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Marketing Mindset with Elijah Whites from Serving Social
We’ve got Elijah Whites, the man, the myth, the legend. I’m excited to have you here. Elijah, you do a lot of videos. You do a lot of photography and I think a lot of people struggle with that in their marketing.
All the time. The biggest thing is time and scheduling. Making sure you’re not only shooting the video but you’re producing the video. Giving a finished product that can then go live and all that good stuff.
That’s important making sure you’ve got good sound, making sure you’ve got good lighting. Making sure you’ve got a decent camera. The smartphone is not a bad video. It’s a pretty good camera but they’re using something on their computer and you’re taking the time to get a better webcam they want it built-in the laptop.
Most standard webcams offer poor quality. You get a camera with your computer that’s awesome. At this point in time, everything comes with a camera. You’ve got to look at what type of camera is it. Is it going to be the best quality? It is always good to be able to test out cameras on computers before you get them. Not everybody can always do that, but cameras are getting affordable these days that if you don’t have a good webcam you can easily pick one up for a very cost-effective.
For $49.99 it’s well-worth than $99.
Amazon, Alibaba, AliExpress, you can get cost-effective cameras literally just littering the streets. If you don’t have a good phone on it and you have a DSLR, there are a lot of different cameras you can use that you probably already have. Maybe you’ve got to change some settings and things like that. It depends on the type of quality. If you’re trying to get video content out there, that’s one thing to getting started. As you get better at it, you want to have the quality. The quality video, quality audio are going to be some of the biggest selling points on why people continue to watch videos because they want to visually see what’s going on and then they also want to hear what you’re saying. If they can’t hear what you’re saying then subtitles work as well.
One of the things that I see happening people are doing videos online and doing a case study deal or they get a new list of assets. Some people are good at posting photos of the property and other people put this map. This map out where you can’t tell what the property looks like, “I’ve got twelve assets in here. Do you want to partner with me?” There’s no smell to it, there’s no scent to it, nothing to excite people about that aspect of things. What are some simple things that people can do even they just find a street view photo?
Google Street View is an easy tool to use to be able to zoom in. You can either use Street View or even Apple Maps that comes standard on iPhone or something like that. Those platforms give you a 3D look and you can zoom in, go out a little bit of an angle or get a different viewpoint of it. You can even utilize some of those resources. I would say right now, Google Maps being the most prominent. The easiest way to use because they’ve done a killer job on mapping out the world and where they haven’t, they’re on the check too. Apple Maps feeds a lot from Yelp and other platforms like that. If you can’t find what you’re looking for through Google, there’s a good chance you’ll be able to go through the map apps and find what you’re looking for there.
When we’re looking for photos of properties, oftentimes, there are so many other, whether Google Maps. We like to jump on Bing too. Bing often has some better photos of the property and more recent stuff from time to time.
Bing is well-known for their images. When you were looking at some of these platforms, a lot of people make fun of Bing. I made fun of Bing plenty of times. You see some of these college humor shows, they made fun of Bing, but Bing did a good job on utilizing images with the inside of their search engine. A lot of applications took note of that and they started utilizing Bing. Being able to tap into their whole system to start being able to hold that information. Google started to kick up their photos and it’s important to contribute content. We talked about it plenty of times, video, photos, all that stuff, on a regular basis. That’s because they’re also seeing where the world is going and what people like to see and review. Bing was definitely an early adopter hitting the images hard.
One of the things that you’ve done in the past, I know you’ve gone over a milestone over five million views on the photos that you’ve taken on Google.
I’m approaching twenty million.
That’s one of the great things from National Social Media Day. That was one of the biggest a-ha moments I learned even at the late 1 AM timeslot where I’ve started to go act like a robot. One of the things that I learned the most is that if you’re out at a spot, if you’re out having fun into that location or looking at a property, because you’ve done a lot of photos for realtors’ reviews or things like that. It’s basically taking the time to upload that to Google.
