Blythe Brumleve:
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LinkedIn presents welcome into another episode of everything is logistics a podcast for the thinkers in freight. I'm your host Blythe Brumleve. And this podcast is proudly presented by SBI logistics the home for freight agents looking for a partner that can help you from everything from the technology stack, to payments to back office support to a carrier database, all of that good stuff. If you are afraid agent looking for a new home, make sure you hit up SPI logistics in order to really upgrade a lot of your game. And so for today's episode, I really wanted to get into the I guess the haziness around marketing stats. So what is a video view, what counts as a quality ROI on your social media posts, and and really talking about the context around those marketing stats and how you can present them to your audience, whether you're or the executive team, whether you are working on creating content yourself, whether you're sponsoring content, creating ads, there's a lot of haziness around, what is a view what counts as a view and and so we're going to clarify a lot of those different myths in today's show, so you can accurately understand your own stats, and then you can confidently communicate those to the rest of your team and to the people who you are reporting to. And then a little bit later on, in today's episode, I'm gonna get into what to do when your company is downsizing as a marketer, we're typically used to having a roll and then having marketing functionality thrown right on top of it, at least that was my experience working at a three PL and a four PL. And so for the majority of companies in the freight space, you are dealing with one person marketing teams. And if you're lucky enough to have more people on that team, to tight market, I don't have to tell any of you that but what to do if your company is not necessarily I mean, I could talk about if a company is closing because I've you know been experienced that before it's not fun. But what happens when other folks are laid off. And now their job duties are now put on to your plate. That was the topic that we discussed on freight waves now, so I want to make sure that I dive into it a little bit deeper on you later in today's episode. But first, let's put some context around those marketing stats and debunking some video view myths. Now, we kind of all know that comparison is the thief of joy, especially in marketing. And when we look at content online, we see a lot of vanity metrics. So we see you know, a Mr. Beast or a Kim Kardashian or, you know, some of these other creators influencers that are creating content online, and they're getting massive amounts of views. And so when we start to create our own content, whether it's for business or for, you know, a side hustle or our own, just personal enjoyment, we compare ourselves to those stats, and it becomes really defeating when your numbers don't stack up. But that's what happens when you compare your numbers to pointless vanity metrics. I use this example quite often, and that if you were going to be hosting a video like this, if you are going to be hosting a podcast, and I could guarantee you 12,000 views from a wide range of people, or 20 views from your target audience, I would be willing to bet that the majority of you would choose those 20 people from your target audience in order to create that content for so that's sort of the first thing I want to sort of lay the foundation for this segment is that we're going to be focusing on the data that matters. And this conversation really sort of came to light earlier this week when I posted about my own podcasting journey. How you know, early in the early days, I would say probably the first eight months of this show. Back when I started with still called the Digital dispatch podcast. We hadn't changed the name to everything as logistics, and I could see the growth just I could see it but it was very, very slow. For Podcasting. It's a very slow churn. And so what helped me a ton during that time, and it still helps me to this day is the platform Buzzsprout they are one of the largest podcast hosting companies in the world, but they release what's called their monthly platform stats, and these are available publicly over on the Buzzsprout website. And based on their data from their podcast hosts, it's around 32 plays. If you get 32 plays on a podcast, you are in the top 50% of all podcasters and that is a really encouraging setting. You might be wondering like that's crazy 32 plays like that doesn't sound sustainable. But back to my earlier point. Would you rather have 12,000 views from someone who probably is not going to buy from you or would you rather 20 views from your target Good audience. And so for podcasting, in particular, it is a very initial slow growth before you ever experienced that hockey stick growth. For another caveat to keep in mind is that more than 90% of all podcasts never make it past 10 episodes. And so we covered a lot of sort of the business side of podcasting in an earlier episode dropped this week, if you want to hear more. So the insights on the business side of podcasting, and what I've discovered along this journey, go listen to that episode, I'll actually link to it in the show notes. So you can make sure that you you hear more on that. But it led to this further discussion and unrelated to my post earlier this week about those podcast stats, and that is the realization around sort of legacy, I guess, let me back up for a second legacy media as we know it. So the CNN, the Fox News, MSNBC ease of the world, even ABC, NBC, a lot of that news programming is what I'd like to call legacy news news programs that have been around for decades. They are facing a massive drop in audience numbers. And this has been trending this way for quite some time. Over the last couple of months, few months, we've seen the top talent at MSNBC, Rachel Maddow, she left or I think yeah, it's MSNBC that she left her primetime radio slot or broadcast spot. And she left that network, then we also have, you know, he's not really comparison to these other two folks. But we have Don Lemon, who was fired from CNN, I think the the head of CNN was also let go this week, where he's going to be stepping down. So major shakeups over at CNN. And then of course, we have, you know, Fox News with Tucker Carlson on the outs, and he actually joined Twitter, and is joining Twitter to start up his own show. And to go not fully independent, but more independent on the or not independent at all, really, he's just going to a new media platform and new media ecosystem. And so he's leaving the legacy news, you know, the 8pm primetime news slot, and he's going over to Twitter in order to debut his show. Well, he debuted his show this