So that video is one in a series that's updated regularly and right off the bat they set the tone by saying that it's not really a matter of whether you engage in social media and mobile marketing but it's a question of how well you do it. Good morning everybody. My name is Eddie Bluff and with my brother Brian I'm co-founder of Sightseeker Incorporated. Sightseeker is a 14-year-old digital marketing agency located in central New York State just about 35 miles east of Syracuse. We're lucky to have a really talented team of 15 employees that perform a variety of efforts all designed to really do one thing and that's increase revenue for our clients and to do that we take a holistic approach to meet client business objectives by developing and implementing plans that do a number of things like connecting our client to their target audience. One of the things we'll be talking about today with social media, right, and positioning their content on search engines so that it's intercepted by a targeted customer defining search queries that helps them to engage on social platforms and that nurtures leads through marketing automation tools and strategies. We have a number of people here. We have developers, designers, writers, analysts, and folks that are just really good at managing client efforts. We do a lot of speaking at association meetings and I recently addressed the AED audience for my first time in January at the AED Summit where I presented a session titled Is Social Media for Dealerships? So it's great to be back in front of the AED audience again. So Brian and I have been talking about digital marketing and technology and change for almost 15 years. Now I think our 14-year anniversary is coming up this summer and looking back 15 years ago it was definitely easier to sit where you are and say, you know, that's not relevant to my industry or I'll pass on that for now or that's the folly of the young. We can't take these positions anymore and we don't need to look at statistics to tell us why. All we need to do is look around us at any point in time over the last day or week and maybe we've become so turned off or tuned out or so accustomed to it that we don't realize it anymore but our eyes are cast downwards and we have devices in our hands more often than not. I just flew back from the University of Innovative Distribution where I presented the session this past weekend and as I was waiting in the gate area I noticed about 100 other passengers waiting to board and over about a 20-minute period of time I noticed that at least two-thirds of my fellow passengers were on their devices, me included. That took me back into time. My first real job out of college in 1984 had me traveling a lot and I never really had to buy a newspaper. I liked to read newspapers because I easily get bored but I would always find copies of the Wall Street Journal or the USA Today or the Syracuse Post Standard, any types of papers laying on the seats left over by the passengers that were there before me and I'd read those papers and I'd be up to speed on current events and news or at least the news that those news organizations chose to print and to deliver to me. It's a little different today though, isn't it? Because today the news is real time and what I consume may be very different than what you consume. We choose the information that we consume because we can and because we are self-serving and that's something I'm going to come back to. We choose information because we can and because we're self-serving and because we have access to information that pleases us and helps us to do things better including our jobs. So even if you were one of those naysayers 15 years ago that says, you know, this stuff isn't relevant to my industry, to my dealership, I'll hold off for now, that's the folly of the young. You know what? In those 15 years, the young have now grown up, they've entered the workplace and today they are our customers and they're our emerging leaders. So let's talk about setting up businesses with social media assets. We're going to approach that by taking a look at what's changed, how to get started, how to succeed. There'll be a number of topics that rotate underneath that overarching theme and those topics are going to include, you know, how social media plays a part in a successful digital marketing program. Long gone are the days where you can take a tactical approach. You still could but you should expect limited results. We're going to talk about the B2B buying process and how technology and the availability of information has turned the B2B buying process on its head and how we can regain lost influence. We're going to talk about how to gain a deepened understanding of your buyer persona needs. We'll define what buyer personas are and that's going to allow you to better position your content that meets their needs and places you on their short list. We'll talk about how social media is a conduit to website visits and why it's important therefore to make sure your website or, as I'll refer to it, your house, make sure your house is in order. We'll talk about questions to consider when choosing which social media platform should I participate on. We'll talk about the most important aspect of any of these efforts and that's creating content and how we need to think about creating content differently today. We need to think once and repurpose often and I'll define what I mean by that. We'll be talking about social media advertising and the reality of social media exposure for business is that you have to advertise today. We'll talk about where to start with all of these moving pieces. Now throughout the session I've sequenced seven questions. The intent is to get you to think inwardly about your own organization relative to the topics that we're discussing. It's not my intent to ask you to go ahead and answer those questions but just to pause seven different times I'll talk you through those and it's just to get us thinking about how does my organization relate to what the topic is at this exact moment. If anyone needs assistance I'll extend my offer that I gave at the summit and provide a free consultation which could include a review of your social or digital strategy, a website audit, a discussion about lead nurturing or really any digital marketing topic that you have on your mind. If you're interested just send an email to eddiebluff at siteseeker.com and that'll be spelled out in the last slide. If you have questions let me know and let's get going, okay? So social media just like blogging or SEO or search engine marketing they're all tactics and while they're definitely important parts of a marketing effort they need to be coordinated. They need to be part of a plan to work well for a business today. At SiteSeeker we've developed what we call the ROC principle, R-O-C, which says that every plan recognizes the need for a roadmap. So a roadmap is a research plan that we follow to take us to our objectives, right? It has a beginning and it has an ending. This plan recognizes that we're going to have ongoing online