Kyle Balmer – B Street Digital

Digital marketing for my coffee shop or cafe.

Cafes and coffee shops are some of the most popular businesses to start up. It’s not overly surprising – we tend to start businesses in areas that we have some familiarity in and after sitting for a long time in a coffee shop who hasn’t thought “well I can do this better”.

Because of this there are now a lot of independent coffee shops and cafes around. We’re ignoring the big boys like Starbucks in the US and Costa and Neros in the UK. Even without these massive companies it’s suddenly a very busy market place.

Unfortunately there’s only so much coffee a single customer can consume a day! A limited number of local customers + a limited amount of consumption per day means that there are natural limits on how much coffee can be sold in a certain area. And if there are a lot of coffee shops in that area there’s going to be competition.

Google My Business – putting our coffee shop on Google Maps

First off your location is obviously going to be important. That’s outside of our remit as digital marketers though. The only thing we can help with is advising how to get people to come a little further to find your coffee shop instead of going to the closest and most convenient. If, however, your competitor is on the ground floor of a giant office building then it’s going to be tricky to pull customers out of the building and around to your site. Doable but tricky – thems the breaks.

Secondly, if your coffee, food, atmosphere and service are crap then there’s not that much we can do online! In fact, you’d be better off not becoming too present online. Visibility is a double edged sword and if your flat whites are disappointing you can be sure some customers will be busily telling everybody they can. Digital marketing can work wonders but still needs a solid product to be in place.

Bad service from Scarlett Johansson is likely acceptable

With these limiting factors in mind, let’s have a look at what you can do specifically online.

First, claim your Google listing. This is super simple but many businesses don’t know about it. You may get a Google Partner or similar coming to visit you to sell you these sorts of services – they tend to show up at any new business offering to set up your listing, take photos and the like. Totally fine to use them but be aware you can do most of this yourself.

Head over to https://www.google.com/business/how-it-works/

This link will be different depending on your country but you should be redirected.

From there simply go through the guided process. It’s all fairly straightforward. Any information you do not know now you can go back and add later so don’t sweat perfection at this point.

The main thing we want to do is finalise the process so that Google will send us a verification postcard. Google will dispatch, in the mail (yes, like the mail with stamps and envelopes and all that!) a postcard. This postcard will have a verification code on it which you can enter in your Google My Business account to confirm that you are a real business at this location.

From here you can edit your Google Maps listing, add menus, opening times, photos, special events and more. You can also see how many people have looked you up and how many people have asked for directions (and presumably come to your location). Extremely cool.

Further down the line you can actually pay Google to make you more visible on Google Maps for terms like “coffee”. That’s more advanced though – right now just make sure that you have your business verified so you can be visible, edit how you appear on Google Maps and start to see all the data.

Make sure to fully fill in your profile, especially adding photos. The main reason for this is that your listing will take up more space on screen. Yes, sure, pretty photos are great but everyone has pretty photos. We just need to make sure we’re taking up as much on-screen real-estate as possible. The larger your listing (due to description, photos, reviews, website links etc.) the more space it takes up on screen. So make sure to fill out as much as possible in the profile so your listing doesn’t look anemic.

Simple but extremely important.

2. Website – setting up a basic website for our coffee shop

Second, your website. Now that we have our Google Map listing set up our website is a little less important. We are primarily interested in new people finding our location and coming to visit. Google Maps will do a lot of the heavy lifting on this.

A website helps with one part of this step. If I’ve searched “coffee London bridge” in Google Maps I’m suddenly shown 20+ coffee shops. How do I choose? There are the obvious factors like proximity – I’m less likely to walk a mile if there’s an equally attractive looking coffee shop closer.

If someone is deciding between two or more locations guess what the normal next step is. They’ll quickly check the website. What are they looking for? Two things – the aesthetics (does it look like a cool place) and the basics – opening times & menu.

My goodness please don’t hide away the basics. So many sites do this – they’ll have a homepage with lots of beautiful photos of coffee, food and smiling staff members and maybe some text about their coffee varietals from the slopes of a Guatemalan volcano.

This is all lovely but if I’m standing under a dripping newsagents canopy sheltering from the rain on a stormy October afternoon looking for a darn place to grab a coffee all I want to know is whether the place is open before I traipse through the rain to get there.

My decision is very unlikely to be based on whether they are using Guatemalan or Columbian beans at this point.

We recommend a single page website. The main information should be on one page which is the home page – the first point of contact with a visitor. The further you hide away the important information the more likely a visitor is to click away from your page – people are extremely fast to leave websites nowadays.

15 seconds is now considered a LONG time on a website. People bore easily

Doing this will make it i) much easier to build a site and ii) increase the number of people who actually come to your coffee shop which is, ultimately, what we are trying to do here.

Save some cash and time by keeping your website simple. Think about the needs of the people actually coming to your site. Don’t just talk about your business, what you do and what you are good at. Talk about what they need to know: how can I get there, what sort of price should I expect, what food can I get there. It’s a very simple shift but effective.