week. And last I checked, it was a few hours ago, he has close to 78 million views on his first episode over on Twitter. And so it sparks up. There's Tucker Carlson, I'm I'm no fan. I do like to watch media personalities make moves, because I like watching the business aspect of media. So I can, you know, sort of pull out a couple different examples. So it would help in anybody really mine or anybody else's who is creating content, it can help you along in that journey to try to figure out why they're making these decisions that they're making? Well, because of that large number, that 70 million number, there are a lot of it and Twitter being Twitter's a lot of people on that platform who are not happy that he has that many views on his very first episode. And so it brought up a lot of conversation around well, what technically is a view on Twitter? And did you know that a view to be counted on Twitter only takes two seconds. And you could just be scrolling through the feed, not intentionally watching it not hitting play, not listening to the audio, the audio can be off. And that can still count as a view, which is remarkable, if you think about it. So there was actually there were other stats to or other insight that I wanted to bring up really quick, because we've never really heard from any CEOs, or out of any of the social media platforms, we've never really heard how they calculate these things, how they calculate video views time spent on page, why don't we get stats, you know, for video completions, things like that we don't really get those on any platform on YouTube, on Instagram On Facebook, none of these platforms provide that and the reasoning and the theories behind why they don't provide that is because they want their advertisers to see that $78 million number and they want to they want them to think that that many people are actively engaging. So it's it's passive. It could be passive viewing versus engaged viewing. And so that's where the waters start to get a little muddy. But one insight that I thought was was really interesting. I'm gonna share my screen here, but it is with the CEO of of Twitter bringing in another controversial person. Elon Musk was able to share his insight into how these views are counted. And so on the screen, what you'll see right here, I think my screen just blacked out. So I'm going to remove that we're going to re add it back but basically on this it's a Twitter thread that Ilan was calm. venting on and he was commenting on the fact that for these views to be counted, and I'm just going to read it because it's probably not going to show up on the screen right here. But Elon says, and he's replying to someone else who is sort of gloating about their view counts for videos on Twitter and kind of proclaiming that it's a huge win for free speech, absolute game changer, yada, yada. So if you think about it from that lens, that there are people that are touting these high view counts on these social media platforms, but then you come to find out you dig a little bit deeper than a view, technically, of a 10 minute, keeping in context of Tucker's video is a 10 minute long video, and somebody only has to watch two seconds of it, for it to count as a view. So automatically, that sounds a little like, that doesn't seem like a stat that should be touted. And there's some more clarification that Elon had when when he was referring to the stats that viewcount is actually understated quoting Elon here, as it does not include anything from our API. For examples, the tweets you see in Google search results or on Bloomberg terminals. So Elon, his argument is, is that that's actually low for a Twitter video, it should be significantly more, because they're not counting the views that are coming from Google search, and other third party sites. Twitter also has an embed feature on their video. So if you embed that content and put it on your website, even if you're making fun of them or criticizing him or praising Him, that view does not count. Specifically on Twitter, that's a separate view count. So with that said, it's a lot of I mean, don't get me wrong, it's a lot of haziness around those stats, it's a little misleading to, to look at that number in the far right corner of the video, and be able to say, Wow, 70 million people viewed that. So in that context, we don't exactly know how many people started watching that video and actually finished it to the end or even watched halfway through. A lot of marketers out there will say, as long as you watch at least half of the video, or maybe 30 seconds or so, depending on the length of the video, of course, then that would be a determining factor on if that video was resonating. If it was a success or not, an could encourage you to either do more of that style of content or to do less of that style of content. So two seconds is all it takes on Twitter now for for argument's sake and to to sort of throw some nuance in here 70 million people is still a hell of a lot of people. And so when you think about it from that, that even if a 10th of that audience watched halfway through or watch the whole thing. And that's that's been I don't even think that's being generous, I think that's actually on the lower end of a 10th of people tend to have that seven, 8 million actually watched the entire thing that is still significantly more people tuning in to watch that clip, then the people, the amount of people that are tuning in to watch some of these legacy media channels, primetime news, spot 8pm, on, you know, Monday through Friday, it's anywhere from you know, 100,000 to 300,000 people viewing it in that time slot. And that's also a time slot where we don't exactly know if somebody is watching intently sitting in front of the television, they're off doing their own thing, you know, maybe it's playing in the background, and they're cooking dinner or something. So all of those caveats we don't know exist in legacy media as well. I just thought that that was really interesting to see some of this start to come to light as to what counts as a video view, and what does it so with Elon kind of shining a light on the fact that yes, those counts his views after only two seconds, but there are factors where the view count could actually be not suppressed, but not counted in full where the full picture is being shown. So that's what we're kind of, you know, that's the goal of my conversation today is to be able to give you that perspective, so that you can understand. Is your content resonating? Is it actually something that people would resonate with and make a call to action from share it with a friend, share it with a colleague, you know, bookmark it to watch it later, maybe they're not in a buying cycle right now, but they could very well be in the future and you probably wouldn't know it based