 Hello, everyone. My name is Deborah Alferon, and I'm a TV anchor, on-camera coach, and keynote speaker. Thank you so much for joining us. I'm also your moderator for today's global innovation through science and technology or GIST, TechConnect conversation on how to grow your startup through digital marketing. So creating an effective digital marketing strategy, it's so important. In fact, one of the most important parts of building a successful startup. And you know, there are so many tools available. How do you know which ones are best for you? Understanding options and choosing the right marketing tools can help position your startup in front of potential customers and partners. So it's really important. Before we begin though, a quick announcement on how you can play a role in discovering new solutions to some of the biggest challenges we face today. I want you to do this. Visit gistnetwork.org to cast your vote in the GIST Tech Eye Pitch Competition. Your vote helps decide which science, technology, or startup idea deserves a chance to go global. Again, just visit gistnetwork.org to learn more and cast your vote today. We want to hear from you. We want your questions and your comments. So remember, you can join the conversation by sending us your questions and your comments through the chat space that is right next to the video player, or through Twitter at hashtag GIST TechConnect. So do you want to get started? I think we should. First of all, I want to welcome our panel of experts. Joining us today, Scott Sorenson, President of Compete Agency. Great to have you here. Thank you so much. You're so welcome. And also, Andrew Nelson, President of Silverback Strategies. Welcome. Thank you for having me. You're so welcome. It's this is going to be awesome day. Joining us in the chat space to help answer your questions and share links to resources is David DeAngelo, a program officer at VentureWell. Oh, this is going to be a great hour. Are you guys excited? Absolutely. Woo, okay. So thank you for joining me today. And as we wait for viewers to send us their questions, I want to kick off the discussion. I just want to ask you guys to explain the value and the purpose of digital marketing for a startup. Very important, right? So, Andrew, let's start with you. What why is so important? Sure. So I'm sure as many of our viewers already know, digital marketing brings some unique challenges to a startup, specifically with a lack of resources, especially with time and money or budget. So with that in mind, I think that it is so important in the purpose of digital marketing for startups is to really lay the foundation upon which you're going to grow your marketing strategy and marketing plan. Specifically, I think it's important to take the time to understand how to really convey the value of your product or service to your target audience. And the reason this is so important is because when you get to the point where you need to start promoting yourself and investing in promotion, if you haven't spent the time on building this foundation, you're potentially going to do it inefficiently and ineffectively, essentially losing your most valuable resource time and money. Yeah, and if you're doing it ineffectively, I mean, nobody in a startup has time to waste. Exactly. Or money to waste. And your thoughts on this, Scott? I think the biggest benefit to digital marketing is just the, for the first time ever, anyone can reach anyone. I mean, back in the day, if you wanted to do marketing or advertising, you had to buy a billboard or buy an ad and something, right? Like TV and magazines was it. Now anyone with $10 can go get 10 clicks, 20 clicks, 100 clicks, people that really are going to your website. You can reach, we can be here in DC and reach anyone anywhere in the world, just because they're all on the digital space. And so, like Andrew said, it's a fantastic way to get these efficiencies. But for me, it's just this groundbreaking voice giving platform where anyone can talk to anyone. And so, if you have something to say or if you have something you want to share or you're testing something, like what an incredible tool to share with people. Hey, I've got this new idea. What do you guys think? And then you get feedback. That's what I love about digital marketing is that how many people read your magazine ad? You have no idea. Right. But how many people clicked on your ad and what did they do with it? I mean, it's all spelled out for you. So, that's why I love digital marketing and why I use it almost exclusively is because of real-time feedback. And I mean, there are what? A couple billion people on Facebook? Oh, yeah. A lot. Right? Probably a lot of our audience is on Facebook. Yeah, exactly. And how they're even watching us right now, right? You can have ads and do all sorts of marketing. You don't have to do big company. And you're going to help decode some of that for us. Yeah, we'll try and break it down. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and so it gives everyone a voice. Everyone gets that. That's awesome. Okay, we're going to dig into that and you're going to make me real smart. Yeah, we'll hand it over. I also want to quickly go over some of the different digital marketing tools that are available to startups. So we're going to talk about this. Organic and paid social media, paid advertising, content creation and curation, search engine optimization. I really need to understand this better and data analytics. So what are your experiences in using these diverse tools for promoting a company's product or services to different audiences? Make me smart, Scott. Well, that wasn't quite the list. It was, it was. And it was kind of all over the place. If you can think of it like a funnel, okay? And at the top of the funnel is where just the most general... I mean, think about everyone that's on Facebook. Let's call that the 3 billion people whatever is on Facebook. That's the very top of the funnel. And as you use your marketing, your targeting, so if you use pay per click was one of them. PPC is the acronym for that. But if you put an ad up, you pick a segment of that group. And you say, I want to advertise to people. Let's say I want to sell, I don't know, what's something fun to sell? Let's sell shoes. I can see my shoes. Oh, did you? Okay, great. Let's sell some shoes. I'm in. You like shoes? Sure. So, of all these people, everyone wants shoes, but specifically, we can drill into are they male or female shoes? Are they high-end shoes? Are they disposable? Like what types of things do these people like? And so you can drill in a certain segment. And then as you put the ad out, so the PPC side, we have to... Pay per click. Pay per click. So that means somebody has, when you put an ad on Facebook, somebody clicks on it, then Facebook charges you. So let's say it's 10 cents. So there goes 10 cents for someone to click on my ad that says, hey, these shoes are for sale. And then they go to my website. And so the other side of the tools you were talking about was like Google Analytics. Right. So this is a free tool. And you just have to put a little snip at a code. There's some great YouTube videos and things like that. I can walk you through it. It's pretty simple. But if you have that code on your site, then as people start visiting your site, Google Analytics watches them. Scary, right? What? They're being watched right now. Yeah, exactly. But it looks at how long they spend on your website. What do they click on? Where are they going? An important metric on there is where do they leave? Right. Right. So it's like, oh man, every time someone gets to this page, they leave. This page seems to be more engaging. Maybe I need a call to action button here or a different picture. And so for me, the advertising side, the advertising tools like PPC and SEO get into that search engine optimization. Maybe you can touch on that. It's a little bit of an art more than it is. Like don't buy an SEO book because the moment it's in print, it's out of. Yeah, it needs to be updated. It changes so often. But anyway, so as you do the advertising to get people to your site or wherever you're trying to take them. And