Christo: Welcome back!
Franziska: Hi!
Christo: Hi! What’s going on? You got new glasses.
Franziska: I’m wearing these glasses; they’re blue light glasses. And I’m wearing them because I didn’t really feel like putting on make-up and this sort of hides my eyes, put on a lipstick but it feels really weird. They look like Courtney Love, a little bit.
Christo: You need more red lipstick, it’s a bit pink. I think she was like bright red, so they’re all really big
Franziska: Today we’re not cops on fashion, but these glasses are pretty cool
Christo: So what’s the point of blue light..
Franziska: Yes, I normally wear them on the night. I bought them on a website called “Quay” and these are blue light glasses and I normally wear them at night when I’m still working because it sort of filters the blue light from your computer, you’re meant to be able to sleep better because I think when you’re exposed to this light you don’t trigger maybe serotonin.
Christo: Your circadian rhythm gets messed up or something
Franziska: Serotonin gets repressed. So if you wear them, I think it’s the serotonin, maybe I’m not a health expert, but it will still trigger, and then you can sleep better. And I’ve been sleeping really well.
Christo: Okay, let’s get onto stuff that we know about now. We got some marketing stuff, rather than the blue light. So in this episode, we got a lot of valuable tips for you and strategies, things to apply to your marketing to make business and marketing better apt for you. So we’re going to cover a tip to do with online marketing and kind of why people find it pretty much impossible. We’re going to get the Hannas
Franziska: Yes, let’s get..
Christo: The Hannas.
Franziska: ..both of our Hannas
Christo: ..they’re kind of our Social Media Ninjas, to share an awesome update with you. And we also got a question. The customer question that we’re going to discuss around.
Franziska: Is going to be around social media.
Christo: ..social Media
Franziska: ..whether you should run social ads or not
Christo: All right. And we got a book recommendation and then we have a word of wisdom. This word of wisdom is going to be from Hemmingway, a very smart man. So here we go..
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Christo: The tip is “The Truth About Online Marketing” and basically how it works. A lot of people find online marketing practically impossible and I’m sure a lot of you guys have realised this in relation to things like you’ve spent money on online ads people click, click your ads but they don’t convert to sales enough so you get to a point where it’s not sustainable to continually run the ads month after month after month, or the flip side you might be doing free stuff like doing stuff on social media for example or online, and if you actually calculated your alley right for the return, you know like basically the time you put in for the return you get in actual sales it could be quite horrific, really, where you find out that you’re working for 5 cents an hour. Basically the reality is two common mistakes that we say people make when it comes to online marketing is thinking that they can just outsource the lot. Now, it’s okay in regards to outsourcing bits and pieces. But you still got to own the strategy because no one will ever care as much about bringing the life into the business as the business owner or someone who directly is responsible for marketing in the business, no one’s ever going to care about bringing life to it as much as you; Outsourcing it to someone is kind of like going, “I’ll just leave you guys to do the breathing for me,” you know, to bring life into the body, into the organisation, so we basically want to make sure. Because often times we hear it a lot, “Oh I just don’t want to know about it,” is like the common thing, unfortunately. You don’t have to do every little bit of it, but you have to be responsible for it in making sure it happens, and kind of like count the numbers at the end of the week. Because a lot of times people just think “I’ll just pay for SEO month after month, and that will solve all of my problems.” And it’s so common that people come to us. How much does that happen with us? Like, “Oh I’m paying someone $1200 a month for SEO,” and we’ll say, “Oh great, are you getting results?” and they’re like..
Franziska: They don’t know, yes.
Christo: “..I don’t even know.” and this is just because they don’t know what else to do so they just continually pay for it. And a lot of the time there will be more effective ways to spend that money, obviously. So rather than just outsourcing it, owning it, and being responsible for it, so you’re across the strategy of it, but you don’t have to do all the clicking yourself, basically. You can do a lot of the strategy with pen and paper, you don’t have open a program, a lot of the time we do online marketing…
Franziska: Mapping it out on paper, yes.
Christo: Scribbling stuff on paper, yes. And another part of it is, sort of second part, second mistake, even if you are outsourcing to someone who is very good at online marketing they might be good at one part of it. And this is a common thing that we see over and over. Like they might be good at let’s say, Google Ad Words, and are actually getting good traffic for you, a good volume of traffic to your website, but if the website is not all built strategically, they’re not going to convert the traffic they’re sending to your website. So it doesn’t matter how much you pay them, or how much traffic they increase. We call this the leaky bucket. It’s like you’re sending people to a bucket with a big hole in it. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how much water you’re pouring into a bucket with big holes in it, it’s still empty. So you spend more and no return, you’re probably aware of this. So that’s like one ingredient to bake a cake but you need six to ever end up with a cake, you know, just having that traffic source. So we got to build out our whole strategy, our processes of what happens, and understanding that new traffic landing on a web page or on a website or on a product, only a very small percentage is going to take the big step of actually purchasing from you if they’ve never bought from you before. It’s like a big hurdle. So we need to basically look at a whole marketing strategy, have some funnels in place. I recognise some people will take a week, two weeks, three weeks, to make a decision to buy, so we have to have processes in places for all of that rather than thinking just one person who’s good at one area is going to solve all our online problems.