on some of the numbers that you may or may not be getting in different platforms. This episode is brought to you by SPI logistics the premier freight agent and logistics network in North America. Are you currently building your freight brokerages book a business and feel that your capabilities are being limited due to lack of support and access to adequate technology? At SPI logistics, we have the technology, the systems and the back office support to help you succeed. If you're looking to take control of your financial future and build your own business with the backing of one of the most successful logistics firms in North America, visit SPI bpl.com to learn more. So let's talk about those different platforms because it's not just about Twitter here Twitter is very low on the totem pole as far as the amount of people that are using social media. So as far as like user growth is concerned, I think Facebook still reigned supreme when it comes to that regard. But there's also a little bit of a questionable numbers on that Facebook reports as well. They own several other different social media platforms, are they including those users in their platform as well as far as growth numbers are concerned? All of that is you know, a topic for another day. But Facebook is it Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok are the top dogs on the on in social media, then I would follow LinkedIn closely behind that Snapchat, of course, not, of course, but Snapchat is still around. And they do you know, surprisingly better, they do better than Twitter. So that's another social media platform to keep in mind. YouTube is kind of bundled into the social media platforms, even though it's not quite social, like that's, again, a debate for another day. But let's get into what counts as a video view on some of these other platforms. So we know Twitter is two seconds. But there are other platforms, so Facebook and Instagram, three seconds, they're not that much better. And you don't have to have the audio on again, this is sort of a theme, I think, among all of these social media platforms, where they're kind of in cahoots together to kind of maybe have the same stats in the same way that they report this data, again, because it's good for their sponsors, to see that kind of information, and not ask a ton of questions. After that, I want you to ask questions and how you can be better at the content that you're creating. So Facebook, and Instagram is three seconds, the audio doesn't have to be on. This includes video posts, and reels. LinkedIn is the same three seconds, but a little bit of context. Because a view means the content was viewed, which is also a definition on how these different platforms make their definition of what a video view is, where it doesn't necessarily. So going back to Elon tweet for a moment, he goes into saying that you can essentially just be scrolling the timeline and not click on the video, but see it in your timeline. And if you watched it for two seconds or more, by accident, whatever it's going to count as a video view. So that's something to keep in mind. Now LinkedIn, the way that they classify a video view, it means the content was viewed for videos, that count happens only after three seconds, so we can't be sure if it was a meaningful view. In other words, did you really glance at a specific ad on the newspaper page, but probably not long enough to take it in properly, that comes from a LinkedIn representative. Now, this was a couple years ago. So that may have changed. I do not think it has though. Another way that LinkedIn measures engagement on posts, especially because we know that you know, they take other types of post text base image based, it's not just you know about videos on that platform. So another metric that they use to gauge is on a text based post that you typically you will see the first intro segment. And then there's a read more, if you click on that read more, that is a signal to LinkedIn, that your content is worthy of being shown to more people, because they are interested in seeing more. So they're going to show that content to more people. So that's another caveat to keep in mind. So we talked about podcast numbers 32 plays on an episode, you're already in the top 50% of all podcasts, which is crazy. So all of this is to say that you need context when it comes to social media stats and the numbers that they quote, unquote, represent. So whether you are creating content yourself, if you're sponsoring content, if you're creating ads around it, you need to be realistic as to what this content is providing. And the goal of any content plan should be to have it be digested to have it resonate with people, are people listening to it? Are they watching it? Are they sharing it with other people? Are they coming to your website? And are they converting to become a lead? You know that it's a lot whenever you think about the fact that you know, you're always going to get well? What's the ROI question and with marketing it really, it's it's probably one of the more annoying questions that you get asked because you know that people just want a singular line of create this blog content. And then you can measure the ROI and you can measure it in an exact straight line. Marketing doesn't work that way. It's very similar to like going to the gym. If you're trying to get in shape and you have a goal in mind. Are you really going to be able to attribute that goal of losing 20 pounds to a specific bicep curl that you made three months ago, you're not going to be able to do that it's impossible. That's what it's like for a marketer that is making content In any really any space, but especially in freight, and logistics, because we are dealing with the fact that a lot of marketers are solo teams, they probably have another role. And then marketing was just dumped on top of them, or there were they were part of a team. And now that team has been slimmed down, because the economy because of the way that the market is going. So, but as a soloist, as a marketer, as you know, a small team, it's your job to still understand what's driving revenue, it's your job to still make sure that you can make sense of why you created this piece of content, and what you hope that end goal is going to be. And so understanding what really counts as a video view, what really counts as engaged, video views on your content is really going to help you explain to others explain to the executive team explain to some of the leaders within your company and even to yourself, or to potential sponsors out there to under better understand what's happening with the content that you're spending so much hard earned, time and money on creating. So as long as you have that perspective, then it helps to make sense of everything else that you're doing in your