Reason, Research and Relevance: The 5 Point Plan for Small Business Success in a Socially Distanced World
“Where did everybody go?”
That’s not just something your out-of-touch neighbor said after stepping out of his house this morning. It’s also what small business owners and professionals are saying as we all rapidly adjust to a socially distanced world.
OutboundEngine’s sole mission is helping small businesses stay top of mind with their communities. For that reason, we created a 5-step plan rooted in up to the minute research to help small business owners and professionals focus their budgets and efforts in a world that digitized overnight.
Step 1 — Share content on social, email and online
TV has been king for a long time, and it is getting a boost from the shelter-in-place orders. The highest rated show in the last week of March pulled in 13 million viewers, with the next highest rated shows coming in at an average of 10 million. That many viewers seems like a lot, but you must consider those numbers compared to TV’s competition.
CBS might have pulled 13 million households for a 1-hour show, but Netflix was able to get 34 million people to watch a 7-hour documentary on the relationship between rednecks and big cats, and John Krasinki’s YouTube hit, Some Good News has drawn more than 24 million views in 10 days with only 2 episodes and that number is still climbing. People are streaming so much that streaming platforms are limiting bit-rates to handle the increased traffic.
Why is this happening? Shouldn’t people be flocking to TV, watching the news and absorbing information? The answer is that people are being told to, “turn the TV off.” This isn’t just well-meaning mommy-bloggers trying to limit screen-time.
The CDC is telling people to stop watching tv. Their top suggestion for coping with the stress of COVID-19 is “Take breaks from watching, reading, or listening to news stories, including social media. Hearing about the pandemic repeatedly can be upsetting” Experts are encouraging people to connect with others as much as possible. Where do you think that is happening?
People are staying inside, but they need to commune. They are doing this on the Internet. All over the world, people are watching and reading content that makes them happy or sparks conversation and encouraging memes. Those conversations are happening across all social media platforms. “The usage growth from Covid-19 is unprecedented across the industry, and we are experiencing new records in usage almost every day,” Alex Schultz and Jay Parikh, two Facebook vice presidents working on infrastructure Not only are many people on social media, more are coming and they are staying there for longer.
Step 2 — Engage and share your expertise to generate quality conversations
People are in defense mode and continuity mode right now. When big change hits, our “lizard brain,” that part of us responsible for fight, flight or freeze, takes over. You cannot post to social media today in the same way you marketed in February. We can’t be overtly salesy, we need to be helpers.
How can you use your expertise to ease pain during this crisis? Think about what draws your attention online, it’s people talking about which grocery stores are full of produce and empty of people, it’s your friends posting about deals they’ve found in the city, or local businesses in need of a boost. People don’t want one more opinion on bad news, they are, as Mr. Rogers famously said, “looking for the helpers.” Smart small business owners are offering ways to assist, ways to optimize. Now is the time to take your reputation as a stalwart member of your community and digitize it. That means moving those casual conversations you normally have in line at the coffee shop, and have them at a distance from your respective homes.
People who offer helpful and actionable tips receive both more attention and more followers from people who simply repost the work of others. What this means for a small business owner is that you can grow your audience in this season by being your helpful self, and then benefit in at least three ways:
- People interested in your services right now will be aware of you, and you will be top of mind with them.
- Then the market does return, you will have used this time to grow your audience.
- Your audience will remember you as the “small business owner who was helpful and not gross” in the Spring of 2020.
Step 3 — Stay connected with social content done for you.
By now you’re asking, “how am I supposed to be a helper online when I’m busier trying to keep my company together than I was before all of this hit?” You might think that you are going crazy because everyone seems to have all this free time, but you are barely keeping things together. Well, you are not alone.
Before this Spring, only 7% of Americans even had the option to work remotely. The number of American actively working from home has sky-rocketed to 56% of Americans in less than one month. That is staggering. Far from being this utopian idea of work, a joint study published by researchers from the Universities of Texas and Iowa found remote workers routinely work longer hours than on-site employees. What is more shocking is that this trend is not from the last month by employees afraid to let up and lose their jobs, but from the past decade. This is why even though we are working from home and productivity is down, we are busier than ever.
The best way to stay in front of your community is to be where they are (social media), when they are there (all the time), and continually and methodically post original content. If you are like most of the small business owners we talk to everyday, you didn’t get into your business to post on the Internet. That’s exactly why we do what we do.
