From Likes to Leads: Crafting an Effective Multi-Platform Social Media Strategy with Estie Starr

[00:02:54] Social media success depends on your goals.

[00:08:07] Marketing struggles are often due to cluelessness or resistance to focus on a specific target audience. Lack of education and fear of missing out contribute to this. Small businesses try to mimic big businesses, but they should start by targeting a specific group.

[00:11:38] Social media promotion: connections, value, not selling.

[00:17:17] Choose influencers and platforms based on audience.

[00:19:12] Free three-day marketing success challenge at estiestarr.com.

Transcript

Sheryl Plouffe [00:00:00]:

How you can still utilize a multiplatform social media strategy to your advantage. Welcome to Cash In On Camera. Today my special guest is Estie Starr from Strand Consulting and the Better Business School and excited to get into this topic. Do you believe that the opening statement that I just gave, that social media has changed so much in the last few years?

Estie Starr [00:00:22]:

Yes, it has.

Sheryl Plouffe [00:00:25]:

Yeah. It's kind of a loaded statement because we have seen so many different changes. I think it's left a lot of business owners, coaches, and consultants a little bit confused about how best to utilize it. Estie, I know that your experience and expertise lie in organic marketing. So I would love to be able to dive in and get, first of all, your take on the current status, if you will, of organic marketing, on social media. Still alive, dying a slow death, changing where do we stand with it all?

Estie Starr [00:01:01]:

It's very much alive. I think that the biggest change we see is in the pressure and in the glut of people on it. And then everyone tries to just mimic what they see, but by the time you're mimicking it, it's old. Right. So if you ever read Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point, you've got that trend. So we're in, like, late adopter stragglers for people coming onto social at this point. In the early days, you had a handful of influencers. Yeah. They ruled the place and everyone's like, want to be like them. And then some people could and some people couldn't. Some people just tagged along on their tailwind. And now you have this pressure where more than ever, every business owner I meet either says I have to get good at social or is there any way for me to succeed without social? There's a handful of people who are making it, and even that handful, I'll tell you, the calls I get from them, it's se. I'm succeeding on social, but I'm not getting clients. I got 20,000, 100,000, 300,000 followers, and I can't turn it into money. So you've got kind of those three groups. Those are the groups I deal with the most. I need to make it. I don't know how. I don't want to make it. Can I do something else? And I'm making it, but where's my money?

Sheryl Plouffe [00:02:16]:

This leads to an interesting conversation about what is success on social media now. As far as I'm concerned, if you are a business owner, it really comes down to more on the client side. I'm not necessarily a proponent anymore of vanity metrics, so to speak. I'm not interested in having a million faceless people following me who are not my target audience or my ideal audience on Instagram. I'm just not interested in it. Right. So I wonder what your thought is about that. Is that your definition of success for businesses, small businesses that you work with?

Estie Starr [00:02:54]:

So I want to say success is always subjective because it always depends on your goal. And so if your goal is ad revenue and becoming an influencer and that's your business model, then a million followers will get you that. Exactly. But if your goal is clients for your own personal coaching or consulting practice, your fitness center, your chiropractic practice, your new educational tool, or whatever it is you're trying to sell, you need to define what are you using social media for. I put it into two buckets. Social media can be used, number one, as an evaluation tool or as a promotional strategy. And one is a lot more effort than the other. If it's just an evaluation tool, you do not expect for people to discover you through your social media. They're going to discover you some other way. You're using other promotional methods. When I say promotion, I mean the means of getting attention from people who may want to buy your product or offer. You're going to use other promotional methods to get people's attention. And then they will likely check out your social media as a form of evaluating you. They might also get on a call with you. They might also come to a class with you. They might also check out your website. They will look into you in a number of different ways. Social media is just one tool to set up your social media in that way. Pretty simple. Get all your platforms set up. Get your profile updated. Again, profile photos differ across platforms. LinkedIn, is more professional. AI is doing a great job on those right now, no doubt. But oh my people are gorgeous. My gosh. Not human, but absolutely stunning. Instagram is more fun. Facebook is more intimate in terms of a homie, here's my family and my pet dog kind of way. Every platform has different things. TikTok is a little more wild, a little more slumber. Party. Every social media platform is a party. Your website, that's your story, your house. People come to you. Social media, you're at a party. These parties are going twenty-four, seven, and they've all got their own vibe. So you got to join that vibe. So you have a profile set up. It's good. You've got some basic content on your page. And again, every platform has a different type of page. At LinkedIn, you've got your whole resume page and your feed is like one little section of your page. Instagram, you got one line about you, if you even put that in. And then it's all pictures and videos. Every platform. Facebook, it's this girl, everything looks different. You set up your page and it's there for people to check you out and evaluate you. That's what they're going to come for. And then it really depends on what you do. Are you a designer? Are you posting work? Are you a healer? Are you posting testimonial stories, tips, advice, or guidance to position yourself as an expert? What's your goal here? How are people going to evaluate you on social media as part of their evaluation process? Once you've gotten their attention, to then convert them into paying clients and customers, and then we use the tool in a specific way.

