Ep.16 – Social Media Marketing Mistakes with Chris Bruno

Introduction [00:00:02] Welcome to the All About Digital Marketing Podcast. The show all about digital marketing brought to you by Social INK, a digital marketing agency specialising in social media and content marketing for brave brands and forward thinking SMEs. I’m your host Chris Bruno and as always we’re here to bring you the most actionable tips, tricks, tools, and insights to help you achieve more when it comes to your digital marketing. Subscribe to the show and be sure to share with a friend if you found something useful or interesting. You can find all the show notes and more information on www.AllAboutDigitalMarketing.co.uk.

Chris Bruno [00:00:53] Hey everybody. So today I wanted to talk a little bit about some of the most common mistakes that we’ve seen businesses make over the last 11 years. That’s right. That’s going remarkably quickly. It’s been over a decade now since we started Social INK. You know in the 11 years we have spoken with, seen, worked with, hundreds – maybe even thousands – of companies. Big, small, international, global, local, and in pretty much every industry you can imagine. From e-cigarettes, CBD businesses, blockchain, cryptocurrency, fintech, finance, retail, e-commerce, training, coaching businesses. We’ve pretty much seen it all. But there’s been a few mistakes that we see businesses make. And we see them make them repeatedly and they’ve become, for us, the common mistakes, as it were.

Chris Bruno [00:01:44] When it comes to social media, and especially digital marketing in general I guess. Social media content, content creation. There’s a real lack sometimes of perceived value. People are looking for the numbers. They’re looking for the ROI. They’re looking for the direct correlation between “I spent x and I received y back”. And this is one of the mistakes that we feel is the most common or amongst the most common that we’ve seen over the last 11 years.

Chris Bruno [00:02:12] What it is it’s about perceived value. When people perceive the value of social media as being something that, “if I put in 10 I should get 100 back” and they don’t see the additional value to it. They’re missing out on what I believe is one of the biggest opportunities for businesses today. Regardless if you’re a small business, regardless if you’re the incumbent you know if you’re the brand new starter in an industry filled with market leaders. There’s an opportunity right now that allows you to create engaging content. That allows you to create perfectly structured targeted content for a very specific audience. And that allows you to create a real fan base. It allows you to build a real business based on people who absolutely love or that absolutely resonate with you and your brand.

Chris Bruno [00:03:02] Now why do I say this as being a mistake? When we don’t value what social media can offer us. We miss out on all the things that it brings us. Social media today can give you a fantastic customer support portal but also a customer feedback loop that has been impossible in the last hundred years to have so fast and so quick. Until we had social media, somebody who’s not happy somebody who has an issue, somebody who maybe found a bug in your platform for example, can literally ping you a message that can come straight through your phone. Through social media. And you can be responding within minutes. Now that’s an amazing feedback loop to help businesses to actually understand where they’re doing things well, where they’re doing things badly. And that’s just one of the small additional value points that social media can bring to your business.

Chris Bruno [00:03:53] One of the second problems and the biggest mistakes we hear is people making excuses. And the reason usually they make these excuses, is because they’ve told themselves a story or they’ve created this fiction in their heads.

Chris Bruno [00:04:06] And it’s usually based on the first mistake. It’s based on the lack of a perceived value. Because you don’t see, perceive a value it’s very easy to say: “I don’t have the time to do that. Social media isn’t going to work for our business. We’re very boring as a business. We don’t have anything creative to say.” This just isn’t right. It’s not real it’s not true. They’re excuses and they’re stories that we tell ourselves. And we’ve all had this and we might do it for other things other than our social media. We make excuses to stop ourselves from having to actually try it. And it’s a mixed bag of the perceived value being too little or not understanding the overall value. And it’s a fear of failure because if we don’t even try. There’s no chance of us failing.

Chris Bruno [00:04:50] And that’s something huge. Something really important to think about. If you’ve tried social media. And by try I mean you posted three times and said it didn’t work. Or if you’ve tried social media or advertising and you spent £50 and it didn’t work, and you didn’t make £500 pounds back so there’s no 10x ROI so you stopped doing it. These are now excuses that you’ve set yourself as reasons why you shouldn’t bother.

Chris Bruno [00:05:15] Imagine when it comes to an athlete, somebody that’s training for a marathon or whatever else, if they’ve never run before and they go out on their first run, chances are everything is going to hurt for the next couple of days. It’s going to be tough to run. They’re not going to be able to run five, 10, 15, 20 miles easily. So what do they do? They set up a regimen of training, of coaching, of learning, of pushing themselves through those pain points and learning from those pain points.

Chris Bruno [00:05:43] Maybe they do more stretching. Maybe they do more post workout activities for example, have a good soak in an ice cold bath. There’s a load of things that you can do differently to learn from and to make better what you’re trying to achieve. And the same is true for social media marketing. And the same is true for your digital marketing in general. No matter what it is that you’re trying to do, no matter what it is that you’ve heard that you should do. If you’re telling yourself an excuse and you’re basing that on a perceived value or lack of perceived value or basically on your own fear of failure. “What if somebody laughs at my content. What if people write nasty comments. What if people don’t engage and they don’t buy my offer?” For example. Then you’re missing the whole point.

