PROACTIVE Podcast with Chris Hogan

Published Jun 21, 2018 This week we're looking at what media formats are the most successful on each of the Social Platforms, and sharing a few tips for how you can get the most out of your post!

and if it does and you don't know who owns it or what's going on there, then you've got to claim it, right? Andrew Groat: Yeah, because if you haven't created one and someone comes to your business and they have a good time or a bad time and they want to leave a review, they can create one like that and then, you have to make sure that you get on top of that and own that. Better yet, you should already have a Google My Business created so that they can find you and do the right thing. Chris Hogan: Claiming is easy, yeah? It's well- Andrew Groat: Provided no one owns it, yeah. Chris Hogan: That's right. What do people do if they need to claim their business listing? Andrew Groat: They just go to business.google.com and from there, they can either create one if there isn't anything yet. It's a really, really quick process. All you need is a Gmail account for that, or if it does exist and no one has verified their ownership of that, then it's the same process. You just claim that, no questions asked. It's yours now until further notice, but a lot of the time, people will create one for you and then they'll say that they're the owner because they may not realise what they're doing or maybe your competitors just decided that they want it, or maybe someone that worked for you created it and now, they don't work for you. This happens all the time. Then, the next step is you have to go and request ownership. That's where a lot of people just give up because it's a really ambiguous process. There's no explanation of what happens when you do that. It feels like there's no way to contact Google, so you have to ... It's the same website. Go to business.google/ad and then you enter the name of your business or your address, I think, as well and you'll see if it's already there. You click on that. You go through the steps, and then, if someone's already got access, it'll say someone already ... or ownership, someone will say, “Yeah, it's already owned by someone else.” Then, you can go through their request access process. What that does is send an email to the person that created that and then, they have seven days to either approve or deny the request or maybe they just won't even see it or maybe they'll ignore it. Once that process starts, you're kind of waiting for them to do the right thing. That's not a really good place to be. Chris Hogan: Especially because you don't actually know who it went to. The email address for who owns it is actually masked, so you can’t even determine what domain it's been owned by or anything like that. Andrew Groat: It’s hard to say, “Oh, wait. That was someone that worked here or that's someone I know,” so it just kind of goes into oblivion and then you have to hope for the best. Every now and then, if someone gets one of these requests, gets one of these emails from Google saying someone wants to take ownership and they ignore it, Google will say, “We didn't get a response,” so they'll just give it to you, that almost never happens. I've never seen that happen myself but apparently, that can happen. Here's some kind of steps to actually do that and how it really works after that. After the seven days is up, Google will send you an email saying either it was approved or denied or there was no response. Then, that's the second place a lot of people give up. They say, “Well, nothing I can do about it,” but right then and there is where you should be contacting Google. If there's a reference number in that email, just write that down because you'll need to talk to them about it. Contacting Google is one of those weird things. It's like if you search how do I call Google, you will spend an hour and find nothing, but there is a way to call them or request a callback and we'll put the link down the bottom here because it's a big link, but basically, you just go through the steps where you say, “This is my business name. This is the business listing that I'm trying to claim,” and you put your contact details and website, that sort of thing. Submit that. Submit your phone number and then they'll call you, and it says here that they call back within 60 seconds. Chris Hogan: Yes. It's normally an automated call and ... Andrew Groat: Then, you just explain what's going on. They'll probably ask if you've done the ownership request first, so if you haven't done that, don't bother calling them. They'll just make you go back and do it, but if you have, you've got that reference number there and you say, “Look, I've gone through the necessary steps. This person's not responding or they've denied it and I'm the business owner,” and then they’ll follow it up from there. They might ask you a couple more questions, maybe ABN or something like that so that they can go and check that. Then, they'll take it from there, but it's really important that you actually get on top of Google and call. Then, if it doesn't work the first time, call them again. Call them again. We spoke to someone recently and ...

