my name is adam jones i'm the owner of pullman marketing uh alyssa is with us too she is our brand strategist um and it's awesome because a lot of brand strategy funnels right into social media marketing and we'll see how that plays out today all right so what everyone ought to know about social media discover the right way to find engage and delight your customers on social media we're actually very particular when we say what everyone ought to know about social media and that's because people already know about social media right social media is not new um it's been around for as long as i can remember i'm technically a i think they call it a digital immigrant um kids that are under 20 are true digital natives they've never not known the internet they've never not known social media they've never not known um access and data like we've had to experience or grow into and so we know about it and congress is starting to know about it more there's a lot of things that are still developing in it i think the instagram ceo is about to go before congress this week i'm talking about kids and safety right there was a whistleblower a while back safety which back in myspace days it's like okay don't talk to strangers right but then we have a whole new context that was able to grow out of it and that is how it relates to your business and how does it interoperate with the business that's what we're going to be really talking about today as business owners what you ought to know to move things forward and so how it works is actually really fascinating i there's a lot of ways that people try to describe it really social media is just an aggregated audience right it's everybody is in this space this fear this uh community this context and it's an aggregated audience just in the way that etsy or ebay has an aggregated audience sometimes it's easier to sell a product on those platforms because people are already there they're already searching they're already engaging versus trying to build your own platform build your own website or do your own in-person event or all these other things it's already there it's already an aggregated audience and there's the thing that facebook was really good at harnessing was what we call a win-win-win in terms of advertising because and feel free to throw it in the chat or show of hands you know if you're hanging out on facebook and you get an ad for um uh iced coconut lattes in hawaii but we all live here in washington well that's not a relevant ad and actually i don't want to be reminded that i could be enjoying that when i'm here right now i would really love an advertisement on a snowplow company right i really want someone to come clean it all salt it all have it clean and ready because i don't have my snow tires on yet right that's because we all wanted to wait just one more day just one more day before doing that so as a user i want ads that are relevant to me as a business i want to show ads to the relevant user facebook helps to make that occur and and that's what we do a lot at pullman marketing is we work with a business we work with facebook find the right audience target the right messaging target the right ad so that your business is growing the end user is happy and of course facebook is happy at the end of the day because we also gave them money right so there's a win-win-win in terms of advertising advertising doesn't have to be this sometimes perceived manipulation it's a curation of experience to actually help people that that's our heart that's our spirit as we approach a lot of it and if a you end user has a good advertising experience it's a lot better it's just a lot better you know what is it for at the end of the day we really believe that it's for brand awareness at bare minimum it's saying i exist and not every business needs that right not everyone needs it um i have a couple clients that are in the construction niche in some ways they really don't need it um they're more than busy they've stopped taking phone calls they're overloaded on their work so there's a little bit of interplay at bare minimum it is brand awareness at the high end we want to be a way for you to delight your customers through your brand right and that's what we talked about last time we did a webinar last month feel free to go check it out on our youtube we also have the downloadable resources for it it's about creating that reputation that gut feeling that you're left with you know when i leave uh mcdonald's do i have a great gut feeling depends on the day right and you know they even say like we talked about last time okay we'll see you next time i don't know if i feel happy when they say i'll see you next time right because i don't want to think to myself i am going to be here next time this this is just a one-time thing i'll go back to my healthy food later you get the salad from mcdonald's and then you know then it's healthy right and so social media works to delight the customer to take it that one step further of you know maybe you really like this type of coffee we're gonna make it even better we're gonna extend it more maybe there's a deal maybe there's a sale maybe there's now pumpkin spice maybe there's now gingerbread maybe there's gingerbread eggnog lattes i don't know if that sounds good i'm pretty plain what comes to my coffee but social media works to improve and increase and innovate this process of brand awareness and delighting your end users so how to pick your platform that's something that we get asked a lot and i would say it depends on the subject matter it really really really depends what's that can you please defined platform yes yeah yeah so uh facebook is a platform uh twitter's a platform tic toc's a platform it's just kind of a generic term to describe uh the social media websites thank you yeah no that was a great question that's a great question so um yeah yeah so the different um engagements communities social medias they all