INBOUND 2016: Shama Hyder - "Momentum: How to Propel Your Marketing..."

Good morning, Inbound. Is this thing on? Can you guys hear me back there? All right, raise your hand if you can hear me back there, just so I make sure. Awesome. Sweet. All right, great. So good to be here. Thank you so much for joining me. I know it's sort of a tight squeeze. Appreciate you guys coming in here. How many this is. Is this your first Inbound? Just raise your hand if this is your first. Wow. Okay. We've got lots of new folks. How many have heard me speak before? Oh, wow. Okay. Different room. Last year when I spoke, it was the opposite. So welcome to Inbound. It's an exciting, crazy time, is it not? Yes. Feels more like a festival. If you've ever done south by, this is sort of similar to that. So great to be here. We're talking about momentum today and marketing in the digital age and what it looks like. I'll tell you my story. I'll. I'll give you very specific things that you can do as soon as you leave here to help your marketing and whatever that you're doing, whether it's a non profit. So just show of hands. How many work within a company? All right. That's different too. How many run your own company? We've got a couple of entrepreneurs. How many work in the nonprofit space? Ok. All right. So it looks like we have a very diverse crowd. So here's going to be my promise to you. I'm going to promise you that each of you will get something out of this that you didn't know before. Is that a decent promise? All right. Because it seems like everyone's coming from maybe a different perspective here. And what I would like from you is if you didn't learn something new, something that could help you in your role in whatever capacity that you're doing things in that you will ask a question towards the end to make sure that you get something out of it. Is that fair? Shared responsibility? Can we do that? Yes. Go America. All right. Okay. So I'll tell you a little bit about myself. You got a quick little bio. And by the way, kudos to Elise, who really rocked getting my name right. That was impressive. So I'll tell you a little bit about myself. We'll talk about how marketing's evolved, where we've come from, where we're going, and then we'll get into sort of the nitty gritty. And I'll share case studies with you, things that I think you will find exciting as marketers. So I graduated from the University of Texas at Austin. Really? All right. Okay, never mind. So, graduated from the University of Texas in Austin. And I have a degree, a master's degree in organizational communication and technology. And I did my thesis on Twitter when it had about 3,000 users. So for those who are familiar, Twitter has, depending on the study, you look at about 375 million users. And when I graduated with this degree, very excited about social media. Very, very early days, I thought that I would do what you're supposed to do when you get out of school. Which is what? Get a job. Come on, guys, you know this. Get a job, right? That's what you're supposed to do. Except there was one major problem about seven to eight years ago. Anybody want to guess what that problem might have been? Not everyone together. No. No jobs. All right, that's fair. That's close. There's even a bigger problem. Can anybody guess what that companies were utilizing? Social. Companies weren't utilizing social. Actually, they weren't utilizing at all. So my problem was that the industry didn't exist. Look at all of you guys, so many of you. This is your first year here. Imagine seven to eight years ago, the industry didn't exist. People said, what is social media? What is this newfangled stuff? What's Twitter? It's probably the most common question, what's Twitter? Some of your bosses may still be asking you that. I hope not, but possibly. Or Facebook is for my 13 year old. Remember, this is before Snapchat, before Instagram, before elections were won or lost, using social media, before governments were toppled. Everything changed with the advent of social media. But this was really, really early days. So I really had two choices. I could let my parents tell their friends that their daughter was unemployed or self employed. So I thought self employed sounded a lot better and I started my own company. So I started the Marketing Zen Group. We're a social media digital social media agency and digital PR firm. We do a lot of influencer marketing, digital PR campaigns, content, so forth. And we grew from me to about 30 people in the course of seven years. We passed a million in revenue in about our second year in business and never looked back. So we've been recognized both by the White House and the United nations as one of the top hundred companies in the US to be run by a young entrepreneur. We worked on amazing campaigns across the board. I'll share some of that with you. So I'm sharing this with you today to give you a sense of how far the world has come. When I started the company, I was 23 years old. The world of social Media, marketing, inbound. None of this really existed. And it's amazing to see how far we've come, but really where we're going as well. So to me, that's fascinating. And the things I'm going to share with you today, some of it still comes from that academia in me, that academic in me that never went away. I love seeing what's next. What's the future. I think part of when you come to a