then you have analytics tools. So those are different. So you have marketing, which is basically the point is to get people to your site. And then once you're at their site, what are they doing? And then that's when you'd use a tool like Google Analytics to analyze what they're doing. And figure out where they're dropping off. What's working. So what's wrong with that page or why didn't they not purchase or go to the next page? Exactly. Yep. Okay, so that's one of them. And so SEO, I hear about it all the time, right? Search engine optimization. Maybe you can make me smart about it and make our global audience smart about how to use that effectively. Sure. So SEO is at its core, the notion of optimizing your website, whether it's in the technical coding or in the content on the website, to put you in the best position for a search engine like Google or Bing to rank you at the top of the search results for a particular query. So it requires a number of skill sets. First and foremost, it's very technical. The coding on the website needs to be done in such a way that it's friendly for Google to be able to read through your website or to find your website. Google actually has a great resource on their own website in their Webmaster Tools that talks about the basics of SEO and the right way to do SEO on your own website. So I recommend checking that resource out. You get all the technical aspects of your website correct so that Google can see your website. But then equally as important is the content on your website. If you want to rank for a particular keyword, let's say it's running shoes, we'll keep going with that example, you better be talking about running shoes on your website, right? Because if Google is going to read your website, you want them to have a clear understanding of what you're talking about. So you need to make sure that you optimize the content, whether it's putting the keyword in the content itself in what's called the title tag, which is the text that you see in your browser when you're on. Yes! Yeah, so that's all the coding, that's all in the backend. So you know what? I mean, there are awesome tools though, like so like you could make like Squarespace, they do a lot of that for you and so they have templates, you know, you're going to be restricted a little bit with certain, you can have a custom site. But if you can use, yeah, Squarespace is great. One that we use a lot, we built a lot of WordPress websites. WordPress, I think WordPress is the biggest, right? Exactly. It's most universal. That's right, and they have a tool, I'm sure many of the viewers watching us are using WordPress or thinking about it. There's a tool, there we go. Yeah, I'm using WordPress. Yeah, here's the notification. There's a tool called Yoast. Y-O-A-S-T. Y-O-A-S-T. I need a piece of paper, but I'll rewatch this. Right, and it's a free tool that enables you to modify maybe the title tag that I talked about or make sure that the coding is in proper order for Google or search engines to go to read your website. So there's a lot of science to it. There's a lot of technical aspects to it, but you also need to have that creative content aspect as well to make sure you're optimizing that. I have so many questions, and so do our viewers. So let's take a couple of them right now. A viewer in Kampala, am I saying that correctly, asks, how can someone use digital marketing in a place where there is no internet access? That's a valuable question. Oh, man. I don't know that I have the... How do you do that? I think you need the internet for this. Yeah, let me think through that. We have experts here, but sometimes we have to think about this. Can you do digital marketing? So some tools can be used offline, but every now and then you're going to have to be able to access the internet in order to be able to update it. I think about even just Google Drive is a tool that we use at our agency often to be able to put together marketing plans or to do keyword research, for example. So you can work on those documents offline, and then when you're connected to the internet, eventually it can get all synced up. You are severely limited, though, in terms of your ability to communicate with people on social media, for example. You'd have to be connected to the internet to actually be able to do that. So... One thing you might want to do is that you can create a marketing plan offline. Right? Sure. You could say, what are the keywords I want to use? What are the images I want to use? You can do a lot of prep work, and so that you can have it all set up so that when you do... I mean, eventually, I mean, digital marketing is internet marketing. You need to find a way to connect to the internet, but you can do a lot of work just on a Word document or something like that where you're saying, okay, these are the phrases, these are the paragraphs, so that then when you're connected to the internet, you go to internet cafe or something, you can just copy and paste in all the work you've already done, and so you don't have to waste that time that you are connected to the internet. You are paying for the internet. You've already done all the time-consuming work. I'll give you one other interesting tidbit here. There's another free tool called Hootsuite that can help with your social management. You can monitor all the chatter out there on a particular topic or on a particular feed, and one of the things you can do is schedule out social posts. So ahead of time, you know you need to be posting fairly regularly on social media, but ahead of time, if you can map out the things you want to say and when you want to say it, you can set that all up ahead of time if you know you're not going to have internet access for an extended period, and it would be essentially posted for you while you're not there automatically. So you could do some of these things ahead of time to help you. I think natively within Facebook, you can schedule as well, but Hootsuite is a lot easier, I think. I think they do a good job. But yeah, so in an hour, you can put together the next 60 days of posts, and then you just push go, and then every day at 10 o'clock, you're not connected to the internet, but Hootsuite or Facebook, whatever is scheduled, that's a great suggestion. Excellent. I knew you guys would come up with Hootsuite for this, and that's brilliant. And even if you have access to the internet, Hootsuite is... Absolutely. And that's what I'm doing when I leave here today. So let's talk about things that are free, too. There are effective digital marketing tools that are free, and what would those look like? Which ones are they? Which ones are the ones that are really worth it? Because I know as I'm building my business, I'm like, this is really cool. Okay, that's $4 a month. And then this one over here is $7 a month, and it does add up. And I'm finding that as a small business owner, too. So what are the ones that are free that you would recommend? So there's an entire category that is just paid marketing, and that's just his own thing. And then you have the organic side, which I would say is probably more, let's call it sweat equity, right? It's like the grind, and that's free. That's your time, but that's still free. It doesn't cost you anything. Ultimately, the idea with search engine optimization, SEO, Google, at the end of the day, is a robot, right? And it's crawling your site. It's looking at your content. What are you writing? What are you saying? And it's trying to decide is this, when somebody searches for good running shoes, right? Good running shoes. Does the Google machine think this is a good site for that? And so that's the idea behind it. So that's why writing a blog as often as you can is important, is because your site then is consistently being updated with, look at this article after article after article of free running shoes. And so eventually, hopefully Google sees that and if people start referencing it or visiting it, all of a sudden you can start organically climbing the ranks. And hopefully the golden grail, I don't know what to call it, is the front page, right? The top 10 results of Google. You want to be in the top 10. That's