MBA1743 Guest Teacher – Alex Douzet – How to Maintain Consumer Visibility In the Wake of Budget Cuts

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Hey O welcome to the Hunter $100 MBA Show. Real World Practical Business Lessons every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the Real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my partner back in 2014 and today's episode is a guest teacher episode. On our guest teacher episodes I bring on an expert to teach their area of expertise. And today we have Alex Duzet and he'll be teaching you how to maintain consumer visibility in the wake budget cuts. Many of us had to slash our budgets this last year because of COVID How do you maintain bringing in new customers, having people aware of your brand, staying on the offense when it comes to marketing when you have less cash on hand? Well that's why we brought on Alex Jose to teach you his guest teacher lesson. Alex Jose is an incredible entrepreneur. He's the CEO and founder of a direct to consumer pet wellness and insurance company Pumpkin Pet Insurance. Their company's goal is to remove the economic barriers from any pet owner from receiving the care they need for their pet. In fact they don't call them pet owners, they call them pet parents. Alex Dize has had a very very full career in the last 20 years growing his business and helping others do the same. On a fun note, Dizeay is also a seven time Ironman competition finisher. He's learned a ton of lessons being a triathlete as well. And he's here today to show you how to get your brand out there, how to continue to market even when you're on a budget, even when you don't have that much money on hand. Can't wait for this one. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

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Huh?

Discover's accepted where I like to shop. Come on, baby, get with the times.

Right.

So we shouldn't get the parachute pants.

These are making a comeback, I think. Discover is accepted at 99% of places that take credit cards nationwide. Based on the February 2025 Nielsen report.

I was very excited about today's guest teacher lesson, Alex Duzay. Because many of us are dealing with some really toug times financially in our business. We've had to maybe lay off some people, cut some costs, maybe even take a pay cut ourselves so that we can make ends meet. All this and you still need to bring in customers. That takes effort, takes money. How can you do this with minimal funds on hand? Well, that's why today we brought on Alex Jozay. He's going to be teaching you how to do that. So I'm going to pass it on to Alex. But I'll be back to wrap up today's episode and give my takeaways. But for now, take it away, Alex.

