Health Check from Brother Brother's guide to Digital Marketing
Here’s our beginner’s guide to digital marketing:
Social Media
Social media is one of the most effective ways to keep customers updated about your events and latest offers and new items arriving in store; and in many ways it has replaced the old local newspaper or freesheet.
When advertising events and offers, you should consider using geo-targeting to promote your store to local sewists and embroiderers in the surrounding areas. You can also use promoted posts as a way of increasing awareness of your store among other potential customers who have interests in crafting, pottery, painting, etc.
It’s important that not all your posts are product related as this can turn off regular followers – instead, have a good variety of posts to keep your audience engaged. Some ideas could be to share some photos (with permission) of customer makes, the latest trends in sewing, craft inspiration as well as promotion of your store’s events and offers.
Post regularly and commit to a publishing schedule. There are tools available that will let you manage your posts automatically in advance allowing you to create your posts for the week or month ahead in one go. You can read more on Facebook Business.
Instagram posts should include location tags and hashtags for your local area, for example, #sewinginDidsbury or #quiltingDidsbury, as well as a hashtag for just your town or city name. This is to make your business appears when customers search their area. To find the best sewing or embroidery related hashtags for your area try some # searches to see what pops up.
While there are many social media platforms, (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter etc.), managing these accounts can take time, so choose one that suits your customer base best.
Facebook or Instagram would most likely be your best options and a new feature allows you to link both of these platforms to help you save time when posting. The feature allows you to simply add Instagram as a posting option with the Facebook post you’re creating, automatically pushing the post to Instagram when you publish it, or vice versa. You can learn more about linking your Instagram and Facebook page here.