Small businesses operate in a highly competitive marketplace, and standing out from the crowd is essential to attract new customers and retain existing ones. One effective way to achieve this is by diversifying their marketing strategy. Diversifying a marketing strategy involves using multiple channels to reach a wider audience. This could include social media, email marketing, content marketing, pay-per-click advertising, and more. By doing this, small businesses can increase their brand awareness, engage with customers in new ways, and ultimately drive sales. One of the key benefits of diversifying a marketing strategy is that it allows small businesses to reach customers who may not be aware of their products or services. For example, a small business that relies solely on word-of-mouth referrals may struggle to attract new customers outside of its existing network. However, by using social media or paid advertising, the business can reach a wider audience and generate new leads. Another benefit of diversifying a marketing strategy is that it allows small businesses to engage with customers in new and innovative ways. For example, a competitions business that sells tickets into competitions, it would be that when you deliver the prize to the winner, that you record it, or do a 'Live' video with them. This not only helps to establish the business as a real life business where people really do win life changing prizes, but it also provides valuable content that customers will want to share with their friends and family. Overall, diversifying a marketing strategy is an effective way for small businesses to stand out in a crowded marketplace. By using a range of channels to reach new customers and engage with existing ones, small businesses can build a strong brand presence, drive sales, and ultimately grow their business.

Building a profitable online business in just three months is a challenging task that requires a lot of effort, dedication, and hard work. However, with the right strategy and execution, it is possible to create a successful online business. Here is a step-by-step guide to help you get started: Define your niche: Identify a specific market or niche that you want to target with your online business. Choose something that you are passionate about and that has a high demand in the market. Conduct market research: Conduct thorough research on your niche market, including your target audience, competitors, and market trends. This research will help you develop a solid understanding of your niche and the opportunities that exist. Develop a business plan: Develop a comprehensive business plan that outlines your goals, target audience, marketing strategy, financial projections, and any other critical aspects of your business. This plan will serve as a roadmap for your business and help you stay focused and organized. Choose a business model: Determine which type of online business model works best for your niche, such as e-commerce, affiliate marketing, advertising, or subscriptions. Create a website: Build a website that showcases your products, services, or content. Ensure that your website is user-friendly, visually appealing, and optimized for search engines. Develop a marketing strategy: Create a marketing plan that includes social media marketing, email marketing, search engine optimization, and any other strategies that are relevant to your niche. Ensure that your marketing strategy is aligned with your target audience and business goals. Launch your business: Once you have developed your website and marketing strategy, it's time to launch your business. Use social media platforms, advertising campaigns, and other marketing channels to drive traffic to your website and promote your business. Monitor and evaluate your progress: Monitor your business's performance regularly and evaluate your progress against your business plan. Adjust your strategy and approach as needed to ensure that you achieve your goals. It's important to note that building a profitable online business takes time, effort, and patience. It's unlikely that you will achieve significant profits in just three months, but with the right approach and execution, you can build a solid foundation for your business and position it for long-term success.

Ads: How one out of place word can get you the ban hammer! We’ve all been there right, you prep a really great download, your landing page is brilliant, and you’re ads are all ready to go. You hit the “GO” button aaaand…. Your ad is disallowed. It goes “against our advertising policies. You’re not authorised to run campaigns around social or political issues”. Social or political issues? I’m giving away my 5 best tips on how you can manage your pension fund, not looking to start a riot! What’s worse, is this is your best all round offering yet! You feel you’ve nailed it all round, stuck to all the guidelines, done everything by the book. So you go back and look. Carefully combing over each word, each sentence in your ad description. The content looks OK. The images were very carefully selected. The wording isn’t misleading or misrepresenting of anything that’s being advertised. What could it be? “Our top 5 tips have saved hundreds of thousands for people living in America so they can retire better off”. Believe it or not, just simply stating the word “America” can get you ban if it’s seen to be misrepresenting America in any kind of way. Yes, the ads bots can be THAT sensitive! Make sure to check the guidelines of what’s appropriate when advertising across a platform with such intense ruling that can literally have your ad stopped for the sake of one simple word! So let’s retry that again with a change: “Our top 5 tips have saved hundreds of thousands for people living in your area, so they can retire better off”. *BOOM* Instant approval! For the sake of making the ad a bit more vanilla, a little less focused on “America”, but still targeting your audience, you can avoid getting the dreaded ban hammer!

