Blog
Make sure Personal Recommendations are part of your Marketing Plan
Make sure Personal Recommendations are part of your Marketing Plan
There are many essential marketing methods small businesses should be doing to promote themselves such as a good website, advertising & newsletters, but we find that many of our clients neglect one of the best ways, personal recommendations. Asking for testimonials & reviews from your clients should be part of your marketing plan.
Reviews
We’ve stressed the importance of your Google Business page in recent times. You can read more about that here. Reviews can sway the reader that you are the right company for them, as opposed to your competitor.
Encourage clients (recent and long-standing ones) to write a review for you on your Google page. You can then share these on social media or in a newsletter.
Testimonials
Testimonials are a more professional approach for asking for feedback. When we’ve undertaken a piece of work, we often email clients for a testimonial to add to our website. Take a look at ours here.
Feedback
How do you know if you have done a good job with a client? If much of your work is project based as it ours, it is a good idea to seek feedback (particularly if a colleague undertook the work) to find out how things went and if there is room for improvement. Create a feedback form on your website or a survey on Survey Monkey.
Asking for Reviews for Social Media
The food and hospitality industry are always being reviewed but as we mentioned previously all businesses need reviews to demonstrate how fabulous they are.
If you are able to ask in person, do. Just ask as a favour at the end of your meeting.
You can ask by email but do ask as a personal favour rather than sending a standard email template. Make life easy for the reviewer and include the link to where they need to post the review.
Incentives work – offer entry into a monthly prize drawer if they leave a review.
Other Tips
If you are in an industry where you are prone to receiving a lot of reviews, do check the sites regularly. There are also tools out there for keeping track of reviews such as Review Trackers.
Don’t forget to thank your reviewers. It’s only polite.
Set up Google Alerts so that if your company is mentioned online, you can be notified
If you receive a negative review or feedback, do take a look at our article here on our strategy to deal with this.
Get In Touch
Using Hashtags Successfully
Using Hashtags Successfully
Hashtags are becoming more and more part of our daily lives, they are an essential part of any social media campaign and if you haven’t yet attended a wedding with its own hashtag you undoubtedly will soon! The hashtag was born on August 25, 2007 in a Twitter posting and was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2010, so as the hashtag’s popularity continues to grow it’s important to use them correctly and understand the subtle difference in usage between the social media platforms.
Hashtags on Twitter, the first platform to use them (you can read about the fascinating history here), tend to be more focused on a topic of conversation, or a group of people, use a focused hashtag that directly relates to your business or targets the audience you wish to reach.
You can take advantage of the trending tweets, shown on the left hand side of your home page, as well as regular hashtags such as national days or networking hours. Find the networking hour that relates to your business and schedule posts to push out at this time.
Twitter gives further advice here on How to choose a hashtag.
Hashtags on Instagram are often more focused on a description of the content. You can include up to 30 per post & the trend is to use as many as you can. However do bear in mind that if your hashtags become very general & not focused on your business / content, you may be gaining lots of followers but they may be the wrong kind of follower—not interested in your business or only interested in being followed back. Too many hashtags can dilute your message, but however many hashtags you decide upon we suggest you bunch them all at the end otherwise the post is pretty unreadable.
There are a number of online tools that can help you research the usage & popularity of a hashtag. We like Keyhole.co as it has a great keyword and hashtag tracking tool.
Remember to use a campaign or brand hashtag which is trackable, best practise is that they shouldn’t mention your business name, but should represent your business and what you stand for.
Facebook began to roll out their hashtag tool in 2013 on the back of the success seen on Twitter. Hashtags serve fundamentally the same function on Facebook but they are still not as widely used. Do use some well selected hashtags but do bear in mind that research has shown (according to this article in Social Media Today) that posts without hashtags fare better than those with hashtags!
How to pick a Hashtag
When deciding on a hashtag you can either take advantage of an existing one or you can create your own.
Whichever you decide to use make sure you do your research first, the hashtag needs to be relevant to your business & should not be ambiguous or have alternative meanings. There have been some high profile hashtag blunders in recent years (Susan Boyles #Susanalbumparty springs to mind).
Hashtag Etiquette
Below are a few do’s and don’ts to summarise the best use of hashtags
Do:
- use hashtags in conjunction with images
- use trending hashtags that tie in with your own
- research hashtags first to see how popular they might be
Don’t
- replace all your content with hashtags
- hashtag #everythinginonesentence #as #it #is #difficult #to #read
- go overboard on trending hashtags – use, don’t abuse
A hashtag should be something someone might search for, the main aim is to make your content easier to find, so keep it short and sweet and don’t over complicate.
Red Desk can help with researching suitable hashtags for your business or next marketing campaign. We also offer social media training.
Get In Touch
No Results Found
The page you requested could not be found. Try refining your search, or use the navigation above to locate the post.