Not just taking the time to upload into Google but taking the time to make sure that what you upload to Google has titles. If you have a way to optimize the image, put keywords on the back end, retitle the photo for what it is. For instance, if you take a picture of a house, you put on there what the address of the houses is, or if this was a white, two-story house in this city. Then somebody who’s looking for maybe a house or maybe they are going after the color, you want your photo to come up. Optimizing it before uploading it to Google. Most people have the issue of uploading the things in the first place, so when we talk about optimizing that just sounds like a lot of work.
Optimizing sounds like a big high-end work when all you just meant was relabel the photos.
Marketing Strategies: It’s really important to contribute content.
It’s like right click, rename two-story home, and Wisconsin and then done and now we’ve uploaded it. Consider Google as a blind person. They can’t see what color the house is. They can’t see what type of house it is, but they can definitely read what type of house it is, which when you’re looking at search results and how things come up in the search. It’s all about optimization, making sure that if you want your stuff to show up within those search results, then you’ve got to take that little bit extra steps to make sure that you could possibly start ranking for that. Not to say that you will, just because you label the photo that doesn’t mean it’s going to rank number one on Google. There are a lot of other factors. If you’re uploading stuff on a consistent basis and you’re contributing on a regular basis, the chances of you starting to go up in rankings is sometimes relatively pretty quickly depending on the competition of the area, is very likely.
That’s one thing I had no clue about, that Google ranks photos of people uploading photos. Google ranks everything we should all know this by now.
They even go as far as like if you’re looking at a local business listing, the photo at the top is the most viewed photo. As people view photos they basically push everything up to the ladder. If that photo is not getting viewed, it gets pushed down because for them they want to be the best looking right off the bat. If this photo is getting the most views, then that means we want to put it at the top and just rank them down from there. For any kind of person that I have, whether it’s brick and mortar or maybe they are doing stuff on the Google side of things, it does give you a good idea of what people are looking at, how many people are viewing those photos.
If you’re contributing images on Google, they do inside Google Maps, inside Your Contributions tab. If you’ve never seen that, I suggest that you get inside Google Maps and take a look at it. Your Contributions tab keeps track of everything; how many times you’ve done a review, how many photos you put, how many times you’ve checked in to places, how many times you’ve edited somebody else’s listing. Maybe you said, “This place was open and clearly, the building burned down last year, this is not open anymore.” Google tracks all of that stuff because they want to reward you and at the same time if you do something wrong, they will also ban you.
What are some of the things that will get you banned?
Breaking their terms of use and you get Sandbox. Basically, it’s like when I talk about optimizing photos, putting maybe what that photo is. If I just went on and said, “I took a photo of a two-story white house in Wisconsin.” Maybe it’s a foreclosure or maybe I’m trying to talk about all those in the videos but now I’ve not only put, “White House, Wisconsin, in foreclosure, new house buyers, realtors,” and I start keyword cramming that, you’ll get penalized for it. Google will remove the photo because it breaks their terms and conditions. If you’re doing a lot of stuff as a business, I have seen it to where they basically do an overall review. You’ve got to keep in mind that if you start effing up, they’re going to start looking at everything you’re doing to see like, “Is this the only area where they violate our terms and conditions?” Facebook and stuff like that, all of the channels will ban you for something. That’s why it’s good to know the rules and make sure you play by the game.
That’s a good point because some media people that we know, we’re talking about uploading videos on YouTube, they put the description on them at the very end. They put like Justin Bieber or they start putting on crazy keywords at the very end which is beyond what you can see on the screen but it still shows up in Google and YouTube search engines. It’s trying to boost their video up.
At some point in time, Google doesn’t even need to step in because the people are going to do it for you. I’ll tell you, plenty of times I’ve been on YouTube and if you’re not seeing any of this is because you’re not getting enough traffic yet, but you will start having people cuss you out about putting fraud, about putting stupid stuff a part of your videos, hoping that they rank higher. Basically, think about this, the internet’s built on trust. We want to try to trust who we’re doing business with. We go to Amazon to shop because we know when I buy something off Amazon, I don’t even have to think about it because I already know that I trust Amazon.