In terms of design make sure the site works well on mobile. This sort of website is called “responsive” ie. the site responds to the screen size. If it’s a full computer screen it will respond and display at full size. If it’s a phone screen (most likely) the site will squeeze down and readjust to fit that size. Certain design elements like menu bars and sidebars don’t work well on mobile devices because there isn’t really enough room for them to be functional.

Keep it simple and use a one page website that works perfectly on mobile devices. The majority of traffic online now is through mobile devices and the fact that you are presenting your site to people who are out and about looking for a cafe makes this doubly important.

Site builders like Squarespace and Strikingly will get the job done for you. Find a nice looking template and go from there. Because it’s a single page site it won’t take long to build – primarily copy/pasting in text and uploading some photos. Squarespace actually has a bunch of professionally designed Restaurant templates which will do the job: https://www.squarespace.com/templates/restaurant

3. Reviews – getting positive reviews for our coffee shop

Once you have the basic infrastructure set up you need to start getting some reviews on your Google Maps listing.

How many? Good question.

Look at your closest and best competitors. What do they have? Aim to have a higher star value than them but also more reviews. This will increase your visibility on Google Maps.

The ultimate goal – 5 Stars and LOTS of them

You might be thinking “well that’s all very well and good but my closest competitors has been in business for years and are waaaay ahead”. Thankfully most businesses don’t have a concerted review strategy. They might have a little flyer or poster asking people to please review but that tends to be the limit.

How should you catch up and overtake? Well, first of all friends and family. Sure, I’m not meant to say this but we all know that’s where we all start off anyway. Having a couple of solid reviews to start with will make it more likely for new reviewers to follow suit and leave reviews.

Incentivised reviews are not allowed by Google My Business. This covers not just incentivised good reviews but in fact any review. The obvious incentive for a coffee shop would be a free coffee for any review (good or bad) but strictly this is against Google My Business’ terms and conditions.

One way around this would be to ask for people to fill out a comment card with their thoughts and a rating out of 5. This can be incentivised with a coffee – it’s an internal system. When they hand it in ask if they’d like to share it online via Google Maps, explaining that it would really help. Of course this is a bit tricksy but technically you’ve incentivised the comment card review (which is internal) and then asked if they’d want to share online. If not that’s cool – you can still (with permission) add comments as testimonials on your website. Just not on Google because it would need to be via their account.

One other way to get reviews is to ask for them at the right time. Again, no incentives here. Let’s say someone has tagged you on Facebook or Instagram. Whilst you are top of mind this is the perfect time to send them a message and ask (politely) if they’d mind leaving a review. Again, just ask from an honest place explaining how it really helps your new business.

Finally, don’t bother with paid for reviews. Yes, they can be purchased but it’s better to just have in place an honest system for asking customers at the right times. Most people just need a small nudge and would be happy to if you ask. Purchasing reviews (especially en masse) is a good way to get your Google My Business account locked out. And because you are tied to that actual physical location this is a big problem!

4. Social Media – how should we use social media for our coffee shop?

Fourth, social media. This is a big one and will be an ongoing process. The items above are mainly about setup and (in the case of reviews) just being mindful to ask for them on a regular basis.

Social media though is something you’ll need to keep putting work into. This doesn’t mean every single day but it does means consistently over time. If you aren’t willing to create a piece of content once per week I’d say give social media a miss for now. By all means claim all the social accounts you need (Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Twitter, maybe Snapchat, maybe Pinterest). Use https://www.namecheckr.com/ to find matching social account names across the different platforms (so you don’t end up with different names on each).

If you are committed to pushing out content what should you be doing?

First of all, cool it with the latte art. Enough already!

Scan the Instagram accounts of your competitors. Or indeed, any coffee shops worldwide. It’s primarily pretty latte art. Pictures of coffee can only go so far. After the 100th picture of a latter the account becomes incredibly boring. Unless you have a genuinely world-class latte artist – if so by all means lean in on this angle. But chances are that this is not the case.

The key is to produce content that your audience is actually interested in. Sounds obvious but people don’t do it. Instead cafes tend to produce content about themselves.

“We’ve just made some new cookies – come and get them”

“Loving these new beans”

“Got to have my oat milk!”

Etc. etc.

There’s only a certain amount of mileage that you can get out of the products of a cafe. Latte art is the most egregious example but the same goes for open face sandwiches, bags of beans or cartons of milk. These are just not particularly interesting subjects to people outside of your organisation.

Stop talking about your specific store. Instead think larger. Think as if you were either a chain of coffee stores or a more general educational resource. Talk about coffee in the abstract – not your coffee specifically.

Practically what does this mean. Tutorial videos, education, expertise. Show people how to use an aeropress. What sort of grind is best for French press at home? What’s the best way to make great coffee whilst backpacking?

