Top Of Mind Marketing Webinar to EO Accelerators.

Welcome to the Top of Mind Marketing webinar given by Ajax Union. Ajax Union is a digital marketing agency. To visit— to find out more about Ajax Union, go to www.ajaxunion.com. You can connect with us on social media as well. And if you're calling into the webinar and you want to speak to one of our consultants, you could always call 1-800-594-0444. So today's presentation is called Top of Mind Marketing: How to Generate More Sales from Your Target Market. And my name is Joe Apfelbaum. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Ajax Union. I love connecting with people on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, so feel free to connect with me. And I love giving presentations. I recently gave one at the EO Accelerators Learning Sales and Marketing Day, and what I realized is that I ran out of time really quickly. And there were a lot more content that I wanted to share with all of you, so I decided to follow up with a webinar that would help give you guys more of the meat and potatoes that you were looking for. I know you got some information out of the face-to-face presentation and you wanted some more strategies. So today we're going to talk about why digital. Some of you maybe have not done digital in the past or have done digital and you're not sure why digital is so important, so I'm going to talk a little bit about some trends. I'm going to talk about achieving top-of-mind awareness and return on investment from the 10 strategies, and we're going to talk about measuring success. We're going to do a recap. We're going to take questions, and I want all of you to engage. So the most important thing that you could do is communicate with me. Tell me what you think. Tell me what's on your mind. Tell me what questions that you have. When I'm talking about things, make sure to communicate with me so that I can then communicate back with you, and that's how we're going to learn. Okay, really excited about this. Let's get started. So digital marketing— why digital? Before digital marketing was around, people were always marketing. People always had a way to communicate the value of their products and services, whether it was through the newspaper or whether it was through calling or through having signs up in places. And all those things still work. Anytime that you get in front of somebody, it works. But when you have technology that gives you information about what's working and what's not working, you can then customize your budget to help you be able to get the most effective use of your time and your effort, your energy and your money. So digital marketing is much more trackable than— I recently had a conversation with a direct mail company. And he was telling me that every time he sends 2,000 postcards out, he gets 3 or 4 customers. Typically, he gets a 1-to-1 return on investment, which means that if he spends $2,000, he gets $2,000 in new business. And for him, that was okay. And I said, do you know what aspects of your campaign worked and what aspects didn't? He said, no, I have to spend the full $2,000 in order to figure out if it works or not. So I said, well, that's very interesting because with digital marketing, you can know exactly what part of your campaign is working and then when you're doing it the second month, you can decide to only spend it on that part of your campaign. So although postcards still work and it's effective, it's not as effective as digital marketing so it's very powerful. In addition, the tracking capabilities are amazing. In addition, the inbound versus outbound, active versus reactive, when somebody is looking for something online, they are actively looking for it. Versus when you're just flashing in front of them when they're walking down the street and they look at a billboard, they're not necessarily looking for that. They're not necessarily looking to buy that thing that you have. It's more of a branding, and even if it's lead gen, you're not necessarily targeting them based— maybe based on who they are, but not necessarily based on what they want and if they're ready to buy. Using digital marketing, you can target people based on their state of mind, based on their psychographic. So, and it's also, you can make it much more relevant using technology and you know that your competition is doing it, so you want to make sure that you are on top of your game. Just so you can get a scope of how big digital marketing is, Google helped provide more than $111 billion of economic activity for businesses, website publishers, and nonprofits last year. If you go to google.com/economicimpact, you will be able to see this based on state and city and So it's it's a powerful way to really understand how much economic activity is happening. Definitely go check that out. People that are are online, they start even if people are buying stuff offline. Like I I walked into Best Buy this weekend and I wanted to get the Moto 360. For those of you that don't know what that is, the Moto 360 is an Android Wear watch that connects through. Bluetooth to your phone and you can answer phone calls through it. It has a nice round face versus the ones that don't have a round face and it's kind of like Google Glass for your wrist. It's pretty amazing. I saw somebody using it here in our office and I really wanted to buy it, so I walked into Best Buy. They didn't have it, but I first did tons of research online and 44% of online shoppers begin using the search engine. So when somebody, before they're going to buy something, whether it's a photography class or whether they're going to get junk removal or whatever else they're going to do, they are going to first research online and hopefully they'll find your business because you are putting yourself out there. And companies with 30 or more landing pages generate 7 times more leads than those with fewer than 10, and that comes directly from HubSpot. So you really want to make sure that you're customizing the experience online based on what people are looking for, and that will help you be able to get more. Event-triggered marketing can potentially save 80% of your direct mail budget. So if you are sending out mail, if you're putting postcards out there, you could send— you can communicate with people based on what they're doing, based on what they're doing and when they're doing it, and that would significantly save a significant amount of money to you. People spend their— at least a quarter of their day on social media sites. Gary Vaynerchuk, a big thought leader in internet marketing, in marketing in general, but specifically in internet marketing, he calls his smartphone an extension of himself. So think about that. Your social media is an extension of who you are. So essentially it's one with you. A lot of people are running away from it because a lot of people frankly are running away from themselves. If you're comfortable with who you are, you're comfortable with how people think about you, you'll be comfortable with social media and what you post online as well because you're okay with people knowing who you are. So we're going to talk about 10 strategies and hopefully you'll be able to get what you need to get out of this. So the first thing you want to do is you want to make sure you know who you're targeting. So for those of you that are looking to make a plan and trying to figure out whether you're trying to figure out the