Joseph Skibbie, owner of JRS Mar/Com in Crown Point, Indiana joins us to talk about Digital Marketing Tips for Small Business.
Here is a transcript:
Ryan: So I’d like to introduce to everyone Joseph Skibbie, who’s the owner of JRS Mar/Com in Northwest Indiana, and also a fellow Rotarian from the Crown Point Rotary Club. So Joe, you have the floor and you can share your screen.
Ryan: If you’d like to.
Joseph: Alright, thank you Ryan and thanks everybody for.
Attending today this is.
And be valuable in the fact that small groups lead to more conversant presentations, so I hope this is conversational ’cause I can and will take the entire time to run through my presentation.
But again, I think you’ll get more out of it if we stop and.
Answer questions as they come up. By quick show hands is everybody present – has a website and active on social media is that?
Yeah, great, so we’re going to cover some of the overview, definitely 30,000-foot view.
But I want.
As many of you to leave with your questions answered as possible, so please don’t hesitate to chime in.
Again, I mentioned a little bit about JRS Mar/Com had been here since 2009. I’ve been growing to satisfy increasing client demand, especially as foot traffic has decreased due to Covid that had been part of our talking points for.
2-3 years prior, what are you going to do when people stop coming into your store?
So we’re going to cover today The Who, what, when, where and why.
And then touch on the how of of social media and how small business owners can use it to
Gain clients to attract repeat engagements and foster prospects.
So I think by now it’s it’s foregone conclusion. Everyone is on social media for the past five to seven years, the fastest growing demographic has been 55 plus.
And even as late adopters get into the social media game early adapters.
Are adding feeds so they now manage multiple feeds.
People’s consumption behaviors have changed drastically.
It’s not just relax and unwind in front of the TV.
It’s relaxing online in front of the TV with a device.
Uhm smartphone, potentially a tablet and and even millennials and xennials.
They’re not even tuning into network television anymore.
We haven’t found an industry yet that we haven’t been successful in reaching out to people and establishing conversations.
That’s you know it is social, so it requires more than one person.
We often use the reference of someone standing in the corner of a room and shouting what they do.
Giving their 30-second or elevator pitch facing the wall. I’m not talking to anybody.
That’s how a lot of people engage on social media, and that is something that we’re going to advocate not doing.
You want to.
Be out, virtually shaking hands, virtually introducing yourself, virtually connecting with people and again whether you’re a business to business, business to consumer.
If you’re trying to establish a direct to consumer brand.
Or uh, advocacy group or not-for-profit.
We’ve got success stories and examples of increased engagement, and ultimately revenue generation, which I would hope is, is why we’re all here.
Some of the brands that we’ve helped with again include Voice-Over-IP phone systems, YouTube Brands, Tree Care Services, the printing industry, custom software development, demolition company.
HVAC companies.
Health, health practitioners.
May even manufacturing, so it’s.
It’s not a case of you know, that doesn’t work for my industry or my customers, not on social media.
It’s a case of what are we sharing and what are we creating and distributing to add value to that customer so that as they come across your brand, they’re having authentic conversations.
They’re understanding your unique selling propositions and the benefits.
That you can provide to their business and your.
Nurturing them through the sales funnel in order to ultimately make them a customer or client.
The social obviously has two components.
Organic and paid.
We’ve been hearing for years that organic is dead and you have to pay to play.
Uhm, I would say for brands just starting out, that’s absolutely the case.
If you’ve had some moderate growth or operate within a fine finally defined geography, you can get away without paying, but.
The economies of scale of.
Pay to play in the paid social as it comes to client acquisition or you know likes and followers.
There’s not many other activities that are as measurable or that provide.
The same type of spike.
So it’s starting with organic I.
I would hope that all of you are doing this already.
Trying to create engagement.
Trying to increase your audience.
Uhm, you do that by increasing message frequency and again purchase can be a goal engagement. Definitely measurable and trackable, and then offering a 24/7 customer service channel is another way that businesses use social to better engage with their customers.
You know, but how do we do that?
When we’re looking at the cost right as as small solopreneurs or small business owners, time is always our most valuable commodity.
The things I’m recommending can be done in 20 minutes a day.
It can be done, you know, three times a day at 20 minutes a day it’s limit-
Literally limitless.
The amount of time and the amount of engagement that you can create on social media, which is why it’s nice to set boundaries.
