Episode 041: The Great Social Outage of 2021
Show Notes
What were you doing on October 4, 2021? If you were like many people, you were wondering what the heck was going on with some of the major social media platforms. Many businesses use these platforms to reach potential clients, and on this day, no one was able to reach anyone or do anything.
What would you do if it happens again? Where would it leave your business if it goes away forever? I want to be able to choose who I can market to, so in this episode, I am sharing with you the best way to be in control of the success or failure of your business.
About Michelle
Michelle Lynne began her interior design career after spending more than two decades working in Corporate America. She began in the home staging arena and has since built a successful, award-winning, full-service interior design firm, employing talented designers and serving clients across the country.
In the summer of 2018, Michelle began focusing on a big gap she saw missing in the interior design industry: teaching interior designers how to run the business of an interior design business. She now engages in private coaching and leads an in-depth, 12-month group coaching program, both options focus on teaching designers profitable processes, systems, strategies, and mindset needed to run a streamlined, profitable interior design firm.
Her motto is simple: we rise by lifting others.
Connect with Michelle
You can follow Michelle on Instagram or join her Free Facebook Community! You can learn about Michelle's program, Designed for the Creative Mind right here. You can also learn more about Michelle's Interior Design Firm here.
Thank you to our sponsors for their support!
Satanoff Insurance is focused on client connections and customized coverage … Be sure to tell them we sent you!
Foyr Interior Design Software helps you create 3D floor plans & Interior Designs … Check them out!
Have ideas or suggestions or want to be considered as a guest on the show? Email me!
Transcript:
Today, I'm talking to you about the great Facebook outage of 2021. Not only was Facebook. But the subsidiaries of Facebook, such as messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, and a couple others that I'm not familiar with.
But my point is October 4th, 2021, where you, one of the millions of people who logged on only to find out that the platform that you use to reach potential clients was not allowing you to reach potential clients. Wasn't allowing you to do anything. Where does that leave you? If it happens again, where does it leave your business?
If it goes away forever. Have you thought about that or was it just a mere inconvenience for you at the time? So something to really consider is, are you giving Zuckerberg and his crew complete power over the success or failure of your business, future business? Personally, I don't really dig that feeling.
I want to be in control of who I can market to and not be at the liberty of somebody else's platform. I don't want to be at the liberty of these hackers who have nothing better to do than just disrupt. Hell, running a business is hard enough not having to deal with hackers. We're going to call them hackers.
I'm not gonna assign anything to them. With the knowledge that Instagram and Facebook, which are two of the platforms that we use at ML interiors group. And I used through design for the creative mind division as well, and many, many, many, many, many, many, many other designers use in order to reach a potential audience.
What are the alternatives, if that goes away, I'll tell you. The best thing you can do for yourself is to create an email platform. This is going to change your trajectory by leaps and bounds forward because, because you own your subscribers, you do not own your followers on Facebook or Instagram or any other platform.
I think there's something called Alignable. You've got LinkedIn, you've got all these other places, Twitter, where you have followers and people who do contact you to hire you for your business. Like we get a lot. Instagram inquiries. However, it's imperative that you have something to complement that.
And what you're doing is you're driving your Instagram peeps over to some sort of a free offer. So you can collect their email address from there. You need to stay in touch with them. Well, let me tell you a few things that you can do that will not be overwhelming. What sort of. Let's call it a freemium.
It's a premium gift. Okay. So you're not giving away all of your secret sauce, but you're giving away something that is going to be of interest to clients who would potentially hire you.
Let me interrupt myself to take a quick moment to thank Satanoff Insurance agency for sponsoring this episode of the Designed for the Creative Mind Podcast. Their support and understanding of the interior design decorating and home staging industries is unrivaled, Satanoff understands what our businesses do.
And they provide insurance that lets me sleep at night. Yep. This is the firm that I use and they will do the same for your sleep habits and your business too. They're more than an insurance agency. They're an extension of my business. They take care of the worry because they are the experts which allow me and my team breathing room to do what we do.
Best design, beautiful spaces. You can find their contact information below in the show notes, give them a call today.
Now clients who will potentially hire you are probably not going to be much of the DIY. So you're not going to necessarily want to give them instructions on how to do something, but you want to set yourself apart as an expert.
You want to be the trusted authority. So what are, I don't know, how did, like, some of the ones that we've done in the past is how do you make your bed like a fancy designer, right. And it's not going to include 9 million pillows or how to get ready for house guests or the one I think we did was our favorite white paint.
Well, just try a variety of different things that may or may not speak to your audience. If it's not getting a lot of traction, try something different. Now don't try something different every month. That's going to confuse your audience. You also want, so try it for three to six months. See if it gets some traction.
If you're in business, you're in business for the long game, it's not going to be a quick, a quick splash in the pan. So try it for six months. Then tweak. How are you promoting? Are you promoting it on your website? Are you promoting it via Instagram? Are you promoting it via Facebook? Are you making it easy for the potential clients to get over there to download whatever you're giving?
Okay. And if it seems a little bit overwhelming, it does take some work on the front end, but you can easily head on over to Canva and create something beautiful and brand it so that it's in line with your branding and something that people are going to want to access. So once you have that and you're capturing the emails, here's the difference.
You own your email list. Everybody who signs up willingly is giving you permission to market to them. There are some rules, but if they go and download something, then you can market to them. You can't just upload an email list and start sending out spam.