least expensive or the easiest way to do this, The first thing you want to do is plan. If you don't have a clear marketing goal, if you're not looking for somebody specifically, then— and you're trying to get everybody and anybody, it's going to be very difficult for you to achieve success and to measure that success. You'll rely on luck, and a lot of people live that way, and it's okay. I just had a breakfast with another CEO. We were talking, and he was telling me he's very comfortable relying on luck. That's the way he chooses to live his life. I told him that's okay. I'm not— I don't want to live that way, but it's okay that you want to live that way. And it's interesting that, you know, I believe it's a cop-out strategy. I believe that because you don't want to work hard to figure out what you want and then go and achieve that, you decide that I'm just going to rely on luck. So it's okay to rely on luck because that's what most people do. But if you want to be successful, you need to really think about what you want to get and then go and get it. So who are you targeting? Who are those people? What geographic area? If you're a design company, and you're targeting people in a specific geographic area because you got to visit them face to face. What's that geographic area they'd rather be doing business? If you're a junk lugging company and you're targeting a specific area, that's great. What about a demographic? What type of people are you targeting? What are their— what's their psychographic? What's their mentality? How do they think? Are they cheap? Are they— do they want the luxury? Do they— are they looking to do it quick? Or do they want reliability? Do they want stability? So think about who your customers are and try to position yourself in a way that you know who you're targeting. At the end of the day, you're going to produce a certain type of result. So, you want to know what are the deliverables and what are the results. And once you can really understand that, so for example, with search engine optimization, you're going to have somebody that you're targeting, you're going to have certain deliverables that you need and certain results and why you want that. You really want to think about why you want those results. Like, why do you want to be number 1 on Google? If you want to be number 1 on Google, If you're targeting people that are looking to rebrand and you want to be number 1 on Google and for a particular keyword, you want to really think about why you want to be number 1 on that. Is it to feel good or is it because you're going to get leads? And if it's to get leads, maybe you want to test it out with an AdWords strategy before to see if that word will actually get you leads because I've been number 1 on Google for many words that have not produced any leads for me. So, we're going to talk about specific strategies today that will help you be more successful. For those of you that just joined, we got a couple more people that joined, there's a way for you to engage with me and it's very important for you to communicate with me whenever you have a comment, a question, a concern. Go into the box, top right corner of your screen, click on the little red arrow and give me a comment. I know 4 of you have already commented and spoken to me and communicated with me. If you have nothing to say, say hello. Let me know you're alive. Let me know that your pulse is is beating because I can't see you when I'm in front of you. I can look at you and see that you're alive. I can tell if you're in the back of the room schluffing or you're on your phone updating your Facebook. But over here, I can only see whether you're looking at the screen or not looking at the screen. So wake up and let's let's engage together. Okay. So the first thing we're going to talk about is content. Then we're going to talk about SEO, SEM. We're going to talk about social, email, PR. We're going to go through these strategies quickly, so pay attention. Every person that's listening to this webinar right now is an expert in something. The reason why you are in business today is because you have a certain skill. You are an expert in what you do. Because you are an expert in what you do, that means you know how to do what you do better than your customers know how to do it, otherwise they would never hire you. And the reason you are in business is because you are an expert, people are looking for that expertise. You are spending hours and hours doing what you do. You need to produce content for those people to consume. You need to create content that will be around for a while, that has long-term value to your business and that will allow other people to discover you and it will also allow you to use that content to stay Stay top of mind with your clients. I recently wrote an article, What is the ROI of Social Media? A lot of people ask me that. What is the ROI of social media? And I wrote an article just so that I can constantly— whenever anybody asks me that question, I can share that article with them and I could show them the article and say— and that's an article that I will keep updating based on the new findings that I have. Somebody asked me, What is the ROI of SEO? There's a report that I have that I could show. that I could show you. If you— somebody wrote, Joe, will you make these slides available to the group? Absolutely. And somebody wrote— and yes, you don't have to copy all the slides. I'll give you the whole thing. I'll put it on SlideShare and send you a link. I always hear about content. Do you have examples besides articles? Yes, absolutely. And I'm going to give some of those examples. So, you know, some of you might not consider yourself a writer or writers in general. But in reality, if you're in business, you're a communicator. And if you're a communicator, chances are you know how to write. You may not have the grammatical skills, but in reality, if you send out email, you know how to write. So when somebody asks you a question, you can write— it might not look the fanciest, and you can pay a writer to make it fancy if you have that desire, but in reality, you have the answer to the questions that your customers are asking. So even if it means just making a list of all the questions that your customers ask you and having answers for all of them or having your opinion on all of them, that is powerful content. And content is not just articles. Content is video. Content is audio. Content is images. Content is anything that's out there. If you think about Google, Google is not a search engine. Of course it's a search engine, but Google's goal is not to be a search engine. Google's goal is to provide people with information that they're looking for when they're looking for that information. So think about that for a minute. What does information mean? Is information an article? Yes. Is information a mathematical equation? Yes. Is information weather? Yes. Is information an image of a cat doing something crazy? Yes, that's information. That might be information that'll waste your time, or it might be entertaining. It depends on who you are. It depends if you like cats or not. But in reality, you have to realize that whatever your customers are looking for, whatever value you can provide for your customers, that will allow people to find you, discover you, and hopefully drive more business. But the foundation of all your other marketing efforts is going to be great