This weekend, all of Chicago is looking forward to beating the heat by watching the skies from the beach. With close to 2 million people in attendance every year during August, the Chicago Air & Water Show is the largest free air & water exhibition in the country. We all love to hear the plane engines roar by and paint trails of smoke in the sky. With sand between your toes and a drink of choice in hand, it’s so much fun to watch those incredible stunts being performed.

As you sit back on the beach with the rest of the crowd, take time to reflect upon your business. What have you accomplished this summer? Do you believe you’ve done enough to grow your business?  Are you soaring to the heights you could be reaching?

Continue reading for Sparkfactor’s suggestions on re-igniting your spark.

We All Start Business Somewhere

The Chicago Air & Water Show got its start in 1959, then called the “Lakeshore Park Air & Water Show”. It featured water skiers, a water ballet, a sea rescue demonstration by the Coast Guard, as well as a diving competition and games. A Chicago Park District supervisor named Al Benedict created it as a part of a “Family Day” of festivities. After it was a success, the next year they brought on the Thunderbirds and the Golden Knights Parachute team. They performed to a massive crowd and ever since it’s been a Chicago tradition. In time it was renamed Chicago Air & Water Show and moved to its permanent location on North Avenue Beach.

A business like yours may have started off just the same. It may have begun in a garage, or a crowded office desk, or with just a simple idea. But no matter what it was, you wanted to see it grow. Wherever you started, your business had to take those first initial steps into the world. Those initial steps may have been very hard. You may not have had a support network or your idea wasn’t able to catch, that didn’t stop you from seeing the heights you could reach. Like how planes go roaring down the runway, you needed enough distance before you could take off. To many businesses, social media is that runway. It’s there to propel you forward with speed and power. Putting your product on a website for all to see, that’s like hitting liftoff.

 

Taking Social Media To New Heights

Once you’re off the runway and into the skies, just about anything is possible. It can be daunting at first, and navigation can be hard. The internet is as wide as the sky, but with time and experience you’ve floated rather than fallen. Your already rising business has so much farther to go. With this newfound momentum, businesses and companies can aim for better heights.

An easy way to start seeing just how high you can go is spreading your wings into social media. Think about how you can reach even higher goals with your social media presence. Have you done much to grow it in the last 3 months? Are there things you could be doing to further increase your presence online? Have you started posting ads to Facebook and Instagram? Those are two very popular websites to get a firm trajectory going. Facebook is one of the best places out there to gain an audience fast, as most American adults spend almost 2 hours on Facebook a day. With over 2 billion active users it’s sure to grab at some eyes.

There are 70 million businesses on Facebook as of 2017, and 6 million of those are active advertisers. It might seem like you’re a drop in the bucket, but there is much more to gain. If so many people are using Facebook to expand their business, then you don’t want to be left in the dust.

There are a variety of ads you can put onto Facebook; from images to even videos in order to reach your clients. This may seem like a huge step up from what you’ve done before, but it is a necessary one. You’ve made it this far, so you have to look at the facts:

• A million hours of video are watched on Facebook every day.
• More than 20 million businesses are using Facebook Messenger to keep in touch with their customers.
• Facebook’s own version of Slack, called Workspace, is used by 30,000 companies.

Being left behind in the open air gets your business nowhere, you’ll fall and you won’t have a parachute. If you are not seriously considering pushing your business into utilizing Facebook, then you may as well be invisible among the clouds. Your company must have a social presence if it wants to keep achieving the heights it’s aiming for.

 

Cruising With Connectivity

The connectivity social media offers for expanding businesses makes advertising possible with any budget, to spread your ideas far and wide.  Now it’s time to start using it to your advantage. You’ve started from humble beginnings, as everyone with great ideas has. You’ve built speed to get off the ground, working hard at what you want your business to achieve.

You’ve discovered that advertising on social media like Facebook is a fantastic way to get an extra boost, so many businesses already use it. To miss out on this kind of opportunity leaves you left in the dust. With the doorway opened to you, social media advertising can guide you toward a point of solid contact with your customers.

As the Chicago Air & Water Show ends this weekend, make sure to move toward jumping onto social media as your next big step. It could be just the thing that flies you to the moon.

 

{{cta(‘4c72b68c-da80-45c1-b0f9-ee0fefa6dcfa’)}}