Local Social Media Marketing With Facebook and Instagram

How do you promote your business locally?

Are you using Facebook and Instagram?

To explore how to reach a local customer base on social media, I interview Bruce Irving.
More About This Show
The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

In this episode, I interview Bruce Irving, the host of the Smart Pizza Marketing podcast, where he helps local pizza restaurants master marketing. He's a former pizzeria owner and you can find him at SmartPizzaMarketing.com.

Bruce explores why social media marketing is worthwhile for local businesses.

You'll discover tips to get your local business started with social media video.

Share your feedback, read the show notes, and get the links mentioned in this episode below.
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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Facebook Marketing for Local Business
Bruce's Story

Bruce has been in the pizza industry since he was 16 years old. He worked his way up and then partnered with someone to run his own pizza business. The restaurant did a pretty high volume of sales for their style of restaurant, which had 10 seats plus takeout and delivery.

Starting in the late 1990s, Bruce and his partner used old marketing methods such as direct mail, which worked well until the mid-2000s. Around 2008, the effectiveness of that kind of marketing started to dwindle, so they tried marketing their restaurant on social media.

Even as the economy struggled after the 2008 economic crash, their pizza business was successful and growing. When relatives and friends in the pizza business started asking how Bruce and his business partner used different types of marketing to grow, they began sharing their methods.

Bruce decided he wanted to talk to other pizzeria operators so they could learn from each other. In 2015, Bruce started his podcast and the knowledge-gathering he did for it evolved into creating an agency that helps local pizza-specific restaurants run social media and digital advertising.

For the last 16 months, Bruce has been running the agency full time, helping local pizzerias grow their business and get better results with online marketing.

Listen to the show to discover why podcasting was a great way for Bruce to learn from other business owners while running his own pizza restaurant.

Video in Social Media

A pizzeria is a very visual style of restaurant. The cooks often work the pizza dough and put together pizzas in front of a big window because it's entertaining. Even more traditional restaurants are moving to the open-kitchen concept because the chef creating the food is part of the show.

To bring this entertaining element to the web, Bruce encourages clients to do video. A lot of them shy away from video in the beginning, but it's important to become comfortable in front of the camera.

Different styles of videos work in any business, not just restaurants. For instance, you can do tutorials. You can also give people a look behind the scenes. If you have the best pizza in town, show your fans why. Do you make your own dough? Do you use a special kind of sauce? Do you cut up all of your own vegetables?

Showing what makes your restaurant special helps you compete with every other place in your neighborhood and the big chains. Your personality also differentiates you from your competitors. If you're a personable owner and can be charismatic in front of the camera, your personality (along with your products and services) separates you from other brands.

It's all in the sauce - the special Stanislaus Pizza Sauce married with PizzaMan Dan's secret blend of spices - which makes your PizzaMan Dan's pizza mouth watering delectable!

TODAY ONLY - yes, MONDAY - we're celebrating our long time relationship with the family-owned Stanislaus Farms in Stanislaus Count...