Get High at Work!

Author: Kevin Sandlin

  • Four Upcoming Speaking Events @ GA Atlanta

    My speaking & teaching calendar for April and May just got a little busier, thanks to the great folks at General Assembly. If you haven’t visited their sweet new space at Ponce City Market, you should do yourself a favor and head to midtown Atlanta and have a look.

    While you’re there, you can get some learning in, too. Here are the workshops I’m leading in April & May at GA Atlanta.

    • Wednesday April 15 – Advanced Social Media Strategies – Step by step, we’ll dig into how best to engage your target audience on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social media channels through best practices and some little-known but powerful personal tactics.
    • Wednesday April 29 – How to Measure Social Media ROI – You know social media is powerful, but now that it’s become part of your marketing mix, you have to measure its ROI. How do you do that? Join me for this hands on workshop and leave knowing how to measure the fiscal effectiveness of your social media marketing efforts.
    • Saturday May 2 – Digital Marketing Bootcamp – the entire 10 weeks of Digital Marketing in one day! Bring your PC and something to write on, because you’re going to need them both as we cover branding, analytics, social, content, the marketing funnel, and your marketing calendar in a blazing fast half day.
    • Saturday May 16 – Blogging for Your Brand Bootcamp – Come with your PC and leave with a fully functioning WordPress Blog, including a custom domain, vital plugins, a great theme, social media connection, a content strategy, and your first three blog posts.

    There are certain skills everyone needs to thrive in today’s digital marketplace, and GA is covering them all. I’m excited to help new marketers and bloggers dive in headfirst and learn skills that they’ll actually be doing in the workshops and then take home to their businesses the next day.

  • Time

    Building on one of the most important aspects of our Digital Marketing Demo Night on Thursday, I need to emphasize the importance of time, mainly how fast it passes, both in the macro and micro.

    In the macro, guess what? It’s spring. How’d that happen? We get busy. We plan each week in minute detail, and plan each weekend with wild abandon so we make sure we don’t get in bed on Sunday night and wonder what we did with our weekend. There’s basketball season (Final Four tonight! Go Duke!), football season, high school & middle school soccer season, and now spring break. And before you know it, you’ll be making Memorial Day weekend plans.

    Time passes really, really fast, especially when you have children. It’s shocking sometimes. This summer, we will celebrate TEN YEARS since that glorious day we made it back to Atlanta after a harrowing 46 hour global jaunt with our two newly adopted children. They were 3. Now they’re 13. And I’ve been told too many times to count that the next 5 years will go even faster. How is that possible?

    In the micro, we experienced how fast five minutes passes in harsh reality on Thursday night as our digital marketing class brought its 10 weeks to a conclusion. No fewer than 8 of the students looked at me in horror and said “Wha…? Really??” when I interjected with “one minute!” Five minutes is a really long pitch, but for these new marketers, it was like snapping your fingers.

    I asked afterwards how many had practiced their presentations beforehand: six out of 17 had actually said the words and walked through their slides before Thursday night, meaning those six had experienced how fast time passes when you’re up in front of 50 people presenting the work that you created.

    Others were very prepared. On at least 3 occasions, when I said “one minute”, the presenters looked at me and quietly said, “that’s ok,” and clicked to their “Thank you / Q&A” slide. Boom.

    Whatever you’re doing, if you’re going to be timed, you would do well to practice before the real deal. Now, how do we practice being people, so we don’t run out of time?

  • Digital Marketing Demo Night

    Last night over beer & Fox Brothers BBQ, we experienced 17 excellent and entertaining Final Presentations from the 2nd cohort of Digital Marketing students from General Assembly Atlanta. All the students said beforehand that they were very nervous, but all of them were very entertaining, engaging, and the presentations were great. I think there were about 50 people in attendance, including co-workers, spouses, and even some parents. Thanks to everyone who came out to support these new marketers, and thanks especially to GA Atlanta and our T/A Liberty White, who made all this happen without a hitch.

    I asked a couple of questions to everyone who presented during the Q&A after their 5-minute presentations. These were questions like “what was the hardest concept you learned in this class?” or “what one takeaway helped you the most?” Here are some of the things that came out of those presentations and the Q&A.

