Top Mistakes Companies Are Making During COVID-19

Today I'm going to ask Karen, how do you best grow an audience on LinkedIn? I believe LinkedIn is the number one social, social channel for B2B companies. So I'm excited to hear how you can grow an audience for your company.

And today I'm going to ask Matt what mistakes he thinks that companies have made so far through COVID-19 and what at this point they can start doing to better and to do more for their company through the remainder of this pandemic.

Welcome. This is the Monday Marketing Meeting. I'm Matt Vadie. I'm the CEO of ERG Payroll and HR, and this is Miss Karen Altman. She is the Director of Marketing for the ERG companies, including ERG Payroll and HR, Guru, and Grow by ERG. Karen, how are you today?

I'm great. How are you?

I'm awesome. Thank you. So let's start on your side. So share with me a little bit about that. I emphasize to people all the time, LinkedIn is fantastic. It is sort of in its golden age right now. Content is being promoted with very little effort, just knowing a few things about what you're doing and being able to put content out consistently and, and creating quality, valuable content like we talked about last episode. What are you seeing companies do that are doing a great job of growing a brand and an audience on LinkedIn?

Yep. So the first thing I kind of want to say is most people, and especially new businesses as they come in, they, when they hear we have to grow our social presence, especially on LinkedIn, their mind kind of goes to paid ads and they have to put money behind it. And that's the only way that they're going to get a lot more followers. When in, when in fact it's not true. There's a lot of ways organically that people can just constantly be putting content out there and there's simple ways to just gain followers without spending any money to do it. I think the most, most simple way to do it is when you create your business page, you're doing it off your personal page. Right there on the side, there's an invite box that lets you invite all of your connections from your personal page to your business page. That is right there. Every connection you have can be invited strictly through there, get you a nice baseline going. And then from there you can constantly, as you make more connections on your personal page, you can continue to invite them. To your business page. So that's an easy one that you should constantly be on the lookout for. As soon as you're making connections on your personal page, make sure you're growing it on your business page as well. Another way to do it is asking, is just asking. So there's, you're putting marketing out there and there's so many ways that you can just ask people to do it. Number one is you have an email signature, put in there, follow me on LinkedIn, follow us on LinkedIn. If you're trying to get followers to your personal page or to your business page, have the link right there. They can click on it. It's on every email that you send. It's one of the easiest ways to get out there and have people follow you. That's also if you send out weekly email blasts, making sure it's on your website. We also have a template that we've used for clients that just, you can send out an email asking people, your clients, any potential clients, any, you know, colleagues, partners, if they will follow you on LinkedIn and engage with you. Just simple asking. It goes behind the scenes. It's not doing a lot of work on your page, but it's getting the followers right there. So those are two kind of ways personally you can just go, you know, take a little step out and gain your followers. A couple of other ways more getting the content involved is with number one, your employees. So have them be engaged in your posts, engage them in your content. You know, your employees are the face of your brand, so they need to be included. So if you put a post out, you know, tag them in it or ask them to like all their, all of your posts, making sure they're sharing your brand posts. So asking your employees to do that on a weekly basis, maybe every Monday you send a reminder out or every Friday you send a reminder out to making sure that they are liking, sharing, because as soon as they do that, it goes all on their feed and then everyone else can see what your, your company's posting. So that's another automatic one is just engaging them, making sure you're putting them into your content. And another one that I think you see the most out of is what I call co-marketing. So co-marketing is where you are putting posts out but you're also tagging your clients, other brands, supporting local businesses, tagging them in your post so then they see that you're reaching out and you're supporting them and then they, it shows up with their feed and then they can share it on their pages. They're more likely to start promoting you because they're seeing that you're doing the work for them as well. So there's many different ways, but the more like engaging that you're getting, especially with your connections already, is where you can gain a lot of followers. Every day you should be liking at least 10 posts. You should be sharing too. You should be posting on your page because if you're not doing that, No one's seeing your page come up. And that's really how you get the followers and those connections on your LinkedIn page. So it takes a little bit of work and there's different ways to do it. But once you put in the work, you kind of have a routine down every day of what you should be doing. It kind of becomes just a part of your day and you're gaining followers just like that. So I would have to say those 4 things are the top ways I think you can organically pull in connections on your LinkedIn page, whether it be your personal page or your business page, to gain those, you know, those audiences without paying for ads, without, you know, you know, it's not hard. You can put a post like today, happy Monday, great job over the week, you know, great job last week, so-and-so on your team. You tag someone, they can now share it, it's now there, and people are now seeing it. So the more engagement you're creating, the the more people are gonna follow you. So I think that's the easiest way.