You know it’s we may all find it harder and harder to walk away from our phones.
There’s always one more thing to do, whether it’s an email or check in notification and then it seems as we set it down, it’s automatically buzzing again.
Enticing us to pick it back up, but what I advocate for for any small business owner is 20 minutes a day.
It can be in the morning, it can be at the end of.
The day it.
Can be at lunch.
The time is really.
Less of a determining factor.
There are ways to measure when you’re getting your most engagement, and after you’ve started and after you have some data, you might want to restructure when you’re investing that time based on when your clients are engaging with your business, but initially hopping in, you know, searching for things that.
Your potential customer might search for.
If it’s HVAC, maybe you’re looking at air quality issues.
Maybe you’re looking at temperature?
Uhm, maybe you’re looking for repair or maintenance issues.
These can all be found in neighborhood chat groups.
Uhm, industry affinity groups, again, neighborhood moms groups.
Being able to engage where those folks are questions pop up and people are able to share a link to your business on any social it’ll pop up and steer them right to your website.
There’s again no limit, and this can be done in 20 minutes.
You can scan each other groups that you’ve identified like comment and share, and now your brand is in front of people that are going to engage in that group later, and that are going to.
Reference those conversations.
So of course you want to be authentic.
You want to be present.
You want to be engaging in those conversations.
But even if you don’t get a response, your brand is up.
Your brand is on the screen, and people who engage in that conversation later, whether they talk to you or not, are going to see your brand.
And that’s again a benefit of social media is building those impression.
No one knows.
How many impressions it takes to drive action? You know it used to be 7 and undergrad and I’ve heard as high as 21. Now is we’re constantly bombarded with advertising messages on social.
Bottom line is you don’t have to be top of mind all the time.
You have to be top of mind when somebody has a need for your product.
Or service and.
This is one of the best ways to do that.
In one of the most efficient ways to spend time and again sharing links to drive battling traffic to your website.
You’re basically pre qualifying visitors to your website.
They’re not going to click unless they want to answer to a question that you’ve either participated in a conversation or shared a resource for.
And again, it doesn’t have to be.
Uhm, you could take stances politically.
Ah, but more often than not, a, you know, ‘atta boy ‘atta girl.
Uhm, way to go type post asking a question and again sometimes stating an opinion based on the algorithms.
The more you know, volatile, you can be, the more traffic you’ll drive, but I would advise against you know, poking the bear, so to speak.
And again, what are we sharing?
You can share comments as I talked about in the engagement piece.
All of the.
The messages will be tagged with your brand from your profile image.
But if you’re sharing from your business page, you really want to make information stand out.
These are some animated GIFs.
That we create on behalf of clients.
Again, custom software.
Not a very sexy or attractive thing to share, but people are looking for a solution that can be provided by custom software.
You just have to share information in a way that captivates their attention.
So once we share the information once we’re commenting we should start to see an increase in likes and followers.
We should start to see an increase backlink traffic.
But if we’re not, then then we can start to look at paid and again paid would enter a campaign when you’re.
Trying to create awareness.
These are people who may have never visited your page may not be aware of your solution.
Uhm may not know who you are, and again, those are all areas where we should be engaging as as small business owners as well it face to face networking events leading a business card, doing drop ends or cold calls.
That’s kind of the top of sale funnel activities that we’re talking about when we’re looking at.
Pain to expose your brand, your social page.
Your answer to a query on Google ads and and the targeting is so specific.
But to create that first brand exposure since it’s often difficult to do that through some of the organic metrics.
Uhm, engaging in paid becomes an option.
Can also increase the audience of lights.
You can run straight light campaigns.
Come again if this is tied around an event or promotion in particular.
It’s a great way to increase the number of people who potentially see your messages on the organic side.
And then once we’re getting into more advanced tactics, we can be installing Facebook Pixel LinkedIn Insights Tag, Google Google Pixel to be able to remarket and retarget to people who we’ve captured with our top of funnel awareness tactic.
We’ve got them to our page.
They’ve engaged, they’ve liked it, commented, and now they’ve linked back to our website.
Uhm, we can serve those people ads as they leave social media and get out onto the Google Display network based on their prior web activity.
And this is when when the.
Technology really makes it efficient because not only are you able to target the people who visited, but the tools all of them allow for audience creation around people similar to the people who’ve engaged.
