Ignoring your prospects is NOT a winning business strategy. But a lot of companies do it anyway by not communicating regularly with their prospects.
If you ignore your prospects, your prospects will ignore you.
Meetings and money, via a third party
Of my three Bredemarket meetings (so far) today, the second was the most promising.
A person at a large company needs consulting services from me. All we need to do is work out the mechanics. The large company relies on a third party to manage its indpendent contractor relationships, including onboarding, time cards, and payments for hourly work. I wanted to learn about the third party, but I ran into walls when seeking current information about the firm.
The third party’s website is static
The third party’s website talks about its services, some unique aspects about the business, the story of its founder (a fascinating story), its technology partners, and its call to action. It provides ALMOST everything…with the exception of CURRENT information.
Luckily for me, I knew where to find current information on the company. Since the company is a B2B provider, I assumed that the company has a LinkedIn page. And I was right. But…
The third party’s LinkedIn page is also static
As you probably know, company LinkedIn pages have several subpages. The “About” supage talks about the third party company’s services, and the “People” subpage links to the profiles of the company’s employees, including the founder. So I went to the “Posts” subpage for the third party…
Use other social media outlets: TikTok, X, YouTube, whatever.
Pay attention to your prospects by providing current content.
If you ignore your prospects, your prospects will ignore you.
Are you ready to stop ignoring your prospects?
If you need help creating content for your blog, your social media platforms, or your website, Bredemarket can help you regain credibility with your prospects and customers.
Authorize Bredemarket, Ontario California’s content marketing expert, to help your firm produce words that return results.
If your Inland Empire company doesn’t have an online presence, one quick way to create one is to create a business page on Facebook.
This post outlines the benefits of establishing an online presence via a Facebook business page. It also provides four examples of Facebook business pages. Finally, the post addresses the thorny question of creating content for your Facebook business page.
Why Faceboook may be the best online presence for your business
For the first time in years, I attended an Ontario IDEA Exchange meeting at AmPac Business Capital on Tuesday afternoon. There was a mixture of attendees: some who had established several businesses, some like me who had run one business for some time, and a few who were just starting out in business.
The ones who were starting out were still trying to figure out all the things you need to do to start a business: figuring out why the business exists in the first place, getting the appropriate business licenses (and in some cases professional licenses), printing business cards (or creating the online equivalent), setting up SOME kind of way to track prospects and customers…and establishing an online presence.
Now some businesses choose to establish their online presence by creating a website.
But even the simplest website can involve a lot of complexity—bredemarket.com currently has 57 pages, not counting tag pages and individual blog post pages.
For many small businesses, it may be much easier to create a Facebook business page then to create an entire website.
Facebook business pages are free. (Well, unless you run ads.)
Facebook business pages are easy to create.
Facebook business pages potentially reach billions of people, including your prospects and customers.
Creating a Facebook business page
So how do you create a Facebook business page?
There’s no need for me to document all of that in detail, since many have already done so.
Don’t worry if you don’t have all the optional items, such as a page cover picture. You can add them later. This will get you going.
Other guides to creating Facebook business pages are available from Buffer (with pictures), Hootsuite (with pictures). Sprout Social (with pictures), and a number of other sources.
But before you create YOUR Facebook business page, let me show you four varied examples of EXISTING Facebook business pages.
Four examples of Facebook business pages
Let’s take a look at some pages that already exist. Perhaps one or more of these will give you ideas for your own page.
The artist page (Paso Artis)
Paso Artis is a European business whose proprietor is a painter who sells her paintings.
The menu options at the bottom of the picture above (some of which cannot be seen) illustrate some of the elements you can include in a Facebook page. Here are just a few of the page elements that Paso Artis uses:
Posts. This is the equivalent of a blog on a website, and allows you to post text, images, videos, and other types of content.
About. This is where you provide contact and other basic information about your business.
Shop. Facebook allows you to include a shop, which Paso Artis uses to sell her paintings.
Photos. As you can imagine for an artist’s page, photos of the artwork are essential.
The shirtmaker page (Shirts by Kaytie)
(UPDATE 10/20/2023: Because Shirts by Kaytie is sadly no longer in business, I have removed the, um, live links to her Facebook page.)
Let’s leave Europe and go to Illinois where we find another artist, but her work is not displayed on paintings, but on shirts. Here is the Shirts by Kaytie Facebook page.
