The Perpetual Traffic experts are joined by Jennifer Sheahan, founder at The Social Guild, to discuss how you can build a thriving social media business. Social platforms are powerful traffic generators, but you have to know what to do and how to do them. Anybody can get Likes and engagement. But traffic, leads, and sales come when you follow a process, and that’s what we’re going to talk about today.
IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL LEARN:
- The biggest mistake marketers make when it comes to leveraging social platforms to get more customers (« and the “social circuit” you can implement to correct this mistake).
- Jennifer Sheahan’s approach to finding an avatar’s pain points.
- Case Studies on Jennifer’s work on Chloe Smith’s election to the House of Commons, and President Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection, and how entrepreneurs and small business owners can apply the same winning strategy.
LINKS AND RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
Hootsuite
Leela Cosgrove Website
Leela Cosgrove Facebook
Canva
Post Promoter Pro
Social Media Success Check
A look at how Jennifer Sheahan schedules content:
Episode 51 Transcript (swipe the PDF version here):
| Keith Krance: | Hello and welcome to Episode Number 51 of Perpetual Traffic. All right. We made it past the big 50. If you listened to the last episode, I hope you really enjoyed that with Frank Kern all about Facebook Live. |
| Today, we’ve got an awesome episode. We’ve been looking forward to this for a while. We’ve got Jennifer Sheahan on and Jennifer, I’ve been really excited to have on. She’s got so much experience with, not only Facebook ads and all wide driven campaigns but also, just social media and how to leverage all these different platforms and also how to have contingencies in place. | |
| Have you ever been in a situation where you’ve been worried about your Facebook ad account being shut down or is your ad account shut down? This is going to be a good episode for you, both whether you are running Facebook ads or you’ve had some issues with that. | |
| First of all, the preface, before I bring on Jennifer, when I first started getting into Facebook ads 2009 or so, when I started really digging in, I remember going to Google and searching “Facebook ads,” “Facebook advertising” and guess who was on the top 3 or 4 on Page 1 of Google? You don’t know this, Jen, I didn’t even tell you this, but FB Ads Lab, which was your site. | |
| Ralph Burns: | Nice. |
| Keith Krance: | I’m sure a lot of the help with the SEO stuff was working with James Schramko, whom we love. I know he’s been a big mentor of yours and you were a mentor of mine when we first started out. |
| Jen has been doing this for a long time and not only long time. Let’s see some of the clients that you’ve been working with. People like Frank Kern, Tony Robbins, Eben Pagan, Ryan Deiss, Joe Polish, Amazon, eBay, Chrysler, and Barrack Obama’s reelection campaign in 2012, a UK Conservative party helping them win the election in 2015 and Jennifer is currently working with the White House right now with their campaigns. You might be wondering, “Oh gosh, is this all about big media stuff?” No, she has so much experience with small businesses, consultants, local businesses, tons of different ecommerce. | |
| Jennifer, I’m really excited to have you on so once again, thanks for coming on. | |
| Jennifer Sheahan: | Thank you so much, Keith. That’s a lovely introduction. It’s so nice to be here with you guys and we’re looking forward to having a chat with you. This is going to be good. |
| Keith Krance: | Cool, cool. |
| Ralph Burns: | Yeah, this is going to be awesome, right? I think a lot of people that listen to this show here are sort of anti-social media management kind of thing or they haven’t really had a whole lot of good experience with that but you are the cream of the crop here. I mean, this is really awesome to have you on because you do it in a way so that you have contingency plans in place, obviously, for your Facebook Ads account but more importantly is really getting your media out there in lots of different channels with ROI in mind, which is a very different way that most people probably experience with social media management in the past. Really looking forward to seeing all the tricks that you got in the bag today. |
| Jennifer Sheahan: | Yeah, I think one of the things is that I actually couldn’t stand social media before. I get it. I understand. Almost every time I talk to a business owner, they say exactly what you just said, like social media is a waste of time or it’s just full of vanity matrix, like it’s a popularity contest, all that sort of stuff. It’s my job, I’m on a mission, pretty much, to turn that around and to help people see how social media, it’s a powerful traffic generator – very, very powerful – but you have to know what to do and you have to know how to do it. That’s what we’re going to talk about today. |
| Keith Krance: | Cool, cool. So, no Molly today, she had an emergency this morning. She was planning on coming on and she’s not able to come on to this episode but she’ll be back next week, don’t worry. We got a good one for you. |
