How Would You Spend $10,000 a Month on Marketing?

[Music] hello everyone welcome to the 21 hats podcast I'm your host Warren Feldman this week Sean busy Hans shy and Sarah seagull explain what they would do if I gave them $10,000 a month to spend on marketing as we all know there's a lot going on right now no one's entirely certain where the economy is headed and no one's entirely certain where digital marketing is headed so it seemed like a good time to ask our regulars where they would Place their bets if we offered them each an imaginary pot of money to promote their brands spoiler alert their responses gave us a good sense of what these business owners think is working right now and it's definitely not Billboards even in Good Times owning and running a business can be a lonely Pursuit our hope is that these weekly conversations will let owners know they are not alone in facing challenges same thing with our daily newsletter the 21 hats Morning Report which Inc magazine recently named the best newsletter for business owners in which you And subscribe to at 21h hats.com where you can also find transcripts of our podcast episodes and lots of other articles and interviews joining me this week on the podcast are regulars Shan busy CEO of Kinesis which is based in Portland Oregon and works with small businesses on marketing culture and strategy Sarah seagull founder and CEO of seagull Communications a public relations firm based in San Francisco and Hans shy who is co-founder of WS an e-commerce Bakery based in Austin Texas the episode is titled you have $10,000 a month to spend on marketing welcome Sean Hans and Sarah it's great to have you all here this week we're going to talk about marketing and specifically what would you do if I gave you $10,000 a month to spend on marketing right now Sarah I think you told us in a previous episode correct me if I'm wrong that one reason you haven't done a lot of marketing for your uh public relations firm is that traditionally Public Relation firms just don't do a lot of marketing do I have that right yeah you do have that right um what's interesting about your your question that you you pose is I didn't actually include any marketing in in terms of my allocation and what I do with the the dollars that's cheating Sarah well the reason why is just because it's I still have to figure out that equation in terms of what real PR marketing would be let's start with the bigger picture then I mean it seems like a a case of people who aren't willing to eat their own own dog food I mean PR is a form of marketing why do PR firms traditionally not spend money on marketing do you know um well I think it's one of those things where it's like it's a big investment for for example you buy a car you buy a wedding ring you buy you know Big Ticket items you kind of want to have you know affirmation that it's going to be a wise investment so for those kind of products like traditionally in PR and marketing it's really hard to go virtual 100% virtual for those Industries because people still want to test drive or try on their products I think with PR uh and marketing it's kind of the same way and the way that you get that validation that it's the right investment is that you find peers that are going to refer you to good PR agencies and marketing agencies and so traditional advertising doesn't really have a strong fit a little skeptical I don't know maybe Define traditional advertising because if you're talking Billboards for sure like you're gonna get a billboard for a for an agency and both what would you say is traditional marketing I don't know everything from a billboard to like a digital app had on um on LinkedIn you know I think I have to do a little bit of AB testing before I invest in that so where where I would put my investment dollars would be in hiring an analyst right somebody who could help me look at the numbers and look at the the traction of which numbers Sarah the overall question of like if I had an influx of uh investment or in money to invest over time maybe you should ask your question again you said you would take the $10,000 a month that I'm pretending to offer you yeah and you would spend it on an analyst y an analyst to look at the results of the marketing that you're not doing no no no somebody to look at like where for example where are people um coming from like how are people getting to my website right now right got how are people engaging with my company already and then using that kind of data to event maybe do a marketing campaign so you're saying you before you spend the money you want to do some research and try to figure out if it would be well spent what a crazy idea I know the second place I would um invest the money would be hiring a a videographer or photographer um we have a lot of clients that um need that kind of uh content and as we know on social media video is King and and having that capability inhouse would really be an upsell for me and then the last piece would be um hiring somebody to help me set up my CRM but I think that would be like a temporary investment you're getting a lot for your $10,000 a month but you know they're all temporary positions right I think that all these these roles are like except for the videographer photographer are are you know part-time or consultancies all right well you are cheating a little bit let me ask you this question mhm you impressed all of us when you told us about the transparency with which you operate your firm the idea that when a client engages with you you commit to keeping them uh informed on who your media contacts are and exactly what your conversations with them are like whether they respond whether they don't respond um just letting people know that you're actually doing the work I hadn't heard of that before I'm sure there are other PR firms that do it but I I