conference like this is sort of getting an insider look, a look behind the curtains to see what's next. What are we going to look forward to as. And then also what I want to share with you is the practicalities, the things that we're seeing in the trenches every day. So unlike some speakers, this isn't just my day job, if you will. My day job is being founder and CEO of the Marketing Zen Group. So some of the examples I'll share with you are really based on what we're seeing, works for our clients. Real world stuff, not just theory, because I know you guys get a lot of that. So that's pretty much my background in a nutshell. So let's look at marketing and how it's evolved. Very quick, I promise. Then we're going to delve into the nitty gritty. But we started with push marketing. Push marketing, of course, outbound stuff that we're familiar with. But what I love is actually this picture that you see in the background that sort of faded. They found this from. This is the ruins of Pompeii. And even on these walls, if you like history or anything like me, what they found is etched ads for fish, for the fish market. So marketing is not anything new, Right? This is Pompeii buried. And there were people writing on the wall that they found and they talked about whose fish was the freshest. Right? And so amazing to me, think about how marketing as a profession has always been there, how it's really part of our DNA in so many ways. And then of course, with the advent of the red, if you will, things change to pull marketing is where you're familiar with, of course, inbound. How do we get attention now that attention's more scarce? People have a choice because guess what they can do. Opt out. They can opt out. They don't have to stand there and hear you talk about your fish, as it were. They can choose what messages that they get and they get to be filters for that message. One of my favorite pictures, if I could sum up almost all my slides into one, would be this. This idea of and can you see the difference between seven years and this is from St. Petersburg Square. And what's the thing that stands out most here? Mobile devices, of course. By the way, people ask me, why don't you update us for 2016? I'm just waiting for 2017, when we all have our little Snapchat glasses. You know, they can just get rid of the. But what's, I think fascinating is if you think about the reach of that event in 2005, that reach might have been a few thousand people. In 2013, what do you think that reach of that same event is? Millions. Millions. And so, you know, when I talk about social media in this context or I talk about sort of inbound, to me it's different. I think there's two definitions. One definition is probably one. What you're really familiar with websites where people connect, communicate, collaborate with each other, that is by all means, that's social media. But there's a greater definition. And that's the definition I hope that you'll really be thinking about as I share this information with you today as you go on to other sessions and you learn other information. And that is this. You guys ready for this? People are now the media. People are now the media. So one of the most common questions I get is what's next in terms of tool or platform? That's a valid question. But what I am far more interested in is this fact of how we exchange information, how we share things, how we amplify and get visibility for something, and how that's never going to change. That is here to stay. Quick show of hands, right? How many of you yelped a restaurant before trying it? The majority of you in the room, how many have looked at a movie review, let's say Rotten Tomatoes or so forth, before deciding to see what you're going to see on the weekend? The majority of us, if you look around, that is social media, that is marketing. Today, it's very different. It's not about the platform or the tool, but how we share information, how we amplify our messaging, and that changes everything. So I feel like we've gone from this old paradigm to a new paradigm. We've gone from push, pull, but now we're entering a whole new era. And this is idea of integrated marketing. Integrated marketing. And so what does that mean? It's not just about inbound or outbound even to me, it's about finding this kind of sweet spot where everything works together. So the old paradigm, of course, focuses on, is it outbound? Inbound, The New paradigm looks at how do we integrate all the marketing channels across the board. The old paradigm, quantity dictates strategy, how much money we have, how many resources we have. Strategy gets built around that. The new paradigm is all about quality, dictating strategy. And I'll give you guys some great examples. So don't worry, we'll get into the nitty gritty of all of this. The old paradigm is brand led. Talk about this too. The new paradigm is being customer driven, focusing on the brand of your customers. The old paradigm forces old metrics on new platforms. The new paradigm looks at new ROI metrics that make sense because the old metrics don't make sense anymore. And of course, I think the biggest difference is in this old versus new is this old paradigm uses digital marketing. How many of you guys still think like that? Or you've had people say, how do we use social media using something versus realizing that this is the ecosystem that we now live in. It's