You’re Doing Social Media WRONG | Transform Your Online Presence

Alright, what's up, Believe Nation? I have a special little video for you guys today. I got asked to do an interview with Dun Bradstreet for their Small Business Saturday series. If you don't know Dun Bradstreet, they have some of the leading information on companies around the world. You want to look up information about a business, they're one of the places to go to. If you need credit reports and a whole bunch of data on companies, that's a great place to check out. So they have a Small Business Saturday series and sent me 9 questions about growing your business in 2017. And so I thought, hey, let's make it a video. You guys can benefit from it as well, and hopefully we get some good answers for you today. So kicking off, number 1: What are some of the benefits of being small that a business owner can leverage to beat out the big guys? I think the big thing about being small is that you're nimble, that you're flexible. That you can make changes really quickly. I deal with a lot of big companies as my clients, and the number of people that have to touch a decision is crazy. And often they'll have me, for example, do a landing page to promote something we're doing because they just can't get it done in time because they have to deal with tons of different people, get approvals at all sorts of different levels, and they just can't get it out. And so they look to small companies as being nimble and flexible and be able to make rapid changes. If you want to do something, you just go and do it. You don't need permission from anybody. The other thing I think that a strategy— this is more benefits, but I think more on the strategy that entrepreneurs should use to beat up the big guys is use your story. Share your passion. Let us see why this is so important to you. Entrepreneurs who founded a business, the most successful ones do it because they have a deep core passion for what they're doing. They're not just trying to make money. They're trying to help people, they're trying to make the world better in some small or big way. And that passion is something that you don't feel from big companies. You can't go to a big corporate company and feel like you mean something to them as a customer, right? You feel like you're just another number. And so entrepreneurs need to go all in on their story. I want to see your picture on your website, I want to know why you started this business, I want to know how much it means to you, because I would much rather buy from somebody that I feel connected to because I know their story than some big company. And I think what happens is, in an effort to look professional, a lot of entrepreneurs try to model the big guys and have boring corporate websites, and you're always going to lose at that game because if I don't know who you are, I'm going to either just compare on price, and that's the last place that you want to compete on as an entrepreneur, uh, and then otherwise I'm gonna go by who I know. If you're the same price as somebody else, as a big company that I know is trusted and respected and you're some new startup and I don't know anything about you, I'm going to go with the big company because it's safer. But if I feel your passion, understand your story, and feel like if I go with you, I'm going to get really good service and someone who actually cares about me as a human being and wants to see me be successful, that's the person I want to sign up with. So stop being so boring and start leveraging one of your greatest skills, which is your story. So everybody, I would love to see a video of everybody. But I know that's not in everybody's skill set, but at the very, very least, your picture on your About page, your story in an emotional way, something that you really get excited by reading, not a boring resume, but something that gets you fired up that when you read it, it's like, "Yeah, that's why I started this business. That's why it means so much to me." Do that and you'll start to win customers. That's how you beat the big guys. I'm fired up. It's only one question in. All right, number 2, is there a common place where you see many small business owners go wrong when they start to market online? Yes, I think, a lot of entrepreneurs do a lot of online marketing in a really mediocre way, meaning you start a business, you're making shoes, you're teaching dance classes, you're fixing computers, whatever it is that you're doing, and you have to know that business inside out. And now people are saying, hey, you need to get on YouTube, we need to be on Facebook, you need to be on Twitter and Instagram and Snapchat, you got to be in all these places. And so you go out and you get the domains and you get the accounts and then you start posting, but it's all crap. The stuff you post sucks. The stuff you post, you would never want to share with anybody. And so you're just pumping out garbage. You're pumping out promotional coupons and, you know, just spam is what you're doing. And then you wonder, why am I not getting any traction? Why am I not getting any followers? Well, because your stuff sucks. It just sucks. And what you need to do is post stuff that you would be really proud of. I would pick the the one social