marketing. Now, all that to say what to do as a marketer whenever the company is closing, or downsizing, not necessarily closing, because you're not going to have any marketing if the company is closing. But if it's downsizing, then it's a situation where you have more responsibility on your plate. And so I was sent in this question. And this is the question that we covered pretty in depth on freight waves. Now, if you were able to catch that, so I'm gonna I'm going to not rehash but I'm gonna go a little bit more in depth with a lot of that content that we talked about earlier. And so that question is, what are your go to marketing strategies? And which do you let fall by the wayside when time is of the essence and you can't do everything you want to do? Because your job description just got a lot longer because of layoffs. And you're doing someone else's job now to I can feel a lot of, I guess, personal stress and anxiety. And that question, I think, you know, I can speak for for some of us when I say that, you know, a lot of us have been in that exact situation. And it's not fun, it's not fun to see your co workers get let go. It's not part. It's not fun to be part of a company who is downsizing or closing all together, I've been a part of both. It's not fun at all. It's it's life changing, especially when the company closes. It's it's a pivot in the road that you have to make a decision on. I guess, fortunately, unfortunately, if you still, you know, have a job at this location. And if you're still wondering how to manage everything that you have, that was your responsibility before, plus all of the new expectations that you have now, like, there's probably a reason why the company is downsizing. So I think that there, that's an important question that you may want to know ahead of time, I don't know that it's going to be really difficult to kind of, you might want to tread lightly when asking those kinds of questions. But the reason I bring that up is because you want to you want to stress to leadership, that you're not going to be it's going to be a come to Jesus moment that you have with the leadership team and with your co workers is that you realistically cannot handle everything yourself. Oh, yes, there's AI? Yes, there's freelancers. Yes, there's all of these new tools that have come into play that will help you with your job and will help you do it faster. But they are not miracle workers, they still require time. It's not a set it and forget it. Even if you are set up with automations, those automations still have to be managed, those processes still have to be managed. So my advice is the first step based on this question are what are your go to marketing strategies? And what do you let fall by the wayside? Audit everything? I would say audit everything, what you're doing your main job responsibilities, the process it takes to get those job responsibilities done. I would create that list first. So audit everything first. The next step that I would do is I would meet with the CFO, I would meet with the CFO and finding out what's driving revenue. Where are those opportunities as far as as far as content is concerned, as far as marketing is concerned that you're having the best win rates. If you're winning contracts in this I mean, you're doing better than a lot of other folks if you're winning business in this year you're doing but you're you're doing something right in this kind of a market. So if you want to, if thinking about it. From that lens, you want to meet with the CFO to find out where the best opportunities where your highest profit margins are your most efficient lanes that you run on time commodities you run on time, or regularly find out what those are, and then that is a step in the right direction of formalizing or for formulating a content plan. The next step I want you to do is I want you to meet with the leaders and the executive teams meet with the CEO individually He or not CEO or the CFO, meet with them individually find out where those profit opportunities are. Because remember, as a marketer, you need to know what's driving revenue, so that you can reverse engineer it, and be able to set your company up for success and set your roll up for success. If you're able to, you know, be somewhat successful in a down market, then that is going to create a tremendous amount of opportunity for you when the market starts to turn and make a correction and maybe hopefully, in a more positive light. So I would meet with the CFO, make sure you find out that additional insight, and then I would meet with the leadership team, I would let them know set that make it table stakes make it exactly. Let them know all of the roles and responsibilities that you're going to be doing. And where you want to prioritize. And the reason I say where you want to prioritize is because there needs to be realistic expectations within the leadership team, that you're not going to be able to do everything. Because if you're trying to do your job and other people's jobs at the same time, you're going to be inefficient somewhere. And so it needs to sort of, you know, take in all of these tasks that everybody was doing, including yourself, and then you need to reprioritize and leadership needs to be involved in those decisions in that decision making process. They need to know if something is important to that that leader you want to know as well as marketer, because you want to make sure that you're taking care of your leaders within the organization. But by talking to the CFO, you're also taking care of the revenue side of things as well. Now, once you sort of set those table stakes with the executives, then you can go into regular meetings, this is such a game changer. When I learned this, as you know, when I was working on the editorial side of things at a magazine, we started having we were having conflicts with our sales team, our sales team was out trying to sell things trying to communicate things, they weren't communicating with the editorial team. And so that happens a lot in freight companies as well, where the sales team is kind of just flying by the seat of their pants, they don't really have a plan because in this market, you don't know that you can have too much of a plan or plan too far in advance. But you're you're you know, you're trying to do the best that you can. So there isn't a lot of structure in a lot of those environments where you're just trying to get business, any which way you can. So as a marketer, what you should prioritize is sitting in on regular sales meetings, typically, sales teams will have a weekly cadence for meetings so they can review common questions, concerns, you know, target accounts that they're going after things like that ideas that they have, by you sitting in on that meeting, you're able to gain that