not just about using your tool or platform, but how we share information, how we connect, how we communicate. And that changes, to me at least everything. It's a huge game changer when it's kind of like the fish swimming in water and it says, where's the water? Well, you're swimming in it. And so this new marketing, this new wave that we're all part of, it's not so much about these tools or platforms. There's something so much broader here, which is this new ecosystem that we thrive in, how we share information, what we do with it. And I think that's really the most exciting part about all of this. So I want to give you principles that will help you take advantage of this new ecosystem. Hence the name of my book, by the way, Momentum, which I believe is available in bookstores here. And Momentum came out in about June and my first book, and I'll give you a little bit of background, I think it'll give you a sense of why I wrote it, why these principles are timely, and why I'm sharing this with you today. So I wrote my first book, the Zen of Social Media Marketing. It was one of the first books on social media. It actually just went into its fourth edition and it's used as a textbook in college classes around the world to, to actually teach social media. Remember, this is a time I started in this industry when the industry really didn't exist. So it's amazing to see something that I wrote come out in its fourth edition. But here's something that happens that very few people know about when you write a book that's well received. Do you guys want to know the most common question is, when's your next book? That's the most common question. And I was just like, I just finished this book. But your most common question that you get is, what's next? And it's very common for authors, once they have a successful book, to put something out right away. But I didn't do that. Honestly, I knew that the Zen of social media was successful because it met market demand. Right. I'm a business. I'm an entrepreneur at heart. I think in terms of market demand, I thought, I don't want to say something that's already being said. And at that point, with Zen of social media, I was a primer. It made sense. People needed it. So I waited about four years before I looked and said, you know what, there's now something that needs to be said that's not being, if you'll pardon the redundancy being said. And so hence for me was we went from a place of understanding. How does social media work? What are the basics? How do I do Facebook lives? What are these technicalities, this tactical stuff to this broader. How many feel overwhelmed a little bit by the world of marketing? You know, I think if anyone says no, it's like, I want to know what you're drinking. I want to do whatever you're doing. Because it is an overwhelming industry. It's a very challenging industry. I think it takes almost a certain level of bravery and courage to be in marketing today because you have to be able to keep up with this. So for me, looking at momentum was less about the tactical, but more about brightness. Broader principles that can help you no matter how the world keeps changing in the next few years. So my first principle for you is this idea of agility through analytics. What does this mean? It means that, by the way, can anybody guess what that stands for? I like it. Yes, absolutely. It looks very good. No sacred cows. How many times in an organization have you guys heard, hey, yeah, let's make that red, because I think that looks cool. Good. Or your boss thinks we should just make this picture a little bit bigger. Anybody ever deal with that? No. Or maybe we should put the button right here. Nobody's going to see the button there. I'm sure these are conversations we all have. So this principle is letting data be our guide, making decisions based on numbers and not on sacred cows. Like, ok, but our founders really love this logo, but our customers hate our logo. So it's focusing on those objective metrics. I think. And we have such amazing data today. We have so many outlets today to be able to get those analytics to make smart decisions. How many look at your Google Analytics on a regular basis? More or less. All right, ok, good. The majority of you, you know, there's two metrics on there that can be so definitive for any website. One that you can look at, of course, is your bounce rate. People don't think about it, but if you have a bounce rate of 70% or higher, that means seven out of 10 people who come to your site leave within seconds. That means either your site's not converting well or the traffic that you're getting to your site isn't ideal. They're not the people that are actually potential buyers, they're not potential donors. If you're a nonprofit, whatever it may be. But your bounce rate matters. Very simple number. Or if you look at how much traffic you get from mobile devices, if that number is over 50%, but your website's still not optimized for mobile, guess what? That's 50% of potential business right out the door before it's ever had a chance. So when I talk about agility through analytics, I'm not just talking about big data. If you're a big company where that makes sense. Of course there are elements where that makes sense. I'm talking about even the most simplest stuff that you can look at that can make a huge difference if you implement it correctly. And of course, now