media network where your audience is and that maps to your skill set. So if you love doing video and you know your audience is watching YouTube, then go all in on YouTube. If you hate doing video, then get away from YouTube. Don't worry about that. If you love writing, then go on Twitter, right? Wherever it is that matches your skill set, what you love to do and where your audience is, that's where you want to play and focus on that one or those two platforms and get really good at it and post meaningful stuff. Post up the people want to share and not just try to be everywhere because you also have a business to run. I mean, for me, social media has to prove an ROI. If you're not getting results from it, stop doing it. Like any other marketing, if you're not getting results, stop doing it. But getting results doesn't mean, oh, you know, I post something up and, and people apply my coupon and I immediately get sales, right? There has to be a conversation, uh, and, and a good way to start at least for me, how I started all of them was I would see if people were— my audience was there, like if people were mentioning my name, if people were talking about me, if I saw people who I was trying to reach really active there, that's where I would go. And I would start with one thing and then another thing and just be an active listener to start, especially on platforms like Twitter. You know, are people talking about your brand, good or bad? You want to at least be a part of the conversation, you want to at least know what's going on. And so I think too many entrepreneurs just jump in, get all the handles, start posting crap, and get no results. And you don't have time to do that. Like, if you're a busy entrepreneur, you're working a lot of hours every week, and you have to run your business, by the way, not just live on social media all the time. And so I think that's a big mistake that they make, and then maybe they just abandon it. Like, you know what, this is stupid, it's not working. It could be the single greatest opportunity to help you market and promote your business, But just like your product and service, if you put out a crappy product and crappy service, nobody's going to buy it, right? If you put out crappy social media posts, nobody's going to engage with it. Nobody's going to share it. So put stuff out that you would want to see, that you would want to engage with, that if you saw it come up, you would send it to somebody else, you would comment on it. That's the level. Create social media posts that you want to show to your grandkids. They say, "Look what I made." Put the same amount of love that you put into creating an amazing product into the content that you're posting out. If you do that, then you'll start having some success. I like these questions. Number 3, we all know those emails or websites that look like spam, but what are some strategies you've seen business owners do to demonstrate their credibility? So, you know, I think if you're cold emailing people, then you are spamming, even if you look credible. If I don't know who you are and you're sending me a promotional email, that's spam. That's not what you want to be doing. In terms of a website, there's a couple of things that you can do. One, I would lead with your story, right? I want to know what you do and why you're so passionate about it. You can showcase your customers and your testimonials that you have. If you've won any awards that you can put up, if you've been in any media, instantly any of those things signal credibility, right? Testimonials with faces and real names of people, not you know, A. Smith, and it's like an avatar of somebody. A real face, a real name. Ideally, you could— if they're from a business, you can say what company they're from so I can see that that's a real live human being who loves what you're doing. Awards you've won, media you've been in, how long you've been in business, and your company story. And a half-decent looking professional website. Like, it doesn't cost a lot of money to get a website up these days, and so you don't want something that you know, you just kind of threw together. If you're, if you're a real business and you're starting to make some money, then put a little bit of effort into having a good-looking website. And those things combined, it won't come off as looking like spam. Like, make something that you'd be proud of. You look at your website and say, I'm really proud of that. You would not be proud of spam, right? You would not put out, you know, if I have this water bottle, I wouldn't want to sell a bottle that's leaky. Right? I wouldn't feel proud of that as an entrepreneur, as a manufacturer. I don't want to put out a bottle that's leaking water, right? So don't put out a website that's leaking. Don't put out a crappy product. Put out something that— it doesn't have to be the world's greatest website. If you sell water bottles, nobody expecting you to have an amazing, amazing over-the-top website. If you're a graphic designer, then maybe, right? It has to look good. But if you're selling water bottles, it doesn't matter, but it needs to be at least has some standards, right? The same standards that you apply to your product, you apply to your website, you apply to your social