Why You Want To Focus Your Marketing On Where The People Are

Imagine Ariel from the Little Mermaid Singing, “I want to be where the people are…”  That song right now has so much context as we are sheltering in our homes.  

As humans, in general, we are programmed to be around people not isolated in our homes, and as business owners, most of us earn our living through in-person human interactions. 

In the last few weeks, we have been asked to shelter in place, practice social distancing, and modify our business to survive in a digital, little or zero actual human contact world.  I can see companies working hard to adapt to the future of a digital world. However, it can be frustrating when you work so hard on crafting the perfect social media posts, complete with a scroll stopping photo, and the catchy caption only to look at your analytics and see that it hasn’t reached anyone. Let alone the intended party of whom you posted to get in front of.

You are not alone in this. In the last few weeks, social media engagement for most industries on Facebook and Instagram has been down. When I first began to notice the dip, I deep dove into client analytics to see where if any traffic was coming from. The first steady stream of conversion was from their Pinterest accounts.

If your business hasn’t leveraged Pinterest yet or even has a presence, you are missing out on crucial conversion right now.  The migration of time spent off of Facebook has been happening for a few years now, but people are also spending less time on Instagram these days. There are a plethora of psychological hypotheses on this one, which is a topic for another time.

The other digital migration that has happened is people have been downloading the Tik Tok app like crazy.  Tik Tok is a great way to escape and watch short, somewhat mindless entertainment. If your business can maintain it entertainingly’s brand on Tik Tok, this is absolutely the time to download the app, create some content, and, if it’s well-received, begin to build a presence there. 

The point of all of this is to keep an eye on your website back end analytics because that golden nugget of data will tell you where exactly your people are.  And where your people are showing up is also where your business needs to be continuously digitally showing up. 

How Digital Marketing Changes In An Election Year

2020 is quickly approaching, and we are all most likely up to our knees for business planning for next year. One unique thing about next year is that it is also an election year, and election years can throw a wrench is business digital marketing campaigns. 

2020 will be my third election cycle as a digital marketing professional, and up until 2016, everything went pretty much as predicted. Candidates bash each other, supporters of said candidates share opinion pieces about the rival, yadda yadda. However, shortly after the New Hampshire primary in March of 2016, I watched the client’s customer bases leave Facebook with the droves leaving the night and day following when we learned who the nominees were. These people also did not log on or interact again on Facebook until well into 2017. 

At that point in 2016, it was just Facebook where the political advertising warfare was raging among the masses. Instagram was pretty much unaffected by the political advertising machine. Instagram, we were still seeing plenty of dog and latte posts with somewhat positive captions that the masses were even interacting with and again somewhat purchasing from businesses.  

The sales trend for purchasing non-essential products and booking services stayed statistically low, as is predicted during an election year. During election years, statistics show that consumers are more conscious of how they spend their money and are more apt to think twice before purchasing because the outlook financially for the next four years is uncertain.  

However, once Facebook jumping began, marketing plans were altered, and email marketing, SEO, and Pinterest became the focus. Which with these changes, businesses’ monthly marketing statistics stayed consistent as non-election years. People are not going to leave the internet because we live here now. People are, however, going to avoid places on the internet that suck for them. 

If Facebook and Instagram are the only marketing platforms that your business is focusing on, I’m sorry to tell you, but in 2020 they could let you down hard. Facebook has already said that they will not filter and will allow all kinds of political ads to be run. Since late September, I have already seen a dozen or more political all sorts of ads popping up on Instagram. This makes me believe that once the Iowa caucuses happen, Instagram will also become penetrated with ads, influencers, and those dogs and lattes photos we all love will be captioned with political comments. At which point, the cycle of leaving and logging off of social media until November 2020 will begin. 

With all that said, the key to running a successful digital marketing campaign during an election year is to be prepared for anything and focus on areas of directly connecting with customers via their inbox and their searches. What worked well for one month could very well not work the next month or as soon as the news cycle is updated. If this election is anything like 2016, we are all going to be opening up our apps to the wild world wide web together. 

Why Keeping Your Social Media And Digital Marketing Up To Date Is Important For Your Business Health

One of the accounts I work with is a user-generated content account where I repost content from paying community members, as an additional way to market for them. Right now, these accounts are smack dab in the middle of their busy season. They aren’t keeping their channels updated because they are so busy running their business. Not updating is entirely understandable. You, as a business owner can not wear all the hats, run the business, write content, and post the content all while taking care of themselves, their families, and their other personal commitments. Something has to give, and most of the time, I have noticed that it’s their digital marketing that gets put on the backburner.