we live in the world of what, multiple, multiple devices, multiple screens. We talk about second screen viewing pleasure. If you watch television, you see it all the time. How people interact with your content is no longer on one screen anyways. Even if it's a traditional ad that they're watching, they're tweeting. I mean just think about. I'm not going to talk about the election, but I'll say this. Let's talk about the super bowl, right? Last super bowl, how many of you, as you watched it on television at the same time had another device out? How many had maybe were tweeting with friends or talking? Right. How many were checking email for the next day for work? So this is the world we live in, but we forget. So how information is consumed is no longer just on one device. Anyways, so couple of. I wanted to just share a couple of tools. I think that might be interesting for you guys. Anybody heard of Unbounce? Right. Some of you. And I know HubSpot has something similar. So this isn't in lieu of. I suppose I'm just Sharing other tools that might be helpful that we find helpful. Unbounce is a great tool, lets you build, publish AB landing pages for AB testing. Very simple. You don't need to get it involved to be able to do this, to be able to test it. So that's one tool again, just to showcase the power of being able to make decisions based on numbers. Here's another one that I really like. This is actually a software that lets you do heat maps. Does anybody do heat mapping on your website right now? Extremely powerful, by the way, for I know there's a bunch that don't. But a heat map essentially will tell you where people's cursor is moving so where their eye is most likely to go. So for example, if this is your website and your phone number is all the way down to the left here, how many people do you think are actually seeing that? Not many. Right. So where should it go? Where it's the hottest, where people are most likely to see or where their cursor is supposed to go? Even small things like this can help make big differences when it comes to your marketing. The second principle I want to share with you and guys, this is probably my favorite principle. And if you take anything out of this today, I hope that this is this one principle. This is the only thing you get to take away. I hope it's this. So what do I mean by customer focus? And I promise you it's nothing like you've heard before. Now give you a little bit of context for it. Do you guys remember I told you I did my thesis on Twitter? Okay, so the question I was asking was, why? Why do people use social media? Have you ever stepped away from this and wondered about this, like, why we use social media? I mean, seven, eight years ago, I was fascinated. I was thinking, why are people saying, like, I just had a banana for lunch, good for you, right? Or, I walked the dog. Great, right? Do you want a cookie for being a decent human being? So I was fascinated by the why behind social media. And I think to this day I am. But I found something incredibly revealing in my academic thesis. My hypothesis was that we use it to connect with people, to have a sense of community. It's for the grandparents who get to see pictures of their grandkids. That's what I thought, but I was wrong. The primary reason people use social media is to showcase their own identity. I hear some chuckling and I think it's because there's a sense of, oh my God, the world really is a giant selfie. We are really narcissistic. The world belongs to the Kardashians, whatever it may be. But if I may take you to a little detour down history, and I promise there's a huge marketing implication to all of this. We look at how we as human beings become who we are, and we do this through feedback from our society. We like to think that, especially as Americans, that we're individuals, that we're independent, but really we're so very much shaped by. By the feedback that society gives us. Go back to kindergarten. The friends that you made. Someone sitting next to you, your best friend, I bet you you made because you both shared a love of blue crayons like you love blue crayons. Me too. Right? Your mom packs you PBJ sandwiches. Get out of here. I love PBJ sandwiches. That's how we make friends. That's how we as human beings evolve. And that doesn't change when we become consumers. It doesn't change when we become marketers, whatever it may be. But here's what's fascinating is if you understand this, if you really understand why people use social media, you'll stop asking the wrong question. And the wrong question is always, what does our brand say about us? That's the question that. That's the old paradigm of being brand led. It's always, what does our brand say about us? What do we want to stand for? The right question to be asking is what is doing business? Business with us? Allow our customers to see about their personal brand. Let that sink in for a second. I know some of you may not even had lunch today, might need a drink after this, which is what I always like when conferences are in Vegas, by the way, because I can always go ask people to go get a margarita afterwards. But what I think is fascinating about this is really if you understand this concept about being customer focused. So this isn't about understanding customer service or meeting those needs. It's understanding that people don't do business with you