    • Time went by really fast – I asked everyone at the end how many people practiced their presentation before last night. Maybe 5 or 6 of 17 had done that, and the rest got a real shock when I interjected “one minute left!” at their 4 minute mark. Five minutes is an eternity to wait for a red light to change, and goes by in an instant when you’re in front of 50 people presenting what you’ve accomplished.
    • Relaxed and entertaining – The most effective presentations last night were those who talked about what they know. Just like blogging, when you are totally immersed in a knowledge domain, you can easily converse or present about it to anyone.
    • Video in a presentation is tough – one student had asked beforehand if he could include a short video in his presentation, and while I agreed, I warned him of the potential dangers. Murphy’s law took over and the video did not work, and then when it did, the sound didn’t work. Prepare for the worst, and have a backup plan.
    • Content rules – every single presenter made sure “content marketing” was a huge part of their DGM strategy, no matter what the end product was. Content is king. Every picture, post, pin, tweet, and update is your content. You control it. Content is king.
    • Marketing is math – This concept really caused a lot of students to stumble. The marketing funnel is a difficult concept to imagine, so we made it visual with a literal funnel. That helped, but many of the students still struggled with getting from total exposure down to actual revenue. It’s all about the math.
    • Starting point – having a framework from which to start a marketing strategy is golden. When newbies dive into marketing, they have no idea where to start. It all starts with your brand. Define it, be intentional about it, live it, and defend it.
    • Six new businesses were launched because of this class. Wow.
    • What’s your message? – One student realized her message was about “me”, so she changed it to be about her customers, giving advice to them instead of promoting herself. Total game changer.
    • “Brand is everything we do.” – I cannot tell you how often I repeated this phrase. Towards the end of the class, I would say, “Branding is…?” and the class would shout, “everything you do!” And it’s true. From Chick-Fil-A employees saying “My pleasure!” after every customer interaction to Uber’s cloak and dagger competitive nature to destroy Lyft, everything you do is your brand. Either you define it, or the market will define it for you.

    Congratulations to these new marketers. It was a challenging 10 weeks, but they earned it last night as we brought it all to a close. Thanks to GA Atlanta for their brand, which is open, helpful, willing-to-try-anything, and all about making learning extremely fun and engaging. GA is a top notch addition to the Atlanta tech community. Well done everyone.

  • Why You Must Blog If You’re Running A Startup

    I’m in the content marketing business, so that’s generally the subject that ensues when someone asks me what I’m up to these days. When someone asks me what that means, I break it down into two parts: I create content strategy and I create content.

    What kind of content? Blogs. Those who understand the value of content marketing have no more questions. Those who do not (yet) understand the value of content marketing continue asking, mainly to determine how (and why!) one might make a living creating content (aka writing blogs) for other people.

    After a few minutes of explanation, the conversation usually ends up in the same place, which is what Mark Suster has said any number of times: if you’re a startup, you must blog. I could quote Suster’s Techcrunch article over and over and over, and I highly recommend that anyone considering a startup just bookmark it, and refer to it anytime you wonder why you’re trying to create prose when you’re not creating product. So go there and read it, and heed the advice of one of the most respected tech marketers on the planet.

    But there are other resources out there who (duh!) agree completely and offer up even more reasons that startup entrepreneurs should blog.

    Still not convinced? That’s ok. You will be, either by trying it and seeing the results for yourself, or seeing one or more of your competitors winning through inbound marketing strategies, the simplest of which is starting, growing, and maintaining and active blog.

    Suster repeats what I’ve heard so many times: “I’d like to blog, but I don’t really know what to talk about.” Don’t make it harder than it is. You know enough about something to start a business, right? Then you know enough to blog about that thing you’re building for that space you’re building it for and that problem you’re solving.

    That’s what you blog about. To quote Suster again, and wrap this thing up, “If you write about something for which you’re both knowledgeable and passionate, I’ll bet you can pump out more than you think.“

    Start your startup’s blog. Today.

  • Digital Marketing 101: Developing Your Brand Strategy

    Cross-posted from the General Assembly blog.
    Branding-For-Startups

    Before you start planning and executing a digital marketing strategy, you need to make sure that you have your branding strategy buttoned up first. Branding makes perfect sense to very experienced advertising and marketing professionals, but to the startup or small business owner, the term “branding” can be hard to nail down.

    In this first post of six in the series “Digital Marketing 101”, we’re going to give you solid steps that you can use to create and execute your brand strategy.
    Start with “Why?”


    Simon Sinek’s 2009 TED Talk is a wonderful explanation of the importance of where to start in your branding strategy, and that is “why do we exist?” This understanding, and the resulting ability to articulate your “why” very clearly and concisely in language that your target audience can understand, will be the foundation of your entire brand. Your “why” must be based on solving a problem for a large enough market segment to create a sustainable business. You exist to solve someone’s problem. Remembering the following point throughout the brand strategy creation process and then throughout every marketing tactic you ever use will be your guiding light: Your brand is everything you do.

