[FILE NAME: Social Media Road Trip – Where Are You Headed To Find Customers?] [DURATION 00:05:55]

Brad Besancon: Well, hello, everyone. It’s Brad and Robert with our Clairiti clip of the week, and we’re going to introduce a series today, kind of the three things we see a lot kind of wrapping up the year. We saw a lot in 2016 and one of those is, the three-part series, we’re gonna start with these objectives, online marketing, social media objectives. The second piece is this ROI issue that always comes up when you’re talking about social media or online marketing, and then all of these extra parts–there’s one in every corner, right, Robert?

Robert Riggs: Yeah, and now, we’re on location today in your new pick’em up truck as we [00:00:34 crosstalk]

Besancon: Yeah, out in the pickup truck. Because one of the things, when you think about social media online marketing, the first thing that you should do is figure out what it is you want to do.

Riggs: Where are you going?

Besancon: Yeah, where are you going? What’s the objective of why you’ve decided to get involved into social media or change? There’s always an objective. There should be an objective in the strategy. When you go to the grocery store, what do you do?

Riggs: Make a list.

Besancon: Make a list. When you plan a vacation, what do you do? You’d spend hours online looking, finding spots to go and everything, yet we run into numerous, numerous businesses all the time and they don’t have a written strategy or an objective of why they’re doing this stuff.

Riggs: Yeah, when they started the business, they had a business plan but there is no marketing plan and certainly no digital or social media marketing plan.

Besancon: Right. And it just doesn’t make any sense. A simple task of going to the grocery store, we get in our vehicles like we are today and we go from point A to point B. We know how to get there. There might be 14 different ways to get to the grocery store, we have our favorite path. So there has to be an objective on what is point B in my social media and online? How do I get there? It’s not going to be a straight road; it’s going to be curvy, right? You’re going to have to take some right turns and left turns, you’re going tohave to back up and start over but there should be an attractive. Heck, we have mapping systems in pretty much–any vehicle now has navigation, and what does that help you do? Get from point A to point B. And sometimes, it doesn’t give you the best route, which in our world, you do have to experiment. You have to say, “Well, maybe we’re going to try a different route or a different objective.” You got to change the destination. You have to load in the roadblocks and the traffic in the roadmap so that’s not going to happen. You have to know where those are and be aware of that, and notice, you’re going to have to back up. In football, you’re going to halftime and make adjustments.

Riggs: It’s going to happen. And one of the problems that we see is, that even when we get clients to get a plan for coaching them, you got to start the trip you, got to put in drive. They said, they’re frozen at the wheel. You got to. You just have to do it.

Besancon: Yeah, and the other thing to be cognizant of is, don’t hand your brand over to someone in a cube because they’re under 30 and you think they understand all the stuff because they grew up with it, and that’s not–I’m not being offensive to you; I’m not trying to critic. We just see that a lot and all the problems that come with that. We have a little saying, do you want to be cute, clever and social? Or do you want to become–those are the kind of three C’s that we talk about: cute, clever, and calm, and you have to pick one of those in your objective and put it in drive and move forward. And so we start with an online branding session about who are you going to be online and that really kind of in part, becomes the starting point of the map.

Riggs: Right. I mean, our brand storming session and we encourage you guys to do it as well with your own staff or whoever it is. You have to know who you are. If you don’t know who you are, how are you going to talk to your audience? And then the second thing is, who’s your audience? Who are you trying to be and who are you trying to target? Are you going to be a sales ? Are you going to more connection? We’re all about conversation marketing. We’re all about driving the conversation online, connecting with clients to eventually convert the clients. And there is a different way of talking depending on what that conversation is that you want to get started. There’s a different language for each of the audience. There is a different language for each of the platforms; your Twitter following doesn’t exactly look at Facebook, and your Instagram, and obviously, Snapchat’s going to be different, YouTube’s going to be different. So there’s even languages within the platforms.

Riggs: And also, you got to think about, there are multiple destinations in terms of what objectives are sure on each of the platforms, and as you’re on your way to those objectives, just like when you’re out on a trip, well, how many miles are we going? “Dad, are we there yet?”

Besancon: “Where’s the next Bucky’s?” right? so we’ve got to be measuring along the way of how are we getting to this objective, and then kind of once you’re there, now what’s happened.

Riggs: Right, and that’s the critical piece, is what’s happening once you got in line with an objective in? What’s the next step?

Besancon: And kind of the reason we’re talking so much about this is that we see this everywhere. Nobody’s got a plan. Nobody else got a strategy.

Riggs: And for some reason, everybody’s got the notion that the same people do Facebook that, well, you just post. You just post stuff.

Besancon: Yeah, and I think the critical thing is, they said, “We know what we need to be doing and we know we should start something. I’m going to change my website because it’s not mobile-friendly so I’m going to fix it. I’m going to do all of these things,” and they never take a step back and figure out what, what is it that the website needs to be doing?

Riggs: Yeah, and posting up a picture of your friends or your family around the table during a holiday or on vacation is a way different thing than when when you start doing that for a brand.

Besancon: Absolutely.

Riggs: And your brand story.

Besancon: Absolutely. There can be pieces of that as your brand and your brand family, etc. There can be pieces of that but without the written objective, without that taking a step back and really kind of understanding what it is you want to do. And you never know if that’s that’s going to work.

So we’re going to start kind of addressing some of those, and next week, we’re going to talk a little bit about this ROI question.

That’s the Clairiti clip, guys. We’ll see you next week. Thank you.