Reach out to local media for free awareness
Reaching out to local media is one of the easiest ways to get quick exposure for something that you may want to promote. Local newspapers, blogs and even influencers are always looking for new things to cover. If you or your business has something to announce, then reaching out to a local media outlet is a great way to get your announcement in front of a relevant local audience quickly, and at low cost. Even if you don’t have something specific to promote, you can just reach out to local media outlets to see if a lifestyle article could be written about your company, or let them know that you’re available to be quoted for other pieces.
If you do have something specific that you’d like to promote, like a new product or service launch, then writing up a press release is a good first step to consider. Your press release doesn’t have to be long at all, and really just needs to drive home the point of the press release. If you are announcing a new product, describe the product and its benefit to customers. If you are announcing an event, give an event description along with lineup of who will be at the event if you have vendors. Give enough information that a reporter or blogger can write an article of their own about, pulling quotes from your press release, but don’t go so overboard that the reporter or blogger gets overwhelmed reading it.
A good start for a press release is around 5 paragraphs, or longer if your announcement warrants it. Introduce the announcement, describe a few aspects of the announcement, then conclude the announcement with a summary. Write a headline at the top of your release. Write your business’ name, your contact name and any relevant contact information at the bottom of your release. List links at the bottom if necessary. Once you have your press release written, save it as a .pdf so you can attach it to emails. Saving as a .pdf is important because not everyone uses Microsoft Word or Pages. It is best to use the universal file type, .pdf, which can be opened on all devices.
After writing your press release, figure out an image to go along with it. Not every outlet you send your press release to will use your image, but providing an image will strengthen your press releases chances at coverage. Choose an image that represents your announcement and is neutral in tone. As you’ll be sending your release to different outlets, try to not pick an image that would fit one outlet really well and another one not. For example, you could provide an image that an outlet could turn into an attention getting graphic, but sending that attention getting graphic to all outlets may hurt your chances at wide coverage.
Once you have your press release ready to go, research a few local outlets that may cover it. In a city this will be easy, as there are newspapers, alt weeklies, social media outlets galore, etc. in a rural area or smaller town, this may take a little more time. Most areas have some sort of local newspaper and social media outlet. For Chicago, you may consider the Daily Herald and @choosechicago. If there is a local influencer that has a large local following, sending them your press release works too. Sending your press release to as many relevant outlets as possible will increase your chance at coverage.
Reaching out to local media is a generally free, always great way to get quick media coverage local to your area. Starting out trying to get the attention of larger, national news publications is a daunting task, unless you know someone who works at a large media company. Reaching out to local, smaller media helps you build brand credibility and awareness. Once you get a lot of local media, your business may just start to get organic coverage without you even having to try. Start with a press release, get your business out there and see what happens. What will you announce?
Google Ads put you at the top of search results
Google Search is the product that the majority of anyone you need to reach is using to find information, and using Google Ads helps you rank at the very top of any search results on Google. This means that when a potential customer, client or donor searches for something on Google, a link to your website will be at the top of a search result relevant to your goals. When your website may rank on page 2 or page 20 on Google normally, you can then skyrocket to the first result.
According to Hubspot, “it’s estimated Google processes approximately 63,000 search queries every second, translating to 5.6 billion searches per day and approximately 2 trillion global searches per year. The average person conducts between three and four searches each day.” People use Google when they’re researching things to buy or what services may be available nearby, and Google Ads puts your website at the top of those searches.
Google lets you define exactly who to reach, defined by location and keywords. You can find people searching “caterer near me” if you own a catering business, "software engineer jobs” if you are hiring, or “birthday gift ideas” if you sell a giftable product or run an e-commerce store. Think of what keywords describe your business, and only pay when someone clicks through to your website.
Keywords are simply words that describe what your business does or what your goals are. If you were a lawyer, you would potentially put, “lawyers near me,” “patent attorney,” or “intellectual property attorney” as your keywords and add to the list or subtract as you see how those keywords perform. With those keywords, your website would show up whenever someone in your defined location searches those phrases, and Google will report back to you how much those keywords cost per click on average, helping you determine what keywords you want to advertise on.