I trust the way that they have their transactions. If there’s a discrepancy, I can get ahold of somebody at Amazon and figure out from there. If you go to a small weird website mom and pop it doesn’t look like they put too much time into it. It has a payment portal and they want you to buy something. You’re not going to trust that too much unless you get ahold of them, you email them and make sure it’s legit. When people are looking at your content, maybe if they do type in Justin Bieber and they find you and it has nothing to do with Justin Bieber, you’re basically going to start shooting yourself in the foot because it does come off of the reason why people get followers. The reason why people that like their stuff and they comment is that you’re a legit person, you’re doing the right thing and they feel like, “I can relate to this person.”
If you’re not giving that type of experience to the user and you’re basically leading them down a path of fraud, be ready to get your ass handed to you and the people will report you. Google doesn’t have to find you. People will start flagging all of your content and Google will ask them, “Why are you flagging the content?” This is all crap and you’re going to get in trouble, they’re going to start pulling your stuff down. All that hard work that you did is now out the window. If you just did it right in the first place, now you have content that’s going to be living there for a long time. It started to gain history, you’re contributing more on a regular basis and you’re going to start building that path that Google can see like, “This person is clearly doing the right good job. They’re clearly doing good content. Let’s go ahead and start pushing him up the rankings because they are relevant to the search terms that these people are looking for. They’re contributing a good user experience to our platform.”
I was at this New Media Summit and was blown away talking to people. People were like they want to get exposure but they’re not out doing basic things that help them get the word out. They’re not doing posting videos. They’re not sharing or creating content. It’s like the snowball effect, you may start with one video, it may be like a snowflake. If you put them up together, you get a snowball. You put enough together over time you get a big snowman, and then you have an avalanche.
It blows my mind when I hear people, “I need to sell more products. I need to get my stuff out there,” but they won’t build content. They won’t shoot the videos or maybe if they do, they don’t like it and they don’t want to push it out there. Scott, you’ve told me plenty of time, you’ve got to knock this crap off and just post it because it’s not going to be perfect and you’ll be able to perfect it. Having a schedule and utilizing a content schedule to know when you create content, what type of content you’re creating helps out a whole lot. If you’re starting to do something, take it in baby steps because if you say, “I want to shoot a video. What do you think should I do with it?” I would give you the whole gambit of what I would tell you to do with that video all the way down to now this video is a blog and it’s going on your website. You don’t have a blog on your website. We’ve got to figure that out too. We would go down that whole route, which can get very overwhelming when you’re already running a business. If you’re going to start with the video, start with that video, at least get it up there. Start getting your feedback from your clients or from your friends or whatever the case is but leave it there. Post it and leave it there. Don’t take it down, let it live.
What do you mean post it? Post it where?
It can be posted on your website, it can be posted on Facebook, YouTube, you can take clips of it.
Let’s keep it simple because I get the idea. I love the clips. I know the last two you showed me, it’s phenomenal. I have not used it yet, but the point of it being is it’s still taking a video. Let’s keep it simple, taking a video and at least upload it to either Facebook or YouTube.
Marketing Strategies: If you’re not giving that honest experience to the user, then you’re basically leading them down a path of fraud.
I would say Facebook or YouTube is exactly where I load them to, just one of those channels. You can do up to both. If you don’t have a Facebook or your Facebook isn’t developed out, you might want to go ahead and start housing everything on YouTube. Taking in mind what you said, you get enough snow and now you make a snowball and it keeps on going from there. If you don’t want to post anything, maybe you don’t have a social structure down yet, your social media are under control, but you know you’ve got to start creating all this content. Start shooting a ton of video. Start figuring out what your branding is. Get comfortable with you talking on the microphone, listening to your own voice, figure out ways to edit down these videos or whatever you can do there.