efforts and that these efforts should all be outward facing and should all be about the customer. So we're on to our first question right off the bat. With regard to your marketing effort think about the top three objectives of your intended program and here's some examples. Do I want to do this? Do I want to engage in social media specific to this topic and digital marketing in general because I want to grow my revenue from X dollars from direct online marketing efforts? Or maybe I want to do this because I want to increase my website traffic. By a certain percentage. Maybe I want to engage in this because I want to increase online leads from X to Y. Or I want to generate a total of X online transactions at an average sale value of a certain dollar amount. Or maybe we have other needs. But as we think about what we're going to do we have to really start with the end in mind. So it's really important to have objectives defined, written down, and those are going to guide us through the plan. Okay, let's move forward. So more about the ROC principle. A roadmap. A roadmap is a formal plan. As I just mentioned it starts with the end in mind and it includes objectives. It includes dates. It includes strategies. Without a plan you can't be successful because there's just today way too many moving pieces to take a tactical approach. In order to put together a plan we need to create a baseline to understand the health of your website. So the baseline is the starting point and it's going to identify a number of things. As an example, what parts of your website are assets and working well? What parts of your website are liabilities and possibly hurting you? And they could be hurting you without you even knowing it. You know, technology and digital marketing have changed dramatically over the years and it's become really complicated. So here's a couple of examples. You could have incoming links to your websites that have been there forever and they've never been causing you any problems but all of a sudden Google comes along and they make big changes to their algorithm relative to linking and now they will devalue your website if they don't happen to like the relationship between your site and the content that that link originates from. And there's been a lot of such changes. If you're a distributor, particularly in your industry, in the manufacturer, distributor, in the supply chain world, manufacturers as good partners supply their distributors with certain things to help them to sell. They supply them with knowledge and they supply them with materials and a lot of that material ends up on your website. So if I am a distributor that sells a particular piece of equipment that many of you do, we're all going to have that same manufacturer supplied content. And that's always worked very well until Google came out recently and they made a change that said we are now going to penalize. We can't make sense of duplicate content. So if every distributor of a particular excavator, as an example, has the same type of content, Google looks at 400 or 500 different results that have the same content, they scratch their head they can't make sense of it. So they've come out with this big change where they will penalize sites that have duplicate content. If you didn't react last April 15th when Google implemented the much publicized mobile-friendly algorithm change called Mobile Get In, you could be penalized and thereby invisible as an increasing number of people search with mobile and tablet searches. So it's really critical as we establish this baseline that we understand exactly where we stand now and how to get to where we want to go next. And that's done only through a research and defined plan. You know, there's a saying that's applicable and that is what got you here today is not going to get you to where you want to go. Okay, so let's take a look at the next question. Question two, program planning. Have you implemented and do you maintain a marketing calendar? So a marketing calendar to my definition is an annual plan that defines all things marketing including new product releases, trade shows, anything and everything that's going to come underneath the marketing department would be my definition of a marketing calendar. An editorial calendar is also an annual plan but that speaks more towards the theme of the content that we're going to be creating and distributing over the calendar year. An editorial calendar is something that we go back to frequently and we update as situations change throughout the calendar year. A conversation calendar on the other end operates underneath the editorial calendar and it pays more attention to the creation and distribution of the individual pieces of content and would certainly apply to what we do on social media, the posts and the content and all the different tactics we might take. A multi-year digital marketing revision or plan is just as its name applies. It's taking into consideration the marketing calendar and multiplying it out over a number of years. So it's important to really think about what's going to guide you in this effort that you're going to undertake. Okay, moving forward, let's talk about a successful roadmap. A successful roadmap is going to define what happens and it recognizes the need for ongoing efforts so that we have continual touch points with prospects and that means the development of a plan. This is a representation of a plan right in front of you. So let's diagnose what we're looking at. Down column A, the leftmost column, we see all of the tactics. We're going to come back to those. I'm going to zoom in and we'll get a better look at those. Across the top of this spreadsheet is the effort timeline and it's defined by month. So you can see that some of these efforts are short-term as an example up here in what would be cell A and row 2. In two-way, we can see that this particular task which speaks to updating and making sure that the website is mobile-friendly has a checkmark in it which means that it's a one-time effort because there's only one cell or it would be a one-month effort and it's already been ticked off meaning that we've completed that. Buyer persona development. These are one-time efforts. Some of these efforts in this plan, as we can see, ongoing website development as an example, continue to tweak as needed. They carry on through the entire months or duration of the effort. Some of the efforts developing an improved editorial calendar and content marketing are periodic, right? So some of these are going to be one-time. Some are going to be periodic efforts and some are going to go out to the foreseeable future. Now, zooming in, let's take a better look at this. Now we're looking at just what we were previously looking at in column A. We can see examples of some of the tactics that could or should be included in a plan and this is just an example plan. In this particular case, the website has been updated and was mobile-friendly. That's what this line speaks to here. We're going to define an audience and we're going to talk more about that