Full Written Transcript of The Episode

Matt Tompkins: Are you ready to take your social media game to the next level? Well, it’s time to embrace this truth. Facebook and Instagram are now video platforms just like TikTok and YouTube. This means that video based marketing is the way of the future.

In fact, it’s happening now. So if you’re not creating videos for your business on a consistent basis, you’re simply not in the game. But don’t worry. In this episode today, we are here to help you navigate the world of video marketing. We’re going to answer questions like, Should you be posting vertical videos or widescreen format, short or long form? And what’s the real impact on your business?

In this episode, we’re joined by Walt Sanders and Michael Murphy of Omaha’s own Wmk Media, and they’re going to show us exactly how to use video to grow your business. Hello and welcome back to Midwest Mindset, the podcast that gives you the small business owner, the big agency Secrets to Marketing. I’m Matt Tompkins of two Brothers Creative, where we believe every business deserves affordable and effective marketing.

Now Walt and Murphy of Wmbc Media have not only turned their own YouTube channel into a monetized profit machine as part of their business, they help small businesses do the same thing with their video content every day. But first, I think it’s important to understand why video content is the most effective tool to market your business today and to also understand why these vertical videos are so popular.

Matt Tompkins: Where do they come from? Well, to answer that question, we’re going to have to travel way back in time, back in the day to the dawn of Snapchat.

Yes, Snapchat was actually the first social platform to incorporate vertical videos, and they did it for obvious reasons. First, 80% of all social media users are on their phones, 80% Snapchat. They tapped into something pretty big with these vertical formatted videos because what they found was that of all those people on social media, only 15% of users would turn their phone for a widescreen video.

And this meant that you were leaving a lot of real estate unused. In fact, vertical videos versus widescreen. When the phone is held horizontally like you’re talking on it, they take up 78% more space, They fill up the entire screen and that means you now have just gained 100% of the user’s attention.

After Snapchat came another big sea change in how social media channels worked. And that was tick tock. Tick Tock took the same addictive, newly discovered vertical format videos and they applied their new algorithm that was different from Facebook, Instagram and YouTube in one major way Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. They were network based algorithms, which simply means that they would place your content in front of people who knew you liked your page or followed you. Tick tock. They started placing videos in front of complete strangers, first using their very advanced algorithm to find the best suited viewers for your specific content.

Matt Tompkins: The massive success of TikTok. It forced the other social media giants to change, and Meta quickly created reels for Facebook and Instagram.

Google launched YouTube shorts for YouTube. I share all of this with you, not for the history lesson, but it’s because this is important. It’s important to know this because this defines why video content is the single biggest opportunity for marketing your business.

All of these platforms are now placing your vertical video content in front of new people, in front of complete strangers. And we’re talking tens of thousands of people, which is the entire goal of being on social media in the first place, right? For your business to be discovered. We’ve seen brand new YouTube channels with just five subscribers, get tens of thousands of views with their vertical video shorts. And today, Walt and Murphy of Media are going to give us the ultimate playbook for video content marketing.

So first we talked about which format you should use, vertical or widescreen. In my opinion, mixed formats of both. You need to have your long form content that’s going out. I don’t know. Weekly Maybe you’re making a post that’s once a week or once every month even where you’re spending more time on that one specific style of video. That’s your long form video, that’s your widescreen. Then you take your verticals and cut it out of the the macro content, if you will. Yeah.

Walt: Yeah. And really, it’s more about more verticals, less horizontals. Yeah. So if you will, the ratio you want the mainstay video and you want shorts that lead people back to that mainstay. The thing about shorts is what you’re doing with those vertical shorts is, you know, brand awareness. The age old rule, if it takes 7 to 8 impressions for somebody to actually click through and investigate further who you are as a company.

So you want as many impressions as you can get with your brand with those vertical shorts so that when they want to find out more, they’re getting to that meaty content that’s that horizontal and that’s when they that’s when they start to learn about your company as a culture, your company. What is it They actually offer some customer testimonials and stuff like that.

Matt Tompkins: The answer is both. Yes, we should be posting both vertical and widescreen videos because they have different purposes, not just between the two different formats of video, but between all the different social platforms and how they work.

The other question we get asked a lot that I brought up with Walt Murphy is how often should I be posting videos? Yeah, go.

Walt: Ahead. Go first. I just want to say if you’re only going to do it very seldom, like once a week, you know, three times a month, there’s not even a point in posting videos. Really? Okay. So the main thing is at least five videos a week. Nice. Okay. Them on the like. That’s minimum. Yeah. Make your first goal to post once a day Monday through Friday.

Matt Tompkins: In the vertical format.

Walt: And try to get a horizontal in there.

Matt Tompkins: Yeah like maybe maybe like 1 to 2 three minute horizontal video. It’s a little more meatier, more in depth content, and then a single vertical video, at least every single day of the week.

Murphy: If you can find us that to be sustainable, if you can find it to be sustainable to to post five, six times a day vertical format, do it because we don’t we’re not running into the same issues that we did back in the day. If you used to spam the Facebook wall, everybody would hate you, you would be annoying and then you keep popping up.

We don’t have that issue with reels because it’s getting put out in front of a new audience and the algorithms selecting where where it goes. Essentially, you don’t have to worry about spamming as much You can you can drop a ton of content throughout the day and a lot of times the same people, unless they’re following you, aren’t even going to see the same video twice.

Matt Tompkins: This is a common thing with all business owners where we think that we’re posting or sharing too much about ourselves. We think we’re making the call to action too much. But trust me when I tell you we’re not even coming anywhere close. In fact, most of us business owners, we don’t make the ask enough. You have to keep in mind the marketing rule of relativity, which, yes, I just made up. But this simply means that your audience does not see your content as frequently as you see your content. You are in the weeds.

You’re going to get sick of yourself, your videos, your content, but that’s because you are seeing it too much. Your audience does not see it anywhere close to enough, let alone too much. So don’t base your decisions on how often you see it. Base your decisions on how often they see it. Are you going to make reactionary choices that negatively impact your results? Well, we.

Walt: Remind clients all the time to is, you know, we’re not making a sales pitch over and over again. We’re positioning ourselves as thought leaders in the industry. The sales pitch is that you’re talking about things that are related to your industry, so therefore you’re being looked at as an expert in some people’s eyes. And with that brand awareness, then comes the sales pitch after they reach out to you, right? So we’re talking all top of the marketing funnel stuff. It’s just push, push, push.

And like he said, I ran an experiment the other day on our YouTube channel and I posted the same short. The original one was 47 seconds long. The other ones were 22 seconds, 11 seconds, just varying lengths. But same content posted them all at the same time, all at 11 a.m., eight of them on YouTube. Channel three of them got over thousands of views.

A couple of them got like 30 views and then some were right there in the middle with like 500 views. Yeah, but it just and they were all unique viewers. Okay. So that goes to show that the algorithm just said, hey, all this content, give it to all these other unique viewers rather than just a whole bunch of nobody except for my subscribers or our subscribers, saw all the videos pop up in their feed. And I did have a couple people be like, Why did you post the same thing? We’re experimenting.

Murphy: Yeah.

Walt: And you do have to do that. Yeah, yeah. And a lot of times we have to caution clients into thinking that there’s going to be immediate success and immediate results when they see these short format and start posting so consistently.

You got to think of the first six months is data collection. Yep. Right. All the ideas that you have for your content. Let’s do those ideas. Let’s get them out on a consistent basis in a vertical and horizontal format. Come back in six months, look at the data and say, All right, out of these six ideas, these are the three we’re going to stick to. Yeah.

And I also, you know, we need people to be thinking in the in the way of like, okay, we’re going to have a YouTube channel, we’re going to make one style of content. You got to think of it as a variety show. There’s it’s the opportunity to have different skits, if you will, different episodes or different styles of content, and you want to have three that are somewhat closely related. So you’re not going to alienate anybody from your audience, but you want to have those three that you can just always be leaning on. And then people can see different range from you rather than just a one trick.

Murphy: And in order to find those three, you had to try ten different styles of videos and see what works and what didn’t work and collect data.

And you can’t just post one kind of video one time at one time of the day with one form of edit and be like, Oh, I guess that video didn’t work. If it didn’t work the first time, recut it, re-edit it, restructure it, tag it differently, try it, try different, try to post it at a different time of day. And as you do that, then it’s like, okay, no, this video is trash. This video worked, you know? Yeah.

Matt Tompkins: The next important factor to video content marketing is how you look on video matters more for business owners and businesses than individuals.

Quality matters because what we’re doing here is we’re establishing the very first impression that prospects new customers are going to have about you and thus your business that’s going to be formed in literally a split second at the longest a few seconds into your video. So quality matters with your videos for a business.

Walt: Feel like I need to go home and change my face.

Murphy: That’s funny.

Matt Tompkins: No, no, no, no. Um.

Murphy: You.

Walt: You’re totally right. Yeah, you’re totally right, though. The beautiful thing about analytics today, there’s a new. Analytic in YouTube on the shorts that says swipe swipe away or stayed on. Yeah. Okay. So you can now see the percentage of the people that actually got eyes on that vertical. Okay. Did they swipe up or not? And you always are going to want to be on the positive side of 50% stayed on.

Matt Tompkins: It’s like my dating app back in the day. It’s like there’s too many swipe lefts. Yeah.

Walt: They’re like, you only considered it for two seconds, man. Wrong with you. Come on.

Matt Tompkins: Damn. I mean the numbers game, right?

Walt: Like. Like. Like. Like. Like.

Murphy: Like someone’s got to.

Walt: Figure it out in the.

Matt Tompkins: Chat. The next thing we’re going to talk about is tags. What are tags? Well, tags are simply keywords or words related to your particular video content. So if you’re posting a video on YouTube about how to make homemade meatballs, some of the tags you would include in the tag section of your YouTube video would be Meatballs and Homemade Meatballs and How to Make Homemade Meatballs. And you’re allowed hundreds of tags.