I would start housing it all on YouTube. I would basically start collecting it all on YouTube. Once you get a big collection of videos up there then you can say, “I’m going to bring in a specialist who’s going to help me build all the social postings and start talking about my videos.” Now you’re not falling into YouTube or a trap of, “I’ve got to create content every day. Now, I’m getting burnt down and exhausted. Now, I have a whole bank of videos that I’m basically going to start rolling out one after the other.” We are looking at strategies where we can basically sit down for about one day and come up with a whole quarter worth of content and then start scrolling that out.
We don’t even have to worry about content anymore until that next quarter but that goes along with our campaigns and maybe it’s the audience that we’re going after. For instance, if it’s a real estate you’re trying to go after, maybe it’s investors only, that’s one thing or maybe you’re going after realtors specifically. You have little campaigns that you’re doing each quarter with all the content you’re doing. Your messaging stays consistent, it doesn’t get too far out there, but at the same time you’re getting your content up. Facebook is great, but if you’re starting to do a lot of video on Facebook, you’re going to start feeling obligated to do your postings as well. If you’re uploading videos on a regular basis, you’re going to start wanting to talk about them. You’ve got to have time to do that. It’s consistency. You start uploading videos and then you get four or five videos and you feel great. You’ve got a lot of great postings out there.
I’m busy and I can’t post anything, two weeks later and you’re trying to pick it up again. All the audience that you probably got when that first set of videos you posted, you probably already lost or if you haven’t lost them as far as followers go, you’ve definitely lost them and your content is showing up in their feed because I haven’t engaged with you. If you notice anytime you go maybe check out a friend on Facebook, you now also start seeing their feeds come up because you’ve shown interest in them. Facebook is going to say, “Maybe they’re interested in seeing more about this person,” then go from there. You can follow people and unfollow people and all that stuff.
I’ve hit 5,000 friends on my Facebook page going through and through like, “Who’s this person? I don’t know this person. I don’t want to be friends with them. Unfollowing, unfollowing. I hadn’t seen this person for a while. I don’t know what’s going on with him. Why am I not seeing him?” In the next day, they’re in my theme, there is a story.
It’s just showing interest because you have so many friends. You can’t see all of your friends through the feed. On Facebook, only 10% of your actual friends’ list is what you see. The algorithm is going to change as you show interest in different people. Having a plan, a schedule, and understanding how you’re going to achieve that schedule, the type of content, and make sure you even have the resources in the first place. Shooting a video is one thing and take in mind you can do a live video and make it very natural, very raw. That’s the easiest thing to do because people like it being authentic. It’s like reality shows where they don’t want cameras in the shots or they try to make it look all staged, but yet on YouTube you’ve got guys who are running out there with cameras. It doesn’t matter what gets you and they even tell, “Bring the camera,” and those guys have millions of followers and they’re producing content. It’s great stuff because people like the realism like this isn’t fake, this isn’t set up, this wasn’t staged. This is you, straight up, being a human being, being honest, being authentic, talking about your industry, what you’re a professional in.
One of the most important things that people should realize is that delivery is better than perfect. Especially in the real estate investing realm, a lot of people don’t have the time or the budget to a lot of fancy production. Sometimes just pulling out the cell phone. Taking a quick selfie video or the video of the property you’re walking through or the due diligence you’re doing adds value. It’s so much more value than not doing anything. Most people never get off of zero, never get off the center to get out to do something and they realize, “This is a lot easier than I thought it was going to be.” It’s a lot worse in your head. It’s like what you said getting optimization sounds much more difficult than just changing the name of the file.
If you’re going to look at a property, let’s say you don’t even use Google Maps, you go out there and take a photo of yourself. It’s easy to pull your phone out and right there in front of the house, “I’m standing in front of this next property that I’m going to be buying” and then give the whole pitch and that’s it, two to five minutes. You could talk about it if you got a chance to tour the house. You could keep it live the entire time, taking people through there. It gives people a chance to find the feet and jump on. It’s an easy stuff to do and it’s a great starting point, even if you don’t want to do that. What I always recommend to people is that if you’re even considering getting in the video, start shooting a ton of video. We’re not garbage collectors. We make videos that people want to watch. Don’t just take a bunch of footage and start collecting it. Try to keep the best pieces but start getting comfortable. Start getting comfortable talking, start getting comfortable with the way that you try to avoid saying “Um.” Avoid all of that.