have different audiences and different ways to to run through it um and i don't even like all social media like i'll be really frank twitter is not my favorite um although recently i've started getting back into it because for search engine optimization which is uh one of my skills that i really enjoy there's a lot of seo people there there's a lot of search engine optimization people that are in twitter with a lot of good information so i'm like okay we'll do that my my business coach he's on twitter a lot so i'm like okay well if i really want this extra engagement this is where i have to go to get this type of information right if you're a retailer or a coffee group a coffee house coffee roaster anything dealing with that well then twitter's not going to be the right spot it's going to be more of your facebook or your instagram possibly a little bit of tick tock if you're wanting to show some of the process in a really quick and easy way those social media platforms do significantly better the the big thing is you don't have to use them all please please please never feel like you have to use every single platform it really doesn't if your audience isn't there there's no point to using it right if the people who would care about your product or business are in instagram go to instagram if they're in facebook and instagram then pick the one that you actually like using right a lot of times when we get overwhelmed or we don't understand a platform it's because we don't really like the platform or it's not very engaging or enjoyable for us and so we it then makes it very very difficult for us to create content or think for content in a platform that we're not actively enjoying ourselves right tick tock has been a really big big big shift in social media for our nation in general it went from hardly any users to over a hundred active users which means that one in three americans has a tick tock now when we look at instagram instagram i think is a little bit under 50 of americans so almost one in two americans have instagram so there is a bit of uh homogeneous uh just homogeny that occurs but you have to know where that audience resides right or depending on your business model where your potential audience is has your audience been shifted have they gone somewhere else you know with facebook's changes twitter's changes and we're expecting a lot of changes from twitter the new ceo has a very very different mind very different perspective than jack dorsey did and so we are expecting massive changes in twitter over the next three months so then my audience might be currently in twitter but you know there might be some nuances where i could say you know they're actually to go somewhere else and so i want to start going in that direction with them right and and going and where they are which passing it over to alyssa our branch regist social media is a lot of things and complicated can be one of them and so i'm just gonna go over a few signs on maybe why you shouldn't do your social media all by yourself the first one is gonna be that uh there's no time uh we get busy we have full-time jobs part-time jobs maybe we're a parent a grandparent and we don't want our time to be consumed by staring at our phones um or even at a computer all day and you know sometimes like you just want to go home and relax and not worry about taking care of other things for your business on social media especially you know when there are so many new things happening in that world it it almost becomes like well i don't have any time so how am i going to keep up which kind of brings me to the next bit which is that coming up with content can get very overwhelming um i feel it and my job is in social media i barely have time for my own personal stuff and when it comes with up to creating content and coming up with those ideas um it can it can be difficult you get stuck between well this is what i see people posting but that's not what i do and then how do i get what they're doing that works to work for me as well and you know maybe you sell a product or a service but you don't know how to fully communicate that to people and so then you get stuck and then the things that you have tried just don't work and that and social media is one of those things where it takes a lot of trial and error and time to fully get to that point where you have a constant following where you have people interacting with you back and forth and creating new content with what seems to be almost like every day on certain profiles and platforms can be a bit much especially if you have other priorities and other responsibilities in life and then the third point is going to be that honestly technology gets complicated um i still struggle with it um i use an iphone for um pretty much anything and everything um mostly apple products but also there are some people who work use androids and that's fine but when you go on to certain platforms so facebook on iphone kind of formats things a bit differently than facebook on an android and if you're going from one thing to the other that can get super confusing and complicated and i feel that a lot um my parents are android users and so when i'm trying to help them find stuff on their phone i'm like wait hold on i don't know where anything is and it happens and then as they keep coming out with new whether it's new social media platforms or new things they're doing on the platforms or they're coming out with a new cell phone i think iphone's up till like 13 now i don't know how they made it that far but they're on the 13th phone and some things are just a bit different and they operate just different enough to where you almost can't find what you need um in that moment and adding social media and all of the settings and the privacies and posting and different terms on that it just gets so much more confusing and complicated and you know it's it can be overwhelming as well uh and then the fourth