Last night we saw another full house for our masterclass, “How to use social media for your business.”
The event started off with a quick networking exercise, where attendees asked each other about their business and memorised facts about each other. Our Chief Communications Officer, Cat, led this exercise and asked members what their businesses were. As High Profile Club pre-screened our members to make sure they are entrepreneurs, everybody had a great entrepreneurial story to tell!
Then, Tanya and Cat from High Profile Club explained the club’s mission, to make our members more visible, credible and influential. As always, our members had the chance to pitch their businesses in front of like-minded entrepreneurs who might someday be their clients or even partners!
Here, our member Plamena pitched her health and nutrition business.
Then, Cat introduced our first of two keynote speakers for the night. High Profile Club member Giulia Iannucci is the founder of KnowThyBrand and a digital marketing guru. She has helped countless businesses thrive in the digital ecosphere and was here tonight to use her expertise in the strategic marketing field to explain to our attendees how to maximise social media use for their business’s advantage.
Giulia was quick to point out the omnipresence of social media in marketing nowadays. She explained that entrepreneurs can turn a blind eye to the modernisation of marketing, but they’ll be the ones to suffer when they lose out on a chance to interact with customers. Giulia also explained the difference between types of advertising, including traditional vs. native advertising.
In traditional advertising, people are forced to sit through what they know is advertisement from a company. Giulia gave an example of Youtube ads, where viewers sit impatiently for the ad to be over, not really paying attention to the ad itself. In contrast, native advertising is sponsored content. For instance, Giulia mentioned how she read an article and didn’t realise until afterward that the article was actually a sponsored ad from the company. Giulia was simply drawn in because the content of the article was interesting.
This is why Giulia believes that native advertising is the smarter and more cost-effective solution. She cautioned the audience against letting their ego overrun their business sense. She explained that a post can get 5000 likes, but unless that post generates any actual sales, it’s worthless. It’s better to make a post with 20 likes but 10 customer engagements.
Our next keynote speaker was High Profile Club member Tosin Oguzie, founder of Founder Sparks and Founders HQ. Tosin has worked endlessly to provide resources to beginning entrepreneurs to help automate their businesses. Tosin works from the point of view of helping clients scale their businesses, so Tosin is naturally an expert at all things marketing, especially digital. At last night’s Masterclass, Tosin was an expert on sales funnels and how social media fits into the sales process.
Tosin talked about finding the personality, not just demographic, of your target audience. For Tosin, it’s useless to do social media if you have no direction of who exactly you are targeting. She suggests that you get a picture in your head of one person you hope to persuade to buy your product through social media. What are they like? Their age? Gender? Marital status? Education? Occupation? Household? Background? And even more narrowly, what dreams and aspirations do they have? What are their challenges and pain points?
Only with this information can a business truly create a sales funnel and target exactly the demographic they will most well serve. This is the sales funnel – an engineered process of narrowing down demographics to achieve better sales percentages. No need to waste time trying to persuade someone who will never convert into a customer to buy your product. Instead, Tosin described a dating-like process where you attract the right people, then engage with them, convert them, and sell to them.
The sales funnel is a “funnel” because inevitably the number of your leads will be greater than the number of your prospects, and the number of your prospects will be greater than the number of your customers. You need to narrow the funnel to save time for your business.
As always, we ended our event with time for networking, as we know that networking is the #1 skill for entrepreneurs. Our guests also had the chance to talk to our speakers.
Did any of this interest you? You can sign up for our next masterclasses here: bit.ly/HPCeventbrite! We also host social events for networking and Breakfast for Directors, where you can listen to an expert speak while enjoying a delightful breakfast with fellow entrepreneurs.
Would you like to learn how to create content to share on your social media as well as with journalists so you become more visible, more credible and more influential? Sign up for 30 days for free!
By Christie Yu
Comentários