| Jennifer, getting into it, I know we’re going to be touching on some of the stuff that you did to help win the reelection campaign for the Obama Campaign, some of the stuff that you’ve been doing for some of these big clients. I love these stuff but I know there’s a question that people have out there. It’s a question for me too. What do you think some of the biggest mistake or two that people are making out there when it comes to leveraging these social platforms to get more customers? | |
| Jennifer Sheahan: | The biggest mistake, I think, people make is they write a blog post or they make a video or they record a podcast and what they do is they immediately send it out to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, maybe LinkedIn. Most people just send it to Facebook and that’s all they do. You publish on your blog, and you immediately send it to Facebook, and then you forget about it and you’ve gone to writing another blog post and you say social media doesn’t work. |
| I think that what people are forgetting when they do that is that customers are everywhere now. Almost everyone has Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Snapchat on their phone. If you publish a blog post and I follow you on a couple of different platforms, I’ll get 3 notices or 4 notices, depending on how many sites I follow you on that you published a blog post and they will all come at the exact same time. If I see and I’ll say, “Oh, look, Keith published a blog post. That’s great.”, I’m not going to click on all 3 or 4 of those links on all the different sites to read your blog post 4 times. I’m only going to click on one. All the other links are just a waste. | |
| Instead of doing that, the simple thing that everybody listening to this could do now is to stagger their content distribution. You can do that, anybody can do that. Instead of publishing a blog post and just sending it out there into the universe and forgetting about it, you can schedule that content very quickly in Hootsuite or there’s a WordPress plug-in you can use to just amplify that and stagger it on different days. | |
| Ralph Burns: | That’s just so logical. I’ve never even thought of that actually. |
| Keith Krance: | Yeah, because people are on these platforms at different times throughout the day, right? Not everybody’s on all the time but at the same time, if you think of that individual user, they’re on at, right now let’s say, they’re only going to be able to consume probably one of these at a time, right? |
| Jennifer Sheahan: | Yeah. |
| Keith Krance: | You have different people at different times as well as the same person that can only consume so much. |
| Jennifer Sheahan: | Exactly. I might be busy today and I’m not able to read your blog post today or I’ve got all these stuff going on – I got to record a podcast, I got to do all this stuff – and that’s it, you only give me one chance and maybe you might retrieve it next week or something like that and if I miss it, I miss it and that’s it. The big thing you can do is instead of creating so much content, focus on creating a few very, very, very powerful, impactful pieces of content and then spending the extra time staggering that content. |
| We’ve actually developed a flow chart that we teach to our students and to our clients and it makes sense of the whole process, like how to do it – on Day 1, you do this, on Day 2, you do that, on Day 3, you do this. You can schedule that all at the same time. It sounds like a lot of work but it’s not that much work. It’s a five-minute job. | |
| Ralph Burns: | What do you call that? Let’s go into kind of how it works and maybe who this will be good for. |
| Jennifer Sheahan: | Sure. We call it social circuit because it’s kind of like running around a circuit. It’s very similar. Perry Marshal is talking about it. He’s got a program called Maze 2.0 and I’m sure people have heard of. It’s very, very similar. Brendon Burchard uses something similar called Circular Viralocity. The people who are really good at organic and paid social media – integrated social media – they’re all talking about this concept. |
| How it works is you take one piece of content and we create 48 or more social media posts from that one piece of content. You can create the audio version, the video version, the slide version. You can create images, custom images. You can pull out tips and hints like a top three points, quotes, to do lists or anything that you can generate from that one blog post or that video or that podcast. Pull all of that out and create a whole bunch of social media post from that. Then, we stagger it. If you want the specifics, there’s a diagram that we can share with listeners too. | |
| Ralph Burns: | Sure. |
| Keith Krance: | Yeah. |
| Jennifer Sheahan: | The specifics are like, Day 1, you publish on your blog post. On Day 2, you send it over to Facebook with a comment. Instead of just sending the link over, you actually make a comment and then the next day, you’ll publish it on LinkedIn as an article on LinkedIn and link back to your blog post. On Day 3, you may take one of your custom images, you put it on Instagram with a link back to your blog post. |
| The idea is that your blog post has your retargeting pixel so that you’re constantly building this audience of people who are getting your content from all over the place and then you just continue on with a Pinterest post which is very evergreen. Pinterest posts are fabulous for evergreen content and it just kind of moves through there and then Twitter feeds the whole thing so you just send links from all of them. It’s like a mass of links going across the inter-webs. | |
