Episode 14 | 3 Tips to Improve Your Social Media Promotions using Influencer Marketing

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Welcome to the Boss It Podcast. My name is Sophia Noreen and I took an Etsy startup and launched it in big box retailers within 12 months. As a creative with an entrepreneurial drive, I left my full time career in healthcare to find better harmony between career, family and self care. We believe you can have it all. Yes, you can launch and run a successful scalable business while maintaining harmony in all aspects of your life. We believe we can learn from each other and draw on many experiences to create the best life possible. During each episode, we will share proven life hacks that will keep you on top and striving every day. There should be no hesitation.Make a plan. Take action. We are here for you. This episode of the Boss It Podcast is brought to you by the free masterclass, "How to Sell More with Influencer Marketing". Planning your campaign will take time and energy. We know this because we have successfully increased our sales and brand name exposure through influencer marketing. If you are running a product-based business right now, you must join our free masterclass. Head to bossitclub.com and go register for your spot in this class. We have a limited number of spots. So make sure you claim yours before they are all gone. Can't wait to see you then. Hello, everyone. Welcome to another fantastic episode of the Boss It Podcast. My name's Sophia Noreen, and I'm going to be your host for today. And today we're going to talk about a topic that I find very near and dear to my heart. We are going to talk about marketing and promoting your business. Now as business owners, we are very good at creating our business. And most of us are very good at operating our business. Otherwise, we wouldn't be running the business for very long. So when you're looking at your business, you need to come at it with a few different pillars. And one of the primary pillars that many business owners struggle with is marketing and promoting and doing that consistently. Now I own a product based business called Also Sophia Ltd., and it was fortunate enough to gain a lot of traction very quickly. And some people would be like, well, how did she go from starting a product based business? And then launching so quickly into these larger retailers. That is one strategy of how to gain market share. But another way that works equally as well is social selling through social media marketing. Over the last 12 months, we were very lucky to do two social media promotions through social selling. And I want to speak a little bit more about that and how we went ahead and executed those campaigns. But before we get right into the nitty gritty of how it was done, I just want to say that it is difficult to plan your marketing campaign. It is difficult to get organized and plan ahead. And when I was speaking with other small business owners or anybody who was considering doing these types of social selling campaigns through influencer marketing, or through other avenues of social selling affiliate, marketing, and whatnot, one of the biggest hangups people are having with being able to execute the plan was starting early enough. And I have to preface this by saying, When we start doing our planning, we are looking at a runway of about three months. Now that might sound like crazy, but it's not. Many companies will plan out the promotions for a full 12 months. They will ensure that they have enough time to hire the right people or bring on the right people on their team or leverage their resources that they currently have. It's very, very important for your business success and your promotion success to give yourself enough time. I also have to say that if you are not running campaigns and promoting your business regularly, your customers will forget about you. And I know that's very painful to hear. You would think that if they bought from you the year previously, if you're a seasonal business, like ours, is currently, we currently supply products for Eid and Ramadan, Muslim holidays, and we are branching out into more eco-friendly products and we will diversify and of course offer different products, cultural, ethnic products to different communities. But currently we are pretty much doing our selling in about, I would say, an eight week period. And that's when we have our highest volume. We are lucky enough that most of our products are reusable, with a few exceptions, of course, like balloons. We don't have the capacity to reuse the balloons at the moment. And if I figured out how to do that, I will definitely try to bring reusable balloons into the market. Because why not reuse when we have so many other problems with eco-friendly at the moment. So why not try to promote eco-friendly products as much as possible. Anyways, I am going off on a tangent. My point is I really feel that as a company, you do need to prioritize this pillar of your business. You need to prioritize planning your campaigns, and of course, giving yourself enough time to execute your campaigns. Okay, so that was what I wanted to say. I want you basically to understand the importance of promotion and the importance of planning. So today we're going to touch on a few things. One being what platform you should use when planning your social media campaign. And the next thing is who to choose as your influencer. So if you're talking about marketing and you want to use influencer marketing, whereby you send your product to an influencer, or you do a paid post or story with an influencer on Instagram or a paid video on YouTube, or now even like a paid video on TikTok; those influencers are critical