the goal. I mean, think about it. When have you ever clicked next page after a Google search? Only when you Google yourself. Yeah, only when you, yeah, yeah, yeah, I could write. That's about it. And we do need to be careful what content we're putting out on ourselves too, for that reason. But yeah, so that's free. That you can always be working on your SEO, talking more, sending out tweets. I mean, every time you're pushing that content, talking about the subjects that are important to you, in the internet, SEO machine will eventually recognize that. And so when people do search for your specialty or something you're doing, they'll be like, well, you know, the AI, Google is like, well, I don't know what you just asked me, but this person over here keeps talking about that. So how would I show them on the search results? Gotcha. And I don't think that we realize that sometimes, that all of the content that we put out really can be free marketing. Yeah, we sometimes look at it as work. Just work, and it can really do that. Some entire agencies, all they do is content marketing, because it is, it's so important. We have a content marketing department, that there's two core principles that I think entrepreneurs or startups or small businesses really need to keep in mind as they're trying to get into digital marketing. And before they even get to the promotion piece. I talked about that foundation earlier. Yes. And some of those things are getting a good website, which does cost a little money, unfortunately. It doesn't have to be much. Making sure it's good on mobile, making sure that it has a good user experience. But the other two that are critical, I think, are good content, not just optimized content for SEO, although that's very important, but quality unique content. You want to give people an engaging experience when they get to your website. And I think that sometimes we undervalue that we are the expert in our product and service, and we are our own best source of content. You might be tired of talking about your expertise, but they are dying to hear about it. So there's a free resources yourself and your own expertise. And then the second one, Scott, you mentioned it earlier, is data and analytics. I think that that has to be set up on day one. Data from day one through the rest of your marketing experience is going to be your anchor, your Sherpa, through everything you're testing and trying, because that's what's going to let you know if what you're doing is working or not, and if you should invest more. So before you even ever get to promotion, I think there are some low-cost resources to really help get that foundation set. Excellent. We have some more questions. And here's one. Are influencers on social media effective in getting good publicity for your startup? What do you guys think of that? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah? Absolutely. I'm sure. Okay. Influencers. I mean, and this is actually, sometimes when you're in a certain, I don't know what to call it, I mean, like circles are small, right? Right. Like if you're into shoes, you're hanging out with people that are also into shoes. If you're into coaching. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sure. And so hopefully the circles you're in, someone of your friends or someone knows someone who is connected or is an influencer and has an Instagram following. And so, yeah, that could potentially ask a favor. You know, say, hey, could you have so and so take a picture and show my shoes? So influencer marketing, I mean, eventually it gets very expensive, right? To have, I don't know. I feel like I should list a celebrity, but pick your favorite celebrity, right? That's millions of dollars, right? So it goes all the way from free to your friends posting about you. Yeah, everyone posts about you. Everyone start talking about you. Those are great influencers. And then eventually you get to the point where this is their job. These people have millions of followers and they want to talk about their new shoes. And sometimes, you know, you send them a pair and say, hey, try these on. Let me know what you think. And they might post about you. So you just hit the nail on the head and it's the challenges that people aren't going to give you a plug for free necessarily. And so that's a big challenge with influencer marketing. You need to give them something of value, which can range from money to maybe trading a link. But what we have found at Silverback Strategies works really effectively is getting them involved in the content creation itself. Yeah. Making you a part of the team. Exactly. So if they're creating a piece of content, keep going with shoes. Let's say there's some fancy new shoe technology and you bring them in as an expert on your blog post. Oh, yeah. Now they're incentivized to share that content already. You almost don't even have to ask them to share the content at this point. Because they want to say, hey, look, I was involved. That was part of this from the beginning. Exactly. You're giving them credit. They feel ownership about it too. Yeah, they actually have credit. They're like, look, I'm so into shoes that the shoe company asked me to develop these shoes for them. Right. So no cold call. Get involved and try to find creative ways. Make them a part of your marketing team. That's right. To try to establish those relationships. People are loving this conversation, by the way. We have so many questions. Michael, from our online audience, is asking, based on your experience, what are the most common mistakes made by startups in their marketing campaigns? I've got a good one here. OK, you take it. I'm going, I got this theme going here of getting the foundation right. And it's when you don't. And I've seen this a few times is a small business will start spending some money on something like Google AdWords, pay for click marketing. And they'll see that it's driving traffic and driving conversions or sales. So they'll want to do more of it. And they'll do more and more. And eventually, their entire marketing budget is going into this one paid channel. But they never took the time to get a good website or good content to begin with. So now they're in this position where they can't afford to spend any less on their paid channel, because it'll impact their bottom line, to go fix what they should have done in the first place. It's a really hard position for a small business to be in. So the mistake in this case is not spending the time at the beginning to get a good website, good content, and get your analytics and tracking set up. That's huge. And I'm learning so much. We have so many questions. A viewer at the Salvadoran American Cultural Center is asking, how can the best elements of a business be identified for inclusion in a social media strategy? Do you want to take this one, Sam? Sure. That's a great question. Again, social media is a little bit of an art. I like to think. I think people forget that social media is social media. Right. Like, think of it like a party. So if we all went to a party, would you want me to walk up and say, hi, I sell insurance. Nice to meet you. Yeah, it's like chill out a little bit on the sales side. And let's think of it like a party. Like, make your social media. Think about it. Literally, what would make you go to this page? Why would you want to go to this party? Right? What's there? What are they talking about? What are they showing? And so when you're looking online of what to include in your social media mix, look at what other people are talking. And like you said earlier, you are the expert. Like, you should be able to feel out. I do like that subject. Or my audience would love that because I love that. So I'm going to share that. I'm going to put that into my social media mix. So I think it's important to not just look at it as a sales channel, but it really is a conversation. It's this. It's engagement. And so as you're looking to figure out what you want to post, what would you want to read? Like flip it on its head. Why would I go to my page? And people also want to get to know you as the expert sneaker, developer, whatever the thing might be. They want