Introducing Ricky Santos!

At the beginning of the year, we welcomed Ricky Santos onto the Adelsberger Marketing team! Ricky had been working as one of the interns at theCo and his graphic design skills in particular caught our attention. 

Ricky was born in Divinópolis, Brazil and spent his four years of life there. In 2000, he and his family moved to Jackson. His father opened a painting company and Ricky helped every summer. But Ricky felt like painting wasn’t his career goal.

In high school, Ricky thought he would pursue a career as an engineer because he wanted to do a lot of problem solving. But he soon realized that math was not well suited for him. So he began to search for another career option that involved both creative and practical problem solving.

He found both of these items in the graphic design world. Ricky said, “I’m excited to work with Adelsberger Marketing because it will give me a chance to work with so many businesses in the local community and help them grow their business.”

His favorite projects at work involve creating motion graphics like gifs and branding companies. In his free time, he enjoys playing video games, drawing and dabbling with 3D modeling on the computer, and watching Netflix with his wife. Over the next year, Ricky plans to continue to expand his skills and develop more of the soft skills that are required in the industry.

Ricky and his wife, Patricia, welcomed their first child, Roscoe, into the world in December. Ricky is a Senior at Union University studying Graphic Design. His family attends Poplar Heights. And, in the words of Ricky, “I own more gray clothes than any one person should.” We’re glad to have Ricky working with us.

Book Review: Crushing It – Gary Vee

“Let me define discipline: it’s backing up your ambitions with your actions.” -Gary Vaynerchuck, Crushing It

Gary Vee is back with a new book. Crushing It is a quick read that packs in the value. Gary covers his pillars of how people can create a digital presence and a future of making a living doing what they love. The book breaks down into two main sections.

The first section is the pillars. He walks through how each pillar can push you to build the platform that can potentially give you the audience to make a living by following your passion.

Gary also walks through each of the major platforms for how to create that content. One of the things I think is significant is that he casts a vision about how you could find success using each of the platforms. But one of the good things about Gary is that he does not make it sound like you would find success as a social media influencer in a few weeks or months; he points out that it takes years.

The second major element to this book is that he walks through actual success stories of folks who took the first book, Crush It, and used it to become successful. Gary showcases success stories of different sizes and different industries. Each of these gives us a picture of how hard these folks had to work to become successful.

If you have any interest in being successful in the digital world in our age, this is a book to pick up and read through.

Superbowl LII Ads Quick Take!

Superbowl Ads seemed to have a better year than last year on the success rate. “Success” in this context means drawing positive attention to a brand and especially getting view count after the game online.

My two favorite ads this year did a fantastic job of surprising and delighting the audience.

    1. NFL. The NFL is running ads to try and get people excited about its sport that has been slipping in the ratings some recently. What started off as an innocuous practice scene from the Giants very quickly turned into a jaw-dropping, I can’t believe this is happening, moment. They capture the star power of Odell and Manning really quickly and kept people in longer by introducing the music 10 seconds in. The music sets off such an odd tone for a football commercial, it did a great job of keeping peoples’ attention. The dirty dancing tribute is the kind of thing that will live a long long life in the minds of fans!
    2. Doritos. While they also upset a bunch of folks by suggesting “a Lady Dorito” that didn’t crunch as loud, they did rock the Superbowl with a great use of celebrities. So funny, in fact, a friend made me watch it at dinner last night (I missed it during the game). This ad gets going a little faster than the NFL one and that gives it a social media advantage. Peter Dinklage is going to catch peoples’ attention very quickly and the first kicks in at 4 seconds which is going to help keep peoples’ attention. Great use of pop culture icons and geniously made to break into two separate 30-second spots to get even more mileage out of them!

And one loser.

Dodge.

Dodge decided to hijack the words of Martin Luther King to apply to a truck commercial. Seems in bad taste. To save the idea, they could have taken trucks out of it and just put a small dodge label at the end. The motivational talk by Dr. King is great, some of the visuals are great, but the very clear insertion of the trucks repeatedly was enough to cheapen it. Then to top it off, they decided to irritate every Vikings fan in existence with this one:

 

A Follow Up: Best Self Journal

A few months ago, I wrote a post about the Best Self Journal and how they used social media marketing to get me to buy one. You can read that post here.

Starting the Best Self Journal a few months ago was a little bit out of my comfort zone. I do not normally use journals or paper products to push me to improve. Also with a name like Best Self Journal it kinda feels like a product sold after a cheesy motivational seminar.

via GIPHY

But I have been very pleased with how the Best Self Journal has helped me improve and challenged me. At this current moment in my life, I am in the process of scaling a marketing firm. This means lots of work, lots of time, and lots of different clients. Trying to grow enough cash flow to bring teammates on is exhausting on the front end. It’s really easy for my time to get away from me.

This affects all areas of my life: work, home, fitness, and community. I think the Journal has helped me stay focused on many of these areas better and helped me keep perspective. These things will help me from, ‘living in a van down by the river‘, hopefully!