content, great social posts, landing pages, organic search, all that's going to revolve around the content. That's why content is king. That's why content is so important. So really think about what your content is and think about what you're going to give people. What is going to be that meat? Let's talk about SEO. Search engine optimization is powerful, and the reason why people like it so much is obviously because it's free. You know, I want to be number one. I was talking to a business owner on Friday, an entrepreneur, has a tiny little business, and they told me— he told me that He wants to take it to the next level. What can he do to take it to the next level? And I said, okay, you could first tell me what the next level means. And he said, the next level is getting unlimited clicks from Google. How do you get that? And I said, what are you talking about? What is unlimited clicks? That's so vague. He's like, I just want to be number one. Number one for what? And he was just like talking with these vague terms and I confronted him a few times and he just— he's like, you know, in reality, I don't really know what I want. And the reason why people want SEO is because maybe they don't know what it is. SEO is a lot of work and it does give you a return on investment over time and it does give you the ability to be more trustworthy with searchers but it's a significant amount of work and if it— at the end of the day, if you're not looking for branding, if you're looking to generate leads, There are other strategies that you can do in conjunction with SEO to help you be able to achieve what you are looking for because in reality, you have to ask yourself, am I doing SEO so that I can feel good about it or am I doing SEO because I know I am going to get results out of it? The only thing that you will be able to know that you can get results out of is something that you can control and SEO you can't really control. So SEO is more about knowing what you want to accomplish before you accomplish it and that's where paid search comes in. Because with paid search, and a lot of people ask me, is PPC and SEO kind of the same thing? Does it rely on each other? The only thing that PPC and SEO have in common is that they are both on the search engine. If you do a search on Google, and I will quickly do a search on Google for a keyword, go ahead and take a moment, all of you that are listening right now and you are actually engaged, take a moment and tell me what keyword you want to be number 1 for. Go in there and put it into the box. I'll take a moment to do that. Any keyword that you want to be number one for. Let's keep it clean, people. Any keyword that's related to your business that you want to be number one for, and I'm going to search that keyword in real. Okay, somebody wrote donation. Okay, make a donation. Look at that donation. There's car donation, vehicle donation. Donation pickup, there's a lot of, you know, it's a very, very general keyword and what does Google show for the word donation? Google shows a bunch of ads, you know, people that have big budgets that just want to pick on people that are just— no one ever searches for just the word donation but, you know, take a look at here. Google shows what a donation means because this is information. So, Google is trying to give you, obviously make money, right? And they're also trying to give you information that you need, information that you need, that you're looking for. So a donation is a gift given by physical or legal people. OK, so then there's the Wikipedia. Then Google is giving you news because typically people that are just searching one word, they're not sure what they want. Google is going to give you all different types of things. Then a lot of people are looking to donate clothing, obviously, because based on Google's algorithm, they know when somebody searches a keyword like donation, they want to donate goods or clothing. Or they want to know where to drop stuff off or they want to volunteer their time and so on. Then Google shows you some images. So all this is content, all this is information that Google is giving people because Google is not really sure. Now as you get, as you get and I have 100 results coming up here because that's what I do. I set my settings to show 100 results but as you get deeper and deeper and this is 80 million results, as you get deeper and deeper into Google you'll realize that Google gets more and more specific. So let's take a look at furniture donation NYC. Okay, excellent. Thank you, Zach. Furniture donation. See, Google is already suggesting based on what people are searching. So this is a great way for you to pick up keywords and figure out what keywords people are actually looking for because Google is suggesting all these things. Okay, so furniture donation NYC. Boom. Okay, so Junk Luggers comes up number 1. Then there's the local listing here, local listing here, donate old furniture, then there's all these other people advertising on the side over here and then what comes up over here? You see junk luggers comes here and then you have these other keywords here around that. So you see, if you want to rank number 1 for this keyword, what do you need to do? First of all, you need to figure out do you want to rank number 1 for this keyword? Let me look at another keyword here. IT consulting NYC. Let's look at that. IT consulting NYC. Okay, excellent. So IT consulting NYC, you have a bunch of people advertising and then Google shows you some local results. It shows you Marathon Consulting and they are an authority for this word because as you can see, they have sitelinks. You see they have sitelinks under here? That means that they're an authority for this. That means that they have the power. They have IT consulting NYC They have it on their website, they have many links linking to it, they have it in their domain and so on. You can see these other companies that are ranking under them. So just because this company right here is number 1, it doesn't mean that they're getting more results than these people here. It doesn't mean that they're getting more results than these people here. It doesn't mean they're getting more results. The only way to know what type of results you get is to test and you can't really test with SEO because once you work really hard and spend 3 years ranking for this keyword, you won't know if that keyword is going to produce results for you. Let's say, for example, Steph wants to rank for social media agency. So social media agency. Okay, so there's a couple social media agencies in NYC, laundry service, pricing, jobs. So when someone's searching social media agency, they're thinking a lot of things. They could be thinking they want a job. They could be thinking they're looking for 24 Laundry Service, which is a social media agency, and obviously they are an authority for that keyword because they have, remember, the sitelinks. You see, they're really targeting that keyword like crazy because they decided that they— it's really important to them and they have it right in their website. We Are Social, here are the competitors of that big fuel company, there's news about it and so on. So if you want to rank for this, there's opportunities to rank in ads, there's opportunities to rank in organic, there's opportunities to rank in the news, there's opportunities to rank in articles and so on. So you can rank by creating content around this and