 Thanks everybody for joining us for another TechSoupConnect Australia webinar. My name is Kat Milner. I am the owner and chief tech ninja of Create Your Change, a digital mentoring company. It is an absolute delight to have everyone here today. So our guest today is Erica McInerney who is a marketing and social media strategist and also a trainer at McInerney. This is a company that was founded to increase digital skills and confidence in both individuals and organizations. Over the past 25 years, she's worked across many sectors doing a lot of different kinds of things, including local government, tourism, regional arts, community services and more. She has helped thousands of regional and rural entrepreneurs and community leaders achieve their goals and stop stressing and guessing when it comes to digital marketing. So without further ado, it is my absolute pleasure to turn things over to Erica McInerney. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. I thought I would just, before we get too deep in it, acknowledge the Ghanai Kurnai people, traditional owners of the land in which I am usually based. My office is based and I do a lot of my work in West Gippsland. Today, as I was saying before everyone started, I had to duck into Melbourne. Bit different. I'm doing this in a spare room. Thank you, Kat, for that introduction. I thought I would just do a very super quick rundown of who I am, why I'm qualified to be talking about this stuff. Been working in this space for 25 years, straight after my first degree and I haven't really strayed from the advertising marketing space. Seven years ago, I started McInerney, which is a consultancy, a training consultancy most of the time and I work with a lot of regional and rural businesses, individuals and organisations. And I'm super into customer experience and consumer behaviour and I love to get a little bit nerdy about all of that stuff. So I will try to not get too nerdy today and I'll just stop talking about myself. We're here today to talk about low cost or no cost marketing ideas. And I'm going to cover off in the space at the time that we've got. I'm going to cover off on a few things. Obviously, I can't do everything and be everything and cover everything today. So if you've got any questions, please, as Kat said, pop them in that chat. I'll go, I might move pretty quickly. So if something comes up, drop it in the chat and I'll just keep every time I move to a different topic, I'll quickly flick back and make sure that I haven't missed your questions. And then at the end, feel free to hang around and ask any questions that you like. Now, the reason that I have started with this quote is it's a quote that I've had stuck up above my desk for a very long time and it's don't push people to where you want to be, meet them where they are. And it reminds me every day that you need to lead with your marketing and that leading doesn't always mean walking out in front, showing people the way. Sometimes you can lead from within walking with people. And I think in that knock for profit sector, it's important to really get to know your audiences and really feel or make them feel like you get them. You understand them, you know why they're here. How everyone else feels about that. Hi, everyone who's just dropped in. Knock for profits often need to really stand out in quite a crowded space. And that space is full of people who need attention and it can feel really hard to stand out, especially when you don't have huge budgets. There are a lot of knock for profits. I'm gonna stumble today. A lot of knock for profits who do have massive budgets and unfortunately you need to stand out from them as well when you're just one of the little guys. The thing about today, the thing about everything that I'm going to teach you is that whilst the platforms that I talk about, whilst the channels I talk about and the activities that I talk about might not cost you very much money, the swap for that is time. You'll be swapping money or time to achieve the results that you want. And I'm sure you're always a bit familiar with that. Correct me if I'm wrong. So what I would normally do before I started any kind of strategy with someone who didn't have much of a budget is I would get them to look within their organization and find out what resources they already have and that skills, is there anyone creative in your organization? Who are the people in your organization who have the skills that you need? What kind of time do you have? How much time can you allocate to these activities? Because that's really important. And can you then structure your activities around your time and the time of the other people in the organization who have the skills that you need? If you focus, if you are consistent, if you structure your activities, you can spend less time. So as we're going through this today, I don't want you to be sitting there thinking, oh my God, she's just saying all of this stuff and I need to do all of this stuff all of the time. I just don't have any time. I don't want you to think that. They're just suggestions. But I guess what you might need to do is start to think about prioritizing channels. How many channels are you using for your marketing? Which ones? Who are your audiences on those channels? It's super important to make sure that you're not trying to be everything to everyone across all of the channels because that's going to eat away your time and stop you from being consistent. Two biggest time savers I find are strategy and planning but you also do need time to do those things. Before you get started, particularly if you're thinking about using social media is to set your intention. And this will help you when you are trying to decide which channels that you want to use. Why are you using this channel? If you're using Instagram and Facebook and LinkedIn and Pinterest and TikTok and email marketing and all of this stuff, why are you using them? Who are you talking to in that, through that particular marketing channel? And what