Social Media Marketing for Small Businesses: Strategy + AI Tools to Create Content Faster

just a second um hopefully oh there's more so probably periodically here at the beginning i would assume more people are going to be jumping in um but i am going to go ahead and get started because we have a lot of information to cover tonight um if you've uh joined me before in any of these conversations you know that i talk a lot plus there is a lot of content that we're going to cover um These slides will be available from the Indiana Small Business Development Center after this workshop. So if you miss writing something down or there's something that you want to go back and check out, certainly follow up with the Indiana Small Business Development Center for that. The recording is going to be available through them as well, and it will be in a YouTube link. So once you've got that link, you'll be able to access it. So thank you all for joining. A couple other items. We do have a decent sized group. This one is going to be interactive. So if you have a ChatGPT account already, you're going to want to go ahead and open that up because we're going to be doing some prompt exercises throughout while we work through how to do social media and utilize AI tools specifically with ChatGPT. I will be moving my screen around in the process, moving my slides to the side and pulling my chat GPT up so that you guys can see that. We will share responses. with each other in the chat so um you'll want to open that as well uh so you guys as well as myself we're going to have multiple things going on at the same time tonight so uh hopefully we'll be able to manage through it if you don't have chat gpt yet or it's new and you're you're not sure how to use it obviously we'll we'll talk through that here as well but there are some fun things that we're going to be doing so that you can at least test it out in this type of space uh if you have questions you can also drop those in the chat i will try to catch those as we go along um as we are doing the prompting with chat gpt i'm going to be pausing so that's usually a really good point to stop and ask questions as well Because of the size of the group, if you stay on mute, you can try to raise your hand. I'll try to catch it, but I cannot see you all on the screen because there's so many of you. So anyway, I'm going to go ahead and get started then. So my name is Christy Dudgeon. If I haven't met you before, I am the president of SVC Consulting. I'm an entrepreneur. I'm also a business consultant. Please follow me on LinkedIn. Join with me. Also, SBC Consulting is there. SBC Small Business Consulting is a third party technical assistance provider. We partner with the Indiana Small Business Development Center for implementation or delivery of workshops just like this, as well as third party technical assistance. help so if you approach the small business development center and need help with social media or websites or marketing even bookkeeping accounting things like that they often partner with technical assistance providers such as ourselves and so you might meet or or be able to work with a member of our team through that assistance so welcome many small business owners feel very overwhelmed and you guys might be one of these right what to post how often to post which platform should you use and how to find the time to do social media it can be very time consuming hopefully tonight i'm going to help simplify that and show you some tricks so that it doesn't control your life because social media certainly can So this workshop will give you clear structure and show you how to use AI tools such as ChatGPT that can help make that process faster and easier. Certainly since the world has shifted a lot to AI, it has changed how we can do marketing and how quickly we can get at least inspiration from that. So what can we expect? um we're going to cover how social media supports business growth how to identify your target audience understanding the social media marketing funnel there is a funnel involved in this choose the right platforms creating content pillars and content strategy these may be new terms for you we'll talk about what those are building a simple content calendar and then using those ai tools to speed up marketing tasks also measuring success and improving results so quite a few things that we're going to cover so a simple social media system successful social media marketing follows a really simple process yes it can get complicated right but this is kind of the flow of the process first we need a strategy what do we want our social media to accomplish second Who is our audience? Who are we trying to reach? Who are we trying to talk to? Third, we need what are called content pillars. What topics do we want to consistently talk about? And fourth, we need a content plan. That's when and how often will we post. And then five, we need those AI tools to help us speed up content creation and planning. So social media success isn't random. it actually follows a structure even some of the influencers out there that you guys might follow on a regular basis uh they have quite structured social media plans uh that they are actually following and if you're you pay attention to their their profiles or their pages depending on whichever platform you're on you might be able to start to pick out some consistency in how they are messaging and planning and so it's a pretty cool thing once you you've learned what is behind all of that. So the basics of social media marketing. So before we jump into creating all the fun things that we can create and using AI in order to do that, we have to get to the basics of what social marketing really is, social media marketing is. And so it's a business tool. It's also a fun tool for our personal lives, right? But it can be a business tool. It's more than just posting. And this is kind of one of the pitfalls as we always think, oh, we've got to post something, we've got to post something, and we don't really have that plan or that intention behind it. it helps businesses by increasing visibility building relationships with customers that's definitely a big one with social media establishing trust and credibility driving traffic to our website or our stores and generating sales and referrals social media is a marketing system not just a place to post photos right so it is a part of marketing social media is marketing itself is many different things um and something that we should consider with our uh marketing plan so it's just a piece of it there's someone that's not on me that i keep hearing some back feet so i'm gonna i think i got everybody now um so how customers move from discovery to purchase so this is that uh funnel or that journey so if you think of it as a funnel right so we've got everybody that's out there that's at the top and then when we get to the bottom we've got less and less people right so as we move through that journey it gets smaller and smaller we start with awareness that's the first stage that all of us would enter into in our customer journey with no matter what brand or product or retail you know whatever it may be this is where we all start out so we become aware of something for the first time this is when the customer discovers something about your business Then we get to a little smaller piece of the funnel. And this is where consideration happens. And this is where someone is researching our products or services. They may be checking out our website. They're probably going to our social media. They're starting to look at our profile and they're deciding whether or not they want to do business with us. And then three, we have conversion. And this is when they actually become a customer. So they've bought something or they've booked something or they've clicked a sign up form or they've filled in some kind of information. And so we consider them to be a customer. Once they're a customer, though, we've got to keep them there, right? So we've got them to convert. And then they can get even further down into that funnel. And it's called loyalty. And this is when someone comes back. So we know there's a lot of products out there that maybe are just a one and done thing, especially when we've got TikTok shops and Instagram shops and all those things out there. They just want someone to click and buy one thing, right? And we may never return to them and ever buy anything again because we probably didn't even remember who we bought it from. They're not looking for loyalty, right? They're just looking for that one-time product buy. You guys are probably all looking for those loyal customers, right? We want them to come and purchase from us or book with us, and we want them to just keep coming back time and time again. So those are our loyal customers. And then we can get even one more stage further from loyalty, and that is called advocacy. This is the people that are out there speaking on our behalf. They're recommending us to others. They're tagging us. They're sharing our posts. If you're in the social media world and advocates are key, right? They're the ones that are speaking on our behalf and they're telling everyone that, hey, you should go do business with them, right? Had a great experience. They're writing recommendations and referrals. Good place to be. So that's our funnel. It's important because these different types of content out there support different stages. So we're going to speak different to a customer in the awareness phase than we would to a customer who's in the loyalty phase. And the types of ads that we might want to show them or the type of content we create is going to be very different. So in the awareness phase, we're probably going to be talking about helpful content. In our conversion phase, though, we're going to be talking. about promotions because remember, we're trying to get someone to buy something in that conversion phase. So this is where we're doing a lot of actual selling, right? So we're trying to get them to push that button, click to the website, book that link. So we need to start with a clear goal. So every social media strategy starts with a goal. Ask yourself. what do i want social media to do for my business and everybody's goal is going to be different and year by year maybe even month by month quarter by quarter your business goal is going to look a little different as well If you're very new to social media or to your platform or your page, you probably just want people to be aware that you exist. That's usually where we start. We want to make sure that we're getting some kind of reach. We want people to be aware, right? So that's that goal. If we're more established business, maybe we're trying to add a new product line. Maybe we're trying to expand. Maybe we're trying to expand into a different market. Then we've got a very different goal. Examples of these, we might want to bring customers into the store. We might want to generate online sales. We might want to build brand awareness locally, grow an email list, promote events or services. Without a goal, businesses end up just posting randomly. That's so, so common. Marketing works best when posts. do support that business objective. So you're always moving towards that objective and you can start to be more consistent with your posting and how you're posting. Understanding your target market. This is probably one of the biggest keys, even if you didn't have a strategy in place or those objectives, knowing who your target audience is and who you're trying to reach. So initially you want to think about who is your ideal customer? What is their age range? What is their location? their lifestyles or their interests what problem do they actually need solved and how does your business solve that problem and what do they really care about so an example is a local pet bakery might target pet owners ages 30 to 55 who treat pets like family so there's a couple key things in that target that's there your target is obviously going to be different than that but we've got an age range in there so that we know that we're we're searching for 30 to 55 year olds we didn't specify a gender we didn't really specify a location here so this isn't that great of a target but it's close these are people who value their pets differently than just an animal right it's someone who treats them like family um so our bakery is probably different than someone who might be just going to the grocery store and buying pet food right this is a specialty type store so we're looking for someone who who's looking at those animals that are a little bit different so that's a very small start to a target market, but we could definitely get much more intense with the type of target that we're looking at. And then we want to choose the right platform. So we don't need to be everywhere. This is one of those first mistakes. We feel like when we start out, we need to be on Facebook and Instagram and then we'd have to do TikTok and what about YouTube? Oh my gosh, we forgot. And then there's Snapchat and Pinterest, right? And you just throw all these things in here and that's when everyone goes, nope, I'm not doing it because I don't have the time, right? You want to choose the platform. based on your audience. And every platform, although we may have more than