BlitzMetrics

5 Tips to Make Facebook Your Lead Driving Machine

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Facebook’s lead generation capabilities are powerful. With the right strategy, you can drive warm prospects to landing pages, registration forms, or checkouts for no more than $1.

And yes…

… it’s possible.

Tip 1: Get your plumbing in place.

What’s Plumbing?

It’s the term we use for tracking. This includes analytics and tracking pixels aka “tags” that you can add to your site using Google Tag Manager.

Without tracking, there’s no attribution of conversions to specific ads or landing pages. This means lost revenue, since you’ll be paying for ads without knowing which ones are driving sales.

Plumbing is critical for analytics, driving more revenue from abandoning audiences, and for creating lookalikes (to find similar customers). By putting users into buckets you can remarket to them, creating a personalized customer experience – a step in nurturing folks through funnel logic.

Pro Tip: Use the Facebook pixel instead of the Conversion Tracking pixel, since Facebook has shifted away from it.

We have a do it yourself guide with checklists to help with implementation.
Tip 2: Boost to audiences that are warm.

Use custom audiences (your email list or your website traffic). They’ve already opted in and consume your content, so they’re more likely to want to hear more or buy.

You can build lookalike audiences from these lists to find similar customers too.

Website Custom Audiences (WCAs) are retargeting audiences who have visited other pages, but have not ended up on your “success page”. This “bucket” is typically full of folks right at the bottom of your funnel who need only a nudge to convert.

You must have plumbing in place first– otherwise Facebook can’t do the targeting for you.

Tip 3: Create similar ads to choose “winners” and boost evergreen

Ads manager allows you to “create a similar ad set”. When targeting audiences, start off with interest, workplace, and even behavioral targeting, but don’t do these all at once. Create similar ads with a few specific interests and boost them all at once.

Once the ads start picking up traffic (over 500 impressions), pick out the interests that are performing the best (low Cost per Engagement (CPE), high relevance, high engagement).

Start combining effective interests together to start building saved audiences that you can boost to directly from future posts.

This “scientific method” of targeting is great for discovering ad/audience combinations that can be boosted evergreen.

When a piece of content drives consistent engagement at a CPM of $2 or less, set it as “ongoing”, so it can continuously push traffic through your funnel (this can be done on Twitter and LinkedIn too).

Alison Herzog is an expert marketing strategist, thought leader, and figurehead for women in the workplace. We promoted an article about her on our Facebook page using this method.

We promoted against 5 different interests and compiled an ultimate “engagement” audience, which made a massive jump from a max of 27 engagements to 119. The relevance score sat at 8 for some time with a CPE of $0.17 (before the audience started to burn out), indicating or goals, content, and targeting were all aligned.

Tip 4: Video. Video. Video.

Have you scrolled through your news feed lately? Video is hot on social and with Live being Facebook’s latest release, it gets favored in the news feed.

Use every opportunity to create video content, because it will drive excellent engagement for a fraction of a penny.

Tip 5: Micro-targeted ads

Some of these companies that are spending 20k a day target broad audiences and lose money doing spray and pray advertising.

Facebook lets you micro-target using the Dollar A Day strategy– the biggest bang for your buck on social.

Hint: you can do this on Twitter and LinkedIn too!

Because you’re targeting audiences of less than 1,000 people, you stretch your ad spend for maximum impact – hitting just the influencers.

Do you have complaints about the new iPhone? What would you like to say to Tim Cook?

Or perhaps you’d like to avoid the round and round with customer service like we did with Uber.

We have a guide on this featuring stepwise checklists, so you can do it too. This is the ultimate form of lead generation, since you incept the executives and influencers at the companies that you’d like to work with.

Who’s your dream client? Write a blog post or article on a high authority site and micro-target them.

Then let me know, so I can applaud you for it!

Have you used Facebook for lead generation? Let me know how in the comments below (tell me about your saucy lead ad tips).

Humanizing B2B: Connecting with real people in a machine-driven world – Interview with Kelsey Carroll of HPE.

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One of our main goals at BlitzMetrics is bringing out the human element in an otherwise machine and data-driven industry– to give it that human touch.

Kelsey Carroll leads branded social content for Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. Prior to her current role, she ran PR for an independent film studio in Austin, TX and then got her start in marketing with the integrated agency, W2O Group. When she’s not reviewing ad copy and creative, she can be found eating Mexican food and seeking out the perfect karaoke song.

