As the publisher of the 830 Times website, newspaper and the voice of the 830 Hour on KTDR 96.3 Monday through Friday from 7 to 8 a.m., the thing to do on an article about marketing tips is say, “Just call me, we’ll take care of you.”
However, I”m going to offer you five free marketing tips that will help your business, and they aren’t based on print or radio.
1 -- Audit yourself constantly! If you have a business with a location, you probably have a Google ad. If you’re part of a franchise, your company has a website designed to represent you. When is the last time you checked to see if the information is correct?
I was recently stalking one niche of business people in Del Rio. Everyone in this industry has a web presence, thanks to the national headquarters. However, when I checked 10 local members, none of their website links connected to their webpage. They all connected to a page in Cleveland, Ohio.
Easy solution, visit your sites, visit your social media and ensure it’s all current at least twice a year.
2 -- Know your audience? Who is it that typically comes through your door and buys from you? What is their age, gender, etc! This will drive so much of what you do.
This may be simply a matter of keeping a yellow legal pad near you and monitor who is coming through your door. Put their age, gender and other data points you think might be important down with a slash. You might be surprised by what the data shows. Hint: Don’t ask how old people are, just estimate.
This information will drive much of your marketing.
3 -- Know your social media.  This one is following “Know your audience” for a reason because they are interwoven. If you don’t know your audience, you can’t find the right social media mix for your business.
More than 71 percent of Instagram users are between 18 and 44-years-old while Facebook users are a bit more spread out and have 10 million advertisers. Bottom line, you need to combine your audience data with social media demographics.
How do you find the social media demographic and other helpful data? Visit my friend Mr. Google (www.Google.com) and simply put your question in.
If you need help, call me. I’d be honored to help you figure it out and translate.
4 -- Maintain your social media. If you have Facebook, Instagram, Tik-Tok or any of the other myriad of social media sites out there, maintain it and keep it going! If you’re not updating it at least several times per week, delete it. In my opinion, a badly maintained social media site is worse than no social media site.
Don’t be intimidated, it’s not that hard. Call me, there’s lots of tricks we can show you that will make this easy!
5 -- Always evaluate. Know what’s working,  know what’s not. If you visit Sanchez Roofing, they can pull up on their computer a pie chart that shows where EVERY customer heard about them from. “When something is working, I pay it more attention,” Raul Sanchez, Sanchez Roofing’s owner, told me. However, if he wasn’t keeping track of the data, he’d never know what’s working.
Bonus Tip. What are you trying to do with your social media? If you follow 830 Times’ Facebook page, we’ve never tried to sell you a thing. We use our social media to build our presence, not sales.  However, by building our presence, we are able to sell more ads and most importantly, keep our community informed.
If you need help with any of this, give me a call and I will help you analyze what’s working, what’s not. I’ll also help you set up a plan to meet your needs. My personal cell phone is 618-593-2285 and my email is joelalangton@gmail.com.
Thanks for reading!