Transcripts
2. Understand the Power of Social Media: How can social media grow
your online business? There are so many ways that social media can help
grow your business, and here are some of them. The first thing is to
boost brand awareness. Social media can help your online business
reach more people. When you reach more people, you are going to be making your business known
to more people, which is very important
for your business. Especially if you are
just starting out and you want to increase the awareness about your product or services. Social media can help you
reach and engage more people. Second thing is increase
website traffic. Social media can help increase the number of
your website visitors. Your website is one of your most important
marketing tools for your business and you want a lot of people
to be on your website. That's where you're
hosting everything about your business,
your services, any downloadable documents you are using as lead generators, and of course, how to get
your product and services, and reviews, and testimonials. You want more people to visit your website and know more
about what you offer, how it can help them,
and how they can get it. And social media can help
increase your website visitors. The next thing is
attract qualified leads. Social media can help attract the right people who
need your business. It's not enough for you to attract or reach
just more people. You also want to attract
the right people. Those are the people
that actually need your product or services that are more likely to become buying or paying customers. Social media can
help you target and focus on those qualified leads. People who are most
likely want to buy your product or services then engage existing clients. Social media can
help your business build an engaged
brand community. A lot of business owners and entrepreneurs are
focusing too much on acquiring new customers that they miss their
current database. They don't engage their
current customer base as much. Which of course ends up to your customers
feeling neglected, and they could possibly leave
you for your competitors. Social media can help
you stay connected and engage your current customers
as well as the new ones. But also mainly help build your brand community so that customers can that
you care for them, that you are there for them, and that they can rely on you. Next is competitive advantage. Social media can help differentiate your business
from your competitors. If you are on
social media and if you are doing it
right, engaging, there are people that
you want your product and services and
providing value for them. You are going to be way better than most of your competitors that are not on social media or that are not
using it correctly. If you are on social
media and you have a strong business online
presence on social, this will help differentiate you from your competitors and set you apart as a trusted
expert in your field.
3. Set Clear Goals: How do you create a social
media strategy that works? Most entrepreneurs don't have a clear social media strategy. They try to be on every
platform at once. And they try to
create a bunch of different content or on a bunch of different topics at once. And they end up confusing
their own customers and people who want to follow
them and they end up overwhelming themselves
and their teams. It's very important to have a strong and clear
social media strategy. How do you do that?
The first thing is to set clear goals. Your business should have clear established goals that
you want to accomplish, and social media should be
supporting those goals. Should be focusing on ways to actually help your business
achieve those goals. These social media goals can
be boost brand awareness, drive more traffic to website, generate more leads,
or increase sales. For example, it's
important to set clear social media goals that you are going
to be aiming for. Then when you
create these goals, when you set these goals, it's not enough to just say, I want to increase leads. You want to have a clear
target that you're aiming for. Something like, I want
to increase leads by 20% in the next 90 days. When you give a specific goal like this for your business, there is something
you can aim for even if you don't
reach it, that's fine. But at least you have
something that you can ****** and analyze and see if you hit that mark or you
didn't hit that mark. And then you can refine your goals and your
approaches accordingly. It's important to be very
specific with your goals. Give it a clear
number, a clear date, so that you can actually measure
and analyze these goals.
5. Choose the Right Platform: The third step is to choose the right social
media platforms. Again, most businesses,
and most entrepreneurs, they try to be on every social media platform
all at once, thinking this will make them reach the most amount of people. But it actually does
the opposite if you are trying to be on all
platforms at once, and if you're trying to
reach everyone at once, chances are you are
not going to be reaching anybody that
you need to reach. Or you're going to
be reaching the, the wrong people that are not going to be qualified
for your business. You want to choose the right
social media platform. The other thing too, is if you're starting on
social media as a business and you are trying to be on all
platforms at once. You are going to be
overwhelming yourself, your business, and your team, and your resources, and
you will not be able to actually manage all
these platforms at once. It's very important that you choose correctly
the right platforms that are good for your business. And focus on one or
two of them first, before you branch out
to other platforms. How do you choose the right
social media platforms? Three questions that you can ask yourself that will help you pick the best platforms for your business,
at least at first. The first question
is, of course, you are a business
and you are on social media to reach
your customers. The first question would be, where are your customers? Which social media
platforms are they on? You should have known that
now by now because you've done the second step we
talked about previously, which is knowing your audience. Part of knowing your
audience is to know again, which social media platforms
they are on the most and which types of content
they engage the most. This knowledge can now help you platforms that are best
for your business. First question again is
where are your audience? The second question would be
about your business goals. Which platform allows you to actually achieve
your business goals? If your business
goals is to increase sales and you want
to use targeted ads, maybe Facebook is a
great way for you. If your business goals is to increase brand
awareness with short, easy to digest content, then maybe an Instagram account or Tiktok might be good
for your business. You need to, again, choose platforms
that will align with your business goals
that you have set and defined
clearly in step one. And then the third question is which platforms you have
the resources to be on? Social media platforms offer
different features and they require different content
format and content types. If you don't have the resources to be on one of these platforms, then you should not be
starting with us, for example. If you don't have the
time, the energy, the resources to create
long form videos, then maybe being on Youtube at first is not the best way to go. But if you have resources maybe for short form
content on graphics, then Instagram might
be a better option. For example, again, the
three questions are, which platforms
your audience use? Which platforms align
with your business goals? And which platforms you have
the resources to be on. Again, when you're starting
with social media, you need to focus on just one or two platforms and do them well first before you branch
out and add more platforms.