She recently answered some of our questions and shared some advice on the importance of the human element while applying it to B2B campaigns:

Why is being human important (especially in B2B tech)?

The robots haven’t taken over (yet). While it’s true that many commoditized, repeatable tasks have been automated, B2B tech sales has remained a largely relational person-to-person business. People like doing business with people that they like and trust… it’s that simple.

But how can a big brand come off as likable, relatable? Being human is important, especially in B2B tech, because we believe there is a person behind every transaction and we attempt to connect with those people through shared experience. For example, one of Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s key partners is Dreamworks Animation. Instead of saying, HPE FlexFabric increases rendering efficiency, we might lean into the story that families love Kung Fu Panda and HPE technology makes that possible.

Since people are getting better at spotting and avoiding ads, how can you make sure your ads attract the right users’ attention?

Let’s say you’ve done everything right in the social advertising world, according to Dennis Yu. The plumbing is set, your targeting is on point. You’ve optimized the process so your content has landed in front of the right people at the right time.  You’ve “hacked” the mysterious algorithms (!) But, there’s still a person on the other end receiving your message. That person can skip, scroll past or even block your ad if it’s not useful, entertaining or valuable. Ads that attract and attain the right users’ attention are usually the ones that embody at least one of those key attributes.

How can content marketers make an emotional connection and get an audience to care about their brand?

As content marketers, we need to be honest with ourselves. Even though I am not necessarily the target customer for B2B tech sales, I’m always asking myself, and challenging my team to ask themselves, “Would I share this? Would this make me smile? How useful it this?” It has to pass the human litmus test, or else it will get scrolled past, skipped over. There is such a competition for people’s attention these days and any the most captivating, through-provoking, visual content will be worthy of anyone’s time, let alone your target customers’.

Social media provides a unique opportunity to make a connection, then track behaviors and responses to form a relationship, over time. From awareness to interest, to consideration, and ultimately, conversion, the narrative should remain consistent. It’s like someone who goes from being a stranger to acquaintance, and then a friend who becomes your best friend. The person doesn’t change, you just get to know them better, while they build credibility and gain your trust.

What’s the best channel to reach a B2B audience?

It depends on what your goal is, of course. If you’re going for more of an awareness play, I say, go where the eyeballs are. Facebook and Instagram’s ad tools allow for some pretty sophisticated targeting, plus they reach almost 2 billion of the world’s population.

Since one-to-one social selling is more about finding that exact right person within a company that makes the buying decisions, LinkedIn is most likely the best channel to search and locate for that person. With tools like Sales Navigator you can track and qualify leads all within the LinkedIn environment, which seems pretty efficient.

What advice would you give to a brand that doesn’t have a big budget for creating content or promoting it on social?

I think a common feeling towards social media marketing for small businesses is that they tried it and “it didn’t work.” Marketing on social media isn’t any easier than any other method, but it’s far more efficient.There are a variety of different levers that can be pulled, like width and depth of your targeting, and small tweaks in graphic or messaging. The more disciplined marketers will A/B/C/D/E test these different variables in order to optimize.

Sometimes smaller brands can create their own attention by being the early bird as social channels roll out new features. As we saw with Facebook Live, the News Feed has been favoring live content and brands who leveraged saw a bump in engagement and reach.

All in all, focus your efforts on one or two pieces of hero content that tell your story in a visual way. Once you nail down who your specific target audiences (the more specific the better), try promoting it for just a dollar a day. It’s a small enough budget that you can learn as you go. Once you’re more comfortable and you’re seeing a response, you can add fuel to the fire as you optimize.

What are your predictions for 2017 marketing trends?

Share of attention is shifting to dynamic & easily-digestible, mobile content

There’s a palpable tension building as mobile migrates toward mostly-video (i.e. Snapchat, Instagram) slamming into the fact that no one has the patience to watch videos that aren’t extremely captivating. The problem– or opportunity, if you’re savvy– is that by nature, every brand cannot create “extremely captivating” content. The cream will always rise to the top. Consistency is key for strong brand awareness. If a brand has a strong narrative in place, it’s easy to translate it from LinkedIn to Twitter, and maybe even Snapchat. Every marketing campaign should have a strong, concise message that is easily replicated across different platforms.

