Jay Sachetti joined Jeff O’Brien, partner at Husch Blackwell and Dyanne Ross-Hanson, president of Exit Planning Strategies talked about the market for mergers and acquisitions, exit planning opportunities for companies that don’t end up for sale and how companies can maximize their eventual sale price during an early October panel at the first Upsize on Tap event at Summit Brewing Co. in St. Paul.
When the state Legislature passed a law requiring employers to provide paid leave and safe time for employees, Justin Bieganek started hearing differing details from friends, colleagues and peers.
Joel Eshelman, founder of Apex Personal Training, has been in the fitness industry for more than a decade.
He founded his company in 2011 and now spends much of his days overseeing personalized group training sessions, one-on-one fitness training and nutrition counseling.
But he finds time to take care of himself and his business. Part of that is a daily commitment to overseeing his social media presence.
“I think people who don’t make social media a huge part of their business are completely short-sighted,” he says. “It’s pay to play now, but this is a free resource, especially for entrepreneurs who are just starting out so they can get their message out there, if they understand how to play the game.”
Eshelman does some of his company’s social media work himself. He partners with a local company, Skol Marketing, to help manage some other accounts and to help keep him near the top with respect to searches conducted on Google.
“I can’t do it all,” he says.
He says in order to maximize one’s social media presence, it’s important that companies understand how each medium’s algorithms work and how they can target niche audiences using various geo-tracking strategies. It’s also important to post consistently and to make the content relevant to the audience.
Between geo-tracking and tracking specific hashtags, Eshelman says he can post a discount offer and track how many people have looked at the promotion.
“Social media strategy used to be just post a lot and hopefully it works,” he says. “You have to be strategic about how you post.”
Eshelman says he is working on organizing and planning content so that he is three months ahead with relevant content strategically spaced for maximum effect.
He says people should “take the time to create a vision around the strategy,” he says. “Just like they would if it were TV or radio.”
As much as anything, whether you have a team of marketing and strategy people helping or you are coming up with a low-budget plan on your own, the most important thing is having a presence.
“If you don’t know how to do it, hire someone who does,” he says. “I’d rather throw a bunch of stuff at a wall doing something, because you are going to create some noise. The worst thing you could do is do nothing at all.”
One of the people who helps Eshelman with his social media planning is Ben Theis, director and owner of Skol Marketing. The biggest mistakes he sees companies make with respect to social media is that they don’t post enough and when they do they are always selling. There are different guidelines to follow, depending on the industry, when it comes to frequency, but business should not immediately jump into sales mode.
“The last thing people want when they go on social media is just be sold. We’re sold non-stop here,” he says. “If all they do is go online and your organic posts all say ‘buy this from us, buy this from us,’ it can be kind of a turnoff. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t ask. But you have to do it in as strategic manner and you have to pick your moments.”
Social media also involves communicating with people, creating dialogues and showing yourself to be an industry expert or a resource.
“Then when people need you, or if they find one of those pieces convincing enough, then they’ll be able to interact,” he says.
Adam Dince teaches social media at several universities and is director of digital experience at Collegis Education. He agrees that companies need to back off on the selling at first and try to establish relationships with the people to whom they are marketing. They often assume they have an audience willing and excited to hear from them, but often just the opposite is true.
“A lot of businesses get in Facebook or Twitter and launch a page or group and they start putting out promotions and discounts,” he says. “The reality of it is people are so bombarded with marketing messages nonstop. The phone, the TV, the radio, everywhere you look there is a marketing message. It’s gotten to the point where people have gotten so frustrated with it.”
It can be frustrating to small businesses just entering the social media world, but people don’t respond the same way to online promotions as they do bricks-and-mortar, Dince adds.
Instead, Dince says, small businesses should spend some time being present, participating in conversations. Follow people, listen and respond. Eventually, he says, you’ll earn the right to promote to the groups.
“It’s actually easier for small-business owners to do than it is for big enterprise companies like General Mills. Small-business owners are the face of their brand. They’re real people who are able to talk and build relationships online.”
Another mistake businesses make is treating their online presence differently from brick-and-mortar stores. Promotions online are fine but give people a sense of your personality and a reason to stay in touch. Once you build the community, Dince says, then you probably are safe going in for a sale.
“Then you are romancing your customer in between purchases,” he says.
Running advertisements online without learning the nuances of targeting is another downfall, as is not collecting email addresses for those who have visited their sites. Facebook, Instagram and Twitter all give you a way to send advertisements directly to those people. Facebook takes your email addresses and scours the net for similar demographics.
“Social and email marketing go hand-in-hand,” he says.