And this is an opportunity you want to take advantage of. They’re not the be all end all, but they are important. So don’t just post a video without any tags because it’s these tags or these keywords that are telling YouTube what your content is about so that YouTube can place your video in front of the right people. Murphy walked us through some important and highly effective techniques for managing those tags in your videos. To me.

Walt: Tags are super important. Youtube does, actually. They do use their algorithm to filter out unrelated content. So if you’re tagging for something like if you put Donald Trump because you know it’s a trending tag, if you put that in your tags and your video doesn’t mention the words Donald Trump, they’re going to just not filter you into the Donald Trump stuff. So you’re wasting your energy at that point. So YouTube is smart enough for that. Put as many tags as you can possibly find that are related to related. Yeah. And just use chatgpt to generate them. Yeah.

Matt Tompkins: And I will say this, let’s back up for just a second cause we need to mention what tags are. Okay. Yeah. Tell people that tags are like what are they.

Walt: Well tags are keywords that you put into the tag area of the YouTube video, but the whole description and the title, those are all used as tags as well. So it’s very important on YouTube if you’re listening. This is been out there forever, but it freaking works. It’s how we got our channels started. I mean, we had 2 million views in the last year.

The title of the video that you upload to YouTube should have all the most popular tags for that video in it because that is actually embedded in the title of the file into the the title of the file that you upload. So you definitely want it to be the same as what you want it to be searched for. Like, you know, the Midwest. Yeah.

Matt Tompkins: Mindset.

Walt: The Midwest Mindset podcast would be the title. Then you would say you know hyphen entrepreneur hyphen, new business hyphen, startup hyphen, advice hyphen. And then you can only have so many words in the title, but you just get the most important tags in there.

And then as you upload it to YouTube, that automatically those tags, if you go and look at the source code behind your pages, you’re going to see that the title is still the same, even though even though you changed the front facing title, it’ll actually the code will right Here’s the front facing title and here’s the actual original file upload. Okay, that’s a good tip. And then you go to chatgpt and type in, write a video about Matt talking to Walt and Murphy from Media.com about what it means to be an entrepreneur in the Midwest. Yeah, and just take that description that it writes for you. It’ll be 3 to 4 well-written paragraphs that actually purposely includes buzzwords, and it’s going to be creepy because you’re like, Wow, they actually know what my company does.

Matt Tompkins: We’ve been talking about things you can do to your video once you’ve uploaded it to YouTube, like changing the video’s title, ensuring in the description, putting in those tags, those keywords. But there’s something you need to do before you even upload it to YouTube and that is how you title your video.

Don’t just title your video when you save it to your desktop computer. Do not just title it something like video number one and then upload that to YouTube because YouTube pulls that information. It’s what we call metadata. It pulls that information from the original video file and that factors into it. Putting your video in front of people. Even if you change the video’s title in YouTube once it’s uploaded, YouTube is still pulling information from the original video file, so title your video appropriately. You can even include, as Murphy talks about here, those keywords that you want to target in the title of your raw video file.

Walt: So the process we go through is all those tags are in the title of the file, upload it title it appropriately. If it’s a short, always put hashtag shorts in the title in that description box. Always put three hashtags because those are the you can put six, but they’ll only list three on the actual viewing page. And then under that, that description that you get generated by Chatgpt because it’s going to have the most amount of buzzwords, those are all going to be tags go down, put all the tags in the tag box that you can possibly think of.

Always make sure you choose the language of the video as English and always put the location the location was filmed or where you’re targeting. Yeah, we’re filming. Is in Omaha. But if you’re running a campaign in Tennessee, Tag It was filmed in Tennessee and that will naturally feed it to people that are in Tennessee. And then if you’re tagging correctly, we just did this for a client. I just tagged a video that it was made in Tennessee because he wants to talk to athletic directors in Tennessee. It’s an athletic director testimonial. So we can now go and look at the analytics and see that people that are interested in athletic director stuff in Tennessee saw those videos. Nice. So when they go to a conference there in two months. Yeah, there should be some brand awareness.

Matt Tompkins: What you title the original raw video file, the description, the tags that you include, the location it was filmed, the language, the video is in the date it was recorded. All of these things add up. Even the thumbnail graphic that you choose actually factors into YouTube’s algorithm.

Murphy: If you have a video that you know is fire and it’s not getting traction, just try to redo the thumbnail. Yeah, try to redo it and see what happens. And I guarantee that click through rate starts to go up. Yeah, that’s.

Walt: One thing that impresses me. I can go look at a video we posted a year ago and it’s got like the lowest impression click through rate possible. And then you go and look at the impressions that it’s still getting after a year. It’s just a straight up line. So you’re missing all this opportunity for that whole year that that thumbnail sucked. Oh yeah, right. So a thumbnail. The best thumbnails, especially when it does involve people in the video, is to have up close to the face some sort of emotion on the face.

Matt Tompkins: And that make that face of that human big in the thumbnail so it can be seen and recognized.

Murphy: Absolutely.

Walt: And in background, minimal words too. Yeah. I always thought it would help. But you look at evidence. Yeah. If you use.

Murphy: If you do use words, make it count. Like make it an impactful statement that makes them It’s a hook. It’s supposed to make them have to click on the video like arrested. Yeah. Yeah.

Walt: Like something like that and then have it. Yeah. Yeah. They don’t.

Murphy: $1 million in damage don’t.

Walt: Duplicate the words that are in your title either because now you’re just wasting space because like they’re already seeing the title.

Matt Tompkins: Seeing the title. Another very common question is how long should my videos be? And the answer is difficult because this does vary as Murphy talks about here in just a second, depending on the content.

But I will tell you this much with the vertical videos, in particular, the Facebook, Instagram reels, TikTok YouTube shorts, you want to accomplish the goal of your video, that impression, whatever it is that you want to leave with people in the first five seconds, the first five seconds needs to hook them. Then you deliver the story, the substance, the content, and then you need a call to action. A CTA. It’s Hook story Call to action. That’s the format that we’ve seen work really, really well with these vertical video shorts.

Walt: Yeah, it’s all based on format too though, correct? Um, yeah. If it’s a podcast, it could be three hours if you really want. Yeah, right. But are you popular enough to retain an audience?

Murphy: Like a reaction video is going to be like three minutes, you know what I mean?

Walt: But but if you’re, if you’re just starting out like and you’re trying to position your if you’re a company and you’re trying to position yourself as a thought leader, let’s start off with a five minute talking head video where we’re just talking directly into the camera, right? And I’m sharing information about the oil industry because I’m big in that field. And then you take, you know, out of that five minutes, we all know you’re going to get 10 to 15 shorts out of that. Now you’ve got three weeks of content just from that one sitting down talking head for five minutes. Yeah.

Matt Tompkins: If there’s only one thing that you take away from this episode here today in regards to video content, I hope it’s this You need to have a strategy. You need to have a plan. You know, planning gives your strategy, it gives your video content focus.

You have an intent, you know what the intention is, and you have a way to measure results because now you know what you want to get out of it, but it also gives you and your team time to execute and maintain this new commitment to content marketing. Don’t just start posting today. I mean, if you’re excited, you’re hearing all these great techniques and tips from Walt Murphy. I’m thrilled to hear you’re excited, but don’t just start posting today. You need to have a plan in place first.

Walt: Don’t start posting until you have 30 days in the can and ready to post and have that scheduled out to give your team that’s doing it some breathing room to give yourself leeway for vacation time. Yeah, things like that. Or the.

Matt Tompkins: Shit happens. Claus Man.

Walt: You could be very strategic about it. Now, one thing to keep in mind, like that power washing company. I know you’re watching, um, one day you’ll get paid for that brand awareness because videos like that will get you to a certain point of subscriber base, will get you monetizable on YouTube. And now it’s like, okay, we’re making these videos, we’re getting brand awareness and we’re making a couple hundred dollars on it.

Matt Tompkins: Now, I’m not going to lie content marketing. It is a commitment. It’s a lot of work and that’s why planning ahead helps tremendously. But this will have a snowball effect over time. You’re going to be able to repurpose a lot of these different videos on different social media platforms, and I think that’s.

Murphy: How you get to posting 5 to 7 times a day is like compound over time if you’re posting one video a day, right? Well, in three months you’ll be able to repost that same video again and you end up just layering up and you’re reusing the same content over and over again in a cycle over, you know, three four month increments.

Matt Tompkins: Content marketing is all about the long game right now. You may feel like you’re just in this day to day treading water, just keeping the head above water mindset. And I get that. I know. I know how that feels. I’ve been there too.

Most business owners, we are in that same place. Content marketing is not a brute force sales approach. It’s not an approach that’s going to generate leads tomorrow. But what it’s going to do is it’s going to take that S-curve, that up and down, that up and down that we see as business owners, and it’s going to level it out to where it’s a nice, steady incline.

Things like video content, search engine optimization, having a website, having the right social media channels, having a strategy behind it all that ties it all together. That is how you get to one year from now, six months from now, two years from now, where you don’t even have to stress because you already have this laid out. You have built this foundation to an indestructible approach to making more money. A huge thanks to Walt and Murphy of Wmk Media for coming on the podcast here today. I’ve got a link to Wmk Media’s website in the show notes, also in the show notes.

This is a very cool resource for you. It’s not even from me or Walter Murphy, it’s from YouTube. Yes, YouTube issued this 67 page guide to all the latest and updated best practices for monetizing and getting more reach, more views, and more impact from your video content on YouTube. It’s a PDF. You can click on the link and download it absolutely free in the show notes and we will close out the show with a call to action from Walt and Murphy themselves for WMr Media here on Midwest Mindset.

Walt: Are you tired of putting out content that sucks?

Murphy: I’m tired of you putting out content that sucks.

