Mid-June 2017, my contact in the marketing department was due to present a cohesive, easy to understand and implement online marketing strategy to the entire team.

Together over the course of two months, we worked to help my contact in the marketing team craft an online marketing strategy that the company could easily implement internally.

This is where they started, what we did, and the results of our work together:

About the Company:

Suits By Curtis Eliot is an up and coming, force to be reckoned with in the men’s fashion world.

Heralding from Edmonton Alberta, with a second retail location in Calgary AB, Suits by Curtis Eliot has garnered international attention, highlighted by their invitation to New York Fashion Week.

Suits By Curtis Eliot is a custom suit designer, tailored for the modern gentlemen. Their clients include such pro sports celebrities as the Gretsky family.  From professional NHL and NFL players, to leaders in their community, to financial, sales and legal professionals, SBCE provides perfectly tailored, completely custom suits at extremely competitive pricing.

The problem:

SBCE experienced a huge degree of success early into their company history. The quick growth had them focused on providing their clients the best possible experience, instead of their internal processes.

In terms of marketing, they had great success on social media in terms of likes and followers, but they weren’t totally confident their efforts on social media were effectively driving in store sales.

They knew they weren’t doing the best job with search engine optimization (getting on google) or following up with their clients via email.

They knew they was room to better leverage their multiple appearances in the news media and they weren’t totally sure how to accomplish all of these goals in a way that wouldn’t take up all their time.

Why they chose me:

Founder, Sean Farmer, had his assistant reach out to me as she’d seen me present on the topic “Socializing Your Sales Funnel: Converting Fans and Followers To Paying Customers” and was impressed with the practical nature of the information I presented.

I also worked with them to create payment terms that worked for their organization, facilitating their ability to get a grant to pay the fees I charge.

What we did together: Develop an online marketing strategy that could be used.

We scheduled 8 phone calls over the course of two months.

In those calls we worked through my proven system for developing an online marketing strategy.

Together we got clear on the business objectives, what was and was not working, how best to and achieve the goals.

Then, we actually built an online sales funnel together: emails, sales pages, newsletter sign-up offers – you name it!.

During these sessions, the marketing team was trained on sleeves-up-get-it-done tactics for

: optimizing the website for search engines
: blogging effectively
: sending compelling email newsletters
: creating graphics for each blog post

And much more.

The final result:

1. Marketing staff that were confident, clear and trained on exactly what to do, when, in order to drive sales from the internet and measure each and every activity for effectiveness.

2. Staff that had dramatically increased their knowledge, skills and confidence in implementing day-to-day online marketing tactics.

3. A 20+ page online marketing strategy was created that could be used as the basis for the presentation and aid in staff training efforts going forward.

4. A checklist that included specific-to-the business tasks to be performed each day, week and month in order to see reliable results.

The online marketing strategy document included:

1. Clarity on the SBCE ideal clients – who the most profitable, enjoyable clients were and how to attract more of them using online tools.
2. What the current sales process looked like – what was working and what wasn’t- and what components should be duplicated and leveraged online.
3. What the current online marketing efforts looked like – and how to design a system (from scratch) for the entire year that doesn’t take all day to execute.
4. An easy to follow, clear checklist of the specific actions to take online to generate additional revenue.
5. An automated online selling system: including the 2 most important website pages that sell for you 24/7.
6. The social media and email list building strategy for the entire year.
7. Integrated online assets: website, email, social, video, media, blogging, search engine optimization so every piece of the strategy works that much harder to make money.
8. Exactly what steps to take each day, week and month to propel your business forward – and how to succeed on social media in just 17 minutes a day.

What the client said:

Would SBCE recommend working with Laurel Anne Stark to create and develop an online marketing strategy and sales funnel?

Click here to learn more about working with me to create an online marketing strategy and sales funnel.

The sound of crickets may be peaceful, but it’s not the response you want from your social media posts.

Getting your social media posts shared can provide a huge credibility & exposure boost for your business.

If you’re taking the time to create content, you want it to be as effective as possible.

3 ways shared posts help your business:

If your objective is to get more exposure build credibility and generate leads for your business, creating shareable social media posts is a super effective way to meet those objectives.

Three benefits you get every single time someone in your network shares your post:

1. You have just been implicitly endorsed by that person.

   This means that regardless of what else is being said users who see that your post has been shared believe the person sharing it knows likes and trusts you.

2. You get more exposure to a network that you cannot access on your own.

   The person who does the sharing is getting you exposure to their network.

3. Increases the views for each post.

   Each time your post is shared, it provides an indicator to that social site that social network that your content is popular.

   Popular content will stay on the timeline for longer and take up more real estate.  This gets you a lot more mileage out of each post.

What makes a post “shareable”

There are two factors to take into consideration regarding getting people to share your posts.

First is the people themselves and how they feel about you and the second is the post itself and how they feel about the post.

Remember: what you post is far less important than the quality of your networking on social platforms.

By engaging with people on social media you make them feel seen, acknowledged and important.

Each notification appeals to our ego & triggers our dopamine receptors to receive a notification of engagement.

So by engaging regularly with others on social media they begin to like you!

In the seven habits of highly effective people Stephen Covey states one of the habits is making deposits in other’s emotional bank accounts.

“The more you engage with people on social media by commenting and sharing on their posts, the more likely they are to reciprocate.”

The 3 ingredients to a sharable post:

Assuming you are actively nurturing your community by engaging on social media, there are 3 ingredients that influence whether or not your post is “shareable”.

1. Ability to catch their attention and the ability to keep their attention
2. It’s relevance to the person seeing it
3. It’s value to the person.

Ways to catch attention on social media:

As you may have noticed multimedia does really well on social media sites.

Videos and images take up more space on the timeline and they also stay for longer on the news feed.

If you’re not posting multimedia or photos with each text update, start now.

5 Tools I use to create videos and images for my social media posts.

To create the ever popular Inspirational quotes, you can use tools like:

• canva
• com
• The Insta quote app.

Any content you produce that shows behind the scenes at your company will also be well received:

• Take photos using your smart phone
• Use your iPhone to take videos on your device and direction we upload to YouTube

Other tips for creating video for use on social media:

• You can do product demos, interviews and summarize your blog posts.
• You can use Google hangouts and interview people or have a group conference. These interviews will automatically be saved and uploaded to your YouTube account.
• You can also do quick teaser videos on Instagram

You are only limited by your creativity!

Ask yourself – Is your post relevant?

Remember the context of social media.

People are there to be social and to be entertained.

There are three rules of thumb for the types of content to post.

1. Entertaining
2. Informative
3. Inspiring

Ask yourself – Does your post provide value?

To answer this question, you want to refer back to your customer profile or your avatar and reflect on what their pain points are, what matters to them and what they struggle with.
Content created around these things will always be more effective and content that isn’t.
If you don’t know what your customers struggle with then survey them.

You can also do analysis of what people are typing into Google, or check out what your competitors are doing.

What has your experience been with creating social media posts? I’d love to hear about it in the comments below.

If you found this post valuable, please like it & consider sharing with your network!