 Welcome to The Business in Hawaii Show. I'm Daila Nyanagida and we are broadcasting live from the ThinkTech studios in downtown Honolulu. If you want to tune in live, we are at www.thinktechhawaii.com and while there, please subscribe to our programs and get on our mailing list. The theme of business in Hawaii is to share with you stories of local businesses by local people. Our guests share with us their journey to building a successful business right here at home. In the ThinkTech studio today is Anna Colvert, principal of Colvert Communication. Anna, welcome to the show. Thank you, thanks for having me. Hey, I am super excited to talk about your journey and about asking you all these questions about how media, communications, marketing has changed over the years. But why don't you start by telling us a little bit about Colvert Communication? Sure, so Colvert Communication is the state's largest digital marketing firm. We work with clients from all different types of industries like Kilo Hattie, Diamond Bakery, Locations Hawaii, Time Supermarket. If you wanted to see all our clients, you can go to my website, ColvertCommunication.com. Although we do specialize in digital marketing, we are full service because I really believe that an integrated marketing communications is critical to creating a successful brand persona and, most importantly, to generate lots of sales for companies. So I know that you have quite a big team that helps you make the magic happen. Tell us a little bit about your team. Sure, I'd love to. So most of the team is made up of women. That's not by design, but I have Pat Monic, she's my vice president. She comes from a long line of branding. And it was principle of forefront branding for many years. And Christopher Gaspar is my senior account executive. I've been working with Chris at my agency for almost four years now. He's been doing a really amazing job of learning about the ongoing technology. And it seems like every day there's some new program and software out there. I have Christine Sullivan, a creative director. She's in Berkeley. I'm Keana Kanoa. She's my niece and social media director. She's in Bentley right now in Boston, graduating from the college I went to in business. And you can see everyone else in the team on my website. Fantastic. Tell me a little bit about how you got started. Well, you know, I went to business schools. I mentioned in Boston and I came out to Hawaii. My parents were, we called Snowbirding. They're from Colorado. So they spent the summers here in the winters, the winters here and the summers in Colorado. And I graduated early from college a semester early. And I was in a five-year accelerated program to get my masters. And I couldn't start early because it was accelerated one year. So I came to Hawaii just to hang out and like spend time with my parents. And I got bored. And one of my friends was volunteering to help the symphony with a charity, a fundraiser. And I was happy to help him with that. And Paul Brown was the sponsor. And if many of you locals know that this was, I guess, 15 years ago, he had seven locations and an international product line. And he asked me to be his marketing director. And I accepted and I didn't go back to Boston. So I stayed. I worked for him for Paul for about three and a half years. And then I worked at the Harris Agency for several years before starting my own company. I had a business partner for a while. And we were under the brand name Wind on Water Communications. And that's when we worked with American Savings Bank. And I built the Hapai app for Capilani. We worked with almost everyone in town. And then two years ago, me and my business partner stopped working together. And I moved all the clients over to court communication. And it's been cranking ever since. I bet. And, you know, I know you from a professional space. And I'm telling you, you are always busy, just always busy, always working on something. But it's really great to see you interacting with the business community and being so active. Tell me a little bit about what people are looking for from covert communication. What do they call you for? You know, it's a really good question. I think one thing that sets us apart is really transparency. A lot of agencies don't necessarily do what I would consider ethical business. You know, they do a lot of metering and, oh, you want a website? Well, we're going to charge you by page or, you know, kind of nickel of diming and also not being fair with reporting agency services and the result of the media. You know, what did it do for you? If I spend $10,000 and I'm not seeing how that got me more business, then that's not a good relationship for you to be in with your agency. And that's especially with online. A lot of people are getting taken advantage of because they don't understand the terminology. And they are basically just have to be beholden to someone or trust that they're getting the right information from their agency. And most of the time they're not. And here in Hawaii, a lot of local companies, you know, they're selling now, you know, the TV stations and the print stations, they're all selling digital packages, but they're reselling that to someone in the mainland. And that creates a very uncomfortable position for a lot of local businesses because, you know, just someone who's in California really understand our market. And usually the answer is no, because what's not cookie cutter like you can do on the mainland, like, you know, the same strategies don't work here than as in New York or California. And so when your clients come to you, they say, hey, Anna, I need some marketing help. I mean, once upon a time, we thought, okay, well, let's print something up. I mean, how is that changed? How has that evolved? It's a really good question. You know, I think as we have digital now opportunities, and everyone is starting to change the way that they communicate, you know, before you waited for the newspaper to come. And now you're getting news on your cell phone or instant notifications of things that are happening. Same thing with television. We used to watch TV. And if we remember, you know, when I grew up, if you missed Wheel of Fortune, you know, you couldn't stop and rewind it or you couldn't record anything. And so people were trained to be fully present with these medias