Small Biz Buzz, by Keap

Jaspreet Singh, founder of Minority Mindset, joins Small Biz Buzz in the final episode of Season 2 of our Big Grit docuseries to talk about his journey to entrepreneurship. He's seen every part of entrepreneurship from being scammed by a marketing agency out of his entire budget for a product launch to hitting 1 million subscribers on YouTube. He shifted from taking the MCAT to closing on his first real estate investment in less than 24 hours. Jaspreet is a prime example of Big Grit and having what it takes to make anything possible. 

Justin Wise, founder of The Different Company, joins Small Biz Buzz in the continuation of our Big Grit docuseries to talk about his journey to entrepreneurship. After teaching himself the basics of digital marketing while his family began to grow, Justin had a pivotal moment with a boss that changed everything. He ventured out on his own, built his first successful business, but found himself at another impasse. He asked himself the question: "what makes me different?" The answer led to The Different Company, and the life as an entrepreneur that he never imaged.

Monica Kline, who is the founder of IDentity Brand, joins Small Biz Buzz in the continuation of our Big Grit docuseries to talk about how she used technology to grow her business after numerous setbacks and challenges.  Monica experienced great losses throughout her journey to entrepreneurship, but she continued to bet on herself and her dream. She is the true definition of Big Grit. 

We’ve got Jennifer Hudye of Conscious Copy & Co on the show this week and it was a stellar show for marketers, copywriters or anyone looking to boost their e-commerce game. Conscious Copy & Co helps entrepreneurs and business owners communicate their message through the power of copy in a way that gets people to take action.  “I started it about five years ago and really stumbled upon just this whole skill set of copywriting. I never grew up as a writer or considering myself a writer. Back in 2013, I was introduced to the online marketing world and my eyes were wide open just being like, ‘Oh my gosh. Okay. There's this whole world where I can start a business online from anywhere and get to serve so many more people’”. By building her copy chops Jennifer not only turned her college side-hustle into multiple six-figure revenue streams but she had outside companies clamoring for her expertise. “Some pretty big names started to reach out to me. People like Joe Polish and Dean Graziosi and Brendan Bouchard and Bulletproof Coffee, and it was just this new business, Conscious Copy, took off back in 2015.” Along the way Jennifer learned there’s much more to good copywriting than flowery language. “My dear friend, Lisa Sasevich has a quote, "Sell the destination, not the airplane." And I was selling that airplane. I was like, ‘In this program, you're going to get 85 PDFs and 46 videos that are an hour long.’” Plus Jennifer lets us in on her five C’s for writing copy that connects and converts.  The first one is…Capture attention. You’ll have to listen in for the other four.

On small biz buzz this week we’ve got the founder of article curation site thebrowser.com and author of Thinking Statistically, Uri Bram. “Every day we read hundreds of articles and select our favourite five for you to enjoy, so you'll always have interesting things to ponder and fascinating ideas to discuss at dinner.” - The Browser We’ll be discussing realistic timelines for “overnight success”, how happy subscribers are the most cost effective marketing agency, and how to tell when you’re using busy work to hide from your real responsibilities. “I always took pride that I answered every email, and I went over subscriber rater... It never ends. you clear your inbox and then you wake up in the morning and there's another. I think we're all traumatized.  A lot of the things I was doing, I enjoyed them because I had gotten good at them. But actually, it didn't need to be me doing them. It didn't really take expertise even. They were the simpler tasks. And I was procrastinating from the harder tasks by the simpler tasks. And what I really needed to do is hand off the simpler tasks.” - Uri Bram

Jake Johnson (Keap Creative director) joins us to discuss the soul of branding, pandemic pivots, and finding the folks who’ll pay big for premium offerings “There were people like, "I can't believe you'd spend $30 to watch Mulan And those are people who just don't get it.”. We’ll also tackle one of the most overlooked growth killers, "promo fatigue". What does that mean?. Listen close, because too much attention to your audience may be driving away your current customer base.  “There's only so many messages that consumers can get hit with before it becomes white noise.” Learn exactly why “getting folks in the door” could be your most dangerous move and when to spot the right and wrong time to commoditize your offerings.

Grady Kerr talks with the team about his years as an entrepreneur leading up to his joining Keap and becoming one of the most well known faces in the company with his popular Automation Hours webinars.  “When you're stuck putting out fires. Your day is managing you."  We’ll discuss the global concept of follow up as a critical growth action and how your brand needs to be an extension of yourself if you want to ensure quality control. You’ll also get an earful as we discuss one of the most common barriers to starting a small business... "When I get this done, then I'll start. When I get this done, then I'll start. Or I could say, “I'm just going to run with it, and I will build the train tracks as the train goes." “

Meet Mwale and Chantel Henry, THE WINNERS OF 2020’s IKON AWARDS!!!! Not to mention owners and founders of https://thebestsellersacademy.com/ where they help speakers and aspiring authors gain visibility and brand credibility by turning their story into a bestselling book. Keap has a special place in its business tech heart for these two. Listen in and learn from Mwale and Chantel about their business, the four P’s of possibility, and their journey to find one another. This show is an absolute delight, we’ll discuss how these two used their disparate upbringings (Chantel, growing up in the streets of Baltimore and Mwale a world away in Trinidad) to inform how they approach business, customer interaction, and mission focus. Hear Chantel as she lays out The Four P’s of Possibility:  Process Partnership Profitability Purpose “Great leaders talk about it. When you cast a vision, you have to visit it often. You can't just cast it in a board meeting, you can't cast it sitting at the dining table talking to yourself.  There are days it's not working. And that's when you have to visit that vision often. Not only did we change our process in terms of being able to document the experience in our business, because what's not documented can't be managed. Everyone's talking about pivot. But we've learned, when we went through the process of doing an audit in our business and removing the dysfunction, things that can't be tracked, shout out to Keap for helping us to be able to track what's happening in your business, be able to document, be able to build the right type of campaigns, and we identify those gaps, we realized we didn't need to pivot, we needed to persevere, because, yes, it's good to talk about pivoting, but sometimes as entrepreneurs, it's tempting to use that as a sexy way to say; ‘I’m giving up. I am giving up. It's too hard, I'm giving up’.” - Mwale Henry

