Dr. Barnes shares the first social media mistake that so many business leaders make. This one mistake can limit engagement and cause people to unfollow a brand or business on social media. This episode is based on Dr. Barnes' book "5 Social Media Mistakes Your Business Should Avoid." Transcription: Welcome to the Bricks-To-Clicks Marketing Podcast. If you're a small business owner and you struggle to market your business, this podcast is just for you. I'm your host James Barnes. And thank you for listening today. Welcome to the podcast, everyone. I'm glad you joined me here today. As you know, in season one, we're talking about the five social media mistakes your business should avoid. And today I want to dedicate this little short episode to mistake number one. And I think it's one of the things that I've seen over the last many years that the companies struggle with really at the very beginning of even creating a marketing message in general, but also just putting content out on social media. And it's this. This is the mistake. Most of the time businesses don't talk about the problem they help their customers solve. And that's part of it. There's a problem piece that's missing. They're about how they solve the problem for their customer, how this problem needs to be overcome. And they don't talk about it as a problem first content and people need to, because the problem is the hook. If you've ever watched any good series on Netflix or any movie or anything that you've enjoyed watching, most of the time at the beginning of the show, something blows up. There's always a problem. Someone is abducted. Gosh, maybe it's a supervillain that appears and they're going to destroy the earth. It could be lots of things, but there's always a problem at the beginning and that creates the drama. And then that drama has to be relieved or solved throughout the movie. This is the same hook that works in your marketing. You have to start with the problem. What is it that you solve for your customer that's a problem they have? And so that's where you really have to start. Now, the second piece to that is it's not just about talking about the problem. It's also identifying that if your customer has a problem, they are losing out on something. If they have a problem, they're experiencing some kind of loss. The loss may be loss of time, loss of money, loss of a lot of things. It could be a lot of things, but time and money would capture a whole bunch of it. Okay. The problem is people don't talk about problems and losses together. And let me give you an example. I was driving down the road many years ago in Louisiana, and I saw a billboard. And to this day, it's one of the best advertisements I've ever seen that captures this whole idea of problem loss and putting it together. At the top of the billboard, it simply said, "Gambling problem?" There's a question mark. That's it. And then next to it said, "You could lose this." And the image that they had drawn next to it was just a silhouette of a family. Now, if you had that particular problem if you struggled with gambling, and you saw that, how fast would that identify you as, yeah, that's me? At the end of the day, that's what we want our customers to say when they read our marketing content about what we do to help them. We want them to self-identify and say, oh yeah, that's me. That's the problem I have. And that's what I need help with. This billboard was amazing. It was so short and sweet, to the point gambling problem. And then it said you could lose this and it had a silhouette of the family. And it was so clear that if you continue to have the problem today and in the future, you risk losing your family in lots of different ways, relationships, could be a divorce, could be lots of things, could be lots of losses, but it's just a powerful example of how, if we can start talking to our customers about the problem that they really have, it positions us so well to actually do business with them eventually, because we really do want to help them. At the end of the day, most companies solve problems for customers because they want to help people. And there are just tons and tons of examples of it. But if you don't put together problems and losses and you just talk about the problem, sometimes our customers don't feel the loss if they don't do business with us. And there has to be some kind of loss. They're going to lose time. They're going to lose money. Something is going to happen that's not a good thing for them. And it's our job to talk about that a little bit. We don't want to be too negative about it. One of the things that you can do to lighten this just a little bit is you can ask a question like that. Gambling problem? Pretty straightforward. It's not too negative. You could lose this silhouette of the family. That's heavy, but it does make the connection. And an addiction problem like that, they're making the point. This is a big deal. You've got to get on ...
