Going Viral by Design – Creating Buzzworthy Content that Converts

Speaker 1: 0:00

a lot of leaders in our space kind of being self-deprecating and kind of making fun of themselves, and you know that people like that, you know, because it gets people out of the the old, you know boys club and kind of makes things feel a little bit more familiar. So I definitely see it working in my industry.

Speaker 2: 0:18

I definitely don't see it working in mine.

Speaker 3: 0:23

Welcome to the marketer. In this episode, we discussed viral content and how your brand can stand out in the digital crowd. We're joined by experts Sarah Lero, Michael Ashford, Traffs Cranett and Jennifer Topper. Check out my guest contact information and bios in the summary below and be sure to follow this channel for more marketing insights. So welcome everybody. It's really awesome to have you on this edition of the marketer. Thank you for joining me. Today's going to be a really fantastic discussion for everybody that's listening. We're going to talk about going viral by design and how you can work with your content to make sure that you get maximum exposure. I'd love to hear some examples of a brand that successfully capitalized on social media. What made that particular campaign effective for that brand? Travis? What's your thoughts?

Speaker 1: 1:25

Yeah, so probably one brand that sticks out to me the most on social media is Wendy's. Their Twitter account. They have really utilized humor and pretty much all that they do. They like to make fun of their competition. They like to make fun of themselves as well. So you know that's a. I think pretty much everybody I follow on X is also following Wendy's just for the humor, and so you know, I think that's definitely in today's marketplace. I mean, you watch commercials on TV. It's just people like to put humor into things.

Speaker 1: 1:59

I'm not that good at humor, so you know, what I've tried to do is just really make everything that we do whether it be for my own personal brand or my company's brand really just inject personality into everything. Pretty much we do. 90% of it is personality and 10% of its product. That's worked for us so far. We've gotten a lot of traction, a lot of organic growth. I've spent no time into SEO or PBC or anything and kind of rocketed over our competition. So yeah, just showing the personality behind the brand rather than just pitching products To follow up on that Travis.

Speaker 3: 2:39

For one, I love the Wendy's commercials too. They're fantastic these days. The Santa Claus one I thought was particularly funny with the guy going and tugging on his beard that's real. But I totally agree with you from a humor standpoint. You know I work a lot with LinkedIn. I've met all of you guys on LinkedIn, which is awesome. I find that humor works very well in social content on LinkedIn as well, just because it's different from the norm. Obviously humor works on commercials and stuff like that. Have you guys seen humor from a strategy standpoint across the channels that you're working with be consistent in its effectiveness?

Speaker 3: 3:33

Is that another one to me Feel free, and then the rest of you can go back to it.

Speaker 1: 3:37

Yeah, I pretty much. So I'm in quick short, I'm in telecommunications and so that aspect is is very suit and tie. But the brands that have kind of probably just since end of 2022 and in all of 2023, the ones that have really started to stand out, gain more market share, are the ones, like I said, putting more personality behind it and then putting more humor. You have a lot of leaders in our space kind of being self-deprecating and kind of making fun of themselves and people like that, because it gets people out of the the old boys club and kind of makes things feel a little bit more familiar. So I definitely see it working in my industry.

Speaker 2: 4:25

I definitely don't see it working in mine. I mean, I love the idea of personality and humor in social media, but I work at a law firm. I'm not even going to stay a conservative law firm because we all are. I mean even you know aggressive personal injury law firms where you see banners on the side of a highway like they can't put humor in. If you're too figurative in any sort of a campaign, it can be construed, as you know, professionally irresponsible, against legal ethics, you know, breaking the, the legal version of the Hippocratic oath.

Speaker 2: 5:09

So we have to be so cautious and as a marketer, you know you can, you can only imagine, you know I've got business development and marketing in my in my DNA, but I've been in law firms for 20 years, so calibrating how you're able to put personality in and translate that into brand effectiveness without being funny, without being snide, without being ironic like we can't even be ironic, like we can't do anything. So we have to be really targeted, really smart, really thoughtful and constantly reinvent how we put our brand out on social media. And really I'm talking about LinkedIn and, to a much limited extent, twitter. The bigger firms really just don't do Twitter the way small firms or independent practitioners do that's. That's a completely different vibe. And they can. You know they can have conversations, they can engage in all kinds of chat and make comments, but you'll never see, you'll never see like a, like an Amlaw 200 law firm engaging that way on Twitter or even on LinkedIn. You may see some independent lawyers on LinkedIn engaged, but certainly not on behalf of their firm.