Listen in as we talk with Keap Creative Manager, Stephanie Haworth. In addition to being the guiding hand behind Keap’s copywriting, design, and UX; Stephanie has agency design chops and was willing to share the inside insights she’s gleaned from years in the industry. “It's very important not to be insular as an agency owner and not see everyone as your competition. “ Learn how to every agency is differentiated by their teams and what it says about how well they suit different clients. We’ll discuss what it means when an agency is hesitant to workshop over the phone and how important it is to set expectations early.

Digital marketing expert Toccara Karizma joins us to discuss where you should and shouldn't be spending your marketing budget. Facebook ads are an ever-changing animal, Toccara has made it a point to track the ebs and flows of digital marketing as well as the red flags to watch for when hiring outside agencies. Listen in to get insights on CPMs, UTFs, and how they can be the difference between dynamic marketing partners and flat out scam artists.

This week, we've got info on automation from a serial entrepreneur who also has the inside scoop on exactly how powerful Keap can be. Ernest Saco (Sr. Product Manager at Keap) joins us to discuss developing a brand, building a successful business from an idea and making the most of your sales and marketing automation. Want to take your online sales to the next-level? This is the show for you.

Alex Edlund, Keap’s head of demand generation, joins Small Biz Buzz to talk about generating demand for your product and business and creating brand awareness.  His team is responsible for acquiring new customers via marketing, and a lot of the marketing that Alex does is performance-marketing related. It's about getting more leads, more opportunities and sales so the business can grow.  “In demand gen, when we look across my team, it is practically every channel that aids in driving new traffic to the website,” Alex said. “So, paid search, SEO, affiliate marketing, paid social marketing, email, all these channels that can really drum up demand for Keap really encapsulates demand gen.”  When it comes to demand gen, Alex said you have to have a sense for who you are targeting. Who's your target audience? What kind of research have you done to figure that out? If you're a small business that has been in business for quite some time, you have loads of information around that, you have your existing customer base, so look at that customer base to figure out what it is about them that makes them unique, or makes them work so well for your business. “When you have a good audience strategy, then it becomes a little easier for you to pick out which channels to invest in, what areas to have a presence in, because you really want to be where your audience is at,” said Alex. “If you know your audience, it becomes a lot easier to determine where you're going to invest your time.” Click play for more.

Rajesh Bhatia, CTO of Keap, joins Small Biz Buzz to talk about the relationship between AI and automation and how they make entrepreneurs’ lives easier. While conquering the chaos of a small business, entrepreneurs have so many things to worry about, mainly, their sales and marketing, which can be easily automated. For example, if somebody comes to your website and they populate a “contact me” form, the goal is to automate the communication by collecting and transferring the data to a lead capture spreadsheet. That's the kind of high-level AI and automation Keap is presenting to the small business arena.   “All we're doing here is providing [small business owners] the necessary applications, tools and capabilities to make their lives easier–either by being able to help manage their contact lists, their sales and marketing automation, their appointments, their pipelines, etc.,” said Rajesh. “We’re building the software so we can help our small business customers because we recognized how difficult their job is, how difficult their work is. And all we want to do is empower them because ultimately, we are fueled by small businesses. And their growth is important to us as a community, as a country. And more importantly, us here at Keap because that's our mission to help small businesses.” Click play for more.

Nate Shaw, who is the CEO of Brooklyn Music Factory, joins Small Biz Buzz in our Big Grit docuseries to talk about his company’s vision to create a community online that provides the same kind of opportunities and deep connections as teaching music in person. “The whole world can be a community,” said Nate. “At Brooklyn Music Factory, one of our real opportunities in 2021 is figuring out how to grow a meaningful, communal connection online that matches the version we have in person.” Nate expressed how pivoting your business during the pandemic is about perspective, reorganizing your team and finding a mindset that can work. He understood his business can be of a benefit, even in the most dire times. “The fact that we were hiring online teachers from any English-speaking country was amazing. What quality of talent that you could recruit,” said Nate. “Our vision in 2021 is twofold. To expand that online community, and build on it and scale it, to expand our teacher network, just start supporting other studios and teachers that need curriculum that works online and in-person. And then actually to shrink our local community slightly.” Click play for more.

Valerie Aprahamian, who is the founder of Advocates for Angels, joins Small Biz Buzz in our Big Grit docuseries to talk about how her company supports and protects parents of children with special needs and developmental disorders through their Individual Education Programs (IEPs). Valerie’s daughter, Chanel, was diagnosed with autism and a very life-threatening seizure disorder, at the age of three years old, by a team by pediatric neurologists at UCLA. That doctor told Valerie that Chanel would never read, write, talk or ever be successful in school. It was also most likely she would have to institutionalize her. “At that time, I didn't even really know what autism was other than I knew it was a very profound disability,” said Valerie. “So immediately I started educating myself on special education law, and I started finding out what her needs were, what autism was, and how to get her the help she needed.” Valerie was immediately awoken to the reality of special education, the bureaucracy of the institution, and the segregation that they placed upon these kids. She immediately knew she wanted her daughter in a regular school with regular kids in a general education class. “They thought I was crazy because they weren't doing inclusion back then. So I was successful in having Chanel be placed in a general ed class at five years old,” said Valerie. “She was the first child with the diagnosis of autism to be placed in a general education classroom in my local school district. So that's the beginning of the story.” Click play for more.