do you want them to do? Set your intention. When I use Instagram, for example, that's one of my major communication channels but I don't use Instagram as a sales channel. I use Instagram as a way to share knowledge. So when I think about success, what does success on Instagram look like for me? It's not how many sales did I get? How many website clicks did I get? It's more how people messaged me. How many conversations did I have? Are people seeing what I'm putting out there? Are people liking it? And when you think about a channel like Instagram, for me that fits really well. Whereas I might use a different channel like networking or email marketing for that more sort of direct sales messaging. So what do you want to do? Connection, networking. Do you want to increase or nurture the volunteers you have in your organization? Do you want to drive your website? Do you want to bring people into wherever you are? Do you want to increase brand awareness or build community? Or do you want to be advocates? What's the intention of you using that marketing channel and knowing that and being really clear and really specific will help you to make better content? Just check in. I think everyone's just saying hello in the chat but I will stop and keep thinking. Now, audiences are something that I could honestly bang on about all day, but I won't. And the reason that I'm so focused on audiences is because they are the key to your success with any of these marketing channels. So really understanding who your audiences are and what drives them. What do they want to hear from you? Where are they? What are they interested in? What time of life are they in? How are they going to help you? Developing that audience first mindset when it comes to your marketing is super important. And I've highlighted the word empathy for that reason. Like really understanding and getting inside your audience's head is important. If you haven't already, true they are, look at who's already connecting with you. If you're selling something or if you are running events, look at demographics, look at where they're coming from, collect information, collect data, ask them things, find out as much as you can about the audience that you have because they're really important to you. And then when you know that, you can go down the path of creating profiles or avatars or anything like that if you want to, if you need to. But I generally find that just a few sentences is enough to really describe your audience. Importantly, knowing how your product or service adds value to their lives, that's something that you need to dig a little deeper into because that's going to drive the messaging that you use across your marketing. So understanding what makes you special? How are you different to your competitors? How are you different to other people who are providing the services that you're providing? That's all really important stuff that you should know and you should write down. Telling a bunch of people who work in not-for-profits, what empathy is probably telling you how to suck eggs and I'm sorry, but I am gonna just talk a little bit about empathy because he keeps coming back to this idea of what is your audience interested in? And sometimes I think that we get a little too close. We get a little too close to our product or our service or our organization and we make it all about us and we start doing things where we think of social media as media. Here's what I wanna tell you, you should know this, this is important, be me, but what you should really be doing is using empathy and understanding how your messaging affects them, what the service you provide does for them and communicating it in that way. So it's things that they want to hear. You're in their personal space most of the time, whether it's email, whether it's social media, whether it's a podcast, whatever it is that you're doing to market your organization, you're in their personal space and it's important to remember that you need to add value to them in some way. I wanted to make a bit of a distinction between empathy and sympathy and this has come up a lot lately. Just before everyone jumped in, we were just talking about weather, talking about, for example, floods. There's been a lot of natural disasters, there's been a lot of crazy things happening in the world and there's been a lot of need for sympathy. And what's really risen to the top is this idea of sympathy marketing. You need to help me because this has happened to us. Spread the message because I think you probably all get what I mean. And there's a bit of a distinction here. So empathy is thinking about how your audience feels and what they need. Sympathy is then focused on your problems and putting that forward as a reason to purchase or to connect with you. Empathy is creating content that develops a relationship based on value and benefits. Whereas sympathy is creating content that has a call to action to help or save. Now, I'm not saying either of these is bad, just making that distinction. Empathy promotes connection based on shared values and interest. Sympathy promotes connection during periods of crisis but it can become often dependent on that crisis. And that's important to understand that if you get too deep in building connections with your audience, if you get too deep into that sympathy marketing mode, sometimes it can be really hard to come back out of that and to people lose interest because they've followed you for a particular reason and they've connected with you for that reason. Sometimes it can be hard to dial that back. So I've got two examples today. One is just to show you just a visual between empathy and sympathy that I can see. So at the top we've got a chook egg farm and it's family farm and you can see that the chickens are really well cared for. You can see that it's a young family and they're all out there. So that connects with me because I want to buy eggs from farming families. I want to buy ethical eggs. The visual helps me. The freshest food grown by Australian farmers from our fields to your table that reiterates that message that it's an Australian farm. Whereas the bottom image is fresh food for your family that puts food on the table for our Aussie farming families that speaks directly to some kind of suffering or some kind of need to purchase from farmers. So we're going to see that distinction, hopefully. 