0021: The importance of branding & paid traffic for your social media strategy with Branding/Marketing Strategist & Public Speaker Robert Courtney Collins

Ea interviews, episode 21, inspiration, transformation, success stories and the imperfect action round. Seven days a week, join Mario Ficcini for today's expert Authority Effect interview.

So you want to go live on Facebook, but you're not sure where to start or what to do. Some people say just grab your phone or buy all this expensive software. Well, I have a better option for you. Check out mariofoccini.com BELive BELive is the simplest and easiest way to go live on your Facebook with a professional production. Once again, mariofacini.com belive here he is, ladies and gentlemen, Robert Courtney. Robert, it's great day to be alive and I'm excited to have you on the show.

Amen. Mario, thank you for having me. I'm super excited to get into this conversation with you.

Yeah, it's going to be a good one. So my first question for you is, what inspired you to start your company out of everything you could do? You could go get a job, you could work for someone, you could have other people work for you. What made you decide I want to do this? What led you to your career path?

I started my path off of necessity. I was laid off from job in 2003 and I really didn't have a choice. Like I had to figure out, you know, how am I going to pay my bills, how am I going to figure this thing out? And because of my experience with working with an employer, you know, it was one of those situations where I decided that I didn't want to work for anyone anymore. And if I was going to do something different at that point, I might as well go ahead and make the decision to do it for myself. And so that sent me on the entrepreneurial path and it's been no looking back since.

Well, I'm glad you decided to venture on it because we were able to meet. So for people that are just meeting you like I had the pleasure of doing this past year, tell us about your company. Who do you help and how do you help them?

Currently, I own a company called Robert Cordian Associates. It's a marketing and branding company.

For the most part. We help people build their brands, we help them establish their voice, and then we help them understand how to communicate that online. A lot of that entails managing social media platforms, giving them the best strategies to grow their audience, teach their audience or show their audience how to trust them and their brands and their products or services, and then ultimately how to monetize that and create transactional value from that.

That's fantastic. So many companies need that Nowadays, and I think a lot of them just don't know where to start with that. Is that your experience?

Yeah, 100%. You know, the majority of the clients that decide to work with us are typically individuals who have had a lot of success in the past, and now they understand that they need to transition into the online world, so to speak, and they're just a little behind the eight ball and understanding how to do that. So most of the time, we're educating business owners and individuals as well as kind of guiding them through the initial process of transitioning online. And then, you know, a lot of people are, you know, going from nine to fives and wanting to enter into some type of entrepreneurial space. And so a lot of times they need to know, how do I build a business? Everyone knows how to use Facebook and Instagram, these platforms for personal use, but understanding how to use it for business is something a little bit different. So most of the time, we spend our days educating them on how to use those same platforms to build their brands.

That's a great segue into, what would you say is the best way to be using these to build a personal brand? What would you say is the differentiator from, I'm using Facebook or Instagram for my personal page versus I want to use this to build a brand and a company, if you will.

You know what, it's funny. Like, the thing that we have to teach them is actually how to be themselves. It's like as soon as someone decide that they want to use their Facebook or Instagram for business, it's weird how the tone and the way they communicate change. It goes from very relatable captions, you know, very authentic, organic comments to, hey, I'm selling this, or, hey, I have this product for sale. Like, we transform into what we've heard on the TV or on the radio for the last, you know, 10, 15, 20 years. And we want to duplicate that because we've been programmed to think, if you want to sell a product or you want to sell a service, this is how you say it. And so what we do is we try to reprogram the thought process of individuals and teach them that, hey, people buy from you because you're relatable, because you're human, because they feel like you're someone that they can trust. You're authentic. Those are the reasons that people want to support your product or support your brand. Not because you're given a great discount or because, you know you're selling this remarkable product. It's usually about whether or not you were connected to them from somebody that they knew or the content that you put out is content that they can relate to and someone that they want to be around.

What would you say the biggest issue people have is when they go into business mode? What do you think there's something they could do across the board that everyone is doing that you see they should stop.

Everybody want to sell, sell, sell. Like it's, it's always about the person's product or the person's service. And I think the, that's the biggest mistake. You know, it should be. The goal should be to help, to educate, to provide value. You should be doing things that's going to add value to the audience that you're speaking to, you know, and so when you reverse engineer that mindset to understand that whatever you're doing when you're going into business, it should be for the audience that you're speaking to as opposed to help helping yourself get to wherever you're trying to get or to accomplish whatever goal that you're trying to accomplish.

Very good. So let's talk about your clients. What's the biggest success story you've had so far from taking someone who wasn't sure what they were doing to they started working with you and they had. What's the biggest transformation you've been able to give them?

