Title: “Covering Your Bases” – Small Business Survival Guide – Marketing Through This Crisis
Guest: Chris Goldman
Peter: Welcome to the Biz and Life Done Well podcast, where we explore what it means and what it takes to do business and life well. I’m your host, Peter Wilson. If you’re like me, you’re intrigued by stories of common people who have achieved uncommon success business and life. Join me as I interview fascinating people about how they got started, their successes and failures, their habits and routines, and what inspires them.
Peter: Hey everybody, well thank you for joining us today. I’m Peter Wilson with bizmarketing.com. We’ve got our webinar series we’re kicking off today presented by our company, bizmarketing.com. We’ve been around for about eight years as an agency. Have more than a day.
It’s myself, Peter Wilson, President of Biz Marketing, and I’m joined today by Chris Goldman, who is our StoryBrand certified guide. Chris, say hi.
Chris: It’s good to be here. I appreciate everybody coming out. Today is, as we said, this marketing through a crisis series. It’s a series of webinars, and it doesn’t matter if you’re a dentist, you have retail space, maybe you’re coming from the art world, it really doesn’t matter where you’re coming from. What we’re sharing with you today is kind of the best of what we’ve been seeing and looking at.
And we’re going to cover not today everything, but today is just getting started. And we’re going to cover several topics. And Pete, what is this series going to look like from where you sit?
Peter: So if you’re a business owner or you’re managing an organization, we really wanna make sure that we cover all the primary areas of digital marketing and some messaging as well. And today is an overview. So we’ll take deep dives in the weeks to come. We’re gonna move through the material quickly. So we will have a resources page where you can get links to the resources and some of the slides and things like that.
So the primary thing we’re trying to do though, again, is to cover, today we’re just gonna cover an overview and then we’re gonna go deep dive on those topics that you just saw on the screen.
Chris: Yeah. And we understand that we’re in a crisis and only if some of the businesses are gonna emerge really strong. Some unfortunately aren’t gonna emerge at all, and some are gonna emerge just way behind the eight ball. And the question we have in this unprecedented series of events that we’re dealing with is how do we thrive coming out of this? And we understand as business owners, a lot of what you’re doing is trying to simply survive and keep things afloat, take care of your employees, your families.
As business owners, you are obviously deeply concerned for the people in your organization, and you have may not have had the time to listen and process some of the latest information, think through some of the best practices that are out there, and strategize, but that’s what our team’s been doing. We’ve been listening, thinking, and strategizing, and we want to share with you what we learned, and that takes us to a guy by the name of Philip. Tell us about this, Pete.
Peter: Yeah, so a guy named Philip Stutz, he has a couple companies, marketing companies. One is called Go Big Media, and another is Win Big Media. So Go Big Media is a company that manages political campaign strategy and marketing for politicians who are getting elected and reelected. Winbig Media is a company that he took those skills and then translated that to business. He primarily focuses on Fortune 200 companies, so rather large companies.
I know most of us are not Fortune 200. So he did a consumer survey, his company, in conjunction with another company. And, they surveyed just at the March, 4,088 consumers, and they found some very interesting stuff that we’re gonna cover today. He is encouraging companies like ours to share this information. He had no strings attached for us to share it with you.
We thank them very much. So Go Big Media and Win Big Media, thank you so much. So Chris, I’ll let you kinda take us through that.
Chris: So like a lot of you, during this odd time, I’m doing an extra project at home working on my deck, and I get a new email from Pete saying, Hey, need to look at this study that was done. The title is Understanding US Consumer Sentiment During the Coronavirus Pandemic. And not only look at it, but really pay attention to all that they’re covering. So I started going through it and seeing Philip Stutz, and of course, he’s well known, and a couple of other names we recognize there. But man, did they cover a gamut of questions.
They talked about consumer sentiment. They looked at consumers relative to the media, what was connecting, what wasn’t connecting. They did a deep dive into travel and where are consumers coming in the travel world. Politics, obviously, because we’re in an election year, and a lot of us, man, you know, don’t know how this is gonna affect the election long term. But Pete said, I want you to pay attention to two questions, forty and forty one.
