Jeff Harrison explains how small businesses should use social media: define your ideal customer first, then pick only the platforms where they actually are. Build an email list instead of relying on rented social platforms. Email marketing returns about $45 for every dollar spent.
Questions this video answers
February 11, 2016.
He states about a 4,500% return — "for every dollar you put into email, you're getting about $45 back."
Andrew McCauley, CEO of Autopilot Your Business.
Chapters
Hey, welcome back to Local Marketing Insight. I'm Jeff Harrison and this is where we talk about tips and strategies on how to take your business with this brick and mortar and use some of these online assets, if you will, to help, you know, get more customers walking to the door and really maybe even take your business virtual and find out that, you know what, there's no such thing as a downtime in the business because you, you're living in a world of 24, 7, 365 around the globe. So today we're going to talk about, hey, how do I use social media? You know, let's face it, social media is absolutely overwhelming at times. I mean, you know, even the stuff that we get them on, you know, there's Snapchat, there's Meerkat, there's Peach, There's Periscope and Ana. There's the standards of Facebook, there's YouTube, there's LinkedIn. I mean, on and on and on. If a person tried to cover all those things, you would never have time to run your business. So how do we use these social media platforms? Well, first of all, I think the very first thing you should do is say, hey, what is my ideal customer? And you're going to hear me say this a lot throughout a lot of the videos when we talk about this is first of all you to define who your ideal target market is and then find out where they're hanging out. And I want to relate this back. If we were just going to go fishing, right? And let's say we were fishing for trout, okay? Now let's say salmon. I love salmon. So we're going to go fishing for salmon, right? Well, we would find out where the salmon are hanging out, right? Are they in the river? Are they in the lake? Are they in this river or this lake? Because here's the thing. If we decide we're going to get on Facebook as an example, and our fish, AKA customers, are not on Facebook, we could be putting all our energy, all, all our money, all our resources and time into that lake, AKA Facebook. And we're not getting many bites because our fish, our clients are not hanging out over there. They may be over on LinkedIn as an example, and we're not putting any time over there. So we want to take a look and say when we decide what we're going to do as far as social media is concerned, even if we're just going to say, hey, we're going to do social media, let's really get tight about our customers. Now, I'm not talking about, well, my customers are 18 to 35. I'm not talking about that. I want you to take it down to what does your ideal client look like? In other words, she's 33 years old, she has two children, she's married, she drives a four door sedan, she has seven friends that they go out. In other words, I want you to really dial it down fairly tight. This will help you because what will happen is if you go to some of these social media sites, they have this range of who's out there, right? 18 to 35, 47 to 30, you know, 54, whatever. I want you to know, hey, this is who my person is, right? Give her a name. Give him a name so you can, so you can identify with them. It was called an avatar. What do they look like then? Once you know that, now go see what, what the numbers are on those, those social media sites. Are they hanging out there like right now? And it's actually early part, mid part of February. And Instagram is really catching on a lot of traction. Snapchat is catching on a lot of traction. But you know what, if your demographic is not doing that, you could be fishing in the wrong lake. You could be spending a lot of time, money and effort spending time trying to catch fish that are not there. You're using the right bait. You're just fishing in the wrong lake. So you want to find out, hey, where they are and then put your time and energy in it. I think you'll see a bigger result and a bigger return on your investment. The other part is, why would we even use social media? Well, first of all, for almost two years now, a friend and I, Andrew McCauley, who owns a company called Autopilot yout Business, he's CEO of Autopilot yout Business. We talked about when you're working on those platforms of social media, any platform is never build your business on rented, rented land. Well, all those are rented land. Here's an example. Facebook, massive, massive property, right? Well, about three years ago, more and more companies were building their entire businesses on that Facebook platform. And then one day out of the blue they decided to change their algorithm, I think because they probably went to be a public company. And what was happening is if you put a, if you put a post out, maybe 8 out of 10 of your people that were friends and fans would see your message. Well, that day they clicked that and said, no, we're not going to do that anymore. It now dropped down to 10 to 15%. And that literally put some People out of business that's building your property on rented land. So when you do this, this is my feeling is when you're using social media, there should, pardon me, there should be one reason you're doing it and that's to build your database that you own, that you can communicate with anytime you want to. And you don't have to ask anybod, you don't have to pay for it. This is simply called an email list. Okay? So the goal of this is to say when I'm communicating on LinkedIn or YouTube or whatever it is, the goal is to get them to come back and become a member of my platform, my tribe, if you will, the Jeff Harrison platform. So that now if I have something I want to put out just like this, I don't have to ask, I don't have to ask Facebook, I don't have to ask Instagram, I don't have to wonder, hey, am I abiding by their rules? No, I can just say, hey, you know what, I want to talk to my people today. I'm going to send out an information and content like we're talking about that's rich in value and it gets to them. Now I know not everybody's going to open it up, but at least it wasn't filtered before I even got it sent out. And I don't have to pay for it to say I'm going to pay so Amy can open up my emails. So the number one reason you want to use social media is my opinion, is to build your list. Now some people want to say, well, Jeff, you know, emails, that's kind of old fashioned. It's kind of, isn't it dying? It's still one of those things where it's about a 4,500% return. In other words, for every dollar you put into email, you're getting about a $45 return on your investment. That's pretty strong. I think you can go across the board on pretty much any of those platforms and it'd be nice if you said, hey, I put a dollar in, I got $10 back. Wow, that's huge. Some of them are like, if I put a dollar In, I get $4 back. That's huge. But to get a 4,500% return, $1 and $45 back, I'll play that game all day long. So for us in 2016, it is the year of building a very strong relationship wise database. And I want to encourage you to do exactly the same thing. So find out where your clients are, find out exactly who that person is, given a name, age, demographics, how many kids, whatever the thing is. And then go find out where they're hanging out. Then go fishing. I'll see you next time. My name is Jeff Harrison, this is the local Insight, and we'll see you next time.