Sheryl Plouffe [00:05:54]:

So, Estie, I just want to stop there because I love what you're saying here. I do understand this idea of evaluation. People are going to check you out after you have garnered their attention, and they're coming back to check you out. So am I hearing you say that the best strategy, multiplatform social media strategy is not to necessarily use it as the means to get attention, so much as it is about positioning yourself as a preeminent authority? Once they have gotten you you've gotten their attention and they're checking you out.

Estie Starr [00:06:25]:

So there's no one better than the other. This is an option depending on your full path. Yeah. I've been doing this for 15 years. I've clocked twelve and a half thousand hours of one on one business coaching in the last 15 years. And I have built hundreds of custom business and marketing strategies for my clients to get them to their stable. Five, six, and seven figures profit. And I have never built the same strategy twice. There is no cookie-cutter on my planet. And so I cannot tell you if this is better or worse for you. I can tell you if you don't like social media, you don't take to it naturally. You don't have the funds to hire a full-time social media management company. This is probably better for you. Right? Because this is the baseline. This is something everyone should have at some level on at least one or two platforms. So you have a basic web presence and basic positioning as an expert authority. That's just basic. This is foundational.

Sheryl Plouffe [00:07:20]:

One of the things that I have found to be a challenge when I'm working with people is this foundational piece that you're talking about, which is who you are, what you do, and who you do it for. It seems to me that on the surface, that sounds like it should be easy to answer, but yet when you start digging in and you start actually doing the work with people, it's a challenging thing for people to even decide. In many cases, it's about deciding who they want to attract, deciding how they want to position themselves, and deciding what they want their business model to be. Do you find the same challenge in all of the clients that you've worked with? And if so, how do you help them so that we can build that social media strategy properly?

Estie Starr [00:08:07]:

So I would say when I have someone whose marketing isn't working, we always start there. And that's typically the first sticking point. Yeah. Occasionally people are getting stuck. They're not getting out there as much, or they're not getting the right conversions. But most of the time, this is the place that got stuck, and the reasons for it vary sometimes it's because they're just clueless, right? They listen to Shopify as point click website business. Ta DA. It's going to be amazing. Oh, my God, you're a millionaire. It's so cool. Passive income, quit your job tomorrow. It's going to be fabulous. And they're just like, okay. And there's just no education on this. Sometimes they know it, but they have so much resistance. I actually have a student right now who came in with so much resistance, and I called her out on it, right? I'm doing this for a long time. I was like, okay, I see your resistance. Here it is. Number one, you're afraid you're going to lose people if you focus on any one group. Number two, you're afraid you're going to be bored. She's like, oh, my God, you see me. I'm like, Honey, not the first, not the second, not the third, not the last. And so I find that sometimes with people who just don't even know that this is what they should do sometimes. And oftentimes they're afraid there's a lot of FOMO I'm going to lose out if I focus on one group that is my ideal clients that will buy from me easily, pay me a lot of money, love me, and send me referrals. If I do that, I might lose. Okay? But there's a fear because there's a lack of education and information around it and because most small business owners try to model big business. They look at big business, and they say, look successful business. They target everyone. Yeah, honey, they start that way.

Sheryl Plouffe [00:09:41]:

Yeah. It's a totally different model. It's a totally different model, and they.

Estie Starr [00:09:44]:

Have totally different budgets, and they micro-target. Also, a large business doesn't mass target. They have multiple micro targets. Pay attention. You will see that. And the third thing is, people are afraid to be bored sometimes. But I like doing different things. I love working with different people. I love this one, and I love that thing, and I love that thing. And so one, two, or three of those will get people totally stuck out the door, and I find that to overturn it, number one is just information and education. This is actually how business works. I got dozens of stories for you of unlocking just this piece and turning $ 2,000-a-month businesses into $ 12,000-a-month businesses in six months or less.

