Category: Blog

Every chance I get to share my expertise I take it.

Click here to read part 1 in this series.

I believe strongly in the positioning as an expert branding technique. The more people who understand that I know what I am talking about when it comes to marketing the better. How do I do this? I tell them about it. This serves to purposes: 1. It puts me in front of people and expands my network. 2. It helps build my position as someone who is worth paying money for marketing.

How do I do that?

CO: communicate: I co-host a monthly event on social media at theCO with Austin Thompson of Thompson Industries (This also doubles as work toward the first portion of my marketing scheme). Each month we give away for free knowledge about how to use social media for business. While I expect none of these students to become customers, what it does is helps position me as an expert on small business social media in Jackson. This is a long term play for sure, but I believe it will pay off.

Speaking at Community Events: Anytime I am invited to speak at a function, I take it. Every chance, I get to speak on marketing or entrepreneurship, I see it as an opportunity to further grow my influence. Even if this is just to students who are looking at marketing, I dive in! You never know what will come of an opportunity you have available. Just this week some potential business came from a community event from over a year ago!

The ROI on this is hard to determine sometimes, but it is there!

That being said, if you need someone to come and talk about marketing or entrepreneurship, I would love too! Just drop me a line!

Click here to read part 3 in this series. 

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This month’s social media win comes from an unlikely source, a utility company. A utility company at first blush is not an exciting venture: generate power and delivering it to people’s homes. Most people think about a utility company about as much as they think of a long snapper in football, which is usually only when they mess up.

That is why this social post caught my attention. It was doing really well and had 158 thousand views from a video put out by a utility company. The video is a 360-degree video of a helicopter delivering someone to the top of a power structure. That lineman then climbs off the helicopter and onto the structure. It also had over 1000 shares which is a great engagement stat!

It’s pretty awesome. Watch it here. 

It led to some great comments from people who were reminded that they are glad someone else does the dirty work. Including the lineman’s mom, which is super sweet!

This is a great example of documenting instead of creating content. This shows us that even conceptually boring industries can create compelling content!

 

Great job TVA!

 

 

To be honest, the idea of writing this post seems like a bad idea. But I know that ideas are free, it is the execution costs. I invest lots of time and money into doing these and these ideas won’t work for everyone. So here is week one of my three pillars of marketing myself:

(ALSO NOTE: While some of this may make me seem pretty mercenary in my actions, this is only one of the many motivations behind my actions. Other things factor into my decision making besides business, like my faith in Christ.)

Be a Great Community Member.

It is easy to start a business and just take, take, take. But as part of my personal philosophy and part as a marketing strategy, it’s a great thing to give back to the community and to be involved.  I love it when you can kill two birds with one stone. But there are limits to what someone can do and I regularly tell people, no. Because I want to do the things I am committed to well. Here is how I work out being a great community member as I think about allocating my time:

Be a great CO Member: I love theCO. I will tell anyone who will listen that theCO is a great place. I owe a lot of my success to the referrals and relationships I have built through theCO. So because of that, I want to invest back in theCO. I teach classes, give tours, help out new members, even move tables and chairs every once in a while. The relationship I have with theCO has been beneficial for both of us and I will be ever grateful for the crucial role it has played in my success.

Be a great Chamber Member: The Chamber of Commerce in Jackson is a great organization and a great customer. This has come after lots of time invested and some dollars (member fees and event fees). By showing up to events, being an asset to their staff, and even serving on the Leadership University board, I have built relationships that have helped lead to business and referrals.

Be a great Board Member: One of the best things about being self-employed is the flexibility in schedules and priorities that if offers. This has allowed me to dedicate a good amount of time to being a great board member at Madison County CASA over the last couple of years. By taking on this responsibility and doing well at it, it has helped be build new relationships in the community.

Click here to read Part 2 and Part 3.

 

The third phase of the ‘Know, Like, Trust” mentality is helping someone build a long lasting relationship with you. Each phase of this process is helping someone go deeper into building a relationship with you.

Trusting is by definition: showing or tending to have a belief in a person’s honesty or sincerity; not suspicious.

