The Social Media Guru - A practical guide for small businesses: Implement an easy social media marketing strategy to gain customers & leads with Snapchat,Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, a blog
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About this ebook
It's practical. It's visual. It's crammed with relevant examples, infographics and actionable takeaways for you to implement straight away.
What will you learn?
• How to actually use Snapchat, Twitter, Youtube, Facebook and Instagram the right way in 2016.
• An understanding of what makes your audience engaged on social media and the scientific, psychological 'why' behind it.
• How to create a brand and social media content that people actually give a crap about and want to follow, share and like.
• How to grow your audience, get them to love you and then part with their money.
• How to utilise free marketing and low cost paid social marketing to generate leads and sales.
• How to create persuasive messages that lead to a purchase through images and copywriting.
Who is this book for?
Do you have small business that needs some exposure but don’t know where to start when it comes to marketing? are you a regular social media user but you have no clue what content you should post on your business page?
Have you ever wondered how that small online retailer you follow on Instagram has become an overnight success fulfilling thousands of orders a week?
Is it really possible to make sales through low budget Snapchat videos, funny memes, and controversial Tweets?
Whether you’re an online shoe retailer, a local plumber or you run your own freelance consultancy business. If you want to use social media to make you more profit, refresh your current marketing strategy or kick your new business into gear this is the guide for you!
We live in a time where...
Entire businesses are built on platforms like Snapchat, YouTube and Instagram. This book shows you how to grow an audience of loyal followers through content who want to buy whatever you have to sell!
Look around you…Notice how your friend spends 4 minutes trying to upload the perfect a Snap to Snapchat of her food at a cool new restaurant while her dish gets cold? Or, your brother who happily spends hours intently watching YouTube videos of a gamer playing minecraft? How many times a day do you open your social media apps on your phone? We are addicted to social media and the branded content we consume defines us & informs the way we live our lives. Social media has become the first thing we do before we eat, sleep or even acknowledge our surroundings. Have you almost been hit by a bus because you are too busy scanning through your Instagram feed? I have. Many times.
All you need is...
The right content, posted at the right time on the right platform which is viewed by the right person to make your social media business page a success.
Everyone is glued to social media, but how do you make money from it?
This book takes you through our step by step blueprint to social media marketing success, (it isn't yet another wishy washy guide to Facebook advertising).
Who is the Social Media Guru?
The Social Media Guru is made up of two people with combined marketing knowledge, experience and expertise. We have consulted for Groupon, Metro Bank, o2, Google Squared Online and been trained by Google, digital agencies and the Institute of Direct and Digital Marketing.
We are passionate about Digital marketing - we understand it, we work in it, we know what works.
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Reviews for The Social Media Guru - A practical guide for small businesses
31 ratings7 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Super informative , gives a clear and concise outline on the benefits of social media marketing. Even as a refresher it was great.✅
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Wow. This book is wonderful
This is a must read for anyone that wants to go into social media marketing. - Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5very well written, useful and easy to understand and follow
4 people found this helpful
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Simple and practical book. Great for a 1st. approach for start up small businesses.
2 people found this helpful
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Very usefull book especialy for the newbie in social media
2 people found this helpful
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5by far the best and most practical social media book i have ever read, a must have for any serious marketer
2 people found this helpful
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Quite basic book about social media. Doesn't add a lot of value besides summarizing common views that every millennial with a bit of psychology knowledge knows.
2 people found this helpful
Book preview
The Social Media Guru - A practical guide for small businesses - The Social Media Guru
Social media makes us feel good… similar to that mini rush you get after completing a good workout, a compliment from your manager at work or when you’ve hit a high score on candy crush. That rush of happiness and contentment is thanks to dopamine, a neurochemical known as the reward molecule
that’s released after certain human actions or behaviors, such as exercising, or setting and achieving a goal. While physical activity is most commonly linked to dopamine’s release, social media is one form of modern-day behaviour, which increases this ‘feel good’ hormone without even having to leave our seats.
Then there’s oxytocin, sometimes referred to as the cuddle chemical
because it’s released when you hug or kiss and also when you post a funny meme or status. According to Neuroconomist Paul Zak oxytocin levels can rise as much as 13% In 10 minutes of social media time - a hormonal spike equivalent to some people on their wedding day.
