 My name is Eric Schwartzman. I'm a digital marketing advisor and author of the Digital Pivot, Secrets of Online Marketing. And in this session, I'm gonna talk to you about how to build a sustainable digital business. It used to be that a digital business was something only big business could do. But that's not the case anymore. There are a number of vendors out there, a competitive marketplace of software vendors that are selling directly to small business. And you don't need to be an engineer or a coder to pivot to digital anymore. Today I'm gonna talk to you about how you can pivot your business or your career to digital so that you can make more money and compete in the age of Amazon, Uber, and Grubhub. And at the end of my talk, I'll tell you how you can download this presentation as well as a copy of my book, a free copy of my book, The Digital Pivot, Secrets of Online Marketing with a forward by New York Times bestselling author, David Pogue. So be sure to stick around till the end so you can find out how to get a free copy of my book, which just came out last month and is already an Amazon bestseller. So let's talk about digital media. You don't have to be a screenwriter to produce a movie or an architect to build a house and you don't need to be a software engineer to use digital media. You really just need to understand the sequence of events and specialties involved because producing a movie or building a house has a logical order, a sequence of events and the same is true with a digital pivot. Motion picture production starts with a script, a screenplay, constructing a house starts with an architectural plan and a digital pivot starts with a website because social media is really a waste of time if you don't have a way to convert followers into customers. There's no buy button on Facebook. And even if there is someday, I would expect to pay a hefty commission on that sale just like Amazon resellers on their marketplace and restaurants selling through Grubhub do. Now it's one thing to pay a 30% commission to acquire a customer through Amazon or Grubhub but paying a 30% commission to retain a customer is unsustainable. So getting your website right is your first priority because there's no sense trying to get people to your website if you're not prepared to convert them into customers. So the logical order for a digital pivot starts with owned media before social media, social media before earned media and earned media before paid media. But exactly what is owned, shared, earned and paid media anyway and why are these distinctions useful? So I started in public relations. I worked at the Academy Awards, the Grammy Awards, the Emmy Awards and my clients included Britney Spears and the Pussycat Dolls. And the way it worked is I'd go with them to award shows and then if they won an award I would meet them backstage in the wings and escort them through the event press room. So backstage at all these events, the Academy Awards, the Grammy Awards and the Emmy Awards they have event press rooms and they divide the space up into four areas. There's an area for photographers called the photo room, an area for journalists called the newsroom, an area for TV reporters called the broadcast room and an area for networks like MTV and BET called the one-on-ones. Now back then, media categories were distinct but that's not the case anymore. News media outlets today move content in a variety of formats. Everyone does every media format. Networks like MTV have TV shows, websites, podcasts and social media profiles. So organizing media by format is no longer useful. Instead today we organized media by channels because the media formats have converged and what's left is owned, shared, earned and paid media. So let's break them down in the order in which you implement them so that you understand how to conduct a digital pivot. The foundation of my digital marketing pyramid is owned media. Now owned media is media you own, usually your website, but it could be a custom mobile app too. Getting owned media right involves four things. One, you have to be able to measure website activity. You have to have analytics. Two, and this sounds complicated but it's not. You have to have interoperable cross-functional text stacks which is basically just a fancy way of saying a bunch of different software products that talk to each other. Three, you have to be able to configure those stacks to automate as many workflow processes as you can because that's the value of integration. And four, you have to understand the basics of keyword research since that informs nearly all aspects of digital marketing. So owned media is analytics, stacks, automation, funnels and SEO stands for search engine optimization. And that's the art and science of creating content most likely to rank high in Google. Next comes shared media. Now shared media is media you share on a social network. Now initially you use shared media to prove to potential customers that you're legit because when people come to your website they click over to your social media profiles to see if anyone's paying attention to you. But here's something most people fail to realize. Your audience on shared media is not your audience. It's the social networks audience and they can take it away like they did to Trump without a moment's notice and there's nothing you can do about it. So you're really performing on a rented stage. Now that doesn't mean that you shouldn't use shared media to acquire new customers. It just means that you shouldn't rely on social media to retain customers. Think of social media