Social Media Consultancy London

How Travel Can Help Your Business

Much of the learning we do in life involves learning in a practical way. We do not sit in a classroom every day learning life skills and how to build our career brick by brick, we learn by experiencing new things and taking ourselves away from our comfort zone to somewhere totally new. Travel is an experience which can broaden our minds and make us feel more in touch with ourselves and the world, but what if travel is also the key to helping us develop our career? If you are still not convinced, take a look at these reasons that travel can be great for your business.

You’ll gain inspiration

Whether you own a PPC agency, a retail store, you are a writer or you work in science, you will need to have the chance to go out and experience things all over the world to see how the same businesses operate in other parts of the world, You may find that their methods prove to be incredibly successful and you’ll want to try them yourself.

Rest and refresh

As we become stuck in the rat race of everyday life, it can be forgotten that we sometimes need to step back and have some time to relax. Stepping away and going somewhere completely different allows your mind to relax and refresh, and often you will return to your work with a sense of enthusiasm and dedication to get the job done.

See the big picture

The moment you step outside your tiny little bubble and find yourself in another world entirely, you will begin to realise how insignificant certain things are in your life. You may find that you have been stressed out over stupid things for a long time, and the moment you are away from them, you look back and realise how silly it was to make yourself ill with worry in the first place. You can come home with a fresh set of eyes and see things for what they really are in your life and business.

You’ll meet new people

One of the greatest ways to network for your own benefit and your business’ is to travel and talk to people face to face. You might find that you have been dealing with international suppliers or clients for a long time, but it is not until you step on a plane to go and speak to them that your relationship with that person is solidified. It doesn’t just apply to those you already know either. You could find that you meet many other new people who can either teach you a better way to do things at home, or will be able to become clients for the future.

It could be that you attend a trade show in your industry in a foreign country and meet many new faces and foreign representatives of brands you’ve always wanted to work with. If you take the time to talk and get to know these people they could be your best way into business with that company.

Shoestring Social Media Marketing Tips

Although there are a lot of benefits to being a small business, having the time and money to come up with an epic social media marketing strategy isn’t one. But, don’t let that get you down because you can create an actional online marketing plan even on a shoestring. Here are some things to help you with that:

Be the Follower

As a small business, it’s followers you’re looking to find, but it might be a better idea, for now, to start following people. Why? Because if you start following your target audience on platforms like Twitter and Instagram, then at least some of them will start following you back. If you can then provide them with interesting content – something to make them stick around – your following will begin to grow.

Use Mannequins Not Models

If you want to market on social media, and it’s clothing that you have to sell, it can be rather expensive for you to hire models to show off your goods, which is why you might want to consider using props from the mannequin shop instead. Obviously, if you have any photogenic friends who’d be willing to throw you a bone that’s great, but when you’re starting out, mannequins are fine. When you have more money, you can start hiring the occasional model to make things a bit more dynamic.

Document Your Progress

Documenting your progress is a great way to gain followers. What I mean by this is that you should try to blog or post about the day to day goings on and ups and downs of life as a small business. This will get you more respect, and be more interesting to more people than a few promotional posts fired off willy-nilly. It’ll also help to build more respect for your brand.

Be Quick to Engage

As you start to gain followers, you will start to get comments too. It’s important if you want to make your business look good, that you reply to these comments quickly and engage with your audience on their level as much as you can. Thank people for mentioning you, answer their questions about your products and even just shoot the breeze. Do this, and you’ll look better than all of those businesses who automate their responses, or even worse, ignore their audience completely.

Get in Touch with Niche Influencers

One of the most effective ways to market your small business on a shoestring is by getting to know influencers in your niche. These are people who already have a huge audience and who talk about the same kind of things you’re selling. If you can get them to mention you in a positive light, chances are your follower numbers will soar and you’ll start selling a lot more.

Run a Contest

Running a contest or giveaway is a great way to get more people in your target audience to follow you, share your links and generally engage with you, and you don’t even have to offer anything particularly expensive for it to work. A bundle of your products or even a modest Amazon gift card will suffice.

Here’s to more social media success!

How To Stay Ahead Of Your Competitors On Social Media

I created a free marketing plan recently for a plastic surgeon based in Harley street.

Currently, he is not using any form of social media other than a Facebook page and he was really taken aback when I managed to find his top competitors are already very influential on Twitter, and he hasn’t even tweeted yet.

I think it can be very demoralising when you see your competitor has thousands of followers and you seem to be following 500 with only 50 following you back! But there ARE ways to get ahead of the competition, it requires consistency and determination.

Follow your competitors feeds

Rather than see competitors as a threat, I followed most of my competitors in the London area and made a Twitter list for them. This way I can get ideas about what promotions they are offering, which potential customers I can engage with and who to follow.

Most of my competitors have been in the freelance marketing scene for a number of years which makes them the PERFECT candidates to learn from. I check which of their posts received the most engagement, which blog posts had the most shares and look to recreate that using my own products – then I follow all THEIR followers and engage with them.

Blogging

I’ve spent hours, weeks, months trying to source the best blogging templates, the best marketing bloggers, HOW to add calls to action in a blog post, you name it, and last year, a business blog I created literally blew up and we doubled our traffic within 6 months without paid ads – it took A LOT of marketing though!

The issue with paying for ads is that the moment you stop the paid ad, you lose your potential customer where as blogging is free and in the long term can really increase your organic traffic. In fact, I DOUBLED my last clients traffic by creating 2 blog posts a week all under 500 words and you can do it too. Even better outsource it a freelancer on people per hour!

Not sure how to blog? Simply take a look at my tips below

- Create Emotion – The most shareable content on Pinterest ignites one of the following emotions. Surprise, fear, joy, sadness, anger, or disgust.

- Useful – Why is this blog post so valuable? Ultimately how will your service /product make my life easier?

- A Catchy Title – Titles simply sell the content. ‘How to ‘ posts are very popular for example, another example would be ’10 reasons why you shouldn’t ………..’. Need ideas? Then think about using a title generator.

- SEO – Try to be as specific as possible with your keywords. If you need assistance with SEO, then look to download a wordpress Plug in such as Yoast.

- Informative – Add a fact here, for example, if I were to write a blog post about why a customer should buy my photos, I would add an interesting fact. ‘Did you know that 90% of the transmitted information in the human brain is visual’

- Images – Taking the above fact, we can see how a great image can be a large factor in closing that sale. It also helps to break up the monotony of long paragraphs. Try taking a look at Canva, a fantastic platform with templates specifically for Twitter, Pinterest and the added option to add text to your image.

Making Twitter Lists Of Your Influencers

I think Twitter lists are VERY underrated. It’s vital a business finds influencers in their niche, so they can easily retweet appropriate content to their followers.

If you wish to follow influences outside your niche, then use your personal Twitter account, not your business one. Interested in influential marketers? Check out this Forbes list!

Sharing On 1 Platform Only

I hate to tell you this, but when I started creating 3 blog posts a week for my last client, I had to SHARE them on multiple social media platforms, NOT just my clients Twitter and Facebook pages. You have spent a whole morning creating a masterpiece. Don’t you want people to actually SEE it?

Take Action – Here are my top Facebook groups and Google Plus groups for business. This is where I share all my content. I also use Triberr where other Twitter users in my niche SHARE my content to their followers for FREE. You can find more about that here.

Triberr

Triberr is a social network for bloggers. The idea is to find other bloggers who write about the same topics. These writers group up in a tribe.

Whenever one blogger writes a post, the others read, comment and share it with their social networks.

The best part is, you pool together all your followers giving yourself a larger reach. So the more tribes you join, the larger your social media reach.