15% of Australian children will go hungry at this Christmas, donate now. These are thoughts of images that we see a lot at this time of year. Empathy is something more like I have young children and I relate to this image. With your support together we can help the two million Australian children who would usually go hungry at Christmas. So do you see the distinction there between sympathy and empathy and understanding that I'm your target market not your this particular fake charity. I'm your target market and you're showing me an experience that I might have with my own children and you're saying with your help you can provide this same experience to families, bang on about that. If anyone has any questions or comments just drop them in. I'll probably just flick through my question screens because I tend to wrap it on. I'm going to talk a little bit about Google because Google sometimes gets forgotten. We talk about Google when we're building a website and we talk about SEO and how important it is to use keywords and key search phrases and all of that stuff. But not everyone has a website and not everyone needs a website but you can still have a Google presence. So what I would encourage you to do is to Google yourself, not necessarily yourself personally but your business, your organization, people who work in your organization and just noodle around and see what comes up and see how high up you come. You can then have a little bit of control and you can do what I loosely call stacking the search. What you wanna do is create some backlinks to you. I'm not gonna go too deep into SEO if you want to get into SEO. I'm sure Kat's got someone who's way better at that than me but you can whenever you're putting images up online, whenever you're sending images out to newspapers or putting anything on your website, just making sure that you have named that image really carefully so that it's got either your name or the name of the organization that can help you with image search. A Google business profile is free. If you don't have one, you should get one. They're really easy to set up and it means that you have this great presence on Google that really, look, I've got a website obviously next to that but you don't have to have a website to have a Google business page. If you're an organization that offers services an organization that offers workshops and things like that then you can start to collect reviews and you can ask your participants to give you reviews and you can put a stack of information on there. You can sell products from there. You can put up like little news things. You can put up a bunch of stuff on there. It's just a mini website. Head to Google and just type in Google business profile and Google will tell you how to do that. I've got an example here of a cafe that's near me and they've got such a great presence and the reason why they've got a great presence obviously is that, look, it's a cafe, so it's a bit different but they do have a lot of people putting up reviews. They do have a lot of people contributing images to the Google image search. So once you have Google business profile people can actually add images to it. So again, if you've got a service that people are attending in a need of Hella case I know they are an artists collective and they do markets and all kinds of stuff and they have a lot of beautiful visuals and if they have a, and I haven't checked but if they have a Google business profile you can be just uploading lots and lots of great imagery of all of your artists and the markets that you attend and really creating this little website on there. Hey, Erica. Yeah. Sorry, before you go on too far can I just ask a couple of quick things? Yeah, go for it. Yes, Google is a Google business profile the same as the Google My Business. Yes. And you touched on backlinks? Yes. I think maybe, I don't know but I think maybe not everybody would necessarily know what a backlink is. Yeah, sure. Playing that a little bit. Yeah. So if you've got a website and you have a URL or a domain the more times that appears elsewhere around the web the better. It helps particularly if people are clicking on that link it helps Google to promote your business hire in search in a nutshell. So you can list yourself in some of the major directories and things to help that. So let me give you an example. DIN for example has an incredible position all the time in Google search. So if you have a search for an organization or an individual you'll often find that they're linked in profile or their company page is like really high up in that Google search. And that's because LinkedIn is popular and it has and Google knows that but you'll also find that having a presence in things like yellow pages or white pages they don't have to be the paid versions or true local or some of those directories your local council might have business or organization directories there might be some online directories that list organizations like yours. But the more times that you can get your business name and your businesses web address and your details onto the web the better because then you can stack that search. So Google has more opportunities to when somebody is searching for what you do or for your name it's got more opportunities to show your website or your details. Does that make sense? Facebook also has a really high position in the Google search as well. So when we think about Google can actually search Facebook and LinkedIn and places like that so making sure that you have all of those profiles set up and set up well and have as much information as possible in there. Yeah, that's a bit of a nutshell. Again, thank you. I