Part of the job of transforming a company in difficulty is finding a market. While the immediate crisis is often a lack of cash, the more fundamental ones relate to funding, sales and margins that are necessary to drive growth and we regularly see a failure to effectively market the goods or services.
A case in point is the use of social media, where it is easy for a small company to find itself running ever faster to stand still and to no effect whatsoever by trying to keep up with all the latest advice on frequency of posting on every available outlet .
How often, for example, do you ‘follow’ someone on Twitter or read their blogs because their insights impress you, only to eventually ‘unfollow’ them because the quality of their posts has deteriorated as the frequency has risen?
For the time-poor small business owner attempting to produce a high volume of good quality material for the ever growing list of platforms including LinkedIn, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, YouTube and more, it is an exercise in fantasy if they don’t have the time, knowledge and writing skills to do it well.
The DIY approach can damage your company’s brand, especially if it isn’t thought through or properly implemented.
Far better to have a clear understanding of the company’s target customers, which media they use and what sort of information they value. This can then be used to develop a marketing strategy based on clear goals, whether to generate awareness or generate inquiries and a marketing plan for implementing the strategy. Your strategy might include marketing via social media as a very personal means of communication.
While business owners need to be involved in social media, especially in approving the strategy and monitoring its implementation, there are a number of ways to achieve this without doing it all your self or abandoning it to others. There are plenty of social media marketing firms but SMEs might consider outsourcing specific tasks to one or several specialists. This might be someone carrying out research for relevant topics as a source of content, drafting blogs and posts, editing them in consultation with the you, then posting them online to media that you specify.
Over time the right specialist can help you achieve your social media marketing goals with the minimum of your time and cost.
In our view quality trumps quantity every time and it is better and more cost effective to produce fewer well-researched and presented pieces than to swamp the e-waves every day because that’s what some “guru” has advised. Developing your brand may take longer but quality content will not damage your brand unlike trivia that may lead others to ‘unfollow’ you.
Please share your own experience of social media and also any techniques that might benefit others.