as a tunnel for driving traffic to your funnel. Next comes earned media which is media about you on a credible third party website that your potential customers find influential. Earned media is guest blogging, link building and digital PR. And earned media has the greatest potential to drive conversions, to generate customers, leads and revenue because people believe what other people say about you more than what you say about yourself. So referral traffic from earned media tends to convert at a higher rate. And content about you published on someone else's website is seen as a third party endorsement. Even if it's a guest blog post you wrote because having your work published on a reputable third party website is an implied endorsement for your message. There's actually a business around it. If you join Forbes councils, which is a paid community that you can join, one of the benefits is the ability to have your work published on Forbes.com. People pay a lot of money for that privilege. These are types of earned media placements that drive conversions, these examples here. So on the left is a post I wrote last month for Fast Company. And on the right is a review that Ivana Taylor wrote of my book on small business trends. Now these are both sites with professional editors. You can't publish on these domains without editorial approval. You can't do link swaps, no funny business. You have to be able to author meaningful articles that offer new ideas and fresh perspectives. You have to lead with thoughts which is why they call it thought leadership. If you just write a piece that rehashes what everyone knows already, you're not a thought leader, you're a thought repeater and that won't get you published at Fast Company. Earned media is media coverage you earn on a credible third party website. And the last channel is paid media. Paid media is online advertising, which is media you buy on someone else's website. Now once your owned media is in order and you're driving traffic organically through social and earn media, you can see how many of your visitors convert into customers. Now if you take that number, the number of visitors that convert into customers and multiply it by the lifetime value of a customer and then multiply that by your profit margin, you know how much you can afford to spend on advertising because you have some certainty over what kind of returns you can expect to generate if you make the investment. One reason I see a lot of small businesses struggle online when they pivot to digital is that they implement these media channels out of sequence. You can't frame a house until you pour your foundation and you can't pour your foundation until you set your drains. And you shouldn't build a social presence, hunt for earn media coverage or spend money on advertising before your owned media foundation is in place. So let's take a closer look at this four step sequential digital marketing framework. So in this example, you see a funnel at the bottom, which is your website, that's your owned media channel. When people come to your website to check you out, your job is to convert them into a customer. And these are the stages they go through when they decide whether or not to buy. So think about a common scenario, right? They search for answers to a problem they have on Google and they find your website. Now, ideally you've calibrated the content on your website to get found by people looking for answers to problems you or your product solves at different stages of the funnel, right? Because you can see there are different stages. People come in at different stages. And since there are many different paths, prospective customers take through your digital media presence on the road to becoming a customer, you need content that appeals to buyers at all stages of the funnel. So if you're selling an impulse product like maybe pizza or I don't know, hoodies, there probably isn't much of a consideration or evaluation process, right? These are probably mostly single interaction purchases. They see it and they buy it. So you can calibrate your content to the top of the funnel. But if you're selling a higher price product or service like maybe luxury products or consulting services, you're gonna need to help your leads get through the consideration stage and nurture them through the evaluation stage so they can make a purchasing decision. So you're gonna need content designed to get found by their problem, their solution and their brand search queries. Now at the bottom of the funnel, you either capture the lead or make the sale. That's own media, that's your funnel. And it's really the most misunderstood and underutilized media channel. But once it's optimized, you're ready to invite people over through shared, earned and paid media, right? So that's your own media. Social media is your shared media. Digital PR is your earned media. And advertising is your paid media. For small business owners or entrepreneurs who are launching new sites or pivoting to digital, own media is what people typically need the most help with. So let's dive deeper into the basic building blocks of an own media presence, which are analytics, stacks, which I'll explain in a moment, automation, which is what it sounds like and funnels, which are conversion paths that are designed to capture lead records and sell stuff. So don't let this scare you away. It's just a screenshot from Google Analytics, which is a popular free platform for measuring activity to your website. Now you can't optimize what you can't measure. So analytics are really where you need