Being a great marketer requires strategy, and takes time, explains Vicki Woods Morris, the founder, and president of Face To Face Marketing. There are 3 main ways or formats in which you can market your business: social media, websites, and newsletters.
Social Media
Social media usually is a client’s first encounter with your business. You want your profile to be updated regularly. Morris advises focusing mainly on 3 platforms for starters: Facebook, Instagram, and Linked In. However, make sure you are where your public is: do not start marketing on the social platform you are most comfortable with, but rather focuses on which platform(s) are your potential clients most likely to be.
“This is where you build individual relationships with your ideal community or your buying person. The types of people, or companies, or organization that you most want to do business with — these are the people that you need to be strategically targetting in every social media post that you make that is related to your business,” Morris explains.
It is best to separate your personal profile and your business page: on your public figure or personal page you want to share social posts, while on your business page stick to marketing. Your audience should get a good understanding of who you are as the business personality behind the company.
“Your business page is where you run mostly promotions and information about your offer. Your personal page or your public figure page is where you should share more social-type posts,” Morris says. “You offer personal stories and experiences; you share relevant information to make your ideal community smarter; you share announcements about events, industry news, … and you do a bit of promotion — only on a public figure page.”
One of the most important things, when you post, is to call for action: “click here to know more,” “comment which is your favorite,” “follow for more” are all calls to action directed at potential clients. On the same idea, make sure to acknowledge engagement: respond to comments and messages. Morris set up an automatic chatbox on her Instagram and Facebook pages, which sends the client an automated message and at the same time alerts her that someone is trying to establish contact. Being accessible is essential to growing your brand, so do not forget to give your audience easy access to your website from your social media platforms.
Take advantage of algorithms. Social platforms are businesses too and are great advertising platforms: by putting a little money in ads, you will increase your chances of being more visible. Algorithms will put you forward when you do pay for that service. As to which posts should be boosted, just take a look at which posts do well organically, for they might be worth paying for them to be more visible.
Morris again highlights the importance of strategy: you can organize and plan your posts in advance using Airtable — which both has a free and a paid version.
“I can organize everything and assign it to my assistant, so I can tell her what I want her to post, the status is assigned, she knows where to post it, she knows the graphic that is going to be used, the date that it needs to be posted, the link, the actual verbiage, and specific notes that I want her to take note of before she posts things,” Morris says, explaining the way Airtable functions.
Websites
“Websites have a job — and it’s usually one of two things: to get people on your mailing list, or to get people to buy your product, or your offer, or your service,” Morris continues.
The goal of a website is not for you to tell everything you know, or have all of your information. Keep it clean and easy to navigate. Your website should not be a stopping point, it should lead the client to either buy or keep following you if he is not ready to buy yet. What you want to include on your webpage, though, is who you are, and what you do.
“One of the core principles of doing business is people do business with people they know, like, and trust,” Morris underlines.
Make it easy for someone to contact you or to make an appointment with you. The essential part that your website must have is a static footer: it should at all times include a way to subscribe to a mailing list. When a customer is not quite ready to buy yet, he can still keep in contact with you until he is.
Newsletters
Marketing through email is one of the most efficient. Newsletters are a place where you can inform your potential clients but also nurture them: cultivate a relationship with the subscribers. Tell them your story.
“I like to put a picture of myself in the email some kind of way. And the reason behind it is so that people feel like I am having a conversation just with them. It is as though they seeing me talk to them when they open that email,” Morris says.
When looking at data, a good percentage of newsletters opened and clicked on is about 2%. This means that you have to keep building your network and grow your emailing list in order to be more and more efficient.
You can use services like Mailchimp, Wix, Convertkit, or Constant Contact to build and send your own newsletter.
Overall, make sure you are consistent over all of your platforms: there should be a continuity in terms of aesthetic and content so that clients will easily recognize that all those platforms are connected. And do not forget calls to action: tell your audience what you are expecting them to do via “subscribe to the newsletter,” “follow for more” and such.