said I'm not an SEO expert. Yeah, Google business profile is a Google My Business. Yeah, they're changing now. They've moved, they've moved it into maps. So when you are actually working on it it's you're actually working on it in maps. So it's got a very good presence in Google Maps. I will say on that note a lot of people tell me they haven't done it because they work from home or they don't have an address. Google business needs to validate an address and it will send you a postcard to validate that address in order for you to have a profile that goes live but you do not have to display that address and that's really important to know you can actually switch that off. They just need to send you a code. So this next, where am I headed? I'm going backwards. Wow, that's so weird. Sorry, my things swapped around. Now I just have to remove to use the other arrow. I'm gonna talk a little bit about location and hopefully there's some people in here who have businesses or organizations that are location-based because this will make a bit more sense to you. One of the cool things about Instagram if anyone is on Instagram and wants to try this at home you can actually now browse by place. So if you go into your Instagram and you do a search you might search for your town. So I'm my town's Waragul and when I search Waragul I can search on the hashtag Waragul or I can search for the place and it'll have the little place symbol next to it. And when you do that, it brings up, oh my video's not gonna work, I just realized. So weird, sorry, whatever. It brings up all of the businesses in your town or that are using the location of your town. So if you're using Instagram it's really important to put your location in so that you can be found when people are looking to see what's happening in your town. You might find if you've never done it before it's all your suburb or your town. If you go in and have a look it's actually really cool, it brings up a map and you can see all of the little circles of the business profiles in the area and you can flick them up, you can tap on them you can zoom in and out of the map and you can really search and see what's happening in your location. Now this is relevant if you are a location-based business if people can come in and work with you or buy from you. The other cool thing that you can find when you search by location is you should have your location or your organization's location listed in Facebook and Instagram. And when you search for your own location you might find that people have actually posted content on Instagram that you didn't even know was there because they didn't tag you they might have just used your locations of your holding workshops or things like that they may have actually posted about you you didn't know about it. So it's a good idea to just keep checking and keep searching for yourself to see what other people are saying about you because you might have some opportunities to share that content making sure when you are posting on Facebook and Instagram then that you are always putting in your location or a location. Which leads me to my next point if you want to increase your visibility in another area then you can use a different location and your posts will appear in that location to those people who are searching in that location. So just give you an example using Instagram stories. If you use the sticker, the location sticker in all of your Instagram stories and I encourage you to use stories and I'll talk about that in a minute. If you use a location sticker you will appear in that location's story. And what that is that in any 24 hour period Instagram compiles together like a slideshow of all the public stories that people have done in a particular town. So let's take my town again, Waragul. Every person who uses the Waragul location sticker in their stories gets pulled together in a little slideshow. And so I can go to search for place and search for Waragul and there's a town story and I can just flick through and see what is happening in my town, which is really cool. So you can use that to be found in other towns in other places as well. So if you are in Waragul but you want people in Shepperton to see what you're doing then you might use the Shepperton location sticker and you will appear in Shepperton's town story slideshow, which is cool. And obviously I'm not in Shepperton but if I was going to do that then I could just hide it under another sticker like a little location, a little hashtag sticker or something like that. Does that make sense? These were supposed to be videos to show you but yeah, it's not working for me. I won't talk too much about this because we won't have time to do activities but if location is important to you then think about where you would like to be found. Within driving distance are people going to travel to you? What kind of hashtags, place hashtags could you use to drive people to you? And start to think about businesses in those areas that you might follow and engage with so that you can increase your visibility. I'm happy to take any questions on hashtags maybe at the end but I did wanna just briefly talk about hashtags because I'm finding a lot of people say to me oh, hashtags aren't important anymore or I don't understand them so I just make them up and I just use whatever or I just copy what someone else is doing. And to that I will say don't do any of those things. They still are important. They're very important on Instagram. They're mildly important on Facebook. They're important on Twitter. Brave enough to use Twitter at the moment. And they're really important on LinkedIn. Hashtags aren't just a funny little symbol. They're a way to search. They're a way for people to search but they're also a way to be found. So I want you to think what do I wanna be found for? What are people be searching for to find this post that I've done? So if I'm talking about walking my dog and I put hashtag coffee, hashtag I love coffee all of this random stuff and I'm not drinking a coffee