firsthand expertise, of what leads are asking when they pick up the phone, what are the cold callers saying whenever they call somebody? Their current customers? What kind of concerns do they have? What kind of questions do they have? Any question that is asked by a customer or lead should immediately go into your content plan, immediately shoot it straight towards the top, because then you can compare you can take those regular meetings from the sales team, you can take the goals from the CFO, and then you can take the job responsibilities that need to be prioritized, because you've already talked to the leadership team about it. That might change based on sales conversations. But at least the leadership team knows that you are doing your due diligence and talking with the CFO and talking with the sales team. So then that way your content that you're going to be creating is going to be a you know, a strong focus on what's driving revenue, and what questions that those those revenue that the revenue was coming from? Or what questions do those those people have, they're sending you revenue. So understanding what questions those leads and customers are sending and asking, that will help you craft better content for your website for social media, and, and all of the rest, because that can fuel the rest of your marketing ship is just simply by listening to what your customers and your leads are talking about. So that's the next step that I would do, then I would take all of them, you know, the all of these different meetings that you've had, and I would create sort of a Venn diagram, and I would have all of that information. And then I would go back through your responsibilities, the processes for each of those responsibilities. And then from there, then you can go back to the executive team and say, I've done XYZ research. Here's what I think we should do next in the next six months in order to generate leads in order to generate greater brand awareness and to get those leads to come to our website and then hopefully make a conversion. And then by that time, at least the leadership team knows that you're doing your due diligence. They know that that insight or that your plan is backed by insight from your own team. seem. And so then that way, they're more willing to give you a budget to maybe hire some affordable freelancers to purchase that new AI tool that could be a you know, really good use one site I did want to bring up if my screen won't crash, again, like it did before, is I want to bring up this site called Future tools, future tools. So once you've got all your processes sort of figured out this website, future tools, and I guess it's just not going to let me show it to you guys today. But it's future tools.io stream yard is not playing nicely with me right now. But future tools.io, they have a database of all of the AI tools free and paid, that have been pretty much invented in the last, you know, sort of eight months or so since all of this, you know, sort of chat GPT has really taken over and really gone into the mainstream, but they have different ways that you can sort through all of the different tools. I mean, there are 1000s and 1000s of tools on this website, it really is quite impressive to see that the it's really it's moved so quickly in this direction. So future tools.io can then help you in that regard to try to find, the way I like to think about processes, especially in marketing is that you you want to write down every single step that you take. So whether it's storing ideas, writing ideas, video ideas, the editing process, the distribution process, because if you're creating content, the distribution plan, where you're sending that content and social media channels, email advertising, you want to have that in mind first, because if you have the idea of where that content is going to end up, then it will help you in the creation process to reverse engineer what content is going to work best. Because if you spend any time on social media, you know that the same content that works on LinkedIn is not the same content that works on Instagram, it's not the same content that works on Twitter, pick two social media platforms Max and focus on those two, because your time is going to be very, very limited. I would even say that, if you're a soloist focusing on two different social media platforms is is going to be challenging, frankly. So if you want to really kind of hone in and focus on where the best opportunity is. And when I say the best opportunity, I mean, the platforms and the channels that are going that where your target audience is hanging out, and where you get the most bang for your organic buck. And when I say organic, I'm referring to organic versus paid. If you're doing advertising, that's a separate conversation that's deserves an entire show all unto itself. But if you're doing organic, there are only certain platforms right now that exist, where if you create content for that platform organically you are have the chance of having a greater reach. So, you know, Facebook is kind of under a recent revolution, I don't want to I don't want to call it a revolution did I take that word back? I guess maybe a resurgence is maybe the correct way of saying it. But Facebook is started to prioritize creators, again, they used to in their early days, and then they got so many users that that's when algorithms come into play. Because so many users create a lot more content, they want to they and Facebook wants to show you the content that's going to keep you on the platform longer. So that's where the essence of algorithms exist. And algorithm is a way to show you the content that they think that you will like the most. So Facebook shut down that reach. I would say probably in the mid 2000s The infamous pivot to video that a lot of companies did that sort of bankrupted a lot of companies, tasty videos, Buzzfeed News, things like that, that really handicapped a lot of their their content creation, because Facebook enticed all of these, these publishers and these creators to come to their platform to create content there, and then they shut their reach off. So they put all their eggs in the Facebook basket. And Facebook said, Alright, we have your content. Now, that's all we really wanted you for. So good luck to you. And they shut down their reach. So if meaning that if you say have a Facebook page, you got, I don't know, 1000 10,000 followers that are on that page, they just shut down. If you were to make a post on that page to your audience, they would just shut down that reach. And they would require you to pay for an advertisement in order to reach the same audience that you spent so much time and energy building. So that was back in the day. Now I am hearing over the last sort of five or six months probably because of declining