Step Into The Spotlight!
In this post I’m going to share with you my step-by-step guide covering how to 10x your social media marketing strategy, step into the spotlight, have a greater impact, attract more prospects, while leveraging your time dramatically and increasing your profits.
What you won’t be doing is working any more hours a week. My goal for you is to copy my proven social media marketing strategy and work it no more than 2 hours a week in total.
I needed to write this social media marketing guide for my “Clicks & Leads Academy” students so thought I would share it here on my blog too. If you find it useful, please feel free to share it.
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Why You Need To “Be Everywhere Online”
While I built my first successful online business The Money Gym by using 100% content marketing and attraction marketing strategies, I had pretty much given up doing my own Social Media Marketing when I discovered (and became proficient in using) Facebook Ads.
Then I started Clicks & Leads, a boutique Facebook Ads agency and as it swiftly grew to over six figures (MRR), I passed all my social media activities to Inga, our social media manager.
I didn’t pay much attention to what she was doing, we had a loose content marketing strategy and it was enough for me that I kept seeing our branded content all over Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google Plus. We weren’t really using Instagram or YouTube at that time and Periscope and Snapchat were just twinkles in their founder’s eyes.
Then I lost my life partner Steve suddenly and with him, my will to cope with most clients and client meetings particularly. I just didn’t want to talk to anyone and found it very hard to care about other people’s businesses. I let most of my agency clients go, keeping just a few who largely left me to my own devices as long as the leads kept coming in at an acceptable cost per lead.
I moved to Greece to surround myself with peace and beauty, to simplify my life and try and find work that was more meaningful for me. I took a couple of courses and thought I would simply focus on creating books from the great entrepreneur’s interviews I’d done a couple of years before.
In the meantime, my social media manager Inga had resigned due to ill health and while I kept up my social media to some degree for social reasons, the intensity of content sharing diminished dramatically.
However, my journalling and general navel gazing along with the healing properties of time passing, resulted in my returning to coaching / mentoring and the re-launch of my Clicks & Leads Academy Community.
I had a bit of money socked away and I used quite a bit of it setting the new business up just right, using the best people and the very best tools that worked together well; Facebook Ads driving qualified traffic to LeadPages, into a new Infusionsoft marketing funnel, Xenforo for the community area, Deadline Funnel to automatically open and close the Membership intake, I even got my own free App made, so that members would be able to get my help on the go, right from their smartphones.
The mentoring membership site soft launched to my list over New Year 2017 to my own small but usually responsive mailing list of around 3500 active readers to …….a rather deafening silence. This was very odd indeed.
I’d been running an ASK! type survey to business owners via Facebook Ads and identified the pain points of the respondents.
All of these pain points were being addressed by my follow up emails, so should have been converting. I was even split testing my own copy, against some professionally written email copy, something I’d never done before. I was getting the odd one or two signups as people moved through the funnel, sure, but not as many as I was expecting.
I contacted a few of my previous “star” mentoring clients and ran the offer past them for feedback. The reaction I got was surprising.
Although they were all on my email mailing list, which I curated and mailed regularly and some even subscribed to the “Own It!” podcast I co-hosted with Judith Morgan, they all responded saying they thought I was still semi-retired in Greece and not taking on clients right now!
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Not one of them had seen my new membership site launch emails and because my previous levels of social media activity had pretty much stopped, I was now firmly out of sight, out of mind!
Social media and content marketing is notoriously difficult to track the ROI on, but here was concrete evidence that, unless you have a strong, continuous social media presence, with multiple “touch points” across all platforms, you are pretty much invisible online as a business.
I rolled up my sleeves and got to work, using the social media content leverage process I’d developed a few years ago, when working with Neil Asher to establish our digital marketing agency we co-founded and self-funded in 2012. This process had created traffic, authority and most importantly paying clients for the agency, super fast. From just two blog posts a week, written by Neil, I had made sure that we were “everywhere online”.
Ironically, while reviewing and rationalising my YouTube channel, I discovered that one video I had made back in 2013 about this exact social media content leverage process, had attracted nearly 24,000 views with no external promotion to speak of.
This, it appeared, was a hot topic.
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My Step By Step Guide To 10x Your Social Media Marketing Impact
Step 1: Plan Your Content
Research Your Market
In the past I’d somewhat struggled to create content consistently, relying on inspiration striking. This is not a great idea as it rarely strikes when you need it to! I am also the world’s worst at research, I’m about a 2 on the Kolbe A test for this, having to delegate the most basic research like finding the best plane ticket to my sister Sarah who’s a 7 on Research at Kolbe A.
There was a bit of a grey area here as I traditionally resist going markets that other people are already active or dominating in. I think this is a hangover from the early noughties when I was one of the earliest people making a living coaching online with my first success The Money Gym.
I liked being seen as a first mover, not someone who moved into someone else’s space. I just kept reminding myself that everyone attracts different clients and that if there was someone working in that space already, there were probably a lot of people not being served by that person, just because they may not resonate with the other personality.
I already knew from my previous businesses and coaching/mentoring work, that my ideal clients for the mentoring membership site would probably be slightly more mature solopreneurs or owners / marketing managers at SME’s. People who want to create an effective business or marketing plan, who recognise that the older ways of getting business were not working any more, people with a good proven product or service, integrity in what they did, but little time or manpower – but they do have some resources, they are not totally skint. People who want to save time, ask questions, find out what tools are the best tools RIGHT NOW to use, how to outsource effectively, how to cut out most of the mistakes and go straight to GO! with marketing their business online.