point is you don't like social media but also maybe you know you need it um like how adam said earlier there are some platforms that you're going to like and some that you don't and sometimes unfortunately the one that you don't is going to be where your audience is and sometimes it's tick-tock if i'm being honest and tick-tock is just a whole new platform when it comes to the way facebook and instagram have operated it's different um but then the unfortunate part is with social media you see other businesses and other people thriving and doing so good so you know in the back of your mind that you need that platform and you need to be on social media but in all honesty you just don't want to touch it you don't want to deal with it you don't want to touch it you don't want to look at it and that's fine we have clients that are like that and they just don't want to deal with the social media and so they let us take care of it and it does pretty good um and then the next point um is going to be that you don't know what to post where um and that can be maybe you own multiple businesses and they all kind of intertwine and so you don't know if you should post this thing that could work for both businesses on what page or maybe you know owning a business you kind of want to promote it on like your personal facebook page or profile but then you also want to put on your facebook page but you don't know if that's okay and posting between accounts whether it's business and another business or business and personal it can be a really weird line to walk you don't know what to promote maybe you are kind of like well i don't want all of like my family and friends you know feeling like i'm trying to sell them on something constantly but i also don't want all of my clients to see all my personal stuff and that's privacy and everything on social media is a really big thing and so it's it's okay to be a bit wary of that and and not know exactly what's okay and what's not okay to post because that's something that we can help you determine but also something that um you know you kind of go with what's what you're comfortable with and so if you're not comfortable with posting something about your business on your personal page you don't have to that personal page can be just for you and your family and what you're going to do for thanksgiving and how christmas is going it doesn't have to be all about your business on your personal page and your business doesn't have to even have anything about family in it um and that's all really up to you uh and i have a couple uh case studies that we can go over and so the first one is going to be beetle bug so the owner of beetlebug she is the sole owner she is the business owner she does everything on her own um she if you look at the photo she makes these adaptive socks with embroidered pulleys on the sides so that anyone with any disability can easily pull them up and get dressed on your own and it's a really really sweet story the rest of it is amazing um but she it's all her she's the one who came up with the idea she's the one that owns the business and for a while she was the one who was kind of like owning the social media accounts and um when she came to us she was struggling with posting on social media and a couple other things excuse me um and she just wanted help and knew that she couldn't do it all on her own and keeping up with the trends because you had facebook that plays nice one way and then you had instagram that played really good another way when it came to certain kinds of content but then now you have maybe tick tock or maybe linkedin to make connections and and kind of like not knowing where to go and where to start um and so she came to us and we started her off on facebook and instagram uh slowly started putting her on pinterest as well that's another platform that does really well which is really weird because you don't think about it but pinterest is another place where she went and people loved her stuff and we were able to take that load off of her shoulders all of the social media we helped create the content and we helped you know manage the account and everything like that and she was able to focus on her business and so now she has partnerships and deals and wholesale deals with um jcpenney and she's just continuing to grow and you can find her socks on the jcpenney website or you can go to zappos and you can find her socks there and she was able to grow and expand in that direction because of the fact that we were able to help take social media off of her plate another case study that we have is speech sounds visualized they're owned locally here in pullman and it is a it's an app that you can download on your phone or on a tablet and um it's for speech language pathologists or english language learners to kind of like learn how to pronounce different english sounds um from this letter from how the sound uh the letter s sounds to how uh the letter r sounds and it's a tool that speech language pathologists or even just someone interested in learning english language sounds can use but the three um wonderful women that you know created this app and own it uh they're busy they work at the hospital they are constantly working with people they're in meetings there's no time for them to create and post and schedule the content and fix the website and do other things that they're doing to continue to grow and maintain the app that there's a lot on their plate there and so they came to us and they were like well what what can we what can you do for us and so we met with them and their biggest struggle was social media because it takes time to sit down and come up with content ideas then create them if you kind of i'm sorry you might have to squint a little bit i am too um but you can see a little image of like a mock-up of a phone and their instagram there those images are all made on a software or on a program where you have to make the