Speaker 3: 6:33

I think that's great insight. Jen, you know, not every company can just put things. You know, when we're talking about viral content, not every company can do things that you know has a high degree of virality just because of the type of content that it is right. Not everybody can use cat videos that are funny, you know. And apply that to something else, to your point, with audience, and sometimes, you know, a lot of companies just have regulations. So, michael and Sarah, with your guys's target market, what are you doing to get in front of the most amount of people? Has there been any strategies that has worked well for you, michael? Why don't you start, do you?

Speaker 4: 7:27

mind if I go back real quick to address some of the things that has already been said. So one of the things that I I think I see a lot is a lot of people in marketing asking the question, could we? And not enough people asking should we? And so you get things like a lot of brands right now, as we're recording this on January 10th 2024, trying to capitalize on social media and meme culture with, for instance, the Selena Gomez and Taylor Swift kind of conversation that I believe the Golden Globe Awards, and so they try to force some quippy snippy thing about their brand into this meme that's going around the internet, whether you're on on X or whether you're on Instagram or what have you, and it just falls flat because it's so obvious that someone in marketing or someone in the executive team said, hey, I see this all the time on on my Instagram reels, go do something with it. And not enough people are asking well, should we do like? Do we have a message to share that would actually resonate and hit our target market and things like that. To Jen's point, you're probably not gonna. You're probably not going to be able to do something like that and have it resonate in your market if you're just trying to force it.

Speaker 4: 8:44

The companies that I see tying into those types of trends and doing it in a really smart way, companies like Train UL they're they're an office or an organizational software system. I believe they actually used the, the software cameo to get all of the cast members of the office, the television show to do like a little pitch for them about how they would use Train UL in the office. That's really smart marketing. Super, super well done. Blew up on on LinkedIn for sure, and and Jonathan Ronzio is, I believe, their head of marketing over there and one of their co-founders and just a just a really smart marketer.

Speaker 4: 9:28

In asking the question, I know we can, but should we?

Speaker 4: 9:30

And here's how we can tap into pop culture in a really smart way?

Speaker 4: 9:35

As far as us, to go back and answer your direct question to us, monty, we we hear the receptionist are trying to tap into people who are influential in the space, and so, you know, influencer culture was really a big thing probably eight years ago, but there are. There are people that have a voice who are trusted in in our target market, and the the people who are listening to their podcasts or following them on their social media or part of their groups on Facebook. Groups are still a thing for a lot of our target market, being administrative assistants, executive assistants, things like that and so if we can partner with them in a really smart way, if we can provide value to them those hosts of those shows or those leaders of those groups and bring something to it where it's just not so obviously a marketing tactic to try and get leads or fill our pipelines, like like what I was saying earlier, the mean culture is sometimes. Then we've seen some success there in reaching a larger market really some brilliant insight.

Speaker 3: 10:43

Can we, should we? I think, is definitely a question that we should all be asking as marketers. But, Sarah, why don't you share what's your thoughts on that and then kind of strategies that you guys have found successful?

Speaker 5: 10:56

Yeah. So Humor, we I work for a construction company and you can't really use a whole lot of humor and construction. I mean there are things that we could play into a little bit, but it's just not our go to. But what we have done is what Travis said is we started injecting personality into our post before all and most of what all the competitors do. It's like you just see a finished, polished building or a product. At the end you don't get to see any of the story and you have anything along the way if it's not a finished product.

Speaker 5: 11:30

And so what some of the strategies I've used is really starting at the beginning, covering a groundbreaking event, showing the project throughout, and then also at the end, if there's a ribbon cutting, you know, making sure we cover those events and share them and I know it sounds so simple, but it's just not something that was really done in the construction industry.

Speaker 5: 11:52

Across their social media, everything is just very polished, nothing is messy or anything you know. So that's what we've used to try to, you know, inject personality throughout our social media. And then, as far as growing our audience, we have started using partnerships with different architects and different clients of ours and tagging them in other social media posts. If it's a project or if it pertains to them and their commenting on our stuff, we're commenting back. We're we're kind of doing a trade, see, and we've done it with some of our, our subcontractors and vendors as well, where they started tagging us and stuff. So we tagged back and it's, you know, a very partnership relationship based and it's it's really working. We've seen tremendous growth over the last year implementing that strategy.