I have seen this repeatedly over the last few months in my own business. Several people have heard my name enough from enough people that they were willing to come and spend money with me. First, they heard about me (know)  and secondly, they liked me enough to know more about me. Thirdly, because of good words spoken about me by others they trusted me enough to make the call.

And the bigger the purchase the important the trust factor of this relationship becomes. Selling a burger? Trust is not as important, selling a house, trust is super important.

On the flip side, if you violate someone’s trust, whether you are selling a burger or a house, the consequences will be the same. That customer will avoid you and speak badly about you to the community.

So how do you build that good word of mouth to build trust? Create star raving fans by doing what you say you are going to do and going the extra mile. One of the best things about the way I am building my business is that people frequently come to be with some trust already because of the people I have already done business with or helped in the community.

These are investments that will pay dividends for years.

Social Media is the best source of marketing. One of the hard things about it (and one of the reasons it will be around for a long time) is that it is always changing and making updates. Instagram has been making some neat changes lately.

1. Galleries- Instagram will now allow someone to upload galleries of different pictures. There has been some great utilization of this already by different brands. One of which was the NFL who honored DeMarcus Ware’s retirement by showing all the quarterbacks he sacked in his career, with icons on several different screens of the gallery. One of the questions will be is how is user engagement in the galleries compared to posting mulitple pictures or s grid layout.
2. Heart-ing Comments- I am super thankful for this one! This makes interacting with the community much faster. For a while, Instagram did not have the equivalent of the like button for comments, which meant writing a comment to thank people for interacting.
3. Story update: Font color- If you press on the color bar when selecting colors for your fonts, it will bring up a color picking screen. This is great if your company has brand colors that are super important to its marketing.
   
4. Story update: Sticker Change- Most people don’t know that if you tap on a sticker you change it to another variation of the same principle. This works really well in the weather and location stickers.
   
5. Story update: Live Live has recently rolled out to all users. Live on Instagram differs from live on Facebook in one key way: Instagram live is there and then it is gone. So if you are going to use live, be sure to have some lead up content to build an audience!
6. Saved Things- Now you can save things from your feed to a special saved item menu. This is great for saving inspiration. I use to save good examples of graphic design so I can have a central deposit for inspiration. 
7. Links in Stories: This is only for verified accounts right now but it allows for call to actions within a story with swipe up. I hope we get these soon!
   

The second phase is marketing your business is to get people to Like you and this is not just a Facebook Like. This is helping someone see that you are an alright person and someone they wouldn’t mind doing business with. Some of these steps will vary based on how large your business is or what your product is. But here are some general thoughts on getting people to like your business.

The biggest part of this is personal relationships. Most of the time, people buy from people. This means that getting to know people is very important to this strategy. How do you get to know people? It is more than just handing out business cards at a networking event. It’s then having lunch with someone and talking about more than just business. There may be programs in your area like Leadership Jackson in mine that will help you build relationships with a group of varied people. The key to relationships like this is that they run deeper than just business help.

Another element is corporate community giving of either time or money. When your company donates time or money to a cause you have the opportunity to build some affection from the community. If your company is known as one that gives more than its share, people will be more likely to choose you to do business with over a similar competitor. This is amplified by people who care a lot about certain causes, the biggest fans of that cause will soon become your biggest fans if you align the cause properly with your business.

The third way and something social media is allowing to do is associating your brand with good feelings. We have seen this becoming more popular with the advent of social media. Big charity events or even just doing cool things for fans is a great way for people to like you. An example comes to mind with a cellular carrier. These feelings can range from just funny or to a deep emotional joy.

These are a few ideas on getting people to like your company. We will look next time on getting people to trust your company.

 

 

 

One of the most basic concepts of marketing is getting people to know, like, and trust you. Over the next few weeks we will be looking at each step in this process.

Know.

To get people to know you, you have to make people aware of you. This looks wildly different depending on what your business sells. If you are a business to business company you have the advantage of having a very narrow group of people to speak to. If you are a business to consumer brand you have the challenge of having a much larger customer base to speak to.