Franziska: Exactly. And we’ll talk more strategy of course but one thing that we definitely always, always talk about here, as a business owner, you really, really have to be across your strategy, and as Christo said, the good news is, you don’t have to implement every piece. You don’t have to know how to do SEO, or how to even do social media ads which we’ll talk about in a minute, but you have to know the strategy and where does it fit, where does this ingredient fit in the cake mix as you talked about.
Christo: Yes, yes. I also think, just to add on a little more rant, if it doesn’t make sense to you, it probably doesn’t make sense. Because a lot of people, too, there is a lot of fluff. Like let’s be honest, in the online marketing world, there are a lot of people who promise, here’s how to make a couple hundred thousand dollars with Instagram ads, or Facebook, or Snapchat, or something out there, and they’re going for people who want to get quick money often from something out of thin air. So when you have a real business, you ought to say how it can work to an enquiry for you, it kind of makes sense. If you can’t make sense of it after having a good look at it you know, then it’s likely not going to make sense at all. You’re probably better off going with a lottery ticket.
Franziska: Next up is a question from someone we ran a workshop this week, a social media workshop with Hanna, one of the Hanna’s you’re about to meet, at a business event, and the question that somebody asked was really good. And the question was, this guy ran a business where his target audience was very small, he worked in a very specific niche, and with a very specific person in that niche, with the HR manager, in that specific niche. He said, “My target audience is only about 3000 people”. Because each contract that he wins is anywhere between 200 grand up to a few million. So he only needs a few of those per year. And so he said, “Should I still be running Facebook or Instagram advertising?” because exactly like Christo said, he went to someone that runs marketing and said, “Can you help me with my marketing to get some of these customers.” and they said, “Yeah sure, we need to do Facebook advertising, Instagram advertising…”
Christo: Facebook advertising, Instagram..
Franziska: ..Snapchat! And I said, “No, actually, you do not need to, want to, or should be running Facebook/Instagram advertising, if your target audience is only a segment of 3000 people in total, in the country.” What you need to do instead, LinkedIn advertising could potentially work if it’s a message straight into someone’s inbox. What you need to do instead is you need to know exactly how you can direct-approach these people in a very smart way, so for example that could be a direct mail campaign. Or it could be on LinkedIn that you message these people but not in a sleazy way like a lot of people do it, but in a way that is adding value. But having said that, so, No, if your core target audience is only 3000 people, a Facebook campaign or an Instagram campaign is going to be very ineffective. But what you do need to do is do a direct campaign to those people through any avenue I just mentioned. But you still probably want to have a little bit of a presence on your social channels that is basically making the perception of your business or creating that perception that you know what you’re doing. So by sharing content that is positioning you as the authority in your niche. And the reason why is because let’s say I’m your target audience, you’re sending me a direct mail campaign, and I’m considering working with you and spending let’s say 500 grand with you through my company, I’m going to, of course, research you first. So I will go look you up on LinkedIn, potentially I will see if you have something on Facebook. Instagram might not be that market there. But wherever you know that those 3000 people will still spend time on, you do want to have a presence there, but you don’t need to pay money to show your content, just have a little bit of presence, you don’t need to post every day either. If you post, maybe once a week, and it’s quality content, then that’s perfect. If you have a small, small, tiny demographic, you don’t need to go and spend money on social media ads. Social media ads is not the magic pill for everyone. It is a magic pill for some, but not for everyone. You just have to be really smart about how else you’re going to approach that customer.
Christo: Awesome! So, let’s get the Hannas.
Franziska: Yes, let’s go to the Hannas.
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Hanna: Hello, it’s Hanna
Hannah: And Hannah
Hanna: We’ve recently started to do a weekly Facebook live session where we talk all things social media. Feel free to join us, it’s every week, on Wednesday at 12 PM, Sydney time.
Hannah: See you there!
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Christo: Thank you very much, Hannas! Good job, or as always, awesome announcement that those guys had. Just another way that Basic Bananas is adding more value to the small business world. So feel free to file like any questions you want to be answered at us, and these guys would be more than happy to answer those for you. So, you’ve got a book recommendation.
Franziska: I do yes.