one platform that we are on, right, us personally, there are demographics that start to break down that commonly use these platforms. Right now, you can probably Google it and see it. It's pretty good information. They don't really change that much. But overall, Facebook is very strong for local businesses and community. community engagement from a demographic level facebook tends to also be an older demographic compared to some of the other platforms instagram is great for visual brands and storytelling it's really good if you have a product or brand market it's all about the visuals right so great pictures great videos that's typically where you're going to find instagram it also tends to be a younger demographic than what facebook is TikTok, this is all about discovery and short form video. Whether or not you knew it, TikTok actually started as an educational platform. So you see a lot of how to's that are happening in there and that still remains popular. There's also a lot of things on there that have nothing to do with educational or discovery. A lot of fun stuff happening on there, but TikTok also tends to be that younger generation. Then we've got LinkedIn listed on here. This is for professional services, business to business. You'll find anybody from the ground level to the CEO on LinkedIn, but the actual focus of LinkedIn itself is all about business or the business itself. I highly recommend every single one of you, if you are in the business world, to have a LinkedIn profile, even if you're not active, because you are all business professionals in one way or the other. I was introduced to LinkedIn. shortly after it started, I feel like. So I don't even remember how many years ago that was. Just because I was in a sales role where I was selling from business to business and someone said, you need a LinkedIn profile. I'm glad that they told me that back then because obviously my network has grown and my career has evolved since then. But it's a great place to be, especially if you need business inspiration or business advice. There's tons of people on there for that. Small businesses should focus on one to two platforms done well. If you are new to social media, if you are new to creating strategies and creating content and calendars, you're also trying to run a business most likely in all of this. And you're probably trying to be your own bookkeeper. And I see Ladarius is driving a vehicle right now. And so, you know, we've all got a ton of things going on. I would say one, right? Let's start with one. Pick one platform that is the most appropriate platform for your business and get good at that one, right? And then add on another platform and then another platform so that you don't get overwhelmed because that's truly the number one reason that people stop doing social media marketing is you just get overwhelmed by it. And the more platforms that you're trying to do all at the same time, you're setting yourself up for failure. So the real secret to social media is not being on every platform all of the time. It's consistency. So consistency beats perfection. There is something called algorithms, if you've heard of those. The algorithms are different for every platform. Even the greatest marketing teams out there, they might have figured out an algorithm and they've got the post working all the time. This is for organic growth. And then the algorithm changes and everything goes sideways. Posting consistently, though, is one of the keys to any of the algorithms. So a common mistake that I see is that, oh, no, I haven't posted in a while. I need to post. And you do a whole bunch of posts at one time, so they all go out there. And then you don't post again for a while, right? And then you come back and you're like, oh, no, here, I have to do it again. So there are scheduling tools out there, and we'll talk about that, where you can get more consistent. So if you create five pieces of content at once, you can just schedule it out. so that it's more consistent and you're not posting them all at the exact same time. You want to share valuable and interesting content as well. So think of yourself as a user of social media. What kind of content are you more likely going to pay attention to or what are you going to pass right by so we want it to be valuable we want it to be interesting um so therefore when you're creating content you need to do exactly the same right it needs to be valuable and interesting also you need to engage with your audience we are we like to be entertained right and we like to engage with different things um sometimes there's questions out there we're answering if we're liking we're commenting right that's engagement uh anytime that we are actually doing something with the content. We're sharing it. We're saving it. Those are ways that someone has engaged. And then there's analytics behind all of that. So in order to be able to see analytics with our social media, we need to make sure that we have the correct type of profile in any of these different platforms. And those vary from platform to platform. So they can be considered a professional profile or a content creator profile. depending on which platform you're on. And if you have that specific profile, instead of just a personal profile, right, then you're able to see analytics. And the analytics are pretty cool because you'll be able to see exactly how many people saw your post or your reel or whatever it is that you've created. You'll be able to see how many people liked it, how many people commented. You'll be able to see demographic information on it. Social media platforms track. everything. So you'll be able to tell exactly what's going on. I ran an ad earlier this morning on our Facebook page because we're at a specific U.S. territory where we're trying to promote a program, and I can see how many were women, how many were men, exactly which part of the territory that they lived in, professional information, how long they interacted with it, if they clicked on it, you know, it's... amazing the amount of information that you can see and that's really important because as you're creating new content uh something that has performed well or done well you want to be able to know that um because you want to create something similar to it so that you can get that same engagement or that same reach obviously if something didn't do well you want to be able to look at that and say okay i need to change something about that the next time that i i do maybe that that pillar So that something is different because it didn't do very good the last time. So good marketing is consistent over time. Not perfect. Almost everybody that starts out, it's clunky, right? It's not going to be good. If you're shooting the first video, I can tell you, the very first video I shot of myself compared to videos I shoot now, night and day difference, right? But you've got to start somewhere. You're not going to get judged for those early things that you did. Most of the time, people actually remove them over time, but it's that consistency part that you really want to get into. So using... AI to create this content faster and more strategically. So we've got that base foundation. That was the quickest opening to how to strategically build a marketing plan basically for social media. So hopefully you've got some kind of foundation in marketing. There are entire workshops actually that are on just that. But there is a plan that needs to be built in order to get into the next part. All right. So this is when we're going to get interactive and we are going to take this prompt, which I'm actually going to copy and paste it into the chat so that you guys can then copy and paste it in ChatGBT. So if you want to go ahead and get your ChatGBT ready, give me just a second to move some things around so I can copy and paste and then I'm going to switch over. And I said ChatGPT and really I just use that as a universal. You guys can use any of the AI sources that you want to use. So if it's Grok or it's Gemini or Perplexity or any of those that you are most comfortable with, then feel free. I just tend to use ChatGPT because I have the team version of it. So I dropped that in the chat and our objective here. is that we are going to write one sentence that you would use to introduce your business. And so this is that prompt. And once you've dropped it in, if you want to go ahead and drop it in the chat then. So if you notice in that prompt, there are a couple things you've got to type in it because it needs to be specific to your business. I'm going to share my screen again and do this. in chat gbt on my side okay how's everybody doing as soon as you've got everything together feel free to you can take the output that you received and then just drop it in the chat so we can all see what you guys got so once i've updated it my chat is thinking And so mine says, meet SBC Consulting. We help small businesses and partner organizations like SBDCs, CDFIs, and CDCs build financial clarity through expert bookkeeping and practical financial advisory support. Stronger systems, smarter decisions. Follow along for insights that help businesses grow. We've got connecting lenses, photographing seniors, families, small business brands, natural real life feel, my goal. images that feel like you i'm so glad you're here follow along thank you dog-eared publishing women-owned indie indie literary publishing and online editing for authors who value craft and community small town roots big book dreams follow us and join the story sarah and alex did you guys use chat gpt or a different platform i just use chat gpt for mine I used Copilot because I'm on my work computer and they give it to us for free. Yes. I used Copilot too. Yeah, as I mentioned before, I do have the chat GPT page version. So we're in the team version, which means ours is secure. I do like to give that caveat anytime I'm talking about AI is that if you're on any of the free versions of AI, just be aware of what you're plugging into it. Don't put any proprietary or personal information in there because Everything that you plug into AI is utilized to build their learning models. If you're on something like Copilot or one of the paid versions, make sure the paid version isn't feeding the learning model. The team version, if you notice down here at the very bottom, it says OpenAI doesn't use SBC Consulting Workspace data to train its model. anything that i'm plugging in there is secure this right here though is general information about your business which is actually good information for the the learning models to have because you're making uh ai aware of your business um and so it's you're training the model with it so we've got vtv sawmill women owned powered by passion for natural wood Create one of a kind handcrafted live edge pieces that bring the beauty of nature into your home. Follow along to see creations and behind the build. If anybody else wants to share, feel free. Oh, yep. Lifting in love and compassion supports youth and families through child mental health wraparound services with 20 plus years in social services. Our relatable team uses therapeutic art and real life support to help youth thrive. Follow us to learn more and support stronger families. um so if you haven't done this yet or you're still working on it continue to work on it um because we are going to just keep building on this as we move throughout uh the next few slides this is the start um and obviously we need that foundational information no matter where we head um with the the next part of our social media creations so thank you for those that participated i'm going to switch back to my slides and we're just going to do this back and forth thing here for a little while i'm going to try to you guys don't have to let me know if if i do this split screen if it just gets too small to read the slides because sometimes that's a problem but i'll try to have them both up here at the same time i did i did mine on my phone you did it on your phone okay yeah you're echoing that's interesting but yeah so if you did it on your phone it makes it kind of hard to drop it in there right but at least you've got it on your phone so that you're able to to continue moving along with it all right i'm going to share it this is probably going to be too small i think i'm just going to make it bigger like that let's go that way okay so we already talked about this i don't know what happened to my slides All right. So leveling up our content strategy, I mentioned everybody needs to have an objective. So an objective is a plan, a structure. We can also repurpose content that can be an objective. We will talk about repurposing in a little bit that builds engagement and drives action. So we got to have that objective or plan. We also want to be creating content that connects. So content. the goal of this with the content is to stop someone from scrolling um so they actually pay attention right uh build trust and guide our audience to act so people follow brands that are helpful relatable and inspiring not just salesy um post with purpose i worked with a actually they were an indiana client uh quite a quite a few years ago now that i think about it that had a business that had a wonderful instagram following They had noticed a drop off though. Not really