In these examples we’re teaching skills. “But wait, then people can make coffee at home and don’t need us!” Well, they already could do this but don’t. They are still going to come to your store for convenience. And by educating you’ve put you and your staff in the position of authority. Being teachers leads to trust – these guys know their coffee.

This is a complete about turn to the type of content most coffee shops put out. It’s something useful for the viewer not for the coffee shop solely. What happens then? We start picking up viewers much faster. Word spreads. You’ll have international followers. Sure these people may not be coming to your store directly but you get the buzz of being internationally known. You could convert that into revenue using online sales but let’s not get too ahead of ourselves.

The main concept here is that by providing a service to people (creating content that they are genuinely interested in) you can build a following. It won’t stop people coming to your store – in fact you’ll see far more people coming in once your name gets out there.

That’s content. What about format? This one is nice and easy: video.

Video has much more reach on social media, regardless of the platform. All the social media platforms incentivise you to use video because it’s more engaging for their users. The more their users stay on their site the more advertising revenue they get. Because of this Youtube, Facebook and the other platforms all want you to use video as much as possible.

When you upload video it’s much more likely to get seen than text or photos. If you then add a little cash to boost the video (on Facebook and Instagram in particular) you’ll suddenly get thousands of viewers instead of the 10s of viewers if you had simply posted a photo and left it at that.

Scared of video? Lots of people are. And this is great news! The more people are scared of doing video the more space online for us to grab audiences. Sure, you’ll need to get over camera shyness. This is very doable though – it just requires doing it until you are comfortable. There’s no shortcut here. I used to be horrible in front of a camera but just kept going until I was OK with the process.

One extra tip here: Go Live. Going Live to Facebook or Instagram forces you to just do it.

Otherwise you’ll get stuck in your head and start stopping the recording at every um or er.

People expect you to be a person. You are coming to them as a person, a teacher. Those ums and ers can actually build your authenticity and personableness because, well, they are authentic! Much better than a highly polished corporate presentation from Starbucks. You’re a local coffee expert remember – that’s what people are here to see. So grab your iPhone and just start talking about your area of expertise.

We have a massive video series about this over on Youtube. The most relevant videos will be those about building an audience online but if you want to go deep I’d recommend starting at the beginning.

Marketing your coffee shop: Quick Summary

In summary we have a couple of steps to follow:

Make sure you grab your Google My Business listing and fill out all of the details.
Set up a basic one page website using Squarespace or a similar easy to use website builder.
Find your review target by looking at competitors and decide on how you are going to catch up and beat this number.
Use video on social media to deliver your expert voice about the subject. Stop talking about your coffee shop and instead teach people about the subject.

Post published:October 21, 2019

Should you have a blog? If you do you are probably using it wrong.

Should you bother with having a blog on your website? The answer used to be a hard YES. Nowadays it’s more complicated. And even if you do have a blog the chances are it’s not being used correctly. Let’s look at what part a blog now plays in marketing your business.

There are a lot of misconceptions in this field. I’m going to take you on a short (and very rough!) history of online marketing over the last couple of decades. Depending on where you entered the scene you’ll likely have preconceptions about the importance of different elements. We’ll take this quick tour and then I’ll show you where we are now and what we should be doing.

Old school marketing

The old school way of marketing online was very much focused on SEO.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. It’s shorthand for “getting to the top of Google”. Yes, there’s Yahoo, Bing and other search engines but in the English speaking world at least when we are talking “search marketing” we may as well just be talking about Google.

SEO is a process of making content for a website that would be useful for the visitors to your website. Google wants your content to be useful not out of the goodness of their hearts but because that means its users will trust Google’s recommendations.

Yahoo made the mistake of allowing for search engine rankings to be effectively purchased – without clear enough labelling that they were paid for results. This led to a loss of trust in the results they were returning and a gap in the market for Google to grow into.

SEO as a marketing speciality became the art and science of making sure Google chose our web pages to show to their users. This was a mixture of what we put on the page itself (content) and how we present it (generally the “technical” factors in SEO). A lot of early SEO was interested in the technical factors – what headings to use, keyword usage, the best length for the article, the number of links to include and so on.

Whilst this stuff is important it’s generally ephemeral. What works one day may not work the next. A lot of time and money was wasted on trying to guess what Google were thinking and getting ahead of them. At least momentarily.

However Google employs a lot of smart people. Any “tricks” that fooled Google are short term. Their engineers are just very good, very numerous and very well funded. It’s hard to compete on a purely technical level.

Instead the best advice in SEO is to produce content that people (shock horror) actually want. Google wants its users to have access to the information they are looking for. If you produce that information then Google will (eventually) make sure the right people are connected to the information. Sure you can use some technical tweaks to make the content more appealing to Google but you can’t override the quality of the content itself. Purely technical SEO is like polishing a turd. It’s still a turd when the visitor turns up to view the information.

So we know that Google likes content. We also know (they’ve told us) that they like lots of it, regularly updated. Speed of turnover and updates means that the content is fresh – at least in Google’s eyes.