then I'm not using them properly. I might think, oh, people who like dogs might also like coffee. That's a terrible example, sorry. But that's not what they're searching for to find the post that I've done. So you need to think about how to bring people to you using hashtags. Using hashtags in peppered throughout your text is a definite no. Use them but push them to the end of your caption. Nobody needs to see them, nobody wants to see them but it's important that they're there. The other type of tag that you can do is you can mention. So if you are working with someone, if you're collaborating with someone, if you're talking about someone, if you think that they might be interested in it. So for example, if you're at a local market you can mention the market, you can mention the local tourism body, you could mention the local council. Anybody who has anything to do with that market or might be interested to know that you're there. If you mention them, then they get a note. They get a notification saying that you mentioned them and they're potentially going to be one of the first people who actually engage with your post. So make sure that if you are talking about someone that you actually mentioned them so that they know. Just using someone's hashtag, they won't get a notification so they may never see that post that you did. Your audience matters. If you wanna be found, if you wanna be seen, you need to think about what they're looking for so that when they're searching for you, when they're searching for something like you, something that you offer, you need to be found at the end of that search. So going back to place and the idea of location, hashtags are a really important piece of that puzzle too. For example, I've just got an example here of a neighborhood house in Bansdale, which is in East Gippsland. If I was putting together a stack of hashtags for a neighborhood house in East Gippsland, this is some of the stuff that I might do. So I'm mixing them up the different types of hashtags so that I can get, draw people to me and also help inform the algorithms about what my post is about. So I've got location, East Gippsland, Visit Gippsland, Bansdale. I've got my brand, neighborhood houses, adult learning, learn local, community center. So they're more sort of brand hashtags. Then my post might be a community garden. So grow your own gardening tips, community garden. You can also use them to suggest something like volunteering is fun, community matters, volunteer work. So you're looking to attract volunteers to your people who are interested in volunteering. And then also too, you can use them for cause if that's relevant to you. Disability awareness, biggest morning tea. So if there's a particular cause or a particular thing that you are promoting at the moment. Excuse me. I'll keep going. I'm going to talk about reels. Hopefully there's people in here who are using Instagram or people watching who are using Instagram. I'm going to specifically talk about reels for a minute because everybody is interested in them. And also they are, when it comes to Instagram, they're the only way that you can increase your visibility really at the moment and grow. So if you're in a growth, if you're in a period of growth or you want to be in a period of growth when it comes to social media, then probably do need to use reels. Set your intention. Like I said, back at the start, why am I using Instagram and why am I using Instagram reels? Who's my audience? Does this suit me? Can I do this in an authentic way? Am I just looking at what everyone else is doing and doing what they're doing? Do resources, do I have the time and skills to master this? These are the questions that you should be asking yourself back when you are setting your intention, when you're thinking about strategy, when you're thinking about planning, when you're thinking, how can I do everything in the time that I've got? And then also always, what's my goal? If your goal is to grow your following on Instagram so that more people can hear about you or so that more people can find out what you do and pass it on and become advocates for you. Does this reel, does this piece of content, does this decision to make videos fit with that goal and fit with my intention? Just continuing on from thinking about Instagram and then where reels actually fit in Instagram mix, it's important to understand that Instagram is not just one anymore. When someone opens up Instagram, they are presented with a whole bunch of different since the one place. And not everybody uses Instagram in the same way. Some people go straight to the shop. Some people go straight to the stories and stories are seen by 90 something percent of your existing followers. So stories are a really great place for you to nurture and engage with your existing audience who might not be seeing your grid posts because nobody's seen grid posts at the moment. So if you're not using stories and you're not getting much traction on your grid posts then head up to stories and start talking directly to the people who already follow you. Stories lead into messages. Some people use Instagram a lot for messaging and I would encourage you to get as many messages as possible because not only does it help you to connect with your audience, it helps the algorithm to understand that you have a relationship with that person and that they're more likely to want to see your stories and your grid posts and your reels. By using stories you can really drive those messages. Reels are very highly interest based and when you go into your reels feed you'll see that most of the accounts, most of the reels that you see you don't even follow those accounts. You might have never even heard of those accounts. So Instagram's putting popular content based on what it thinks you're interested in. My reels feed is a mix of social media tips which I don't necessarily want to see and then also lizards and ocean creatures because that's what I sit down with my son goes, can we watch reels? And so I