Yeah, that's really good. You touched on a couple of really important things there. And that's, first of all, is that you've already got a network of people that you can tap into that can share, like, comment on your content. And that's one of the things I think people, people try to build this audience from zero to one and keep going from there, whereas they already have connections, like you mentioned, being able to invite them, awesome new feature from LinkedIn. But I think the thing people, you touched on it and just take it a step further, People forget that LinkedIn has an algorithm where if you're not getting a certain number, a certain amount of engagement within a certain amount of time after you post, so that means likes, comments, shares, then LinkedIn is not showing it to a broader network, right? So this particularly applies to your personal page, not as much your brand page, because like you might have 4,000 connections, but your brand might have 40 followers to start. So that's a great opportunity to share your brand stuff through your personal page and then tag other people there and continue to grow momentum across the two accounts. And so one of the things that we— you mentioned it already, that's, you know, naming people. That's almost a cheap and easy like that you can just grab there, right? If I, if I named Karen in a post, Karen is definitely smashing that like button 9 times out of 10. So great stuff there. Great stuff.

And it just doesn't— I guess one of the other points is it doesn't— when you're creating the page, one time a week going on it, just thinking sitting there it's just gonna gain followers because it's there. It's not gonna work. It takes that time and energy to put into it. And unfortunately if you're not used to it, it might be hard to do that on a daily basis. But once you get in the routine like I mentioned of doing it, it just becomes, you have your coffee in the morning, you check LinkedIn, you like, like, like, like, share, share, post this, and then you've done your job for the day. Maybe at the end of the day you check back in. So, you know, just making that part of your routine, it should definitely be a part of your to-do list every single day. So, you know, we can hit on the valuable content that needs to be on there, but I do think if you're not putting, you know, you're tagging out, you're liking and you're sharing, your content's just not going to grow as much as it can.

So. That's right. No matter how valuable the content, if nobody hears it, then the value is not amplified. But to that end though, I think people overcomplicate how hard it is to create valuable content. Doing it for your clients all day long, right? So I'll use our company as an example. If somebody calls me with an HR-related question, then all I need to do is turn on the video cam and go, hey, answer the question to a broader audience because it's the same question that other small business owners have, or simply writing that up in a post. So whatever you're doing already, then go ahead and repurpose that. And that can be a Twitter post, a LinkedIn post, a Facebook Facebook post. They have different ways of creating that, but images and all these different things to start to add in, you'll start to see what creates more engagement. But people want the real value and insight that you create as a business and a brand. And so there's a lot of different ways you can do that.

It's almost— think about it of how you talk, that's how you should— how you would talk to someone, that's how you should be writing it. Yeah, don't be as strict on there. You don't— if you don't talk like that, they know that that's that's really not you, that's not your personality. So don't try to be someone else on social. Be yourself, be your brand, be what your brand is. And you know, that's all through the communication. So I don't put on a different face for it. Always just be yourself.

So keep it real, as they say.