Speaker 3: 12:44

We? You know the way these platforms work from a social media standpoint. What I've found in working on all of them as they all are very similar right in how their algorithms work in terms of getting views to your content, having early engagement, having people either putting likes and comments and stuff like that. That that has to be across all these platforms right, that these platforms want to know that people like your content and they're engaging it. So when we're talking about viral content, viral content can mean different things to different people.

Speaker 3: 13:26

Right, the traditional sense of viral content is, oh, I got millions of views and stuff like that. But when you put it down into our the companies that were working with your guys as companies and stuff like that, that could mean I only, you know I typically get like a thousand views, but this, but this post, particular post or whatever, I got 25,000. Right, that could be, you know, because it's dramatically different from what you typically do before. So you know you speak to what you feel like is viral content, if you would, within your own brands, and what does that do for your brand when that happens? Like, do you capitalize on that? Is it something that you work towards doing more of for a specific reason.

Speaker 1: 14:21

Travis, you want to start us off again, absolutely so, viewership wise, like you know, I'm just going to use LinkedIn because it's it's pretty much my primary source for for marketing. Viral for us is probably one of our posts getting about 1520,000 impressions. It doesn't really the nature of our businesses is just very, it's very different than most. So you, you're there's no ROI for it, really anything that a that a telecommunications company posts on social media, it's really just for warming up the brand for when you finally get people, like on a demo or on a call. So you know, what I've, what I've been doing, is anything that kind of it's a little bit more than our other content, kind of repackaging it, cutting it up into maybe a couple different other pieces, posting it on a couple other platforms, and then you know, if we have one thing performed, let's say, this month I'll I'll kind of reattach that same topic. I won't say the exact same things, but I'll wait like another month or two and I'll and I'll talk about it again. So, yeah, pretty much everything that I do on the branding side it's really to it's, it's the kind of to warm up any kind of calls that we have or partnerships that are coming.

Speaker 1: 15:49

Sales cycles and telecommunications are astronomically long, anywhere from six months to two years. We had one account that took us, you know, three years to finally close, and that's just because in telecommunications, especially on the enterprise side, a lot of these guys are in one year, three year, five year contracts. So it's it. I found that expose kind of are we regain our most traction. And the biggest, the biggest thing I hear from expose is when I'm, when, whether I'm doing a panel or just walking around it, people will reference a post that we did two months ago that I know it performed well because I can see all the analytics but just kind of just gives me the validation that you know what we're doing is working.

Speaker 1: 16:45

And this is just such a big beast it's. It's different than probably most others and I can get away with a lot more personality behind the brands and I talk a lot about mental health and so that has that has allowed me to make connections with people. That a I saw. So you post about anxiety, as all you post about depression. I personally I have Tourette's, so you know I post about that a lot and I've seen those one on one connections just build up through my marketing and then, and then we can start talking about product. You know, I try to try to learn people first and you know, maybe six months later we finally start talking about products. So that's kind of how it works in my space and that's kind of that's what works for us. So you find viral stuff and just kind of building.

Speaker 3: 17:35

Um, jen, you're in a space again that's, you know, kind of locked down by a lot of regulation stuff and just by nature of the space. You know, like I said, you're not going to use a lot of humor, you're not going to. Is there anything that you have found to be effective that you know? I know we all have a desire to increase following for our brands. We all want to increase that brand awareness out there. Some forms of viral content can help assist that right. But have you found anything that's been effective for you in that space?

Speaker 2: 18:10

Yeah, well, I mean, I, I I moved from the world's largest law firm Two years ago to a very small New York law firm, which is still considered, you know, mid sized, but it's a completely different scale. You know, I mean totally different scale. So not only do we not have like a whole external PR firm and PR team and communications and media and digital, like I had all of that at my prior firm and you know they were the experts and they sort of ran with our messaging from the marketing side and turned it into some cool things. But you know, like I said earlier, it's limited, it's law firms. You're not going to get general counsel clicking on a LinkedIn post and then being like, oh, I think I should hire them for our next $20 million lawsuit against some giant, you know healthcare industry or something like it's not. It's just not how it works, but on our little mat, on our little micro level at our firm, which is very like old school. Well, I'll just leave it at that. You know we would post the articles that are that our authors would write.