to know what drives you? Why did you do this? Yeah. Anyway, going to a next question, we have a viewer in Monrovia asking, how can you secure your intellectual property while doing digital marketing? What do you think, Andrew? Hire a good lawyer. I was going to say, I was going to say, you can't. Right? Foundation. Right. It's not easy. And I don't have much experience with international intellectual property law myself. But I think that it is important to have some legal counsel early on. I don't think you need a lot of it. And I'm not talking necessarily about the intellectual property of your product or service itself, more so on your marketing and on your content you're putting out there. It's important to make sure that it's not being stolen. And one easy way to do that actually is there's a number of tools out there, but you could also just Google your own content and see, are people copying my content? Is my content being used elsewhere? It might not necessarily be illegal, maybe it is, but Google will punish your website, actually, if your content's being copied, if they're seeing duplicate content. So I think it's you, maybe, trying to cheat the system or something. Exactly. Yeah, so you do want to look out for it. It's important to be vigilant about people copying your marketing content out there and hire a lawyer. That was the first thing I learned in starting a business and one of the things, and not necessarily digital marketing, but it's get a copyright or a trademark on your name because you don't even realize that someone else could be using the same name. It was a long process. Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, it really is. The other thing just small, maybe a little too deep in the weeds is just put little marks on your images. And so put your, I'm losing what they call it. A watermark. A watermark of your logo or something like that. So someone can Photoshop it out or something, but it makes it just one step harder to use your image somewhere else. Don't make it easy for them. Yeah, don't make it easy. And then if they do, there's your name on the image. So it actually might help out. That's good. Okay, we have a viewing group in Namibia asking, what's the one key tool to ensure that your website appears first on any search engine? Obviously, there are ads that will be up there. That's right, it's good way to get into it. So there is that. And I always see the little ad and go, no, I'm not going to click there. I'm going to look down a little bit more. You know, everyone says that, but- But someone clicks. Yeah. Someone clicks. 95% of Google's revenue is people clicking those ads. Yeah. So I know and everyone, it blew my mind the first time. I kind of realized that. 95%. Well, they're an advertising company. It makes sense. So it surprised you. Wow. I'm sorry, we just went off on that. Yeah, that's okay. So how do you get to be one of those first non-paid people? How do you do that? That organic win. So for tracking it, other than just googling the keyword that you want to be ranking for and checking who's on top, there are tools out there that range in cost. I know Moz.com has a tool. Moz is on base. Ahrefs.com is another one that can help you. Or SEMrush is another website that can help you monitor who's ranking for certain keywords. And it's changing all the time. So you can't worry too much about one ranking on one particular day. You have to watch it over time. So there's a number of ways that you can monitor. And then there are larger tools like Accuranker where you can monitor thousands of keywords in real time and see how things are trending. So there's a range of tools to help you monitor that outside of just googling yourself. Yeah. Gotcha. One more question from our viewing group in Liberia asking what's the benefit of creating a business website and what's the risk in managing a business website? Do you want to take that one, Scott? Sure. So I guess you could look at it two ways. One is if you're an e-commerce business, if you're selling your products online, then I mean it's absolutely essential. 100%. Right. Then you need to have that website to process the order and take their money and get the shipping details and things like that, right? So you do need a website for that. For maybe consulting businesses, service-oriented things where you're not necessarily the actual transaction isn't happening on your website, I still think it's incredibly important to have what I would call a digital business card. Right? I mean it's if people search for, they know your name and they search for your website and you don't have one. Then the first question is, are they still in business? Is this legitimate business? Is this legit? And that's actually a good piece on the social media side as well. Some people will just set up their social media page and then leave it. They're in business and they're doing things, but if anyone goes to their page and it's dead, it's like are they still in business? Yeah, can I call you? Will you answer the phone? Like they don't even know. So it's almost like the other way I compare it to is an Amazon review. Okay? So Amazon, you can go on and buy all these things, but Amazon's real power are the reviews. What is better than what? It's based on the reviews. So how much money is one more five-star review worth? It almost would be impossible to calculate that, right? But we do know that it's essential. You need good reviews to sell on Amazon. And that's how your digital footprint is. Is if you're not present, if you don't exist, then people offline are going to question doing services with you because it's like, well, if I look for you and you don't exist, then I'm all of a sudden less sure about doing business with you. It's like going to your house ringing the doorbell and like, are they going to come out? Yeah, right. They're here. The car isn't here. The car isn't here. The driveway, maybe it is. Yeah, yeah, this house looks empty. There's no furniture. There's no, do you live here? What's going on? Yeah, yeah. And then you leave, hmm. I don't know if I want to hang out with you anymore. Yeah. Right. We have a question from Twitter. How effective is it to do advertising on your own website? What do you think, Andrew? It depends on your business model. Many businesses make their money through ad revenues on their own website, especially if you're a publisher or you're posting content regularly. I mean, that's how every news organization is making their money, right, is on the advertisements that they sell. If you aren't though, it's planning on having ad revenue be your key monetization strategy, I would typically recommend against it. If you're trying to sell shoes or you're trying to do, you really want people focused, I think, on your services and what you're trying to convey to them. And those ads may be disruptive in that user experience on your website. So it's tempting because you can make money from it, but you have to be very careful not to disrupt the user's experience on your website with those ads. And if it's not going to be a primary source of revenue for you, then I would typically recommend against it. Yeah, it's about opportunity cost, right? It's like, okay, we can put these ads on the side of my page, but I'll get 30 cents if someone clicks on that ad, but if they buy my product, I'll get $10. Right. And so it's like- You need to focus them. Yeah, it's like less is more when it comes to websites. I have lots of clients that say, oh, I want a website like Apple's. And it's like, okay, do you have a billion dollars? First off. But the other thing is to take cues from the big dogs. Google's Nexus products and things like that. The sites are so simple. Like your website does not have to be complicated. In fact, the biggest and best websites out there are very simple. I mean, Google, it's a search bar, right? There's nothing else going on, right? You know what they do. They could add all sorts of stuff there, right? They could add all sorts of banners and things like that, but that's a distraction. All they want you to do is search and that's it, right? I mean, they want to do other things, use their maps and among