Remember these takeaways:

  • Show that there’s people behind the brand. Focus on relatable messages rather and shared experiences.
  • There’s people on the other end receiving your message- so make sure your message captures their attention and meets their needs.
  • The best channels for reaching B2B depend on your goals, but LinkedIn wins due to refinement and access to decision makers.
  • For small budget efforts, focus on content that tells your story and target a highly refined version of your intended audience with a $1.00/day budget. This provides a test bed to play around and optimize your message to see what works.

Are you thinking in terms of business-to-business, or human-to-human?

 

Publishing Your Unpublished (Dark) Posts on Facebook

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If you’re running ads on Facebook, you probably already know what a unpublished (dark) post is. Just in case you don’t know, it’s a post that is used to promote your message to people without being on your Facebook page. I wrote an article on the HostGator blog if you need more detail on what a dark post is and how to create it.

Dark posts are great because you can do many different things with them. One example is that you can run different ads to test how a message will perform in front of an audience. But after you’ve found the winning message, what do you do now? Recreate the post and press Publish?

Sure – you can do that. But then you lose the value of the ads you paid for, the social proof. All of the likes, comments, and shares are now gone because it’s a new post.

With this post, I’m going to show you how you can publish your post live to your page so that it can begin earning organic reach. Since it already has social proof from the paid reach, it will publish to the page with the same reach and hopefully gather more engagement.
Please watch this video for more details. If you are unable to watch the video, I’ve included the steps below.


 


Step 1 – In your ad manager, click the hamburger on the top left of the page.

 Choosing Page Posts in Power Editor

Step 2 – Hover over “All Tools” and then select the Page Posts option. This will show you all of your dark posts by default. If you need to, you can change your page on the top left.

Options Within Power Editor's All Tools

Step 3 – Select the post you wish to publish. You can use their search feature to help identify your post.

How To Get An Ad Post on Your Facebook Page

Step 4 – Next to the search feature is the Actions drop down. Click that and select Publish. This will publish the post live to your page.

Publishing An Ad Post

I hope you found this tip to be helpful. If you have any questions about these steps, or what you can do in Facebook in general, please leave a comment and we will be happy to give you more details.

 

How to save and edit Facebook Live videos

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If you’re doing a lot of Facebook Live videos, perhaps for a conference, then you may have lamented the inability to edit it. There’s a quick way for you to download any video off of Facebook- here’s how:

On a desktop device, right click and select “Show Video URL”:

A box will pop up. Copy the URL that appears in it:

Now paste it into your address bar, but replace “https://www.” with just “m.”, so that it looks like “m.facebook.com/….”

You’ll now see the page in Mobile mode, which comes with the ability to save the video file as a .mp4. Simply click “Play” and then look in the bottom right corner.

Your browser will download the movie file into your Downloads folder:

You can now open it in any movie editor to do with as you please. If you don’t have one, you can use an online tool such as online-video-cutter.com to trim out unwanted sections:

And that’s how simple it is to download and edit Facebook Live videos! Note that you can also use this on normal videos as well. Perfect for building your speaker reel or snagging that perfect little clip.

 

 

Automotive Social Media Charlatans Exposed

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I have been a part of the automotive aftermarket for over seven years now. Companies and brands of all shapes and sizes are realizing the relevance and power of social media. While their efforts are admirable, many are not capturing the characteristics of the aftermarket that make it unique from all others.  That being said, there is a stark contrast within the measurable, mechanical world of the automotive aftermarket with the fluffy, mysterious world of social.

Bobby Likis host of the Bobby Likis Car Clinic radio show.

So I was wondering…
Does the mechanic ask you what type of wrench to use in fixing your car?

Would you trust a Ferrari mechanic who has never seen a Ferrari before?

Pros fix your problems, have legitimate certifications, and can provide a well-defined outcome with reasonable certainty.

But in social media, we have no such thing yet.
So to avoid being a self-proclaimed social media expert, focus on being a driver (no pun intended) of business value in your area.

There is an assumption that if you know how to post to a social media account is sufficient.
This ability alone does not make you an expert.

The automotive aftermarket segment is like no other, with companies that operate as B2B, B2C and hybrids of both.
Knowing the tone and personality of the brand, and having an understanding of the customer base and audience will allow for good content and even better targeting.

If you don’t know about antifreeze, you’re not going to be able to credibly write content for Prestone.

If you don’t know about how to modify Corvettes for maximum performance, you’ll fail responding to die-hard Lingenfelter fans.

