KIP: Getting Results On Social Media
Social media is an essential marketing tool for businesses, but it can be difficult to use it in the right way to see the results you want. In this Knowledge Is Power article, we’ll talk you through the three main components to success on any social media platform. Before we do that though, it’s important to consider who your target audience actually is and that your business probably doesn’t need to be on every single social media platform. This is a mistake we see time and time again. So the first step to achieving your social media goals is identifying which platforms to be on. What social media platforms should my business be on? At Constructive Marketing, we look after a wide range of businesses’ social media channels and each one is on a different mixture of platforms. For businesses that operate in the B2B market, LinkedIn, Instagram and X is usually the way to go. Whereas one looking to target individual consumers needs to be on Facebook and Instagram or even TiKTok or X. This is only a general recommendation and where ‘knowing your audience’ really matters as you may find that a specialist platform, like Etsy, could benefit your business.. Of course, things aren’t usually that simple and for some clients we find that a two-pronged marketing approach works best for them. For example, some of our clients predominantly serve the B2C market, but can also supply to businesses. For them, a mixture of social feeds with varying content is the way to go. If you’re not sure where to start, it’s best to speak to an expert to make sure you’re on the right track. The Three Main Components Of Social Media Success With a combined social media experience of over 20 years, our social media team identified the three main components you will need for social media success. The great thing about these components is that they apply to each of the social media platforms and to any social media strategy. Regardless of what you want to achieve and on what platform you want to achieve it. 1: Accuracy The first thing to understand before you start using social media for your business is who you are trying to reach. Whether you’re looking to increase brand awareness, sales, website visits or something else, you need to always start with that question – who am I trying to reach? Then you can move on to ask, ‘what is it I want them to do?’ This is the cornerstone of all marketing and is especially true for social media. The main aim of each platform is to show its users content they are most likely to engage with (and therefore keep them using the platform for longer and more often). So making sure that the content you’re creating will be liked by your target audience is key. This may seem like an obvious point to make, but you’ll be surprised by the amount of people that don’t do this. More often than not, people get carried away with creating content they like creating, or content that they would like to see in their own feeds. Rather than what is best for their target consumer. 2: Consistency There are two ways that consistency is important to social media success: the amount of posts and the quality of the posts. Posting consistently is crucial to get the attention of any of the social media algorithms. Think of it like knocking on the door of a packed networking room. Eventually, you’ll be let in and be able to meet everyone inside. Algorithms look for consistent activity so if you’re posting the same amount of times each week, your content will begin to appear to more people. Making sure that the quality of the content is always good is the other way that consistency is key. We’ve written a whole blog post on why content consistency gets great results. In that blog post, we also give a couple of client success stories that show that it works. 3: Time One of the misconceptions of social media is that it’s a quick fix that will secure sales straight away. Yes, a tiny percentage of posts do ‘go viral’ and create a huge buzz but in reality that’s not the case. Building interest and reputation through organic social media activity is a long game. Remember that, above all else, the aim of social media is to build a relationship with your current and potential customers, and this takes time. You wouldn’t walk up to a complete stranger, ask them to marry you and expect them to say yes, (unless you’re on ‘Married At First Sight’ of course!). It’s the same with social media; why should you expect people to buy from you after you’ve put out just one post asking them to? Instead, you need to take the time to build a relationship with them and gain their trust before they even consider becoming a customer. Your post also needs to direct that potential customer to a credible source of more information, such as a specific landing page on your website. There are lots of different factors at play that impact the time it will take so it’s important to trust the process. One of the mistakes business owners make is cutting their social media budget too early. Implementing these components into your social media It’s best to put the components into practice in the order we’ve listed them in. Identifying who you’re trying to reach and what you would like them to do is an important first step to getting the results you want from social media. We offer a diagnostic service that involves a half-day meeting with one of our experts to identify where you’re going wrong and what you need to be doing instead. Once that’s been done, we’ll produce a non-obligatory strategy that we can help you implement or you can take elsewhere. If this sounds like something you
3 Easy Things You Can Do Right Now To Improve Your Social Media Marketing