Pay per click advertising on Google is a much easier and cheaper marketing strategy than social media ads and can be much quicker to see results from than organic strategies like SEO. Pay per click advertising with Google Ads lets you find the exact people who are searching for topics relevant to your goals, in the locations that you operate in, at the budget that you set, and that’s it. Once you find your keywords, you can sit back and adjust your advertising budget as results come in.
If you have a specific date in mind where you’d want to see results from a Google Ad campaign, it would benefit you to start it a few days beforehand. Google Ads take a while to ramp up, and you won’t see updates on ad results for a few days after the campaign starts. Don’t think that your ad isn’t running, as Google shows your ad to a very limited group of people, monitors the feedback, extrapolates, then shows the ad to another group of people informed by the data. Google is figuring out what your ad means and who to show it to. A campaign can take months to really find exactly who to show your ads to. When you start seeing better performance, that means Google may have found a better audience, and you should increase spend.
Google Ads are cheaper than social media ads because they’re pay-per-click. Social media ads generally mean that you’re paying to put your ad in the feeds of social media users, hoping they’ll click, giving you a cost-per-click. The difference is, Google charges you when someone clicks through to your website, and the average Facebook ad is charging you just to show an ad to a targeted group of people.
Google Ads are perfect for businesses that sell online, or businesses that need to collect leads of a specific type in a specific location. They’re even better because you only have to pay when someone clicks. If the value of a new customer to your business is a high monetary value, like if you’re a lawyer or car dealership, spending a little bit of money on Google Ads could potentially mean tens of thousands of dollars in profit from one single click. Google Ads are a great maitenence level marketing strategy, as you can set your budget and keep it running for as long as you see results. What keywords describe your business?
What it means when plants go dormant for winter
One of the most breathtaking aspects of plant life is the seasonal cycle of growth in spring and summer, and dormancy in fall and winter. Observing a perennial plant as it appears throughout the year is a beautiful reminder of life itself, simple evidence of growth and change. Early in spring, tiny green buds appear on wooded stems that will grow to join a shrub’s full growth in summer. These leaves eventually change color, die off, and the stems that sustain such vibrant life go back to the dormancy of winter—only to repeat again the next spring. This cycle is obvious to see, but to track it over the course of a year is a captivating experience to behold. What does it mean when a plant goes dormant though and how to plants know when to ‘wake?’
In our climate, growing zone 5b, perennial plants and trees go dormant in cold months in order to protect themselves from the harsh freezes of winter time. This means that growth is halted, and these plants essentially can be considered to be asleep. This phenomenon helps plants conserve energy for the next growing season, as if they kept trying to grow in the cold of winter, they would be expending precious energy that would be wasted when the cold kills off new growth. Dormancy lets plants stay in a static state, until the environment surrounding them is more accommodating to growth.
There are two stages of dormancy that plants undergo to prepare them for winter, and to help them know when to wake up. Endo-dormancy occurs first within a plant, triggered by the shorter and colder days of late fall. As explained by Michigan State Univeristy, “as the plant enters endo-dormancy, it tracks chilling units to track the passage of the winter. Chilling units are hours of time spent above freezing. The number of hours required for chilling varies for different plants from less than 500 to 1,500 hours or more.” Continuing, “if warm weather occurs before the plant completes its chilling requirement, no growth occurs. Chilling and endo-dormancy normally prevent plants from beginning growth during warm spells in the middle of the winter.”
Once the winter is beginning to wane, eco-dormancy kicks in, and endo-dormancy is done. Michigan State University explains this as, “after chilling is completed the plants are no longer in endo-dormancy. They are now in eco-dormancy. The plants are dormant only because of cold or cool weather. Warmer temperatures into the mid-40s will cause them to begin growth. Once the plants start to grow, they lose the ability to readjust to colder temperatures.” As the temperatures begin to slowly rise in springtime, a plant’s growth will mirror that progression towards warmer days. A plant’s growth will start slow in spring, and as days begin to become warmer and warmer, plants will grow faster and faster. This change is so subtle, that a plant’s growth will get started before you can even observe it, as growth begins from the inside of the plant.
