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Tips To Break Your Creative Block – Creativity Series Part 1

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Watch Dr. Rodney Hill, the Futurist for Texas A&M University, explain how to get into a creative “flow” when you just can’t seem to come up with any new ideas.

Transcript

Robert Riggs: Hi, we’re Robert and Brad, and we’re here with the Clarity clip of the week and with Dr. Rodney Hill, the futurist at Texas A&M University to talk creativity. Now, Rodney, a lot of people think that not everybody can be creative but you’ve got a process you take your students through where you get there.

Rodney Hill: I think everyone can be creative. It’s just through the school systems, they’re not exposed to creativity. In fact, it clips their wings most of the time. If they try to be an original or creative, or come up with unusual answers, they’re slapped down; they expect students to reproduce knowledge. You memorize this, you feed it back on a test, but they don’t ask them to ever create anything. So that’s what’s happened to kids, so I have to show them how to get into their creative mode, and a lot of people call it “flow.” Essentially, when you’re in flow, both hemispheres lock into the frontal lobe and it’s referred to as optimum behavior.

Brad Besancon: One of the things we’ve noticed is, especially with our clients, is they have no idea how to get into the flow. Is there some tips, maybe three or four tips where, did you take your students through, it kind of gets them to flow part 1 or flow 1.0?

Rodney: Sure.

Brad: What are some of those?

Rodney: Well, getting into the first day, I’ll pass out red apples to a hundred in the class, and they’re all sitting there with a red apple wondering.

Robert: [laughing] They’re supposed to give that to you.

Rodney: Yes. So I have them either lean back they can lay down on the floor, in the aisles, whatever they want to do, and then I take them to an exercise that was written by the associate dean of engineering out of Stanford. Stanford requires 2-3 hour classes on creativity to graduate any engineering curriculum.

Brad: Interesting.

Rodney: And so anyhow, they go through a whole range of what it’s like to eat an apple. About a minute into it, they have to bite into the apple, and we imagine the apple, the sunlight going in this apple’s form, the way the skin reflects the pattern of [00:02:16], streaks and dots, not just one color. But anyhow, it goes everything, from going into the ground, coming up the sap, flowing into the blossoms, etc. but essentially, they are imagining, and what’s really interesting, this is the first time and they’re just sort of like in a daze when they get out of it. Now, the second class period, I use an exercise from the Olympic Training Center which is progressive relaxation exercise where you flex your hand and your shoulders, you go through a whole range of things, and then you release it so it gets them into that idea but a lot of them all of a sudden realize that when they are creative, they go through a series of things.

Brad: So if you had to tell a business that looks at Robert and I and says, “Guys, I’m on a mental block. I’ve been doing this for two years on social media. We’re writing blogs–

Robert: Two weeks.

Brad: Or two weeks. [laughing]

Robert: We walk in with an apple.

Brad: Yes, should we bring an apple? What would you say for a company that says, “I’ve got this team of people and we just seem to be regurgitating and nothing new’s coming out,” what are some real specific steps that they can do?

Rodney: Oh, okay. There’s an exercise that you can take them through. One is, pass out, get about halfway through the second lecture on creativity and say, “Okay, stop. We’re having a pop quiz,” and they will all go gasp, “But you said it was all going to be producing.”

Brad: [laughing] “This is a creative class, we don’t have tests.”

Rodney: And so I hand them out a sheet which is down here, it’s the chemical formula for coffee and it goes through a whole series of things. You have to design this container that will keep it at X degrees centigrade and you’ll have a packet in your hand, and you have to be able to get to another room and open the door holding this device. Essentially, just before that, I told them about trigger words, that if you’re listening to music, you never listen to music with words in it because if you’re trying to come up with something creative, you’re fighting off those words.

Brad: Yes, your [00:04:30] trying to sing the song.

Rodney: [00:04:30] image. So anyhow, they come up with these fabulous Rube Goldberg contraptions that have a bunch of them, put them up on the whiteboard, and they’re like, the really–

Brad: They have no idea where it came from.