So if you’ve got a well defined audience, if you’ve generated traffic back to your site, if you’ve been able to.
Get people to visit.
Frequently now you can stay in front of them as they you know.
Again, it’s always awareness, evaluation, intent and ultimately decision so you’ve you’ve captured their attention as they evaluate your presenting them with more information.
Ultimately, when they’ve indicated intense perhaps by.
Filling out a contact form or taking a call action on your website, then you can close the deal with conversion, but again, purchase is not necessarily the ultimate goal of every engagement.
It may be organic data capture and you’re just looking to get someone name, address and phone.
On an email so that you can market to them further, either through text campaigns or email campaigns.
Oftentimes, you know, small business owners feel that these things are going to be obtrusive or intrusive to their clients day, and we used to hear that quite regularly with email marketing.
I don’t know that.
That ever materialized.
If anybody is upset about receiving your message, there’s the unsubscribe button.
And similarly with text messaging, we have that as well, so it’s one of those things where if you’re not doing it, your customer sure as heck will be and.
Being able to get them up to that frequency and understand.
You know, is this the right customer?
Are we hitting them with the right message?
Are they engaging with our secondary messaging and and ultimately are we driving conversion actions which whatever has been defined by the campaign, whether it be a phone call schedule, link, attending an event?
Participating in an event or ultimately purchasing a product.
And again, you can target frequencies with paid to only run.
Those ads to three or four or 15.
Uhm, views or impressions for each individual?
All right so.
You know, now we’ve we’ve heard about paid advertising.
We’ve heard about where it fits in the funnel.
We’ve heard about.
How active it can be in targeting?
How do we do it?
This is again a basic framework overview, but most of the social campaigns are.
Similar in this regard where you can select a goal.
Obviously, after you’ve determined how much you want to spend.
And you know, do you want to increase likes and followers?
Are you looking for people to message posts?
That you have.
Or do you want people to view videos, visit a website or ultimately schedule an appointment?
These are all things that you can set.
Within the tool there’s even lead Gen forms where if you don’t have a pop up with a form on your site or on a page on your site, then you can get that information directly from the social media.
Paid advertising gives you the ability to A/B test creative, which maybe is just a.
Uhm, fancy way for a marketing to say, you know we can test this ad against that ad.
And usually you only want to change one variable, but you know, depending on the size of the campaign or the budget, you’d be amazed at what a 3%.
Higher click through rate can do for marketing budget efficiency.
So again, if you’re sending out newsletters, if you’re running any type of paid advertising, if you are making frequent changes to your websites and you’re not running A/B testing.
Uhm, you could be spending that marketing dollar more effective.
And absolutely understanding you know what factors are.
Changing engagement rates or what factors are turning a wasteful spending into a more efficient spend?
And this for us as someone who represents a number of different clients.
What they do testing does is it takes out a lot of difficult.
Design questions related around preference.
Right, I like this one.
Well, I like that one.
Well, it doesn’t matter when the one is clearly outperforming the other.
Then it makes that discussion much much smoother.
Again, action based viewing.
As people are clicking, you get indications on if they’re watching the video for three seconds.
You know or watching 10%, 20%, 50% of the video you start to understand which content people are engaging in more.
And ultimately, again, that allows you to pick the winner and reallocate your budget more effectively.
So this is the initial screen I mentioned.
You know choosing a campaign objective for both Facebook and LinkedIn.
Come again? You can. Awareness consideration conversion is what they call it, but are you looking for brand awareness or reach?
Just get the information out to the widest amount of people possible or you’re looking to drive traffic or engagement.
Potentially increase app installs.
Video views again, you can run lead generation campaigns and even with the Facebook Messenger tool you can be getting direct messages from people interested in acquiring your product.
I’d say anybody operating a business locally that is distributing nationally, messages is a great way to implement.
That customer support.
FAQ version.
And again you can lead right to.
Specific pages you can define conversion action if it’s purchase or clicking on a particular page.
And then I know Facebook has.
Catalog information as well, where you can list your catalog of products to purchase directly from Facebook.
You just have to connect that with whatever merchant services provider you’re using, and then they also have in store traffic, but we haven’t seen people paying for that objective.
And then on LinkedIn.
You get a little bit more professional out of the same tactics, but.
Uhm, again job applicants for anybody having trouble hiring right now.