user growth that Facebook has started to kind of add a little bit more fuel to the fire of creators that are on their platform. So you are getting a little bit more of a bump in your content if you're publishing to Facebook, but hands down best organic reach if you were to invest your time. Anyone afraid can tell you it's LinkedIn LinkedIn far in a way that's where the shippers are hanging out. It's where the executives are Hang Out is where the brokers and the carriers and the business owners are hanging out. So LinkedIn first and foremost, now if you're trying to recruit drivers, maybe in this time, you're I mean, I would imagine that a lot of companies are always trying to recruit good drivers. And so those good drivers are gonna be really hard to come by. So maybe for recruiting purposes, Facebook is the perfect place for you could be worth an experiment. But LinkedIn is I would say, number one, I would say number two is still tick tock because the chance to go viral on that platform is much greater than any other platform. And then I would say, YouTube shorts, YouTube shorts, YouTube is another one of those platforms that is desperately trying to compete against the behemoth that is tick tock as far as user attention is concerned. So they've been pushing YouTube shorts a lot. And so when you think about it from a YouTube angle, if you're already creating long form content in the form of a podcast, or you know, videos that are 20 minutes or longer, you might want to think about putting them up on YouTube. And then using a tool like Opus clips, where you can plug in a YouTube URL, and it'll be able to find and cut different social media clips for you, and you can send it right to YouTube shorts. I like the shorts to YouTube angle because it does what tick tock can't do and send that short form content viewer to your long form content. It's very, very difficult to do that. Even if you do go viral on tick tock, if you have one of those short form clips, and it does really well. The viewership for that or the trends, I guess the the transition for folks to be on tick tock to leave, tick tock, and then go to YouTube, or then go to your podcast to listen to, it's very slim, infamously you know, Instagram, I think their conversion rate on their stories, is less than 1%. So you're putting content where users are with the goal that it's being digested, and that they don't have to leave the platform to download your ebook or to get the rest of the video or whatnot. Let the content speak for itself, and then do direct uploads to those social channels offer HootSuite, HubSpot, all of these tools are great, but they are all considered as third party tools. When it comes to LinkedIn and Twitter and Facebook and Tik Tok any of these other platforms, they'll allow you to post there, they'll allow you to post the same thing to several different platforms. But they prefer that you go and you do a direct upload directly on their platform, don't use third party tools, it decreases your reach might be easier for you. But this is you got to play to some of the you got to play to the algorithm gods, these are the rules. So we just play by them. And when the attention shifts, and the organic reach goes to another platform, and it's a little bit better there than I would give you the same advice. The only good thing it from this is that you might feel like oh, this is so exhausting. Why do I want to focus on all of these different social media channels don't, don't focus on all of them, focus on one or two. And then when you get really good at one move on to the next. And then if something happens where that app gets shut down, or that app the organic reach is dwindling and falls off that falls off of a cliff, then you can use the same skills that you built, building that profile on that account, you can move it to wherever the attention has moved to, you know, for a little while, the attention moved from for a very brief little while it moved from Tik Tok to the platform be real. I don't even know if anybody who's using be real anymore. But that was one that you know, had an organic reach for four months. And that's maybe being a little generous. But now it's plummeted again. So when you think about what these behemoths of the apps that are still exist, they can kind of turn it on and turn it off as far as access and organic reach is concerned. But if you are just looking to cut straight to the chase, reach your target market and not get overwhelmed. Just make content that works well on LinkedIn. And the thing with LinkedIn is that you can do video, you can do text, you can do image based posts. But the only way you're going to learn of what's resonating is to just keep doing it and listen, listen to your customers, listen to your prospects understand what questions they're asking, and create content that answers those questions with the goal that it is going to be digested on that platform. Remember this if you remember any sort of key stat from this show, remember that 95% of people are not in an active buying cycle. The overwhelming majority of people in this space now are getting overwhelmed with people trying to get new business out of them. Cold calling is I don't I don't know who answers cold calls. I don't but I also don't have a desk phone. So that could be a very good reason why I don't get a lot of cold calls. But even like cold emails or you know, sales pitches and my LinkedIn DMS I don't read them I don't care. I don't have time waiting for it. And a lot of these other people don't have time, when they go to social media, what they're looking to do is they're looking to get distracted from the work that they should be doing. So what you can do to scratch that itch for them, is to make content that resonates with them, and publish it directly to the platforms where they're already hanging out. So when they become that 5%, that does become or evolve into an active buying cycle, and they're not in that 95%, then they think of you first they think of your brand first, and they come to you and they don't even go to Google to try to search for a solution to that problem, because they know that you are solving it because of the content that you've been creating. Do you wish there was a central place to pull in all of your social media posts, recruit employees, and give potential customers a glimpse into how you operate your business? Well, all of this should already be on your website. But too often, we hand that responsibility of building our online home off to a cousin, a neighbor's kid down the street, or a stranger across the world. Digital dispatch believes in building a better website at a fraction of the costs that those big time marketing agencies would charge. Because we've spent years on those digital front lines. Our experienced team focuses on the modern