It's the real deal. Awesome. Awesome. But getting on to your fun stuff for the day. So as we're a couple months into COVID-19 and you know, as you know, the situation has not been good for many and you know, having a pandemic going on, but it has created a lot of advantages for most businesses. And I just want to see what mistakes you're seeing most companies do that they haven't taken advantage of, that they haven't done during so far. During COVID-19 and what they can start doing today, this week, you know, for, you know, it's not going anywhere, it's still around, it's still a big part of everyone's life. It's not too late. So I just want to get your thoughts on what they can be doing, you know, what in the next couple weeks, in the next couple months, over the next year for COVID-19.

Yeah, it's interesting. It's kind of dawned on me over the last couple weeks that crises exploit our weaknesses. Right? So I think about it like— I love to use the sports analogies— when you play against a really good coach, they're gonna find what your weaknesses are and they're gonna double down on that. And it's almost like in times of crisis, the things that you got away with when maybe you were facing a lesser team, the market was good, conditions were better, now you're getting it thrown right back in your face and somebody is just beating you down with it. And so, and right now that's the market. And things happening that are external-facing. But so we're seeing a lot of that. So people that were— had a bad culture, as an example, have really now— that's just been amplified. All those things that were below the surface when times were good and people didn't talk about them and leadership thought they might flow over and they could just get through it, and, you know, employees just said, ah, you know, this is a good job, so I'm not going to make a big deal about it. Those things are now big problems. And so they're getting amplified by, I can't get to work, I need to work remote, I'm getting laid off, I don't communicate properly with my people. And so some of these things are turning into bigger issues that could include legal issues, could include turnover, could include, for some businesses, never returning, quite frankly, unfortunately. But I will say communication has kind of been at the core core of everything we've seen. So bad culture, good culture, good experience through COVID-19, bad experience through COVID-19. And I'll extend that into some of the racial tension happening in our society as well. You know, talk to leaders, this is on all fronts. It started with COVID-19 where it was, hey, okay, things are just different, but my people get it because they watch the news and I'm still going to communicate with them the same way I've always done it. And we're going to have the same meetings and things aren't going to change all that much. Well, guess what? The game plan has to change. Going back to that, teams exploiting your weaknesses. Well, now it's time to go in at halftime and change up your game plan. And so a lot of people didn't. They stuck with the same game plan in the second half, and now they're getting toasted. And so, you know, that's been probably one of the biggest mistakes is that in a time of crisis, we have to increase the velocity, the frequency, the intensity of our communication with our team, even if things are good. So in our world, you know, things were relatively good. We were helping a lot of businesses in bad situations, but for us, we were busier than ever, which required more communication than ever, right? So we stepped up our team meetings to daily. We stepped up, you know, more and more of these Zoom conversations. We tried to increase the collision. We're seeing more of that for the companies that are excelling. They're finding ways to work around barriers, and most of that all starts with communication, getting ideas from all components of the business. Now, the companies that have been struggling, they're kind of doing the opposite. I had this conversation with a leader not too long ago, you know, going back to the start of the racial tension, you know, days in, said, I just, I just don't know what to say. And I'm just, so I just haven't done anything. And well, you know, I can certainly understand as a white male not knowing what to say, right? I've, and certainly with a company that has diversity initiatives that we have not achieved up to this point. And so, I know what it feels like to say, okay, I'm not 100% sure what to say here. I know that part of this is going to be listening, but you still have to talk to your team about what it means to you, what it means to the organization, what your plans are going forward, how things will change if they're going to change. And that can't be a one-time thing. Going back to the COVID-19 thing, I don't get to just say, hey guys, things are going to be good going forward and we're all set from here. Charge on! Like, we have to say, you know, we are talking every single week about Here's what's changed. Here's what stayed the same. Here's what's going to change over the next 3 months, 6 months, 9 months. Here's how we see it's going to affect us over the course of the year. You know, we're talking to our team, we're dealing with these PPP loans, we're dealing with the FF CRA. I'm like, look, this is a 14-month thing we're talking about here for our team. This isn't a 14-day thing. You don't get to just learn about it and move on. We're going to be reconciling the forgiveness, we're going to be reconciling the tax credits, all this stuff for a long time. So dig in, get ready for what's going to be a long battle and be prepared for it because mentally that's important. And it's the same for organizations who are facing any other kinds of struggles. And I will say probably the last thing that I've noticed is that people aren't, they aren't doing the research to put the things in place that can help their team. And the example being, I talked to a company that, you know, maybe a month after all of the tax credits came out, the PPP loans were coming out and they had just started paying all their staff to work from— to not work at all without getting any credits back for it because they weren't properly tracking it. And they hadn't gotten to the point where they didn't put them on unemployment because they just didn't want to put people on unemployment, even though they would have made more money by laying them off— the employees, that is— by laying them off and then being on unemployment. And the employer would have saved all that money out of pocket. And then they're scurrying up trying to work backwards because almost out of pride, they thought it was the right thing to do for their employees. So they were just using gut instinct and what they thought was good leadership. Instead of being, you know, taking the time to put in the research to see what programs are available and to help their team instead of just doing what they thought was right. And so that's one that's been a little bit interesting, kind of hard to talk to some of these folks sometimes who say, hey, look, you've wasted a lot of money. And is there any recourse for that? No, not the way you did it. You know, we sent you 75 emails about the webinars, right? So educate yourself. You know, sometimes you got to open the emails, sometimes you got to listen to the webinars, sometimes you got to listen to the people providing the information of just saying, hey, I know what I'm doing because I've been a business owner for X number of years. So that's hard for people. We're all pride people, right?