This has been a great one you can target.
Umm by career duration you can target by industry you can target by.
Graduation date and then even – I’m sorry we can’t do it by a graduation date.
That would obviously violate hiring laws, but.
From job applicants, you can.
Limit people only with this experience in particular software.
So for us we use hoot suite.
We use Adobe creative shop.
We were able to eliminate candidates who didn’t have proficiency in those tools.
It then makes the evaluation process that much easier again.
So you’re paying to reach more people more effectively.
You’re potentially A/B.
Testing employment offers to get the one with highest engagement, and then you’re eliminating wasted time on the back end by pre qualifying the people that you’re interviewing.
So again that.
Jobs promotion is a specific objective within LinkedIn, but you can just as easily post and evaluate.
Jobs in Facebook
We don’t cover Google as as much in this, but again, if you understand what keywords are driving traffic to your website and how they’re impacting your business, then you could pay for anyone searching for those keywords and it could be keyword phrases.
It could be more than just a word, but, uh, particular.
Solution to a problem that you provide.
You can then invest.
In getting increased awareness around that product or service.
And again, with paid, it’s just as important to create.
It’s it’s it would be silly to post without an image.
It’s almost getting to the point of, you know, wanting to have some type of motion on all your ads.
You’re going to be paying to reach more people.
You want it to be the most engaging content.
It’s just a few examples of.
Different animated GIFs and videos that we can create as well as some static imagery that again is captivating but engagement rates are always higher for motion, so we’re navigating most of our client experience into motion graphics.
Alright, so many of you have started on the organic side.
I didn’t poll on the paid but let’s let’s see real quick is by show of hands.
Is anybody actively engaged in boosting or running paid campaigns and their social engagement?
Not currently OK, but yeah, but definitely in the organic engagement.
Posting regularly sharing in groups, steering people back to their website.
When we look at it, when to start?
Obviously you know.
Starting sooner rather than later is going to be beneficial.
Everything that you learned from day one on is accumulated knowledge and you just can’t get that through books.
The books are going to be.
General information, nothing specific to your industry, and even if if they’re writing a book on it, chances are that it’s an industry that’s large enough.
That the numbers won’t.
Equate to the small business environment.
We find wild variations with any you know industry related reporting that we come across.
For the social.
You know the automotive industry is going to see 3.6% click through rate when running ads on social media.
We don’t necessarily see that those you know, aggregate data is aligning with what our clients are experiencing.
Sometimes it’s higher, sometimes it’s lower small businesses.
It’s kind of always a variable number.
The wild card.
We’re going to mention strategy quite a bit in these subsequent slides and, and that’s always the question you want to ask.
Anytime you start a new venture is.
You know, do we have a strategy in place?
And why are we going to be doing this?
What are we hoping to accomplish?
What terms do we want to use?
Is there seasonality to your business?
Right?
So this is this image here.
On the right is a seasonality curve for search volume interest.
Uhm, for business intelligence tools.
Oh, I’m sorry, golf cart so bottom left.
And as you see, as would be expected for golf cart related terms, it’s an outdoor vehicle primarily driven during the warm months we’ve seen March through July as the highest search traffic over time with these 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Southern states.
Driving a significant amount of the search.
Traffic this is a Google Trends report.
Again, it’s a.
Free tool that anyone with a Google account can utilize and you can run trend analysis for any product service theory idea and oftentimes that’ll help you indicate that maybe your Christmas time spending should be at a low.
Uh, if you’re in the golf cart industry?
Historic data is always beneficial.
You know, if you’ve run similar promotions in prior years, what did you get from that?
What are you looking to accomplish and and many times you know we’re investing in campaigns that don’t have historic data, and we’re setting the benchmark with that first.
Paint, but any data that you have Google Analytics data prior paid ad spend prior analog paid spend.
You know if you’ve participated in events for years.
What has been the return on that?
Did you get 10 names?
Sign up sheet for giveaway that day?
Did you get 20?
And what are the comparable metrics in terms?
Of time spent.
And you know resource alignment so.
That you can measure that.
You know, have conditions inside your business changed.
You have new staff or new product or service.
Uhm, sometimes this might be something that the plan was to bring someone in in order to manage these campaigns.
But you always want to keep a managerial approach to it and be monitoring the reports again so that you understand in comparison to prior initiatives.