graphics um and that takes time i do that and that takes a good chunk of time out of someone's day especially if you're putting out content ahead as well um so from doing all of that they they needed help and so they came to us and we were able to again take over their social media accounts on instagram and facebook and we were able to create the content for them and then because um it's more specific and niche stuff i sent it over back to them then they're able to approve it and that's another thing you can do you can actually have someone make the content for you and then have you know then you can go in and be like yes this is correct or no please change this this and this this is a little bit wonky or can you reword this send it back to well they send it back to us and i go in and make the changes and usually schedule it out for a week two weeks or three weeks depending how many bits of content we had there but we were able to help them and they're moving up in their jobs they're doing amazing stuff and it's because now they have more time to focus on their jobs and on the app and on um doing other things to advance just themselves and speech sounds visualized as a whole um while we take care of their their social media yeah and the the big thing there that we're trying to illustrate is you know whether whether you're working with a company or you have an employee we want we'd rather a business owner be passionate about their business and focusing on driving their business because there's things that only you can do and if you don't even like social media in the first place allow somebody else to do it right as much as we're going to teach people how to do things it's hard to teach when there's already some resistance there and you know maybe you're passionate about a social media platform maybe you just love instagram there are some business owners who do or tick tock or others then go ahead go do it go run with it go run full speed ahead and then we're going to show you a few things of like some do's and don'ts and some more tools to help you prepare long term right like alyssa was saying you know it's christmas coming up we have three to four weeks of content prepped and planned for most of our clients because we we don't want to be working on christmas day right we want to take a few days off if we can but that means we have to plan for multiple clients making sure that everything's posting everything's set up everything's approved where a lot of business owners may that might slip that might be put off towards the end of the month in the moment so top five mistakes most businesses make you are perfectly set up for the results you are receiving um that sounds hard um that hits me here because i'm like wow why why are we doing better well we're perfectly set up to receive the results that we're receiving right um and it's to look at it from a big picture point of view but then also narrow in so i have um some do's and don'ts that we're gonna roll through together the number one mistake that we see is that profiles are not filled out all the way especially with google my business a lot of people don't fill that out all the way and it's we're making a video for that it's on youtube um subscribe it'll be cool there's there's a lot of nuances that are there and here's an example so this is a coffee shop in spokane they have 20 followers they have 69 people that have checked in and i have a phone number and an address it might be a little bit hard to see but if you pay attention the photo at the top is pretty much almost the exact same photo as their profile so there's no branding there's no logo i have no information right there's just nothing here for me to engage with versus another coffee shop this is woods coffee they are on the west side but i have a plethora of information right these people have 26 000 followers and likes inside of facebook and i have a website i have a phone number i have an email address i have there's a send a message button so they're open to engagement and then they i have an about section that says family owned and operated local coffee chain the pacific northwest i'm like oh okay when i was finding them i didn't know that they were a chain until i dug a little bit deeper i was like oh wow this is actually really cool they actually are very family oriented they also have their own roastery and actually some of their locations also have a bakery that's that's awesome that's legit and then i have an instagram and then i have a twitter a coffee shop with a twitter that that one's kind of new in my mind it is it is but the fascinating thing is they are located in bellevue and their local clientele actively uses twitter a lot okay they know where their audience is they know who their customers are and they are actively engaging with those customers and one thing i would say if you're wanting to get into it more research how other people are doing go look at regional chains don't look at like mcdonald's or jimmy john's or some of these others but look at your regional chain and how they're operating because odds are they've already spent a lot of money making this work they've already spent a lot of money figuring out the right system the right language the right types of pictures and the right types of engagements because the mistake with just having a presence just everywhere is it's difficult to post consistently to all of them and and so using this example of the cedar coffee shop this coffee shop it says that there's posts about cedar coffee what that indicates is that they've actually never even posted they they created it they put their phone number there and then they left it and so other people can tag and say oh hey we checked in here oh hey we're at the coffee shop and their information will pop up however at that point you're allowing the community and facebook to curate content for your audience or in this example also showing oh this