Sheryl Plouffe [00:10:29]:

You have to unlock that really foundational piece. Otherwise, you'll never see success in business on social media. Like, it's a foundational part that really needs to be dialed in. And so I love your point about using it for the evaluation part, right? People are going to come and check you out, and you need to have that when we want to talk about getting leads and getting clients.

Estie Starr [00:10:57]:

Promotion.

Sheryl Plouffe [00:10:58]:

Promotion. So this is the thing that I see a lot of people doing wrong, and I love the idea of certain promotions, but it has to be in balance. What I'm seeing sometimes a lot of people do is like, they only do promotion.

Estie Starr [00:11:13]:

That's it.

Sheryl Plouffe [00:11:14]:

It's only a promotion. So guess what people do? They tune out. They are not tuned in because you've taught them that every single time you post. It's promotional, it's something about it's for you. And social media people care about themselves. So I want to ask you, what do you feel is the right balance if you indeed believe that there ought to be a better balance between promotion and non-promotional material?

Estie Starr [00:11:38]:

Absolutely. So when I say promotion, I actually am referring to a system of promoting yourself and your services on social media, which at a maximum has 10% of promotional content. And that's a maximum. I just had one of my students on today's call, we have our cohort of the marketing program running in the business school right now. And one of the students was like, okay, so I'm trying to use social media to promote. I'm like, let's redefine terms, all right? When I talk about using social media to promote, I am saying that you are making connections, building relationships, and offering value. At a maximum, one in five shares can include seeding a promotion. And that would sound something like, hey, I totally hear that struggle. You've got this. I just worked through something like this with a client. Here's a tip, and if you want to chat, we can call that promotion you want to post. Hey, everybody, take my course program. It's amazing. Only $657. That is one in ten to one in 20 of your shares at any given time. If you're on social media, remember, it's a party. So this is my favorite analogy. You are joining the party. Now, if you are a stranger to the party, nobody knows you, nobody sees you. There are millions of people at this party. Literally hundreds of millions of people at this party. You are invisible. When you first show up, you can get visible quickly by saying interesting things, joining groups that are talking about things, and joining those conversations, right? We call those groups. We call it comments. People will start to notice you, and if you are scalable, they will start to follow you, which means they will start to listen to what you're saying at the party. And if they like you a lot and they listen to you a lot because you're always saying cool things that they're interested in, you can become an influencer. Now, still, none of that sells. That's still just attention. But when I talk about using social media for promotion, that is the beginning. That is actually the beginning, middle, and most of the end. Social media for promotion is using this party, this incredible 24/7 party that you can join from anywhere in the world at any time, using almost any electronic Internet-connected device to meet and connect with people all over the world who you can provide value. And foundational piece is, who do I provide value to? What am I doing now? Let me provide value. Value, value. Build what we call KLT, know, like, and trust factor. Build brand equity. Let people get to know who I am, what I'm about, and what I help them with. And then when someone has a problem, I can offer help. And once in a while, once in a while, not once a day, I can be like, hey everybody, I got cool. And this is why.

Sheryl Plouffe [00:14:23]:

When people try to copy other people's.

Estie Starr [00:14:25]:

Social media, they're like, oh my God, my competitor does this. It's great. So they see their competitor post like, a 20% off discount. They're like, I can do that because my competitor did it. And they're like, 20% off silver. Like, oh my God, I'm coming. It's amazing. I'm so excited. Like, oh, well, this clearly works. So they post a 20% discount and they get crickets.

Sheryl Plouffe [00:14:42]:

Why?

Estie Starr [00:14:42]:

Because your competitor has been hanging out at this party for years. They're besties with thousands of people. They've been talking, chatting, connecting, befriending, sharing. They're besties.

Sheryl Plouffe [00:14:55]:

And those activities are often happening outside or behind closed doors of social media. Who's trying to emulate that? Doesn't see all of those conversations?

Estie Starr [00:15:06]:

They're missing so much of the value. They're missing the messaging, the embedded. They're missing so much. But even just on the surface, they're missing the fact that this person is talking to their besties. You're talking to strangers. So this person says to their besties, they're like, hey, everybody, I got a 20% off sale. And their besties are like, yay, I'm so excited. I'm coming. You come in, you're like, hey, strangers, I got a 20% off sale too. Everyone's like, Why are you here? You're weird. Yeah, you said the same thing, but you don't have the same level of connection.