| Ralph Burns: | Can you repeat that part where, I think, Day 2 you mentioned, post it again with a link in the comment? |
| Jennifer Sheahan: | On Day 2, you’ll post it on Facebook but you’ll make a comment about it. You’re going to not just post your blog post and say, “here’s what I have to say, blah”. You can make a comment on the post so that you’re talking about it and generating emotion. This comes back to our whole philosophy about social media and why most people fail at social media and it is because they think, cat memes and throwing your blog post in front of people and saying “buy my stuff” is going to work and it doesn’t work. When you do that, you just blend right into the background. What you have to do is you’ve got to pull in, dig really deep and understand your customers and take a stand. You got to have something to say, something. |
| Everybody you follow on social media that you stop when you’re scrolling through your Facebook feed and you stop and you read what they have to say, they’re almost always controversial or teaching you something new or grabbing your attention in one way, shape or form. That is the first thing that we do with all of our clients and that’s the first thing I teach all of my students is to understand how to dig really, really deep with your audience and know exactly what makes them tick so that you can drill right to the heart of them every time you make a post. | |
| When you make this blog post, you write this blog post and you share it on Facebook, you don’t just share it and say, “this is my stuff, read it”. You share it and you say, “This is why you all suck at social media.” Right? Or “this is why… ” whatever your niche is, whatever your market is, “this is why you can’t get a Facebook Ad to convert.”- You’ve got to be able to say something, a big, bold statement that makes your audience stop in their tracks. | |
| Keith Krance: | This is why you’re dragging every single day at 2:00 in the afternoon when your neighbor next door is not, something like that. |
| Jennifer Sheahan: | Right. Exactly. And why you just turned 40 but you feel 55. Getting their attention and understanding their pain for the health niche, it’s like this is why when you shower and see yourself in the mirror, you feel sick but you still go and eat a doughnut later that day. It’s understanding their pain and understanding who they are and what the conversation that’s happening in their head. When you can understand that, you take the time to do that, social media becomes so much easier. I’m kind of combining the technical stuff about this social circuit in with the psycho-graphics of your audience. |
| Ralph Burns: | This is one of the things that, I think, we actually have talked about just a lot recently, Keith. For whatever reason, this seems to come up when we’re talking about pieces of content that really speaks to your avatar, whether it’s a Lead Magnet or a blog post or whatever it happens to be, what kind of discovery process do you go through with a customer to get to those pain points because we find that that’s the thing that most people really struggle with. They know who their avatar is but they don’t really, really know what that thing is. That little detail that can really trigger it and is potentially related, obviously, to their main product. How do you go through that process with your customers? |
| Jennifer Sheahan: | That’s a really big thing and it helps if you have two people. If you have somebody you can talk to when you’re working this out, that person can ask the hard questions. What we do inside our program is people ask the question, you know what they say, all our new students and new clients, they say, “Oh yeah, my target is men who like baseball.” Right? And you’re like, “Okay, so let’s get a little more specific with that.” And they say, “Okay, well men who are over 40 and who like baseball.” I’m like, “Okay. They’re married.” “Okay, married men.” |
| You kind of take the step by step and go deeper and deeper and deeper. What about baseball do they like? Do they play it? Do they coach it? Do they like major leagues? Do they play it in college and they never were able to take it any further? Is it little league or do they like to play or bet on it, like is it gambling on baseball? What is it? And so, you just keep asking questions and going deeper and deeper and deeper. | |
| Some of the questions I like to ask are, “what are they afraid of?”. What are they afraid of? Because until people feel really motivated to make a change, they’re not going to give you any money. If you just say “this is a fantastic baseball bag that you can carry to your games”, big deal. There’s a million baseball bags or whatever it is that you’re selling. If you can talk about the pain of always forgetting a key piece of equipment or talk about the pain of being at the game and not having your water bottle or these essential pieces when you play baseball that you do not want to be without. Getting to the bottom of that fear customer is essential. We talk about what’s their pain, what are they afraid of, why do they need you. | |