Rodney: No.

Brad: Yes.

Rodney: But they’re wonderful. But then I flip in and show them slides of, what if I told you this was coffee? They would have come up with coffee cups, coffee mugs; they wouldn’t have come up with–

Brad: This is a chemical liquid.

Rodney: Yes, an accordion thing that lifts to the served saucer on a belt, and there is a range of things. That’s what most businesses are doing. They tell the people doing the creative thing: “Okay, come up with a [clicks tongue].”

Brad: Exactly. They tee it up too much and say the same free flow.

Robert: Okay, we’ve been talking with Rodney Hill, the futurist at Texas A&M University about getting into the flow for creativity. Now, in part 2, we’re going to come back and talk about some other specific steps of, how do you get into the flow?

Digital Marketing Conversations Should Be About Them — NOT YOU

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Watch Clarity Digital Marketing Agency Dallas Video About Online Conversations.

Transcript

Robert Riggs: Hi, I’m Robert Riggs. This is Brad Besancon with Clarity Digital Marketing and we are sitting in downtown Waxahachie, Texas. This is one of the few surviving examples of Main Street Town Square Texas.

Brad Besancon: It’s a Survivor.

Riggs:, I grew up like this. You grew up like this. But it’s gone and it’s gone because of shopping malls, big box stores, and later, Walmart but although it may be gone, the principles of how to relate to a customer that walks in the door here are the still the same online.

Besancon: I mean, the way these businesses were formed, it was mom and pop, right? And I want to start a business to serve my community, right? That’s what I’m doing, I’m providing a service for my community and my friends, and my family. It should still be the principles of business today whether someone is walking in your store, a dry cleaners, or they need your help for something, or a plumber’s out–whatever the case may be, you should still have that kind of conversation marketing, that conversation attitude which is a cup of coffee and a handshake. And we’re seeing it all the time where our clients or the reason they’re hiring us is because they don’t have that and they’re really struggling online especially on social, but it really is Main Street marketing.

Riggs: So I remember walking into the shoe store on the square in Paris, Texas and the conversation did not start with, “Hey, let me sell you some shoes here today.” It was always, “How are you doing today? How’s your mom doing? And grandma?” and all of this.

Besancon: And what was the next question they ask you? “What can I help you with?”

Riggs: “You with.” You.

Besancon: “What can I help you with? What shoes do you want?” It doesn’t matter if your style of shoe is different from mine, you’re the customer.

Riggs: So that is a good point for social media online. You’ve got to put the “you” in social media.

Besancon: Yeah, you’ve got to put that. It’s customer-centric, right? And you hear big businesses talk about, “We’re going to be customer-centric. We’re going to be customer-focused,” and you go to social media, it’s all about them.

Riggs: Yeah, so for some reason, people in business have gotten the notion now that online is somehow different. I’ve got to pound it—sell, sell, sell. People do not like to be sold to online or frankly, anywhere else.

Besancon: No, I mean, we’re here in Main Street, the survivor. Why are these little businesses still thriving? Because they have a connection with their customers.

Why Digital Marketing Is A Lot Like Golf

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A Golf Pro explains how the right Approach is important to setting up a well placed shot. Here’s how the same Approach applies to Digital Marketing.

Transcript

FILE NAME: Why Digital Marketing Is A Lot Like Golf] [DURATION: 00:05:53]

Brad Besancon: Well, hello, everyone. It’s Brad with Clarity Digital and I’m here with Kyle Kerver down at the Cleburne Golf Links, here in the Pro Shop, and we’re talking about our map program which at Clarity Digital, stands for Method, Approach, and Performance.

Today, we’re going to talk about methods with Kyle because there’s nothing more important in golf than kind of a system or methodology, right?

Kyle Kerver: Sure. We follow a process in golf much like business: you start everything out the same way. You start behind the ball to set up your shot, to set up your round. You set up everything in a process.