And these are dealing with personal value. So like they asked this question, please consider, of all the decisions you make in your life, which could include personal actions, products you buy, or decisions that you make in your day to day life. And then taking those values and applying it into the consumer world that we’re in. And wow, it turned everything upside down. Right, Pete?
Peter: Yeah. I mean, it’s really a huge shift, as Philip said in a podcast that I listened to. We’ve kind of been on this growth mode for the last eleven years, maybe the last five or six years in The United States. Things have really accelerated. And the types of personal values that were affecting decisions were success and admiration, wealth status and influence, and being in charge and directing others.
And those were at the top of the list in terms of what personal values guide your purchases and decisions within a six to eight week period that flip flopped. And what really came to the top is helping and caring for family and friends, which is number one. Number two, preserving your own safety and the safety of your family. And number three, being dependable and trustworthy for your family and friends. And so now, we are making decisions solely on need based on want.
So a couple things as a business owner that I really encourage you to think about is what does this mean for your business? How are you positioning your products and services with this lens in mind, which helping and caring for others, personal and family safety, trustworthy and dependable, which a lot of brands we work with, they already use those, but you may not be, and this is solely what people are using.
Chris: And it’s not just that, these three top values of helping and safety and trustworthy, they’ve always been at the top when it comes to women, but now what we’ve seen is the male part of our world has risen to value those equally. And so they’ve shot and it’s really a complete reversal of what we’re looking at now. So one of the things that we wanna understand going forward is that things are not going to go back to normal or the way they were when we go back to what we might call the new normal. Whatever’s ahead of us is going to be different, and preparing strategically for that is going to be key for those companies that want to emerge out strong and ready to go. Because when the economy starts back up, at least in Washington State with these four phases, social distancing is in place in all four phases.
And so it’s going to look very differently. I was just at Chipotle yesterday. Every six feet, they have a big branded sticker in their line to go through. And so companies are already beginning to adjust to this new world that we’re living in. And the other thing is owners are continuing to reel instead of utilizing time, a lot of them.
And so those of you that are with us today are the kind of people that are thinking forward, and that’s gonna benefit you greatly as you’re preparing for what is ahead. And we wanna focus on this messaging that’s actually working now. We authentically care about you. We’re concerned for your safety, and we are trustworthy and dependable. We’re not worried listen to it.
We’re not worried about wealth, success, or being in the lead. So I belong to a well known fitness outfit, I will leave nameless. And when I realized that, oh, they’re going to start shutting things down, I called them, said, hey. I’ve gotta figure out an alternative way to work out, probably something at home. I need to cancel my membership because chances are it’s gonna be a long time before I come back because I’m asthmatic and they’ve been, you know, worried about this stuff.
So they said, yeah. You’ll have to come in tomorrow morning and fill out paperwork and turn it in at the health club. We don’t do that online or over the phone. And I said, well, oh, okay. So what time tomorrow?
And they said, yeah. Anytime before such and such. And I went by early in the morning the next day, and it was clear and evident from the professional level of the signage up that when I was talking to them on the phone, they knew they wouldn’t be open the next morning. And so I was really felt betrayed by that. And then a couple days later, they send out this message that said something like this.
We don’t want you to be worried about your membership. We will continue to draft your monthly dues even while the clubs aren’t open. So don’t worry about getting us your money. We’ll make sure and continue to take that from you. And when you’re done with your membership, we’ll just tag on those many days or months at the end of your membership.
So don’t worry about us. We got us covered. Wow. I cannot wait for them to open up so I can cancel. By the way, two weeks after that, somebody in house figured that out, and they sent out a message saying, we’re pausing all drafts.
Now contrast that with Pete’s experience.