Very, very.

Easy answer for me, actually, it's a company called I don't want to use profanity on your show. And some people consider profanity. So I'll spell it. It's S H I T I Coolers. And that's an actual brand. These guys came to a seminar that I do every few months called Branding for Beginners and they didn't have a direction, so to speak. They weren't really using social media. They had put some things out on Instagram and some things out on Facebook that had actually didn't have a. They didn't even have a Facebook at the time, they only had an Instagram. But they noticed they were getting some really good engagement for a really small audience at the time. And they took this idea based off of there's a brand of coolers out there that are supposed to be like the best coolers on the market. They're like the luxury high end coolers. Weddy. Weddy. Yeti. Yeti. There you go. Yeti. So they took the Yeti brand and the principles of the Yeti brand and they decided that they would create a brand completely, completely on the other end of the spectrum from Yeti. And so I thought it was an interesting idea. The concepts are cool. But what was most important was the group of guys were very. It was a very tight knit circle that kind of believed and promoted these ideas. And so they came to a workshop and.

I gave. In the workshops, I give very detailed instruction on.

How you should start, like step by step. You know, grab a domain, grab a Facebook page, grab an Instagram page, turn your Instagram page into a business page, read your analytics, run ad campaigns, measure the ad campaigns over 30 days, pick which one is working, the one is working, duplicate that, you know. So I gave them very detailed instructions on how to roll out. Take $100, use $25 per week, the ad campaign at work, take the whole hundred dollars and then put that hundred dollars toward the one that worked in your second month. So they came to that class, follow everything that I, you know, told them to do step by step. And within one month, they had, their Instagram page had grew to 5,000 followers. So they went from 500 to 5,000 followers just in the course of a month. They went from $600 in sales the first month to $6,000 in sales the second month to about $10,000 in the third month. So literally like a trophy in terms of putting our practices into action and then following step by step and then watching the results come through was just pretty incredible. And if you go check them out right now, it's S H I T I coolers on Instagram and on Facebook. And they're doing tremendous. Probably 2, 300,000 on Facebook in terms of followers, probably a half, probably, you know, 150 to 200,000 followers on Instagram. But their, their engagement and their sales each month are, you know, truly impressive in terms of somebody who started from scratch, came to one of our workshops, followed our, you know, our strategies, and then were it was able to execute it and watch the results happen.

Wow, that's a fantastic story. I'm glad you shared it. That sounds like what most people would want to have. I mean, I don't know anyone that wouldn't want 10 times growth on their audience size. And, you know, it sounds like 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 times in their profits as well.

Yeah, you know what? Like we preach, we have an acronym that's called attack. And attack stands for audience trust, attention.

Content and consistency. And so audience being like the priority. Because in our minds, like we talked earlier, it all boils down to a numbers game. So if we can increase the audience, create trust, build the attention, and then obviously create great presentation through our content and do that consistently, the money and the profits kind of naturally follow.

So you were talking about your biggest success story, and I appreciate you for sharing with us. What would you say is one thing anyone can do starting off that would help them improve their brand? Because I think people. Would you agree that people look at Instagram is one thing, YouTube is one thing, LinkedIn is one thing, and Facebook is another thing.

Yeah, you know, I think. I think people, just like I said at the beginning, I think people have to learn how to be themselves when it comes to their brand. Like, I don't think there's any distinction anymore between a business brand and a personal brand. Two, three years ago, I was very big on deciding whether or not you were building a personal brand or whether or not you were building a business brand. And I feel like there's no line anymore. I feel like every successful brand, in order to achieve more success, you have to establish yourself and your personal brand, to take the business brand or the business side of the brand to its highest possible levels. You know, so I think it's understanding who you are, understanding how to communicate your daily activities, your hobbies, your interests, the things that you feel are important to you. Because there's always going to be an audience out there that relates to the things that you relate. And then you use that to bring people into your world, so to speak. And then at that point, they organically find out about the things that you do.

Anyway, that's a good point, because I've made this at some of my trainings before, because people say, well, I don't know if I want to do a personal brand or. A common question I get is, should I do a personal brand or a business brand, if you will? And I go, well, let's look at some things. You know, Oprah has a company. She's cool, but she has the Oprah brand along with the company. I go, okay, but everyone knows her. She's a talk show host. Of course she does. And, you know, everyone has an example of an author, a speaker, speaker, whatever the case may be. But my favorite two are Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, because people think of them as multinational companies and they're big brands and all these different things and they have great products and everything. But if you think about it, yeah, they have thousands of people. They're not just a speaker or an author. But if you think about it, what was Steve Jobs? I mean, what do you think? One of Apple's biggest successes. Reasons for what do you think Apple's biggest Success was attributed to. Was it because their products are a hundred times better, or do you think it was Steve's magic in being able.