Speaker 2: 19:25

Our attorneys tend to push out a lot of content, whether it's shop, thought leadership, an analysis, or it's just a quick summary of a legal decision or a regulatory update. You know kind of this is what happened, you know. And every law firm puts out the exact same stuff you know, as if they're the only ones that are going to cover the latest. You know third circuit decision on some something you know. So whoever gets to it first door, whoever makes it more punchy, can get more clicks. I mean, you're relying on attorneys in your firm to develop their networks on LinkedIn to push it out. Very few people are going to follow a law firm. They're going to follow their attorney or their friend from law school or their neighbor. You know they're. Your kids play soccer together and you chat about business on the sidelines, you know. So you're going to follow individual lawyers, but nobody follows the firm pages that much. It's just not that cool, except for Law school students who are looking for sure job.

Speaker 2: 20:33

So we're not marketing to them, but we do want to make sure that law school students see our posts and Want to get a sense of our culture, because that's how they choose what firm they want to go to. And for us, I decided that you know, we could do a little bit of video. Like we just got these new offices. They're beautiful, overlooking the Brooklyn Bridge and lower Manhattan and the Harbor, and it's just gorgeous. And why not do a couple of short video clips, even if it's not original content that they're coming up with, but rather the partners are summarizing their articles in like less than two minutes so that somebody doesn't have to read a 3000 word article with footnotes and legal citations. And that went through the roof. We found that video on LinkedIn from our little firm. Blew every other post out of the water. Blew every other post out of the water, and I'm talking about, like tax issues. Like people were clicking and watching the video about Tax stuff.

Speaker 3: 21:45

That's awesome.

Speaker 2: 21:47

So we have a great tax partner. She's she's new this year, last year. She's very conversational, she's got cool frizzy hair and she just talks tax and it's going over great. So we started doing Q&A conversations with our cannabis lawyer because that's also kind of sexy too for social media, and now it's started to really take off within the firms of partners are all interested. I want to do a you know a video clip. I want to do a podcast clip. So we're getting more clicks, we're getting more engagement from my internal clients, which are the partners of the law firm and, by extension, they feel good about sharing it, which is all I care about, because I don't have my hands on their contacts.

Speaker 2: 22:33

They do and as a marketer it's frustrating. You want to manage all of their mailing lists and contacts. But you know, law firms are different, their partnerships, they're not corporations. There's very few mandates as far as CRM goes. But having them love the content so much that they're pushing it out, then like my job is done, like great. You yeah, we're set.

Speaker 3: 22:57

I. That is so well said and I think one of the main benefits to content once you find a path that people are really interested in and engaging, right from that Verality standpoint, they're going to share it and which is, you know, viral. That's what happens right, you share it and I think that is a major component of it. Michael Sarah actually talked about you know, having some partnerships, if you would, with Like-minded companies, people within their office, so to speak, that, specifically, will come and engage their content to try and get it out there more. Jen just talked about she landed on some video content that worked really well. What's your thoughts about Having specific companies or people that will engage your content when you put it out there, because you know that activates the algorithm and gets your content out further. And what are the specific things, like what Jen found, that you guys have done that has created that viral aspect of it to get people to share it?

Speaker 4: 24:10

I'll be honest, I don't. We don't do anything like that in terms of like, getting other, getting other companies or or even our, our staff, to Go and like and repost stuff. We do ask them to do that, but that's not a huge focus of ours and we are a company in marketing that does a lot of. We try to inject a lot of humor I mean the amount of wigs that I have alone in my closet, just from all the different costumes that I wear and in the videos that we put out there on social media. I'm trying to produce our brand here, our, our live demos. For instance, my sales director, our sales director and I His name's Tom Foster we always have a theme of a costume that we wear in those live demos. So We've been slash and axle rose, we've been Harry and Lloyd from dumb and dumber. We've been I mean just so many different which and then we take those, we clip those. Of course, we try to share those out. We're really trying to figure out what what going viral means and looks for us, as we really invest a heavily in vertical video YouTube Shorts, instagram reels we're doing a lot there and trying to see what, what hits, what can we, what can we do to get? What can we do to use the humor of who we are as a company and the silliness of I'm willing to be an idiot on camera. So If that helps kind of drive the algorithm, I'm all for it.

Speaker 4: 25:37

I will say perhaps a different way of going viral for us has been when a customer is in a group of our core audience. So one of our our core audiences is behavioral health practices, small private practices, and, and they are all in some sort of massive group on Facebook or on other platforms. Anytime a customer of ours, not by our volition, goes and posts about us in those channels, massive virality. I mean I can, I can sit there and look at our web analytics of where those referral sources are coming from Facebook, facebook, facebook, facebook, just constant, constant.