Before you know it, the winter is over and the frosty mornings of spring foreshadow the dew of a summer’s dawn chorus. Your plants are awake again and a new year is here. Dormancy is a spectacular skill that perennial plants in our climate are able to undergo with practically no help from anything other than their natural habitat. As the winter months approach, take the time to observe the changes in your plants. Take stock of what seems to be cold hardy, and figure out what works best for your landscape. Even though there isn’t growth in the winter, and plants go dormant, there is still beauty to behold in natural phenomenon.
A simple guide to fall cleanup
Winter is just around the corner and mornings are now marked by the frost of cold months, meaning that it’s time to start thinking about your fall cleanup. If you haven’t already completed your cleanup, don’t worry, there’s still time to prep your landscape for overwintering, and still time to ensure that your plant material will be as vibrant and healthy as possible next year. Fall cleanups are a simple task that goes a long way to protect your landscape, and can be broken up over the course of several days if you can’t get to it all at once. Below are a few tips for what to focus on when cleaning up your yard.
Leaves off of the lawn, or raking up your tree’s fallen leavesis probably the most recognizable part of a fall cleanup. Raking leaves into piles, for jumping into, composting or otherwise, is probably one of the more iconic fall time images to imagine. Depending on the size of your lawn, this task can be done in a day, or over the course of the fall as different kinds of trees drop their leaves at different times. However you decide to rake up your leaves, just know that this is essential not only for aesthetic purposes, but for the health of your lawn and landscape as a whole. Un-raked leaves give moisture a place to still, shielded from the sun. An abundance of moisture, that isn’t evaporating, under organic material, creates ideal conditions for mold. Mold is not something that you want in your landscape, lawn or plant beds, so be sure to rake up leaves before they have much time to build up. Do a little raking here and there until there are no more leaves to drop, and you’ll keep ahead of any mold spores.
Cutting back perennials optimizes your plants to grow healthily next year, helps them conserve energy during the winter and minimizes the potential for your plants to get infected with disease. Not all perennials need to be cut back, and all can technically be left to winter without being cut back. Even still, perennials like grasses, hostas, irises and hydrangea paniculata/arborescens will all benefit from a fall trim. As explained by PennState Extension, “cut back hostas and remove all their leaves from the ground as soon as the frost takes them. Dead hosta leaves harbor slug eggs that will hatch and ruin next year's greenery.” Take your time with cutting back perennials, as energy is transferred from the stems and leaves of the perennial to the root system, for overwinter storage, during fall.
Cutting back perennials too early will stunt this transfer of energy. As explained by PennState Extension, “Don't be in a hurry to rush outside and cut plants back. Unless the plant is diseased or infected, wait until several hard frosts have killed back the tops. In the spring, the plant sends up energy from its roots to produce beautiful foliage and blooms. Allow the roots time to reclaim that energy from the dying plant, keeping it strong for re-emergence in the spring.”
For perennials that you can leave for winter, without cutting back, think of what will add interest to your winter landscape, what will provide food for birds/animals, and what can provide shelter for birds/animals. Echinacea, or coneflowers, can be left for winter, as their seeds provide food for birds, and can provide shelter in the snow. Similarly, Rudbeckia (black eyed susans) and oxeye sunflower will provide feed for overwintering animals and birds. Large, structural grasses can be left until spring, as they will provide protection to birds, insects and animals that need it.
Prune summer perennial shrubs, or anything that blooms before Mother’s Day. Don’t cut them all the way back, but by giving them a slight trim before winter, you’ll be cleaning them up and optimizing them for best growth early next year. Look for dead growth, uneven growth or diseased growth. If there are still dead blooms on these shrubs, feel free to cut them off and add them to your compost pile. Again, you aren’t cutting these back like you would a hosta (all the way to the ground), but more so cleaning them up for next spring’s growth.
