Business-Building Ideas from Terry Brock
Business-Building Ideas from Terry BrockHow can you best use social media to achieve your business goals? Find out what works in Facebook — and if it is the only platform you need. Find out about the way to market a small business, a service or other type of business.
In this interview with Dan Deigan, of Little Conversations Today http://littleconversationstoday.com/, asks me about a wide variety of topics on one of my favorite subjects — marketing. Think of this one as a way to learn about marketing today and what is effective. This would be a great video to use for you
r weekly company training session. I cover a lot of ground on a lot of topics that can help you optimize your business.
Achieving success in business today is what you need. As I speak about marketing and social media around the world, I see many traits from those who succeed and those who don’t. In this interview you’ll learn about some that work as Dan and I have a very candid, andfruitful discussion.
If you’re wondering about using blogging in business, this is a great interview to watch and study. I talk about how to go about using a blog and where it can help you most. Note the ways that I mention you can use blogging and how to go about it. Even if you’re a seasoned blogger, you’ll enjoy what you hear on this one.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Enjoy the video and learning!
Terry
Terry Brock, MBA, CSP, CPAE
www.TerryBrock.com
Connect with me on Social Media
Twitter – @TerryBrock,
Facebook – www.facebook.com/MarketerTerryBrock
LinkedIn – www.linkedin.com/in/marketerterrybrock/
Watch my videos – http://www.youtube.com/terrylbrock
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[podcast]
GENERATING BUSINESS THROUGH SOCIAL MEDIA
Hi! I’m Terry Brock with terrybrock.com. Marketing and Advertising are critical for small businesses; critical for any business. We find that entrepreneurs sometimes have limited funds and pretty much all the time and we’re trying to figure out where do we put the dollars. Do we pour it all into say, one platform of social media like Facebook or Twitter or whatever? Well, there are a lot of questions about advertising and these are some of the questions that I was asked recently on a radio interview from Canada.
Dan Deigan is guy who has a great radio show on helping people to overcome adversity, build their business and do more. He talked to me about how to do these things and so, I wanted to share these with you.
Now, this is fun. We actually just turned on the recording while we were recording it over Skype so you can see the video of it and of course, you get the audio. You are going to find out how to advertise, how to market more effectively. If you’re an accountant, if you’re running a store or if you’re running some other type of business, you are going to find a lot of different ideas that can help you.
This interview is packed with a lot of ideas as Dan asked them. I think you are going to enjoy this. So join us now for this conversation with Dan Deigan of Little Conversations Today and me, Terry Brock. I’ll look forward to getting your reactions.
Dan: Welcome back to CIDI 99.1 FM. This is the Adversity Connection and I’m your host, Dan Deigan. Today, we’ve got a very, very special guest.
There is one thing to start a company or start a website and start blogging and start sharing your information with the world. But there is another thing to market it. Marketing your information is key in order to get your message out in order to share your product or service with the world.
Today, we’ve got Terry Brock. Terry Brock is an internationally-recognized speaker and business coach in the areas of Marketing and Technology. Terry and I just finished a great conversation where we’re sitting here, hundreds of miles apart, being able to speak on this first ever video-recorded CIDI show. Whether you are listening to this on the radio, at the end, we’ll share where you can get the links in order to watch this live.
Terry, thank you so much for being here. We so appreciate your time and we’re very much looking forward to just the excitement and energy that come when the two of us speak and how we are going to share this information with everybody so they can start marketing their company, product or service effectively today.
Terry: You bet, Dan. It’s great to be with you again.
Dan: Thanks. There are some people that say, “Well, if you are marketing on the web, you got to go Facebook.” And Facebook is the biggest bang. It’s the Kohuna of Marketing. You got to focus your attention on Facebook. There are other people that suggest, “Do a little bit of this. Do a little bit of this. Do a little bit of this and you maximize your potential.”
Our question to you is, I guess the beginning stages of Marketing, “Are we looking to master a specific area or do we want to diversify or do we want to go for the big gusto like Facebook?”
