Katie Wagner - Digital Marketing Demystified (F2718)

Hi everyone, it's Bill Black, the exit coach from the Exit Coach Radio show. You know, one of the biggest questions I get on the show is what exactly goes into a business exit plan and when should I start creating mine? Well, I always tell people that the best time to start was 5 years ago, but the next best time is now because you never know when you might need it. So we put together a free report that describes what an exit plan is and what you should know. You can get it free by texting exit plan with no spaces to 44222. That's exit plan to 44222. Again, text exit plan to 44222. Welcome to the Exit Coach Radio show, the show for baby boomer business owners who are looking for cutting edge information as they plan their 3 to 10 year business succession and exit. Every week we interview top professional advisors for. The best tips, strategies, and precautions so you can be well planned and don't miss our one minute exit coach tip of the day on exit coachradio.com. And now here's your host, the exit coach Bill Black. Well, hey everyone, thanks so much for joining us today. It's always a pleasure to have you with us. You know, I spend a lot of my time, um, scouring the, uh, the universe for top advisors so that you can get some ideas and become well planned in a wide variety of areas. Today is no different. Um, I have found, uh, an expert on social media, and I know if you're over age 50, you're probably thinking. Social media, I just don't get it. I understand the yellow pages. I remember that just that was great, easy to understand. How do we navigate all the complexities of social media? Well, Katie Wagner of Katie Wagner Social Media is joining me today, and we're going to talk about, you know, overall a once around on digital marketing. So Katie, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for joining me today. Hi, thanks so much for having me. My pleasure. Uh, you know, when I was talking with you, I was so impressed at how simple you made these things sound, and I know if you, if you're working in it all the time. And you grew up with it. Social media is one of those topics that's, that's, you know, it's a kind of a natural thing. But if you're an old curmudgeon like me and you came up like through, through this, you know, the digital age kind of came at us and we're like, oh, OK, we get it. There's, there's MySpace, and then there was Facebook and then Twitter and then it's like wait a minute, stop hold stop the presses. There's too many new things coming at me and I don't know how to use them all. So that's what you do and Katie Wagner social media help people demystify that. Before we get into that, Katie, tell our listeners a little bit about you and your background. Well, sure, so, so I'm in social media, but I am not a millennial. I'm older as well, and I learned to use it, so it is possible. And I actually learned to use it because I was a television anchor for 15 years, and when social media started getting big, it was changing the way people interacted with the news. Nobody was going home to watch the 5 o'clock show because they could get headlines on Facebook and Twitter and see videos on YouTube. And so we had to go out and learn to use these channels in order to get our audience back. And so when I retired from TV in 2009, I realized that business owners were starting to try to use social media channels, but they weren't sure how to tell their story. They weren't sure what to post or how to connect with their audience there, and it ended up being a little salesy or not very effective. And so I realized that the skills I learned in the newsroom about what makes a good story and what engages an audience could help business owners translate their message into, you know, reaching their audience better. And so we started the agency to help them do that. Yeah, you know, I didn't know first of all, that you were a TV anchor for 15 years. That's pretty cool. But um, you know, uh, for, for a lot of people, I think it was this shift from placing an ad to Creating online relationships or or or followers that threw a lot of people, right? OK. Tell us, tell us all you know. Yeah, yeah. Well, it's, it's a two-way conversation. I think that makes people nervous, right? Because if you think about it forever, business owners have needed to get the message out about their business. They need their target audience to know what they do and how they can work together. But we're used to that being one-way communication, where we put an ad in a newspaper or or a magazine or we make an ad on TV or radio, and no one talks back, right? We just put the information out there. That's called push marketing. It's the way we did things for many, many years. But with social media, we're seeing a shift towards pull marketing. Where it becomes a two-way conversation and now we put things out online and people can interact with it. They, you know, they click on it to learn more or they make comments on it or push the like button, and now that becomes a much more interactive process where we're pulling them back into our business to learn more and that that develops the relationship. And so I don't think it's so different from what we've always tried to do as business owners. This tool just allows us to go a little deeper, a little faster, which actually makes it highly effective, but I think it can be scary and sort of intimidating to people who who aren't used to having to have those conversations right off the bat. Yeah, good point and very well described. Thank you so much for clarifying that push marketing to pull