The social media expert dies

Sure, there still will be colleges offering degrees in social media.

And the need for strong measurement in social isn’t going to go away either.

But the one-dimensional social media expert will be extinct.

If you don’t have deep vertical expertise for a particular client, you can’t help them in their social media.

Sorry.  Just won’t work.

Your knowledge of how to pin and tweet won’t make up for lack of vertical knowledge.
Same is true for whatever set of tools you employ.

Here’s Rob Schermerhorn, who is a Ferrari mechanic.

Because he’s able to post content that Ferrari owners relate to and because he knows where Ferrari owners hang out (Ferrari Chat), when he runs ads, he gets leads.
This is the GCTA viral cycle:

Goals: Drive leads for his Ferrari tuning service
Content: Lots and lots of examples of him tuning Ferraris over the last 20 years– going faster for cheaper. You’d be surprised at what penny pinchers these guys are, but that’s another story.
Targeting: Ferrari owners, not the 18 year olds who are fans of the Ferrari page. Choose the right interests and demographics. Income works, too.
Amplification: This is where we run ads, but we call it “amplification” instead– the combinations of content and targeting to drive relevant traffic.

These are the mechanics of social media amplification.

  • Miss any part of this cycle and the wheel collapses.
  • If you don’t have awesome content, all the analytics and targeting in the world won’t save you.
  • If you don’t have proper targeting, no amount of measurement or content will win.
  • If you have clear goals, solid content, and strong targeting, but no amplification– well, you still might win, but you’ll be running on a donut tire.

How are you doing against these factors?

They’re not magical.
It’s just that not many people get this owner’s manual when they get their Facebook page, twitter account, or whatever network profile.

How to get your audience to segment themselves

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Today, a few members of the Blitz team tuned into “4 Steps To Creating Personalized, Segmented Campaigns For Your Audience”, a Perpetual Traffic podcast featuring Ryan Levesque. Here’s our thoughts:

Why is it that people won’t stop sending cold email blasts and spending countless ad dollars on broadly targeted, misfiring ads? We know ads are most effective when they cater to specific “buckets” of people – targeted audiences.

We’ve seen this with remarketed ads – ones that follow you, coaxing you to convert. With plumbing in place, businesses can track behaviors, like when you visited the Nike site and spent an hour deciding whether or not to buy the new “Free Runs”.

Details like this allow for the most personalized digital ads experience – tying a user all the way to a specific product that they’ve shown interest in, but haven’t yet purchased.

Ryan’s developed a unique process to magnify and segment his target audiences – he just asks prospects about their concerns. It was in the niche industry of Orchids (yes, plants!) that he tested this method.

Ryan’s “Ask” method, is driven by quizzes and “Deep Dive” surveys.

“Find out what their pain is in a very deep and profound way. Then you learn specific language patterns, echo back that pain in their exact words, and solve it for them.”

– Ryan Levesque

When you group folks into these “buckets” you can customize your funnel and user experience. Nurturing leads down the funnel is key to a campaign’s success. Nothing better than marketing to people’s self-addressed needs.

After running surveys, Ryan realized there’s 4 main concerns or questions that folks had:

  1.     How to get your orchid to re-flower
  2.     How to re-pot your orchid
  3.     How to save a sick or dying orchid
  4.     People who are given an orchid as a gift.

He customizes user experiences through quizzes and survey. People who received an orchid as a gift would be directed to a landing page on “How To Care For Your New Orchid”.

The power in this technique comes from the target audience’s sense of being understood.

You’re essentially asking, “What can I do to help you?” and creating a solution that they’ll pay for. We’d like to test this and see what power can come from pairing surveys with large WCAs to create a double whammy effect.

Don’t settle for our summary. Check out the podcast to find out more on how Ryan went from $375/mo. to $25,000/mo. with his Orchid business and continued to apply his method for others.

Are you using remarketing techniques? How about surveys and quizzes? Let us know how your campaigns are doing in the comment section below.