distributing it. But when someone's searching social media agency, do they necessarily want— do all the people that search want to use a social media agency? Do some people want jobs? Are some people researching? Are some people looking for bids? Is it a small business looking for it? So the way that you customize your approach here, free social media trial, no contracts, are those the types of customers that you want? Zero down social. So if you put up an ad, let me see what comes up over here. So this is obviously targeting free Facebook trial, zero setup fees. They're obviously targeting small businesses and so on. So that might not be the type of customers that you're looking for, but if they are the type of customers that you're looking for and this works and that keyword is important to you, then maybe, then maybe you want to take an ad out to see the effectiveness of that word and if you see you got a really good lead from it or several good leads, then you start working on your SEO. So that's why I'm talking about it over here. Paid search is instant, there's no minimum, allows you to target a very specific audience and it drives traffic to your site. I highly recommend before you go out and do an SEO campaign and decide what keywords you should target and organic is very important but you should definitely try out a small paid campaign to see if those words make sense makes sense to you. Somebody wrote, does Google know where I am? Yes, Google knows where I am. So check this out. Because based on where you are, they're going to give you different results. So what is my IP? Look at that. So Google knows what my public IP address is. And based on my public IP— and now I'm showing you all my public IP, which I don't care because you can probably see anyway. But if you type in what is my IP, Google will tell you this IP basically has your caller ID on it. If you have a company name, it basically says this IP is Ajax Union and it gives you the address and all the information. I can actually see that when people come to my website. I have this app that allows me to see that information, but the bottom line is Google wants to try to be as specific as possible. So when you are searching something like coffee shop or something, right, you don't want a coffee shop in Malaysia, you want a coffee shop locally. Google is actually going to show you coffee shops right around where I am. You see, in Brooklyn, there are coffee shops right around where I am that it's showing me. It's showing me images, showing me news and all that stuff around my personal location. So absolutely, Google is trying to customize that. Let me see what else people wrote over here. Let me catch up with you. Somebody wrote award-winning email design firm. Okay, awesome. So you want to know that if someone is searching award-winning, award-winning email design firm. I don't think anyone ever typed that into Google, but you could probably rank number 1 on Google for a word that nobody ever typed in. How do you know no one even has content for that? You can quote the words together and you could see no results found for award-winning email design firm. So if you want to pat yourself on the back and you want to feel good about ranking for a word that doesn't exist in the word, in the world that Google knows of, that's great, you can do that. And I used to do, when I used to do SEO exclusively 10 years ago, that's what typically I would do. I would say, okay, what's the opportunity to rank for a word? You just want to rank? Okay, great, I'll make you rank. Let me find out a really awesome word to, let's say you want, let's say you're a document management company, document management company, CT, And no results. Okay, so if I put document management company CT, I'll go to document management company Connecticut. I'll say I'm making number 1 for document management Connecticut CT, document management company CT. Why? I'm going to add it to their website. I'll put a couple of links to it. Before you know it, Google will be like, this is the only website in the world that has these 4 words together. Chances are you're going to get number 1 on Google for that word. So you really want to think about, you know, is it an ego? Is it an emotional decision that you're making? Or am I doing it because I want to drive more business? And if it is an emotional If it's an emotional thing that you are doing, then chances are it's not really going to help you, you are going to be spinning your wheels. So, if you want to push the needle, you really want to think about testing it out using paid search and then going back to SEO. Alright, let's talk about social media. The purpose of social media is not just to update it because you are doing social, but social media builds trust and allows people to trust you. If you think about the Facebook icon, when I think about my Facebook, When I go to a website, you know, I'll go to one of— post your website on here. I'll take a look at your website. I recently went to a photo website. What was the photo website? PhotoTuna. Okay, so this is one of you. One of you are on here. You wanted to rank better on SEO. So I went here and I saw the F. And when I see the F over here, what does it make you think? Tell me what it makes you think when you see this F. Go ahead. And post it in the questions box, in the comments box. Tell me what you think about when you see these social icons as the first thing when you log on. You see a phone number, you see a navigation bar, and you see social icons. What do you feel? Go ahead, I'm asking you guys a question. Okay, so that we have a well— we have a good, well-used social media presence. Okay, well, I can't really tell that. It makes you feel that, right? But I can't tell if your social media is updated or not because I didn't click on it yet, but I'm going to click on it just to be able to see what's cooking and I see that the last time you updated was September 30th. Okay, that might be good, that might be good for— and 23rd, okay, and you're getting some engagement. I see you're getting 30 likes, 8 likes, 5 likes, 10 likes. I see that you have a good One person gave you a 1-star, but for the most part you have 5 stars. Awesome. You know, there are things that I would do to improve this, but what do you— I want to know what people are thinking. I want to know what— first of all, what do you think about putting an icon on here and how does it benefit you? Somebody wrote a Facebook page for their business and somebody wrote easily accessible to be able to communicate with them frequently. Do you have to do social as part of your digital strategy? Okay. So I'm going to answer that in a minute, but if you take a look at— if you think about this icon, these icons right here, when you think about Facebook, are you thinking about social media strategy? Are you thinking about advertising? Or are you thinking about what Facebook means to you as a consumer, as an individual? Think about this for a second. Take a moment and think about this little F icon. When I think about the F icon, I'm thinking about my friends. I'm thinking about my family. I'm thinking about the people that I trust because when I click on Facebook and then I click on my own little Facebook and I try to see the messages and the things that happen, my wife's here. My wife posted a recipe on Busy in Brooklyn about this delicious thing and I was the first one that liked it. 2 other