Enter The Blog

Shortened from web-log, the blog became the de facto vehicle for delivering content on a consistent basis. There’s no particular reason why this should have happened. It’s primarily based on Google’s attraction to recency and regularity.

Blog writing and SEO have become synonymous over the years. Primarily because having a static website with no new content isn’t very attractive to users (and therefore to Google). They have little reason to revisit. Blogs were a neat fix for this – a portion of a website that could be easily and regularly updated.

Enter Social Media

Blogs happily chugged along as the primary way to update the world on your coming and goings for years. Even early social media like MySpace was not hugely different to blogs – it was just a network of blogs where you would see your friend’s blogs.

Will the last to leave please turn out the lights?

It was Facebook that really shook this up. Whilst it wasn’t the first social network it was the one that grew fastest. Right time, right place. And because social networks depend on network growth models (it’s right there in the name…) the biggest and fastest growing wins. The more connections in the network the more valuable the network is and the more reason to join. The big get bigger.

Social media (Facebook) changed the dynamic. Previously we would have our own home online – our webpage and its blog. Over time we’d add content, much like a bird building its nest up. Google would reward us with traffic as our content was found. It might take a while but if we continued chugging away producing quality content that people wanted there was a good chance that it would all work out.

Social media meant we could put our content out right now. In front of thousands or millions of people. In particular niches. Without all the technical setup. Without all the waiting for Google to find the content.

In the world of project management (and business in general) we talk about three factors: better, faster, cheaper – choose two. You can have two of these factors only at the cost of the third.

Suddenly social media came along and seemed to offer better, cheaper and faster.

Marketers could get directly in front of their market for much cheaper, much faster and arguably with a better experience right there on the platform.

RIP Blogs right?

This was an understandable reaction. What’s the point about owning and building up a blog and web site over time when we can get the same results faster and cheaper with social media?

SMM (Social Media Marketing) became a powerful tool in the digital marketer’s arsenal, at times completely replacing SEO.

Renting vs. Owning Debate

Depending on when you became aware of the various forms of digital marketing (which will mainly be age dependent) you’ll likely have different preconceptions about what’s best.

The general move though has been away from blogs and websites to social media. Again, understandable due to the apparent benefits.

There is one very important caveat we need to introduce here though – the difference between owning and renting your marketing platform.

When we use Facebook or any social media platform we are renting exposure.

Rental gives us advantages : leverage being the main one. We can get to 2bn people on Facebook with the right budget. Renting means flexibility, speed, low starting costs. If something isn’t working we can easily edit it or stop completely. Renting is brilliant for the short term.

A blog/webpage on the other hand is more akin to owning. We build that platform with our words and content over time. It’s an asset that we own. In fact we can even rent it out (running adverts on our site). It takes more time to build for sure but importantly we control the asset. Ownership is fantastic for the long term.

We find this dilemma in life. Should we rent or own? With property the answer is generally you want to own. With cars it will depend – do you want to switch it often? If so then renting may be best for you. What about movies/DVDs? We used to buy and own films. Now we rent them via Netflix or a similar streaming service as subscriptions are merely temporary rented access to a shared asset.

The main issue with renting is loss of control. I wanted to watch The Descent the other day on Netflix. I’d been seeing it’s poster on the front page for the last couple of months and had a mental note to at some point get around to watching it. The moment I decided to watch it, I found it was no longer available – it had been taken off the week before.

Not a massive issue in this case but let’s loop back to the world of digital marketing.

Let’s say that you’ve built a beauty brand on Instagram and have 200,000 followers. You’ve been making a living recommending certain lines of cosmetics and are very happy with your business. One day you wake up and Instagram has changed the rules on paid promotions and all your past content has been removed or banned.

Or you stream games on Youtube. Some (many!) involves guns and violence. Suddenly the political winds change and video games are being blamed for shootings. Youtube reacts and demonetised your videos.

Or you run real estate advertising on Facebook. You’ve done well over the last few years and have hired a team of people to work for you. Facebook decides to restrict how you can market real estate based on anti-discrimination laws and suddenly your advertising doesn’t work. Leads collapse, revenue collapses, you need to lay off those staff members.

In all the examples you are at the whims of forces larger than your business. Sometimes larger than the social networks themselves. After the Cambridge Analytica scandal a lot of Facebook features were thrown out with the bathwater. Legitimate marketers took a hit in the aftermath due to a knee jerk political overreaction. Yes, restrictions were required but the way they were enacted had the potential to destroy a lot of bystander businesses.

A solution

We cannot predict what events will cause sweeping changes on the social networks. There’s no point trying to guess. Instead we can just build in buffers and hedges against whatever does happen.

The gut reaction is to jump to another platform like Snapchat. This is shortsighted – it’s still just renting space on a platform. One more refined solution has been to separate income from the content. For Youtubers and influencers this has been to set up on Patreon to get paid directly from fans rather than rely on Youtube to keep cutting cheques. This is better but still relies on Patreon not raising its % of their income over time.