Hey everyone, I'm Alex Touzay and thank you for joining me today. I'll be teaching you about what you can do to maintain your company consumer visibility amidst budget cut. When I launched Pumpkin Pet Insurance in the middle of COVID we had a very limited marketing budget so we had to come up with creative way to optimize our strategy. Many of our tricks and tactics, I will discuss them in depth today. So let's get into it. To start, whenever you are establishing a company or startup, budget cuts or repertoisations are something that every company experience. It's essential part of improving and growing your business. Like it or not, cuts are sometimes, you know that what's, that's what you have to deal with at every company that I've been part of. It's an issue that you will encounter. So you just better be prepared for it. When economic times are tough. One of the first areas that companies often find themselves making cuts are and is the marketing budget and the advertising budget. It's a real double edged sword. Brands are struggling, often needs to do more with less marketing to raise consumer awareness but remain competitive. Advertising and publicity can also be very expensive. So what should you do? Well, you There are a number of ways companies and entrepreneurs can engage with consumers and their customers and maintain visibility while also dealing with a very tight budget. First, and maybe the most important tool you have at your disposal are your social media channels. A company's social media platform are key components of a brand identity. It's the first place consumers go to to interact with your business, learn about what's new, and really understand how your company is responding to what's going on in the world. I've put together three quick, cost effective ways to engage with and appeal to new and repeat customers on social media. The first one is incentives and giveaway. Consumers love freebie and swag. If your company sells a product or service, tie it to an offer or a free sample, a free trial, or host a giveaway to organically engage with your audience. With that said, most prominent social media platforms, especially Facebook and Instagram have a complicated algorithm which actually prevent the majority of a brand's existing fans or followers from seeing content on the company post unless the brands pay Facebook or Instagram for that exposure. So one way to naturally increase your social visibility without having to pay Facebook or Instagram is to encourage your fan or people visiting your page to like, comment and especially share your company incentive and giveaway on their own page. Rather than simply entering the giveaway social reaction in comments, increase the post organic reach, which means more people find out about your giveaway or your incentive and the brands pay nothing for additional exposure and it's basically a win win for everybody. Another approach is social good campaign. Studies shown that 87% of consumer will purchase a product from a company that supports an issue they care about. A social good campaign is a way in which a brand utilize its social media platform to encourage followers to post, share or donate for a specific cause or a philanthropic endeavor. Launching such initiatives can often result in powerful consumer generated content while encouraging audiences to engage with your brand and do something meaningful at the same time. When the pandemic started, Pumpkin Veterinary Network took a huge financial hit. We at Pumpkin wanted to do something to help clinics stay afloat. So we came up with a campaign where we offer our followers the opportunity to support their pets. Respective veterinarians we launched a social media campaign on Instagram and Facebook called Off Meow for Vets in which Pumpkin made a $5 donation to a clinic whenever someone take their favorite vet and use the campaign hashtag. It worked incredibly well. So well in fact that when we expanded our budget, we actually expanded our budget to extend the initiative. People were jumping at the opportunity to show their support for frontline workers. Another tactic is to leverage Micro Influencer so let me start by explaining what is a Micro Influencer. So micro Influencers are people who generally have between 1,000 to maybe up to 500,000 followers on the respective social media platform. They have a highly engaged audience and post content that's consistent with a particular niche such as wellness, fitness, food, pets, travel, etc. Smaller influencers can be an excellent source for expanding your brand's reach and connecting with new consumers in an authentic way. While large scale Influencer can run many thousand of dollars for a post, many micro influencers have strong dedicated following and tend to be more willing to post branded content in exchange for free product or service that they feel provide value. This process requires some trial and error, but it can result in low cost wide scale exposure. So for example, when we launched Pumpkin, we started by connecting with Micro Influencer with anywhere between 10,000 to maybe 90 or 100,000 followers. While some were still proactively expensive or already had existing existing account and working with competitor, others were incredibly receptive and excited to work with us in exchange for free participation in a wellness program. Through tapping into these smaller but very connected audiences, we were able to achieve a free visibility among the wide range of consumers who we otherwise will have had to pay to reach that audience. Now let's switch gear. Another way to kind of reach audience and increase consumer visibility is to improve a company search engine visibility through what a technical Search Engine Optimization, also known as SEO. SEO is a practice of increasing the quantity and the quality of traffic to your website through organic engine results. Search engines like Google use complex algorithms to rank content that will be relevant to search query SEO is complicated, but the simplest way to look at it, especially with Google is if Google wants to display the best possible content to the searcher. They rank them on a variety of factors that measure how well the searcher enjoys the content, such as time spent on the site, the bounce rate, the referring domain, the social domains reputations. Since most consumers don't bother to read beyond the first or second page of search engine, where your company rank is extremely important. So some easy top level suggestions that can help you improve your SEO include adding a blog page to your company website. No matter the business or industry you are in, a blog is an easy way to add more content to your site. The more content you have on your site, the more opportunities has to be found by Google and other search engines resulting in organic or free web traffic. This is especially valuable in industry where paid advertising can be extremely competitive and therefore be extremely expensive. Creating content that drive user to your site for free is a great path to better overall profitability. Another tactic that I will describe as an hybrid between an SEO tactic and also like building brand awareness is to conduct surveys. It's an excellent way to help increase a brand's awareness and SEO since they can be used to garner press interest from high traffic media outlet. One of the biggest ranking factors in SEO, for instance is how many referring domains your site has it increase your overall authority. Simply put, the more sites that link to your content, the better chance it it has to increase in search rankings. Google doesn't value all sites equally. Higher authority and credible sites like national press outlets have more authority and credibility than the newly launched blog that may link to your site. Because news outlets that report on survey finding will link to the original source in their story, this type of content will organically help generate authoritative links back to your site. It's important to note that media loves to write about surveys. If your company has had to pause innovation efforts or campaign, a poll can be a great, easy cost effective way to align a campaign with new credible findings that news outlets are inclined to cover. Because we launched Pumpkin at the height of COVID we had to establish creative to get the media to pay attention. So we initiated consumer driven brand relevant survey to help generate newsworthy topics that we believe the press will pay attention to. They are affordable platform like SurveyMonkey which makes it extremely easy to tailor a survey to meet your company budget. Finally, be on the lookout for industry networking opportunities and events. Many conference since COVID have moved online and are doing virtual events and panel discussions using video conference tool like Zoom. During COVID many brands participated in virtual events which helped increase accessibility for both attendees and speaker since time and travel budget were no longer a limiting factor. So as we move beyond the pandemic, I think we will see interest in virtual events continue with conferences becoming a mix of online and in person opportunities. Conferences schedules are frequently changing and adjusting, especially now, so it's important to stay up to date so you can apply to speak when you find something that's a good fit for your expertise. For instance, during COVID I personally participated in a virtual conference called A Peak Inside the Pet Boom. It was a conference that was organized by a leading venture capital firm with many experts covering topics such as pet nutrition, the future of veterinary medicine. So it was a good topic for me to be to be an expert on one of the panel. Another tactic is event give brand leadership the chance to connect with other industry executives for networking purpose and can help companies get in front of key demographics for little to no cost. So to reiterate, when working with a tight budget you need to find creative way to stay relevant with consumers. Consumer utilize social media by rewarding followers with free sample or giveaway engage with customers through social media campaigns or fundraising efforts doing incline partnership with Micro Influencer to authentically expand your brand audience without paying for social media advertising. Another category is organically improved your company SEO by adding a blog to your website to increase your site rank and use of keywords, conducting survey to increase the credibility of your site, your site authority and increase overall breast coverage that can drive brand awareness. And finally, remain on the lookout for events conference your leadership can speak at to increase the exposure and make connections all right guys, this was Alex Douzet, the CEO of Pumpkin. If you are interested to see how I've used these tips firsthand or if you're interested in learning more about Pumpkin, you can visit Pumpkin Care to see how we put much of what I discuss into practice. Thanks again for your time today for joining me. And and now back to omor.