to start when you do a digital pivot. Because in a digital pivot, analytics are how you keep score. Now this graph from one of my clients' websites shows the number of digital interactions before a prospect becomes a customer. So what you can see is that of the people that came to their website and bought something, 43% of them did so on their first visit, 20% bought on their second visit and 7% bought on their third visit. So 70% of purchases occurred in the first one to three visits. The remaining 30% required four or more visits before they made a purchase. Now on the right, you can see traffic sources where it says MCF channel grouping, right? Those are the channels, the media channels to which the purchases are attributed by percentage. Direct is basically unknown. So let's take that off the table. And let me explain to you what these channels are. So you know, it's pretty straightforward. Organic search is people who searched, Google and click the link that was not an ad. Referral means that they came from someone else's website. So that's earned media. Email is email marketing campaigns and auto responders and social network means shared media. Analytics are foundational to digital marketing, but the dirty little secret of analytics that no one talks about is this. So you're launching a new site, but it takes time to vote traffic. Depending on your resources, you're looking at three to six months before you start seeing much traffic at all. But without at least 5,000 visitors a month, it's tough to draw any actionable conclusions from your data about what's working because there's not enough visitors to draw statistically relevant conclusions. So you need data to optimize your own media presence, but it takes time to aggregate that data organically. It's like a catch 22. So if you can afford it, it's expensive, but if you can afford it, this might be a good reason to buy traffic early on through paid media so that you can test and optimize your funnels quicker. But getting your measurement right from the start is critical because you can't go back and recapture that data retroactively. So your first priority when it comes to own media is analytics. At a bare minimum, you should be measuring four things. First, you should be measuring website usage with a tool like this. This dashboard is showing you the number of interactions someone has with a website before they buy. The next thing you should be looking at is your search engine visibility using a tool like SEMrush or Google Search Console because you're gonna see, I mean, on average about a third of your traffic from search if you're doing a good job. And so this is, that's a third of your potential revenues. So that's a source you wanna monitor as well. And then the other two things to take a look at to sort of as table stakes, I would say, are monitoring how people use your website with a heat mapping and session replay tool like Hotjar, which you see on the left. So the little red click bar that you see at the top shows how many times people clicked that. You can also actually watch videos of people visiting your site. So you can see if they're finding what they need or if they're getting lost or if they're frustrated because something's not there that they expect. So that's Hotjar. They have a free version that you can install. And then on the left, you need to monitor the performance of your site with a tool like Google PageSpeed Insights, which again, is a free tool. You just put your URL into and hit return and it'll score how quickly your page loads. So at a bare minimum for own media analytics you need website usage analytics with a tool like Google Analytics, search visibility analytics with a tool like Semrush or Google Search Console, heat maps and session recording videos with a tool like Hotjar, and website performance analytics with a tool like Google PageSpeed Insights. So this guy is Paul de Podesta and he's the data-driven major league baseball team manager who inspired the movie Moneyball. I talked to him for my book and he used performance data instead of traditional scouting and observation to decide which players to draft on his team. And here are three things he told me he did differently which led to his success. So first, he left his gut out of it. He put average salary all around players before superstars. He played the averages rather than the outliers. Second, he realized that confirmation bias is a data-driven marketer's worst enemy. Only 3% of men, six foot two or taller, only 3% of men are six foot two or taller but 30% of CEOs are six foot two or taller. That's confirmation bias because your height doesn't qualify you to be a CEO. de Podesta based his decisions on performance data rather than irrelevant metrics. And third, he realized that his ego was not his amigo. To keep his ego in check, he kept a decision-making diary that listed all the external factors that came into play when he made a decision so he could improve his human decision-making algorithm. So the next thing to think about with own media optimization is the concept of trust. Optimizing your own media presence also means winning the trust of website visitors and Google. So think about when you're searching the web for an answer to a question or solution to a problem. Consider how you evaluate a business you've never heard of when you visit their website. You may not even be conscious of it but you evaluate websites for trustworthiness instinctively by considering these six factors, right? First, you judge the look and feel of a website based on popular design trends, right? Is