Published Dec 8, 2017 How can you adjust your strategy to stay ahead of the curve in 2018? Well, behind every good content marketing campaign is some good old-fashioned market knowledge. TO MASTER YOUR MARKETING YOU NEED TO KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE. Don't get left behind next year! Listen to your demographic and keep up-to-date with the latest marketing trends to create content your audience actually wants to engage with. You can start by asking your existing customers which products or services are of interest to them. Watch our 72nd episode of ‘Get Fact Up’ to bring your marketing A-game into 2018. VIDEO TRANSCRIPT: G'day world, Chris Hogan coming to you live from the Me Media studio here at Burleigh Heads on the Gold Coast in Australia, if you're listening from overseas. Today, I want to cover off, what is your 2018 marketing strategy going to look like? Now, obviously we've come to the end of 2017, and it's like, "Whoa, what a big year, just need a rest." But, I'm sure many of you are going to be taking a break, and maybe even taking a break from devices. So, this marketing strategy ... This thought process that I'm about to let you in on, is very simple done, and you can do it without your device. So, let's go. So, there's heaps of different ways to actually approach a marketing strategy. Some people say, follow the four P's, the seven C's, the four C's. The four P's are: Price, Product, Promotion, and Place. If you add another three to that, you've got the seven P's. Which is: Process, People and Physical Evidence. And, then there's the four C's: consumer wants and needs, cost, convenience, and communication. So, today, all I want for you is to understand a really simple concept. And, that is to remember one thing: Know your audience. That's all you have to do before you kick off, actually typing out your marketing strategy for 2018. So, knowing your audience basically means talking to your existing customers, talking to friends and family about: what product it is that you sell, or service that you sell, and whether or not they would purchase it, how they would go about purchasing it, when they would want it, who do they trust, when purchasing that product. Do they trust you? Or do they trust another marketplace? For example, do they trust eBay, over your online store, or do they trust Amazon over your online store. Why do they need your product or service? Why do they need it? Not want it, need it. Why buy from you and not your competitor? What did they need to know before they buy? Huge question there, right? So, there's so many questions that can come into purchasing a single product before they actually hit the transact button. And, those questions can be ... what do I need to do if I return this product? How are we going to work together? I don't understand how we integrate me and you, and this service that you're offering. So, how are you going to break that down? So, your audience, what kind of media are your audience going to want to interact with? Is it, long-form blog content, long-form written content, infographics, video? Now, it goes without saying that video is absolutely the best type of content you can produce for a product page, or even a service landing page. But, there might be instances where people can't actually watch the video, they don't have their headphones with them while they're on the train to work. And, I actually had someone say that to me the other day, that they've been loving Get Fact Up. And, I was like, "Well, thanks very much for the compliment. And, it's great to know that somebody's listening." And, they said, "Actually I read it. I read the transcript while I was on my way to work on the train, because I forgot my headphones." So, there you go. If you do produce a video, consider having a transcript for it. There's so many reasons why somebody can purchase from you. There's so many reasons why they won't. So, very simply, know your audience this end of season. And, change-over into the new year actually feeling empowered and knowledgeable about who your market is. Because, if you don't have a market, then your product has no place. You're never going to sell anything if you do not know your market. That's it from me. That's it from Me Media for 2017. We hope you loved Get Fact Up, and the new way that we produce. I can't wait for 2018. I'm not going to say it's bigger and better, because everybody else does. So, I want you to take care. I want you to take a digital detox. And, I want you to just think about your customer. Ask questions, and maybe jot it down in a notepad. Take a break. Take it easy and see you in 2018.