Natasha Davis, who is the founder and CEO of Impact Branding Consulting, joins Small Biz Buzz in our Big Grit docuseries to talk about her journey from being a nurse to realizing her real passion of becoming an entrepreneur and all the obstacles she had to overcome to be successful.       “It takes time. Shifting from a mindset of being an employee is a big shift to being an entrepreneur, but then you have to shift from being an entrepreneur to being an employer, to being a business owner, it's two different mindsets,” said Natasha. “You have to begin to make different decisions. When you start a business, you're making $5,000 decisions, maybe $2,000 decisions, but then as you continue to grow, if you're doing it right, you're now making $25,000 decisions and $50,000 decisions, it's a different mindset.” Natasha stresses the importance of never stop trying; never give up on yourself. “Even when people say no to you, you have to truly believe in yourself. And you have to believe in what you're doing. Believe in what your cause is,” she said. “And don't look at yourself as this little minute thing. You're on this earth to do powerful things. You are that cargo. And if one person says no to you, screw it, go to the next person. There are people there who need you.” Natasha Davis can be found at impactbrandingconsulting.org.     Click play for more.

Clate Mask, Keap’s CEO, joins Small Biz Buzz to talk about the mindset of entrepreneurs versus small business owners and how having grit can get you through the hard times. Clate expresses the fact that the entrepreneurial journey is hard enough, let alone with the curve balls like we've had this year. COVID-19 really clarified the difference between the typical small business owner and the entrepreneur. “The typical small business owner generally lives in a very concerned state of being and is very cautious and very concerned about the present, and can easily be swayed by circumstances around them,” said Clate. “Whereas the entrepreneur is very focused on the future and is very optimistic and is very driven and action-oriented to not get stuck into a rut, but to actually drive to a better place and is willing to take some risk and is willing to be uncomfortable. Typical small business owners want to be comfortable. Entrepreneurs are okay when they're not uncomfortable so they can drive to a better state.” Clate also discusses Keap’s upcoming conference, IKON, which will be held virtually this year November 12-14. “If you're serious about growing your business and you want to be in a community of people that are like-minded and are serious about growing their business, if you want to understand sales and marketing automation and how it can change your business, and you want some inspiration and motivation, IKON is an event like none other,” said Clate. “It is so remarkable to see what happens when you bring people together and their stories, how they use our software to change the game, how they are overcoming the challenges, how they bring grit and optimism to their work every day. I just love our customers.” Speaking of grit, check out Keap’s newest Big Grit docuseries at keap.com/big-grit. Also, if you want to register for IKON, click here. Click play for more.

Paige Clark, Keap’s Corporate Communications Specialist, joins Small Biz Buzz to talk about utilizing the small business aspect in local marketing when it comes to social media. “If you're really working on growing [your] small business, you want to focus on the people who are your market,” said Paige. “And that's why you want to start with this local bubble on social media.” Per Paige, the first place you should start, whether it’s on Instagram, Facebook or Twitter, is geotagging your location, but use it strategically. Don’t tag a place that no one's ever heard of. Don't tag the taco stand on the side of the road because they have good tacos. You want to tag the more general area that is going to have an impact. Click play for more.

Kristen Boss, a business coach geared toward women entrepreneurs, joins Small Biz Buzz to discuss the challenges business owners face to make their first $100K, how to sell confidently and know when it’s time to pivot.   “Why not get there faster by learning from an expert, hiring mentors, getting involved in masterminds? Go get educated!” said Boss when it comes to selling. “It's always going to return back to you. I love grit for building business. It's where a passion and perseverance meet to create a long-term goal. So you have to have the long-term goal in mind and you have to have passion and perseverance, which is grit. You got to be gritty.” Boss said your business has to meet the needs of others. People can tell when someone is selling something to meet their own needs–the entire energy of the experience is very different. Boss also said when it's time to look at a pivot, you should be asking yourself: am I meeting my needs or a felt need I see? Is it an area where I'm an expert? Would I do it for free? Would I find joy and purpose in that? And then lastly, am I running from pain? Or is this a time for me to get critical and do some evaluations and look at what's working? What's not working? What do I need to do differently? Click play for more.

Jason Komosa, chief business officer at BlackCart and mental coach, joins Small Biz Buzz to discuss the importance of maintaining a work-life balance mentality when things hit the fan, especially while we’re all working through COVID-19.    Let’s face it, we are living in a world where overwork is overvalued–this idea of we’re working so much to get onto the next task, then onto the next, and the next. Then we develop chronic stress and ultimately, it's the number one enemy of success. It makes things worse. “We ignore our meaningful relationships. We cut out the fun of our lives. We eat poorly. We sleep poorly. We don't exercise. We don't move. We don't take walks. We're kind of just in this self-created isolated bubble,” said Komosa. “And we think it's helping us get more done when the reality is, it's having a reverse effect. It's actually hurting our quality work. I'd much rather have five quality hours of someone's time versus 12 hours of mediocre time. And they say, well, I'm going to wear this badge of pride that I worked 12 hours today. Well, great. And seven of those hours were terrible work. It's all backwards.” Komosa strongly recommends tracking your time. Go through your day and write down what you are doing in every 15, 30-minute blocks. What you'll notice is you will organically change your behaviors to what you want to achieve. The idea is first before you try to change and do something different, focus on what you are doing now. Then from that self-audit, decide you’re going to make some changes. The idea is to use that data to benefit yourself for the future–for tomorrow, for the next week, the next month. And so on. Click play for more.