the visual style up to modern standards or does it look old? Web design style changes every four years or so so you need to keep your site current. Now I've included a link to Andy Crestadina's blog with research on what exactly constitutes modern design standards so it's not a subjective debate. If you joined us late, I'm gonna give you a link to where you can download my slides at the end of today's presentation. Let's take a look at the other five factors. So next, is the site secure? Is there a valid SSL certificate in place? That's the little lock that appears in the browser bar. Are you using mostly stock photography or are there real images of your products and your people? Google says that content originality plays a role in determining page quality. So photography could negatively impact your page quality score if you're over-reliant on stock. Since Google determines page quality partially based on expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, build out your bio pages so they have the same kind of detailed information that's on your LinkedIn profile. List out your academic degrees, professional credentials, any published works, any industry awards, really any third-party achievements that qualify you as an expert. Now for WordPress users, and if you're not familiar with WordPress, it's a very popular content management platform for powering a website. For those companies that are using WordPress to power their website, you can search optimize your bio pages by adding what's called schema with Yoast's FAQ block. That way, you can win the trust of site visitors with fax instead of flourish and Google by giving them schema that they can index. This module is pre-built and ready to go and using it on your bio pages is an easy way to make your site more trusted in the eyes of visitors and Google. Now, if you joined us late, today's presentation is based on my new book and at the end, I'm gonna give you a link to where you can download a free copy. So if something's unclear, you can download the book and get more clarity there. And the last two ways that you can optimize your site for trustworthiness is if you're selling to other businesses instead of consumers, you can win the trust of site visitors with client testimonials and logos. If your website runs on WordPress, again, which as I mentioned earlier powers more websites than any other content management system in the world today. For testimonials, I like the BeaverBuilder module called UABB Testimonials. And for client logos, I like the PowerPak Grid and Carousel module. Now, if you're not selling to other businesses, if you're a B2C selling to consumers, the equivalent of this, winning trust would be star ratings and customer reviews. But all of these factors combined determine the trustworthiness of your website, right? These are the factors visitors consider when they're deciding whether or not to advance from the awareness stage to the evaluation stage of your funnel. So clearing the consideration hurdle is really all about winning trust. So a lot of small businesses trying to figure out digital, launch a website, and then they become disappointed that it doesn't generate business. And they're not sure why. But just as a facade of a building on the back lot of a movie studio is not a building, a website without a funnel can't convert leads to revenue. Now, this is a picture of a movie studio backlog. And these are not real buildings. They're just facades. They have no interiors. If they need to film a shot of someone at an upstairs window, they use a ladder. It's a fake out. The same is true of a website that you can't use to connect with the parent company or schedule an appointment or price services based on your needs or transact commerce. A website that's just an online brochure is like a facade on the back lot of a movie studio. It may look good, but it's non-functional. So ask yourself, if you're a small business and you launched a website that's not generating revenue, is your website a gateway to your business that people can use to transact commerce? Or are you just pretending? So let's look at what it would mean to transform a website into a gateway to a digital business. So a website is the presentation layer of a digital business. It's the doorway through which prospective customers walk into your online store. If you wanna generate leads, you need web forms to collect customer contact information. If you wanna limit the number of junk signups that result in bad registrations, you need a good forms tools to support your website. That tool is actually different from the content management system that you use to manage your website. It's different software. Then as you collect these leads, you need a place to store them. And that's where a CRM or Customer Relationship Management Tool comes into place. And there are CRMs that are affordable and designed to accommodate small business now. So if you want web registrations to flow directly into your CRM, you need a CRM that's integrated with your web forms. This stuff used to be expensive and hard to use unless you were a programmer, but that's really not the case anymore. Plenty of small businesses doing less than a million in annual revenue are using these tools. And in fact, I'd say the difference between small businesses that succeed and small businesses that fail online usually comes down to how well the different software products they use are integrated with each other. So now, right, I've got people signing up on my website. They're coming into my CRM. If I'm selling a considered