because of who you are. They do business with you because of who they are. I see some light bulbs, right? So as inbound marketers, marketers in any really area, this becomes huge because think about how many times you simply focused on your brand or your business. Have you even thought about what it means for your audience? And I'll give you some great examples that I think will really drive this home for you. Facebook has long understood that you don't get on Facebook just to comment on other people's stuff. That you spend more time on your profile than Anything else, they understand this. And so that's why a lot of the changes that they make, it's to give you those platforms, it's to give you those tools to be able to showcase that identity. So if you're doing anything on Facebook, for example, but you're making it about your brand rather than your customer's brand, you're losing in some ways. Have you guys ever wondered why maybe, like, Joe's Local Cupcakery has more likes and more engagement than a huge page that's run by a conglomerate? Why? Why does Joe's Cupcakery attract more people? Because the people liking it, people engaging. It says less about Joe's. It says more about them. Do they like local businesses? That they have a sweet tooth? That they want their friends to know that they like cupcakes? That's who they are as an individual, and Joe's simply gives them that platform. Give you guys another example. This is specifically supposed for my nonprofit friends, but applies across the board. How many are familiar with the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge? How many maybe participated in the Ice Bucket Challenge? Right. Quite a few. And so have you ever thought about what made that so successful? When you just look at the numbers, in 2013, donations were 1.7 million. In 2014, donations were 11.4 million. And the reason why ALS was so successful with this is because they understood this concept of being customer focused, understanding that as long as they kept talking about what they did. And it's noble, right? Not to say that it's not, but. But how do you get people engaged? You get people engaged when you make it about them and find a connection or a thread to the message that you want to get out there. So if someone got on Facebook or whatever and dumped ice bucket or ice water or ice on their head, it said something about them, that they were willing to stand up for a cause, that they were willing to be a little silly, that they were willing to get other friends involved. And hey, if it supported a good cause, why not? So this is a great example of. Of being focused on your audience and not necessarily specifically the brand or what it's trying to do. Here's another one of my favorite examples. Does anybody know what that is? It's actually right here in Boston. Close. Yeah. I mean, sort of. Yeah. Looks like a library, and it looks like an incubator, maybe. It looks kind of like a coffee shop. It's actually a financial institution. This is called the Society for Grownups, and it's aimed at millennials or digital natives or snake people. Whatever it is that. And I'm a millennial, so I promise I'm teasing in good jest. But what I love about this is actually Massmutual started it because, of course. And I've done so many keynotes across industries. I've done a lot of stuff for the financial services, a lot of clients in that space. And one of the challenges is, of course, trust has eroded for banks, for financial services, especially among the younger audience. So it was about how do we get people to bank when banking doesn't mean the same thing? For many of us, banking isn't about putting on a suit or going down and shaking hands and sitting down with a banker, is it? No. It's that app on your phone that you get money deposited to. That's where your check goes. That's how you use QuickPay, maybe to pay funds. It's PayPal, Lenmo. Whatever it is, banking has changed. And so for them, it was, how do we now go after this audience that we want these younger customers? How do we keep them engaged? So they said, we can't make it about MassMutual. We can't keep talking about us and security and trust. These aren't the things that our people or our audience cares about. They care about what, Traveling the world, learning how to cook, paying off their student loans, saving up to buy their first home, financial independence. So they started really this idea. If you really look at it, it's really a bank. But money doesn't really exchange hands here. But they have courses. They teach you how you can save so you can travel the world, how you can pay off your student loan. And who do you think is there to help if you want to put your down payment on your first home? The bank. Yes, guys. Right, the bank. But what I think is fascinating is this is so successful for them. They're opening their second one up in Brooklyn now. So this was their test in Boston, and now they're going towards Brooklyn. And more and more companies are going to embrace this idea. And it's not just about millennials, which, by the way, I've done a lot of talks on millennials, managing them, marketing to them. By 2020, we. Because I know there's a lot of us in the room are. Are the majority of the workforce. So it's no longer this sort of small group that's over here. No, it's the majority of the workforce. And it is going to change a lot of