You’ll notice that Shirts by Kaytie has a different menu item order (and different menu items) than Paso Artis. For example, Shirts by Kaytie doesn’t have a Facebook “shop” element; you need to contact her directly to purchase items.
Enough of such exotic locations as Europe and Illinois. Let’s head to California’s Inland Empire and look at my favorite marketing/writing services Facebook page, the Bredemarket Facebook page.
First, Bredemarket (unlike Paso Artis and Shirts by Kaytie) provides services rather than tangible products. Therefore, I chose to include a “Services” element as part of my Facebook page.
Second, Bredemarket has chosen to implement Facebook’s “groups” feature. In Bredemarket’s case, there are three separate groups that focus on various aspects of Bredemarket’s business. Inland Empire businesses can read the content in the Bredemarket Inland Empire B2B Services group and not get bogged down in out-of-area identity discussions about the change from FRVT to FRTE. (They’re missing out.)
By the way, if you are an Inland Empire business—especially an Inland Empire startup technology business—and you have never heard of Startempire Wire, STOP READING MY POST and go follow Startempire Wire’s Facebook pageNOW. Startempire Wire is THE news source for Inland Empire startup tech information, and is a strong champion of the IE tech community.
So what does Startempire Wire’s Facebook page offer? Posts, photos, weekly videos, and the “Inland Empire Startup Scene” group. All of the content is jam-packed with information.
Facebook pages are essential to these firms’ strategies
Now in some cases the Facebook pages are only part of the online presence for these firms. Both Bredemarket and Startempire Wire have their own web pages, and both firms are also active on other online properties such as LinkedIn. (Bredemarket is almost everywhere, but not on Snapchat.) But Facebook is an essential part of the outreach for all four of these firms, allowing them to reach prospects and clients who are only on Facebook and nowhere else.
Perhaps a Facebook page is a perfect solution for YOUR firm’s online presence.
Let’s talk about content
But creating a Facebook page is not enough.
You need to populate it with content, such as images, videos…and posts.
Now I’m not saying that you HAVE to update your Facebook page daily, but it’s a good idea to add new content at least once a month.
But what if you aren’t a writer, or don’t have time to write? Do you have to resort to ChatGPT?
Heavens no. (I’ll say more about that later.)
Well, online content creation is where Bredemarket comes in. I help firms create blog posts, Facebook posts, LinkedIn articles, case studies, white papers, and other content (22 different types of content at last count).
Does your product (or company) need these 22 content types?
Let me help you populate your Facebook page (or other online content).
Authorize Bredemarket, Ontario California’s content marketing expert, to help your firm produce words that return results.
If you’re starting out in business, you’ve probably heard the advice that as your business branches out into social platforms, you shouldn’t try to do everything at once. Instead you should make sure that your business offering is really solid on one platform before branching out into others.
Yes, I’ve been naughty again and didn’t listen to the expert advice.
One reason is because of my curiosity. With one notable exception, I’m intrigued with the idea of trying out a new platform and figuring out how it works. Audio? Video? Let’s try it.
And as long as I’m trying it out, why not create a Bredemarket account and put content out there?
So there’s a reasonably good chance that Bredemarket is already on one of your favorite social platforms. If so, why not subscribe to Bredemarket so that you’ll get my content?
Here’s a list of Bredemarket’s text, image, audio, and video accounts on various social platforms. Be sure to follow or subscribe!
My compulsion to share stuff about identity and biometrics, which you can see if you visit my Bredemarket Identity Firm Services LinkedIn page and Facebook group.
Unfortunately for us, 90% of the song deals with the negative aspects of a person obsessing over another person. If you pick through the lyrics of the Animotion song “Obsession” and forget about what (or who) the singer is obsessing about, you can find isolated phrases that describe how an obsession can motivate you.
“I cannot sleep”
“Be still”
“I will not accept defeat”
But thankfully, there are more positive ways to embrace an obsession.
Justin Welsh on embracing an obsession
While Justin Welsh’s July 2022 post “TSS #028: Don’t Pick a Niche. Embrace an Obsession” is targeted for solopreneurs, it could just as easily apply to those who work for others. Regardless of your compensation structure, why do you choose to work where you do?
For Welsh, the practice of picking a niche risks commoditization.
They end up looking like, sounding like, and acting like all of their competition. The internet is full of copycats and duplicates.
(For example, I’d bet that all of the people who are picking a niche know better than to cite the Animotion song “Obsession” in a blog post promoting their business.)
