Part 1
Hi there.
So my name is Keith Griggs and I just wanted to talk a bit about this lockdown caused by the Coronavirus and how I think we should respond to it. In particular, how we should respond to it in terms of our business.
So I mean obviously it's causing incredible suffering to many thousands of people all over the world and it will almost certainly touch our families and friends as well. So it's a horrific thing.
But some people seem to be just, maybe a bit fearful about it or just shutting down and just using this as a time to just rest and relax and watch Netflix and so on.
But this could go on some time. And I think it's crucial for business that we are very proactive and use this time to our very best advantage. So, that's that sort of thing that I want to talk about today in this video.
So, obviously, I think is vital to stay healthy, stay safe, stay isolated, eat healthily, and go for lots of exercise.
That's definitely one thing. But also I think we can just take a step back, just like at Christmas and in August, the whole world seems to just shut down, which is often quite frustrating to me because I tend to want to plough on and carry on usually in that time.
But it forces me to take a step back and have a real think about things, go back to first principles and work out how everything fits together in my business and how I want to go forward. I think it's very valuable to do that.
Also of course you can also massively improve your digital assets.
You can create new sales funnels. Maybe your website doesn't do a very good job in terms of messaging and so on to take people through different stages from visitors to serve them a different message when they've interacted with your site and content a bit and know you better.
And then eventually they contact you or have some interaction and then you can sell them something cheap or give them something free and then maybe upsell them more expensive later.
So you move them up the value ladder, which is a way of maximising your income from each particular prospect, which is a much, much more profitable way of doing it than trying to acquire new customers all the time and just I'm selling them your standard offering.
Another thing that's really important I think to do is produce a lot of content.
This is content. This is a video, I'm also going to get it transcribed and use it as a blog post, and then also go to extract the audio and use it as a podcast. But the video, I'm going to syndicate it and put on many different places all over the internet, social media website and so on.
Part 2
I'd also like to talk about what I call the four pillars. I've sort of split various avenues into four areas that I think are absolutely crucial to any business.
So the first area is the whole thing about websites and messaging, which I have already touched upon and I will touch upon it a bit more in a minute. There's traffic and retargeting, which is absolutely crucial to get people into your website and to bring them back once they've been there.
Social media is becoming more and more important every day as people spend more and more time on there. And reputation is vital, what people are saying about you online and how you use this to your advantage.
So let's go into these four pillars, these four areas in a bit more depth.
Improving your website messaging.
So taking them on a journey through your funnel, which I've already alluded to, people do need a different message at each stage. A lot of people don't realise that, they just have a website. That's why it's much more ... I think it's very useful to just map out your whole presence on the internet as a sort of funnel and have different messages at different points where people first engage with you and then where people know you better. Take them to a different place in your website and give them a different message. Or it could be on your email list or maybe a Facebook group or something like that.
Also, inject the personality of your brand. In my case, a lot of my brand has actually to do with me, my personality, and that's why I like to use videos a lot to help get that across and help build a sort of connection with the people viewing my content.
Setting up email lists is another great way to improve your messaging too. Just like retargeting it's a great way to sort of capture people and then give you the ability to connect with them further and further into the future as you send them more and more content.
So that was the first pillar. The second pillar is to set up tracking and retargeting pixels, though I hope you've already done this. A lot of people have not.
For example, Google Analytics is extremely useful just to see how people find your site, how long they spend on each page, and their journey from where do they go off to each page. It can give you a lot of feedback about what people like about your site and then that can really help you create more pages, create more contents to give them what they like rather than what they find boring.
Adwords is really good. So if they come to your site, you can ... Maybe you're not advertising on Adwords at the moment, but maybe in three or six month's time you want to retarget who's been to your site so that's why it's good to put your pixel up now. Same thing with Facebook. Same thing with LinkedIn. You can target with LinkedIn ads, people who have been to your site.
And then of course, after capturing their information, we target them, set up ads and follow these people around for the next three to six months. So I have heard it said that 96% of visitors to your website never come back, so when you think about it it's an incredible waste of money to spend a lot of money advertising on SEO to get someone to your site and then never see them again. And the vast majority of people will fall into that category. So that's why it's so important to follow them around. It's also said that we need seven touches with a prospect before they like and trust you enough and know enough about your product and understand the benefits. They're not going to get all that on one time so you need some points of contact before they're ready to actually take out their wallet, take out their credit card and hand over their money.
So in the olden days, this used to be by points of contact by sitting in the emails, speaking to them and so on, but now over the internet we can create a lot more points of contact by retargeting using ads that appear on different sides. So Facebook, for example, giving you different aspects of your message, maybe different angles, different hooks, or maybe you show them testimonials from other people or case studies or something like that.
Part 3
The third pillar is to just be omnipresent, be all over social media. Obviously one way you can do that is retargeting, which is what I said, but make sure you have social media accounts set up on all the major places where your prospects gather. Almost everyone goes to Facebook. That's a great place to go. Even CEOs and B2B customers spend time on Facebook because a lot of them, for example, have children they want to keep in touch with and so on.
The fourth pillar is reputation. People believe what other people say about you much more than what you say about you, because obviously you are biased and you're always trying to present yourself in the best light. Whereas if someone else says something about you, it's much more believable, especially if they seem like a reputable person, you can see the picture and so on.
It's really important to manage your reviews online because you're wasting your money otherwise on advertising. If you have a bad reputation, bad reviews, no one's going to buy from you. You need to fix your reputation first before you invest in anything else. Managing it is very important. Have a system in place so if someone leaves a review, you are immediately notified and can respond to it. You should respond to both good and bad reviews because that just really helps people feel that you're a good company to do business with.
The second part of this is to build your reputation. Proactively approach customers and clients and ask them to leave reviews for you on various platforms. Thirdly, market this. Once someone has left a good review, you should put it on your website, maybe make an image from it, maybe make a video from it, put it on social media, maybe use it in your advertising, just get the word out there.
They're the four pillars. And as well as that, I think it's really good to just take time out just to network with more people because another saying I've heard is that “your net worth is your network” in that although most of the people we network with, it's maybe a waste of time. We might have a pleasant little conversation with people, but now and again we come across someone who has some skill, some idea, maybe they know who can really help us a lot.
And that's just happened time and time again for me. I just think it's a really good thing to just have lots of conversations with people. Maybe they come to nothing, but maybe they could be something that could just totally change the whole way you do business. I think it is great to interact. I think LinkedIn is brilliant for that. I've met so many amazing people on LinkedIn. Reach out, message people, talk to them and hopefully you'll find some people that can really help your business.
Maybe you can find a people, even if they can't provide you a service that your company uses, maybe they're just great people to bounce ideas off because sometimes one little comment from someone can really open up a whole new world of ideas for you. Don't underestimate this, and I think it's a extremely valuable use of our time. That's the end of this video. Please subscribe to my content, like my pages. Please get in touch with me and hopefully see you soon. That's all for now. Bye.