actually had not heard of one doing that before seems to me that's the making of a good marketing message it is I don't know that that would translate into the kind of clients I want though right oh that's interesting why do you say that well because traditionally larger companies with um uh who want to retain uh a PR agency aren't going to go for what you know the commercial them to buy they're going to do their homework and and and research the agency that they're going to eventually hire so I don't know that those kind of traditional sales methods are going to have any value because it's a big ticket item we're a big ticket item Sean you're in a related field how's this striking you I guess I'm kind of curious Sarah what's it you know if you were to kind of throw out the outliers like the small hotel you mentioned that you do kind of almost as a pro bono work your average customer what would you say is sort of their annual value to your firm about $100,000 about 100K yeah okay yeah so it's it's a big ticket item I mean I think a lot of the things Sarah is saying resonate in that the buying cycle for somebody buying $100,000 and more it usually starts with you know kind of talking to people in their networks you know more of like a hey who do you work with um who do you trust you know that it's just it's just not so highly trans I think digital marketing which is kind of the thing that we're talking as the other way to go is often more transactional you know and it tends to attract a different type of customer I don't know if that's been your experience Sarah yeah can I say something from my perspective as someone who is not in the industry but has been looking at these type of vendors lately please and definitely is not an ad situation I would never go to a pier agency with an but it's very hard like actually we it's a whole thing but we had an investor pushing for a particular PR agency and they had a crappy deck and out outdated deck they didn't have a social media presence themselves they were not really on link then so whereas the one that I actually want to hire that I am I love them and they're probably out of my price range they are constantly putting themselves out there but what I'm saying is that like in this game is credibility because if I were to if were to hire a PR agency then we'll have to commit for say at least six months usually right yes and if it's not realistic to expect results tomorrow if because if it's a creative agency you get a creative like a few creatives and then you judge if they're good or bad but with a PRC we need to trust the process and trust that it's going to be a few months and that you're building a relationship for us for the Long Haul and I'm guessing it happens a lot like we're very aware that yeah we want to pictur in New York times but that's probably going to take a while and a lot of relationship building and that's what we want to partner for I don't know if you're doing this but a lot of times the first thing you're doing is you go through their Twitter I'm I'm a big Twitter person for instance and a lot of people saying my in my industry are on Twitter a lot and I want to see what that person is doing on Twitter who she's talking to like her her whole footprint same with LinkedIn like uh the agency that this agency that I've been talking to that I've been ey they are all over the place LinkedIn offering very valuable content and also showcasing what they do so I really feel confident this person know what they're doing whereas the other one that we were considering was kind of invisible invisible yeah Hans let me ask you a quick question about that so you're kind of working through the funnel of marketing of saying I'm evaluating them for credibility so it sounds like you became aware of them through their shall we say organic efforts on LinkedIn is that correct or is it paid efforts on LinkedIn it's all organic oh I don't think they're yeah I don't think they're putting out out that if you see out you're probably kind of doubtful but at the end of the day I think that what you need to cultivate is the social proof because not only does this person has a lot of like there's a oh we got this brand on the New York Times for Valentine's Day awesome and then there's the comment by the founder of the brand and people commenting on it yeah we love working with you and that is what really gives credibility because then I don't have to ask for them it's all in the public and I don't have to ask them for referrals the referrals are just there and there's no way of Faking them can I ask you a question why do you want to be in the New York Times oh we're a consumer we're a consumer brand so in our case it's a lot of highball but and I'm just saying the New York Times as an example It's like because it's the top up the top of Publications but it's just B hypothetical well I don't know I don't go to the New York Times to buy cookies that's why that's why I'm asking um it's a lot of eyeballs and yeah it would be appropriate if you were doing a fund raise and you're looking for investors doing a fundra that's so so that's why you want to be in the New York Times oh of of course we don't expect sales from The New York Times okay for instance we're one of the things that we got and we do our own PR and we just got a a column published on in magazine we actually grow it and that's not going to sell a single cookie but that is going to give us a ton of credibility with investors and with retailers most of America doesn't buy the New York Times doesn't read the New York Times but the name does carry a lot of weight wait so if I get to put on my website a seene in the New York Times and people do it all the time like we were mentioned once on bity Fair and we tell people oh I seen on bity Fair yeah we were seeing on bity fair but you had to look really