only has 20 likes and they don't really post consistently even though there's a presence there i don't even know if it's open there's not even business hours right um and and on this one if you scroll there's um some there's there's some things that i might call inappropriate or in a pro pro um that i i don't appreciate but because the owner said hey let's have a presence but i i don't have enough time to post somebody else is in control and it reflects poorly and so we always have to be a little bit careful that if we do choose a platform that we are all in because sometimes just having a presence can backfire on us pretty bad and as a as a contrast of you know posting consistently ladder coffee they're also in spokane they have they post content all the time and even not all of it's like oh my gosh look at this cup but they're also saying oh hey our winter stuff is coming our winter menu starts next week our winter stuff starts tomorrow come get a sneak peek hey and they even did like a soft launch right hey come come at the end of the day we're going to do some of our winter menu ahead of time for you guys to try it out only for the two hours that people come and show up and so then what that does is that creates kind of an exclusivity because only the people who know know and with that posting consistently and with that uh all in attitude they they have some super fans they have people who are delighted to be a part of ladder coffee who are delighted to be engaged with them on a regular basis and and that's when you're all in it's a lot easier to create that type of momentum the other thing we see often is not posting relevant content um this is this is one example this is on instagram can you guys tell me either if you unmute yourself or if you type in the chat uh what does this person sell what what is their business looks like jewelry and shirts i guess yeah ish it took me a while it took me a while to figure it out it's a online jewelry boutique but i guess they have some shirts i guess um i guess they go to some in-person events which is weird that you're an online jewelry boutique but you're also going to in person events too um if you're scrolling and you're engaged with them or even if you're trying to discover them it's actually really difficult right so these examples are really easy to find and then sometimes they're really hard to find bad examples because then sometimes they're really hard to find um she she had she mixes a lot of family into it and a lot of like home life and so if you're just scrolling through you really don't know if she is a business or or personal another example is sugar babe vegan bakery which is over in colfax in the mercantile if you scroll through their stuff it's fantastic i know instantly oh you're a bakery right and they did mix some seasonal things some holiday greetings in there so i know okay well there's gifts i can buy gifts if i want to oh they do have chocolates i didn't know they had chocolates before but it's still in the vein i know at a glance who they are and and what they're about and that that is imperative like that's half the battle for showing up to the show right hashtags yeah you're asking about hashtags earlier using hashtags inappropriately is a big mistake that we see or even not using hashtags at all um so if i click next click next there we go so this is cute i like chinchillas i think they're cool i'm not a big like hamster or guinea pig or ferret person i don't i'm not about those but chinchilla those are cool to me if i adopt a chinchilla i don't even know if a normal veterinarian looks at chinchillas right like i i have no preconceived notions on that whatsoever but there's this uh veterinary clinic that i guess specializes in uh exotic or unusual animals but if we look at their hashtags they have leita crica and leita crika family um i don't know what those are i would not know what those are ahead of time or even know to click or search for them hashtags are a way for us to categorize conversations so if you use spokane washington i can see all the postings all the instagram related to spokane washington anyone who tagged a photo as hashtag spokane washington will show up when i research that and and for a lot of restaurants and food industry that's how the younger generation is actively finding good food is through instagram twitter has the hashtag system they curate theirs a little bit differently uh they have some different ways that they um provide the information instagram's pretty uh open of just hey here's the most recent post with everything related to spokane washington twitter says here's the most popular related to that and whether it was recent it could have been two years ago their their stuff isn't always as fresh in the way that they run their hashtag system for for local businesses i really do recommend using localized hashtags and instagram will show you how many people are using the hashtag or how many posts might be related to that hashtag and it's really really important because if we wanted to do like a colfax wah you can't for our area you actually can't just use colfax because there's a colfax california so if we do just normal colfax our stuff gets muddied really quickly with the colfax in california but if we do hashtag colfax wah then you can be integrated with the rest of the colfax washington conversation and area and a lot of tourists will do this too if they're new to a region or if they're exploring in a region they they hop in and they're like hey uh what what goes on in this town let's go find the hashtags related to this area and go shopping hiking or do other things so like that who is it possible to create one it is it is and that's what they did with leita crica that's what they did with that but only the company itself knows that that is in use and so then it it's difficult to use that and be discoverable is the better way i would say that um and we we saw an issue