About a month ago I went to the WWC ( https://thesupportcenter-nc.org/wwbc ). I had the privilege to be in the Break Out Session that Sarah was the Speaker of. For those of you who are interested, I did tweet about it. My twitter handle is @Queenbeepirate. I thoroughly enjoyed that Break Out Session, and it’s what prompted me to interview Sarah for ENT645. I hope you enjoy my interview with Sarah!
- Tell me a little bit about yourself
My name is Sarah Benoit and I am the President of Creative Original, Inc., a small business web development and consulting firm in Asheville, and I am also Lead Instructor and Co-founder of the JB Media Institute, an online Internet marketing school. I am also a Continuing Education teacher for AB Tech here in Asheville and I teach a wide variety of classes including Social Media Marketing, SEO, Online PR, WordPress, Google Analytics, and more. I have been working in the social media field since 2005 and I have been teaching since 2006. I have been personally using social media since 2003, when it was just a few million information junkies and IT people hanging out online at all hours of the night on sites like Mypsace, Stumble Upon, Dig, and Delicious.
- What does your typical day look like?
Right now my day is a combination of working on website designs, managing social media accounts,and teaching classes. My classes typically happen either in the morning or the afternoon so there are many months where half my day is spent teaching and working with students, while the other half of my day is spent on website management and social media work. The social media work can include content development, strategy development, advertising, social media performance reporting, and client training.
- What are the best way to market yourself/business other than social media?
I firmly believe social media is not a marketing plan all on its own. It can be a valuable tool for building a network of active and engaged influencers, customers, and leads. It can also drive website traffic, conversions, and sales. Success usually comes from combining social media marketing with a really well designed website, a regularly updated blog, Public Relations outreach, email marketing, advertising strategies, networking, or any mixture of these efforts. The most important thing is to know who your target audiences are and how you can most easily get in front of them. Then you must have really great content and calls to action so when you get in front of them they actually do something valuable, whether that is sign up, register, purchase, share, etc. Even traditional marketing like print ads, TV commercials, radio ads, and direct mail marketing can be more effective when paired with a strong, well targeted social media campaign. Remember, don’t try and do it all, especially when you have limited time, manpower, and/or resources. If you can only use 2 or 3 tools (for instance if you are only prepared to use your website, Facebook, and Pinterest or your blog, Facebook and Facebook ads) then choose the ones that will reach the right people and use them consistently and well.
- What is your favorite social media platform? And why
My favorite social media platforms that I use personally are Twitter and Instagram currently. I like Instagram because of how easy it is to use. I also like the visual nature of the system and how in the moment Instagram can be. Twitter is a long time favorite of mine because I am an extroverted, information junkie who likes to learn new things and Twitter is fast, simple, to the point, and a great community when you want to actually meet and stay in touch with new friends, partners, colleagues, industry leaders, reporters, journalists, etc.
- What got you interested in marketing?
In 2003 I was working in corporate healthcare and the company I worked for was closing so I was laid off. I studied literature in college and mainly focused on creative writing. I had a year of unemployment and at the time jobs like the one I had were scarce in the Asheville area. I met my first business partner at a concert in Boone, NC and she was already working in marketing in Virginia and also had a writing background. Together we started an SEO and internet marketing company. I took the first few months I was laid off to focus on educating myself about all sorts of digital communications and online marketing strategies and I was very excited to put my communications skills to good use on the Internet. This was the beginning of my now 13 year career in digital and online marketing.
- As an entrepreneur what should I look for when selecting a marketing agency?
In order to find the right marketing agency for your business or organization there are few things I would ask when you have your first meeting:
–How is the marketing company structured? Who will be handling your project? How often will you communicate with them and how will they communicate? Do they use a project management system? What services will or can they provide? How will they report on their work and the results?
–Have they worked with a company like yours before? If so can they share a little bit about how they approached that client and what the results of the marketing were?
–What are their strong points as a team? If it is an individual marketing freelancer, what their strong points as a marketing professional?
It is also essential that when you first meet with an agency or professional that you share some basic information about your business plan and what stage your company is in. As the business owner you must be the one to clarify the following:
–What are your company’s goals? What results do you expect to see from the marketing?
–Who are your target audiences and what do you know about them? Can you share any information about demographics, interests, behaviors, etc.
–What have you done for marketing in the past? What worked and what did not?
–What are the most important calls to action in your sales process and what do you define as a conversion and as success?
- What advice would you give a newcomer into the social media marketing business?
There are three major things I would advise:
First, social media marketing only works when you have a truly strategic approach where you can set goals, execute a plan for achieving those goals, and then track and see if the goals are being accomplished. If goals are not being reached then adjust the strategy and see if you get better results. Social media is a long game, there is not usually immediate gratification from your work. It takes time to test, track, report, evaluate, and adapt each one of your campaigns and if you are really working the process then each time you should be more effective and generate better results.
Second, quality is more important than quantity. When you build a social media network or account for a client it’s better to have 10,000 followers or likes that are people who are really in your target audiences than it is to have 100,000 followers or likes from totally unqualified people. Unqualified audiences do not generate conversions.
Third, Create a strong project management system. The biggest mistake social media professionals make is that there is no actual system behind the social media marketing work. It is just being done mostly in the moment with no real structure. A clear project management approach to your social media work will allow you to avoid dropping any balls, delegate tasks when you need to, understand the time involved in managing each site so you can charge appropriately for your services, and help the clients have realistic expectations about what social media marketing can do for their business.
Finally, never stop learning! The social media industry will change every 30 days, sometimes dramatically, so learn to enjoy learning how to do something, then learning it again, then learning it again.
- What book/novel has had the biggest impact on your life?
Totally unrelated to my work I think the novel that had the biggest impact on my life was Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley, which I read when I was 14 or 15. I am a huge fiction lover and she is one of my all time favorite authors. In regards to social media there are not a lot of books I recommend since they are often out of date so quickly, but my favorite social media author is Gary Vaynerchuk. His books are fairly evergreen and he is not only the top social media expert in America, he is also an extremely successful entrepreneur and has a unique view of social media and the world because of this. I really loved his book Jab, Jab, Jab…Right Hook.