Perhaps it’s semantics, but in Welsh’s way of thinking, embracing an obsession differs from picking a niche. To describe the power of embracing an obsession, Welsh references a tweet from Daniel Vassalo:
Find something you want to do really badly, and you won’t need any goals, habits, systems, discipline, rewards, or any other mental hacks. When the motivation is intrinsic, those things happen on their own.
Find something you want to do really badly, and you won’t need any goals, habits, systems, discipline, rewards, or any other mental hacks. When the motivation is intrinsic, those things happen on their own.
I trust you can see the difference between picking something you HAVE to do, versus obsessing over something you WANT to do.
What’s in it for you?
Welsh was addressing this post to me and people like me, and his message resonates with me.
But frankly, YOU don’t care about me and about whether I’m motivated. All that you care about is that YOU get YOUR content that you need from me.
So why should you care what Justin Welsh and Daniel Vassllo told me?
The obvious answer is that if you contract with Bredemarket for your marketing and writing services, you’ll get a “pry my keyboard out of my cold dead hands” person who WANTS to write your stuff, and doesn’t want to turn the writing process over to some two-year-old bot (except for very small little bits).
I’m still working on my TikTok generative AI dance. (Don’t hold your breath.)
“Pry my keyboard,” indeed.
Do you need someone to obsess over YOUR content?
Of course, if you need someone to write YOUR stuff, then I won’t have time to work on a TikTok dance. This is a good thing for me, you, and the world.
As I’ve stated elsewhere, before I write a thing for a Bredemarket client, I make sure that I understand WHY you do what you do, and understand everything else that is relevant to the content that we create.
As I work on the content, you have opportunities to review it and provide your feedback. This ensures that both of us are happy with the final copy.
And that your end users become obsessed with YOU.
So if you need me to create content for you, please contact me.
Does your identity business provide biometric or non-biometric products and services that use finger, face, iris, DNA, voice, government documents, geolocation, or other factors or modalities?
Does your identity business need written content, such as blog posts (from the identity/biometric blog expert), case studies, data sheets, proposal text, social media posts, or white papers?
How can your identity business (with the help of an identity content marketing expert) create the right written content?
If you don’t move quickly, you may miss your opportunity.
The first post mentioned a company (whom I didn’t name) that hired an international marketing company in December 2021, but that hadn’t created any customer-facing content by March 2022.
The first post also mentioned a bank that put a customer-facing email test togehter in eight weeks.
Oh, and John DeLorean took eight years to get his car out, which didn’t help with his financing issues.
On the positive side, the second post described how one company moved quickly. Rather than waiting for a centralized content creator to distribute content, Intuit provided guidelines so that its employees could extend the reach of Intuit’s content through their own social media posts.
The second post also noted that quick generation of content is appreciated by customers, vendors, and partners.
How can you move quickly?
So let’s say you’re an Inland Empire business who needs to create between 400 and 600 words of content quickly, such as the text for a brochure, a blog post, or a LinkedIn or Facebook post.
How can you get it out quickly?
How can you avoid waiting eight weeks, or three months, or eight years for your customers to see your content?
Here are four actions you can take to get your content out.
Specify your content needs.
Ensure you are available.
Ensure your content creator is available.
Book your content creator.
I’ll describe these four actions below.
One: Specify your content needs
If you rush to create content without thinking through your needs, your content won’t be that effective. Take some time up front to plan what your content will be.
Ask yourself critical questions about your content.
(UPDATE OCTOBER 22, 2023: “SIX QUESTIONS YOUR CONTENT CREATOR SHOULD ASK YOU IS SO 2022. DOWNLOAD THE NEWER “SEVEN QUESTIONS YOUR CONTENT CREATOR SHOULD ASK YOU” HERE.)
Don’t know what to ask? I’ve written an e-book entitled “Six Questions Your Content Creator Should Ask You.”
The six questions (hint: you’ve already seen two of them in the first two parts of this post):
Why?
How?
What?
Goal?
Benefits?
Target Audience?
When Bredemarket meets with a customer, I ask more than these six questions, but they’re the most important ones.
If you can answer these questions, either on your own or with the help of your content creator, then you’ll have a roadmap that allows you to create the content together.
Two: Ensure you are available
Note the word “together” in the paragraph above.
After you meet with your content creator, your part of the task isn’t done. Or shouldn’t be.