As we head into 2024, you may be looking for quick wins you can do to get your social media marketing off to a good start in the new year. In honour of National Mentoring Month, we wanted to give you three easy things you can do to do just that. When we’re delivering social media training, we always like to give people a couple of ‘constructive nuggets’ that they can come away with and implement straight away. Which is what we hope you get from this blog post. So, without further ado, here’s what we suggest: Use authentic photo and video One of the things we see time and time again with all our clients is that when we use authentic photos and videos in their posts, they get a lot more engagement. With most of us having smartphones with fantastic cameras on them, getting quick snaps of the work you’re doing has never been easier. If what you do involves improving a space, a great thing to do is get a photo before you start work and a photo after – preferably from the same spot. This will allow your social media audience to see your work and compare the results. Which acts as a great portfolio for you and is something you can easily implement into your posts for better engagement. Make sure you’re using your banner photo space A mistake we see all too often is businesses not using the banner photo space they have on their Facebook, X or LinkedIn profiles to showcase what they do. This is something that can be easily fixed with a great photo of your product or service that will act as a centrepiece for your feed. As an example; you could use a before and after photo – as we suggested in our first tip – to really demonstrate what you do. There are free versions of image software like Canva that allow you to make sure that your photos fit in the given space. Which will ensure it crops well and is easily visible. Use hashtags properly If your business is on Instagram, X or LinkedIn, hashtags can be a powerful tool to help you reach the right people. Next time you write a post for your business, try to include hashtags that are: It’s important to make sure that you don’t overuse hashtags and keep them relevant to the audience you want to reach to maximise their potential. If you’re already doing these things and your business is still struggling to benefit from social media, it might be time to speak to our social team. They will be able to help identify where you’re going wrong and establish a social media strategy that works for your business. Give us a call on 01903 686858 or email social@constructivemarketing.co.uk.
Why Social Media Is Important For Construction Businesses
Social media is now a firmly established part of the business world, but many still question its value. Whether it’s about how good and profitable it can be, or what it can bring to a businesses. Over the years, we’ve worked with a number of construction businesses to build their presence on social media. In fact, just recently, we helped Cheesmur Building Contractors increase their social media reach by over 825%! While this is a fantastic result, many business owners in the construction industry are sceptical about what social media can do for their business. So here are three key things our clients have achieved as a result of improved social media presence: Improved relationships with stakeholders One of the main foundations of the construction industry is the connections that are made with others. Whether that be suppliers, sub-contractors or consultants, it’s important for your business to maintain a good relationship with them all. Social media can play a huge part in this.. By posting about recent projects and tagging those involved, you can show your appreciation for those businesses and the teams behind them as well as boost your chances of being front of mind for the next project that comes along. Be considered for new projects Being active on social media, particularly on LinkedIn, allows you to be on the radar of the big decision makers. Meaning that they could consider you for projects you may not have been considered for before simply because you weren’t coming up in their feeds. A lot of decision makers use social media to follow brands and maintain industry knowledge. Our construction clients have a LinkedIn audience of many thousands and Senior Management and Directors make up around half of it. That’s people in senior leadership and director roles, who are possibly those making decisions on tenders and contracts, following our construction clients on LinkedIn to receive their updates to their feed. Enhanced brand exposure Most of our construction clients just didn’t have time to social media before starting to work with us – it’s one of the reasons why they got us onboard! Not only do we understand the industry, we also work with the social media algorithms to make sure that the right people see their posts. Increasing their brand exposure and allowing them to build on their positive reputations. Just in one week in April, one of our clients received 4,877 impressions on LinkedIn – that’s 4,877 views on the posts published in one week! Continuing with that example, the posts published for that client were all about the projects they were working on and events they were attending. Showing their audience they are busy with different projects and active within their business community. A fantastic message to be sending out to stakeholders and peers in the industry. If you’re struggling to make social media work for your business, speak to us today. We can support you in setting goals to achieve as well as run and manage your social feeds to make sure those goals are met. Give us a call on 01903 686858 or email us at info@constructivemarketing.co.uk.