something that they dove into to figure out what was going on, but they had done very well over the years and then suddenly things had kind of stalled out. And what had happened as the company had grown, who had managed their Instagram page had kind of switched hands through a couple different people. And what had started as beautiful photos. of home interiors that were highlighting their products had turned into percentages off or upcoming sale and so on instagram uh the most important thing that you can do is have beautiful photos that's uh instagram will reward you for that So they were doing everything right in the beginning. And then as they put less and less emphasis on their social media, they just became salesy. And so my feedback initially was if I was a potential customer of yours. I would probably just wait for a sale because it looks like you're constantly posting those on social media. And so nobody was probably ever buying their product actually at full price. They were just waiting for one of those percentages off. So ended up hurting them a little bit, but they got it all figured out and on a better path. So you don't have to be a content creator to be successful on social media. A lot of people that are content creators, they didn't set out to be that. It's just working through it and figuring it out. You also don't have to be the most creative person in the world, especially with these tools, but you just need a system that makes your voice clear and your value obvious. So a three-part content formula. So when you're creating content, you want it to have these three things in it. The first is a hook. That's what grabs someone's attention. Sometimes this is a question. Sometimes it's a statement. Sometimes it's a word. And this is. videos specifically, right? We can also have this in just a text post or a caption that we're associated with a picture. And that's, that hook is going to grab our attention. That's literally why it's called a hook, right? It's grabbing us. Then we have the story. This is what builds our connection, trust, or value. So this is where we're actually talking about whatever that hook grabbed our attention and then we have a call to action the call to action is also a big one so what do you want them to do with this information and so this is where we're either telling them to follow us to comment to answer some kind of question to go to our website uh we're giving some kind of direction for someone to do something next so an example is a hook i almost gave up on my business last year This is probably awareness, right? If we're trying to ask people to just follow us, we're trying to make them aware that we exist. And as long as they're following us, then they're going to see the rest of the posts that we've got going on. So now our next task is we're going to talk about hooks and we're going to share a hook. So we're going to create one here in a minute. But these are 10 social media hook examples if you're a small retail store. So all I did was ask, you know, for 10 examples if i own a small retail store right um you won't believe it when's the last time this is the number one thing i don't even have to read the rest of them right but you can kind of get the idea of what a hook is it's capturing point of view you walk into a shop three things you'll only find we asked our regulars this cozy product was made what does your home need supporting small doesn't have to be hard What's not a box store? So those are the types of phrases, at least from starting out, that grab a lot of attention. I know on Instagram, it seems like the pattern lately, I've seen a lot of people, these three things and, you know, and then they'll list off the three things as they continue to go along. But it's or if you're starting a business, you need to know these three things. Right. And so if you're starting a business, suddenly you want to know what are the three things that I need to know. So let's ask AI to create 10 hooks for us. So. Using the same chat we had earlier. So we've already got that basic information on there. And now we've got CD scent detection dogs. We help reunite families with missing pets using trained scent detection dogs. Prove search strategies. When a pet goes missing, hope isn't lost. Follow along for search stories, tips, and hopes. That's awesome. Thank you. um so using that same chat that you had earlier so opening chat gpt or co-pilot or whatever that may be you're now going to ask for 10 hooks and you guys can type this one in instead of copy paste 10 hooks that are applicable for your business specifically for instagram that is literally what it is so it's going to take that information that you had before and it's going to build onto it then and we get our response i like to ask for a defined number pieces of information. Typically, it will give you like three to five. This has broken down. I don't know if your guys will all look this way or not. And this is very specific to what I had said that my my products and services were right. So you might have it in groups like this. So ChatTPT got broke it down into those groupings. um it looks like yours i can't tell if those are groups or not the way they came through um but yeah so you've got different hooks i'm going to drop mine in there as well yeah you can see how it broke mine down into different categories and the more that you work with ai the more That's OK that the numbers didn't show, Deanna. The more that you work with AI, though, it's going to learn how you like to see things or how things like to be presented. So I obviously. work in my AI a lot and there's certain ways that it knows to present me the information. I get pretty picky with it too. There's also a knowledge base that you can build in them so it understands how to talk to you, also how your tone would normally be. Like I said, if you're very new to it, it has some learning to do and you two can learn with each other. So don't be afraid to to give it feedback and ask it to present it differently for you if you don't like the way that it presented the information. And then it says pro tip. So it's already starting to build this next part. I don't know if yours gave you additional feedback. down here um but we are going to get to that part that it's starting to talk about so um it wants to be more specific in my world everybody good with that Make sense? That was a simple one, right? So we had to feed it information, which we already fed it before, before we could give it or ask it for 10 hooks. Actually, if I went in here the very first time and just said, give me 10 hooks that are applicable to my business for Instagram, it's going to give me 10 hooks. It's not going to be applicable for my business, right? Because I didn't feed it any information, but it will automatically give you a response when you ask it to do something. Unless... you say something very specific at the end of the prompt like ask me follow-up questions or ask me for further details right and then it will give you a list of things that it wants you to detail out So I've mentioned content pillars a couple of times and content pillars are very important in our social media. So content pillars is where we really start to build this content plan that we can follow along with and get some consistency to it. It's also how we don't post randomly. So it's a guide for us then. And so in these content pillars, they're actually content categories. Steven, you're cracking me up with your phone over there because I keep seeing your phone and your camera on your computer. But content pillars are the core themes your business posts regularly about. They help you stay consistent. avoid running out of ideas that's a really big one too so what do i don't even know what i was going to post today they help you guide you to have those ideas and they help you balance out your content also example pillars and these are some very common ones they are education behind the scenes product and service customer stories and engagement It's recommended that you have no more than five. If you have more than five, then you're just getting kind of crazy all over the place. I think three is actually a more manageable number. So basically how these pillars work, and we're going to look at this a little bit more, is that we take these three pillars or these five pillars, and I always go like this because they're like poles, right? Pillars. And all the content that we create then wraps around those pillars. So we have educational content. We have behind the scenes content. We have products and services. We have customer stories. We have engagement. And we can either evenly utilize those. So maybe if I'm looking at, and this is getting crazy, if we're posting five times a week, because we have five pillars, I could say Monday is educational, Tuesday behind the scenes, Wednesday products and service, customer stories, engagement, right? It's going to look something like this. These are educational promotional connection at engagement credibility. So there's a little bit different, five different ones here, but it's showing there's five different pillars here as well. And then, so every Monday, I'm going to be educational. Every Tuesday, I'm going to be promotional. Every Wednesday, it's going to be something about connection. Every Thursday is going to be engagement and every Friday is going to be credibility. Now, I don't always recommend posting five times a week. However, that's just an example, right? We also then, as we really dive into social media, we might want to start looking at the percentage of times we use these. So maybe because of where we are with our business and whatever that objective is, right, we might want to be more educational than we want to be engagement. I don't know. So we might post 30%. of the time educational and only 10 percent of the time the rest of it i don't even know if that adds up correctly i think that's only 70 right so we're getting to 100 of the time but hopefully that gives you kind of an idea so we might post educational every fourth time where everything else is just one time and we just rotate them that way so they just rotate through um but this also takes these content pillars this slide in particular and it tells us what our purpose is behind it then so what is the purpose behind educational posts they're to teach they're to inform and they're to have value and so an example of that three ways to style our fall jacket so it's a retail store they have jackets they're teaching someone how to style so they're not just selling the jacket right they are but they're teaching people how to utilize it how to style it Promotional, this is where we're selling directly or we're showcasing our products. So new arrivals just dropped, probably still the same jacket, right? Because it's a new arrival, but the message behind it is different because it's all about promotion at this point. connection. This is where we're building emotional ties and we're humanizing our brand. So why is people buy from small businesses in the first place? They tend to like the small business owner or the people that work there or the mission of the company, right? And the passion of the people. So this is that connection. Meet the woman behind the register. Maybe everybody that's walked into the store has already met her, but now you're seeing her on social media. You're reaching a broader audience, right? With this fabulous person that works within the company. Engagement, this is purely to get likes, comments, and saves, right? That's the goal behind engagement. Pick one, cozy or classic, right? So you're asking people to comment, which one, cozy or classic? And you probably have seen posts like that before, right? Choose one, one, two, or three, or four. What would you do? And it's purely to get someone to respond to something so that you can get those comments. Credibility. We're showing proof. We're doing testimonials. This is behind the scenes. A little bit different word for it. We're calling that pillar credibility. Here's how we chose which brands we stock. So this is the process behind the scenes of how we decide what products actually come to the store. That's another big one with small businesses. People want to know how the businesses operate. They want to see what happens behind the scenes, whether that's unboxing things, putting things on shelves. Sometimes us losing our minds because, you know, a shipment didn't come in and we planned for it. This is all things that are valuable, at least from a social media standpoint, because it humanizes as well as connects. And it shows that we're a credible business. So this is a one idea per pillar kind of thing. So when I was talking about maybe multiple ideas, oh, it cut my thing off. uh daggone it um so there was uh more to that but this was showing a monday wednesday friday type thing but if i have three pillars in particular this part of it we can actually see we are only doing educational behind the scenes and promotional so monday is educational wednesdays behind the scenes friday's promotional so pillars their whole point is to simplify the planning process so we can just take a pillar and we can put it on a calendar as we look forward so we're starting to develop a content calendar now because now we have our