To convey the messaging, his ability to storytell 100%?

So even some of the biggest brands such as that, as you mentioned them, they're still personal brands. They're just adapting to a business. As far as the personal branding, would you, what would you say is more important? Is it get your branding out there or know your metrics?

I think they both work hand in hand. I think data is extremely important, but I think the data doesn't matter if your personal brand isn't being established and conveyed. You know, I think.

One without the other, like if you have one without the other, you fail either way, you know. So I think they go hand in hand depending on what ultimately you're trying to accomplish. Like, I feel like I know so many influencers and people that have established large followings on different platforms and they've never looked at the data in their life because it never really mattered to them. And actually a lot of those individuals are becoming our clients because you need to understand the data in order to expand, in order to build, in order to create partnerships, in order to make yourself interesting to other brands so that they want to use you and work with you. So if your awesome and goals is about creating brand deals or collaborations and things like that, and you need to be able to explain the data and then show why that data makes sense for another person to come and be a part of what you're doing, or for someone to invest in you or for someone to pay you for the fact that you have a large audience.

So you were talking about how people become your clients and some of the events you run. How would you say speaking has helped your business?

I think in this world of personal brands, speaking is probably the most important thing. Like it's probably the thing that I feel has added to the whole authority, you know, in an expert. It's like if you can, you know, have a conversation where people are asking you live real time questions and you can give real time solutions to situations that they're having problems with. I think the respect for what you do, it just goes to an entirely different level. And so, you know, I've never set out to become a speaker. I've never even really considered myself a speaker until this year. I've really decided like, you know what, I'm going to put myself.

On the speaker rotation and try to actively book gigs and things like that. But before that I just wanted to Help and answer questions when they were asked. And, you know, those scenarios begin to happen more and more where I was getting invited to come out and talk to social media or entrepreneurship or personal branding, et cetera, and noticing how there would be influx of opportunities that would happen immediately following those bookings and those, you know, speaking situations, it was like, okay, clearly this is a part of or something that I need to make a part of my business as fast as possible because not only am I helping people, but I'm creating another opportunity for myself to generate revenue and to continue to build and expand my personal brand.

It's one of my favorite things to suggest to people because there's people that have their knowledge, they have their expertise, and they just keep it in the book. They, they just keep it in their trainings, they just keep it pretty much in the computer, if you will.

Right.

But they never get into that reality of it's one of the funnest things to do, get face to face. Like how we met, it was in person.

Right.

You can't replace that, no matter how cool this is. However, you also can't be all places 24 7. So how has video helped your business?

Oh, video. I mean, I feel like we're in the age of video. I feel like video is probably from a social media and digital standpoint is probably one of the most effective ways to communicate. Any message, I think is getting to a place where it's almost like if you don't have video, then you really don't exist, you know, especially, you know, running a marketing company. And we're trying to.

Paint pictures for the brands that we work with. And a lot of times the first thing they ask, like, is usually an entry point, can your company create videos? And so it's weird, like there these businesses are recognizing how important video is, but don't even have a Facebook page, don't have an Instagram, don't have a, you know, a Twitter, like the place where the video would live. Those things don't exist. But the recognition that I need a video because everybody had videos, you know, and so I say, I just say, like, video is definitely important. It's probably one of the important, most important pieces. But back to your point earlier, she wanted to kind of mention that, like, I feel like you have to do what's what your strong suit is, you know, and so when it comes to orating or speaking live or writing or creating video, you have to figure out, like, what is my niche, what do I do best? And then recognize that to be Your strength, but then also make sure you have a little bit of the other stuff in the event the person that you're trying to connect with actually communicates different than you do.

That is powerful. That is very powerful. Play to your power medium. Because video is great, speaking is great, but if you have no desire to do it, you're not gonna enjoy it as much.

Exactly. The passion is not gonna be there.

So I'm gonna ask you something, because you have a unique perspective on not just speaking and not just video, but you produce your own live events. Not everyone goes to this level. I've done some, but I know you do it regularly. And it's a whole different animal in my experience. What's your perspective on it? Should people do them or not?

You know, I feel like. So I come from. I come from what I like to call the old Facebook. 2008, 2009, MySpace. MySpace. You know, I come from MySpace. And so back when we first started Facebook, creating an event on Facebook.