meaning we're going to take a look at who are our buyer personas, the customers that we have to influence to make a sale. By going through this process and understanding what our customers require, we're always going to have ongoing website development and we're always going to have content marketing efforts. So it's this type of a plan that really lifts all of the many, many different moving parts and pieces to the effort and it keeps us on track. So let's talk about that. Question three. Is your organization or business unit actively involved in search engine optimization? To be successful, there's not just one technical approach. So we're probably going to have to make sure that we're found for targeted search on search engines. There may be different search queries that we can't move ourselves up to the top of the search result page. So we're going to probably want to be engaged in a pay-per-click, also called the search engine marketing program. Do you currently monitor your website's performance using Google Analytics or some other analytic program? And if you're not monitoring what you're doing, you can't ever designate anything to be successful or a failure or anywhere in between. So it's really important to set milestones and to have metrics of measurement, right? Are you involved in lead scoring and nurturing, which have to do with marketing automation and drip marketing? How about video? Video is so big, and we're going to talk more about video for your audience, but are you currently video marketing through YouTube or some other platform? And email marketing? I'm sure that every one of the distributorships has an email marketing list. So these are different tactics that really should be considered as part of this plan. Now, more likely than not, our effort is going to look something like this, where we have the prospective customer at the center, and we can see that they consume information in a variety of places, right? And in a variety of ways. And while we're here today to talk about social media, we have to understand that social media is just one piece of a puzzle. And when we look at the social media platforms, there could be many different platforms that different people that we're trying to influence to make a sale for the distributorship are involved in. We're surrounded by, we're bombarded by messaging from a growing number of platforms all the time. You guys know that. It's important to understand what this picture looks like for your prospective customer, and therefore to position your content in the places that they go. Next question. Is your organization or business unit active on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus? We're going to talk about these platforms and a couple of others as we move forward here, but these are some of the ones that you might want to consider. Now, our effort today needs to be customer-centric. We're closing out the conversation about the ROC principle. It needs to be customer-centric and focus on the customer because technology and the availability of information has changed how we buy. And with that change, there's been this tremendous shift of power to the buyer. The steps in the buying process haven't changed, and we can see those on the left hand side. Buyers still have to realize that they have a problem or a need that they need to satisfy. They need to research and find solutions, different potential vendors, different potential products. They then have to evaluate and negotiate and purchase. Eventually purchase. Throughout this whole process, they're going to form opinions about the people that they dealt with and about the product and the service, right? Now, what has changed is that there's been this tremendous shift in power, and that's in buyers or sellers of the product who would normally be involved in these early stages, like identification of need. You see that there's a gap over here, and to the right of search, there's a gap over here because buyers don't need sellers to become educated anymore, and that takes the seller, you folks on the line, right out of the game from the very start. I just read a B2B report in Forbes called the Disappearing Sales Process that said that industrial buyers will conduct 70% of the buying process by themselves through online self-education before they ever talk to a direct sales rep. Unless you're found in search, unless you're branding yourself an expert on social platforms, those buyers are becoming educated by other people that are doing those things. If I'm talking to your prospects every day on social media, good luck on seeding me. You're not going to do that because I've established myself as their go-to guy. Social media enables us to really brand ourselves as the expert, and once we've done that, we're hard to become unseeded. Buyers are also, remember I mentioned down here that there's a post-buying evaluation, feelings that we've gained through the whole process. Well, buyers are really influenced by reviews from others that have purchased that same product and voiced their opinions on social platforms. That same Forbes report also stated that buyers are really, they rely heavily on content and unbiased peer advice for the same information that they want to learn from the salespeople. And that video that you just watched also referenced that 90% of the buyers trust peer recommendations. So these peer recommendations and reviews are really powerful. So what do we do? Well, it's critical that we have to fill these gaps. We have to fill the gaps that are now in the buying and selling process. To do that, we have to position content that solves problems and that answers questions that would be typical in each stage of the buying process. And if we deal with more than one customer type or persona, as we're going to look at in just a second here, they're very likely to have different personalities and different needs. And we have to provide content that's focused on the customer and not us. And when we're talking about social media, we have to do this in a way where we're educating and not overtly selling. So let's talk about personas. As we think about developing content, as we think about which social platforms we're going to be on, as we think about our messaging, as we think about our website, as we think about anything as it relates to marketing, it's extremely important for us to understand who our customer personas are and to develop content in the form and in the medium that rings true to those that are most influential in the buying process. So the definition of a buyer persona or a customer persona is that they're fictitious archetypes, which means that they're just a collection of characteristics that relate to those people that we have to deal with in the buying process. Maybe an engineer or a purchasing agent or, for you guys, a fleet manager or anybody that's involved in the buying of our products and our services. And the nature of the B2B buying process is complicated and it's long. It can range from six days to six months or longer. So following where people are in the