12 Things I learned at SLC/SEM

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  1. Better to spend 5 minutes a day optimizing than one hour a week optimizing– frequent, lightweight touches are key with Facebook ads because of progressive boosting.
  2. Your Facebook paid metrics are undercounted– Facebook places the spillover effect of paid into organic, which can often be 10X bigger than the organic component.  This is separate from cross-device and direct/none issues in Google Analytics. It means that boosted posts create impact beyond that post alone- great content creates great word of mouth.
  3. Forget about manual bidding on Facebook– just use oCPM, since your issue is not the bid, but the relevancy between your content and targeting.
  4. You should be spending 80% of your time boosting posts to various saved target audiences, even though boosts are 20% of your budget. Start with a dollar a day (so $7 for 7 days) and progressively add more if the performance is strong. You can now select engagement or website clicks for boost objective. https://blitzmetrics.com/idea-facebook-funnel-backwards/
  5. Facebook is one component of your remarketing efforts, so you’d want to run Google and Facebook remarketing together using the same rules. Remarketing is a fancy way of saying “user behavior targeting”, meaning that when someone clicks in any channel, we remarket the next piece of content to them.
  6. Use Google Tag Manager or Adobe DTM to drive all your pixels– way more powerful and accurate if you have more than 5 pixels.
  7. Use Business Manager to manage your Facebook assets for the same reason– you’ll avoid heartache later by doing it now. 
  8. 95% of “broken” Facebook campaigns have an issue with GCT (goals, content, targeting), as opposed to anything that could be solved by knowledge of Facebook ads. Because of this, your ability to follow a process is far more important than any PPC skills you have. https://www.tabsite.com/blog/dennis-yu-answers-toughest-facebook-questions/
  9. GCT is “strategy” or another way to say funnel sequences– it’s channel independent. Strategy doesn’t change, while tactics are channel level (SEO, PPC, etc) and change all the time. Tools, therefore, are not strategic.
  10. If I had an extra hour of time to invest, I’d put it into building process among our people instead of getting deeper into tools.  Most companies chase shiny objects instead of getting the basics right.
  11. Your own personal branding as a PPC professional is critical to opening doors for you at Google, Facebook, and other companies you’ll work at over the course of your career. So reach out and “interview” these people for your blog. Make them look good by adding value before you ask, and they will remember you.
  12. “Inception” is influencing the influencer– to set up employer targets and boost to these for a dollar a day. Have your customers and the influencers in your vertical do the work for you. https://learn.infusionsoft.com/marketing/advertising/how-much-do-facebook-ads-cost-a-budgeting-guide-for-small-businesses

A Surprise from Social Media Dallas!

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IMG_2087
This morning I found a package from Laurie Shook of Social Media Dallas.

You know the feeling when you get an unexpected gift from a old friend?  That’s how I felt.

Laurie had taken the time to collect quotes from various Social Media Dallas members, print them out and stick them in a Scotty Vest.  This vest has many pockets, so there were 11 cool quotes placed in 11 pockets.

Social Media Dallas Vest

Two of these pockets had a crisp $100 bill with a quote from Benjamin Franklin.  And one had a quote from Abraham Lincoln, accompanied by a $5 bill.

Just imagine if I got a quote from Salmon P. Chase, who is on the $10,000 bill.

In addition to speaking at Social Media Dallas (where we discussed the “Facebook for $1 a day” technique, I had the honor of teaching two SIG (Special Interest Group) classes.  We covered the power of checklists, the 9 Triangles (core of everything we know), and how to build a proper social media plan.

The following months had Scott Monty and Brian Fanzo as featured speakers, so we’re in good company.

Thank you, Laurie, for being an amazing host and making me feel so welcome.
Looking forward to the continuation of our training in Dallas!

How to go from a one man show to an agency

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You’re good at what you do. Clients wouldn’t hire you if you weren’t. But you’re afraid that by hiring more people, you’ll lose the personal touch and the quality of your services will go down. At the same time, your business is growing and you’re not going to be able sustain this current effort level.

So something has to give: scale up (what you’d like to do), decline business (not smart in the long run), or work harder (impossible). Clients come to you because of your expertise and relationships.When you’re small, you are the face of your business, so your personal brand and company brand are synonymous.

To survive in the world of business, you have to find ways to start working ON your business instead of IN your business.

First, start documenting how to do the simple things. Billing clients, weekly performance reporting, and other simple stuff should be driven by checklists.You can have junior folks do these things so you can focus on the 10% of stuff that is truly high impact.

Do you know what items are highest impact?

Probably those that are strategic in nature, leaving tactical stuff to be competently handled by the rest of your team. Your documentation should be step-by-step checklists, assisted with video training snippets to make it easier to digest.

