Social media should be part of your integrated marketing plan
Social media should be part of your integrated marketing plan
Reb Risty Hi I’m Reb Risty, Head REBL at REBL Marketing, and I’m here today with April Ball, our Social Media Specialist. We’re going to talk to you about why social media is important for your business. April, how are you?
April Ball Doing well, thank you.
Reb Risty Good. Can you tell us a little bit about your approach with social media?
April Ball Absolutely. You know I take a very tailored approach to all of my clients. I go in and I talk to them and figure out what their goals and objectives are, and together we come up with a strategic plan and whether it should be organic, or it should be paid.
Reb Risty Organic and paid – what’s the difference between those?
April Ball You know that’s a really great question. Paid marketing is what you’re going to do when you spend ad dollars. You’re going to put your social profile in front of all the people that don’t already know it exists. Whereas organic marketing is essentially free. You’re going to go in it with a consistent posting schedule and you’re going to do engagement where you put yourself in front of your target audience.
Reb Risty Okay, at REBL we focus on organic. Tell me a little bit about how you use organic for our clients.
April Ball Right, we have one client that is an outsourced accounting firm and they really target small businesses. What I do for their Instagram specifically is I follow the Small Business hashtag. It’s really easy when I’m scrolling through their news feed and looking at everybody I follow, well now I have these posts that pop up in my news feed of everybody who tagged small businesses. Then I can like, I can comment, follow, direct message whatever is appropriate to the person that posted that, and really get a good grasp on the target audience.
Reb Risty I like that. I think that’s really unique in choosing a hashtag that’s outside of their normal you know key terms to really reach their audience. So that’s great. Tell us a little bit how you create content then around that for their social media.
April Ball So it’s really going back to that tailored approach. If a company already has a library full of photos, we’re going to capitalize on that. Why recreate the wheel? Otherwise, we can go onsite and we can take photos of their service or their products. Once we have those photos we’ll create those clever captions and we’ll put them into a content calendar.
April Ball You make sure that there are no duplicates that there is no repetitive messaging and that there is a good range of content that we’re sharing. From there we either schedule the posts or we post them live.
Reb Risty Great. This is probably your most common question, how do you know it’s working?
April Ball You know, this too is a great question because so many business owners don’t understand the analytics that each platform produces. So that’s where I come in. I take all the analytics from every platform that we post on, and then break them down into an elementary level and I put them into a very detailed and comprehensive report. Then I give it back to my business owners so they can really understand and comprehend how social media is benefiting their business.
Reb Risty Yeah, it’s so important because all the platforms they have such different reporting systems. It is valuable to have somebody who actually knows not only how to pull it but read it, and I know our clients have really appreciated that with you. Any last thoughts on if someone wants to start their social media or improve on what they’re doing?
April Ball You know, they say Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither were the largest social media profiles. It takes time, especially organically. Just stay on it, keep doing consistent posting, make sure that you’re taking the time to do that engagement, which is honestly the most cumbersome part it takes, it takes so many minutes out of a business owner’s day. If you can find somebody to do it for you who knows what they’re doing that is your best option.
Reb Risty Yeah, I completely agree, and I think with any well-integrated marketing plan it is about consistency and really following through with what you’re doing.
If you want to REBLutionize your marketing through social media, give us a call.