Peter: Well, yeah. I had an experience with the Vail Corporation who owns a lot of ski areas in the area, well, all over The United States. And our season was cut short. I actually ended up going up on the very last day that the season was open, and things even then, were having social distancing while you’re in the lift line, so it was really weird. And we received an email that said, hey, we’re shutting down for the season.
It was like that night or the next day. And they said, We know you’re impacted right now. The most important thing is our safety of our staff and our guests. We will get back to you. We know your season has ended abruptly.
We know you feel like you got ripped off. We know you signed a, you paid for a season’s pass, which by the way is non refundable. We wanna do something for you. So what, and they said, we’re not gonna, We need to make a plan right now. We’re just worrying about keeping everybody safe.
A couple weeks later, I received an email that said, Hey, we will have something to you by the April. We will have a plan ready to share with you by then. And right to the day, they had a plan and they offered a generous credit towards the next season, which I thought was very fair because lift tickets are non refundable. They really didn’t have to do anything, especially in this case. But we ended up saving, or will save a significant amount of money on our tickets next year, and my thinking of that brand has increased.
Chris: And your brand is what it’s Yeah, your brand is what it’s really all about. And, Pete, I like the language you use when it comes to brand. What is a company’s brand? What does it mean?
Peter: Well, I mean, in some respects, it’s the identity. And it’s, at the end of the day, it’s that feeling that somebody has when they think about your brand, when they think about you, not even your brand. When they think about you, it’s that feeling they have when they think about it.
Chris: And it’s shaped by words and imagery. We all know about brand logos, but here’s here’s what I would encourage you to be thinking about right now, is you have a moment right now to work on your branding, to work on your messaging, and you wanna make sure that your messaging matches your authentic brand, and that that is creating a feeling. And that all begins with words. So one of the things we’re gonna really be looking at is the kind of messaging you need to get in place for your company, for your corporation. We use a narrative approach that is called story brand.
Some of you have read Building a StoryBrand by Donald Miller. And by the way, next week, they have given us permission to give to you for free the keynote presentation of StoryBrand. Now we will not be able to record that. We’re able to present it. We can’t record that section of it.
So it’s a one off live. Get your friends, your other business people to be there around the table or virtually around the table to be part of it because Story is utilized to help us keep information, complex information in our head. It’s a sense making device. It is also the way we communicate. At the end of the day, when Pete talks to his family, they say, hey.
What how was your day? He’s gonna tell them stories. That’s what we do. But understanding how your story and your customer’s story intersect is really key, and I wanna pause on this point for just a moment. Your customer needs to be easily identified by everyone in your core team, if not your entire organization.
And we’re constantly amazed at how many companies cannot identify who their customer is because your customer can’t be everybody. Your customer just simply can’t be everybody. You gotta really be thinking about who is our customer and understanding how they win by engaging your products, your company, your services, all of those kinds of things. And so positioning your company correctly, not as the hero of the story or the hero of the narrative or the focal point, but positioning yourself as being a help to other people, that’s the key of effective messaging. And to do that, you’re gonna have to have a website that really puts forth your brand and your message.
Websites are important. And Pete, I think I like your language on this. Talk about
Peter: Well, I mean, first of all, every business must have a strong website. You must have a strong website. People expect you to have website and they expect you to have a website that’ll work on a phone. I mean, this is 2020, hello, these phones have been around for what, ten years now? So you’ve gotta have a website that is strong and that it works.
One of the things that a lot of companies don’t understand is that the website is the only space online that you can control 100%. Every single pixel on the screen, if you have the right designer and developer, you can control exactly how it looks. And that isn’t the case if you’re relying on your Facebook profile page, your Google My Business page, maybe a LinkedIn page, or a Instagram business page, you can certainly post content to those pages, but you can’t control the full look and feel of it. And they can wake up one day and decide they’re gonna change things. Well, that’s the one thing about your website.
You have 100% control over that, and it is a great place to feature your products and services. But one of the things you need to bear in mind is that your website has to present itself as a legitimate company within about eight seconds of somebody pulling it up.
