Got 15 minutes to help your business grow?
No matter how busy we are in our businesses, we all know that we have to devote some time to grow our network of customers and clients. It is that awful thing called marketing; you know, the time-consuming, budget eating monster that only large and successful businesses can afford to do right. At least that’s what we often tell ourselves.
The fact is that there is a medium for advancing your brand that is often unutilized by small business owners; social media.
Yes, I know – blogs and tweets and article submissions and press releases and fan pages and lions and tigers and bears, oh my! We’re small business owners. We have small budgets and small offices so how can we handle large and complex processes like social media?
You might ask the same thing about the large and complex world of print advertising, or billboards, or radio. Somehow plenty of small businesses managed to find the time to prepare and execute marketing strategies that included some or all of these older media venues.
And the one thing you can be sure of is that you probably spent more than 10 to 15 minutes a day on average in the creation of those strategies. How did you find the time? You had to, and so you did.
Marketing has to happen for a business to grow or to even survive. There are not enough of us lucky enough to have the perfect product or service in the perfect location so that everyone is willing to search you out and find you on THEIR time.
Marketing is not always a direct sale; quite often it is simply the effort to get your name, your brand out there. It’s the golf game with potential clients, the networking lunch where you schmooze with other business owners, the cocktail party you force yourself to go to so you can meet new prospects. And those are hours of marketing eating away at your business time.
As is often said, Social Media is the new water cooler. It is the electronic venue through which people connect socially, just as they have done physically at the business dinners and golf outings for decades. You need to get your face out there (wonder why they call it Facebook?), to let people know what’s new with your business (Twitter anyone?), to offer advice on how to help other people solve their business or personal needs (“Blog” does come from “weB LOG” after all), or to simply be seen in the company of other business professionals (where you can be LinkedIn to their conversations).
It’s not easy, but it certainly is not hard to get a start in social media. Just a few minutes each day to collect your thoughts to words, and a click of a button to send those thoughts into the web sphere. The Internet is open 24 hours a day, and plenty of your potential customers are out there having a conversation. Drop in on them and say hello. You’d be surprised at how many of them would like to hear from you!
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