    With this understanding (start with why, and your brand is everything you do), you can create your core branding statement by answering this question as briefly and simply as possible: why does your business exist? Your answer should be in terms of solving a problem for a market or market segment. For example: “ABC company builds MVP web apps for startups in 2 weeks for $5,000.” This statement identifies the customer segment (startups), the problem (startups need a minimum viable product to get to market and test an idea quickly) and their solution (MVP in 2 weeks for $5k). Furthermore, ABC company understands that startups don’t have (a) a lot of money or (b) a lot of time, and they’ve addressed both aspects of that customer profile.

    Know your customers

    At some point, you’ll actually meet and get to know your actual clients, but when you’re starting off, you need to “know your customers”, which means understanding who your ideal customer is. Create a persona of your ideal customer, name him or her, dress them up in the clothes that your customers wear, understand the words they speak, where they get information and influence, and most importantly, where they look to find what you will offer. Ultimately, complete customer profiles include an understanding of their identity, needs, and behavior.

    Your customers’ needs should match up exactly with your “why”, which is solving someone’s problem. In other words, your customers need your solution to their problem. Therefore, you must have a deep and complete understanding of that problem. That understanding usually comes from your own personal industry experience, in which you’ve lived that problem.

    Understand your business model

    The short version of your business model is “how do you make money?” Ultimately, you make money when you provide value for a customer who pays you for your product or service. That’s the easy way to think about it. But you must go deeper than that, and consider the following: 

    • How does your customer learn about your business? (marketing)
    • How long does it take for your customer to get from learning about you to purchasing? (sales cycle)
    • Where – specifically and exactly – does the purchase transaction take place? (distribution)
    • How do you deliver your product or service? (delivery)
    • Is your customer a one-time purchase or a subscription (or other repeat) customer? (lifetime customer value)
    • What kind of support does your product/service require, and how do you deliver that support? (customer service) 

    No two businesses are exactly the same, and if two businesses are very similar, branding is what sets them apart to the customer. Your brand is everything you do, and if you are not intentional about defining your brand, then the market will define your brand for you.

  • DGM2 Digital Demo Day

    With only two sessions remaining before our Final Presentations in the Digital Marketing class at General Assembly, tonight we’ll be doing a rapid fire three hour review of the last 9 weeks. The final projects that the 18 future marketers have to complete consist of a full digital marketing strategy document (less than 10 pages) and a stand up presentation (less than 5 minutes) with slides to the class. I’ve positioned this presentation as a pitch of a digital marketing campaign to the “board of directors”, which will be the rest of the class, and anyone else who wants to attend.

    That’s right, this is a demo day for our new digital marketers, and you’re invited. We’ll have beer, food, great company, and 18 short but fantastic presentations.

    Here’s what we’ve covered in since the last week in January, and what we’re thoroughly reviewing tonight.

    • Your Brand – where everything starts. What do you stand for? Why are you even in business? How will you treat your customers, users, employees?
    • Measuring & Metrics – there are certain metrics that any SaaS company must keep a close eye on. What does your business need to measure when it comes to digital marketing?
    • The Marketing Funnel – everybody’s got a marketing funnel. Does yours end with email subscribers, customers, users? What kind of exposure do you need to bring enough visitors to your website so your conversion rate and average order amount brings you your revenue goal?
    • Owned Content – what’s in your content arsenal – blogs, video, images, technical data – and how will you publish that content?
    • Paid Content / Ads – Where are your customers? That’s where you should be buying ads, but how do you know where they are? Facebook? Google? Twitter? Find out through small experiments, then stomp on the gas.
    • The Marketing Calendar – every marketer’s best friend. If you’re going to market with content, and we all do, whether we know it or not, then we must have a content marketing calendar. It’s as simple as a spreadsheet.

    So join us from 630 – 930 on Thursday April 2, at General Assembly at Ponce City Market. Yes, free beer, but you might also find your next great marketer. Either way, you’ll get a solid dose of what new marketers are learning.

  • Nothing Hurts Like a Date

    A wise friend and business partner many years ago said something to me when we were planning a project with our team. We had the what, the where, the why, and the how. We were all in agreement, and then he asked “when?” We all kinda mumbled and didn’t really give it any credence. Then he said with a little more emphasis, “When are we pulling the trigger? Nothing hurts like a date.”

