Digital media

3 Simple Social Media Tips For Business

“Experts” everywhere in social media want to show and tell their secrets to social media success. I’m here to tell you that you can boil it down into three steps.

I learned these managing the social media for the Dallas Cowboys and over the past five years working one:one with clients who were struggling with how to use social media properly.

There is a lot of work involved in these steps, but if you take the time and the steps you will learn more about your audience and how to drive them to a conversion.

3 Steps To Get Your Content To Connect To Start Conversations That Convert

by Brad Besancon

Everyday in the digital industry we see so called Gurus and Ninjas speak and write about how business should use content and social media in marketing. They use statements like “engaging content” and be sure “your content and social media is relevant.” What the heck does that mean?

Is what’s relevant to you relevant to me? Probably not. So why don’t we look at some real-world concepts that we’ve learned in our experiences that should help answer these questions. [Read more…] about 3 Steps To Get Your Content To Connect To Start Conversations That Convert

3 Tips For Business Owners To Make Their Websites Mobile Friendly

by Brad Besancon

Mobile Friendly Websites – Interacting With Your Brand

Transcript

Transcript

Brad: You better be thinking mobile first with website design. You better be thinking mobile first with photography, content. How is your social media?

You know, 60 something percent of our time online now is in social media. So how are you using this to better your brand and your connection?

Mobile Friendly Design

Robert: You have to first look, “Well, what does that look like on the mobile phone?”

Brad: On the phone, on a 4.5, 5-inch screen, not a 27-inch desktop anymore.

Robert: You as the executive and business owner, you might be still looking at the desktop. But I got to tell you something. You’re not your customer. That’s not the way they experience the world. It’s not the way they’re going to experience your product or your service.

AudienceSpeak

Brad: Yeah, it’s right back to audience speak. What is the people you’re trying to target doing? How are they interacting with your brand? How are they interacting with life? Which now we interact with life right here now.

Robert: Yeah.

Brad: We don’t just come to a mall anymore and hang out. We’ve got to show on Instagram. We got to check in. We got to do all this stuff. That’s the screen between life we’re now seeing.

Robert: So here are some questions for you as a business owner. If you’re wondering what those kids downstairs are doing with your brand and social media and all, well, first off – and the developers, because you don’t speak their language. But here are some simple things that will equip you to ask the right questions.

Mobile Friendly = Mobile First

One, is it mobile first? Go look at your own website on the phone. Does it stack up? Does everything look right to you on the phone? Secondly –

Brad: I got another one. Call your customer service department and see how it works.

Mobile Friendly – Touch to Call

Robert: Yeah, yeah. So on the phone. Can I touch the phone number and call your office? Can I touch the address and it takes me –?

Mobile Friendly – Maps

Brad: Get the map.

Mobile Friendly – Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP Pages)

Robert: Immediately to the map. You would be surprised how much this is not going on. Another question I ask them is that – developers, “Are we on AMP? Are we AMP-ed? AMP-ed up?” Well, what does that mean? That means accelerated mobile pages.

Everything online –

Brad: Download.

Mobile Friendly = Pleasing Google

Robert: Yes. Everything online these days is about pleasing Google, kissing up to Google and as much as you might dislike that, they own it.

Brad: It’s the way it is.

Robert: So they’re big on a thing called “AMP” and what this means is there’s a code put on every one of the pages of your website. That’s going to mean they load on the phone, they load mobile much, much faster. Why is that important? Well, it’s because you want to please Google and you know that somewhere down the line, if I haven’t done that, well, and my competitor has, then they have an advantage on us.

Brad: Well then again, people aren’t experiencing who you are or what you’re about or anything about you on a desktop anymore.

Robert: Right.

Brad: In that scenario where I asked Robert for a recommendation, guess what Brad is going to do the minute after Robert says, “Call Bob Jones,” or whatever.

Robert: Yeah.

Brad: I’m going to go look at Bob Jones right there. It’s right here now. Everything is right here that I need.

Mobile Friendly – Page Speed

Robert: So you go there. What if it just takes forever to load? The pages are not coming up and all. Well, you as the business owner/executive, hey, we’re going to give you a tip down in the bottom of the notes here of how you can go check up on the developers into doing their job. There’s a page speed test. It’s available to all developers. Obviously there’s a lot not using it.

