 So let me give you a bit of an overview. Just to whet your appetite a little bit. You're going to find out a little bit about me, a little bit about Kevin. And I'm spitting into this thing. Is that better? That's better. Then we're just going to go over five key things from a marketing perspective. So this is your top of the funnel stuff. This is your exciting stuff to get people interested about your business. So who has heard of the MX2 mobile mapping system? Yes, get in there. Brilliant. OK, so my family, my dad is a surveyor. He's a hydrographer and a mine surveyor. So I come from the survey background. So we actually manufactured equipment for very dirty environments like mining and quarrying and oil and gas. And then, of course, I needed to set up my own business in marketing and sales. So I set up my business 11 years ago. And I don't look back because I love it. I love everything about it. So my background is in marketing and sales to help geospatial businesses grow and become more profitable. And the profitable bit is the most important part. Kevin. Very good. Well, since Elaine started off with a question, who's heard of Landsat? Anybody, Landsat program? Well, I was the first person to market commercial Landsat data over 30 years ago. And we had the pleasure of trying to sell for the first time satellite imagery. Well, after I did that at a company called EOSat, I started my own firm in the Denver, Colorado area. And I've been helping geospatial companies market their data, boost their sales through strategic marketing, content marketing, market research for 30 years. So we're here today to help you all fine tune your marketing and hopefully increase your market share. He's only 26, maybe 30. I think my company is older than you are, Elaine. I'm only 21. OK, and my iPad has gone to sleep, which is always wonderful. So marketing disaster number one. Who has a landing page on their website? Specific. Nice. Tom's there, got it? Anybody else? Do you know what a landing page actually is? OK, so get your phones out. Everybody get your phones out. Come on, let me see phones. Phones, phones, phones. I want you to take a picture of the QR code. Take a picture. Come on, I'm watching you all. Go, phones, phones, phones, phones. I don't know if people can get that. There's a matter in my madness. You're in the way. You're in the way. OK, so the whole point of a landing page is to attract the right type of buyer. OK, so you want to. I bet you're thinking, if I could only have half a dozen more of these types of wonderful buyers, you'd be quite rich, wouldn't you? You'd be quite wealthy. You'd be like, yeah, give me more, give me more. One of the things that most geospatial businesses are really bad at, they don't have specific landing pages. And these landing pages are focused on that right type of buyer. It's all about first impressions. It's all about building your brand. It's also a lead generation. So if you look on the QR code, it will take you to a page. The page, of course, is promoting what we do. But it's interesting. So those people that we are targeting will be interested in that information. Yeah, OK, I'm interested a little bit more about that. I will fill in the details. A landing page doesn't have to have tons and tons of things in it. The whole point of it, it's a lead capture form that is light, OK? Light. You're not selling them anything. You want to nurture them. You want to get them feeling, OK, I'm interested to know a little bit more. What do I need to do? When people start then selling them stuff, you think, OK, I'm switching off now. And that's why marketing has got a bad remit in the whole world and in the geospatial. So you guys need to go in there and build on this. So the landing page is perfect for that. It also massively helps with SEO and stuff. So some quick tips for you. First one is testimonials on the web page. Great way to actually promote what you do. If you notice on my landing page, I actually didn't put a testimonial on there. But you can have a little nosy around on the website to find out what's happening. The other thing is great images, but make sure they load fast. Because how annoying is it when you go onto a website, you can't find what you're looking for, and then the damn thing takes forever to load. Uh-uh, it's a nightmare. And then, of course, sign up here. And as you see on the page, there'll be a little sign up. And also, if you go on there, you can win a bulldozer, a LEGO bulldozer. You want that, even I want that. Kevin, do you have any comments about the landing pages? I do. If you're gonna walk away remembering four things, I want you to remember faster, better, cheaper, safer. So your landing page, sure it's gonna be about you, but it can't be totally about you and your company. It has to be about your clients. And to set yourself apart, you've gotta explain how your product or service is gonna help your clients or potential customers do their jobs faster, better, cheaper, safer. Remember those four things. And that's also what most great client testimonial stories will be about. They'll focus on one or more of those. Faster, better, cheaper, safer. Okay, the next thing. Now this is a biggie for you guys. Everybody in this room, I bet all of you guys are actually selling in here. This is where people go wrong. You need to start before the person you're selling to even knows they have a problem. Okay, this is really key because you want to nurture those potential