Walt: No, legitimately though, we need to have a deep talk. Come a little closer.

Murphy: This is getting intimate. I need. I need you guys to understand something.

Walt: If you’ve been afraid to pull the trigger on making good content and growing your influence and brand awareness, WMr media.com are the guys for you.

Full Written Transcript of The Episode

Matt Tompkins: What is a podcast? When we’re asked that question, I think each of us has a different idea of what a podcast is in our head right now. For some, you may be picturing Marc Maron interviewing a celebrity in his garage or for others, it’s Joe Rogan. That’s a pretty obvious go to for podcasting. He’s sitting in his multi-million dollar studio stirring up controversy. Or others may be picturing video, only it’s just a YouTube show. Others may be it’s only audio. It’s Serial, it’s NPR, New York Times. Everybody has a different idea in their head of what a podcast is.

But on today’s episode, I want you to set that aside and I want you to think of a podcast as what it really is a tool. Podcasting is a tool. And not only that, podcasting is the most affordable and effective marketing tool for growing your business. On this episode we have not just one, but two podcast pros here to give you the secret to Skyrocket your Business.

A podcast. Hello and welcome back to Midwest Mindset, the podcast that gives you the small business owner, the big Agency Secrets to Marketing. I’m Matt Tompkins of two Brothers Creative, where we believe every business deserves affordable and effective marketing. If you’ve ever been to a local business networking group or just had conversations with other business owners, you have probably been told the very long list of things you need to be doing or should be doing with your marketing. Yet other business owners are happy to tell us what we need to be doing.

From SEO and SEM to blog articles to videos over here that are different than videos over here. And no, this new social channel is the social channel you want to be on, but they neglect to tell us how we’re supposed to do all these things or when we’re supposed to find the time to do all of these things.

Matt Tompkins: So as small business owners, we’re constantly on the hunt trying to find this this singular thing, the silver bullet that will check off every box on our marketing wishlist. Podcasting is exactly what we have been searching for.

Podcasting is unlike any other medium in the way that it builds trust. The ways that it can be utilized, the techniques we’re going to talk about today on this episode that Trump cold calling and cold emailing that establish you as an authority, as a credible go to in your industry as a thought leader for branding, for content, for just pure SEO output, you get four times the SEO output from every single episode. Podcasts are tracked just like the written blog now, just like the written word.

You can quadruple your SEO output with just 110 15 minute episode. And we are going to go through the process of how you can minimize the time down to just 20 minutes per week and fulfill an entire week’s worth of marketing for your business. It truly is incredible.

And I’m not going to do this alone. We didn’t want just one podcast expert, one podcast pro here. We wanted two. And that’s why I went to my podcast coach and mentor. I work with him in radio. He was my program director for over a decade and he is still the VP Senior VP of Programming at Iheartmedia, as well as the podcast talent Coach. Eric Johnson Podcast Talent Coach.com. I asked Eric, why does every business need a podcast?

Erik Johnson: Podcast is the best way to build rapport with your clients. Nothing is like audio. If you and I are watching a video together, we’re watching a movie, we’re watching a YouTube video. We see the exact same thing.

There’s very little left to the imagination and so it’s very black and white, cut and dry. When I’m telling you a story and you’re listening to audio, the audio leaves a lot to the imagination. If I if I describe to you a red Ford Mustang sitting out front of a casino, you’re envisioning that Mustang in a way that’s ideal for you and brings you the most pleasure. Is the Mustang a 68 or an 86? Is it convertible or hardtop? Is it cherry red? Is it running? Is there anybody in it? Is anybody standing around? Is it daytime or nighttime?

Matt Tompkins: Mine has Chevy Chase driving it for some reason. I don’t know.

Erik Johnson: Why. I don’t even want to know. I don’t. That’s very odd.

Matt Tompkins: But you know, it’s my imagination. Okay, Let me chase.

Erik Johnson: It reminds me of a National Lampoon’s Vacation.

Matt Tompkins: Yeah, That’s the way it came into my head.

Erik Johnson: That’s why. But I don’t know that Chevy Chase was driving. Okay, Maybe.

Matt Tompkins: I should have imagined the beautiful woman.

Erik Johnson: In it, but that would have been more comfortable. So that’s what audio does for you. It lets you build that rapport.

So the four steps of the sales process, you build a rapport with your with your prospect, qualify them to make sure they’re right for you and you’re right for them. You educate them on your solution and then you close the sale. But everybody rushes to that educate. Hey, let me tell you what I have to sell you. Here’s my thing. And we haven’t built the rapport yet.

Building rapport is about 40% of the sales process and then that qualifying your prospect is another 30. Like I need to make sure you’re right for me and you need to make sure I’m right for you. And a podcast allows your listener to self qualify themselves. They understand what you believe in, what you value, how you operate, and by listening to your podcast and the stories that you tell and what you share about yourself, they build that relationship.

Matt Tompkins: People want to do business with people they know, like and trust. Trust is everything. Everything comes down to trust.

Trust is what every marketer, every advertiser, every business is chasing after. Because once you have established trust, people will fill in the blanks. We’ve talked about the difference between our feeling brain and our thinking brain and how we make decisions based off of our feeling brain That’s all about who we trust.

And podcasting is a format that is designed to be unlike any other medium. It’s intimate, it’s personal. It’s one on one. I mean, you’re literally inside someone else’s head speaking to them.

Erik Johnson: Know, like and trust is just another way to say rapport or friendship relationship. You’re building that bond when people are consuming video. A lot of times if we’re watching TV, we’re watching it with other people and we’re seeing the exact same thing.

And it’s a communal activity. When it’s audio, you’re listening to audio while you’re driving, you’re listening to audio while you’re working out, exercising, riding a bike, walking the dog. It’s usually just you and what you’re listening to.

The only reason people listen to audio is for companionship. They don’t want to do whatever it is they’re doing by themselves, so they have something on to listen to. Video, especially on YouTube, is a phenomenal way to get discovered. It’s one of the best search engines there. There is in a way, for you to get discovered and people see what you have to offer.

The podcast builds the relationship. With everybody. So use your video to get discovered. Use the podcast to build a relationship so you’re right there in their pocket, in their ear, talking to them with a one on one conversation every week.

Matt Tompkins: What I love about podcasting for small business owners who are limited on time and need maximum results is that you do one thing, you do one action, and you get many things out of that one action.

For example, we’re talking about some of the many benefits, the very effective results driven benefits of an audio podcast distributed to 45 plus audio platforms from Apple to Spotify and everybody in between. But you also can layer video on top of it. So you’re still doing that one action recording, that audio podcast. Now it is a video podcast on YouTube and we’re going to talk about some of these techniques that we use with our clients every day to get even more value out of it, especially when it comes to your SEO. Absolutely.

Erik Johnson: Video is such a powerful medium to get discovered and bring people into your world. So start with the video to get discovered. Take that audio, use it as your podcast to build a relationship and then use the transcript of it or your show notes for the blog post on your website. So you’re taking the same piece of content, repurposing it in three different ways. It starts giving you SEO Google juice so people find you when they’re searching for you. You have those keywords in there and it’s just a great way to build your brand and build your business and attract new clients. Every business should have a podcast.

Matt Tompkins: Now, as with any other form of media, it is important that you know what you want your audience to do. Who is your target market? Who is your ideal customer, or in this case, your ideal listener?

And hopefully those two align so your podcast can help you grow your business. But then what is the message you’re going to craft? How are you going to resonate deeply with that audience and what is it that you want them to do?

Erik Johnson: Your podcast is a marketing tool for your business, and so before you ever record a podcast, you need to decide what you want your audience to do when the episode is over. What is that first step? They can take down the path to doing business with you That could be downloading a free resource you have on your website to put them on your email list.

That could be sign up for a webinar that you’re holding that could be attend a free event that a networking mixer that you’re holding on Friday afternoon could be an open house that you’re having on Saturday. Whatever it happens to be, decide what that call to action is before you record the content of the episode, then make the content of the episode, stir that emotion in them, and talk a lot about the why and why they want to take action and why they want to accomplish what it is that you’re going to help them accomplish.

So the call to action becomes powerful at the end. But there’s so many ways to get leads. If you get people on your email list by offering them a free resource over on the website, now you can follow up with those leads. You can get people to sign up for a sample of your product or service. You can get them to attend an event you’re holding and get them to sign up, buy tickets, come to a free event. There are so many ways to get leads, but they’re building a relationship with you. They’re building that rapport. They’re getting to know who you are by the stories that you tell.

So many people want to create a podcast and they just want to make it information like, I’m going to teach you my six steps to success. Nobody cares. Nobody cares. I can take your six steps to success success, and I can teach them as well. There’s nothing that’s going to separate the two of us. The only thing that’s going to make you different is your story and your personality and your journey. It’s your opinion and your take on the information. Why are you.

Matt Tompkins: The person to lead people on this?

Erik Johnson: Why should I listen to you? Right. I has information cornered like you’re not going to out information. I am right there aggregating everything on the Internet. It’s your opinion and your thoughts of that information that will separate you. And that’s what I can’t copy. And that’s how you’re going to build a relationship with your audience. I mean, pun intended.

Matt Tompkins: It’s your voice. It is your voice, both literally and figuratively. It is your.

Erik Johnson: Voice. You have to be authentic. You can’t be out and pretend to be something you’re not. You can’t be this persona and this, you know, you don’t you don’t need a big radio voice. You don’t need to be somebody you’re not.

You don’t need to be Joe Rogan. You just need to be you and have an opinion and make somebody care. I often say if your audience was to rate you on a 1 to 5 scale one, I hate him. Five I love him. If everybody’s rating you a three, you’re dead in the water. Like three means I can take it or leave it. I don’t care if you have more fives than ones you’re doing all right.