Speaker 4: 26:20

Whenever a customer of ours is is excited enough about our product, happy enough about our product in our service, that they go and post about us. And so my, I guess, goal as the marketing director is how do I make sure that everyone in this company understands that you are a part of the marketing team, the customer service that you provide, the product that you build, it all contributes to that customer. When somebody asks hey, does anyone have an idea of a system that I can use to check in my clients at my my office, that our customer goes, absolutely, it's the receptionist. You got to try them out, I love them. Great product, incredible service like that's what we want. That's viral for us. We're trying to figure out the other stuff that we can do, but that's viral for us.

Speaker 3: 27:10

I think that's brilliant insight, michael. Getting your customers to share testimonials and how you guys work is is absolutely. Oh, there's such golden nuggets. You know when that happens.

Speaker 4: 27:28

It's our number one source of leads in traffic to our site Are referrals, or people have used our product and come to our website directly.

Speaker 3: 27:36

Yeah, it's like the Holy Grail there, Sarah. How?

Speaker 5: 27:39

do you?

Speaker 3: 27:40

I mean do you kind of take the same approach? I know the construction industry can be very different, right, I mean it's, you know, getting people to interact and respond but have you found something that works for you? I know you've got people that you're having and partnerships that are coming and commenting on the content. Have you found anything that particularly has been different, that kind of elevates your brand and gets you out in front of more eyes?

Speaker 5: 28:13

Yeah. So video is a huge factor for us in, specifically, drone videos, because you can just capture the overall site, a construction site, better and you know it looks nicer. You can, you know, see the city in the background. And drone videos have been huge for us, so much that I mean just this week I've had four of our partners and some of our customers reaching out to us saying, hey, we need access to this drone video because we want to put it on all of our stuff. So it's been huge for us.

Speaker 5: 28:45

And being able to see our clients are like oh, they're showing off my project and I need to put that out there too. I mean, I think that's huge because it's just putting our brand back in their face again and again. And I just did a content analysis of all of our content and how it performed for 23 and the drone videos were by far the biggest. And every time I'm posting these drone videos I'm tagging our architect, I'm tagging our client if I can Some don't want it, you know all those MBAs with construction but I'm tagging as many people as I can because they all want to see it, they all like try to repost it so that you know they can show off their product One of our partners that we use for Carpentry a lot they specifically will repost it and say okay, do you see at this time stamp, this is, this is IBC, this is our work, this is what we're doing.

Speaker 5: 29:43

So it's really been huge for us and they didn't really have a video strategy before I came on, but at my last place it was huge and I was like we've got to do this. I mean, you're building great buildings, you're building Kansas City. We've got to show it off.

Speaker 4: 29:57

I'll watch a drone video all day, every day. I love drone videos, so kudos to you, sarah.

Speaker 3: 30:04

There's two things like that that really get me. One are the drone videos, the other are the time lapse. I love watching time lapse videos. I'm sure I dig it too. So, I don't know if you guys saw, at one point there was some time lapse videos of a guy. It looked like he was in the jungle right and he would dig a hole and he would make this like house just out of the ground. It had like a pool in it and everything else. Did you see those, Jen? Those were absolutely amazing.

Speaker 2: 30:41

Yeah, my kids and I were addicted to them, addicted to them.

Speaker 3: 30:44

He built like 20 of them, houses with like little pools, and yeah, yeah it was really crazy, all with very primitive tools, you know it's a bunch of clay and everything else, which kind of gets to the point that you know content can really be anything, and you guys have talked about now a number of different types of content that has been working for you really well. Right One for specific reasons. When you find that when you kind of land on something that you go, oh, this really works I think it was either Travis or Michael, I can't remember which of you were talking about repurposing that content over and then using it again when you find something like that, do you come back to it after a period of time, run it again, do you get the same kind of effect from it and do you change it up at all, like adding different call to actions? Or once you find something that's working, then how do you maximize it? Travis, can you respond to that?

Speaker 1: 31:46

Yeah, like I was saying earlier, you know what I'll do. Is you know, if we have? If we have one piece that kind of works better over the others, I'll figure out. You know, first I'll take that piece, let's say I posted on LinkedIn. I'll then cut it up, post it as a YouTube short or post it as a very quick TikTok video and maybe, like a, if it's long form, turn it into short form, post it on Twitter. Those have worked well for us In my industry. They kind of run their course. So one thing that does very, very well may only work an additional one to two other times as as a repurposed material, but that that then helps us know. Okay, what can we start. What can we start moving the goal of our future marketing pieces towards? This worked a worked over B, but C worked over both a and B combined, and so you know what. That's what I'll do. I'll just I'll take something that works, cut it up.