Besancon: It’s amazing, all that you have to go through for a little white ball, isn’t it?

Kerver: That’s correct. It’s amazing.

Besancon: And the sad thing is, what we find is at Clarity is, there’s probably more people going through steps in golf than they do in their business. So one of the things we hear in golf is that you have to play your game.

Kerver: Right.

Besancon: You can’t play Tiger’s game or Jordan’s game, or Rickie Fowler’s game; you can’t have their swing.

Kerver: Correct.

Besancon: You have to have Kyle’s swing and Brad’s Swing. So tell me the importance of playing it your way and your game. What are the critical aspects of that?

Kerver: As a teacher of golf, I teach very specific things in general but when we get down to it, once we get to a certain physical level, we do have to figure out our own way of doing everything. So my swing might be a little different than yours because we’re different body types, we’re different heights, weights, everything as far as the way we’re built, so even on the physical side is different but more on the mental side as well; we have different brains, we have different approaches of everything so we really have to find what’s best for us.

Besancon: Yes, really like the attitude of your game, right?

Kerver: Very much so.

Besancon: So you can only help mechanically so much.

Kerver: Very much so.

Besancon: And then it comes to kind of the attitude and what you’re doing, which brings us to another aspect of business which is, you have to play your game.

Kerver: Yes.

Besancon: Right? You can’t go out there and be Coca-Cola or be Walmart, or be super Target; you have to be your business, your brand, your voice. The same way around a golf course it is, you have to pick up the clubs that you chose and swing it.

So you talked about some of those steps. Let’s walk through like some very one, two, three fundamental steps that kind of apply to golf that as well as kind of what businesses should be thinking of when we’re talking about this analogy.

Kerver: Right, so kind of how we start with our approach to every golf swing, is we look at the general area, we kind of assess the situation. Every golfshot is different. So we look in a general area and then we find what we want to do specifically for that golfshot; there’s so many things that are involved in that golf swing at that moment, so.

Besancon: A lot of muscle memory.

Kerver: A lot of muscle memory. And then on the mental side of it, you have visualizations; you have to visualize your goal for that shot. You have to visualize your own personal swing for that shot, and then–

Besancon: Sounds familiar? It’s like business.

Kerver: Exactly. And then as you step into your shot, obviously, you have to execute at the end of it. So a lot of commitment involved there, a lot of going through a checklist, setting up your business the same way.

Besancon: I mean, you just went through the steps that Robert and I go through with companies all the time: visualize where you’re going; we always challenge our clients, where do you want to go with this? What do you want to do online? What is your social media? What is overall objective of it? When you’re walking with that ball sitting in the fairway, where are you trying to go? Are you trying to lay up? Are you trying to get on the green? Can you get to the green? You have to go through all of those questions. And what’s really critical about the other things I think you said which is important in the game as well as in businesses, you kind of take a step back before each shot, right? Walk us through kind of stepping back and what you’re trying to do when you kind of, like you said, overall picture.

Kerver: Sure, sure. We step back behind the ball. Obviously, the most important thing is target. We look in a certain direction, we look where we want the ball to go, but in generally speaking, we look at all the elements: look at wind, we look at temperature, we look at elevation of what we’re standing on, elevation of the green, the slope of the green–

Besancon: Where you’re starting.

Kerver: Yes, where you start and where you want to end up. So all those things you take in, in a general aspect, and then as your approach the ball, it gets more specific and more specific, until we do execute the golf swing.

Besancon: Time for the action now, right?

Kerver: Right.

Besancon: You make your decision.

Kerver: Correct.

Besancon: Right? You pick the club, you visualized it, and now you make your action.

Kerver: Yes, sir.

Besancon: Sounds a lot like listen, think, speak for Clarity’s standpoint.

