Marketing + Margaritas Episode 1 - Theme Days
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EPISODE 1 SHOW NOTES
Lani’s List of Content Theme Ideas >>
Celebrations and milestones - eg your business birthday, reaching 100 clients, a staff member finishing study or winning an award
Industry news and events - recent or upcoming happenings that are relevant to your audience
Product or service spotlight - make sure you're sharing what you do!
Staff spotlight - share what your team do and how awesome they are at their work
FAQ - what do your clients and potential clients ask all the time? Use those answers as social content!
EPISODE 1 TRANSCRIPT
Welcome to our very first podcast of Marketing + Margaritas!
Bear with us. This is our first attempt at a podcast and living in the world of marketing, this is the fun stuff that we get to do, we get to try and see how things work, how engagement goes, it's what we live and breathe every day. So, if we decide that this is utterly nonsense, and we don't think it's of value to you, it's not going to see the light of day - but fingers crossed, we actually know what we're talking about and you get some wonderful insight out of it.
Today we wanted to talk about a really easy content strategy that any business can use on any platform. We're going to be delving into theme days. It might be something that you've heard of before, it's not some sort of big, complicated process. But basically, it's just one of the social media tools that you can use to make posting consistently and easily across your different platforms - just simpler for you.
The main question we get from clients is - "I have trouble posting to Facebook". They either don't have the time or don’t know what to post.
The easy question to ask yourself is – at your business, what do you get asked all the time? What do you do? What are you doing each day? What is it that you're talking about with your clients and customers? You are already surrounded by this information - you just need to take a little step back and have a look. Theme days are a great tool for creating extra content and making it super simple.
But it also makes it strategic as well. When people say – “What things can I post on?” for Facebook, or Instagram or whatever, there's 50 million different things you could be posting - your dog having a bath on a Sunday etc. You could be posting anything, but is it actually helping you get towards where you want to go?
Okay so, what you should be posting on Facebook?
The first step with anything, any marketing activity whatsoever, whether it's social to a billboard, to just anything - it needs to have a goal. What is the actual purpose of your posts? If you look at Facebook overall for your business, you may be trying to increase sales, launch a new product, venture into a new market or it could be recruitment. Look at what your overall business goal is. We'll just use Facebook as an example because it's easy, and everyone pretty much uses it. So specifically for Facebook, what are your goals there? What are you trying to achieve? If you were looking to launch a new product, then you might be trying to grow your audience as much as possible so that when it launches, you've got a chance of a higher conversion rate, because you've got more volume of people.
If you're doing recruitment, what would be a good goal for recruitment? Obviously, you want a larger audience, that's everyone's underlying goal, but you want engagement. You want people to actually be seeing your posts, sharing your post going, "Hey, Bob, I think this job would suit you".
That's really perfect Lani. One of those things with recruitment especially, and that's something that's big thing in our region, is that quite often, it's not just the person that you're directly trying to target. It's actually the people around them. We call them our influencers. Not as in social media influencers, but we all have influencers in our lives. For example, if I see a gardening thing that I think Lani would love, I will tag her in it. She might not have been directly seeing the post herself, but I will tag her in it. Recruitment is a massive one for that. If we know people who are searching for jobs, we'll quite often share or tag them in stuff that we think might be relevant to them, which leads into the next part of strategy. Once you know your goal - who are you talking to? Who are you trying to reach? Again, that's not only just knowing who your target market is - age, gender, demographics, all that kind of stuff. But also, who the people are around them that influence their lives that could potentially be useful to tap into as well.
Then, it's kind of you guessing, researching and testing out where your target market is. For example, if you were looking for 35-year-old mums, then probably a mix of maybe mostly Instagram with some Facebook would be where you would find that audience. Now, we do social media every day so I just kind of pull out of my head what I think the answer might be. But one of the things with marketing is that there is no exact formula, there is no exact science to it. It really is a matter of trying and testing something. And then if it doesn't work, tweaking it, or dumping it, trying something else, or if it does work, cool - keep doing it.
So, what you're saying is it's okay for a post not to go viral every time you post it?
Yeah, basically.
Even if it’s just one platform at the start, just get in there and have a crack at it. And if that audience starts coming to you, you'll be able to see through insights and analytics - that's the beauty of digital marketing. It's all about that data. From your analytics, you'll be able to start seeing if that audience is there, if they're reacting to what you're doing, if they're coming and following you and that type of thing. At the start, it's kind of a bit of research, use a bit of psychology and just kind of go with your best guess of where they're hanging out.
