A festival can be anything
When you think of a festival, you may start begin visualizing thousands of people congregating outdoors in a major city to listen to the popular music of a given era, sponsored by Unilever’s latest macro-trend based offering. You may think of your town farmer’s market, soundtracked by a local band and catered by non-franchise food trucks. You may even recall Red Bull’s month long multi-venue music festival that sold several cans of Red Bull sometime during the 2010’s. Festivals can be completely virtual, like Fortnite collaborating with Marshmello, who according to Google is an “American DJ” and not a marshmallow (Confectionery), or the livestream of Condé Nast owned Pitchfork Music Festival. Is a popup event a festival? It is if you want it to be. Find some other businesses, brands or organizations, a location, and start collaborating on a festival of your very own.
Festivals are a fantastic way to build community and learn more about the businesses, brands and organizations in your community. No individual entity exists in a community alone, so collaborating on events is a great way to meet other business owners and community leaders, as well as offer your own community something fun and interesting to do. Your festival or event should be about community building, with the goal of having a positive impact. By providing your community a well planned event, with aspects of entertainment, information, commerce, and resources represented, your event can eventually become something regular (weekly, monthly, yearly, etc.) that people in your area look forward to and benefit from. If the event is a success, attendees will be more likely to remember your business, brand or organization.
You can create opportunity for entrepreneurs who are getting started on a new business or nonprofits who may not have the budget to do a lot of advertising. These are great aspects to planning events and booking vendors, because working together and collaborating is generally good for business. If you have a retail storefront, then working with a startup caterer for a mini popup food festival on one weekend day during your slow season may bring in more business for your storefront, while also providing a new business an opportunity to gain exposure to more new clientele. This is a win win, as the caterer isn’t a direct competitor to something like a boutique or retail store, and the storefront owner can get more foot traffic during a slow time.
Collaborating with nonprofits on events and festivals is another great addition, similar to collaborating with entrepreneurs. Nonprofits generally don’t have the budget to advertise a lot, especially if they are local specific. This is a problem, because nonprofits are generally good for a community, and more people should probably know about what they do and how to get involved. Baseline, if you’re having event the easiest thing you can do is to collect food, clothes, personal hygiene items, etc. from attendees to donate to your local food pantry. You can also think about your event’s activities and think of if a nonprofit could be a sponsor. Are you going to start inviting local musicians to play sets at your coffee shop? You could donate a percentage of drink sales from a specific menu item to a local music nonprofit and put their info materials on your counter. A collaboration doesn’t have to be too big of a deal or take much effort. If you can just get info about a local nonprofit in front of your customers for a day, that may start to make a difference over time.
Your festival can also be online and offline at once. According to Forbes, hybrid events are beneficial because “professionals can still go in person to network, interact physically with vendor booths and products and enjoy the atmosphere. On the other hand, people who cannot attend in-person or do not want to go in-person can still experience and access the event using their computer, phone or tablet. Furthermore, hybrid events allow companies to reap the benefits of both in-person events and virtual events.”
Your festival doesn’t have to follow what you think of when you think of big music festivals or state fairs. A festival can be anything as long as people show up. Free yourself to think of what you could plan within the parameters you have and get creative. Don’t get hung up on if you can’t get 5 food trucks to show up at your shop, what is something else that could be similar? You can’t find a musical act on short notice? You can find a good loudspeaker for just about what would be fair to pay a band for a day. Start where you can, and iterate as you plan more events. Learn from what works, and more importantly what doesn’t. A festival can be anything, what would yours be?
Collaborate with local nonprofits to build community
Collaborating with local nonprofits is an easy way to build community around your business, brand or organization, while also giving back and helping a local nonprofit support your area. Depending on what your organization does, you can collaborate with nonprofits in many different ways. If you operate a restaurant, you can run a fundraising campaign where you donate a percentage of sales on a given day to a nonprofit in your area. If you provide a service, like graphic design, you can donate your services to a local nonprofit. Event the smallest collaborations can make a big difference. If you run a boutique, you can keep a jar and info card next to your cash register for donations, if you have a storefront or community board, you can let nonprofits put leaflets up to advertise their campaigns and events.
