Part II – an interview with Brandon Falcon of Falconics Inc.
Recently we sat down with Brandon Falcon with Falconics to lay out a 5-part series on social media and creating a credible presence in the highly competitive virtual environment. Our last blog focused on explaining the organic and paid side of Facebook and determining the best means of utilizing the Facebook platform to brand your business.
This week’s post will continue on our initial Facebook discussion as we explore how digital marketing can increase your exposure exponentially.
Danna
Do I necessarily, as a small business owner, should I have a blog? Should I have a podcast? Or anything like that, is that a good option for me? And what about if I don’t have the time?
Brandon
So, time is usually the first thing I address. We all have a finite amount of time available in every business. Family and so forth will have to be included in the total picture. The first thing that we like to do, or we recommend, is to identify what you have time for and what you can most impact. It might be blogs and podcasts significant to one customer, and they can’t find downtime for email marketing yet. It can be the exact opposite for the next customer. Maybe they have resources, have scheduling tools, or have experienced, so there isn’t a learning curve. It’s hard to say without digging a little bit deeper into their specific situation. With that being said, yes, I do find it valuable to have these additional lead generation tools. Typically, my two favorite things are blogs and email marketing. Once you have a good email sequence set up, usually a handful of automated emails reach out once an individual is first introduced to your brand. These sequenced emails are designed to educate the receiver more about your brand. The goal is to run these emails simultaneously with your organic social media content. You want to lead them down a path to click on your social media pages to learn more about your brand, and the worst thing you can do is have nothing there. They will think your business is shut down. So we want to run them simultaneously to build rapport with our customers; on top of that, running things like your blog articles to reinforce your email and social marketing efforts.
What happens is that the blog articles complement the SEO side, helping you get found on Google. What Google does is crawl your website looking for keywords etc. When you publish a new site, they periodically, by their timing and choice, read the site, figure out terms based on what you’ve written and what it thinks you’re all about. It tries to send traffic to you for those things. When someone searches on Google, you solve a problem, and your content hopefully pops up for that problem; blogs are so precious for that reason. People often get so caught up in thinking, needing to write these massive 5000-to-10,000-word articles when all you need are 4-5 paragraphs. That’s it. You write as little as 500 words. For some of our clients, we call them micro-articles. The reason being, we want to solve a particular problem. So, we will often sit with the client and ask what some of the most common questions you are asked that you think, “I wish I could get this out, and then everyone would know about it.” That’s what we recommend.
Putting the blog on your website and doing some co-activities and helps drive traffic. We start taking down those communication barriers early on in the conversation, building trust with that customer, so they are more likely and more willing to communicate with us much more straightforward and trust what we suggest much faster.
Danna
Okay, so in other words, a blog would be an excellent addition to your social media platform.
I find I enjoy blogging, and even though my time is limited, it takes me maybe 45 minutes to an hour to knock out a blog, and I have to do it first thing in the morning when my brain is fresh. It might be four or five o’clock in the morning that I’m knocking out this blog.
Is social media marketing better if it is a B2C environment or a B2B environment?
Brandon
Gotcha. So that’s a bit of a loaded question there. If we want to generalize it, typically, we’ve noticed B2C is the easiest. B2C involves our end goal to acquire consumers in general, whereas B2B is selling to another business for those who don’t know. It is much easier to identify the end customer or consumer and available users than identifying specific roles and other companies. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t work; it’s just a little more complicated. We do have cases where it does work, and it works beautifully. But it does seem to get saturated a lot quicker because if there is a way to do it and there is a way to find them easily, other businesses are typically going to be after them as well. Usually, a finite number of them and buying patterns don’t change as quickly as individual buying habits do. For instance, you’re a pharmaceutical provider, and you want to get in front of more doctors to see your product, there are only so many doctors in the country you can target. So, you and every other competitor that does medicine like you have to compete for that. This is where you find out how you stack up to the competition and focus on the value you bring to the table. These are the areas that a professional can assist in fine-tuning your message.
On the flip side, if we’re selling shoes can hit 500,000 to 5 million people for the same amount of money. Yes, many brands are marketing to them using generic messages; however, if we can assist you in narrowing that down a lot quicker, and it’s usually a lot more effective, we typically see a lot higher return on those types of customers.
Danna
That’s why it’s so important to identify who your avatar is. Who is your customer and niche, as much as possible? You don’t want to squeeze yourself so much that you’re not going to have a big enough audience, but you also don’t want to have such a large audience that it’s going to be challenging to narrow down to those people who are going to buy from you.
Let’s talk about how I can take control of my brand online through social media.
Brandon
Yeah, so I would say first off that you should get them if you don’t have the main profiles or platforms. That is going to be Facebook, Instagram, Linked In, and Twitter. If you sell a product or provide many valuable resources digitally, for instance, an online coach or a blog, Pinterest would be an excellent beneficial platform. If you don’t do any of that, say, for example, you’re a roofer, I’m not saying it won’t work, but we typically don’t see the same return on a roofing company, compared to a brand that sells shoes, coaching or even fitness recipes.
Danna
Let’s talk about a roofer, okay. You’ve got commercial, and you’ve got residential roofers. A commercial roofer may not do as well on Facebook, whereas a residential roofer might. Commercial roofers might want to advertise through LinkedIn because it’s business to business. LinkedIn is generally business to business, and so those are the things that need to be taken into consideration when you’re selecting your platforms.
