Start With A Win - ELEVATE Your Business's Digital Marketing | Tony Adams Part 2

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to Start With A Win, where we unpack franchising, leadership, and business growth. Let's go! And coming to you from Start With A Win headquarters, it's Adam Kantos here at Area 15 Ventures. This is part two of a two-part series on how to improve your web presence. Our interview is with Tony Adams, the Chief of Staff of Area 15 Ventures. Full disclosure, I'm a partner in Area 15 Ventures, but Tony is an expert in online presence. He's helped us build great online presence in a lot of companies and I wanted to bring him on this podcast. We had so much information that we couldn't fit it all into one episode. So this is part two of two. Go back and

Starting point is 00:00:40 listen to part one if you missed that before you get into this one. We are going to dive deeper into how to create a better web presence in order to build your business, create greater profitability, create greater customer experience. Let's get right into it with Tony. All right, Tony, welcome back to part two of this. We've covered website and SEO on part one, but I want to dig into some of the things that I'm getting asked about regularly that are kind of not the cool parts of this. One of which is kind of the monotony of social media. Social media is everywhere. We always see these influencers all over the different social media sites. What is your take on social media and how it can help improve your web presence?

Starting point is 00:01:25 And obviously we should link to our social media accounts on our website and back to our website from our social media accounts that adds to our SEO and probably gives us some dynamic content also. But what do you think? What should we be doing? Yeah. I mean, you look at all of the basics out there, meta, which is Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, boy, Pinterest, threads, all these guys, right? And it's what do you use? How do you use it? Who am I actually targeting? Facebook, generally an older audience, Instagram, a little bit younger. Gen X. Yeah, Gen X. Yeah. So, you know. Instagram, a little bit younger. Like Gen X. Yeah, Gen X, yeah.

Starting point is 00:02:08 So Instagram's a little younger. You've got Snapchat nowadays. But some things that you really need to be doing consistently on each channel that you might be on is definitely linking to your website. Having a call to action is incredibly important. People need to be able to know what they see and how to get to where they see it. You need to also understand that you are trying to build a following too. So if you're using Facebook and someone likes your posts, you know, you might get 50 likes on a post let's say an additional step that you can do beyond just posting is once someone has actually liked your content is go in and invite them to follow your page Facebook

Starting point is 00:02:56 actually gives you a really easy mechanism to do that so if you just click on the the likes at the bottom you'll see a list of all the people that have liked it and invite buttons next to all of them. Oh, there you go. So it's simple. You can connect to your customers that way. You know, what's fascinating is when you look at social media, I made a purchase from a QSR, a quick service restaurant the other evening and got the food home, opened it up and it was overcooked. It was horrible. So it was unedible at that point. And I started, I went on the website. I couldn't find a place to contact the employees at the store that I got it from. So I went to Instagram. I just went on there and I searched for the company

Starting point is 00:03:37 and there's a button that says message. So I messaged him and I sent him a picture of the food and I said, I just got this home. It was an online order. I can't eat it. And instantly their social media manager replied to me and said, I am so sorry. I will put a coupon in your account right now for a free meal. I mean, it was just, it was, I was frustrated and I was upset because my dinner did not look good at that point. I wasn't going to eat that part. I had some other food to eat. But ultimately, it was fascinating how quickly I solved my problem with social media. And by the way, I went back on and gave them a good rating for helping me. It was interesting that when you look at your ability to monitor and connect with your customers,

Starting point is 00:04:22 I'm a repeat customer now because of that experience. That's great. So it is something that's really important. your ability to monitor and connect with your customers. I'm a repeat customer now because of that experience. That's great. So it is something that's really important. We mentioned YouTube on the last one. And I also have seen that YouTube is the number one search for term on Google. Sure. Why is video so important? And what should we be doing to implement that in our website?

Starting point is 00:04:44 And also our other web assets, why is video so important and what should we be doing to implement that in our website and also our other web assets? I guess you could call them like our social media accounts. Absolutely. Well, you look at YouTube and YouTube is its own search engine, right? People go to YouTube for many different reasons, learning how to do things, investigating, entertainment, the whole nine yards. But YouTube really is a platform that allows your content to always be evergreen. Oh yeah. What does that mean? Well, it never, well, Facebook, you know, as soon as you're three posts deep, you're irrelevant, you know, right? And so whoever is on the top of the screen, when that Facebook app is open is what's relevant at

