Dr. Barnes shares the first social media mistake that so many business leaders make. This one mistake can limit engagement and cause people to unfollow a brand or business on social media. This episode is based on Dr. Barnes' book "5 Social Media Mistakes Your Business Should Avoid."

Transcription:

Welcome to the Bricks-To-Clicks Marketing Podcast. If you're a small business owner and you struggle to market your business, this podcast is just for you. I'm your host James Barnes. And thank you for listening today.

Welcome to the podcast, everyone. I'm glad you joined me here today. As you know, in season one, we're talking about the five social media mistakes your business should avoid. And today I want to dedicate this little short episode to mistake number one. And I think it's one of the things that I've seen over the last many years that the companies struggle with really at the very beginning of even creating a marketing message in general, but also just putting content out on social media. And it's this. This is the mistake. Most of the time businesses don't talk about the problem they help their customers solve. And that's part of it. There's a problem piece that's missing. They're about how they solve the problem for their customer, how this problem needs to be overcome. And they don't talk about it as a problem first content and people need to, because the problem is the hook.

If you've ever watched any good series on Netflix or any movie or anything that you've enjoyed watching, most of the time at the beginning of the show, something blows up. There's always a problem. Someone is abducted. Gosh, maybe it's a supervillain that appears and they're going to destroy the earth. It could be lots of things, but there's always a problem at the beginning and that creates the drama. And then that drama has to be relieved or solved throughout the movie. This is the same hook that works in your marketing. You have to start with the problem. What is it that you solve for your customer that's a problem they have? And so that's where you really have to start. Now, the second piece to that is it's not just about talking about the problem.

It's also identifying that if your customer has a problem, they are losing out on something. If they have a problem, they're experiencing some kind of loss. The loss may be loss of time, loss of money, loss of a lot of things. It could be a lot of things, but time and money would capture a whole bunch of it. Okay. The problem is people don't talk about problems and losses together. And let me give you an example. I was driving down the road many years ago in Louisiana, and I saw a billboard. And to this day, it's one of the best advertisements I've ever seen that captures this whole idea of problem loss and putting it together. At the top of the billboard, it simply said, "Gambling problem?" There's a question mark. That's it. And then next to it said, "You could lose this." And the image that they had drawn next to it was just a silhouette of a family.

Now, if you had that particular problem if you struggled with gambling, and you saw that, how fast would that identify you as, yeah, that's me? At the end of the day, that's what we want our customers to say when they read our marketing content about what we do to help them. We want them to self-identify and say, oh yeah, that's me. That's the problem I have. And that's what I need help with. This billboard was amazing. It was so short and sweet, to the point gambling problem. And then it said you could lose this and it had a silhouette of the family. And it was so clear that if you continue to have the problem today and in the future, you risk losing your family in lots of different ways, relationships, could be a divorce, could be lots of things, could be lots of losses, but it's just a powerful example of how, if we can start talking to our customers about the problem that they really have, it positions us so well to actually do business with them eventually, because we really do want to help them.

At the end of the day, most companies solve problems for customers because they want to help people. And there are just tons and tons of examples of it. But if you don't put together problems and losses and you just talk about the problem, sometimes our customers don't feel the loss if they don't do business with us. And there has to be some kind of loss. They're going to lose time. They're going to lose money. Something is going to happen that's not a good thing for them. And it's our job to talk about that a little bit. We don't want to be too negative about it. One of the things that you can do to lighten this just a little bit is you can ask a question like that. Gambling problem? Pretty straightforward. It's not too negative. You could lose this silhouette of the family. That's heavy, but it does make the connection.

And an addiction problem like that, they're making the point. This is a big deal. You've got to get on top of this problem. And so it was really powerful. I'll tell you more about that billboard as the episodes in this season unfold. I'm going to use it throughout every episode to tell you the rest of the ad, but that was a really powerful statement at the top. And so I want to give you an exercise you can do. I want to keep these podcasts really short. There's an exercise you can do. Just a piece of paper and pen, or you can do it in an Excel spreadsheet if you like to do Excel stuff. I love Excel. It's going to be three columns. Okay. In column one, you're just going to have a problem. That's the subheading. And then underneath it, what is the problem that you solve for your customers?

And I'll give you a way to get to this. For your company, think about your company, just simply fill in the blanks here. We help people blank. What do you help people do? Do you help people get jobs? Do you help people market their business online? Do you help people overcome depression? Do you help people? What is it? Just try to put it into really simple terms that way. Okay. In the next column, and you're going to have several things down this list. The other one just has one thing or two that you're going to have as a problem. I want you to title this problem and then loss. Okay. Think about the problem you just said, you just filled in for your company. What are the losses your customers are experiencing right now because they have this problem?

Are they losing time? Are they losing money? Are they losing health? Could be mental, physical, could be lots of things. Are they having to endure some kind of hardship that there's a loss? What is that? Think of about that. Make a list of those things. Okay. Now in the third column, I want you to make the subtitle at the top feelings. All right. You've got problems, losses, and feelings. And then go down the list here. If you said the loss was the loss of time. Okay. Then what are they feeling? What are your customers actually feeling if they're indeed losing time? It could be a lot of things. I think of frustration. Nothing frustrates me more than to waste time. I don't want to do that. What are your customers feeling? Depends on what the loss is. Write that down. Make a list.

And there could be lots of feelings in this space. If you put money as a loss, maybe you have that one, then maybe this person's feeling overwhelmed. Maybe you're a financial consultant and you help families do financial planning and maybe debt is a problem. And so they're losing lots of money in interest and there are lots of other issues related to that, but maybe they just feel overwhelmed. They don't know where to start. Maybe that's how they feel. They're just overwhelmed. They're tired. What is it? Make a list of those things. And I think what you're going to start to see is this is who your ideal customer really is and how they feel about the problem that you're going to be solving for them. And the more you can use language, like what we're talking about, problem loss and the feelings that people have about it, the more you can help people see that you have a solution to it, but you first have to spend your time really working on what is the problem you solve?

And then what are the losses that you're helping your customers avoid? Because all of this can go into your marketing. Mistake number one is most companies struggle to really identify the problem they solve for their customers and the losses that they could avoid, but they're not. They're not avoiding them. They're experiencing them because of the problem they have. Really work on that. Do the exercise, go through it, make a list of problems, losses, and feelings that go along with it. That's going to start to give you an idea of the kind of language you can use on social media, your email campaigns, your website. I worked with a business owner today, in fact, and she's a counselor and a lot of people go to her for mental health. And we just worked up some different marketing messages for her website.

And one of them was, are you tired of struggling with depression? She gets a lot of clients that come to her for that. And that's why she does a lot of work to help people overcome. And it's just a simple question, almost like what we just said a minute ago, the gambling problem example. It's just really short and sweet. And so if you're someone and you come to her website and you see this, and this is you. Then it's just automatically telling you you're in the right place. And then she goes on to add some other things in there that are really powerful. And we're going to talk about more of these mistakes that people make on social media in the next episodes. But the first one is this problem loss, not using it in your collateral, in your marketing. You got to do it....