| Why do they need you. Most people can’t answer that question. They say, “Oh they want transformation” or “they want to change”. Why do they want to change? Are they afraid their husband’s going to leave them? Are they afraid that they’re going to go bankrupt? What does that mean for them? The embarrassment of having to tell their family or their having to leave their house in their sacred neighborhood because they can’t pay their mortgage? Let’s really, really dig deep into the pain so that people get chills when they think about their customer and how their customer needs them desperately to save them. | |
| Ralph Burns: | Is it mostly moving away from types of emotions or is it sometimes the opposite, moving towards what do they want most? What do you find is most effective? |
| Jennifer Sheahan: | Moving away. Moving away because I’ve been moving away. Some people are moving towards people but when you’re on social media, you’ve got to get their attention really, really fast. The aspirational stuff, Facebook’s full of aspirational images of sunsets and happy people and love and everybody’s life is fantastic on Facebook, right? Nobody’s going to get on there and talk about “Oh by the way, I just got a foreclosure notice in the mail.”
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| By really understanding the dark side of it and understanding their customer that way, you’re so much better positioned to grab their attention and then they want to listen to what you have to say because they feel like you’re talking directly to them. | |
| It applies for content but it applies even more for social media because you have to grab them. We find that late at night, people are scrolling through their Facebook feed, maybe they’ve just had a long day, they’re going to bed, they just got all the kids to bed, and they’re scrolling through their Facebook feed on their phone and you got to grab them. There’s no better way to do that than when you’re speaking directly to them. | |
| Ralph Burns: | That’s awesome. It’s so contrary. It stands out because of the way that Facebook is. Exactly like what you said so that’s brilliant. That’s awesome. |
| Jennifer Sheahan: | I have to say it, I learned this process, this really, really deep process, from a woman named Leela Cosgrove. She’s in Australia. If you follow her on Facebook, she’s an expert at polarizing. She totally understands and she’s always arguing with people and debating with people on her Facebook post. |
| Keith Krance: | How do you spell that? Leela… |
| Jennifer Sheahan: | Leela and her last name is Cosgrove. |
| Keith Krance: | Cool. |
| Jennifer Sheahan: | Sometimes, she gets mean. Not mean but really aggressive with people and stuff. She just says, “Well, they’re not my client, they’re not my customer” but what she finds is that her ideal customers connect even better with her because she polarizes them. |
| Ralph Burns: | Absolutely. |
| Jennifer Sheahan: | That’s like an extreme example of it. That’s where I learned the power of this and how important it is to do this. |
| Ralph Burns: | Exactly. That’s a very important point because a lot of times, when you listen to this podcast, if you want to say, go look at what somebody like that is doing, notice what Jennifer said there. She analyzed somebody that’s doing this at an extreme level and took the important points out of that and then added some of that into her own voice and her own customers. You don’t have to do exactly. If you look at that person, they’re way too negative, she’s not saying you need to be like her. She’s saying, learn from a little bit of what she’s doing. That’s the important thing. |
| Jennifer Sheahan: | Right. I’ve been able to take that and be able to teach it to other people, to our clients and to our students who are in completely different markets, who don’t want to have a big rant on their post but they can stand up for themselves. |
| Ralph Burns: | Yes. Exactly. |
| Jennifer Sheahan: | And show people how to have a real discussion on Facebook where you can disagree with someone in the comments. You don’t have to just delete their comment. You can ask them probing questions and really get to the bottom of why are they making this comment on your Facebook post. |
| Ralph Burns: | All right. I love it. Okay. Now you got some examples, you got some case studies you want to talk about. |
| Jennifer Sheahan: | Yeah. |
| Ralph Burns: | Yeah? Let’s talk about how you’re using this in the real world. |
| Jennifer Sheahan: | Cool. Yeah. Last year we worked with the UK Conservative party. There’s a MP there named Chloe Smith and she’s doing everything great but she was set to lose her election. All the polls said that she was going to lose and they got scared and they said, “Oh.” |
| This is when most people come to talk to me because everything else didn’t work and I don’t know what to do and I need help urgently. Everybody said she was going to lose. All these polls that have never ever been wrong said she was going to lose. And she won her election. | |
| I’m really, really proud of that and all the work that we did with her and the conservative party because we’re American and I lived in Australia so to be able to write and to speak in the language of a UK MP was a real proof, in my opinion, of our process. | |
| Keith Krance: | What’s MP, in case people are wondering? |
| Jennifer Sheahan: | It’s Member of Parliament. It’s like a senator, US Senator. |