I think one of the key things that applies with golf and business is this step-by-step approach, right? You have to practice. You have to create muscle memory, and you have to approach or you have to create your own system, if you will, and your game so that you can stay consistent. And ultimately, that’s what golf’s all about, right? Consistency.

Kerver: It’s all about consistency.

Besancon: Yeah, so we really appreciate your time, man. I really appreciate you letting me come down here and kind of walk us through. And I think some of the key takeaways are this: you have to have a map, you have to have a method, an approach, and a performance tester, right? Which is what we’re talking about and you also have to be sure you’re taking a step back first, going through a system, thinking about your next shot with the basis of where I wanted to go, right? It’s the same in business: you have to know where you’re going before you can start.

And then I think the biggest thing that Kyle said was, is know where you’re starting, right? And look at all the things that are making up your starting point.

That’s Clarity clip of the week from Cleburne Golf Links. Come down here and enjoy a round.

3 Key Tips To Building A Digital Marketing Strategy

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Would you start a cross country road trip without a map? Of course not! Here’s how the grey haired geniuses create a MAP to successful digital marketing.

Transcript

Brad Besancon: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the new Clarity Digital. I’m Brad and this is Robert, and we are standing in one of the new [00:00:05] thousands of new homes in the market which I’m sure you guys have seen. And one of the things you have to have before you build a house is what?

Robert Riggs: A plan.

Besancon: You got to have a plan.

Riggs: An architect’s plan which we find is completely absent out in social media.

Besancon: Yeah, online marketing, social media, one of the things we’ve noticed here at Clarity is, we walk into companies, midsize companies, large companies, there’s no plan. We call it a map, and not like a roadmap; this is a map and we’ve got a little acronym there that we use called your Methodology, your Approach, and your Performance, and those are the three critical things you need to have that we’ve noticed over the last four years of business that people just typically are not utilizing before they go start go [00:00:48] stuff on the wall.

Riggs: So building a house is no different from building a marketing plan for social media, so let’s start with the M.

Besancon: Yeah, so methodology. One of the critical things about methodology is, what are you going to do? Who are you going to be? What platforms are you going to be involved in? You don’t have to be on all of them. If your audience or your target clients are not on Pinterest, then maybe you shouldn’t spend a lot of time on Pinterest and post on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.

Riggs: Yeah, you got to understand who the audience is and where are they. So now I have a map A.

Besancon: Yeah, when we talk about approach, what’s your voice? What’s your brand message? How are you going to make those conversations and those connections with your target audience or your particular clients? So for example, are you going to be cute, calm, or creative? Those are kind of the three C’s we use.

Riggs: And then the P of MAP.

Besancon: The performance. You’ve got to test. You’ve got to track. You’ve got to look at the data and all that really stems back on your methodology, right? So what are you trying to accomplish in the beginning?

Riggs: And so one of the things that we do to try to get to the bottom of the M and the A of the map is a brand storming session. Yes, to really understand, who are you online? Who are your customers? How do you need to talk to them? But that really is like the foundation of this house.

Besancon: I mean, these common-sense conversations.

Riggs: And what you have to think about as a business now, you’re a publisher. You’re a media producer. You’re a news company because no one can tell that story better than, no one might–not even tell it. Nobody can tell that story better than you can tell it.

Besancon: If you’re not telling it, who is? Someone out there is going to tell your story.

Riggs: Yeah, a critic, maybe your competitor is telling a story about you but you’ve got to understand who’s your story. It all starts with map.

Besancon: With map: methodology, your approach, your performance and your platforms.

Riggs: That’s the Clarity clip.

Clarity Digital Marketing: How We Disrupt Online Distraction

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Distraction is the biggest barrier to connecting with new and current customers online. Clarity Digital Marketing specializes in Disrupting the Distraction with Clear Concise Conversations.