buying process can be an arduous task, and it's something that we've got to do to fill those gaps that we just saw. In order to accomplish the jobs of the various personas that we have to influence, they're going to have different informational needs and very possibly will need or prefer to consume that information in different ways. Understanding who these people are then, what they need, how they prefer to consume that information is your critical first step to anything that you do in marketing, anything at all in regards to the social platforms that you participate in, your website, your blogging efforts, even your hard copy literature. Okay, so let's go on to the next question. Think about the people or the personas that you folks most commonly deal with in the sales process. Who are they by job title? I mentioned fleet manager before. I learned about that when I interviewed one of the marketing managers from an AED distributor ship just prior to going to the AED Summit and presenting, and she told me that fleet manager was a really important one. But I would imagine that you deal with people in the buying department, buying agents, purchasing managers, maintenance managers. But you need to identify those to yourself and think about who they are, and not only think about who they are, but even think deeper. Are they visual and creative people, or are they more likely to buy something based upon data and facts? I know that I'm a visual person, so if I have an opportunity to look at a graph or a chart or read a long piece of content or go to a video, I'm going video every time. My brother's just the opposite way. He's attracted to data. He's attracted to bar charts. So just based upon our own individual personalities, not to mention job requirements, people will tend to move towards different types of content. So it's important to understand who these people are and what they need and what really motivates them to learn. Let's talk about personas and how they might interact in a buying situation. Up across the top here, we see four of the five steps involved in the buying process. This is after I've identified a need, so they've already done that. Now these two personas that we're going to discuss are in the process of performing research. They're in the process of establishing a buying criteria, whereby they're going to evaluate vendors, and then they're going to eventually buy. Here's a story. Joe, the R&D engineer, that's our persona here, this guy on the left, and Jackie, the buyer, the other persona in this story, they both work for Panasonic, and Panasonic's going to be releasing a new TV. But this one's going to be a lot thinner, and consequently, there's going to be a lot more heat, and the components are going to have to be tested and rated for this new increased temperature environment. Now Joe, the R&D engineer, he's going to start his work in his search for solutions a long time before the product is released, and one of the components he's going to be looking for is a high-temperature solder paste to hold those components together. So if you're a solder manufacturer, and Joe finds his way to your social platforms, to your content, to your website, he's going to be looking for a bunch of things that he needs to satisfy his job requirements. He's going to want to talk to some of your engineers. He needs to have that engineer-to-engineer kind of conversation so he feels comfortable with your solution and your approach to his problem. He's going to want to consume and review case studies, and he's going to definitely want to get a sample of your solder products. That's the kind of stuff that Joe needs. At some point in time, though, as Joe moves through this buying process, he's going to narrow down the solution set and the vendors, and he's going to establish the buying criteria to the point where he can actually pick up a packet, walk it down the hallway, and hand it in the process off to somebody else. Introduce or meet Jackie, the buyer. Now, Jackie has a technical understanding of the situation, but it's at a really high level. She's probably a really nice person, but she has no time for long personal interaction where Joe needed that relationship with the engineers in order to get the information that he needed. Jackie's on a mission. She's got very little time. There's a stack of papers on her desk that keeps getting higher. Jackie's interested in on-time delivery. Testimonials, warranty information, what are your payment terms in getting the best product for the best price? So you have to ask yourself, if you're in this situation, have I provided all that information that Joe needed in the form that Joe needed that information? Have I provided Joe with access to the engineers? Do I know Joe well enough that I'm going to provide access to the engineers, an area where he can request a sample of our products? Do I know Jackie well enough? Have I made the cut with Joe to the point that my name stays in that packet that he hands off to Jackie? So as good marketers, we've got to understand what takes place from the beginning of the sales cycle to the end, what personas are involved, and then we need to sequence that information. We need to lay out our content on our website, write blog articles, send out emails that sync up with each step in the process in a form that appeals to the respective personas involved. And if we do this, we're going to generate more leads and close more business. Your website is a funnel. It's got input and it's got output. Notice that social media up at top in addition to search engines and vertical websites drives traffic to your website. It's really important to understand that social media keeps you top of mind so that when customers and prospects have a need that they think of you and they visit your website, I mean really when we think about social media or anything else that we do, we want to drive people to our website. That's our home base. That's why we're doing this. Once visitors are on your site, there's a handful of things they can do. They can look at one page and leave. That's called a bounce. They can read a page or two and then exit. They can look at a couple of pages, determine that they're interested in talking to you, you might be able to help them, and they can take an action. These actions at the bottom of this funnel are called conversion actions. The types of conversion actions that people can take that are on your website is very dependent upon the type of industry you're in and the functionality that your website provides. They can certainly pick up the phone and call you. Great conversion action. We want phone calls. If you have a shopping cart, they can go and purchase something from you. none better, right? That's the super conversion action. They can send you an email, fill out a form, they can link out to your social media platforms, your LinkedIn platform, to your Facebook platform, et cetera. They could choose to join your email newsletter, right? There's a handful of things that they can do. It's the layout of your website that's gonna