search for stuff that he's into. You'll notice if you're using reels that it's very interest based and the minute you watch one lizard video, it's all over. That's all you're going to get from then on. All right. Crapping on a bit, sorry. The next thing that I want to talk about moving on from that sort of idea of place is if you are local and even just local to Australia or to a region, local stories matter. If you want to build a local audience then you can share relatable content. You can share shared experience is really important. If you think about the things that make you stop the things that make you want to read more it's because you've gone, oh, I'm interested in that or I know that person, all right? I've been there, I know that place. So really using local faces, local places things that people recognize things that people can relate to is important. Collaborating with other local organizations or other people is a really great and a really great way to expand those networks and to get more eyes on what you do. And also to depending on who you're collaborating with and obviously it would be with someone or with an organization that has shared values and a shared audience. It means that you have the opportunity to connect with their audience, with their followers as well and that's going to expand every single person that follows you on social media or signs up to your email list is connected to a stack of people who have similar values and similar interests to them. So even if you don't have a huge following if you're connecting even you have 120 followers on Instagram that's 120 people who have huge networks. So connecting with them on an individual level and putting up relatable content and interesting content and messaging each other and doing stories and connecting with them it's really important. And the more that you can connect with them the more likely they are to talk about you. As you will know all of the things that you do online are run by computers and computers use algorithms to solve problems. In the case of something like a Facebook they use hundreds and hundreds of thousands possibly even millions of algorithms to solve all of the problems. And one of the problems that they solve is when I pick up my phone and I open up Facebook what do I want to see? What am I interested in? What am I most likely to engage with? What are my friends up to? Who am I close to? It's my little butler. It's bringing me the daily news and if I'm only in Facebook for 10 minutes a day then it's only going to bring me the most like the top level stories. So these algorithms get to know the habits of the users but they also get to know and understand what it is that you as an organization, as a company page, what are you posting about? What do you talk about? Who's your audience? Who's interested? So working with algorithms is really important and algorithms love consistency. They love data. So be consistent with the type of content that you do be consistent with the wording and don't jump from here to there. Be consistent with your visual identity. I love Canva. And if anybody is watching this and they've never used Canva canva.com go and check it out on the desktop version. The app's not great. The desktop version of Canva is amazing but it presents people who aren't creatively minded with a lot of choice and a lot of different designs to use. And so what I see then is these social media feeds that are just a real hodgepodge of designs. And then I don't recognize you in my feed. If you're not consistently showing up with similar graphic design or similar faces or your logo or something that tells me it's you when I'm scrolling past, I'm not recognizing you. And that's really important. It's really important for those algorithms as well. Algorithms love to see connection which I said before, messages, saves, shares. Make sure you're using calls to action. Get people to do stuff. Who are you talking to? What are you saying in your post or your email or whatever piece of marketing you're doing? Who are you talking to and what are you saying? What do you want them to do with that information? And did you ask them to do it? That's important. I want people to message me. I've posted a tip and I want people to comment below if that tip helped them. If I don't say that, they won't do it. So if I don't end my post with, I hope this really helps you, try it out and come back and tell me if it worked for you. If I didn't tell them to do that, they won't do it. So think about that whenever you're creating a piece of content. Algorithms, all of these channels, they all use search engines. Facebook is still the third most used search engine in the world. Instagram is a search engine. LinkedIn is a search engine. YouTube is the second most used search engine in the world. You must optimize your profiles. You must think about keywords. You've got to think about the words that you're using so that when people are searching for what it is that you do or what you're saying, that you show up. If you're not saying it, if you're just putting an article up and just going, hey, check this out, how do the algorithms know? They're not gonna go and click on the article and go and read the article and come back and go, oh, that's what she meant. So you've got to be quite specific in the language that you use. And we say like, talk to the robot, but don't talk like a robot. So if you can't say what you want to say in your caption without sounding strange, then use keywords as hashtags instead. And that's a really easy way. If you want to have a really nice fluffy post, make sure you back it up by having some keywords down the hashtags. I'm gonna talk about asking. This is another really great quote from a very famous salesman. He might not seem that relevant in a not-for-profit sense, but the sentiment is, don't sell life insurance, sell what life insurance can do. Don't want you to think about that from whatever perspective you're coming from because people don't connect with the insurance. They