Improving Your Digital Marketing
As we’re sure you’ll know, technology is constantly changing and there’s no exception for digital marketing channels. So it’s no surprise that, in order to be successful at digital marketing in 2023, you need to continually evolve your digital marketing strategy. The beginning of 2023 is a good time to make some changes. Here’s what we suggest: Streamline the social platforms you’re on A lot of businesses make the mistake of being on every social media platform in fear of not reaching everyone. Unless you’re a government or global consumer brand, this is the wrong approach to take – you don’t want to reach everyone you want to reach your target audience. So ask yourself – what platforms are they on? Think of social media platforms as news channels. There are lots of different ones out there; Sky News, BBC News, Channel 4 News, ITV News etc. Each of them is essentially telling the same stories, they’re just doing it in a slightly different way. As a result, people have their preferences – some always watch Sky News and don’t like BBC News. While others prefer BBC News over everything else. So what social media platform does your target audience prefer? Once you know that, you can start removing your business from other social channels and focusing on the audience’s favourite/s. Top Tip: Make sure that you don’t leave your social media accounts to become dormant. It’ll reflect badly on your business and may make potential customers turn away thinking your business is not operating anymore. Instead, either delete the social account completely or – if there’s an option to – make the account invisible to the public. Build relationships with your customers One of the main goals of any marketing efforts that you do should be to build relationships with your customers. Very few consumers are going to decide to buy from you simply because you asked them to. What many will do is shop around, look at alternatives and ultimately choose the business that resonates with them the most. Making sure that your business has a good relationship with the consumer will give it a good chance of being the one that consumers choose. Make sure you’re consistent Whatever digital marketing efforts you’re doing, making sure you’re consistent is a constant rule. While changing things up is important, it’s equally as important to make sure that you’re giving things ‘a good go’ before deciding that they’re not effective for your business. Here at Constructive Marketing, we’ve got years of experience managing a diverse range of businesses digital marketing strategies. Whether you’re not sure where to start, or you already have goals in place, we can help. Give us a call on 01903 686858 or email us at info@constructivemarketing.co.uk to arrange a meeting with us and get your digital marketing back on track for 2023.
What is a Google Business Profile?
And how can you optimise it? Google Business Profile (GBP) previously known as Google My Business (GMB), is an amazing free tool that allows you to be visible on the tech giant’s search engine. Making the most of this tool is one of the best ways to appeal to your local market as the information you provide on your GBP not only appears in Google search but also on Google Maps. So what can you do to optimise your GBP to improve your online presence locally? Here’s our top three ways to optimise your GBP. Location, Location, Location! One of the best ways to optimise your GBP is to include all of the local geographical areas that your business operates in. When it comes to selecting the areas to put onto your profile it’s important to be as specific as possible. Be sure to include specific town or city names, not just the county and country in which you operate. By including more locations on your GBP you will increase your chances of appearing when people search with location keywords, however, if you want to appear locally, you don’t want to include every city and town in the country. Optimise your services Another great way to improve your local reach is to update the services that your business provides. By listing all of the services that you provide your presence within the local market will be much higher as you will appear under a lot more search terms. For example, if you are an electrician, you could include services such as: electrical inspections, electrical wire repair and electrical socket and switch installation. Simply head into the services section of your GBP to start exploring the different services available. If you can’t find every service you provide, you can create a custom service. A powerful description The description of your business is one of the ways that you grab the attention of the reader, it is how you let the reader know what your business is all about, what you do and how your services can be of use to them. With that in mind, you must ensure that the description on your GBP is the best it can possibly be. The description section of your profile does have a character limit of 750 so you don’t need to write an essay on your business, just something simple that gets your point across. On the Constructive Marketing Google Business Profile, our description reads; “We are marketing experts. Our expertise includes Marketing, PR, Social Media, Graphic Design and Websites. We have the skills to cover this and more. We have extensive experience with writing content for websites, social media, award entries or print. We also create websites that combine the art of design and content optimisation along with the science of building organic SEO into every page. Contact us now to find out how we can take your business to the next level. Specialist sectors include Construction, Education and Care.” This uses 650 of the 750 allowed characters, so you can see that you don’t have to write much, just make it count!Having a well-optimised GBP is an integral part of your online presence. We work with a variety of clients from different industries to maintain a good online reputation for them. If you’re looking for help with maintaining a good reputation for your business, give our team a call on 01903 686858 or send us an email at info@constructivemarketing.co.uk. We’d love to help!
