We are being asked a lot how Covid-19 is affecting our business. What all of this means for our little Company of One, what we are doing with all our “extra time” and are we worried about what the future holds?
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Working from home can be a complete luxury and also a total buzz kill, depending on how you go about it. Unfortunately, in the current time, we are all being encouraged or dictated to work from home for a significant period of time. For some people, this conjures ideas of “staying home” all day and working in your PJ’s with Netflix on in the background. For others, it conjures ideas of complete and utter social isolation and uncomfortableness. Both can be true, but what you do really need to focus on is how to best stay sane when working from home.
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Over the past few months in Australia we have had a huge change in the way that social media operates, particularly for brands and influencers. The removing of likes by both Instagram and now Facebook has caused outrage in some corners of the social media world and rejoicing in others. The question now is what this means for business, and I am the first person to say who the heck cares if they’ve hidden the likes – that’s not the point. Outrageous, I know.
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It can be challenging being a small business owner. Sometimes you feel like an expert in one really niche area of the world, and wonder how the hell the person who needs your services will ever find you. Or else, you feel like a jack of all trades but a master of none – and it tends to swing from one extreme to the other.
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Each of us in small business came into what we are doing with a Vision or a skill or maybe even a dream. It could have manifested itself as a product or a service, a doodad or widget or even just selling the idea – but there was obviously a time where we were doing it all. The making, the thinking, the website, the writing, the selling, the chasing and – if you were lucky – the invoicing.
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A new year is a time when most of us review the year that has been and take the opportunity to adjust our habits moving into the new year. Call it new years resolutions or intentions or your focus for the year, now is the time to be considering how you want your year to look, especially within your work or business.
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I spoke last week about how important it is to be blogging for your brand, but it’s important to note that no one wants to be putting in all the effort of blogging without sharing it with the intended audience. While content being live on your website is a good thing for increasing your search results or giving you kudos in the eyes of Google, ultimately what we should be trying to do with any blog post is to deliver value for your customers – so we have to get the content to the people! What are you doing to amplify your blog posts? Firstly, you need to consider the lifecycle of your blog post when writing it. Is it a piece of evergreen or cornerstone content – a blog post on a topic that will continue to be relevant for an extended period of time? Or is it really topical and will only be relevant for a little while? If your content is evergreen, share it a little bit now, but anticipate that you will be able to share and promote that content for as much as years afterwards. If your content is only going to be relevant for a short period, share and amplify it quickly and regularly over a shorter space of time to get maximum mileage out of your posts. Then consider your amplification platforms. Where does your blog go once it’s live on your website? Pick and mix from the list, depending on what your marketing strategy looks like right now: Email newsletter | Affiliate or partner websites | Social media | As an article on LinkedIn | as part of a campaign promoting another piece of content | via direct email to customers (usually in an email signature) | As a printed fact sheet | Now consider the piece of content itself – what are the ways that we can get maximum mileage out of this one idea? Some of these I touched on earlier in the article. You can share a blog post with your suppliers or partners in the hope that they will share it with their audience. You can turn a brief (350 words or so for best results) blog post into a longer report or fact sheet. Turn quotes from the blog post into images to go onto your social media. Create an explainer video that…
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Whether you call it copy, content, news, updates, articles or blogs, writing words that you share regularly with your customers is becoming more and more important for businesses. Blogs generally fall into one of the below topics: Product information | Service information | News | Corporate messaging | Industry education | Work reviews | Industry updates | Blogging was once considered the domain of young people who wanted to share their every thought, sort of like a diary online. Now, bloggers are major influencers online and writing a corporate blog has a host of benefits for your brand. Here’s why you should be putting pen to paper (or keys to screen) for your business. Become an expert voice in your industry or space Blogs provide an excellent avenue for brands to share insights on your product, service or corporate mission and culture – heck, it can provide you with an opportunity to criticise your competitors or call for greater legislation. A blog provides you with an opportunity to share your knowledge with your customer base and allows you to position yourself as an expert within your field. But with great power comes great responsibility – make sure that you have a clear, strong, correct message and take time to really consider what it is you want to say, who you’re targeting and what you want them to get out of it. Contributions to SEO – particularly with googles new changes Blogging contributes in a number of different ways to your search engine optimisation – it provides more keywords for Google to index from your site and updating content attracts users to your website in the first place. The Google algorithms are constantly changing, and in the latest update in June of 2018, Google announced that they will be giving greater search results to those brands who create engaging, regularly updated content that people want to read. So whether you’re publishing blogs on topics that people regularly search relative to your business, or whether you’re explaining concepts, strategies and processes, what you write will contribute more than ever to the discoverability of your brand. Forced consideration Sometimes, particularly with new products or services, brands just create these things out of a perceived customer need. The marketing strategy, the communication strategy, where precisely the product or service fits in the market – that can be a bit…
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I was once told an absolute gem of a fact that has really stuck with me through the years, so forgive me if you’ve heard this one before. You are more likely to complete Navy S.E.A.L training than you are to click on a banner ad. And yet brands continue to invest in and be disappointed by the results achieved through new ways of, and greater quantities of, digital advertising. Whether it’s the post that appears every 10 images in your Instagram feed or the onslaught of promotions you see in your email inbox or around your favourite blog, there are more ways than ever to target people digitally. Digital advertising should never be seen as a cure-all as part of a marketing mix. Simply launching digital ads, whether they are display, social, or programmatic, does not guarantee you business. It’s really as simple as that. I can completely understand in a small business that we believe, in the modern age, that there should be a magic fix, a simple solution to promoting your products to the right people. But its just not true. Those who make the platform (Facebook is a really easy example in this case, but all the platforms are similar in this regard) are trying to get you to spend more and more on digital marketing – and so they promise highly targeted, specific delivery to your ideal audience. The reality is that they can’t guarantee that – and even if the ad is served to the right audience, that doesn’t guarantee that the audience is interested in the product or service you’re trying to sell. In the days of print advertising, a print distribution of 50,000 units did not guarantee you 50,000 purchases. It did not guarantee you 5 purchases. It simply told you how many eyeballs would be on your ad, maybe, if they saw it at all. Im not trying to suggest that this is the right approach either, particularly if your brand has low marketing budgets, but we need to think more broadly about how to target our ideal audience and not simply look for the quick fix. The horribly unsexy truth is that the best way to capture your ideal audience Is to create content that engages them. It’s not as simple as “build it and they will come” but use the technology we have (namely social media,…
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