It seems apt to be talking about beginnings and growth as we approach our 4th Birthday. Occasionally it really does pay to review your journey and appreciate just how far you have come.
I started The Last Hurdle at the end of June 2011 with no capital to invest and absolutely no revenue coming in – what a motivator!
I have grown the business substantially over the last 4 years and whilst I have been the driving force of the business development, our success would not have been possible without assistance. Assistance from those who believed in me and my vision, those who joined our team and contributed to molding our offering (which is still taking shape), those friends of the business who gave moral support and even those who had a negative influence deserve a nod as these people gave me valuable lessons, mainly to avoid all negativity and remove those kinds of influences!
I have been in sales and marketing for over 18 years and in that time I have seen the digital world rise to become an amazing business development tool. I think one of the key differentiators for a BDM is the ability to spot opportunity and make the most of it for yourself, the business and your clients. One such opportunity has been using social media to help grow The Last Hurdle. I have used Facebook for my own personal use for a number of years, when I started The Last Hurdle my first online presence was a Facebook Business page. The website came later!
Business Growth Through Facebook
Facebook is constantly evolving and developing as most successful businesses do. It refines the offering constantly, take business pages. When I added The Last Hurdle Facebook Business page in June 2011 there weren’t that many local business pages in existence, certainly not the volume there is now. During that period if you ‘liked’ a business page per day you will now have close to 1,500 pages… imagine if you saw every single post from each of these pages on your time line… your ‘wall’ would move down so fast you wouldn’t be able to read the content. Little wonder then, Facebook minimise the amount of content you can see from a page, unless you select the ‘get notifications’ under the like button drop down or ‘subscribe to events’ and that’s an article for another day.
From day one Facebook has been instrumental in The Last Hurdle success, in our first year 86% of the business generated came from Social Media, just over 78% of that is attributed to Facebook. Year on year just over 50% of our business growth is attributed to Facebook – and you thought it was only for consumer businesses!
When we were asked if we would like to be featured in a case study for the Facebook Success stories (you can see our Facebook Success Story here) we needed to collate all the ways we have enabled business growth through Facebook. When I sat and started to list these, it became a bit of an essay. Here is the summary infographic of how we have enabled Business Growth Through Facebook:
If you would like to know more about Business Growth Through Facebook, contact our business development specialists on 01604 654545 or email sales@thelasthurdle.co.uk