Have you been stumped on how to grow your social media following and therefore grow your business? Maybe you’re posting regularly, highlighting your product or service with great photos, adding Stories, and yet still, your following doesn’t really seem to be growing and you don’t seem to be gaining any new customers from it.

So what gives? The most important question to ask yourself is…

Are You Someone Worth Following?

This can be a hard question to answer for yourself without any bias. So maybe grab a few trusted friends and talk through the following questions:

What value do you add to your followers’ feeds?
When looking through your feed, do you see that you just talk about and sell your products/services all the time?
Do you give away anything of value or any expertise?

Now that you’ve thought through these a bit, let’s get into what things we’ve seen followers value on Instagram.

What Makes Someone Valuable on Social Media?

The term “value” can mean something different to everyone. For some it may mean financial incentive for your social media following through exclusive deals or giveaway. For others it may mean valuable information or expertise in the form of helpful tips and tricks. While for others it’s a personal connection to another business owner through a behind-the-scenes look at you and your business.

While value can mean many different things to different people, we’ve put together a short list of some things that are considered universally valuable across a wide audience.

1. Get Personal

Owning a business can sometimes feel really lonely! No one ever truly prepares you for how much entrepreneurship takes over your whole life. So providing a behind the scenes look into your life and your business can be really valuable for other business owners. Share your wins, your losses, and the lessons learned, because chances are, someone who follows you has been through it or will go through it at some point! Social media really is about connection after all.

2. Answer Questions

A great idea is to keep track of the most frequently asked questions, then spotlight and respond to one at least weekly on your social media platforms. You can even make this interactive through Instagram Stories. Once a week or once a month (whatever you have time for), you can put up a Question Box in your Story and then do either a Live Q&A or answer each question in a separate Story.
Pro tip— Also add some of those to your main feed with a great photo!

3. Hold Contests & Give Special Discounts

It’s a great idea to host giveaways and contests exclusive to your social media followers. Offer a special discount every now and then in your Stories or create a contest in the comment section of a post. This gives your followers an incentive to make sure they check your content regularly and not just scroll past.

Pro Tip— Team up with other local businesses for your giveaways. This helps grow both of your followings. And local businesses supporting each other is just amazing on every level.

4. Involve Your Online Community

Your social media following can be really useful to you in helping you learn and grow professionally. Ask your community their opinion. Utilize Polls in your Stories. They’re essentially a free focus group. When you involve your audience in decision making, whether it be picking a new service, a new color, or a new scent (etc, etc), they feel like they’re really a part of something they love. And community is everything online. (Have we said that already?)

You can even encourage them to post about you on their own pages (AKA: User Generated Content) by sharing tagged posts on your own feed.

5. Give Away *Some* Knowledge

We’re not saying to give away all your hard-earned secrets or proprietary information, but it is important to give your followers some value through education or tips & tricks you’ve learned along the way. Pick some 3000-foot-level tips to share regularly. Get your audience wanting more! We’ve actually found the more you share, the more some people value your expertise enough to contact you and become a client!

A Few Don’ts Before You Go

Now that we’ve talked about what TO do, we feel the need to mention just a few things NOT to do.

1. Don’t just show your products— As we briefly mentioned earlier, followers come to social media to ENGAGE with you, not just to be sold to. If you’re only sharing product info and photos, people may get sick of it after a few months.

2. Don’t spam— If you post too much, especially in Stories, people will become numb to them, then annoyed by them, and then unfollow your account. So post regularly, but make sure those tick marks aren’t little dots day after day.

3. Don’t post “canned” captions— People want to engage with REAL people with actual personalities, not Instagram bots. So be sure to show them a real idea of who you actually are. Canned captions are not only basic, but they actually may trigger the algorithm as non-unique content, which the algorithm doesn’t like.

Conclusion

If you don’t have time to do a lot on social media, that’s okay. Something is better than nothing. The most important thing to remember is not to JUST sell. If you can only create 10 posts a month, make sure they have diverse content and provide something worth a follow. And as always, if reading this stresses you out more than it helps, we’re here to take this off your plate!

Content Marketing is something a lot of people talk about. It’s a buzz word in the marketing industry, but what does it actually mean?

Have you ever built a website? Did you write your own website content? If so, did you feel like you were just taking a stab in the dark? Or did you feel extremely confident in your content, only to find your website wasn’t getting traffic or converting leads?

We’ve found that in many cases, our clients have written a lot of content that never actually gets read or doesn’t convert, and they’ve been left feeling frustrated. So, we’ve come up with 3 steps to create content that actually gets seen AND actually sells.

1. Find Out What Are Your Customers Actually Searching For

Search is a great tool people use for finding products and services they need, and businesses have spent years trying to figure out how to easily be found on search engines.

Search is also a great channel for you, as a business owner, to figure out what your customers want and how they’re searching for it.

Do you know what terms your target audience is actually searching for when looking for someone in your field? Do you know what problem or pain point they are trying to solve? What is prompting their specific searches?

You can actually use Google Trends to discover what keyphrases and keywords people are using when they search for various topics. You can input a keyword or phrase, and Google will tell you how many people are searching for that phrase and will show you a list of related phrases.

One quick example: we worked with a Managed Service Partner who was looking to improve their website SEO. What we found when looking through their website analytics was that most people who were searching for what they provide didn’t actually know or use the terms “MSP” or “Managed Service Provider.” But people were actually searching for “Outsourced IT.” So we were able to help them adjust their content for their site (not to mention their Adwords) to be more tailored to what their audience was searching for. Suddenly, they saw a spike in website rankings, which significantly increased traffic!

2. Have The Information Your Potential Customers Need Once They Get To Your Site

Finding out what people are searching for so you can build your content around that is just the first, although arguably most important step in improving your website traffic and conversions. Once you’ve done the research on what keywords and topics are commonly searched in your field, you can begin to write out your website content based on that.

When writing your website copy, it’s important to write it from the perspective of what your target audience is actually searching for, especially for SEO purposes. It’s also a great opportunity to educate visitors about information they don’t know by answering their questions before they even think to ask them.

Lastly, and this is important— it’s really important for you to write your website content in a way that someone who knows nothing about your business will understand. Of course we understand that this can sometimes be hard to do, especially if you’re an expert in your industry. So, that’s why we’re here to help!

3. Write Your Website Content So That People Outside Your Field Will Connect With It

It’s extremely important that your website content answers questions your customers are actually asking, not just using high level jargon they may not even understand. When describing your business and what you offer, do it in a way your customers can understand rather than how you might talk about it to another expert in your field.

Have you ever sat down and thought about your business from the side of someone who knows absolutely nothing about your industry or the work you do? This can sometimes be a really challenging task. That’s why getting feedback from trusted colleagues and professionals outside of your field is a good practice when it comes to content for your website!

Conclusion

Once you’ve gotten to know your customers better and listened to what they need based on your website analytics data and key search phrases, you can adjust your content in a way that catches their attention, answers their questions, and drives conversions.

If this task seems daunting or you don’t know where to start, we’re always here to help.