Find Out The Pain Points Of Your Ideal Client
Luckily, I still had the 650 survey responses I’d gathered while running Facebook Ads to a simple survey, which was aimed at my target market and those asked solopreneurs and business owners “What Is Your One Biggest Challenge Right Now, Marketing Your Business Online”. I had used Typeform for this as it’s affordable, beautiful to set up (and use) but most importantly, enabled a Custom Thank You Page URL, so I could track which audiences responded best to my ads and survey. This is invaluable data for later as you’ll want to revisit those audiences, survey respondents and, indeed, those visitors who clicked but didn’t take your survey, when you are ready with your Free Gift offer.
Plan Your Content To Address Those Pain Points
I went down the local greek supermarket Katerina’s and in their surprisingly extensive office supplies section, bought myself 5 x highlighter pens in my favourite colours and thought about the three main topics I expected the client challenges to be grouped into; Mindset, Marketing and Money. These topics also fit with a series of interviews I’d done with successful entrepreneurs I’d done previously that I was now turning into a book of the same name. I’d asked each entrepreneur for their best tips around their business mindset, business marketing and business money
I printed off the survey responses and started reading them, highlighting the first column with the main colour and adding a splash of a second colour only if the challenge really did straddle two topics. I actually ended up with around 10 key sub-topics, loosely grouped into the 3 x main topics.
These topics formed the basis of my content plan and so I moved onto how best to create my content. I wanted maximum engagement with maximum efficiency and ease of creation. For me it had to be video and it had to start on YouTube.
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Step 2: Create Your Content
I knew Facebook Live was super hot right now so I attempted a few of those, ditto YouTube Live, but the broadband connection in Greece was very variable in the house we had rented. The quality of the picture content was pretty bad (and I’m not a perfectionist by any standard). Then a couple of things came together to combine and turn into something else again, like the best ideas always do.
Since moving to Greece I’d been compulsively watching a YouTuber called Casey Neistat, who was using film making techniques to create a brilliant daily vlog, which was ultimately designed to market his new company Beme. Gary Vaynerchuk was also starting a DailyVee vlog show, filmed by a super talented young man called DRock.
My daughter Phoebe and I had just met Gary Vaynerchuk and DRock in London and they’d made a big impression. Phoebe had been inspired to become interested in video editing. She’d created her own YouTube channel for makeup tuition and product reviews (occasional strong language warning!). This had led to her starting to be invited to create videos for other businesses locally, to review products and being invited behind the scenes on fashion shoots, for example.
I thought that, if we could work together in some way, I could introduce her to my audience and some of them might hire her too. Especially if we could work virtually, as she’s in Shoreham and I’m in Greece. An idea started to form….
Wouldn’t it be fun to create a daily (weekly?) vlog aimed at my ideal target market, focused around solving their problems but also highlighting that I was now a digital nomad at the age of 55 and showing what that life was like. This was something my target market aspired to, so it would provide a whole new level of authenticity to my marketing, something that’s very important to me.
Now Casey and Gary Vee both live fun, exciting, glamorous, action packed lives in New York, while I was living in a sleepy village in Greece, out of season. It would have to be VERY tongue in cheek!
I talked to Phoebe and we hatched a plan where I would film some talking to camera shots, with various background / greek colour snippets and she would put it together for me each week, upload it to YouTube, then I would take it from there. She got to work on creating some beginning credits while I ordered a new camera and started filming.
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Step 3: Polish Your Content
We decided on a rough format for the new show as I’m hopeless without one. I find that creativity thrives when hung on a rough framework, so I try and start with one, every project.
I would talk a little bit about what my digital nomad life had been like that week, with Greece itself providing plenty of adventures and good stories. Then I would tackle a “Challenge of the Week” before moving into a “What’s On The Blog / Podcast This Week?” closing section.
Phoebe would then edit my rambles into something crisper and more coherent, editing out the bits when the local dogs started barking, Greeks in olive groves turned on noisy chain-saws, lorries piled high with Mani stones rumbled past, random insects dive bombed me or I forgot what I was going to say.
She saved some of the best bits for the “Bloopers” section at the end and I gave her full permission to be creative and funny with the footage, as long as I kept some shreds of dignity! After all, this was going to be a tongue in cheek homage to Casey and Gary, while letting my future cleints get to know me.
I certainly couldn’t compete with all the young guns in their 30’s and 40’s for ripped abs, fast cars and a fast paced, luxury lifestyle.
I wasn’t as polished and certainly not as glamorous as other female content creators I admired, such as Mari Smith, Denise Duffield Thomas, Marie Forleo and fellow Brits, Nicola Bird and Bernadette Doyle.
I could only be my rather portly, makeup-free, 55 year old self, in my little village in Greece, mostly wearing black as I had only what fit in one suitcase, so I wasn’t even able to dress up much for filming. Besides, I wanted to be ready whenever the location was right and inspiration struck.
But I thought to myself, hopefully, doing this DESPITE all that would inspire other people to have a go, too. It would encourage my ideal clients to start creating and sharing their own social media content, warts and all. It also gave me new content to talk about too, as I was really having to push past some of these personal demons myself, in order to get the content to Phoebe in time, every week.
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Step 4: Repurpose Your Content
The first videos started to come back from Phoebe and I loved them. After approval, she was uploading to YouTube, I was downloading them from there and uploading natively to my Facebook Page and embedding on my blog using the YouTube code. I also embedded the playlist from YouTube into a Vzine page on my website.
What else could we do though? How else could we move our Social Media Marketing Strategy forwards?
(This is a great question to ask yourself as an entrepreneur by the way, when you feel yourself at a loose end. What else? What else? What else can I do to move my business forwards?)
I’ll share the other Steps in this free video on “How To Be Everywhere Online (In Under 20 Minutes A Week)“). No optin needed, just pure Social Media Marketing Strategy dynamite!