hard give you credibility all right Sarah I'm gonna let you off the hook this time uh I suspect we may come back to this question in the future uh Hans how about you um you told us last week that you were one of those businesses affected when uh Apple changed its privacy settings which created problems for Facebook where you were doing your marketing uh I guess I would start have you adjusted to uh to the changes in digital marketing the thing is this the funnels are longer like it used to be that Facebook will not only bring you say we're selling cookies and Facebook and and Google and they would not only bring you people who are customers for cookies but they will bring them to you at the right time when they're looking for the cookies because if I ask like who is in the market for cookies everyone like across a Year everyone buys cookies but that's not very effective if you are talking about the response marketing so with the changes in iOS 14 Facebook's ability to do that got handicapped so what you need to do now it's a longer funnel and you need to be like hey cookies we make amazing cookies but you may not be ready to buy them but we're here and we need to find ways to engage people even if they're not ready to buy that's the name of the game now it's not really like I'm looking for this person who's gonna click right now I'm gonna spend $60 piece so that's good and bad it's good if you are a powerful well taught out brand it's better for you in the in the sense that you're getting quality customers as opposed to people in a rush because like think of this it's 11:00 p.m. you need diers you go to the closest gas station or whatever whatever diapers and that's fine that's Revenue anyway but you ideally you want them to be in love with your diapers same thing applies to cookies so what we're doing and we found that work was one we needed to change the positioning and we needed to stop talking about how delicious the cookies are because I say that competitor next door says that the same thing and every single cookie competitor says that the cookies are delicious and probably they are so we need to find a better positioning something for people to latch on because they're going to have to think of the P for a longer time from the first time they saw it to the time that they actually purchased so it's a longer consideration window and the other thing that we found was that whenever we run PR we got and of course we had an upt in sales but it signal the algorithms to show the lower cost because there was interest in what we're doing so for instance we had an article published about Us in Austin monthly which is a big deal here in Austin and we got an insane amount of sales in Austin but because because Facebook's got the signal hey these people are talking about this this is because Facebook wants to show you things that are interesting to you so if everyone in Austin is talking about this and it's getting shared all over the place they want to talk about the company that's why we learn that we that PR is the name of the game for us like they not long the direct response and the direct hey I saw this I'm going to buy it because we are so bombarded by messages that a lot of them don't really register directly but it creates this interest so you're kind of in the act and people they're going to be looking for you so that worked great for us and then we got forance we got the Today's Show and we the Today's Show for think 30 seconds because Kaa was talking about Kaa was talking about the brownies and how delicious they were and then J interrupted her he really messed us up but that was $177,000 in it was a fantastic day because our marketing all of a sudden becomes very efficient how did you get on the Today Show we got a brownies on the Oscar bags on the Oscar gift bags so that's yeah that's that's how they landed on how did you get your brownies in the Oscar gift bags Louis talk to this girl here who runs uh 2512 which is like a a community thing here where like every event that's happening in town is polished and and turn like instead of like we were not trying to pitch her or anything like we're like hey we would love to talk to you and she came to the to have coffee and cookies and they talk for an hour and a half because Luis has that thing for going for him that he can talk to aaq and he and he was like the day after like hey I just remember that I know this guy he was with me in high school I haven't talked to him for in a while but let me call him and that's how we ended up there nice if you had not gotten them mention on today's show would those gift bags have been worth it to you oh yes because you know what it's not it was not only the Today's Show it's a ton it was a ton of different it was a ton of different things so but what we what we learned and this is the reason we didn't hire that PR agency was this they wanted to keep talking about the brownies and no one cares about the brownies I mean they are very good but the brownies are not it you need to tell the story and position the founders and tell like the reason why for this company to exist so what we learned also was that the Oscars was not really relevant to Ink magazine no they don't care but that allowed us to say hey here's an excuse to talk to you in magazine here's this founder talking about their product and this is our story and they were like respectfully we don't care about the brownies we love your story we want to run a story about you but the brownies are't really for us so the way we see those collaborations is more of a an excuse to keep frankly talking about ourselves I'm sorry we may come across that I we love to do that no it's it's smart yeah we position it like that I think what I hear you saying is that in the beginning you were buying ads on Facebook and you were sort of just transacting you