You can't do it wrong. To recap - you need to know what your business goal is, what you're trying to say and who you're trying to talk to you. Once you know what you want to achieve, and who you're talking to, where you're going to be, then it's a matter of what do you actually want to tell them? And that's where the theme days come into it.
There’s certain industries, and I'm not going to name and shame, but there's some that are a bit more have a tendency towards it than others, where their page can just be a barrage of the same type of posts over and over again. Eg I'm trying to sell this particular thing, so here's 50 million posts of it nonstop, every day, all year round. Same thing, same words. Even if it's something that you're interested in, it becomes monotonous, it becomes white noise, it becomes something that you tune out to. And in social media, it's really hard to screw up, unless you do something really offensive. Honestly, the worst thing you can do in socials is be ignored.
This is where you need to put your consumer hat on for someone outside of your business and go – “What do people that I'm selling to, or I'm giving my service to, actually want to see?”. If they see something over and over, they might get sick of it - exactly the way you behave on socials. If you're scrolling through Facebook and you see ad 'X' five times every three scrolls, you're done.
The beauty of theme days is that, because you're going to be using a different theme for every day, it means that part of the strategy is that you have a content mix. This means that you're always going to be hitting different messages, which is perfect for your audience. But it's also what you want. You don't want to just be saying the same thing over and over. You want to have that variety in there because different things appeal to different people. For example, say you were selling property. I wasn’t going to name and shame, but real estate agents, we get it, you're selling property. So every time you get a listing, you have to pop that up, I totally understand that. But at the same time, if all I'm seeing is just this new house listing, new house listing, new house listing, if I'm looking at property at the time, yes, I am definitely interested. But if I'm sort of sitting on the fence, or I'm potentially wanting a bit more guidance or looking for a sales agent, you're seeing that they're listing them, but you may not be seeing anything else that actually happens.
It's still going to become monotonous. But, it doesn't mean they will tune out from you, it's just that you could be getting more from me. If you were posting your houses, one of your theme day topics could be obviously new listings. But then another theme could be how to DIY easy renovations. If you're in an area like we are for example, here in Mackay, we've got some older areas that if you're buying a house there, most of them are probably a bit older. If that's your market, then one of your themes could be easy DIY’s at home, because most of the people who are buying from you are probably going to be renovating those homes.
Or how about maybe a staging tip once a week? If you are a seller, you want your house to look the best. You want that extra couple of grand if you can, so some staging tips and cleaning tips like - what are buyers looking for when they're coming through? Or you're doing open houses?
Another one could be, staying on the real estate example, that you want someone who you can trust and who has credibility in the market. Real estate agents unfortunately can get a bit of a bad reputation for being really salesy. To change that perception - what's a bit about you? What's your personality? Why did you get into real estate sales? What does it mean to you? How does it feel when you sell a place? All those kind of things that actually give people an insight as to why you genuinely enjoy what you do and why it matters to you, to have integrity and do things properly, and all that bullshit.
And in doing that, you're creating personality for yourself and for your brand that people can actually relate to, it's creating that emotional connection. It's like - oh, I actually know you, because I've been following your page, I feel confident that I can resonate with you, and you'd be a great real estate to use for this service.
If I was looking to list my property with somebody, all real estates have generally the same kind of commission rights and stuff, probably valuation costs too. I think a strong contender for who you would choose to list with would actually be how much you connect with the agent themselves.
That goes not just for real estate, but for most businesses - especially regional. We sometimes have a lot of choice here and sometimes you don't in different industries, but feeling like the person is reputable, trustworthy, and without even meeting them. Because we do so much online, you're creating that personality, you're trusting that brand, before you've even get to that handshake or phone call.
And that's pretty much the entire purpose of marketing overall. Whether it's a press ad, or a Facebook page, or whatever, we are wanting to build trust and develop a relationship with people so that when they might need our services, they think of us. There's that 1 in a million chance that they'll look at an ad and be like, boom, I'm sold - this is exactly what I want right now. But a lot of the time, it's when we think about purchase decisions, there's a bit of a lifecycle to it. That’s what marketing gives us the opportunity to do, and social more so than probably any other channel.
Yeah, it's called social media for a reason.
You don't have to be corporate and scary - you can have personality.