Terry: Well, the answer to that is as with so many things in Marketing, it depends because it’s going to depend on what you’re doing. For some people, Facebook is the place where they need to be. They need to put a lot of emphasis in that. Put a lot of dollars into it and make sure that you are there because that’s where your market is.
But as you see, that’s the key. It’s where does your market live? Are they on Facebook? Are they on Twitter? You can do advertising on Twitter also that is very effective and with LinkedIn.
The way you find out about it, here’s the answer. You test. How about that? You test it. You have to write it out and you have to say, “Okay, let’s meticulously go through and see what works. We put X dollars into Facebook. We did this and this.” Real good marketers never stop testing. Always testing and always trying, just like the marketers of old. Like wonderful people like Dan Kennedy, Ted Nicholas and Gary Halbert, who have been icons in Advertising and Marketing.
They would constantly test and when they find something works, they go, “Great!” They make notes of that and meticulously keep track of it. Then, from there, they go back and they say, “All right. What if we change this one verbose?” Make the headline a little bigger is the way I would do back then. “Let’s change it from red to black.” Or, “Let’s try this.”
With us, we can try at different times of the day with Facebook. Or, if I did two in one hour and none for the rest, how is that going to be? Or, if I put a picture of this person or a picture of that person?
But you want to keep details of it. I would suggest try what’s going to work best and what others are doing that are in a similar field of yours. For instance, if you’re in the retail store and you want to find out, “Where do I best advertise?”
Look at what other retail stores in your area are doing and look at other retail stores in other areas around the country and around the world. Find out what is working and then be willing to experiment. Be willing to try and adapt. Find out how it works differently.
You and I are in the Information business and Communication. Find out what is working and what is happening. Others would say, “We tried this. We ran this ad and we sold many more.”
As an example: One of the things we are coming out with, as you know, Gina Carr, my partner and I are working on a book that’s due to be published this Fall called, “Klout Matters”. It’s about measuring your digital influence.
Well, one of the things we feel that we need to do is have a strong presence on social media; with Twitter, with Facebook particularly, maybe a little bit with LinkedIn, but not so much with LinkedIn because Klout really will matter even more to thought leaders. It’s very good in LinkedIn; it’s a great place to be for advertising many things.
However, for those that are thought leaders, I guess a LinkedIn group could be very good, but largely, we see Facebook and Twitter as very, very effective and having some audio and video advertisements that we could put on to LinkedIn or refer to them will also work.
The long answer to your question, it’s really a combination of what’s going to work and the way you find out what works; you test, test and keep on testing.
Dan: Is there any sort of denomination we should go with? Like I know Facebook, for example, has a bunch of different platforms that you can market up. Should we say, “Okay, let’s take a $50, $50, $50 and see where that brings us.” Or is marketing our business, our product or service an expensive ordeal these days?
Terry: It can be. I think what you want to do is look at what is going to work there by saying, “Well, I’m going to take 50, 50, 50.”
I would just rather take 100% and put it here. Then, put 100% over here on the next test. Then a 100% over here. By trying to diversify too much, you are not going to get the biggest bang out of your buck. I think you want to look at but don’t just run in and try something like shoot in the dark. Do some research. Find out what has worked. Find out what is going on.
This is what advertising has been doing for years. They find out. For instance, back in the days of television only, they would look at what kind of advertising budget their competitors put in there, what kind of advertising budget they put into this or that. Work and find out what’s going to be there but I think you want to find a good mix. Then, when you find that mix that works, you might say, “Okay. We are going to put a little bit here. We might put 75% into this platform. Then we are going to put 10% over here and 15% over there.” Something like that might be the way to do it.
Again, it all really depends on what your market is going to say, what your market likes and where your market lives.
Dan: Obviously, I mean, let’s be realistic, Research is a key element. It’s almost that whole theory of “If you don’t know where you’re going, how do you know when you’re going to get there,” kind of scenario.
For somebody who is just starting out, let’s say for example, in a Services’ business. So you have a service you’re offering. Are there specific locations they should go or any specific routine they should follow that you would suggest to get them rolling on this foot? Instead of them, just for example, sitting in front of their computer and saying, “Wow! How would I research this?”
