4 Most Common Mistakes Business Owners Make with Social Media Templates

Social media templates are really amazing little magic wands when it comes to social media marketing. They make it so easy to post consistently and build a brand with raving fans and loyal clients/customers. If you aren’t sure what social media templates are or how you can use them in your business, click here for our full guide on social media templates. (Even if you’re true to the social media template game, you may get a few pro tips!)

While social media templates could be your secret weapon to becoming a social media superstar, we’ve also seen templates taken way too far and to the extreme.

When it comes to social media templates, variety is not the spice...

Here are the top 4 mistakes entrepreneurs and professionals make when it comes to using social media templates.

 

 

 

Mistake 1: Buying Content Over Branding

The world of social media templates is truly amazing, and it can honestly be super overwhelming with all of the different options and variations available. Once you see all of that ready-made content out there, it’s hard to see anything else. We see it all the time: a business owner will go in and buy EVERYTHING in his or her niche, and just start posting away.

Sure, maybe you got thousands of posts and you won’t have to worry about content for another year… but have you seen what it does to your brand? Using tons of different templates without sticking to a single brand is making your brand look sloppy and unprofessional. And it isn’t because you didn’t put the work or money into it! The sad part is that you did… and you’re still coming up short.

As businesses on social media, we need to be keenly aware of how consistent our brand is.

To build a business that lasts decades and that you can trust to support your life for years to come, you need to build a brand. A brand means loyal clients/customers and elevated perception of trust. When your visuals and messaging coordinate consistently, you begin to paint an image of your brand in the mind of your ideal client. If you aren’t doing that, you may be getting sales - but you are not building a brand. You are allowing everything around you to control the image of your brand.

Including your competition.

If you aren’t intentionally branding and your competitors are, that alone is telling potential customers exactly what to think of you…

It’s been said: Branding is what they say about you when you’re not in the room. That really puts branding in perspective. Whether you are intentionally branding your business or not, you are building a brand. Your brand is the literal image of your business inside the mind of your ideal client/customer. As a successful businessman or businesswoman… you WANT to control this! Don’t let chaos and everything else in the world define your brand. You create it. You build it. You OWN it.

If you consistently use the same imagery, messaging, fonts, colors, etc., you start to be a source of consistency for your followers. The ultimate goal is that your ideal client knows who you are before they even begin to digest the post. That type of brand recognition is where you get repeat business and where you are able to establish your expertise and that customers can trust you with solving their problem.

 

 

Mistake 2: Buying Content Over Templates

The entrepreneur or professional who purchases all of their content in the form of social media templates will never - let me repeat: NEVER - understand the marketing process or have a holistic view of their brand.

They will never have control over that area of their business, because they delegated the entire process, never taking the time to learn and understand it for themselves. And let’s face it… marketing and branding is a HUGE part of where our actual sales and money making activities come from. Without a brand, you have no official business image. Without marketing, you have a great product or service with no way to sell.

You should ALWAYS want to be in the mix of your branding and marketing. We’ve seen multi-million dollar organizations that went from small businesses to large corporations, and the founders never once allowed anyone else to manage their social media presence and content. Many big brands with a long life will never delegate that part of the business. If anything, they will create entirely new in-house departments just for social media management.

When you lose control of your brand, you lose control of customer perception. And customer perception is EVERYTHING.

Once you buy a template set, you need to make sure you’re sticking with those main branding and messaging formats. Social media users give you less than 8 seconds to consider whether or not they like your company and message. You need to make sure you’re making a great impression and controlling that customer perception from the get.

And to do that, you need to learn how to create high converting content. It’s all about marketing psychology and relatability, so you won’t ever truly understand the mind of your customer until you get into it. That means learning social media and content creation, analyzing your statistics, and creating your social media marketing strategy based on your real-world experience.

But when you create content, you need the templates to support a fully functioning strategy. Which leads us to Mistake #3…

 

 

Mistake 3: Choosing templates that DON’T provide a variety of content types.

