Give the People What they Want

At some point, I feel like I'm going to end up writing a list of Marketing Commandments (next e-book, maybe?). There are always moving pieces to any marketing strategy, but some things hold fast and true - and no amount of Shiny New Marketing Ideas are going to change them. 

Example: Know Your Audience

Building brand awareness on social media takes time (and it takes a lot more time when you don't have a large budget to spend towards boosted posts). You can pay money towards building or "buying" followers on Instagram and Facebook, but that doesn't work for me for 2 reasons -

1 - It's inauthentic. It just doesn't work for my brand. 

2 - It doesn't tell a good story. If I have 100 followers on my social media page but 25% of them are engaged, that's a better story than if I have 1,000 followers and only 2% are engaged. 

A friend suggested I post more around marketing tips and "How to build your brand" on my social media - it's something they wanted to see more. So I diligently scheduled my July posts to be centered around that - 1 new marketing tip each week. I even created a video and boosted it to my followers and their friends to encourage them to like our social media pages so they don't miss our tips. 

By week 3 of this experiment, one thing is very clear: this is not what the vast majority of my followers want to see. Engagement is down by 50% (FIFTY PERCENT!) compared to my other posts that usually include some Charlotte Skyline or a photo of Max being a dog. 

So - starting in August, I will be back to posting photos of Max at various spots in Charlotte (August we're going to focus on breweries - because nothing says Charlotte more than dogs in breweries, amiright?). It may not have anything to do with marketing suggestions for your small business - but hey, if the people want more photos of my dog laying around - I'm not going to complain. At least I have a good-looking model who lives with me.