This week we’ve seen a flurry of business news related to marketing. TikTok remains in flux with no clear path forward in sight. The WordPress eruption continues to escalate with no resolution. What’s a business owner to do?
First, please be assured that the Dashboard Interactive Marketing team is keeping up to date on these issues (and others) that can impact your business’ marketing activities. We help you navigate the ever-changing sea of information related to SEO, social media, digital advertising, and more.
Next, we’ve put together three time-tested recommendations that all small business owners should do to protect the valuable marketing assets they have built over the years.
With these tips and our expert guidance, you should be in a good position to continue your promotional and lead generation activities this year.
Three Tips to Protect Your Marketing Assets
1. Back up social media assets.
Many small business owners leverage social media to share images and videos with their audiences. However, as we have seen from the recent back and forth regarding the availability of TikTok in the United States, keeping these valuable assets on any external platform (a website or place that you do not own) is dangerous. Any social media or third-party website host can shut down at a moment’s notice, whether due to business changes, regulation, or technical issues, taking all your assets with it in one big gulp. Be sure to back up and save valuable assets such as videos, reels, and images, on your own computers, secure external hard drives, or secure cloud files. In the event that one platform disappears, you can reuse the assets on another one without having to go through the time, trouble, and expense of recreating them.
2. Develop your email list.
Depending on your business’ social media platforms, reaching new customers is tricky. Organic reach has declined in recent years:
- Facebook: The average engagement rate of an organic Facebook post ranged from 2.58% down to just 1.52% in 2023. This decline continued into 2024, with organic reach becoming increasingly challenging due to the platform’s pay-to-play model.
- Instagram: Organic reach on Instagram saw an 18% year-over-year decrease in 2024. This decline is attributed to changes in the algorithm and the increasing voluem of content being posted.
That doesn’t mean you should stop leveraging organic social media posts. What it means is that you should recognize that just using organic posts isn’t going to make as big of an impact as it once did.
And, added to the declining reach is the constant risk of being deplatformed, meaning having your account shut down. Whether by accident or on purpose, this has happened to people and businesses over the years, and social media companies can and do limit exposure to your content or take accounts offline without warning. If that happens, your organic reach could evaporate instantly.
To avoid losing the momentum you have so carefully built up over the years, encourage your followers to join your email list. Offer an incentive for them to sig up, such as content they cannot get elsewhere, like a special video, a unique report, checklist, or another value item. This list then becomes your own proprietary list, which you can use to reach your followers at any time. (Of course, we want you to follow email marketing laws and best practices, too!) We can help you encourage social media followers to join your email list. Please speak with an expert at Dashboard if you’d like asssitance with this idea.
3. Have a backup plan.
It is heartbreaking to read posts today online from TikTok consultants or contractors who specialize in creating short TikTok videos and marketing plans. These people are genuinely afraid that in the space of a few days their entire business model could grind to a halt. Many small business owners who relied upon TikTok as a marketing channel are also upset at losing what they perceive as a valuable lead generation tool.
Every business owner should have a backup plan, not just for business continuity, but for marketing continuity, too. If one thing doesn’t work, we must be able to quickly shift to another. If short videos can no longer be displayed on TikTok because the app shuts down, we must look at other platforms and decide where, how, and why we want to leverage them. Consider your marketing channels and discuss with your internal staff and the Dashboard team what potential continuity plans should be in place for your marketing.
Plan Ahead, Do Your Best, and Keep Promoting Your Business
The world is uncertain, and that includes the marketing world, too. As a small business owner, you have a lot on your plate. While we cannot control the actions of others that impact our marketing – the social media platforms of this world, the website hosts, the digital advertising services, the algorithm changes – we can prepare for it. We can be smart about it and set up ways to speak directly with our customers that will not be impacted by third party platform changes. We can enact continuity plans. Together with the team at Dashboard to support you, let’s plan ahead, do our best, and keep promoting your business!