Speaker 3: 32:57

So you'll kind of you'll kind of split test different pieces and components that are working well. Do you have a framework for how long in between you might repurpose something? So like, if you have something that goes really well today, you get a ton of views on it, Will you wait a specific amount of time or do you continually test that before you'll?

Speaker 1: 33:18

Yeah, generally, generally I'll wait about a month to really. You know, and that at least in my industry that kind of shows, okay, that I was this just a fluke and you know it was good in the moment. You know I'll wait a month. Month is usually my minimum. I won't, I won't do it before that and then if it performs well a month later, then that kind of tells me, okay, it wasn't a fluke, this is actually content people want to see, they want to hear it, and then trying to trying to recreate that. So it's not, it's not technically the same exact message.

Speaker 1: 33:55

You know word things differently. Maybe I'll use, I'll use video rather than just a copy. You know, let's say, a long form piece works well for us A month later I'll turn that into maybe a longer video and then if that works, I'll probably use it another month later. But I typically don't use the same content more than three times. It usually just kind of falls off the cliff. In the telecom industry, technology changes so quickly that people like people like things that are fresh and and they don't want to see the same exact content too many times and in too short of a period.

Speaker 3: 34:36

But what's your thoughts about?

Speaker 4: 34:39

repurposing. Repurposing love it, definitely do it. I will. I'm an admitted shiny object chaser.

Speaker 4: 34:45

So I have a tendency, and have had a tendency to, you know, launch the campaign, use the content up as we had planned, and move on to the next, next shiny new thing that that we can put out there. And I literally just had this conversation, right before we went on break for the holidays, with our creative manager who kind of brought it up. He's like hey, we put a lot of effort into those things that we produced a year, year and a half ago and we've reused those again, like so that it wasn't just like this one time shot in the dark that we threw out there. And he made a great point like definitely exposed to blind spot. For me, I I'm off chasing the next thing. So I would say, in terms of repurposing, yeah, we're doing that a lot with our podcasts, with our videos, with our content that we're we're producing from our, our campaigns, but going back into time and pulling forward some of those assets that we've used in the past that have worked well, you've got to do a better job of that, I think.

Speaker 3: 35:43

Fantastic, Jen. Let's talk about the platforms a little bit. You know there's all kinds of social platforms. You've got your websites. You've got, you know, all kinds of areas that you guys are putting content out to. I imagine, in terms of your strategy for which platforms you would use and why, can you kind of walk us through and I like Sarah to follow up on this too of where have you found your target market to live the most? What do you know? How much attention do you put into the specific platform? Do you repurpose that content for those specific platforms and do they change? You know, can you walk us through your strategy there? And then, Sarah, I'd like you to come back to that.

Speaker 2: 36:33

Yeah, sure, I mean, our content is all virtually the same thing. They're legal advisories, they're updates, they're articles on, like I mentioned before, you know, changes in the law, a decision, regulatory update or some sort of interstitial analysis, you know, affecting clients. So we're not, you know, we don't have a lot of different things. We are now doing video clips on those in summaries, we're doing some short podcast clips on those elements as well, but the content doesn't really change. We're not, you know. I mean there's no song and dance there, it's all very sort of like one dimensional. But the platforms matter because we can't rely on LinkedIn, for example, for the reason that nobody is going to follow our law firm and hire our lawyers. People hire lawyers, not law firms. They might hire a name and then a lawyer for that, which is, you know, valuable, especially for a firm like ours.

Speaker 2: 37:38

We've been around for literally 170 years, but we're not, you know, one of these gargantuan firms. We have syndication platforms that we use that lawyers, in particular in house counsel from companies used to search information. Look, everybody wants free legal advice. Nobody wants to pay five, six, eight, $1,200 an hour, $1,500 an hour, $2,000 an hour. Nobody, even the wealthiest companies, don't want to do that. So their second best thing is to search platforms that syndicate law firm content. So these are much narrower. You guys wouldn't have heard of them because they just wouldn't. There was no reason to right. They're mostly in house counsel or you know referral law firms looking at Mondack Lexology, jd, supra. So we pay those platforms to syndicate our content and it's huge We've.