Terry: Again, I think it’s going to depend on the kind of service. For instance, let’s suppose that you are a dentist. A dentist wants to advertise and wants to go on and get more patients coming in. That service is going to be a little different than say, an accountant. An accountant might want different.
So you want to find out who are the kinds of people I want to work with. It depends because within dentistry, you might have certain specialties. You might say, “Gee, I’m going to focus only here on children.” So you have Children’s Dentistry or maybe you will have one which is going to be more cosmetic or maybe you are going to focus on being an endodontist. Whatever it is, find out those things and then, think about, “Okay, where do those people hang out?” If you say for instance, you are an endodontist, then that’s going to mean a lot of referrals. What you want to do is hang around some dental groups. Find the groups where the dentists hang out so that general dentists might be able recommend you.
If you are an accountant, you think, “Okay, where am I going to account? I’m I looking for small businesses. Am I trying to work with more medium-sized businesses? Do we want to go into a specialty area on that?” Find out where the people that you’re targeting live. Where do they go? Where do they hang out? By “live”, I mean where do they live online? Where do they normally hang around?
It might be you say, “Hey! I found a direct correlation that people that are interested in the kind of dentistry that I do really like to go to Blue Jays games. So they’re really into the Blue Jays and they want to go there.
Great! If that is what the data is showing you, then you might want to consider buying some ads around that event, doing that online or maybe offline. But I think what you want to do is look at each one. There is no one-size-fits-all and always-do-it-this-way. You want to sit down and Google Analytics is a great tool for finding out a lot about that. Another good tool is HootSuite. Get the Analytics within HootSuite and start studying those. We go over those now regularly and we say, “Okay, where are we doing?” We watch the amount of people and we go, “Whoa! Look at that one. It was way up on that day. What was it that we did that day?”
“We put a post out on this.”
“Oh really? That got much juice?”
“Yup.”
So watch for those things and realize when you do certain things here, it’s going to get a lot more.” Getting pictures for instance in Facebook, we know, helps to generally get a lot of good juice. We get a lot of good Facebook juice that way by putting in pictures of certain people. Pictures of people; pictures of nature can work as well. Pictures of pets can be very good but find out what works.
One of the things that we do is we use a lot of Word Art. So we’ll get a picture of something with something that I said before; some kind of pity phrase that someone picks out. One of our administrators look at it, finds what’s there and we put it out and then, we track how did that Word Art do. Those that get the biggest jump in usage are the ones that we put back into circulation to reuse a little bit later.
People have a very short retention span on social media, so we use that to our advantage. You might see something on February 3rd and then sure as whirl, it’s going to be out there, maybe August 3rd. Given that there is enough time between February and August, people probably forgot about it or if they see and go, “Yeah, I’ve seen that before,” they just go, “Oh! I like that one again.” Much like a good song on the radio.
Dan: You’re listening to the Adversity Connection on 99.1 CIDI broadcasting from beautiful Knowlton, Quebec. Just before the break, just in case you’ve missed it actually, we are going back to the beginning here. We’ve got Terry Brock, internationally-recognized speaker and super-marketer, I’m going to call you, Terry, because, really, the knowledge you have for Marketing in technical is just unbelievable.
If you go to terrybrock.com, you’re going to see a ton of his videos, a ton of his interviews and this great little Send-A-Voicemail thing that is on the side of his site. I absolutely love that, Terry. I haven’t seen it until I saw it on your site and I think it’s a great idea!
Terry: Thanks!
Dan: We were talking about the social media aspect of Marketing. Just before the break, you’d finish discussing about some Picture Art, some Word Art, you called it.
Now, taking a step further from that social media, should we be looking at offering – so you are offering a service. For example, you used a dental business and an accountant. The idea kind of flows around — Christine is in my head when we are looking at ways to market, you know, create a little mini-course. So maybe take a little mini-course and give it away everywhere you can, whether it be in your blogs, you link back to it for somebody to download it, on how to effectively take care of your teeth, or on how to effectively create a budget if you’re an accountant. Is that something that you would sometimes suggest to clients? Think up a key product that won’t take you too much time to create but everybody really needs to understand how it works.
