how to give your sme’s marketing a boost on a budget.
It was 2021 and the pandemic had already been going on for a year. Bars began to re-open, but a bar by the name of The Front Room situated in north-east London is one that had noticed a significant fall in sales after the initial lockdown of bars, pubs & restaurants. How do I know this? Well, the manager happens to be my wife’s cousin and good friend!
The Front Room itself holds a number of events each week ranging from special sports broadcasts, pub quizzes, karaoke and DJ club nights, but the manager wanted to bring the number of attendees at these events back up to pre-covid levels and didn’t know where to start.
If you’ve read my other articles, by now you should be aware that I am in fact a qualified secondary school teacher, so imparting knowledge and wisdom is something of a habit now! I caught wind of the struggles that The Front Room was facing and reached out to the manager and sat him down for an impromptu consultation and explained that their social media profiles (which had been dormant for over 2 years), had a collective following on Instagram & Facebook of just over 800 followers at the time and are a great asset to them. I shifted into teacher-mode and gave the bar manager a crash course in social media marketing on a tight budget.
For any other SMEs looking to give their marketing a boost on a budget, take notes:
Plan your social media post topics & themes in advance on a content calendar within Excel. There are plenty of free downloadable templates out there.
Use Canva to create visually appealing and well-designed graphics with speed and ease.
Draft and schedule social posts in advance on a free-to-use social post scheduler, such as Hootsuite, Buffer or Later to name a few.
Be sure to use a hashtag generator to find the best hashtags for your posts - especially for Instagram posts as hashtags have a huge influence on discoverability, with Instagram posts allowing up to 30 hashtags at a time, so make the most of them! There are a ton of these hashtag generators out there such as Inflact, Hashtagify and RiteTag, so find the one that works best for you.
Fully flesh out your social media profiles’ bios with all the necessary information, as well as appropriate links. If you want to have multiple links in your bio, but are only restricted to one link such as on Instagram, you can use tools such as Linktree to host multiple links under one parent link. You can even brand & stylise your Linktree as well to really show off!
On top of this, I also walked the manager through how to use Facebook’s (now Meta’s) advertising platform, setting up a dummy campaign from scratch and then watching him repeat the process back to me so I knew he fully understood it. I then apologised for being such a teacher towards him!
Since this consultation, The Front Room’s collective following on Facebook & Instagram has surpassed 2,000 followers. As well as this, The Front Room reported back that their average revenue on event nights is now double what their average was before Covid. As for payment for my consultation…a hearty chicken club sandwich, a side of fries and a crisp beer on the house!