When Bredemarket creates content for a customer, there are points within the process where the customer reviews the content and makes suggestions. Normally when I create between 400 and 600 words of content using the Bredemarket 400 Short Writing Service, there are two review cycles. Here’s how I explain them:
Bredemarket iteratively provides two review copies of the draft content within three days per review. (The number of review cycles and review time must agree with any due dates.) The draft content advances your goal, communicates your benefits, and speaks to your target audience in your preferred tone of voice. Relevant examples and key words/hashtags are included.
You return comments on each review copy within three days. For longer content, you may provide the draft formatted copy for the final review.
Why? (If you read my e-book, you know the “why” question is important.)
Maybe I have questions that popped up while I was drafting the content. Maybe something occurs to you after you see the draft content. Whatever the reason, these review cycles provide opportunities to improve the content as I develop it.
But to get your feedback, you have to be available. The standard process gives you three days to return your comments, although of course you can return them faster. But if you don’t return your comments for weeks or months…well, that kind of kills the idea of getting the content out quickly.
Of course, in some cases delays are unavoidable. One of my customers was dependent on a third party to complete his part of the review, but the third party was not delivering. In that case, there was nothing the customer could do, and that content was delayed.
One critical question: what if you need your content very quickly?
Now if you add up all the times in the Bredemarket 400 process, your total comes to fourteen days: one day for the review, three days for me to create the first draft, three days for your review, three days for my second draft, three days for your second review, and one day for the final copy.
If you need it in one week rather than two weeks, then we jointly need to figure out a faster cadence of reviews. I can adjust the schedule to meet your due dates.
But you have to be available for the reviews.
And as I note below, I have to be available for the creation.
So when you’re planning to have Bredemarket or another content creator generate something for you, remember that you’ll need to spend a little bit of time on reviews.
Three: Ensure your content creator is available
You know how I said that the Bredemarket 400 process gives you three days to review each content iteration? Well, at the same time it gives me three days to draft (and redraft) the content.
Can I, or the content creator you select, hold up our end of the process?
Right now I’m going to tell you something that has happened since I wrote those two “In marketing, move quickly” posts in March 2022. In May 2022, I accepted a full-time position with an identity company, and therefore no longer spend full time on Bredemarket activities.
Therefore, if you need to meet with me Monday to Friday between 8 am and 5 pm (Pacific), I can’t meet you. I have my day job to worry about.
I have regular office hours on Saturday mornings when I can meet with you, and I can arrange to be available on weekday evenings or early weekday mornings. And of course I can draft your content and incorporate your suggestions at those times also, outside of regular business hours.
But if you need a content creator that is available during regular (Inland Empire) business hours, then you’ll need to select someone else.
Just make sure that the content creator you select is available when you need them.
Four: Book your content creator
When you’re ready to move, move. If you don’t start the process of creating your critical content, by definition you’ll never finish it.
So take the next step and find someone who will create your content. There are a number of content creators who serve Inland Empire businesses.
But if you want to use the Ontario, California content marketing expert, contact me at Bredemarket and I’ll arrange a meeting. Be prepared for me to ask you a few questions.
For years, I have been working with computer systems that are used by people. Sometimes I forget that, but then someone like Mike Rathwell reminds me of this fact. Just like Jake Kuramoto reminded me of that fact 12 years ago. It’s all about customer focus, after all.
Rathwell begins by asking why people administer Atlassian systems (or, frankly, any system).
…the real reason we are around to administer this particular system is because real humans are using this system to do real things. Without humans using this system to do real things, administering it is purely an academic exercise. As such, we are here to ensure that this particular system supports, and continues to support, doing these things.
Perhaps there are those that think that the users of an Atlassian system are required to serve the needs of the system. That’s backwards. The Atlassian system is required to serve the needs of its users.
Even if they do stupid things and ask stupid questions.
For those who think “Dumb and Dumber” is too complicated, there’s always the panned prequel. The poster art can or could be obtained from New Line Cinema. Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3132477
Except they don’t.
Rathwell emphasizes that users do NOT ask stupid questions.
Be sure to read the rest of the article, which states that “techsplaining” is a bad idea also.
But I’m going to travel back in time to another instance in which users were called “stupid.”
Jake Kuramoto says that users are not stupid
Perhaps some of you remember this one.
Most of us access social platforms by performing some type of “login” process. Now logins can take many different forms (password, fob, biometric, whatever), but the process is basically the same.
You go to a place on the Internet.
You “login.”
You are now able to access your social platform of choice.
