What your business MUST have as a digital presence…
A client forwarded me an email the other day from a business who specialises in obtaining grants for not-for-profits to support their digital marketing to see if I thought their service would be useful. Alarm bells immediately rang when I saw the opening paragraph which claimed;
Are you a business that doesn’t Post every week on Facebook, Instagram, Linked In, TikTok, Pinterest and Twitter?
If this is the case, your company and brand will look weak to your customers, google will downrank your website in google search, and you are missing out on new customer Leads and Sales.
Well this got my heckles up! Blatant scaremongering preying on small business and charity owners who don’t really understand what they need to be marketing their business/not-for-profit effectively online.
Anyway, it got me thinking… what exactly does a business need from its digital presence?
A crystal clear message
When someone visits your website or stumbles upon your social media profile, what do you want them to take away from it? Going back to the client in question, we’ve been coaching them on simplifying their messaging. They are a charity and so we have been focusing on their why (why do they do what they do?), what (what is the problem they are solving), how (how are they solving the problem) and CTA (what can you, as a charity supporter, do to help them achieve this). Everything should answer these questions and so we’ve got rid of some of the noise around it to make it crystal clear to their audience.
2. A clear audience
We work with a lot of land-based industries and so, when we ask who their target audience is, we get told ‘landowners and farmers’. There’s a big difference between a farmer who is preparing to retire and a recent Farm Business Management Grad who has taken on their first Farm Manager role. There’s a huge difference between a family farm of a couple of generations farming 300 acres and a huge commercial farming business farming thousands of acres and hiring a number of personnel. You get my point!
One of our clients has three quite distinct farming audiences;
Landowners nearing retirement and looking to make an income from their land without having to actively farm it.
Progressive, typically younger farmers, often those who have recently inherited or taken over the running of a farm, who are looking at diversified income streams.
Farmers who are scared about the viability of their farming business in the light of changes to EU subsidies and so are looking to make their farming business viable.
As you can imagine, the way of reaching these different groups with their messaging are quite different. Be really specific with who you are targeting (you’ll probably have more than one audience) and where you can find them.
3. A plan
You know your message, you know who you’re talking to and you know where to find them.
If they don’t fit into the TikTok demographic, don’t have TikTok. If it’s B2B, focus on LinkedIn. If you’re targeting pensioners, explore radio advertising (or targeting the younger generations who care for them).
Now think of content themes which are of interest to your audience. We work with a beef box brand and our content themes are ‘Life On The Farm’ (customers want to see where their meat comes from), recipes, products and sales, customer reviews/testimonials/photos. If it doesn’t fit under those themes, we don’t post it - this keeps the messaging crystal clear.
4. Consistency
This goes beyond posting regularly. It means using a consistent style, colours, fonts, tone of voice, etc. Don’t use a fancy new font every time you post, create a batch of templates which fit within your brand guidelines (we’ll talk about these some other time) which you can edit and re-use again and again and, if more than one person posts on your account, make sure you use a consistent voice.
This all creates a clean, professional appearance and makes your brand identifiable by the posts you produce.
5. Confidence, creativity… and time!
This is the trickiest bit. The above should all be super easy because you know your business inside out. But having the time to think creatively about how to portray those messages and the confidence to put it out there is hard.
We can provide coaching and a sounding board to help you develop this, to we can take it completely off your hands! Book in a discovery call to discuss how we can help.