people liked it. Awesome recipe. And that's what I think about. I think about the people that I love, the people that I trust. So the fact that you as a business are on Facebook as well and you're sharing in that space with me and on your page, I see my own friends there because I can invite them to like this page, that builds trust. The fact that I have my own image here on your page, the fact that I like it is trustworthiness. And the fact that I can see which ones of my friends like it also builds trust. So if you think about it, social media is about building trust. Now, if you ask the question, do you have to do social as part of your strategy? No, you can have a business that doesn't necessarily tap into that trust and is successful. There are plenty of businesses that don't do social and they are successful, but why not do it? Why not? Some people say if you're not going to update it, don't have it. Okay, why not update it? Because it takes too much time? Does it take too much time? Is there a better way to do it? So when I'm updating it, I use a company called Buffer App. I'll show you Buffer App now. Really awesome, really awesome application. There's many others that you could use, but if you take a look at Buffer App, and I got this for my own, for my Facebook, my Twitter, and my LinkedIn, I go and I have 8 things on my queue. I didn't want to— I can add up to 100 things on my queue and then These are things that kind of get updated by themselves and I can customize it. You see Wednesday, if you go to my Facebook, you're going to see at 1 PM something's going to happen. I'm giving a webinar. I don't have time to do this, but I'll sit down every once in a while or while I'm running or while I'm doing research and I come up with something really cool. It's on my browser. I can just click a button and all of a sudden it goes into my buffer and it really doesn't take up that much time and people see it. So the question you might ask is, you know, and somebody just asked, does it really matter to update social if only 1% of people that see it like it? Your strategy is not to engage every single person. Think about how many people I engaged during this presentation. I only engaged about half of you. The rest of you are just watching. The rest of you are just enjoying. Some of you are not even watching. Some of you are listening. Some of you have called in. But I engage half of you, and you know what? For me, that's a major success to engage half of you and to have you asking questions, because that means that I am teaching you and I'm helping you. If you only engage 1%, you're still engaging people. If you have 1,000 people on your Facebook and you engage 1%, how many people did you engage? You engaged 10 people. How many people do you want to engage? When you're doing a call and you're speaking to a customer, how many people do you want to engage? You want to engage that one customer. If you engage one person And they liked it and their friends saw they liked it, that's powerful. If you're only engaging 1% of your audience, maybe you should change your messaging around and you'll engage more. If you want them to like, maybe ask them to like it. Maybe ask them, like my wife asked about a recipe, that was powerful because she gets engagement. When I'm about to go for a run and I need motivation and I ask people, please like this, I get 20, 30, 40 likes. Yes, I have over 1,000 friends. Is that not success because I only hit 2% of my friends? It's a huge success because I got 20 people to do something, do something for me. That's powerful and that gives me motivation to continue doing this. So if you think about what your goal is, if your goal is to engage all of your audience, you're never going to be successful because there are going to be only— if you remember back to the presentation that I did, how many people actually engaged with me? It was a room of about 30 to 40 people. How many people actually communicated with me? There was one lawyer in the front, there was Adam, there was Danny in the back, there was Ray. There were a couple people that were engaging, but for the most part, most of the people were quiet. They weren't saying anything, either because they had nothing to say or because they didn't want to sound like a fool or because they just— that's not what they do. They don't engage at presentations. They just keep quiet and try to consume and try to get as much as they can out of it, and it's okay to do that. But my goal is not to engage everybody. My goal is to go to that and to make a difference in one person's life, to be able to have one accelerator get over $1 million, and that will happen, maybe as a result of what I said, maybe as a result of what the other speakers said, but if I can influence somebody to help them be able to achieve success in their life, that for me is worth everything. So for me, it's not about everybody. It's about what am I doing and what my goal is. Once you know what your goal is, you'll be able to be more successful. Your customers are currently spending thousands of hours on social and they see you. Just because 1% of people like it, just because only 1% of people see it, that's because you don't have high engagement and when you don't have high engagement, you're going to have less of a reach. You can use advertising to get more people to see it and I highly recommend that. Why not advertise to your friends? Why not get in front of them? It's tremendously powerful to do that because they are your target audience. Imagine if you could only advertise in front of your customers. That's powerful. So it allows you to engage and to target people based on their likes, based on their demographics, based on their interests, based on their preferences. Social is very important. You should definitely include it in your strategy. Remember, you have a limited time, you have limited effort, so Think about that. Think about including it and why you should include it and what you want to get out of it. Let's talk about email marketing for a moment. I'm going through 10 strategies and I want to make sure that I get through all the strategies within the first 3 quarters of this presentation so that I could take questions and hopefully this will be meaningful to you. Feel free to post questions at any time. As you can see, I'm totally talking to you. I'm engaging with you. I'm going back and forth. Somebody over here wrote, what if I don't have one because I don't think that people would find me would be correct? What if I don't have a keyword because I don't feel I'm going to— my industry has such a wide range of prices, literally $99 to $100,000. I've always thought PPC would get me tons of the wrong people. That's an assumption that you're making because you are not doing it. If you did do it, you can customize your message to weed out the wrong people. You can, on the PPC ad, you can put your message there that would talk to your audience. So let's say for example, I'll give you an example in your business, okay, and then we'll get back to email marketing. So let's type in design firm, okay? So I Google design firm. So within the design firm, there are all types of design firms. There are design firms that talk about expert website design and SEO services, there's award-winning creative work, There is, we design websites that convert visitors into paying customers. So this is lead generation, this is kind of like SEO, this is