Sheryl Plouffe [00:15:36]:

Yeah, and I think when I led you into that question, I was thinking more about overt. I would call it overt promotion. Meaning overt promotion is obnoxious. Hey, I'm and buy my thing and discounts and all that kind of thing. That's what I meant by promotion. To your point, those activities of connection, providing value, et cetera, I'm totally on board with that.

Estie Starr [00:16:01]:

To me, that is promotional promotion. The other thing is paid ads. And paid ads are an inherent interruption. You are busy. You're busy looking at your old friend from high school, new shoes, and this one's vacation and that cute little baby panda eating a stick, and you're busy. And then the ad comes and it's like, hey, cool thing. Now that ad better be really good to interrupt your little emotional veg that's happening here while you're scrolling. If you are organically trying to do promotion, you better have a lot of social clout to pull people out of what they're in the middle of to try to sell them a thing. And then you better be like, grab and go.

Sheryl Plouffe [00:16:42]:

So I want to ask you, I know we're running short on time here, but I want to ask you since we're talking about a multiplatform social media strategy, we've really explained about promotion versus the effect of people checking you out. But what platforms or how many platforms ought a small business or an entrepreneur really be focused on at any given time? Because multiplatform would imply potentially all of them. But is that what you subscribe to or teach or do you suggest a smaller number or specific platforms?

Estie Starr [00:17:17]:

So I always say the same way when people are like, what influencers should I use? What celebrities should I connect with? I say your celebrities are the people that your audience celebrates. And so your social media platforms of choice should be the ones that your audience uses. If you're trying to sell to Gen Alpha, which you shouldn't, they don't have money yet. But even Gen Z, you're not on Facebook. They're not on Facebook, they don't care. And if you are trying to sell to the 40, 50 plus market, you got a couple on TikTok, but that's not where the majority they're on Facebook and on Instagram be at a minimum on the platforms where your audience is, even for evaluation, because that's where they're going to go check you out. People go to their home base. People who live on Instagram, when they're checking you out, they check out Instagram. And if you're not there, you're not one of them. Be where they are. So when you're setting up your baseline, your baseline is where's your audience and if they're not on social, guess what? Doesn't matter that much. Actually, genuinely doesn't have people targeting septuagenarians people. 70 plus social media is really not your biggest strategy. Print mail, direct mail in person.

Sheryl Plouffe [00:18:31]:

It's a great point because I think that we assume that we're trying to grow a business or whatever, and it's like, I have to be on social, but you have to think about what is your business model. Like, who is it that you're trying to attract and what are their behaviors? Where are they hanging out just because you think it's social media might not be? And you explore that and you find out to your point if it's certain people over a certain age, they might not even be on social media. They might not even have phones at this stage.

Estie Starr [00:19:00]:

Right?

Sheryl Plouffe [00:19:00]:

So you have to kind of know that. Estie, I'd love for you to share about your you have challenges, and I want to show it on the screen and have you tell us a little bit about this challenge that you do.

Estie Starr [00:19:12]:

Sure. It is a three-day marketing success challenge because I've been doing this for a long time, got a lot of information, and I want you to have marketing success. I really believe that everyone who wants to can and should be able to create their own salary. And so many people get stuck on marketing. So we created this three-day marketing success challenge. It's not expensive, but it is temporarily available for free and you go to sdstar.com free gift. If you had spelled my name right, estiestarr.com free gift. You can get free access for a limited time to the Marketing Success Challenge and get the clarity and confidence to market yourself successfully. So we talk about some of the things we talked about today, including social media, and a couple more steps to take to set up your multiplatform social media strategy. I talk about your brand, how you focus your people, how you refine your messaging with a really great shortcut that I picked up a couple of years ago, and some other cool stuff I highly recommend.

Sheryl Plouffe [00:20:09]:

I love it. Thank you so much for being on the show today. This has been enlightening to hear someone else's perspective and somebody who's really boots on the ground and doing this for so many years as you have about where you think social media is today, it is not dead. It is alive and well. But you do need to have a proper strategy on how you're actually going to execute whatever it is your goal is. And that might require you to do some internal work or work with a coach to help you uncover what those things are. So I love that. I think that social media, I mean, we cannot deny attention. There is attention on social media. Therefore, we can utilize it.

Estie Starr [00:20:52]:

Yeah. Go where the eyeballs are.

Sheryl Plouffe [00:20:54]:

Where the eyeballs are.

Estie Starr [00:20:55]:

Get in front of them in a way that works for your goals.

Sheryl Plouffe [00:21:01]:

Estie, this has been a pleasure. Thank you for being on the show today. We really appreciate you, and I look forward to connecting with you again soon.