Brad: Yeah.

Robert: But it’s going to tell you. It’s going to rate your website, the mobile experience and the speed because Google is measuring how fast your page opens in milliseconds. It’s a race. But what it is about is that – do you want to frustrate your customer? It’s almost the equivalent –

Brad: It may not even be a customer.

Robert: Yeah, your prospect.

Brad: It may not even be a customer there.

Robert: It’s like leaving someone on hold when you call.

Brad: Yeah.

Robert: That is the way it is.

Brad: Good start [0:03:19] [Phonetic].

Robert: That’s our Clarity Clip of the week. We will see you here in the next couple of weeks.

[End of transcript]

How Social Media Souped Up The Ringbrothers Hot Rod Business

by Brad Besancon

Brad Besancon talks to Mike Ring of the Ringbrothers at SEMA 2017 about how Facebook marketing expanded their custom car business to an international market. If these Baby Boomer hot rod builders use social media, don’t you think it’s about time you started?

Transcript

Brad Besancon: Hello, everyone. It’s Brad with Clarity again and we have the honor of sitting here with Mr. Ring of Ring Brothers and we are going to talk a little bit about social media. We’re not going to talk too much about cars which is kind of odd for you, isn’t it?

Mike Ring: It is, yes. It’s the end of 2017, same line, it’s been all cars.

Brad: So yesterday, we were in a Hot Rod Association panel with you and listened to you, and you indicated how important social has become to your business in kind of bringing on the passion of the next generation. Tell me a little bit about when you guys realized that social should be a part of kind of your overall business model.

Mike: Well, I got to tell you, we were pretty late in the game. I mean social has been around – we didn’t pick up on it until probably five years ago, how important it was and I’ll tell you, it was truly important. I mean, it got us to be able to reach out and find people and have people find us that we’d never have the opportunity to get. That includes all over the world. I mean, we’ve got customers from London, England. We’ve got a customer from Russia. You can’t get that without social media.

Brad: Right, and it just helps you spread your message and what you’re doing, and your passion for cars because you guys are very unique in what you do. You guys talked about that yesterday, about how it’s your kind of model and what you do, so you realized that, and then what did you start doing? Did you just jump in there full-fledged or did you like, “Hey, what do we do with this stuff?”

Mike: It was honestly way over our head. We had to hire a company to do it. Our sales went up, everything about it was good. Today, I don’t know how you could be without it.

Brad: Yes, and so let’s talk about that. So here we are, it’s not a typical business. We heard that also in the seminar, “I don’t use social, I don’t use social,” and then here’s The Ringbrothers using socials. How has it influenced business from a standpoint – because you guys do a lot – you don’t just build cars. You do parts and some other things.

Mike: We also do collision work.

Brad: So how has that affected your overall business?

Mike: It’s tremendously, like I said, you could get customers that you could never get without it and it also allows people, to really show them what you’re doing. The followers we have right now, I mean, I don’t even know the exact numbers, a couple hundred thousand Facebook, which that’s a couple hundred thousand people. That’s a lot of audience for just kind of starting out into this.

Brad: Yes, and you never know which one is going to pick up the phone and call you and say, “Hey, man, I really liked what you did. Can you do that for me?” So let’s talk about what you are doing. How do you use, let’s say Facebook or social media now in kind of keeping that connection with your customers and your fan base?

Mike: I think just showing everybody what we’re doing from start to finish is a big part of that. It’s one thing to show somebody a final product but it gets them engaged when you’re showing them little pieces here and making them wait for the final, the final ending.

Brad: It makes them a part of it, right?

Mike: It does, it brings them around, makes them part of the build, part of the process, and I think it’s exciting.

Brad: Yes, I think it is too, and they are killing it on social so if you guys are into cars and like custom builds, get over here and watch these guys. They are doing a great job. Hey, thanks for your time.

Mike: You’re welcome.

Brad: I really appreciate it.

Mike: Thank you so much.

Brad: Congratulations on everything.

Mike: I appreciate that.

Brad: Alright.

Social Media Road Trip: Need Directions To Your Customers?

by Brad Besancon

Are you following the right directions to find a profitable audience for your business in Social Media?

Transcript

[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.