other things, but google.com just a search bar. You need to provide value to the user. And to them, the value is that search box. On your website, it's going to be something different. And ads don't always add value to your website, but they can if that's how you're doing it. And again, if that's your business model, if you're providing content to sell ads on the side, then yeah, go for it. That's an entirely different thing. Exactly. So what's your strategy? What's your goal? You do need to pick. Okay. This or that. A question from Mike in Columbia on Twitter. Are there specific social media strategies certain businesses should follow? And how can I best decide where to invest my resources? Every business should follow certain strategies. The hardest part is figuring out which ones, right? Scott mentioned earlier though, with a few bucks, you could get up and running. The bar to entry is so low to these. So assuming you have your foundation set and you're ready to start investing in promotion, you just need to start testing. There are some clear winners and losers. If you are a B2B product or service, LinkedIn is a great place to start. That's a network for business professionals. So you can do a little bit of audience research ahead of time to understand where is your audience engaging? Where are they going? Where are your competitors finding success? Or where are they promoting to help guide you? But it's pretty easy to run a test. Keep your budget low. Have your data and analytics set up so that you can see if it's working or not. And then let that data really guide the decision on if it's the right strategy or not. Yeah, that really is the right answer. Everyone, and I think as entrepreneurs, we get stuck in pretending. It's almost like we can lie to ourselves that our assumptions are reality. We're like, oh, so and so this type of person is going to buy my thing. Or this type of person, my target audience is going to love this picture. But that's an assumption. Based on everything that we brought to the table and where I was yesterday. Yeah, it's a best guess. Which is a good place to start. Yeah, it's a great place to start. But if you're not testing two images at the same time to figure out which one's better, because ultimately, I have to tell this to this client sometimes, I'm like, your opinion doesn't matter, right? You're not your audience. That's why the test is so important. Yeah, that's why the test is so important is because we want them to decide for us what phrase or what image to use. So testing that's absolutely. And test all the platforms. Yeah, exactly. It's not going to hurt you to spend a few dollars. It's not going to take your business down. And that's what's great about digital marketing too is you'll know pretty quick. Exactly. You'll know like, hey, when I'm on Twitter and I do these things, is it working for me? I mean, you do need to give it a fair shot. But at the end of the day, you can see pretty quickly, wow, when I talk on Twitter versus when I talk on Facebook, a lot more people are talking to me on Facebook. And if you have to pick between the two, then now your decision's made for you, right? Absolutely. So for those of you just joining us, guess what? You're watching the Just Tech Connect conversation on growing your startup through digital marketing. And I am joined by panelists, Andrew Nelson and Scott Sorensen. And we really appreciate you being here. And of course, David DiAngelo, who's our chat expert. We're currently taking live questions from viewers and you can submit your questions through the chat space. It's next to this video or you can do it on Twitter using hashtag Just Tech Connect. So here's a question I have for you. Some startups don't have large marketing budgets, right? So let's talk about some affordable yet effective strategies to leverage tools that are available. What do you think, Scott? There are a number of things. One is content. So you got to start that right away. The thing we didn't talk about SEO is it's a long game. Six months minimum, minimum. I mean, probably a year before your ranking, really, in the top 10. That's great information because you might get disappointed. Yeah, don't expect any organic traffic from your blog posts in the first couple of months. You really got, and I don't want to call them throwaway blog posts, but you really just need to start producing content. That's a free thing, right? You just post it on your blog or I'll be updating, depending on how your homepage is set up, but be adding things to your page, talking on social media. All of that can be incredibly powerful in the long term. And you do need to have that foundation. You do need to have, I mean, for the first time in history, brands can be people, right? Like I call brands our bros. Like, I mean, you have, I'm trying to think of some of the fights you have, but you have these fights between Taco Bell and Oreo. Yeah, like beef. It's really funny, too. Right, it's hilarious. It's where fights that go on, yeah. And all of a sudden, these brands are being personified. And so it's important for you to be out there. And you can, I mean, before when you had a company, you had this long time between, do people like my product or not? Oh yeah. Now, after the first review comes in, right, you're like, oh shoot, that's broken. We need to fix that on our product. Like your feedback loop is so powerful. So I would start there with the content. Start with the content. Start producing as often as possible. I'm going to say once a day, probably be publishing something. Yeah, I mean, that'd be impressive. If you can keep that up. Keep it quality. Yeah, see with quality. Start with maybe once a month if you need to do something, but work on your cadence. Make sure it's consistent. People need to be able to count on you. Right, because they know to go there. Yeah, every Tuesday, it's Tuesday tech talk. And there we are every Tuesday, right? And you might think that no one, well, the first Tuesday tech talk, no one's there. And that's okay. Pretend they're there, yeah. They're building an audience. And I say this to some of the people who I work with, because I help people with their strategies as well on Facebook Live, because as a news anchor, I did a lot of that. And sometimes they'll say, I only have four people there. And I say, if you could change four people's lives, wouldn't that be worth it? Yeah. You've got to not get caught in those little numbers at first and do it. What do you think about this? Well, you can't promote until you have content. Because otherwise, you're sending people to a poor user experience. And what are they going to read when they get to your website? So an empty box. If you can create. If you ever want them to think of you as the leader of your particular niche, or if you ever want them to come back, you better have that quality content ready for them, even if it's the very first viewer of your website. So look at it as you're building an archive of quality content to really fuel that promotion that you'll eventually be doing. And just a quick note on the foundation and make sure you're everything in place. It honestly really is a stumbling forward. It don't get caught in perfectionism. It's much better, not always. Sometimes your website's terrible. But it's almost always better to have something out there. It's iterative. You know, but it's iterative. And so as you learn that, oh, people aren't liking this or I need a change. This is a bad user experience. But you can't learn that that's a bad user experience until someone's had maybe a bad user experience, right? And so you got to just stumble forward with it. Don't hold back and wait for everything to be perfect. And I don't have the perfect picture. It's like start with the OK picture. And let's start getting some feedback. Get those analytics coming in. Start your year trek on the SEO climb today. And so really, I would say you just get started. I mean, that's probably the hardest steps can be the first one. And learn. Be open to learn. It is. It is a learning process. It really is. And don't take it, you know, if somebody makes fun of your first video or whatever. I mean, just laugh it off and try again. You learned something that was valuable and it cost you nothing. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, it cost you a little bit of ego. But we have enough of that. That's OK. Let's get back online and see what our viewers have to say. Online viewer Rony Rivera asks, would you recommend using a blog in my social media strategy and what would be the benefit of that? And we talked about that a little bit. But do you want to take this one Andrew? What do you think of this? So every industry is a little bit different. Every audience wants to read different types of content. But we at our firm have found that blogs are a great archive of content to base your social media off of. You could write one great high quality blog post and have weeks worth of social media content to refer back to that blog post just based off of that one. So the challenge with social media is that when you post something, how quickly is it at the bottom of the feed and people aren't going to see it anymore? I mean, it's really fast moving. Hours within minutes sometimes. Right. And you need to fuel that beast with quality content. So I think a blog can play a critical role in housing the content on which to source your social media post. It's a nice long term anchor. And I liked what you suggested as well as your blog post can be a couple of pages. But then you just take pieces of it, smaller snippets, and that becomes your Facebook posting feed. I never thought of that. When I post my blog, it's one and done. Yeah, no. Come back, revisit it, pull a quote out of it. The next a week later, pull a different quote out of it and always referencing back. I have a client who we've been posting three or four blogs a month for a couple of years. So they have 20, 30, 40 blog posts. And just recently, just one of those. So thinking about that, they've got 40 blog posts and just recently one of them was picked up on the front page of Google. And so their website went from a few thousands and literally overnight, it doubled. And so now it went from like a few thousand people a day to two, three, four thousand people a day. And that's our new standard. But it's because of a blog post we wrote in August. Really? And so it's that quality content. The blog is a great place for fresh because you don't want to be necessarily changing your homepage every day. And so the blog is a great place. Google, all the crawlers are set up to know what a blog is and treat it differently and understand that some blogs are set up. You just keep scrolling and it never stops. It just keeps loading the next blog post. So yeah, definitely have a blog. I think it's a great place. And like you said, it depends on the industry, but in general, people want to talk about what you're doing or what you're saying and they want to hear what you have to say about it. One final note, talking back to the question with social media and a blog, a great benefit of the blog is by using that to fuel your social media. You now have a way to bring people back to your website. So another challenge with social media is if all you're doing is posting, that's great that you're engaging with people. But what are you doing to get them to your website? To get them to learn more or purchase or convert whatever that means to your particular business. So by posting on social media and referencing your blog posts, you're now bringing them into your blog and you're starting to bring them into that marketing funnel. I'm learning so much here today, Jennifer. Thank you. And I know so many people at home are too. John Howard on Twitter asks, what's a strategy to get more views on your website without spending a lot of money? What do you think of this, Andrew? Yeah, so a couple of times ahead, a blog on social media is a great way to get that started. And then that blog can serve double duty with organic search or SEO. So it's really about having quality content on your website that is optimized for social channels and optimized for SEO channels. It takes time. That's the problem is when you spend money on promotion, you get that instant. You can get that traffic to your website. If you have the luxury of those budgets, then great, that should be a part of your strategy. But if you don't, you need to settle in and start that long work of posting quality content, optimizing it for SEO, posting it on social media. And if you do that consistently, just like your client saw, it will build on itself. Eventually one of them hits. And eventually it even gets exponential. It's amazing how fast it grows. Based on stacking on each other, absolutely. And further to the blog posts, you might think it's a good headline, but you might want to switch it out and try a different one as well. Because it might just... Okay, I got a couple of clicks. Well, let's change that out because you might be speaking differently to different audiences. Yeah, that's true. I would make sure that you don't necessarily change a historical blog post because you're trenching in the historical... If you change it, then Google has to re-crawl it. And so I would suggest actually just doing a new article that's similar with a different title later. Or test two social media posts. Or test two at the same... Yeah, exactly. And see which one does better. Right. The other thing to add to the conversation here about content, that we just kind of use that word generally, but it's important to understand, like don't get stuck in a rut where you're just posting pictures or just posting text. Video is extremely powerful and extremely underutilized. And there is a war right now going on between YouTube and Facebook. And they are discounting and promoting videos. They're trying to own videos online. And so when you post a video, they are pushing it for free to your audience because they're trying to beat out the competitor's website. So don't just get stuck on, oh, this is a pretty picture. But like do a Facebook Live, do a selfie video. Talk it. I had a client who... She was a limousine company. And I'm just like, you should... Once a week, get in your limousine and, you know, and sit there and talk about the business. You know, and she's, well, no one wants to hear from me. No one, like, I mean, you're going to be surprised. People want to hear from you. They do, no matter what you're doing. And so it's important to get out there, have that voice, and you'll find yourself, I think, in your brand. And not always does the president of the company need to be the voice, right? You can have someone who is loud and fun and whatever. And so, you know, will you talk about my product? Once a week, you know, let's just do it for whatever reason. And so when we say content, it's pretty wide. Exactly. One other note on video, because I think that's a huge topic right now. We were just working with our Facebook reps yesterday, and they let us know that they're expecting by 2023, I think was the date. 80% of all engagements on Facebook will be video views. We'll be with video. Video is going to become, if it hasn't already, the number one source of engaging with people on Facebook as a platform. And it's quickly becoming standard. The standard. I don't know, you know, text is still very important, but it's going to become the most effective way here pretty soon of engaging your content with people online. So that's really important. Think about how video needs to fit into your strategy. And if you don't feel comfortable on video, and you're thinking to yourself, people don't want to hear from me. Actually, you're wrong. People want to hear from you. You really should try. Everyone. They really do. This is a question from Twitter and from Elaine in Beirut. What's the best way to generate business to business meetings from digital marketing activities? That's a great one. I'll throw that to both of you. Whoever talks first. Yeah, I think we referenced it earlier with LinkedIn. That is an entire platform dedicated to B2B. It's kind of annoying a little bit. Actually, every time I'm on there, I'm like, I don't want to buy your services. But find those platforms. I don't know what else. I mean, be there. Well, one of the other