Picture the scene: it’s Sunday morning and you’re making pancakes.
You’re excited to share a big, beautiful stack of deliciousness with your family – you start warming up the pan, and your mouth is already watering.
The butter sizzles, and you dollop in your first few spoonfuls of batter with high hopes.
It smells amazing. You get the lemon juice and sugar ready.
But then… you realise these first pancakes are a bit rubbish.
They’re a weird shape, a little bit burnt, and yet somehow also undercooked. You eat them yourself standing up at the stove, feeling disheartened.
But then you try again with your second batch. These ones are lots better – even though it’s the same cook, the same pan and the same recipe. So what’s changed?
What pancakes have to do with marketing
As well as making you 100% more likely to crave pancakes, this story is the perfect analogy for what happens when you start creating content for your brand.
At first, you’re giving it your best shot, but you’re not quite warmed up properly yet – much like the pan.
You spend a lot of time creating that first piece of content, only for it to land with more of a flop than a badly timed pancake flip.
You start to wonder: is this worth it? Am I bad at this? Why does nobody want what I’m serving up?
But the truth is, people ARE hungry for your content. You just need to perfect your marketing recipe.
Warming up yourself – and your audience
We all know that by batch four or five, all pancakes seem to be effortlessly amazing: think the perfect golden colour and fluffy consistency (yes please – load us up!).
But you have to go through the process of creating the not-so-great ones to get to the ones people can’t get enough of – and it’s the same when it comes to marketing your brand on social media.
Those first few pieces of content are really all about discovering your tone, the types of things you like to post about, and the content your audience actually responds to (rather than what you thought they would).
Plus your audience needs to be warmed up too. They don’t know you yet, so they’re not going to fall in love with you after just one post – or even a handful. You build trust with them through repetition and being seen in their feeds again and again.
And the algorithm is similar. Platforms just don’t know what to do with a brand-new voice straight away, and so the first few posts or videos you create are really just you introducing yourself to the system. It’s not a verdict on whether your strategy is working or not, because as it starts to understand your flavour, the algorithm will serve you up to the right people.
So if you’re in the ‘terrible first batch/radio silence’ phase of your social media marketing, don’t take that as a sign from the universe that it’s not working and you should stop.
Instead, keep pushing through. Your most flippin’ delicious marketing era is yet to come.
Need some help creating the perfect marketing recipe? We’re experts in the Crispy content-creation kitchen! Book your free chat today to discover how we can help.