Yeah, absolutely. I think that's an awesome brand. I think that's what we should be from now on.
That's another discussion for another day.
Okay, so what are some examples of some generic theme days that you would do so say, Jade?
Why are you asking me when you're the one who's done the prep work and have it all written out in front of you? How about you read your list, Lani?
Alright, so here's a couple - get a pen and paper handy if you've got one. Just back pedalling two steps - you don't actually have to have the theme along the top of your Facebook post or your posts. This is just for when you sit down and plan. For example, if we're using the same real estate example, if we're doing a listing once a week - okay, hopefully it's selling more than one house a week. Maybe your themes are two listings, a tip and a personal post. So you sit down and go: I'm gonna do four posts this week. This is what I'm covering. You really break it down and it makes it so much easier to what you're doing rather than going "ohh I'm doing four posts this week, what the hell am I going to talk about? I don't really know what's going on." Or the alternative - “I haven't posted in two weeks. Holy crap, I need to get something up now. Oh, here's some random piece of crap that gets me no engagement, no reach. And when people look at my page, they're gonna be like, what the hell is this person even talking about.”
Anyway, back to a list of theme ideas. So a great one to do is celebrations or milestones. These won't happen necessarily every week, depending on what your service is. For real estate, you could be celebrating a sale, for milestones you could be celebrating a staff member, you could be celebrating a business achievement - anything like that for you, your clients or your staff is a great one. And by using celebration or milestone language in your post - saying things like "Congratulations Jade for XYZ” - Facebook loves that stuff. Loves it. It will pick it up or push it – Congratulations, Well Done - that kind of language that celebrates, Facebook wants to share it. It's a good one.
A really, really easy one, and I wouldn't do too much - maybe just once a week or so, is industry news or events. It's like I really am struggling for time, I don't know what else to post, but it is relevant to you and your business and what is happening in the region. That is something that your followers should be interested in.
Obviously, you want to a product or a service spotlight sharing what you do, how you do it, why you do it, how can I work with you etc. How can I buy from you? What is it that you offer? What's your point of difference? We don't need to sell to people, but we kind of do need to let them know what we actually do have available as a business. And that doesn't have to be putting up your whole catalogue of services or your capability statement. Pull out one little bit of one big service that you offer and just do a deep dive or something funny, or an example or a case study. Or if you have a photo, and it's just a couple of words, a “look at the team doing this”, something along those lines. It doesn't have to be super, super long or super short. Those kinds of different things will engage with different audiences. That's another thing to test - long and short posts.
Yep, I found it really interesting that some audiences really do like a long in-depth post. Not every post, don't make them all like a chapter book. People will turn off. But if you've got something interesting and important that people want to learn about, chuck it all in.
If it's engaging and gripping enough, there will definitely be that certain audience. For example - for someone who's really into gardening, and you have a specific type of mulching technique or whatnot, and here's what we do, our process or whatever. If you're really into composting, you'll actually sit there and read that post, because you want to learn this. And if it's from someone I know, like, and trust - I follow their page, I'm into their thing, I see their results. It's not just some sort of book or something I've picked up, I've actually seen them producing these great results, and now they’ve given me the inside secrets on how they do it. Of course, I'm gonna read that thing.
Another one is a staff spotlight. If you have a really big team, they do amazing work and you want to, again, kind of celebrate them, it falls into that category a little bit. Or if they do different services, so one person specialises in ABC, they're a commodity to your business. Why not actually share that with everyone? Tell them how cool your people are.
Another one is questions - you will be asked questions about your business and your products every single day, write them down, share them on Facebook. Instagram stories is a really good one for that. And just a quick plug. If you're not already using stories, please do. Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram have the stories function - it goes right to the top of people's newsfeeds. It's more quick, fun and in the moment content – just use it. It doesn't have to be video, it can be pictures. And if you're scared and it doesn't go well - it's only there for a short time. It goes away. So you can actually ask questions and stuff on your Instagram as well - there's a little field that people can fill in with. So if you're saying, what's something you want to hear about from me? Or if I was to say, What's your biggest challenge with XYZ? - then people can ask questions. And then you can use those questions as social media content, while also answering them. So, there's a bonus there. And even though you might have answered that question a month ago, if someone is asking it, it’s because they missed it. Not everyone is going to see all of your content. You are going to repeat yourself with things, just like you do with clients. You can tell a client something and then six months later, they're like, so why are we doing this?