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What a fantastic lesson by Alex Duzay. I love his idea of working with influencers and I'm going to take it another step. One of the ways we've grown our software company, Webinar Ninja, is through partnerships. And what I mean by partnerships is that you're leveraging somebody else's audience that they've gathered already to sell your products and services. And you don't need to spend any money to do this. You can just come up with a partnership, some sort of revenue split, an affiliate commission, something that gives them a kickback for promoting your product and they can promote it themselves via email. Or you can do like a joint webinar and sell it together as co hosts. The point here is that you have your own audience, but there are tons of audiences out there that people have built on their own people that would be interested in your products and services. Reach out to those people. Make a list of people that have audiences you would love to get in front of and reach out to them and say, hey, I have an idea. I want to partner with you. Here's the deal. This is what's in it for you. And if you have a great product that their audience will love, that's really a good motivation for them to say yes to this partnership. Thanks so much for listening to the Hunter MBA Show. If you love what you hear, smash that subscribe button and make sure you subscribe. It's absolutely free. By hitting subscribe you get access to over 1700 of our business lessons that are in our archives. It's the only way to get access to our archives. So hit subscribe right now. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. There's a line that Tony Robbins says that sounds a little cheesy on its surface, but it's actually really true. And it is something you should remind yourself of every day. Successful businesses are not about resources. They're about resourcefulness. It's not about what you have. It's about how you use with what you have, whether it's money, whether it's relationships, whether it's your product, your service, whatever it is. If you utilize what you have and get creative, you can go a really long way. That's what's gonna differentiate you from the competition. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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