Social media platforms have too much power and influence nowadays. But by trying to be everywhere at once, you’re missing so much. What’s the key to being successful on social media? Join your host Juliet Clark as she discusses finding the ideal customers and clients for your business. Today, she talks with Megan Brame on how to build businesses to increase revenue so we can live the awesome lives we have always dreamed of while improving the lives of our customers at the same time. Megan is a 5x award-winning Advanced Digital Marketing Strategist who helps entrepreneurs create ride-or-die fans for life. We all want to be successful entrepreneurs, but sometimes, it’s unclear how we could develop marketing strategies to achieve the goals we have set for our business. In this episode, she gives an overview of why marketing doesn’t have to suck and explains why we need to stop using shiny social media platforms to reach our audience. Different things work for different people. So, tune in as we enhance our knowledge to execute strategies and learn different opportunities for professional growth.
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Strategic Marketing For Customer Engagement And Business Growth With Megan Brame
I’m excited to have this conversation. For some of you, it may be a little bit controversial. If it is, I guess you’ll just have to not read. Before we get started, I want to send you over. Remember to go take our quiz at www.PromoteProfitPublishQuiz.com. Find out if you’re ready to publish. When we start these journeys into writing a book, we think that writing the book is the hard part. Publishing is a little bit easier if you do it the right way but the hardest part is the marketing. Find out, do you have that audience built? Do you know how you’re going to market? Do you have the funds to pay for it? Those are all the things you never take into consideration before you do this and it hurts you getting your expert book out into the realm.
Also don’t forget to go over and subscribe to our YouTube channel, Superbrand Publishing over on YouTube. If you’ll listen to the podcast or over read the blog, you can see video over there. You can see these people. You can see that my guest has purple hair. If that’s what you’re into, you can email us and find out what color purple that came out as. Our guest is Megan Brame. Megan is a five-time award-winning Advanced Digital Marketing Strategist who helps entrepreneurs create the ride-or-die fans for life. I love that you kept this short and sweet. Welcome.
Thank you so much. I hope I can be as controversial as you lift me up to be. I think it’s going to be boring.
I think it’s going to be boring but I think in a sense it’s not going to be boring. It depends on which side of the aisle you’re on because we’re going to talk a little bit of politics too. Megan is a social media and marketing expert. Before we jumped on here, we were talking about do you really need social media? Do you really need Facebook? I’m going to let you expound on that. You all know out there, I haven’t been on Facebook for years and my business has taken off. It’s been a good thing.
In social media, there’s no guarantee you’re getting it to the right people.
That is such perfect proof. Many people get scared like, “I can’t leave Facebook. All my fans will go away. Nobody will know that I exist.” You’re proof that you don’t need it. I ramped against Facebook because in my opinion, they have way too much power and influence, not only in the world but small businesses with the ability to control and toggle your reach. Are you able to reach the people who need your help? Not really. Not without paying.
Even if you pay, there’s no guarantee you’re getting it to the right people. My beef with Instagram is long and vast. I don’t think you need social media. I think you need organic marketing and a strategy for organic marketing. If that is social media, then so be it. There’s nothing wrong with that. You got to run your business the best way that’s for you but if you’re like, “I’m sick of Instagram,” you don’t have to be on Instagram. There are ways around this.
I had a business page, a show page and huge audience. I had a big audience over there, about 5,000 people, plus the likes on all the pages. I always would get scared. I would get tired of it. I feel like it’s gotten toxic in the sense that a lot of people are fighting on there but there are other things for entrepreneurs like the time suck. How do you avoid the time suck?
You have to start at the beginning, which I know is trite and cliché. You have to start by figuring out who you’re trying to target. Are they even on Facebook? If so, are they on Facebook for the same reason that your business is on Facebook? When I was a director of marketing, I got into fights like go in the corner, take a time out fights with the sales department because they want it to be on Instagram. I was a director of marketing for a staffing company. Nobody’s going on Instagram looking for jobs. They’re going on LinkedIn, Twitter, maybe Facebook, not really. My point was we couldn’t devote time to being everywhere just for the sake of being everywhere. We have to be strategic about where we’re going, who we’re talking to and how we’re talking to them. It’s great if you want to reserve your name everywhere. That’s fine but don’t put so much effort into a platform that isn’t going to provide for you.