to your promotion. So we're going to also touch on who your influencer is and what you should look for. And then the final point we're going to touch on today is just a little bit about planning because as I said, planning is so, so crucial to the success of your campaign. So we're going to touch on those topics. Okay, so let's start off first with the platform. When you're looking at your ideal customer, now, it's very important to know who your ideal customer is. And if you have not had a chance yet to go listen to our episode on your ideal customer and how to avoid bad client experiences, go back and listen to that after this episode. But you need to nail down who your ideal customer is. Who is your ideal customer? We call it IC. So who's your IC?A re they children? Do you have a product that is for children? Or are you a brand photographer for big companies; where would their executives be absorbing content? Would they be on LinkedIn? I want you to really dive deep into examining your IC and who are they. Where do they absorb content? Is it Instagram? Facebook? Tiktok? YouTube? LinkedIn? Twitter? And I'm sure there's many more. So the list goes on. So you really need to understand where is your audience living? I remember when I first started out about 12 months into the business, I was listening to a podcast I think, or a YouTube video. And it might've even been Simon Sinek. I can't remember exactly who I was listening to, but they were speaking about how you have to go to the watering hole, where your customer is. So they were just basically saying that. You can't expect your customer to come to you. So if you know your customers are all congregating and they're all having conversations and they're all absorbing content on a particular platform, make sure you focus your campaign on that buying platform. So if it's Instagram, use Instagram. If it's Facebook, use Facebook. In our business, we tend to use Instagram and Facebook. And we don't use TikTok at this time. And YouTube, we have not really been doing YouTube videos. I find that YouTube is really great for like how-to videos. And if you have tutorials of some sort on how to use your product, or if you are an educator on whatever platform you're educating on, more how-to types of content lives on YouTube and does really well on YouTube. Instagram, of course, if you have great photos, if you have great, pictures on your product, they work really well on Instagram. And I find Facebook is a little bit of a mishmash of everything. Personally, I find that, for our business, if, for women over the age of 40. So if we have our ideal customer being between the ages of 20 to 50, we find that most of our ideal customers between 20 and 39 live on Instagram and the 39 to 50 year old women primarily absorb content on Facebook. So we try to ensure that we put content on both. Of course we are more dominant in the Instagram space at the moment. But one of our primary goals for 2021 would be to provide more content on Facebook. Okay. So I want to give one more example, which I'm sure you guys all can understand, is children's toys. I'm sure if you have kids, you can completely agree with the statement that the toy market is very good at using YouTube to give toys to the kids, the influencer families and the children, the YouTube stars to unbox toys. And this of course, results in the children watching, wanting those toys. Recently as well, I found, some video games are in the same category as toys. So of course the video came companies are going ahead and asking the YouTubers to play their video games. I'm sure they're getting commission on behalf of attracting new followers, new gamers to their platform. So the strategy of hiring an influencer on any of the platforms works really well. If your ideal customer is living on that platform, it's pretty basic. But if you think about it, you really have to understand your ideal customer, who they are and what social media platform they are using regularly. Okay. Tip number two. I find the best results for our campaign occur when our demographics and psychographics of our ideal customer lines up with the influencer that we've hired to promote our product. So what do I mean by that? Of course, demographics being your age, your gender, your ethnicity, your nationality, could all go under demographics. So those things are fairly simple to pinpoint when picking your ideal influencer. So we call them ideal influencer avatars, and we have ideal customer avatar. Right. So we are trying to choose our ideal influencer avatar based on our ideal customer. So if our ideal customer is say, for example, like myself, between 30 to 40 year old, female, South Asian ethnicity and lives in North America. I, as the brand would like to choose an ideal influencer that matches that profile. Now where it gets a bit tricky is a psychographics. Psychographics is the beliefs and barriers and those intangible things that really help make your ideal customer's decisions. So for example, I'm not sure if everyone listening to this podcast would have come across these before, but there is the seasoning boxes for cooking. And South Asian cooking has a lot of spices. Like we have, I would say, in one dish, sometimes you can have up to 10 different spices. So it's very, I would say a gourmet-level cooking. When you're doing South Asian meals, you are putting in a lot of ingredients. And so many companies have come out with the spice boxes and they've basically taken all the spices and they've put them together in a little nice package. And then they tell the recipe on the back and what to add. So very convenient, especially for somebody who is living in North America, working full time. So the companies have