So once you get their email address, you need to stay in touch with them. And I'm not saying that you need to spam them or that you need to send them something. Every week, once a month is plenty.
Twice a month is better. You can be writing a blog once a week. And automatically send that to your email list that will get them back to your website to finish reading the blog.
You can just type in the first paragraph, a couple of photos, drop that in and say, read more here, link it back to your website. That's one and done. Okay. Because you've already written the blog and you should be writing the blog in order to keep your website relevant.
Now another thing that you can do is just write 12. I'm just going to call them newsletters. Y'all nobody likes to read the newsletter, but that's what I'm going to call it because that's what I call it internally. So call it a newsletter, call it something interesting. Call it value, add whatever you want.
I'm just going to refer to it as a newsletter. All you have to do is sit down and write 12 months' worth of newsletters. Now I don't suggest that you write specifically to any particular season because people will opt into your newsletters, your newsletters that people are going to opt-in at any point over the course of the year.
So you can just have them running at any time. So if they opt in, they get newsletter number 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 on 12 in order. So if they opt-in in January or if they opt in, in. They're getting them in order.
You don't have to get so fancy that you have to create. Okay, well, they're going to get this for Christmas. They're going to get this for the 4th of July. They're going to get this for back to school or whatever, just drop them into your email service.
Make sure the photos are of a size that you can send easily and it doesn't get stuck in there in your server, their server. Make sure that they're short and sweet, but that they also add some interest y'all.
This podcast episode was made possible in part by Foyr, a lightning-fast interior design software that has photorealistic renderings. I'm not kidding. You can barely tell that it's not a real room.
So why leave your beautiful designs up to the imagination of your client? When you can show them what their space is going to look like? You will sign more clients and get more approvals with the software it's powered by artificial intelligence and hope out for its ease, because if I can do it, anybody can, because y'all know that my design team are the ones who do all the work, find them.
You could write about how to make your bed like a fancy designer, how to mix your pillows on your couch, that, you know, the heights, like one's a 22 inch, one's an 18 inch, and then you have a lumbar, like whatever, you don't have to be perfect.
You're not a blogger. So let's back up a little bit. You are not writing professional blogs. You were not writing professional newsletters. You were just writing enough.
I mean, get your grammar correct. But you're writing enough to set yourself up as a trusted authority. Okay.
- How does style a round coffee table
- How to style any coffee table
- How do you determine what size rug do you need in your room
- What height should your hang chandelier hang
- How do you mix metals?
So these are a bunch of ideas that you just know how to do automatically. Just get it out of your head and write it.
You do not need to nurture your email list until the end of eternity, 12 months. Lots of times people will save those news newsletters, but they will save those emails and go back to it when they want to call you. Oh yeah. Yeah. Do you remember that girl?
She was sending us, she was sending us emails for awhile. Now that we've just bought a house. We're ready to use her. Let me go find that information. Okay. So again, you don't have to create more than a day. Sit down over this upcoming holiday season and just crank a few out again. Done is better than perfect.
If you don't have images of your own work, because you're just starting, we'll then grab some stock photos and just, and just write about. And you could say, here's what here in the image below, you can see that this pillows, this height, that doesn't go over the side of it, doesn't go over the back of the couch and it's a low-profile couch and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Just write about what you love. And then you upload it, whether it's MailChimp or Constant Contact or Active Campaign or like there's like a bazillion of them. Just find something that's simple. Back in the day, MailChimp used to allow like 2,500 contacts that you could email them X number of times a month and it was free.
So there's a lot of opportunities out there for you to start building your own email list, start promoting. It starts screaming from the top of the mountain. What you're giving away, why it's going to benefit the client and why they spend that in your newsletters and in your blogs as well. You need to make sure that you're putting a call to action at the bottom.
So if you want more information about the services we offer, give me a call. Okay. And then give them that information so that they don't have to hunt you down or click here to contact us. Whatever you need to do.
This is going to be the foundation of your business. Marketing is special. Yeah. When social media goes down again, because that wasn't the first time, October 4th, 2021.
That was not the first time it had gone down a couple of years prior as well. So people don't have anything better to do. They're sitting around their houses. And obviously trying to, trying to take down social media, don't let that impact your business going forward.
So if you don't already have an email list, that's what you need to do. Start by creating something that is of value that represents your brand, go to Canva, makes something pretty, make it simple.
Don't overthink it right now. Something is better than nothing. You can redo it again and again. See what's working. See what doesn't work and then you create it so that they go to your email list automatically registered, and then you just automatically have it preset.
So after they download something, maybe you send them something a week later, and then you send them something 30 days later. And then 30 days after that. And then 30 days after that and you just keep the momentum. It sounds simple. It is a little bit of work, but it's an investment into your future.
And investment will always give you a return. Well, a good investment does, and this is a good investment. So don't wait, don't wait, go start creating your freemium and then start an email list and don't get discouraged.
If it doesn't grow quickly, if it doesn't grow quickly, that just means you're not promoting it enough, promoted on your Instagram while it's up once a week.
Once every two weeks, Hey, have you seen this? Go download my super-duper fun, free information and just get it out there so that we're not relying on social media for everything. Plus it drives people back to your website that gives you Google juice. It's just, it's just a good thing to have. So that's all I have for you today.
I hope you guys are going into the holidays and get a chance to rest. Get a chance to create an email list and a freemium and start 2022 in control until next time. We'll see you soon.
