It’s not what you thought it was
If you’re anything like me, when there’s a problem with something in your business, you jump right into finding a solution.
So when you’re struggling with your social media marketing, you go to work trying to figure this thing out. You click into Google and run a search to see what others are doing just to get a tip, a 10 step checklist, a story that you can compare yourself to … anything to help you solve the problem.
We read blog posts that make us think that we’re creating our posts the wrong way to connect with fans. Or someone else tells us we’re using the wrong sites to find qualified customers.
“Well, I guess that makes sense,” we say to ourselves. So we push forward with their advice and a few weeks later, we’re right back where we started from with our social marketing problem.
And then we fall into this unconditional pattern of finding more answers and trying out that process until we shrug our shoulders again and think, “OK well, that one didn’t work either. What’s next?”
It’s easy to just keep following this cycle of doing more research but when we spend all our time trying to solve the problem, we’re assuming that we know what the problem with our social marketing is and some amazing blog post is going to answer our questions.
But is solving this thing for the pure sake of saying that we’ve solved it really the right thing to do?
Don’t be so quick to act
There’s no doubt that these blog posts were good at helping you understand the problems that entrepreneurs have with social media marketing. But are they best choice for coming up with the right solution for your defined target audience, your products or services or the specific needs for your business?
We live in a world that if something doesn’t download in 5 seconds, we click away from that site. We want an answer to our problems and we want to work out a quick fix as soon as we can.
We want it fast and we want it now.
Some days we feel like Veruca Salt in Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory, “Daddy, I want a golden goose and I want it now!” And we’ll just push forward without a plan wanting that fancy boat or an Oompa Loompa until we end up falling down the garbage shoot.
{ If you don’t know what I’m talking about with Veruca Salt, don’t make me feel old. Rent the original Willy Wonka movie and you’ll see what I’m talking about. }
And if we keep running in circles and we’re not getting anywhere then maybe it’s time to change our approach to this thing. It’s time to slow down and really take a look at the problem.
It’s time to brainstorm some questions and not just look for any solution that you think will work.
The Real Problem
The first step to solving your problem is to spend some time understanding the “real” problem.
Is it really the content you’re posting? Are you really on the wrong site to connect with people who want to buy your stuff? How will you really know unless you take a step back and really see the whole picture?
Let’s break this thing down. Work through these questions to help you get the full view of what’s going on with your customers and your social sites:
1.Who is your target – male, female, both?
2. What is the age range of the people who use your product or services?
3. What social sites does your customer use?
4. How does this person use their top social sites? Are they on for fun, connecting with family and friends? Or are they posting information about their business?
5. Take a look at their lifestyles – run a Google search about the buying patterns of your customers. Are they visual people who need to see the thing first before buying? Or do they need to read a whole bunch of information before they make a decision?
6. What have you tried in your marketing plans and what happened? What was successful and what didn’t work?
7. Check your Google Analytics to get the details about where your site traffic is coming from and what are they clicking on to get there. If you get stuck in your analytics and not sure where to go, take a look at this post to give you some easy to follow steps to monitor your site traffic.
Brainstorm time
Now that you have a better idea of who your customer is and how this person uses social media, let’s start brainstorming your problem to find a solution that makes more sense for your business.
We’ll use this 3 step process:
1. Set a timer to 10 minutes and you’ll brainstorm questions not solutions. Come up with as many questions { don’t answer the questions, just come up with the questions! } as you can think of – just keep writing until the 10 minutes is up.
Here’s a few questions to get you started:
- What is the problem?
- Why should I do this?
- What could I stop doing?
- What could I do more of?
- What steps do I need to take to do this?
- What would I want more of if I was a fan/follower?
- What if money and time weren’t an issue, what would I do?
2. Next set your timer to 5 minutes and review all your questions. Prioritize your questions by putting a number next to each one with #1 being the most important to helping you solve your problem.
Now pull out the top 3 questions that you feel are the “real” problem that needs to be solved.
3. Time to define your problem – use your top 3 questions as a starting place to be specific to find the solutions to solve your real problem.
The best way to do this is something called a Gap Analysis. You want to work through the gap from where you are right now to where you want to be. What are the steps and tools that you’ll use to get from Point A of being in the problem to Point B, having the problem solved?
And keep writing and working it out until you see a clear path of what you need to do to with your social media marketing.
I know that was quite a lot to help you think this stuff through!
If you need some help to work through this brainstorming stuff, download this free Brainstorm Session worksheet. Because if you’re anything like me, it feels so good to write this stuff out and plan out my next step to keep me moving forward.
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