Start with these three tasks and your landscape will be more than prepared for the winter months. Break the tasks up into a few weekends, and you should be able to tackle a task as you find free time. Everything doesn’t have to get done all at once on the same day. Rake your lawn as needed until leaves stop falling, cut back the perennials that really need it (hostas, irises, plox, hydrangea, etc), and prep early growth shrubs for spring next year. A fall cleanup shouldn’t stress you out, and completing yours over a few weekends will give you ample time to take stock of your lawn and what it needs for next year.
Can your business offer a subscription?
More and more, subscriptions are becoming a common way to pay for products and services. Generally tech enabled; streaming service subscriptions, subscription services for basic goods like razors and toothbrushes, free shipping subscription clubs, newsletter and podcast subscriptions, monthly clothing subscriptions, gaming and e-sports subscriptions, creator subscriptions, food of the month subscriptions, coffee of the month subscriptions, wine of the month subscriptions, Amazon Web Services, reoccurring donations, subscriptions, subscriptions, subscriptions. There’s a lot of subscriptions, and there’s a reason for it! Subscriptions are a fantastic way to keep customers engaged with your business and offer them the flexibility of being able to cancel their membership at any time.
It may be hard to remember, but the primary way of making money on Apple’s App Store, a $64 billion business, used to be selling access to an app as a one time purchase. It was only in 2011, when Apple started offering subscriptions for apps on the App Store, four years after the iPhone was announced. Back in the early days of the App Store, developers would usually sell their apps for 99 cents, or more if the app was a professional grade app or premium service. This was great at the time, as it was a new way for software developers to monetize their work, and a brand new way for consumers to find and buy apps for their cellphones. As smartphone adoption became the mainstream, app stores became common and subscriptions became standard, Apple’s App Store and others like it became platforms that enabled whole new industries that created billion and trillion dollar companies.
If you sell an expensive product or service, can you turn that price tag into smaller monthly payments? Photoshop used to be an extremely cost prohibitive software for people to use, or let alone buy to see if they like graphic design. Because of this, graphic design was much more expensive and difficult to find people with experience. As more people started using computers, and Adobe introduced a new monthly subscription plan, more people are now able to download creative software, and figure out if that’s a skill that they’d like to learn.
Software isn’t the only business that is going to a subscription model. Panera Bread, known for bread bowls, bagels and baked goods is now offering customers a coffee subscription plan. For the cost of a couple cups of coffee a month, subscribers can get unlimited coffee. This keeps those customers coming back for their coffee in the morning, where they now may now buy a breakfast sandwich. That customer may now go to Panera for lunch now too, because of the free coffee refill. Subscriptions can be any part of your business that keeps your customers engaged with your business.
Most website platforms that offer commerce tools also offer a subscription plan for businesses to create. You can get creative with what you offer, like a surprise of the month club, or use a subscription to collaborate with a local nonprofit, like a book of the month club for a local coffee shop. If you’re a yoga studio, can you offer a subscription to unlimited classes, or virtual classes? If your business has an expertise, then maybe you can create a paid newsletter for information and advice on your domain. What will your subscription be?
Customer reviews are worth offering a discount
Positive customer feed show that the people who purchase from your business care enough to share their experience in a review that can be seen by others who may be potential customers. If you’re lucky enough to get a large amount of positive reviews, then that shows a lot of credibility to people when making purchase decisions, which can result in better sales and traffic to your website, store or socials. Reviews are a simple thing that can be invested into, if you have a base of happy customers or sell a product that people like. You can offer a percentage off, a coupon code, free shipping, or whatever else is relevant to your business as an incentive to get customer reviews. The small investment of a one-time discount code can pay long term dividends if the review is positive, as it will stay on your social media or webstore indefinitely.
