Why every service based business should be making social media content.

Growing up, we hosted a yearly yard sale. My siblings and I would gather all the clothes we grew out of and the books, toys, and games we grew too old for, and would set up out in front of our house to sell to others in our neighborhood. Now if we simply set up tables in front of our house, we would be lucky to get a few people passing by to stop and check out what we had to sell. So, early in the morning, my dad would drive us around to place signs on busy street corners around town, directing people to where they could head to check out our yard sale.

Our town had a decent number of people who get up early on Saturday mornings and drive around scoping out different yard sales. However, they would likely never have found us if we just set up tables in front of our house tucked away in our neighborhood. So by placing our signs where we knew these people would be driving by, we could grab their attention just long enough to maybe convince them to head down our street.

Something that is critical for every business to understand is where they can grab the attention of their target customer or client.?

It’s my continual mission to provide small and local business owners as much information as I can to help them manage and scale their businesses. I hope you take away at least a small amount of insight from this reading that you can apply to your day-to-day business operation.

Why Every Service Based Business Should Be Making Social Media Content

To bring people to my family’s yard sale, we could have done a lot of things. We could have gone door to door all throughout town leaving flyers on people’s doorsteps, we could have asked to speak at some local events in the week leading up to it, or we could have even bought an ad spot on the local radio or newspaper. All of these things were sure to have gotten a lot of people’s attention, maybe even more than our little signs we hung on a dozen light posts. So why didn’t we do them?

It wasn’t worth our time or money!

For how much time and money we would need to invest to do any of these things, we might as well not even run a yard sale! We were lucky to even make two or three hundred bucks after everything was all said and done. Better yet, who is to say we would have even reached the people we wanted to hear about our yard sale.? We knew the people looking for yard sales on Saturday mornings would be driving around all of the busy street corners. So why go door to door or pay for ad spots when we could put ourselves right in front of where we KNEW our customers were going to be, for FREE!

This same small idea applies on a macroscale to businesses today.?

The cost of maintaining a regular social media presence is one of the cheapest ways businesses can be interacting with their target client base. Especially in the local business world, social media tends to get overlooked in favor of more traditional forms of advertising. Yes, every local plumber, electrician, landscaper, etc, should be knocking it out of the park when it comes to their website presence, Google Ads, and local advertising/events. However, many underestimate the power a regular social media presence holds.?

Your Target Client is On Social Media… Every. Single. Day.

Even if your target audience is a bit older and you think they aren’t spending time on social media platforms, they are. The consensus rough estimate is that 70-75% of 50-64 year olds regularly use some form of social media. This number increases with younger age brackets, which means over time, usage rates for older demographics is likely to increase.?

It Costs Almost Nothing

There exists no other form of advertising where people have the chance to interact with your company for free. Social platforms charge nothing for organic posts. Meaning, if you create content that genuinely provides some form of value to your target client, you have the chance of reaching them at no cost other than the time it takes to create a post.?

Talk Directly with Your Ideal Customer

The ability to speak directly to potential customers is not something you frequently get the chance to do. However, if people in your local area find your content engaging or helpful in any way, they may follow your page. This is an incredible opportunity to start a discussion. As a plumber, not everyone’s house is in need of some repair at the minute; which means you can’t really go about cold calling residents hoping they happen to need a plumber. However, if you see you get a new follower, you can send them a direct message thanking them for the follow and an offer they can redeem with you at any time. This is likely not going to seem “salesy” to them as it is disguised as a thank you for following the page. They may not need your services right now, but if a need should arise in the future, you could be top of mind if they know they have an offer they can redeem.

Now, the purpose of this writing is not to go into the details of HOW you should go about social media content, that is a topic for another day. I am simply trying to encourage those business owners who feel it is not worth their time to invest in a genuine social media strategy. It is my honest belief that even if you feel your business is too mundane or this is not the place your ideal customer is spending their time, a social media strategy is a valuable asset you should add to your business.?

You know where your target customer is going to be and can put your business in front of them at very little cost. Why wouldn’t you want to put your business on the busy street corner that is social media?