content pillars so we can say monday educational wednesday behind the scenes friday promotional one two three maybe we're going to do that every week at the beginning because that makes our lives easier we know when we need that piece of content and then we do want to evolve our pillars over time so there are certain circumstances where we will change these if we have a seasonal business or we have types of events and things that play into the way that our business operates we definitely want to incorporate those periodically we can probably choose one of the pillars that they're actually going to fall under but we do want to add those in We want to revisit these also. Remember, objective is what we're starting with. So if our objective is this, we have these pillars, right? Maybe our objective is changing as our business grows and changes. Therefore, we want to revisit those pillars to make sure that they still align with our audience and the goals of our business. Your pillars are not a box. They're a framework. so they're just helping guide and keep that frame together they guide our content creation they help keep us consistent and they make sure that our message hits the mark so let's build your content pillars now so this one i am going to copy and paste this one which means i have to stop it so that i can actually touch my slide because this one's a little bit bigger So you shouldn't have to do any updating in this one unless you definitely want to. But it's a three-part prompt that we are dropping in there. But it's using that exact same thread, that exact same chat that we were using before. You're just going to add this to it. And once you have those, you can drop them in. So mine are pretty intense. Definitely beyond those generic basic. um pillars that i had although they still do um follow along oh i gotta look it got a little too big so the chat's only going to let us do a thousand characters at once so i might have to do the beginning so minor education expertise support readiness and insights i would say even without adding that extra information So Alex, that was the output, the full output that it gave you. It didn't take it to that next step. No, I'm going to screenshot the rest of it. Okay. Because mine was pretty long too. I don't think it'll let me copy and paste the whole thing. Yep. So you can see how it gives you, I just wanted to make sure it was giving everybody that same level of detail. So this is pretty good information. And if you think back to how we started with this, we really only started with basic information about your business, right? So even though we had some key items in there, we probably could feed it a lot more information than we actually did before we got to this point. However, we're still getting quite... quite a bit of information back out of it with that limited information. If you already have a marketing plan, you know, if someone has helped you create a marketing plan or you have a large marketing plan or you already have a social media plan, oh yeah, the screenshot looks great. You can actually feed. that in before you start creating this. So that's going to be a lot more information than those basic, I think our original prompt was maybe five or six lines, right? Of information that we provided, but you can, so now you've got some pillars. So it looks like Alex, maybe it gave you four pillars. Did anybody else get any kind of, oh, no. Oh, and Alex has got it broken down weekly, which is great. So here we go. My, my weekly. So it's telling me Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, generally when it spits out this kind of information to me, if I don't intend on posting five days a week, I might take this though and say, okay, Monday is actually going to be Monday. Tuesday might not be till Thursday, you know, so at least you've got that basic framework still. It's just that Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday might not be your plan. At a minimum, I would say post once a week. And if you start by posting once a week, that's something, right? We want that consistency. And then you can build up to twice a week, three times a week, four times a week. If you're only posting once a week, you pretty much have something here now for five weeks in a row that you can post. So good start. If anybody else wants to drop in their hooks, feel free. Not hooks. Oh my gosh. Content pillars. Feel free to. But as we start to build a content pillar strategy, you're going to see there's a few steps here. Obviously, AI just helped us jump right ahead when we did that and created this strategy for us. We didn't even have to go through here. But you can see the basic content pillars that a lot of people utilize. And so what I mentioned, you go to their profile or you go to their page, whatever it may be. you will start to recognize some of these. You'll start to see the themes that are within, even influencers, right? You'll start to see those themes throughout and you'll start to be able to pick it up. And it's funny when you start to, because you'll be like, oh. This is educational. Or wait, that was a promotional, right? And when we start talking about repurposing content, you can actually take one of these and utilize the same videos that you've already created or utilize the same images that you've already created and just present them in a different way. And it's a whole different pillar. But you want to choose three to five of these that best match your business goals, right? Or the ones that AI is creating for us right now. So educational, teach something helpful. Promotional, promote those products or services. Behind the scenes, this is showing your process, your space, your story. Connection or personal, this is where you're building that human connection. Engagement, you're asking questions, polls, challenges. Social proof, this is your testimonials and your reviews. Obviously a big thing when you're first starting out is being able to share things like that. Success stories, different values and beliefs, depending on the type of your business, you might want to share your... mission, your culture, your causes. Then there's tips and how to. These are short, actionable guidance, seasonal and local, timely and community events or content. And then maybe what else, right? It's the stars or the moon or the no limitation here, right? We can create whatever pillar. It's just dependent on what your business is. But you will most likely see. Definitely those top three, those are very common for businesses to be using. And so we talked about sharing our pillars there. So step two, then, once we've got our pillars, that doesn't necessarily mean that we need to use them exactly as they are. But we could then refine these a little bit further. So for each pillar that we selected, you can fill out the table before. So educational, why it matters to my audience. So if you're really looking at your pillar. And you've got refined pillars, right? So it is refined it a little bit further, Alex. Why does it matter to someone and how did we refine that down even further? And then we can create those post ideas from that. And then the third step is to then develop that weekly content map, which our prompt, it was already starting to do that for us. So try to plan one post per pillar for the upcoming week. Use short post ideas or captions. AI already did it for us. But if you were doing this on your own, this is what this would look like. So we've got the day, the pillar and the post idea. And then we want to review. So we always want to be looking at those analytics in the end to see how we did. and at the beginning because we're starting out we don't really know uh exactly how things are going to perform uh maybe we don't have a lot of followers yet so the more followers that we get or the more friends that we have uh the better the analytics are going to come back and so we want to see which pillars are getting the most engagement now some pillars are designed or their purpose is to create more engagement than others, right? So any of those, especially if that's the one called engagement, we probably should notice that we're getting more engagement from engagement than we might be from education or something like that. which feel easy for you to create. That's another thing. So if you've got some pillars that you're creating content and there is one in particular that you are really challenged with, you're really struggling with, maybe you shouldn't have it as a content pillar right now, especially if you're trying to get inspiration on what you should exactly be doing. And then what's missing from your content mix? So if there's something that keeps coming up that you keep thinking about, or maybe when you're starting to go through and looking at content that makes more sense, you could certainly add in that pillar later because now you're getting used to what you're doing. So the next thing then is content batching and planning. So what is batching? And this is creating multiple pieces of content in one focused work session. This is how we control the beast that is social media. This helps reduce that daily decision fatigue and it keeps us consistent even on the busiest days. So I always recommend block off the same time in the same day and create the content and do the scheduling, right? So that we have our plan in place. So we're already creating our content calendar. We're already creating content pillars. We're talking about all that stuff right now, but we're actually going to put it. down into a plan so that we can actually do batching. And that's what this is. So step by step, how to batch a week of content in one to two hours. Choose that focus time. Pick one to two hours per week. Block it like it's an appointment. Defend it. Do not let anybody else take that away from you. I talk about this the same with bookkeeping, right? we we have to stick to our finances and we have to do them and the only the way we do that is if we defend the time that we blocked off for it so an example sunday afternoon or monday morning uh before the shop opens just as an example i tend to do mine on a sunday just because i uh enjoy i think my mind is freer at that moment to be more creative um and so i i will work on social media at that point but we want to open our pillars and we want to open a calendar and so we're going to use the content pillars that already created earlier we're going to open a simple content calendar now we've just barely started talking about content calendars only from me mentioning it uh it can be a piece of paper it can be a actual calendar that's digital um it basically needs to have the days of the week on it and um it could be a spreadsheet right a lot of spreadsheets are actually what is happening whatever you are comfortable with uh hello danielle i don't know hi hi am i late you are you're an hour late oh eastern versus oh i'm so frustrated okay i'm sorry that's okay it is being recorded and it will be available um so you can get a copy from the indiana small business development center and catch up with what you missed so um This can be a list form. It can also be a block form. So whatever you're most comfortable with, that's the goal. If you're starting on a piece of paper, no judgment, that's very common. You're going to strategically enter the content pillar on the days of the week. So that's why I said that it's block pillar or block. calendars you can take education drop it in in a few places on the calendar you can drop in promotional in a few places depending on whatever those pillars were that you created then you want to refine the pillars so yes we're talking about education but exactly within what an education do we want to focus on that time some people will have a theme for the week even so even if there are multiple pillars that you're hitting on they're all going to follow some kind of theme sometimes the theme is they're all going to be towards awareness. Sometimes they're all going to be towards that conversion, right? Or loyalty. So that could be the theme for the week. So that can help guide you what's going to go there. And then we're going to add the post idea to it. So we've got the pillar listed there and we've got the post underneath of it. Now we know that when we're creating content, we need a hook, we need the story or the caption right in there, and we need a call to action. So there's going to be three pieces to that post that we're going to create. And this is what a simple block calendar then looks like if we color code it and make it lovely. So I like the ones that look like this. So that top, that color is the actual pillar that they're dropping in there. So this person, when they created it, has actually dropped in. um different things from that seasonality standpoint right so they've highlighted a specific day a father's day being one um the first day of summer being another and so they're going to share something that's specific about those uh you know there's some businesses it's world hamburger day and it's you know wine day or whatever it is it's every day is a day right and you can find these in google there's there's something to celebrate every single day um so you can get a little crazy with that but at least you could You can pick out the ones that you really want to