From one small business owner to a another – let’s call the ‘Create and Cultivate event’ the light bulb moment for like minded women.
Yesterday we were part of the Create and Cultivate event at the boujee fitness studio ‘The Fitness Collab’ in Staffordshire, If you haven’t been then you need too! It is a Studio owned by a Mother and Daughter duo Josie and Frankie , they promote health and wellness, a real approach to fitness and all things the ‘Universe’ so crystal healing , manifesting health, reiki and a very holistic approach to life – we just bloody love it here and they just feel like family from the second you walk in.
The event here was a workshop where three marketing experts conducted power hours around all things social media, marketing strategies and you becoming your brand and let me tell you it was powerful. That powerful in fact we needed our next blog to be about our main take away pointers from the day.
As female small business owners we are expected to be the accountant, the product, the adverting specialist, the social media expert , the local business who supports the community and 3000 other things all whilst been the wife, sister, aunt , daughter and bestie as well as eating 5 fruit and veg each day and remembering your 2pm appointment for your infill! So it is safe to say we need structure and 99% of small l businesses lack structure where there brand, marketing and social media is concerned and that is a fact, which is crazy to think when this is one of THE most appointment things to do to attract your customers, followers and business.
It is the one thing a lot of small businesses struggle with but why when we are surrounded by it every day. Imagine you’re sitting in a coffee shop, sipping your Pumpkin spiced double shot latte (let’s keep it seasonal), when suddenly an advertisement catches your eye. It’s not just any ad—it’s clever, captivating, and it instantly grabs your attention. You find yourself drawn to the message, intrigued by the product or service being promoted.
Have you ever wondered what makes certain advertisements so effective? How do businesses manage to create such powerful connections with their audience? Well yesterday we dived into the world of effective advertising strategies and it was actually a pretty simple concept where we drew four circles and analysed each step and how to put together advertising strategies to maximize the impact of your campaigns.
Advertising as we know plays an important role in the success of any businesses by promoting products or services to prospective audiences. However, simply creating an Facebook or Instagram post randomly just is not enough; it requires a few things, creativity, strategy, and knowing your audience to effectively increase your reach .
A huge part of this campaign building was knowing your audience, until yesterday we were picking age ranges from mid air and acting like we knew the answers. However that is fine because we aren’t trained marketing experts with degrees and training in this field.
As small business owners what we studied or previous careers 9 times out of 10 are opposite backgrounds to our current business types. For example my background is travel 4 years for a high street travel agent , 10 years working overseas for an airline – fast forward to 2023 we are now a UK wide grazing and event planning business . They are so different so training like this to help us learn our audience quickly and other top tips is crucial as we really don’t have 5 years going spare right now to study.
We got taught how to really start from the basics. I am going to share in this blog the top 3 for me from yesterday (trust me there were 100’s my brains overflowing’ but these 3 really engrained something for us yesterday and I am sure will do the same with normal people just like me who work long days, weekends to make their small businesses grow.
Firstly we looked at Who is your audience? Who needs your services? Who will be interested in buying your product? Sophie Coleman has over 7 years experience working with huge names and really knows her stuff. She helped us to really get to grips with understanding your audience but in a way that anyone can understand it. She really got across that it is the foundation of getting started with any business. Getting demographic information such as age, gender, location, income level, and occupation is a great starting point. Through this information you can further gather data on your consumer’s hobbies, attitudes, lifestyle choices, and interests. Use surveys, interviews, groups, community talks to analyse current market data.
Sophie yesterday said it perfectly – think of one of your clients . For example Molly, 29 year old busy mum of three , very little time free so needs quick snippets of information, she has booked a few setups through you so has disposable income, has three kids parties once every year and got milestone birthdays coming up. At Christmas they go all out with the celebrations and Christmas eve they go big to make it extra magical.
This for Oh So Sweet would be classed as our audience or a segment of our audience , so how we market to this segment would be different to a newly engaged couple who have no children , recently engaged and reading every blog there is going on Wedding trends for the coming year. This really hit home with us as our random ads weren’t really connecting , yesterday we learnt that to connect to your target audience, cover their paint points, needs and offer solutions. Something that people can relate to, and generate interest.
Another huge takeaway from the day was your brand. This part of the day was delivered by Deb Harrington from Abovo Marketing. Before Create and Cultivate I thought the brand was my logo, colours, the tone of my posts and what our photos looked like. I was right the brand is this but the brand people buy into is you. It really got me thinking Nikes Just Do It ‘campaign’ launched before I was born and is still one of the most iconic and successful advertising campaigns to date. The campaign had lots of inspiring stories of athletes and encouraged individuals to push their limits and pursue their goals. By associating the brand with the values of determination and perseverance, Nike established itself as a leader in the athletic industry and significantly increased its market share – it wasn’t about trainers or sweat tops it was about people who their customers related to and empathised with.
People want to know you , for us there is 1000’s of other graze companies and event planning services, what makes us different. The answer to that is the faces behind it. Showing off you , the funny you, the behind the scenes you, celebrating your milestones you – show it off as that is what makes you stand out. I learnt yesterday that this is the brand just as much as a polished logo and or perfectly placed graze. Use storytelling techniques to connect emotionally with your customers. Narratives, customer stories and testimonials can help bring your message to life and make it more relatable.
For most businesses these snippets of information are worth time and time is so valuable , my third big takeaway from Create and Cultivate was from Kat Bailey , the owner of Simply Socials. She covered lots of Penny drop moments but her main pointers were around captions , consistency and scheduling .
