As a business owner you can either reach an audience through paid advertising or by using social media.  Growing your social media audience is a free marking method that can be very effective to grow and reach your own audience. Below are a few ideas on how to get more people to like your facebook page. ​

Managing your social media is the last part of your social media marketing plan. Many other parts have to fall into place before you can manage your social interactions and implement that new social customer service plan.

This misconception of what a social media manager does causes confusion and sets in place unrealistic expectations. Very few fully understand the amount of work that goes into a social media plan that includes research, planning, workload and the implementation of posts. A well thought out and quality social media plan should have intent such as driving traffic back to your website. If your website is small with limited reasons for sending people there, your social media campaign has no real goal. A holistic approach using your website and social media in unison is the only logical way to use social media to benefit your company. This way you dont only grow your social media following but also help make your website more relative in online searches.

I am a firm believer that you need very few social media management tools to implement a social media plan with success. ​

Step 1: Start by doing research on your industry, finding and following the leaders and their @handles, documenting the specific #tags they use and doing some basic industry searches to find additional #tags. Document all this in a tag directory that you can refer back to when creating posts. ​

Step 3:  When you know what types of posts you will be doing, it is time to start doing the work. Quality posts are planned out beforehand with words, specific social search #tags, related @tag mentions, a link and/or image. This will help to relieve the unexpected stress of managing your social media, set you up for success, and help you to be prepared for posts no matter how hard your workday might end up being. ​

Step 5: If you are serious about doing this right we would suggest making sure that you refer to your company using ONE @tag. If you have different user vanities for your social pages it could cause a lot of confusion when feeding social posts and tagging unsuspecting pages by accident. If you are not sure how to solve this issue, read more about the online Plugin service we offer. ​

Step 6: We use a detailed calendar where we plan all our final posts. It is important to get someone to review your workload for spelling mistakes before adding them to a final implementation calendar. This format helps us to easily copy and paste parts to our scheduling tool. If you are using a platform such as the free version of Buffer you can schedule 10 posts at a time going out over 3 social platforms. If you would prefer to start small you can feed facebook to twitter and then use Facebook’s scheduling tool. ​

Step 7: The last part is really the social media management part. Making sure that posts go our correctly, and editing posts with mistakes. Watching interactions and responding to comments are part of social media customer service. Your social media management team can also help to increase your conversion rate. You do this by sharing posts to a personal page, in messages, and pushing posts through to related groups. When done in a non-invasive manner this increases the reach of your posts and clicks to your website. The alternative would be to pay to boost posts using pay per click (PPC) advertising. ​

Managing your social media does not have to be expensive. It is easy enough for anyone to do successfully if you are willing to try new things and learn from making mistakes. We have many free versions of scheduling social media tools that are definitely in depth but really easy to learn.

For those small business owners, entrepreneurs and startups struggling to get through their daily operational task, we can help. We do the research, planning, and workload. You approve it all before we add it to implementation and scheduling. The only part you are responsible for would be step 7, managing interactions,  providing customer service, and sharing posts through to groups.

If you have any questions, please fill out our contact form and we will get back to you. ​

Event marketing is the process of promoting an event and a means of reaching the audience the event is intended for. Event promotion has become pretty problematic over the past 10 years with the evolution of digital tools. This has divided the process into not only the traditional outbound flyer but added an inbound part promoting your event online.

Many companies, and especially local non profit groups, are confused by the amount of online platforms and how exactly to use them. Those responsible for marketing events often have a personal profile on many of the social platforms making the task daunting and intimidating. This results in poorly attended events, frustrated hosts and sponsors.

​With so many new parts to event marketing, a systematic approach is key. It helps to divide the tasks between four different people with different skills: Brand, Content, Social, and Link Management.​

Step 2: Content - Write a press release of at least 300 words about your upcoming event. ​

Step 3:  Link - Submit your press release to local newspapers to print. Also find some national online newspaper outlets where you can upload your article. ​

Step 4: Content - Create a shorter condensed version of your press release and load it to your website blog. Do online research on the different featured parts of your event and find a photo for each. Such as a photo of the venue, the band, food trucks, beneficiary of fundraiser, and last year's event, etc.  Add a photo after each related section discussing that part. ​

Step 5: Social - Using the published blog create five posts about the event. For example one about the venue, the band, the food trucks, the beneficiary of the fundraiser, and last year’s event and who attended. Do some basic social searches to find specific but different #tags to include in each post. Each posting will be posted with the blog url. When you paste it into the post section it will load an image, make sure you select the correct image related to each post. Schedule your posts for one a day starting at least 10 days before the event. Post your 5 postings twice so that you have 10 total posts. ​

Step 6: Social - From your public business page create an event tab for the event. This can be done on Facebook and Google Plus. Add a short intro paragraph about the event with a read more and the blog link to drive traffic to the website. Invite your friends to the event and share it through to your personal profile and local related local groups. ​

Step 7: Link - Find the url links of online published articles of your press release. Add them to your blog neatly creating a hyperlink inside a word...featured in Top News… Find national third party sites such as Yelp and Evently where you can also create event tabs. Load the banner jpg and a read more link to the blog. ​

Step 8: Brand - Export your banner as a jpg and load it to the social media event tabs. Export your flyer as a jpg and load it to the wall of the event tabs. Create a short announcement post about the event and post it with the loaded flyer to your page walls. ​

Drive That Matter grew from great desperation and compassion for my fellow local small business owners. For years now I have had to say: "Sorry I am unable to help you further" after completing a website for a client. I knew the path forward 'technically' but implementing it just seemed so difficult.

​With so many parts and pieces to take into consideration, digital marketing was not only complicated but in my mind seemed almost impossible to execute effectively.

​As a small business owner myself trying to juggle keeping my business open, staying on top of deadlines, servicing clients, while trying to take care of my family, it has turned into a headache best ignored... 

Finishing the last part of Plugin Matter's Three Part Process, has given me great joy and unbelievable relief. Building this puzzle in a fun and doable visual has enabled me to explain the bigger picture visually not just to myself... but to fellow entrepreneurs desperately needing to see beyond the business problems of today. 

My biggest stumbling block was building this brand from scratch as it has so many parts to it. It has been extremely time consuming and very difficult but Corlia, my sister and partner who is also a hardened corporate art director, immediately grounded me with purchasing some stock vector images. After some tweeks I made the supporting images our own. The logo and other parts literally fell into place soon after.

This has been a long road for me. I know the building blocks by heart but finally having the road-map in-front of me is just so enlightening!

Below I included my path from the first flyer draft created a year ago, to the flyer I just finished today.  I can say with confidence, Drive That Matter is finally live! 

​Melien