web technologies to bring in all of the places you're already active online, show off those customer success stories, and measure the ROI of it all in one place. With managed website plans starting at $90 a month, head on over to digital dispatch.io to see how we can build your digital ecosystem on a strong foundation. We've got explainer videos right on the website and the ability to book a demo immediately. Find it all over at Digital dispatch.io. So just to sort of recap a lot of those different steps. Audit everything. Set expectations with leadership, meet with the CFO, sit in regularly on sales meetings, if they won't let you sit in regularly on sales meetings, then ask if a note taking app like otter.ai can join that meeting a lot of meetings like that are remote. So having like an otter.ai join that meeting, take notes for you and then send you and everybody else a recap is going to be a godsend. I promise if you haven't used otter.ai Doesn't sponsor me but I'm open to sponsorship if they're listening, because it is saved my life. I use it on episode transcriptions. I use it to find key moments within the within the shows or within meetings. And then I can it makes things so much easier, and all the transcripts are searchable. And another bonus, I swear they should be paying me for this. But another bonus is when you set the name correctly. So like my name, in particular Blythe Brumleve, you can probably imagine how many times it's been misspelled or mispronounced again, or mispronounce pronounciating. Jesus, it's been mispronounced. So during when that happens in otter.ai, I just have to fix it once. And so every new transcript that I've uploaded since then, or every new meeting that I'm a part of otter.ai knows and they spell my name correctly. And all of the after all the meetings after I said it that once they correct it from here on out. So if you have a challenging name, or a difficult name, or even your company name, just know that you can set it and forget it in otter.ai. So I guess I should probably recap this Akin otter.ai number one fan right here. But sit in regularly on those sales meetings, try to get a tool like that, or note taking app in order to help you if you can't make all the meetings and just be able to have that searchable database that you can go back through, write out your prospects or prospects that to read out your processes. Use AI where it makes sense. Make sure you have a way to measure leads. I haven't actually talked about this one yet. But you need to find a way to measure leads you need to you need and the way that I do this. And the simplest way to do it and most cost effective way to do this is ad How did you hear about us to all of your high intent forms on your website. Because you don't want to be the person that does all of this work sits in on the sales meeting meets with the executive team. You know, mix all the content publishes to social media and you don't want to be doing this for months. And then go to your website and realize the goddamn forms don't work like infuriating when it's happened to me infuriating. So you want to make sure probably before you do before you create a lot of content directing folks to come to the site and convert. You want to make sure that the forms on your website work. And then the next step would be is to add a field to those forms that says How did you hear about us make it required and make it a free text field. Don't add a drop down. Don't add checkboxes just make it a free text field. If you make it a free text field, then users are much more willing. Like if they're already at the point that they're going to come to your website and they're going to convert the biggest complaint I hear is like oh Will people won't fill out the form if they have to answer this one random question. It's not true, it has zero impact on how many people are going to if you've done your job, and people come to the site, and they're ready to convert that one question is not going to prevent them from, from, you know, doing business with you. And if it does, it's probably not somebody you want to work with anyways. So add, how did you hear about us no checkboxes dropdowns, make it a free text field and make it required. That gives you the most insight that you could ever imagine I haven't installed on all of my sites, I have it installed on my clients sites, you would not believe the kind of feedback that we get on those forms one, one trucking company in particular, that we ask this question on the driver applicant forums, and we get questions and we get answers like, I met, so and so driver at a at a rest stop, I saw your son, I saw one of your trucks driving down this interstate, we're getting those kinds of answers. And you would never have no, I mean, this company probably spends a ton of money on Craigslist ads on job board ads, and come to find out that one of their more successful recruiting is done at the truck stop. So as a marketer as you're not going to get a lot of this insight right off the bat. But adding that field to your forms will help you start to collect that database so that in the future, hopefully, you know, the only upturn of this market and not that no, not another downturn, knock on wood, hopefully, you'll be able to make better buying decisions on where to spend advertising dollars, maybe you don't need to spend any money on Craigslist ads anymore, because other recruiting efforts are doing a little bit better. And then maybe you can have room to experiment. And those other methods that are doing a little bit better. So that's a very, very important thing to keep in mind is that before you create all of these different marketing campaigns or content campaigns, before you do anything, make sure that you have some way to measure that lead conversion that's coming through on the websites. And then that way, you know, when those leads do convert what's resonating the most, it could be one salesperson that's really knocking it out of the park. And that's actively publishing to LinkedIn or to Twitter or to random like Reddit or Facebook groups, all of these things matter, but you need a way to measure them. So then that way, it helps you not only now, but in future budgeting decisions. So make sure you have a way to track leads focus strongly on distribution, we kind of already touched on that make sure you pick one or two channels tops in order to distribute your content. think email is also a big one. But you also want to be a little cautious of email because everybody's inbox is so flooded. I can I know I'm not the only one who treats email almost as like a to do list. So when I get an email, it's either delete read, or to take care of later on. Most of the time, I'm just deleting and moving on with my life because I get too many damn newsletters. So just