Matt Tompkins: Eric coaches his podcasters on the many, many different ways there are to generate direct leads and sales from a podcast to profit from your podcast. One of the most effective is interviews, and I’ve seen this firsthand. We had a client and they were sending out cold emails, not getting the response rate that they wanted, and we simply shifted it up.

We flipped the script, as they say, and in. Invited those same people to be a guest on their podcast. 80% not only responded. 80% said yes. Compare that to the 8% response they were getting in just their normal cold emails. So imagine if you have this big name client, the CEO, this top executive, this person you admire, you want to collaborate with.

You want to partner, you want to do business with or it’s just a client you want to land using your podcast as a way, a proverbial foot in the door to invite them on your show is a way to leave them with an unforgettable first impression and build and nurture this new relationship that you would have otherwise had no opportunity to begin.

Erik Johnson: Zoe Roth came to me looking for some coaching, and she’s a consultant. She’s she lives in Australia. She’s actually from Canada. She goes into businesses and helps them tear down the silos so departments can work better together. And so she she’s a consultant in that arena and she came to me to help her with her podcast. And I asked her, how many downloads is your podcast getting? And she goes, I don’t know. I don’t even look.

That’s not what I do it for. And I said, Really? Why is that? And she goes, I use my podcast to open doors to prospective clients. She said, When I try and cold call a client, it’s very difficult to get past the gatekeeper and actually get an appointment scheduled with them to talk to them about what I can do for their business. But when I call and and invite them to be a guest on my podcast, they take my call nearly every time because they all want to be on my show.

So I’ll invite the CEO to be on the show. We’ll have a conversation about booking the interview, then we’ll have a pre interview conversation where we can kind of get to know each other and talk about what the interview will be about. Then we’ll do the interview, they’ll come in and we’ll sit down and we’ll do the interview. So I met with them a third time and then when the podcast episode is ready to be published, I reach out to them again and say, We’re publishing the episode, Here are the assets, here’s the link to the show and here’s when it’s going live and that sort of thing. And then I reach out a fifth time and we talk about how it went, how everything went. And at that time we now have a relationship built because we’ve spoken on the phone five different times, and that’s when we start talking about how we can work together. Now, before.

Matt Tompkins: You let that imposter syndrome creep in and tell you who’s going to want to be on my podcast, I only have 100 downloads an episode or ten downloads an episode. Let me tell you, hear firsthand, they do not report downloads publicly for any podcast.

That is another way. Podcasting is truly unique and nobody cares. Podcasting is a lot like your bench press. You are the only person who knows how much you can bench and you are the only person who cares. Podcasting is not about how many downloads you matter. Size does not matter. It’s about the quality of those downloads and who is listening to your show. Trust me when I tell you that people will say yes to coming on your podcast as a guest.

Erik Johnson: So many people are worried about the size of their audience. Well, who wants to be on my show? I don’t even have you know, I don’t have that many listeners. I don’t think I’ve ever had a guest say, How many listeners do you have on your show unless you’re shooting for the top of the top?

Like if you’re shooting for an A-list celebrity who is who is limited in their time and very selective on who they grant interviews to, nobody’s going to ask you what your audience size is. They’re just flattered to be interviewed by your show. Well, an average people don’t even know what a good download number is. Yeah, they.

Matt Tompkins: Don’t know what it means.

Erik Johnson: I have 512 downloads. What does that mean? Yeah. Is that good? Compared to what? Like, I don’t know. I don’t.

Matt Tompkins: Know. We don’t do this with television ratings. We don’t know if I want to watch that. Jimmy Kimmel. I mean, he’s only got 3 million viewers compared to, you know, Jimmy Fallon over here. He’s got ten. I’m going to watch him like, no, nobody cares.

Nobody cares. Nobody cares. It’s just in our heads. So far, we’ve talked about how to generate new business leads with your podcast, how to use your podcast as a platform for branding. When you layer in video, the other truly substantial value to your podcast is with SEO search engine optimization, or as we like to call it on this show, trying to start a trend being search engine friendly podcasts are the most search engine friendly thing that there is, especially when you follow the formula we’re going to give you here in just a minute.

Erik Johnson: Absolutely. I like the way you say SEO or search engine friendly rather than optimization, because so many search engine optimization companies promise to make your website and your content optimized. Well, the problem is the search engines change their algorithms all the time.

Matt Tompkins: Google just did their 3,000th change over the last year. So yeah.

Erik Johnson: If it’s optimized this year, it’s probably not going to be optimized next year. So just create great content and make it very rich and valuable and search engines will find you. Don’t don’t try and game the system. Don’t. Stuff your content with with search engine phrases and terms and things like that. Because if you’re gaming the system today, it’s not going to work tomorrow. But if you’re making great content and you’re sharing valuable information and it’s unique because you’ve added your story and your opinion, then it will stand out from everything else and it will get noticed and it will get shared by other sites and other people. The number one way people discover podcasts is through word of mouth.

They hear other people talk about It might be mentioned on another podcast. A friend might tell you, you might see it mentioned on social media, you might see it mentioned in an article. But that’s the number one way. And the way to get people to talk about you is do things worth talking about. Just create great content, share valuable information, help people, provide them information on your show, and then give them an opportunity to take a next step with you to to work with your business and really succeed through the information you share with them.

Matt Tompkins: And in the in the show notes, we’ve had this in the show the last few episodes. We’ll put it in there again today for you. You can download a free checklist on how to write and or structure, I should say an SEO friendly blog article so you can use this. It’s not advanced math, trust me.

They act like they wrote the algorithms themselves. Right. But these agencies, they’re just doing what other websites are telling them to do. That’s all that they’re doing. So they failed college math just like the rest of us, you know? So except for maybe Eric, because I know you were an architect, so you’re good at math.

Erik Johnson: The problem is AI is coming in and AI and it’s taking over. Yeah, they’re going to it’s going to make you optimize it anyway. You’re not going to need an agency. Just ask Chatgpt how to optimize your website. It’ll tell you so.

Matt Tompkins: So Eric, you coached a lot of podcasters. I’m curious what you think, what you think of this process. This is kind of how we work through it. It’s kind of our secret sauce to minimize the time, kind of simplify the process. So what we do is we say, okay, we’re going to do some research for whatever your podcast or business is, and if those two align together, that’s that’s a good thing. Your ideal customer or ideal listener go through that process.

So let’s say for the year we’re going to really own this certain phrase, you know, we’re going to own the word marketing or whatever it might be your video podcast, and then build out content and the episodes. What we advise clients to do is go through and write this, follow that checklist for the blog, write a blog article, then use your blog article as your prep for your podcast episode.

You can link back and forth as we’ve talked about, and then you can also break up your your blog into little sections for little additional video content that you can use for your company. And you really kind of that’s kind of how we streamline and simplify the process of start with writing it, then you record it in an audio form, then you have the video, then you have however you can kind of parcel up that podcast to amplify all of that content. So you’re getting, like I said, at least four times the output. Is there any other tips you give for business owners who want to.

Erik Johnson: I like the own the phrase for the year and I like taking the blog post and making that into various pieces of content that you can share on social media and your videos and that sort of thing. I like a piece in the middle of it and it’s themes that might stretch for a length of time. So you might do over four weeks or 12 weeks where you have a content plan.

So on my show I might talk about the confidence to start and imposter syndrome on one episode, and I might take that into how to structure your podcast and I might take that into content ideas and I might take that into interviewing style, and I may take that into storytelling, and then I might take that into how to generate leads, and then I might take that into how to grow your business. So it’s a, it’s a story arc that starts with where do we start with our podcast?

How do we get the confidence to start? And it ends with how do I drive my business with the show? So it’s it’s a story arc that leads into that monetization of your podcast. So if monetization is the my phrase of the year that I want to own, what is the path over the course of the next 12 weeks or eight weeks or four weeks?

Matt Tompkins: It’s like the transformation. What is the transformation your listeners going to undergo? Absolutely. And to know that you have to know where they’re starting and where they’re going to end up. Same thing, by the way, for any business, you’re here with a problem. We have the solution. And then here’s the end result. Here’s where you’re going to end up, Right.

Erik Johnson: Here are the steps you need to take. And now I create episodes for each of those steps. So I love the way that you break it out and then repurpose the content on video on YouTube and your podcast and your blog and your social media and all of those little areas where you create the content one time and then just use pieces of it to be everywhere. And now they’re all linking together and now all of a sudden your SEO friendly put them all.

Matt Tompkins: Back to your website where you own the content. And Eric, you know, you coach a lot of podcasters. Eric By the way, full disclosure was, you know, Ben and I’s coach for I don’t know how many painful years that was for you in radio and broadcasting. You came a long way.

Erik Johnson: It was. That was a lot of fun.

Matt Tompkins: It was fun, though. Yeah, I remember starting. Or not if it was just don’t even want to listen to my first aircheck. But mine either. But Eric is great if you’re a business owner, if you’re a podcaster and you want somebody who can help you through this process. Eric is the guy. That is why he is the podcast talent coach. And speaking of websites, podcast talent coach, dot com slash magnet. We have so and then tell us what that is exactly.

Erik Johnson: So that’ll give you 21 lead magnet ideas. So we talk about generating leads. How do we get people on your on your email list? Well, here’s a little secret. Nobody wants to sign up for your newsletter. Nobody wakes up in the morning going, Oh, I hope I have another newsletter in my inbox.

Matt Tompkins: You know what I’m going to do today? I want to go read the About Us section of some random company.

Erik Johnson: That doesn’t happen. That doesn’t happen. So let’s give them a valuable piece of information in exchange for their name and email address.

So it might be seven ways to attract your ideal listeners. Or it might be how to grow your business with podcasting or something like that. I have 21 different lead magnet ideas that you can use in your business to give people value, to get them on your email list when they’re on your email list, then you can nurture them, send them great information, bring them back to your podcast, get them to your free events, and start building that relationship so you can get that at podcast. Talent coach.com/magnet.