Ramon Ray, the founder of SmartHustle.com, joins Small Biz Buzz to discuss how to build a community around your small business in which you can actively engage with customers and see more growth.     Ray emphasizes how important it is to bring people together and serve them value as well as provide solutions to your customers’ problems after they have come to know, like, and trust you. “This is what community is about. I would encourage you to get people together on a video call, get people together on a phone call, get people together in a discussion group whenever you want it,” said Ray. “Community can even be an email list. Other people can't see each other per se, but I think to a degree, that in a way, is community. Humans were meant to be with humans.” Click play for more.

Amber Anderson, owner of Tote + Pears, joins Small Biz Buzz to discuss how to market to an underserved audience with the appropriate ads, in this case, women and their families. Amber Anderson’s agency, Tote + Pears, focuses on supporting startups with product management and branding. About two and a half years after launching, she made the decision to focus 100% on women–women being consumers, women being employees, and women being the thread that tied a lot of things together. “[Women] make over 85% of all consumer purchasing decisions, and in many cases, they are the ones that are driving the decisions in their families,” said Anderson. “So that's how we got started and how we became a female-focused branding agency.” Brands and businesses usually don't ask, you're a woman and you're what else? That's the position that Anderson’s agency takes at Tote + Pears. “I feel like if we did that more often, we'd see a lot of ads that connected more authentically,” Anderson said. Click play for more.

Pam Slim, owner of Main Street Learning Lab, once again joins Small Biz Buzz to discuss how little marketing actions make it easier to take action in your small business. Slim recommends that small business owners leverage ecosystem development and partner development to look at ways in which they can understand their bigger systems. “I call [it] tiny marketing actions, which can definitely be marketing actions where you're planting the seed to get the word out, where you get more visibility, where you connect with customers, but it's also really tiny relationship actions,” said Slim. “There are ways that you're just slowly in little tiny ways connecting with people and connecting people with each other, and it's when you do that, at first it can take a little bit of time to learn the different players, but over time as you start to do that weaving, it begins to generate a certain kind of momentum.” Pam suggests that small business owners ask, "What are tiny little ways that I can start to plant the seed, connect with somebody, reach out, ask a question, make a connection?" and then make it a habit. That's the real key–make that the way you operate on a daily basis, and that's where you’ll find a lot of momentum in your marketing. Click play for more.

Jeremy Ryan Slate, who's the founder of Create Your Own Life podcast, joins Small Biz Buzz to discuss how your small business can compete with big brands without breaking your budget. When it comes to building your marketing strategy, Slate recommends thinking of your journey as climbing a flight of stairs. You have to figure out what the bottom stair is so you can start climbing up. You want to find out which stairs are already getting you there. It's the smaller ones, more niche, more industry related. “Your PR and your marketing should work together. You can't just have one,” said Slate. “Whether you're a small business, medium-sized business, whatever you are, if you learn how to get media the right way, you can really cut the learning curve.” Click play for more.

Foodfight! is the animated feature that is the center of discussion in this episode of Worst Business Ideas in History. The hosts break down what went wrong with the release of the 2012 film produced by Threshold Entertainment and directed by Lawrence Kasanoff that received very low ratings and nothing but negative reviews. They also tie in how important it is to listen to your business partners when you have an unpopular idea that may cause irreparable damages to your organization in the long run. Click play for more.

Melody Lewis and Turquoise Devereaux of the IndigenousCC join Small Biz Buzz to discuss the importance of having diversity in your small business.    “Diversity has to be the foundation of your business, that's just it, because naturally, it will impact all these other areas of work–your customer relations, your marketing, all of that,” said Melody Lewis. “Diversity, the understanding of it, what it means and how to apply it, that's the tone that will ensure the sustainability of it, because it's part of the way you do things.” Check out their REZponse Roundtable YouTube channel to see how they’re revitalizing the indigenous perspective in the workplace. Click play for more.

In this episode of Worst Business Ideas in History, the hosts break down what went wrong with the release of the Atari Jaguar and what a disappointment it was to its target audience, mainly teenagers. This product essentially killed Atari as a corporation, as it leveraged its console to bait and switch the audience with false claims that the product was better than those of its competitive counterparts. Click play for more.

Ronnie and Lamar Tyler of Tyler New Media join Small Biz Buzz to discuss the role of diversity in entrepreneurship and how small business owners can support each other through allyship in their respective communities. “There's a huge wealth gap, and it's not getting smaller between different groups in this country,” said Lamar Tyler. “And right now, African Americans are pulling up the rear, and we want to help close that gap through entrepreneurship.” “We are clear about our mission to uplift, equip, and support the community, to support families in our communities so that we can build strong families, we can close in the wealth gap, and just build up our communities. That's what our mission is,” said Ronnie Tyler. Click play for more.

Don Capparella, the CEO of Quality Travel Solutions, joins Small Biz Buzz to discuss how he adapted his travel agency through the hardships of COVID-19 when the travel industry took a major hit.   “We're going to save this industry. We're going to save our business and we created five pivots that we had to do to make sure that we were going to survive,” said Capparella. “We had to pivot our marketing. We had to pivot our client communications, pivot our offerings and destinations. We had to pivot our own internal process. And then we also had to pivot our mindset, which sometimes was the hardest.” Click play for more.