Starting point is 00:05:24 that moment. And anything below that tends to disappear. On YouTube, you can have a video. I have videos that are 10 plus years old that still get viewed. Wow. And it's a great place to just always have great content and always be building a library of content because it never goes away. Okay. So YouTube is owned by Google. Yes. And obviously we have AI now, Google Bard and Google Bard has a new extension to go to YouTube. So how do you see Tony Adams, the, you know, very smart web guy here, how do you see Google accepting integrating video in its search topics? Because it knows what's in your video as soon as you post that video. Absolutely. Does that help you? Yeah. Well, Google originally, you know, you were able to use captions to really help bolster your

Starting point is 00:06:19 presence. Google didn't have a mechanism to understand what your videos were or about. And if you really break down what a video is, it's a compilation of lots of pictures. You know, and you think about a picture's worth a thousand words. Well, how much is a video worth, right? Especially if it's made up of a bunch of pictures. So what Google used to do is caption your video and based on those words it could pull out different search terms or relevance points on what the video was about. Now it's actually able to interpret the imagery and it basically

Starting point is 00:06:56 works just like that. It breaks your video down into a series of images, analyzes every single image and understands what the whole message means in totality. And so having good robust video online is just another way to inform the search engine what you're about and what your message is that you're trying to spread. Also YouTube, just in a platform in itself and the videos in itself, you are able to write good long text-based descriptions and link to things in your video. And these are great places, again, to just bolster your SEO reputation.

Starting point is 00:07:36 It's fascinating. I was heavily involved in video as a CEO of Remax. And I still, obviously, am very heavily involved in video. We're on video now with this podcast. And I was talking to an agent who was struggling in his marketplace. This had to be five, six years ago. And I asked him, I said, are you using video? He said, no. I said, start using video, build yourself a YouTube channel, which is simple. It's very little time to go and set up your own YouTube channel and fill out the different blanks and they walk you through it. But he started implementing video into every single one of

Starting point is 00:08:08 his customer interactions and talking about his community, things like that. He does no paid advertising now. Everything he does is only on YouTube and he's making really good money, having great business in the real estate space simply because he is sharing his community with people via video on YouTube. So I can't stress enough for entrepreneurs, for big business, small business, YouTube is the way to go. Yeah, absolutely. It really, really helps your social media presence and it's repurposable. That's the great part about YouTube is you can actually go on, pull up your video, hit share, and it brings up all the other social media apps and you can just instantly load the video onto these other apps. Now, a little resizing may be necessary in some cases, but ultimately it comes down to

Starting point is 00:08:53 it's all shareable. Absolutely. And you can take those videos, put them on your website, and sometimes Google will show your website along with the video that's on that page. And it just makes it very robust for someone to want to click on. Yep. Here's my challenge to everybody. Go search for something, not while you're listening to this, but go search for something and then watch how all these videos show up in the search results. There's a reason for that. Absolutely. Google knows that people go to YouTube to figure things out. So it's just going to serve those things right up. So that was basically social media in a nutshell.

Starting point is 00:09:33 Good copy, constantly posting things, using video and answering people, communicating with the customers on social media. If you're not doing all of those things, you're really missing an opportunity here. And there are tools also just, you know, so there are optimal times to post. Right. And there's frequency to post, you know, how many times you post on a certain platform. You just Google that, you know, find out what, you know, Facebook, Tuesday, 10 a.m. for instance, right? And the other nice thing is, is you may not be available on Tuesday at 10 a.m. However, they have a scheduling tool that when you're sitting down on Sunday morning doing your social media posts, you can set them to go out at the optimal times. And let me stress.

Starting point is 00:10:13 I mean, that's a great statement, Tony. Let me stress. Don't try and just fit these things in when life is happening because you're not going to get them fit in. That's right. Batch, create. So sit down and you can use AI, chat GPT, Claude, Google Bard, any of these AI mechanisms. And I'm going to do a podcast about AI here in the near future.

Starting point is 00:10:33 But just go on to any of these and say, give me 10 social media posts about this whole piece and load a bunch of information in there. Who you are, who you serve, what product or service you use, your why, the community, things like that, that you're all part of and say, give me 10 social media posts and then go in and adjust those. There's your content for 10 days and go in, batch create it, spend an hour or two getting it there and then pat yourself on the back because you got your marketing done for 10 days. Absolutely. That's fantastic. Let's talk about this bogey that a lot of people

Starting point is 00:11:10 are afraid of, but makes a huge difference on this planet. And that is online reviews. People are very vulnerable. Absolutely. And it's like we're very super delicate as to what somebody's going to say about us online. But if you're doing a great job in your business, you should be asking everybody. Talk to us about reviews and how many do we need in order to be significant? What should we be trying to accomplish? You've done a great job of gathering online reviews, building mechanisms to do that. Take us through your online review expertise. Sure. So first thing I'll say, Google does not consider you significant unless you've got 10 Google reviews. Oh, wow. So 10 is