Chris: That’s really interesting, that idea of the eight seconds. I didn’t realize it until I started studying data, that on average, people will only spend eight to twenty two seconds on your website before they go somewhere, either into your website or to another business’s website. And so in those eight minutes, they need to understand who you are, what you do, what you do that benefits them, and how to do business with you, and it’s got to be that quick. But it’s also a place to feature your work. When you say feature your work, Pete, what do you mean by
Peter: Well, let’s say that you are a dentist. One of the things that you can show is a before and after pic of somebody’s mouth, especially if they had some alignment procedures or teeth wiping or just their smile. If you’re a roofing company, you can show a before and after of a roof, or maybe not even show the before pictures, but just present your work in its best light. I know we have some artists, on today with us, and one of the things that you can do is, if you are a musician, obviously you can feature your work, and you could also show your work. So what I really mean is, show your work in the best light, and it’s really powerful if you show your work in its best light when it is being enjoyed by your ideal customer.
Chris: Yeah. It allows you, a lot of times we think of it as just a place to sell those products and services, but the more you can show people, your customers you currently have enjoying your products and services, and letting them hear the testimonials, and setting up a reviews page. Very important for people to be able to access reviews and be able to understand them. So part of what we’re going to be doing in this series is making sure that you’re covering your bases. And we want to talk through this list one more time here so you understand this series of webinars, what we’re going to do.
And be aware, in a few minutes, we’re going to open up for Q and A. You have a Q and A button there where you can begin to ask your questions even now that you may have about the webinar series or about where we’re heading.
Peter: We’ll be right back after this quick word from our sponsor.
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That’s bizmktg.com.
Peter: Now back to Biz and Life Done Well with Peter Wilson.
Chris: Next week, we’re gonna have a thirty minute presentation on story brand framework. That’s the part we cannot record. And then we’re going to be joined by our interactive design specialist, Kyle, who is an amazing designer, does great work. And he’s going to be talking about colors and logos and all that, the importance of how you do design and branding or design relative to your branding. And we’re going to begin taking then a deep look at website development and what’s involved in that.
Pete, talk about social media and Google Ads and all that fun stuff.
Peter: Right. So social media, most companies are using it in some form or fashion. Most people expect you to be doing something with it. We have developed some techniques and some insights into how to get the most out of social media with respect to your brands, how to use the advertising features of Facebook ads and Instagram ads, and also Google ads. One thing that I’ll share right now is that we are seeing a significant decrease in some areas for the pricing for the ads.
So if you wanted to get a message out to an audience, not all audiences are less expensive to reach, but many are, and now is a great time to get your message out using those services.
Chris: Well, it’s not that they’re just less expensive right now. I mean, just think about it within your own families and your own circles of friends. How many people are online more than they’ve ever been online right now? And they’re having to be, and so they’re seeing those ads left and right even compared to where they are. Yeah.
We also wanna talk about reviews and reputation management. What do
Peter: you mean by reputation management? So what I mean by that is your reputation really is reflected by your the reviews that are about your company online, primarily. That’s where people have an opportunity to see them. And what I mean by reputation management is, are you trying to, are you doing something to get more reviews from your clients or patients? Are monitoring your reviews online to make sure that everything being said about you is correct.
If something bad happens, how are you reacting to that? What do you do if you get a bad review or a fake review on Yelp or on Google or some other site? And then finally, are you featuring the positive reviews about your company somehow on your website?
Chris: Have you ever had a bad review, Pete, that I did.
Peter: I actually received a fake review from somebody I’ve never heard of. It really got me mad. I ended up writing back a response that just said, hey, never heard of this person. This is clearly a fake review. If you’re serious and wanna talk about marketing, here’s my phone number.
Give me a call anytime.
Chris: And the interesting thing is a lot of us don’t understand that you can manage those reviews. People just don’t know how. So we want to talk about that. And search engine optimization, or SEO, as most of you know, we actually have in our team. We should mention right now that we have a team that has expertise in coding, expertise in social media, in design, and we have a gentleman who’s our SEO specialist right now currently actually in South Africa, but we know them personally.