Figure out a nonprofit that resonates with what your business does. If you have a tutoring business, then you could start a college scholarship for local students. If you’re a local grocery store, specialty food store, or coffee shop, you can donate extra food to a food bank, or a percentage of monthly sales. Basically every business, brand or organization has something that can be thematically tied to a nonprofit, or at the very least, is located somewhere, and collaborating with your local government or rotary club can be just as impactful.
Working with a nonprofit or local government group means that you’re doing a good thing that helps benefit your community. This is just a baseline good thing to do, that many people already do. When your community thrives, your business, brand or organization thrives as well, and by becoming an active contributor to benefit, you become even more of a stakeholder in your community.
Collaborating with nonprofits or local government groups at its most immediate, gives both you and the group that you’re collaborating with a campaign to promote, other than your business or their group. If you start a trash cleanup walking group in collaboration with your local park district and conservation nonprofit, then the three of your organizations now lead a regularly meeting group that promotes your organizations while also benefiting your locality’s green walking spaces.
When figuring out what to do and who to collaborate with, it’s important to keep in mind what your organization stands for, and to only pitch collaborations that really speak to what your business, brand or organization actually does. This way, you can avoid confusing collaborations, or seeming like you’re only interested in the collaboration to benefit yourself. The best collaborations are symbiotic, and benefit everyone involved. Make sure the organizations you choose to pitch align with your work, and that you can provide real value. Don’t be a nuisance, and if you get no’s for your pitches, learn from any given feedback and try the next organization.
If done successfully, working with local nonprofits or government organizations helps generate positive affinity towards your business, brand or organization. A long running collaboration between your business, brand or organization can potentially even become a real changemaker in your local community, bringing positive change. You don’t have to start with a big collaboration with a state-level nonprofit. You can really just start with a tip jar at the counter of your boutique store that is donated to your county homeless shelter. Small changes make all the difference, and if it helps your company and the organization you’re working with, why not try something?
How offline and online advertising work together
Digital advertising is a powerful and efficient tool that can be used to reach the exact audience that is relevant to your business, brand or organization, making it easy to find potential new customers. Online platforms like Facebook, Google, and other social media companies collect data shared on their platforms and combine it with other data sources that they purchase, giving them ample information to create profiles on their users about what people are interested in. These platforms then make this information available to advertisers, who can then create ads that will show in the newsfeeds of people who may be interested in what they are advertising. Online advertising is a great tool because you can keep your advertising budget solely for people who might actually be interested in your business, brand or organization, and only spend when someone actually sees an ad.
Offline advertising is almost anything else that isn’t online advertising. Billboards, leaflets, traditional media, business cards, t-shirts, car wraps, etc. are all examples of offline advertising. Offline advertising is great because at its best it can be easy and highly visible, with good return. Printing out 100 leaflets for an event is cheap to do, and putting them on local community boards or the windows of coffee shops and boutiques can be a low cost way to get your event’s ad in front of a lot of people, quickly. Keeping business cards on you at all times and if, “what do you do?” ever comes up (or if you’re just good at networking), is a zero effort offline marketing tactic that can have long term payoff, if you ever meet a potential customer or client.
Each advertising channel has its own unique set of benefits and pitfalls. Advertising on Instagram Stories is an excellent way to get your content in front of a wealth of people, but if your business isn’t prepared for that traffic or if you target to the wrong audience, you’ll waste a lot of money quickly. If you rely solely on leafletting, but never actually get around to researching where to place your leaflets, or don’t go around pinning and taping up your printouts, then that channel becomes useless. Ideally, you find a few different channels to advertise through, and by using a blend of strategies, the benefits and detractions of the channels can even themselves out.
When you pick a few different marketing and advertising channels that are both online and offline, you can get the benefits of both, and use the channels in some interesting ways. Notably, you can blend the visibility of offline advertising with the hyper-specific targeting of online advertising to create a symbiotic boost to both marketing channels. If you make leaflets for something that you’re trying to advertise, then only target your online ads to the newsfeeds of people in the specific areas that you leafletted, then the chances of someone remembering your ad or business goes up. If someone sees your ad at a local coffee shop, then is served an ad of the same graphic through their social media newsfeed, that means there are two points in time where someone would be hypothetically seeing your ad. The second time they see the ad, they will likely remember the first one, and that will add to the chances of them remembering your ad.