Yeah, exactly. Don't be afraid to repeat yourself. Try to use slightly different language if you can - a different way of explaining it because it penetrates the audience a little bit better. But definitely ask questions. Ask polls - they are really fun. If there's a 123 kind of answer, go with a poll if you're really stuck after all those things. A mass engagement one is "caption this photo" - if the team is doing something a little bit quirky, a little bit fun. You need help naming a new product or a service - ask, create that engagement.
And that's the thing. With algorithms for social media platforms, if someone pauses for a moment on your piece of content, that's clocked by that platform. You don't have to actually do anything with the post for an interaction to be clocked.
Yeah, that's a reach.
So that means that the person will be seeing your content more. If they hit like or the heart, on Facebook, it's the next level of engagement (after a pause). So if you get that, it makes your post live for a bit longer. If it's any of the other reactions, it lives for even longer. They are more potent than a like or a heart because they're the ones we most commonly give. And then the big one is comments. If you just tag someone, that's not really that big of a thing. But if you get people writing comments on your posts, it means that it's going to live in people's newsfeeds longer, so you're potentially reaching more people. So what Lani is saying is that by encouraging engagement, asking for engagement - that will actually help you to broaden your reach across whatever social platform you tend to be using,
If it's an event and someone tags "hey, Jade, we should go along to this". And then she replies "Yeah, let's book a ticket" - then there’s a good chance that my friends will see that I've commented, Jade's friends will see that she was tagged and commented on it - then we'll probably like the event and select going. So that's how it grows, and you want your audience to be doing that for you. Asking them seems ballsy, that's fine. Tell them like this, to find out more.
Or, that kind of thing. And the other thing, too, it's the other part of the equation of it being a social platform is that it's not like regular advertising where you're talking out to your audience. You're talking with your audience, so when you're putting stuff out there, you really do want them to be writing back to you. And then if someone goes to the trouble of commenting, for Christ's sake, make sure that you answer them back. Seriously, don't leave someone hanging. If they just tagged someone as a name, that's fine. However, say you're posting a celebration, you've been open for five years and they comment "Well done", you might just like it. But if someone actually takes the time to write a bit of a comment - always, always, always respond. Reward them - recognise the effort they've gone to, because it might not seem like much, but you would know from your own social media scrolling and activity, we tend to be predominantly people stalkers. We linger over content, but don’t actually interact with it.
I'm just here for the comments.
Not everyone would have seen them, I won't name names, but there's some big supermarket companies and there's some big national broadcasting companies that are in the media, and when they start replying, and actually replying to comments with some funny things, they actually ended up snapshotted then go viral, because people are like - that business actually has personality.
Wow, there are humans there, who would have thought it.
Exactly, so don't be afraid to reply.
So basically, once you have a whole list of different potential themes that you could be doing - and Lani is just giving you a list of like generic ones that could work for any business. For you specifically, if you were in gardening, you might have a weekly safety tip - eg if you're going to be doing this, wear gloves, because this stuff, you might not realise - it's actually poisonous. Put a mask on.
So there's going to be themed ideas that you have, that'll be specifically related to your industry as well. So when you've got a list of all different themes that you could have, then it's a matter of working out how often you want to be posting. For a lot of our clients, we recommend that they get to posting once a day, during business days. If your business is say - an event hire or something - then definitely weekends, because that's when their core business is happening.
Yeah, exactly. And we’re not saying that you have to be posting once a day, right from the get out. It's something that you can work up to. So it's steps - even if you start out posting, say two times a week, that means that whenever someone goes to your page, it's never been more than a few days since there's been a post. Then they know that the page is active because an inactive page looks like the business is defunct as well. But it's not really gonna get you into algorithms or anything like that. And then if you work up to say, posting four times a week, and then posting five times a week. So if we work from our high level goal of posting five times a week, then look at your content themes. Choose your best five - the five that you think are going to work the best. Again, there is no exact science to this. It's just knowing your audience, knowing what you're trying to achieve, knowing your business and making your best guess. When you've got those five topics, then pick a day for each one. Some might actually naturally relate to a particular day. Some might not.
Create a calendar as an easy way to do this. Every Monday we're talking about staff, every Wednesday we're talking about service, every Friday we're doing a Friday funny, which is a meme around the business or our services.
