When I decided to start a business, I had no idea what I was doing. I just wanted to be my own boss. Four years and four million unpaid hours later, I still don’t really know what I’m doing, but I’m starting to figure out what not to do (namely, the things I was doing for the first three and a half years). Nowadays, I’m a (relatively)new-and-(vastly)improved small business owner and online retailer. I still make plenty of mistakes, but I try not to make the same one twice.
One way I have invested in my own success as a business owner is by joining the Cleveland chapter of the Ohio Women’s Business Center. This Va-Jay-Jay friendly mecca is nestled right in the heart of downtown Cleveland, and offers everything from free printing to one-on-one mentoring. I’ve been a member since last fall, but aside from the free coffee and printing (because, free), I hadn’t really taken advantage of the resources they offer.
Determined to get my money’s worth out of my membership, I attended Think Tank Thursdays for the first time yesterday, and promptly got my ass schooled in all the ways my social media misuse was shooting my profit margin in the gonads.
Our guest lecturer was Diane Helbig, author of Lemonade Stand Selling and owner of small business development firm Seize This Day. This tiny dynamo of a woman taught me more about marketing in an hour and a half than I learned in two semesters of college courses.
I basically learned that I’ve been doing everything wrong, yet somehow she made me enjoy the process. This woman was Christian Grey to my Anastasia-- she hurt me and made me like it.
After nursing my wounded ego, I decided to compile my notes from the session into a blog post, so that all you would-be business owners could read it and weep. After you’ve read it, we can get together in the comments section and have a pity party. You bring the whine, I’ll bring the cheese (and I’m pretty sure I just did).
10 Online Marketing #Fails I Was Making Until Last Week
- Trying to sell on Social Media.
Social Media is not for selling. It’s for sharing content, gaining exposure, and establishing yourself as an expert in your field by solving problems. When you do all of those things well, it’s called engaging. The more you engage with others online, the broader your potential customer base becomes. The broader your base is, the more likely you are to make sales. Get it?
- Generating content instead of curating content
Marketing professionals say that to effectively market a product or service on Twitter, you should post at least three times a day. On Facebook, the recommended posting is seven times a day. Generating that much content is literally a full time job. Instead of typing your fingers to the bone, Helbig recommends small businesses focus on content curation-- in other words, find someone else’s content that you enjoyed and share it with your audience (crediting the original source, natch). Curating content not only saves time, it helps you develop relationships with other content creators that could become cross promoters down the road and links you to larger brands with bigger audiences than you have. It’s like a digital piggyback ride.
- Failing to focus on consistency over quality
Any marketer worth their salt will tell you that consistency is key when marketing a product or service. So why do we think that online marketing is any different? Building a following is based on consistent engagement, whether online or IRL.
Look at it this way. Think about your favorite book or television series. Was every episode or chapter your absolute favorite? Did every single season or book hit it out of the park? Now imagine that you had to wait five years between season one and season two, or book one and book two? Which would you be more forgiving of, a crappy installment, or a late one?
Online, time moves in dog years. The top brands are tweeting about their product three to five times a day, Facebooking seven to twelve times a day, trend-tracking and paying per click to stay relevant. I’m not saying you can’t afford to go at your own pace. I’m just saying make sure your pace isn’t getting you #owned.
- Failing to use a RSS reader
RSS Readers collect all the information on RSS feeds you follow and puts them on one page for you, making content curation a snap. There are tons of free readers available online, just Google ‘Free RSS Reader’ and pick one. I chose Feedly because it also includes YouTube channels.
- Failing to use Google Alerts for myself and my company
This one is truly sad because I do use google alerts. I follow my local legislators, Bakari Kitwana, Dr. Rhonda Williams, Ta Nehisi Coates and Angela Davis. You know, important people. The first step to being a big deal is believing you’re a big deal. So I set an alert. Because I am somebody.
- Wasting hashtags
Hashtags are an amazing way to make your brand look relevant and convince the kiddos that you know how to navigate the internets. Yet, like many aspects of social media, appropriate and beneficial usage is as much an art as a science. In short, there is no magic formula for making your brand go viral, but using the right hashtags, at the right time (and in the right context) can drastically increase your brand’s visibility.
Instead of trying to make up your own hashtags, which may or may not catch on, why not auto-boost your brand by embedding your posts with currently trending hashtags? Free hashtag tracking tools like the six reviewed here by Talkwalker blogger Richard Sunley track trends in real time, so your posts are always on point.
- Failing to use management tools to schedule posts
Don’t get me wrong, I pre-write about seventy percent of my promotional posts. I just didn’t know I could schedule posts for multiple platforms using a tool like Hootsuite or Buffer. Both tools offer free and pro versions, complete with analytics and post schedulers for most social media platforms.
- Failing to have dope graphics
Up until last week, I made all my labels in paint. I’m not a graphic designer, and simpler seems to work better for me. Only being a business owner is not about doing what you want, it’s about consistently delivering must have solutions to your customers that will keep them coming back again and again. Unfortunately for me, this includes having attractive, professional looking labels and promotional print lit. Fortunately, websites like Canva, PicMonkey, Pablo, and Pixlr make it easy for anyone to design awesome graphics and lit. Check out this shop banner I made on Canva in under twenty minutes!
I came of age in the Facebook era. To me, LinkedIn is forever associated with MySpace, Y-Chat, and other second rate social media platforms that old people get on in a desperate attempt to recapture a slice of their younger years. Turns out, that is exactly how my little brother feels about Facebook.
The point is, your thirties are not your twenties, and everyone expects you to be full time adulting by now. So yeah, LinkedIn matters. Upload a professional head shot (not a selfie against a white wall) and your most recent resume, and devote a decent amount of time to filling in your profile. Because in the real world, business people use LinkedIn.
10. Failing to think outside the blog
If MYStory is a Blog Outside the Box, it is such in name only. Diane reminded us not to get trapped by convention when planning an online promotional strategy. Anything can be a blog post-- short videos, audio rants, mini reviews of an interesting article, even a political cartoon. You can also re-use content to get twice the mileage out of it. With a world of potential posts in front of me, suddenly my two post per week goal seems that much more attainable.
So, how did you do? Which marketing #fails were you guilty of? Let me know in the comments below ;-)
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