When you start shooting video, it starts allowing you to get more comfortable intros, outros, not doing the “ums.” From there, making sure that your message is there. If you want to get on a video and wing it, by all means, there are a lot of people out there that their personalities fit well with that. If you’re somebody who has to be a little more structured, you need to know what you’re going to talk about. Have your talking points on a regular basis. Know like anytime I get on video, I want to make sure people know these top five things. That may change with the different locations you go to, but at least make yourself some of those points so it’s never about, “When I do a video about, I’m not that interesting.” Most people don’t feel that they interesting, but you get on video. You start to hit those topics. You’ll figure out soon enough like, “Maybe people do like me or they do find my content interesting. Maybe through the process of me making a video, I’ve gotten good enough to know the type of content that people want to hear and so my messaging has gotten more fine-tuned.”
You’re going to hone your skill. Here’s one of the great lessons when I was in freshman college. The first classes I took was radio and television because I wanted to be the next Dan Patrick from ESPN. One of the things that the instructor made us do was do a good tape recording. We had a cassette tape recorder. I know you may not know that time. I record myself and then I listened back to my voice. Everybody in the class had it and the number one thing from that is everybody hates the sound of their own voice. How it sounds for me is different than if I play it back to hear it and vice versa.
We all hate our voice. It’s horrible, it doesn’t sound like me. I sound like an idiot or you hear yourself saying, “um,” like that because it’s one of the best things that you can do. Also, the biggest learning curve is a hockey stick learning of what you goof up on and how you can correct things. Sometimes “ums” are a silence filler. Sometimes silence can say so much especially when you’re speaking to somebody or you’re in front of the stage or you’re on a video, giving people the opportunity to catch up or the topic to sink in.
I’ve never liked to hear my voice, but at the same time because I started doing more video, I’ve gotten used to it. I’ve gotten used to the fact that like, “What’s up, Scotty?” I don’t like the sound of my own voice but yet I’m here in person with Scott and then I listen to him on video and his voice sounds the same to me.
It’s different when we hear our own voice versus when we hear it again.
One thing I’d like to add, this is something we’ve talked about in the past. That is when you don’t like the sound of your voice just remember that that’s how people think you sound and that is how you sound. The same thing with I don’t like the way that I look on camera or I don’t like the way that I act on camera. You can act one way on camera but when you get around people in person and you’re acting something completely different, then you’re fake. It’s best to just be if you’re animated, be animated, if you’re a little more on the calm side and that’s just how you are. Figure that out and see what works because the more comfortable you are on video, the easier it’s going to be and the sooner you accept that you are who you are, one. I think you’ll be able to move through life a whole lot easier. Then two, things like video war or maybe doing a podcast or taking photos and stuff like that or putting yourself out there or maybe even getting on stage. All of that will be way easier for you.
It’s not easy to begin with, and some people are not as much naturally outgoing or introverted versus extroverted. I too had a problem onstage. I experienced a very genuine nervousness before speaking and it was on a Thursday. I was going to this thing New Media Summit and we’ve got 150 people giving their two-minute pitch to get onstage or to get on the podcast. They do it in front of a video camera and a couple of thousand people were watching. Then there were 200 people in the room and then they were being critiqued by the eight judges. I’m going to judge. Suddenly the guy was, “Scott, you’re pitching. We want to hear your pitch,” because they were doing like drawing the letter. I get up on stage and I was like “Okay, I’ll do it,” and I was like, “I need some music.”