Perfect. Exactly. And so then we recommend to actually try scheduling your content out once a month. Now, when you think of spending a few hours doing a whole month worth of content - it sounds like, I don't have time for that. It sounds unachievable, it sounds really overwhelming. But because if you break it down, like Alanna was saying before, if you're sitting down to batch your content once a month, and you've got your theme days, and you go - okay, every Monday I'm going to be doing this. So all I need to do is four staff posts. Just four staff posts, and that's all my Mondays done. And then I'm going to do four service posts - and my Wednesdays are done, then four Friday funnies - and all my Fridays are done. So then you've got a whole month done, and you don't have to look at it till next month for your scheduling.
Check your comments.
Not totally tuning out - you don't get off that easy.
And hopefully you will have inboxes, and comments and everything that you do need to engage with.
So how do we know if a post doesn't go well? And what do we do?
Again, I'm going to use Facebook as an example for this because they've got the best analytics, so it's the easiest to look at. But what we've found is that once we've been posting theme days for about two months, so that's eight weeks of content, in our insights when we are flicking through, we can actually see patterns in the engagement. So we can say - okay, every Friday our engagement goes up. We get heaps of engagement, those funnies - we've got a great sense of humour, naturally, and everyone loves it. But it might be that every Wednesday our service spotlight, so we can see every Wednesday, we don't really get very much reach or engagement. So then it’s, how can you do that differently then? Or do you need to switch it out for something else. Now, if it was a core topic, like your service or what you provide, definitely rethink and get creative on how you can still be promoting what you do, but in a way that appeals more to your audience.
And it might not be about the content, it might be about the day or the time.
If you think about when you sit down and look at your phone, or when your partner sits down and looks at their phone, what time slot is that? If you're talking to Mums, they're going to be in line at school pickup waiting for the kids with time to kill. Seven to seven thirty, they're going to be bathing kids and putting them to bed - a stressful time. They're not going to tune in until nine o'clock. So make sure when you're looking at your analytics, you're actually looking at the time people are on.
If you leave it about two months, just schedule content out for those two months, and then at the end of it, have a look. And you should be able to see patterns by then of which days are up and which days are down. And so that means if it was, say the staff profile one wasn't doing well, that's where you can switch it out for one of your other content ideas that you had from that initial list.
So yes, that's pretty much how to create and use theme days. Really easy, right?
Themed days are just one small part of a larger social media strategy. Because obviously, like we talked about on a tangent multiple times during this, things like stories and looking at your analytics - there's a whole bunch of other stuff that you can be doing as well. But if you're just starting out, or you are just really under the pump, then theme days are just a really simple way to get going with marketing. Nothing is ever perfect, nothing is ever done. Whereas if you get started, and then you start getting some action and some results from that, it'll create momentum. And when we get results, and we create momentum, that's when we can actually go - oh, this is worth my time, this is actually doing something. I'm gonna keep doing it and growing it from there. But this is just a way to actually get started - because sometimes that's the hardest thing to do.
Absolutely. These things take a little bit longer when you're starting something new or trying something out. So just be patient with yourself and actually take the time.
Yeah, be kind to yourself, man. Like you're in there. You're doing it. That's freaking amazing.
You got this.
One other thing that I forgot to mention a little earlier is, if you are sharing some industry news or events, it's really handy to have a resource list of really great sources. So anyone that is an industry body in your specific field, who’s going to be sharing news or events, make a list of all those people. Any media that will be sharing things that are relative to you. Even if you're doing a Friday funny or joke, have a list of Facebook pages that you will go and search for to find that content. These things make creating content or sourcing so much quicker and easier, instead of just sitting there once a month when you're scheduling and going searching randomly for everything.
And that's the thing about batching content - you might not have everything prepared the first time. But as you go along, add to your source list. Add to your list of ideas as things come up, keep adding to it because you'll make it easier and easier for yourself. And that first time you sit down and batch a month's worth of content, it might take you half a day but once you do it a few months, it'll probably only take you a couple of hours.
If time is tight and sitting down and doing a whole month of posts scares the crap out of you - do a fortnight or do a week. Just get started.
Yes. 100% I think that's the theme for today's podcast. Get started.
Oh yeah. Congratulations - Marketing + Margaritas podcast one done!
Thank you for tuning in. We hope you guys got something out of it. And we'll see how this continues. Wish us luck! Hopefully that all recorded.