determine what they can do. The better that you lay out the site, the more value you're gonna get. So this is really critical today because Google has become dramatically more protective of the user experience. If your website, as an example, loads slowly, that's a really bad experience and Google doesn't like that. They monitor that and they can devalue you for that. If you have broken links on your website, and I bet many of you do, that's a bad user experience. It's like inviting a friend to come over for a house party and say, hey, come up the back steps. When you know that three out of the five steps at your back door are broken, right? It's a bad experience. If your website isn't mobile-friendly and doesn't conform to their April algorithm change, then you're subject to being devalued in the search engine. So let's take a look at how traffic moves through a website when I move this back one. This particular website, let's say they get 10,000 visitors. They come in the top of this funnel from social media, from vertical websites, from search engines, and it processes or it converts at 0.75%. So three quarters of 1% of the people that come into this website have converted, identified themselves, they're now into the sales cycle, and some amount of those leads are gonna turn into sales. So we've made some money and that's great. Now the most logical thing and the easiest, the most natural thing would be to say, give me more of that. So what we could do is we could easily just say, I'm going to increase my efforts at the top of the funnel by 25%. I'm gonna throw more money at it. I'm gonna put more resources. I'm gonna write more content. I'm gonna do something that's going to affect the amount of traffic coming in by a plus 25%. So I've gone from 10,000 visitors to 12,500. I haven't done anything to the middle of my funnel or to the conversion capability of my website. So I'm still converting at three quarters of a percent. But if you look at the bottom now, the output has increased and hypothetically, now I've just made more money. That's great. But the way that effective website digital marketing works today is to not only pay attention to the quality and the amount of traffic going in, but I think more importantly, really paying attention to the funnel, to your house. Make sure that your house is in order. Make sure that your website processes your valuable customer persona and give them opportunities to take actions that moves them into a sales functionality or moves them into a sales process. So if we do that, look at here. We've just concentrated by increasing our conversions from .75%. We've upped that by just one quarter of 1% to 1% coupled with the increased traffic. Now that's how successful digital marketing works. So when you think about your website, is it currently ranking well for important keywords? Is it generating sufficient leads? Is it mobile-friendly? The purpose of this question is to get us to start to think about how does our website receive and process the valuable traffic that we're gonna be working hard in our social media efforts, that we're gonna be working hard through our content generation, our email marketing, and our search engine optimization efforts. So there's a lot of social platforms and we can see that there's new ones introduced each year and that can make the decision of where to start kind of a tough one. You've gotta start somewhere though, right? And choosing from one of these platforms that we're all familiar with would be a good place to start but the idea is to go where your audience is and to start small and expand as it makes sense. So there's a number of questions that you could ask yourself when deciding which is the right platform to choose. The first one could be who is your audience? And that takes us right back to the customer persona and all the information we discovered as we developed those personas, including how old are they? Are they male or are they female? What are their interests outside of my product or my service? Another question, what are my goals? Well, as a business owner or as a salesperson, I know that I have certain goals, including I wanna drive sales. I want more profitable sales. I want better leads. I wanna increase revenue but we've gotta have more reasons than just the financial revenue aspect to participate in social media. How about brand recognition? We wanna increase our brand recognition. We wanna develop friendly relationships. And as we do this, as we participate with social media, we really need to remember to avoid all temptation to use social media to sell. That's like a violation of an unwritten rule or an unwritten trust. Social media is definitely not for selling but it's for connecting with people and for providing interesting value so that they come back. It's for letting your personality show. Another question could be, is my audience on this platform, the platform that I'm considering? And you can figure that out simply by entering your keywords into the search box of each platform and you'll be able to see who's there and what types of conversations are going on. And we'll take a look at that for your industry in just a second. You'll also wanna consider how active your personas are on the platforms. As an example, while a young Facebook user might have a profile on Facebook, they're probably gonna be more active today on Instagram. So we participate in a lot of different platforms and we do need to have insight as to which platforms are most active for our targeted personas. So let's talk a little bit more about each of these platforms reflected here. Let's start with Facebook on the left-hand side. While Facebook has more users than China has people, we have to remember that Facebook is used to build relationships. I mean, that's what we do on Facebook. We build relationships and we keep in touch with old friends. That makes Facebook a really good platform for you to build loyalty of your existing customer base, the people that already know who you are, you have a relationship with them. The downside to Facebook and a number of these other platforms is that it may be really hard to grow your following organically today on Facebook because as Facebook has grown, become more popular, the individual number of people or friends or connections that we have has grown. The consequence of that is that the lifespan, the amount of time that our posts are visible has really decreased. And I'm sure that each of you can really relate to that. Think about your own personal timelines on Facebook and things just move by at the speed of light now. So if you're posting organically, the amount of time that that's in front of eyeballs that you want to see it is gonna be greatly decreased. With that said though, Facebook advertising can be very targeted, very effective and comparatively inexpensive. It's a great solution. So if you're trying to build a dedicated following within your customer base, Facebook is definitely a good option for your dealership. Twitter, because Twitter has the hashtag, it's a really valuable tool to