Published Nov 13, 2017 Chris: Good day, world. Chris Hogan and Andrew Groat coming to you live from the MeMedia studio here at Burleigh Heads for "Get Fact Up" episode number 68 - on important marketing metrics to track. How you going, Andrew? Andrew: Good. How are you? Chris: Good, mate. So website traffic is probably the number one metric that people tend to track when they’re looking at - obviously their marketing reports. And we know that being that high a level probably isn't good enough. Andrew: Yeah, traffic’s not really that important. There’re other things that you should be looking at. Chris: Cool. So we've got some example Google Analytics snapshots that we've got here from the Interwebs. And we wanted to just have a look over those and break some of them down. So here we have the Google Analytics snapshot of acquisitions and channels, it's real easy to find. And it's breaking down that high level traffic into multiple different channels... Andrew: The different marketing streams, yeah. So this one’s eCommerce business, and straight off the bat you can see that something's wrong here, ‘cause you’ve got paid searches as the highest traffic. But, you need to circle a few things here, so the problem here is the bounce rate is massive. Paid search, high bounce rate, a lot of money's gone down the drain quite frankly. Chris: So let's talk about bounce rate while we're on that. So between 55% and 70% bounce rate is considered high. Anything over 70% is considered pretty much extreme. So it's time to bring that down. Andrew: So just to explain what a bounce is, it’s when someone comes to your page - doesn’t click on anything and then they leave. So someone that didn't interact with your page at all. Chris: And bounces can happen a lot. Especially in search and social - ah sorry, in paid search and social, because people have searched for a particular product. Andrew: They may not necessarily wanna see it. You might have put it in front of them when they don't want it. Chris: In paid search they've searched for a particular product, they've clicked on that link to that paid page and they've seen what they wanted to see - probably priced, they're shopping around, boom they're gone again. If you didn't entice them to click through to another page, then essentially they've bounced. And they could’ve been sitting on that page for a long time. In fact, they could’ve been sitting on that for hours, all day, reading all the content that you had to offer, but if they didn't click through to another page it's called a bounce. So the same thing can happen in social, right? Because... Andrew: Yeah, we say this all the time that social's people's down time. And if you're putting ads in front of them and they don't realise it, they've clicked through to an ad, they're often just gonna bail back out of that. Social traffic tends to have high bounce rate and lower engagement metrics because of that. But, it's a great branding opportunity, it's not a right off there. You just have to be showing the right sort of content, maybe not necessarily trying to get someone to buy something straight from Facebook. Chris: And then we've got on that same slide we've got their conversion rate, and 3.11 conversion rate. Conversions categorised as 2% as average, 5% is good and 10% plus is great. So they're sitting between averaging good. Now if we were going to say, for example if the client said, "Hey, while I'm getting lots of traffic on paid search, that's great, I'm gonna increase my spend." Andrew: Well I would say don't even bother. Especially when you have a little bit further down that email traffic is a 10.24% conversion rate. I would be saying do more email campaigns, 'cause that's obviously working really well. And then maybe have a look at bringing this bounce rate down, put a bit of work into that. Make some more relevant content, have a look at your page load potentially and have a look at your targeting - maybe you're showing your ads to the wrong people. Chris: There's so much you can do in eCommerce. Show that there's a sale on and that it's a limited time. For example, there's a counter there just above the "add to cart" button that says buy now or you'll miss out. For instance... Andrew: Get some more testimonials. Get some more reviews and writings and things like that. Chris: More content on that page essentially. So that is called conversion rate optimisation. Improving your page to improve conversions. If you can improve those conversions then potentially go back and invest more dollars into that paid advertising. Andrew: I would also say maybe get a heat map or a screen recording software installed on the website and actually get some hard data - hard evidence about what's going on there. It might just be as simple as there's no calls to action above the fold, it might be a real easy fix. Chris: Could be an error. Paid search - don't forget if you've got so many heaps of campaigns, that's a very high le...

