Hey there, my fabulous listener, welcome to episode 210 of the Small Business Made Simple Podcast.  This one I am going to push your thinking when it comes to your marketing budget!

Thank you for lending me your ears today – I know you have lots of choices, so I sincerely appreciate me being one of them!

If you’re enjoying this podcast – I’d love you to take a screenshot and share it on your socials and tag me in it.  How cool would that be!

Don’t forget you can get the show notes for this podcast at www.socialmediaandmarketing.com.au/210

Before I get started on today’s episode – how did you go with last week’s episode? Episode 209? If you didn’t listen into that one – then once you are finished here – slip back there for even more small business made simple GOLD! It was all about launching with Russell Pearson – one of my favourite eps for sure.

But onto today’s episode.

We are talking about paid marketing strategies today and probably more so around paying to be found on social media – eg/ Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads etc.

I recently did a workshop, and in the free Q&A time, the question put to me was, “how do I bet the algorithm on Facebook and Instagram?”

My answer was rather short and a little blunter than I think the questioner thought the answer would be.

My answer.  You can’t.  You simply can’t.

And frankly, if you are posting and producing content on social media with the intention of trying to beat the algorithm, you will fail over and over again (for most of us anyway – every now and then, something or somebody will go viral – but that’s the exception, not the rule!).

As a small business owner, you should forget the freaking algorithm exists.  Stop thinking about it.

Let’s look at this completely logically with our business and marketing hats on.

You are using someone’s business FOR FREE and expecting to earn money.  You don’t want to spend money, but you want to earn money from someone else’s business – a business they spend millions, maybe billions on each year, and you want it for free.

Logically it just doesn’t make sense, does it?

If it were a newspaper or radio or tv station, you can’t get that for free, and yet we believe or have been taught or conditioned to think we can get it for free with social media.

And let’s put it out there – many of us do.  Many of my leads come from social media, and many of my clients come from social media.  Perhaps a mixture of free and paid over the years – many touch points for sure!

But my point is that the odds are stacked against you.

Meta (Facebook parent company) is a business that earns money from their product – and their product – sorry to tell you – is YOU.

You are the product that Facebook and Instagram are trying to sell.

The more “yous” they have, the more ad space they can sell to people and perhaps people like you!

So not only does Meta sell you as the product, it expects you as the buyer too.

It’s freaking crazy when you start thinking about it too much – which I am not going to do because I have a “clean” podcast and don’t want to go down the rabbit hole of swearing like a truckie or wharfie about Meta (those who know me well, know how restrained I’m being – I am NOT a fan of Zuk)

And to flip the thinking here again – I want you to look at your business model – REALLY look at it.

If you could, let’s just say, beat the algorithm, could you handle the business? 

I often laugh at emails and DMs I get that say “Let me help you get over 300 leads a day into your business” – because 300 leads a day would turn me insane.  My business model couldn’t handle it – I would be rocking in the corner after day 1!

So, if you look at your business, ask yourself this question

“how much more business can I handle?”  or if you’re a new business you are probably thinking 99% more – so ask yourself a set of different questions

• How much do I want to earn this year
• How many hours do I want to work each week

Once you know the answers to those questions, you know around how much marketing you need to do and know if going viral is really the thing you are aiming for or whether that’s just a good vain metric you’d like to have in your arsenal!

Also, use your insights and analytics to make good marketing decisions.

When to post

What to post

Where to post

So many business owners I work with have a “thing” for Instagram and use that platform the most, but the reality is that Instagram brings them very few sales and very few leads or traffic to their website – so in essence, they are marketing in the wrong place to get sales.  We know this to be a fact because we look at the data, and Instagram just doesn’t stack up.

So back, probably, to the original intent of this episode, if you are trying to use social media for free and are getting frustrated with your lack of traction, sales, or leads, my advice is

• Look at your data, like I just mentioned above and get some clarity around what’s working, what’s not and marketing goals
• Set aside a marketing budget – yep, some cold hard cashola and get yourself a paid marketing strategy.

For some more information on Facebook/Instagram ads – go back and listen to episodes 32 and 42 of this podcast.  Links are in the show notes

www.socialmediaandmarketing.com.au/32

www.socialmediaandmarketing.com.au/42

To finish and recap – you can’t beat the algorithm, you shouldn’t be trying to beat the algorithm and you need to make decisions based on marketing facts (using digital data) and have a paid marketing strategy and invest money into your business.

Social Media is becoming a pay to play place (or really is if you look at Facebook and Instagram), so rather than ignoring this, embrace it and invest some money into your business, in your marketing.

They say your marketing budget should be around 10% of your turnover – how does your marketing budget stack up again?  Yes, I said turnover, not profit!

I’d love to chat more about all this – it’s a complex topic because we see people or think we see people beating the algorithm, and we want a slice of that pie – but do we REALLY want it?

Personally, and no offence to those who do this, but dancing and singing and pointing on Instagram to go viral just isn’t my thing.  I’d rather have my followers than 50,000 of them because I was unauthentically dancing and singing.

Work out what you really want, what your business really needs and then let’s chat.  Book a discovery call with me http://bit.ly/Discoverwithjenn, and let’s get your marketing humming today – why wait any longer?

Otherwise, let’s chat in my Facebook group – Like Minded Business Owners.  If you’re not a member, come join!

See you next week on the podcast for episode 211!

But in the meantime, let’s hang out on social and get social on social – you’ll find me on Instagram, Facebook and my fav LinkedIn.

Oh and before I go, do you have a subject you’d like me to chat about on the podcast or a guest I should interview?  Please get in touch – DM me, or email jenn@jenndonovan.com.au – thank you!

But whatever you do,

……..remember small business peeps, as my opening song says, there’s no point in dreaming small!