marketing. I think one thing a lot of people think about, at least people that I talked to, are that I, you know, before I would spend a lot of time and maybe a lot of money creating that one message, and then that message would go out and maybe we'd test a couple of different messages to see what worked and now it seems like we have to constantly be thinking of new content. And new things to say and that's not the easiest thing when you're running a busy business. And is that that's kind of where you come in, isn't it, to help them think about what different messages you might want to send and when and to whom? Yes, absolutely, and I actually think that's the hardest part of social media is knowing what to post on there. Because if you think about it, anyone can write a tweet, right? It's a sentence. It's not hard, but knowing what to say is, and knowing how to get that to connect. And so, yeah, most of our clients outsource their social to us, and we run it for them. We help them create content, we The interact with their audience and we're trained to facilitate those conversations, but we also do coaching and training for business owners who want to do it themselves but aren't really sure how to find those messages and write content that engages. We'll help them learn to do that better. Love it. OK, so we have a couple questions for you, Katie. One of them is do businesses need to be on every social media channel? And you know, I don't know what that means because I've seen, I've seen pages with like 20 icons on them that represent different types of social media channels, but I assume we're talking about the big, the big 3 or 4 that we all think about. Yeah, and so that's one of the biggest mistakes I think people make. They say, oh, I need to put my business on social media, and they go out and get profiles on one of every channel they can find. And no, you don't need to do that because your audience, your target audience, isn't on every one of those channels. Though each of the channels Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram they all have different demographics and different audiences, and they play to different types of content. And so it would be impossible for a single business to do really well across all of those channels because your audience isn't everyone, right? So I think it's better to start with maybe one or two. You start small, figure out where your audience is spending time, and then really grow and nurture that community on those channels before you try to expand into anything else. Because the thing that makes social media effective is consistency. You have to be frequent and you have to be consistent over a long period of time to have it work. And so when you spread yourself too thin and try to talk to everyone on every channel, you're not doing any of them really well, and you're taking yourself away from your real job, which is running your business. And so if you can start smaller and really refine that communication in a in a test market, let's call it, then you can figure out where to go next as you expand. I love that concept. It sounds it makes it sound a lot less daunting, a lot easier to approach if if an If an owner were to ask you what is your favorite channel, what would you say and why? Well, my favorite channel is actually LinkedIn. I think LinkedIn is the most underestimated social media channel there is because people tend to treat it like an online resume. And although there's a profile, it's not a resume, and it's not intended to be. Your LinkedIn profile is a story you're telling about yourself, and it doesn't mean that you have to list every piece of information as you would on a paper resume. You can craft that profile to tell the story you want to tell. So for instance, my LinkedIn profile, I was in television, like I said, for 15 years. I worked at lots of stations during that time, but I don't list them all on my LinkedIn profile. Because what I want you to know is that I have that background, but for the past 10 years I've been in social. And so I do list everything about my agency, but then I collapse the listings about my TV career because you need that background, but you don't need that level of detail. And so you can manipulate the information, not in a false way, but to tell the story you're trying to tell. Um, I also think LinkedIn has a lot of capabilities for outreach, for B2B usage. It has a lot of tools that people don't know exist in their advanced search and their ability to publish articles through LinkedIn. I just think it's one that people overlook. They put up a profile and they ignore it, and they don't revisit the power of LinkedIn and what it can really do for you. Now having said that, the the best channel for you is different no matter what your business is, right? Some, some businesses are going to do great on Facebook, others need to be on something like LinkedIn or Twitter. It really depends who your target audience is, so it can vary. Right, right, right, and it is part of that, you know, part of that is that LinkedIn started as kind of a resume, a job finding, almost posting kind of a site years ago, and it changed and we didn't get the memo, you know, a lot of us were trying to figure out and I think it's, it still comes off in some cases. Because I see on my LinkedIn, it's, it's like saying, hey, you might be interested in these job opportunities on the right hand side. So I don't think that they've done quite the, the, the complete transformation. It still has a, a foot in, in job finding, right? Recruiters use it a lot, right? Recruiters and headhunters use it a lot. I, they