with facebook uh years ago where people were just making up hashtags and it actually really destroyed the facebook experience because you you would click something oh this is the only post related to it oh you click that there's maybe two posts from the same person related to that that that it's not a very enjoyable experience another another example right of like not filling out the rest of your profile say i found the chinchilla i'm like oh my gosh this is cool i want to learn more i go their profile i don't have any other information right i don't have a phone number i don't have a website i don't have anything to go off of and so then i'm stuck getting out of the app going to my web browser typing in the name hopefully i'm remembering the name and then finding it that way the problem when you do this is instagram will not like downrank your profile but instagram's not going to show your profile as often because you forced a user to leave the platform when you don't have engagement or you even discourage engagement by not having enough information instagram's not going to boost you or help you in any way the goal of all social platforms facebook to tick-tock everything in between is to keep you on the platform they do not want you to leave and so if there's not enough information and you're forcing them to take other actions and engagements they're they're just not going to promote you they're not going to work with you they're not going to say that this is valuable content and you can see that this person has 422 posts that's a lot they only have 139 followers that's really small for how much content that they've been putting out and part of that is the lack of hashtags versus versus this group the they're another spokane vet hospital but they also have uh many aussies many australian shepherds hashtags puppies of instagram hashtag spokane hashtag spokane valley spokane doesn't suck that one's really oddly popular a lot of people do use that and then hashtag pacific northwest if i'm even outside of the spokane area maybe i'm in chihuila which is a little bit further north of spokane and i say oh hey they have aussies and they work with puppies well i actually have a healer i have something very similar they would understand my breed if they understand my dog they understand my breed and they work in my regional area hey i should i should go check these people out and they have their hours when they're closed a phone number and their website all available now this account is really new and they have 14 posts and they're already at 30 the level of the other one right it's a little funny when we look at these kind of stark contrasts but at bare minimum this vet clinic is going to do significantly better in the long run just because that they've taken care of the basics they've taken care of appropriate hashtags and appropriate information now there's ways they can optimize it there's ways they could grow it but just showing up and just showing information in your profile is half the battle um the other thing is not engaging with followers and i i don't have any good or bads because those can get really bad really fast but we do say you know if someone commented and said hey oh my gosh i love this picture going to say awesome thank you so much you know what do you like about it or hey do you want to see more stuff like this oh hey are you interested in these types of products oh hey would you like a free sample oh hey would you there's all kinds of ways as a brand that you're able to once again delight that user delight and build that brand awareness and build that just brand reputation by having that engagement with your followers especially if they comment especially if they leave a review like facebook reviews google reviews and someone gives you a five star go and say thank you i have businesses that would love more five star reviews google will also rank you higher facebook will also rank you higher when you go in and you have that interaction that engagement because it shows that you are an engaged owner and if you have an engaged owner that means you're going to have a better facebook experience you're going to have a better google experience which keeps people on the platform longer so those are the types of things to keep in mind that a lot of what google facebook and the others push for is good customer service good customer experience so throwing it over to alyssa yeah so um i'm just gonna go over how to kind of uh succeed with content creation um where you know there are a bunch of different styles of content out there um and so picking the right social media that works for your style of content that also kind of helps with optimizing time and your energy so the first kind of content is going to be video content so some of the platforms that play really nice with video and our solely video is going to be tick tock and youtube um tick tock is a little newer and like adam said they're still kind of going through i'm going to call it an identity crisis where or growing pains growing pains identity crisis you know they want to do everything um but also aren't fully there yet but um and you've probably honestly seen some videos from tiktok um or if you have that one song that's kind of stuck in your head and you don't know why that's probably what it was from and and youtube where youtube that's a it works with long-form video it works with even like quick short videos um and and video content doesn't have to be something super elaborate with different effects and transitions and you know wonderful lighting and you know a big fancy camera it can be just from your phone holding it or doing what i do sometimes where you set it up against something that's a little high then you just face it towards you um video content like that all of that works the next uh platforms that work with video content is going to be instagram uh you can post videos you can also post on your stories