If you’re selling on a platform like Etsy, Ebay or Poshmark, reviews is a built in product, and an indicator to that platforms algorithm of where to place your product listings in search. Because of this, you also have a direct financial incentive to get more positive reviews for your product listings, as more positive listings means that your listings show up higher in search results, making sales more likely. Once a potential customer gets to your product listing, having a lot of positive reviews is an indicator that you sell a quality item, worth a customer spending money on. Two identical listings, one with reviews and one without, a potential customer is more likely to purchase from the listing that has the social proof of a review.
Reviews work so well that even average reviews are more powerful than a product listing with no reviews. According to Qualtrics, “93% of customers read online reviews before buying a product.” People read reviews, and products that have reviews make potential customers feel more familiar with what they may potentially purchase. Having no reviews gives a potential customer no feedback about what they want to buy, and gives them nothing to expect from the purchase. Investing in reviews is an investment in a potential customer’s experience with your product’s listing, similar to in store merchandising.
It is also important to be responsive to your reviews. Thank positive reviewers, and help resolve negative reviews. You don’t have to respond to everything (though that will be a big boost to customer engagement), but try to give thanks to positive feedback and stay on top of any problems that arise. According to GatherUp, “Businesses that don't reply to any reviews earn 9% less revenue than average. Businesses that reply to their reviews at least 25% of the time average 35% more revenue.” Continuing, “75% of businesses don't respond to any of their reviews.” This means that by just responding to the most immediate reviews, you’ll be more responsive than 75% of businesses online.
Customer reviews can be repurposed to be social media posts as well. You can anonymize the quote, or ask customers if they’re fine with you sharing their review. Quotes can be made into graphics, and these graphics can be posted onto social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok. Be creative with your reviews, and show off the best of what people say.
Reviews are important for businesses, brands and organizations. Businesses tell potential customers what to expect when they spend with you, and help businesses build credibility in their location and industry. Reviews are important for all businesses, but are critical for online only businesses. Directly ask your customers and following via social media or a sign at your cash register. Offer a discount or deal for people who review your business. Your investment doesn’t have to be a large amount of money, but the return you should see will be multiples of that amount. Reviews give life to your business, it’s almost like a potential customer walking into your business on it’s best day, just by reading. Who are your best customers?
Facebook is down, or a time to consider other channels
All of Facebook is currently offline. That means that Facebook.com, the Facebook app, Instagram, Whatsapp, and all of Facebook’s tools are offline, and can’t be accessed by Facebook’s users. Facebook’s work product, Workplaces is even offline. Facebook is effectively wiped from the internet right now, which never happens, as Facebook can effectively (in some ways) be considered the Internet. Whoever is dealing with this at Facebook has a big job to complete right now. Depending on how much your business, brand or organization relies on Facebook products, today may be a crisis. Luckily, Facebook is down for everyone, and another silver lining is that this can be an opportunity to consider other channels to reach your customers.
Are you too dependent on social media? Social media is a fantastic way to reach your customers and potential new ones, but if you rely on direct response social media advertising (pay per click), you can start to think of social media ads as a tax on your profit. If social media advertising is your #1 way of reaching customers, then maybe find a few other channels that are organic and cheaper. What is a halt to all of social media other than a time to notice a halt to your ad spend?
If you get all of your traffic from paid social media, try blogging more, or posting more engaging content on your social media. Blogging will create webpages for search engines to index, creating a landing page for potential customers’ search queries. If you advertise on social media, you can cut that spend by posting more engaging content that gains more reach. Try posting more video, or following a trend on TikTok. Consider posting information about your products or services onto YouTube.
Singularly focusing on social media blocks you off from whole other worlds of potential customers. Some people don’t use social media, some people only use it sparingly. Try other ways of reaching people. If you’re spending on social media ads, try taking some of that spend and allocate it to paid search ads. All of Facebook is down today, and while it will probably come back, take the prompt to consider how you’d reach your customers during the next social media blackout.
Don’t have time to blog? Aggregate!
