If you are like many small businesses that are trying to stay current in today’s digital world you have a website, write a blog and are trying to be active on your social media sites – right?
Do you wonder how to tie it all together so you have a congruent as well as consistent brand message and image? I think this is a challenge for many small business owners and so I want to share a couple of examples of businesses that are doing a great job so you can model what’s working.
La Tavola Marche is an organic farm, inn and cooking school in Italy. I am very familiar with this example because I have been following this site for several years because of my personal cooking interests. This farm is run by a couple from the United States who decided to buy an old farm house and turn it into a cooking school. Jason Bartner is an experienced Chef and brings his own style of cooking and teaching to visitors from all over the world. His wife Ashley documents everything they are doing via a blog, social media sites, a podcast and most recently live online cooking classes.
What I really love about what they have done is that they are totally authentic, sometimes their podcasts are quite quirky as they ramble on about the latest happenings in Italy and their experiences with the community they have entrenched themselves in. They never act pretentious and in fact are quite the opposite. After reading the blog, listening to the podcasts and partaking in the live webinar cooking classes you feel a part of the life they have created in Italy whether you ever get there or not.
La Tavola Marche Pizza Night
Their website is colorful and filled with such great images that share in telling the story of a recipe or nearby town. They share recipes of foods they cook right there and encourage you to try them and give them feedback. I find the cooking classes via webinar was a brilliant marketing strategy which they chose to offer in the off season. This keeps them top of mind with the audience, creates new content for their site and keeps people connected to their brand.
Ashely is very consistent on social media, she engages with followers and always has something fun and interesting to share. She is using social media to create brand awareness and stay top of mind with followers asking advocates to share the experience.
I encourage you to check out the website: http://www.latavolamarche.com
You can also find links to all of their social sites on the bottom of the website.
http://thegirlfriendlife.com/
The Girlfriend Life is certainly worth taking a look at. Joann Darby started her business by sharing a book of tips for women and then sharing those practical tips with women on social media and via her website. Her Facebook page now has 294,000 fans and she posts many, many times a day which her audience has come to expect from her. Her page is considered more of a passion page as she uses it to engage fans vs a selling platform. Although it does appear some of her product suggestions are probably linked to affiliate programs.
Her audience has grown to such large numbers in the past three years and it looks like it won’t stop anytime soon. Joann has hit big with busy women who resonate with all the basic struggles most women who have busy hectic lives have. She offers solutions for those busy women and a lot of fun with cooking, craft ideas and life tips that apparently women can’t get enough of evidenced by the engagement rate on her Facebook page. Joann knows her audience very well and along with that knows how to communicate with them.
She has great images, very little text and inviting messages. Check out www.thegirlfriendlife.com and the Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/thegirlfriendlife
I like to share examples of companies that are successful in creating, building and engaging an audience as I believe we can learn and model after successful businesses. Do you have some other businesses that are doing a great job marketing? Please do let me know in the comments below.