While this is an understandable situation, I am here to advise against this happening too often to you. There are inexpensive and even free resources to keep your accounts up to date; it just needs some planning in advance and setting aside a few hours during the week to update the scheduling applications.

In this day in age, we all as customers have become accustomed to interacting and engaging with a brand on we feel like we know them in real-life level. We think of brands as a part of us and the smaller ones we might even feel a personal connection with the owner.

The flip side to this is that it could be attracting other new people to your feeds via locations, hashtags, and search terms. If these new people visit your feed, see that you have not posted in months or longer, they may scroll right past you and choose to do business with someone who is keeping their feeds up to date and current.

Both of these situations are not ideal for your business because, in a world where our attention span is about three seconds, a society we are continually fed content from every direction existing and customers could forget that you even exist if you are not staying at their top of mind.

A few suggestions to avoid this situation from continuing to happen to you, invest in either a free or a paid social media scheduling platform, schedule time on your calendar to write and schedule your posts. Or hire out the workload to a social media manager.

Every single business has a busy season. The trick to keeping existing customers as well as enticing new customers to conduct business with you is to maintain your social media presence.

Instagram vs. Pinterest Marketing: 7 Big Differences Between Them

When I am coaching people on how to use Pinterest the first hurdle that we have to get over is that writing for Pinterest is completely different than writing for Instagram.

On Instagram, your followers are brand loyal. They are following and interacting with you on this platform because they enjoy your brand and reading what your brand stands for and offers.  On Instagram, you need to not only have photos that are on brand but you also need to write your content on brand. On this platform, keep in mind that you are also dealing with a seven-second attention span. Your photo needs to be scroll stopping AND your caption needs to be witty and captivating.

In coaching sessions when we are creating pins, clients want to write the pin description as if they are writing an Instagram caption. Writing an Instagram type caption on Pinterest is not going to help you get found on Pinterest, and here’s why.

People searching on Pinterest are not brand loyal. Read that again. People searching on Pinterest are not brand loyal, meaning most pinners do not give a shhhh about your brand. These people are searching to achieve a predetermined outcome in their mind.  

Here’s an example: A pinner types into the Pinterest search bar “San Francisco Industrial Wedding Venue”  what this person wants to achieve is finding examples of all of the Industrial wedding venues in San Francisco that are on Pinterest. When they find a photo that they are imaging as their dream wedding location they will click on the pin and be taken “fingers crossed” to the website of that venue or at least a photographers site that has tagged the venue in their blog post.

The reason that this searchers results came up with so many Industrial wedding venues in San Francisco is that the pin description was littered with these terms.  See Pinterest is a search engine, their algorithm could care less how witty and popular your caption is. Pinterest’s main job is that it wants to show it’s users the most relevant items related to the words that they typed into the search bar.  The results that show up in your search are directly related to the keywords in the description of the pins that are being shown to you.

I heard a saying once that said, “My eyebrows are sisters, not twins.” Not only is that true for your eyebrows but it’s true about the digital marketing platforms of Pinterest and Instagram.

Let’s get into the 7 “sister” qualities on both platforms:

1. On both platforms, you need to have a well lit and captivating scroll stopping photo.

2. On both platforms, the images should be branded, meaning they look like they belong to the same family because chances are if someone is very interested in all the things that you have to say, you want to be recognized on both platforms.

3. Instagram photos with words tend to perform as well as photos without. Whereas, Pinterest photos with words perform exponentially better than photos without words.

4. Instagram: Hashtags matter on how you are getting found.

5. Pinterest: Hashtags do not matter on getting found, it’s all about the search terms baby.

6. Instagram: Witty or emotionally heartfelt captions perform best.

7. Pinterest: It’s all about the SEO, save your emotional words for Instagram.

In conclusion, the moral of the story here is that to be successful on both platforms you need to flip your brain when you are writing for one over the other.  Both of these platforms should be a part of your digital arsenal but how you use them and obtain leads through them are completely different.

The Social Media Apocalypse What's Your Digital Marketing Back Up Plan

The social media apocalypse of Facebook and Instagram being down is happening. It’s March 13, 2019, Mercury in retrograde and we’ve been experiencing the biggest meltdown in social media history.

Since 8am PST people around the globe have been unable to get into both Facebook and Instagram. At the coffee shop today the world seemed a bit quieter, people are having these things called conversations with each other instead of being preoccupied with snapping a quick picture of their latte to put on their Instagram story. (Ahem I am guilty of this as well, sometimes.) I don’t know if this is because we are all secretly freaking out just a little bit.