3 Facebook Mistakes That Could Be Costing You Customers
When it comes to Facebook, the majority of small businesses tend to run their page themselves. This usually entails the business owner putting together a quick post of an evening after their work day. Mainly because they feel that is what they should be doing. Although this can generate some fantastic results, inevitably, some mistakes are made which could be costing them customers. During our years of experience with working with businesses to improve their marketing efforts, we’ve noticed a few Facebook mistakes small businesses make. The fact is, 56% of Facebook users go to the platform for information and 78% of US consumers discover retail products to buy on Facebook. Your small mistakes could be preventing those users from choosing your business over your competitor. If you find that you’re making the mistakes mentioned, it’s worth spending time rectifying them. Don’t worry, we are here to help! 1. Broken link to your website The chances are you’ve worked really hard to create a website that you’re proud of, or you’ve paid someone a lot of money to make you a website you’re really proud of. Which is why it’s crucial that customers can visit it. There have been many instances where we’ve tried to click on the link to the business’ website through the about section on their page and been greeted with a 404 error message – a huge red flag for a potential customer. Research has shown that there’s about an 8 second window to capture someone’s attention and a 404 error message is going to make them drop off. So double check that all the links on your Facebook page work. Although this may seem like a very small thing, around 5% of visitors to your site will buy from you. 2. Irrelevant message prompts A great tool that Facebook introduced for businesses is the capability to have frequently asked questions, or question prompts on Facebook messenger. Having these on your page encourages people to ask you the questions you’ve suggested and can kickstart that conversation between you and the customer. Having said that, Facebook does auto-populate these questions which can make them irrelevant to your customers. This, in turn, actually discourages them from sending you a message. For example; a property maintenance company may have estate agent questions auto-populated because the Facebook AI has just recognised the word property. Making sure that the auto-populated questions are relevant to your business is important as people are 53% more likely to buy from a business using live chat. So encouraging them to take that first step in messaging you could win you the business. It’s easy enough to set up these questions yourself in just four steps: Inconsistent posting There’s a saying that success is 5% brains and 95% consistency and this is partly the case for Facebook posts. Although there are other factors too, such as the time posts are published and the content within them, consistency is very important. As we mentioned at the beginning of this blog post, business owners often hastily put together Facebook posts in the evening after a day’s work. This isn’t a consistent way of working and results in less reach and potentially less customers. A good way to combat this problem is to only commit to the number of posts you can truly do. If that’s only one a week that’s completely fine. Try to avoid doing three or four one week and then only one the following week. Instead, schedule those posts to spread them out; which you can do within Facebook. Suddenly, you have five weeks of consistent content rather than two weeks of inconsistent content. By rectifying these small mistakes, you could be generating more leads and, in turn, getting more customers. Looking for more helpful blog posts? Explore our searchable blog for more top tips. If you’re still struggling with making your Facebook page work for your business, give our friendly team a call on 01903 686858 to find out how we can help.
6 Easy Ways To Refresh Your Marketing
Small Changes Can Make a BIG Difference To Your Marketing You might not have the time nor the resources to do a full on redesign of your website or completely revamp your social media channels. However there are quick wins that you can achieve in a few hours, whether doing it yourself or asking a professional to help. Here’s a few ideas that we’re undertaking at the moment for both ourselves and some of our clients: Refresh your logo – visual branding is often created at the beginning of your business’s life when you’re keen to get something ‘out there’ to get the ball rolling. Several years down the line and you’re still using the same one but times – and your business – have moved on. If you’ve built good brand recognition you won’t want to waste that credibility, trust and awareness so, rather than throwing the baby out with the bathwater and ditching the existing logo, why not go for a refresh? With a successful logo refresh, you can continue to reap the benefits of the brand awareness and trustworthiness of your ‘old’ logo but demonstrate your currency, dynamism and forward-thinking approach with a new look. Revisit your website content – like your logo, you may have created your website when you were first looking to tell people about your business, and it’s been left like that for some time. For some of you, a redesign and rebuild may be necessary but an update of images and written content (aka copy) could work in many cases. For example, is your ‘about’ page up to date with any staff featured? Is your portfolio showing your most recent clients and work? Perhaps some of the language you used doesn’t reflect the tone you wish to convey? Take some time to read through the copy and change the bits that don’t fit with how you now see your business. There may also be references to past promotions or events that have taken place and are no longer