The offline/online strategy is really helpful, because you can be extremely specific in your ads relative to the location that they exist in. You can reference something that only local residents may get in an offline context, then run that same ad online, keeping your business, brand or organization in mind. This makes your ads more effective, meaning that they will be cheaper to run, meaning that it will cost less money to achieve your advertising goals. Offline/online helps you reach exactly who you need to reach online, while also creating the broad visibility of offline advertising.
Offline/online can be used by both local businesses, brands or organizations, but it can also be used by large companies that have a wide range of markets they serve. As a small local business, all you have to do is keep your messaging consistent and utilize both online and offline channels. As a larger company in many locations, all you have to do is find a primary goal for your advertising, then personalize it for a local audience. This is how Chicagoans get advertisements from multinational conglomerates that speak of the city being windy, or how New Yorkers get ads from the same big companies that make puns about large apples or pizza. A great thing about offline/online is that it can be utilized in any sized market. Messaging can get even more specific the less people in a given area, so you don’t have to focus on big cities to try this strategy.
Some social media advertising channels will even let you type in a list of addresses where you offline ads are, and they’ll send an online ad to anyone who has visited your retail location (or where you leaflets are), meaning that you can reach only the people that you need to if you’re running a super specific advertisement. If you’re advertising for your coffee shop, what’s something that a customer leaving your shop might remember? Reference it in an online ad, inviting them back to your retail location. It’ll feel personalized, because it’s directly referencing a customer experience, and they’ll be more likely to visit your shop again.
By combining offline and online advertising, businesses, brands or organizations can get the best of both strategies and avoid the pitfalls of solely relying on one way to advertise to people. Utilizing offline advertising in addition to online marketing strategies, you create multiple different opportunities to reach a potential customer, making the chance that they remember your business, brand or organization much greater. By trying different strategies and learning from what does and doesn’t work, you’ll increase the efficacy of your advertising and also save some money while you’re at it. Because you can reference a local area with online, then follow up online, your ads will be more effective. How would you mix online and offline advertising? What channels will you utilize?
What is your business’ lifestyle?
Every business, brand or organization has a lifestyle, or a story that can be told to describe itself. Some businesses have an easily identifiable lifestyle, like a hotel or travel brand. Brands that are lush in experience can readily show what time spent at those businesses may be like. Businesses that are less focused on vacationer hospitality, and say tax preparation or other professional services, have a more challenging task when determining how to visualize the story of their brand. While difficult, telling a brand story about a hypothetical client success story about a business that is up to date on all of their paperwork, and how that business can now focus on their core operations. Every organization has a story to tell, a way to show how their operations work, and a community that it exists in. Even a vending machine exists in a place, and that place has a story, and people that live within it. Every business, brand or organization has a lifestyle and thus, a story to tell.
You may already be aware of lifestyle bloggers, or lifestyle social media influencers, or people who create content surrounding the life they live. Lifestyle bloggers or influencers generally work with brands to make content that promotes products and showcases how to use them. Lifestyle bloggers or influencers also typically rely on monetizing the audience that follows them, either through advertising, brand collaborations, sponsorships, or events. If you think of your business in the same way, you can start to think of how your business entity might tell these same stories. Are you a retail storefront? You can make the same how-to content about the products you sell that an influencer might make on their own. You can even hire lifestyle content creators to work with you on how to best create a brand lifestyle.
So what is your lifestyle? Think about your core business operations. What do you do and what industry are you in? Do you sell things, offer services to others, or are you a community organization? Where are you located, do you work online? Think holistically about your business, brand or organization and really zero in on what makes it what it is. Your business isn’t just a list of products, think about what people who shop at your store do with what they buy.
Now that you have an idea about what the lifestyle of your business, brand or organization is, you can begin to create content surrounding that thesis. Posting on social media is a great way to reach existing customers, social media platforms will also share your content algorithmically, heling you reach new people. Blogging is another great way to communicate with customers. Blogging helps you go a little more in depth on a subject than a social media post, and can also be shared by Facebook or email. Blog posts will also be indexed by search engines, so people can find your business when they search online.
