Back Roads and Bold Moves
"Back Roads and Bold Moves" is the podcast for anyone building a business far from the city lights. Hosted by Elyssa Giedraitis - rural WA mum, social media strategist, and unapologetic straight-shooter. This show is about real business talk without the buzzwords.
From social media that actually works (even with crappy Wi-Fi) to the messy reality of running a business in a small town, Elyssa dives into the strategies, stories, and bold moves that matter. Expect unfiltered opinions, rural grit, and conversations that cut through the fluff.
If you’re tired of cookie-cutter advice and want to do business your way, whether you’re on the back roads or beyond, this podcast is for you.
Back Roads and Bold Moves
Stop Talking About Yourself: Shifting To A Customer-Centric Approach
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In this episode, we explore the importance of having a custom-centric focus on your local business's social media platforms.
We begin with discussing who you're business is ACTUALLY talking to and the importance of knowing your target audience, before moving on to three types of content that are essential for your local business.
Welcome to Localize and socialize the podcast for rural and regional business owners who want to harness the power of social marketing to connect with their local community. I am your host, Alyssa Gydritis, the owner of EJG Creative, a social media agency helping rural and regional Australian businesses throughout Australia to maximize their local impact. This Pod cast will help you navigate the everchanging social media landscape and explore strategic actions tailored especially to businesses outside. Of the bright city lights. Discover the methods to telling your story authentically, how to create meaningful connection with your audience, and build a strong online presence that reflects the heart and soul of your local community. Let's demystify social media and turn it into a powerful tool for your regional business. Let's get into the episode Stop talking about yourself on social media. Take a step back and look at your current content and your marketing. Is it all about you and your business or is it all about your customer and your potential customer? You are probably talking about yourself and your business a whole lot on social media, aren't you? From right now, you need to enact a customer centric approach to your business, social media. It needs to be all about your customers and your potential customers. Your customers need to be the starting point for all of your actions, processes and decisions that your business makes, including on your social media. This marketing strategy needs to be implemented right across your whole business. But obviously, being a social media manager, I want to talk to you about using a customer centric approach on social media and three types of content you can use to do that. You've heard it before, but it is that important that I will say it again. The starting point to a customer centric social media marketing strategy is knowing exactly who your target market is. How are you going to talk to them if you don't know who you are talking to? This is something that should be a part of every single business brand strategy. You need to break it down. You need to know who they are, what they're listening to, what they're doing in their spare time, what they do for work. Are they single? Are they married? Do they have kids? A great way to do this is by creating a buyer persona. Create a whole fictional character that represents the different people that you want to be your target audience. Something that I do to make it even easier is figuring out someone I know who fits the character I'm creating and basing it loosely on them. They're never going to see the strategy, so don't worry about that. But being a local business, you obviously want to sell to locals so choose your ideal local customers. Jim down the road, Patricia from the chemist, whoever it is, and base your buyer personas on them. Now that you know who you are creating the social media content for, let's talk about the content because you want to be adding value to your customers journeys with your business. I tell people to only use promotional content sparingly, and when I say sparingly, I mean take what you think is sparingly and decrease that. Again, think of it like adding a dash of your least favorite herb to your dinner. We are no longer creating constant content that continuously shouts, hey, we're selling this. And this and this and come and. Buy it from us. We're creating content that adds value to their lives. So that's my first type of content. Value content. Value content is, to put it simply, content that provides your ideal customer with real, relevant value. This type of content focuses on building meaningful relationships online that can then translate offline. You are nurturing the connection and establishing trust with your target customers while also building credibility and the reputation of your business. Value content is helpful to your customers. It provides them with something that they can take away, like this podcast. This podcast is value content. I'm not trying to sell anything to you. I'm just providing you with value content that is helpful with information you can take away and make use of it. When creating your value social media content, make sure you keep it relatively simple. Don't overcomplicate things and just focus on one topic at a time. You might create a how to guide, a deep dive into a topic relevant to your business, or create an infographic that presents data to your audience. Industry news that would be interesting to your target customer is also a great idea for value content as well as sharing any practical tips and advice that are easily actionable or they solve a problem for your ideal customer. My second type of content is community content. This one is not a standard content pillar for all businesses. It is very specific to a local business and therefore you won't see the big marketing agencies and that talking about community content as a business that is directly trying to target their local community. You need to show proof that your business is for your community, that