 

Use this same training to qualify your prospective staff as a real-life litmus test of what to expect. In doing so, you’ve also solved the burden of having to interview and qualify people one at a time– a real time suck. Tools like Infusionsoft and ClassMarker let you run people through self-serve training and quizzes which you can use in the qualification process.

Boil down your offering to just the essentials.Make a package that you can reliably and consistently execute.Then you know that your training and agency offering are in alignment. Clients don’t want custom, as much as you think– they want results.

Before you argue that this sounds cookie-cutter or eliminates thinking, would you say that a Tesla is low quality?

 

Even movie studios have a process for how they create films– a framework that enables creativity versus no structure leading to chaos. If you seek to do things differently for the sake of doing it differently, be prepared to fail a lot. You want to use proven techniques, especially if you’re doing something that can have standards, such as advertising, website building, or anything in digital.

Get out of the day-to-day. Hire a project manager if you need to.

Ironically, if you truly want to help your clients, you’ll focus more on troubleshooting than on administrative details you can delegate. This requires that you trust the people you’ve been training.

We look at three criteria for success:

People: Good character, since that can’t be trained.

Process: Do they know what to do?

Platform: Have you trained them on how to do it?

If you have these three, then you can attend every other meeting instead of all meetings (alternating tactical versus strategic).

One effective strategy to initially wean clients off you personally is to say that you’ll show up mid-way through the meeting. They’ll later find that you didn’t have to be there the whole time, giving your people a chance to shine.Don’t worry about “cutting out” of meetings — if you’re really that good at what you do, clients would expect that you are delegating to handle the workload.

Ideally, you should just review the work instead of doing it all yourself. If your process is solid (checklists with training videos), you should have consistent delivery.

Follow the Content>Checklist>Software process to scale up.

You can share your training publicly.

Don’t be afraid of your “competitors” stealing your know-how or clients deciding they don’t need you. If that were to happen, then you don’t know enough or have enough depth to deserve serving clients. What happens in most cases is that prospective clients appreciate your sophistication and this INCREASES your new client growth. So engage in “content marketing” with no fear.

Fire the bottom third or more of your clients — the ones that are a big headache or make your staff unhappy. The clients that treat you best are usually the ones that pay the most and demand the least.

You should keep the  kind of clients you want more of– handing the rest to “competitors.”This way, you have consistency across what you offer and can double down on process bits instead of trying to do everything.

The corollary to focusing on the ONE thing you do well– then doing it over and over– is to say what you DON’T do.

We like to say we don’t make creatives, don’t do SEO, don’t do community management, and don’t do strategy. What we do is implementation– drive traffic and conversions on existing assets that are already converting. The marketplace will believe you when you demonstrate you’re world class at doing one thing repeatedly well.

A good test for a great client is to raise prices– gasp, I said it. If you’re truly delivering value, they’ll have no problem paying more. Even I often struggle with mustering the courage to do this, but if you’re proving your value, then making the case should be easy.

You don’t want to be the cheapest and you do want a few clients to balk at your price. If nobody ever balks at your price, you’re undercharging for most deals and those who are paying less will often think you’re not as good, since your prices are low– a double whammy.

Elevate your team. As these junior staff move their way through your checklists and up your leveling system, encourage and praise them. Build their personal brands and give credit where it’s due, publicly where possible.

The sum of the personal branding efforts of your teammates is your content marketing at the company level. This way, it’s not about you, unless you mistakenly named the company after you– change it, if you’ve made that mistake. At this point, you’ve gone through the steps to grow your business versus just being another employee working in your business. I think you’ll find that developing others is more rewarding than trying to micromanage every bit yourself.

You’ll have to be patient and tolerate some level of work that is worse than what you’d do personally, but if you have rapid iteration, mistakes are small and adjustments are quick.

We call this “trial and error” process MAA for Metrics>Analysis>Action, and it’s fundamental to marketing.

If your training content is solid, you’ll have produced checklists for execution. These checklists repeated at scale create opportunities for automation– so you’d build or hire this out.

When you have a repeatable process, you effectively have a franchise, with you as the first franchisee.

You’re blazing the path for others to follow, so they can learn in your footsteps, do according to your checklists, and teach others who are a couple levels below them.  We call this LDT for Learn>Do>Teach:

If you find these principles powerful, check out all nine triangles and discover how they fit together.

Have you implemented any of these processes in your business?