6. Create a Content Plan: Step four would be
create a content plan. Again, most entrepreneurs
and most businesses, they don't have a
clear content plan. They try to create a bunch
of different things at once and put it out there
on every platform at once. And it's not really directed at anybody and it's not focused. And that creates
the opposite effect of what they want to achieve. They want to achieve
more exposure, but they get the wrong exposure. People just don't know what exactly they can expect
from your platforms. Having a clear content
plan is important. The content plan that we are
going to be talking about in this workshop consists
of these five things. Content pillars, content types, content goals, content ca***dar,
and content scheduling. Your content pillars are the main themes or topics
your content focuses on. You don't want to be
creating content on everything in the world that
relates to your business. Even if you have a bunch of different topics you can be talking about that
relate to your business. It's important to
categorize your content in three to maybe maximum
five content pillars. But it's advisable to have
three content pillars, three clear main themes, main topics that you are talking about on your
social platforms. That anyone who goes
to your profile knows exactly what they can expect and what they will
get from your platforms. For example, if you
are a nutritionist, your three content pillars
may be nutritional education. That's a pillar where you are providing content that educates your customers on the
best nutrition advice. Then a second content pillar could be a healthy
recipes people. When they come to
your platforms, they can expect to see every once in a while or regularly, they can expect to
see a healthy recipe. Then a third content pillar, for example, could be
health and wellness tips. These are the three main
pillars for a nutritionist. For example, that
anyone who goes to your social media
platforms or follows you, expects to hear about these
three pillars all the time. My content pillars, for example, are content creation, content marketing,
and storytelling. Everything that I create and I post is about the three pillars. It's either about how to create content,
valuable content, how to market your content, how to use storytelling
techniques to engage your audience. Next is content types. These are the formats
of your content. It can be a video,
audio image, or text. Video, of course, can be
long form or short form. Audio can be a
podcast, for example. Images can be a
photo, a graphic, an infographic, and text can
be a question or an article. My content types, for example, are mainly videos and images. Videos are educational videos like the one you're
watching right now, and short clips on platforms like Instagram
and Youtube shorts. And then also images. I repurpose my videos, and sometimes I create
different content, but mainly I create videos. And I repurpose them into images and
graphics to make them more accessible to
people who want to look at graphics instead
of watching videos. Maybe I will also start
a blog, who knows? Because I want to make my content as easily accessible
as possible to everyone. If people want to read
and skim through, instead of watching a video, then I want to also repurpose my videos into a
blog format as well, to make it easily accessible. But for now, my main content
format is videos and images. Right, Next will be
the content goals. These are the
specific objectives you aim to achieve
with your content. We talked about
that in the section on setting clear
social media goals. This is similar to
the content goals. Do you want to align with your overall social
media goals and overall business goals like
boost brand awareness, drive more traffic, website generate more leads,
or increase sales. But with your content
that you're posting, you also want to go
on a deeper level. You want to choose goals
that actually are going to be more specific
to each content. Things like to provoke emotion, to inspire action, to
educate, or to entertain. It's not just that
you want to post content to increase
website traffic. No, you want to post content that has another
specific goal to it. Provoke emotion can be something about you want to
raise awareness about a great cause and you want people to get really excited
about it, to inspire action. You want to move people to
take a specific action. It's not just about
watching your content, but you also want them to take ownership of
something and take action. Like maybe fill a survey that's going to help someone or vote or
something like that. And then of course,
to educate and to entertain can be goals
for your content. All right, so here's an
example of a content planner. Your content planner
helps you stay organized, consistent, and time efficient. With a planner, you will know ahead of time what
you'll be posting, where you get posted, and what the goal is
from your, these posts. So you're not scrambling to find content ideas and
create on the spot. You can, of course, plan your content in
any way you want. But here's an example that
I use that works for you. So here's a schedule that you
can create in any platform. You can create this in
Google Excel sheet or a platform like Notion,
Trello, Asana, Monday. But in any place you want to
create a table like this, here's what I would
put on it first. The first column is the pillar or the
topic of your content. For example, if you are using the same nutritional
nutritionist example, their first content
pillar that they're posting about is
nutritional education. And the topic is
five healthy snacks you can make under 5 minutes. Then the second column
is the content type. If it's going to be
an image, a video, an audio clip, and then the content goal is
the third column. What do you want to
achieve with this post? Then the platform. Where are
you going to post content? Instagram, Youtube, and then when you want
to publish this content. And the last two columns would
be the caption. The draft. You don't have to create
the exact caption, but a draft of what
you want to be writing or posting
with your content. And then the CTA,
the call to action. What action you want the people that watch
your content to take. Once you watch your content, and then a tip is to auto publish your posts to save time, you can utilize leverage free native social media
scheduling tools on each platform to auto or auto publish your posts to schedule automatically
to save your time.
