She’s in Business Podcast Ep 06
Donna: Do you want to be more purposeful in the way that you show up on social media and build a strong brand that converts to sales and revenue. But does the thought of maintaining regular posts feel overwhelming and stressful. The value of having a strong brand on social media is directly linked to the success of your business. But it's often another thing that gets pushed to the long list of to-dos. Sure you can just push through from one day to the next, and you can add posts on the fly, but this ultimately leads to feeling stressed, creatively exhausted and scratching for ideas. In this podcast, I'd like to highlight a few things that will help you to kick start you on the way to streamlining your social media marketing.
So you can choose to carve out more time for you to grow other areas of your business. Or you can take the time to relax and enjoy your family. Saving time is something that I know helps, especially when it comes to the vortex of social media. So not only do I want to give you the highlights in this podcast, I want to invite you to a three day social media challenge to go with it.
To teach you not only why you need to be purposeful in the way you show up on social media marketing, but also how to do it. It's a live virtual event, it's free. And in the three sessions, you'll discover the importance of planning your social media calendar. You'll be able to look ahead and have a monthly focus that serves your business goals.
I'll be sharing the number one method to construct social media posts that will bring you more leads and sales. And you'll learn why posting daily on the fly is the worst way to manage your time effectively. And the simple thing you need to do instead. By the end of the three-day challenge, you'll leave feeling confident, clear, and scheduling your posts like the boss lady you knew you were.
You can relax and switch off knowing your social media presence is strong. And to register, all you need to do is go to donnahann.com/3daychallenge It's three days of super value packed sessions to take your social media presence to the next level, and to save your bucket loads of time.
With that being said, let's start the podcast so I can share with you why showing up on social media is so important.
Why have so many businesses and brands embraced social media? Because they understand the importance of social media and how it adds value. When it comes to enhancing your business or your brand's overall visibility, there's no other form of marketing that is shifting faster than social media.
Every business can benefit from understanding it’s importance when it comes to reaching their audience and strengthening their brand. With just a few clicks you have the opportunity to highlight all the best aspects of your business. It's a platform that provides you with the opportunity to legitimise your brand, demonstrate your expertise, and you can present blogs, staff, bios, share posts and produce content that creatively highlights your company's core values, your brand voice, and also any other unique qualities that your products or services provide.
You can use social media to distinguish yourself from competitors, by showing your audience the value in what you do. Your customers will check out your competitors and weigh up their options, and you get to connect with your customers on a personal level. Frequently, your business is literally in arm's reach of thousands, millions of people, every single minute of every single day.
How you choose to use social media is totally up to you. You can use it to build awareness or to build your following. You can use it to test your messaging and try and figure out exactly what your customers want. It's low cost as a form of paid advertising, and you're in control of reaching your target market with more ease than ever. And you can track your results and analyse what's working, and what's not, you can stop wasting time and energy on the things that are not creating the desired outcome. Social media is very effective in expanding your potential customer base really, really quickly and increasing traffic to your website or to your physical place of business to generate more sales.
On the flip side of that, the biggest gripes I hear from business owners is having inspiration for what to post and being consistent because of the amount of time it takes them.
The other thing is social media is a distraction that can somehow, makes time feel like it's standing still meanwhile, the minutes and hours are ticking by. It's that rabbit hole that's so easy to fall into. So I developed a system that I use within my business every month that makes daily posts on social media far more manageable when it comes to my time and my creative energy.
Before the start of each month, I batch my social media for the month ahead and I create all the copy and all the images. And then I share them using a free tool and it's done for the entire month. What I love about using my system is that I'm not constantly scratching for ideas every day of what to post. And I can be strategic about what I'm putting out into the world. For example, If I have an event or a promotion for my business coming up. I can actively promote that in advance to get the best results possible. If I were to promote an event on the fly. I would definitely not get the same results.
And I find it pretty draining to be constantly thinking about what I need to post or kicking myself for missing an opportunity or not starting a campaign early enough to get the message out there. A month in advance works for me, but you may prefer to focus on one week or two weeks in advance. It really depends on your business, your preferences with time and your objectives with using social media.
For me, the system that I use starts with an annual social media plan, which gives me the bird's-eye view of what I need to focus on each month when I'm marketing my business. I then use my content planner to map out my content for the month. So I create the copy and the captions. I create the images using Canva, which I love Canva. And then I schedule all the posts on Facebook and Instagram, simultaneously saving heaps of time using a free scheduling tool.
If something in the month changes, I can easily go back into the scheduling tool and reschedule, delete, edit. And the best part of it is that because one of my businesses is quite seasonal, I can rinse and repeat the content each year because I've got it all there on record as part of my social media plan that I keep in my G drive. And that saves me heaps of time. And it keeps my branding really consistent, too because most of the work is done and I can just go in and make sure it's still relevant and update a few images and then I'm good to go. Better yet, I can ask one of my staff members to go in and check that it's still relevant, to update anything that needs to be updated and then to schedule them in.