Terry: Dan, you raise an excellent point on that. Having a course, an education is one of the best forms of marketing. For instance, if you are a dentist, putting out information that teeth could be decayed this way even though you might be brushing properly and flossing the best you can; here’s how you could omit something and why you need to come by and have regular checkups. Put together some videos on those types of things. Put together something on what’s happening.
If you’re an accountant, say your market is small businesses. You might say, “Did you know that you could run to trouble from Inland Revenue by doing this. Or by the IRS could this kind of thing, depending on the country you are in.” And be able to say, “We are going to… what’s the value of Revenu du Canada up there, don’t you?
Dan: Yes.
Terry: Revenu du Canada. You love them as much as we love our IRS here, too. (Laughs) I think what we want to do is we want to find out what it is and an accountant, could say, “Hey, if you want to avoid problems with the IRS or Revenu du Canada, did you know that the law now says this, this and this. To find out more, you can tune in to this course.”
Have a webinar. Have a course that’s available and little tools like we use often is ScreenFlow. I love Camtasia and using Camtasia, you can create a ScreenFlow that accompanies PowerPoint or Keynote presentation. It gives you the ability to create knowledge that you already have as an expert and then, get that information out there.
Creating webinars, creating podcasts and other forms of information are just some of the best ways to really get information out there and do the advertising and the marketing that you want. Don’t forget, writing blogs. You’re still giving a lot of good information by writing those blogs and you’re answering specific questions.
Here’s a ninja trick, Dan, if I can share with the audience.
Dan: Please do.
Terry: I would say, don’t just say, “I think they’re interested in this. I think they’re interested in that.” Find out what they’re talking about. Literally, go to the Groups. That’s why you want to be on groups on Facebook. You want to be on groups on LinkedIn where your target market hangs out. Watch and read, over a period of time, what are the areas that are causing them the greatest problems. What are they complaining about? What are they saying? “Oh, I don’t like the new this from this.” Well, find out what that is and then, create a market that would need a blog post that is going to address that specifically.
For instance, let us say in accounting. Let’s suppose you’re in accounting and you know that small businesses are there. You get involved in the small business group that might be in your local area. If you see people saying, “I just don’t know how to fill out this new State Form XR335. 335 just really has me spend… I don’t what to do.”
Then, you as an accountant would do your research, find out what it is about XR335 or whatever it say and then say, “Small Business, are you having trouble with XR335? Get your answers here.” And you write a blog post that answers those questions for them with lots of references to how you’ve helped people to do that when they contact your office. If they call your office, they get perhaps a free consultation over the phone and then you can set up an appointment. They can come in and you can get them set up and no more XR335 problems for them.
The whole idea is you find the problem, the real problem, not the one that you just think is there. Find that problem and then address it in a profound way and in a helpful, educational, highly-informative way.
Dan: This brings us right down to another key question. A lot of people that have businesses or have asked this question before, they’ve said to me and I mean, I’ve personally heard it which is why I’m asking is, “A blog is not going to help my business. Can a blog really or an article subscription somewhere, an article that can help somebody? Or really, the reality is that no matter what business you are in, you are here to serve people. Can that help on almost any aspect or any aspect of business?
Terry: I think so particularly today. There are very few areas where we don’t want to know something else. We want to know more. Another might be a few where you have, if you ran a stand in a train station, people probably aren’t going to wonder about that. They just want to get whatever you got: a bottle of water, a sandwich or something before they hop on the train.
There would be some businesses where it might not work but in most businesses, think about it, if you are a hardware store, find out what kind of tools people are looking for. Or this time of year, when you are trying to take care of those shrubs, here’s a good tool that does this. The more that you can provide meaningful, beneficial education, the better off you’ll be. And today, it’s better than ever because you don’t have to only write. Sometimes, writing is the best way to do it.
If you think, “I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know how to write. That’s okay. Get a little recorder and you record it. Just record what you’d like to say and then, there are lots of people you can tap into around the world through services like oDesk where you can get contractors that will help you to write this. There are lots of people all over the world that speak English very well, or whatever language you want. They’re out there. You can send them a recording. They can listen to it. They can transcribe it and then, they can wordsmith it. Make it sound really good so that now, you’ve got a polished, professionally done blog that will be ideal for your market.