Want to read more by Dennis Yu? For more content follow him here:

http://www.adweek.com/socialtimes/author/dennis

https://www.facebook.com/dennisyu

https://twitter.com/dennisyu

Why your personal brand is more important than your company.

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A long-time friend of BlitzMetrics, Leonard Kim, constantly inspires us with his personal branding insights. I recently sat down with him to learn how he became a personal branding leader:

What inspired you to work in your industry?

I tried a few different projects in the meantime until one day it dawned on me: I had already figured out a formula on how I developed my personal brand.

I tried it on a few clients as case studies- It worked, every time. I was sitting on a way to mentor others to duplicate my exact success, without being stuck working 120 hours a week, but I just didn’t see it earlier. The way to help others duplicate my success is through the course I have set up at InfluenceTree.com.

I saw on your website that you wrote a book on social media. Can you explain the primary purpose of social media for the average business?

What type of business you have doesn’t matter, whether it be a cancer center, nursing home, or even a manufacturing company.

You need to be on social media.

Social media isn’t just a way for you to talk to people who may potentially visit you. It’s a way of getting your name out there into the world. So when someone needs your services, they can find you.

There are many separate components to this, all equally valuable. The most important ones:

  1. Locations: these integrate into mapping software, which helps consumers find your business.
  2. Reviews: which help consumers identify which business they want to work with.
  3. Advertising: which helps get your business in front of more people who are actively looking for what you have to offer?

What exactly is brand management, and why is it important?

Your brand is the most valuable thing you have. It’s how your consumers see you — and what keeps you fresh in their mind when they think of who to speak to when they need services.

Let’s say you get into trouble and you need a lawyer. There are thousands of criminal defense attorneys in Los Angeles. But how do you know which one to choose?

Let’s go into the mind of a future defendant. They will be scared and won’t know what to do. First, they might Google criminal defense attorney, but whose names will they recognize?

They could read reviews and ask friends. But that one incessant ad on the radio or TV… that one will likely be who they select.

Why? By managing their branding properly, they became the sought after expert in the criminal defense field.

How do you stay ahead of the curve in the industry?

Have a proactive mindset.

You have to stay consistent with what you are doing, yet at the same time continually test new theories and concepts to see what works. When you find something that works, keep doing it, while looking for the next thing you can improve upon, then the next thing and the next thing.

Without constant improvement, you will never stay ahead of the curve, then you will become complacent and may end up being replaced by a competitor.

Do you have any advice for startups or entrepreneurs?

You’re an entrepreneur running a startup who’s taken the risk of a lifetime to go out there and pursue your dreams. You know the odds are against you and that 95 percent of businesses fail within the first five years.

You know that you will have to sacrifice everything you have ever loved to get to where you want to be, but you are doing it anyways.

It’s applaudable but won’t get you to where you want to be. The only way you’re going to be able to increase your odds and achieve true success is to put your personal brand at the front of the company. Because guess what, it doesn’t matter how great your products or services are, no one cares unless they know who is running the company.

They want a leader who they can buy into, someone who knows what they are talking about who’s an expert in the field. Someone they can feel compassion for, an underdog that they can root on to victory.

Otherwise, you’re just another company in a pool of a million. And guess what, your unique selling proposition isn’t that strong when you’re just another face in the crowd. You need to work on your personal brand so that you stick out.

One book that changed your life?

“The Four Agreements” by Don Miguel Ruiz. The principles are simple. The execution is simple. All you have to do is adapt four new mindsets and daily habits, but the results are life-changing.

Three goals you’d like to accomplish (Note: they can be long-term and /or short term, serious, crazy, etc.)?

I tried having goals in the past. When I was 21, I wanted to sell 25 cars in a calendar month. I sold 22 or 23. I made five figure and was the #2 top salesperson that month. But when I went home, I was disappointed and angry at myself for not hitting my goal.

Les Brown says shoot for the stars and if you miss, you will still land on the moon. I think that’s bologna. You’ll land wherever you land, but you will be frustrated, angry, and disappointed in yourself for missing your mark and won’t be motivated to try again.

I don’t have goals. Instead, I create habits that I stick to each day. What I do is I reverse engineer what it takes to hit something, figure out what actions are necessary to get there, then work on those actions every day until they’re habits.