use to find out what people are talking about. By placing a hashtag in front of any word or words in the Twitter search box, you're gonna see, you're gonna be given an organized list of all the conversations that surround the words that you put into the search box. And that's gonna help you to determine what people are talking about, what trending conversations are going on. And this is all real time stuff. So it's gonna help you to develop what you want to write about, what you want to talk about. And that's critical. You can't get eyeballs in our interaction unless you are talking about the things that are keeping your customer personas up at night or the things that really interest them. So this is a great tool to use for that. Beyond using it as a tool, as a research tool, Twitter is excellent to get exposure for your brand. It's a great way to share your blog content and your updates with your audience. It takes no time to send out a tweet. Right, I mean it's 140 characters. And if you think about it, the people that receive your tweets, they've chosen to follow you and therefore they are qualified in that sense. Twitter's often used to provide real time updates. And so many people will use it as, with an offline engagement, like to announce that you're at a trade show or at a leaders conference or that your company's involved in some type of a social activity in your local area. Pinterest, Pinterest is not one that I would have put on this slide. It's used for scrapbooking, which just means saving content by pinning photos to this virtual bulletin board. The audience has been mostly women and it's most used in retail businesses. The reason that you're seeing it up here is that marketing manager from the AED distributorship that I referenced earlier, and this was a big distributorship, and she really impressed me. She said that Pinterest is within her company's top five platforms. And I was surprised by that. She, and her rationale was that there's a, because there's a visual element to your products, she's told me that she's gotten really good leads by posting images of your products on Pinterest that have links to product descriptions. So people click on the image, they see a link, expanded information behind that, product descriptions, and contact forms. So I was shocked, but she taught me something and that's why it's up there. And it's the same slide that actually I presented to the AED Summit. YouTube, let's talk about YouTube. And we should talk about YouTube and we should use YouTube. It's both a search engine and it's a social media platform. It's big and it's just getting bigger, it's huge. The introductory video suggested that by 2018, the video's going to account for over 2 3rds of mobile usage. YouTube is owned by Google. It's the second largest search engine, which is amazing. And the top search query on YouTube begins with the words how to. It's perfect for your industry. Why? Because you guys have cool stuff. You have stuff that moves and digs and does really cool stuff. So I think it's just, it's a must have for your industry. The search engines like video, they really do. We like video, at least I do. We all have cameras, right? So we don't need to go and hire a professional photographer or a videographer to do these videos necessarily, right? So there's different applications for video, but we should all be using video much more. LinkedIn is another one that I'm really, really high on. It's a great platform for business professionals. It's one of our favorites here. I believe that it should be one of the top go-to platforms for executives and salespeople in your industry. It has the largest user demographic of the 30 to 49-year-old age group. And typically these professional people, those could be some of your personas right there, some of the people that can influence a sale. It's in the target age range. LinkedIn is used for a variety of purposes for B2B, lead generation, general networking, as well as recruiting. There's discussion groups. That's the whole reason right there to be on LinkedIn. Discussion groups are just about anything under the sun, and it's really within these groups that you can gain some ground and brand yourself as an expert. Instagram is one of the fastest-growing platforms, particularly among young users, as I mentioned earlier. Like Pinterest, it's also photo-based and therefore works really well for visual-based businesses because it's a growing platform. There's less noise on it as compared to Facebook. So if your audience is on Instagram, there's an opportunity that your posts will have a wider organic reach. Google Plus is known to have an older male demographic. Google Plus is something that viewers should definitely use, simply and only because of the fact that it has Google My Business. You're gonna wanna write that down, Google My Business, which enables you to have visibility on the top of the search result page for local searches. And we see them all the time when we search Google, and they return local listings above all the others. So people that do business with you are searching for what you provide. They're gonna be using geographic modifiers in their search query. That's gonna trigger Google's local business listings, which I refer to as Google My Business. So you're gonna get a huge benefit of top-page ranking beyond the social interaction that you could have on Google Plus. So I really think that Google Plus is the place to go. So let's move forward and look at seeing if your audience is on certain platforms. And this is just an illustration of what I said before. To find out if your audience is on a certain platform, type in your words. I typed in construction equipment into Facebook, right? And we're able to find companies that have established a page by searching those keywords, and I can find out how many people are following them and what kinds of interaction they're having. Here's an example on Twitter. I had no trouble finding other companies that do exactly what you do, that have active Twitter pages, right? Same with LinkedIn. Here with LinkedIn, I searched for construction equipment as a category, and you can see in the upper left-hand side that I found 15,000, 15,017 different companies that are listed under the construction equipment category. So we know that your competitors are there, which really wasn't a big surprise to me. LinkedIn additionally, groups. Additionally, using LinkedIn Search, I know that there's 317 groups formed around the construction equipment category. Finding a good group to join and take part in discussions is really where the action is. In fact, out of all the social platforms, the majority of leads that we've seen and backed by any research I've seen are gonna come from LinkedIn, and the majority of those leads are gonna come from within discussion groups. So I can't say enough about discussion groups. So it would be valuable to you folks to find out what groups your customer personas participate in, right? Maybe these aren't the groups that you necessarily want to be in. Maybe they are. It would take a