award-winning, users love it, full service. Everyone has their own little message. So thinking about what your message is and then when you click on it, what happens? Does it take you to a landing page or does it take you to the homepage? Most people send you to a homepage. Your advantage will be like, what am I doing over here? Why am I even here? You should be going to a landing page, you should be going to a place that specifically talks to that customer based on why they clicked on that and specifically sets you apart from the competition, and that a person wouldn't contact you unless this was talking to them specifically, whether it's with a video, with a form, or whatever it is. You should not be sending people to a place that they just click on and they go to your homepage. So this person here has a form here at least, and it's talking to them. Help clients at any level. You see that? They don't care. They just want to help anybody at any level. You see that? They even have a newsletter pop-up over here. Let's look at the next person over here and see if they are doing a great job. Design Impulse, you see, I don't believe that this, you know, it depends on what you are trying to accomplish. You know, they want to show that they are a company that has expert web design and SEO and it's clear that they are not necessarily trying to get everybody and anybody. They don't have a lead gen form here. You know, they don't even have a phone number or anything on their website. UXteam.com, they are focused more on the UX. And they do have a landing page, website design services, but again, the form is under the fold. We design websites that make our customers money. They are more into lead gen. We spoke about that. So, you know, they have a testimonial here, why you— they have a message why to use them right here in Secaucus. So if it's important for you not to use offshore, it might not be important for some people and so on. So you really want to think about that, what you are doing and why you are doing it and who your target is and based on that you could use PPC to get people, you just have to show them your message. Let's move this out of the way and get moving on. Email marketing is powerful. See, I was speaking to this company that does lead generation, a guy that owned a call center and he was telling me that calling doesn't work like it used to work anymore and now he completely changed his company to be a prospecting company that uses email only and what he does is he generates leads for his customers based on email. So email marketing speaks to customers directly, goes straight into their inboxes. It has a high conversion rate. It's significantly less expensive than mailing. You know, mailing, a stamp is 42 cents, 43 cents, whatever it costs. It doesn't cost anything practically to send an email. It costs a penny, 2 pennies, whatever it costs. It's literally the new cold call. When you're sending out an email to somebody, it's like you're cold calling them and it's very, very powerful. It allows a high level of customization based on people's interests, based on their geographic location, based on their behavior, whether they opened it, whether they viewed it, whether they deleted it, whether they sent it to spam. You can customize your message and you could— allows you for more frequent communication without being annoying. So, um, Zach said you lost me, but now you're back. So if you guys can hear me, that's great. Okay, I'm glad you can hear me. So email is powerful. What I want to know is how often do you send emails to your list? Go ahead and put it in the box. Tell me how many times a month, a week. So Pia said she sends it twice a month. Anybody else? Anybody else send messages to their list? Somebody said he doesn't have a list. Awesome. A person wrote quarterly, once a month. So people often ask me, how often should I be emailing my list? And the answer to that is— Every day. As often as your list will tolerate it, as often as people want you to email them. If somebody has a daily deal website and they are expecting an email sent to them every single day and you send to them once a month, you are missing out on an opportunity because it's a win-win for the customer. It's a win for you to send them the daily deal and it's a win for your customer because they are looking for that deal. So if you are just sending your emails once a month because you don't feel comfortable sending an email more often to your customers or you are sending it quarterly because you don't want to annoy your customers, you are making an assumption. You could easily send out an email to your customers and say, hey, how often would you like me to be in touch with you? I have a quarterly list, a monthly list, a weekly list, and I have a daily list. I could send you my daily reads just to be in touch with you. And also depending on your bandwidth and depending on the value that you see from it. I believe there is value by being in front of people. Anytime that you are in front of somebody, there is a significant amount of value in that. In, in being in front of them because it'll give you the opportunity to get referrals, opportunity to get more business, opportunity for them to think about you and help you grow your company. So it's, it's important for you to be adding value every time and make sure that it's the best use of your time, but sending out emails is extremely important and doing it the right way that is customized to your audience will allow you to be successful. So think about how often you're sending it and think about if it makes sense for you to be doing it the way that you're doing it, or, or maybe not. People tell me, how do you build a list? How do you get more people onto your list? And the answer to that is right on your website, right on your social media. Anything that you're doing right now should have a way for people to opt into your list, to be able to— whether it's PR or whether it's a video— ask people to join your list. When you meet somebody, say, hey, can I add you to my list? If they're a qualified potential customer. And chances are they will be like, sure, I would love to get your emails. I would want to get all your emails from you and if I don't want it, I could always unsubscribe, right? So for me, if you are adding value, if you are a design firm and you are sending out designs, I love looking at designs. I would love to get your email. If you give photography tips, I love photography. I would love to get a photography tip every week in my inbox. If you want to teach me how to get organized and how to declutter my life and send me a tip once a month, Or even once a week, how to be less cluttered, how to get rid of all the junk from my desk or from my basement or from my trunk. Yes, I know people that have junk in the— yes, I'd love that. I'd love for you to send me tips on how to do that. Digital PR, let's talk about that for a minute. When was the last time that you sent out a press release? When was the last time that you sent out a press release? Press releases are so important because it's an easy way for you to advertise in the news. And if you think that press releases don't do anything, it's possible that based on your goal, it's not helping you accomplish what you want to accomplish. But how did you then promote that press release? What was the press release about? How did you get the word out about the press release? Did you