Transcript

[FILE NAME: Clarity Digital Marketing: How We Disrupt Online Distraction] [DURATION: 00:02:56]

Robert Riggs: Hi, I’m Robert Riggs and this is Brad Besancon with the new Clarity Digital. We’ve learned a lot over the past three years together and so we’re kind of changing our approach and how we do things. So for starters downtown, Dallas behind us, how many people do you think, as we’re speaking, have a smartphone in the palm of their hand no matter what they’re doing?

Brad Besancon: All of them.

Riggs: All of them.

Besancon: All of them. I mean, one of the crazy things we have learned, Robert, over the last few years is that’s our biggest distraction, in addition to 3,000 to 5,000 brand messages a day hitting us–I think I even counted on my desk. I’m just sitting on my desk, there’s 20 brand messages just on my desk. We touch, tap, or swipe our phones 2,600 times a day and most of us who are in social are on 60% of the time or an hour mobile phone. And the other thing we’ve learned that we just consistently keep running into, we can’t believe it that all these distractions are going on but what happens in online marketing, nobody has a what?

Riggs: A plan or what we call a map, a method, an approach, and a measurement of performance.

Besancon: Exactly, and it seems real simple, right?

Riggs: Right.

Besancon: Before anything gets done, before you go to a grocery door, what do you do?

Riggs: Oh, you make a list.

Besancon: You make a list.

Riggs: You make a plan.

Besancon: You make a plan.

Riggs: “What’s on aisle 5?”

Besancon: And yet we consistently visit with companies that don’t even have a plan or an objective, or goals, or any of the stuff in online marketing.

Riggs: And online marketing has really gotten tougher because of the distraction. There are so many things going on inside that smartphone as well as all around.

Besancon: It’s everywhere.

Riggs: Yeah. So how do we break through?

Besancon: So you’ve got to learn how to break through and that’s what we do. And one of the other things we always see is me, me, me, me, me, me, me. “Let’s go sell them something in social.” “Let’s go tell them how great we are,” and what did we learn?

Riggs: It’s not about you.

Besancon: Not at all

Riggs: And people in this day and age, they don’t like to be sold to. Frankly, they don’t really trust big brands and companies. You got to earn it.

Besancon: And we have a saying, “It’s what you’re telling them, not what you’re selling them,” and that’s kind of been our new focus, what people earn.

We hope to work with you someday. If you find this interesting, we’re here for you. We start out with our brand storming and process called listen, think, speak, and it’s all about the customer. It’s all about your target audience.

Riggs: And we talked about audience or you might think of it as a market, and we have a phrase we’ve coined of Audience Speak and that is, are you speaking the language of your customers and clients? Because if you’re not, they won’t care.

Besancon: And someone else is.

Riggs: Right, and you won’t break through the disruption. You won’t disrupt all that distraction going on; it won’t happen.

Besancon: No.

That’s our Clarity Digital Focus. We hope to maybe work with you someday.

Riggs: Yeah, and if you find out that your likes and engagement are stale and going nowhere, you need to give us a call.

Besancon: Absolutely. Looking forward to it, guys.

Riggs: Thank you.

What’s the ROI of Social Media Marketing?

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Just like working out in the gym, Social Media ROI requires putting in the hard work on a consistent basis. Here’s Business owners should think about the ROI of Social Media Marketing.