By focusing on the habits, I’m continually surprised with the results I get. I never thought I would have 2 million views on my content within the first six months, let alone 10 million a year-and-a-half into writing. Or that I would have a quarter of a million social media followers, or be featured in leading global media publications. But it happened because I was focusing on the habit, not on the result.

When you buy into the result, you are left with disappointment. When you let go of the result and focus strictly on the action, you’re continually surprised and happy with the progress you make.

What do you feel makes you stand out in the market?

People buy into me first, not my company. Once they buy into me, they want to learn more about my company.

But why do they buy into me?

I’m honest and genuine. I say things as they are and speak from the heart. I don’t do anything extraordinary to stand out, but do what all of us fear. I share pieces of myself and embarrassing moments that people can potentially ridicule me over. But for some reason they call me brave or inspiring instead.

You should try it. You’ll be surprised at the results you get by being open and vulnerable.

What challenges do you face when helping others build their brand?

People want to lead with their company instead of their personal brand. They understand that they need a personal brand, but they’re stuck thinking the company needs to lead.

Your company needs a leader that the world can buy into, not just your employees.

If you’re an inventor, share your vision on why you created the product. Not why it’s some revolutionary product that some company developed. No one cares about the company.

Companies don’t get medals of technology and innovation from the President. People like Mark Humayun from Keck Medicine of USC do.

But guess what happens when people get that medal? It automatically elevates the status of the company that they are associated with. So why keep trying to win when you’re playing with a self-imposed disability, when you can kill two birds with one stone by elevating yourself, which ultimately elevates your brand?

If you can collaborate with one major brand who would it be and why?

Do you remember how T-Mobile just used to be a discount phone company? Well, I’ve been with them for over a decade so I knew what their brand proposition once was. Nowadays, they are seen as innovators and are leading the market. But how did they do that?

They put John Legere in charge. When he walked in as CEO, he went out there and used his personal brand to revolutionize the telecom industry. He made statements and promises that a telecom company couldn’t make.

He spoke with a voice that the company voice couldn’t embellish.  By utilizing his personal brand at the forefront of the company, he made T-Mobile one of the most sought after telecom companies in the industry.

If I could work with one major brand, it would be one in an industry that’s been beat up and criticized over the decade, and help them recover their positioning at the forefront, much like how John Legere did for T-Mobile.

What is one major failure that you’ve had and how did you overcome it?

Back in November of 2011, I had barely started living on my own again after almost going homeless and having to move back in with my grandmother. I was working at an entry level job at a Fortune 100 company, but I was still trying to be an entrepreneur on the side.

I tried to put together a few business deals, but they all fell apart. I started talking to my ex again and all she would do was call me a complete loser and make fun of me because of how unsuccessful I was. Then I started dating a girl who ended up kicking me out of my own hotel room and charged a love kit to my room.

I was so devastated that I didn’t know what to do. I felt like the purpose of my life was to continually fail. I had nothing.

All the startups I worked with failed. My business deals were poisoned. I was sleeping on a sofa and couldn’t afford to live on my own. I was mocked and ridiculed by the love of my life. The woman I thought I had something with slept with someone else in my hotel. I only earned $13,223.33 for the year. Things were so bad, I wanted to kill myself.

I wrote a letter to my ex saying goodbye. I planned out how to do it. I role-played every scenario in my head until I found one with a high probability of success. The day I planned to do it, my ex came and saved me and talked me out of doing it, by doing what she does best. Telling me how stupid and ignorant I am.

She helped me get out of my own mind where I was drowning myself into an endless pool of misery and helped me see hope at the end of the tunnel.

I used that opportunity as a second chance at life. I wasn’t in a hurry to go out and succeed. Instead, I wanted to go back and find myself. When you work in startups, you spend so much time working, you don’t have time to reflect. So I spent an entire year reflecting back upon all the decisions in my life that got me to this point, then searched endlessly for the lessons of each one.

By the middle of 2013, I had started to encompass what led me to where I was, what I learned and how to do better the next time around. I also dabbled in sharing a few of my thoughts, being more open with friends and trying to be as honest with myself as possible. Next thing you know, I gave writing a try, then shared what I learned in the process. Now, I’m here.

But I could’ve been dead at the end of 2011 without ever having achieved anything at all with my life. So it just goes to show you, that anyone can really go out there and make it, no matter how unsuccessful or scared you may be. Because trust me, I still feel fear every single day, but I do what I can to overcome it and push forward. Usually, I’m quite pleased with the results.