Strategic Marketing: We can’t devote time to being everywhere, just for the sake of being everywhere. We have to be strategic about where we’re going, who we’re talking to and how we’re talking to them.
That brings that one size fits all strategy, which I do see a lot out there where someone will take a post and they’ll do the same post across different platforms but different platforms are meant to be used in different ways. Would your advice be if you have to be on it all, choose 1 or 2 of them and thoroughly understand that platform and how you need to post and adjust?
That’s a fantastic strategy because first, it’s an ego thing. You have to give up your ego and say, “I don’t have to compete with all of my competitors who are on Pinterest because I know my fans or my ideal client is not on Pinterest for the things that I do.” I feel like it’s a Pied Piper kind of situation where someone will start on a social media platform and their competitor will follow them. “Juliet’s on there. I better be on there.” Then someone else says, “Megan’s on there. I’d better be on there.” Nobody’s actually talking, making sales or doing anything. We’re all just following the leader and the leader didn’t know what they were doing either.
When you are picking a social media platform, don’t look at where your competitors are. That’s going to put you down a rabbit hole of time waste. It’s detrimental. Instead, focus on who your ideal customer is, what platform they use, if you want to use social media, how they use it and how you can utilize that to your advantage. Remember, every social media platform and even Pinterest too, their goal is to keep you on the app as much as possible. They can’t sell ads on your website. They can only sell it on the Instagram feed. If you can get an organic strategy that dips your toe into using the amplification power of a social media platform but don’t rely on that as the only strategy, that is the smartest way to go for a long-term approach.
Let’s talk about this a little bit. Off of social media, I had to rely on building actual relationships, which was amazing because I felt better about the communication and people were buying more. That’s one of the things that social media started with, especially Facebook, “We’re going to have a community.” Even to the point where they built those communities. One of my beef with Facebook is they get a new idea, put in the algorithms and then force your old audience out of the way. Remember when they decided that communities were the new churches of your life? We saw people go from having a business page with great engagement, people going on to all of a sudden, those people didn’t have visibility and now you have a group. People thought the groups were the way. Nobody’s selling anything out of a group anymore.
You need to focus and stop doing what’s easy. Start thinking critically and figure out the right choice for your business.
Facebook in particular but all platforms to one extent, you’re beholden to their whim and that whim can rock the boat in thousands of dollars. You can be up because they implemented this new feature that works for you. Reels was big. Instagram started that mostly because they wanted to be TikTok. When everyone else got Reels, then you’re one of the millions. You can’t differentiate yourself unless you worked hard in the beginning to set yourself apart in such a way that no one else would go to another author or another marketing strategist. You are at their mercy and that’s not the way you should run a business.
Let’s get into something that people don’t realize about social media. Have you ever read The Age of Surveillance Capitalism?
No, I haven’t.
Facebook, these guys aren’t making money. It started out all of them, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. It was this big community be able to communicate but then it turned into billions and possibly even trillions of dollars of revenue because they have collected all of this data on us. Let’s talk about the downside of that. I read an article about a woman who requested. You can request from Facebook a history, a log of everything you posted. She got 14,000 plus pages of information that Facebook had collected on her. Think about that when we come to social media. How scary is that? They tracked, doing all this buying and sold your stuff. Is that what we want to do for our businesses?
Strategic Marketing: When you are choosing a social media platform, don’t look at where your competitors are. Focus on your ideal customer, what platform they use, how they use social media, and how you can utilize that to your advantage.
