Small businesses still neglect social media and online marketing
During challenging times, I’m still surprised at how many small businesses still do not use social media as a tool to market their business.
The most common excuses, I hear are:
- We don’t have the time, we want to but we just never get round to it.
- We don’t have the budget.
Believe me when I say, I have made a lot of these excuses myself!
My question to you , how much are you losing out by avoiding social media and the online environment?
A friend of mine is a freelancer and struggles to make ends meet and when I offer to help him with social media marketing, he says he’d love it but doesn’t have the time to follow through because he is too busy trying to keep things afloat within his business. The thing is it’s very important to market your business otherwise the results never change.
I understand how busy we all are and can get and while I actively do my best to maintain a strong online presence, I realise that I also occasionally lapse with regards to marketing my own business. I know there are things I’m meant to be doing but seemingly avoid doing, as I’m so busy focusing on the nitty gritty of doing what I love in my business, so I tend to put some of my marketing activities aside for the following week which turns into weeks. I realised that if I want better results, I need to schedule time in my diary to actually do some marketing activities. While one can outsource some of your marketing, the planning and direction needs to come from you, the business owner.
Marketing is one of the most important, if not the most important business activities and should be your number one priority. so I urge you to pay attention to it. The survival of your business is dependent on it, so allocate time for marketing, even if it is 2 hours a week, it’s a good start.
Pick one social media marketing activity that resonates with who you are, so that you know it will be easy for you to actually sit down and do it.
Then make a list of all the things you need to do, such as
- Sort out a website,
- Set up a newsletter,
- Get trained on Twitter. Facebook or LinkedIn
- Blog once a week
- Post interesting content on Facebook or Twitter
- Update my profile
- Find local networking events to attend
- and then start doing these things gradually
You will find that it gives you a real confidence boost, when you market your business. Or opt to pay someone to help you, someone who is passionate about the online world and social media and preferably a person who comes highly recommended, has good testimonials on their website and responds to you quickly by email. Even if you start off on a pay as you go scheme, that’s a great start, you will be amazed at how much difference even 2 hours a month can make. Be honest and realistic with your social media consultant, web designer or online presence builder, about your budget and see what you can get for what you want or indeed what they can recommend to get you started. Shop around, but avoid spending too much time or trying to figure out how to do it yourself as this will become very time consuming and you would be wasting a lot of time the could best be used elsewhere and distract you from what you love doing in your actual business.
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