Small Business Social: How to Build Relationships

Do you use social media to attract and engage customers?

Are you wondering how you can use social media to market your business and drive sales?

To learn how you can develop relationships with social media and content, I interview Jeff Korhan for this episode of the Social Media Marketing podcast.
More About This Show

The Social Media Marketing podcast is a show from Social Media Examiner.

It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

The show format is on-demand talk radio (also known as podcasting).

In this episode, I interview Jeff Korhan, author of Built-In Social: Essential Social Marketing Practices for Every Small Business. He also trains and coaches small businesses on social media marketing at Jeff Korhan.com.

Jeff shares his knowledge of and experience with social marketing from running his own small business, and how you can implement it into your business.

You'll learn about the 'Social Marketing Process' and the importance of collaboration and cooperation.

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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Build Relationships With Content and Social Media
What did the experience of running a local landscaping company teach you about social marketing?

When Jeff first started his local landscaping business, he had just completed 10 years in the corporate world and was fairly ignorant of how small businesses operated.

He started to research and study the industry he was about to move into and discovered by accident that small businesses were less formal than the corporate world. Even back then, people wanted to get to know you. Today it's something that can easily be done with social media.

You'll find out what Jeff discovered about consumers and why it was the key to getting his business off the ground.

Jeff explains how going door-to-door led him down the road to content marketing. Not only did he spend a lot of time with customers, he also spent time reaching out to other people in his industry. The one thing they all had in common was that they all used Yellow Pages for advertising. This led him to explore other options to stand out from his competitors.

You'll discover what kind of advertising worked for Jeff and an example of an ad he used.

Jeff figured out before the age of social media that he could get business by educating his consumers with his expertise. He started to look for a way to differentiate his business from local competitors and found out that there were a lot of unanswered questions.

You'll find out what you need to do to resonate with your customers to help build your business.

Listen to the show to find out why you need to start thinking of how you can be the source of answers and how educating people can make you an authority.

The Social Marketing Process

Jeff explains the 3-step Social Marketing Process, which is:

Content attraction
Social engagement
Sales conversion

The first component is that content attracts attention. You should start at the beginning. Use content to attract the attention of people to help build an audience. You need to publish the information online, where people can find it.

The second component is to engage with people and develop relationships using social media. Over time, once you have developed trust, this is when the third component, the sales conversion, almost becomes a byproduct if you've got a sales process in place and you know how to convert people to whatever it is you're selling.

Jeff finds that some businesses don't have a reliable sales process. In his book, he writes about how to develop that process and if you have one, how to make it even better.

When it comes to knowing what kind of content to produce,