Now some of us intuitively understand how to “go to a place on the Internet” and “login.”
And back in 2010, there was a group of people who had a sure-fire method of doing this. Specifically, they would go to this thing on their computer (they didn’t know what it was called, but it was on the computer), type “facebook login,” click on the link that came up, type in their login and password, and access Facebook.
Now “this thing on their computer” was the Google search page in their web browser of choice. And they would search for “facebook login,” and the first search result would happen to be facebook.com. Once they made it to facebook.com, they would type in their login and password.
This was a method that people had perfected, and it worked 100% of the time.
So what broke down? When a new page became the top search result, people would NOT end up at facebook.com, but would instead end up at a ReadWriteWeb blog post. This blog post did NOT have anywhere to enter your Facebook login and password. So…Facebook is broken!
Now most if not all of the people reading my post right now know that you need to go to the facebook.com URL to log in to Facebook, and that you cannot log in to Facebook via (then) readwriteweb.com. But then again, the people that are reading my post right now actually know what the acronym “URL” means. (If you don’t, it stands for Uniform Resource Locator.)
Now find someone who doesn’t know the difference between a computer monitor and a web browser and explain to that person what a Uniform Resource Locator is.
Now there were two schools of thought on the whole ReadWriteWeb / Facebook login episode.
The one school of thought maintained that anyone who thought that they could login to Facebook via ReadWriteWeb was stupid, and that everybody should know to bookmark the facebook.com URL or type it into their browser rather than searching and running into an unbelievably successful SEO campaign.
But that school assumed that everyone knew what a URL is, or what SEO is. (Search engine optimization. Try explaining that one while you’re explaining Uniform Resource Locator.)
And Jake, despite his technical chops (he was with the Oracle AppsLab when he wrote this post), stated the same thought that Mike Rathwell would echo twelve years later.
I think it’s fair to say that computers shouldn’t make people feel stupid.
If you want to get to your favorite social platform, you shouldn’t have to know acronyms like SEO or URL or HTTPS. The only thing that you need to know is the name of the platform you want to access. (Otherwise you’ll end up at MySpace. Or Grindr.)
I’ll take it one step further. If the myriad of systems that make up your computer can’t figure out what you want to do, then it’s the computer and its many systems that are stupid, not you.
Now I just have to take Rathwell’s message to heart and avoid “techsplaining” myself.
And when I write, I need to continuously keep my customers (or, more accurately, my customers’ customers) in mind. I’m writing for them, not for me. Create messages that resonate with them. And if the audience is non-technical, don’t assume that they know what SEO and URL and HTTPS mean.
This post is an update to my January 2021 post about the four identity information services. Yes, I just created a fifth one. (But most of you can’t see it.)
The first three services
The first three were created for the benefit of employees at (then) Motorola, (then) MorphoTrak, and IDEMIA. Briefly, those three were:
A Motorola “COMPASS” intranet page entitled “Biometric Industry Information.”
A MorphoTrak SharePoint intranet page entitled “Identity Industry Information.” (Note the change in wording.)
An IDEMIA (and previously MorphoTrust and L-1) daily email newsletter.
The fourth service
Of course, since I wrote the January 2021 post in the Bredemarket blog, the main purpose of the post was to tout the fourth identity information source, the (then) newly-created “Bredemarket Identity Firm Services” LinkedIn showcase page.
I subsequently created a companion Bredemarket Identity Firm Services Facebook group, which like the LinkedIn showcase page (and unlike my previous efforts for Motorola, MorphoTrak, and IDEMIA) were publicly accessible.
Why did I do this?
I marvel at the thought that I kept on doing this over and over again for four different companies, including Bredemarket. Why did I have this pressing need to reinvent the wheel as I traveled from company to company?
Habitually I’ve been a reader, and have found myself reading a lot of information about the biometric industry or the wider identity industry. Of course it’s not enough just to read something, you have to do something with it. COMPASS, SharePoint, email, LinkedIn, and Facebook allowed me to do two things with all of the articles that I read:
Save them somewhere so that I could find them in the future.
Share them with other people who may be interested in them.
I didn’t collect information on my impact to others in versions 1.0 and 2.0, but by the time I started managing the IDEMIA email list, I not only received comments from people who appreciated the articles, but I was also able to grow the subscriptions to the email list. (People had to opt in to receive the emails; we didn’t cram them into the inboxes of every IDEMIA employee.)