buyers who's never heard of you, who doesn't know about your business, who doesn't know they've actually got a problem. So an example for surveyors, for example, they could be on a construction site and they bring in a digger and the digger digs up a load of stuff and okay, it destroys a load of pipes underground. The issue for the foreman on the site is not that they've dug up the pipes, even though that's a big disaster, but it's how much downtime they're gonna have now on that construction site, which is gonna cost a fortune. Okay, so you could have some content pieces on your website related to that particular problem. Then it educates the buyer. The buyer is you all know it yourselves. When you're interested in something, you start delving into things and you start researching what's going on. This is key. So this is some of the things that you need to do having content along this whole customer journey. So quick tips for success. Draw out your customer journey. Draw it out before the buying journey actually begins. So the pre-buying journey and just think about your ideal customer. What are some of the things that they would like to know more about? What's important to them? Not about selling your product, but what's important to them? It's all about the customer. They don't care if you've got, hey, I've got the latest equipment or the GNSS or whatever. They don't care about that. They want to know how it's gonna help them. Any comments from you? Correct. Well, and a couple of things to add to that. Just some elements on the buyer's journey to help them and you along the way. You wanna have some press releases, some news announcements out there to establish your brand. The case studies, we already talked about them. Case studies are stories about your customers and their success with your product. That's where Faster, Better, Cheaper, Safer comes in. Of course, you need product sheets that describe the pro or service, product or service. Make those downloadable if you can so they can take them with them. Blogs are great. Speak directly to your customers or potential customers. The great thing about blogs is they can be as short as you want or as long as you want. I recommend short. And then also, don't forget videos. Videos are fantastic. Not just for marketing, but how to? You've gotta constantly educate your clients even after they've bought from you. How do they use your product? How can they use it better and have a better experience with it? So those are all things that are part of the buying journey. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, who knows what a power base is? Anybody? Little names in there? Ooh, one person. It's all right, she's on my team. She knows this one. Okay, so a power base is all the people around you, like your friends, your family, your colleagues, your customers that tell you when it's great and when it's terrible. These are part of your power base. These are part of your network. We just call it a power base. And these people are gold. So one of the things I want you guys to do when you go home, write a list of all the people that is connected to you. Now, if you actually type in network or power base, or it actually comes up with six degrees of separation. And actually, you are all connected to some amazing people, people that can buy from you, buy your service, buy your product. So make a list of these things. And don't rule out your family because you don't know who these people know, okay? It's caught me out. I'm like, nah, but yeah. Maybe because my dad's a surveyor, he knows a lot of people, but it's a really good way of actually building on it, your network, your power base, Kevin. And one thing to remember about your power base, the people in that base and the companies can be kind of unofficial business partners, even if you don't have some kind of an official signed memorandum of understanding or something like that. If you do, that's great, but you can have unofficial business partners. And for me, we trade clients, oftentimes we might have conflicts of interest where we can't take on a client, and we trade them. We don't necessarily have any money change hands when we do that. So we share. We just, you know, I give something to one of my business partners, they give something to me, and it all works out in the end. So it's great to leverage that. And one of the best business partners I have, they provide a service that I personally don't provide. They do market research. Some of the biggest market research reports that you've read in the geospatial industry has been done by one of my business partners. So when somebody comes to me and needs that done, I can just sub it out, or in that case, just give it away to that business partner. So you never want to have to say no to work. Absolutely. Okay, who leverages their staff members in their company to do social media? Not sure. Okay, so this is a big thing, a big disaster that you guys are making. You need to think about your team members. Now, don't think of the negative on the poaching. They're gonna poach my staff. You need to build a team. People want to work for you because they love you, because they believe in what your mission is, what your vision is, where you're after. But actually, using and getting people involved from a staff member perspective is massively valuable. The reason why it's valuable is, one, they feel special. Two, you're building the brand. It's a cohesive brand. And three, it has