I reached over the DJ I said, “I need you to play Guns ‘N Roses.” I was like, “Let’s get going.” He played Welcome to the Jungle and we started, all eyes were on me. I knew my five points. I’d give my five points a million times. I was nervous before speaking, but I turn around and look straight at the camera. I had my notes in my head, a lot of people were reading straight off teaser because they were stopping, stuff like that. I knocked it out, 45 seconds later I was done and people were like, “That was good,” because it’s something I say on a regular repeat basis. It’s like your elevator pitch. Everybody gets nervous and gets butterflies. Somebody said, “Get your butterflies in order though,” but it is easier said than done a lot of times. It’s always worse in our mind that when it results and the minute you can realize it’s worse up here than it’s usually is in real life, it will be a lot better off. You’ll get over your fear of doing video. You’ll get over your fear of doing selfies. You’ll get over your fear of sharing what you’re working with.
Marketing Strategies: People like the real, just be a straight up human being.
One thing I will say on the selfie part. A lot of times when we do video, we hold the video out and we’re looking at the camera. Hold your camera up. If you’re already doing a video on your phone, don’t try to be cool by holding your phone like low key, acting like you’re not taking a video of yourself. Just straight up, get that camera out from you and stay up because I don’t want to see what’s up in your nose. I get these people, they’re holding it down here. They seem like their chatting up their nose. You see your face like I can look directly at you but now I can’t even hear what you’re saying because I’m too interested in looking up your nose and that’s just distracting, so remember that. If you don’t think it’s cool when people take selfies and stuff like that, then do it inside your car. Go where you’re not being seen. If you are doing video, don’t do it up your nose.
Just be yourself is what I’m hearing, and it is true. The thing is it’s okay to laugh if you’re humorous and silly. If there’s something serious, be a little serious but it’s okay to joke around and make fun. If you’re laid back, don’t be overly top serious because people will have a hard time accepting that, you’re not serious and all, whereas this isn’t you.
I don’t know how many times I’ve been recording doing videos of an event, I get too low and I get in trouble. They’re like, “No, do that again but go higher. I don’t want to see the chin.” Everybody agrees with the chin thing. I’m a photographer. I’ve had people take their camera away from me when they asked me if I take a photo because like, “You’re just not understanding, I don’t want this. I need something way up here.”
The biggest thing that we always talk about is get it out and get it done. We did learn some good stuff on Social Media Day from Dana. She shared some amazing things on YouTube strategy about how to upload it and then not make it public. The minute you upload a video to YouTube and it’s public, YouTube has to go out and try to find stuff for you. That was a key tip that I’d implemented. It is making sure when I do upload to YouTube now, I make sure I got the right title in there. I’ve got the keywords and the right description there immediately. If we just uploaded a video, YouTube is going to classify those videos that go out trying to find classifications for that, which may not find anything at all for you. They may show others feeds. If you uploaded a video to YouTube which you all should be doing because it’s the second largest search engine, take the time to put a title there and make it searchable. What would be a good title for a book doesn’t make a good title for a video.
It has to be something searchable. It has to be something that people would search. We’ve dealt with dental clients who want to use the technical terms for their industry instead of saying tooth removal. They’re like, “It’s the specific procedure.” Let’s talk about that in the description, but let’s get a title that is searchable. You can always look at, if you’re not quite sure how to title those videos, I would check out influencers in the industry who are already putting up videos like yours and see the way that they are using titles, how their formatting their descriptions, that type of stuff. You can always look on Google and basically go through the keyword platforms and see maybe what’s the highest-ranking keywords for your industry. When you put together your titles, don’t just throw your keywords in there. Make sure it’s comprehensible and searchable. This is what people search for. This is what I would type in, trying to find your video or something close to your type of content. There are different aspects and different ways that you can figure out the type of verbiage that you need to be using.
What’s your favorite type of video that you do?
I like abstract weird stuff going on. I have a lot of apps where I’ll take a video of myself and then now it’s like eight of me and then I’ll go back in and then disappear. I don’t post a whole lot of that stuff because I’m still figuring out how I roll that content out. I don’t have something that consistently shows. If I start rolling this content out, people will understand how this correlates with what I do, compared to looking at Serving Social, now they’re just confused because it’s not consistent. This is different from over here, my messaging isn’t there. I like doing those type of videos here. I’ve been getting more into marketing minutes where I’m giving that 60 seconds of, “Here is something you can take today and implement.” Even then, a new website will be coming out. A lot of cool stuff happening for Serving Social right now.
