Home Entrepreneurship Discouraged by a slow season? Don’t stop your social media marketing efforts

Entrepreneurship

Discouraged by a slow season? Don’t stop your social media marketing efforts

December 15, 2017

Many small business owners experience a slow season at some point during the year.

Discouraged by a slow season?
Don’t stop your social media marketing efforts

Not only are there steps that you can take to help you change that.

Even if a slow season means you have less money allocated for your marketing efforts, you can still take advantage of all free tools available to you on social media to give your business that extra push.

Giving up is not an option! Let’s go over some things that you can do (for FREE) to push through your slow season or even start seeing some growth during your slow season.

1. Take advantage of video

Although videos are popular, they are also still widely underused in social media.

Try doing a weekly Facebook live, give insights into what your business has been up too. Go live on Instagram, to showcase upcoming products; this is especially effective for product-based companies with Instagram being a highly visual platform.

Think Periscope is dead? Think again!

I always tell my clients to do what everyone else is NOT doing.

Anytime I hear someone say that Twitter is dead, I smile a little because, for some of my clients, it’s their number one lead generation tool.

Videos can get great organic reach on many social media platforms if you really take the time to deliver content that resonates with your audience.

When the time comes that you have marketing dollars for ads, you can use those videos that already have social proof to create various campaigns.

So, give video a try!

2. Recycle your content

Share & Share! This is one of my favorite tricks!

It’s a real time-saving tip. You surely have some posts that have done amazingly well!

Regardless of the platform, you will not get 100% organic reach on your posts, schedule your posts to be shared on a continuous basis so that more of your audience can be reached. For the posts that receive the most likes, comments, and share – share them again, over and over!

Another one of my favorite tricks to recycle my content is to take some of my articles and turn them into a massive amount of tweets.

Go over your article and highlight various points that could help your audience and provide value. Small sentences that speak for themselves, and will leave your audience thinking “I want to find out more!” I do this by using a google sheet; I go over my article and copy/paste back and forth between my article and then my google sheets. Then it’s time to schedule.

And last but not least another great content recycling tip is too take a section of a recent or past article and expand on the topic.

It’s impossible to share all of your wisdom inside one article; you likely have more to say on so many topics inside your articles.

Make it a practice that once you’ve written an article, you go back and take a topic from it and take time to expand on the topic.

3. Boost your customer service efforts

This goes without saying; customer service should always be at the core of any strategy, paid or organic, slow season or not.

What you can do during your slow season is to focus on helping your audience get to know you a little better.

By using all of the free tools that you have available on social media, you could do various campaigns focused on staff recognition, storytelling & brand awareness!

Here are a few ideas:

– Monthly brand awareness campaign. Create a monthly campaign where X amount of days per week you will do a video or post or even short article talking about the history of your brand, the struggles, the growth you’ve experienced and the plans you have for your business.

– Do weekly team member recognition where you either create a post thanking your team members for a job well done or allow them to do a live on your Facebook page talking about their experience working with your company.

– Do a weekly Facebook or Instagram live answering some FAQ’s that you often receive.

– Schedule regular posts showcasing customer reviews.

Another important tip with social media for customer service is to ensure that you respond to comments and messages promptly.

When someone calls or emails your business, you hopefully return their calls or emails quickly, do the same on social media.

Social Media is customer service; the only difference is that the world is watching!

I hope that these insights will give you something to think about and some steps that you can take to help your business during a slow season, even though all of the above can be and should be done at any time.