And I’m all about helping people with their content. You know it’s so many people will teach you how to launch a podcast you know go watch a YouTube video. Launching the show isn’t the hard part, but so many people get their show launched and they go, okay, now what? Now what? Now what? Know what? 7 to 10 episodes. Seven is the average.

Matt Tompkins: Before people throw in the towel.

Erik Johnson: People give up at seven episodes because for three reasons. One, they they figure out it’s more work than they thought it was going to be. Right. Because they don’t have a strategy. Right. They don’t have the plan like you just discussed. Here’s how you do it without eating up your entire week. If you watch the YouTube video, they don’t show you that. Yeah, they don’t.

Matt Tompkins: Show you the hard part. Yeah, They.

Erik Johnson: Don’t grow their audience fast as they thought they would because they don’t have a plan and a strategy to go get in front of new listeners and bring them in. You know, they figure if you build it, they will come. That doesn’t happen and they don’t monetize their show as fast as they thought they would because, again, they don’t have a strategy.

They don’t do what we just talked about. They don’t have a plan to walk people from discovery to enrolling as a client. And without that plan, they give up. They throw that towel in at seven episodes. So that’s what I help people do. I help them take their content, turn their information into entertainment and turn their podcast into powerful, profitable relationships so they can grow their business with their show.

Matt Tompkins: Thanks, Eric, for joining us here on the podcast today. If you would like to download Eric Johnson’s Free 21 lead Magnet ideas, the link is in the show notes from the podcast Talent Coach himself. We’re going to have Eric back on the podcast again to do a whole episode dedicated to specific lead generating techniques that you can implement with your podcast to grow your business.

Thanks for joining us here on Midwest Mindset and we’ll see you on the next episode.

The Secret Behind the World’s Greatest Salesperson

Full Written Transcript of The Episode

Matt Tompkins: What is the secret behind the world’s greatest salesperson? Now, don’t worry. This isn’t one of those clickbait Facebook ads where I try and sell you my 24 set DVD program revealing the shocking secret to sales.

No, I’m talking about the literal world’s greatest salesperson. The Guinness Book of World Records lists one single person as the greatest salesperson on the planet. And it turns out there actually is one big secret to his incredible success. In this episode, this secret to sales is revealed, and we’ll see how you can apply it to your own business as we uncover the secret behind the world’s greatest salesperson.

Welcome back to Midwest Mindset, the podcast that gives you the small business owner, the big agency Secrets to Marketing. I’m Matt Tompkins of two Brothers Creative, where we believe every business deserves affordable and effective marketing that produces real results. Something happened to me as a kid that stuck with me for most of my life. I’m talking this stuck with me up until just maybe a few years ago, maybe 5 or 6 years ago. And what happened was when I was a kid, I was a Boy Scout, and every year we had to sell popcorn. And I hated I hated selling popcorn. I hated it.

And I don’t know why. At the time I hated it. I mean, I loved the camping and the horseback riding and all the merit badge badges and everything else. But I would take picking up trash on the highway any day over selling popcorn, and it always ended up like this.

Matt Tompkins: I would wait till the last minute because I put it off. I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t want to sell popcorn. And then I would end up calling my grandma and begging her to buy like ten, ten things of popcorn, you know, of kettle corn. They had the variety pack, which was good. I mean, it was good kettle corn. But I despised sales.

This version of sales, this inaccurate mindset, if you will, was in my head forever. It stuck with me all the way into adulthood. And it wasn’t actually until a number of years ago that a friend of mine, a mentor, somebody I looked up to, said, You know, you’re really good at sales. And I said, What? I think I literally stepped back like, physical reaction. I hate sales. I’m not no, I would never be doing sales. Sales is the worst last thing I want to do with sales.

And they said, what do you think you’re doing right now? And it was a moment. It was a, you know, an aha moment. The light bulb went off in my head, and that’s when I realized that sales is not this false stereotype of we’re tricking someone into buying something or talking them into buying something that they don’t need. And I’m not saying that doesn’t happen.

Matt Tompkins: That’s a bad version of sales that’s manipulating people. Sales, though, is actually solving a problem. It is building a relationship. You know, referral, marketing, networking, whatever you want to call it. Sales is just about building relationships.

You build relationships to build trust so that when your ideal customer has a problem and you have a real legitimate solution to that problem. You can help them. It’s really as simple as that. And when my mindset shifted, I started to realize all the things I love about marketing are really they apply equally to sales. I mean, sales is really a part of your marketing strategy. It’s all about human psychology, understanding people’s wants and needs. It is not that image I had since I was a Boy Scout in my head of being forced to do something I didn’t want to do.

Now here’s where it can catch up with us as business owners, because I think a lot of people have that that false stereotype in their head and that delays our action or our willingness to take action when it comes to sales. Now, sales and marketing are pivotal, foundational to your business.

Most most companies start off with just one or the other. They have marketing or they have sales. And eventually you you grow from just 1 to 2. You have both and you have sales, which, you know, your company can survive on just brute force sales for a long time.

Matt Tompkins: But marketing is really what gives gives this plane the lift that it needs to reach the altitude we define as success.

And it makes your sales a whole heck of a lot easier. But we delay that. And so we have this negative view of things like cold calling or prospecting new leads or talking to people. Most business owners are even afraid just to put a call to action button on their own website to say, Hey, this is a business relationship, let’s do business. I can help you.

We’re very passive about it. We’re gun shy because I think in large part to that that false image, that false stereotype of sales that we have in our head. The truth is that we can’t simply ignore sales because we don’t like it doesn’t matter if it’s based off of a false definition of what sales really is. Without sales, your business cannot succeed.

Needless to say, I was pretty surprised to find out that basically my whole life was a lie. I had based my life on this premise that sales suck because of my Boy Scout popcorn days and now that had just blown up in my face. Talk about your all time backfires. Just as I was surprised then I was equally surprised to find out what the secret is behind the world’s greatest salesman.

Joe Girardi is listed in the Guinness World Records as the world’s greatest salesman. He sold more retail big ticket items one at a time than any other salesperson in recorded history.

Matt Tompkins: You may be thinking, well, he was probably selling something really cool, like, you know, I iPads, iPods, iPhones. No, no, it wasn’t even a gizmo or a gadget. It was a very old school traditional item that he was selling. In fact, I was even more surprised, I would say shocked to find out that what he was selling his profession is usually the typical stereotype that we think of when we think sales in a negative way. I’m talking about a car salesman.

Yes. The image that comes to many people’s mind when we think sales is used, car salesmen, we think somebody who’s trying to trick us or talk us into buying something or manipulating us, selling us a lemon. Joe Girard. He was a car salesman. That’s what he sold. In total, he sold over 13,000 cars. That’s about six cars per day on average.

On his best day, he sold 18 vehicles, 18 vehicles in one day. On his best month, he sold 174. These numbers mean good for him, but I feel embarrassed. Joe Girard. He sold more cars by himself than 95% of all the dealerships in North America. And to make this even more incredible, he sold them one vehicle at a time. He did not do any bulk deals. This wasn’t like shopping at Sam’s Club or. Costco? No, he did these one by one.

Matt Tompkins: So what was his secret to success? First thing we probably think of is, well, hard work. He’s probably an incredibly hard worker. And yes, he does list that as a very important trait. But let’s be honest, most of us are working really hard and we’re not seeing these kinds of sales numbers. Joe also accredits being likable. That’s part of it, too.

But there are a lot of hard working, likable sales people out there, and they’re not selling 13,000 vehicles. Now, what Joe did that was different is he personalized his relationship with every customer. There is such a power in the little things. The little things.

For example, he would send a personalized greeting card every month to his entire list of customers. In January, it would be something like, you know, Happy New Year. Inside it, he would say, I like you. I like you. That’s it. He would handwrite these cards.

He would hand address them. They were not this mass mail, mass snail mail campaign like those flyers we get every political season. No. He did these by hand. All 13,000. What he did was he built relationships with every person and sending something that seems as little and frivolous as a card in the mail. Builds trust and builds relationships. A phone call not to try and sell something, but just to say hi. Check in, say Hey, I like you. You’re awesome. That is the secret to a success.

Matt Tompkins: Because what what ended up happening with Joe and what will end up happening with you and your business is that the vast majority of your customers will be returning customers and they will tell a friend who tells a friend and so on and so on and so on. Referral, marketing, Word of mouth. I think we get lost a little bit when it comes to marketing in trying to acquire new customers and we focus only on. Who’s next? And we don’t focus enough on who we already have.

Who is nurturing that relationship with your current clients? Are you following up with them? When was the last time you spoke with all of your customers? What is a way that you can personalize? Your relationship. I understand. We’re busy. We can’t all we can’t invite everybody, every customer out to dinner. But you could send them a card.

A handwritten card. That has incredible value and an incredible return on that value. By the end of Joe’s career, yes, he was sitting out 13,000 cards per month. He had to hire an assistant to help him. But by the time he was about ten years into his career, almost two thirds of his sales were to repeat customers. It got to the point where customers had to set appointments months in advance to come in and buy from them and they would wait. Contrast that with other car sales people who just stand around waiting, hoping for walk in traffic.

Matt Tompkins: And that is what a lot of us do as business owners. We stand and wait. We hope. Remember, hope is a dangerous drug. Hopium. We need to detox off hope. Because hope doesn’t increase sales. Hope doesn’t increase revenue.

Standing there in the parking lot or the proverbial parking lot of Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, I’m putting my name out there, but nothing’s happening. It always surprises me when business owners say, it’s my slow months, we have nothing to do. And I ask, Are you following up with your current customers? Are you nurturing those relationships?

And the answer is a lot of the times, What do you mean They’re already my customer. I don’t have to work for it anymore. I think that’s the thought behind it, Understandably so. You know, but the truth is, those customers, that relationship, it needs to be nurtured just as much as new relationships because it’s those relationships that are actually well, A, they are what is keeping you.