Instead the best defence is to make sure we have our own home online. The best structure for this is still a website with a blog. If we think of the internet as open land then setting up our own website is the equivalent of building a house or maybe a ranch. Previously we were hunting and gathering. Maybe at most pitching tents if we intended on staying a little longer on a social network site. Now we are digging wells and building a brick house. Settling in.

Does this mean going back to the olden days? Not at all. We’re going to use the traditional and the new. Classic and modern.

Social media is still the best way to get exposure. So we’ll use it for this. Blogs and websites are the best place to give our communities a permanent place to stay. Therefore we’ll use them as such.

We’ll use social media to generate an Audience and then send them to our site/blog as they become part of our Tribe.

Here at B Street we’ve developed a model we called BATON. Business, Audience, Tribe, Offer, Network. For Audience we use social media and for Tribe we’ll move into a more permanent home. We use each tool where it is most effective.

Two tiered content production

The easiest way to do this is to produce content that is adaptable for both social media and our blog/website. Celebrate laziness! Create once, publish multiple times.

This blog that you are reading for example. It started as a set of notes. I wrote the notes as the skeleton of a blog article and as a video for social media. The structure is basically the same.

The notes are written up into a blog article first and then I record a related video. That allows me to flesh out the arguments by writing so I can more easily talk about the issue afterwards.

Equally I might do it the other way. It depends on my mood to be quite honest. Some days I record the video and use the thought process during the recording to flesh out what I’m going to write. Whatever works for you is the best method.

From here the two assets (written and video) can be further converted.

The video can be cut into clips for different channels.
The video can be transcribed to create even more text for the web page (great for SEO)
The video can be embedded above the blog article itself.
The text can be edited and rewritten into a longer guide or an ebook (combined with others)
And so on

The main thing is to use one piece of content in as many ways as possible.

All social media assets point back to the written blog assets.

This is how we get people from our rented social channels back to our owned blog channel.

This is using each tool for its best suited purpose and glueing them together with content. This is how you balance out the long and short term, the slow and fast, stable and flexible.

Let’s summarise:

SEO is getting to the top of Google
Blogs became the de facto way to do this
Social media came along and seemed superior in all ways
We are only renting social media channels; we own our blog
Use social media to build an audience; bring them back to your Tribe website
Content is the glue linking social and blogs – use it wisely by repurposing your content

Post published:October 18, 2019

Stop Using Facebook like a Consumer – Facebook Marketing for your business

The number one mistake we see businesses making is their insistence on using Facebook the same way as if they were a consumer. Organic Facebook reach is dead. If you want to use Facebook for business there will be a cost to doing so. Not realising this is the biggest business mistake on Facebook.

This is not a new problem – it’s been around a few years. So if you know about digital marketing and have been operating on Facebook for awhile you don’t need me to tell you this. However the problem has not stopped – new businesses taking their presence online via Facebook are still making the same mistake.

Facebook business failures

Go on Facebook and look up a local business. Chances are they do have a Facebook page. Very likely though it’ll be a husk: one or two posts around the time of being first published, maybe a splurge of activity and then nothing.

Most business Facebook Pages are ghost towns…

This happens because business owners think that simply by being on Facebook they’ll be visible. They’ll be able to post their new menu or a deal on a particular service and it’ll be seen by potential customers. Unfortunately not. Without a paid boost this is no longer realistic.

Even worse; the people who actually follow your page will be unlikely to see your post. These are not strangers. These are people who have already told Facebook “yup, I want to hear from this business”. Even these people are unlikely to see the majority of what you post.

What happens therefore is that after an initial burst of excitement with their new Facebook Page business owners become disillusioned. How come no one is phoning about the new offer? Why has no one liked the photo of our new lasagne special?

The result? After a frenzied week of posting they stop. Facebook doesn’t work, they’ll justify themselves. Or, it may work for your business but not for mine.

But what about the hundreds of thousands of businesses that Facebook does work for? Why does it work for them and not for me and my lasagne? And it does work – Facebook’s business model is based on advertising and they wouldn’t be the size they are today if they didn’t deliver on their advertising promises.

Where then does this problem stem from?

Who is Facebook’s customer?

We treat Facebook as users – as consumers – not as customers. This is the core error.

Most of us are familiar with using Facebook as users. Heck, even our grandmother’s use it. In fact the average age of a Facebook user is 40.5 in the US. We’ve had a decade of experience using Facebook as users, as consumers.

When we use Facebook as a business though we have to come at it differently. We are no longer users – we are customers.

Stop and think about this for a moment. Who is Facebook’s customer? (I just gave it away but have a real think).

Most people would immediately say “well, the average Joe using Facebook. Me, my friends, my grandma. Facebook is for us.”

But this is incorrect. The average Joe on Facebook is PRODUCT, not the customer. More specifically the product is Average Joe’s attention.