Speaker 2: 38:43

I'm not good at math, which is why I'm in legal marketing but I can tell you that there's been an enormous increase in leadership and conversions and clicks to our website, into our attorney biographies from when I started and we got these, these articles syndicated, so that's been huge for us. We stay away from the standard social media platforms other than very sort of one dimensional, you know posts of reposts of content. But there's other smaller organizations, membership organization, bar associations, publications that are, you know, in your industries. They might be trade publications In legal they're sometimes lobbying groups associated with the state, for example, or, like I said, a bar association. There's a few legal referral networking organizations and they all have websites and listservs and like practice groups that they are all able to push that content out to and so we selectively choose which of those platforms to push our content to.

Speaker 2: 40:01

It's time consuming, you know they don't get everything we're not going to send. You know an international law firm referral membership organization. So necessarily some of our land use articles on New York property owners. For you know some city statue you know in Italian law firm in Milan is like, yeah, maybe they might have a client with a property that they own in New York City, but like there are other ways for us to push our content. Like you know, we want to be more selective about how we choose what platforms get what content, and you know that's a that's a time consuming job, but we're grateful for the opportunity to get our content out, especially if it's free.

Speaker 2: 40:48

You know the like I said, monda, jd, super and Lexology can be very expensive. It's kind of worth it, but beyond that it's more granular and the price that we pay is just. You know, my and my staff's time in selecting and pushing out that content.

Speaker 3: 41:04

Yeah, I'd like to come back to that issue after we hear from Sarah on this about you know, using a specific maybe what we would call influencers or influencer platforms and stuff, but, Sarah, would you mind sharing with us so you know what's your guys's approach to the platforms and and what you guys do in your strategy?

Speaker 5: 41:30

for us overall, linkedin is our biggest platform, that we focus on it. We've seen the most growth in it in the last year and we are connecting with the right types of people because we're, at the end of the day, we're selling to business owners, architects, owners, representatives and that spans a lot of different industries because we play in eight different markets of construction. So LinkedIn is been the most overall that we've seen now to grow. With the architects, we have seen more growth on Instagram. They like pretty things. They want to post you know they're pretty artistic photos of the pretty projects they designed. So we have been able to connect with more architects on Instagram than we have any other platform.

Speaker 5: 42:16

So we kind of for our strategy we play towards who we're marketing to, because we are marketing to a variety of different people. We're trying to connect with business owners on LinkedIn, we're trying to connect with architects on Instagram and then, you know, on the hiring aspect, we really try to show our personality and our culture on Facebook because there's a lot of, you know, different platforms for attendance and construction workers and trade trades, people that don't. They don't have a LinkedIn, they don't play with Instagram. So it's we have to keep our Facebook alive so that they can see us and us as a company. So that's, we kind of have to divide and conquer our, you know, with across different platforms.

Speaker 3: 42:56

I love that you have different strategies for the different platforms, like using more of a personality approach on Facebook and stuff. I think that's very smart, Michael. Let's jump into talking about influencer strategies. I'll just talk a little bit about that. Do you guys use influencers? How do you use them? Has it been effective?

Speaker 4: 43:30

Yes, we use them. I'll get into how we use them, but yes, it's effective. It's incredibly so. In fact, we're launching a new vertical because our behavioral health influencer campaign, so to speak, is over the last couple of years, has worked so well for us and we sell to a lot of different potential buyers. So our visitor check in software can pretty much be in place at any office that takes in visitors or guests or contractors or what have you. So our total addressable market is very large, but there are some places and spaces where we are our sales cycle is very short. They use the heck out of the product and they absolutely love us and they talk about us a lot, and behavioral health was one of those. We're moving into the finance space here in 2024 as well, because they're another similar private practice type of setup to behavioral health office right, and we've used several influencers in the. That's the space and we will in the finance space here in 2024.

Speaker 4: 44:37

And primarily, what we found the best inroads to finding these influencers has been podcasting. If someone has a large influence, influential podcast in the space, chances are they have a whole network that flows in behind that, as we found. So if a former private practice owner now is a podcaster and a private practice coach and runs their own private practice mastermind and group on Facebook or circle or any other kind of membership platform. We can tap into those not just with passive ad reads on their on their podcast, but emails to their newsletter lists, social media posts on their social media live events that they do to their, their communities and their groups. Having the backing of that, that influencer or that that leader of that group has been so good for us in in that space, so much so that we're duplicating it several times over now. So that's where I started. I started in the podcast space and let things trickle down from there. Some work better than others. The ROI on some is higher or or better than others, but overall it's been a really solid strategy for us.

