Rev & Reach Episode 16 – Small But Mighty: Digital Marketing That Works for Small Businesses

00:08 LORI: Hello, everybody. I’m Lori Jo Vest, and it’s time for another episode of Rev & Reach. I am here with PopSpeed Digital Marketing LLC team member Kiley Metcalfe. Say hi, Kiley. KILEY: Hi, everybody. LORI: And we are here to pull back the curtain and show you how we do digital marketing. Today, we want to talk about smaller businesses—and that might mean you haven’t hit, you know, a million dollars yet. Maybe you’re two or three million, in that range—let’s say, like, three million and under—and it can be really difficult to decide how much marketing you need to do, and there never seems to be a budget, right? So what we want to talk about is ways and things you can do to get your business going in the right direction, and use our own agency as an example. Kiley, you do all of our marketing efforts at this point in time. What do you think? KILEY: I think that, I think one of the things that we have learned along the way, and obviously we have an interesting perspective here, right? Because we’re a digital marketing agency that, for a long time—I think it’s fair to say—neglected our own digital marketing, right? LORI: Because it was all referrals. KILEY: Exactly, yeah, exactly. LORI: That was referrals. KILEY: It’s 100% true. So, for a while, we didn’t have a need for it, and then as we kept growing, we were like, Okay, how are we gonna do this and make the time? And it’s so easy for that to get lost in the shuffle, even for us, when it’s the lifeblood of what we do every single day for our clients—and we should be practicing what we preach. It’s very easy to have the “client first” mindset because… LORI: That’s where the money comes from! KILEY: Of course they are, but we need to grow, too. 1:59 KILEY: Exactly. So, one of the things that I think—and I’m sure you would agree, Lori—that we noticed when we really put our feet down and started getting serious about how we were going to promote ourselves, kind of on the side of our clients, is that it takes time. And that’s not something to beat yourself up over, or fear, or anything like that. It’s just the simple fact of life is that, in the nature of our work, our clients come first. When we have time, we work on our own stuff. We make it better; we hone it in. And we’ve been… I don’t—Lori, you’ll have to remind me how many years we’re going on, like, the agency existing. And here we are: digital marketing, and we just started our podcast this year. You know what I mean? 2:53 LORI: Yeah, seven years. Seven years, lucky seven! KILEY: Lucky number seven. Woohoo! But yeah, I think the first thing I’d say is just that it’s going to take time to get to a place that you’re happy with and where you’re doing all of the things that you “should” be doing. And that’s okay. Ultimately, the work that makes you the money is what is going to come first and be the priority, is where I think that conversation should start. 3:22 LORI: But what I noticed with us—which I think is probably based on my experience in business in the past, still relevant—is it’s referrals. If your business’s business all comes from referrals and networking, that is amazing. It’s really good. However, if you really want to grow your business, it’s extremely difficult to grow your business on referrals. There’s a lot to that. And as soon as you get a referral, what is the first thing they do? Go look at your social media. Go look at your website. Go look at your—look at everything. Your presence online. What does it look like? Are you on Google Business? What do your reviews look like? So there’s a lot of things that people are checking digitally before they even call you. So if a referral comes in, you want to make sure that you look good, that your platforms and channels you are on are built out, that you’re posting regularly. But as a small business, I know you can get away with posting a little less regularly—maybe just twice a week. That is very reasonable, right? I mean, Kiley, is that the cadence that we do right now? 4:30 KILEY: Yeah, yeah. We, for us personally, we’re twice a week right now, sometimes three. But you have to keep it manageable, right? Because, especially depending on what your business is, you’re not going to have the time—especially if you have a small team, if you don’t have an agency at the moment, if it’s just simply not in your marketing budget—you have to stay realistic. And I think that two, sometimes three, cadence is good. 5:00 KILEY: Especially what you just said, Lori, in that foundational basis. If you’re super referral-based, and ultimately your goal at this point—as opposed to just really hitting the ground running and growing super fast—is, if right now you’re good with those referrals, you still need that place to send those referrals to get a better idea without having to have a salesy type conversation. Just let them get to know you on their own a little bit. That foundation, that user-friendly website that’s pretty and appealing, that baseline of social content, is so important to make a good first impression. 