3 Mistakes To Avoid With Your Social Media Strategy: Not knowing who your audience is Not creating the right content Using non-relevant images/video Not Knowing Who Your Audience is: If you haven’t yet, defining your audience is key to kicking off your ads successfully! Have you defined: Age Group? Gender? Interests? If you haven’t had time to work out your ideal client, now’s the time! You can start by generating ideas on their ideal age range. Are they young? Middle aged, or closer to retirement? Are they male, female or a non-specific gender? What things generally interest your ideal customer? Do they travel a lot? Do they love gardening? Are they retired? These simple questions can help you better target your idea client, by closing the gap (and the guesswork) that various social media algorithms go through while advertising and showcasing your content on your behalf. Not Creating The Right Content When was the last time you spoke to your client base? Did you send them one of those forwarded meme’s? You know, one of those funny ones that only the cool people will laugh at? The ones that “get you” and your sense of humour. Was it something you’re 100% sold on that your customers will be glad to remember you by? If you’re not consistently bringing value to your clients front door, will they keep wanting to open up when all you do is bring a slightly funny, likely inappropriate meme to the meeting? Let’s face it, content has a time and a place, and while sharing the funny stuff can be a great ice breaker, is it really how you want to be remembered by your customers? Bring value. Or they’ll seek that value elsewhere. Using non-relevant images/video “A picture paints a thousand words”. And a good video can leave you speechless! Both images and video perform really well when added into an ad campaign. Video has been proven to perform the best out of all of the standard options (image/video/text). What view to do you give to others when promoting your brand? Do you post high quality images and videos? Or do you post more for click bait/likes on your posts? Is the visual image you’re creating of your business, the one your most happiest with? Is it consistent? Is it of a good quality? Or are you just posting to see who will like/share? But wait…. “What do you mean by high quality” I hear you say? If you have the power to stop someone in their tracks with the video content you make, or you can open up someone’s mind to 1000 new reasons to like you and your product/service, ensuring what you share is of good quality, on point, and relevant, is extremely important. If the first way new prospective clients see you, via an image or video in a ad? Is it of the same quality (or better) you see in others in your industry? How do you stand out against everyone in your sector? What are YOU doing differently to everyone else? In a world where content is king, ensuring all of your content is engaging, memorable, thought provoking, effectively, “on point”, is absolutely essential. Whether you post daily, weekly, monthly (or heaven forbid), yearly, it’s important that at every point, your customers can see a high value, high quality output from you. Not just in your text, but your imagery, videos, emails, products/services. If you can be proactive in all of these 3 areas, and look to improve on these basics, your overall customer offering will improve. Your content towards your customers will improve. Your visual offerings will improve and you’ll begin to shine over and above what your competitors are. And let’s face it, you don’t want to give away your customers to your competitors, all because you’ve not nailed the basics, do you? When was the last time you gave your social media outreach strategy a quick MOT to make sure it’s firing on all cylinders?

Staying top of mind as a business is everything. When customers decide they are ready to buy, they usually pick the first business they know solves their problem. If a business comes to mind, they must have made a great impression. Forming a great impression can be done through numerous avenues, yet, nothing is more impactful than making a conscious effort to remain top of mind throughout the buyer's journey. Digital and content marketing provide a means for businesses to stamp their image into their customers' minds. Yet, using these haphazardly often leads to poor results, a lack of direct feedback, and dissatisfaction with various marketing channels. Instead, we can look to leveraging unique content, targeted interactions and three other methods we're going to run through below: Regular Informal Updates Social media is fantastic for spreading your message and running targeted ads. However, most businesses miss out on the simplicity of providing regular, informal updates. Many marketing 'gurus' would contest the relevancy of these posts. Their goal isn't to sell, convert or push a product. Instead, their goal is to generate engagement and keep your brand at the forefront of your audience's mind. These posts are usually: Meme shares General questions Employee updates (something employees have done) Posts relating to a niche holiday Appreciation posts for audience members These posts excel as "filler" in between more significant pieces of content. Leverage email marketing Email marketing doesn't have to be the final tick box to be checked when you have a new product out; you can use it to remain in contact with your fans. We associate newsletters with sales content, but using it to send educational or thought-provoking material can be just as effective, if not more. The best thing about this is you don't necessarily have to create any more additional content then you already are doing. By taking content from your social media, you can combine a few posts into a newsletter informational update that serves to catch your customers on their preferred platform. Email marketing further mitigates the reliance we have on social media and their algorithms. Your most may only reach 100 people on Facebook, but you can contact all 500 through email. Create Employee Advocacy Your greatest asset as a business is the people that work within it. That applies to all facets of the company, especially relating to brand awareness. Your employees will have different friends, contacts and business relationships. You're likely to reach an entirely new audience if they were to share your content. Similarly, doing so increases your current audience's chances of re-seeing your content or, if the algorithm prevented it before, seeing your content for the first time. An efficient means to achieve this is creating a reliable content calendar with consistent publishing times. Doing so enables your employees to know when a post is published and gives them a window to boost its reach via search. Make sure to communicate your goals with your employees. Depending on your business model, they may not have branded their accounts under your business, if so, sharing the content may hinder their brand and reach an unrelated audience. Implementing these strategies Implementing the above strategies doesn't have to be complicated or confusing; we recommend doing so in these three steps: Work with your content creator to create multiple short update posts. The focus here is engagement. Using a content calendar, catch your team up to speed on the posting schedule and set up a sharing plan internally to boost the reach of your content Using content posted each week, create a roundup newsletter designed to engage with your email list By working with your team, you can have an effective strategy within an hour that enables you to stay top of mind. When your customers are ready to make a decision, you'll be one of the first they think about.

