Where are you at in your business? Do you know what the best practices in marketing are right now? What can you do to change or shift your business so that you can capitalize and do the best that you can? We're entering into the Fall and we think it is a great time to look at your business and figure out what you have to STOP, START, and CONTINUE.
Ask yourself:
- What are the things you need to stop doing?
- What are the the things you need to add?
- What are the things that are still working that you can continue for the betterment of your business?
You need to ask these questions to every now and then. Why?
The thing about social media is, it’s constantly changing!
There may be some fundamentals and strategies that won’t ever change, but sometimes your approach and focus can often change. In this episode, Social Media Marketing Happy Hour girls Dawn and Traci talk about the importance of paying close attention to your business to see what's working, what isn't, what's changing, and if necessary, accepting and embracing change as it comes.
In this kind of industry, you have to be able to keep up with the recent advancements, the trends, and the new strategies, or else you'll fall behind. We try to stay on top by constantly testing, updating, and leveling up their knowledge and skills. We never stop learning and following top leaders. Of course, no one knows it all, not even the best of the best in the industry! But we should always try to keep up… in fact, it's our job to keep up! We hope that's why you come to us, because we try to stay on the cutting edge of everything so that you can get valuable tidbits from us and so that you can maximize your efficiency in your own business.
What has changed for Dawn and Traci?
The Happy Hour girls are shifting a little to be able to do extra things that are very valuable and fulfilling. We realized that both of us have different strengths and that we have to capitalize on those strengths to make a bigger impact and a more fruitful business. Not only are we doing what's working better for the both of us, but we also get to work on our heart's desires.
Some of the listeners might not have known but both Dawn and Traci have kind of quietly launched their own side businesses apart from Happy Hour. Dawn has been doing consultations related to marketing automation, email marketing, membership sites, whereas Traci has launched an agency where she does social media and marketing consulting and training and some done-for-you marketing services. Don't worry listeners, this doesn't mean that The Social Media Marketing Happy Hour is going anywhere, it's just something that had to happen – a necessary change for us that would propel our careers forward even more.
How about you? Are you doing the things that you love doing? It's great to be working on things that make us fired up. When you don't view work as work and view it as something fun and exciting, you become more happy, and ultimately more productive.
It's not just knowing what's working, it's also knowing what's NOT working for you. And once you know what they are, you make adjustments in that regard.
If there are things that you don't like doing, think of outsourcing the work. Sometimes, there's that part of your business that you are not too keen on doing or you don't have enough time to get to doing it. For example, if you don't like blogging but you know it should be a part of your business, hire someone else to do it. Get a virtual assistant or someone who can help you with some of the tasks you have difficulty getting to.
At Happy Hour, one of the things we had to evaluate is the podcast. Because we have shifted into this client model, we had to scale back on the podcast. A lot of people come to us asking what they should be doing day in and day out. They want a step by step checklist they can follow. You can't just build your business based on the fact that you've checked the boxes. If you're not reviewing your business and seeing if you're actually going where you want to go, then it's pointless.
For example in podcasting, we used to kills ourselves doing it 7 days a week, but we had to step back and see if this strategy was really contributing to our goals, bringing in more clients and making an impact on more people. But the truth is, it wasn't doing that that for us. So we changed the schedule and went with podcasting 3 days a week and ultimately to 1 day a week. We still made sure we brought value to each podcast, despite of it being not as frequent as before.
If your reason of having a podcast is to raise awareness of what you do or to become a thought leader, that's great! But if you think you're going to be able to monetize it quickly, in our experience, it's not possible. For those of you who are planning to have a podcast to generate leads, and we're saying this because we love and value all of our listeners, it is actually one of the hardest ways to generate leads for your business.
There are much less expensive and time-consuming ways to generate leads like our Twitter strategy. Don't miss the next episode if you want to learn more about this and know how Traci has created a lead generating machine out of Twitter.
Also, if you haven't joined our Facebook Gamechanger's group, go to https://happyhourhangouts.com/fbgroup.
