What’s one thing that businesses need to be paying attention to right now?
It is advertising. Sometimes social media service businesses might not need to quite venture into advertising when they start out. But when they expand and want to grow, and when you jump into social media, you might think that because it hasn’t been around very long, you can do a lot of organic stuff still. And that is a great way to get started. Learn social media as a marketing tool. But as you grow your business, which probably isn’t that long after you get started, perhaps a couple of years, then you definitely should look into advertising. And it doesn’t have to be huge advertising. You don’t have to think you’re going to the Superbowl and starting a $10 million campaign. You can start small.
When do people need to make the shift towards paid advertising?
After six months or a year of going at it, and you’ve learned how to do work with the tools, learned to work with the platforms, learned how to be consistent, and built up some content on your social media accounts. Then you can start venturing in. There’s no reason why you have to wait. You can start reaching out to your local areas and communities you want to work with.
Advertising, especially for local small businesses, on social media is super smart.
Absolutely. It can be very effective. And it doesn’t have to be just for huge corporations.
It’s important to make sure that you build up your content base, so you have something to draw from as you begin advertising.
What should you look for if you’re hiring an advertising expert for your business?
It can be very helpful to specifically ask, “Do you work with service-based businesses? Coaches? Do you work with products in e-commerce?” There are a variety of different areas that will require some different skills, different content, and different ways to reach out to communities.
I mostly work with service-based industries. And when you’re on though, you can start offering things like discounts, which you might not offer for like e-commerce. You might have a specific direction that you take the advertising, that you wouldn’t do with e-commerce, so a service-based business might want to run something that will draw their communities into calling them for a consultation, or call for a service call, so that they can come and give them a consultation in person. It’s a different venue than the e-commerce types of stuff.
Not only are you looking for somebody who’s well-versed in advertising on social media, but you also want somebody who’s well-versed in advertising in your particular type of business., you know, or type of business.
You can start small. You might want to start off with $100-$150 per month in your marketing. It’ll take a little extra in the beginning when you start to run a different ad as you’ll have setup and that kind of thing. There are a lot of things in the backend to set up for Facebook, and things change often.
Hiring somebody to do that kind of work for you can be really great too because they will be on top of changes. You can certainly bring start at $150 a month, and from there, you can certainly grow it. You can play around with the stuff that works. Then you can continue to run those ads that continue to work for you for an extended period of time until they stop working,
What is one of the biggest mistakes that people make when they start advertising for their business?
There can be a lot of mistakes, but there are probably two big ones.
One is expecting results instantly. You think, “Oh, I’m going to run an ad.” And you just throw it up there and expect great results – which would be fantastic – but you’d need to try things and test things.
And that would be the second thing. You’ve got to try stuff. And a lot of people say things like, “Oh, I’ve got to be on Facebook for advertising.” But you get to be on there, and this is a platform that wasn’t around 20 years ago. People couldn’t reach out in the way that we can reach out now. So, think of it as an opportunity. You get to try things and see what your community likes. Because you can’t do that with a mailer.
Social media does provide a fast response time to see what’s working and what’s not – and it’s an opportunity that needs to be taken advantage of.
3 Action Steps
- Create a social media advertising budget for your business.
- Shift to social media advertising when you have built up content.
- Consider hiring an expert in social media advertising who is skilled at working with businesses like yours.
- Do not expect instant results. Take the time to try different things with your ads.
Connect with Jennifer Ressmann at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/voiyoosocialmediamanagement/ or https://mailchi.mp/8cb85fe4b34a/voiyoowhydoessocialmediamatter
Please comment below. I would love to hear from you.
No comments yet.