email that press release to all your customers and ask them what they think about it? Did you post it on social media and get people to give you a congratulations that you got onto the Wall Street Journal with a press release? Were you then number one on Google for an important keyword that actually drives business to you? It helps you with SEO. It helps you with your reputation, and it can give you great content for your tweets and for your email and for articles, and it positions you as an influencer and authority. So if you're looking, if you're looking for new business from a press release, chances are you're not going to get it directly from a press release. But if you're looking to stay top of mind and to have content to be able to then distribute through your other channels and to also be number one in the news section for that day or that minute depending on how popular the keyword is, then it's a good idea for you to do that. Good advice on a press release. The content of the press release would depend on what value you can add to your customers. Whether it's a question that somebody asks you on a consistent basis or something that happened in your industry, an event that you're doing, an idea that you have, it all depends on how people are going to engage with your press release. A press release is there as another way to not just advertise yourself. Yes, it's important to advertise yourself in a press release But try to figure out a way to hook people in for them to want more, for people to find it interesting. You know, what you can do is you can interview 20 companies that you're already doing business with and ask them a question, and that'll be great content for your press release. You say you did a survey for women-owned companies of whether or not email marketing is beneficial for their business, and this is what they said, and blah blah blah, and this is the finding that you had. You can do things on press releases. It all depends on your business and what you're trying to accomplish, but if you know what your goal is and what you're looking to accomplish, whether it's top-of-mind awareness in front of a certain industry, if it's content that you can then share with your group of people, the latest press release, if it's a product that you want to talk about or an idea or a new way of doing things, it's very, very powerful. Every time we come out with a product, we issue a press release. Every time we have an event, we issue a press release. Every time we have something of value to offer, we issue a press release. Press releases are really important and I highly recommend you consider doing them. Guest blogging. There are tremendous amount of blogs out there in your industry that are looking for content. There are associates and brand names that are trusted names in your industry, whether it's in the search engine optimization industry, in the social media industry, in the organizational industry. In the photography industry that are looking for your expertise. Go out there, communicate with them. You don't have to write a whole blog and then submit it. You can give them a list of 3 ideas, send it to them and say, hey, if I wrote an article about one of these 3 ideas, would you post it? And see what they say. It's not rocket science, but once you get in front of their audience, suddenly not only do they have new content which helps them rank on SEO, which helps them engage their followers and helps them add more value. It also gives you more exposure. So I'm constantly being featured as a guest blogger on many networks, and I was recently featured on Forbes, on Inc., on Entrepreneur.com, and so on. That's because I'm constantly looking out for people that want to feature me, and I'm constantly giving them ideas of how they can feature me. So think about anybody that you recently saw that has a blog that you'd love to be featured on and how you can add value to that, and then communicate with them. Video— if you're not using video for your business, you're missing out on a huge opportunity. A lot of people are shy to get in front of a video camera, but in reality, a video is just an expression of what you look like in real life. And if you're not shy, if you're a salesperson and most business owners are salespeople and you're not shy to get up and do your elevator pitch, you should have your elevator pitch on a video. People tend to be visual and when they can associate your brand with a person and they can see you talking to them, they're going to trust you more and it's more likely that you're going to be able to connect with them. If you check out my channel, I have a channel called GrowTime.tv, check it out. I do my own videos. We do videos for our company. Our staff is all on video and it allows us to entertain, educate, and inspire our audience. It's a powerful and measurable way because you can see your views, you can see your comments, you can then share it on other areas like social, like email. It ranks on SEO and it has long-term value. A video doesn't just go away. The longer a video is around and the more views it gets, the more likes it gets, the more comments it gets, the higher authority it will have. If you search how to do something, I recently searched on Google, I think how to— what was it? I think it was how to make a— how to catch a mouse. I think it was how to catch a mouse or something like that. Here, let me show you. How to catch a mouse, right? So let's say you are a pest control company. How to catch a mouse. You know, these things were updated January 2012. I'm sure that if you put a video, how to catch a mouse, you probably would get ranked here somewhere, especially if that video was a good video. You see what I'm saying? So think about how to add value to your industry by using video. And video could be a screen share of you. The other day I wanted to figure out how to do something on LinkedIn. I wrote how to publish on LinkedIn because somebody asked me how to do it. I found a video of somebody else doing it right on Google. So if you're a social media agency or if you're doing design and people are looking for how to do this, how to come up with a plan, how to come up with a branding plan, these are things that if you're too shy to put your face on there, put your computer screen on there and do a video on slides. Like I'm right now, technically this is a video. It's being recorded as a video. So later I can upload this to YouTube and I can use this as a video. I can customize it, I can edit it, and so on. So videos are very powerful. Podcasting— for those that haven't seen my podcast, you can go to ceomojo.com. Podcasts are incredible. They allow you to— one of the benefits of a podcast that you don't have with video is that you're kind of inside the person's head. You have a— once you create a community— here, check this out— once you create a community of people And I use SoundCloud to post all my— and also iTunes. So if you go to comojo.com/itunes, you can check it out and you can subscribe to it. And then I have a significant amount of content later because I transcribe it. I think we use Speechpad to transcribe it for us. But just record yourself saying something. You see, they transcribe it really well for us. And then you can have— you can rank for all these keywords and you see all these people that I put up here. Actually, Sarah Enline was an accelerator that went from accelerator to the president of