Inviting 10, 15,000, 20,000 people on a Facebook invite was nothing. Like, you could hit the invite all button and get five of your friends to be a part of an event and literally invite everybody's fan base or followers or friends over to the event. Which when you broke those numbers down, if we could get 20,000 people invited to an event, then usually 180 to 250 people showed up like clockwork. Like, it was a very.

Systematic approach to organizing live events. So in 2008, we figured, why not create events on Facebook, book venues, invite those people out, charge a cover of 10 to $20. And at the time, I was only pushing a unique brand, our clothing brand. And it was an opportunity to not only expose the brand, but build a network, meet new people, create a database that we can then email and follow up with email marketing afterwards. And it just was a system that made sense. Initially, it was very hard to program and organize, but after, you know, forcing ourselves to do it for two, three, four years, it became very easy. And I wouldn't trade that experience for the world. Now in today's space, I feel like having a cool mix between.

An online presence and then doing some type of in. In face event, you know, maybe once to four times a year. Makes a lot of sense to pull the people that the network that you've created online, to pull those people into your realistic kind of network outside of Facebook and Instagram and LinkedIn and these places. I feel like it creates better relationships. And you kind of. You seal the deal of the connection that you Started, you know, online. So I think it's important if it's a part of your personality and you can handle some of the logistical things that come with it. But I think the mixture of the two makes for great productivity in terms of building real life relationship.

I appreciate you for sharing that with us because so many people think I need to do live events. You know, they see you do it, they see me do it, and it's like, oh, that must be the secret. The secret is we like doing that, right?

Yes.

That's our personality. We enjoy it. But if it's not yours, I can point to just as many people that are doing six, seven figures a month and they just stay behind the scenes and you can have a great business that way also. So it really depends on the personality and the strength and if you even want to, because again, it's a whole other animal. So appreciate you for sharing that part with us. We're gonna thank our sponsor and come back to the imperfect action round. Rapid fire, 60 second answers. And I got three questions for you coming right up. Instead of trying to get your prospects attention, why not be so captivating they can't look away? That's a quote from my first book, Video marketing for business owners. And I'm saying it again today because the truth of the matter is if you can't get your prospects attention, they're not going to pay attention to you and they're not going to receive your message and you'll never be able to help them. That's why I love belive. Before it even launched, I was using it in the beta phase and it is the simplest and easiest way to do Facebook lives. To reach your audience, to interact with them. You can cue the comments up, you can take questions, you can answer them live. There's live polling features. You can make a professional looking production very inexpensively and very quickly, which is important because you don't want to be spending your time messing around with computers and hardware and all this other stuff. Live streaming can get very, very intense and there is literally nothing else I would recommend to start off with that is simpler, easier and more affordable than belive. So check out marioficcini.com belive once again, that's marioficcini.com Belive. All right, we're back with the imperfect action round. Robert, are you ready to share your wisdom even further?

Oh, this will be fun.

So the first question I have for you is, what is, in your experience, what is the fastest path to the.

Cash being as authentic as you possibly can doing something that you truly love. And I think the money follows.

Love it, love it, love it, love it. So the next question I have for you, what is the biggest problem you see your audience have and how do they fix it right away?

Growing their audiences on Facebook, Instagram and all the other major platforms.

What's the fastest way they can do it?

Grow it? The fastest way you can grow it organically is different for platforms, but we'll just say the main one, Instagram, is by using hashtags, and Facebook is by jumping into other people's conversations and adding your. Your insight and your opinions and then interacting with your followers.

So adding value, basically.

Value.

What would you say for LinkedIn?

For. For LinkedIn, I don't want to act like I have the answer for LinkedIn because I'm not as savvy there. We're becoming. But for LinkedIn, I think it's definitely providing value to the audience, for sure.

I'm asking personally now, I'm gonna throw an audible, but it's my show, so I can do that. I've been doing a lot of hashtags on LinkedIn because, honestly, LinkedIn, serving them up. When I'm promoting the show, it's like, do you want to add podcasting hashtags? And it gives me 12 of them. I'm like, yep. Do you think that's a good thing for LinkedIn or do you think it's better for Instagram? What are your thoughts?

You know, I know for a fact for Instagram, like, it definitely works for LinkedIn. That's something that we're researching because we just recently became way more involved in LinkedIn. Like, by the end of this year, I'm going to be just as savvy on LinkedIn as I am on every other platform. But it's probably given individuals the biggest organic opportunity for growth. If you understand the audience that you're talking to, if you're in the professional space and you can find a happy medium between.