were saying I have cookies some people click on the ad they buy cookies and you basically you were buying customers and it was efficient an efficient way to buy customers and now that you can no longer buy customers quite so easily you've had to Pivot the positioning to say I have an immigrant story I have a I have kind of a gay rights story I I have something more here than just cookies and so that gets you conversations with influencers it's pretty much pretty much it's a lot easier to engage people right you're selling the brand like you're doing what Cliff bar did you're doing what U Red Bull did where you're selling the kind of the lifestyle and what's associated with it as opposed to the and that's why those companies have been so successful is they're not selling a drink and they're not selling a a protein bar yeah because you're not curing cancer and you need to be very aware of that so Hans how are you going to spend the $10,000 a month that I'm not really giving you that's unfortunate actually for us because he could really use the money right now use the money for us what makes a lot a lot of sense and something that we're kind of weak on is what we have learned doing this fundraising thing and a lot like the pr we started doing we started doing our PR kind of out of a bit of a crisis mode and Louis really got the handang of it thank God we haven't been great at engaging with influencers but that is because we we were treating them kind of in a transactional way and I think the same thing that I was saying about about media about media that you you cannot just talk to the yeah like I cannot just talk to a reporter every time I want them to P something I need to keep a conversation going so what I would spend that money we would be on seeing product to influencers and not do influencer like not trying to get Kim Kardashian to post about us but smaller influencers that have credibility that have smaller followings but I think with $10,000 we say at $50 a piece we can do 200 influencers and just share the product with them well it's brand ambassadors you're working on creating people that will consistently talk about you yeah but you need to be very what we have learned is that if you tell hey I would love for you to post about her cookies would you like me to send some that doesn't know that response you need to treat people I mean you need to treat people like people and you need to build like a longer term relationship and to engage them with the whole thing that you're doing as opposed to hey how much are you charging for a post because two things happen like they have a ton of offers like that and people can smell it from a mile away so what is what off offer does work what's the right approach first you need to follow them and know who they are and who their audiences who their audiences and then you the way it works you need to like talk to them engage with them really it is a whole point job because you need to engage with them and like these are these are people at the end of the day so it's a lot easier to say to an influencer hey I love what you're doing I would love for you to try our product obviously not everyone is going to post about it not everyone is g to take it take the offer a lot of them are going to take it and not mention it ever but the ones that do get it they will get really engaged with you because you're saying hey I would love for you to try this and if they love it they will we do this a lot with influencers um where we have come brands that where we we don't even pay the influencers we just we position it as hey influencer we have one of our clients is a a regional doughnut company and they're always coming out with new flavors influencers love to be ahead of the game in terms of what's new so we say all right um every time we come out with a new flavor you're going to be first to know and be able to be first to post um and we'll obviously give you free product uh and that has created long-term engagements for our client that have been very fruitful for them totally totally whereas if you're just paying them people don't care I mean you can you can tell as a as a customer you can tell when they're just reading a script what you've described uh reaching out to 200 influencers and not just being transactional with them but trying to build a relationship that's a lot of work is that something that you personally are going to do Lis is going to do or you're hiring someone internally or you're gonna hire an external firm how how are you going to get all that work done I would say that we probably have to hire someone to do that it's it is a full it is a fulltime job because at the end of the day you don't have to you you have to find them first which is a lot of work in itself you and you need to constantly engage with them because that's the other thing you need to be top of mine so that is somewhat actually we're planning on hiring like once our funding comes through we're planning on hiring someone to do just that because is if it's well done it can yield a lot because the other magic trick that a lot of people don't know is that when a Tik Tok or something gets a lot of Engagement then you repurpose it as an app you get your creative out of that but yes it is managing that is a lot Sarah have you figured out how to find the right influencers for a product I mean they're you know as Hans just described you're looking for people who don't necessarily have a huge footprint they're not necessarily uh famous how do you match up the right people with the right brand well we actually do ours manually um and we have test driven and looked at all sorts of influencer tools that help you find find the right people but none of none of them are we've never been satisfied with the results of them so we actually manually find them and so we have a team of people