Everybody on our team is a real person who we really know and talk with all the time, and we’re gonna get some information on that. And then email and mobile messaging campaigns.
Peter: Yeah, so right now, one of the most important things to have is a list of your customers’ email and even mobile phone. But email has turned out to be this capability that folks have pooh poohed for a long time. It’s still here and it’s still pretty strong and it’s here to stay. And we’re finding that a lot of companies who had a list of their customers and potential customers are able to leverage that now to get their messaging out in a very personalized way, and really communicate with their customers and build a brand. Mobile is using text messaging.
Clearly, that’s the way that a lot of businesses communicate now, and it’ll just continue to grow.
Chris: And we’ll talk about effective use of video for small companies as well, because a lot of times we kinda feel like that’s out of reach, or we don’t do it at the quality that we need to. So all of these resources that we’ve talked about today, including the slides that we’ve shown you today, we’re gonna be putting up on a resource page. But we would also like to know we’d like to thank you for being with us. But we’d also like to know some of your questions that you may have for us to tackle in the coming weeks because we really want to shape and customize this where it benefits you the most. Our goal in this series of webinars is to simply help small businesses get back on their feet and get ahead because we believe in small business.
When small business is doing well, our communities do well, people have jobs, and we have those connections that we’re all missing right now. So if you have any questions, please feel free to type those in on the Q and A button. Just put those there, and we’ll go from there. Pete, what do you wanna kinda wrap up with?
Peter: Well, I’m just really super excited to have everybody with us today. It’s just amazing that, thank you for trusting us to share this information with you. We do have a question. I don’t know if you can see that, Chris.
Chris: I can. Let me read the question here. I’m a go between for property owners and commercial tenants. While landlords want to partner with tenants, they can’t necessarily waive rents. Well, it’s a big issue.
We are making deferral and repayment plans. What do you recommend we do to help the tenants know that we want to partner with them? The concern is how the landlord is perceived by the tenant six months or a year from now. That’s a great question. I wanna just tell you something that I listened to recently that caught my attention on this topic.
On Saturday morning, I was driving around listening to something, and it was an interview about this very topic. What do you do if you can’t pay your rent? It was coming from the tenant base. And the the interviewer was encouraging people, actually make contact with your landlord and have an upfront, authentic conversation about it? And he said one of the things that they’re finding is that tenants and landlords right now are afraid to make the call.
They’re afraid to have the conversation. They’re they’re afraid for the fundering for fear what’s on the other end. But he said, and I thought this was really important for everybody in your situation, is to proactively make the call and let them know we are concerned about you. We’re concerned about how you’re doing, and we want to forge a path forward that benefits both of us. And one of the things he brought up that I had not thought about is that, you know what?
A lot of landlords, they don’t have a mortgage that they can put on pause. It this is their income, and it’s a domino effect. I have a friend that’s in that very situation. They own 20 properties. They owe nothing on them.
That’s great. But that’s their sole source of income, and that sole source of income is tenant by tenant drying up, and they’re wrestling with how do we deal with this. And I think, Pete, what I’m hearing from Stutz and the others is make have the guts to make the call and have the conversation because people are dreading it and you can turn that as a positive. Would you agree with Right,
Peter: yeah, and I would say in the case of the question, reaching out to the tenants and letting them know how to get ahold of you. Just make sure that they understand how easy it is to have that conversation.
Chris: Here’s another question. What social media platform is best for commercial real estate agents to market on?
Peter: I would wanna look at the goals of the organization. I mean, there’s a lot of different platforms. One of the ones that comes to mind is it really depends on who you’re trying to reach. LinkedIn is one, especially in the B2B space, that can be very powerful for reaching out
Chris: to
Peter: potential clients. So my go to in a b to b space would definitely be that, would be looking at LinkedIn first and foremost.
