Marketing can tend to take a back seat in our daily business plan; it can be so easily left for another day. However, if you went to the gym once a fortnight, would you see much of a change in your fitness and physique? If you popped in once a day and did two minutes just on the tread mill, would you achieve great results?
When marketing isn’t working, it is often down to the level of effort being made or the lack of suitable substance. Because, for many of us on social media, the news feed element spins past at an incredible rate. Therefore a one off post here and there a couple of times a month will be missed by most people. That’s when we begin to think “it’s just not working for me”.
Marketing and advertising are different
These days most adverts just don’t work because they’re too general. But for the person placing the advertisement in the local paper, it seems like he’s spent his money wisely and he can forget about his marketing for a while.
But when we look at return on the investment we’ve made, we may be sorely disappointed. And the same goes for random leaflet drops too. How many times do we keep one of the hundreds of leaflets which drop through our door with alarming regularity? My recycling bag is full of them.
So social media marketing is like going to the gym. We need to know exactly where our clients hang out for a start, then we need to go there regularly and interact with them. We need to try the cross-trainer, the stepper machine, the tread mill and the bike! Different posts for different media, using the language that connects with our audience.
Go ahead and press their pain points!
The best part about social media is that it’s FREE! All it requires is some effort on our part. Thinking about the kind of people we want to attract, what issues do they tend to have in common? What worries them? What keeps them awake at night? What problems do you resolve over and over again? What questions do you get asked all the time? How can you enunciate that so that your audience easily understands?
As one highly successful Osteopath commented to me, “Social media is an invaluable free tool for our marketing plan.” How marvellous that, for once, your investment is time and energy but not money!
And whatever you think is enough posting per day – double it!
It’s almost impossible to post too much. But mix it up and make it either interesting, informative or light-hearted. In fact, most people will only see your posts in their actual news feed rather than decide to go and look at your whole page! However, if they do come by to look at your posts, is there a nice mix of images, articles, blog posts and advice? And most of the time are you adding a link back to the relevant page on your website so that they can go there quickly?
Remember that the clue is in the name: ‘social’ media. Ask yourself, will your audience really be fascinated by skeletons, medical terminology and images of muscles with no skin on? You should see my Facebook Business Coaching for Osteopaths news feed some days!
Finally then, like the gym, there needs to be a variety of activity. It needs to be consistent and persistent to achieve the desired results. And, as you might expect, there are unlikely to be significant results for three to six months of dedicated effort. So keep going!