Small Biz Buzz hosts Crystal Heuft and Scott Martineau are joined by Josh Collins, who works for an agency called Streetsense, is a TEDx alum, a speaker, and an expert in experience architecture. He will be discussing how he helps businesses design and create by leveraging experience as a strategy. “Essentially what we're talking about is serving our audience from awareness to advocacy, and everywhere in between,” said Collins. “Experience design, experience architecture really is about accessing empathy to understand where your audience is, how they experience your brand, your communications, and what they might offer, how they respond.” This leads to the idea of feedback loops, and learning to design intentional feedback loops that allow businesses to understand what those experiences are as quickly as possible. All small businesses intend certain things, but many times, those intentions don't deliver. Without feedback loops, and without really thinking critically about that, small businesses end up talking to themselves more often than not. “At the end of the day, it is the responsibility of everyone wanting to become a great brand, everyone wanting to grow their business, to make connections that your consumer, your audience never forgets,” said Collins. “That's how you get them to advocacy.” Click play for more.

Small Biz Buzz hosts Crystal Heuft and Derek Harju are joined by Kristin Rowan, the director of marketing and public relations and sales for Square Egg Entertainment, the parent company for Phoenix Fan Fusion, who discusses how to pivot and adjust when a large-scale event suddenly faces an emergency.   In this case, the coronavirus pandemic. When it started getting bad, everything changed when everybody started to realize this didn’t look like the seasonal flu, this was different. Rowan’s team started planning early when it became apparent that Phoenix Fan Fusion wasn’t happening. For her small, but mighty team of six, they didn't have a team of PR people or lawyers or all of those who can revise what they needed to do. Any revisions, any statements that they made came down to one person and long hours were experienced by all.   “We pivoted from, ‘Hey. Here are all the guests we have coming out, and here's all the events we're planning and look at all this fun,’ to virtually nothing,” said Rowan. “When you're planning an event that gets postponed like that, we don't know which panelists are going to be available. We don't know which rooms we're going to have in the convention center. We don't know what guests are still going to be available. And their filming schedule was stopped the same as our schedule was stopped. So for us, it was not so much a pivot as it was a full stop.” Click play for more.

Small Biz Buzz hosts Crystal Heuft and Scott Martineau are joined by Chris Ducker, a personal branding expert, serial entrepreneur, and successful podcast host, who helps people monetize their expertise and their personal brand through the work he does at his company, Youpreneur. Ducker stands by the mantra of when you build the business of you, it's future-proof. It can't be copied, plain and simple. Because of your uniqueness and the way that you lean into that uniqueness is what ultimately makes you future-proof. “Regardless of what crisis you might be going through or what problems you might be facing, or whatever competitor has stolen your product idea, they can have the exact same product with the exact same packaging, but ultimately, people buy from you because you are their favorite,” said Ducker. “That's what the personal brand business model is all about. It's about becoming somebody's favorite.” Click play for more.

Small Biz Buzz hosts Crystal Heuft and Scott Martineau are joined by Frank Gerola, a real estate agent in the Phoenix Metro Area, who discusses how he’s adapted his business during the COVID-19 pandemic. Gerola’s business represents both buyers and sellers. One area of concern that came up for his clients was safety while looking at houses during the coronavirus. “A lot of it is comfort level, how comfortable they are,” said Gerola. “One of the things that we try to limit is the buyers' exposure, and the exposure they're bringing to the property.” Gerola requested that no children were to be brought to a home showing. If people had to bring their children, each parent would view the home individually while the other parent stayed in the car with the kids, then they would switch. As children tend to “look with their hands,” this was a way to mitigate the spread of germs. During home showings, Gerola provided booties and gloves to his clients as well as wiped down the house once they were done looking at it. He requested the homes to have all of the lights on, all of the doors open in every one of the rooms, the closets open, a couple of the cupboards open so the only doors that visitors would have to touch are the front door, the rear door, and the garage entry door. “It’s working all together as a whole. And then letting the consumer know, the seller know, ‘We have your best interest in mind as well. We understand your concern and we hear you,’” said Gerola. “A lot of it is up to the consumer, but when you show them that you're proactive, it's a win-win.” You can find Frank Gerola’s business on Instagram, @GilbertNOW and on Facebook, GilbertNOW. His personal handle is @RealtorFrankG on Instagram and Frank Gerola on Facebook. Click play for more.

Small Biz Buzz hosts Crystal Heuft and Scott Martineau are joined by AJ Wilcox, who works for an ad agency that helps with the account management side of LinkedIn Ads as well as teaching, training, consulting, auditing, and anything else individual teams need to attract leads. Wilcox expressed that the big limiting factor for LinkedIn Ads is their cost. The average cost per click, when you're using their ad network in North America, ranges from $8 to $11. This isn't traffic that's ready to buy–these are individuals who are interested in learning more about topics, or they're interested in consuming content. So $8 to $11 a click for something that is more mid to top of funnel. “What I tell people is, if you have a lifetime value of $10,000, $15,000 or more of one of your future customers, then LinkedIn Ads is a great place to get to know them and get in front of them,” said Wilcox. “If less than that, smaller B2C offers, even smaller B2B offers, you're going to have a really hard time getting a return on your investment.” Wilcox said you're launching a combination of AMO–your audience, your message, and your offer when you present your LinkedIn ads. The first thing you're going to be looking for is your click-through rate. “I think most people who start using LinkedIn Ads should use one ad format. It's called single image sponsored content,” said Wilcox. “It's the simplest, shows up in your newsfeed type of ad. Very versatile. And the average click-through rate on these across the network is a little bit less than half a percent.” Click play for more.