things with LinkedIn that you can do, other than the feed, the news feed, which is a good place to be. Right. Another place to be posting content. Right. Exactly. Is a LinkedIn email is a place where you can send. It's almost, if you haven't seen it, it's almost like a little email inbox within LinkedIn. So whether you're sending someone a direct message or you can sponsor message and pay to get it out a little bit more. It's an opportunity to directly engage with a particular industry or someone of a particular seniority. And you're able to talk to them just like you would on Facebook. It's harder on Facebook. You don't know what their title is necessarily or people aren't always there for work. But the world, are they a decision maker? Right. But LinkedIn is just a great place. People go to LinkedIn because they're in the mindset of wanting to further their career or make connections. And they're in that business mindset already. So it's a great way to engage in those types of conversations. The other way that just came to me is education. So start a video school on your subject. Right. Share how you do what you do. And you'll be surprised by people reach out to you. Oh my gosh, you're an expert on this because you have a class on it. Right. But they don't necessarily know that unless you're out there teaching. So I would say start some type of content whether it's on YouTube or Facebook or something. You need to be kind of kind of. Yeah, there's some great platforms that are literally just for trainings and things like that. But start a course. Start a course on your subject. I mean, even if it is tying shoes, like you'll be just blown away by the niches that are inside niches. I guarantee you thousands of people of a month search how to tie shoes. Or unique ways to. I bet if you should go look up there. Go look it up right now. Someone is doing this. Someone let us know. Yeah, go find the coolest how to tie your shoes to cool us. I bet that's a thing for sure. Or maybe make a video on that. And then see if there's not. Yeah, you should make a video and then you can own that free advice. There you go. Yeah. So we have a viewer from the U.S. embassy in Monrovia, Liberia asking, what's the best way to use digital marketing to rebrand your business? Rebranding is hard. Yeah. And I think it's great that we have entrepreneurs and startups thinking about rebranding because it's a lot easier to do at that point than it is once you've invested all this time in building brand equity. Right. Yeah. So obviously, you can redesign your website and I think that you have an opportunity to get some free PR, a little bit of publicity here. It's an exciting thing. You're rebranding. Why are you rebranding? Yeah. It's this new message, this new look and feel you're getting across. It's better than it was before. So you have an opportunity, whether it's on social platforms or it's a little more old school but even press releases are places where people still pick up press releases. You can go get that message out. You know, we're excited, we're rebranding and this is the new direction we're taking things. So just like you would any piece of content, you can turn that into a content opportunity. Exactly. And you see this all the time with, again, I like to call them, I just lost it, but mentors, right? So look at Apple, right? How many times their logos basically stayed the same but it has progressed, right? Used to have the rainbow in it, used to have this, now it's really simple. Microsoft, same thing. The squares used to be all wavy and flag format and they've rebranded as well to stay up with the times. And so that's a great question and that's great forward thinking. I don't know if you need to rebrand because of something bad that happened or it's just feeling tired, but the digital platform is the best for that because it can change. You can take off your logo, although it will be forever on the internet, the old one. Right, everything lives forever. But you, at least on your page, you can have your new brand up and ultimately that's what people are going to reference is I know when I go looking for what logo does this client want me to look for, I always go to their homepage and say, okay, which one are they using? Right. Okay, this is their most up-to-date brand. So it's important to be consistent here too. There's SEO implications here, which I'll get to in a second, but if you are going to rebrand, make sure that you, all at once, change everything that you've done online, all your social profiles, your website, obviously. You're talking just on the contents, on the imagery and things like that. Yeah, so exactly, your profile photo for your business on social media, for example, I see people rebrand, but then they have a bunch of old logos out there. It's confusing for a user, first of all. And it takes you out of the experience. Exactly, which is the right company. Do I really, is this a legitimate company? I'm not sure what's going on. Is this the right, this pay format has the old logo, are these pay, is this up-to-date, are these prices correct? And then thinking back to SEO, this is actually also incredibly important. Google's going to trust your website a little bit less if they're seeing that your address is different in different places and your logo is not lining up or the name of your company is not lining up. They'll actually notice that. Oh, 100%, just like a user would, and they're not going to be as certain that you are who you say you are or who are you. So there's even SEO implications on being consistent and thorough on that transit. Even Google will see that you're having an identity crisis. Wow, everyone sees that. You can hide it. Which is your real address. Who are you? You're going down in SEO. And one other thing to add because you were talking about press releases, I can tell you from being a reporter that don't give me your press release as an attachment because you're asking me to do one more thing. Oh, that's smart. Put it in the body of the email. Yeah, it's already open. So I can forward it to someone, I can look at it right away, but if you ask me to take one more step, I mean, we're just so busy. You're lucky I even opened it, right? Right, so many emails. Yeah, smart. So we have an online guest who's asking, what are the business risks for changing a website from one domain to another after a year or two? And what are the ways to avoid having problems? This is kind of connected in a way to the last question. Major, major risk. Yeah, I was going to say a nuclear bomb. Right, yeah, catastrophic. There are smart ways to do it, and ultimately, almost in all cases, you take a hit for a few months, but then once Google or whatever search engine comes back and says, oh, okay, this is who we used to have as number one. Let's put them back. So it doesn't have to be catastrophic, do plan on taking a hit, but I would do some research, a lot of research. There's a right and a wrong way to do it. That's pretty black and white, and there are steps that need to be followed that are frankly over my head and very, very technical. You need to tell Google this is going to be happening, and you need to add certain code to say the old website is the new website. And then you need to make sure and kill all the old stuff, otherwise you get the duplicate content, and you start getting punished for that. So find a checklist. There are checklists out there. We're going to call them website migration checklists. Okay, good information. That you need to follow, I couldn't even attempt to try to list them all out right now. And if it's done wrong, if it's done properly, you might see a little bit of a dip in a recovery within a couple of months. Exactly. If it's done wrong though, you're completely removed from Google. Like you're completely removed. So you have to be very careful. That is very important information. Thank you for that. Great question. Yeah, absolutely. And we have time for just one more question. Wow, this hour flew. We have one more question from Ahmad in Jerusalem on Twitter. So how should I go about creating a low budget marketing campaign for a website in something such as