Blogging is a fantastic way to develop a presence online. Blogging gives your customers, audience, followers, donors and readers something to read that can inform them about your brand identity. Blogs can be used to publish information, lifestyle content, pure entertainment, art, embedded videos or podcasts, or really any other form of media can be made into a blog. Blogs are the building blocks of a website, and as such websites with a lot of blog posts are generally ranked higher in search results. Blog posts can also be posted onto social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and Reddit, bringing readers and potential customers into your website through published content.
Blogging is great for businesses. Pretty much the only downside to blogging is actually taking the time to blog. Blogging is writing, and writing can be a grind if you aren’t already a good writer or really enjoy the process of writing. Blogging for people who don’t like to write can be a lot of staring at a computer screen without typing, frustration, and procrastination. Blogging means that you have to think up a bunch of different random ideas that are related to your business, brand or organization, then think up 250-1000 words on a subject. Then you have to find images that go along with what you just wrote, while also being on brand for your organization. Blogging is great, unless you don’t like to write or don’t have the time to sit down and write.
The good news is that if you don’t want to blog, or don’t have the time to write, you can still gain some of the benefits of blogging for your business. Services like Google News don’t actually publish anything. They aggregate links and curate content. You still think of Google News as a news source, as it “publishes” a list of algorithmically curated news (that pulls a short excerpt from the article), much similarly to an actual newspaper.
Your business, brand or organization can do this same content aggregation with social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and Reddit. You can even quote from articles to incorporate into a video or image post for Instagram, YouTube or TikTok. By acting as a curator by aggregating content, you can still inform your customers and following of topics relevant to your operations and gain domain credibility. The only thing different than blogging, is that when someone clicks on a link that you aggregate, the reader will go to a news site instead of your own website.
If you absolutely have no time at all to blog, or absolutely do not want to publish blog posts, then aggregation can be the next best thing for your business, brand or organization. You can still aggregate content on your social media accounts (or website by embedding), and still build your brand. Aggregation keeps you in conversation with your audience, and if blogging isn’t a possibility, it’s easy to start. Figure out what topics relate to your business and start Googling for some links. What does your business do?
Square Card Reader enables simple card transactions for entrepreneurs
Credit and debit card processing can be a daunting task to setup, until you find a solution like Square’s Card Reader. You may already be aware of Square’s headphone jack reader, the small white square that fits into a smartphone’s 3.5mm headphone jack. As smartphone companies updated their phones to get rid of the 3.5mm headphone back, and as card issuers introduced chip cards, Square has also introduced a brand new chip card + contactless payment reader. Still reasonably priced, Square can now get you ready to accept chip cards, contactless payments (like Apple Pay), and regular swipe cards—within a few hours.
Square charges a small fee per transaction, with no monthly retainer fees. For businesses with under $250,000 a year in transactions, each transaction with the card reader costs 2.6% + 10 cents. That means a transaction of $10 would cost you $0.36 to process with Square. You can carry your reader around with you wherever you go, and if you sell a service, then you can effectively pitch what you sell anywhere you get cell service. If your business scales above that $250,000 threshold, Square will negotiate an individual rate for your business.
The contactless and chip payment Square Reader costs $49.00, shipped free from Square or available in-store at retailers like Target and Walmart. The swipe Square Reader (the headphone jack reader) is free for your first reader, and $10 for a replacement. The contactless and chip reader comes with a headphone jack reader for free.
Square Reader connects to your phone or tablet with Bluetooth, and is seamless to connect. Once you create your Square account, download the Square app, and connect your reader simply through the Settings menu. As long as your smartphone has Bluetooth on, the Square app will automatically detect the reader, and begin pairing if the reader is in paring mode. Square’s website has an easy guide to help you get started.
Square also has an invoices product which lets you create and send invoices to customers, with the same account as the one you use with your Square Reader. Square Invoices gives your business the ability to sell products and services when you aren’t physically with your customer, like at a farmer’s market or art fair. Invoices are great for billing hours for a service that you provide, or a large wholesale order for a B2B client. Since Invoices is a part of the broader Square platform, all of your transactions will appear on a general transactions report, showing you how much business you get from each channel that you operate in.