Think in terms of campaigns or content franchises. A dentist can create a campaign about low sugar foods and post new recipes regularly. A bank could run a quarterly spotlight about their business banking clients, showcasing the successes and stories of their clients. The best content franchises can be run evergreen and are simple to understand. Don’t start by thinking you’ll do something daily or weekly, because you might find that it’s hard to generate that number of ideas while also running a business or organization.
You don’t need to be trendy in your communication or follow what lifestyle bloggers and influencers do. Stay true to what your business does, or what your operations are. By communicating to your customers through storytelling and valuable content, you will show that you know what you’re talking about, and if your business operates well, customers will return. Lifestyle content keeps customers engaged with your brand, because it gives people something to read, watch or listen to that is related to, or presented by, your brand, but not necessarily explicitly transactional, like only posting an image of a product and asking for people to buy it. When the time for a purchase decision arises, your business will be in you customers’ minds, because they have been engaging with your lifestyle content.
Lifestyle content and multimedia storytelling benefits from longevity. Stick to what works and adapt to what doesn’t. Pay attention to what your customers say and how they engage with your content. Monitor analytics provided from your social media or website accounts, and let them tell you where to potentially focus. Be regular, but don’t burn yourself out. After some time, you’ll begin to notice a depth and range to what you’ve been posting and your business’ lifestyle will start to be readily communicated to anyone visiting your online or marketing presence.
Every business, brand or organization has a lifestyle and a story to tell. Communicating in a way that draws customers in by showcasing your operations and community will go much further than simply stating what you sell. Show existing and new customers how your business operates, give people how-to’s or walkthroughs to inform them beyond a product listing, keep engaged with your local community and how your industry interacts with it, visualize a lifestyle for your audience and how what you sell will help them achieve it. Lifestyle content is simply showing people what your business does in a way that communicates more information than price and purchase. What is your business, brand or organization’s lifestyle?
Every business should be blogging
Blogging. Blogs. Blog. What is a blog? Blogs are online journals or informational websites displaying information in reverse chronological order. Blogs are articles that you publish on your business’ website. Blogs can be about your business, what you do, your business processes, what you sell, your announcements, and your plans. Blogs can be posted as often as you want, and they’re great for speaking directly to your customers, as well as for finding new people to inform about your business. Blog about your location and where you operate. You can really blog about whatever, as long as it is relevant to your business. All you need is a website, and most website platforms have blogging built in.
Simply put, blogging will increase traffic to your business’ website. By publishing regular blog posts, you are creating new information rich webpages for search engine to index, and if your blog posts are relevant to your business, search engines will reward you with traffic. Search engines “scan” the entire Internet often, mapping out domains and keeping track of website quality. Blog posts are pages that people like to click on when using search engines, as they generally answer a question, explain something, give a how-to, or announce news. By keeping your blog posts high quality, search engines will notice when people stay on your website and re-visit it. These are indicators that search engines use when deciding who to rank at the top of a search page.
Your business can blog as much as you’re able to, and anything helps. You can blog every once in a while, and it’ll still grow the amount of you business’ website pages indexed by search engines. Blogging more frequently is rewarded with more traffic because search engines will begin to consider your business’ website to be a good source of information that they can rely on to send traffic to. As reported by Oberlo, “Businesses that produce 16 or more blog posts per month experience 3.5 times more traffic than blogs that post fewer than four posts.”
Blogging is a common practice in big business that can easily be adopted by any small business, nonprofit, artist or organization. Brands often announce product launches on their own company blogs, and companies like Facebook use blogging to inform their business customers on how to use Facebook for business and announce new ways to advertise. These companies use content marketing because it works, and is an effective means of corporate communication. According to Oberlo, “86% of content marketers use blogs as part of their marketing strategy.”
Not only does blogging give you the ability to speak directly to your customers, maintaining a regular blog for your business is an excellent way to find new customers organically when people search online. When blogging, use phrases that people may be searching when making purchasing decisions. If you provide a service to a local area, be sure to mention the specific towns that you provide service for, and when someone searches for that service you provide along with their town, you’ll start to show in results the more you blog and mention that phrase. If you’re a pizzeria in the northwest Chicago suburbs, write blog posts including your service and location, like “pizza delivery in NW Chicago suburbs."