Customer behaviour has changed significantly over the last few years. Social media now overshadows one-way marketing for customers that want to build relationships with brands. Engagement marketing has taken centre stage by driving conversions through building a sustained relationship. Customers want to interact with other product and brand users while learning new information from the business in the form of valuable content. Despite social strategy growing in popularity, social media platforms are rife with companies pushing continuous sales content with a disinterest in forming relationships with their customers. For those looking to engage authentically, we have a few tips that you can leverage to begin forming stronger relationships: Create Valuable Content Value is a subjective term that largely depends on how an individual sees something as valuable. For some, that could be a helpful guide, whereas others may just be looking for something entertaining. As a business, understanding why your audience values your product or service is an essential first step, then you can begin to strategize what content they would enjoy. Innocent have a strong, core brand voice that focuses on engaging with their community 90% of the time and pushing products the remaining 10%. They understand that their demographic is families, and they create content that encourages users to interact with each other. Would the same content work for a BBQ business? Probably not. The second step is implementing a healthy content mix. Unless your followers are in the hundred thousand range, chances are you still need to do a bit of work to educate your audience on your product. Most businesses over saturate their profiles with sales content, product pushing and website backlinks. While this type of content is essential for conversions, it shouldn't be the majority. Adding content that speaks to the needs of your audiences creates immediate interest. Relate to the challenges they face and tell a story about how your product was the solution. How-to and community involved content (like contests, send in your pictures and so on) are also a great way to bring people together. Respond As A Human Responding to comments is a must if you're looking to build a strong community. For this example, we'll be referring to Facebook pages, but this can easily apply to Instagram pages and LinkedIn pages. When a customer comments on your post, they send you a signal that they enjoy your content (or dislike it, which gives excellent data). Innocents' tone of voice is so impactful because they respond as a person, not a brand. No formulated scripted responses. Customers feel like they can have a chat, rather than "enquire" about your content; this keeps people coming back for each post to engage. Conclusion Humanising your brand doesn't take some secret sauce only the big brands have access to, it merely takes conscious effort from brands to deliver engaging content as humans. By looking at your current content, you'll notice where your focus is and where you can improve. It doesn't take a world-class copywriter to craft an engaging story, and it requires us to think differently about the purpose of the content. It shouldn't be sell, sell, sell. It should be engaging, develop relationships, and convert.

How To Identify Your Ideal Customer

It's been a while since we last posted on the blog. That's because we've been super busy with a whole array of clients! That being said, we've been very fortunate to help promote an upcoming world record attempt by an ex-para called John Bream who will be looking to jump 200ft into water from a helicopter! Such an amazing project is all in aid of raising money and awareness around depression and veteran suicide. We all know someone who has suffered. With military personnel taking a much bigger brunt than just regular civvies, it's time for the word to spread that there is support out there and vets can still continue to make a positive difference, even after serving their country. As a business support service, we've taken on this project for free and instead of blindly sponsoring, we have offered to do as much of the advertising across social media and news outlets as we possibly can, with no charge. We feel that this is a much better way in which we can help such a great cause. If you want to get involved, you can follow The Flying Fish on Facebook and also donate to the project which is raising funds via Go Fund Me at https://gf.me/u/yfhhhy John is currently going through some intense training around the U.K. so that he can be fit and ready for his jump. He begins his helicopter training in August... EXCITING! John will be looking to make his attempt near the end of September 2020 and will be looking to do this jump, from a helicopter, opposite the War Memorial based in Southsea (Portsmouth).... The very same that both The Queen and Donald Trump were at in 2019. Why not follow on Facebook, give it a like and a share and if you can, spare some pocket change to help this unbelievable cause!