They are what is keeping you in business right now. And they are what is going to keep your business and your doors open in the future. Referral marketing is a powerful thing. Building trust is an incredibly powerful thing. When you build trust with somebody and you build a genuine relationship, it has resounding implications. It is a ripple effect that will increase sales and grow your business.

Full Written Transcript of The Episode

Matt Tompkins: What is your value as business owners? We’re never really given an instruction manual on how to know what our time is worth or what a fair price is that we should be charging for our services. And as we’re starting out, it’s very easy for us to undervalue our business and what it is truly worth. In this episode, we’ll learn how it all comes down to having the right mindset.

We’re joined by Amy Nakai, the owner of Rooted Tree Specialists, who’s going to show us the power of having the right mindset to find success even when the odds May be stacked against you.

Matt Tompkins: Hello and welcome back to the Midwest Mindset, the podcast that gives you the small business owner, the big Agency Secrets to Marketing.

I’m Matt Tompkins of two Brothers Creative, where we believe every business deserves affordable and effective marketing. Since we’re talking about how to know our value today on the podcast, I think it’s apropos that we share where we actually started out as business owners.

You know, we’re embarrassed sometimes to share just how much we have devalued ourselves in the past. So I’ll take the first step here. Okay, I’ll put myself out there because I found this slip of paper here, this real life invoice. You can hear it. I’m holding it in my hand that I found when we moved here to our new studio. And this was for some video production that I did back in the day.

I’m going to say back in the day and not give you a specific date because that would embarrass me perhaps a little bit. That might take it a little too far because it wasn’t that long ago. So I went out and I filmed a bunch of live speaking events and charged $100 in total to film each of these events and then just $100 in total to edit everything together.

Matt Tompkins: Now $200 in total for all of this production work that equaled, I’m guessing, probably 15 to 20 hours, if not more. Of my time. I mean, I was basically working for free. I was basically paying to do this work. I share this, though, because this is common.

This is normal. I think all of us have done this where we undervalue our services. We don’t know what our actual value or our worth really is. It takes a lot of years to gain the confidence and the wisdom to know what we’re worth. Now, our guest today, Amy Nakai, has found success in a male dominated industry. She has forged her own path and she has found her success.

I think if I were to describe it in one word, it would be mindset. It is finding the right mindset and investing in yourself so that you have the energy, the passion and the confidence to know your value. I asked Amy where she gets this energy, this positivity, and it turns out the secret is you can actually shape and form the mindset that we take to work with us every single day.

Amy Nakai: I love to listen to positive podcasts. I love to watch positivity, YouTube videos. I love listening to positivity. It just fuels your.

It’s absolutely changed my persona. And so I just exude a ton of confidence, a ton of positivity because I absolutely love that I went from being a negative.

I mean, everybody in college would say I was a pessimistic. I would just look constantly at the negative and I’ve completely done a 180. I just when somebody says something like, if somebody cuts me off, I’m like, Man, they must have needed the bathroom a lot more than I did or something to that nature. I just always look towards the.

Matt Tompkins: Positive, having the right attitude, the right approach, That positive mindset is important, but mindset is so much more than that.

Mindset is applying that with routine and discipline every single day. One of the things I appreciate about Amy and her story is that she didn’t just want to do something to do it and try it. She actually wanted to be great at it. So she is constantly educating herself, learning and growing to perfect her craft and get better in her own industry.

Amy Nakai: So I am an ultramarathon runner, so I run an ultra marathon is anything more than a marathon. So I run through the forest all the time. I love it and I just love trees because they were ever changing. It’s not like the road running where you’re just everything is mundane in the same trees are ever changing.

And so I really did seek something that was in the forest in nature, was in another company, and then went on to become a GM and then was like, You know what? I can just do this myself. I absolutely love it. Got my well, I got my arborist license before that, but got my arborist license, my pesticide license and just continued to go to school for those things. So I think.

Matt Tompkins: One of the most challenging things about knowing your value is actually sticking to your value because it’s very easy for us to devalue ourselves, to lower our price, to think, Oh, well, if our competitors are doing it at this price, I have to be lower or we’re challenged or questioned as to why we should be charging what we charge.

Amy Nakai: And I can’t tell you how many times clients will say, Oh, it’s just climbing, I just need to trim those two branches or just something.

Okay. It’s a lot more intense than that. It’s a lot more work than that. And then we’re taking thousands upon thousands of wood like pieces, pounds of wood down. Like it’s not. Oh, it’s this easy thing. It’s always more complicated than it looks.

Matt Tompkins: So let’s get into how we establish what our value is in the first place. And I think we really have to look inward and we have to identify what makes us unique. I mean, people can get the same thing or similar products or services pretty much anywhere these days.

What is it that makes your business unique? And I think that really boils down to the experience you’re providing for your customers.

Amy Nakai: I think knowing how you’re different and why you’re different. I am different because our arborists that are climbing are certified arborists. Our climbers excuse me, our climbers are certified arborists, so they know how to make the proper cuts and why To make the proper cuts. So then our mission then comes back to we care truly not our mission. That’s not our mission. But we care truly about the clients.

And so we’re presenting a product, a service that is better than most people because we spend time. We didn’t just train any 18 year old how to wield a chainsaw.

We showed value to the clients on getting them trained and making sure that they do that, and then with showing the value of making sure every client knows, Hey, this is why we care, This is why we might be more expensive, because we’re different. Because we’re different this way.

Matt Tompkins: What we’re talking about here is shifting from this cost based pricing mindset to a value based pricing mindset.

And knowing what your value is is a lot more than just the cost to make that product or deliver that service. It is knowing what sets you apart from your competitors and other companies in your market.

Amy Nakai: When you have clients who say, Hey, I got another estimate, hey, I got another estimate, and I upfront tell them you will absolutely find other less expensive estimates out there. But I just know the service that we provide for you.

And thank you so much for sharing that information. I value feedback. Here’s why we’re different. Here’s the value that we provide. And so I think depending on the client, some people just don’t want to be inundated with the minutia.

But building that value for them and sharing that with them on every single like this is why we’re worth more is because we care about your product and your house, not just dropping a huge log on your fence or anything like that. And we have insurance. And so that’s a lot of times too. So I would say a lot from different clients. We’ve heard estimates that other companies share.

Matt Tompkins: Listen, price is important, but it’s not everything. And the risk is that it can quickly turn into a race to the bottom.

Who’s going to have the cheapest price? Cheap, cheap, cheap. And people I’ll tell you right now, we do not want cheap and we want a fair price, but we want a price based on true value. If you’re about to have heart surgery, would you rather have the cheapest doctor or the best doctor?

Amy Nakai: My goal is truly I do care about your dollar, but the service that you’re providing. So in that race to the bottom dollar, it’s really how do you value your clients? I mean, we had one that we got done a lot quicker than we were expecting. I mean, I am telling you, I put a ton of money on this because I thought it was going to be a lot more complicated than it was.

It ended up not taking as quite as long. It went flawlessly smooth. And so we came down and we said, we’ll take $1,000 off and not so they can see. I don’t I’m not money hungry for that. And that is definitely coming across in hopefully in everything that we do so that clients see that we really do care about the client, not just the dollar.

Matt Tompkins: So how do we charge more? A fundamental component is trust. Consumers have to trust in the value that you are putting out there.

So if you want to have a higher price point, you need to be honest and transparent. And if we’re being honest here, many businesses don’t want that. They don’t want you to know how much money they’re making on that product or service. But if you can be transparent and honest, you can establish trust. And once trust is established, then you determine you set the value for your business.

Amy Nakai: Especially when right now you’re trying to pinch every penny because it’s just super valuable. Groceries are more. And so what am I what are you wanting that dollar for? What are you bringing to me that’s different than this? I think if you read clients so because you can get way overboard. Some people don’t want every single detail, but truly every single client is.

I will let them know up front you will find less expensive bids. Here’s why we are more. More expensive is because we value your property.

We value your trees long term and the community so that we train our arborists and dump fees are more expensive and gasoline or diesel is more expensive. But we truly value your tree whether you’re here five, ten, 15 years from now and whether you use me or not. This is why we are more.

And so I think building that value in every single aspect of what you do to every single client gives you that confidence too, and gives you that know we are worth it.

Matt Tompkins: You want to focus on the end result. What is life look like after you’re done, after they’ve purchased your product or they’ve hired you for your services? We yes, want to have as much information, the specs, the facts, because there are clients who want a lot of that. But it really helps when at least when it comes to marketing your business, getting your message out to paint that picture, if you will, to show what the end result looks like.

That is a huge component to establishing your value for your business. Amy also hit on something that I am very passionate and coach people on all the time, and that is to not do what other people are doing, especially big companies, just because you see them doing it. We often try and emulate and we don’t ask why we’re doing it.

Amy Nakai: I think there’s in our industry, there’s so many companies that, well, this is the way we solve this problem. This is the way we trim this tree, this is the way we solve this insect or this disease or anything like that.

Just because they’ve done it the same way for five, ten, 15 years. So because I am younger in the scene, I haven’t been doing this for 15, 20 years. I wasn’t handed a company. We built it it from the ground, from the ground up. I’m the first female owner operator that I’m out there doing it in the trenches with them. So I am.

How can we be different in the community? I’m spending time doing research. We’re spending time learning because trees are ever changing and insects are ever changing. And so if you have a product that you’re providing or a service that you’re providing for the community and you know you’re different, if you focus on that, it naturally comes out of you.

And this is why I’m different and I’m okay with being different because I’m solving a problem in the community. I’m solving this need this way so I’m able to charge more. And here’s why. And I love what Slater said about, you know, if it’s what good. Fair. Good. Fair or good? Cheap and good.

Matt Tompkins: Cheap or fast?