that literally go through and you know we're looking for certain kind of people we're looking at different hashtags and yeah maybe we miss out on a couple but we also may find many more that an algorithm doesn't find so um we really we want to make sure that whatever influencers we choose reflect the brand are going to reflect the brand in a positive light so we're we're looking at their posts we're looking at their reals we're looking at the hashtags they do we're looking at who they follow and but we're looking at their engagement levels I mean you can say oh yeah I have 100,000 followers but when only 25 people like your posts like that doesn't match up absolutely agree with all of that that is it is not is not something that you can Outsource to an algorithm and it's never going to be it's again it's real people that you need to treat the real people one last question before I put Sean in the hot seat Hans I noticed that in spending the $10,000 I'm sort of giving you you did not mention Facebook have you come to the conclusion that in part because of what happened you don't want to be dependent on one platform the way you have been in the past I think that at the end of the day you need a mix of channels and they support each other because what happens like back into what I was saying when we were on the Today Show sales were spiking on Facebook as well if you get a ton of Interest say on Tik Tok your profile your brand is getting a ton of interest because an influencer is posting about it then and you also run ads to the people who engage with that then you get a second point of contact to people who are already engaged with what you're saying so that's more efficient so I don't think one is a substitute for the other but what I do think is that the way like the way the way it works now there are so many touch points across different stages of De stages of the fno and they all need to work in concert the same way that is not really effective to just run Facebook out without any social un organic presence a social nonorganic Presence by itself is probably going to be way too limited so you can I don't know set get fuel to the fire if you will that's probably how good anal all right Sean your turn uh you you've told us previously that the pandemic kind of blew up your marketing that you were largely dependent on uh going to physical events where people actually gather um and that stopped for a while and threw you off so I'm giving you another chance with uh 10,000 per10 what are you going to do our strategy before the pandemic was largely a center of influence strategy where we would go speak at events we would conduct workshops we would find places where multiple buyers would be in one place um that's a center of influence and we had a CRM we've had a CRM for I don't know eight years now so we have a lot of information on where customers come from where the best customers come from we had drilled it down to almost mathematical formulas if we did a certain amount of activity within the year that would yield a certain number of inquiries those inquiries would yield a certain number of qualified leads certain number qualified leads would turn into certain number of customers and a certain number of customers would return a certain dollar value to us so it was amazing I mean we and and you know to to be fair it took us some years to build it um but we could actually forecast revenue and then hire based on those forecasts the pandemic really messed with that for a lot of obvious reasons and then you know kind of two hans's situation when when a marketing channel or multiple marketing channels get interrupted sometimes the the other ancillary channels you have get disrupted in other ways so for example we also had email marketing we had content marketing you know those channels have been really messed with in the last couple years um you know what I mean by that is data security and privacy have become much more important so it companies are really locking down email so a lot of times now your email never arrives at its intended location so you know that's that's created a lot of challenge for marketers and so I think I think in the current land Cape marketing is harder than ever um for everybody um I think Hans illustrates those those challenges if I were to get I mean we're spending more than $110,000 a month right now on marketing and if I were to get even more money what I would do is build out our Catalyst Community you know to its full potential and and what Catalyst Community is is it's an event that we sponsor where we invite small business owners we only invite owners of companies we don't we don't let salespeople into that event and it's a it's a learning event so this year we're we're going to invite 100 people to it and there will be no like insurance salesman in the room um because we we need to create a space of trust where people can kind of share their experiences and don't feel like they're being sold to um so I would put a lot a lot of energy into that which we already are put more and then the other aspect of the Catalyst Community that's been very successful for us is um we call them Labs Catalyst labs and so we have zoom uh connections of maybe four or five owners in a one hour round table and then they're all unified by a theme so the theme might be commoditization of your product it might be um hiring and recruiting it might be retention um you know and we just we just help people um learn from each other and those are really great kind of positioning activities to sort of put Kinesis as somebody who can help in these areas but we're not selling to anybody and so for us it's a longtail marketing strategy so your longtail investment on kind of these it's almost like free education free discussion free opportunity free you know that eventually turns into new