How is it perform? Right?
Uhm, I give another presentation on digital marketing strategy overview and what we say is that marketing really hasn’t changed.
Still about frequency still about reach.
Still about duration, you know?
Again, marketing is not sales.
Sales is not marketing.
We’re trying to generate interest and then the sales team can come and take over, but.
From information that’s available and the tools for distribution have changed marketing.
Itself is still the same.
But more information is better for more informed decision making and hopefully better execution of budgets, especially if budgets are tight and you need the justification for the continued spend.
Digital allows that.
Again, you know historic sales report is is sales going up?
Going down?
Do we know why?
And you know again ending with.
Have you developed a strategy
You want to be measuring?
You want to be understanding why you’re engaging in a particular venture and know how you’re going to measure and analyze based on your goals.
And how they’re measured.
You know, again, talking about seasonality.
Increase in online and digital activities. Since COVID. These are July 2020 numbers, but.
Uhm, you know, maybe this is mirrored in your own activity.
Is as outings decreased, you found yourself more reliant on your phone for entertainment.
Reliance for network television, relying on YouTube engagement, gaming apps etc. Across the board technology adoption as well as social media engagement as spiked significantly following Covid.
And again, the people that were positioned then to be able to transition and communicate primarily on social, they obviously saw the rewards of that investment, and I don’t believe that we’re going to see less of this where people are going to not use grocery delivery apps.
People aren’t going to use the.
Transportation apps, or, you know, if they’re visiting large metropolitan areas now, they can get a scooter or an automobile anywhere within a mile.
You know that that type of convenience just doesn’t go away.
So again, when we’re looking.
At when I say no time like the present.
More than happy to have conversations with with anyone in attendance today.
We can start to strategize and and what are some natural inch steps to enter into getting digital marketing as part of your strategy?
But yeah, we’re definitely the.
Rapid methodology where it’s get in, get your feet wet, learn, take your lumps, move forward and do it better next time.
So where do I start right?
It’s always a tough, you know we’re getting into organic, we’re.
Actively engaging and groups and getting messaging back and forth and maybe potentially.
People are visiting our website, you know, is our website built to convert?
Are we re-targeting those people?
There’s so many different places?
How do I know where to get in?
At the bottom of this page is a link.
This is a document that we share openly with as many people who will listen.
This project strategy map.
Which I’ll touch on.
Again for.
This as a framework. It’s 3 pages. Some of these end up 15, 20 pages when we’re working with clients.
Go through you know what keywords are relevant to my business and I wouldn’t say to rely exclusively on people internal.
To the business.
Pull people outside of the business and how they search for a particular industry.
And then cross check that information against Google ads.
There’s a keyword research tool that you can get monthly search volume for your specific geography and be able to identify.
A perfect example is you know credit card processing, merchant services industry – talking with professionals in that industry they swore up and down and there’s no or merchant services.
More merchant services we have to use merchant services.
We were able to demonstrate that people were matched searching for merchant services.
No one knew what that was, what they were searching for was payments.
That may be intuitive to you.
That was news to us, but definitely rely on data that’s collected by Google.
Again, they’re only 90% of the search market. If you’re investing in digital, you’re getting into the search market. You know. Go to the industry leader.
Geography again nationwide or regional or hyper local.
Identifying that will obviously make some of the selection criteria for your paid advertising, even content that you’re creating all these questions being answered makes it relevant to you or a copywriter.
Or maybe writing things on your behalf.
To be able to sharpen in on these demographic and psychographic descriptions.
Business description – again is our 30-second elevator pitch. We have it here in our strategy map because you have a short form in a long form.
Business description anytime you’re online starting a new profile, you come right back here.
Copy the name, address and phone.
Copy the business description, insert whatever images are necessary and you have a profile.
Started and again social profiles have more value than just engaging.
They’re another backlink to your site.
Right, and again, engagement allows for those.
Those posts to be indexed on most search engines for Twitter and Facebook I believe.
Products and services offered.
Again, this may not be an entire listing or catalog, just what do we want to focus on in this promotion or on this campaign.
Any local competition we should be keeping an eye on and and again the most important part here is goals and goals.
Goal measurement.
Do we want to see an increase in?
Web traffic.
Do we have historic data?
Do we know what the last three months or last 12 months web traffic was increased?
