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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- About the Author
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Becky started Small Biz Survival in 2006 to share rural business and community building stories and ideas with other small town business people. She and her husband have a small cattle ranch and are lifelong entrepreneurs. Becky is an international speaker on small business and rural topics.