business for you because you're becoming this kind of trusted advisor to uh business owners um I think this the same way PR works is that we we generate a lot of um blog content that just kind of gives you how to or educates people on how to navigate the pr world and so it positions us as a trusted advisor we're giving out information for free maybe some of those those people that read our freedom free information will eventually pay us because they don't want to do their influencer program by themselves because they know that it's a it's a headache and it's a lot of work to do because they don't have a a media database because they don't have the right tools and resources to it but um we kind of line up with what you do we've been giving away free stuff for a long long long time and and in the early days that was coupled with an SEO strategy and it worked really really well the thing that I see changing Sarah is that um and I think the pandemic really accelerated this is I think people are becoming exhausted by digital and and I think that the content is reaching fewer and fewer eyeballs when distributed through traditional blog strategies so all right I'm really looking at like I'm really active on LinkedIn it's it's been a tremendous source of new community and ability I was going to ask you about that Sean I I've noticed how active you are and and we engage a little bit there I'm curious have you it has moved the needle you've seen it make a difference for sure yeah I mean and what's really crazy about it is there are a lot of people I never see them active and then I'll talk to them in the real world and they're like oh yeah I've been watching you on LinkedIn I really like what you said and I was like I've never seen you there and and so I think that's an opportunity for B2B sales especially um but maybe even I mean I I see Hans for example like actually you're drifting into a B2B kind of Arena right or B2 influencer as opposed to buying customers one at a time what you're saying is Absolut absolutely true and that thing like the thing is that people are absolutely exhausted if you are on I don't know Instagram or Tik Tok like every third post is an it's an ad and people are exhausted about it the way we are setting it up and we're seeing brand succeed is like really being credible like this person knows what they're talking about be it cookies or PR or whatever or accounting I don't know it's really about demonstrating that you really know what you're talking about so the way you position yourself this long time is like we are we keep talking about this thing that we do in our case is this building of the safe spaces and we keep really digging on that so people believe in us and the other thing like about about link which is a great example that you get to talk person to person and I love what you're saying about about uh like yeah this person oh I read like you never like my post you never comment on my post but you read them and I think that it's sometimes a mistake do just measure engagement as that oh only five person like this but then you realize that you're building you're like building a It's Kind kind of a drift like little by little you'll believe the presence so people get kind of frustrated by that but it's absolutely necessary because otherwise you're just cookies Sean when you say you're active on LinkedIn what are the things that you do and what do you think drives results for you yeah that's a great question and what's crazy I think the pandemic because I had so few options especially in the early days I was like what am I going to do and I had been active on LinkedIn for a long time really cultivating a network and not accepting invites from folks that I hadn't actually met in the real world so as a result like my you know I have several thousand connections none of them are people who are just strictly trying to transact with me and so that's part of it like I had cultivated a really strong owner Centric community on LinkedIn and so when the pandemic hit and I'm like locked in my house I I just started talking about business challenges and even even bringing P the personal world into it like hey I'm really struggling with this pandemic and leading teams and all this stuff and and over the course of a couple years I ended up posting like 400 times I wasn't counting um but I had asked one of my teammates to log into my account and just copy every post I made and put it into a spreadsheet and so so we would we were actually Gathering data on engagement likes you know kind of response views because that's actually kind of hard to see in with linkedin's tools and so we built a database of like what I said and when and you know what happened and then we're actually in the process right now of evaluating that but I would say like the thing anecdotally without like saying the data says this anecdotally the things that say celebration building Creation Moments Of Joy those things tend to create a lot more momentum um and the things that I find don't are things that are like highly critical and and I can drift that way I can be very critical of the marketing ecosystem for example and and so I've had to really Tamp down my tendency to be a Critic and amp up my tendency to build things I don't know if that helps it's very helpful I'm going to probably do the thinking you know that makes that makes perfect sense I think it's important to be clear about what you mean by being critical I think if it's just an opinion and you're kind of shooting from the hip and being critical of someone or something I can see that not playing well if it's an analysis of why something didn't work that I that's not really being critical that's an analysis and to my mind and I think those can work but I anecdotally speaking I see the same thing you do I think the the the through line for me is