“Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love.”

― Mother Teresa

Reading Gary Vaynerchuck’s Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook (#JJJRH) tonight, and enjoying the motherlode of case studies about the right and wrong way of using micro content to drive engagement and sales. 

The big takeaway: this stuff doesn’t have to be like giving birth. Creating content can be easy. Put another way: it doesn’t have to be time consuming and expensive. It can even be fun. At least @GaryVee makes it seem so. He painstakingly illustrates all the parameters for exactly how to go about creating and posting content on all the really big sites. It’s like a picture-filled guidebook for micro content 2013…and I’m hoping he comes out with volume two in 2014! 

Micro content creation will work for you.

Most people I get to talk with are running a small business while at the same time, serving their customers. There’s no disconnect. A lot of solopreneur brands are pretty much their own personal brand.

There’s not a clear division between “real life” and work and social media, which means that whenever you pick up your phone or laptop you lose an hour or two.

Too much information? Just enough? Why do these little pieces of content suck people in for so long when they have other things to do anyway? Because they’re scrolling fast, pulling in content and instantly deciding whether to read it, or even look at it for longer than 3 seconds.

All of that information and visual candy drives you forward — bit by tiny bit. It’s movement: blurring fast movement of eyeballs over images, text, headlines, hashtags…zoom. You get hooked, almost as if you are carried along down a swiftly moving stream. 

You know you do it. So why would you expect your customers to pay any more attention to you than to Christina Aguilera’s new cell phone case, or the video of your friend waterskiing? Truth is they don’t. They don’t care unless it grabs them. Or they know you already.

When you’re thinking about marketing in 2014, you have to think small. Think tiny, Think MICRO.

Tiny, little bites. That’s how your customers consume content. If your content grabs them, they click over and look at your website, or read your bio on LinkedIn, or even read a blog post. 

Micro content is the easiest way to reach the customer of your heart-centered small business

The way people grab information is perfectly suited to the type of content someone who’s busy — but passionate about their business — would create it. Quickly, not a huge investment of time, not too “over-done” or studied.

That’s what’s so cool about the way marketing is going!

Can you make this work? Seems like it could be easy, right? Just snap a photo every now and then and pop it on all the social media sites you’re on, with hashtags, of course…right?

GaryVee says NO. Each piece of content should be created for the stream you’re tubing in. And that’s the best segue I can offer for why you should read @GaryVee’s #JJJRH…so you don’t go blasting all that micro content to everyone, everywhere.

With a marketing strategy, and knowing what content goes where, you gain confidence and engagement with potential customers. Best of all, you can do this with a small team and not a lot of money.

No big deal if something doesn’t stick. You can turn around and post something new next time. And that “next time” can be right after lunch.

In this fast-moving, mobile, connected age, anyone –literally anyone — can do this. All you really need is heart, and a good understanding of your peeps.

“Small things with great love…” A weird way to describe a book whose title refers to boxing, but a suitable analogy for marketing your small business in 2014.