your business values your community, that it actively supports it. Obviously, I work with clients that are focusing on local marketing and targeting their local community. So I create a lot of community content and I can confirm that it performs very well on all social media channels. People engage with it, people share it more and they appreciate it. I will tell you about some of the types of community content that I do create for my clients. So if the business is sponsoring or partnering with an event or a club, I will make sure to share content about it, but not just content saying, hey, we're sponsoring this. Praise us for it more so content that promotes the event or the club itself. Not only does it work well for the community, but it works for the business to show that they are supporting. One client I have is a community run organization that actively gives back to their community. So for their community content, I'll share donations that they've made, but I'll also share information about what that donation is going to go towards. They also often have community groups having stalls out the front of their business. So I'll share that they're out there, but I'll also make sure to share what the group does for the community. They support the local football club, so I make sure to post about them as a club, their results, their events, et cetera. For some of my clients, it is also appropriate for me to post about local upcoming events or notices that the customer base would need to know about. This also allows us to tag other businesses or accounts in the content and create a relationship there. For example, we shared a post about a local pub and in return they shared a post about us. A couple of weeks later, I have another client who is a manufacturing business and for their community content, we post content about jobs that are done for the benefit of the community, like stairs that we installed at the local rec center, safety installations done at the bowling club. Another type of content that performs really well for this client is posting content that actively shows their community and people who they know from that community coming in to get work done. So for an example here, if a relatively well known family buy a machine from the business, we will take a photo of them with their new machine and with the people from the business and we will post that to our social media. Usually they'll share it, but also it gets really good engagement and interactions on social media. It shows that people are trusting the business because people that they know have already trusted the business. They can have trust in them. Other community content examples that your local business might be able to use include talking about something that is happening in the community, like a natural disaster or a really popular pain point. You can share some local news. You can share local events even if you don't have an affiliation with them. Create content that resonates with your local audience. The third and final type of content that I want to share with you and I want you to start posting on your local business socials is entertaining content. People love that shit. It's light hearted, it's humorous, it's shareable, and it adds a human element to your brand. Content that comes under an entertainment pillar still needs to relate directly to your target audience. They still need to see the content come up on their feed and it makes sense that your business has shared it and it makes sense for them to be seeing it. Also, just a reminder that it doesn't always have to be funny. Ha. It can be entertaining in the sense that it sparks some curiosity or it shows off some of the personality of your business. Some examples of entertaining social media content that I use for my local business clients include trending memes adapted to the client and their target audience. Telling a story from within the business with visuals and quizzes and polls are really popular as well. I have one client in which we regularly post short form videos that we call workshop walkthroughs and it's just a compilation of videos that quickly show what the people in the workshop are working on at that moment. It really works quite well, especially on TikTok and on reels. If you look at my own social media, you will see that I incorporate trending memes into my own strategy and I make them relatable to my audience. For another client, I recently posted a feed post, would you rather asking if people would rather be the person driving the header or the person driving the chaser in the business works in the AG industry and it was the start of harvest, so it related to their audience and it performed really well. Entertaining content can work well in different forms, but it certainly does perform really well as a short form video. All right, let me recap the three types of content I talked about in this podcast that your local business should be using in their customer centric social media marketing. The first was value content, content that provides your customers and your ideal customers with information that is helpful to them. The second was community content. Content that proves that your business contributes to your local community and that they value their community. And the third type of content was entertaining content. Content that grabs your audience's attention, shares the personality of your business, and is just fun in general. Do not forget that the most important part of your local content marketing is knowing exactly who your customer is and creating content that talks to them, but not about you. Thank you for tuning in to this. Episode of Localize and Socialize. I hope you're leaving with new insights, strategies and inspiration to elevate your local social media game. Before I sign off, remember you can connect with me on your favorite social media platforms, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter. Just search for EJG Creative. Let me know your thoughts on the episode, ask any questions you might have, or even inquire about getting social media management help. Don't forget to subscribe, rate and leave. A review on your favorite podcast platform. Until next time, keep thriving. Localizing and socializing.