When search engines think of your business’ website as a good source of information, they will send relevant local traffic to it. This new traffic consists of people who are searching real questions on search engines, and are actually curious about the topic since they made the search (as opposed to being served an ad). If your website provides good information and is easy enough to navigate, people who find your website via search can become new customers. Again, Oberlo published in a study, “55% of marketers gained new customers because of blogging.”
Blogging is free and easy to do. Start by writing about what your business does. Write about your industry and how these things are relevant to the area in which you serve. Post your blog posts onto your social media accounts, like Facebook, Twitter, etc. and your existing customers will be able to start reading your posts right away. As you post on you blog, keep posting them to social media, and you’ll begin to get even more traffic. Blogging is the best free way to build your business’ brand and communicate to new and existing customers. What will your first post be?
Are you advertising on Facebook yet?
Facebook’s advertising platform is probably the best way to reach customers right now. If haven’t yet tried using Facebook to advertise, then you should consider incorporating it into your marketing strategy, as you can reach exactly who you need to as a cost effective price. You can “boost” posts within Facebook’s app, within a few simple steps. Just tell Facebook where you want your ad to show up, and to whom. Facebook lets advertisers access their knowledge of Facebook users and shows ads to the people who are most likely to engage with an ad. Since Facebook makes money when ads are successful, they are highly motivated to help you achieve your business goals.
Facebook lets you “boost” posts that you’re already making. You don’t have to create an individual ad, or think up a catchy slogan or memorable concept. You can just promote the posts that you already make, visible on your profile, putting them in the newsfeeds of others who don’t follow you. As Facebook owns Instagram, you can advertise on both platforms seamlessly. You can boost your posts within the app simply by clicking the blue “Boost Post” button beneath a post. This will bring up a menu where you tell Facebook your objective for the ad, who to target, and how much you want to spend.
Objectives for Facebook and Instagram ads are simply telling Facebook what you want to get out of your ad spend. Do you just want more engagement on the posts on your business profile? Do you want to gain more awareness from people who don’t follow you? Do you only want to reach people who already follow, and are already engaged with your business? Do you just want video plays, or are you trying to optimize for a click-through to your webstore, ending in a sale? Keeping your objective in mind while advertising will help you achieve your goals, while minimizing wasted ad spend.
When you start to advertise more on Facebook and Instagram, Facebook’s algorithm will begin to learn who responds to your ads the most, and start to show your ads to them more organically. You can also save a custom audience of people who respond to your ads, or even those who make a purchase after clicking an ad, to target future ads later. Making a custom audience like this helps you target your most engaged customers, in a cost effective way. You can also create a “look-a-like” audience of this group or people, where Facebook creates a new audience of new customers who are similar to those who already engage with your brand.
Another great thing about Facebook advertising, is that you get access to Facebook’s Ad Manager, which is an extremely in depth, robust, tool to advertising on Facebook, Instagram and beyond. With Ad Manager, you are able to reach much more targeted audiences of people, and track metrics of advertisements to inform future ads. You can measure who sees your ads by demographics, who engages, and who purchases. You can see how many people saw an ad, how they engaged with the ad, and how many times people saw the ad. Facebook Ad Manager will tell you exactly down to the fraction of a cent how much it costs to achieve a business objective, like a sale. With Ad Manager, you can clearly see how someone finds your company, how long they engage with your content, and if they make a sale.
By knowing if your ads are working and if people are engaging with the content, and not clicking or scrolling away, you can iterate and build better ads. This knowledge also helps you post more relevant and better content, as you’ll see exactly what your audience likes and responds to. Knowing this can help you make business decisions too, and help with planning. Maybe people engage less with a seasonal sale that you would have hoped, or people really respond to limited “drops” of products. If you blog as a part of your marketing and brand strategy, keeping tabs on which articles perform best will help you write more.
By advertising on Facebook, you also have access to advertising on several prestige publications and websites that can help you gain more reach, with no additional effort. Facebook has a service called Audience Network that acts as a display advertising network for publications to use on their websites. Publications like Buzzfeed, Vice and the Huffington post all use Audience Network, meaning your ads can run on the articles published by those outlets. The media brands have a deal with Facebook where they get paid to generate traffic, and Facebook extends that access to its advertisers (you!).