something to keep in mind. So focused strongly on your distribution. And then one final thing, realize you're not alone. This industry in particular, has a lot of marketers that are soloists, a lot of marketers who are also founders or who work for small teams who are wearing a ton of hats. You're not alone. There's social media groups that you that you can participate in, there's connections that you can participate in, especially on LinkedIn, Twitter's kind of growing, as far as that's concerned is that the freight community is concerned. And then I would say there's other associations TMSA transportation, marketing and sales Association. I'm a board member for them. And that is really our bread and butter is helping those folks who feel like they're alone. Now our annual conference by the time this episode airs live, well live, the conference is coming up by the time this episode appears on the podcast, the conference will probably be close to the end. So TMSA is annual elevate conference is happening in Savannah, it's just a few days away. So if you are listening to this episode live, there's still time to get tickets at the beautiful city of Savannah, but they create this community of other marketers practitioners within this space. And it's really it's such a I went to my first event last year and it was such a breath of fresh air that you're able to connect with other people who are going through exactly what you're going through. And there's it initially I think a lot of folks are worried that like oh, I don't want to share my like company trade secrets. Like it doesn't know marketers like sitting in waiting in the wings in order to steal your marketing idea. That doesn't really happen. So with this, especially with this group, we're all trying to get better. We're all trying to learn from each other and it really is a situation of a rising tide lifts all sales. So know that you're not alone. If you can't make it to TMSs annual conference this year there is there's another one around this time of the year for next year. That will be 100th anniversary of the TMSA. So I'm gonna wait to reveal any sort of details about that. And then also, just feel free to join the join the group you might not have, you know, the funds to be able to join as a member, but connecting with other TMSA members will actively help you in your marketing journey. And that group will actively help you to put you in a position where in the future, hopefully you to become a member. But if not, you know, it's not like a, you know, a situation where they're waiting for like the IOUs or anything like that. So TMSA, follow Jennifer carpus. Romain over on LinkedIn, she's doing incredible things. She's the Executive Director, she's been on staff for about a year and a half now. And she has literally pulled this organization into the modern 21st century. So join a community so you don't have to feel so alone. So you can bounce ideas off of other people. And then it just it, it really does help to not feel so alone, especially when you have a lot of responsibilities. And it's probably very overwhelming and stressful. And we've all been there and it's not fun. So let's you know, help each other out a little bit, I think is always, you know, a good resource to take now, kind of rounding out today's show and take a sip of water because I'm starting to create a little bit more of a format for these shows, which is nice. So I have gentle reminders for myself to promote the episodes that we released over the last week. Course a conversation with Jennifer carpus Romaine that is the evolution of the TMSA you can actually go check it out on the everything is logistics podcast feed, so be sure to check that one out. I mentioned What does real success and podcasting look like if you're interested in that. That one was also just published this week. And a couple of other stories that I really want to shine a light on is the freight agent trenches with Steve burrows. He is a freight agent for SBI logistics. One of the coolest people I've ever met actually got a chance to meet with him in Vancouver at SBI, his annual freight agent conference. He is a character his whole family is lovely. And they thrive on running their freight agent business as the family if you want to work for this for his company, you better marry into it. And he says it on that episode. It's a really interesting episode. So be sure to check that one out. And then last but not least the relationship between venture capital and logistics with auto tech ventures. Brock Sendak he is that the person I interviewed for that episode, I originally met him out at manifest the future of logistics conference in Vegas. And he was so smart, like just brilliant. If you've ever he actually has a calendar link right on his LinkedIn profile, that if you have any kind of idea in the freight space, any kind of you know, ground transportation, he says book a meeting with him because he wants to hear from you. He wants to know about your idea and possibly invest. So for all the aspiring entrepreneurs out there, listen to that episode, kind of get a greater understanding of what venture capital looks like, and getting those venture capital relationships in transportation. So if you have those ideas, he's willing to listen, you can go to his LinkedIn profile, and you can book a meeting with him and sort of talk it through and talk it out with him. So great guy, I really love chatting with him. So I think you'll enjoy all of those episodes. So you got your weekend listening marching orders, I guess is the right phrase to say for that. But that about does it for this week's episode. So thank you all so much for tuning in. You can catch more of my work over on everything is logistics.com. That's where all of my social links, email newsletter, all that good stuff is all located including past episodes as well. So all those episodes that I just talked about will be available right there on the website immediately as you listen to this. So until next time, thank you guys for tuning in. Go gents. I hope you enjoy this episode of everything is logistics, a podcast for the thinkers in freight, telling the stories behind how your favorite stuff and people get from point A to B. If you liked this episode, do me a favor and sign up for our newsletter. I know what you're probably thinking, oh God, another newsletter. But it's the easiest way to stay updated when new episodes are released. Plus, we drop a lot of gems in that email to help the one person marketing team and folks like yourself who are probably wearing a lot of hats at work in order to help you navigate this digital world a little bit easier. You could find that email signup link along with our socials in past episodes over at everything is logistics.com And until next time, I'm blind and go Jags