things. But this isn't even so much about millennials as it really is about understanding your customer's brand and being customer focused and making your brand secondary, that empowers them. Does this make sense? Awesome. All right, so the third big trend that I have for you is, is integration. And what I mean by integration is understanding. You guys have heard about the customer journey, right? Understanding the customer journey and figuring out where your brand, where your products fit in into that journey and not thinking about it so much as online or offline. Because I hear that a lot. I hear a lot of people say, well, this is digital marketing. This is traditional. But I'm here to tell you that those lines are blurring. Because when was the last time that you said that you're watching a video on tv? You probably don't, right? Or if someone says, I'll telephone you, would you give them sort of a weird raised eyebrow like you're going to. What you might say you're going to call me, or I'll reach out to you. And the idea is that there's multiple ways to do this. So I want to go through this futuristic scenario with you, and I'm actually going to read this out for you because. Because I know it's a little hard to read on here, but I think this in many ways showcases integration. It showcases the future of marketing, of selling, of buying. And more importantly, I think it's fascinating how near this is. So this is like maybe five years away, if that. If it's not already currently happening. And I'll talk it through with you guys, which, by the way, if you guys want a copy of the slide, if you want to give me your card, I'll have my team send you a copy. I know there's a lot of information packed in here. All right, so by the way, this, I guess, scenario was done by McKinsey, McKinsey Consulting, and that's where I got this. So credit to them. All right? Scene one. Curious about her friend's headset, Diane taps it with her phone. Both have near field communication capabilities. Scene 2. Diane's phone prompts her to photograph her face and then displays how the headset would look on her in various colors. Scene 3. She's then invited to send the photo to Facebook friends, who are asked to vote among the choice of colors that best suit Diane. Scene 4. Meanwhile, she receives a text alert from Spotify, offering a free month subscription to its premium music service. If she buys the headset, the manufacturer's data shows that she isn't a subscriber yet. Scene 5. Friends like the headset in fuchsia, and Diane completes the purchase plot thickens. Scene 6 When the headset is delivered the next day, a message asks if she would like to post a wow picture on Facebook of her wearing it, with a link for others to buy it as well. Scene 7 When she meets those friends in person, her cell phone reminds her of the NFC chip in the headset oops. And offers her an additional free month of Spotify service for each friend who taps and buys a headset. Scene 8 Every week she gets a Club Gig of the Week message offering discount access to a venue. And if she wears the headset when she walks in the door, a club video board welcomes her by name. Scene 9 While Diane listens to songs, Spotify reminds her that the headset manufacturer has brought her this listening experience. Scene 10 at a gym a few weeks later, Diane gets an opportunity to buy and download an exercise program the gym offers. She can access the program by tapping her phone on a nearby display. Scene 11 Everybody needs a drink. Giving you guys a moment because some of you look truly concerned. But you know this isn't so much about intrusion or because I know I get a lot of that when I mention this. But I think what's fascinating is to see how integrated marketing becomes and how integrated becomes not just to what a customer likes and chooses, but to the overall journey from how she discovers that the headphone exists at all to how she decides to make a purchase, how it gets shared so her friends get to be a part of that experience, and how that sales process continues through upsells or other things that make that product even more useful beyond just hey, I have these headphones but now I have music to go with it. Now I have a gym program to go with it. And so at your level, no matter where you are, think about how you might be able to integrate more of what your marketing is, what you're doing to really the customer journey. Not just from a perspective of how does our customer buy but beyond that how does the customer use the product? At what point are they most likely to tell their friends about it and how can you make that easier for them? So I know this was a very detailed and sort of a high level example, but really it's an idea of you can pull from this nuggets of how it might be applicable to what you you're doing. My fourth principle for you is around content curation, another favorite principle of mine, because if you guys haven't noticed, the Internet has changed and we've gone from being content hungry to what? Overwhelmed. Content overwhelmed. Do you remember People used to say, I like long walks on the beach and surfing the Web. Could you ever say that now? No. Like, who surfs the Web? You can't even surf Snapchat. For Kayla, everything's changed. So we no longer serve the Web. We have so much information, but we still need information, don't we? What we're tired of is data and