Social media audience and engagement you know, are we looking to each of the individual social media tools to report?
Do we have a tool like HootSuite which aggregates social posting and provides concise reporting across multiple channels?
Or do we want to look at a more specific sales goal? Increasing sales by 3-5% in the next quarter? Then what is the information that we’re looking at to be able to measure that?
Come again? I say the most important, ’cause if you don’t know what you’re going after and you’re not measuring it, how are you going to measure success or failure of the campaign?
Social bookmarking sites you know should we be on Pinterest?
Do we have a younger audience that we need to be on?
Tik-tok, Triller you know.
Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, Reddit?
You can’t be everywhere, so you want to be able to understand where you’re going to focus your time and why.
Social media map.
This is just to take a look at who’s going to walk in the door next.
You want them to be your ideal customer, right?
A three to five paragraph description of who that person is?
And then that’ll help steer your copy and editorial to present well to that individual.
Editorial calendar and schedule.
What are we going to be writing and when content is king?
If we’re not writing?
If you know creating videos or creating those animations or GIFs we talked about and then site mapping, how do we want people to proceed through our website and what?
What are the actions that we hope they take on each?
Individual page.
So yeah, I think we’ve identified all those things in our project strategy mapping process.
I can share this link or even share the presentation right?
If you want to distribute it to the group.
But again, it’s starting with.
Strategy is the best and again, Simon Sinek famous author and the marketing space always start with the why.
I think that’s a good reason with marketing as well.
I don’t know what you’re hoping to accomplish and how you’re going to measure it.
You know we’re getting tour well, we got nine more slides so.
Social media is not going anywhere.
It may be legislated, which could change the game, but adoption is increasing as more and more people globally get access to smartphones and.
Again, it’s it’s access to electricity for recharging its access to Wi-Fi for access and its lack of governmental control.
That’s fueling the the.
Global market, but this is domestic social media use to, you know, looking to grow to 260 million users account for over 20% of daily.
Total mobile minutes.
It’s measurable, cost effective if you know if you look at a couple 100 bucks to run a business card ad in the newspaper, you don’t get a whole lot of data with that.
You don’t know if it was effective.
Ryan: Let’s see.
That same budget on digital can be spent and you get data and and hopefully some long term decision making fuel for potential.
Growth down the road and any other marketing activities.
Can’t hammer this home enough.
As we look at first of 50 million users.
Facebook over here. Three years mobile phones was 12. All these thing ATM’s computers 14 years 18 was 18 years.
It’s it’s incredible.
It’s like the Internet, social media chat apps, etc have been able to do.
I just put that in here to kind of reinforce the fact that it’s not going anywhere.
They may again legislate it, but.
We’ve, you know, we’ve seen their GDPR.
Legislation we’ve seen overseas restrictions.
We’ve seen iPhones that now don’t report things as specifically through Facebook.
These are just things that have, you know, sent minor ripples through our industry, but.
We’ll see if if you know these these gentlemen who seem to be making the laws and ladies that aren’t comfortable social media users can somehow come up with legislation to impact it.
It could be, you know, detrimental to not only the end user, consumers who enjoy usage of it, but the business community.
Leverage is it for advertising, and obviously we’ve seen the.
Impacts in other industries as well that social media can add.
More data in terms of.
Adults who use at least one social media site again.
By age 18 to 29, no surprise there that that that’s the top 30 or 49 is next 50 to 64 and as we look you know, 65 plus with, you’ve guessed, you know.
But somewhere around 40%.
Think about how you may be getting photos of your family members and other states.
Think of how you’re engaging in in groups of your your own.
It’s amazing what socials been able to do.
And then this.
The global statistics for adoption of different social media. You know 2 1/2 billion.
Users in terms of Facebook 2 billion for YouTube and WhatsApp in Messenger apps here at the top.
I don’t, I think unless they’ve changed it within the last three months, I think they’re still not advertising allowing advertising.
On the tools.
But with all.
The use centralized, of course they’re going to try and monetize that somehow, so we may see advertising on Messenger apps here.
If if we’re not already.
Come again? Instagram and a billion users TikTok 800 million.
Read it 430. You don’t even see LinkedIn, which I would say.
300,000,000 was the last.
Number I heard for LinkedIn users so maybe they changed something and got rid of some ghost accounts but.
Maybe it’s just less because it’s a more professional use, but.