OutboundEngine understands that small businesses are at their best when they spend their time doing what they do, and leave the marketing to professionals. You see, it’s not just enough to make a decision to write content or pay to have it written, you have to follow through day in and day out for months and even years. Otherwise you establish a professional and business brand that says you are inconsistent and unreliable. The second key point is that your content has to be carefully researched to provide the right value at the right time. From practical how-to’s to specific content that highlights what separates your business from the competition. Most importantly, salesly and spammy content is something you must absolutely avoid. In OutboundEngine’s eight years and across 20 million created content posts our focus group research has created the exact prescription for content success. And, that applies to the work we now create for our clients in a post-COVID world.
Step 4 — Stop buying leads and spending money on paid search.
We have written extensively on how prices have been soaring for years. You cannot jump into a 25 year old technology and expect the results from the era it debuted. If your SEO budget is just $1,000 a month, then your chances of ranking at the top of a search are zero. Consider purchased leads to be in the same category.
Imagine it’s 2019, and you are finishing up your workout at your local gym. Something on the bulletin board catches your eye. “DIVE FOR $100 CASH,” the flyer reads. It seems simple enough, for $5, you can gain entrance to an event at the public pool to swim for $100. The next day you show up to the pool, pay your $5, and upon walking into the pool, your heart sinks.
Not only are there 200 other people preparing to jump into the pool, but a dump truck is dropping $100 worth of pennies into the pool. To make matters worse, there is another larger dump truck dropping $1,000 in fake pennies into the same pool.
The whistle blows, and you are now fighting 200 other people for handfuls of dirty pennies that might not even be real. This is what it’s like to purchase leads. You will get a list of mostly inaccurate data, and the people who are real aren’t even interested in speaking with you. After 800 phone calls, you might find 2 buyers. The promise of a lead list is like diving for pennies and expecting to come up with a $100 bill. Your hands, like your leads, will more likely be empty of any real value.
Smart marketers will use free tools to engage customers where they already are, and talk to them about their interests. Stop wasting money on initiatives that will never give you a strong ROI.
Step 5- Consolidate all marketing in one place. One login, One password, one mobile app.
The longer you are in business, the more tools you pick up. This is true for physical items as well as software. If a business owner isn’t careful, they can end up with a suite that has been stitched together like Frankenstein’s monster. While this is it’s own issue, it presents a more modern problem as well. Other than ads before YouTube videos on CPR. Is there a more annoying problem than remembering all of your passwords?
There is too much at stake for you to constantly cycle between tools and apps. You don’t have time to get stuck in a technology loop, constantly resetting passwords and checking every location to see if some important information has finally hit.
Another factor associated with all these services is that in the recent economic expansion we have dramatically increased our expenditures on subscription services. In fact 84% of Americans underestimate their spending on monthly subscriptions. Most actually spend 197% more than their first guess as to what they were actually spending. Consolidation and value go hand in hand with security.
Best practice is to consolidate as much of your efforts into a single tool as possible. This will prevent you from losing track of what’s most important, and it will also keep you safer.
In today’s Post-COVID world, value is more important than ever. At OutboundEngine, we demand of ourselves to deliver 300% in value for what we charge for our service.
Security and simplicity go hand in hand. Think of your online tools as doors to your home. The more doors you have, the less secure your house. The goal is to have as few tools as possible
What about tools that sync-up together? That’s even more dangerous to non-tech savvy users. Even if you have firewalls set up, 99% of all breaches originate when people incorrectly set up permissions between software solutions. If you are not an IT professional, the more software you own, the more likely that your settings are incorrect.
OutboundEngine has helped small business owners digitize their marketing efforts for nearly a decade. We know how to keep our customers top of mind with their books of business, and our solutions help to generate repeat and referral business.
Now more than ever, every business in the world must migrate their physical efforts to the digital space. If you feel like you are running to catch up, then give us a call. Our team is ready to cover your bases, or just to provide some free advice, so that you can invest more time in the things that made you a success to begin with. Don’t fall behind this Spring, use this time as a chance to grow in new ways.
Recap:
- Take advantage of the massive increase in social media traffic and usage
- Eliminate wasteful spend on products that just aren’t working now, and haven’t for sometime now.
- Create or contract content that can be shared that is on-point for the moment and balanced in its themes.
- Keep active and in-front of your audience
- Consolidate budget to one service, with one password and one login.
- Call OutboundEngine for free advice or for more information on anything written here.