As I said at the beginning of the podcast I'm holding a three-day social media challenge starting on the 24th of August, where I share my system that I've just described with you.
It's a virtual live event. And each day I facilitate a group coaching session where I'll walk you through the social media system, which will save you bucket loads of time. I also provide you with the templates I've created so the annual plan, the content planner, plus a bunch of canvas templates. And in the workbook, you'll get a list of 50 ideas that you can use as inspiration for your posts. And I teach you how to access and use the free scheduling tool, so that you can set and forget. If you want to register, all you need to do is go to donnahann.com/3daychallenge. The link is in the show notes, and it's also in my Instagram bio, and you'll be getting the keys to creating social media posts that sell.
It's just one of my techniques that I teach in my Ready To Rise program. And it's free for you to join and level up your social media in just three days.
The biggest part of my system really is the planning, creating and posting regular content is crucial in building a successful business to build awesome brand awareness for your business and in turn, bring you more customers and more revenue.
An effective social media strategy won't work without an engaged audience of your ideal customers. And how do you do that? By creating consistent posts that are relevant to your market, by interacting regularly with followers and by sparking your ideal customers by taking action to buy your product or service.
When you post content on the fly without a planned purpose, one of the biggest mistakes that owners make is not only because it is an ineffective use of your time, but it's unlikely to be mapped towards your sales goals for that month. And I'm going to help you to change that by planning content, with purpose and with intention, you'll save time, dial down the stress and the overwhelm.
So let me finish this podcast by sharing seven reasons why using a planned approach is so important to the success of your social media marketing.
Number one is to save time by being organised. When you're maintaining a social media calendar, ensure that you plan ahead, batch your work and harness those creative brainwaves in one hit.
Basically it's the best way to make sure you'll never find yourself desperately scrolling through generic inspirational quotes, hoping to find something to post. In posting interesting and engaging content that adds value for your followers, you'll grow your brands, positive reputation, and in turn, you'll grow your customer base.
As I've said, you're also saving bucket loads of time by scheduling your posts ahead of time and managing audience engagement from one place.
Number two is posting consistently. Whether you're trying to increase your followers, build general awareness of your brand to boost a new product or service, or to get more customers in general, you must post consistently.
There's just no shortcut around that one, unfortunately. Because consistently showing up in your audience's feed is the key to engaging them on social media. Engagement increases your organic reach by the platform's algorithm. So basically your posts get shown to new eyes and to new people who start following your brand.
Number three is when you plan ahead, you make fewer typos and you also reduce the risk of making big mistakes. Planning your posts ahead of time means that you can build fail safes into your workflow. Copy editing the text, fact checking any information. They're all a lot easier when you're working days or weeks in advance, rather than on the fly.
A social media calendar is the best way to prevent a low key embarrassment or a high key social media crisis, and nobody wants that.
Number four is get more ambitious with your social strategies. By planning ahead, you'll have more time to look at different ways to experiment with strategies and ideas.
Should you run an Instagram contest? Should you start looking for influencer partners? Maybe it's time to get your brand on LinkedIn or introduce a new social media strategy.
Number five is you don't miss out on relevant moments. Now more than ever, you can optimise a wider audience, our worldwide audience, if you want to.
A social media calendar allows you to strategically observe worldwide global moments that are relevant to your brand's audience. Also with your day-to-day schedule covered, if something topical comes up, you can have the creative and logical bandwidth to engage with the moment in an on-brand way.
Number six is to make higher quality content. Having a long term purposeful vision for your business, means you'll be pushing a consistent brand voice and content that supports your marketing goals and planning your content in advance means that you and your team have breathing room to do their best work, and your audience on social media will appreciate the quality content that you're delivering.
And finally, number seven is to track what works and then improve upon it. What gets measured gets done and what gets measured gets improved. Your social media analytics have a lot of insights for you. A social media content planner provides the opportunity to schedule your posts and experiment towards improvement.
Plan out your posts until you find the right recipe for the type of content, the format, the frequency, and the best time of day to post for each social platform. And you'll be surprised. There may be a difference between the best time of day to post depending on the social platform that you're using.
Social media is an incredibly effective tool for your business and you need to take advantage of it!
Showing up consistently by posting regularly, you'll be able to confidently build a stronger brand, save time, and dial down the stress and overwhelm, and you've got to love that. The best part is that if you take action and you make a system part of your strategy, you'll also be able to regularly tune out from working and be present with your family and take time for you. And that's what it's all about.
I'm so excited to share the concept with you today. Just some of the many things that I use to carve out more freedom within my business and balance in my life. And if you want to do the same, then I want to encourage you to join me for the three-day challenge. It's only 30 or 40 minutes a day for three days, and you'll be on your way to systemising your online marketing and growing your customer base.
It takes seconds to register for the challenge, just go to donnahann.com/3daychallenge. Register, turn up, live for the prizes and take action because you are made for more.
© Copyright Donna Hann™ She’s in Business™ P/L 2020. All rights reserved