purchase, I've got to nurture those leads through to a purchasing decision. And to nurture website registrations with outreach sequences that can be automated, you need an email marketing platform that's integrated with your CRM, right? This is a basic tech stack. These tools are all interoperable. They're all different. And they would allow like a salesperson and a marketing person to collaborate online to make money, right? Because the marketing person would handle the forms and the email marketing and the salesperson would use the CRM to prospect and sell. And then, you know, if you can tie in analytics then you can start to, you know, get hard data about the type of activities that people are performing on your site. So like before when I was showing you the Google analytics slide, that information was all anonymous, right? I don't know which leads converted there. I just know rough numbers and percentages. But if I can integrate my analytics with my CRM I can actually start to home run the metrics to specific leads and see which leads were on my site the longest, which pages they went to and what have you. So this again is a basic tech stack that you can use to generate, nurture and convert leads to revenue. I would say this would be the sort of baseline difference between a website that's an online brochure and a website that is an entrance to a digital business. This is the tech stack I use on my own website. You can see in addition, I use pop-ups, I use live chat. I use social widgets because if I can't get them to sign up or give me their email address at least I try to get them to follow me on social media and join my community. And then of course I use Stripe for e-commerce so that I can actually make a sale online. But I would say without an integrated tech stack you don't have a sustainable digital business. You're just faking it. You have a digital business facade. So tunnels are how people get to your website and funnels are how you convert visitors into leads and leads into customers. And this is the tech stack I use to convert contacts into cash. So let's take a look at what these tools look like on the front end. Okay, so this is a screenshot of my website. It's a busy screenshot. So let me break it down for you. So item number one is the top screen banner, the red banner that says free digital marketing webinar. And item number two is the green email signup slider with my picture on it in the bottom left there that says get exclusive marketing tips. Both of these pop-up conversion widgets are powered by a tool I use called opt-in monster. Again, I don't have to be a coder or programmer to set it up. I can integrate it with a WordPress site by pointing and clicking, dragging and dropping. And I can integrate these conversion widgets with my CRM and email platform. So leads that are generated through the pop-up widgets go directly into my CRM automatically. And then item three on the right hand sidebar there, right, those three pieces of art. These are all gated content marketing offers. Basically content that you sign up to download. The top one, which says don't play with fire is a free startups guide to PR white paper, which explains how to hire PR without getting burned. Below that is a free media monitoring buyers guide, which is basically a review of the top 10 media monitoring platforms and a feature by feature comparison chart. And then below that is my secrets of successful PR white paper, which is basically an insider's guide to hiring PR or agency or freelancer. And if you wanna download any of these reports, they're at the link below on this slide. These are all examples of gated content marketing offers because you register to download them. And because I'm constantly publishing new content, people who subscribe wanna get the new stuff so they give me a good email address. Here's an example of a three-page conversion funnel for a gated content offering. Now, in this case, it's my essential digital marketing skills report, which has the most in-demand digital marketing skills today in order of importance. So the first page in the funnel has promo art. You see, I've got the dotted line around it that advertises the report. So if you click on it, you're directed to the second page in the funnel, which is called a landing page. And a few quick things to note about landing pages. So the landing page has no header or footer menu. So the only action you can take is filling out the form. The graphics and colors on the promo art match the graphics on the landing page so that when someone clicks through, it meets their expectations. And then you see logos of media outlets I've been published in on the bottom to convey a sense of trust. So you can see, obviously, if I've been published by these outlets, I'm not a spammer. And after you fill them out and submit the form, the third page loads, which is an acknowledgement page to let you know that your request went through, simple three-page conversion funnel. This is how you convert content into contacts. But what happens next? Then you get the white paper sent as an attachment to an auto responder email. So I don't get an email that I then have to respond to manually. Your lead automatically goes into my CRM, which is synchronized with my email marketing platform, and it sends you out this email. I prefer in my email auto responder messages to just go with plain text. I know a lot of people put images in there, but I want it to look more like a personal email than a blast. Even though I think people know that it's a blast, I just don't want it to look like