media posts, you apply to everything that you do. Don't just hire some company and expect them to deal with it and then you don't have to worry about it for the rest of your life, right? The same standards that you apply to your product has to apply to everything in your business. Getting thirsty. Okay, number 4. With so many places for business owners to turn for online advice, how do you recommend they cut through the noise in order to make an impact? So I would start with thinking about how you best learn. I learn best through visuals. I like seeing stuff. That's why I started on YouTube. That's why I consume YouTube videos. If I look at where am I learning most, it's going to be from videos. I would much rather see Steve Jobs or Howard Schultz talk in a video than read their biography or read an article about them. That's just me. I think most people are visual, but if you're not, then don't do that. Read the books, right? So it'd be first figuring out where is it that you learn best. If it's video, you're going on YouTube. If it's reading, it's looking at article websites, news websites, biographies, which are, you know, books for people to read. It could be ebooks. If you like hearing stuff, then you get audio ebooks, you get podcasts. Again, you play to your strengths. Well, then I would talk to people that I know and respect to see where they're consuming information, and I would also just try out a bunch of stuff. Like, I consume a lot of YouTube videos. It's part of my business too, but I consume a lot of YouTube videos, and I'll give a lot of channels a chance. I'll give a lot of channels a minute and You know, somebody's the new business guru, I'll go check them out for a video, a minute, 5 minutes, see if I'm hooked, see if I like their style, see if I'm learning anything, see if it made me think. Uh, you don't have to finish a book, you don't have to finish a video, you don't have to finish a podcast. If you're not learning, get out, right? Go up, go out and learn. If like you want to listen to podcasts, you want to look at YouTube channels, okay, great. Go, go find a list of the top 50 video channels, YouTube channels for entrepreneurs or for your industry. Go watch one video from each of them and see if you're learning. And chances are you'll find there's like 4 or 5 at the top that you can actually learn something from and the rest are, are just garbage. And that's okay. Don't spend too much time on the garbage ones. That's fine. Subscribe to those 4 or 5, consume the content on a regular basis, whatever that is. I think For me, I have something daily that I'm looking at because I love the infusion. It's both the knowledge in terms of information I can apply, but also the motivation, the inspiration, the daily, you know, watching a video from someone that I respect makes me want to grind a little bit harder. So that's my advice. Find the medium that best fits you and then look up which are the best ones, give all of them a chance, and then be willing to Ditch the garbage ones super quick and stick with the ones that you like the most. Number 5, we're halfway through, we're kind of halfway through. When working with new business owners, what are some tools or steps you use to come up with a digital strategy unique for their business? I think the first thing starts with understanding who the entrepreneur is and what they're good at. You should be good at your business, right? If you're an entrepreneur, you need to be an expert at what you're making, right? I'm an Expert at making water bottles, right? You better be that expert or you're not going to have success in business. Business is about providing value. Value comes from having expertise in the market or industry. So then I'd be looking at how do I best capitalize that knowledge and distribute it online? So my preference as much as possible is to go video because I think it's the way the world's moving and I think it's, it's It's the way that a lot of people learn, and that's how I like to learn. So my preference, I would love to be able to sit the owner down and make the first video be why they started this business, why it's so important to them. And it may take a lot of takes. They may have nervousness and be afraid of the camera, and it may take a few takes to kind of work that out, and then you get to something really passionate because entrepreneurs are passionate people. Like, we started this business for a reason. We persevered through a ton of crap for a reason, and that gives us the strength and fortitude to keep going, and we're going to turn up when people get excited and ask us about our company. And so you'll always find that deep level of passion for the business, and I want to see that in a video as much as possible because it communicates, it breaks through the clutter, it breaks through the corporate, you know, everybody's playing safe veil, and makes me feel like, man, this person really gets that industry. And so that's what I would love to do as my first video. And then I would love to do a Q&A format. I would take all of the common questions that your customers would ask you. You know, what material goes into the bottle? How do you determine what size you make a bottle? You know, why, what colors do your bottles come