Transcript

Robert: One, two. 5 pounds.
Brad: 5 pounds? What’s the ROI on that?
Robert: Probably not much.
Brad: Not much. Not much on a 5-pounder.
Robert: So this is the Clarity Digital Marketing Clip of the Week. Robert Riggs, Brad Besancon talking about putting in the work.
Brad: You’ve got to put in the work. We’re here at a little gym, down in my little town where I live now, Midlothian, and one of the things about coming to a gym is you want some ROI. You want return on investment and that’s a major question we here in social media all the time, “What’s my ROI, Robert? Why am I doing this?” And you think about a gym and the ROI doesn’t come tomorrow, it doesn’t come next week—it takes weeks and sometimes months, and there’s these other factors that go into getting a return on investment when you’re in a gym. Like, you can’t come out here and work out for an hour a day, and then go home and eat junk food.
Robert: Yes, and when the ROI in social is audience building, 6 to 8 months if you’re just starting—6 to 8 months. You’ve got to understand the audience and what they’re doing.
Brad: You’ve got to take your time. You’ve got to put in the work.
Robert: Well, we always get asked, “What’s the ROI?” Well, okay, let’s think about some of the other things businesses take for granted. What’s the ROI on your business card?
Brad: It’s an expense, it’s an overall expense. It’s not a high expense, it’s not a big expense, when you pass it out, “Hey, Robert, I’m Brad. Here’s my business card,” what are you hoping for? You’re hoping they call you.
Robert: It’s also awareness.
Brad: And it’s all awareness.
Robert: So let’s think about what are the other things companies send out, they never ask this question about.
Brad: Newsletters. We had a client one time where we said, “You’re spending,” they had four staff members working on a newsletter, every day, a daily newsletter, four staff members, and we said, “So what’s your open rate?” And what was his answer?
Robert: “We don’t care. We don’t want to know and we don’t care.”
Brad: So what’s the point? Talk about an ROI.
Robert: Yeah, so, by asking upfront, what is the ROI, none of this alone leads to a direct sale, none of it. You know, if you go back to marketing, there is the sales funnel of awareness and leading them through the funnel. Well, social is the important part of getting them into the funnel, so you can start that conversation.
Brad: It’s conversation marketing. You are starting the conversation, you’re creating the conversation, you’re controlling the conversation, you hope, to a point, you’re engaging in the conversation. It is a dialogue; it’s not a monologue. And that’s the way you need to think about ROI and social is, is it’s a conversation, it’s like a happy hour. It’s like a business party. It’s sharing information, it’s talking to each other, it’s engaging with your customers, to eventually—holidays are coming up—we’re not saying you can’t run promos, we’re not saying you shouldn’t run them. You have to do those things and if you’re in a direct sales position, you need to do those things. But what we’re saying is you have to start the process and then do some specific things to attract the ROI. But it is an awareness campaign, it is a conversation.
Robert: Yes. And I’m out of television. I never heard our salespeople they get asked by everybody, “Well, what’s the ROI on these TV spots?” Look, it was taken for granted that if you have a mass brand, you need a mass audience. It was about brand awareness. And you don’t often see a direct, “Hey, come down and buy my couch,” there’s a sale, they’re showing the product. Well, social is a lot like this.
Brad: It’s a lot like that. It’s a lot like coming to the gym, putting in the work, and the return on investment, it comes weeks and months down the road.
Robert: Here’s what you should be worried about in terms of ROI as a business, if you’re not engaged win a conversation with your potential customers and your current customers online in social, hey, your competitor probably is.
Brad: What’s the ROI on not doing it? That’s the question.
Robert: You want to give them to Amazon, you want to give them to a competitor? That’s what will happen and you need to think differently about ROI.
Brad: Absolutely. We’ve got to get him back in the gym. These 5-pounders aren’t working.
Robert: Got to put the work in.
Brad: That’s the Clarity Digital Marketing clip from Dallas, Texas, guys. See you next week.

Social Media Road Trip: Need Directions To Your Customers?

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Are you following the right directions to find a profitable audience for your business in Social Media?

Transcript

[FILE NAME: Social Media Road Trip – Where Are You Headed To Find Customers?] [DURATION 00:05:55]

Brad Besancon: Well, hello, everyone. It’s Brad and Robert with our Clairiti clip of the week, and we’re going to introduce a series today, kind of the three things we see a lot kind of wrapping up the year. We saw a lot in 2016 and one of those is, the three-part series, we’re gonna start with these objectives, online marketing, social media objectives. The second piece is this ROI issue that always comes up when you’re talking about social media or online marketing, and then all of these extra parts–there’s one in every corner, right, Robert?

