Written by Lourd Vijay – Digilah (Thought Leadership)
Founder of LVDS (Lourd Vijay’s Dance Studio)
Hear here if you are not upto reading!
https://open.spotify.com/embed/show/6ukAttNgIccm87g1oHMcWe?utm_source=generator
Social media has very drastically altered the world of business. Every entrepreneur or company has to constantly reinvent themselves to stay afloat; making it a challenge to comprehend the present trends, the ever-changing algorithms, the indecipherable analytics and the sudden upspring of agencies and social media marketers.
For small enterprises like ours that offer niche services like teaching dance, choreographies and performances, and predominantly catering to the hobby-classes market, social media has worked to be both a boon and a bane.
When it comes to delivering great content, dance as an activity and an art form fits perfectly to drive the kind of content that grabs enough attention, likes and follows, but then the big question is “does it bring a brand like ours a measured, tangible outcome?”
We, in the past have had an array of professionals, agencies, freelancers and interns with a social media background who have helped us with our presence but unfortunately the returns and benefits have been dismal. The ad spends have had no valuable outcome as the leads were largely irrelevant and were from a geographical region that wasn’t where we operated within. However, the influx of user-friendly and life-saving tools such as Canva for great creatives, IMovies or Inshot for video edits & Wix for intelligent websites, has lowered our dependence on social media professionals while also empowering us with a better sense of aesthetic. Functional tools such as these are the need of the hour.
My experience has made it very evident that organic growth is the only way forward in an industry like ours. Which means we need to churn out great content every single day. Our quest, hence, is to answer this sole question – “What is great content?”
Over time we have built a better hit-ratio for the kind of content we post. The turnaround time to interact with our followers has also improved drastically and our costs have reduced leading to faster and better ROI(Return on Investment). This has obviously come at the cost of some preliminary investment in terms of time and resources. The effort seems to have paid off for now, which we hope continues until Metaverse decides to throw us off with new algorithm alterations.
Therefore, my learning’s from building my business through social media has been:
- Look beyond vanity metrics, clearly stating your KPIs
- Use reports and analytics to see what is working and what is not on a regular basis
- Most important own your brand, personality and tone
Being optimistic, we hope to overcome the setbacks Covid has caused and evolve into a national brand and an enterprise that operates across varied geographies. The graduation to being a national brand would enable us to hire the brightest minds from the social media industry who can drive up value from the word ‘go’.
Until then, Canva is the tool for survival.