| Keith Krance: | Sure. |
| Jennifer Sheahan: | What we did is, you can use the same process with your clients or yourself. We took the top 4 pillars of her campaign. For a business owner, you could take the top 3 things that you do differently and talk about those 3 things. Just write those down. |
| We took the top 4 pillars of her campaign, the things that she was campaigning on and what we did was we dug deep into each one of those to discuss and debate and really pull out the issues, both sides, opposing sides of what she was standing for and what the arguments that people had on both sides of the equation. We really took the time to understand that and to immerse ourselves in it and then what we did was we created a series of unique, branded, custom images on which you guys can do on Canva, or Photoshop. Canva’s really great because it’s free and everybody can use it. | |
| Ralph Burns: | We love it. |
| Jennifer Sheahan: | And created a series of unique, branded images with her logo and all their colors and made them a campaign material but highlighting the different pillars of her campaign, highlighting the issues and then writing posts on Facebook that discussed it in detail so we know you’ll believe X, Y and Z. However, we’re campaigning for A, B and C and this is why we believe these things and so we combined that with very, very specific ad targeting with Facebook and sent those posts out, not only to her organic audience, but also to a very select paid audience. We combined that strategy so that she could engage with voters and attracting more people to her message. We did that consistently over 6 months and they won the election. |
| The tide started to turn and we were on point and we encouraged her to do a few Facebook Live videos and to do lots of Q & A’s and to talk to people about the issues on her social platforms and it was so exciting, that election day. | |
| Ralph Burns: | Isn’t it just amazing how you can change the course of the campaign just through what it is that you’re doing through these platforms? I still find it staggering, the amount of influence that you can have. |
| Jennifer Sheahan: | I totally agree. It’s amazing because what I’ve discovered is these big companies and big political parties, they have the best marketing brains in the world working on their stuff but the problem is, they don’t have visibility of what’s working everywhere else. They’re only in their campaign so they only see what they’re doing. They don’t see what you could do in the manufacturing industry or what you could do in the music industry or the movies or in small business and so when we see something that works somewhere else, we’re able to come in with a fresh perspective. We say, “Actually, you know, this worked really well over here. Why don’t we try it here?” and that’s been really good. |
| With Barrack Obama’s reelection campaign, we came onboard mainly through Democrats Abroad, there’s a whole organization called Democrats Abroad, in helping get more voters to register to vote. Americans who live overseas, their votes have to be in way, way, way in advance. The Democrats Abroad agency, they were struggling to get enough Americans to register to vote and then to vote in the election. | |
| We started with that campaign and targeted Democrats who lived abroad and immediately, everybody was rushing to register to vote and that got the attention of Washington. They were like, “Woah, wait a minute. Why are all these Americans are coming out of the woodwork? How did this happen? Where did we get this idea? What happened?” and then they pointed a finger at me. It was really exciting, I was like, “Yeah, it’s my fault.” | |
| Ralph Burns: | That’s awesome. |
| Keith Krance: | I tried to have this conversation with everybody I see when I was at a restaurant the other day at a golf course. It’s a small town golf course and they started doing these dinners and they wanted to let the rest of the town know that they’re doing dinner now, a nice dinner. She’s like, “we did everything” we’re going to turn it off in a couple of weeks and these people were showing up and we’d posted flyers everywhere, we posted on Facebook. I go, if you want to keep it going, just post it on Facebook again and push the boost button and boost it out to everybody in this town, there’s only 15,000 people in that town, and it will be full but they don’t know that. |
| Ralph Burns: | You focused on that 80-20 really, the area is like the swing states and international voters and voter registration. I remember that just being a huge, huge push if we can get people to vote then we can get them to vote for our guy kind of thing and you focused on the real, well, the little hinges that swing the big doors, in this case, it’s billions of people. It’s not really little but focused effort on specific areas where you could make the biggest impact. |
| Jennifer Sheahan: | Exactly. That applies to local businesses too. We owned a bar, a small little bar here in Chicago and one boosted post for 5 bucks brings in extra customers so, if one extra customer comes into our bar, a little bar, and buys a round of drinks for him and his friends and that cost maybe 12 bucks, I’ve doubled my money. |
| Ralph Burns: | And that’s just one time and they’re going to come back. |
| Jennifer Sheahan: | Just one time.