Speaker 3: 46:04

Fantastic. I would like to jump to Travis as well. Can you respond to Michael and what what they're using for strategy? Have you been able to see the same effects, whether it be from podcasts or different influencers in the telecom space?

Speaker 1: 46:27

Yeah. So, like I keep saying, the telecom space is very different, that we don't really have no influencers per se, but we do have people that are. They do hold a little bit more weight. I mean, I guess you would technically call them influencers but I do utilize them, sometimes only because I happen to be personal friends with most of the you know, the top voices in our industry, and that's kind of a product of my approach to how we were going to market in the telecom industry.

Speaker 1: 47:01

So you know, about three or four years ago is when we really started to dive into that and I kind of selfishly made it a point to seek out who are the top voices in telecommunications and how quickly can I become their friend, unfortunately for them. I kind of bombarded them, talked to them a lot. I would find something that interested them and that also interested me, and talked to a lot of them and, oddly enough, a lot of the people in my space all kind of come from Ohio, and so I mean, if you're from Ohio or if you know anything about college football, the Buckeyes are pretty much a they're a statewide norm. Pretty much everybody in Ohio loves football, and so it kind of gave us a common ground to start off friendships. So you know, now I it's one of those things where luckily and you know, hopefully if they're watching this, they don't start charging me. But it's one of those things that I kind of get for, I kind of get for free. I'll just text them. Hey, I need you to that. I'm going to send you something real quick, post it on your, on your socials, have your company share it. And it's kind of the reason why I started diving so much into doing the podcast too. So now, whenever we post a podcast episode, I pretty much have all of my partners in the industry which happened to be some of the some of the larger in the industry I have them reshare it.

Speaker 1: 48:45

So our podcast you know, the impressions on LinkedIn typically are are relatively high. They are definitely our highest 20,000 plus impressions. It's one of those things where I'm glad they're my friends. But I also kind of kind of abused that and I use that as much as I can. I try, I try not to be a too much of a pester, but it comes with comes with my personality.

Speaker 1: 49:16

I'm very, very personal kind of person. I try to inject as much of who I am. You know, like I said, less about product. You know my father, I'm a hockey player, I like to play video games, so it's finding all those common grounds. I've been able to find a lot of friends and luckily I've been able to use that to my advantage. So it's, you know, I've got a core group of the top people in the telco industry are are texting me and I'm texting them pretty much daily. So it's one of those things that a lot of others have had to kind of put a little bit more work towards. And you know, counting my blessings, I haven't had to, I haven't had to work too much at that, so so just kind of been a natural fit for it To kind of sum up our conversation here because we're coming up at time.

Speaker 3: 50:13

You guys have shared with me that viral content is important, and it's important for a number of reasons. One brand awareness getting your content in front of the right people at higher volume. It can actually drive more conversations to you and for your brand and for your marketing and sales teams, so to speak. It's not necessarily all about the views more than it is about the effect of what the content does, not only for the brand before the conversations, but being that is that kind of sum it up, if you would.

Speaker 3: 50:56

And then the you know the spaces in which you guys live. It's find those spaces where your target market lives, yes, and also find some people that can help influence that content on your behalf, whether that be influencers just in general or particular industry spaces that exist, as Jen pointed out, excuse me, that can really help boost your brand. And then Michael provided some amazing insight in terms of how to get your your customers, slash clients to get out there and actually share your content and post about you, and sometimes that can be the most effective viral content in itself. So did I miss anything you guys want to share? Any last thoughts?

Speaker 4: 51:53

I would just say, with everything that my my co guests have said, there's been an intentionality with everything. And, as I kind of referenced earlier, the companies that are just trying to latch on to a cultural moment in time just to your point, Monty there just to get a lot of views. None of us advocated for that. It was all an intentionality of understanding. Like we, as marketers, we have to understand our market, we have to understand what we'll play and what won't. In Jen's case, what are we legally able to do and not. But there's just a level of intentionality that's needed for this, like there's there's going viral and then there is spreading a message far and wide to the people that need to see it. And I think the best marketers bring that level of intentionality to it. And if things go viral, great. But we care about our, our target market and our customers first marketing is all about strategy, isn't it?

Speaker 3: 52:57

Yes sometimes we get we can get lucky on some things. For the most part it's pretty well defined, with that consistency and working towards things that work. Travis talked about a B split testing. It's always intentional what we're working towards. So well said, michael. You guys, thank you very much for your expertise and insight that you brought to the conversation today. I learned a ton from you guys. Thank you for being on the show.