Attention is a limited resource. It’s a subset of time but even more valuable – attention is focused use of time, something that is in short supply nowadays. We’re pulled in so many directions simultaneously by our various electronic devices, all beeping at us for attention.

Facebook is in the business of selling attention. The supply of attention comes from their users. The demand for attention – who they are selling to – the customer: businesses.

This means when we as a business approach Facebook and then proceed to use it in the same way we would as a user (instead of a customer) we’ll be disappointed. Simple as that.

The intern can do it

Working in digital marketing and with clients we see this a LOT. One tragic (albeit hilarious) tendency of businesses is to simply appoint whoever is youngest to deal with “social media” and “online stuff”.

The assumption here is that because the intern (or whoever) is young and uses social media as a user they are the best person to deal with it for the business.

Oops. Wrong.

We see this again and again. A young person given the helm with all things digital and left to sink or swim. Often, as an agency, we are brought in to help or replace the young person who is obviously out of their depth. It’s not their fault – they were thrown overboard without a life jacket. Enough nautical metaphors.

Attention isn’t free

Why do people think they can use Facebook without paying?

To be fair in the “olden days” this was more doable. When Facebook was small and had less users there was more chance that what you posted would actually get seen. When you posted a cute cat pic your friends and family were almost guaranteed to see it. If it was your racist uncle then you might even (unfortunately) see their Christmas-ruining rant many times over.

As Facebook grew though this changed. There are more than 2 billion users on Facebook now. There are 7.5 billion people on earth. Think about that – Facebook’s user base is just under 1/3rd of ALL humanity.

As the amount of people on Facebook increased so did the amount of posting. Stands to reason. At the same time advertisers were entering the fray. This was (and is) Facebook’s business model – get a lot of users and sell their attention to advertisers. The increase in users and customers means that Facebook got very busy.

Think of your main Facebook profile feed. The posts you see on a daily basis. The text, photos and videos – interspersed with advertising. All of these friends, relations, community groups, local events, big businesses and more are clamouring for your attention.

If Facebook let them all through unfiltered your feed would be chaos – you’d have new messages popping up every few milliseconds. Stop reading for 5 minutes and you’ll return to find 1000 new messages, all of them vying for your attention. Me, me, me!

So, Twitter.

Instead Facebook (and actually Twitter nowadays) added filters. Whenever you hear of an “algorithm change” on social media this is what it means – it’s a filter basically.

Facebook can tweak who exactly gets your precious attention using these filters. This is an extremely delicate balancing act. If they give priority to your friends and family only and block the advertising they’ll go bust. Remember, the businesses are their customers.

If they instead reduce the amount of content from friends and family and instead bombard you with solely advertising then guess what – they’ll lose their users. People will flock away from Facebook onto the next flavour of the month like Google+ (ha! RIP Google+).

No users, no attention, no product.

No product, no revenue, no business.

As such Facebook’s decisions about their algorithms are extremely important. They even influence stock prices as its so essential to how the business works.

How to advertise your business effectively on Facebook

OK, back to you. What does this mean for you and your business?

First up we need to stop using Facebook as a consumer. Take control back. Kick that young ‘un off the social media admin accounts. Youthful scallywag.

Next we’re going to loosen the purse strings.

Oh no! A cost!

Well, here’s the long and short of it. Tough. Getting attention costs money.

Unless you are Arnie…then maybe you can get away with it.

If you were running an advert on a TV station would you expect it for free? No – it costs. A lot.

If you were running a flyering campaign is it free? No – you need to design, print and distribute the flyers.

Hell, if you were going to a conference to do some face-to-face marketing would you expect it to be free? No, we shell out loads for these events, not to mention the time it takes.

All modes of garnering attention have an inherent cost. Facebook is no different.

The good news – Facebook is cheap. Much cheaper than those alternatives.

And, because most people pay NOTHING you can get ahead easily.

The difference between 0 and 1 is massive on Facebook. 0 investment means 0 reach. A small investment ($1-$5/day) means you are suddenly in front of hundreds-thousands of potential customers per day.

Is that cost worth it to your business? That’s a business decision. You need to know the value of attention for your business, the value of a lead and the value of a customer. Then you assess the costs of Facebook advertising against these business costs.

This is beyond the scope of the article (and covered elsewhere) but a useful piece of information. If you are going to start advertising on Facebook make sure you use video. Preferably Live Video.

Why? You get a HUGE amount more reach per £/$ spent. Facebook’s algorithms (their filters remember) prioritise video content over images, images over text. Live video is treated even more preferentially. In fact it’s the only way to get organic reach reliably nowadays on Facebook.

Also, if you are using video don’t just add a link to your Youtube channel. Facebook and Google (the owners of Youtube) are bitter rivals. Unsurprisingly therefore Facebook’s filters are more likely to show videos embedded on Facebook rather than on Youtube. Makes sense – they don’t want to send people away from Facebook over to Youtube.