Marketing insights firm; Radiumone explain that social media usage is a dopamine gold mine. Every time we post, share, ‘like,’ comment or send an invitation online, we are creating an expectation
.
According to the same study. We feel a sense of belonging and advance our concept of self through sharing
. Customers get a high from positive interactions with one another when they share, ‘like’ or post something. With this in mind, our job is to create branded social media posts that increase our dopamine and oxytocin levels but also appeal to our primitive way of thinking.
Over thousands of years we have evolved from primates to humans, the exterior has rapidly changed (very few of us are that hairy) but what motivates us, scares us, threatens us, what we crave and our relationships with other people hasn’t.
We can use these evolutionary behaviours to influence the way consumers feel about your brand - One is our innate need for the safety that a group provides. Think about the lives of our stone age ancestors… If an individual was banished from a group, it was essentially a death sentence. The threat of predators, not to mention the challenge of finding sufficient food, meant a single person would survive long alone. To be part of something, whether it’s a social movement, owner of a trendy Chanel handbag or appreciated through 5k of likes on your selfie - is everything. We are coded to crave love, affection, attention, appreciation and acceptance.
Understanding the behaviours of your social media target market will help you tailor communications (posts, memes, videos etc.) to them in a more personal way. Therefore it’s important to consider the evolutionary habits that dictate how your audience uses social media. We can break these evolutionary habits down into six fundamental needs that everyone has in common irrespective of race, gender, colour, weight or religion influence our behaviour, interaction with others and even our buying habits:
1.certainty: assurance you can avoid pain and gain pleasure
2.uncertainty/Variety: the need for the unknown, change, new stimuli
3.significance: feeling unique, important, special or needed
4.connection/Love: a strong feeling of closeness or union with someone or something
5.growth: an expansion of capacity, capability or understanding
6.contribution: a sense of service and focus on helping, giving to and supporting others
When we share pictures of our cat, like pictures of a friends holiday or message an old friend through Facebook we are satisfying at least one of these primitive needs. As an advertiser of our product(s), our job is to manipulate these needs and then present our product as a solution. A new pair of shoes will give you significance, certainty, a connection, assurance and confidence to find a mate, or a subscription to an online dating service will increase your feeling of closeness when you find your ideal partner.
Adhering to and playing with the behavioural characteristics that makes us human is the blueprint for any successful social media campaign you run from this day forward. We will continue to look at the ways you can tap into these innate human needs with social media throughout this book.
Do better this time round
You may have experimented with social but you are unsure how to use it correctly to market your business?
You may have tweeted ‘buy my new handmade jewellery’ or ‘10% off your first order’ and sat there wondering why there wasn’t a sudden surge of customers buying everything you have in stock?
Maybe you have heard how important social can be but you don’t know where to start or where to begin and it all seems a bit overwhelming?
The truth is, people don’t want to be flooded by sales messages, their social networks are a personal space where you share memes with friends and photos with families – the ‘buy my products now’ approach just won’t cut it. There is a science behind being successful at social media marketing, you need to combine knowledge of & how to implement:
•understanding the psychology of human behaviour
•creating an environment for people to make choices and influencing through persuasion techniques
•clever branding that makes us feel something
•the customer experience in a digital world with a multiple devices at our disposal
•how to implement the right targeted strategy
•understanding the importance of measuring your results and implementing changes
•throwing a bit of creative flair in the mix to ensure your posts aren’t boring
With these understandings, you can be successful with any social platform you want.
72% of adult internet users have a social media profile. According to a recent study from Statista, These are the leading reasons for interacting with companies on social media platforms in the UK in 2015:
You don’t have to be a big company with a humungous budget to succeed in social. At its core the mechanics of each network are designed for small and medium sized businesses; they reward advertisers who can think of new creative ways to engage their audiences. It allows you to compete with large companies regardless of your media spend. To put it simply you can reach your target market with a few pounds and get them engaged by providing intriguing, entertaining and valuable content – create stuff people want to see and you will do well.
The key to social media success is engagement. There is a lot to be learned from the brands who manage to get people to interact with them online and in this book we will take the best parts from their campaigns, explain the reasons they work so well and recommend suggestions that a small business can implement on a small budget.