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| Ralph Burns: | Unbelievable. |
| Jennifer Sheahan: | Just as much as it works for national, international politicians, it works for tiny, little businesses too. The exact same strategy, you just have to understand your audience and you have to speak directly to them and use a combination of organic and paid traffic to strategically get your message across. |
| Ralph Burns: | That’s awesome stuff. |
| Keith Krance: | Basically, you have a resource, right? |
| Jennifer Sheahan: | Yeah. |
| Keith Krance: | You talked about it. You’ve mentioned that you’ve got a map, or something like that, that people can look at and they can download. |
| Jennifer Sheahan: | Yep. |
| Keith Krance: | We’ll add the link to the Show Notes as well. What’s your website? |
| Jennifer Sheahan: | My main project right now is called The Social Guild. It’s thesocialguild.com. What I do there is I teach and educate social media managers, VA’s, marketing people about how to implement this process for their employers or for themselves. It’s paid organic strategy and we work together for an entire year. |
| That’s my pride and joy. I absolutely love it because we have built an amazing community of people who are actually doing the work. We get to take the learnings we have from our agency, which is Socially Grown, and share that. That’s the visibility that I was talking about earlier. Because we have so many students and we have an agency that we run every day, we’ve got visibility across a broad range of industries. Together, all of us social media managers and marketing people, VA’s, inside our program are all sharing ideas on what’s working across all different kinds of platforms. | |
| I’m happy to share the flow chart with you guys and I’m sure that that alone will help a lot of people make sense of their social media so they don’t feel so overwhelmed and they start getting some good results from social media, which will be great because it’s very powerful. | |
| Ralph Burns: | Absolutely. Much appreciated. I want to get back because I kind of interrupted you back real quick. You talked about how you started in the international voters and little bit of the swing states and then that captured the attention of the big campaign. |
| Jennifer Sheahan: | Right. |
| Ralph Burns: | And then, what happened? |
| Jennifer Sheahan: | Well we were starting on the international section and getting voters to register and that got the attention of Washington and then the next thing I knew, I was on a conference call with Washington and speaking to people there. That’s when we started to work as a cog in the gigantic wheel that was the reelection campaign. |
| In that process, it’s phenomenal. Anybody who’s ever worked on a project with the White House is, I’m sure they would agree, just phenomenal to be part of something so major. They communicate very uniquely, everybody is kind of in the dark, pretty much. You’re given your marching orders, you need to do that and then you report back on your results. Everybody’s on like a mask conference call that you dial in and you just get the number 10 minutes before the call. It’s amazing. It’s really, really cool. | |
| In general terms, we were working with specific demographics. We were given the objective, we were given the location and we were given the key issues. Just exactly the same thing we did with the UK Conservatives is we dove into that and figured out what the pain points were, what the issues are, figure out what those people are thinking and feeling and created Facebook Ads to address those specific issues. | |
| What was happening, what we found out initially, was that the people in the ground, because the campaign had hundreds and hundreds of people on the grounds talking to voters, and they just didn’t know the policies. They didn’t know, they weren’t hearing it, they were only hearing it from mass media so we were able to change that and actually get them the messages that they needed to hear. | |
| Ralph Burns: | For people who are listening that are just small business owners or maybe just getting started in Facebook Ads, if they’re listening to this show here and they’re saying, “Okay, well, she did the President Obama reelection campaign in 2012. That’s all great but what’s in it for me?”, it really is the same, exact strategy. Unless I’m really missing here, it’s find the pain points, really get into a discovery about your avatar, and then address those in sort of a systematic fashion, you can obviously do it through targeting with Facebook as well but, through organic. That pretty much the same thing if you were to give people a template, this is how you do it? Do it the way that I did it with President Obama’s reelection campaign? |