We’ve covered video’s use in marketing extensively over on our digital marketing course on Youtube.

How to market on Facebook – a summary

Let’s summarise.

Don’t allow your business’ Facebook Page to become yet another husk – empty and unloved.
Facebook is a company. Unpaid reach does not happen. Get used to the idea of advertising as a business cost.
The difference between 0 and 1 online spend is massive. Get ahead of your competitors with the tiniest of spends.
Use video to get the most bang for your buck.

Post published:October 16, 2019

Digital Marketing without a Degree

Working between the digital marketing space and the mentorship and personal growth sector means that we’ve been asked a number of times whether it is possible to work in digital marketing without a degree.

It’s a common enough question that we’ve decided to put a quick blog article together on the issue.

In short you do not need a degree to get into digital marketing. In fact a lot of the formal education programmes out there are old fashioned and are likely to be teaching you out of date and unhelpful techniques.

Instead there are a HUGE amount of resources out there for learning the ins-and-outs of digital marketing yourself. The key is what to focus on and what resources are worth your time (and money).

Finally, we recommend proving your value to potential employers by showing off your chops with a real property – namely, yourself.

Let’s jump in.

Not worth the paper it’s written on – digital marketing without a degree.

There are an increasing number of digital marketing courses at universities and colleges around the world. We did a quick review of their curricula and materials and were not terribly impressed with what we found.

One note – this is primarily focused on degree granting institutions. There are a number of more vocational based outfits like General Assembly (in the US) which seem to have far more up to date curricula.

The problem with university based courses is the reliance on textbooks and non-industry professors.

Textbooks take time to write. A long time! Often they require a team of people over a number of institutions compiling information about different areas of expertise.

A lot of textbooks release yearly editions but for the most part these new editions are merely reshuffled (especially exercises and question numbering) just to make sure new students need to buy the new edition instead of just buying a second hand one. The content itself doesn’t change much.

The problem with the length of time it takes to publish and revise textbooks means that the information is always at least a year old. This is fine in most fields – the date of the battle of Waterloo isn’t going to change in your history textbook.

However, digital marketing does change. And it changes rapidly. A recent (2019) example would be Facebook advertising for real estate in the USA. A March 2019 rule changes mean that it’s now required to declare real estate advertising and this leads to a restriction in the tools available in the interface.

Any 2018 textbook (or even 2019!) would not be able to include this change. The way textbooks are published simply doesn’t allow information to be amended this quickly.

The second issue with in-class instruction of digital marketing is that often (and this may sound a bit mean, sorry!) the instructors are teachers first and digital marketers second. This is the norm in educational institutes and normally does not matter.

However, having hands-on experience in digital marketing is essential for efficacy. It’s not enough to read about the tools and techniques. Digital marketing is far more a craft – it requires getting in there and getting your hands dirty.

To be fair, a lot of teachers will be from the industry initially. But again if the information they are teaching is out of date (even by a year or two) it could be actively unhelpful for them to be passing it on to students.

What about the degree itself? Degrees are primarily a signalling device. They show that you’ve been able to concentrate and get through a programme of x number of years. This shows a potential employer that you are reliable, you’ll turn up and do the work.

There’s a concept called the “sheepskin effect” which explains an awful lot about how society treats degrees. If a person completes multiple years of their degree but does not get their final certificate (for whatever reason) they are treated as if they had no degree at all. Even if they have completed 5/6th of the course and have 5/6th of the knowledge – they are treated as if they have 0/6th of the knowledge.

The piece of paper itself (the degree) is what matters. Not the knowledge acquired. This is the main value of a degree – not what is learned per se but the signalling power of the degree itself.

This may mean that some employers will require a degree. This is one argument for getting a degree. However, there’s another way to see this requirement.

This is primarily them being lazy employers though – their HR department are weeding out applicants based on a false flag. You could have the same or more experience in the field but do not have a degree and they wouldn’t even see you for an interview. I would argue that this is not a company you should want to work for. Your skills and knowledge will not be appreciated for what they are. In the next section of this article I’ll show you how to build those skills and then prove those skills to the job market in a far more impactful way.

Skill Up – how to learn digital marketing

Let’s say that you’ve decided to go ahead and learn digital marketing yourself. Even if you are going to apply for a degree it’s still important to skill up before hand. By gaining knowledge and skills you’ll know what parts of digital marketing you actually enjoy. It’s a BIG field and having this knowledge early will allow you to not waste time studying everything.

First of all remember that digital marketing is still marketing. A lot of people forget this. Get yourself a solid foundation in the core concepts in marketing early on. Learning fancy digital tools and techniques is all well and good but without knowing the basics of marketing your work (and results) will remain surface level.

The Personal MBA by Josh Kaufman is a good place to start for basic business and marketing knowledge. The whole book is available free online section by section or you can grab a copy at any bookstore or Amazon.