    Nothing hurts like a date. Now I say that all the time, because it’s just so true.

    It’s easy to say you’re going to do this or that, but when you put a date on it, it becomes real. Put it on your calendar, and you’ll do it. You can tell a lot about a person by looking at their checkbook register (or nowadays their debit card charges) and their calendar. What do they do with their time and what do they do with their money?

    Yesterday, in preparation for their final projects, I was providing feedback for several Digital Marketing students, and the most common two pieces of feedback were (1) that their strategy documents were too long and (2) that there were no dates & times to anything. When we create goals, those goals should be “S.M.A.R.T.”: strategic, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time sensitive. Scripture us to  “number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” When you put it on the calendar, it becomes a real thing.

    One of the things that I notice about people on a daily basis is whether or not they have any sense of urgency about what they’re doing. Does “when” even matter to them? Yes, we live in a microwave super-size society, so we have come to expect things immediately, but when you’re building something, shouldn’t there be a sense of urgency in building it? That doesn’t mean to hurry and do a poor job. Rather, it means to count the days in which you have to do the thing you’re setting out to do.

    How do you number the days? You put a date on the calendar, make it real, and get some sense or urgency behind your action. Then go do it. Nothing hurts like a date written down on a calendar shared with your team.

  • Blogging for your Brand 2

    Tonight General Assembly hosted the second session of “Blogging for your Brand” at their new facility in Ponce City Market. This session was different from the first session back in January for several reasons:

    • New GA Facility
    • Paid ($10) vs. Free Event
    • Second Time Around

    So it was different, but very good. The staff and facility at GA Atlanta are both top notch, and everything went as smooth as it could possibly go. What I liked best about tonight’s session of this 2-hour workshop were the group’s new questions and the new perspectives that those questions brought to me and the rest of the group.

    For example, one of the questions was directed at me and the business behind Atlanta Tech Blogs: “How do you create a content strategy and branded content for someone you don’t even know?”  Great question, and the answer started with the fact that I get to know their brand first, then their audience, and then I can begin to create a strategy and original content based on their brand.

    Another great question was about frequency of blogging. There’s no standard for how often you should blog. David Cummings’ posts arrive between 9pm and 10pm every night, whereas John Saddington has several posts spread throughout the day, and Salesloft adds content to their blog 2-3 times each week. There’s no standard. Your frequency is up to you. The more important idea is consistency: whatever the frequency, be consistent.

    Also, an attendee asked about engaging with social media influencers, and whether or not one should engage those influencers using their personal twitter handle or the company’s twitter handle. Again, there’s no rule; however, that decision should stem from the company’s brand and culture, which drive social media engagement methods and boundaries, and ultimately drive the content that the company produces and shares.

    One of the longer discussions we had tonight was about branding, and how content itself as well as content strategy must come after branding. Branding determines your content voice, your content audience, your words, and your values. Those things make up content, so you should make branding decisions before you engage in a content marketing strategy.

    Thanks to everyone who attended, and to GA Atlanta for hosting. I look forward to leading this workshop again soon. Next Thursday, I’ll be leading a new workshop called “Pitch Camp“, which will be based on Pitch Practice, but focus far more on the mechanics of the pitch rather than having everyone stand up in front  of the room and deliver a pitch in exchange for feedback. I hope you can join me at this event next Thursday from 11am-1pm.

  • Upcoming Speaking Events

    Next week and the following week, I’m giving two talks at General Assembly’s newly opened campus at Ponce City Market. They have a fantastic new space in the renovated old building that’s prime for small and large group gatherings, and I’m excited to do these two talks in those new digs.

    First, this coming Wednesday, March 18th, from 6:30-8:30pm, I’ll be leading “Blogging for your Brand.” I gave this same talk back in January at GA’s old temporary space next to Dancing Goats. The crux of the talk is that everyone should be blogging and that anyone can create and maintain a useful, active blog for themselves or their company. Here’s the outline for the two-hour event.

    • Platforms – Blogger, WordPress, Medium, etc.
    • Starting – Most people’s biggest hurdle.
    • Writing – “I don’t even know what I’d write about!”
    • Best practices – How to make it count.
    • Promotion – You have to tell someone or nobody will know.
    • Measuring – Yup, Google Analytics.
    • Success stories – Be a millionaire! Or something.