and wait for the medias to come. Now people are, you know, streaming on devices, even radio change with Spotify and Pandora. And what it means for the consumer and in our case for businesses is that we can be much more targeted of who we speak to and when they get that communication. Because what we're learning now is, let's say, you know, you, for example, maybe in the morning, you have your coffee, you look at Facebook, you are reading the news online, you're not necessarily clicking or buying things, right? That's not your purchase behavior. But later in the day, we see after you come home and have a glass of wine and you're now is where you're buying things online or shopping. So we're not going to choose to serve and add to you when we know you're not at the highest opportunity to convert. We're going to wait and serve you that impression later when you are ready to shop. And we know that. So what it does is it creates, it reduces noise for the consumer because they're only seeing the content that they actually really care about. And it reduces costs for the marketer because I don't want to serve and add to someone who has no interest in my product. So, you know, you don't want to see power cool ads and I don't want to see diaper ads, right? And online marketing and really, really good tracking actually allows us to target a niche audience right at the moment of intent and who have the highest likelihood of purchasing, which is good for, you know, all parties. So what I'm hearing is that there's a lot of opportunity to leverage our digital age. So does that mean that there's no more need for print on paper? You know, once upon a time, you know, a mailing campaign or maybe even like a radio spot. So does that mean that marketing has pushed out those things or is there a secret combination, a secret sauce to all of that makes it happen? I definitely believe that, you know, there's a room for every media and we need them and it really depends on what we're selling, right? When you look at and in traditional marketing and all marketing, we look at what's called the purchase funnel, right? And it starts with awareness and then it goes to consideration, intent and then action. And marketing is actually much like a math problem. For example, McDonald's, you know, they have the McRib limited time offer coming out. In traditional marketing, we know that, and we're talking about here, TV, radio, print, like a newspaper ad, things that are that come quickly, you know, a long term publication, like a quarterly publication isn't used in the same way as as this example. But so the McRib's coming out, we know that we need to reach 90% of our target audience, in this case, I'd be people over the age of 18, right? With four to seven messages over seven to 10 days. And if we do that, we get what's called critical mass marketing. And we know that from the top of the funnel, we'll get 2% of people over the age of 18 to come in to McDonald's and get the McRib. That's why you'll see oftentimes three or four commercials right in a row from the same company, because they know that, oh, it's a limited time offer, it's only going to have this McRib for one month. And we need to serve X amount of ads very, very quickly to get people to come in and try the McRib, right? Wow, that really is a math equation. Yeah. And we see other tools as well, but with online marketing, you know, and we think about the goal of most marketing is to drive people to your store, right? Or online, right? And so I look at websites kind of like the mothership of all communication. And then we use print and we use PR and radio and video to create a richer experience and to drive traffic to the site, because that's where we can can either sell them something, capture information about them, or, you know, it's really the starting place of like where the experience of the customer and the business happen. So talk to me about the differentiation between you said PR and marketing. I think quite often we hear them together. What's the difference? And as a business, when do I know what I need? Yeah, so there's different types of PR stands for public relations. And what is the key difference between PR and traditional marketing is really how we talk about, so you've heard of Nielsen, right? Right? That's how we know online when you run a TV commercial, reaches this many people. That's when people are tuned in on their cable box. And based on how many people are seeing that commercial, that's how the cable companies or Bravo, whoever it is, decide how much they're going to charge for a 30 second spot, right? Because it reaches many people and it had a certain impact. So the same kind of concept is true with PR. Like when we try to get someone on the news, and I actually have a lot of examples on my website, a breakout PR that I've done for different clients like times that you can see if you're interested in what that means. But what we want to do is create a clip or B-roll footage that we send to the media. And the goal is to get the client on the news or in a print publication, but typically the news is usually where you're going to get the most eyeballs, right? And the most impressions. And then how we rank PR or how Nielsen does it is they say that if, let's say we're going to advertise in KHA wins morning news, right? If I bought a 30 second spot, it would cost me $250. If I can get into the actual segment and it runs for 30 seconds, they would take the equivalent of the cost of the media spot and multiply it by three, because they say that it is three times more impactful to hear it on the news and it is to watch a commercial, even though it's during the same timeframe. Does that make sense? So the goal is really, and I like to do PR a little bit different than other brands do. I don't just take right of press release, the old way of doing PR is you write a press release and then you just send it out to everyone, right? But we didn't have online like we do now. We didn't have instant access to news that happens moment to moment. And so what happens that when you do that, it dilutes the message because it's really not news anymore. If everyone gets it, if every reporter gets it, what kind of, is it really news or not? And in some instances, like a epidemic or we're having this disease that's going on right now, sure, people want to