Starting point is 00:11:57 actually your first benchmark to try and achieve. Okay. So let's stop right there. Do you, you have to have your business part of Google my business then, right? Correct. Okay. So you can just Google, Google my business. I think it's google.com forward slash business and make sure that you've got a Google business listing there. Awesome. And that's what pops up on the right side when people Google your business and they can leave on online reviews there. Yeah. And more so on mobile, it takes up your whole page when they search for you. So, oh, wow. Okay. So keep going from there. So you got to be on Google My Business. You need 10 reviews. What should we be thinking about here? Well, you know, first and foremost, I mean, the focal point is your customer, right? You know, your customer is who is going to leave that review

Starting point is 00:12:45 and taking exceptional care of your customer is what gets you reviews. I generally use the term reflexive wow. And so it's a wow that you have provided your customer. You make your customer kind of say wow reflexively. And it's because you've done something unexpected or exceptional or something just really great that just your customer just can't help and go, wow. And so you have to kind of think about your business a little bit. You know, are you doing just what's expected of you or are you going above and beyond? You know, if you think about, I, you know, I used to speak with real estate agents quite a bit and speak in front of them and would talk to

Starting point is 00:13:30 them a little bit about, you know, did you list your listing on the multiple listing service? Did you post on social media? Did you take a client, you know, out for lunch and talk to them about the property? You know, did you take them out to coffee? Did you do this? Did you do that? And, you know, everybody in the room would raise their hand and I would say, well, great. Everybody's doing the bare minimum of what's expected. So what did you do that was exceptional to wow them? And people would sit back and go, huh, I'm just basically doing the bare minimum. I need to up my game a little bit. And sometimes we just need to do that a little bit. And sometimes it's easy to do that. And sometimes it's free.

Starting point is 00:14:11 But what you see is when you actually up your game just that little bit that sets you apart from your competitors, people start leaving lots of reviews, even just unsolicited. You don't even have to ask sometimes. Well, okay, let's talk about solicited versus unsolicited, you know, you don't even have to ask sometimes. Well, okay, let's talk about solicited versus unsolicited reviews. Obviously, you don't want to pay somebody to do a review. Of course. Yeah. And ultimately, ethically, they should be disclosing if they were given anything in order to provide the review. Right. So how do we ask somebody for a review? I know you've used QR codes quite a bit or even emails. When you ran hair salons, you would send out a post-visit questionnaire asking for a review or automatically serving it up.

Starting point is 00:15:06 And I mentioned QR codes. We've used those a ton. What suggestions do you have for our people here to ask for them and how to provide that served up easily? Well, really the first step in asking for a review, and actually I'll take one quick step back, solicited versus unsolicited. What I define solicited as is just asking for the review. Unsolicited is someone walking out of your business with that smile on their face going,

Starting point is 00:15:31 I'm going to leave a review because this was so awesome. Which more people walk out with a smile on their face and don't leave a review than do. So we need to capture those. Absolutely. And so that brings me to my next point. You have to make that journey to leaving a review frictionless and easy. And you have to lead them down the path to the right direction, to the right place, to leave the review in the spot you want. And so that's where these QR codes, email surveys, text surveys, even if you have an app, push notification surveys are imperative. And so I'll talk about Google,

Starting point is 00:16:08 but there's Yelp, there's Facebook reviews, there's TripAdvisor, Trustpilot, lots of different good places for people to leave third-party reviews. You just got to get them there. QR code's fantastic. Google has a way to simplify the review generation process for you just by serving up basically five stars. You scan the QR code and you're immediately taken deep into your profile page and pops up five stars and how was it? So all they have to do is as long as they're signed into their Google, perhaps you just click the star, the review process starts. Now we, you mentioned hair salons, we would send out surveys about 45 minutes after they left the building or after they checked out. It was a simple thumbs up, thumbs down. How did we do? And you don't have to get too complicated because people are just, you know, very simply,

Starting point is 00:17:05 you're going to quickly open something from you because they were just there and go, how was it? Great. Thumbs up, thumbs up. Next question, leave a review, thumbs down. Tell me more about why. Awesome. And in our restaurants that we have, I know we pay close attention to our reviews and we reach out and contact people about those. How important is that, especially if you have a bad review, to reach out and try and correct the matter or understand what the challenge was? What do you think people should do when they either get a good one or a bad one? Sure. And there's a myriad of reasons on why someone might leave a bad review. The thing that you first have to do is take a deep breath as that business owner and go, you're wrong, you know,