I will say that I have enjoyed the silence of only having to focus on other digital marketing platforms for my clients that do not include a member of the “Facebook Family” for one day.

The real question we should be asking is, “ Will Facebook and Instagram be back tomorrow?” Honestly, that could happen. We could wake up tomorrow with the same messages on our pages, or they could be erased forever. As of this posting Facebook, reps are saying, “Facebook is down for required maintenance. We will be back soon.” Historically when huge expansive platforms such as Facebook and Youtube have done an update it’s only been 1-3 hours, as of this writing we are going into hour number 12.

If this outage has taught us anything it should be to not put all of your eggs in one basket. I’ve been saying it in talks and to clients since the first Zuckerberg Senate hearings, start thinking about your digital marketing backup plan.

If these platforms do not exist tomorrow, do you have access to your customers? Do you know your customer's email addresses and how to get in touch with them? The only real channels that are guaranteed for you to directly communicate with your customers or clients are your blogs and your email campaigns. I know these are such a pain in the ass to do. These digital marketing campaigns actually take a bit of time, I get that. You can’t post a pretty picture and write an emotionally touching caption to get your message out there. But you should start considering a plan B.

There are other great platforms to build a presence on as well Youtube and Pinterest are two that if you are not already tinkering around on you should at least begin investigating.

Lately, I’ve been pushing current clients toward my Pinterest management package because it is a powerful search engine that as of right now I don’t see going anywhere but up. The power of brand awareness that Pinterest offers is incredible if you know how to use it. Start here, you already have amazing photo content of your products which is half the battle, because you have been posting those awesome images to Instagram. Just start posting them with a good description to Pinterest as well.

Consider blogging as well, if you are a service based business or a product based business you have things to say, things that your target market IS searching for.

I am really thinking positive that the “Facebook Family” figures it out and that we are back in action soon but then again if they don’t we’ll figure it out. We are in this together.

Why Your Business Needs a Digital Marketing Strategy

This week the lovely Jamie Teasdale of Propel Business Works  is sharing why having a digital marketing strategy is extremely important to really reach your target market and put more money in your bank account. Jamie’s expertise is creating digital marketing strategies and plans for businesses. This post has some seriously great information! Be sure to follow Jamie on social media using the links at the bottom of the post!

Social media and blogs aren’t just for personal connection any more. Online communication is where the masses are. It’s where people are spending their time. That’s why your business needs a digital marketing strategy. According to the 2015 census 78% of U.S. households have a desktop or laptop computer, and over 74% have a mobile device. That’s an incredible statistic and it makes sense knowing how quickly we have adopted online communities as our new normal place to connect, interact, and find services and products we need.

It also means your audience, your clientele, your target market is there. Whether they are searching for an answer, clicking through ads that caught their attention, visiting an application to catch-up on relationships, shopping for something, leaving a review, or a plethora of other reasons, I guarantee your customer is online. It might be via a mobile, tablet or desktop device, but they ARE congregating with the masses – and they’re coming in hourly droves, sometimes even more frequently.

So, marketing to them where they are makes sense, right? That’s where digital marketing comes in. Digital marketing is different from physical marketing like print materials, signs, brochures, handouts, flyers and other pieces of collateral you have designed and printed. Digital marketing is virtual. It is marketing via communication to your target customer digitally where they are showing up online.

Having A Strategy Is Vital

Marketing in general can’t be done with a half-baked strategy or it will fall short or even fail completely. Spending money and time on marketing materials or support without first knowing who you’re talking to, what they need to hear, how often they should hear it, and how it should be presented is just a waste of valuable resources. (Tweet This)

Do you realize there are different demographics on different online sites? The people who show up on Facebook aren’t necessarily on Twitter or Snapchat. There is a specific and substantial reason for certain businesses to have a presence on Pinterest or on Instagram. Is your business one of them?

What A Strategy Should Include

A solid, researched, and customized-to-your-business digital marketing plan will tell you who you should be targeting and where you should be showing up in order to reach them. 

It will map out the types of emails you should be sending and how often, not to mention what posts you should be sharing, whether on your blog or on a social platform or directory. 

A unique plan will outline the best frequencies for communicating and will lay out your company’s style of communication so you and your team have a reference point every time something is sent out across the wifi waves.