Small Biz Buzz hosts Crystal Heuft and Scott Martineau are joined by Brett Curry, who discusses how to leverage YouTube Ads to grow your business with a focus on ecommerce. For those small businesses that don’t have a video crew or can’t invest enough money in video production, Curry breaks down how to create a compelling YouTube ad on a budget that will still see sufficient viewership. He explains you can set your campaigns up to drive conversions, but you can also just set them up to optimize for views. Get creative when you start to build what's called a viewed video audience that has viewed your video before, so now you can run another ad to them or show them a display ad or a search ad next time they're searching on Google. If you approach it the right way, you're building an asset and an audience as well as potentially driving conversions right away. When crafting a video, you don't have to go full production. You don't need special effects and trained actors or to hire a scriptwriter for $50,000. If you just remember that the most important elements are the script or the story that the video tells, and the simple visuals, the message can still be compelling. “You could even use stock images if you had to, or basic footage that you add to it. So you don't have to go full production, in fact, I recommend you don't,” said Curry. “Start with some concepts, test those out. Once you know a concept works, then increase the production value and kind of take it a step further.” Curry also reveals three types of content that businesses can use to build brand awareness on YouTube. Click play for more.

Small Biz Buzz hosts Crystal Heuft and Michael Van Dusen are joined by Jason Komosa, a mental coach who helps leaders achieve their goals by creating a better balance in all areas of their lives.   A mental coach is a person who supports you, champions you, is your sidekick, your accountability partner, being very open, very authentic, very vulnerable. The idea is to just make you better while training your mentality, mind, and spirit. “Leaders and entrepreneurs need to make sure that they're prioritizing their life. Not just their work,” said Komosa. “If we're just constantly focusing on work and ignoring all the other things that we need to have that quality energy, that quality work, it doesn't make sense to work 15 hours if eight of those hours are really quality, awesome work and the other seven are just half-ass mediocre work.” “The message I preach is, ‘You might think you're doing yourself and your company a favor by putting the extra two or three hours of work. But the reality is you'd be much better off taking a break, stopping work, getting some rejuvenation, spending time with your family, go outside, get some exercise, get some movement, eat healthy, and get a good night's sleep,’” Komosa added.   Click play for more.

Small Biz Buzz hosts Crystal Heuft and Michael Van Dusen are joined by Freestar’s Co-founder David Freedman and President and CEO Kurt Donnell, who discuss how being advocates for publishers has maximized their revenue.     Freestar maximizes publishers’ programmatic ad revenue specifically. Basically, every time you see an ad that appears on the internet, there's an entire auction that's happening in milliseconds behind the scenes. Freestar puts pressure on that auction to drive up the price to help publishers make as much money as possible and be competitive in a world where Google and Facebook continue to take a lot of the market share. Freedman and Donnell deliver a real service that's very black and white in the sense that they drive revenue and people see it. It's also a revenue share model, so there's no upfront cost or fees for the publishers to work with them. “We're very passionate about the technology side and also giving a voice and a fighting chance for publishers these days, because it is a tough industry for them to survive in,” said Freedman. “Our industry is pretty much all geared towards the advertiser. Everyone's focused on satisfying them, which typically results in the publisher getting screwed,” Freedman continued. “We wanted to flip that theory on its head and go the opposite direction. Publisher first is one of our core values and kind of our guiding decision making on everything that we do.” Click play for more.

Small Biz Buzz hosts Crystal Heuft and Scott Martineau are joined by Paul Ramondo, who helps small business owners and entrepreneurs generate highly-qualified leads and sales using Facebook ads and digital marketing funnels. Ramondo divulges how to use the tools that are available both intra-Facebook and extra-Facebook to find your audience, refine them, build an audience avatar, build an ad set for targeting so you can then run ads and test to see what resonates and what doesn't resonate with your target audience. “It’s important to define what the internal emotions are in which your product or service solves or activates for your audience, and how that relates to the avatar that you're targeting,” said Ramondo. Ramondo recommends spending $5 on targeting a cold audience in a cold audience campaign and $5 a day targeting a warm audience, which are based off your retargeting audiences and include retargeting people who have visited your website, retargeting your email list, retargeting people who have engaged with your Instagram or Facebook profile, etc. and then run ads variable to the audience that you're speaking to. “Customize to the audience that you're speaking to because the way that you speak to a cold audience is going to be different from the way you speak to someone that's already brand aware,” said Ramondo. “A warm audience already knows who you are, whereas, a cold audience needs to learn about who you are. You need to build trust, you need to build rapport with them before you can actually get them to take out their wallet and buy from you.” Click play for more.

Small Biz Buzz hosts Crystal Heuft and Scott Martineau are joined by Mike Kim, an online educator of marketing who focuses on the personal brand and copywriting space. Kim’s business operates on two arms: copywriting for personal brands–meaning a speaker, a coach, an expert, a trainer, a thought leader, an author, anyone who's paid for their thoughts, and being a marketing consultant for some of the bigger thought leadership brands. “I always say that when you influence language you influence thinking,” said Kim. “We have that opportunity right now because the world is in a very, very unique place and we can use our words to bring comfort, to bring hope, to bring leadership, to bring clarity.” When Kim is ever asked, "What is unique about the way that you see marketing?" he says, marketing isn't about closing a sale. It's about opening a relationship. If you filter everything you say and do, marketing wise, through that lens, that's going to help you, because you're going to approach people as friends. You're going to approach people as people. People do business with people. “My marketing isn't just a nice slick campaign with a nice slogan. It's actually part of a bigger context, which is a movement I'm trying to start,” said Kim. “I'm not trying to be a religious leader, a cult leader, political leader, but in a sense, I'm trying to help the folks who want to become their own boss at a personal brand and help them through using the power of marketing to do it.” During this unprecedented time of the "coronapocalypse" as Kim refers to it, it is a golden opportunity for businesses to pivot the way they brand themselves and let their personal voice come out. Click play for more.