Posting video boosts engagement on social media
To give your business, brand or organization an engagement boost on social media, incorporate more video into your posting schedule. Social media algorithms on Facebook and Instagram prefer video, popular platforms like YouTube and TikTok are video based, and people generally are starting to prefer interacting with video posts rather than photos, images, graphics and text posts. As a viewer, video is easy to engage with. Information is presented to a viewer in a passive, information rich way, instead of a text post where someone has to read text to engage with the post, without any other visual or auditory elements. Posting video will give your customers and followers something easy to engage with that can be dense with information.
The Verge reports that, “Instagram is no longer a photo sharing app, according to Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram.” Furthermore, “Mosseri said the company is looking to lean into entertainment and video after seeing the success of competitors like TikTok and YouTube.” Because social media companies and algorithms are beginning to prefer to promote video over static posts, posting more video means that you will gain more reach with your posts.
Facebook is also now promoting Reels from Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, on the main Facebook app because of how well video performs on social media platforms. As stated by Facebook in a press release, “with the ability to create reels and have their Instagram reels suggested to people on Facebook, creators — whether they’re just starting out or already have a large following — will have more ways to express themselves, grow their communities and reach new audiences.”
This holds true in a survey of marketers reported on by Oberlo that states, “video marketers get 66% more qualified leads per year,” that “video marketers achieve a 54% increase in brand awareness,” and that “93% of marketers say they’ve landed a new customer thanks to a video on social media.” When social media algorithms promote your content to a wider reach of people, that means that your content has a greater opportunity to reach more people than you could have by just posting static images. This can be thought of as a boost to your business, brand or organization’s lead generation strategy, because your top-of-funnel social media posting will reach more potential customers.
People also turn to video for information when they are making purchasing decisions. According to Oberlo, "most people (96 percent of them, to be exact) turn to videos to learn more about a particular product and/or service.” These can be product reviews, unboxing videos, informative videos released by a company on how to use a product, or even just someone checking to see if a business, brand or organization is taking the time to publish content that is worth spending money on. Given two similar products, when researching, a potential customer will likely choose a product that is sold by a company that publishes informative, quality, video about that product, rather than a product sold by a company that doesn’t post at all.
Now that your content is reaching more potential customers or followers, pay attention to your analytics and figure out what works best for your operations. Are you seeing an overwhelming increase of traffic to your socials and website? Double down on whatever you’re posting, and see if that results in a further increase in traffic. Are there certain themes that people seem to be reacting more strongly to? Are people engaging with your commerce related posts more or less than your informational and entertainment posts? Figure out what those who follow your social media accounts like and start to incorporate more of that into your posting schedule. Don’t only do what the analytics says all the time, or pigeonhole yourself into one specific post. Experiment, iterate, learn and keep your content evolving along side your brand, business or organization.
With these benefits to posting video content in mind, marketing in general is shifting to video. To keep up with the latest effective marketing strategies, it would be a good bet to try posting at least a little bit more video than you are now, if you aren’t already. According to Oberlo, “87% of marketing professionals use video as a marketing tool” in 2019. Almost 90% of marketers are using video as a tool to reach their client’s audiences because it is a tool that has proven effective. Video gets more reach, grabs the attention of someone scrolling a newsfeed better than images or text, and people like engaging with media rich posts, such as video. Continuing, “88% of video marketers are satisfied with the ROI [return on investment] of their video marketing efforts on social media.”
Your video content absolutely doesn’t have to be professional, cinema level, production value. Video can be text over video, a clip of someone speaking directly to the camera, or a short clip of something interesting happening nearby to where you operate. If you don’t post any video yet, try a video Instagram Story or Facebook Story. These go away after 24 hours, so you can figure out what works before you post on your profile. If you’re already making Instagram Reels and posting on TikTok, then try posting longer form on YouTube. Video isn’t going anywhere, and is projected to only grow as a share of content posted online. Posting more video will likely reward your business, brand or organization, and posting regular high quality videos should go a long way to bringing in new business and brand awareness. What will your first video be?
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.