which are um photos or videos that stay on your profile for 24 hours facebook also has the same feature or on instagram reels which is instagram's version of tick tock so it's just basically a bunch of videos that go up to about maybe three minutes or so at the most and then linkedin you can put some of your videos up on linkedin and that's just another platform that you can do that with pinterest is one as well but yeah your video content for any of them they don't have to be anything crazy it can honestly just be you walking around if you have a shop you can walk around your shop and you can say hey you know we have a sale coming up for this particular product or hi guys um it's me and i just want to let you all know that you know this weekend we'll be having a big sale or you know even just like your dad joke of the day um i'm bad at dad jokes but um you know your dad joke of the day or just something and and bits like that content pieces like that don't take all that long to create they play nice with all the platforms and you can get to your audience in some fashion um especially on tick tock you can kind of just end up getting to your audience um even after posting a 30 second video they don't have to be super long they don't need to be workshop webinars long they can be pretty short the next bit of content that you can do is going to be photos and images and so when i say photos and images it can be something that you just snap a quick photo of on your phone or on a camera if you want to do that too or something you made through a graphics whether it's photoshop a design program things like that and those kinds of content those play nice really only on instagram and facebook you can get on linkedin uh pinterest is one of them as well i apologize i didn't had that one on there um but your photos and your images just like the videos it doesn't need to be something where you kind of like sit and you put in you know different gradients and backgrounds and textures you can just i'll use my cup as an example you can just take your cup and set it up take a picture hey we have this cup going on sale i wish it was we have this cup going on sale um you know this weekend or get ready for christmas with your starbucks something something peppermint latte with some kind of foam on top starbucks gets really complicated with their holiday drinks but you know it things like that um and you can just that's something that even i have done for some of my clients and you can get a bunch of photo content a bunch of video content in like 30 minutes and that's 30 minutes out of your day and then you know you can sit and then you have this load of content on your side where oh yeah i need a post about this and then you can post it and then you're good and you don't have to worry about editing you don't have to worry about anything else and it it makes things up really easy especially when starting off your platform because you can grow into the more complicated things you you don't have to start there um and then the last bit is just kind of a reminder that your content doesn't have to be fancy it just has to be relevant um when you go onto these platforms you see people that are doing amazing things with you know their talents and everything whether it's a video that's edited with different colors and lighting and transitions and effects and it looks really good and and you can give them that but also you have there are some content creators out there that just set their phone up and talk for like a minute and they do just as good if not sometimes even better it's it's really amazing as long as the content is relevant to what you do and like we said to your audience then you're gonna do just fine um you don't need to do complicated tick-tock transitions that i may or may not have tried and may or may not have failed more times than i'd like to admit um and and you don't need to you don't need to know how to do graphic design you don't um i don't i just got pretty lucky with with where i work in and the training that i've got you know i i got lucky on that end um but if it if it's up to me i i'm content with just posting nice photos like you can stage products um you can have your your cup and then maybe some coffee beans right here and that's that's a whole photo right there it's not fancy it's not complicated and and that'll do just fine people like stuff like that sometimes going uh what is it sometimes being simpler and cleaner about what you do is gonna perform better um on your profile especially if it's relevant and all that other stuff um but so that's a bit on succeeding with your content creation and then adam's gonna go over some content funnels yeah so this is this is a content funnel um a lot of people like to call this also a sales funnel right where everyone is in the top part of the funnel then they become aware of you then they have interest and then they have the desire and then they might convert and that's actually where most sales funnels end is after that purchase i i don't believe in doing that i if someone buys from me i want them to buy from me tomorrow and the next day and the next day and then i want them to tell their friends about it i really believe that a sales funnel and the way that we approach our content needs to not just go for a conversion and sale but also for advocacy that people are promoting and actively engaging with you from beginning to the end and forever on and so one of the ways that we help that's helped us kind of work through this framework quite a bit is actually just turning it on its side and being able to work through the format better this is also based upon the writing format called ada which is attention interest desire action and that's a really easy way to write out content using that writing formula of ada and so when we're looking and we we build these and we build this often for a lot of our clients we we kind of take a bigger picture