Social interaction is nothing new, we are programmed as humans to share experiences and we have been doing it for thousands of years. Social media is merely a digital channel that enables us to interact, spread word of mouth, share culture and experiences on a bigger platform and reach a potentially infinite amount of people. As business owners, we now have a bigger audience to connect with and multiple ways to spread our message, enabling us to measure and track our reach, see who loves us, see who isn’t happy with our products, see who might want our products and find ways to speak to them without looking like a weirdo. It serves as the perfect surrounding to start or join a conversation. So how do you initiate a conversation? Through content marketing.
What is content marketing?
Content is anything that adds value to the reader’s life
, Avinash Kaushik of Google
We share something like 2.5 billion pieces of content each and every day online. More than 30 billion pieces of content are shared on Facebook each month and 6 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube – that’s almost an hour for every person on Earth Just like search & SEO was a decade ago and social was five years ago, content marketing is the next digital media revolution
. This was the prediction made by one of world’s top business magazines, Forbes. But what exactly is content marketing?
It is a marketing technique of creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent pieces of visual information to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience – with the objective of selling stuff. Online Content comes in many forms – YouTube videos, images, memes, gifs, Snapchats, written guides, blog posts, tweets, Facebook statuses, ebooks, banner adverts. Here are a few examples of what branded content can be:
•entertaining – a YouTube video of cats chasing dogs
•funny – a meme
•informative – a cake baking blog post
•helpful – an infographic that takes you through the steps of changing your car engine oil
•motivational – inspirational quotes and pictures
A dictionary definition of Content Marketing goes something like this. It is a strategy for producing and publishing information that builds and maintains engagement, trust and authority with consumers. There are four things to keep in mind when crafting your digital content:
1.content marketing focuses on the creation of new content and curation (gathering or sourcing other peoples content and reposting it)
2.it’s also way of becoming a recognized thought leader in a specific subject or area – the GoTo person in that specific area just like Zoella is to the beauty market
3.It’s not only key to driving your social media, it is the core of your whole of digital and marketing strategy – create stuff people want to read and repost and your branded message will spread
4.digital content marketing is only successful when it is valuable and relevant to the person reading it
The reality most businesses like yours have to face up to is that most consumers don’t care about you, your products, or your services…they care about themselves, and their own wants and needs. Their focus is the job that they are trying to get done at that exact moment when they use their phone, laptop or desktop. So your challenge is to give them something of value they are passionate about. If your content does that they will spend quality time with you and not your competitors.
Content marketing is important to you because it allows you to communicate with your customers and prospects without the hard sell – it’s like a conversation with two people in the pub where you can share funny stories, views, opinions and recommendations. So unlike most traditional marketing it doesn’t interrupt what we were doing (think of those massive pop up adverts that appear from nowhere and take up half of your screen, which conveniently conceal the ‘x’ button). Content that’s done well it actually adds value to the whole customer experience.
So the name of the game is to deliver consistent, valuable and relevant content to your customers. It might be entertaining or inspiring – think the Red Bull space jump, for example.
Or it might be valuable because it’s educational, or provides a useful utility or service, helping fulfil your customer’s needs and wants. Be it buying a new car, booking a holiday, or finding a new office supplies company. In return your customers will hopefully not only provide you with their business, and loyalty to your brand. But also, by sharing your content and the positive experiences they have with you, they become advocates, or vocal fans of your product or service.
Why should I do it?
Sharing content is central to our online behaviour. We used to gather around the coffee machine at work it to talk about the big programme on TV last night but now we share the things (content) we ‘like’ via social media. It’s up to YOU to create content that does.
We are all publishers! We need to recognise that everyone with a camera, photo editing software and social media channels is a publisher of content – to be successful with your content you need to post content that is good enough to cut through the noise and hire social media celebrities to push your own content out to their audience and loyal following.
It can be hard to get people to come to your website or social media pages
Think about it; how often do you research a brand? You might do so when you are planning to buy a big-ticket item such as a car, mortgage or holiday. But how often do you actually visit a website or social media page for a toothpaste brand, your favourite pasta sauce, soft drink, or fast-food restaurant? How many visitors do you get to your site every day? And how often do they come back? Brands are learning to create content that is engaging and makes us want to come back. Time and time again.
Let’s look at an example of helpful branded content that encourages people to come to the brand directly and return time and time again for advice. The example here is from Johnson + Johnson, the brand behind some of the biggest name baby products