Published Oct 20, 2017 Andrew: G'day world. Andrew Groat and Chris Hogan coming to you live from the MeMedia Studios here at Burley Heads for, Get Fact Up! And today we're talking about? Chris: Podcasting. Andrew: Podcasting. Chris: Podcasting as a marketing tool. Andrew: Absolutely. Chris: Or a content marketing tool, yeah. Andrew: Are we podcasting? Chris: We are podcasting right now. We're doing a podcast about podcasting. Andrew: We are. We're more vodcasting, so video on demand casting. Chris: Is that what it is? Andrew: Yeah. Chris: Oh, okay. Of course. Of course, it is! Andrew: I actually don't know what "pod" means? Chris: It's just from iPod, it's just stuck around since then. Andrew: Excellent. Cool, let's get cracking on! So podcasting as a marketing tool is actually really effective and I think there's plenty of high profile entrepreneurs that have been alluding to podcasting as a great way to get out to your audience, and that audio is a great way to engage with your audience, especially during those down times that people have. Those mundane tasks that people have throughout their day. Some of those might be driving to and from work, some of them might be walking to and from the post office, or while you're on lunch walking to and from the café, or sandwich shop where you're getting your sandwich. And the other ones are on the weekends, so mowing you know, I have to mow lawn so- Chris: So you listen to a podcast as well. Andrew: ... I listen to a podcast. Chris: I mean, you can listen to a podcast while you're working, you can ... yeah, driving, driving's a big one yeah. Andrew: Yeah, so some people I know that have pretty lack lustre jobs, actually do have a earpiece in one ear, and they're not that engaged with their work, it's packing boxes or something or other, and that's how they get through their day. Chris: Yeah, and stuck on the train, there's heaps of times when- Andrew: Exactly. Chris: ... when you need something like that. The thing is, the reach of podcasting is huge at the moment. There's so many platforms out there that you have access to and everyone's looking for this sort of content. And it's strange, I was talking about this today, like the success of podcast, it's a little bit surprising when you think the format would've died out by now. But I think it's because it's so personal and endearing, and when someone's done it professionally, it really gives you a window into the people behind whatever industry you're talking about. What it's like to be in their shoes and their world. And you learn really vicariously through podcasts I think, so it's a cool format. Andrew: Yeah, a lot of people that I listen to. So one of my good friends got me into listening to podcasts only a few years ago, and the first one I started listening to was Joe Rogan. Now, he's not for everybody, he swears a lot, and he's very opinionated on certain topics, but he'd get some really interesting cats on there, and they have great conversation and tell life stories that are just fascinating. Or they're researchers, they're authors, and they're sharing how they came to write about the book that they wrote, and man, there's some amazing stories that come through. Chris: It's funny, because if you think about these podcasts, and you just feel like you're getting smarter listening to them, it doesn't matter what they're talking about. You're like, "These are smart people talking. I'm getting smarter listening to this." It's just how you, especially Joe Rogan, you feel that way about him, but most of the time he's just talking about crap. Like he's just, he's waffling on about stuff. Andrew: He really is. Chris: But you genuinely feel smarter listening to it. Andrew: You do. You absolutely do. So some of the podcasts that I love is Joe Rogan, London Real was the next one that I think I got into, which is fantastic. Then there's Ben Greenfield's Fitness, which is awesome. Doctor Rhonda Patrick, she's a research scientist and goes heavily into nutrition and is big on mental health and how to improve mental health. Doctor Michael Greger, I'm not sure that he actually has a podcast, but he has appeared on many podcasts and he's also a researcher on nutrition. I'm heavily into nutrition, I love nutrition, so I listen to a lot of those types of ones. But then there's the business ones like Tim Ferris, he's got a great podcast. He's always talking about optimising time and stuff like that, and the guests that he gets on, he's talking to them about how they made the best of their lives and stuff like that. So I guess there's lots of different niches where people can actually plug into with podcasting. Like there's already heaps of podcasts out there worldwide. Chris: Yeah, that's it. A lot of people might think, "There's so much there, is it saturated?" But it's not really. Andrew: No. Chris: The amount of people watching and listening to podcasts doesn't mean saturation, because if you got a unique podcast,...