5:43 LORI: Oh, yeah, absolutely. And what I would also add is that when we started, we started small. We started with social media, we started with blogs. And the blogs were maybe once a month. Social media was, you know, not as frequent as it could have been. And then we added—we used that time with those things to just get into a rhythm, get into a groove. Make it part of your day. Make going to social part of your day. Make creating content a part of your week. Maybe it’s something you do on Friday afternoons when it’s nice and quiet, you plan for the next week, and then, with the newsletter, setting a hard date to send it. We send ours on the first of the month at like 12:05am, and we call it “We Got Here First.” Now, it’s not an original idea. We stole that from an agency that used to use it and doesn’t use it anymore, and that’s not competitive with us, and it has a hard deadline. It’s got to go out on the last day of the month, period. So there’s no excuses. You know? Sometimes that means we’re doing it on that day, but we’re doing it, you know? And we’re developing our list. 6:59 LORI: That’s the best way to develop your list: to have a compelling newsletter or monthly missive that you send out that has useful information for your audience and that builds relationships. In past companies, when I’ve done marketing for different places I’ve worked over the years—I was in sales and marketing, so you’re kind of managing the whole thing—I would get calls after we sent our silly little newsletter. “Hey, you know, I was just thinking of you guys and, hey, I’ve got a bid for you. Do this bid for us.” And I would get work from the newsletter that we did. That was before social media—it’s been a long time—but before social media, we sent one out just once a month, and people would respond, because again, it’s repetitive touch points and it’s top-of-mind awareness. You want to stay in that consumer’s purview, so that they see you in various places. Anything else to add to this? Kiley, what are you thinking? 7:56 KILEY: I think website is on top of that. I think a lot of brands get this right now; I think some still don’t. But just the importance of really investing in your website—I would say social is massively important. Adding a newsletter on top of that can be extremely helpful when you have the time and the resources to do it. But if you’re not investing in your website—for me, this is not research-based, this is personal—but I do think a lot of people would agree, just in the digital age that we’re in, if you don’t have a website that looks somewhat modern, at least a little bit like you took the time or invested in it, or made it a user-friendly experience, it will just instantly turn people off and away from your brand. If you don’t make their experience, or the pathway to learning about your business, easy, no one’s going to do it. And it really is an indicator that, although you might be an industry expert and have every—you know, that small but mighty mindset and really know what you’re doing—a bad website really kind of leads people to think otherwise. 9:19 LORI: They don’t care. Or you just don’t care. KILEY: Yeah, I think not caring is a really good way to put it. So that would be—if your website’s lacking right now, I think that would be a really good place to start to inch your way towards that process of having a real digital marketing effort. I would suggest not stopping there, but if you’re really not thrilled with your website, I think that’s something that should be an immediate change. 9:46 LORI: Absolutely, because it does lead traffic. You know, it helps with search because people do go to Google. Somebody told me the other day that kids 18 and 19 don’t ever use Google. Well, they’re using the other engines, which are social media at this point. KILEY: Yeah, TikTok, YouTube, right? LORI: Yeah, they’ll search everywhere. We’re in a place right now with search engine optimization, where people are just searching everywhere, and TikTok is a huge place where people go to find information. And same thing with Instagram, Facebook, all of them. So if they’re looking for a vendor for something or a service provider, you want to be there. You want to be there and be active so you don’t look like you’ve, you know, stopped posting. Don’t stop posting for two or three months once you start—keep going. Consistency is key, you know, and it makes you look like a longstanding, successful business when you have a nice social media feed, right? KILEY: Absolutely, absolutely, completely agree. 10:49 LORI: Yep. So I think that’s all we’ve got on this topic. This is a short one, and if you’re a small business, we’d love to hear from you. We are one of those agencies that works with both global organizations as well as smaller—we have a charter school client, we have a nonprofit client. We work in a lot of different categories, and we would love to at least talk to you; maybe there’s something we can do to help you with your website and get you started with a social strategy that you can then implement. So there’s a lot of ways we work with customers, and we have small business clients that get great results from what we do. So that’s what we’ve got. Thank you so much for joining us. We’ll be back again soon with some helpful, useful information on how to get more ROI out of your social and digital marketing efforts. Please feel free to connect with Kiley and I on LinkedIn. We’re both open networkers there. We’d love to hear from you. So take care. We’ll see you soon. KILEY: Thanks, everybody.