it's harder to grow organically on social media it's true but at the same time a lot more people are trying to find interesting businesses small businesses that align with their values that provide quality products and services so we're talking about how to approach marketing in a more nuanced way in today's environment making sure that even though google words don't work the same way people are seeing instagram plateauing that you can still use these marketing strategies for your small business so you can promote your business effectively let's debunk some myths and focus on what's working hi i'm vicki i'm a management consultant and business storyteller helping people to stand out because of their point of difference so the first one i really want to address specifically for small businesses is that you don't have time right the time is very limited you have to do everything so the first thing you want to make sure you do is create once test twice and repurpose intentionally content marketing is not new anymore this is the name of the game for marketing and everyone from small to gigantic corporations are doing it so it's really hard to stand out and if you're small and you don't have a following what ends up happening for most is that you spend endless time creating content but not seeing an increase in followers engagement in exposure overall so how you want to do this is to be a bit more tactical with the way you use your content and you want to create ones test twice and repurpose intentionally what i mean by that is you want to not overly create without knowing which direction you want to go so the way to do this is similar to startups like clubhouse they have an invitation only structure and what happens is that the people who are invited are people who are giving them feedback before they release their product to the wider audience they are not able to yet scale their product to satisfaction so you want to do the same things with your marketing have a small group of people that are your target audience and test your content ideas with them before you invest so much time filming that youtube video making the post beautiful and writing all of that caption only to find no one responds to it let's use an example to make this concrete so let's say you run a goal-setting business and you help people set goals stick to their goals and eventually achieve what they want to achieve in life and you have an idea of making a video like the top 10 tips for setting the right goals instead of starting to script it bring out your camera start to film it edit it put it up on youtube and hoping the youtube god or algorithm blesses you with you know millions of views you want to test it first in a low threshold platform what i mean by that is something that's quick and easy that you can get feedback right away so things like twitter facebook groups that have the right audience in it you want to test this idea with them to see how they respond because what's in your mind what makes sense to you might not make sense to your ideal audience because you are a few steps ahead of them right that's why you you have the business and other people buying your service or your product and let's say you know with this goal setting um what 10 tips for goal setting you see that in the comments uh of your twitter or within that facebook group that people are saying these are really great but i really have difficulties sticking to my plan or it's really hard to find accountability within myself because i work for myself then you see that what the pain point of your audience is might not be in the tips of how to find the right goal but actually in the accountability part then you want to engage and test now again for the second time top 10 tips for sticking to your plan then you see people engaging with it more tell me more then you know this is something that people are really interested in now you can actually start to script your youtube video for more focused on accountability because people are more drawn to that and you got better feedback you can test again within your youtube video if people are still interested in that top 10 tips for setting goal what you want to do is build a feedback loop right so this way you're always engaging and conversing with your audience and you actually get insight out of your audience instead of just making it up in your head which makes it very hard for a small business without a big following to blow up now repurpose intentionally don't just repurpose every single thing whether or not it actually connects with the audience or not right that's posting for the sake of posting repurposing for the sake of repurposing and you're putting the cart before the horse once you see that people are engaging with specific parts of your your video then you can repurpose to put it in a different form so you can reach more people and this brings me to strategy number two which is you want to be on at least one evergreen searchable platform this is how you grow while you sleep you want to capitalize on algorithms that reward quality content over time because right now time is not yet your friend let me know in the comments if you feel like time is not your friend right now your time on the platform is still very limited and your audience is still very small what i mean by that is a platform where people 10 years from now can still perhaps find your good content created today and the idea is that because you're small you don't have the big following you don't have the reach so you rely on the algorithm to recommend you and the way that different platforms work the algorithms recommend different content in the searchable platforms so things like blogs things like youtube things like pinterest because people search the algorithm learns over time of what's actually quality what's actually keeping people engaged so even when you start small let's say you just have you know 100 followers or so as you grow as the content is being tested by more people the algorithm will raise