a newsletter or an ad of some kind. So I prefer plain text. I also send these messages from my email address. So if you want to reply, it comes directly to me and I can engage you in a conversation. And I let you know that in the text of my email. In order to do this though, your web forms have to be integrated with your CRM, and your CRM has to be integrated with your email marketing platform. And that's a tech stack, right? I told you I was going to explain tech stacks, that's a tech stack. Different solutions that are integrated with each other and have been set up to automate simple business processes like delivering a white paper download. Now after the form gets submitted, a lead record gets automatically created and I can see how much time on average they spent on my site, the media channel they arrived to my site from and the first page they entered my site through. And this tells me a lot about how interested they are in buying from me and what specifically they're interested in. Collectively, these lead records are what form my sales pipeline. And if I'm a sales person, I can start to sort this database by different factors to see which of the leads are most engaged and I can use it to remarket and nurture these leads to move them through my sales funnel. This is a picture of my email marketing platform. This is an eight message email marketing cadence, a series of eight messages that go out over time that I use to nurture leads and these are the first three messages in the cadence. Now my objective here is to get leads to decide whether or not they want to do business with me. So in this case, a no is as good as a yes because it means I'm not wasting energy nurturing a lead that won't buy. So unsubscribes are a good thing because it gets leads with no commercial value out of my pipeline. Better to get the ones that won't out of your pipeline as quickly as possible because not all leads convert. Some will, some won't, so what? Now, if your CRM is integrated with your web presence and your digital marketing channels, you can score your leads based on digital activity and find the most engaged prospects. So you see this is a lot more than just a website, right? It used to be only big business could afford these tools but you can do this now yourself and small businesses that are doing well online are using these tools. You do not have to be an engineer, not anymore. As I mentioned, there's a competitive marketplace of software vendors catering to small business and you can learn to use these tools yourself. Here you can see that I'm scoring in the green bar you can see I'm scoring the propensity of my leads to convert based on the number of digital interactions they've had with me. And this is the real value of an integrated tech stack, the ability to collect all digital actions that occur, whether to the website or email or social media on your lead records so that you can separate the warm from the cold leads. A sustainable digital business is built on the convergence of owned, shared, earned and paid media. And in this slide, you can see how these different media channels overlap. Now, when it's done right, owned and shared media together convey credibility because you have a trustworthy website and visitors who believe in you. The intersection of shared and paid media is visibility because if you buy broader reach more people see your message and they assume you must be commercially successful if you can afford to advertise. The combined value of earned and paid media is prominence because if you're getting the attention of influential websites and you're advertising you're either famous, important or both. And if you have a strong owned and earned a strong owned and earned media presence you have influence because your brand obviously has the capacity to impact the behaviors of others. When these four channels are optimized the result is a sustainable digital business presence that converts awareness into transactions. In my experience, coaching small businesses through digital pivots, each channel takes about three to six months to start delivering results and each channel requires continued attention. Digital marketing is a process that starts with owned media optimization. Get your funnels right first, build your tunnels after that. Now that you understand this framework for implementing a digital pivot, if you wanna dive deeper here's how you can download this deck and get a free copy of my book The Digital Pivot Secrets of Online Marketing. Thanks for taking the time to join me for this discussion on how to build a sustainable digital business. My slides and a free copy of my book will be available at EricSchwarzman.com forward slash small business expo for the next 24 hours. There are plenty of people out there who will promise to make you rich with YouTube ads or online courses but digital business is not a get rich quick scheme. It requires ongoing commitment but it is the future of business. So if you're at a crossroads looking to reinvent yourself or finding new opportunity this is it. It's still early enough in the game to become a digital business expert and prosper in the age of artificial intelligence and e-commerce but you need to diversify and modernize your skills. You don't necessarily need to be a specialist but you do need general knowledge of how it fits together so you can quarterback a pivot and that's what you'll get from my book which is basically a digital marketing MBA in a single book and you can download a free copy at the link here EricSchwarzman.com forward slash small business expo.