Christo: You’ve been reading…
Franziska: I love reading, I’m a nerd, I read a lot of books. And I love this one. This is a shout out also to my friend Cameron Herold, and check him out because he has a lot of books out there, and he’s an amazing human, Canadian guy, and this book here is called, “Meetings Suck”. It’s a really short book and I highly recommend reading this book, and the reason why is because you know, it’s cheeky, the title, of course, we all know, we all have meetings, you almost can’t get around having meetings, having meetings are useful if they’re ran in a way that is efficient. A lot of our meetings are not ran efficiently. And I often tell the team here, when you book they book me for meetings, we don’t need an hour for every meeting. Sometimes half an hour is enough, sometimes a walking meeting is also really good, but it’s just that this book just outlines how to be very efficient with your meetings. We might quickly share a few things that we do here that help us to be running meetings that are efficient and outcome-driven. I might just share some, maybe you might have some tips too. One of the things that I like that we do here is when we book meetings, we obviously put them into our GoogleCal, we have all synced calendars, and then we also add a little agenda, and I’m pretty sure he talks about this too, where we talk about what are we going to cover in this meeting, what’s the purpose of this meeting, so when we come into the meeting, everyone already knows what we are doing in this meeting. So that’s one thing. Did you want to share something?
Christo: Also, just excluding. Like asking, have a second thought, as you’re inviting people to the meeting, do they actually have to be there, so if they don’t need to be in the meeting, if they can just get a quick brief after, as an outcome of the meeting, you know it saves people time.
Franziska: Another thing we have started doing quite extensively is huddles. Sort of follow-up huddles. So we might have our first meeting today, about a specific strategy that we have to discuss we do half an hour, with the people that are relevant for the meeting, then we say, okay, what are our next steps, this, this, this, let’s do a quick huddle next week to check in on the progress of this specific action or project that we have been working on. And then we book in a huddle which might be a 15-minute huddle and we just stand and we could be checking on the project.
Christo: Two other little quick ones.
Franziska: I have one quick one. But you go first.
Christo: Starting on time. Just starting the thing on time. Because often times, we had like a backlog for the microwave, about six of us trying to use the microwave at once, so we’re all queued up, and a few of us were about four minutes late, just so you get the idea of how we like to be on time. And that’s a weekly team meeting, but if it’s a meeting’s announced for different things or different segments or areas of the team to meet up, you start on time to be respectful of everybody’s time, and just start on time, means you get straight into it more, rather than kind of like, ah how’s you day, when it’s a meeting, just hit the agenda straightaway.
Franziska: Did you have another one?
Christo: The other one, I forgot.
Franziska: I’ll do the other one. The other one is not booking meetings on the hour. So I often book meetings at say a quarter past three, instead of three, or a quarter to two, instead of two, and the reason why is because it sends that subliminal unconscious message that we’re going to be on time. I think you’re more likely to be on time than if it’s always on the hour. So I like to book my meetings a little bit sort of funny, rather than straight on the hour.
Christo: Intriguing. The other one came back to me.
Franziska: Okay.
Christo: Okay the other thing was when we’re in a group setting, doing the post-it notes strategy. You’re the one who kind of like introduced this, where we, if there’s a group of let’s say five in a meeting, someone runs the meeting, I like it how we tend to not run them, so we dedicate a team member because it’s their job to run the meeting, instead of us always running it and feeling like everyone has to be there, a team member takes responsibility and runs it, so that everybody gets their voice. If it’s something where we got to brainstorm ideas together, often we might go grab a post-it note each and we have silence for two minutes, write your ideas on the post-it notes, hand them to the person who’s running the meeting, that person then reads out all the ideas, so it’s not just like if Franziska’s full of ideas, that she talks the whole time, or like I’m a bad one, I might talk the whole time, and then someone’s got some amazing idea, but they’re a bit more shy or they don’t want to talk over the boss, so they won’t get the chance to speak, but they might have had the best idea in the room, at that moment. So the post-it note strategy is a good way to let everybody put their voice in, and it goes to that team member who’s running the meeting, to read those out. And we all put our inputs in.
Franziska: I love that. Now we’re going to finish with a word of wisdom, and today’s word of wisdom is by none other than Ernest Hemingway. Ernest Hemingway was an amazing writer. We actually went to his place in Havana, where he always went and get drunk. In that bar, remember?
Christo: Yes, it wasn’t his place where he drank a lot, but yes, the bar, where he spent a lot of time.
Franziska: He lived in Cuba for a long time. And he’s got a lot of, of course, amazing literature. But here’s the one quote that I wanted to share with you because it just came to my mind more recently the importance of this, which is, “When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.” this is, I know, very basic, but I think it’s so profound if we actually applied this. Maybe for the next seven days, give yourself a challenge for the next seven days, or 30 days, or for the next lifetime, if you focus on listening more and listening more intently when people talk, you will gain so many more insights, and this can be applied to team members when team members talk, customers, anyone, friends
Christo: Customers are a massive one
Franziska: Yes, and you just, sometimes you feel the subtleties or you hear the subtleties, nuisances, that you need to know to have insights into the culture even of your company, or with customers, if you just hear more, listen more of what they say, you might be able to help them more, with the right campaigns and talk in the way that they want to be spoken to. So I think listening more, that’s my word of wisdom, and if we all want to take a little bit of a challenge, let’s say for the next lifetime, from now until the end, which is to listen more. I think that will be pretty cool.
Christo: Let’s do it.
Franziska: Let’s do it.
Christo: I’m going to stop talking now and listen
Franziska: Shhh