highlight or applicable to your business if you wanted to add it. Then there's the hook that's following underneath of it or what is it that I really want to talk about, right? And so we can even build further and further than that. Yes, Danielle, you're totally going to be able to watch what you missed. That's why it's being recorded. Just follow back up with your Indiana Small Business Development Advisor to get a copy or the link to this. It'll probably take a couple days before I send it to them, but you can go ahead and email them. And then we've got other pillars in here. So purple. is inspire right so i can see it very clear i'm a visual person uh yellow is the brand so i know whenever i'm talking about your brand uh blue is news so they've got news and then they the teal one is authority so you can see that their pillars are inspire brand promote news those are the five um and remember when i was talking about you might not share them all consistently um promote is only showing up there once right so in two weeks time we're only talking about promote once where everything else most of them look like they're three times the teal one is only two times so that's how they're rotating them a little bit different um this spreadsheet then i i personally would not only say what do i think i'm going to talk about so that's my refinement right that you can see here but then i would just directly underneath of that i may say my hook my caption and my call to action so there might be four different things that fall underneath of this but the first step in creating a content calendar is to put the pillar on there then second refine it then third start to create the actual content and of course we're going to use ai to help us do that So we're going to reference our content map when we're creating our batch planning. So we've got two weeks on that map that I just showed you or that calendar that I just showed you. So we're going to create a caption, use AI to help if needed for inspiration. Remember the hook, the story, the call to action. I will say the caveat here. AI, although super helpful, you don't necessarily want to take exactly what it says and copy paste, right? We could sound a little bit like a robot. It might not know you well enough yet. It might not sound like you. I had a client one time that got called out. big time because she didn't sound like herself. She was trying to reach a different market, so she was only using AI to inspire her. But however, her existing followers, which were over 10,000 of them, did not like the fact that what she was posting did not sound like her. And so it was immediately noticed. You can work with AI multiple times, obviously, to get it to change. Take what it tells you. Switch it around so that it's the way that you would have set it, right? You don't want just the machine. Gather or create visuals. So get in the mindset. And this is the hard one for a lot of people. of taking photos or videos of everything that you do in your business. So even the most mundane tasks, right, that you have to do every day that you think nobody would want to watch, they probably don't want to watch all of it, right? But little snippets of those videos actually are pretty valuable when it comes for you to start creating videos and reels and things. Short, simple videos are the most impactful. unboxing a package a customer walkthrough you just walking through your store walking through your office or walking through a job site depending on whatever it is that you do walk into your building you want to be the eyes of the customer right so you want to experience it like you're the customer not the person this there every day um what do you want to see or know about a business so always approach it from that standpoint not what do i want to tell people about my business but if i was approaching a business for the first time what would i want to know about it in order to make a decision about it um Use templates to save time. So tip of the week, today's featured item, weekend special, these types of things. So when I talk about templates, does everybody know Canva? Have you used Canva before? You can just shake your head or say yes in the chat or something like that. So if you've never used Canva before, highly recommend it. Just check it out. will save you a lot of time when you're creating content from templates and things like that so lots of inspirational graphic things you don't have to be a creative person in order to go in there and start to use it there is a free version of it the paid version is actually pretty inexpensive and it actually has a scheduling component to it which is nice i think it is 12.99 a month or something for it and for that you can utilize all the templates. You're not specific to just those free ones. It's a great tool, though. Everybody has become a graphic designer overnight because of something like Canva, and it saves a lot of time. So batch scheduling. So as I just mentioned, Canva has a scheduler in it if you pay for the paid version. You can also use Meta Business Suite if you've not heard of Meta Business Suite. Meta Business Suite is the overall giant conglomeration that actually owns Facebook and Instagram. That's Meta, as well as a lot of data centers around the country. They have the platform. that is beyond your facebook page or beyond your instagram page and actually because facebook and instagram are are part of the meta world you can manage them both on the same platform which is called the meta business suite you can create content there from an uploading standpoint you can create posts if you are utilizing both facebook and instagram you can change the exact same post because remember i said at the very very beginning not the same platform, not the same demographic. You would not, even though it will let you cross post, you're talking to two different people and you're talking to them in two different ways. So I don't recommend that you just cross post blindly between them because the intention behind it is not the same between those platforms. However, if you are using meta business suite if you're using the same image you can alter the captions between the two you can use the same caption change the image and then schedule it out directly from there it is specific only to facebook and instagram though so if you're using a platform outside of that like tick tock or snapchat or pinterest or one of those linkedin you won't be able to post scheduling things there canva has some limitations with what it can do tick tock is picky it has to be on the mobile version sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't same thing with instagram reels if you're using the desktop versus the mobile version of canva some will let you schedule some won't so there are limitations social pilot later these are paid uh third party bulk scheduling tools some of these are better than other out there uh in the world of technology these are changing every day right there's new ones being added um things are things are coming and being better but um social pilot was one of the better ones that i have used before because it was able to easily posts to multiple platforms where some of them have those limitations as i mentioned before you often have to pay based on the number of platforms that it will post to though so if you happen to be on five social media accounts at the same time that you're trying to schedule to all of them and post maybe it's only going to let you do three with this tier of payment right and you have to pay more in order to be able to do five however Sometimes those payments are worth it because it's saving you that time. And so when we're batch scheduling, what I'm saying is we've bulk created everything. If I'm looking at that calendar that I had in there just before, that was two weeks worth of information. Maybe I've created all that content, right, just now. And so now I'm sitting here going. Monday at 2 p.m. or Tuesday at 3 or Wednesday at 9 a.m. This is going there. This is going there. This is going there. And that's what these bulk scheduling tools do. And then I can walk away from it, except for the fact that I have to pay attention if people are commenting or they're engaging in it. But as far as having to create and having to remember to post and do all of that, if I'm bulk scheduling. i've done all that ahead and that's how i can really control the beast that is social media um because that's usually the hardest part is that oh no now i have to come up with something to post and now i have to post it and then i forgot and it's six days later and i didn't do it um repurposing i i briefly mentioned this one so repurposing means that we are taking something that we've already created and we're repurposing it so it's just like recycling upcycling re-changing right um in canva which i mentioned before there is a simple way to do this uh we do have to have the paid version of canva which is 12.99 um in order to do what's called resizing but if i've created something in canva that was an instagram story to begin with so if you guys are familiar with social media everything has a different size so instagram stories are kind of this long rectangular right not to be confused with facebook stories they're two different sizes But maybe that Instagram story did really well and I loved it. Right. And I got a lot of good feedback from it. And maybe I want to turn that into a Facebook post. Well, there is a button in Canva that I can just click to resize it. And so it'll take that long post and it'll smoosh it down into a Facebook post. So simple. Click of a button. didn't have to do anything else otherwise what i'm doing is like smooshing things and and copying and moving stuff around and it can be a little difficult um but i can convert any of these things from one size to the other now depending on how big something was to begin with and i try to it it might Distort a little bit and I've got to do a little bit of movement. But anyway, it's much faster. Same thing as if I want to take just an Instagram post and I want to turn it in to, you know, an Instagram story. Right. And so those kind of move around. I can do this same thing with videos. So a LinkedIn video or a YouTube video, these are more like rectangular like this. But if I want to turn it into a real, they turn like this, right? And so things move and change and we get those black bands on them. That's because we don't have the right size of the content. So that's why we get those black bands because it's trying to fill in that blank space. So I can easily do that. i can take one design and i can convert it for multiple platforms so sarah's saying when you schedule canva for example actually post to your accounts yes so you you will connect your accounts through canva and it will schedule to those actual accounts so that's why i was saying sometimes tick tock is a little weird uh sometimes you have to be on your desktop there's others that you have to be on your mobile phone you'll play around with it it will give you a warning and tell you that you can't post it instagram is one definitely one of those like you could do an instagram post really easily out of canva but it may tell you you have to be on the phone to do a reel or it may say you have to go directly to the platform to do it you can do video editing in canva you can add in these little snippets that i was talking about. It's not the best for video editing, but again, for $12.99, you can do a ton of stuff. You can still do a lot of that free stuff in there too. But if you want to schedule it, it is definitely one of the cheaper items to use. You can even build a website. You can connect a domain to it, all still under the $12.99. So if you guys are paying hosting fees for websites, it's one of the ways to do it a little bit cheaper. um b-roll so i haven't really said the word b-roll but i've i've danced around it a little bit when i keep talking about all these snippets of just things happening in your everyday business um the the b-roll made simple then is that this is capturing simple video content while you're working. And so you don't need to be a professional video production person. This is where we can, a lot of us can get really stuck is that we think we have to make a big thing out of creating video. But these are really just short clips from your daily business activities that become very valuable content. Now, B-roll hit, I want to say four or five years ago. it was massive the algorithms absolutely loved it so if someone was adding this b-roll into it or they were creating a a reel that was 100 b-roll if for some reason that was that was the big thing at the time and so if we talk about the difference between what is a role and what is b-roll a role is what i'm doing right now so you're looking at me i'm talking directly at the camera um if it was b-roll you could be i you might see a city escape as I'm talking or it's me typing on my laptop or something like that or. I'm going to take it from the side here, like a picture and maybe that that is the B-roll, right, of what I'm doing. I usually take a picture of everybody that I'm talking to and I haven't done it tonight because, you know, it's social media, right? So I'm not even practicing what I'm preaching. But that's the difference between