Robert Riggs: Yeah, and now, we’re on location today in your new pick’em up truck as we [00:00:34 crosstalk]

Besancon: Yeah, out in the pickup truck. Because one of the things, when you think about social media online marketing, the first thing that you should do is figure out what it is you want to do.

Riggs: Where are you going?

Besancon: Yeah, where are you going? What’s the objective of why you’ve decided to get involved into social media or change? There’s always an objective. There should be an objective in the strategy. When you go to the grocery store, what do you do?

Riggs: Make a list.

Besancon: Make a list. When you plan a vacation, what do you do? You’d spend hours online looking, finding spots to go and everything, yet we run into numerous, numerous businesses all the time and they don’t have a written strategy or an objective of why they’re doing this stuff.

Riggs: Yeah, when they started the business, they had a business plan but there is no marketing plan and certainly no digital or social media marketing plan.

Besancon: Right. And it just doesn’t make any sense. A simple task of going to the grocery store, we get in our vehicles like we are today and we go from point A to point B. We know how to get there. There might be 14 different ways to get to the grocery store, we have our favorite path. So there has to be an objective on what is point B in my social media and online? How do I get there? It’s not going to be a straight road; it’s going to be curvy, right? You’re going to have to take some right turns and left turns, you’re going tohave to back up and start over but there should be an attractive. Heck, we have mapping systems in pretty much–any vehicle now has navigation, and what does that help you do? Get from point A to point B. And sometimes, it doesn’t give you the best route, which in our world, you do have to experiment. You have to say, “Well, maybe we’re going to try a different route or a different objective.” You got to change the destination. You have to load in the roadblocks and the traffic in the roadmap so that’s not going to happen. You have to know where those are and be aware of that, and notice, you’re going to have to back up. In football, you’re going to halftime and make adjustments.

Riggs: It’s going to happen. And one of the problems that we see is, that even when we get clients to get a plan for coaching them, you got to start the trip you, got to put in drive. They said, they’re frozen at the wheel. You got to. You just have to do it.

Besancon: Yeah, and the other thing to be cognizant of is, don’t hand your brand over to someone in a cube because they’re under 30 and you think they understand all the stuff because they grew up with it, and that’s not–I’m not being offensive to you; I’m not trying to critic. We just see that a lot and all the problems that come with that. We have a little saying, do you want to be cute, clever and social? Or do you want to become–those are the kind of three C’s that we talk about: cute, clever, and calm, and you have to pick one of those in your objective and put it in drive and move forward. And so we start with an online branding session about who are you going to be online and that really kind of in part, becomes the starting point of the map.

Riggs: Right. I mean, our brand storming session and we encourage you guys to do it as well with your own staff or whoever it is. You have to know who you are. If you don’t know who you are, how are you going to talk to your audience? And then the second thing is, who’s your audience? Who are you trying to be and who are you trying to target? Are you going to be a sales ? Are you going to more connection? We’re all about conversation marketing. We’re all about driving the conversation online, connecting with clients to eventually convert the clients. And there is a different way of talking depending on what that conversation is that you want to get started. There’s a different language for each of the audience. There is a different language for each of the platforms; your Twitter following doesn’t exactly look at Facebook, and your Instagram, and obviously, Snapchat’s going to be different, YouTube’s going to be different. So there’s even languages within the platforms.

Riggs: And also, you got to think about, there are multiple destinations in terms of what objectives are sure on each of the platforms, and as you’re on your way to those objectives, just like when you’re out on a trip, well, how many miles are we going? “Dad, are we there yet?”

Besancon: “Where’s the next Bucky’s?” right? so we’ve got to be measuring along the way of how are we getting to this objective, and then kind of once you’re there, now what’s happened.

Riggs: Right, and that’s the critical piece, is what’s happening once you got in line with an objective in? What’s the next step?

Besancon: And kind of the reason we’re talking so much about this is that we see this everywhere. Nobody’s got a plan. Nobody else got a strategy.