kind of give LinkedIn a bad name, right, because they use it to mine the data there. But if you overlook that, there's always going to be a role in job search, right, for any social media. But if you overlook that, there's a lot of opportunity to expand your connection as a business owner and, and really reach a new network of people. So if you think about networking, like you'd go to an event or maybe you're in a networking group or you go to a chamber of commerce event, something like that. Um, you're just going to meet people. And now LinkedIn allows you to do that at home in your pajamas, which is a lot more efficient. Um, but there's still the same level of outreach and search and being able to find the right people to talk to, and then getting your messaging in front of them. A lot of times for clients, we'll do things that look sort of like an email drip campaign but happened through LinkedIn. So if you think about who the target is that you're trying to talk to and we go through advanced search and find those people, then we can sort of send them a series of messages with content that might be helpful to them, whether it's videos or blog posts, you know, you send this content out every few weeks and try to add value and get someone to realize that being connected to you might be something they would like to do and, and take that conversation further. So I think there's a lot of the interaction on LinkedIn that people forget that it can't just be a profile you pop up and ignore, that the more you work it, the better it's going to work for your business. Well, that's great information, Katie. Thank you so much for that. You know, when When you're first starting, let's say you get a call from somebody today that's an ideal client for you, somebody you really look forward to working with, and when you first take a look at that person's current status, what do you look at? What do, what do you, how do you look at a new client and to find out what they're currently doing? Yeah, well, we look at their social media for sure, and we also look at their website because in any digital marketing campaign, your website is the hub. That's where people are going to check your credibility. So even though they may discover you on social media, which often they do, they're going to click through to the website to make sure that that you hold up, that you are who you say you are. And I've seen a lot of really great social media campaigns go badly if the website then can't support the level of professionalism you're, you're putting out there. So a bad website will derail your entire digital marketing campaign. So the answer to your question is, first we look at that and say, is this site representative of the business and the messaging they want to put out there? And can it convert people? When people click on it, can it convert them into people that will contact you or want to know more about the business? That's step one. Then we look at the social and we say, is this engaging an audience? Is it building a fan base, and is it driving traffic to the website, which is one of the main goals of social media. If social's working really well, it will increase your website traffic and therefore your conversions. And so good social media means, you know, what's the, the number of engagements you're getting on your posts in relation to how many fans you have? You know, I don't think fan numbers are the end all be all. It's, it's mostly ego bill, if we're honest, because if you had 3000 fans on social media who were never going to do business with you, that wouldn't do you a lot of good. But if you had 300 who loved you and interacted with you constantly and stayed, you know, connected and you were top of mind, that would be a lot more valuable for your business. So we're really looking at engagement more than strict fan numbers, and Facebook in general, but all social media, runs on an algorithm. And they look at the engagement ratio, meaning how many of your fans are engaging with your content, to determine how many people to show that content to. And so sometimes we'll look at pages and maybe they have 10,000 fans, but if they're getting one like or one click on their posts, that's a terrible engagement ratio, and their social has a long way to go because the algorithms aren't rewarding that behavior. So probably what's happening is they're posting in a vacuum and no one's seeing the content. Whereas if we can build up engagement and people interacting, Facebook or whatever channel says, oh, this must be good content, let's show it to more people and we can actually reach a wider audience that way. So it's kind of a cycle, a loop that happens. And so we're looking at what's the status of their social now and how can we build it to be more engaging and more active, um, because that's what's going to work to then drive traffic and, and leads back. So what I hear you saying is that first you look at the website to make sure that when people finally get there, which is the purpose of a lot of this information, is to drive people back to that. That they're going to, you're going to show up right and they're going to be able to convert into maybe asking the next step and I'm going to ask you about that in just a second and then and then you look at social media to see is the social media driving to the website. It all makes perfect sense when you say it like that. It's great, great information to have when they get to the website, what are some of the most effective tools to convert them and get them to a next level of interest? Well, I think it, it depends largely on your business, but, you