Small Biz Buzz hosts Crystal Heuft and Scott Martineau are joined by Mel Kettle of Mel Kettle and Associates, who is a Communication Specialist whose area of expertise is helping people connect.     “I work with clients so that they can get a clear understanding of how to connect with compassion, with conviction,” said Kettle. “I help people communicate so they connect and engage with their people. Whether it’s their people, their workforce, their customers, their stakeholders, their investors, their volunteers or whoever else they need to have that strong relationship with.” She also has a podcast called This Connected Life where she discusses what’s important when it comes to connection and her audience, as well as welcoming many guests. “Probably 50% of my episodes are guest interviews where I talk to leaders about how they stay connected with their people so that they can achieve the outcomes that they want to achieve both personally and professionally,” Kettle said. Kettle believes that connecting starts with yourself. You need to have that self-connection piece and you need to be comfortable and competent with who you are and to look after yourself physically, emotionally, spiritually and mentally. If you don't do that, then you're never going to present your best self as a leader to your workforce or to your client base, which is what many people forget when it comes to connection.   Kettle also provides insights on what small businesses can do to connect to their audience, their family, and themselves during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown and what they should be doing to anticipate permanent changes in the workforce for the future. Click play for more.

Small Biz Buzz hosts Crystal Heuft and Scott Martineau are joined by Grace Abruzzo, the owner of Rooted Physical Therapy, who is a physical therapist specializing in the pelvis area, and discusses how her business aligns with her passions, her calling and how she uses it to provide a service. Abruzzo typically works with women, but also works with any gender, any transitioning transgender and any age group. She got into physical therapy because she has a history of needing from when she was a child what she now provides. She has been trained in treating the whole body, but specializes in the pelvis. “When I was in physical therapy school, I learned that this is the thing that I always needed that I never knew existed and that most people don't know exists,” said Abruzzo. “I was immediately hooked.” Abruzzo also tackles the subjects that people don't feel comfortable sharing with a medical provider or the conversations that they hardly have with their spouse–helping those overcome the stigma behind discussing pelvic health issues. “I'm working on one person at a time, but the change I'm making, I'm hoping that we're all going to experience it,” said Abruzzo. “Because if you do healing, your partner is going to feel it, your kids are going to feel it, your friends are going to feel it, it's going to change the world.” Click play for more.

Small Biz Buzz hosts Crystal Heuft and Scott Martineau are joined by Jasmine Star, a photographer and business strategist who empowers entrepreneurs to build a brand and market it on social media to grow their business. “Your net worth is your network and that network is really built on social these days and that has been a game changer for my business,” said Star. The secret to a successful social media presence is the ability for people to show up consistently. It wasn't until Star had crafted a plan for consistency that people would expect her to show up as a representation of her business and her brand. She had created a brand using a blog with nothing more than her words and being consistent, and applied that same ideology to Instagram. Her social curator business will help any type of content or organization see authentic engagement on social media.   “You are enough. Do you have the willingness to keep on pushing forward to get to where you want to go? I believe that we all have that wild ability for success as long as you remain undaunted,” said Star. Jasmine Star can be found on all social platforms @JasmineStar. You can also find her at jasminestar.com and all of her social media membership. For those who want to create a brand in marketing and social media, you can find her at socialcurator.com. Click play for more.

Small Biz Buzz hosts Crystal Heuft and Derek Harju are joined by Odeen Domingo, founder and owner of CO+HOOTS Coworking in Phoenix, Arizona, who discusses his experience being an entrepreneur, a husband and a father and how he balances it all.    “You're a team. A family is just not a family. You have to work together,” said Domingo. “For me, I feel like you have to have the introspective what you want in your life. We go through stages where your business is everything. Then you have a family and then your family is everything but then you'd still have a business.” Domingo believes if you're trying to be a family person, that's all you can do. If you're just trying, that's perfect. As a business owner, or someone who wants to be a business owner or entrepreneur or a startup founder, you learn that your time is valuable and that time blocks are critical. “Any time that you can give to your family, even though your business is taking over your life, that's perfect. It's fine. As long as your child knows that you love them, that's all they really need,” Domingo expressed. “As long as you're trying, as long as you're being intentional about it and everything else, it's perfect.” Click play for more.

Small Biz Buzz hosts Crystal Heuft and Scott Martineau are joined by Susan Baier, the owner and founder of Audience Audit, who talks about attitudinal segmentation and identifying an audience that actually works for a small business. As a small business owner, your audience is not based on what it looks like. Your audience is based on the problems your small business is solving, and who has them, and why your customers haven't solved them already–that is attitudinal segmentation. “In our research, what we're doing is looking at populations, customers, prospects, whatever it may be, B2B, B2C, and saying, we can look at company size for these people, or we can look at their age or their gender, but instead let's look at the kinds of attitudes that they have about this category, the kinds of experiences they've had in the past, the things that are important to them and the things that aren't, and let's group people that way,” said Baier. “You don't have to choose just one audience, but you have to be super clear, for the audiences that you choose, and choose is the operative word,” Baier continued. “The ones that you want to serve, the problem that you want to solve, you have to be crystal clear about why they're looking, and what is involved in their choice, and who they're putting you up against, so that you can provide relevant marketing content, product services, whatever it is.” “Who” is not the question you have to answer in marketing. “Why” is the question you have to answer and find your niche. Tune in for more.

Small Biz Buzz hosts Crystal Heuft and Derek Harju are joined by Veronica Belmont, product manager and evangelist at Adobe Spark, who divulges how those two roles at her company align in an effort to expand her brand, make decisions around products and how small businesses can leverage brand evangelists to supercharge their companies on social media.     “We use Airtable within our own organization to keep track of all the content that we're posting to social or on the blog to make sure that we are getting ahead of our publishing schedule and [having content] in the pipeline. That's one of the biggest tips that I can give to small companies,” said Belmont. “Understand that it's going to make it harder for you if you're posting off the cuff–have a plan, know what kind of engagement you want to drive, know what kind of voice you want to have on social and starting with those building blocks before you start working on campaigns is really crucial.” Belmont also suggests seeking those who may not have achieved the full evangelist level yet; they don't necessarily need to have a huge audience of their own but if they're already having conversations with other people about your product, you can find them by searching your hashtag on Twitter, replies or looking into other conversations on other platforms about the kind of work you're doing. Tune in for more. 