in? Whatever the common questions are, and you know them, like they're happening daily, right? When the customer walks into your store or customer is calling you on the phone or or a customer is sending you emails, there's the same questions that repeat over and over and over and over and over again, and business owners are used to saying the same thing, right? You're used to, you're used to what the questions are and you're used to knowing what your answers are going to be, and so I would love to see some of those questions turned into video and release those as standalone videos for your YouTube channel, put them on your website, get a transcript. I would use Rev.com. You can get it transcribed for $1 a minute and then maybe you need to fix up some of the words because you don't speak the same way that you may want to write and put that up. That would be my favorite marketing strategy. But the person may just hate being in front of the camera, may just absolutely hate being on video and have no interest doing it and in fighting it. And I don't want to fight with a new entrepreneur. They have enough of a fight to get their business going. I don't need another fight with me. And so I would try to get that knowledge out in another way. I would have them write, take those same questions and write, write down an answer, 500-word answer. I would have them write out their story, why they started, why they're passionate about it. If they refuse to write, then I would try to interview them. I would, I would hire somebody to ask them the questions and then write it down and turn that into content. I'm basically trying to get the knowledge that's in here of every entrepreneur and put it out into content so so that I can build a relationship. I want the entrepreneur to build a relationship with their current customers as well as new people who are out there searching. So the people, when they find your website, they don't think it's some spammy place, but they see that this is a person who has a knowledge, knowledge, who really knows what they're talking about and who really cares about me and wants to help me solve my problem. If you can do that, then you're ahead of the curve. Then you have people calling you who are ready to buy and all you have to do is ask them how much and get the details and close the sale. It's a super warm lead as opposed to you trying to go out and cold call people. Number 6, can people expect to get results from purely organic campaigns these days, or is it pretty much required that they have an ad budget for a campaign? No, you could get tons of results from organic campaign. Most of the stuff I do is organic. My YouTube channel is pretty much all organic. And those are the ones that work best. But the key is you have to do something that people want to share. You're not getting organic traffic because your content sucks, right? Go back to question whatever it was before. You are not getting people paying attention to your content because your content is just a commercial and people don't want to share a commercial, but people do want to share knowledge. People do want to share information. And so I would take a lot of time to sit down and, and make a video or, or write out what you feel is really valuable, helpful information for people to make a decision to help them with something that they're going through in their life. Think about the customers that are coming to you. They have a problem, right? They have a problem in their life that they're trying to solve, and you could potentially be a part of the solution. So give them the knowledge to help them solve that problem. If they know you, like you, and trust you, they're going to buy from you. They're going to want to work with you. They're going to share information with you. They're going they want to pass your name on to other people as well. And so you don't need to have an ad budget, you don't need to have an ad spend at the start. An ad spend can potentially get you there faster depending on the medium that you're using. I think if you're going to do an ad spend, Facebook targeted posts is the best bang for your buck. You could say, listen, I want people who love Justin Bieber and are single moms and live in Missouri, you know, you could target those people with an ad where you— it's super difficult to do it through any other platform, but you do not need to have an ad budget. And, and for any of this stuff, I love testing it. I hate spending money till I'm making money. I want to test it. I'll invest my hustle, my heart, my grind, my effort to try to find a way to make it work. And if it stops, if it never works, then I drop it. And if it starts working, then I look at how can I use money to help me Expand it. But if anything, if I had $1,000 to spend on getting the word out, I would rather invest that money into creative, into the story, into hiring a videographer and shooting it, into writing out the content and putting a nice graphic on it, into making something that I'm really proud of. I would rather invest that $1,000 or $500 or whatever budget you have. I would put that into the content, into the creative, much faster than into advertising, and I would get a much better return. Number 7, online to offline, any examples of