Marketing from the Car

Facebook Hates You - How-to Reach People Everywhere with Content Distribution - Episode 2

• Brian

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0:00 | 7:36

Posting to Facebook isn’t enough - and it never really was. 

In this episode, Brian Ostrovsky (creator of Marketing 3-4-5™ and founder of Locable) breaks down how to actually reach people using a smarter, simpler distribution strategy that starts with your website and ends with results.

This episode covers:

  • Why content without distribution is a waste of time
  • How to share content once and have it show up (mostly) everywhere
  • Why social media reach is broken (and what to do instead)
  • How to grow an email newsletter that actually gets seen
  • What happens when your content starts ranking in Google
  • The power of cross-promotion using free Locable tools available to Locable Communities

Whether you run a business, Main Street, Chamber, DMO, or nonprofit - if you’re tired of shouting into the void, this episode is for you.

💡 Pro tip: If your content is worth writing, it’s worth putting on your website as your home online.

🔗 Mentioned Resources


Learn more about Locable and see how your community can become a Locable community.

Join our #TakeBackLocal community of local-doers here >>

Why Examples Beat Explanations

SPEAKER_00

Welcome back to Marketing from the Car. I'm your host, Brian Ostrovsky. And in our first episode, we talked about the basics of the marketing 345 approach. And really what we're getting to is the need to share your story. But as we've talked about in other episodes, this can feel weighty. And if you're not a writer, this can feel impossible. If you are a writer, you might write really well-written content that no one cares about. So we're going to spend a lot of time throughout these episodes talking about examples. The examples help people go, oh, I get it, instead of glossing over when you tell them what you do. Because you know, nobody really cares because they don't know. And then you share something interesting, and now all of a sudden they care again. So these examples are going to vary a lot. That's the content. The second piece is distribution. If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, it doesn't make a sound. Obviously, that's an old kind of annoying cliche, but it leads to the question of you just creating content isn't sufficient. Now, today most of you listening probably don't really create much content. Now some of you do. And uh those of you that do probably are overly reliant on social media. In part because it's easy, and in part because you don't know what else to do, and in part because of time and whatever. So content marketing uh is a concept that's been around for quite some time. I didn't invent it, although I highly uh embrace it. And uh years ago, HubSpot created this idea of inbound marketing, using content to draw people to you, although I think they did it really more from a corporate perspective versus local. And what I want to highlight for you is the marketing 345 approach to distribution. Now, if you go to marketing345.com, you'll see a page with the approach if you want to read along. Uh, but I'll just talk and for those of you watching the video, wave my arms a little bit here. So uh at the core of all of this is you need to create content, which is often called blogging, but it's announcements, it's whatever, it's articles of some sort. And that content needs to live on your website because it's your home. So if you don't have a website, that's a big problem. You're gonna you're gonna have a big problem, and we'll talk about that in another episode. But uh, let's assume for the sake of today you have a website. So the the articles live there. Banone goes to my website. How are they ever shaped? Okay, so once your content is on your website, then you distribute it to social media. Now, I say this a lot. Facebook hates you, not personal for them. Definitely feels personal for you, but you don't reach really very many people. On average, about three percent of your followers will see your stuff. You can outperform and whatever, but really it's it's not it's not real encouraging. So the goal is to share content to social and get the ones who do care out. Now we're gonna talk about recognition and and highlighting people's stories so that if you write about me, I share your stuff, my friends see it, you're expanding your reach. But the goal is to share it, get people back to your website. And then for most of you, we want to cultivate an email newsletter. This is really powerful. It feels like old tech or whatever. And some people say, Well, I don't like emails and no one opens emails, and it all sounds right, but it's wrong. In fact, I can prove it because unless you don't have an email account that you check, you do get emails. You just get more crap that you don't care about. So you don't want to fall into that bucket. But the thing is, if I subscribe to your email newsletter, I get 100% of the emails that you sent. Now, if you don't set it up right, there might be a problem. And I surely don't open everything you send, but I at least have the choice on social media. I don't even see it. The algorithm doesn't let me see it. So now we're taking that content, we're sharing it to email, we're sharing it to social. Ideally, someone who receives your email will open it, click, go back to your site to read the thing because you're sharing previews of it. And some of them might share it to social to share it with their friends. Maybe that you have an event that they want to have their friend go to. And now someone from social goes to your website and they go, Oh, I don't want to miss stuff. Subscribe to my email. So we're trying to grow an email newsletter here. And then if you're using locables tools to automatically distribute your content and cross-promote, if you're in a locable community, uh, which is to say someone who uses um our software for your Main Street chamber tourism, et cetera, uh, you get a bunch of free tools. And now anything you publish in locable can go to your website and those other places, but also to your chamber or to your main street or to your DMO or maybe to all of them. And then you can cross-promote with your friends. You know, you might have a brother who runs a business and you want their stuff on your website, your web, your stuff on their website, and all sorts of stuff. Doesn't mean it takes over your site, but it's there. It shows that you're a good good Samaritan, good citizen. And with all this going on, big brother, I mean Google and again Chat GPT and others are watching. So now you start to rank. And obviously, if I search for you by name, I should find you. That's not really very impressive. But it's when I search for something that you've talked about that I find that content, that I get into your ecosystem, and then I learn about you and your services. That's where we want to get. So this notion of distribution is really important. Is it more work than just publishing to Instagram and having to auto-publish to Facebook? Yes, it is. But that other thing doesn't have value. Well, maybe it has some value, but the effort to value breakdown is very small. In a future episode, we'll talk about how to use Reels and Facebook Lives and the like to participate in this distribution process. Uh, but for now, suffice to say, most of the content you create is probably going to be an image with some words. Uh, and again, it doesn't have to be a lot of words, it can be bullet points, it can be all sorts of stuff, but it needs to live on your website and you distribute from there. So as we go through these uh these various ideas, keep in mind this idea of distribution is really fundamental to make sure you reach people where they're at. And I'll also note if it lives on your website and someone gets referred to you, they will find it far more likely than if it just lives on social. And please, please, please, don't make the cardinal sin of creating unique content for social or your email newsletter. If it's important enough to create, put it on your site and then distribute it. How terrible is it if I don't see the newsletter because I deleted it, and then I call you the next day and go, hey, what about this thing? And you're like, oh, I sent it out yesterday, but it's gone now. No, have it on your website. You can reuse it over and over and over again. And you can also use it for sales support. So if you come talk to me uh about your business or about uh your chamber or whatever, and you ask a question that I've addressed in a prior example, I get to say, oh, we talked about that with one of your peers. Let me send you a link. And now it's not just attracting leads, but it's helping with sales support. So I hope that you see that distribution is important. If you do it right, it'll probably take an extra 30 seconds to a minute compared to doing it wrong, but you will get infinitely more value. Uh on locable.com, we have some examples of businesses that move beyond just social and how they unlocked hundreds or even almost a thousand clicks from Google in just a few months. It's pretty, pretty amazing. So, uh, in future episodes, we're going to talk about how to leverage this more fully and give you lots of examples of how you can create content very quickly to tell your story to activate all of these channels so that you and your community can take back local.