Similarly, I’ve received comments from people on LinkedIn who follow the showcase page, stating that they appreciated what I was sharing there.
And while COMPASS and the MorphoTrak SharePoint are long gone, and IDEMIA’s Daily News may or may not still be in publication, I can assure you that the Bredemarket Identity Firms services LinkedIn page and Facebook group still continue to operate for your reading pleasure.
And that’s the end of the story.
No it’s not.
The fifth service
As some of you know, Bredemarket has become a side gig because of my new day job, which is with a company in the identity industry. During my first days on the new job, I set up subscriptions to my new company email account so that I could receive information from Crunchbase and Owler, as well as relevant Google Alerts on the identity industry.
And as I began receiving these subscriptions, as well as performing my usual scans of other news sources…
…well, you can guess what happened.
“I need to store these stories and share them with my coworkers,” I thought to myself.
Finally, I created a new identity information service using the well-worn title “Identity Industry Information.” (Hey, it’s easy for me to remember.)
Now I can’t actually SHARE this service with you, because it’s just for the employees at my new company.
And THIS iteration takes advantage of a technology that’s slightly newer than COMPASS.
It’s a Slack channel.
P.S. to employees at my current company – if you’d like to access this Slack channel, DM me on Slack and I’ll send you an invite.
It would be nice if my initial plans for my consultancy Bredemarket were perfect and addressed my consulting needs for years to come. But my plans are NOT perfect, in part because I can’t anticipate what will happen in the future.
And so I iterate. Which is why I’m renaming the Bredemarket General Business Services Facebook group and the Bredemarket Local Firm Services LinkedIn showcase page.
In this post I examine why I created Facebook groups and showcase pages in the first place, why I originally named the Facebook group “Bredemarket General Business Services,” why I subsequently named the LinkedIn showcase page “Bredemarket Local Firm Services,” and why I’m changing things.
Why create Facebook groups and LinkedIn showcase pages?
When I established Bredemarket in 2020, I knew that I wanted to target multiple customers. This sentence on the Bredemarket home page has remained unchanged since 2020:
Bredemarket presently offers its services to identity/biometrics, technology, and general business firms, as well as to nonprofits.
These four customer groups have some different needs. A nonprofit’s concerns differ from those of a fingerprint identification software vendor. Because of this, I wanted to find a way to talk directly to these customers.
So Bredemarket…has Facebook groups that are somewhat similar to the Bredemarket LinkedIn showcase pages. One difference is that I have three groups on Facebook. In addition to the identity and technology groups, I also have a general business group. At this point it didn’t make sense to create a LinkedIn showcase page for general business, but it did make sense for Bredemarket to have such a group on Facebook.
You can see how these Facebook groups (and LinkedIn showcase pages) are derived from my original 2020 statement of Bredemarket’s target markets. To a point; as I noted, I didn’t create a general business showcase page on LinkedIn, and even today I don’t have a nonprofit LinkedIn showcase page or a nonprofit Facebook group.
But I would begin to pivot Bredemarket’s business that summer.
Why I created the Bredemarket Local Firm Services LinkedIn showcase page
As I write this, Bredemarket has no clients in my hometown of Ontario, California, or in any of the nearby cities. In fact, my closest clients are located in Orange County, where I worked for 25 years.
It’s no secret that I’ve been working to rectify that gap and drum up more local business.
After attending Jay Clouse’s September 2021 New Client Challenge, I determined to pursue this local market more aggressively and determined how I was NOT going to pursue Inland Empire West customers.
So when I market to local businesses, I’ll want to do that via relevant Facebook Groups. Obviously I won’t market the local services via LinkedIn or Twitter, because those services are not tailored to local service marketing.
Let me draw out the implied assumption in that statement above, that even the Facebook marketing would be via groups created by other people. It wasn’t like I was going to create my OWN local Facebook group or anything like that. I was going to post in the Facebook groups created by others.
Anyway, proving that my initial plans are NOT perfect, I fairly quickly changed my mind regarding LinkedIn, deciding to create a LinkedIn showcase page devoted to local services, even though I didn’t have (or need) a parallel Facebook group.
And in fact I’d cheat by adapting the artwork for the Bredemarket General Business Services Facebook group and repurpose it for use in the Bredemarket Local Business Services LinkedIn showcase page.
This appeared to be a brilliant idea, and the new local LinkedIn showcase page was successful. Not as successful as the Bredemarket Identity Firm Services LinkedIn page, but it certainly provided me with an avenue to speak just to the local community.