companies doing a great job driving traffic to their physical stores through online campaigns? Well, I'll do some shameless self-promotion here. I run Toronto Dance Salsa. I acquired, I was an investor earlier on, I acquired the business at the start of 2016, and this is a retail store We do salsa classes. We're the largest salsa dance school probably in North America, teaching 5,000 to 6,000 people every year how to salsa dance. And so it's a, it's in a mall where people can walk by, but the majority of the traffic comes through word of mouth. Any service-based business need to have positive word of mouth. And then through online, from Google searches, from, Facebook campaigns, from YouTube videos. And so in terms of our marketing strategy, in terms of our online— what was it? Driving traffic to their physical store through online campaigns. A couple of things that we do that are highly effective. One, at all of our events, we'll take pictures of people dancing and having a good time. We'll post it to Facebook and we'll tag them. We'll comment on them. It's a great picture. They're dancing. They're having fun. They get tagged. One, they feel like they're part of the family. They feel like, oh, look at this great moment that's been captured for me. And two, a lot of their friends see it. And especially for the repeat people, their friends ask them like, where— I see these pictures of you always having so much fun. Where— how are you doing this? What's going on? Where are you learning? And they talk about my business and then they end up signing up for a Level 1 class. Two, we write content. So we have a lot of content on our website about salsa dancing, about what to think about in the first class, about how to compare or what to prepare for when you're coming to your first class, about do I buy shoes, not buy shoes. All the stuff that I was preaching, we're actually executing on in the business. We make YouTube videos where my head of operations does a series called Ask Alex, his name is Alex, where people ask him questions and he'll make a video response to it, we'll turn that into an article, and I'll have a transcript that'll be on the website that builds rapport with people getting to know Alex as well as seeing content that ranks in search engines. Um, we pay a lot of attention to our reviews. People rank us in Google and say they had a great time, and that helps us with our online marketing the next time. Uh, we have a Facebook ad campaign where we look at people who are, uh, in the age demo that really fits well with our student range. And so that brings in new students. We have a newsletter campaign that goes out to current students or anybody who signed up for the newsletter every time we launch a new class that they can be notified that something new has come out. So all these things, all these things have helped us turn this physical store that's in a mall that we're probably in our mall, in the mall that we're in, we are the least dependent on foot traffic. Normally in a mall, it's like location, location, location. You care about how many people are walking by all the time, uh, and we do get some walk-ins, but I, I would say we are the least dependent business on foot traffic in our mall because we do so much online, because we build up so much momentum and kick up so much noise that people find us and they want to come to us as a destination. So we end up probably bringing in more people to the mall than the mall ever brings to us, which then also gives me some leverage. Gotta go talk to the mall, talk about my rent. Hey guys, I'm helping you out. Recently I've had two of my instructors go on Snapchat and they're posting daily updates, kind of behind the scenes of what happens at Toronto Dance Salsa and showing their lives. And that helps again humanize the story back to the first question about how do you compete against the big guys, share your story, right? It shows them behind the scenes and interacting and having fun. A lot of people might be stressed out about coming to a salsa class the first time, and so they're nervous and worried, and you know, what if they look bad? What if they don't get the first move? Are people going to laugh at them? And then you watch these Snapchat videos that we then turn into YouTube videos as well of people who are friendly and having fun and joking and laughing and not judging each other, and you say, you know what, I think I could fit in there, like it's not as scary as I think it would be, and so that helps drive business for us, and so online has been a massive success story for our company. Number 8, what tool or strategy do you think will make the biggest impact in 2017? I think video is gonna be more and more important. I'm on the fence in 2017, it depends on your demo, I would say either either the ones that are already popping with YouTube, Facebook, or Snapchat. Snapchat is still skewing younger, although it's starting to pick up steam and starting to get more mainstream, but more people are on YouTube and Facebook for most of the markets that people are covering. So for my audience, YouTube and Facebook is a much targeted, more targeted demo right now than Snapchat, but I wanna be prepared for Snapchat, right? Alex and Lily, two of my instructors, and