connect with what it means to them. They connect to the fact that it's a safety net. They connect to the fact that it's providing for their family that they're like, whatever it is that you're doing, what makes what you do important to your audience or to your customers or to your clients? What's the thing that makes it important to them? Even an artist, it's a thing that connects people to art. Is it a gift? Is it going to hang on their wall? Do they like it? Does it match? There's all of these decisions that go into somebody purchasing a piece of art. And rarely is it the thing that you might think. Anyway. All right. So if you wanna scan that QR code, if you haven't already got it, I've got a free downloadable on my website which is about calls to action. Cause I find, particularly not for profits, particularly artists, sorry guys, ladies find that the thing that's lacking most in marketing is a call to action. And there's this misconception that if you, that it has to be sales-y, that it has to be go and buy it on my website, download it now, do this, do that. Sales messaging doesn't have to be so direct, especially when you're talking about email or social media content. They say that in that guide. So hopefully, hopefully you'll download it. But just as a bit of an example from that is, instead of saying sign up, you might say be the first to learn more or tap through for all the answers. Contact us cause we're also bored of those sales messages. Contact me, subscribe now, like, tag, share. There are all things that we just tune out. Can you come up with a different way to say it? Subscribe now on some good stuff in your inbox. Help me spread the word. There's always a different way to spin it. But everything that you do should have a purpose. And then you should connect with that purpose and you should get your audience to connect with that purpose. Helen has just said, really calls to action, you're so right, it makes me squirm. Makes everyone squirm. One tip that I give people all the time is, if you don't, if you find the sales messaging part of what you do really uncomfortable, sit down with a Word document or something and type out a whole bunch of calls to action that you feel okay about. And when you create content, just go over and just copy and paste and disconnect from actually writing that again, approve them, be happy with them, order them into the different types of call to action that they might be. So there might be some website ones or there might be some come and visit me at the market or there might be all of that. Just write them all down and then just copy and paste and do that last and just do it and send it. You don't need to check the spelling, it's done. Because yeah, it's hard. But the thing is people don't mind that you're selling something if you're selling something. It's really, we're used to it. That's why we're there. Just as a little bit of a summary, try if you're not already, try making reels to draw new people to you. Reels don't have to be dance, dance. They can be anything, they're just videos. So they can be a video of you creating. They can be a video of you just talking to camera. They can be a video of a walkthrough of your organization. They could be people just waving behind their desks and introduction. They can be literally anything. It's just a video. Yes, Kat, you can make Reels on Canva. That is true. Canva is amazing. Try using storytelling to nurture your existing audience and use that story's function. Stories are great. Can, yeah, probably push that barrel a little hard today. Do encourage messages. I know they take time. I get it. But you'll find that the more messages you receive, the more comments, the more reach you'll get and you'll actually start to build this really nice connection with the people who follow you. If you're busy, if you're super busy, you can use the Frequently Asked Questions in something like Facebook. They have in your, if you go into Business Suite into your inbox, you can set up automatic questions and answers. So if there are things that people are asking you all the time and perhaps you're not available all the time, then you can have a little menu of Frequently Asked Questions, which is great. Carousel posts are working, still working pretty well on Instagram and encouraging people to save things or putting out some tips or a recipe or a how-to or whatever it is. If you do it in a carousel, then you can encourage people to save it and that shows intent and algorithms like that. Try some long-form captions. If you always have these little brief captions because somebody told you that brief was good, sometimes brief is good, but you might mix it up by getting people to actually read something every now and then. Calls to action if you're not already doing them and also try commenting more where your audience is. So go and follow accounts, go and follow and comment on accounts where you think your audience might be. One of the things about Instagram that's happened recently is we have the ability now to, when we go to our feed, we can choose people that we're following or we can choose people that are our favorites and that's stifling our ability for our posts to get out because people are choosing following or favorites and when they do, if you're not a favorite or they're not already following you, it's very hard to be found. End of story. But if you're following all of these accounts where you think your audience is and you hit your following feed, then you're going to get a chronological newsfeed of all the accounts that you follow. So you can have the chance 10 minutes a day to be the first or the second person to comment on all of those posts that are coming in and that means that you're more likely to be seen by anybody else who sees that post. So just, yeah, just try maybe spending a little bit of time noodling around on Facebook and Instagram and LinkedIn or YouTube or wherever it is that you are. Just commenting more to increase your visibility. Probably run out of time but