We’re not going to release that content because we know it wouldn’t be as effective until we have something that supports what we’re talking about. I don’t want to just send you a video and talk to you about a quick little tidbit. I want you to be able to go back and read my blog on how that’s implemented and the easiest way for you to be able to do that. We’re getting some stuff out come November. November is the hard day for a new website to launch, so there’ll be plenty of fireworks and firecrackers.
It’s going to be a whole lot marketplace. I don’t want to talk too much about it yet but it’s going to be the easiest way for business owners to be able to buy marketing services and have very transparent upfront pricing compared to just getting put into a monthly contract for some outrageous amount of money. You’re not quite sure if it’s working for you or not, but you’re hoping when you get to report back and see the data, that you’ve got something out of it. We’re trying to take a little bit different approach and the new platforms are going to be phenomenal. We’re super excited to share it with you all once that comes.
Do you ever have a conflict of conscious? What I mean by that is a conflict of exactly what you guys are doing and sharing that message out to your own social platforms because you’re doing a variety of different clients. I pretty easily know what I do. I’m notes, notes, notes, notes. What I’m trying to get at is it’s different though because your personal profiles are there, but you do a variety of things.
In our business here, we haven’t shared too much of the stuff that we do for our clients with others. It’s good to talk about how we help people and maybe the businesses that we’ve helped. We do have our pitch deck or something and we talk about some of the businesses that we’ve helped. On our website right now, we definitely did not build out the bio section because we realized quickly after we built this last time that this wasn’t going to be the site that we’re going to stay with. We’re going to rebuild the whole thing. We’ve got the site out there, we updated it but now it’s like no. Now we’re going to bring in the new platform but we need something that looks good, that showcases for the most part what we did.
On our end though, we’re focusing more towards the actual education piece of marketing. There’s a lot of information out there but what I don’t think people understand with a lot of this information is the math of how it’s built like, “In this one piece we were able to get these many followers and we do all these crazy things using this tool.” What they don’t show you is the actual infrastructure that is already built, that they’re able to basically take those campaigns and build onto it.
Everyone talks about marketing strategy. Marketing strategy is so important. It’s not just the way that you deliver content. It’s the way that you plan on people perceiving your business. It’s how you roll out that messaging step-by-step so it’s not something that’s too overwhelming for people. They consistently see it and they start to understand it. On our side of things, the content that we’re going to showcase is more so about how we’re taking the products and tools that we’re trying to sell to all of you fine folks, on how we use those in our own business to showcase, “This works.” It’s not just something we saw with another client. This is stuff that we’re using in-house and we’ll be able to show them those type of metrics and all that data.
Marketing Strategies: Sometimes, silence can say so much.
A lot of people think that success with marketing happens just like that. It’s a build-up process. It’s one rock in the bucket at a time until it overflows. We’ve got to put that foundation in place. The best day is today, not mañana, it’s to start doing something today and realize that it builds upon itself. I got to where I’m at now with 1,100 videos or 1,400 videos online, it’s going to start over one video. How did I get to episode 343 of the podcast? It’s because I started with episode one and then just build it all out. I got better at 300 than a lot better than it was episode three. That’s the thing people don’t realize is if you’re here for the long run, no matter what you’re doing now or no matter what you’re doing in ten years now, marketing is something to be one of the most integral parts of what you’re doing.
Marketing always changes and buyers look for information, that always changes. Marketing is definitely going to be one of those pieces that you want to have, and you want it to be there. Even in going as far as your website, if you plan on being in business for a long period of time, you’re not just a fly by night salesman or anything like that. Being able to go ahead and have those platforms, have that infrastructure built and then gaining the history, you’re contributing, now you’ve got history. You see many websites where you’re like, “I don’t know.” You’ve got these companies saying, “I don’t know how they’re outranking. You look at their website, I just spent $20,000.” You have these people who’ve been here since the ‘70s like you came in the business five years ago. They’ve got history, they’ve got clout. They got legitimacy online.