A lot of opportunity here for you.
As a business owner to get your message in front of people again organically or paid.
It should be a part.
Of any communication strategy, certainly.
More usage statistics again.
Which social media and what’s the usage percentage?
YouTube and Facebook are by far the leaders.
So in summary.
You know how do we make social media work?
Talked heavily about strategy.
Definitely want to start with plan and just like you wouldn’t go to an interview.
You, without your best shirt without your best time without your you know best blouse.
Don’t steer people to a website that’s not ready for the the focus of the campaign, right?
It’s you know, I’m gonna get somebody to my website.
There’s information advocating on the product or service.
There’s a subscription bar on the side.
There’s a pop up to capture their name, address, phone and email.
And and it’s all.
Flowing across multiple devices, it’s it’s mobile responsive.
Load times are quick, we’ve got posts linking to it.
We’ve got content on it that’s frequent.
And or I’m sorry, frequently updated and relevant.
And then are the social media channels sharing information relevant to that purchase journey?
And how do we increase the frequency of engagement?
Talked about the motion graphics again, animated GIFs, videos, anything that’s going to capture their attention and get them to click on.
The link and then we.
Talked about some of the higher end.
Technical aspects of remarketing and retargeting and then using that data to make future decisions.
So this is obviously a very robust framework, but think about what you’re doing to create awareness, get someone.
As a viewer visitor.
Turning them into a fan or follower.
Ultimately, getting them to visit the website now, there may be a regular content reader.
Maybe they’ve subscribed.
Maybe they’re looking for a solution to a query now they’ve submitted their information.
Come again? Lead magnet and landing pages offering advance sales offer.
Now they’re prospect.
Now they’re interested.
They’ve given you their information.
They want you to communicate with them.
Are you sending a weekly newsletter text, you know, depending upon the purchase cycle of your product?
You know, as I look at again financial advising that that could be constant, it could be tide to.
Come tax time, it could be tied to life milestone, birth of a child.
Right?
Accounting services obviously promoting around tax time is too late.
You need to be two to three months ahead of tax time.
You know hiring hire heroes.
I’d say there’s a higher sentiment around veteran’s day and Memorial Day to be able to capitalize on some of that sentiment and get information out.
And obviously the the Firestorm Indy anytime there’s a major weather event you could be pushing advertising 24 hours.
24 hour post of that event just to stay in front of people. Maybe they call the other guy their phones busy. Maybe they call you.
You take out maybe you.
Be there in time that they need, you know, marketing can get the phone to ring marketing and drive demand, but ultimately you know this bottom of funnel stuff.
The turning into a customer repeat customer and brand advocate that that’s all handled by sales.
Hopefully if you’re the salesperson yourself, you know.
Or responding to all these messages, and this is another area of opportunity where if you’ve set up this whole channel and somebody messages you on one of the channels established, right?
Take Facebook Messenger for instance, and you don’t get back to me.
Or don’t get back to them.
In a timely fashion.
They’re going to go somewhere else, and that person is going to be, you know, waiting by the phone.
It’s kind of a.
Modern day anchor. As a business owner. If you aren’t available 24/7 and somebody is and you know you have to determine the risk to closing that deal and the time that you’re willing to spend again is small business owners. Time is our most valuable asset, but this is where to take. Kind of the general basics.
That we discovered discussed in our organic and paid strategies into a full comprehensive funnel strategy.
And again, as we look at repeat customers.
That’s a another way to grow sales.
Get him to buy more frequently.
Get him to buy more when they’re there, and then ultimately turning them into a real advocate.
Do you have any affinity programs or how are you staying in front of them after?
They’ve been a customer.
Perfect, I’ve got two slides and.
We are.
Again, a lot of this can be overwhelming if you think too much.
Like I said, 20 minutes is a nice starter point, but you could spend hours understand the answers to these questions as a as a place to document within your strategy.
Who maintains your website?
Do you know creatives or do you have creative skills?
What goals are you trying to accomplish?
Have you set a budget?
Often times in my industry people will come and say here’s a perfect referral for you. This guy has a website from 1992 and.
Realistically, that guys guy or gal or that business is not a good referral because they haven’t spent in. You know 20, 27, 28 years.
Uhm, why is why is that?
Going to change now so.
Again, setting a budget, understanding the goals and the measurement, and then really serving information to your clients where they’re at.