Your plan should be easy to trust and should get your marketing ball rolling in the right direction so you begin increasing awareness, fans, and sales. But be sure to keep your eye on analytics, too. Monitoring what is working and what isn’t will propel your communication to improve.

Where To Start

I always tell clients to just start. All the research and planning can be an activity you pursue during your business planning sessions, or monthly strategy meetings. It isn’t rocket science and tools are available to us nowadays that were never more accessible or affordable.

If you already know who you are and where you need to be, start with one social site. Learn it. Become consistent on it. If you can blog, even once a month, that activity will fuel your social communication and get your creative juices flowing. How to layer on one marketing approach after another will depend on your business and industry, but don’t feel like you need to jump on all platforms or tackle all of the communication opportunities available to you all at once.

When you find yourself too busy with orders or doing the thing you do that you can’t handle all the planning and management that goes along with a digital marketing strategy, we’re here, ready, and eager to help. After all, this is OUR juice. It’s what we love to do and we happen to do it well!

Cheers to a strategic future ahead!

Jamie Teasdale

Propel Businessworks

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Jamie’s professional experiences have instilled exceptional customer service and high standards into everything she does. A music and art enthusiast and animal lover, she has been a marketing junkie since before she can remember. For 10 years her passion for developing and energizing the visions of small business owners was ignited and she hasn’t looked back since.

Social Media Terms Of Service

Y'all I fucked up. I went outside of the terms of service of a social media platform. I did it unknowingly.  I got called out and immediately deleted the post. Terms of service, how many of you actually read them in detail before you accept the terms? 

Yeah I didn't think that very many of you did.  I am here to tell you that you should at least give those good ol' terms and conditions a once over or at least Google the Cliffs Notes version of them after you accept them. 

All of this brings up the question, who legally owns your photos on Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest? Let's get educated, shall we?

Instagram

The answer from Instagram, “People in the Instagram community own their photos, period. On the platform, if someone feels that their copyright has been violated, they can report it to us and we will take appropriate action. Off the platform, content owners can enforce their legal rights.”  

Ok that makes sense, Instagram has your back by what anyone does with your photo on Instagram, offline you are on your own. But did you know that reposting is actually in violation of Instagram Terms? Yeah I didn't know that either, but given the platform and how it works, a majority of users are cool with you reposting as long as you are linking back to their account. However, always ask before assuming that it's alright.  This is what the terms of service statement says, 

"You represent and warrant that: (i) you own the Content posted by you on or through the Service or otherwise have the right to grant the rights and licenses set forth in these Terms of Use; (ii) the posting and use of your Content on or through the Service does not violate, misappropriate or infringe on the rights of any third party, including, without limitation, privacy rights, publicity rights, copyrights, trademark and/or other intellectual property rights; (iii) you agree to pay for all royalties, fees, and any other monies owed by reason of Content you post on or through the Service; and (iv) you have the legal right and capacity to enter into these Terms of Use in your jurisdiction."

Facebook

Ok cool that's Instagram terms, now let's talk Facebook. Does Facebook own your photos once you load them onto your account?  No, the photos are still your photos, not Facebooks. In fact, it’s right in Facebook’s terms of service: “You own all of the content and information you post on Facebook.“  However, let's address what rights Facebook does have with your photos once you've uploaded them. 

You own all of the content and information you post on Facebook, and you can control how it is shared through your privacy and application settings. In addition:

1. For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (IP content), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (IP License). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.
2. When you delete IP content, it is deleted in a manner similar to emptying the recycle bin on a computer. However, you understand that removed content may persist in backup copies for a reasonable period of time (but will not be available to others).

Basically, Facebook can use your photo "royalty free" however they feel without asking for your permission or paying you any money they may get from using your photo. 

Pinterest

Great, we've got the big two out of the way now let's focus on Pinterest. Are you using photos from Pinterest as almost a form of a stock photography site? Do you think that just because it's on Pinterest you can borrow it? Well here's the deal unless you are repinning it, that content needs to live on Pinterest. If you do this it's considered copyright infringement. Yeah, buzz kill huh?

Here's what Pinterest actually says,

"If you post your content on Pinterest, it still belongs to you but we can show it to people and others can re-pin it."  You can refresh yourself with Pinterest's Terms and Conditions here. 

In conclusion, is it okay to repin images on Pinterest? Maybe. Is it ok to repost on Instagram? Sometimes. Using other peoples photos on the internet these days is tricky business.  All you can do is refresh yourself with the particular terms of service. How are you feeling about all of this information, are you going to go back and read the terms and conditions?