A-roll and B-roll. You hardly ever hear anybody talk about A-roll. Usually you will hear the roll B-roll, but it's a short background footage that basically supports whatever your your main message is. You can get a lot of B-roll from Canva also. They have a lot of free images and a lot of free videos on there too. Obviously it's not you and your business, but if you're new to all of this and you don't have a lot of video content, that's another place that you can. kind of piece together things with what you can get in there um so using them these are again i mentioned these kind of earlier unboxing new inventory setting up displays or shelves packaging customer orders preparing a product or service customer browsing with permission right is he normally one of your customers permission close-up of products textures details um i mentioned the the business that always had the very homey things right so you might be looking really close at a product so it's almost like you can touch and feel it um right there in the video uh it's and then it might go right back to you talking and then it might go to the detail again and that's kind of how those videos switch back and forth between the a and the b roll um but how that b roll helps you is that it creates engaging reels and tick tocks it adds visuals to voiceovers or captions so it's not just someone talking the whole time you can post content without always being on camera there are some accounts out there that are 100 faceless right you never even see the face of the person and maybe that is something that you want to do there is no requirement That it has to be a person's face. That's actually the, the social media account. Um, so it's pretty much all B roll at that point. Um, but it helps you build a visual story for your brand. People want to see things, right? Uh, maybe not just you, um, pro tip though, keep your phone nearby while you're working. Uh, again, like I said, I almost forgot myself to, to take the picture of everyone. Um. Record 10 to 15 second clips throughout the day to build that content library, and then you can use it anytime. Once you've got that video, you can use the video over and over and over again. And really nobody's going to know any different that it's the same snip that you've used here or four days later, right? There's so much out there that we're seeing and doing. Probably your family members are going to be the ones that are going to call you out on it because they're the ones that are actually paying attention. But most of the world is not going to know that you were even wearing the shame shirt. There's also that concern. seasonal planning so what about seasonal planning and trends uh definitely something we have to pay attention to so trends uh if we jump on the trends that are out there uh they will help us from a potentially going viral or that potential reach so there are platforms uh instagram tick tock in particular that uh when a trend is is trending right um whether it be the music that's in the background or the act actual piece of information that's happening, those trends tend to get more reach because that's that algorithm that's at play. So we want to make our content timely and relevant. So even though we are scheduling and planning ahead, we still have to be paying attention. So another thing that the social media platforms love is for us to use the social media platforms. Their whole goal is to get people to that platform. and not let them leave, you included. So that's why we all kind of go down the rabbit hole and lose our lives sometimes. I, for one, like to not ever touch TikTok because I feel like I would lose four hours of my life every time I turn it on. So I don't want to do that. But that is the goal of the platform. So they are succeeding. And so if you are able to retain people and keep them on the platform. uh then they will reward you and how they reward you is they show it to more and more people because the goal is to keep them on the platform so seasonal content helps your business stay visible and relatable inspiration holiday local events changing seasons so this is always happening spring back to school holidays local community events that are happening uh the more that people are sharing The things that helps you as well. So if there's people around your community and you are one of those people that are talking about the wonderful things that are going on and they start sharing, that's going to help you. And then also industry specific moments. So we are all friends in small business, right? Even our competitors, we can help each other out when it comes to social media. And the platform will know that you're posting specific things and it will start to show you other business. with very similar content to yours, right? And so you can also get inspiration and ideas from them as well. You can also monitor reels, TikTok, Instagram trends for inspiration. You don't need to dance to participate. I do like to say that one because there are certain platforms out there that it seems like you always have to dance in order to be part of the trend. You can use the music, right? That's behind that and capture it. best performing video that I ever had. It was when I was a real estate agent. So this was a while ago when I was active in that. I had used trending music, but it was me remodeling a house. So what I was doing had nothing to do with what the trend was. And just because I had hit the music at the time that it was being played, it... it went much further. My reach was much greater than any other video that I ever had. And it had nothing to do with the actual trend, but the music was popular. So if we're using AI to turn seasons into content ideas, here is a prompt example. Now, this isn't going to be one that's specific to the business that you've already plugged in there, but it is a prompt example. So you're saying what it is. You can also take what you've already typed in there because if you you notice you know the beginning of it is pretty much everything that you've already said um now you could really take that prompt from from what you've used before and you said you know i want to focus on seasonal posting ideas within these content pillars particularly um spring is approaching right so this time of year spring is approach approaching i want to create seasonal social media content for instagram and facebook Using my existing content pillars, so this would be the example you're already typing it, create eight seasonal posts for spring that would appeal to my audience. For each post idea include a hook to grab attention, a short caption concept, a suggested visual or video idea, and a call to action. So if I take that right there, what I just said, and I type it over here, I would say spring is approaching and I want. to create seasonal social media content that kind of day not going to be perfect but it'll be cool i'm going to drop that in there in case you guys want to play along so you don't have to type it like i just did unless you were being slow so the team version of chat gpt is a little bit slower than the personal version because it's dealing with a little bit different information also we will wait for that to pop in there. So if you guys want to copy and paste that and drop anything in there, that would be great. We'll see if that comes to life and I'll drop mine in there. So a followup prompt then. So once we've asked it to do that, we can then say, now turn these ideas into a two week social media posting plan with the mix of content pillars. And so that is creating that content calendar for you. So all that work that we were talking about how to do that. i do want to discuss that we're not really going into it today but when you really start diving into utilizing social media to help you create content and to create these plans you can now create ai content assistance you can create lots of ai assistants they're called bots different platforms give them a different name and the whole purpose of a bot is so that you just ask it something quick or you drop it a snippet of information and it gives you consistent feedback right so um these are easy to build uh we will i'm not sure if we'll have one this year for indiana but um out in the world we're probably going to end up doing one of these because we get asked for it a lot but because they are so easy to build we could create or you could create an ai content assistant and you would train it to understand already all this information that we fed it. So when I said something like, if you plug in your marketing plan, right, so the bot, I would say, using this marketing plan, create content, something like that, right? And it's something as simple as that. And so when I open up the bot, it's going to automatically say, what would you like me to do today? Or whatever question I've already told it to ask it or to ask me. And I might say, I need content for a seasonal promotion, right? And it's already going to have all that information fed into it. It's already going to know what my marketing plan is. It's already going to know what my content pillars are. And it's just going to spit that out for me. right and so a lot less typing and a lot less back and forth so i did want to mention those are out there so you don't have to rebuild this every single time but if you're on this thread because you've already started it right or you're on this chat because you've already started it you're probably just going to continue using this for a little while until eventually you reach your character limit which takes a while copilot is a lot shorter character limit than what chat gpt is meaning it'll only let you go so far in the same chat before it makes to start over a new one, but there are limitations on those. So that is a cool thing to have because talk about making things even more efficient is just build a bot where it just. spits out whatever you need to. So the next thing to cover then is to talk about advertising. So I mentioned before, I have a Facebook ad that's running right now in a very specific part of the world because of a program there. But implementing advertising is a way to reach more people when organic reach might be limited. And so the reason that I'm using an actual paid advertising is because it's a new area. that has a program. We have no followers there because it's a brand new area, right? So I can post everything that I want to, but nobody's seeing it because it happens to be the U.S. Virgin Islands. So it's an area of the world that I'm not even in, right? So sitting from Ohio, my organic reach is not very likely to reach anybody in that area. So paid ads can expand our visibility. It also lets us do targeted marketing. which says i want only people in the u.s virgin islands to see this i don't want anybody else to see it um and so i can make sure that my message is getting exactly to the audience that i want it to get to so this helps promote a product or an event it helps drive traffic to a site or a store build email list retarget past visitors so if we're in something like facebook there is an ads manager in meta it's big there's lots of different options with the types of ads that we can create in there it's a whole other workshop on its own but i wanted to make sure that you guys knew that it exists um you can also do it straight from your phone you don't even have to go into meta um you know you don't have to be on the computer and do all of that um it will walk you through step by step what you need to do um 75 of small business owners who run ads say that they see a measurable return on investment within the first 30 days. Now that's coming straight from Meta itself. I can say if you created a good ad that people want to respond to, it will be effective. The same thing with Google, right? If a Google ad is good, people are going to see it, they will respond to it. If they didn't... if it's not good content to begin with though that's the other thing uh they're probably not going to be responsive to it whether it was organic growth or it's paid advertising so the difference between boosting a post and using ads manager though so there's two different things going on boosting a post means we're just taking an existing post and we're pushing it out a little bit further so um quick and easy is boosting so we've already created the post right and we're just telling it that we want to put some money behind it to push it out a little further. Now, if that post was not performing well to start with, so we weren't getting any engagement, we weren't getting any reach. Remember, we're looking at those analytics. Boosting it is not going to do a whole lot for it. Now, we want to be specific about what we boost and what we put money behind. If it's doing well, we can just boost it to push it faster and further. So if we've got a great reel that's out there, that's another way to help it go viral. Although if it's doing well, they have flip side of it. you probably don't need to do that it's already performing well right um custom targeting with this type of thing so i talked about targeting ads custom targeting is very basic um when we're boosting um we can't do goals we can't a b test and we don't have much placement control we're literally just taking what we had and shoving it out there