if you have any budget, you can use Google ads and Facebook ads and you can look at paid partnerships with influencers if that's an option. You can do a lot of really cool things with Facebook ads which I won't go into detail but feel free to get in touch if you're interested. But one of the things that I put up here just going back to that idea of location is one of the things that you can do with your digital advertising is this idea of geo-fencing. So you can choose a specific area that you want to target people who come in and out of that area. So in the case of a cafe, if they wanted to bring foot traffic in, then they might serve ads within walking distance of their cafe and the ad might have a call to action on it. Come in and show this ad and get a dollar coffee or whatever makes sense. But all of these things, they're faster. They're much faster ways to grow your audience. The stuff that I've talked about today is a little bit slower but hopefully it just makes you start to think about the way that you're doing things and are you making the most of things like algorithms and search and all of these opportunities that are there instead of just doing what you've always done or just posting or just continuing to try to guess what you should be doing to reach your audience. Does anyone have any questions? Sorry, I went over a little bit. Feel free to unmute if you've got questions instead of typing. I can see people's mouths moving, hang on. Tosally, baffling. I'm baffling you still. Yeah, I'll get then. I think don't work the ad, you just, you have to go through, you get used to doing the sign thing. But you have to rethink of different ways of coming up with the sign things that they're doing but can't get proved right. I think that it's okay to keep doing the same things that you're doing or keep saying the same things. Repetition, there's nothing wrong with repetition at all but things do change and people change and these channels that you're using are changing dramatically and also more and more people, more and more profiles are being created every second so the noise levels are louder and louder and these old ideas that you have to have, you have to aspire to 10,000 followers on Instagram or Facebook or something. It's a very outdated idea. It's very hard to achieve now. Few years ago, much easier but really understanding that every single person that you're connecting with is important. Talk to them, talk to them, encourage them to help you by sharing stuff, create content that is appealing or interesting or fun or pretty is just get to know your audience and don't necessarily feel like or don't feel like you have to post every single day. Just post consistently. If you can post three times a week, then post three times a week. Don't post three times a week, one week and then not do anything for a month and then post once and then post 10 times in a row because you're actually doing something. Be really consistent so that people can get to know you and expect you to be there and recognize you and continue that conversation with you. And reels and posts, that'll be fun. Reels are just videos. Stories, reels are just videos. And stories, stories are great. Stories can be anything. They only last 24 hours and you'll start to notice the most that when you start doing stories that more people message you. I've noticed that. I noticed the message is coming in now. And then when they message you, you're having a conversation. And if in the course of that conversation, you lead them to a website or to do something else, then it's a much gentler way of kind of... Definitely. I hate to jump in here, but we are at time so I'm gonna need to wrap it up a little bit. So Erica, do you have a slide that shows your contact information in case anyone wants to reach out to you? I do. If you scan that QR code, that'll take you to a whole bunch of links so you can have a look, you could go to my website or any of my social media. There's a whole bunch of stuff on there if you like or you could just get in touch with me. My email address is erikatmackanderny.com.au. Actually, do you wanna drop that in the chat maybe? Yeah, sure, that would be great. And yeah, you're welcome to chat. I'm always up for a chat. Sometimes it takes me a little while to get back to you. But yeah, if you've got any questions, I know this stuff's kind of confusing and there's a lot of things that you could be doing but the main thing is to just work out what you've got the time for, who in your organization or in your family and your friends or is it someone that you can hire? What resources do you have? What do you wanna achieve with this stuff? Are you using too many channels? Are you using the right channels? Like really just have a think, step back and actually have a look and say, are we doing the right thing to reach the audience that we wanna reach to achieve the goals that we set? And I just want to say thank you again if you wanna put a little bit of love up on the screen to say thanks Erica for sharing such a wealth of knowledge. I know I was like, wow, I think my biggest takeaway were those from this to this wording. Yeah. And also finding out that hashtags are still relevant because I tend to not wanna be bothered. Now we're gonna take a little bit of a break but we, so our next webinar is gonna be coming up on Wednesday the 18th at 4 p.m. Same time as this one. And it's gonna be called Overwhelmed to Organized. So if you're looking to make 2023 your most effective and productive year yet, this workshop will prioritize you and help you stay focused so that you can achieve your goals. If you would like to look at that, there's the link in the chat to register for that one and to get that one on your calendar. So thank you again, big time to Erica for joining us today, sharing your expertise. It was just absolutely invaluable. Again, I'm Kat Milner. It was my pleasure to be your host today and I look forward to seeing everybody next time. Thank you. Thanks everyone. It's good to see you all.