with inspiration whether it's about a person personally individually or whether it's a business that has survived through difficult times that's been my experience too I mean like for example we set up a school I think I've talked about this on the show we set up a school for the parents and our um and our team when schools were shut down we took our old office we turned it into a a school we hired a teacher and uh one thing led to another and ends up in the New York Times like we didn't promote it we didn't there was no goal to get PR from this I we we never it was just basically one of my employees went on Facebook and asked around about you know teaching resources and then a reporter just happened to see it and then the next thing you know we're featured I promise you that article got us zero new customers um however sharing it on LinkedIn which says hey here's an owner who cares for his team here's somebody being Innovative here's somebody who's not accepting the status quo of suffering um that's got a tremendous value to us and then the credibility of the New York Times like saying like whoa this is a thing that's a celebratory moment to to a degree and and if nothing else it's an awesome hiring tool so to just say like this is what we stand for as a company one thing I should mention I think is really important for people to understand is that there's a real shift going on right now where the platforms do not want you to leave and the old strategy had been create some content on your website that's awesome go to a platform post a link to that awesome content and get people to come to your website to learn how great you are right now the platforms are actually punishing that strategy so I no longer post any kind of links in any of the content I create especially on LinkedIn and so the actual post has to stand on its own Merit but you do include it in the comment section even that's there's a question whether they're starting to see that as a oh my God I haven't seen that yet yeah it makes sense but that really forces you to be everywhere and that's what it makes it really hard and from a consumer brand we need to be on TK Tok which frankly is hell it's expensive what it means is you've got to spend a lot more money across a lot more channels and you've got to be really smart yeah though and I know it it brings everybody back to just brand visibility like a long time ago when you when PR first started it was just about like getting your name out there and it wasn't about these links and now the Links and the value of those links is as you said are dissipating yep my question for you on if somebody includ a link to a New York Times article like I just included something the other day on my on my Channel about like hacks does LinkedIn punish that if it's like a third-party news source or are they only are they smart enough where they're punishing you only for linking back to your business website that's a great question I haven't quite figured it out yet we're just about out of time Hans I just I gotta ask you how do you do uh your Tik Tock stuff are you handling that internally we are not really doing much in the way of Tik Tok actually like it's something that we need to do but we haven't really and part of it is because it's really time consuming so our priorities right now are elsewhere so one of the goals with the new funding is to hire someone to do that it's trial and error like I hope I wish there was a formula and it was it used to be okay let's put PR pictures on Instagram it's no longer the case so it's a lot and I mean I have better things to do I say hire an intern like that's a a perfect opportunity we just helped a client hire a digital intern their entire job is going from doughnut shop to dut shop taking pictures and doing videos of donuts we actually got National international coverage um of the job because it was for a doughnut Enthusiast and now this you know 20 something or I don't even know how old um she is but like she creates amazing content but that's what they do and if they're digital Natives and they understand it and it's not laborous for them and they're very focused on what it is like your job is to look at Tik Tok like I swear my 16-year-old would do it for you oh they would be happy do the reason that we haven't done it yet is that because like there's with the fundraising and all thing there's so much in the air right now that we want to be able to manage this so we don't need to clear the bandwidth to yeah do it ourselves but definitely we need to clear the bandwidth so we can manage it but yeah it's definitely one of our priorities right now because we have done it and we do it like but but it's not really an engaging presence because it's very sporadical yeah you with Tik Tok you have to be consistent like you have to post every single day um otherwise it's a waste of your time absolutely all right well unfortunately we are out of time I suspect we'll come back to most of these conversations fairly frequently please look for those $10,000 checks in the mail uh I'm sure they'll be on their way soon uh but for now my thanks to Shan busy Hans sh and Sarah seagull as always thanks for sharing guys wait wait don't leave yet if you have a question or a comment that you'd like the 21 hats owners to address send it to me by replying to your Morning Report or by email at Lauren 21h hats.com that's l r n21 hats.com do it now before you forget and don't be afraid to tell Jay what you really think you can take it and if you got something out of this conversation help us reach more business owners tell a friend subscribe and review us wherever you get your podcasts follow us on Twitter subscribe to the morning report at 21h hats.com this episode was produced by Jess thubron founder of blank word Productions okay now you can leave thanks for listening everyone