When you choose JC Creative Media social media templates, you’re given our complete original strategy without having to read or learn a thing. We can offer this, because we’ve been in the trenches growing businesses and marketing on social media. We know exactly what kinds of posts you need to achieve all of your marketing objectives. So with our combined passion for branding and social media marketing expertise, we’ve provided you with a fully cohesive visual brand that also offers a fully functioning content marketing strategy. We are serial entrepreneurs who love building brands just as much as designing brands. We have over 20 years of content creation and digital marketing experience - so we know what works and doesn’t work.

What works: show up consistently with branded content that informs, engages, and sells.

What doesn’t work: post a bunch of mismatched ready-made content that is backed by no strategy whatsoever and pray to the social media gods that some of that spaghetti sticks, you go viral, and you now have hundreds of new clients and customers lining up to hand you their credit cards.

We see it time and time again, and it has never worked.

It is for that reason that we made these strategic social media template kits to help elevate your brand and align your marketing strategy.

But it’s done in a way that you don’t actually have to learn anything at all if you don’t want to. You simply post the posts, analyze their performance, and make more of the ones your audience loves. That’s it!

But that’s also another reason why it’s so important that you choose the RIGHT templates and not just ALL the templates you can get your hands on.

When you buy a couple of sets of 30 templates that don’t match each other or that only focus on one post type (like product promotion for example), you’ve actually just created a lot more work for yourself if you plan on building a professional brand. Just for the visual aspect of your branding, you’ll need to make sure all of the elements (fonts, colors, imagery, artwork, etc.) match and coordinate - as you’ve essentially just purchased 2 different visual brands.

Then it’s also going to take a lot of extra time to create matching templates for other promotion types.

Then you’ll also need to think about creating templates for content marketing posts.

The point of social media templates is to save you time.

When it comes to buying templates for your social media marketing, think about the long game FIRST.

Choose templates that:

• Have visual branding you can stick to for longer than a year
• Have the right template types
• Have enough posts to inspire creativity
• Have some ready-to-post content to kick your strategy off (if you are brand new to social media marketing)
• Are easy to use and customize

 

 

Mistake #4: Using only free social media templates

So… We’re all about finding good deals and investing your money wisely… But your social media templates are not the place to do that. Most social media templates are extremely affordable, so you definitely want to consider investing what you can to find your perfect match. Your social media feed is often your first (and only) impression for potential clients and customers - it’s worth it to make it a good impression!

Free social media templates are great if you’re just trying to learn the world of templates. If you’re working with them for the first time and trying to see what you can do or how to work the software - or even if you’re just going to create a couple of test posts and see how they perform - free social media templates are a really great option.

But at JC Creative Media, we’re all about elevating your brand.

I’m sorry to put it so bluntly, but: Free social media templates are NOT going to do that for you.

Of course! There are some amazing designers out there who have produced some very beautiful free templates that could easily begin to elevate your customer’s perception. But if we want to elevate your brand, it takes so much more than giving you the rights to just a few really pretty posts to do that.

Your brand touches everything in your business, and everything in your business becomes your brand.

From your customer service, to your visual appearance, to the organization of your office or website, to the way you and your team dress and the language you use. It all becomes your brand. This is why and how you can control customer perception, elevate your brand, and meet or exceed your business goals.

It’s easy to see why your social media feed is so important as a first impression to your potential or existing customers and clients with the potential of 4.8 billion eyes on you every day. A branded, cohesive feed is the way you say without saying: “It matters to me that I’m a professional. You can see that I take care of my business and it’s image with this pristine social media feed that I’m proud to show you, and that’s how you know I’ll take just as much care of you.”

Free templates usually come anywhere from 1-10 in a set. It’s often something offered to help potential customers get a feel for the type of work the designer does or the templates he or she creates. Kind of like a test drive! And while they can absolutely be used for your social media posts, they’re not ideal for building and elevating your brand.

 

 

If you want that competitive edge, you need to really level up.

Take your brand up a notch by looking professional, put together, and available for business, you need to get a set of matching templates that is strategized for business growth and optimized for multiple platforms. This is how you save time while still posting consistently.