Advertising on Facebook is a powerful tool that help any business reach new clientele, as well as speak directly to those who are already customers. Advertising on Facebook doesn’t have to be a tech-intensive difficult process. You don’t have to know how to code, or even have a lot of budget to spend on ads. You can start advertising on Facebook, Instagram, and their Audience Network today with as little as $1. You can spend as much as you’d like as you become more familiar with the tools. You can also stop your spend at any time. Testing Facebook advertising is a win win if you have a specific goal in mind, or just want to get your business out there a bit more.
Event marketing tells brand story through customer experience
Event marketing is simply figuring out an experience that can tell the story of your brand, company or organization. If you have a retail location, event marketing can be an event held at your storefront. If your are a brand, then event marketing can entail throwing a party for a product launch. If you’re a nonprofit, then event marketing could be throwing a fundraising gala or concert. The common thread between all of these examples of event marketing, is that they all give your customers an opportunity to engage with your company while building community, entertaining, and potentially expanding your audience.
Event marketing can be to promote specific products, or to generate sales, or to just create more awareness about your brand. If you are a gourmet boutique, then hosting a wine tasting every month where you pair wines and foods you sell to customers is a simple way to incorporate event marketing into your brand strategy. If you own a coffee shop, then simply inviting local musicians to play acoustic sets during off hours could be a great way to build community and increase sales.
Event marketing can also be done online, now that consumers are more familiar with attending livestreamed events. If you are a startup clothing brand, or similarly lifestyle oriented brand, then you can schedule livestreamed concerts or live performances to be distributed through your social media channels. This helps your brand gain awareness, and can help you tell the story of your lifestyle company. People who engage with your livestreamed content can be re-targeted later with future products, information or events.
According to PR Newswire, “in this year's report, consumers identified ‘inspiration and meaning’ as the most sought-after quality in brands, a 200 percent increase from 2012 for this particular set of attributes. 76 percent of all consumers would rather spend their money on experiences than on material items.”
Because consumers are now looking to spend their money more on experiences than physical goods, event marketing helps your business reach potential customers, for when they do decide to make a purchase decision. Events don’t have to be cost intensive, and don’t need to be too high concept either. Figure out a small scale event that is relevant to your business, better if it can be repeated if successful. Start small, and scale from there. Your customers will be happy to engage with your business in a new way, and you might find some new business along the way.
Are you posting your art on social media?
If you aren’t posting your art on social media, you should consider starting. Not only does posting your work on social media give you a digital space to showcase your work, but it also gives you the ability to create a following for your art as well as give people you meet at art fairs/galleries a place to find you and follow along. Social media is somewhere where a majority of people spend at least a little bit of time online. Since it is free to post, you can essentially use a platform like Instagram as your own personal digital gallery.
If you haven’t yet started posting your artwork on social media, consider starting an Instagram profile to start building your online presence. You Instagram profile is a grid of photos three images wide, that can scroll as far as photographs you post. Posting to Instagram is as simple as choosing an image from your smartphone’s camera roll, then clicking “share.” You can write a cation for your work, add a location tag, or tag another account. If you want to, you can edit the image you choose to upload, and add hashtags to help others find your artwork.
When you start your Instagram account, you can start by posting your past work in however order you like. You can group images by series, or create carousel posts to showcase multiple sides of a work within one post. Create text posts to give information and context about your artwork to anyone viewing your page, or post behind the scenes photos of your process to show people how you make your art and find inspiration.
An Instagram account can be a great low barrier to entry way to start building an online presence for your work. You don’t need to start building a website for your work, and can build at your own pace. Instead of trying to create an entire art career online over night, start slow and build over time. Showcase your artwork on an Instagram profile, use the tools to find a following, then start to decide if you want to build a website or online store.
If you are already posting your artwork on social media, but aren’t advertising, consider boosting your current posting with a bit of ad spend. You can promote the posts of your art that you’re already making for as little as $1 and gain more audience for your work. Are you showing at an upcoming art event and want to make sure your followers know when and where you’ll be? Post and promote a notice of your upcoming event to make sure it’ll be a success.
Advertising on social media can be done simply. On Instagram, you don’t even have to leave the app. Underneath any post that can be promoted, there will be a blue button that says, “Boost Post.” Click this button, and you can tell Instagram who to show your post to, by location, interest, behavior, and other demographics of your choosing.