view of you know if if we're going to be making content what is a blog article what is a video what is a one-off instagram post you know what what are these different elements and so for our business i mentioned before that we talk a lot about you know search engine optimization so these are pretend sticky notes um if we were in person i'd be doing sticky notes um and i would say you know the top uh 10 things your website needs in 2022 right and i might say instead of things like top 10 seo updates your website needs in 2022 and and that's a blog article that's also a video right so then i might say okay well what's an easier way to break it up so i might say hey you know here's a a lot of our clients when we do this type of work you know what a 15 increase in site traffic looks like from doing step one and two sorry this is a weird mouse and keyboard so then that could be a linkedin post that could be a facebook post that could be a one-off picture that could be a tick tock those are all really really kind of shorter form and then taking it one step further if i'm using twitter right i can say you know number one thing to do on your website in social uh in 2022 is xyz and the cool thing is i can just duplicate this right because i have i started with an article that was here are the top 10 things you should do to your website in 2022 i can just go to twitter and say okay here's number one tomorrow is number two the next one is day three day four day five day six so just writing a simple blog created anywhere from 10 to 15 posts right like that i start in the middle and work my way back and i decrease the amount of time because if someone's in the awareness phase they're they're not going to sit down they don't know me from bob i know it's usually you don't know me from adam but i'm adam so hopefully you know me we in that awareness phase they're going to have a little bit of time but i can say hey you know if this was interesting if the number two item was interesting check out what that looked like you know here here's a link to my other article or my other post here's the all the ten things you can do maybe you came in at step nine here's all the other ones so that you don't have to scroll through my timeline or my feed you can just go the blog article and see all of it together in one spot right ultimately what i would really really like because like i want them to take an action is you know subscribe subscribe to our my twitter to the youtube uh hopefully my email newsletter i love email newsletters uh that you own your audience there i want them to do that and you know what if they say wow this content was super legit hopefully they're going to say either thank you on a post or they're going to ask a question and as we do that as we engage in that way there's going to be a lot of interactions and twitter facebook etc thank you so much marie for laughing at my jokes uh um as we engage in that way twitter facebook etc they're gonna see oh this this is engaging content we need to promote it more and then the algorithm is doing the work for me that that's what we ultimately want and i'm going to do another short example you know we look at coffee that's that's a really easy example right now coffee is just big it's a big industry with billions of dollars behind it you know top five mistakes people make when making coffee all right so then i might also be able to write a smaller thing about um okay so number one mistake is usually not hot enough water or they'll do not filtered water those things will change the uh the the flavoring and the taste very very simply very very easily right but once again i can now have on twitter or facebook or even instagram anywhere else you know number one mistake you want to learn more go to the blog to learn all the mistakes and so that's one day of content the next day mistake number two the next day mistake number three mistake number four mistake number five and we're building this awareness because they might not know about it but if i say hey if you want to know the number one issue with making coffee there you go i i've grabbed someone or me hey you know maybe number three number four number five might surprise you so there's ways to do that and once again i want them to subscribe i want them to engage with me and then maybe uh maybe i'm selling coffee maybe i'm selling coffee they can buy the coffee you know buy a filter or buy it buy a cleaning kit right because maybe you have hard a lot of calcium deposits in your espresso machine and i have a cleaning kit for that it's actually a really good idea you can buy it and then hopefully you're going to send me a review you're going to engage with me you might even ask a question of like hey i bought this kit um do i how many times am i supposed to flush water through you know i flush water three times it still tasted a little funny oh well you're only supposed to flush it once so maybe there's something else that we want to talk about as a customer service experience i can hop in and work through that with them um and that's that's the way that we build a lot of our content is we're helping people become aware to build that interest build up the desire encourage towards a conversion now that we have some trust you i'm no longer an unknown person but you're like oh i kind of like that guy he has some authority he seems to know what he's talking about i wonder what's this cleaning kit i want to learn more oh okay now that i'm kind of getting more into this coffee culture how do i do this part and we're helping them through from start to finish what all that looks like thank you sweeta for sponsoring and putting on this event we we love being a part of this we love engaging swede has just been one of the coolest organizations for our area and they they do a lot of good work so that's it for today we'll be closing out the the session i just can't say enough thank you all [Applause] [Music]