7. Engage Your Audience: Fifth step in creating a successful social
media strategy would be to engage
your audience. You don't want to post
great content and leave you want to actually connect with your audience
and show up for them. If you want to build a
relationship with anybody, you need to be showing up
consistently in their lives. Same with social media. If you want to be
building a relationship and trust with your audience, you want to be engaging
them regularly, not just posting and leaving. You want to engage your audience
through these five ways. Value driven,
consistency, clarity, compelling, and call to action. Value driven, you want to share content that provides
value to your audience. This is content that
would be answering a question or solving a problem. This is pure value. You're not asking
anything of them. You're not promoting
your business, you're not asking them to
commit to your product. You are just simply giving
them value, providing value. Your content is value driven. Consistency, you want to set and meet expectations
for your audience. If you are posting a post once every week or
every two weeks, you want to keep this cadence. You want to keep this pattern to build healthy expectations
with your audience. And to stay consistent. You want to stick to
your content planner. You want to stick to
your content pillars and your posting schedule. This will help you
stay consistent and organized and will help you build more trust
with your audience. Because now they can have a clear expectation from you
and they can rely on it. Clarity, you need to clarify your messaging so your
audience understands you. If your posts are not clear, your audience will not
be able to follow. They will disengage
and they will not continue on your platform. Your content needs to
be short and sweet. As short as it needs to be. As long as it needs to be, but not too drawn out. You want to get to the
point as soon as you get to the point you stop
there. Don't add to it. It should be as long
as it needs to be, but not too long that people get confused or bored or tune out. You don't need to use
any inside language. You might be an industry
expert and you might be having a specific lingo or terminologies you use
in your business, but your audience may not be aware of these terminologies. You don't want to use
any inside language. You want to make sure your
posts and your content is using clear language
that anyone can understand. Then you always want to
simplify your posts. If you write a post, you need to summarize
it at the end. You need to use bullet points. You need to use steps this way, you will help your
audience actually follow what you're
trying to say. This is true for a
video, for a blog post. Anytime you're creating content, whether it's a video or a series of images
or a blog post, you want to, at the
end, summarize it. And you want to use short
points and you want to use steps that people can
follow and understand. Make it short and sweet, no inside language
and simplify it. Then compelling. You need to diversify your content
types and approach. If you're posting the same exact content type all the time, people may get a little
bored and they may not engage better
with your content. You want to diversify your content approaches and
your content types. You want to use storytelling
in your content. Don't just give them a
bunch of information. You want to use it
in a narrative, in a storytelling
way that people can actually relate to
and connect with. And you want to use
visually appealing content. It can be images, it can be the thumbnails
you're using, can be the slides you're using. But you want it to be
visually appealing as well. And you want to make
it easily accessible. That's what I was talking
about earlier in the workshop, about making my content, repurposing my content on different platforms or
on different types. It's easily accessible to more people because not
everyone likes to watch or can, or half the time to
watch a long video. You might want to
repurpose that into a blog post or a series of
images on social media, or a shorter summary of
it on your Facebook. But make sure you are
mixing and matching, or diversifying your
content approach. You're using storytelling,
you're making it visually appealing and
you're making it accessible. Your posts then call to action. You want to invite
your audience to join you on your brand journey. You don't want to
just post things at them and then leave. Because your audience may want to actually engage with you,
but they don't know how. Don't assume that. They don't assume that they will
comment when they want to, that we reach out. If they want to tell them, actually call them to an action. This can be through polls
and quizzes on social media. Can be through encouraging your audience to create content around your brand
and share this content. It can be through
contests and giveaways. Encourage your audience to join your brand through contests
and giveaways on social. This way you actually
are inviting them to be part of
the conversation. You're not just performing
or preaching at them. You are actually inviting them
to be part of your story.