Amy Nakai: Yes. Good. Cheap and fast. Yes. I love that. Because you’ve set yourself apart for this is my value and this is why we are going to be more expensive. Not all the time, but truly like why we do charge more because we have certified this or because we do spend time doing research on this.

Matt Tompkins: Some of the best business coaches, they will work with you to get to the real you first because it starts with you. It starts with us on an individual level to establish the right mindset, and then that will transform the business around us.

And Amy talks about this with her business and how they even came up with her. Her motto, her slogan for rooted tree specialists and being rooted not just in your community, but in yourself.

Amy Nakai: I actually did. We I came up with the motto first, and then we came up with it because then we came up with the name because I just truly am rooted in the community for the community and why that’s important. But if you’re rooted in who you are and confident in who you are, it oozes out of you and here’s why it’s okay.

And then people start to see that authenticity. But truly who you are. And I think that’s how we’ve been successful. I’m not trying to pull one over on somebody. I looked at this lady. We went and evaluated this tree and she said, Well, I’m already getting it treated by this. And I looked at her and I looked and but it still has this problem. Where are you paying money? I don’t understand it, But they’ve been doing the same thing for the last 20 years. And I think if you’re providing a service or a product or anything that feel confident that you are providing that different than your competitor and it’s okay to charge more.

Matt Tompkins: When we started this podcast, I asked Amy how she has this level of energy and positivity, and she mentioned that, you know, she listens to a lot of positive podcasts and that sounds like a little thing, but it really is not, because what we’re talking about here is knowing your value, you do that by establishing the right mindset and mindset is not something that’s just it doesn’t just happen overnight.

It doesn’t just change instantly because we want it to like anything else. It takes discipline and routine every single day. What we put into our body, both the substance, the food and also what we put into our mind, what we consume, what we listen to, the books that we read, the people that we surround ourselves with. That is what truly sets our mindset every day.

Amy Nakai: Absolutely, Yeah. If you’re listening to I mean, there’s so much negativity around us, I feel like all the time and it’s just so easy to get bogged down. So if you’re just listening to positivity, it truly does, or reading books that are about positivity, it truly does change who you are.

Matt Tompkins: Everybody is looking for this big secret to success. I can tell you firsthand that Amy is like many of these successful entrepreneurs and business owners that I’ve had the chance to talk to have on this podcast and work with over the years.

And it’s really the opposite. It’s not a big secret. It’s the little things. It’s the little things that end up mattering the most. It’s positive affirmations on a daily basis. It’s focusing on the people that we surround ourselves with, those five people around us that make us who we are or who we’re going to become. It’s the little things that matter most. Mindset is a daily commitment. It requires discipline and routine, as Amy has showcased here on this episode.

But it is what is going to define your success, not just as a business owner and an entrepreneur, but as an individual, as a person. Thanks once again for Amy Nakai joining us here on the podcast, and thank you for joining us. We have a link. You can find out more about rooted tree specialists and Amy Nakai in the show notes, and we’ll see you in the next episode.

Full Written Transcript of The Episode

Matt Tompkins: When you ask business owners why they’re on social media, the most common answer that you’ll get is something like, Dude, everyone’s on social media. I can almost hear my Grandma Nola’s voice echoing loudly in response because everyone else is doing it is a dumb reason to do anything. Grandma Nola was a wise woman. Grandma Nola used to also tell me that anything worthwhile is worth questioning.

So I think it’s very fair to ask if our business should be on every social media channel and considering how much time, personnel and money that we throw at a multi-channel social media presence. I also think it’s fair to ask how much money has this approach actually made your business? What’s the return on this investment? Has all of this busy work moved your business forward, or is it just that busy work?

In this episode, let’s stop trying to be everything everywhere all at once and see if we can answer some very basic questions. Starting with Should your business be on every social media channel?Hello and welcome back to Midwest Mindset, the.

Matt Tompkins: Podcast that gives you the small business owner, the big agency Secrets to Marketing. I’m Matt Tompkins of two Brothers Creative, where we believe every business deserves affordable and effective marketing. 51% of all businesses will be closed after five years.

Over half of all businesses will fail within their first five years. Now, I don’t know this as a fact, but I think it’s pretty safe for me to assume that there is no entrepreneur, no business owner out there who just had to close their doors. Their business is done and said, If only we had spent more time on TikTok, our business would still be open and thriving today. Now I am in no way anti social media.

Quite the opposite. I think it’s in a very effective tool for small businesses to use, but that’s it. It’s a tool for many businesses. Their entire marketing strategy is just social media. We’ll just post on social media. It’s free. It seems easy.

Everybody’s doing it. Social media is not a strategy. Social media is a tactic. It is a tool that we use within our marketing strategy. Social media is not this magical marketing cure all for your business. There are many benefits to using social media effectively. You can get your message out. You can communicate and connect with your customers, your prospects directly. One on one. You can be seen.

You can establish your authority, establish credibility, you know legitimacy. You can be discovered by new people, especially the way that the algorithms work for things like reels on Facebook and Instagram, TikTok YouTube shorts, where they’re putting you and your reels, your your vertical video shorts in front of strangers, front of people who aren’t familiar with you or your business.

Matt Tompkins: That’s a huge opportunity can build your brand. But the risks and the negative side effects of a multi-channel social media approach are very real. And I don’t think we talk about those enough. The first one being it is a major time suck.

Yes, social media is a major time suck. It takes a major time commitment. Just think about individually how much time each of us spends on social media every day. Now I found studies that range on the low end 2.5 hours per day to the high end, six hours per day on social media. The average American spends 2.5 to 6 hours per day on social media, on our phones. And if you don’t believe me, open up your screen time report. I get that notification every Sunday, and it’s kind of a shocker. But social media is designed to be addictive. It’s designed to suck us in and we lose track of time.

So that’s how much time we’re each individually spending on social media. But that gets multiplied if you are a small business owner, because we’re not just on one social media platform. We’re not just on social media for our own entertainment, just, you know, the mind numbing scrolling on and on and on. The endless scroll, as they call it.

Matt Tompkins: Now we have to maintain all these channels because all these channels now are direct representations of our business. In addition to our website, they are in essence this, in essence, this digital storefront. So now we’re not just on Facebook, we’re on Instagram, we’re on TikTok, we’re on YouTube, we’re on LinkedIn, we’re on Twitter. I mean, that’s six right there.

So instead of focusing on just one platform. Where we know our ideal customer is with a message that is specific and targeted to reach and connect with them. Now we’re dividing up our time by six, so we can’t do any channel really that well. And our message is very vague because we don’t know if our ideal customer is even in on all these channels.

We don’t know why we’re doing it. We’re just doing it because we see everybody else doing it and we think. That we need to to. This is a major time suck and that means it is costing you money. We we like to look at social media as this thing that is free. It’s very easy to use or it seems easy to use and everybody’s on it. It is not free. It is not easy to use and we may see everybody else on it. But trust me, they’re all going through the same frustrations.

They’re all scratching their head just like you and I wondering why? What am I doing? Is this even working? Is this even worth it? Just think about how much value you place on your time as a business owner.

Matt Tompkins: We have a very limited amount of time. You can always make more money. You can’t get more time. We can’t add more time to the day. And as entrepreneurs, we need that time.

So you have to ask this very real question Is your time best spent divided up over six different social media channels doing a mediocre job at best because you’ve divided it up versus dialing in your processes and procedures, working on your invoicing or, heaven forbid, you know, picking up the phone and doing some cold call prospecting, that is still perhaps the number one way to increase your sales. Old school. And I don’t think the answer is yes.

Now, that doesn’t mean there isn’t a place for social media. It means that if we’re going to do social media, we have to have a very specific, targeted strategy that it is a part of. To put this in perspective, I want to bring up the story of Vilfredo Pareto. Now, he is the guy. He’s the Italian economist who discovered what is now known as the 8020 rule.

Now, the 80 over 20 rule. What he found the it was also known as the Pareto Principle in Italy. What he found was that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population. The 80 over 20 rule he found could basically be applied to anything. I mean, give or take a percentage or two.

Matt Tompkins: 80% of a company’s profits come from 20% of its customers, 80% of road accidents, traffic accidents caused by 20% of drivers, 80% of software usage is by 20% of users. 80% of a company’s complaints come from 20% of its customers. 80% of wealth is owned by 20% of people. I could go on and on and on. What’s cool or perhaps nerdy, if you want to look at it that way, I admit it’s a little nerdy is to apply the 80 over 20 rule to the 80 over 20 rule and then you get the 64 over four rule.

Now, trust me, I’m horrible at math. All that means is that 4% of your efforts result in 96% of the outcome. 4% of your efforts Is a small business owner equal 96% of your company’s revenue? 4%. In other words, 96% of the time is just a complete waste of time. 96% of the things that we’re doing as business owners is not moving our business forward.

It’s not cultivating relationships with clients and bringing in new prospects and dialing in those things that systematize our business. Only 4% is. So now when we take a step back and we consider the amount of time that we’re giving up to social media and then dividing up to get mediocre results among all these different channels. That time has a much higher value. I mean, just imagine if 4% right now of your time is getting you 96% of the results for your business.

Matt Tompkins: Imagine what an extra 1% could do. Just 1% difference. And that can happen if you took maybe one hour of those 2.5 hours per day that were. I almost said wasted but spending on social media and instead dedicated it to these things. The boring shit as our our friend and guest Jeremy Aspen said the main reason why businesses go out of business the boring shit. Dedicate one hour a day to learning QuickBooks. One hour a day to your processes and procedures.

One hour a day to, you know, cold calling, cold emailing, prospecting. New leads. That’s how you move your business forward. So we have to take a real honest look at the amount of time that social media is consuming and is it worth the results? The other thing we have to ask is, is it working? Do we even have a way to measure whether or not it’s getting results? Our efforts on social media.