| Jennifer Sheahan: | That’s exactly how we would do it. That’s exactly how we do it for the bar, that’s exactly how we do it for all of our clients. You’ve got to figure out what your key issues are, pull put your key points and then dive deep into those points and understand exactly why people need you – what their pain is, what they’re afraid of and how you can help them, where your customer is now and where you’re going to take them, and understand that in as much depth as possible because every single time I’ve worked on any sort of campaign, whether it’s organic or paid and it didn’t work, it always comes down to the fact that they don’t even know what they do or why they do it or why people need them. |
| If you understand those things, you’re going to be well-positioned and I highly recommend that people get involved. Make sure you have a Facebook page, make sure you have a Twitter account, make sure your LinkedIn is up to date. Most people haven’t looked at their LinkedIn account since 2007. Get into LinkedIn and make sure it’s up to date with lots of keywords and lots of relevant links and lots of relative stuff about who you are because there’s an entire group of people who use LinkedIn as their main source especially for anybody who’s a consultant or running a business or a done-for-you or an agency or anything like that really have to pay some attention to LinkedIn and just start sharing your content on different platforms and see what kind of results you’re getting. You don’t want to wait until something happens to your Facebook Ads account, to freak out and then you don’t have any traffic at all. Starting now and building up a foundation that you can cross promote things, you won’t be stuck. | |
| Keith Krance: | Yeah, exactly. Let’s say your Ad account is, let’s say you’re good and then let’s say 6 months from now, something happens, your Ad account gets shut down but in the meantime, you’ve been growing all these platforms, you’ve been leveraging maybe paid twitter ads and Facebook Ads, you’re posting links from LinkedIn to your blog and you’re staggering the way the content is rolled out and you’re using unique different strategies. |
| It doesn’t have to be perfect, you just have to do it. It doesn’t have to be perfect. That’s the one thing that we continue to try to really, really shout. It’s just get out there and do it. Like for the restaurant, you guys can post a quick comment for a half offer of a drink or take a picture of somebody having a good time and post it and boost it. It’s simple stuff there because that’s what they want. They just want to have fun or they want to have a drink and they want to have a good social atmosphere so it’s pretty simple, I assume, but I’m sure you guys are doing some really creative stuff there as well. | |
| The point is to get your message out there. Think about if you were that exact customer, what would you be thinking? | |
| Jennifer Sheahan: | Right. |
| Keith Krance: | Sometimes, you forget what they don’t actually know. We do this all the time. Put yourself in their shoes 6 months ago if you took that journey yourself. |
| Jennifer Sheahan: | I think, to sum it all up, the reason most people can’t stand social media is because they don’t see a set result and anybody can get traffic. Anybody can get engagement, anybody can get likes but traffic, leads and sales come when you follow a process. In turn, the hard work that you’re doing on your content and on your product creation and your sales calls and all that sort of stuff turn back over to social media and start using the same process over there and you’ll start to see much more than just clicks. You start to get traffic, leads and sales, which is the whole goal of what we’re doing online. |
| Ralph Burns: | Yep. Exactly, exactly. All right, this has been amazing stuff, Jennifer. Thanks again. This has been awesome. She’s got a great resource for you that will really help you visualize what we’ve been talking about so we’ll have that in the Show Notes as well as the URL which is thesocialguild.com. |
| This has been great, great stuff so whether you’re a small business, whether you’re a big brand and think you can really take this stuff and put it into action. Jennifer, this has been awesome stuff. Thank you so much for coming on. We’re going to have to have you come back on and hear from people as they’re implementing some of these strategies and talk about some more case studies. | |
| Jennifer Sheahan: | Thank you so much. Thank you guys. It’s been lovely chatting with you. |
| Ralph Burns: | Yeah. Awesome, we’ll talk to you soon. |
| Jennifer Sheahan: | Talk to you soon. |
| Keith Krance: | Thanks, Jennifer. |
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