You can also do audio. Once you got it written down, why not sit down there and have the text and put an audio together. Many times, people want to listen to and get educated when they’re moving; when they’re driving the car, they got that long commute or I don’t do a lot of commuting, I work out at home, but I listen to podcasts extensibly.
I’ll give you an example. Dan, we’re getting intimate here. I did laundry this morning. While I was doing the laundry, instead of wasting time, I was listening to some really great podcasts. Getting education, learning about a lot of different things while I’m doing the laundry there and hanging it up and all that kind of stuff. I’m having a great time. Doing the kitchen and cleaning that up. Kitchen cleaning turns into education.
So now, it’s now the University of the Kitchen and the University of the Laundry Room. Wherever I’m going and I really think that’s the way to do it. To have a lot of fun and continue learning.
Dan: Bless our hearts to Zig Ziglar who created Automobile University. It was the first time I heard of that and you’re absolutely right.
Right after this break, we’re going to get in to some other really meaty material with Terry on marketing our business and what kind of strategies we can put together. So for everybody watching, look for that. We’ll be right back.
Dan: You’re listening to the Adversity Connection on 99.1 CIDI broadcasting from Knowlton, Quebec. Well, just before the break, Terry, we got into a bunch of different stuff. We talked about some educational courses we could create. We talked about blogging and the need for the high majority of businesses to write a blog and advertise it in the field of where you are.
You also discussed getting into some groups and really finding out what people needs solutions for. Taking those, Randy Gage said once, “The thing is, Critical Thinking, if you go out and you find something that people need resolution on or they need help on to solve it, you create a business around that and you instantly have customers.” It brings us back to the beginning of our show here which was really Research, Research, Research and research.
If we are looking at Researching, is there kind of a standard plan we should sit down and maybe brainstorm with somebody a bunch of different ideas? Even if we go back to Dentistry and Accounting, how do we get new clients in? Do we look at demographics? Do we look at population? What would be some key elements that you would suggest to anyone looking to sit down now and say, “I need to create a marketing strategy, a marketing plan. Where do I start?”
Terry: Well, I think it’s a good point. You want to start and I’m going to borrow from the great Stephen Covey who told us, “Begin with the end in mind.” You sit down and you think, “What is it that I want to accomplish and what do I need to do and where do I go for this research?” There are lots of material. There are lots of educational materials on Research. I remember I had a class in MBA program on Market Research. George [0:22:06 – inaudible], matter of fact, I remember who the professor was. He was a good one.
Going out and doing the research to find out what are people actually doing. Not just what I think. Too many people make the mistake going, “Well I know, I would like blue widgets, therefore everybody wants blue widgets.” No. No, because you are not the one buying these things.
Dan: I want a green one.
Terry: Others are. Yes, exactly. Find out what the other people are saying because some people might want the red widgets. You are a red widget kind of guy, aren’t you Dan?
Dan: Red, blue and green.
Terry; That’s right. See. Some people, “We want red today. We want blue tomorrow.” My point is, don’t assume that what you want is what the rest of the world wants. Frankly, I would say, it doesn’t matter what I want. What matters is what the marketplace is asking for. So start doing that kind of research. Tools are available today to do that. HootSuite is an excellent one. Google Analytics, we’ve also mentioned before, make sure you get those.
Now there are some others that cost you a few coins that can be very, very good. Look into some of these tools that are out there. Radian 6, for instance, is a very nice one but you could be putting down a few coins to get something like that and a few thousand dollars every month to get some real analytical information. But there are lots of them.
Do a search on Facebook tools or Facebook analyzers or Twitter Analyzers. There is a Twitalyzer, I believe is one of the tools to analyze which tweets that you send get the most interaction. Which gets the most retweets?
It’s not just, “Hey, I think a lot of people liked that one. I saw two tweets come through.” Well, look at it objectively. This is where we have to become a little more quantitative. I think that kind of research is good.