Are we actually increasing revenue? Do we actually have new sales, new leads, Qualified leads? We can’t just go by. We got a bunch of hearts, views and likes. Because what does that mean? I mean, yes, I understand it releases dopamine in our brain.

It’s part of what makes social media like a slot machine intentionally designed to be very addicting because it rewards our pleasure center in our brain. But we have to ask, is this actually getting us results for our business? The results we need to stay in business?

The other thing we have to consider is how people use social media and ask Is social media an ideal selling environment? Do people want to see ads on social media? Now, trust me, you’re talking to the guy here who has had I have fallen for I don’t know how many targeted Facebook ads.

Matt Tompkins: I have bought so many things from China because it’s I know it’s like my Achilles heel. I see Marvel stuff, a Captain America shield, which still is not arrived, by the way.

That was a nice $73 waste of money. Yes, they can be very effective. I am proof of that. Targeted ads can work very well for your business, but we have to understand how people are consuming content. Reels, posts, videos, and what they really want. Think of it this way. You’re at a party.

All right. Social media is kind of like a party. And, you know, people on social media, they’re just scrolling through. They just want to be distracted for a few seconds. Just like at a party, you’re moving from group to group. You know, you’re mingling, you’re having fun.

You get bored with Tom’s story about, you know, how he was a almost became a Boy Scout eagle. And then then his conversation really takes a turn and gets weird. So you exit pretty quickly. You move on to the next group, the next conversation, the next story. You’re just having fun. And then you have the guy who is selling Amway who comes up and says, hey, you know, I really got to tell you about this deal.

Matt Tompkins: I mean, is that the right moment to be pitching? The long line of products and services that Amway has. And I know picking on Amway here actually sold Amway.

So I guess I can’t technically pick on them because I still have a closet full of their stuff from when I was in high school, young and vulnerable and impressionable. But I digress. No, it’s not the best selling environment. People are there to have fun. They’re not there to buy, you know, your service or your your your product. Social media is very similar.

You know, people don’t want to be bombarded by your message, by your ad. So use it wisely. Use it Very smart. Be hyper targeted in how you use it and understand how it actually works and what people actually want. Because you can easily turn off new customers if you are that guy selling Amway or whatever it is at the wrong place. Doesn’t matter if it’s Amway or not. People are going to be turned off. They can be turned off very easily.

So is it the ideal selling environment for your business? And you’re noticing a theme here because everything is about your business, because every business is different. You know, it may be Instagram may be the ideal selling environment for your business, for your service or product. You know, it may be that Instagram or Facebook is the ideal platform for you because your ideal customer is on that platform and you’re on that platform all the time, so it makes sense for your business.

Matt Tompkins: That leads into this next big misstep that I see a lot, and that is small business owners. We see what the big companies are doing and we see what all our competitors and all of our all of our fellow business owners in our market are doing.

And we do the same because we see them doing it and we think, well, if they’re doing it, then I need to be doing it too. It’s like keeping up with the Joneses. One of the biggest mistakes you can make is trying to do what big companies do. Stop doing what big companies are doing unless you have a big company yourself. Stop doing what that big company is doing.

Unless you’re Coca-Cola and you have hundreds of millions of dollars to spend on your marketing to do this very broad, very, you know, just kind of it’s this spray and pray approach where we’re just going to try to appeal to everybody, be very safe. We’re not going to be specific because you know what? We have hundreds of millions of dollars so we can bombard people with these messages.

We can hire a Kardashian, We can do whatever it is that might move the needle for Coca-Cola. But guess what? We’re not Coca-Cola. We have a very limited, if any, marketing budget at all and we have to use it very wisely.

Matt Tompkins: So trying to emulate what big companies are doing, it’s like they’re not just playing a different game, they’re playing a different sport. They’re playing baseball. We’re over here playing soccer and we’re trying to compare and do what they’re doing. Matt Why did you bring a baseball bat? This is soccer. Does it make any sense?

You just wasted all your money on that nice baseball bat and you don’t have any soccer shoes? So stop doing what other businesses, big businesses and companies are doing. Also, stop doing things because your competitors are doing. Here is an honest truth. All right. So results on social media are kind of like a bench press. Nobody knows or cares about your bench press except for you. You don’t know how effective. Social media is for that business that you’re jealous of.

You don’t know if because Susie at her bakery got 10,000 views, that means that she’s increased profits by ten x. You don’t know if it’s had any impact. She could be going out of business, for all you know, just like you don’t know or care what Bob can bench press.

We get tied into this. It’s very ego driven where we think everybody wants to know that I’m successful. So I’m going to post videos and I’m going to put on this show Puff out my chest. I think at the gym they even have a term for it.

Matt Tompkins: It’s called peacocking. It’s just showing off. You’re strutting your stuff, you’re showing off your fancy feathers. None of that, though, is moving your business forward. None of that, though, is helping you market your business to increase profits, sales and revenue. Stop doing what you see big companies doing. Stop doing what you see your competitors doing and start doing what you and your business need to be doing.

Which leads me into how I want to wrap up this episode because I’ve been pointing out a lot of things you shouldn’t do, a lot of mistakes and missteps that we want to avoid as small business owners. And if you’re wondering, Matt, when are you going to get to what we actually should do? Well, that’s right here. That’s what I’m getting to now.

How should we use social media? Well, instead of a multichannel approach where you start on 5 or 6 different channels, start with just one channel. How do you choose that channel? Well, choose the channel based off of two things.

There are two criteria you want to base this on. One is where your ideal customer actually spends time. So if your ideal customer is on Facebook predominantly or on on LinkedIn or Instagram, choose the platform they’re actually on, it’s going to make it a lot easier for you to reach them with your message. And the second piece of criteria here is choose a platform that you actually spend time on, because odds are, as a small business owner, you’re going to be doing a lot of this work yourself.

Matt Tompkins: And if let’s say you hate Twitter, you don’t like Elon Musk and you lost your blue check mark of certification, validation, whatever it’s called, and you’re angry and you hate Twitter, it’s going to make it much more likely for you to lose sight of Twitter and not give it the time and attention that it needs, which is missed opportunity. And, you risk having that dead channel for your business just sitting there.

So pick a channel that your ideal customer is actually on and pick a channel that you are actually on. Number two, Market message media. We talked about these, the basic three key ingredients to any successful marketing campaign and that is know your target market, know your message, have it dialed in and specific and then choose the right media.

And this applies across the board, but especially so with social media. Social media, as I said early on, it is not a strategy. It’s just, well, it has media in the name. It’s just a form of media, a way for you to get your message to your ideal customer.

Number three, create a content marketing schedule or a content marketing planner. And this is going to prevent that time suck because the last thing that you want to do, your last thing you want to do is just open up an app and think, What am I going to do today? And then just because what’ll happen is what happens to all of us.

Matt Tompkins: You, we’ve all done this. You open up TikTok and next thing you know, you look at the clock and four hours have passed by and you’re like, did I just enter a time warp? What just happened? So don’t do that. Instead, create a planner, a schedule every single day for one hour. I’m going to dedicate it to that one social media channel.

And that’s going to give you a lot of intent, a lot of focus. It’s going to prevent that time suckage from happening. It’s going to give you a plan. What is your message for this month? Is there a term, a phrase, a thing that you want to own for this year? You know, in 2024, we’re going to own the phrase meatball because, you know, we’re an Italian restaurant, meatball, meatball.

So we can figure out a plan for the entire year, divide that up into quarters, into months, into weeks, and all of a sudden you’re going to have something that resembles an actual strategy.

One of the thing that’s really important to keep in mind with social media is that we don’t own social media. We don’t own the content that we’ve created and posted on social media. We have given it away to these social media platforms for free, and then they are leasing it back to us and they are setting the terms. So I just spent thousands of dollars on this video promoting my business.

Matt Tompkins: I uploaded it to Facebook and then Facebook now owns it. I just given it to them for free and they set the terms. They say, Well, if you want anybody to actually see this video now, you got to pay us or we’re going to suppress it. And that’s how that’s their business model.

So it’s just important to keep in mind that you always want to point people back to something you own, i.e. your website, your mailing list. Last two things here that I think are super important real quick. One is to always follow the data points that matter. It’s easy to it’s easy with social media to manipulate the analytics, to show good or bad or whatever we want. It really is.

So you need to focus on the analytics. The data points that truly matter for moving your business forward. The three I would start with are pretty simple and straight forward. One is leads, qualified leads, and then sales. Sales pretty obvious. That’s closed deals. That’s new revenue moving your business forward. Right. But if you’re going to try and troubleshoot, if you’re doing a good job with your marketing or the marketing agency that you’ve hired, leads and qualified leads are really they’re great tools for really fine tuning your marketing.

So leads, qualified leads and then sales. And the last thing I really want to impress upon you here today is to always question why you’re doing something.

Matt Tompkins: Don’t just do it because your competitors are doing it, or because you see Pepsi-Cola doing it, or the big companies in your industry doing it. You really need to put in the time and do your homework, do the research, figure out where your ideal customer is.

Those those three basic ingredients to a successful marketing campaign. Trust me, they are fundamental and universal. Know who your target market is. Know what your message is to reach them and your form of media to reach them. And while social media is yes, a form of media, I mean, it has it in the name. It is not a strategy. And having a marketing strategy is the difference between your business succeeding and failing. Thanks once again for joining us here on Midwest Mindset.

And if you want to know if your marketing is working, if you would like to measure your marketing, we have a free measure, my marketing tool, the link is in the show notes. You just click on the link, take advantage. It is free. There are no strings attached and we’ll walk you through the process to find out if your marketing is working, whether it’s you doing it yourself.

Where most of us business owners start out, or if you’ve hired an agency and you just don’t know, you know, maybe you even have a hunch that you’re being taken advantage of. Well, we can find out. Measure my marketing.

The link is in the show notes, and we’ll see you on the next episode.