know, I like good old fashioned contact forms. Can you get somebody to reach out to ask for more information? And at that point, you've also collected their email, which is um valuable for you to build your email list and you can market to them in the future. But we try to build landing pages on websites that give them valuable information in exchange for the fill out of a form, whether that's an ebook they can download or a podcast they can subscribe to, or maybe it's a free consultation depending on what the business is, or a half hour session with the business owner, you know, to discover whether this is a fit. Um, you have to offer something to get them to do that, but the best websites can get people to say, yeah, I'm interested in learning a little more. Let me just give you my email and have you contact me. And that's really when a business owner can take that to the next level because now they have a personal interaction. And this, this works across a lot of industries. Like, for instance, we work with a real estate company where we created ebooks about each of the communities they serve. And when somebody goes to their website and you say, hey, learn more about XYZ community, they fill out the form and they check which ebook they want. And now we're able to provide those realtors with not only a name of somebody who, who is a prospect, but an area they're interested in, so that the company can then funnel them to the right realtor to work in that area. So that's, that's tremendously valuable, but it works with our law firm clients too. We write ebooks about, we have a fiduciary law client, and they wrote an e-book about 10, you know, estate dispute mistakes, right? You know, make sure your estate isn't fought over. And so people download that several times a week because they need the information. Maybe they're in a situation where the family is fighting and they need, they need good info. And that builds our clients as a, as a resource, as a thought leader, um, and can be very valuable that way. Now, I've heard um that The email address is the the the currency that you're really after here. it's it's capturing that email address. So from what I hear you saying and you, you set up your social media to drive to the website, the website then entices people to request some kind of information that in ah ah with that transaction. They, they, they leave their email address or provide their email address which gets captured by your CRM and then can be used to communicate with people further in the future. Do I have that right? That's digital marketing in a nutshell, yeah, that's it. Cool. All right. All right. So tell us about your, your website and um what's, what's at your website? Yeah, so my website is just katiewagnersocialMedia.com, and if you go there, we have a blog that we publish 8 articles a week on that can help you learn to do social media better. You'll also find a link to our YouTube channel where we publish tip of the day videos with good social media tips, and we have a live Facebook show called Social Media Helpdesk every Tuesday at 12:30. Um, where people can ask questions and my staff sits around and sort of brainstorms about the things we find are really working on social media this week, cause, you know, it changes weekly. And the tips and tricks that we've been liking. So there's a lot of free resources there for learning more about social because one of our main goals is to not have it be scary for people. We don't want it to be overwhelming because everybody should have access to these tools and feel comfortable using them. So let me tell our listeners a little bit about how to spell Katie and all that kind of stuff. So it's K A T I E, Katie Wagner W A G N E R. Social media you can figure that out on your own. So it's Katie Wagner social media, Katie with a K.com. And you know if if you want to see how it should work, go to katiewagnersocialmedia.com and then give Katie get in touch with Katie. And I'm sure you can do that easily from your website, right? Absolutely. There's a form you can fill out. Wouldn't you be, wouldn't it be surprising if they could get there and they couldn't reach you in any way, you know, this is where you learn from example. Katie knows what she's doing. Listen, all of you people out there that are thinking, you know, I can do this myself, or I, I have an HR person that'll do this on the side or the receptionist. Don't kid yourself. We've gone, as she as she's told us, we've gone from push to pull marketing. You need to get on that train and engage a firm like Katie Wagner Social Media to help you take advantage of, of your, your customer base, the world out there that's looking to find you and help message in an appropriate way so they'll. Back to you, Katie, it's been a real pleasure to talk with you about this. I mean, I took a page full of notes just in that brief interview and I learned a ton. So thank you so much, and I would love to have you back sometime and we can talk maybe a little bit deeper about some of these, these issues, maybe talk about how to create different types of campaigns. Would you be willing to do that? I would love that anytime. Terrific. And by the way, Katie is well networked in a group that we both belong to called Provisors that that puts at our disposal hundreds and hundreds and thousands of professional advisers. So if you have any other needs, give Katie a call and she'll be able to connect you with some great advisers. Katie, thanks once again. I appreciate you coming onto the show. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. Thank you for listening to Exit Coach Radio.