Small Biz Buzz hosts Crystal Heuft and Scott Martineau are joined by Lindsey Schwartz, the founder of Powerhouse Women and author of “Powerhouse Woman,” who discusses how she benefited from attending mastermind programs where she got the chance to dive deep with a group of other people on the same journey that she was, which reaffirmed all of the overwhelming feelings she was experiencing about starting her own business. As far as focusing her business strictly on women, Schwartz said, “I never intended from the start to create a women's community only because in my past I worked with men and women, but I noticed most of the conversations I was having were specific to women.” Schwartz believes there are so many women with really brilliant ideas who aren't getting into the entrepreneurial spirit because they only see the highlight reel and think they’re not meant for this journey. “That whole conversation inspired [my book], which was really written from my own story of how not together I have it and showing women how you don't need to become more, you don't need to learn more in order to be this powerhouse, you just need to turn into what's already within us. And the fundamentals for creation, just creating things from nothing are within all of us,” said Schwartz.   She also hosts a podcast where she talks about how to equip women with the tools and the mindset to get out of their own way and into action around their own big ideas. “That's actually one of the reasons I love having a podcast. We can just go a lot deeper into what a little caption can share, but I think it's more just about us realizing that if we're feeling icky looking at social media, we're just comparing our blooper reel to someone else's highlight reel,” said Schwartz. “You have to get it straight, social media is always going to be a highlight reel.” Tune in for more.  

In this very special edition of Small Biz Buzz, hosts Crystal Heuft and Scott Martineau are joined by Keap CEO Clate Mask, who talks about overcoming challenges small businesses are encountering right now during the coronavirus pandemic and the different opportunities, processes and systems entrepreneurs can leverage to adapt and keep their startups alive.   “While this is an unprecedented event, there's certainly been events like it in the past in terms of taking down the economy, and causing all kinds of problems,” said Mask. “So I think it starts with the state of mind, and then it goes to the innovation and creativity, and the ways that you respond, and recognize opportunities to serve others and create solutions to problems that people are facing.” This is the opportunity to give and serve and this is where building relationships with prospects and customers shines through. What businesses need to do, and what entrepreneurs should be looking at is, "How can I serve? Let me just be in the posture of serving and giving, and helping." Mask also offers small business owners ideas on how they can adjust their products and services, specifically right now during the coronavirus outbreak, as now’s the time to work on your business, and put systems in place. Tune in for more.  

Small Biz Buzz hosts Crystal Heuft and Scott Martineau are joined by personal-brand strategist Isha Cogborn of the Epiphany Institute, which is her company. Per Cogborn when it comes to branding, it's about being able to share your expertise at a level where you can have the impact that you're really created to make. “There are a lot of people who are very bright and shiny, and they've got very slick marketing and they look great, and unfortunately, they don't have what people are looking for. So for those people that are on the unknown end of that, I really want to help them to be able to develop the skillsets to be found by the people that need them, and to really be able to connect with the people that they're uniquely gifted to serve.” Also according to Cogborn, there are three distinct categories when it comes to people building their own brands online: Influencers, experts and thought leaders. Which one do you fall under as a small business owner? Tune in to find out.

Small Biz Buzz hosts Crystal Heuft and Derek Harju are joined by Tanya Moushi of Moushi & Co. to talk about solopreneurship executive coaching. Moushi discusses her experience as a solopreneur and starting her own coaching business and why this business model works for her personally. She divulges about the importance of being empathetic in business, common missteps and oversights, and what criteria she considers when helping a business find its purpose and how it can improve.   She also discusses her GECKO model–gratitude, empathy, care, kindness, optimism, which is a framework that a business can use to be good. It helps instill virtues and shapes culture within a company and influences impact on stakeholders, employees, customers, shareholders and the community. “All of these things that would make you a good human, make you a great business,” said Moushi. Tune in for more.

Small Biz Buzz hosts Crystal Heuft and Derek Harju are joined by Scott Martineau, co-founder of Keap, who talks about how lifecycle marketing evolved. He created a movement around an approach to marketing. It's his attempt to explain to small business owners common problems that they’ll face as they're trying to acquire new customers. Keap helps small business owners hone in on how to use lifecycle marketing in what they're doing. Small business owners have a really unique advantage to show up in the lifecycle relationship and deliver value to their prospective customers in advance of a sale. It’s about engaging your customers with educational content using three different systems. Tune in to find out what they are.

Small Biz Buzz hosts Crystal Heuft and Jack Smithson are joined by Brendan Alan Barrett, founder of StartInPhx, who talks about how to overcome pushback when it comes to following up with B2B clients. It’s a matter of talking to as many people in the same area on the same day to build content, collateral or touch points that you can refer back to. While prospecting into an account, there's always something that can be learned. The rule with prospecting and follow up is questions. You're going for engagement, but if you're asking the right questions, you can decipher if this is engagement for their benefit versus engagement for your benefit. Know who your audience is so you don’t spread yourself too thin and make sure you're following up with the people who are going to move through the funnel and be acquired. At a certain point, you should also know when to cut your losses. In matters of work-life balance, the big themes are boundaries. To set good boundaries, you have to have good clarity and best practices put in place. Tune in for more.