Leslie McLellan and Sheila Scarborough of Tourism Currents presenting at Main Street Now 2019 conference. Photo by Becky McCray.

Sheila Scarborough and Leslie McLellan of Tourism Currents laid out a simple starting point for all your social media efforts. Good news: it’s as easy as filling in the blank.

Fill in the Blank

• (Our company) is where
• (our customers)
• find (the thing we offer)
• with (this benefit)

So all you have to do is fill in the blanks.

• Small Biz Survival is where
• rural business owners
• find practical information
• that helps their businesses prosper

Run it all together, and it looks like this:

• Small Biz Survival is where rural business owners find practical information that helps their businesses prosper.

I’m sure you can see how this helps with all your marketing, not just social media. Every piece of marketing should relate to what you just wrote.

Social Media Application

Because I have that clear understanding of what Small Biz Survival is, my social media strategy is easy. With every post on social media, I can address rural business owners with one of these four things:

• increasing their awareness of Small Biz Surivival and our articles,
• offering our free email newsletter so they can sign up,
• sharing a link to an item we have for sale that helps them,
• or sharing a link or information from another site that’s useful and practical.

And those, it just so happens, are the four types of social posts that Sheila and Leslie identified:

• Awareness
• Lead generation
• Sales
• Nurturing

Take your fill in the blank answers and then brainstorm examples of the four different types of posts. I can think of a dozen different ways to remind people that we have a newsletter. That’s lead generation because they give me their email address in order to sign up.

That might be enough for you. Maybe that’s all you need to think clearly about your social media marketing. That’s cool. But if you want to do more, hang in there with me.

Secret Power Tool: Your Calendar

Now that you know what you’re all about with the fill-in-the-blank answers, and you know some things you could be posting online, you’re ready to power up your calendar. And the best way to do that is to jump over to Tourism Currents for their story on Creating your social media content calendar: a planning process.

They’ll walk you through a super simple fill in the blanks calendaring approach that works for anyone.

Jump to Creating your social media content calendar: a planning process

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Photo (CC 2.0) blullana_miranda, on Flickr

You’ve seen the stories, “Build Your Business with No-Cost Marketing.” This headline has been used many times, most recently when talking about social media.

We want such things to be true. Yet, we also know the reality – there is a cost to everything. It may not be a cost in dollars, but instead, it may be a cost of time.

So as you plan your small-business marketing budget, it is important to plan not only the dollars a marketing effort will take but also the time you will have to put into the project. Ask yourself, which resource is at a premium?

Most small business owners will quickly reply that they have less money than time. But is that really the case? Take for example, these common arguments; first,  social media marketing doesn’t take dollars, just time and, second, everyone can do it.

Time spent occurs in many different ways. They include:

• The learning curve – To use any tool, you first have to learn something about it. Then you learn the basics and, to get the most out of it, you have to learn some of the tricks and tips.
• Building and maintenance – I don’t know how many people have commented to me that while building a social media effort was hard, the maintenance of it is were far more time is spent.
• Platforms change – No only does the best marketing tool get replaced by something else, but internal changes within a tool are constantly being made. Thus to get the most out of one, you need to keep learning, tweaking, and changing.
• Time wasted – Social media, if you don’t monitor yourself closely, can eat up enormous amounts of time. You  start out doing one thing and find yourself spending extra time checking out more leads and ideas. And it’s addicting, we don’t turn it off. An ag-business owner I know once wrote on how he wanted to check the weather. Two hours later, after also doing the news and sports, he found himself immersed in movie reviews and videos. Be careful!!
• Is it your thing? Each of us have skills and talents and know what comes easy and what we struggle with. What someone else can learn and do in a day might be a week of misery for us to follow.

Everything I have written may have you feeling as though I am arguing against having an online presence. Nothing can be further from the truth. I am a full believer in the need of a small-business to be present online. This blog is only designed to: (1) make you question whether or not your presence should be a do-it-yourself effort; and (2) determine the size of your effort. You don’t need to be in all places.

So as noted in the beginning, plan your marketing campaigns, plan your dollars and plan your time. Know what your time is worth and how you should best spend it. Investigate where you can reach your audience. Learn what they want from the dollars they spend. Understand the emotional ties they have to your products and services.

So forget the hype but hold on to the ideas. Marketing, including social media, is key to building your business.