Brandon
Absolutely. The residential ones, we work with some so that I can speak to that quickly. They are usually somewhat successful on Facebook. You pick a market area you want to work in; we make our messaging very specific to that audience; you choose times that you might want to pay for ads, like during hurricane season at certain times in Florida. We know what time the ideal time is to advertise, and we want to be the first and foremost one in front, ready to promote that. Whereas with commercial projects and such, it more difficult platforms like LinkedIn would be beneficial. We even found success with the ones like YouTube ads and stuff like that. Usually, platforms like YouTube are so tightly tied to Google that you can relatively quickly get a hold of them on that platform. They’re searching for things that we can easily target. They see us in passing and give us a ring.
Danna
It’s my understanding; correct me if I’m wrong; advertising through Google is more expensive than other social media platforms. But you do get a better return quicker through Google.
Brandon
Generally, by advertising on Google, you’re trying to solve a problem at that moment. In contrast, our socials platforms are what we consider passive marketing, meaning that we are positioning ourselves for future sales.
Danna
Okay, okay, so advertising through Google, you’re trying to reach that 1% that’s ready to make a decision right now. That’s what they’re searching for specifically.
That’s a different take on it. I didn’t even think about that. So that’s why you’re paying a little bit more because you’re reaching that 1% of buyers that are ready to buy now.
Brandon
Again, the social media posts are passive and complement the other digital marketing approaches like Google. Yes, searches on Google are initiated because of a problem that needs to be solved now. Passive methods are designed to keep you top of mind for when the need arises. Through data analytics, we can track common interests that would eventually lead to a conversion. Let’s say you’re in the market to buy a home with specific characteristics and you’re searching through Google. Google will identify that you’re looking at a house that may be older, in need of a roof replacement, and they’re going to start indirectly suggesting, based on our targeting too, that you might want to get your roof replaced with ABC Roofing. So, again, you need to understand your customers buying cycle and where they’re at and make sure you’re there when they need you.
Danna
Talk about hashtags and the @ symbol. What is the importance of these symbols?
Brandon
Yeah, so hashtags are specific per platform; some utilize it more than others. Hashtags are utilized to define a specific audience or a particular bubble. That’s how I would describe it. Another way of describing hashtags is to imagine you’re in a large room, you have many folders on the floor, and each one has a particular audience or other similar content. Anyone can walk in and pick up a folder thinking it’s attractive to them and look through it. In this case, your hashtags have put your brand front and center based on what the viewer is looking to solve.
Let’s say we’re a residential roofer, and we work in Central Florida. We might utilize hashtags like Central Florida home, a new home, first home, homes near Florida. You want to make sure all those hashtags are listed and your image or video has a related subject line. If you’re a roofer, it may be a photo of a roof you just completed, maybe before and after images. Those hashtags allow that photo to pop up in the audiences or groups you want to pop up in their searches.
When someone comes to look for a Central Florida home, either buy a second home or buy their primary residence, etc. They begin their search, their information is captured, and they start indirectly seeing your ad regularly. They may be actively hunting for a roofer, but typically what they see is passive postings. They find us, and they start subliminally seeing our messaging regularly; they begin to engage us more, thinking, yeah, I might need that. Data shows that if you’re looking at homes at one point or another, you’re probably going to need a new roof at one point or another in 30 years. We’re making sure we’ve captured them in the early stages, right when they’re ready to buy. That’s how hashtags work.
The @ symbol is utilized more so for name branding. You can use @ symbol in front of the brand name, and clicking on it will take the viewer to a website or landing page. You can click from a post directed to your profile; this has been beneficial when you’re doing many collaborations, between brands, or between another organization like a Chamber of Commerce. It could be a tag for a business that you recently went and tried out and so forth.
Danna
Okay, interesting. See, I didn’t even know that one either.
So, as we close out here, let’s talk just a bit about some of the common mistakes that businesses will make on social media?
Brandon
Many good and bad things can happen on social media, and even good intentions can end up poorly executed without you even knowing that you’re doing it incorrectly. For example, you don’t want to put 20 hashtags on a post on a Facebook profile. That’s going to hurt you. Facebook prefers three to five maximum, whereas, on Instagram, they are okay with many hashtags. But if you’re on Instagram and you’re a big brand, and you have 10,000 plus followers, 20 hashtags are wrong for you. On average, you want to stick to five.
Mistakes are dependent on where you are in your journey. Another of the most common mistakes I’ve seen is infrequent posting. Or they are posting in bulk when a business owner probably sits down during a free moment and does it themselves. This happens quite often in the early stages of their business when they do it all at once. Then they don’t post again until next week. Most of these platforms rely on consistency; they don’t necessarily care what you’re posting about because they’re going to get it to the right people. If you’re not consistent, they lose their trust in you, so they’re going to pick someone easier to engage.
Another mistake I would say is, utilizing links to your website within your post, for example, posting your blog with a link or a video. This is problematic in your profile and puts you in the wrong position with the platform. The reason is that if you think of it from Facebook’s point of view, they are spending time and money to get people to open up their app, get on their platform, and search. They make money from the advertisement on the platform. If you were making an organic post, for instance, not a paid ad and post a link in it, you are potentially or realistically stealing business from Facebook and sending it to your website. That does not benefit Facebook. Facebook does to combat that is lower your exposure, and they keep lowering it until you get no views on your post whatsoever. The majority of what I see nowadays as brands complain, “I don’t understand, I post all the time, I’m not getting any traffic. No one’s looking at me.” You’re most likely self-sabotage on yourself; it’s something you didn’t realize you were doing; you’re talking about yourself too much and not the value you bring to Facebook subscribers.
These are some of the main things I see that usually can hurt a small business. There are a million more that we don’t have time to dive in deeper.
Danna
Well, we’ll be diving deeper into future blogs as we move forward with this series.
Our next blog in the series will focus on Facebook, some of the tools and tricks that Brandon will be bringing to you.
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