November for us, like any business, is a time of reflection – to look at our business model and work on the business development for next year

The end of the year is also one of our busiest periods as businesses reflect on the last 11 months and then realise how much more they need to make of social media for business

COLLABORATION FOR STARTUP BUSINESSES
We started off November with the SUBS Altrincham (or Start-Up Business Services to give you its full title) Smart Start Event at the Crest Court Altrincham

For those that aren’t aware of SUBS Altrincham – it’s a local solution to a national problem, and a collective of 12 businesses coming together to help Startup Businesses in the Greater Altrincham area. I touched last month on the

difference between working with an active business VS working with a government organisation and I think this is really important. There is no greater recipe for success than building a strong support network around you to help and offer advice and expertise

Alongside advisor Andrew Thorp of Mojo Life we ran facilitated groups on the core areas of Attitude, Finance and Marketing – the 3 core pillars of success for any new business

Ourselves and Barbara Hallwood ran the Marketing Group and the core themes that came out were

• With Social Media the amount of platforms are overwhelming – where do we start?
• PR is much more effective than advertising
• A Multi Channel Approach often works best for marketing – face 2 face networking and online
• What works marketing wise for one business won’t work for another – every business is different

Marketing generally points to one question you need to ask before you spend a penny on marketing – where are your customer eyes?

Work that out and work backwards from that to the individual channels

If you just need a quick chat about this please do give us a call on 07806774279

SOCIAL MEDIA FOR SOCIAL ENTERPRISES
After foodie businesses – charities and social enterprises should be dominating social media as the storytelling platforms are perfect for their causes

So often they don’t

This month we’ve had the pleasure of working with 2 Social Enterprises

• One is a arts based social enterprise in the South that works with mental health services
• The other is a North West based social enterprise that look at food waste

What’s immediately apparent when you meet a social enterprise is how passionate they are about their specific area of interest and how sometimes that passion is all consuming. The passion is their literally their life and they’re so entrenched in what they do each day. It really is infectious and every business should spend a day with a social enterprise and take some of that away with them for their business

In many cases Social Enterprises are used to telling their story and communicating face 2 face and the main issues with social media are how do we manage this in a time efficient manner and how do we cut through the noise with our story and message

If you need training help with Social Media for your Social Enterprise – the issues that really float my boat are

• Vegetarianism – Proud Vegetarian for 18 years now
• Racial Equality
• Youth Work – In London 2012 I was an Olympic Torchbearer for running live music events for Under 18s

If you just need a quick chat about this please do give us a call on 07806774279

EXTENDING TRADITIONAL MEDIA COVERAGE VIA SOCIAL
At the end of last month we received the news early one morning that one of our clients was going to be in that days Manchester Evening News for a Halloween Feature

As we touched on earlier before a multi-channel approach can really work wonders for marketing and we had just hours to put a new plan into action

• Link out to the press article via twitter and Facebook – which then got picked up by North West tonight and ended up as part of a TV Broadcast that evening
• A Mailchimp mailout was formatted and distributed to the venues mailing list
• Posted in a hyper-local Facebook group to reach outside their own audience
• Collated screen grabs of the TV appearance into a Facebook gallery
• Linked out to the I Player link following the TV Broadcast
• Ran a post-event gallery the following day

Often marketing campaigns are planned months in advance – sometimes though you have to change your plans in a moment to go with the moment

The online reach of the whole campaign was twice the size of their Facebook audience (likes) and helped to compliment the extensive media coverage

ANY QUESTIONS?

Get in touch with Alex on 07806774279 or email alex@altrinchamhq.co.uk

Also please download our FREE DOWNLOAD below with some handy handy tips for the major 7 Social Media Channels

Altrincham Hq

“With over 12 years experience of Social Media and 17 years experience of online marketing in other companies, clients come to myself when they want a veteran rather than a rookie” Alex McCann