EO, president of EO Brooklyn, which is pretty amazing. And she talks about her company here. I definitely recommend all of you to listen to her. She had a pretty good interview. So, you know, Dave Kerpin, social media agency, Paul Newman, So if you think about a podcast and why it's so powerful, it's because you're having an intimate relationship with the people. They're not doing anything else. They're on the train, they're listening to you. Could you imagine if you can whisper in your customer's ear for an hour, for 45 minutes, and give them value and make them laugh and make them feel good? And it doesn't really cost a lot to produce a podcast. You can literally record yourself on your smartphone saying something, or you can record a conversation over the phone. I use UberConference and record it and bam, and then I just Pop it on there and it's done. It's great for social, you could share it on social. It's great because you can create content out of it. Podcasts are really amazing and you see a real return on investment from it. I get people all the time telling me they hear my podcast and it's so amazing and I got to keep doing it. Retargeting, we spoke about this at the event. So essentially when you go to a website and they have retargeting on, they will follow you around the internet. So If I go to Zappos and I look for a pair of shoes that I like, Zappos will then follow me around all over the internet. So if you want to get started with that, you can use AdRoll or you can do it within Google AdWords and so on. It creates engagement, it increases your ROI because the people that are coming to your website typically already know who you are. So what I want to ask you is, what are you going to do? Tell me in the box below, tell me as a result of all this, what are you— which one of these strategies speak to you the most? And what are you going to do to help you drive more leads and more sales to your business so that you can grow and hopefully hit that million-dollar mark? Go ahead and comment in the box below. Tell me what you're going to be doing, what you learned today, if this advice was good, if you liked it, if there's something else that I can tell you now. that can help you become more successful? Be more consistent with my message and work on my organic website leads. Awesome, that's powerful, that's powerful. That'll, that'll, that'll drive more business to you and help you grow. Is there anything else? Anybody else that want to share what they're going to do? AdWords retargeting, build a list and email good stuff. Absolutely. Up my emails. Helpful, thanks. Okay, great presentation. The press release ideas were totally new to me. Awesome, thank you very much for that. I will try to come up with a message that might attract the right people through AdWords. Excellent, that is amazing. And also make sure to remember to, to put an awesome landing page. It was helpful, thanks. What I would definitely tell you to do is figure out how you're going to measure success. Figure out how you're going to measure success. Is it the quantity of leads that you get? Is it the quality of leads? Is it the amount of eyeballs that are going to be visiting your website through your target audience? See, for me, if I have a million people come to my website, that doesn't help me. I want to have the right 100 people visit my website, and I want to have the right 10 people fill out a form, and I want to have the right one person have a conversation with me once a week, once a week, and let that once a month turn into a piece of business for me. Because the type of business that I want is not a $500 account. So think about in your business, what do you want? And once you know what you want, you'll be able to measure and figure out, is my social media strategy helping me? See, when you send out an email campaign to 1,000 people, you know which people opened it. You can then communicate with those people and say, hey, I saw you opened my email, I wanted to discuss it with you and have a conversation with them. Powerful stuff. You can't do that when you're leaving a voicemail for somebody on a cold call. Although voicemail is very, very powerful. I recommend all of you call my line and listen to my voicemail. My number is 569-1036, 718-569-1036. Listen to my voicemail. I basically left a whole commercial on my voicemail for like a minute long or whatever because I don't listen to my voicemails anymore. So I literally I said, hello, thank you for calling Joe. This is not the real Joe, and I just go on and on talking about Ajax Union and so on because I don't want anyone to leave me a voicemail. It's just a hassle for me. Send me an email. I don't like listening to voicemails. So you can use your own greeting as a marketing tool, and when you leave a voice message to other people, you could use that as a marketing tool as well. So what, what actually matters? It all matters based on your goals. So is it comments? Is it likes? Is it shares? Is it unique visits? Is it CTR? When you're creating your plan and you're writing down what you want to accomplish, think about what is going to matter. In business, it all relies— at the end of the day, how much business are you going to drive as a result of the activities that you're going to do, right? So you think about this is your strategy, these are the activities, this is the quality that I'm expecting, and these are the results that I'm going to have. So really lay that out in a foundation and write it down because if you don't write it down, it's not going to happen. So if you're going to publish one blog post per week, you're going to do one press release per quarter, you're going to send out an email once a week, these are all things that are going to take time. If you're going to update your Facebook every day, that's going to take time. So decide how much time you're going to invest and then figure out how you're going to invest that time and then once you figure that out and you see the results that you're getting, then you can go out and potentially hire an agency or hire an intern or hire someone to help you. But if you're not sure what you want to accomplish, you might want to get a professional to help you figure that out, or you might want to be able to do it yourself and then test, because marketing is about testing. The more that you test, the more that you'll know. So at the end of the day, all that matters is action. So what are you going to be doing? Hopefully it will be one of these 10 things that will help you be able to grow your business and then will drive you to success. So for more resources, you can check out CEO Mojo. You can sign up to our podcast, and hopefully we'll see you again. I believe that we, we have a rooftop event. You can email events@ajaxunion.com to find out more about our events. I think it's tonight. We have an event at Prana at 6 PM. So check that out if you're around Manhattan. You're welcome. You're all welcome to come. If you didn't sign up, you can go to meetup.com/businesseventsny. I look forward to— I don't know if I'm going to make it, but if I could make it, I'll see you there. If not, you'll meet probably 100 or 200 entrepreneurs that are going to be there. All right. Any other questions and comments, feel free to email me. My email address is marketing@ajaxunion.com, so this way other people get it. Thank you very much for joining, and we'll see you again soon. Have a wonderful day.