Alex runs ops, they're on Snapchat every day. They're starting to build up momentum. We still get more juice out of Facebook now and probably for most of next year, but Snapchat is coming, right? They're getting more views on their stories every day. People are following them. People, you know, students in the class are commenting and feeling like they're following along Alex's journey and talk to him about it. So if you're younger, if you have a younger audience, definitely Snapchat number one. If you're getting, you know, if you're over 30, 40, 50, you're definitely going Facebook, YouTube. But I would have an eye on Snapchat for 2018 and having a strategy around it. The world's going video. If you are not the person to be on video, I would really question it and see if there's a way that you could do it. And still, really, if not, then find somebody in your organization who is passionate about it, who could be the face of your company, because it's going to be super important in 2017 and especially going forward. And last question, number 9: Who are some of the influencers who have made a large impact on how you think about online marketing? I think a lot of the people, you know, some of the people on my wall here have impacted how I think about the world, and then I apply that to online marketing a lot. Where, you know, Steve Jobs is about having a big impact. Howard Schultz is about doing it through values. You know, my parents taught me about believe. AP Giannini is the, was the believe banker, and Kanye West, you can't see him really there, is about doing it now. No time to wait. Don't wait till you're, you know, you retire to get going. Start doing it right now. So a lot of their thinking, and all the other entrepreneurs that I profile and look up to, they influence my thinking, and then I just take a lot of that knowledge and apply it to marketing and specifically online marketing. So, you know, Howard Schultz is all about leading through values. Great. How do I market through values, right? And then how do I online market using my values? And so I think there's a lot to learn from any, any famous entrepreneur that you can then apply to your online marketing. I think If the question is about the tactics, the specific execution, that, that can change year to year. Like Steve Jobs, you know, probably didn't know a lot about Snapchat, but you can learn from him on how to have success with Snapchat. The lessons about having a big impact and doing something important, doing meaningful work, you can apply into your Snapchat, right? Where Every snap needs to be important. Every snap needs to be something that you're proud of. Every snap needs to be something that, you know, somebody sees it, they're going to feel impacted by, right? So you can apply his mindset methodology without having— without him having done Snapchat and whatever the next thing is, MooChat, that comes out in 2020, you can still apply a lot of the same things. If you're talking just about tactics, how to actually go and execute in that platform, probably Gary Vaynerchuk's had the single biggest impact. For me, on— I don't really do a lot of Snapchat. Maybe Facebook, probably Gary on Facebook has had the biggest impact there. For YouTube, probably Tim Schmoyer has helped me a lot with my YouTube channel, helped me grow to almost half a million subscribers on YouTube and 5 million views a month on YouTube. So Tim has been a great role model for me there. That's probably my two. Those would be my two. I don't know that I've looked up to anybody for advice on Twitter or LinkedIn or the website. So yeah, so Gary, Gary on, on Facebook and a little bit of Snapchat for my team, and Tim Schmoyer for YouTube. I recommend going to check them out. If I had to throw a third person in there, I'd probably say Lewis Howes runs the School of Greatness podcast, which has very little to do with marketing, but he's interviewing people who've had a lot of success in their respective fields and their mindset and way of thinking and the lessons that they preach, you can apply to marketing, you can apply to online marketing, you can apply to your business. It kind of changes and shapes your mindset as a human being, and so you can bring a lot of that to your business in a lot of different ways. So that's it. Thank you guys for the fun. Those are my 9 strategies to grow your business in 2017. Hopefully you enjoyed it. Thank you, Dun Bradstreet, for the opportunity. I'd recommend going to check them out if you're looking up information on businesses and need some credit scores or information on private companies, I go check them out. I've used them in the past before. I'd love to know what you guys think. Those of you watching this video, let me know, what was your favorite strategy out of the 9? Leave it down in the comments below. Do you have another— do you want to add a 10th? I did 9. Do you want to add a 10th strategy to grow your business in 2017? I'd love to know what your single biggest advice for 2017 entrepreneurs would be? Leave it down in the comments below. I'm going to join in the discussion. Thank you guys again for watching. I believe in you. I hope you continue to believe in yourself and whatever your one word is. Much love. I'll see you soon.