Exactly. You hit on a good point, you know, talking how important communication is. And there's a lot of employers who— so especially you who are, you know, you're very much into this because it's a big HR aspect and that's kind of your bread and butter, you know, those who aren't very much into it and they get these tough questions from employees, what is one tip, and they don't know the answer, what would one tip you have for them to be to answer these hard questions when they don't even really know what they think of everything? Is there a good way, you know, a general way to talk to employees or, you know, I understand what you're, you know, it, what, say, just a tip for employees who really don't know how to answer these questions right when they get these questions, these, how to answer these questions.

Yeah, no, I understand what you're saying. So first of all, it's be honest, right? So a lot of us want to pretend we have the answers because we're in a leadership position. If you've got a question, I want to be able to answer it. And you're, you're only going to dig a bigger hole there, right? Uh, regardless of what it's related to. So just be honest in the same way you would, whether it's a client, a friend, whomever, I can find out the answer. I want to help you and I want to be here for you and I want to put you in the best situation personally and professionally to succeed. And that's my commitment to you as a teammate. So I think that's probably the number one thing is that there, there are a lot of industries and we see this from the outside where it becomes us against them, employer versus employees. And then the divide, this is when that bad culture divide starts to happen is when things get harder. And so the only way you can get rid of that is to go, "That's a great question, Karen. I will definitely find out an answer because I want to help you." Right. And so, you know, just being honest and forthright with your teammates and communicating effectively and then doing what you say you're going to do. So going back again, I mean, there are a lot of people that wanted to stand up at the beginning of each of these things and give a powerful speech about how we're going to rally around it. And then they went silent when things didn't go the way they hoped.. And so, you know, not everything is going to go the way you hoped. It's important to be open and honest with your team to the point of not transferring worry though, right? So like, if you don't want to create more worry for your teammates, but you certainly want to give them the North Star and hey, our normal 90-day vision planning process or 2-year vision planning process or whatever it is, we're condensing the windows because we just have to look out for day by day at this point. And so, uh, you know, just Being, being experienced enough to know what you don't know and willing to share that with your team is super important right now.

Absolutely. Well, I think we covered some good little topics today. Yeah, definitely. Just for everyone who's listening, we are more than willing to help you if you want to start growing your LinkedIn and you have questions, reach out to myself or Matt. If you are going through these, you know, you know, you haven't done the best that you can do during COVID-19. You want to get help, we're here. So reach out, you know, email us, you know, shoot us, go to ergpayroll.com or growbyerg.com. You can contact us right through there. So we're here to help. And