your good content up so what you don't want to do is just focus on the instant gratification platforms like instagram where you know a post from a month ago probably will never get seen again the third strategy is use ada marketing 101 do not reinvent the wheel ada has been tested and tried for decades by huge marketing firms working for big fortune 500 companies it works and you want to be able to anchor all of your marketing efforts based on what's working and that's ada attention interest desire and action funny enough this is one of the tips i've shared with fellow youtubers on improving audience retention and it really had good feedback so now i'm sharing it with you first attention spark curiosity this is so important that i'll go into depth in a moment but here i just want to show you a visual example from master class who's got this you got this who's out here cracking you is there anybody else like you no let's go nothing gets attention better than the word you so master class does a really good attention-grabbing detail with visuals that make you want to learn more who is she what is this what's she going to say now we go into interest this is where you turn the curiosity into something a little bit more concrete how do you do that you want to make sure it's what you're talking about is relevant to the person in front of you i wrote a web series called the misadventures of awkward black girl and also wrote a tv show called insecure and the only difference between those two is money two things master class do really well in this interest section one is that they capitalize on your aspiring nature right she achieved xyz wow how amazing that sounds great i wonder how she did it right you are already helping them sell to yourself the second thing masterclass does really well is talk about what's on almost all of our minds and that's how to make more money in this case but of course depending on the thing that they are selling they are tapping into the depth of human need right the fundamental needs i have another video on the maslow's hierarchy of knees if you're interested in seeing exactly what those are and how you can address them but the idea here for interest is that you want to make the thing relevant to your audience via their needs desire this is ada's d how do you make sure that people go from interested to wanting it right and here giving details is very important you want to tell them exactly what they'll get and then show them what life will look like afterwards i'm going to share with you all of my struggles and show you step by step how i made the transition from the internet to television and film i'm gonna give you my blueprint for how i wrote my pilot using four categories narrow down the one idea that you want to pursue right now and do it people love step by step they love blueprints they love the benefits that's listed to make them the ideal them so make sure you give the relevant details and finally action this is all building up to your audience taking some sort of action right and it doesn't have to always be by now it could be just find out more if they are just at the beginning of their customer journey i'm issa rae and this is my masterclass [Music] think about action not in such an aggressive way always like i'm just sell sell sell all the time but rather as guiding people down the customer journey with you and that brings me to the next strategy of saying the right things david perel says the best the world rewards people who are best at communicating ideas not the people with the best ideas this is so true so many people my clients included have amazing products amazing services things that you know they are genuine the quality is high they put at a fair price but why don't people buy it why doesn't it go viral why doesn't it take off it's because even though it's good people are not interested enough you don't have their attention you don't have their interest you don't have their desire and you don't have their action that's why people are not finding out what's best about you so here is you want to say the right things with the whole aid of structure in order to guide people to find out more about you what you don't want to be doing is writing and rewriting your instagram bio writing rewriting all of the copy on your website only to not know where you want to head of course most people know right i don't want to sound cheesy i don't want to sound over the top i want to be authentic but i don't know how i think that rhyme did i very much just now anyway it doesn't matter uh let me show you an example from oatley to demonstrate what i mean by saying the right thing they're not saying generic stuff like it's good for your body and the environment or it's healthy and tastes delicious or milk made out of oats right like it's it doesn't give you that cheesy generic boring marketing speak that many of us for some reason end up writing when we're talking about our own business and the trick really really really coming tying it back to ada is that you want to spark curiosity curiosity kill the cat if you don't catch their attention there is no speak of the rest of ada if that makes sense so the best way to focus on your content if you want to say it right is just think about the first step the curiosity stuff and that's exactly what oatley did right they didn't even go on to explain what is the oat milk why is it good for the environment why does it do xyz they just wanted you to look at their ad every single person now knows how to google they know how to search for you if they are curious i go into detail on how exactly to articulate to build out the whole story if you want to go beyond curiosity in this with examples from steve jobs but the really the idea is focus on curiosity first if you found this video helpful please give it a thumbs up it really helps with the algorithm that i've been talking about subscribe if you haven't already i share videos like these with colorful examples all the time and i will see you in the next one bye