gotten very smart and they have basically made these convenient boxes for people in these situations where their time is limited and they still would like to provide their family with somewhat of the gourmet cooking experience. Now, of course, some people could argue that that's not really gourmet. But let's face it: it's the best given the situation. It's a convenient product that is solving a problem. So if the ideal customer is somebody who would like to now we're going to the psychographics would like to provide this level of cooking to their family, but is lacking the time, that is where you need to line up your ideal customer psychographics. So they have lack of time. They still would like to provide the family with that Indian flavored cooking or the South Asian level cooking. They would like to offer their family South Asian meals. And they're still lacking time. That is the psychographics for your ideal customer. You have figured out the barrier and you figured out the want, so that's kind of how you can tease out your psychographics. So for your business, for your service or product, now, you would want to look at your customer psychographics and you would want to say, what are their psychographics? You could say, for example, another great one would be recently we were living in the pandemic, of course. Right. So another great example would be something like Skip The Dishes. Skip The Dishes is an app that is readily available on our phones. You can download it from many different app stores and it has listed restaurants. It's like Uber eats. If you're not aware that these apps exists, they're really convenient. But basically, if they were to do an influencing campaign, they would look for somebody, probably a bigger demographic, because it's not just for females or males. It's not just for one age group or another. But if you think about it, they will aim at people who know technology. They also aim at people who potentially may have a disposable income so they can eat out more often than not. I'm just using a really, really generic example. But the point is, you're going to look for your customers' wants and barriers, and that would help you identify what their psychographics are. And together with your demographics and psychographics, you will be able to then say, okay, this is my ideal customer. This is who they are. And what you're going to want to do now is to find the ideal influencer to do your promotion. So if you go back to the Indian spice box example, we're going to look for a South Asian young female between the ages of 30 to 40 years old who is living in North America or some other European countries, say UK. And they are very pressed for time. They want to still enjoy Indian cooking, but they don't have time. The barrier is time. So now we look for somebody that represents that individual. Why? Because chances are that they will have a following that mirrors them. T hey're going to have other females that are between the ages of 30 to 40, who are South Asian descent, and potentially also want to feed their family South Asian food and are pressed for time. It's natural for people to follow people that mirror them. It may seem common sense, but I sometimes feel that when we are doing our promotions, we may hear from somebody, oh, so-and-so did such a good job promoting my product. But their product may be something in fashion and your product might be cookies. And so now you're going to say oh, she did a really good job promoting that scarf. I think she'll do a really good job promoting my cookies, too. But then when you complete your campaign, you're going to be like, oh, that didn't really line up. And that's because the psychographics were off .The individual who had been promoting the scarf was a fashion influencer. So everyone who was absorbing her content or was a follower were looking for fashion. They weren't looking for cookies. Whereas if you go for an influencer who, of course, mirrors your demographics and psychographics, and she is more in line with cooking or she has kids or something that is more in line with the psychographics of that following, then you're more likely to have more success because her following is there to find out more about food or lifestyle with family, for example. So that's point number two: you need to make sure you know your IC's demographics, and psychographics, and it lines up with your ideal influencers's psychographics and demographics. Okay. Point number three is the amount of time it takes you to plan your marketing campaign is longer than you think. I mentioned earlier in the podcast, it takes us three months prior to launching our campaign to just plan. But I have to say, because it's planned, it's on autopilot, which means that during the campaign, I'm not doing much. The influencers and affiliate marketers know exactly what to do. They've been giving clear instructions. They understand the goal and they understand the messaging. So it is in your benefit to plan. And I want to say this quote by Benjamin Franklin, because I think it really, really brings home this messaging and his quote is very famous, of course. If you fail to plan, you may as well plan to fail. Like, how impactful is that? If you fail to plan, you may as well plan to fail. Like, that for me is so impactful because why would you bother executing anything if you don't give yourself enough time to plan?, The reason why it takes so long to execute a campaign and plan a campaign is because if you're working with multiple influencers and multiple affiliates, it takes time for negotiation and organization. It will also take time for your team to find the most appropriate ideal avatars for your influencers and for your brand ambassadors