little bit more research and thinking about that, but we need to identify our personas, always going back to the persona, right? And find out where they are, and if it makes sense, join those groups and wait for an opportunity to chime in on a discussion. And remember to keep that number one rule of social media etiquette, thou shalt not sell on social media platforms. Many of these groups are governed by rules that prohibit direct solicitation. One more thing that you can use LinkedIn for, if you have the premium version of LinkedIn, this is awesome, you can apply filters and you can do advanced searches to uncover people by title and industry. In this example, I was able to find out that within the industry logistics and supply chain, that's the name of the category, I found 5,339 people that have the title fleet manager. So if a fleet manager is potentially one of your buyer personas, you can target these people. Okay, let's talk about Google+, just for a second, then we'll move on. Google+, has communities which are much like groups in LinkedIn with additional sharing options. There's private communities and there's public communities. The private communities are gonna have an ask to join call to action down here, and you'll need to submit a request to be approved to join those communities. And there's a lot of ways to share within communities. Google+, is good because they have all these sharing opportunities, including video Hangouts, which is something that we use an awful lot. If you're gonna be on social media, you wanna be credible. That's the point, you wanna be involved, you wanna be consistent, and you wanna be credible. So to become an expert on social media, here's the steps I would take, right? You wanna create social platforms where your audience is located. So you're going to create your accounts, whether that's Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn. And once you're there, you're gonna wanna grow your audience. The easiest and most natural way to do that is to let your current customers, your past customers, everybody on your mailing list, know that you're now on LinkedIn, or Facebook, or wherever you wanna start. That's gonna give you an immediate organic growth, and it's gonna be pretty natural. I mean, think about it in your personal life. When we see people that we know that have joined Facebook or have joined LinkedIn, we automatically connect with them. So that's a good way to start just naturally. You're definitely gonna want to add those appropriate social media badges. So if you're on LinkedIn, if you're on Facebook, if I'm on your website, I should see prominently badges that link out to your Facebook page and link out to your LinkedIn page. In anything else that you send out to customers on a regular basis, you're gonna wanna have those badges that let people know that you do participate in a social platform. But beyond that, you're gonna wanna grow your network by advertising to increase your likes and to increase your followers. There's some ads that are specifically targeted to do that, we'll look at those in a second. So additionally, how else would you grow your networks? Well, you're gonna need to create content. Content is gonna be something that has to be an ongoing active part, and that content has to be content that both is favored by search engines, so you're gonna need to know something about search engine optimization, and it's gonna be content that has to solve problems for your audience. And you're gonna use the social platforms to distribute that content. You're gonna wanna participate in discussions on LinkedIn, and where appropriate, lead those discussions on LinkedIn. And that's the circle that's going to help you to become an expert on social media. One of the most common objections about creating content that we hear all the time is, I don't know what to write about. You know, I've seen a lot of really smart business people say, I just don't know what to write about. I think they have social, they have a writer's block of some form. We need to think about this differently, because there's so much to do in life and in our business world today, that there's too many moving pieces, so we need to find some efficiencies. Here's one I'm gonna share with you. We need to think once, and we need to repurpose often, because every single day when you go to work, you're thinking, you're solving problems, you're learning, and you're teaching. And all of these actions take energy, and they produce really valuable results. So as an example, when we work to solve one customer's problem, the chances of that being a one-off problem is probably pretty remote. So we should take that experience and turn it into a blog. And if I turn it into a blog, why wouldn't I take my iPhone, go next door to my colleague's office, and say, hey, Tim, do me a favor, hold my video camera, I wanna just talk about the top three points that I made in this blog, and then post that to YouTube, right? So now I've double-dipped as far as multipurposing. If you write a case study on the top 10 reasons to do anything, why not break that down into 10 individual blog posts? So the summary of this slide is we have a real opportunity to take advantage of the things that we do in our daily work lives, and with a small amount of additional effort, we can turn that into valuable content. We need to use these social platforms, then, as a force multiplier, right? We need to use SlideShare to publish this PowerPoint presentation. I've already done the hard work once. Why would I take four minutes to publish it to SlideShare? Now, should I expect to get 10,000 eyes on this PowerPoint and SlideShare? No, not at all, 1,000, never. 200, I don't know, 50, yeah, probably over time. So the point is I've done the work, repurposed it to do a little bit more work. We should use Twitter as a delivery device for our blog content and our video content, and we should be sharing all of our content on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+. Now, a different topic, a different session altogether, a lot of different platforms, a lot of moving pieces. There are automation tools that you can employ so that you can take one action, publish a blog, and it then automatically updates your Twitter account, your LinkedIn accounts, Instagram, et cetera. So we have other ways to save time and become more efficient, save dollars, so that this doesn't seem to be just really overwhelming. Some of the content best practices, we've pretty much covered these. So content must be customer-centric, about the customer, solving problems every day, making their lives better and their jobs easier. It's got to align to the various stages of the buying process, and it's got to address the typical questions that you are asked. And I bet you that those of you that have been in business for a while have been asked the same types of questions about a piece of equipment or a problem over and over and over again. So when a customer calls you up, they can start the question with, I'm thinking about buying this particular piece of