Oglivy’s books on advertising are also fantastic resources. Advertising is not the same as marketing but his books are really about marketing in its entirety. Both his original book and the version update for the digital age are worth reading.

Online start following Gary Vaynerchuck and Seth Godin.

Combined these resources will give you a very solid knowledge of core marketing. Don’t go chasing the pretty lights of specific tools yet. Get the basics down with a little reading and exploration. “What works now” always changes – learning the fundamentals will help you to decide for yourself what specific techniques are worth pursuing in the future.

Once you have a foundation in marketing you need to build up the basic skills of digital marketing. Very briefly these will be:

Social media marketing
Video
Basic design
SEO
Copywriting
Blog writing
WordPress
Understanding data

Each of these takes years to master. That’s not what we need now. You need to be familiar with the basics of each. As you learn the basics of each you’ll be able to decide what particular areas you are actually interested in.

Depending on your first job in digital marketing you may need to know ALL of this or just ONE area.

If you are going into a big company very likely you’ll be hired for a very, very specific role and will need mastery in one area.

If you are going into a small company you’ll be expected (rightly or wrongly) to have experience in all of these areas…and maybe more.

What’s the right way to learn? This is the perennial question of depth vs. breadth of knowledge. Should you be a specialist or a generalist?

This is too large a question to answer right here. The practical advice I’ll offer is that for now go general so you have a foundation in all areas and, more importantly, can start to focus in on what it is you actually like doing.

Best digital marketing resources

Thankfully today you don’t need to spend huge amounts of money to access educational information. In fact a HUGE amount of the information you need about these areas is free online.

The problem is not access to information. The problem is that there is too much information out there. We need curation. We need selection. We need a guide through what’s out there.

This can be very difficult when we are new to the area – how are we meant to decide the best way to educate ourselves without knowing what’s best to learn? Catch-22.

If you can, find a mentor or coach. Someone a few years ahead of you professionally. This person can help to guide you through your learning and will be far more valuable than any formal university lecturer.

Otherwise Udemy.com is your friend here. There are many courses on ALL of these subjects available, all for around $10. Udemy has constant sales – there’s no need to ever buy anything at full price there (which is why I don’t sell courses there in general!).

How to find the best courses? First, check the previews. Very few people bother to do this. There will be a handful of free lessons in each course. Does the lecturer’s voice annoy you? Do you hate powerpoint slideshows? Are the videos too long for your schedule? Then don’t buy the course!

Check the ratings and number of reviews. It’s easy to have 5 stars if you have 12 reviews. But to have 5 stars and thousands of reviews? Chances are the course is legitimately good!

Try a few courses out and then check the other courses that a particular teacher offers. Quite often you’ll find they’ll have other digital marketing courses – quite often in all of the above highlighted areas of importance.

Later I’ll add specific guides on how to learn the topics step by step but for now use your judgement on udemy.com and you’ll be able to find more than enough fantastic material.

Putting it into practice – build it yourself

As you start your learning it’s super important to put everything into practice. Don’t just learn abstractly. Make sure you apply. This is how you convert knowledge into skills.

I’d recommend choosing a project. It could be a personal blog. It could be an Etsy store. It could be a youtube channel. It could be a combination of multiple digital marketing tools – hopefully it will grow to be this because then you can practice across the whole range of tools.

As you work through the courses you can apply what is useful to your project. This is helpful for learning but also for two additional reasons: employability and unemployability.

What do I mean by this?

First up the best calling card you can have is living, online proof that you can market online. If you go to a job interview and are asked about your relevant Instagram skills imagine pulling out your phone and showing the interviewer your Instagram account with 30,000 followers. Boom, game over – pop the champagne.

The best demonstration of ability is…doing it.

People are very good at talking and self-promotion today. It’s as if people have forgotten about the power of just getting on with it.

You showing me your successful Instagram account will land you the job over 50 other applicants (with impressive degrees!) who can only answer my Instagram question in the abstract.

Doing the work makes you employable.

The second effect of your online work though is making you unemployable.

Oops! That’s not the goal is it? You wanted a digital marketing job initially right?

Well, once you’ve learned the skills and set up your own online properties you may decide that you don’t actually want to work for someone else. If your online work is generating an income it becomes increasingly difficult to return to “ordinary” employment. You’re on your way to becoming an online entrepreneur.

Of course you can balance the two – working at a job whilst building up your online presence and business too. If you are really smart you’ll leverage the two so that your success in one helps the other.

The main thing is that having your own digital assets gives you far more control over your relationship with a potential employer. Nothing is more powerful than having options. Use your education experience to build those options so that when you do talk with employers you have power.

Tying everything together:

Formal degrees in digital marketing are not worth it
You can learn digital marketing through self education
Learn the basics of marketing first
Use udemy.com and similar resources to get a broad base of experience
Apply all your learning into your own projects
Be more employable by having walked the walk
Be unemployed by not wanting an employee!
Digital marketing gives you options. Options are power

Post published:October 15, 2019