A website though is just a landing spot. You have to still direct people to that website. That’s the most important thing. People think your website solves everything. When we go to these expos and we see people, “We’ll build you a website for your buyers or sellers.” It doesn’t mean people are going to flock to your website. You’ve got to be still out there marketing, still sending out letters or doing things online.
It’s like handing out flyers to hope that people will show up at your pizza joint or walk through the door. The websites that are brick and mortar, it’s that digital real estate that you own, but you still have to start to tell people how to get there. You’ve got to make sure it’s connected to your Facebook and anything that you put out. You’re having somebody go back to your website. Not just going back to your website. If you specifically have a blog or you have some type of content that you’re marketing online and you have that blog on your website that specifically talks about that same stuff, link that to the blog. Don’t just link them back to the site. Link them to the place to reinforce it because if they like what they read, they’ll probably explore your site to check out others.
At the same time when you have Google Analytics set up and you’re doing marketing like this. It’s like that next level that people usually don’t implement until they bring in a marketer is understanding how many people went to that blog and when they got to that blog, how long did they stay on there. Did they go anywhere else once they got there taking? You can also do remarketing through social media. If you are doing marketing, they come through, they find your post on Facebook, they go to your blog, they read the blog and then they go back into Facebook. We’re now able to look at them and say, “Can I touch this client again by remarketing them through the social media channels?” because basically, you’ve tagged them by coming through your site.
A lot of business owners that we’ve talked to about this stuff, especially I don’t want to single anybody out but good old boys that are there in business. They are real things about, “I don’t like it when people track me online, so I don’t want to do that for somebody else.” That’s your decision but you are missing out a whole lot. You’re missing out a lot of opportunity for your own business and that’s fun. There are some of these areas where people don’t think that they are ethical. Most people agree to be tracked. Most people agree to all these things that they say is an injustice. We’re just too lazy to read the fine print to figure out what we’re getting into.
Marketing Strategies: Start doing something today and realize that it builds upon itself as it goes.
There are those areas where you can optimize, not just having a website but truly understand how your website works for you and there are changes that need to be made. Is this content working out? Even videos; videos are the same thing. You bring people back to your video page. Maybe you have the featured video and some of the other videos you’ve done. You can see where exactly they go, where they clicked, where they left, what they looked at before they left so you can adjust your content or adjust your video content or adjust the way your descriptions are done.
Sometimes, and I’ve had to do this in my past is put down what I thought was right and listen to the experts. It’s not always easy to bury your beliefs when your beliefs were wrong about everything that’s going on.
That’s the one thing I do like about marketing though is it’s so big that I don’t have to be the expert in all of this. I’m not the expert in all of this. There are going to be things where people come to me and I don’t know how to do that, but I know somebody who can do that, and I know enough about the industry as a whole that I could make sure that I work and achieve the goal that you’re going after. You do have to bring in the experts and figure out why is this going wrong? It’s because you did it wrong.
Elijah, what’s the best way for people to get ahold of you?
You can go to www.ServingSocial.com. You can also find us online, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. Other than that, you can always email me if you have any questions at Elijah@ServingSocial.com. I’m always more than happy to jump on a call with folks, chat with them, see what you’ve got going on, see how we can help or just even direct you in the right location.
Elijah, I’ll let you get back to taking care of Kristie.
I appreciate it.
Don’t wait to begin, start now. Start doing something now and over time it will build up to get better at what you do and before too long, you’ll be looking down way from the top. We’ll see you all the top.
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About Elijah Whites
Elijah Whites is the CTO and executive of Google partners programs at Serving Social LLC. Elijah has had the opportunity to work with highly influential companies across numerous industries. His work discovers new and creative ways to incorporate marketing strategies through technology to gain brand awareness and increase market share.
Having worked with small businesses and national brands to reach a broader audience. Elijah’s work engages users across multiple platforms and increase online as well as in-store traffic by using Google‘s Street Views 360-degree immersive Technology.