If you are an online business, you have a huge population to reach out too, but you get the advantage of being able to use extremely trackable marketing. If you are a local business you have to a put a lot more legwork in.

Here are some questions to ask yourself when working on the Know portion:

1. Who is my audience? Work through narrowing your group down to as small of a group of potential customers as possible. This will allow you to focus your time and money on that smaller group of people. Why talk to everyone when you need to talk to males 25-35 in 20 miles of your location.
2. What is the most affordable way to communicate with that target audience? I default to social media. But for my business, which is business to business, it is largely through word of mouth. So the follow-up question is, who do you build word of mouth? Become valuable to people. This will quickly lead you through becoming liked and trusted.
3. How many times do you need to reach these people to make them familiar with your name? Old school marketers have suggests 7 times. This can be completed through very technical means of retargeting to make sure that your digital visitors have an opportunity to remember you! If you need to have boots on the ground commit to going to a set of networking events for a long period of time. This will help you get known.

Getting know is probably the most expensive portion of this process. Loading people into the funnel is intensive but you can’t create new business without loading the funnel. Next week we will look at getting people to “like” you!

I was asked the other day about what are some of my favorite Gmail things for business. Many of these are enabled in the Labs settings of Gmail. Here is a list:

1. Undo Send: Here there even been a better email tool? Probably two times a day, I need to hit “undo send” at the top of my Gmail. This feature from Labs allows me to prevent an email from sending for a few seconds after I hit send. This helps calm my nerves when sending an important email or quickly fix something that flashes through my brain as I hit send.
2. Hubspot Email Tracker: This is not a Google Product, but HubSpot has a great sales tool that acts like a modern read receipt. I use this when I am sending important email or email to people who I am not sure that open them. This ends up giving you date, time, frequency, and even location of the opening of the emails. Check it out here.  PROTIP: Only send these tracked email to one person at a time or the tracking gets difficult to interpret.
3. Send Later: This is another product from a third party. Boomerang allows me to schedule emails to go, which I tend to use a few times a week. Maybe its reminders for a meeting or an email I type out super late in the evening or on the weekend and I want to be recieved in normal business hours. I occasionly even use it for emails that I don’t want ot deal with the consequences of at the time but am reminded to write it.
4. Canned Responses: These allow me to generate form emails and load them with two clicks. I use this for requests to come on my podcast or if I am doing some sort of repetitve emailing. It takes a few times to get use to the method of how it works so practice with it first.
5. Mark as Read Button: I am a digital horder, so I do not usually delete emails. But I love the mark as read button because it allows me to group remove email from my inbox. My inbox also acts as a to do list in someways to this helps keep it clean.
6. Unread message icon: Many times I have two many tabs open in my browser and I am unable to see the new email count in the page description. This feature ads a small counter to the Gmail Icon in the browser. Helps me stay on top of things!
   
7. Filters and Labels: I use these for various things but one particular use is in client work. I use several tools to generate leads for my customers that I want to keep a record of but I do not want to read them. So I am cc’ed on all the emails coming in from those sources. I use filters and labels to mark them as read and move them to a specific inbox. This saves me lots of time!
8. Grammarly: This is another third party program that helps me with spelling and even grammar. They have a free service and a paid version. I am currently on the free version but I am super impressed with its ability to improve my writing!

What are some of your favorite Gmail hacks?

My social media win at the Super Bowl this year was an ad that appeared to be live! Not, snickers, it didn’t really deliver as much as I was hoping for but A for effort.

Tide, of all brands came up with the most brilliant play on Super Bowl Sunday! Tide had an intricate plan that involved a ridiculous amount of conspiracy between the production company, fox, and the NFL.

The team created a fake set and pretend to have Terry and Curt talking as if Fox had accidently cut to them during the game. During this shot, Terry had a giant stain on his shirt. They did this so it blended just right with the actual production so people thought Terry was just doing a segment with a stain on his shirt. Which is completely believable with Terry Bradshaw.

They followed the ‘accidental’ setup with a full commercial above capitalizing on it.

Here is a great breakdown by AdAge.

What a genius plan and execution!