To that point, I remember when Facebook logins became all the rage. Everybody who login on Facebook on my blog will be able to follow my page or something like that. They made it so easy, which is the most insidious part. Why would you not have this cool feature? Why would you not have a Facebook login if that’s going to give me more fans or something? We started to shift from vanity numbers into realizing that if we have 20,000 people on our Facebook group, six people are seeing my message. What’s the point of it? That’s when it started to become this world of, “I need to stop doing what they’re saying is easy and start thinking critically about is this the right choice for my business? What does this provide in terms of giving my customer a good experience? Does a Facebook login do anything for them for that? Not really.”
To another quick side ramble, they made things so easy so that we put so many things on our websites, on business cards and everything like, “Here’s my Twitter feed, my Instagram feed.” It slowed all of our websites down. All of this trying to put on shiny objects for our users isn’t helping them. I believe in minimal. Keep it simple. Tell them what you want them to do and stop trying to give them all of this flash. They don’t need flash. They need your solutions.
The flash is why marketing is changing every 9 to 14 months. We see changes in the marketing because people get exhausted by, “We’re supposed to opt-in for that. We’re taking a quiz. I’ve got a video and a book.” People are exhausted by all of it.
If you are on Instagram personally, how many times do you scroll through your feed and you’re like, “There’s a plant picture. There’s somebody’s kid.” You don’t stop. You don’t take it in. You’re just like, “That’s a cool plant. That kid is ugly.” Why would you want to run your business in a situation where people aren’t exposed to your message in the way that you need them to be exposed?
The ability to get into someone’s inbox and not be hit by spam is rare.
When I get on Pinterest, I can’t get off. It’s one of those things. I don’t do it as much as I used to but when it was new, I would pin recipes, exercises but I would never do them, never buy and never engage. In fact, I used to tell people, “If I ate all the food I pinned and worked out as much as I pinned, I would be like a 400-pound sumo wrestler.” People don’t. They’ve gotten so immune to it all. It’s the same thing with the Facebook ads. I remember years ago when people were having online events, summit, opt-in and they’d get all these things in their feed for coaches. They would complain about, “How do I get rid of this? I’m tired of seeing these people.” We’re exhausted by it all.
Where a lot of entrepreneurs make mistakes is they’ll think about how they think a platform runs. How do I think Pinterest runs? I think that I can put this pin, put a little description and then maybe use hashtags, maybe not. I’m not sure if Pinterest works like that but I’ll do it anyway. It will bring me tons of people into my sales funnel but it doesn’t work that way because you’re up against so many different people who are trying to do the same thing. It pays to instead of thinking like, “I’m going to make all these recipes, do all these workouts and have the most beautiful life that you have ever seen.” People use Pinterest to pin stuff that they’re never going to do or if they do, it’s because they’re bored or something.
How can I instead pivot that thinking to my advantage? To be fair, I don’t know the answer to that. I would have to do some jotting down on how that would work but that’s my example of be realistic about the way platforms are used before you start utilizing them as a marketing strategy. I don’t want anybody to waste time thinking like, “I made all these beautiful pins and people are pinning them but nobody is coming to my website.” It’s because that’s how Pinterest works and that’s how Pinterest wants to work.
I have a question about Pinterest. Be honest. Audience, answer this in your head and be honest too. How many times have you made something on Pinterest and it didn’t look anything like it was on Pinterest?
Strategic Marketing: Joint ventures can work, but the expectations have to be realistic. You have to figure out what will make them click and join a specific webinar or newsletter list.
The instant pot recipes that I make looked like some variation of curry. No matter what I do, it looks like some sort of glop together. There’s no beautiful life here. There are no beautiful instant pot recipes. It’s all just mush that may or may not taste good.
I do desserts. They always taste good but they never. In fact, I put them on the table and my family would be like, “What is that? Why should I eat it?” You mentioned something about they’re not clicking through to my site. Remember the days when we all had huge lists of people who didn’t respond. Is that out the window too, since you’re someone who does a lot of marketing and funneling? What works now?