You want to make it as convenient as possible to them and make the purchase easy, whatever that looks like whatever the purchase journey is.
So yeah, definitely open for questions anybody and then our next of learning.
June 29th, we’re going to cover paid advertising in greater detail, paid advertising, waste or wind. That’s an online virtual program through Harper College in Palatine, IL.
And that’s 9:00 AM to 10:30 AM, central Standard Time and I can share the link in the chat as well as share the slides.
And it’s if anyone has any questions please.
Speaker:I have a question.
Yes, Sir.
Speaker: So I play in the LinkedIn world and of course the information that you talked about is available in the Google search criteria, like for instance used golf carts.
Speaker: Is there such an animal or or is that where professionals like you come in to find out?
Speaker: OK, I know golf carts are used then if our buying ads and and doing things in, you know the website side but if I wanted to reach out to someone is there a reverse look up type of function?
Speaker: In other words, who is looking for golf carts?
Speaker: You know 60 year old men?
Speaker: You know of a certain income level or a certain education or something?
Speaker: Is there a way of finding that out?
So on LinkedIn, I don’t believe you get the.
The option to select.
Golf cart you could.
We haven’t had any experience in that.
This was kind of an example.
But I know Facebook there’s golf cart communities, their golf cart pages.
There’s a way to get the information in front of.
People that come.
That you’re looking to get.
There’s really come and then they have in market as well.
They used to be able to do this for home purchases where you know if, let’s say you picked someone with.
Let’s go why, let’s say 12 month to six year old kid in market for a home making this much.
Fan of golf cart and boating and all that comes, you know, in that environment then you can exclusively run ads to people who have self identified that information.
And and that’s absolutely what we use to get information in front of people.
And then you can pre qualify and maybe promote content around repair, right golf cart repair or.
Ways to use my golf cart that I never intended right?
So you always want to.
Again pre qualified through content and the content is whatever you’re posting and sharing the demographics you’re talking about.
Can you get in front of people who are interested in golf carts?
Yes, definitely on Facebook.
I don’t know what the equivalent metric would be on LinkedIn where you can literally go in and search all these things, so if there’s a LinkedIn golf cart community, then absolutely.
Ryan: Does anyone have any other questions for Joe?
Speaker: I’ll follow up with one more and that is with regard you didn’t meant I saw podcasts and I don’t think you mentioned blogs, but what is the current feeling out knows when are the right times to do that?
Speaker: And just any comments on those.
Yeah, podcasts and blogs are part of robust content marketing strategy if you have.
You know, again, now it’s.
Blogs for sure.
You can post on your website podcast.
You can post on your website too, but are you podcasting for product advocacy or you podcasting to grow an audience you know now you have a secondary marketing initiative that needs to potentially have its own.
Budget another row.
Or is it just another resource that you know this podcast is talking about answers to our FAQ on our website and now we go and have a 15 minute discussion on.
You know why hiring a hero is is better than hiring a civil civilian.
Right, so you can work, you know, and again, content.
A well built out page for SEO purposes would potentially have a article from 600 to 1800 words. A video, 30 seconds to a minute, potentially a transcript of the video underneath it and you could have a podcast link on there. And now you’re really becoming a page that has authority.
And you know not to get into a whole another discussion on SEO, but.
Come experience authoritativeness and trustworthiness is part of Google EAT acronym that is, you know what they’re saying is defines there.
You know succinctly defines there hundreds of page Google Master user content on SEO.
Oh so definitely away and how they judge that is very subjective.
They judge it by time on page, right?
So if somebody visits your page and leaves within 10 seconds, then you probably don’t have the answer to the query that they were searching.
But if they’re on the.
Page they’re there for you know 30 seconds.
They read an article, then they.
Watch a 30-second
Video then they listen to a 10 minute podcast.
You’re probably giving them some valuable information and, uh, subjective metric.
So that’s how.
Google is looking at those engagement metrics and definitely the more content you have about a particular solution, the better.
Speaker: Thank you.
Good question, thank you.
Ryan: Does anyone have any other questions for Joe?
Ryan: Alright, well let’s give Joe A.
Ryan: Hand for his presentation today.
Thanks for the opportunity guys and please feel free to reach out.
With any questions that.
Didn’t bring to the table today.
Or get get to.
You 5 minutes after we shut down.