Chris: The other thing that is important to note is this is why even Pete and I, we have a social media specialist that this we’re gonna have her on with us for an entire episode because this is so important to everyone that encounters their business, whether you’re real estate or something else. What social media platform works best for me? And the other thing that I’ve learned is what’s working now may not be what’s working in a few months. Some of this is figuring out who your audience is and what resonates with them on what platform. She has just let us know that she agrees on LinkedIn as being a really strong platform for that.
She wants to let you know that. And also using Facebook is actually really a good option right now for real estate if you’re doing it right and well. And one of the reasons we are are honored to have Emily on our team is because she has that knowledge that leads to the nuances of design layout that’ll tell you exactly. And and, Pete, I wanna pause here for a moment and ask you to address something. When people are doing ads, we back up what we do, at least with our clients, with data.
Right? Why is that important? I mean, you can just buy ads, but there’s something Well,
Peter: I think early on in social media advertising, a lot of companies wasted a lot of money. It used to be a great way to lose a lot of money quickly or just blow a bunch of money quickly. Without the accountability of attribution tracking, where you’re actually tracking the results, it’s a great way to waste a lot of money. And now what’s happened with most of the advertising platforms is they have something called machine learning built in, where if you set up specific goals that you have in mind, the way that the ads are actually served to people will try to optimize for the specific goals that you’ve created. And so we are reporting that data back.
So it’s kind of a positive feedback loop. What happens is you have a goal, you tell the system your goal, it goes out and looks at the audiences and starts serving your ads. And when your goals start being reached, that positive data gets fed right back into the system, and it’s using that data to make decisions on how to spend the money in the future. And we’ve seen, in one case, we added about 50 clients onto a system that Google had with machine learning. Within thirty days, we saw a 20% decrease in their cost per lead.
So it’s very important to do that.
Chris: The other thing that we wanna look at is being careful that our messaging is positive. There’s so much negative on social media out there that when you have a positive strong message, it tends to stand out really good. One more question that we have here, Pete. Do you feel many companies, big or small, do not stay current with what makes for a happy repeat customer?
Peter: Amen. Yeah, I agree with the statement really, or the question. I feel that a lot of companies don’t, I guess that’s my answer. A lot of companies don’t stay current with what makes for happy repeat customers. That starts with your brand, which is your promise, and whether or not you fulfill that promise, and then it goes over into the way people talk about that experience, and whether or not you’re even asking them.
One of the things that we’ve worked with a lot of customers on is, hey, ask your clients how they felt about your products or services. Were they happy? And some people will say, well, don’t wanna know. Because that’s just like poking a hornet’s nest, and I’m like, well, that’s pretty shortsighted. So I would agree that a lot of companies, probably more in the past, I think more companies, more and more as they put in survey systems and review systems, I think consumers are getting trained to be asked and to respond to surveys and questions and things like that, in addition to just having a phone call or a conversation as well with the people who are managing the service.
Chris: Yeah. It’s a bold thing to ask for input, and it’s a an important thing to ask for input as well. We’ll leave with this one story and then a bit of information. I what I ended up doing for my workouts, I know you’re all concerned, is going with the Peloton community and their specifically, their cycling. So I got a Peloton bike and started cycling.
What’s interesting is after every ride, I’ve had it about eight weeks, about forty, forty five rides. At the end of everyone, it wants me to rate five categories. Overall, the instructor, the stream quality, how difficult was it, and the soundtrack that we run to. Do I like the music that they played? And it takes me about ten seconds to rate those, and they’re constantly gathering from a couple million people worldwide in their network, constantly getting information, and they’re they’re brave enough to do that.
So one of the things that we wanna become are the accounting companies that we are working, big or small, doesn’t matter, with making sure that our customers were hearing them because that’s what communicates we care about.
Peter: Thanks for listening to this episode of Biz and Life Done Well with Peter Wilson. You can subscribe to us on iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and most of the other popular podcast platforms. Please tell your friends about us and leave us a review so even more people will find out about us. Thanks again. We’ll see you soon.