Being yourself and presenting your information in a way where people feel like they're being helped, you know? And so in terms of the hashtags, I don't. I've used them quite a bit, and I haven't necessarily seen a big spike in activity in terms of the results for the post. But I still feel like even on LinkedIn, like the magic sauce for Facebook and running ads on Facebook, just to throw another nugget out there is if you run an ad about yourself and you expose some very vulnerable parts of your story and how that's helped you maximize your current business situation, it will do well, like 100%, no doubt about it. And I've noticed the same thing on LinkedIn. Anytime we've done anything that's come from a vulnerable place and we've shown how that story or that journey has impacted real life situations and created real life opportunities, people tend to respond well. So I think just sprinkling that authenticity, which I know has been kind of like the theme of our conversation today, I think that's always the magic saw.

I would have to agree. And you know, the platforms change so much. I love how you said, by the end of the year I'm going to be as well versed as the this as I am with the other ones. Because I would say that Instagram is known for the hashtags. I wouldn't say Instagram is known for authenticity as much as some of the others. That's just me though, in what people share. But the LinkedIn I noticed they were doing it. And I can personally tell you I haven't done extensive research, but I don't know if it was my title I changed to host of the podcast or was the hashtags themselves. I've had equal amount of people reach out on both though, so I seriously was con. Didn't know if there was a preference for. I kind of figured it leaned more towards Instagram, but that's the world we live in. You know, maybe Facebook's gonna go, well, we're gonna buy up LinkedIn too and just own the whole space. So who knows what's gonna happen next? But here's my next question, and the last one for you is I love reading books from a hundred years ago personally, because all this stuff we're talking about now you can talk about LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram and what do we come back to? To be yourself, be authentic, you know, do what your strength is. So how do you maximize the customer lifetime value once you bring on a client?

By continuously adding value, you know, you have to establish what the customer needs, what the client needs, what their objectives are. And then I feel like, you know, I always go by that old mantra under promise over deliver, you know, so it's kind of like my goal and my team's goal is to constantly surprise and constantly go beyond the ask of whatever the client is. Educate them as much as possible with things that they didn't know, you know, and, you know, constantly overachieving the goals and whatever the objectives were when you first brought them on as a client, you know, and I think as long as you continue to do that, then the client needs you, you know, and they. You. You create a sense of, we wouldn't be who we are without having, you know, this team behind us, so to speak.

I know what you're about, and it's one of the reasons I invited you on the show. Love your personality and I love that you're sharing. You know, it's about adding value. It's about being client centric. Like, I tell people, my clients, I think there's too many people out there, like you said, just going, ooh, Facebook, LinkedIn. Look, there's another way. I can spam people and put my message out. I have a business you should buy for me. Here's the number. 17 times a day, like, get a little creative. I mean, at least change the number around and get a Google voice or something. It's like no creativity whatsoever. So what's a business? Maybe not a business book. Let me redact myself. What book has changed your business the most?

You know, I. I'm a fan of so many books.

A few that stand out. Like, I'm a big Malcolm Gladwell fan. You know, I love the Tipping Point. I love what the Dog Saw.

One of my favorite books is the Alchemist.

Paulo Coelho.

Yeah, that's, you know, that's like, it's one of those books where you can't put it down. You start reading and it's just like, you want to see what happens. But it has so many life lessons, you know, that can be applied to business, for sure. A book that literally changed, you know, my course of life, I think you can say, and it's a small, easy read, and a lot of people probably know it, but who Moved My Cheese Was just like. Like, I read that book and it was like light bulbs just went off, you know, 10, nine, 10 years ago. So, yeah, I mean, there's a ton of books. But the Tipping Point about Malcolm Gladwell, I think for somebody that's just considering.

Considering entrepreneurship to understand that everything is. Everything is momentum based, to put it in my own words. And one. One action leads to another action which leads to another action is I think, what that theme of that book was kind of about. And it's kind of been.

A model that I've kind of built for my business, is like, every day you need to be doing something to create the next opportunity. And the minute you think you're good and you don't need to do any more activity when the world's gonna come crashing down on you.

That is such. Those are all great recommendations and it's interesting you say who moved my cheese? I. I actually recommended that. What day is it? Two days ago. One day ago in the last few days, let's say. And if, if you're listening and you've never read it, it's a great book and all of them are so appreciate the recommendations and appreciate for having you here. Where can people find you?

If you're on Facebook you can find our agency, Robert Courtney and Associates, a marketing and branding company. Type that in the search. If you're on Instagram Robert Courtney Collins and our website is Robert Courtney and Associates.com Very good.

Well, appreciate you coming out. It's been a great time and I thank you for sharing your wisdom with everyone.

Yeah, no, thank you for having me. Love to come back and do it again anytime.

Excellent. Well, I will talk to you soon and thanks again. God bless.

Take care.

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