Having an online presence gives fans of your artwork a place to stay up to date with what you’re working on. If you’re someone who sells art at local art fairs or exhibits at a gallery in your area, having a web presence will give the people who see your art at a physical location a way to follow your artwork, and potentially make a purchase if your have an online store set up. Platforms like Instagram also have built in ways for your artwork to be found by people who you may not reach otherwise. If you haven’t yet started posting your art on social media, you can build a gallery for yourself today.
Try Instagram Reels for more organic reach
Instagram is a great medium to tell the story of your business, inform customers of new information or to reach new customers. Since it is free to post on Instagram, you can post as much as you need to, showcasing new products, bring customers behind the scenes, and promote limited campaigns. As time goes by, Instagram organically distributes your content on the Explore feed, putting your content in front of people who might not already know about your business or organization. Instagram was once a image sharing social network solely, and as Instagram develops new ways to post, Instagram rewards posts made with new features with more organic reach. This reach brings in more traffic to your business’ profile, potentially bringing in new business.
via Facebook
It pays to keep up with the new features that Instagram introduces, as Instagram is generally releasing the new mediums to keep up with their competition. In August 2020, Instagram released Reels, their response to the short video based social network TikTok’s rise in popularity. Reels let users upload short vertical videos that can be made on platform with a simple to use video editor. Instagram users can play the latest popular music, or anything else from an in depth music library, over their videos, and utilize a few other editing tools that create a surprising range of video styles.
“More than 50 percent of people use Instagram’s Explore page in a month, Stein said, and now there’ll be a dedicated hub for Reels.” -The Verge
Instagram has created several surfaces within the Instagram app for Reels to be played, organically distributing Reels content to Instagram users who’s interests align with subject matter. Use a few hashtags when uploading, and you’ll help Instagram show your content to people who will most likely want to engage with it. Instagram has made Reels the default content medium to show at the top of all hashtags, and have allocated a similarly high traffic section for Reels within Explore. Because of these Reels dedicated locations within the Instagram app, as well as an organic promotion in Newsfeed, Reels are getting a massive amount of organic engagement.
Utilizing Reels increases your chances for your content to reach more people on Instagram, and if you use hashtags relevant to your business, you’ll likely reach the right people. If you are a local business, tag nearby towns or the hashtag that a local media outlet uses, and you’ll have a good shot at reaching a lot of people in your area, as these hashtags are generally less populated that more general ones like #smallbusiness or #boutique.
Instagram is currently promoting Reels in direct response to TikTok’s rise in popularity. As Reels is essentially the same video format as a TikTok, Instagram (who is owned by Facebook) hopes to slow user attrition to another app. Instagram still has more users, and even more daily users, than TikTok, so it will pay to make the most of Instagram’s reaction to TikTok’s success. Your content, and thus your business, will reach a wider audience. In addition, Reels is an information rich way to post content, so you’ll benefit just from higher fidelity communication with your customers.
“We are getting better at using ranking signals that help us predict whether people will find a reel entertaining and whether we should recommend it.” -Instagram spokesperson Devi Narasimhan
Video is a great way to communicate with your followers and potential new customers on Instagram. A picture tells a thousand words, and video tells 30 pictures a second. Baseline, utilizing Reels helps you tell the story of your business, inform your audience about what you do, and promote events, campaigns or sales. The added bonus is the Instagram is organically boosting these posts to stave off competition from another company. Utilizing Reels will be a win win of showcasing better content, while reaching new audience.
Instagram Shops brings your retail store online
If you’re a retail storefront and don’t sell online yet, Instagram Shops might be a good first step into ecommerce. Instagram Shops helps you utilize the effort and design you have already put into merchandising your storefront by making Instagram posts shoppable. If you’ve never sold anything online before, you can list a batch of initial products that you sell in your store, and sell them through your Instagram profile. You don’t have to list your entire inventory and can list your products with Facebook, if you don’t have a website. As you get comfortable operating an ecommerce channel, you can add more products and advertise your listings.
Instagram Shops give your business profile the ability to create “product tags,” which operate the same as when you tag another account in a a post, except linking to a product listing instead. These tags make your posts shoppable. This means that you can take a photograph of your retail store, featuring a product, then tag that product in your post, and Instagram users can make a purchase within the Instagram app.