Let’s talk specifics:

    1. Scheduling: The biggest thing that the BSJ has helped me with is time blocking out my day. I am really good with schedules and meetings. But how I spend the time around those usually was just spent putting out fires or whatever is the most urgent thing on my plate. This prevented me from making progress in balanced ways across my schedule. It also allowed me to get distracted from projects that I was already working on. The BSJ uses 30 minute time chunks through the day to help you block out time.Usually, at the end of the workday, I take a few minutes and look through my Asana task manager and my meetings for tomorrow and plan out my work schedule for the next day. I am able to allocate time for each of the projects I need to work on and even constrain email checking to specific time periods. This factor alone has increased my productivity considerably. For no other reason, other than this calendar function, this book is worth buying for me.
    2. Targets: Causing me to set targets for the day, 1-3 super important things to get done for the day, has allowed me to rest easier at night. Sometimes during the rush, it can be easy to forget how much you accomplished during the day and feel like you need to continue working all night. With these targets, it has given me the ability to look back and see that I have accomplished something and that it is okay to rest (at least occasionally). Conversely, if I have gotten distracted or lazy during the day, the targets can push me to get back on track and get important things accomplished even if takes a little extra time.
    3. Goal setting. I traditionally like big picture goals, like buying a house, but am not good at milestone goals to get there or progress toward those goals. The BSJ has a great goal mapping and follow up system. For example, every day, you write out your goals for the 13-week session. This helps to keep the goals on top of your mind. I am currently behind on two my three goals for this session, but it’s not because I have forgotten about them!

The way it breaks down your goals into steps and habits to accomplish them has been very helpful to me toward working on these goals and helping to become more of the person and business that I want to be.

 

How To Respond to Facebook’s News Feed Change

You may have heard about the Facebook news feed change. Here’s the announcement.
The question for those of us who create social media content is: now what?
The full truth is we don’t really know. We’ll watch as Facebook implements their new algorithm to see how it impacts our organic reaches and watch our own Newsfeeds transform.
In the meantime, I believe there are several key items to consider as we create content:
1. The death of organic reach has arrived. Organic reach has been dying for years. This is why I have said for a while now that Facebook marketing plans without a budget is not sufficient/modern. For example, I don’t take social clients without a decent social ads budget. Organic reach has dropped a lot over the last couple of years and this might be the death blow. That doesn’t mean organic reach will go away all together. But I believe it’s safe to say that it will no longer be enough to depend on organic reach to get your content to your customers.
2. Bad content will further restrict your pages reach. The restriction of organic reach will most likely effect pages that produce bad content. I think those who don’t do a good job at social media will be hurt worse than the good players. I explained myself in greater detail in my previous blog regarding this announcement. Facebook’s goal is to keep more people on Facebook and that means providing the best experience possible. So if the Facebook algorithm detects that people don’t like your posts on a regular basis, you will be punished for it. I think this is also a reaction to the polarized political content and *legitimate* fake news. The danger of Facebook is that we are building houses on rented land. I think this will most adversely affect small businesses who do a bad job with social media or do not know how to use social ads effectively.
3. Ad costs will continue to increase. Facebook’s ad inventory on its newsfeed filled up last summer and they were looking for new ad revenue. Facebook will continue to place ads because it’s their revenue stream. The cost may go up to weed out some ads but overall I don’t see a change in this coming quickly. Over time expect ad costs to continue to rise. Remember above all else, create quality content so that your customers are excited about the value your posts give them.

Engagement Bait: Big Facebook Update

via Facebook

 

Engagement Bait, what is it and how does it affect you?

 

Engagement Bait is a term that Facebook has rolled out that indicates how to get people to engage with your content via comments or likes. The graphic above shows three examples of engagement bait. Here is a list of five types of engagement bait:

  1. Vote Baiting: Asking users to vote via reaction to encourage engagement.
  2. React Baiting: Do this thing to show us what you think or get a result.
  3. Share Baiting: Share this post to enter a contest.
  4. Tag Baiting: Tag a friend who looks like this
  5. Comment baiting: Comment ‘yes’ if you love pie, or comment to enter

Why do people do this? It helps game the almighty algorithm. How? Well the Facebook Algorithm looks at how people are interacting with posts to see if it is any good. If people are sharing, liking, and commenting on a post, it signals to the algorithm that people want to see this post. So by artificially calling people to interact with a post instead of them interacting on their own free will because of the awesomeness of the content, they can get a boost in the newsfeed.

Why make this change? Facebook has two things it needs to do. Keep you on Facebook and make money. Engagement Bait is dangerous for both of those. To keep you on Facebook it needs to be a great experience and you need to see things that are interesting to you. Most of the time, items that are engagement bait are not that, they are spammy. Secondly, Facebook needs to continue to shorten the reach of pages so that they can sell ads. If you can get noticed by gaming the algorithm, you may be less likely to spend money.

Why is this now a big deal for marketers? Because now, Facebook is going to penalize you for doing this. Up to this point you could do engagement bait for posts or most likely contests and never have a problem. That is what is changing. Facebook is going to start actively demoting pages that break these rules. Not just the posts that break the rules, but the pages that do it. The Pages that break these rules will see the organic reach and paid reach drop even more if they break these rules. If they break these rules repeatedly, the may even see their page suspended.

