getting local Ontario breweries involved as we didn’t have a brewery in Windsor at the time.
Unfortunately the first year, although it was an absolute blast, we had a small turn out and that was mainly due to our marketing efforts and not really planning the launch properly. However, if we used Social Media the way we could have, I know we would have had a much better turn out.
As the years went on with this event and the others, I had come to learn a lot more about using social media as a marketing tool and started to get more people to attend not only that event but many other events that we had planned.
Fast forward to now, that’s something I do for other businesses…create strategies so they don’t have to worry about fumbling like I did early on.
The biggest issue came down to content and not knowing what content to publish and when. This is something that can really make or break a business online. Having a plan and knowing your audience is key.
The question then becomes, what type of content should you be posting?
Something I’ve mentioned many times before is using the Three E’s when you’re creating content and I want to talk about each one of those E’s now.
Education
No matter what industry you’re in, YOU are the expert. Being an expert, the best way to market yourself and your business is to show how much of an expert you are by providing value to your audience.
When creating educational content, there are many ways you can do it. You can create content in the form of a Blog post and then using your social media platforms to tease those blog posts, you can create infographics as a way to provide value to your audience, posting a mini training video and so many other ways.
Educating your audience is a great way to stand out and really show your audience you know what you’re talking about. Not only that, it helps to build trust with your audience.
Entertain:
Showing your audience that you’re an expert in your industry and educating them is great and will definitely go a long way but if you’re only posting educational content that becomes boring after a while.
There will be a small portion of your audience that wants to focus on the facts and data driven content but that is only a small piece of the puzzle. You need to be entertaining to your audience and post content that grabs their attention.
Think about your favorite TV Show and how much you love watching it. If that show had no drama, wasn’t at all funny and didn’t have a plot would you keep watching it? Think about the content you like to engage with and that provides value to you, do you like content that entertains you? You need to have a strategy and part of that strategy you will need to entertain your audience.
You can do this in a number of ways like a meme that fits your industry, using branded graphics that are entertaining and so many other ways.
Engage:
If I’ve said this once, I will say it a million times, social media is exactly what it sounds like…a place to be social.
If you just post content and leave it alone, it’s no different than wasting money on a billboard and having no idea who’s engaging with it and having no idea what your ROI is. In order for social media to work for you and your business, you will need to be social.
When it comes to creating content that is engaging there are many ways you can do it. You can create content that asks a question like how do you take your coffee, you can create content that has a poll in it or you can even create content that simply asks your audience a question like what do they want to see from you. As long as you ask something, it’ll encourage your audience to start engaging with you more.
This can also be done in many other ways, by making sure you comment and reply to the people engaging with your content, reaching out and commenting on others in your target audience and getting into groups that your target audience are in and commenting on content there as well to provide value.
As you create your strategy, using these “Three E’s†will help you build relationships, grow your audience and start generating the leads you need to grow your business with your dream 100.
Using what I just told you in this blog is really going to help you grow your business online but I want to make sure you have all the tools you need to take it even further.
To do that I want to offer you my 30 Days of Content for free so you will never have an issue coming up with content ever again.
Even more, I have just updated my content calendars to make them work even better for you and help you plan and schedule the content you just created using our 30 Days of Content eBook.
I have also added a mini training on how to use these calendars and make them work for your business.
To get all of this, just click the button below and start creating content your audience wants to engage with!