knowledge. But what do we still need? Wisdom. Wisdom to make choices. So as I've keynoted for so many areas, one of the groups I've done a lot of work with is real estate and travel agents. And one of the things that I've been hearing for the last seven, eight years from real estate agents, for example, is no one's going to use agents anymore. We're going to all go away because the Internet. And you know what? It's true. Today, you can list your home, sell it, you can buy a home, and you never have to have another individual involved. Technically, the this is totally possible and doable. Yet over 90% of people still prefer to work with an agent, with an individual. Why expert. It's someone who can be that filter, isn't it? They're the curator. They take data and they turn it into wisdom. They take knowledge. So, yes, you might be able to say this has three bedrooms and two bathrooms, but they're the ones who can tell you, yeah, you know what, they're building a park just down the road. They're rezoning that area. So that's going to be great for the kids, right? Or this is getting rezoned to go into a new school district, whatever it may be. So what's really important is, as we get overwhelmed with information, we still need information, but we need it within. We need it to be relevant, we need it to be contextual. And what this means for you as marketers is to understand how overwhelmed your customers are, how overwhelmed you are, your consumers are, and to be that filter to curate that information so you can be the source of that wisdom. And I'll give you some great examples. How many are familiar with Pinterest? How many do a lot with Pinterest, by the way, Pinterest is one of those things where I wake up in the morning, I'm like, I wish I thought of that. I should have invented Pinterest, because really, not a specific service or product at all, is it? It's the ultimate curation engine. Now, if I'm looking to decorate my room, my living room, for example, I don't have to go searching all over Google. I can go to Pinterest and see what are interior designers. You know, if I want a Mediterranean theme, what does that look like for the living room? It's an ultimate curation engine. Here's some great other examples. Upworthy. Anybody familiar with Upworthy? It's one of the fastest growing sites right now. And what I find fascinating is the. They don't actually create any content. They simply find really positive videos online. They give them catchy headlines and share. So why is it so successful? It's so successful because if you want a positive, pick me up. If you want to see puppies or whatever, if you just want to see something that makes you smile, you go to Upworthy. You don't have to go through YouTube and filter through things. You can just go here and find positive content. It's a filter, it's a curator. This is one of my favorite examples I want to share with you guys because inevitably people sometimes tell me, we have clients. They're like, okay, but this is great for industries that are sexy, that are exciting. But sure, what, we're boring or we're in a boring industry? What we do, how do we make this work? And I love this example because if these guys can do it, really, anybody can do it. These guys sell. Any guesses? Clickers, Yay. Right? They sell handheld clickers. And to make those even more exciting, they sell handheld clickers to educational buyers in school districts across the U.S. wouldn't you love that as a marketer? Right. So their buyer pool is what, maybe 500 individuals who buy for the school district. Like, they've got a very small audience. They're selling clickers. And what I love about this is they were at. Every year they had an annual trade show and they looked at how do we, you know, how do we stand out? Because we're competing with Scholastic, macmillan, all these big guys. Here we are, the small little clicker company. And what I love is they got creative and they said, what we will do is showcase clickers throughout history. And you guys know when the first clicker was made, it was about the size of that podium. Not kidding. I mean, I would do all these calculations. The slides would change and you guys would ooh and ah and go home. That was exciting. And so they brought in all these clickers from the 70s and 80s because the company had a lot of history. And they were the most visited booth that year. They beat out all these other huge guys because they were creative. Then they took that and they made it digital. They called it the museum of Clicker Curiosities. Now, of course, you and I, as a regular person, may have no interest, but do you think an individual who buys these for their square district, who. That's their job, might find this a little more interesting than flipping through a catalog? Yeah. The answer is yes, absolutely. Trust me, if I handed you a clicker catalog, you would be begging for this. Right? So it's fascinating to me how this can apply across every industry. Right. This is going to be my last principle, and I'll open it up for questions. If you have questions, keep them in the back of your mind. So this idea of cross pollination, what I love about cross pollination is breaking down silos. So many times when we're in marketing, we're in business, we think of people in buckets. We think of our vendors, we think these are our customers, we think these are our partners. But we never