equipment and you could probably walk away, come back 10 minutes later and pick up the conversation right where you left off, knowing what they would have asked you. So that all comes with understanding who our customers are. The question on social media is, is organic reach dead? And I think it really pretty much is. Post-reach on the platforms, particularly the more popular ones, it's greatly decreased. That means you're gonna need to advertise. And done right, social media advertising can be really effective. Targeting is great, as I mentioned. And the ads are comparatively cheap. So let's just look at a few of these. Facebook, there's a number of different types of Facebook ads. There's two of the most common. The one on the left is a page post link ad, also called a newsfeed ad, because that's where it appears. This is the most common Facebook ad. It's a great way to promote your website. They typically have a big image like this and they have the side benefit of generating likes to your page. Over on the right-hand side, speaking of likes to your page, this is a page like ad, and that's exactly what it's designed to do. It's designed to increase page likes. It can be displayed pretty much anywhere and it's gonna include a visible call to action down here in the lower right to like your page. And as with anything done that includes an image, it's really important that we take some time to pick the right image to achieve the best results. On Twitter, the most effective ads are promoted tweets and promoted accounts, also known as promoted handles. A promoted tweet is really just a tweet that you've purchased, you've put some money against to reach a wider group of users. They're labeled as promoted, but outside of that, they're just regular tweets that people can retweet, reply to, favorite. They're best used in combination with a compelling piece of content announcing a new product or a new service or a sale or an event. If you can, it's great to include a video or an image to include exposure. And they appear in a number of places, including at the top of related search pages, on targeted users' profile pages, and on their timelines. Promoted accounts or promoted handles on the right-hand side are used to promote why someone should follow you. Promoted accounts will include your logo and a strong call of action to follow you. LinkedIn ads, you know, with a growing user base and tons of information on each user, LinkedIn is an awesome place to advertise. Sponsored ads on the left-hand side are charged on a cost per click or a cost per thousand impressions. They can appear on the right-hand column with your target audience profile page, their homepage, their inbox, search result pages, and group pages that they belong to. Clicks on these ads can be directed to your website or it can be directed to your LinkedIn page. And the targeting is phenomenal. If you think about all the things that we put into our LinkedIn profile, you can imagine you can target based upon anything, industry, job functions, seniority, geography, et cetera. LinkedIn sponsored updates or sponsored posts on the right-hand side, they let you publish your posts or updates right to the LinkedIn feed of any member on your site, not necessarily the people following you, anybody. Here's why you wanna advertise. Here's an example. We had a client, what you're looking at on the y-axis here is number of Twitter followers. It goes from zero to 1,576. And here is a calendar of this effort by month, and it goes on, I think, 18 months. We had a client that had a really compelling story to tell. They felt that if they could get people to see this story, to understand their messaging, that they could engage people in the sales process, they could really get a jump on their competition, because their competition was developing the same type of offering or a competitive offering. So they had a limited period of time. Their strategy included tweeting four to six times, and they were hoping, four to six times a day, that's key, four to six times a day, they were tweeting with the goal of gaining more followers, and the followers would see the content, and some number of those would interact, and they would increase sales. And they were making ground. You can see that they were getting more and more followers, but the competition was breathing down their neck. It wasn't happening at the rate that they wanted it to happen. So we got involved just before Christmas, and just by creating a sponsored ad campaign on Twitter and throwing a little bit of money, I don't remember what it was, but it was hundreds. It wasn't thousands. We were able to greatly, greatly increase the number of followers, helping them to sell more product in that short period of time that they had before the competition caught up. Okay, final slide. Here's how I would start, right? Remember I said you gotta get your house in order. Number one, this is your website. You have to ask yourself, are you meeting the needs of your personas, the people that are already on your site? If not, you gotta get your house in order. Remember that funnel diagram? We need to widen the middle of that funnel by making sure that our website operates well, processes visitors, and provides value. And by doing this, you're gonna benefit by taking care of the low-hanging fruit that's already there. Now let's go up to number two, where we see the logos for the search engines. Prospects are looking for your products and services every day. So let's focus now on the top of the funnel. You need to ask yourself, is your website, is your content aligned to intercept that traffic? What I mean by that is, have you applied the principles of search engine optimization to the content that already exists on your website? You need to get that aligned so that the search engines will favor that content and show it and put it up in front of the targeted customers. Once you've got that process due, let's go to number three here. This is the blog. You should have a blog on your website. You need to start to build out more content to increase your visibility for a wider range of keywords. And we need to write as often as possible. And if we're writing, like I mentioned before, why not take that blog content and turn it into a video? And if we're gonna write blogs, we might as well use the social platforms to distribute our content. If we do this, our sales will come easier and that's the way that the successful digital marketing program works. Folks, we're just right up on the top of the hour. Are there any questions I can answer? Okay, if there's any ongoing questions or if you're interested in a free consultation, whether that's about your social media strategy to look at your platforms, a website audit or a conversation about lead generation, please feel free to send me an email at eddiebluff at siteseeker.com. And I thank you very much for being part of today's session.

social media

mobile marketing

digital marketing

target audience

marketing automation

buyer personas

holistic approach

content alignment

LinkedIn communities