farther um ads manager i did mention ads manager and meta it is not quick and easy it is a lot of steps even though you've gone through all the steps there is a review process um i tried to do this yesterday i got rejected 12 times i think and i finally gave up and i came back today and i modified my ad a little bit facebook is very picky so just because you're paying for something doesn't mean they're going to let it happen they do have a lot of rules also in the ads that are out there and that are getting created They do have advanced custom targeting, though. So one of those things that I mentioned is I have a very specific geographic area in which I wanted this ad to be shown. And so I can specifically say that if you want only females between the age of 30 and 40 to see it, that is the only people that are going to see it. Right. When we all register for Facebook, we all had to put our birthday in there. We all said what our gender was. Right. So all of this information, it knows where we live because we put our where we live. If you're like me, it might not always be the most accurate information. So it is based off of what somebody put on the social media platform when they signed up for it, though. I think my son was a 54-year-old man at one point. It used to crack me up. It was because when he registered, I think he was only 13, and he didn't want people to know he was 13, which I happen to appreciate that. But it was funny when it said his birthday was, you know, and he was going to be 54. It does let you do multiple goals. It does let you do something called A-B testing, which is a nice thing to do when you're first starting out if you've never done ads. It literally has an A version and a B version and you get to see which one did better. And so you get to play around with that. And also placement control. So when to boost, to promote a post that's already doing well, when to use ads, that's when you have very defined goals as far as traffic, leads, conversions that you're trying to reach. So when you're setting up a simple ad funnel, your first ad doesn't have to be complicated. You just want it to be intentional. Examples, back to that funnel that we talked about at the very beginning tonight. Awareness, this could be a video ad introducing your business. Consideration, this could be a carousel showcasing your top products. So if you don't know what a carousel is, it's multiple images. um conversion this could be an offer ad with a discount or a lead magnet so there's a lot of lead magnets out there that that you're offering somebody something free for signing up or registering so uh templates digital products are very popular for this this free thing so you're giving somebody something for free you've then captured their email address they're now in your marketing pool right and then you're going to retarget and market to them a little bit different um start with a very low amount of money i think a dollar 25 or something like that is like the lowest you can go uh in a day uh facebook is actually very cheap um to use from an advertising standpoint with the number of people that you could reach um the the tighter that you get the target the the more likely you are to reach your target audience and when i say that is if you send it out to the entire united states As an example, so you're not targeting at that point, you're sending it out to the United States. It will say it's everybody 18 and over. That's how they all start. And then you're narrowing down from there. And so maybe we don't want it to be the entire United States. Maybe we only want it to be Evansville, Indiana. And so we can get it as down to say, if I'm local to Evansville, Indiana, that is the only people that I want to be able to see. And maybe I'll do a 15 mile radius around it. Right. So I can capture everybody. I'm going to drop into Kentucky a little bit, but that's all good. And so that then maybe I only want it to be people that are between the ages of 18 and 45. And so I can narrow my age gap down. Now, when that happens, what Facebook is going to do is it's going to start messing with those numbers. So we're going to go from potentially a million people that would see my ad. If I was the whole United States, I might get down to where only 800 people are going to see it. Right. And then I can get even further. So I can say that these are only people who play sports or watch something to do with sports right on Facebook. So they've watched a reel or they interact with some kind of sports page. And so you can see how this gets even smaller and smaller and smaller. And so Facebook is going to say, oh, it's only going to show it to so many people. Well, what you're trying to get to do is you're directly to your target who is most likely to interact or buy your product, right? Or book the information. And so that's your dollar spend. So you can spend a lot of dollars showing this to a lot of people that could care less about what it is that you're trying to sell. Or if you know your target really well, you're going to narrow it way down and you're going to spend your money getting it directly to those people that are most likely to interact with your business. And you're testing and learning along the way. Sometimes we get too narrow and we don't actually get it to anybody because also the other key to marketing is we get people at the moment where they're actually likely to buy, which is, you know, the harder part to it. But at least we're giving ourselves more success if we're getting it. to the person, it just might not be the right time for them. So a simple checklist, choose one goal. Do we want traffic? Traffic being, are we trying to get people to our website? Are we trying to have people fill out a form? Do we want engagement? Are we just trying to get people to follow us? Are we just trying to get people to comment? Those are actually goals in ads. So if we're just trying to grow our presence, maybe we are in Evansville, Indiana, and we're just trying to make people aware that we exist. And so this is just an awareness ad and we want people to start following us and seeing our business. And so that's the goal. Maybe we want signups. We can then create that post or ad graphic using Canva that I mentioned before. It'll create us a pretty graphic in there. We can create a pretty graphic. And then we can use meta ads manager. to build our audience so that's where we're narrowing it down for that location our ages our interest and then we can set that small budget we can start three to five days you can run it for one day you can run it and you're picking generally a daily budget so it's going to show you exactly what your daily budget would look like it's going to show you what your expected reach would be and then what your expected actual lead or conversion looks like so it might you you might see you have 64 000 people that are potentially going to see it and you might only get eight people now these are estimates right so there's no guarantee behind that you may have more you may have less but that reach is a pretty close estimate because Facebook is controlling that, right? They're controlling how many people can see it. And then we want to monitor the results. So if it's meta business suite that we're using insights, then we go to ads and we can see the actual analytics on how it performed. So this is what an AB test looks like that I mentioned. So we're setting up two different versions of basically the same ad. So this can be two different visuals. This can be two different captions that we're having perform at the same time. This is an example of an AB version. So this is a company that sells jackets. They've got the yellow jacket on the left. They've got the black jacket on the right. Happens to be the same model, right? He looks very different. He looks kind of different. dark and sinister over to the right. He has bad background. It's just a bad photo all around. They sold 48%. So this is conversion, right? So this is actual sales. You can see they've got that little shop now button. So that button's taking either directly to a Facebook shop or to their website so they can buy the coat. So that conversion was 48% with A and it was 26% with B. So if they were going to run an ad, they at least got good feedback that which one performed better, right? Which one looked better. They definitely sold more of the yellow coat than they sold of the black one. Social proof then. So what is social proof? It's all about trust building. And so if you remember in the funnel, we talked about Our loyalty and our advocates down there at the bottom of the funnel. So this is where social proof starts to come in. This is where we're trust builders. So people trust what others say more than what we say. So we can do all the ads in the world out there. But someone speaking on our behalf tends to have so much more power than any ad that we're going to see. So if you're asking someone for a recommendation, you're more likely to go buy or do business. with that person because your friend recommended it right or maybe they're not a good friend and so you're avoiding them um but these are types of social proof that we have out there those are reviews and testimonials uh make sure you have your google business profile make sure you're asking for reviews that's a great place um for reviews and testimonials and for people to find our business photos and videos from customers so if someone took a picture of a product that they bought or they said something awesome about us on social media and they shared it on their own social media page. That's huge, right? Those are considered to be advocates when they do that. Influencer shout outs. We can certainly give influencers free products or ask them, pay them or ask them to give us a shout out, right? Things can really take off if an influencer, which has, you know, a bunch of followers, they say something great about our product. That's why they have as much power as they do. And also before and after images. If you're a contractor potentially and, you know, you are a home remodeler, for example, and you've got the before pictures and the after pictures, that's social proof, right, of the great work. So 93% of consumers say that UGC is helpful in making those purchasing decisions. How to get user-generated content then? Ask happy customers to tag you. You guys have probably all been part of a share and win campaign at some point. they've asked you to like. comment, tag, share, right? They're asking you to do all that because they're trying to get that user generated content. And for everyone that does that, at the end of whatever day, you're going to be entered in a drawing for a free product or a gift card or whatever, right? So they're getting more people to follow their pages and also getting that boost from shares and likes. You can create a branded hashtag. So something like Instagram, where hashtags are important. Same thing with TikTok. You can create a branded hashtag that is solely for your business. And then every time you are creating content, you are utilizing that hashtag. You're asking other people to use that hashtag. one of the most familiar places is when people get married right they have their own hashtag about their wedding and then everybody can see all the pictures that everybody shared on instagram just by entering that hashtag well the same concept works for business if you have everybody that loves what you do use that brand hashtag you can very easily find all those photos that everybody's been out there sharing featuring different customer photos in uh posts and stories offering a small reward so coupon or shout out so caption idea Real customers, real feedback. That's what we love the most. Tag us for a chance to be featured, right? um turn social proof into sales then so use testimonials as content pillars so we talked about uh engagement credibility i think were some of those those pillars um so you can use those testimonials that you receive so the post what sarah said about our new gift sets the story highlight customer love uh why they shop with us a real could be a voiceover of you or someone on your staff reading a customer quote like your latest google you right you could be reading it a website you you can embed the instagram user generated content right there on the gallery And so then growth engagement. So in great engagement, that word engagement is more than likes. So we've got comments, saves, shares, story replies. These all boost visibility. Social platforms reward conversations. Remember their goal is to keep them there and keep them there for a long time. So engagement increases trust. Trust drives sales. Top engagement boosters, asking questions in your captions, this or that, which would you choose? Using interactive stories, polls, quizzes, slides. go live this can be a little bit daunting uh but you could go live on a lot of these uh different platforms and uh have people reply to comments uh with the videos so uh tick tock is one of those you know you see a video you can actually reply to the video it's a video of you replying or sharing and you're you're doing some kind of commentation there um collaborate with other businesses or creators uh businesses that are are working together can help each other from a market marketing