massive organic reach. So when you're promoting stuff and different things and the staff members are doing some great work, it's a brilliant way to actually get the name out there and really grow it. But you need to have buy-in from everybody. If you've got a bit of a, oh, I'm not quite sure about what my business is doing and I really don't want to share what they're doing, well, you're in the wrong game. So you need to have a real think about, actually, we need to build on this, this amazing network of people. I work with a company in the UK, for example, called Stormgeomatics. Storm at Geomatics. Have a look at them. Have a look on their LinkedIn profile. They are phenomenal about supporting their staff members. They've just hired a load of young surveyors. They do hydrography, a lot of work with water-based solutions. And all their staff are actually talking about what they're doing in the field. And it's really interesting because you get perspective from the young ones, you get perspective from the old ones. And it's been really good for building their brand which then attracts more type of customers. So a big thing to think about. Kevin. Think of it as a force multiplier. Many of you probably have Facebook, use Facebook, and I hope LinkedIn. LinkedIn is one of the most powerful social media tools we have along with the platform formerly known as Twitter. But just start with the other people in your company and make sure every time your company puts out an announcement on LinkedIn or on a Facebook business page or on Twitter, you get the other people in the company to go and like that post, right? It's because what happens, LinkedIn works essentially the same way as Facebook. When somebody likes the post, the post gets moved up and it goes out into more people's feeds and more people will see it. So if you've got 10 people in your company, all 10 of them, or whether it's 100, should be liking every official post from the company. And it could be Instagram, could be Facebook, all those things are good, but that's the important thing. And make sure everybody's aware of this and let the company know. Say, hey, we just put out a big announcement on LinkedIn. Please, everybody go and like it over the next couple of days and that'll make it hang out there, more people will see it. Another little tip actually with LinkedIn is video. Video is the big thing at the moment. I was back at Social Media Marketing World in San Diego. Woo, exciting, especially for us marketeers. And it was all about video, organic reach and video. So small, little, sharp, short videos as well as the big stuff. Tell the stories, this is really powerful. Who pisses off the media? Oh my God. I says, should I have that swear word in there? It's really bad. Anyway, this is a big one. And I think I'm gonna hand this to Kevin because this is a big area that Kevin looks at. This is something I deal with all the time. So in the United States, there's a big trade show called GEOINT for the intelligence community. And my firm runs the press room at GEOINT. And so I'm always talking to the journalists, the media in the press room. And one of the complaints I hear from the media so often is that PR people, marketing people, when they're reaching out to journalists, and I'll talk about a couple different ways, when they do that, they don't do their homework. And they're just sending things inappropriate to the media. So a couple things to keep in mind. When you're sending out press releases, all right, you can send out a generic geospatial press release to all the geospatial media. But let's say you've got a project that, or maybe a product that just applies to oil and gas. So you're not gonna send that to the urban planning publications. So I use email for sending out press releases and I have all of my email lists for publications and bloggers and reporters. I've got them divided, categorized by their vertical market and what they do. So that's the first thing. Don't send press releases out that are inappropriate. Here's the second thing. A lot of savvy PR people, they will pick up the phone or send an email or at a trade show, they'll pitch a story idea in person to reporters. And that's perfectly fine. That's reporters are used to that. But do your research first. Make sure you know before you approach a reporter. It could be they only are interested in news, legitimate news that's happening. And there's some others that might be more interested in features and products. And so be very careful about what you pitched. You don't wanna waste their time because if you waste their time by pitching bad ideas or sending them press releases that are inappropriate, you know, they're not gonna take your call, they're gonna avoid you at trade shows. Your emails are gonna go directly into the trash folder. So be very respectful, do your background research and send appropriate information to the right reporters and publications. It's coming back again though, you know, that there was a part where press was massive and then it sort of was like, nah, you know, you had to advertise to actually get a press release put into a magazine. Now they're flipping their mindsets and they're also changing, which I've seen a lot of lately. And also working directly with the journalists and the editors has been gold because again, going back to your power base, that's free advertising to lots of media to take full advantage of it. So any questions? Thank you very much for having us guys.