know what's happening, the death toll. But with a story about a business, about who this business is, maybe they got new leadership or maybe they're growing into different channels like amazing care network, for example. We're expanding that and you want to pitch a story and you want to create your own content so that it's exclusive for a reporter. Or I like to film things myself and then submit it to the news because they're always looking for more happy content. The news is oftentimes very unhappy and it's nice to have like a local touch. And if you provide your own footage, you're very, very likely to get that exposure. I'd love to hear way more about what you do that makes covert communication unique. Unfortunately, we're going to go to a short break, but when we come back, let's talk more about that. So this is Business in Hawaii and we'll see you back here shortly. Aloha. My name is Mark Shklov. I am the host of Think Tech Hawaii's Law Across the Sea program. Being a lawyer has many aspects and I try to cover them every time I do a program of law across the sea. Not everything has to do with law or being a lawyer per se. Some of it has to do with the people you meet, the things you see, the places you visit. And that's what I try to combine in Think Tech Hawaii's Law Across the Sea. Thank you for watching. Aloha. Aloha. I'm Keisha King, host of Crossroads in Learning on Think Tech Hawaii. On Crossroads in Learning, our guests and I discuss all aspects of education here in Hawaii and throughout the country. You can join us for stimulating conversations to enrich, enliven, and educate. We are streamed live on Think Tech bi-weekly at 4 p.m. on Mondays. Thanks so much for watching our show. We look forward to seeing you then. Aloha. Welcome back. This is Business in Hawaii and with us today is Anna Kovert of Covert Communication. Anna, thanks again for joining us. When we went to break, we were getting into a really great conversation as to the difference between marketing and PR, public relations. And you pointed out that everyone does PR, if you will, a little different and covert approach to PR. Can you tell us more about the whole reporting space? I mean, well, what do we need to know? Well, yeah. And especially with digital marketing, like I was mentioning, it's much easier to trust a port of a television spot or radio, because there are third parties like Nielsen that actually tell us how many people were tuned in or streaming. That's what I call pretty pure data. But with online marketing and social media marketing, it's very, very different and difficult to trust what you're seeing. And the reason why is think about this. How do you know? So what we, online, we call an impression is a cost per thousand impression. That's one of the key metrics. What did it cost you to reach 1,000 people with 1,000 ads? That's what we call CPM. The only other way to track online success is by click. And that's called cost per click. Now, with a click, I can actually verify that someone clicked to my website using Google analytics or third party reporting, which I've actually created my own custom reporting service because I didn't necessarily trust all the data and analytics. But how do you ever know that an impression ran? You don't. There's not any third party that is doing any review of these media companies. So you could spend $30, $40,000 and immediate companies like, oh yeah, we ran 10 million impressions. But we never, we can't, we have to just believe them. And that's, that's a hard thing for a lot of companies, especially when, you know, you're not getting the same immediate success as you did when you were doing television at the top of the funnel, right? Because before, and it's shifting a lot, as we know now, people are moving most of their budgets online. And to come back to what you were saying before, is that what we should be doing? Because you can't truly brand a company fully online if they don't already know who you are or why you exist. Like you need things like television or print or, you know, a strong website, video, things like that to explain and introduce your brand. And then a banner ad works to continue the story, I call it remarketing, right? But in order, you can't introduce a brand new brand with a little tiny little banner ad, it's not going to mean anything to anyone. But if they see Nike, they already know who Nike is, and then you can accelerate your reach with online. That's really why it's important to have a full plan. So, so we're going to have two types of businesses, right? We're going to have a brand new business, and we're going to have an old existing business. So for a brand new business, at what point do they, do they need to engage marketing, public relations, communications firm? You know, and I think for a lot of entrepreneurs, they'll say, Oh, well, you know, I'm just starting out. Maybe I don't, I don't need that. Is there, is there a good point at which you should be investing that way? Absolutely. And, you know, coming from a business background and, you know, marketing is one of the key parts of a business plan. How are you going to get your products out there? What are you selling? How to communicate? Why do you deserve to be in existence? Right? And LLC is an entity. It's a person. And it has to have a personality right from the beginning. And it has to have a way that it's going to reach out and get people involved and that otherwise it won't work. So if you're thinking about starting a business, your brand is the most important part of that marketing plan. And people make a big mistake. I think you're right. We're like, Oh, let my niece design a logo or I'll use Squarespace and make a website. It's not important. I'll do it later, but you only get one chance to make a first impression. And nine out of 10 businesses fail because they have not seriously thought about all stages of their business plan. And most of it is failure to do marketing because a lot of companies, you know, that's the last thing on their list because they need to have employees. They need to keep the lights on. They need other things that are day to day marketing, you know, it's an intangible commitment really. I mean, you can start and stop at any time, but it is one of the most important ways that you stay afloat. But with covert communication, you've made the