standpoint on social media, and then using those trending real audios that I talked about, especially on Instagram and TikTok. Don't post and ghost. So that's part of it when you're back scheduling. Don't post and then just walk away truly for two weeks. Reply to those comments and direct messages that you might be getting within 24 hours. So if someone has taken the time to comment or reply to you, make sure that you're replying back to them as well. and uh ask a question in your response because the goal is to keep the commentation going and to keep it um hashtagging and community strategy so you want to use a mix of hashtags branded niche location type hit uh uh hashtags examples shop indiana full style uh main street muncie uh follow and comment on local business accounts or creators so if you are a local based business you want to be part of the local community and the more that you're interacting with other people within the local community the more that they're going to see the content uh follow the different groups if you're it's facebook those types of things share to those groups uh re-share content from your town or your chamber of commerce so events and things that are happening in the area host a giveaway way with another fellow small business, that's cross audience exposure, right? You're gaining exposure from their audience, they're gaining exposure from yours. So everybody's helping each other out. I did mention analytics and optimization, where you find those uh if you're on instagram and facebook you're going to find that in meta business suite if you're on tick tock they have their own analytics linkedin has page insights um let later and metricool are also free tools that you can utilize that are going to help you analyze those analytics so key metrics that you're going to want to track you don't want to track everything. Again, it falls back to what is your business objectives and goals. So reach is an important one. Are people seeing your content? So when you look at that post, you want to know how many people it reached. Obviously, the more people that it reaches, the better that it's performing. That means it was a pretty good piece of content. If it didn't really reach anybody, there's a couple things. It could be the content itself. It could just be the timing. That's another trick to posting is finding that sweet spot of when your followers or the people that like your page are actually engaging with things. That's a science to develop over time. That's when you get to know who your audience is. Engagement rates. so likes comments follows right uh shares saves those are the other types of engagement are they interacting with it oh saves and shares are there that indicates value and relevance uh how many people have shared a reel or saved a reel and never went back and looked at it right uh you helped whoever that creator was um just because you saved it website clicks this converts to sales or signups right so if we we've got those ads that have that on there Followers, this is growth over time, not overnight, right? Followers do not always translate to sales either, right? We can have the most awesome social media page. We can have all these followers, all these people engaging. They may not ever buy a thing. So that could just be because we're entertaining and awesome and people want to pay attention to us, but they may not actually know that we're trying to sell something in the end. um how to use this data high engagement uh repurpose or boost that post right so high engagement was good we want to use it again and again and again or we want to boost it and get even more Low engagement, try a new format. Maybe it was just the wrong format. So we can take a post, we can create a video out of it. We can make it a question. Maybe we had a bad hook. So we didn't quite capture people's attention. So we just want to look at it and kind of reformat it a little bit and then try it again. test two different types of posts so if we can do a little a b test and see which one runs better and then we can compare those but make a monthly habit of reviewing refining and repeating. So hard part is figure out those objectives and our strategy. Then we figure out our content pillars, right? And then we get our calendar out there. Then we start to create content. But once we are getting in the habit of creating it, we need to always be reviewing, refining, and then repeating. So how to use prompts to create better content. We talked about that today. We can use, and if you notice the prompts that I was giving you, nothing was crazy, right? So these aren't huge long prompts. We just want to make sure that we have that basic information in there. All else fails. If you're new, just start to have a conversation with the AI platform that you're utilizing and ask it questions. You can say, I'm new to social media marketing. I don't even know where to start. What information would you need from me to help me get started? Right. And AI is going to give you a list of questions and it's going to ask you things like, what is your business name? What do you sell? Who is your target audience? And then you've got that information and then you can say. what social media platforms should I be posting on? And it's going to ask you maybe a little bit more about your target audience, and then it will give you a recommendation of the social media platforms that you should be on. And you can just continue building it. But the best thing that you can do when you're using AI, definitely for the first time, is ask questions. and then ask it to ask you any follow-up questions just by saying ask me any follow-up questions you've stopped it from just responding with limited information and it will give you a list of questions that you can then answer back And you will reach a point where I'll actually say to you, I think I have enough information or I have as much information as I need. And it will give you then a response. And you can go back and forth like that for a long time. But treat it like a two-year-old, right? Why? Why? Until you get to the point where you understand what it's trying to tell you. We talked about how to batch and repurpose content with Canva as far as resizing, how to run a basic face. Facebook, Instagram ad, how to use UGC and reviews to build that trust and then how to grow engagement and track success. So this literally was two hour crash course of everything you ever needed to know about social media. Who wants to take a stab at this answer though? I said it probably 12 times. What is the number one key to social media marketing? It's so simple. Go ahead. You can come off mute. I'm going to cheer for you if you get it right. You can type it in the chat if you're afraid to speak. Yes. Look at you guys. Consistency. Absolutely. Even if you're bad, just be consistent, right? You will get rewarded, rewarded eventually for your consistency. So just stick with it. As hard as it is, obviously, the more that you do it, the more that you're going to start to learn about what you're doing. You're also going to be paying a lot of attention when you're on those platforms. So consistency. I love the one with the exclamation point. JD was confident. Deanna, not so confident. She put the question mark. However, you both are right that it is consistency. So again, my name is Christy Dudgeon. I'm the president of SBC Consulting. Feel free to interact with me. I am not active on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok like I used to be back in my real estate days. However, I am active on LinkedIn. So you guys can catch me there. So any questions that you guys have? We have about four more minutes. You can come off mute or you can drop them in the chat. Otherwise, as a reminder, contact your Indiana Small Business Development Center or advisor if you already have one. If you want a link to this as well as the PDF of these slides so you can have this information. And don't be afraid to ask them for help. That's why they are there to help you develop all this stuff. You are welcome, everyone. Glad you enjoyed it. Oh, thanks, Patty. It's great to know. They do have these at least once a month. There are different topics. I know we have at least one in a month. Anything from financial to marketing to business planning, lots of different topics out there. So make sure you join. You're welcome. Thank you. Thank you. My job for listening as well. your dog was probably listening to my dog snoring i have a boston terrier that's literally right here beside me snoring the whole entire time i i do have a question for you about the batching so yes so like you can get the entire post like everything set up on like i guess when i'm picturing doing a post on instagram so you got your visuals you've got your caption you've got your hashtags like Can you do all that in Canva so that it automatically goes out? Yes. Let me jump over there real quick and see if I can log in. That's one of my grandsons. Hopefully Canva will come up. Sometimes it's picky when I'm in here. For some reason, I'm going to turn my camera off real quick and just see if it will help. my internet push this all right this is just a youtube snippet oh yeah that was a legal legal course um so when i go up here to share and if i if i go directly to youtube it's not going to be connected which of course is going to say open i'm going to see if it'll try to give it to me even though i'm not connected nope it's not going to do it I was hoping I could get to the page to show you, but when you get to there, so maybe if I say Instagram, this is the part that you want to get to where you're sharing this. Normally what you're going to have here is a block. Once you've got your Instagram account connected that you can type in a caption. and you could type in the hashtag so the visual is what i'm actually sharing out of canva right but then i come over here when i'm actually doing that share and i'm typing the rest of that information in and then at the bottom of this it's going to actually have when i'm scheduling it so that's where i'm going to put the date and the time in that i want that to go okay so so you have the visual there but then all that information is going to be put in on the right yes okay created the visual i'm sharing the visual then i can do the rest of that information okay because i've been doing a lot of like i create an instagram and then i do cross share on facebook so i thought that was interesting what you said yeah um i mean is it more about i mean i understand the demographics of the two but like i guess some of the posts i do i feel like are fine for both Some of them are. Yeah. Some of them definitely are. But if you, the intent of the platform or what the platforms really are all about, it's, they are two different things. So where you might post something on Instagram that's visually beautiful and amazing when you. create the caption for Facebook, it may still be the same image, but you're probably going to have a lot bigger caption than you would have used in Instagram because the photo is probably going to speak for itself on Instagram and that's what the user is looking for. But you might actually be describing it or talking about how you got to whatever that picture was, right? Like if you're on a trip or it's a vacation or whatever that may be, that there's where that community and kind of that conversation side of things are different in Facebook than they would be in Instagram. And so that's where using meta can sometimes be helpful with those also, because you can look at both of them at the exact same time and you're just toggling. between facebook and instagram and then you just schedule them right out there and post it also okay so you can do them simultaneously but and you can also update that when you're doing the cross posting you can do a little bit of updating also before it goes over to the other platform okay okay thank you so much very helpful All right, we are out of time. So thank you all for joining. I hope to see you the next time around. So have a good evening. Bye bye.

Social media can feel overwhelming for many small business owners.
What should you post? How often? Which platforms matter most?

In this workshop brought to you by the Indiana Small Business Development Center, small business consultant Christy Dudgeon (SBC Consulting) walks through a practical system for creating an effective social media strategy — and demonstrates how AI tools like ChatGPT can help you generate ideas, plan content, and save time.

This training is designed for entrepreneurs, local businesses, service providers, and anyone looking to simplify their marketing process.

In this workshop you will learn:

• How social media supports business growth
• How to identify your target audience
• How to build effective content pillars
• How to create a simple content calendar
• How to use AI prompts to generate post ideas
• How to batch and repurpose content efficiently
• How to increase engagement and visibility
• How to track results and improve your strategy

You’ll also see real examples of prompts small business owners can use to quickly create social media posts, captions, and content plans.

The goal is simple:
help you create consistent, meaningful content without spending hours every week on marketing.