Business Bullets - Marketing

Marketing can be one of the first things companies strike off when they’re just getting started or facing financial struggles. We don’t think that’s necessarily right - if you need new customers you need to be promoting your organisation to those very people. Marketing is the way you do that.

But it doesn’t need to be an overly expensive venture and there really are elements that you can bring in-house, without even hiring a marketer at all, if you’ve got the time and some know-how. One of the easiest wins that companies can make, from a marketing perspective, is bringing their social media efforts in-house.

If you’re a start-up or SME looking to save some of your marketing costs, then managing your social presence yourself is an obvious place to start.

You should identify the following characteristics in either yourself or the person who will be responsible for running your social media:

• Are they proud advocates of your brand, company ethos and understand your organisation's goals and audience?
• Are they somewhat savvy using online tools and platforms?
• Are they personally active on social media?
• Are they able to dedicate 3-5 hours a week on social media?
• Are they keen and enthusiastic about marketing your business on social media?

Across the board, all of your social media profiles should:

• Have a professional, visual presence, so your profile and header photos should be uniform across all channels (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.). Your profile photo should ideally be your business logo.
• Be correctly and fully set up - include your business location/s (if applicable), as well as a description of what you do/why customers should choose you; link to website and phone number.
• Pay attention to your brand voice. Make sure all of your social posts are grammatically correct, but also consider your brand voice and the tone you use for your posts. If you’re an accountancy firm, you should appear quite formal, trustworthy, reliable - but you can still inject humour and personality with the odd #FridayFeeling post, or photos of the team at work or networking events.

3 ways to boost social media activities

Brush up on your social media competency

There is a wide range of learning opportunities out there for companies to suit all platforms and knowledge levels. If you’re going to undertake social media marketing for your company you need to be prepared to brush up on, or undergo further learning, to ensure you produce the best efforts for success. Some of our favourite free courses are: HubSpot - Social Media (Free Certification), Facebook Blueprint (Free Certification for Creating Facebook Content) and Later - Instagram Training (Free Online Courses)

Boost your presence with paid social advertising

You can further widen your social media presence with the implementation of paid social advertising. Even just opting for a small budget towards paid social efforts can hugely widen your reach and there are lots of resources, ebooks and documentation online to help you get accustomed to the various paid social platforms.

Start with £25 a week advertising on each social platform and monitor your success with reach, engagement and conversions, to choose how you tighten both targeting and your creative, before choosing to add more money to your advertising efforts.

Use on-brand and professional graphics and media

Although text posts are a great start, the real success with engaging your audience is visually appealing, on-brand, graphics and multimedia, including photos, video, infographics, etc. Use a free tool such as Canva to get started with producing professional, smart, consistent media. Canva comes with a whole host of easy to amend templates for social posts, infographics, presentations and more.

Those are the three ways we’d recommend you get started with your own in-house social media. Make the most of free resources and consider upskilling your own team through workshops and training sessions from reputable providers.