look at, could they be both? We tend to see people through certain lenses. Think about Uber. Do you think that the taxicab companies could have been Uber? Absolutely, they could have. They had the technology, they had the resources, but they were so focused on no. People hail down cabs. People call us. This is how it works. They didn't think about, what do people really want to get from point A to point B? What's the end goal that we're serving? So cross pollination is about breaking down some of those silos to better help grow your business. And I'll give you an example. So this is a client of ours, and we work across so many different industries, guys, everything from mobile apps to retail. And it's all about how they can use social media, digital PR influencer, marketing content to grow their brands. And so how many are familiar with Hager? Should see a couple of men, right? Men's apparel. They coined the term slacks. Hello. Anyways, it wasn't that much of a surprise when they came to us and they said, listen, we really want to expand our brand to younger generations, okay? But what was fascinating was when we launched their digital campaigns, they had no social presence. And of course, this is a major brand. We don't want to go out there with no social presence. And so we had to look beyond what was available to us. We could have spent a lot of money in advertising to drive those initial likes to get those initial folks. But then we looked at, okay, let's look outside the box and look at where do they sell. So Hager sells through retailers like Kohl's, JCPenney, so forth. And do you guys think that these folks had a huge digital Presence. Absolutely. So we approached them and said, hey, your manufacturer is now getting on board. They want to do this big digital push. Can we do some cross promotion? And what do you think? They said, absolutely right, Absolutely. So we were able to get our first 20,000 fans 0 advertising just by leveraging the current retailers they already had. Because guess what? As the brand grew, people would buy through the stores. It was a win win. But we'd been thinking about, well, no, those are our distribution partners. That's not who we go through. But when marketing, especially with cross pollination, it's about using those other resources. This is going to be my final example before I open it up to questions for you guys. Ernest and Young did a huge new brand change and they wanted to get their new branding out there, their new messaging out there. And what they thought about was, why not use our own employee base? So you had 3,000 employees participate and using really no advertising dollars, they were able to reach over 20 million people in the first year alone simply by leveraging their current team. We did this with one of our clients as well. On a smaller scale, one of our clients, we were creating all this great content for. We're trying to get it out there and we thought, how do we. What's the low hanging fruit here? So what we started doing this was a private investment bank, had a lot of investment bankers who worked as individuals or I guess with their own networks. And one of the things we said is we started talking to these bankers and they said, oh, I didn't realize we were creating all this content. That's great. So we created an internal newsletter for the team that gave people very quick tweets they could copy paste LinkedIn post, right? Ready to go. And it was a win win because if they shared that, their network benefited. And guess what? We got traffic to the site within the first month alone. We increased traffic by 30% simply by doing that. Simply by taking advantage of a base that already existed. Was more than happy to share the content, just needed it to be easy, to make it easy for them to be able to do so. How many are on Slack with your team? How many, when you publish a new blog post, share that in a group. Slack. And encourage your team members to share. Right Handful. Well, there's one strategy for you. One of the things that we do at our agency is, and we have so much content on marketingzen.com, we've been blogging for about seven years now. Anytime we create a new post, the team posts it in our Slack chat in the lobby and says, hey, guys, share. Here's the hashtags. Here it is, ready to go. And we see immense traffic just from leveraging our own team and getting their support and sharing the content. And it's not mandatory, it's not required, but people are happy to do it if you make it easy for them. All right, so these are my principles for you, and here's what I would want you guys to take away from this. Before I take questions, I'd love to take questions. We're living in an ecosystem today, and I know a lot of this can seem overwhelming, but I hope that you also see that you have the opportunity to see it from a different perspective. And that perspective really is that you also have immense opportunities. You have tools now that give you amazing visibility, the ability for amazing reach, and it's up to you on how you choose to leverage the different tools, what you want to activate to help you get closer to your goals. So I hope this was helpful. I hope that you guys enjoyed it. I will definitely open it up for questions. If you have questions, please line up in the middle, use the mic, and I will be here until they pretty much kick me out. So thank you so much.