Starting point is 00:17:53 and that's not, you know, the approach you need to take. You never win when that's the case. No, and you know, I know that there are a lot of the customer maybe isn't always right. Businesses out there, mortgage, real estate is definitely one of them where sometimes you have to have hard conversations with your clients, but in general, you are out there to satisfy your clients. And if a client's an unsatisfied client, even, or customer, even if it wasn't your fault, sometimes you just have to take it on the chin sometime and you know go above and beyond and do what's right and you know do what's necessary to make that a

Starting point is 00:18:32 happy person because happy people at the end of the day are going to tell more people and tell them about their experience and you're actually more likely to win more people, more customers to your business if someone was originally unhappy, but they tell the story of what you did to overcome that. Yeah. Look at my bad food situation that I dealt with. I mean, I went back and certainly they're making that right. And I care that they care. So that's fascinating. Final topic here, Tony, map search. And I know this ties into everything. How do we maximize this? I know a lot of people are saying,

Starting point is 00:19:12 hey, put your address in the content in your photos, you know, in the geotag or whatever in your photos. Do different things like that on your website. Should we be concerned about making sure people know where we are? And how do we increase our probability of being found on map search? Sure. Yeah. And actually, I'll bring up, I believe, a sixth topic, and that's voice search as well.

Starting point is 00:19:36 Oh, wow. So voice and maps today really actually go hand in hand. So as there is a Google business, there is a Bing business, there is businessconnect.apple.com. That's how you get on Apple Maps. So there are platform, you know, there's Waze, there are several, there are MapQuest, MapConnect, MapBox. I mean, there are tons of them, right? So we should be concerned about this. You should be very concerned about it because it's not just people. Once people understand your business or know about your business or even are traveling and trying to discover businesses around them, people are sometimes foregoing the search engine and just opening their phone up and pulling up the map app on their phone to discover what's around them or

Starting point is 00:20:26 what's close by to eat or go to a movie or go grab a drink or whatever, right? And so you have to be available in all of these places. Now, going beyond even just the map apps, you think about, you sit down into your car and type in, you know, cars today have restaurants near me. I do that all the time. Exactly. So how do you get on those places? Well, you got to get on the map apps where the cars are actually pulling the data from. So they're all interconnected. And so especially with, well, I'll mention Siri, your map profile on Apple, again, businessconnect.apple.com, that's one of the go-to places on how to get on Siri. The second go-to place to get on Siri, just so that you know, is Yelp. So Apple actually pulls in Yelp reviews into their listings. And when you look at listings

Starting point is 00:21:20 on your Apple app, you'll see Yelp reviews. And you don't have to sell food in order to be on Yelp. Oh, absolutely not. I remember traditionally everybody's like, I'm not a restaurant, so I'm not on Yelp. But I think all businesses are on Yelp now. Yes. Yeah. I know a very successful real estate team out in Scottsdale that does a lot of Yelp ads because no one else is doing them. Ooh, there you go. A little gold right there, folks. Tony, we've dug deep. We've talked about websites, SEO, social media, reviews, map search, and voice search. This has been a master class in understanding our low-hanging fruit, but also a fair amount of depth in our web presence.

Starting point is 00:22:01 I've learned a lot today. I hope all of our listeners have as well. Are there any other key points that you think these folks should hear about this web piece and any recommendations? Honestly, it takes a little time. It takes a little effort, but it's worth it. And so anything that's worth it takes work. Yep, that's true. And, you know, honestly, this is something that you can actually measure your results and see the success on. And so just getting out there and doing it is important. And I would strongly suggest that if you have a business, if you're online, if you're not online, get online. But if you're online, start doing some small things and you will actually

Starting point is 00:22:45 start seeing improvements. Awesome. Tony Adams with Area 15 Ventures. You do a lot of great work for a lot of people. So thanks for what you do. I do have one final question I ask our awesome guests on the show. And that's how do you start your day with a win? How do I start my day with a win? Well, a lot of times it's just getting up and going to the gym, getting that knocked out early and having just kind of that nice feeling of accomplishment after going. But sometimes it's just having a good, strong kind of focus on what I'm going to do for the day over a cup of coffee. I like it. I like it. Tony, thanks for being on Start With A Win. We appreciate all that you do.

Starting point is 00:23:31 And thank you for listening to Start With A Win.

Start With A Win - ELEVATE Your Business's Digital Marketing | Tony Adams Part 2

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.