    The following week, as part of General Assembly Atlanta’s “Launch Week”, I’ll be doing a similar talk to the one I gave at ROAM Dunwoody last fall called “Pitch Camp.” Pitch Camp will be on Thursday March 26, from 11am-1pm. For those two hours, I’ll be doing a much expanded version of the intro I give at every session of Pitch Practice, going deeper into how to craft and master your best pitch. Here’s how it’ll run.

    • Why everyone should learn to pitch
    • The anatomy of each type of pitch
    • 30 second elevator pitch
    • 3 minute pitch
    • 5-6 minute investor deck

    I hope you’ll join me for one (or both!) of these events. As always, both events will be full of learning, fun, and laughter. Both events are just $10 to attend.

  • Jason Dominy @ GA Digital Marketing Class

    The fourth and final of our guest speakers in this 2nd cohort of Digital Marketing at General Assembly was none other than coffee & beer master Jason Dominy. I met Jason in person in his office at The Dalton Agency last fall after we engaged in numerous digital conversations. Jason is a firm believer in 2Dto3D conversations.

    Last night, Jason joined us at Ponce City Market to teach us about Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook & Display Ads: what they’re good for and what they’re not good for.

    Jason started us off with a primer on the power of digital media advertising.  We used to be “on the ground” with advertising, and could only go where paper could take us, but now we can go anywhere we need to in order to get our audience, and rise above all the stuff on the ground.

    So where do we go in digital marketing? You go wherever your audience is. You can even go everywhere, but you don’t need to, because your audience isn’t everywhere. You determine where you go (by which we mean what ad channels and social networks we use, by learning where our customers are, what channels they use the most. There are dozens of tools to find this answer, but the easiest and most effective method of finding this information is to simply talk to your customers.

    Then create great content that your customers will like. But how do you know what type of content they’ll like, share, and engage? The best types of content are the types that we want to see in our timelines. Do you want to see what you’ve created? If not, change it. We’re all bombarded with content, so we need to market differently so that we stand out from the spammy noise makers.

    We don’t have a lack of content. We have a lack of quality content.

    Twitter

    Twitter is good for…

    • short updates
    • quick engagements
    • real time info
    • Quotes
    • Easily digestible content
    • targeting – amazing how granular marketers can get with twitter; e.g., if people follow a certain twitter user, target their timelines; and it’s not very expensive.

    The best Twitter ads don’t come across as ads. You get the audience’s attention with something that stands out.

    Twitter is not good for…

    • conversations
    • posting lots of information
    • overall reach for single tweets – tweets get served to all followers, but not everyone can see it.
    • posting out just marketing

    The average lifetime of a single tweet is measured in seconds, so it’s helpful and very much acceptable to post several times during the day the same content, even several days in a row at different times. You can’t do this on Facebook because their timeline algorithm is different. Also, sponsored tweets sit up near the top, so they may get seen more, but they’ll also get ignored more.

    Finally, if you have an egg as your avatar, you’re doing it wrong.

    LinkedIN

    LinkedIn is great for…

    • connecting B2B
    • recruiting / hiring
    • search – their blogging platform gets far more engagement
    • providing a great background for your business
    • targeting

    LinkedIn is not good for…

    • connecting with your fans
    • total reach
    • paid ads
    • tracking

    Display (aka banner) Ads

    Display Ads are great for…

    • targeting
    • tracking
    • catching attention
    • budgets

    Display ads not great for…

    • people who hate banner ads
    • your grandparents
    • bang for your buck
    • formatting – specific sizes for specific places on specific web sites
    • x marks the spot – we’re trained to click the X to close the ad

    Retargeting

    Retargeting is great for…

    • re-targeting those who already visited you
    • tracking
    • catching attention
    • reminding
    • success

    Retargeting is not good…

    • because it can be a little creepy
    • because it can backfire
    • because it causes brand fatigue
    • because your customer can’t turn it off

    Facebook

    Facebook is the most cost effective method of paid marketing today. Jason puts out ads every day for $20 and reach 8,000 people or $30 and reach 25,000 people. Really cost effective and hyper targeted.

    Facebook’s organic reach: if you have 20k followers, Facebook determines who sees your content and how often they see it, so now you really have to pay to play. That said, Facebook is still ridiculously cost effective to advertise.

    Knowing all of these channels are out there, available, and relatively cheap, you should find out where your audience is, and then put your money where your audience is.

    Thanks again to Jason Dominy of the Dalton Agency for taking time out of his Tuesday night to educate a group of future digital marketers. If you ever need help in that area, or in making a great cup of coffee or creating a great batch of craft beer, Jason is your guy.