My answer is terrible. Different things work for different people. I’m sorry. If I had that answer, then my hair would be the most beautiful shade of purple in the world instead of the faded purple it is now because I would be a trillionaire. Do lists work? Lists work if you can honor that relationship that you have requested from somebody. The ability to get into someone’s inbox and not be hit at spam is rare. You’re not spam. They opted in but they don’t want to read you anymore. People hit spam very liberally. To get past that, you have to respect the amount of work that it took for them to give you their email. If you have an opt-in that you’re using at the beginning of your sales funnel, it’s your goal to get someone on the list and then get them into an automated email sequence, you have to do it in such a way that honors the reason they signed up.
Maybe somebody signs up for a marketing spreadsheet or a free chapter of my book. Why did they want that? They wanted the marketing spreadsheet because they want help with figuring out a social media strategy or they downloaded the copy of the chapter of my book because they wanted to see what the worst day in my business was. Honor that. Create the sequence that honors that and engages them. If you can get somebody to respond and reply to your email, you got them. It’s gold, instead of doing weekly updates like, “Here’s the blog post I put out.”
Customers don’t need the shiny flash of social media platforms. They need solutions.
I’ve done it. I’m trying to get away from it because who cares? They get millions of blog posts out every week. If I can instead think of a way to keep you engaged and have you answer questions that will funnel you into my blog posts, my show episode or things like that, then I’m giving you more value. It’s not about me, my blog posts and my show that I put out. It’s about why am I doing this? I’m doing this to help you with your marketing. My email list and the newsletters that I send out have to reflect that.
What do you think about all these people that are sending out all these joint ventures? I used to. They didn’t make money here and there on but I stopped and I run my author’s bestseller campaigns instead. I do that because I want people to see the diversity. I want them to see what’s going on and how this all works. What do you think of the people who are still sending it out? I still get them from a lot of people, the joint ventures and I’m like, “I’m not interested. I gave up on you a long time ago.”
Joint ventures can work but the expectations have to be realistic. Most people are over this. What’s going to make them click and join this webinar? What is the actual value you’re giving? You’re just doing a joint webinar to make money, which we all are. I’ll grant you that. We’re doing this to make money but my customer doesn’t care that it’s for me making money. My customer cares about what’s in it for me. You can flip that instead to not be like, “Join me on this joint venture.” It’s, “How’s your marketing going? Do you like Instagram or are you getting sick of it?” Ask questions. Get people involved. That can help with the joint venture situation. Not everybody’s into it and that is fine because we don’t want everybody. We want the people who get what we’re doing.
I feel the joint venture for the programs at this point are going after the newer audiences. People who’ve been in this business for a while understand that, “Those things aren’t going to help me. Been there, done that.”
With more experienced businesses, it’s too difficult because, in the beginning, most people are starting off on the same steps. “What system do I need to set up my business? What goals do I need to set? What social media platforms should I be on?” That’s much easier to target people but when you’re 5, 6 years in business, it’s not the same strategy. Everybody’s gone off onto their own little things and how do you group people in on a joint venture webinar. I don’t know.
If you want to reserve your name everywhere, that’s fine, but don’t put so much effort into a platform that will not provide for you.
This has been illuminating. I hope it has been for you too. Megan, where do we find you? You have a show too. Talk to us a little bit about your show and then where we can contact you.
They should go listen to the podcast because the amazing Juliet Clark was just on talking quizzes and breaking hearts.
You need to send me a link so I can share it.
It’s not up yet. The show is called Stop Sucking at Business. What it does is I bring on people much smarter than myself to help us all figure out what we’re doing in this crazy business world and how to make a profit. You can find that everywhere but you can go to MeganBrame.com. That’s my hub. That’s where all the stuff is. I would love to see you there.
Thank you so much for being on. We appreciate your insight and your purple hair.
Thank you so much, Juliet. I love you and I like you.
Important Links
- www.PromoteProfitPublishQuiz.com
- Superbrand Publishing
- Megan Brame
- The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
- Stop Sucking at Business
About Megan Brame
Megan Brame is a 5x award-winning Advanced Digital Marketing Strategist who helps entrepreneurs create ride-or-die fans for life.
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