Finally, social media is just one marketing channel, Dince says. Business owners must realize it can be valuable, but it’s not the end-all-be-all.
“It can be okay, but it is not going to be a top performer,” he says. “Social media is a great place to keep people aware, to earn media, if you will. When they leverage other channels together and they are building their brand together through email marketing and search marketing, and they are also doing social, when they are approaching digital holistically, they tend to find a lot more success that way than if they are just approaching a channel singularly.
One vital factor in the success of a social media program is putting the right person in charge. Tanya Korpi Macleod, CEO of Macleod & Co., says companies often assume social media is a thing for young people.
“So, they put their proverbial nephew in charge of things,” she says. “Social media is social — it’s dealing with people. You don’t delegate that to someone who is, frankly, immature and doesn’t have the people skills and nurturing capacity for your small business.”
Companies also need to recognize the need to proceed with caution and a plan.
“If there is no strategy behind it you’re going to get yourself in trouble big time by having the token millennial in your life be in charge of managing it,” says Allison Wasz, agency director at Macleod & Co.
There’s almost a crisis communications component to social media, she adds.
“Once it’s out there you can’t take it back,” Wasz says. “You are putting yourself at risk from that PR standpoint and it can be very expensive to try and fix that.”
Hashtags are popular right now, but they can be an example, Macleod says, of ideas gone horribly wrong. One large fast food chain, for example, posted a hashtag asking people to post about their memories of eating there, but it didn’t turn out as anticipated.
“You throw those things out into the Internet, into the wild and people just go nuts with them,” she says. “People started piling on about finding rat droppings in French fries and stuff.”
Korpi Macleod and Wasz aren’t suggesting, however, that companies stay away from social media. They just recommend having a strategy in mind before embarking on that road.
“To have a strategy behind your social media is very similar to what you should have as a strategy behind your brand and who it is you and your company are to your prospects and your audience,” Macleod says. “Who are you? Who do you want to be interacting with? What do you want them to think of you? It’s those basic questions that inform the type of content, how often you post, how you want to interact with your audience.”
And your efforts should be targeted, Wasz adds. She cited a live question-and-answer session on Facebook where, Sentera, maker of drones and supporting software, had audience members send questions for engineers to answer in real time.
“In their social strategy, there’s a fair amount of education,” she says. “We sold drones out of that because people were connecting on the human element.”
Figure out what you want to do and do it in a targeted manner. “You are a guest in somebody’s feed. If somebody invites you in you need to be providing them value, whether that value is a laugh or a smile or a fact they can repeat” she says. “The strategy comes in with what is our play here. Because if you try to be everything to everybody there is no traction.”
Typically, Theis says, companies will use a mix of outlets — some combination of Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and maybe Twitter. Google Plus and Snapchat sometimes factor in. New outlets pop up often. The mix depends on the demographics users are trying to reach.
Facebook, he says, targets a rapidly aging demographic. Parents and grandparents are comfortable using it. Conversely, the number one pure social media outlet for millennials is Instagram.
“Usually it’s part of an overall strategy,” Theis says.
Options for digital advertising include using websites, search engine optimization, pay-per-click advertising with Google or Bing, and then social media management.
“You can do any of those by themselves,” he says. “But they kind of cohesively go together, they feed off one another.”
Contact the experts
Adam Dince is director of digital experience at
Collegis Education and teaches social media at several
universities: ad*******@***il.com; www.adamdince.com.
Joel Eshelman is founder of Apex Personal Training: 612.405.3002; jo**@***********ex.com;
www.trainwithapex.com.
Tanya Korpi Macleod is founder and CEO of
Macleod & Co.: 612.315.5200; ta***@**********co.com;
www.macleodandco.com.
Ben Theis is director and owner of Skol Marketing: 612.787.7565; in**@***********ng.com;
www.skolmarketing.com.
Allison Wasz is agency director at Macleod & Co.: 612.315.5206; al*****@**********co.com;
www.macleodandco.com.
As the name suggests, Owatonna-based Kamp Automation looks for customers with a process they’d like to automate. It could be a small, inconvenient, tiny part that people can’t assemble. It could be a high-volume product so needed that the customer can’t find enough labor to produce it in the necessary quantities. “We’ll work anywhere from medical device companies to the seed industry for corn and soybeans,” says Kent Patterson, co-founder, president and CEO. “We just jump all over wherever there is custom automation.” The company started in his garage. Patterson and his partners built a machine. The company started to grow to the point where now it has 48 employees — and had a bunch of people and stuff in different locations. “We went from a garage to a shop to a shop and just kept moving to new places and signing leases,” he says. “We got to a point where it’s like, OK, this is getting big enough and sustainable — we felt that we wanted to look for our own space.’”