Instagram Shops help you get started with ecommerce. If you already post on Instagram, you effectively are doing the same as you have been, just adding on the ability for people to purchase what you post. You can use product tags on image posts, Reels, and in captions. When someone clicks on the tag, they are brought to a listing page for the product, and they can make a purchase right on the Instagram app. Instagram even offers users the ability to save payment methods, so frequent shoppers can make one-click purchases.
The ability to make your Instagram posts shoppable makes your retail offering that much more robust. If you have a physical retail storefront, you get to be meticulous in merchandising. With Instagram, you get to showcase your work, your products, and use the medium to tell the story of your business in a way that lets customers engage beyond the walls of your store.
You can advertise shoppable posts as well, which amplifies your product listing’s reach to a relevant audience. If you’re an outdoors store selling a water bottle as your first product, you can boost that shoppable post into the newsfeeds of people who are near your retail store, who are interested in hiking. If you are a clothing boutique, you can target to people in your retail storefront’s area who follow the brands you sell on social media.
Shoppable posts and Instagram Shops merges the in depth merchandising of a retail storefront with the efficiency of a digital sales channel, enabling your business to potentially reach new customers by doing what you’re already doing. All you have to do is post about your business, and showcase the products that you sell. Tell a story about your business and inform customers about the intricacies of your wares. Once approved, you can set up Instagram Shops within a day, and scale as you become familiar with selling online.
Is your business on social media yet?
Social media is the easiest way to reach your existing customers, while finding business at the same time. According to Forbes, “driven in no small part by the pandemic, Americans spent more than an average 1,300 hours on social media,” last year. Continuing, “Facebook led the way, where Americans spent an average 58 minutes a day on the app – or 325 hours a year.” Social media is how people communicate, pass time, and get information. If your business isn’t yet on social media, or if you aren’t posting regularly, then you are missing out on the ability to communicate directly to your clientele, and passing up an opportunity to promote your business efficiently.
1) Communicate directly to your customers
Social media gives you the ability to communicate directly to your customers. You can describe your business as you wish, and showcase your work the way that you want. Since posting doesn’t cost you anything, you can speak directly to your clientele whenever you want. Promote sales, use Stories to show how your business works. Go live to give a walkthrough in your retail store, or write a long post on Facebook thanking your customers for their business on a holiday. Social media gives you the flexibility to keep in communication with your audience, which helps keep your business in mind during purchase decisions.
2) Promote specific campaigns
Do you run sales seasonally, or do you need to promote an in-store event with a live musical performance? Do you have a book launch coming up, or throwing a customer appreciation night? You can use social media to promote time specific campaigns, like events or sales and keep customers up to date with special offerings from your business. Use Facebook Events to inform and remind customers of an event or date, and use Instagram to promote and inform potential attendees of the event as well. Social media helps you reach your customers to promote whatever you’re planning.
3) Reach a local audience
Social media is global, but you can also use it to reach a local audience. Use hashtags of your town, surrounding area, local publications, local businesses, your state, county, etc. and you’ll start to reach a local community of businesses, organizations and potential customers. Comment on content within these hashtags that you like or are in a similar industry as yours, or even begin to collaborate with other local businesses. Once you start to get more engaged with your local social media, you will begin to algorithmically surface in the feeds of other media users local to your business.
4) Automate ads
You can also automate your marketing with social media advertising. Find a targeted local audience of potential customers, or promote an online store to a much wider audience. Social media ads help you reach new and existing customers directly in their newsfeeds. You can target your ads by interest, location, or behavior, and the available tools are very effective and cost efficient.
5) Gain credibility in your field
The more you post about your field, if customers and other people on social media respond positively to the content, you’ll gain credibility in your field, as your posting will show that you know what you’re doing and are good at what you do. If you’re an artist and you post daily about your work and process, you’ll showcase that you’re an experienced artist. If you have a specialty retail store and post credible information about your wares, people who visit your profile will pick up on that.
Social media is the best way to reach your customers and find new business, as it’s free to post, and most people are on at least one social media platform. If your business isn’t on social media yet, you really should be, as it will likely only become more a part of how people engage with commerce. You don’t need to get on every platform immediately, and create new profiles on every new platform, but finding one or two platforms that you’re comfortable posting on will go a long way towards establishing an identity for your business online.