intangible or let's say the invisible visible by tying metrics to that where people can see what type of responses they're getting from the media that they're using or their approach. So then talk to me about an existing business and we always hear the terminology that we're rebranding or use the word remarketing. What is that? And when is the right time for an established business to do that? Yeah, it's a great question. And you know, a lot of, I think a lot of times people get really attached to an old brand, you know, and then they get to, and they think it's a failure to do a rebrand. Well, why would I have to? Like I love my brand. I've been successful all these years. You know, is it necessary? And you should always just look at, look at Starbucks. They've gone through four logos, upgrading their logo to be more modern, to be more contemporary. Same thing with Jack in the Box. Most companies, big companies, established ones, this, the logo you're seeing now is not the logo that they always had. And you can take that as, as a lesson of was it about logo to begin with? No, but is it telling the same story to the customer now than when you first made it? And a lot of times, you know, depending on what you're selling, you know, there's, you have to attract a new millennial or you have to, who are you selling into? And is it really sharing the brand that you are now? And what's different about you now? There could also be competition that enters a market that you need to stand out from. There's lots of reasons why people rebrand. But I think the most important thing is to realize that it's not, you shouldn't feel bad about wanting to do a rebrand. It doesn't mean that your old brand was any less important. It's just how to position you in the new market. I've had the honor of interacting with you on, on a couple of projects, Hoy Pacific University, and then now with, you know, our newest project. But you know, I think for a lot of existing businesses, their story is important. My journey is important. How I started this was important. And what, what I'd love for you to share with the audience is, I mean, how important it is for the communications firm that you choose for them to take the time to understand, and how do you do that? How does covert do that? Yeah. So what we like to do is a brand foundations exercise. And we go through a series of modules with our client. And you, it can be from, we've done it for hammock, like large groups of people to even just a one-on-one with a small business owner. And what it is, is a series of questions that helps us articulate who our brand is. And like, I always have to think about it as, you know, it's like a real person, your brand. And what car, if we were, what car would we be? Who are, who do we aspire to be like? Who are, what kind of clothing do we wear? And that all is really important to try to understand the, the how we frame communication and to make sure that it's consistent and cohesive. Because when people start to mistrust a brand is when they don't know who you are, right? Like just like a person. Wow. I feel like that's not who I, I thought that they were. And then that's when you lose a customer, right? Or a relationship. So I think it's really important to get that all, we, we call like the brand Bible, because literally everyone is on the same page. You have an executive summary that everyone's like, okay, this is who we are. This is how we talk about ourselves. Are we, you know, buttoned up or are we more casual? And what are our goals for this year and for the next 10 years so that everyone can be aligned? And, you know, important to our local culture is that the connection that people have. And a lot of times entrepreneurs here will stand up businesses out of a passion or out of a legacy or something like that. And, and through my experience with covert communication, you spent the time to get to know me, get to know who, who I was about and what I wanted to do. And then you asked me really tough questions, aspirational questions about where I want to be. And through that exercise, it really, it even really gets the business owner thinking about, well, what is it that I want to be? And no one's ever asked me what, what I want to aspire to be and how that's going to be communicated in my brand. What advice do you have for entrepreneurs, for business owners, for legacy business owners, even in choosing the right communications firm? You know, I think it really is like a style. Do you want to be hands on with, you know, a smaller boutique agency like mine? You know, we really, we really get dirty with our clients. I mean, we, we're day to day, we all, we share Slack channels, we're super open, like I believe in screen sharing, you know, or do you feel more comfortable with like a large institution where there's conference rooms and, you know, everything is a change order and a lot more paperwork and, you know, larger teams that are, you know, working with you kind of from afar versus, you know, together as a day to day to make decisions because that's I think the key difference between a boutique agency and like a large agency. And it's really what makes you more comfortable. I've, I've definitely enjoyed my experience with you and with your team and, and the, the journey that, that we've been through. And I know that there are so many business owners alike that, that would enjoy that experience. And understandably that there are going to be some larger organizations that do need a larger corporate type firm. We are running out of time, but I wanted to give you an opportunity to tell everyone how to reach you. And if they have any questions, how do they find you? Sure. So you can go to covertcommunication.com. My number is 808-351-3629. And you can also see me on LinkedIn. In addition to covert communication, I have three other companies Breakthrough Reports, Reactium.io, which is a framework, and Aerial Impacts, which is a custom direct mail company. Wow. We might have to talk about those too someday. Well, Anna, I wanted to thank you again for joining us and a huge thank you to the fabulous production staff here in the studio. If you would like to be a guest on our show, please like us and subscribe and leave a comment below. Business in Hawaii airs every Thursday at 2 p.m. And we look forward to seeing you here next week.