Aren’t I brilliant?
Why I’m changing the names of the Facebook group and LinkedIn showcase page
Well, maybe not so brilliant.
Time went on, and I would share identity stuff to the “Identity Firm Services” showcase page and group, and I would share technology stuff to the “Technology Firm Services” showcase page and group. When I wanted to share local stuff, I’d obviously share it on the Bredemarket Local Firm Services LinkedIn showcase page, and sometimes I’d also share it on the Bredemarket General Business services Facebook group.
But this raised two questions.
What is the Bredemarket General Business Services Facebook group?
The third market category that I created in 2020 isn’t making sense in 2022. If you go to the Bredemarket General Business Services Facebook group today, it’s kind of vague. In fact, you could say it’s, um, general.
If you scroll through the group posts, you’ll see a lot of posts from me that have to do with businesses in California’s Inland Empire.
Because I do not moderate the posts in the group, other people like to post, and their posts can be, um, general. For example, there is one person who occasionally posts things like this.
Now I have no reason to reject the post, because the poster isn’t violating any group rule. However, this person could use the services of a marketing and writing professional. The company is doing SOME things right. such as advertising the services provided, including illustrative pictures, and incorporating a call to action. The call to action, of course, is to call…
…061 531 5144?
For those who aren’t familliar with geography, Kempton Park is outside of Pretoria, in South Africa. Which means that if I had wanted the company to provide a quote when my own roof was damaged by winds, I would have to call the country code 27 first, THEN call the local area code 61 and the local number 531 5144.
Somehow I doubt that Ontario, California is in this company’s service area.
Now I could have posted a comment along the lines of “You idiot! Do you really think that people in this group are going to contract with a roofer on another continent?” But I didn’t do that. Instead, I simply commented with this question:
Over a week later, the original poster hasn’t responded to my question. I guess the poster is too busy writing “Thought the group would like this” posts on every “general business service” Facebook group. (Terrible waste of the poster’s time, when you think about it.)
And that’s what can happen when you create a group for “general business services.” It’s too general.
What is the Bredemarket Local Firm Services LinkedIn showcase page?
Thankfully I avoided this same problem when I created the Bredemarket Local Firm Services LinkedIn showcase page.
Or did I?
If you don’t know me or my background and encounter a showcase page devoted to “local firm services,” what are you going to think?
That’s right. The page name doesn’t mention the locality that is the focus of the page.
Next thing I know, my roofing friend is going to discover my Linkedin showcase page and start posting weekly, with an equal lack of success.
How do I make these better?
So it’s obvious that both the LinkedIn showcase page and Facebook group would benefit from a refocus and a rename.
But what name?
If you had asked me this question in September 2021, I would have chosen the name “Bredemarket Inland Empire West Firm Services.” My local marketing target at that point was businesses in Ontario, California and the surrounding cities. “Inland Empire” was too broad a term for those cities, but “Inland Empire West” is a real estate term that fits nicely in my target market area.
This also tied in with a marketing promotion that I was running at the time, in which I would offer a discount for customers in this immediate area. However, I recently rescinded that promotion (as part of the numerous changes I’m currently making to Bredemarket’s business). Since I wasn’t making money (from an opportunity cost perspective) with my regular package pricing, I certainly wouldn’t make money with DISCOUNTED package pricing.
At the same time, I was getting less strict about keeping my target within the Inland Empire West, and was therefore open to extending throughout the Inland Empire. Although most of my online collateral is currently targeted to the Inland Empire West, I won’t turn down business from Moreno Valley or Redlands.
So perhaps I could use the name “Bredemarket Inland Empire Firm Services,” without the “West.”
But I didn’t like that either.
While “Firm” implies that I work with businesses and not individuals (I don’t write resumes), I figured it would be clearer if I used “B2B” instead of firm. “Business-to-Business” would be better, but that would make the page/group title awfully long. Of course some people don’t know what “B2B” means, but that could be an effective filter; if you don’t know what “B2B” means, you’re not going to use Bredemarket’s services anyway.
Having settled on the title “Bredemarket Inland Empire B2B Services,” it was now a matter of making the title change. (Without changing the legacy URLs and potentially breaking existing links.)
Again, the URLs don’t match the page/group titles because of legacy issues, but I think it’s better than what was before. And hopefully this will focus the content and make it more relevant.
Unless you’re a Pretoria homeowner with a leaky roof.
Bredemarket 