What should you do now?

  1. Make better content. Make content people want to interact with.
  2. Spend money on reach: You need to have a Facebook boosting budget for your company. If you do not, you are living in the past!

For more information visit Facebook’s announcement. 

Social Media Win: Haltom Home Team

And what a win it was! The Haltom Home Team had the most viral video in Jackson (probably) ever. The Haltoms brought in Austin and Colin from That’s Classic Media, to create the “Relaxin in Jackson” video that went viral in fall of 2017. Check it out:

Though not super familiar with their careers, Austin and Colin are clearly super talented with both video production and music. I thought these guys looked familiar and then I realized they hit it big with a Nashville themed song a few years ago.

When I say it went viral, it has at least 406,000 views on Facebook. That excludes any dark posts that might have gone with advertising. More than 3,000 likes and reactions and more than 6 thousand shares! Those are unheard of statistics in Jackson.

What can we learn from this?

  1. Investing in content is smart. The Haltoms knew if they wanted to make an impact they were going to need to hire help. They found a great team to work with. Now, I am sure they also paid handsomely for this video, but to bring in experts, it costs money!
  2. The content they used was not necessarily reality based but their jobs are easier when people are excited about the territory where they are selling property.
  3. This should give them a great start in increasing name recognition. Not only did all those people just see the Haltoms name and see the team on camera, they interacted with a video from their page. This is a great opportunity to follow up with retargeting advertising based on that video interaction. They started to create a warm market and they have an opportunity to increase that brand recognition for a lower dollar amount by targeting folks who watched a portion of that video.
  4. Social Media Content goes quickly: The video went viral which is amazing. The next level of that is to continue to put out high-quality content. It would have been great to have a behind the scenes video to release on the back end of this video to target folks with. Social Media content is not just a one-time investment, it is a reoccurring investment.

Way to go Haltom’s and Austin and Colin!

Customer Spotlight: Care Center

We love nonprofits at Adelsberger Marketing. My (Kevin) background is from nonprofits. It’s even better when that nonprofit does work to expand the work of the kingdom of God! The Care Center fills a very specific and important niche in Jackson and West Tennessee. We had the pleasure to work with Nathan Young, Director of the Care Center and his board members to create a new website and two videos for their Christmas Banquet.

You can check out the website here: https://www.carecenterofjackson.org/  (Photography provided by www.leleandbeane.com)

You can watch one of the videos here:

If you are interested in getting more involved with the Care Center, check out the “Ways to Help” page on their website.

Our Values: Doing the Right Thing

Blog #4 in 4 Part Series. Read the series from the beginning.

Doing the right thing is always the right thing. Enough said. Right? But our human brains start spinning when it comes to actually doing the right thing. Because doing the right thing isn’t necessarily always the easiest thing. Doing the right thing isn’t always the fun thing. Or the most efficient, cost-effective, or even the most impressive thing.

But doing the right thing is always the right thing – especially when no one is watching. We all mess up so we let’s go ahead and put it out there. We as individuals and as a company are not perfect. We’ve made mistakes along the way. Being able to own your mistakes is vital.

In the world of social media and digital marketing, it could be easy to tell the customers what they want to hear instead of doing the thing that is best for their business. We strive to always put into action the plan that is right for the client, even if it’s not what’s best or easiest for us. Ultimately, if it’s bad for our customer, it will end up being bad for us also. We strive to be a reputable company that you trust with your business.

So that means we’ve taken some financial hits along the way. We may not do this every time, but there have been times when a client has approved an item for print. Once printed, they noticed a mistake and we have covered the cost and labor of reprinting.

It also means that we’ve turned clients away or referred them to other services. Our social media plan may not align with what’s best for your needs at this moment. And that’s fine. We’ll do what we can to get you pointed in the right direction rather than force you into a contract with us.

So even when the right thing is difficult, we hope it’s the choice that we make. Not every company would be willing to say that they strive to do the right thing. But who wants to do business with those guys? Not me. I want to do business with people and brands that I trust. That’s why I strive daily to build a reliable business as well.

Our Values: Relationships

Blog #3 in 4 Part Series
Click here to read from the beginning.

 

We love everything about small businesses! We love learning their history, getting to know the owners, and helping them grow. We love small business so much that we started this one!

We know that the key to business is relationships. We believe that once you are an Adelsberger Marketing customer, you are in the family (though occasionally you might be the that awkward uncle that doesn’t come to Christmas parties anymore because of what happened in ’98.)

For example, I know WAY too much about pet cremation. That’s because Turner Pet Cremation was one of my first customers. In order to tell the story of their business to their customers, I needed to learn everything about them. I learned how they operated, how they handled their products, and what the owners valued. They, in turn, opened up their lives and their business to me. We built a relationship through working together.

Whoever coined the phrase “business isn’t personal” must not have owned, operated, or founded a business. One of the foundations of business is relationships. Your relationships with your customers, employees, competition, office suite neighbors, and vendors. Each one of these relationships is a personal relationship that we don’t take lightly. You are trusting us with one of the most personal possessions you have – your business. And we will work hard to build a relationship with you so that everyone’s business will succeed.