or affiliates. So with that in mind, you need to give yourself the time to choose appropriately. Again, going back to point number one and two, if you're on the wrong platform and you've chosen the wrong influencer, then your campaign is less likely to be successful. But if you take the time required to choose your platform, choose your correct influencers or the most ideal influencers for your campaign; so what I'm going to suggest is for small brands that are just starting out as well. You also have to build a relationship with your influencers and your brand affiliates. The reason why is because as a small brand, you may not always have the monetary means to pay big post dollars. Now, I'm not saying to go and undercut your influencers. It is their job, and we have to respect their time and it takes time to develop content. If anybody knows, social media content creator spend their whole day. an 8 hour day creating content. So it's very much like a full-time job. So I'm not suggesting you go and undercut, but what I am suggesting is to go build a solid foundational relationship with them. Because if you do that, even if you pay for your posts and you don't just give a gift, you know, they will see gifted posts; even if you pay or you don't pay, it doesn't matter. They will feel a connection to your brand. It's not contractual anymore. They feel like they are part of your company. They feel like they're a part of your team. And that means a lot to brand ambassadors and influencers because they are independent contractors. They're working on their own and sometimes it gets lonely. So building a solid relationship takes time and I would start the conversation months in advance, usually three to four months. When I think somebody is the best fit for our company, we will start, you know, we start engaging with them early because then that way we get a good understanding of how they respond. If they're a good match. We also enjoy their content. We go support their content and they, in response, will respond back and it becomes a really nice relationship. That is one of the bigger value adds for starting your campaign planning early is you have the time and the runway to build that solid relationship with your brand ambassadors, affiliates, and influencers. Okay. So those are the three big tips I had for you. So we'll just start from the top. One, you need to know what platform you are going to put your promotion on. You should understand who your ideal customer is, their psychographics and demographics, and then mirror those demographics and psychographics to your ideal influencer avatar, or your ideal affiliate avatar. I know it's a mouthful. And the final tip is you need to give yourself at least two to three months to really plan out and execute your campaign. Now, when I say two to three months, remember that's two to three months from launching your campaign and building that solid relationship during that time with your influencers is key. Guys. I really have to say that I really do love this topic. And we were very successful at executing two campaigns over the last six months in the middle of the pandemic. We're in 2020 right now. And sometimes, it's hard to believe that the world has changed so much. But I would say selling online through social media is your best bang for your buck especially if you're starting out new in business. When we executed our first campaign back in March, April, May of 2020, we had many small businesses approach us and asking us for feedback and help on how they can also do the same thing. So we've gone ahead and we have put together a free masterclass for you. The free master class is called How to Sell More with Influencer Marketing. We know that this is the best way again to increase your sales and your brand exposure. So if your interested in this masterclass, you can go ahead and visit bossitclub.com. And on that page, you'll see information on how you can register for that free masterclass. The spots will be limited. So my suggestion is, as soon as you hear this episode, if that is something that interests you on learning how to sell more with influencer marketing, I would go immediately and claim your spot. Okay, guys, we covered a lot. I hope that this episode was useful. Please share with your friends. If you know anybody in business who also needs to hear the same messaging: that marketing and promoting your product is extremely important for your business success. It is sometimes scary. And I know you have to put yourself out there, but I always say it like this. You can create the best product and the best service, but unless you promote, no one knows you exist. So those are the words that I listened to in my head. Every time I want to take a back seat to promoting. It does take time and it takes energy. But if you plan ahead and you use strategies that have been proven, you will definitely be successful. Okay guys, that's all for today. Remember, make a plan and take action and yes, you can have it all. So my fellow bosses, did you enjoy that episode? Now is time for you to make a solid plan and take action. But first, remember to subscribe and follow the Boss It Podcast so you receive a notification whenever we drop an episode. Remember to leave us a review on iTunes. Take a screenshot of your review and share it on Instagram as a post or a story and tag us @BossItclub. If Instagram is not your thing, no worries. Email your screenshot to [email protected]. As a massive thank you, we will be sending you our Top 50 Tips for Starting and Scaling a Business. This list is exclusively for podcast reviewers. So don't miss out. Now remember bosses: make a plan and take action in all aspects of your life. Yes you can have it all.