8. Measure Social Media Success: All right, so how do you measure your social media success? All of the stuff we talked
about so far is great and all, But if you can't actually
learn anything from it, if you can measure it, it's not going to help your
business goals, right? In this section, we're
going to be talking about the key metrics that you
want to be focusing on. How to attract them,
and then the analyzing, and then the refining
of these metrics. Again, most businesses, they are focusing on
the wrong metrics. You want to get the most
followers and the most likes. But these are really, they
call them vanity metrics. It means that it
doesn't really help you understand if your
business is growing or not. It's just tells you a lot
of people are following me. But I don't know why
they're following me. I don't know what exactly
they want from me. Are they actually going to be customers or just following? Because my content looks pretty followers and like,
yeah, it's good to know. But they are not really going to help you measure
business success. The key metrics, the four
key metrics you want to focus on are engagement rate, click through rate,
and conversion rate. The reach is the number of unique users who
see your content. Example, a post reaches
2000 people on Facebook, meaning 2000 people
have seen your post. How do you measure this reach? You can use the native
social media analytics tools for free to measure this reach. Every social media platform have its own any tools that
you can use for free. It will tell you how many
people saw each post. This is an important
metric for you to know because this potentially gives you your audience size. How many people you could potentially reach
with your content. How many people
are out there that can potentially
become customers? That engagement rate, this is the percentage of
your audience that engages with your
content relative to the total number of
followers or impressions. For example, a Facebook post has an engagement rate of
8% meaning that out of 10,000 people reached 800 users interacted
with the post. If your post reached
10,000 people, only 800 of them actually
interacted with your content. Gives you another layer
of understanding. All right, 10,000
people are potential like my audience size
that I could be reaching. But 800 of them wanted to go step further and interact with
my content through likes, comments, shares, or Saves. This gives you an
idea of how much interest people have
in your content. Again, you can measure this with your social media
analytics tools for free. Then the click through
rate is the percentage of users who click on a link or a call to
action in your post. A post has a click
through rate of 10% meaning 10% of the viewers
clicked on a in post link. This is very important
because again, it gives you another
layer of understanding that people didn't
see your post, didn't just engage with it. They actually want
to commit with you longer off the platform by clicking on your links to take them wherever you
want to take them. You can measure this, again, with the social media analytics, it can tell you or you can use
Google Analytics for free. Google Analytics will help you create links that you can track. And any URL shortener like Bite, for example, can help you
create tracking links for free. And you can track
how many people click on these
links in each post. Then the conversion rate. This is the percentage of users who take the
desired action, such as making a
purchase or filling out a form after interacting
with your clients. This is important for your
business to know if people actually fulfilled a goal
that you had for them. If you want to generate more leads by giving them
a free downloadable, and you have this link of the downloadable on
your social media. In your posts, you want to track this completion
of this task, the conversion of this process. They went from seeing the post, clicking on the link to
actually downloading the PDF. This is a conversion right now, if they have seen your post, clicked on the link
and then they said, no, I'm not interested anymore, I'm going to go back to
my social media account. Then that conversion
didn't happen. So you want to also
track convergence. You want to track, okay,
how many people actually completed this goal
that I set for my post. And this is of course,
very important to know if your business is
on the right track to achieving its goals. And you can measure
these conversion rates through UTM tracking links like Google URL
Builder or Bittle or Hobspot URL Builder
or Google Analytics. These are all free tools
you can use to create trackable links that
the UTM stands for. The parameters that you can add in these links
that will tell you who clicked on this post
on social media platform. What link was that? Was it
for a form for a webinar? Was it for a form for
a lead generator, PDF? It will give you a
lot of more details about the people who are interacting and
clicking on these links. Then you want to
analyze these results. Analyze results compared
to your business goals. You want to know things like which posts are
performing better, which call to action
links are getting the most clicks, weekly
profile performance. You want to monitor your
social media efforts. You want to know
on a weekly basis what's going on with
your social media posts. Getting the most engagement, what's helping you convert. Get more convergence
on your goals. This way you'll be
able to re, to adjust your strategy based on the
results and then test again. When you analyze your
social media efforts, you'll be able to
actually refine your goals, refine
your approaches. For example, do you need to
change the content pillars? Are your content pillars not
attracting the right people? Are they not getting
the most engagement? Do you need to change
the content type? Maybe people or your
specific audience are not really interested
in long videos. Maybe you need to change
it to shorter videos. Do you need to increase
posting frequency? Some businesses might find
that they need to post more content on social media
to reach their audience. Or that their content
is very digestible, that people want
to see more of it. Once you understand and analyze the results from your
social media posts, you can now refine it and have and then test again
so you can see every week. Okay, where are you going?