Riggs: And for some reason, everybody’s got the notion that the same people do Facebook that, well, you just post. You just post stuff.

Besancon: Yeah, and I think the critical thing is, they said, “We know what we need to be doing and we know we should start something. I’m going to change my website because it’s not mobile-friendly so I’m going to fix it. I’m going to do all of these things,” and they never take a step back and figure out what, what is it that the website needs to be doing?

Riggs: Yeah, and posting up a picture of your friends or your family around the table during a holiday or on vacation is a way different thing than when when you start doing that for a brand.

Besancon: Absolutely.

Riggs: And your brand story.

Besancon: Absolutely. There can be pieces of that as your brand and your brand family, etc. There can be pieces of that but without the written objective, without that taking a step back and really kind of understanding what it is you want to do. And you never know if that’s that’s going to work.

So we’re going to start kind of addressing some of those, and next week, we’re going to talk a little bit about this ROI question.

That’s the Clairiti clip, guys. We’ll see you next week. Thank you.

1 Billion Reasons Your Business Needs A Social Media Strategy

by

More than one billion daily active users checked Facebook on their mobile phone in June 2016. Young adults up to 33 years of age check their cell phone 85 times daily. Here’s why your business needs an online marketing strategy.

Transcript

Brad: Well, hello everyone. It’s Brad and Robert again with this week’s Clarity Digital Marketing clip and we are in Las Vegas, Nevada, the city that never sleeps, and we did get a little bit of sleep. Signed up a new client here, locally, so we’re excited about that. But in our travels, over here in Las Vegas, we ran across some research and data backed by Pew that really opened some more of the importance of this mobile and social media. In fact, one of the bullet points was that 43% of the world’s population has a smartphone now.
Richard: Smartphone, yes.
Brad: So do you think it’s important to have a mobile initiative?
Richard: Well, you know, Las Vegas. You can see device obsession because most of the people here are experiencing Las Vegas through their smartphone.
Brad: I can’t believe the number of people we walked by that are just walking down the sidewalk videoing.
Richard: And where is allthat content going? Social media. There is also a study that indicates that more than a billion people check into Facebook at least once a day. A billion and that’s recent study. B. So for those of you who do not think that your customers or clients aren’t there, hey, you could walk down the strip here and you see every age group on it.
Brad: Yeah. Well and I think the key thing to think about the Facebook stat is, do you think in a billion people, you might have a few customers out there or someone you can connect with? Now, you’ve got to think about that. It’s a billion in a month. It’s not a billion over a period of time, it’s 30 days. Do you think in 30 days, there’s a billion people that might be interested in a product or a service, or doing business with you, or having some connection with your brand or your product?
Richard: And think about yourself. You go to bed with a phone and you wake up with a phone. A lot of people wake up and what do they do? Check e-mail, check social, and if you really want to see the frequency of that and what’s coming, there’s a small study of 18 to 33-year-olds that found that they check, on average, really without even realizing it, 85 times a day and that can’t be for e-mail.
Brad: Yeah, I mean you think they’re checking e-mail? They’re on Snapchat, they’re doing the Instagram, in that older age group, probably Facebook. I mean, it is part of our life not. It is our alarm clock, it is our communication tool, it’s our phone, it’s our video chat, it’s our social media piece, everything, it’s our video camera. So if you don’t have that strategy or initiative thinking about social mobile—really is what it is now, it’s social mobile—then you’re falling way behind, in all levels of business. It’s not just for the big boys. It’s for all levels of business.
Richard: And your customers are on mobile, in social, and it’s very hard anymore to get them to your website, so what is your social media strategy?
Brad: What are they doing? How are you going to connect with them socially in social media? Quit trying to do it on a website because it’s not happening.
Richard: And the big takeaway from Vegas is?
Brad: Always come out to Vegas and have a good time.
Richard: And be sure you check your phone. That’s the Clarity Digital Marketing clip of the week.
Brad: Have a good one, guys.