Imagine your business has been shut down, but there’s a great marketing opportunity with a fairly captive audience. You’d want to know a bit more about it, right?
My name is Barrie McDermid and the business I run is The Punctuation Show, which basically involves me travelling around the country, singing songs about punctuation and grammar to pupils of varying ages (they either love it or die of embarrassment when I sing to them – either way, they don’t forget it). Needless to say this involves large groups of people, which isn’t ideal for working from home!
My story is probably fairly similar to yours – the enquiries dried up and the phone stopped ringing. I work in schools, but set up as a limited company on the advice of my accountant, which it turns out, means little to no support. Thanks Corona Virus.
In all honesty, there’s something a bit more liberating about all of this when you accept that something is happening out of your control – it frees you up to start thinking outside the box.
Having attended a number of digital marketing courses recently, I knew that Facebook were trying to push their ‘live’ video platform. At the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, the lockdown couldn’t really have worked out better for them – BUT, I could be a part of it.
Lots of parents were stuck at home with kids who needed educating and I’m in the business of raising attainment through entertainment. My Facebook page to date had been uninspiring, with the odd ‘like’ here and there, but this was a time to change. Even though I say so myself, my show is pretty engaging (it’s kept me in a living for ten years), so I set about adapting it for the phone screen.
I asked on my personal page if people would be interested and people responded with a resounding ‘yes’.
A graphic was posted with details of what was happening and it managed to get a post reach of nearly 40,000 – pretty amazing to me when I’d been used to single digits.
I did my first show and it went brilliantly – some technical issues, but lots learned and things to improve. The second show went even better, albeit with slightly reduced views due to the Easter Holidays. The best part? My page likes/followers went from 500 to over 1500 in just under a week. All of my posts are now getting seen – almost as if Facebook is rewarding me for that content.
Going forward, I intend to carry on with a weekly show and let the word spread. Lots of schools are sharing my events and many are watching live from their school halls and I’m getting some great engagements and positive comments from my target audience – children. Teachers (who are my client base) can see this on the page.
We might be in this situation for some time, but we can still raise our brand awareness. If you haven’t thought about going live on Facebook yet, I’d thoroughly recommend it. What have you got to lose?
Twitter – @punctuationshow
Facebook – www.facebook.com/thepunctuationshow
Youtube – www.YouTube.com/thepunctuationshow
www.thepunctuationshow.com