Are you trending upwards? Are you trending downwards? Is your business
on an upward trend towards its goals or do you
need to make any changes?
9. Course Recap: All right, so to
summarize how to create a social media
strategy that works, you need to do five things. You need to set clear
goals, know your audience, choose the right platforms, share engaging content, and then analyze and refine
your performance. I want to hear from
you. I want to hear what you think
of the content, what you want to hear more
about. How can I help you? Let me know through
social media, at the Kim Darwish or website, Remar Wich.com or by e mail at hey at Mdarwich.com
I would be excited to hear from you and I would
love to connect with you and know how I can help you with content like
this in the future. All right, so I hope this
workshop was very helpful. I hope you found a lot of
like helpful nuggets in it to help you build a stronger
social media strategy. So go implement these
things that you learned today in your
social media strategy. And let me know again, on my social media or by
e mail how it worked for you and how I can be
of help in the future.
10. Project: Create a 30-Day Content Calendar: Right, So for this
class project, you are going to create a
30 day content ca***dar. So basically a ca***dar
for your entire month. It doesn't have to
be exactly 30 days, it can be four weeks, it can be three to five days a week. It depends on the
content, cadence, and frequency you want to work with and that will help
you stay consistent. But this project will help you build a ca***dar
for the whole month. The first step you
will need to do is to pick one to two
social media goals. And the reason it's one to two only is to stay focused and not be distracted and overwhelmed by so many goals
that you have to track. Like in step one, when we talked about
setting clear goals, These goals can be to
boost brand awareness, drive more traffic to website, generate more leads, or
increase sales, for example. It's very important
when you are picking these goals to make sure they are specific
and measurable. Like this example here, increase leads by 20%
in the next 90 days. This way you can actually
track the progress and see if you are meeting the goal
or not meeting the goal. There is a resource for you, you can download in
the course resources. It's a social media goals list. It has a lot of ideas
for social media goals. You can pick one or two from. Step two would be to identify
your target audience. You want to know exactly who
you are trying to reach with your content and
who are the people you want to communicate
with on social media. Like in step two when we talked about
knowing your audience, this means knowing
their demographics, their needs and
their chal***ges. Where are they from?
What's their background, their status, their income, their language they speak? What needs they have, and what
chal***ges they're facing. The way you know
this target audience is by doing research. So you can do Youtube search, Google search in personal interviews,
or social listening. Meaning you are
monitoring online, that type of content
similar to yours. What this content is about, who are the people
interacting with it and what are they
saying in the comments, or how are they
consuming this content? Then step three is to choose
one social media platform. And again, the reason it's only one platform to start
with is to stay very focused and consistent
with one platform and not be distracted and
overwhelmed trying to manage multiple
platforms at once. When you choose a
social media platform, you want to make sure it's a platform where the
target audience is on a platform that will help you meet
your business goals. And a platform that you have
the resources to be on. Step four is to create
a content plan. A content plan will help
you stay organized, stay consistent, and
stay time efficient. When you create a content plan, these are the things
that will go into it. Your content pillars,
your content types, your content goals,
the content ca***dar, and then the scheduling. There's another resource for
you in the course resources. It's a content Planner. It will help you map out your content plan
for the whole month. Then step five is to actually build your
content ca***dar. Once you work on the
first four steps, sit down on a Google ca***dar or even a document or whatever you prefer to
use to create a ca***dar. And then map out on each day of the week what content you
want to post on this day, What content type,
what content pillar, what content goal you want to achieve with
that content piece? The goal is to have a
full content outline on a ca***dar for
the whole month. Then after that,
the following steps would be to actually
create your content. You can schedule a day or
two to create content, to make sure you are
not spending a lot of time every day or multiple
days creating this content. You just want to have a day
or two where you bat create. Also, you can repurpose
any content you have. If you have a video, you
can break it down to multiple clips or a graphic. So you can save time on content creation and
be more efficient. So you can refer back to
lesson six through eight, where we talk about
content creation and engaging your audience and also measuring social
media success.
Karim Darwish, Marketing Guide