For most businesses, social media forms a significant part of their advertising and helps them to be more visible to their target audience, however creating, planning and posting content one post at a time is time-consuming and lets face it if we all are honest the thing that we do when we get in bed at night and think ‘Oh crap I haven’t shared that post I did’ then rush through it or we leave a setup or event and think it is a 5 minute wait for my drive through lets quickly share before my next appointment, client or event . I would be intrigued to know how many of you just laughed at that and said ‘ That’s hands down my social media strategy’ It was mine to until yesterday. Kat not only yesterday analysed each of our profiles making sure we could be discovered on a search on Instagram , ensured our caption creating was on point and she even give us a simple content calendar which was genius. She spoke about making time , maybe two hours each week to plan that months content so it was quality and consistent. We left knowing what we needed to do but today I delved a little further into how I will schedule it across my three main platforms and wanted to share a few little gems I found with you. They are genius time savers, you post once and shares everywhere at the time you tell it to without you thinking so here it goes;
I want to be the entrepreneur , the boss babe and local business owner who gets talked about by others at Mum and baby classes locally – i am busy been so many things within my small business I need to work smarter not harder and avoid some of these most common pitfalls, that you know may be inevitable. In the end of the day you have clients to serve, not just spend all your day posting on social media – hallelujah the penny drops after a 6 hour workshop after two years of running my business.
What are the benefits of a scheduler?
You can be visible online without having to post your content physically. You can focus on other tasks in your business with the peace of mind that your content is still be shared and engaged with on your social media platforms.
You can focus more time on creating better content. If you are rushing to get a post out because you have a spare couple of minutes, you aren’t going to be focussed lets face it. Posting and planning your content allows you more time to think about your posts and to create better and more engaging content.
You can be more strategic. Planning your social media ahead of time can help you be more consistent, not only with how regular your posts are, but also the type of content you are sharing and creating better customer experience to suit ‘Your Molly’s’ in your business who we spoke about earlier.
You can manage multiple social media accounts all from one platform. As busy small business owner it is not easy to keep up with all the social media platforms, so having a social media scheduling tool with help you be visible across multiple platforms all at once.
You can visually plan your content. Many of these schedulers I have found allow you to arrange your content so you can see how it will look on your feed in advance. By doing this and planning ahead, you can create a visually pleasing Instagram Feed – making it aesthetically pleasing for your customers tying in with what Debbie Harrington discussed with us about the brand.
Here is a few schedulers I found:
Later
Later is one of the most popular visual social media schedulers platform for Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. It makes it easy to upload your content and visually plan your content ahead of time, it has an app and web version. The features we really liked are:
A visual content calendar making it easy to get started
A drag and drop function so you can easily plan and preview your feed to make sure it looks the way you would like it to
It will post automatically to Instagram
You can find out when your best time to post is and analyse your content performance to track your likes, followers and click-throughs with the analytic function.
Planoly
Then we have Planoly - with this you can create and customize content for all of your social channels from our selection of designer templates with their new design app
Embed shoppable gallery on your blog or a website to sell your physical or digital goods
Planonly isn’t just a content scheduling platform, it is a powerful all-in-one platform so if you have things to sell online it is all in one place which we liked for the Audio guest book etc.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a powerful social media scheduling tool that caters to both, large and small businesses, t he good thing about Hootesuite is that there is a FREE potion as well as paid, so you can try before you buy. The features we really liked are:
You can manage many different platforms all from one place
You can manage up to 3 social media profiles on the basic free account, and you can schedule up to 30 messages a month
It allows. you to provide better customer service, but being able to reply to messages in Hootesuite
Hootesuite have lots of useful free social media training and webinars to help you learn more about getting the most from your social media
You can also monitor, track and analyse the performance of your posts
Buffer
Buffer helps you to build your audience and grow your brand on social media by helping you craft the perfect posts for your platforms in one place. Here is a few top bits:
You can collaborate quickly with your team on posts and social media marketing campaigns and even set up approvals so team members or clients can approve your posts for quality and brand before publishing
You can custom tailor your posts for each social media network easily
There is an easy to use calendar that allows you to view all of the content you have lined up
It has listening tool, so you can plug in various hashtags, accounts and topics of interest and monitor the social conversations happening around those subjects
You have your shiny scheduler but don’t know where to start with creating content? There is some great apps Canva , Capcut and Wordswag – at our next Create and cultivate workshop we will look more in depth at these but this is another blog right there.
Self employed for women like us can feel an overwhelming lonely place, trying to be everything everyone daily. Events like this one make you feel so empowered and that you can really do this as there is another woman just like you by your side on this crazy little journey building your business and working on your goals. I never planned to blog about yesterdays event Create and Cultivate but really felt like I learnt so much and today a Monday of admin’ felt really up there and I have spent the day motivated getting s*** done so hopefully this can help you to.
I’ve seen first-hand on these events , how powerful it is to be in a community of ambitious successful women who share their experiences, offer advice and who are just supportive of each other. I see these women championing each other on each others pages, the Telegram group we have and lots more.
Yesterday was a group of women in a room wanting to learn a taboo subject that scares us as it is so important for our growth we over complicate it – the workshop really broke this down into bitesize chunks and Kat, Debbie and Sophie did this perfectly. There was 100’s of key learning points at Create and Cultivate but no blog will ever be long enough .
We can not wait for the next one you even get a graze included to keep your brains fuelled throughout the day , for more information contact us through the chat box or follow The fitness Collab for more information.
Lots of love ,
Lucy
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