e-commerce? What platforms should I use? So it sounds like he's asking about paid. I think so. Would you assume that? So I would bust out the Excel spreadsheet. This is what I do. And I say, okay, what are my costs? What are my margins? Okay, so every time I sell one of these, I make $10. So now you know, make sure you include everything you can and say, okay, if I sell one of these, I make $10. So now you know what your marketing budget is. It's $9. You want to be able to say, okay, and when you start, it's going to be your worst. So plan on that. Oh, it should always be better. My go-to in terms of platform, I think that's about platform, is just Facebook. Just because it's so universal, the most users, it does a great job with text. It does a great job with images. It does a great job with video. So all types of content. And they have the shopping ads nowadays, too. Yeah, yeah. Marketplaces, Sharpian ads. And they have lead generation as well now. So you can actually, it's actually great because you already have your information on Facebook and someone says, hey, do you want to add your email to this email list? Your email is already populated. So that's a fun new thing. So yeah, so I would start there. But I would start with the big picture of, okay, what is a successful cost per conversion? You need to know that. Otherwise, you're just spending money and then at the end of the month, you're like, do I have more than I started with? Or do I have less? And then testing, it really isn't, and when you know that margin you need to hit, you'll know right away if this is sustainable or not. And if you're in the ballpark of it sustainable, then I would say you'd probably be able to cut that cost in half over testing. Yeah, by optimizing. Another tool that we've found success in with e-commerce websites in addition to Facebook is, again, Google AdWords, they have an entire suite of advertisements specifically for e-commerce. I think back to that shoe example. Have you found Google AdWords to be more expensive in general than Facebook ads? It really depends on the industry, but the costs have definitely gone up. There's a lot, I think you're onto something there. I do think that in general, Facebook can be cheaper. I do find though that for now, Google has so much experience and so much reach in developing these ad products that they can really go toe to toe, which is surprising. Two years ago, Facebook could not go toe to toe with Google in terms of their performance, but over the past year or so, they've really... Their targeting is incredible. Their targeting, the cost is lower, their ad formats are better. So there are definitely times where you can beat out Google. The nice thing about Google ads as well is you don't necessarily have to set up a Facebook page and do all this work. You can just throw up two banners and see which one gets more clicks. Exactly. And so it's actually a great way... Like if you're starting from nothing, that's a great place to say, do they like it blue or they like it green? Do you like this logo? This way, and look at your click-through rates. That's what you want to look at, your click-through rates. That shows for every 100 people that see it, five people clicked versus one. You're like, okay, that one's better. That one from there. This has been so much fun. It really has. I've learned a lot. We're getting to the end. We're almost out of time, but before we get to saying goodbye to everyone, I just want to ask you both. What would you say the most important takeaway is, Scott? Oh, jeez. Yeah, I honestly would... As an entrepreneur, I say what I see hold most people back is the fear of failure. So all of this stuff, probably this last hour sounds very overwhelming. We've been doing this each, I think, close to a decade. So it takes time to get here, but I would just say just get started. Post something today, talk about it, get your brand foundation, figure it out, figure out what you want to do, and then test it and try it. Find a way to go probe somewhere, somehow. Do people like this? Are they going to engage with this? And so that would be my best summary. I think probably where the audience is at is, don't be afraid to get started and start right away because it's going to be a long road. Don't expect success right away. I feel like a lot of those big, giant success out of nowhere stories do a lot of harm to the entrepreneurship community because it is a roller coaster and it goes up and down, up and down. And so I would say my number one takeaway, most important thing is it really isn't... Is it going to be Facebook or is it going to be Twitter? I mean, that's nominal. It really comes down to getting out there and being present, having content exist. That needs to be your first step. Love it. Excellent. Biggest takeaway, Andrew. So I'm going to give two, I might be cheating, but... It's okay. Okay. It's okay. Number one is learn to love data. Maybe Excel spreadsheets don't excite you. Maybe data does not sound very exciting, but making data-driven marketing decisions is the key to staying cost-effective, efficient, and to optimize and grow things over time. It takes the emotion out of bad decisions. That roller coaster. That people say, but I really like this image. Irrelevant. Yeah, it is. It's like, look at the data. Yeah, great suggestion. The second, I think, it just gets back to that foundation. Without paralyzing yourself for perfection, it is so important to get a website, get content, and get your tracking and analytics set up. Without those, you are going to have to end up spending even more going back and fixing it later. Yeah. So important. We are so lucky to have both of you here. Really, you're doing such a wonderful service to people all across the country and the world. Yeah, I hope we helped. Amazing. So thank you both. And also a shout out to David DiAngelo contributing in the chat space. Hey there, Dave. Before we go, we want to mention an exciting opportunity for entrepreneurs. The 2019 Global Entrepreneurship Summit, it's going to be held on June 4th and 5th in the Hague in the Netherlands. The GES Summit will bring together more than 2,000 participants and they're from all over the world. This is a marketplace for new deals and partnerships and also a forum to really discuss the larger context of technological change. So if you want to learn more and you want to apply to participate, we want you to go and visit the summit website at GES2019.org. And a special thanks to everyone watching today, especially you're the host of the viewing groups around the globe for bringing entrepreneurs together to be a part of this vital conversation. I mean, we had audiences at the Lead Africa iHub in Pretoria, South Africa. The U.S. Embassy in Esmara, Eritrea. I'm sorry. A lot of names here. The American Cultural Center in Namibia. The American Spaces in Brazzaville and Pointe-Nor, Congo. U.S. Embassy in Lometogo. The American Center in Uganda. The Youth Network for Reform in Liberia. The L Space iHub in Tunisia. The Barritech iHub in Beirut, Lebanon. The America House in Jerusalem, Israel. U.S. Embassy in Quito, Ecuador. The Costa Rican North American Cultural Center in San Jose, Costa Rica. The Benjamin Franklin Public Library and Cultural Center in Honduras. The Public Library of Sula. Valley Autonomous University in San Pedro Sula, Honduras. The Network of Nicaraguan Women Entrepreneurs at the U.S. Embassy Binational Center in Nicaragua. And the U.S. Embassy in Tegucalpa. Tegucalpa. Honduras. I don't know. Teguc... It's gone. Yeah. In Honduras, we love you there. Yeah. You're wonderful. The U.S. Consulate General in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. And please continue the conversation, even though I may have messed up the name of where you are. Because it doesn't mean that I don't love you. Anyway, please continue the conversation on Twitter at hashtag GIST Tech Connect. And check back here on gistnetwork.org for information about other upcoming GIST events, including programs just like this. I hope you enjoyed your discussion today. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you to all my guests. I loved being here. Goodbye. Goodbye.