Then do your qualitative research. Go out on Facebook and say, “Hey, I’m thinking about going with blue widgets or red widgets. What do you think?” And watch what kind of response you get.
Of course, it’s not completely scientific but you are getting a good idea of what people are asking for. Mind by the way, taking into another level then and say, “Which would you prefer, red or blue widgets?” Then you watch people as they respond. All those that said, “I really prefer green widgets,” you can contact them directly because they’re your friends. They’ve already opted-in to get communication from you and say, “Hey, I noticed that you were interested in the green widgets. If you are interested and you like to know more about it, I thought you would appreciate this link to our site on green widgets.” Then send the link. Nothing pushy but it’s just, “Here if you want more information.”
Again, we go back to education. What we are doing today is we are looking at how can we be better educators. How can we help people to achieve the goals they want to relieve their pain? Education is one of the best ways to do that. Utilizing audio, video and text, think about where that comes in. I work with clients all the time. I talk about how they can do this and what’s best for them.
For some, it’s best to do… I remember I was working with a client up in Michigan a while back. He was just a genius in certain areas of Customer Service and helping people on those areas. So he was looking at other markets and I said, “Look at what you’ve got.” I identified a couple of things that he had but he hadn’t seen. He goes, “Terry, that’s right.” So he implemented them and then, the next year he came back and said, “Terry, I’m so glad I’m in your program because my sales have doubled based on what you said. We did this.”
I thought, “Well, what you’ve got to do is that research. Part of that research is getting other people to look at what you’re doing. Get other people to pay attention to you and talk to them because sometimes, they can see areas that you can’t see on your own. So work with others and make sure that you’re analyzing what’s going on and be much more objective than allowing input from only yourself.
Dan: Terry, we wouldn’t be able to end the show without you sharing all of your contact details, how people can get hold of you, how you can help people and just once more, go over what your passion is in life.
Terry: My passion in life is to help other people. I might sound trying and the [0:26:01 – inaudible] journalist in me goes, “Yeah right, everybody says that.” But really, that’s what really gets me excited. I’ve had lots of success. I’ve travelled around the world. Literally, around the world several times in 35 countries and what gets me excited is being able to help others; to see other people that go, “Wow! Terry, you’ve really changed because I introduced a concept to them,” and because I know that others have done that for me. I think that’s what it’s all about.
Money? Yes, it’s very important too. Money is important in our world today. I think what we’ve got to do is realize value for value is a critical way to live. So that what drives me and if I can help someone, if you are watching this right now, if you are listening to this and you say, “Hey! I’m hearing this guy. He’s got some ideas that sound interesting.” But you want to know a little bit more, that’s where I can help you out. Go over to my website at (www or dub-dub-dub as cool techies would say) www.terrybrock.com. Just like for listeners in Canada, Sir Isaac Brock. I’m going to claim Sir Isaac Brock as a relative, Dan. (Laughs) I can’t prove it but at least, as long as I’m in Canada or nearby Canada, I’m going to claim that anyway. Most Americans are going, “Who’s that? I don’t know.” But that’s okay too.
Anyway, back to terrybrock.com, take a look at the blog, particularly the blog. If you got some questions, drop me a line. My email is terry@terrybrock.com. One of the ways to reach me is Twitter and my handle there is real simple again, @terrybrock there on Twitter and I’ll be happy to get back with you.
Dan: Beautiful! Thank you so much for being here again.
Terry: You bet, Dan. Always good working with you. Appreciate what you are doing also. The work that you are doing here, getting this out and the information you are giving to people, overcoming adversity and overcoming some of the things that have hit them really hard like, “How am I going to get over that?” And you are not just saying, “Have a happy face.” You are giving really good ideas of people that have done it and how they are doing it. So Dan, thank you for doing that.
Dan: Thank you my friend. To connect the adversity in everybody’s life was what our true passion is.
You’re listening to the Adversity Connection on 99.1 CIDI. We are so grateful that you stopped by today. Remember, we are on again Thursday. Have a great week. Joy to you in every precious moment. The past is history, the future is a mystery. The gift is now. That’s why, they call it the present. Take care. We’ll see you next week.