Chris Bruno [00:06:24] Social media has given you the biggest opportunity right now to get out there and to find your potential audience. The reason I say it’s the biggest opportunity is because even without spending any money on ads, or on expensive equipment. With just a mobile phone you can keep your businesses’ social media profiles up to date with a huge amount and a varied amount of content. Remember from your iPhone you can turn into a Facebook Live broadcast straight from your phone which would be going out in HD. You can create photos from what you’re looking at or what you’ve been doing. You can create 360 experiences from panoramic images taken on a smartphone. There’s a hundred things that you can do and do them very very easily. So the reality is if you’re making some of these mistakes and we’re going to go into more of these over the next few episodes.

Chris Bruno [00:07:15] But if you’re making some of these mistakes i.e. you’re trying to find excuses. Or you are making excuses as to why you don’t need to be on social media. Or why you’re not in social media. Or if you’re looking for the direct return on investment and not taking into consideration the customer support angle, the brand awareness angles, or even the customer knowledge angles, the ability for people to have conversations with you directly on social media to find out more, no matter what stage they’re at – especially the prepurchase stage. Then I think you’re missing out. That’s my honest truth that’s my honest opinion. And basically here at Social INK we’ve created a guide for the seven most common mistakes that we’ve seen in businesses over the last 11 years.

Chris Bruno [00:07:58] If you’d like to grab that feel free. It’s currently located at www.PostLikeShare.com/7-mistakes. Have a look at it. The truth is there’s going to be at least one of those points that resonates, possibly even more. And the reason why they’ll resonate is because again you’re not alone. We’ve all done this. I set up my business eleven years ago and you know at the beginning it’s very very hard to get on top of everything. It’s very very hard to understand all the different angles and all the different elements. But the one thing that I can happily say is 11 years later one of the core focuses for us has always been to maintain and to continue to maintain our digital marketing presence. This year we’ve gone a little bit overboard as an agency and we’ve had challenges over the course of the year that have seen us create huge amounts of content to try and showcase just how this can be done by businesses. Small or large.

Chris Bruno [00:08:55] The truth is when we do one of our crazy challenges, it’s things like going live for 31 days in a row, on social media, on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube. You don’t need to go so extreme. But if we can do it for 30 days straight, or for example in June when we wrote 100 – well we wrote and published a hundred blog articles on our website. There really isn’t any excuse for you not to be able to create 1-2 pieces of content every single week. When it comes to these mistakes, and when it comes to the challenges that businesses see, again. You’re not alone. People are in the same boat as you. People are struggling with the same things as you. They become common mistakes because of the fact that they are common and they happen a lot. So don’t worry and don’t panic. If that’s the position that you’re in, there is something you can do about it. Start off with our guide if you’d like and have a look and have a read to try and identify some of these things but more importantly get a little glimpse into how you could be doing things differently. And hopefully, that’s going to help get you into the right direction and get those first stepping stones towards success from your social media. The second side of it is, if you’d like to find out more. We do offer a coaching program that specially designed for small to mid-sized businesses to help you guys when it comes to your content creation. When it comes to your social media marketing, when it comes to your overall digital marketing. The idea of taking a coach on this, by the way, isn’t a hard sell. It’s the simple truth. When I want to try and get fit, when I need to try and get healthier, when I want to try and lose weight. The first thing I do is look for a coach to try and help me through these things.

Chris Bruno [00:10:33] Doing things on our own can sometimes be very very hard. It can be challenging. But most importantly it can be lonely and we can lack the accountability to hold ourselves responsible for the actions that we do and the results that we achieve. So if you’d like to find out more we’d love to hear from you. But if not, most importantly have a look around and ask yourself. Am I making excuses for not being on social media and for not doing more on social media? Is it really true, some of the stories that I’m telling myself? And the ways that I’m trying to focus in terms of how I’m running my business or how I marketing my business? And ask yourself a real question that’s very very simple. How much time would it really take up for you to create three to five pieces of content – whether it be images, live videos, pre-recorded videos of you talking to your mobile phone. How much time would that really take and how can you can you honestly justify not having enough time to be able to do that?

Chris Bruno [00:11:32] Guys it’s been a pleasure to talk to you about this today. Keep an eye out though because we are going to be doing a few episodes coming up, that are going to be about specific pain points and specific mistakes when it comes to social media marketing. Look forward to seeing you all soon.

Chris Bruno [00:11:47] Hope you enjoyed the episode. Remember to subscribe and leave us a review to let us know what you think. You can find all the show notes on www.AllAboutDigitalMarketing.co.uk. If you’re looking for more help with your digital marketing, I’m excited to tell you that the team at Social INK has launched a brand new education platform focussed on helping all brands and businesses with their social media marketing.

Chris Bruno [00:12:10] If you’d like to find out more simply visit www.PostLikeShare.com. You’ll find all our latest training courses, coaching, and resources available. Simply sign up today. Till next time. Thanks everybody.