Leslie McLellan and Sheila Scarborough of Tourism Currents presenting at Main Street Now 2019 conference. Photo by Becky McCray.

Sheila Scarborough and Leslie McLellan of Tourism Currents laid out a simple starting point for all your social media efforts. Good news: it’s as easy as filling in the blank.

Fill in the Blank

• (Our company) is where
• (our customers)
• find (the thing we offer)
• with (this benefit)

So all you have to do is fill in the blanks.

• Small Biz Survival is where
• rural business owners
• find practical information
• that helps their businesses prosper

Run it all together, and it looks like this:

• Small Biz Survival is where rural business owners find practical information that helps their businesses prosper.

I’m sure you can see how this helps with all your marketing, not just social media. Every piece of marketing should relate to what you just wrote.

Social Media Application

Because I have that clear understanding of what Small Biz Survival is, my social media strategy is easy. With every post on social media, I can address rural business owners with one of these four things:

• increasing their awareness of Small Biz Surivival and our articles,
• offering our free email newsletter so they can sign up,
• sharing a link to an item we have for sale that helps them,
• or sharing a link or information from another site that’s useful and practical.

And those, it just so happens, are the four types of social posts that Sheila and Leslie identified:

• Awareness
• Lead generation
• Sales
• Nurturing

Take your fill in the blank answers and then brainstorm examples of the four different types of posts. I can think of a dozen different ways to remind people that we have a newsletter. That’s lead generation because they give me their email address in order to sign up.

That might be enough for you. Maybe that’s all you need to think clearly about your social media marketing. That’s cool. But if you want to do more, hang in there with me.

Secret Power Tool: Your Calendar

Now that you know what you’re all about with the fill-in-the-blank answers, and you know some things you could be posting online, you’re ready to power up your calendar. And the best way to do that is to jump over to Tourism Currents for their story on Creating your social media content calendar: a planning process.

They’ll walk you through a super simple fill in the blanks calendaring approach that works for anyone.

Jump to Creating your social media content calendar: a planning process

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Photo (CC) by Frits Ahlefeldt, on Flickr

Do you steer away from the competition? Or do you embrace the opportunity and locate beside your competitors?

Often small-business owners will tell you that they would be happy if they had no competition. Yet having no competition may mean you are selling something that no one wants.

Given that thought, the same owner may say that competition is all right as long as it’s not located close to his or her store. But is that a good idea?

A recent road trip found me on the highway for nearly 1,500 miles. During that time, I had a visual reminder about competition and clustering. What you will notice, as I did, is that if one hotel or gas station or restaurant is at an intersection, a second one or even more may be at the same location.

The reason this occurs is the same reason why many other types of firms will locate near their competition: Clustering makes the entire group stronger.

Research has verified the strength of clustering in many industries. Clustering allows the consumer a choice. Having more selection will draw more customers than just one business of any type. It not only draws customers, but those businesses often will see higher revenues.

Clustering helps the group become viewed as a destination. This certainly is true in the tourism industry, but the same has been found for manufacturers as well (i.e., why is it called Silicon Valley?).

Not only does clustering increase the destination perception, but related businesses also may begin to locate in the same area. These businesses might offer complementary goods and services, thus further increasing the customers’ perception of value. Or these businesses might be suppliers, therefore reducing supplier costs of production.

Thus, as a small-business owner, competition may be a really good thing.