relevant. Similarly, perhaps you used stock images at the start but now have (or are in a position to get) images of your actual products or services? Small changes can make big differences to customer and client perception and is great for enhancing your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Google especially loves new content and even making slight changes to existing copy will mean that Google improves the ranking of that page. Update your social bios and headers – In the same way that website content needs to move on to reflect any changes in the business, so too do your social media bio and ‘about’ information. Similarly, you might like to change the header image on your Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn business page. Perhaps you’re now offering a new service or product that you’d like to highlight? There is also lots of free or good value design software out there that offers exact match templates for specific header sizes to ensure you get the maximum effect. We love Canva (you can check it out here) which is super easy to use. Icons and thumbnails These are often ignored in design, which is a huge mistake as icons are often the first thing someone sees about you. Does your logo actually work when used in this small format? If not, can you focus on a part of the logo? Can you simplify it in some way? When designing the Seaside Creative branding, we realised that our logo where the beach hut is being constructed would not work across our social media icons so we developed our single beach hut which is now equally recognised along with our main logo. Consistency across all channels – consistency is a key aim in marketing. You want people to recognise your brand and what it represents easily and quickly. The best way is to keep your branding consistent, that is imagery, tone of voice in your copy, typography (the fonts, colours and sizes you use), any uniforms, signage or livery, customer service, or anything else that represents your business. This won’t always be possible down to the tiniest details but you can certainly take an overall look at your website, any literature (brochures, adverts, leaflets), your email signature, etc to make sure that each one looks broadly the same. Are you using the most up to date logo? If you’ve chosen to use a certain font, is it the same in your emails, your website, etc? If someone looked at your website, would they know it was the same business as when looking at your brochure or any other aspect of your business? Remove or update out of date stuff – this ties in with the previous point as it’s very easy to change logos, a point of contact, or a page on your website, without ensuring that it’s been updated everywhere it needs to be. Did you pin a post to the top of your Facebook page when you had a promo on and have left it there months after? Perhaps you’ve got printed literature featuring old price lists? Save yourself awkward moments by making it a regular task to check everything is current. Customers and clients will either be confused by out of date information – creating more work for you when they contact you about it – or get the impression of an inactive, stagnant business and this won’t help you win new customers. Set aside a morning or one day to take a look at each of these ideas – in fact, some may be achieved alongside each other. If there’s anything you’ve got questions about do get in touch.
Our Top 5 Tips For LinkedIn Company Page Success
How Good is your LinkedIn Company Page? We have delivered training sessions on LinkedIn Company pages and received a surprising response for more info. So we thought why not put it into a blog and share it with as many people as possible. The key difference between a LinkedIn profile and a company page is that one highlights your personal career achievements, while the other highlights your company or employer. This can be hard to get to grips with if you’re the owner of your own firm and used to talking about your company in the first person. Create distinction between your profile and your company page It is important to use the first person on your profile page – ‘I am proud to have achieved…’ etc. However, a company page needs to be written in the third person – ‘ACME Ltd is pleased to announce a new client win…’ etc. Note: Please do remember that ‘a’ company is a single entity too (a personal grammar bugbear of this writer!) eg: ‘the company has won’ (not ‘have won’) Once a distinction in voice has been created between a company page and a personal profile then it’s much easier to use your company as a ‘hub’ for all company news. No matter what size the business is, this ‘hub’ can then be followed and shared by all those who are interested parties, such as employees, clients and business contacts etc. The top 5 things to include when creating your company page The following list should be fairly obvious to most seasoned LinkedIn users, but it still amazes us just how many pages (and personal profiles for that matter) we see that are missing key information or contain irrelevant – even inappropriate – content. As with most things in life, get the basics right and a good starting point will be had by all. The main thing is that the LinkedIn company page is a free resource that, if used properly, can really showcase the best of what a company has to offer. Why wouldn’t you want to do that? Of course, if this is another thing on top of an already time-consuming social media schedule, then maybe think about getting help to run it. Dormant social media feeds are almost worse than having none at all! We offer some really cost effective packages at Constructive Marketing and are happy to help with training team members too. Just ask If you’ve enjoyed this post, and would like to receive more useful advice and tips from us you can sign up to our newsletter. It comes out monthly and you can unsubscribe at any time.