Social Media Presence for Business
Episode 1024: Social Media Presence for Business, with Jason Yormark
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Social Media Presence for Business — Learn strategies to enhance brand visibility and drive growth through our guide on social media presence for business.
Social media presence for business is an essential strategy for establishing brand identity, engaging with customers, and expanding market reach in the digital landscape. For today’s episode of Onward Nation, we have our guest Jason Yormark. He will walk us through the path to becoming a social media expert.
Jason Yormark is the founder of Socialistics (www.socialistics.com), a leading B2B social media agency that helps businesses turn their social media efforts into real measurable results. He is a 20+ year marketing veteran whose prior work has included launching and managing social media efforts for Microsoft Advertising, Office for Mac, the Air Force, and Habitat for Humanity. Jason has been recognized as a top B2B social media influencer and thought leader on multiple lists and publications including Forbes, ranking #30 on their 2012 list.
The significance of maintaining a strong social media presence for businesses cannot be overstated, as it serves as a powerful tool for encouraging customer relationships, promoting brand awareness, and driving growth in today’s interconnected digital world.
What you’ll learn in this episode is about social media presence for business:
- Why developing a social media presence for business success is crucial in today’s competitive market, and how Jason’s career path led to becoming a social media expert
- Why the key to leveraging social media is found in focusing on the right metrics and getting real results
- What challenges Jason and his team have faced in dealing with organizations’ past bad experiences working with marketing agencies
- Why Jason is intentional about his interactions with clients and is focused on building relationships that can blossom over time
- Why a key part of being a successful entrepreneur is learning to overcome the fear of being on your own
- Why marketing is often the first thing that gets blamed when there are problems in the business, and why marketing is seldom the fix for deeper problems
- Why being committed to their social media niche has been a powerful catalyst for growth at Socialistics
- Why the key to a successful social media presence for business is to meet people where they are and leverage your reach
- Why the level of intentionality Jason and his team practice and the trusted reputation they’ve cultivated have improved the number and quality of incoming leads they get
Additional Resources:
- Elevate your insights about social media presence for business by reading this blog from Socialistics: Tis the Season to Sell: Boost eCommerce Sales with Social Media
- Learn more about social media presence for business, and you can find Jason here.
- LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jasonyormark/
- LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/socialistics/
- Facebook: www.facebook.com/socialistics
- Twitter: @jasonyormark
- Twitter: @socialistics
Social Media Presence for Business: Full Episode Transcript
Get ready to find your recipe for success from America’s top business owners here at Onward Nation with your host, Stephen Woessner.
Good morning. I’m Stephen Woessner, CEO of Predictive ROI, And your host for Onward Nation, where I interviewed today’s top business owners, So we can learn their recipe for success, how they built and how they scaled their business. So, Onward question for you, maybe a couple of questions for you. Does the mere mention of social media invoke an eye-roll from you or your team? I know sometimes, and it definitely does for me. Or, the very least, is social, not at the top of your priority list as a business owner, which oftentimes it’s not in the top vital priorities.
And the reality is there are lots of reasons for you to feel that way, whether it’s the number of channels or how often “we should be there.” I mean, wouldn’t it be awesome, though, if we could forget about all of those vanity metrics, the things like Facebook likes and comments and Instagram followers, and instead focus on growing our audience and nurturing leads by being helpful so that when somebody in your audience is ready when they actually have a need and they need somebody to solve a particular problem or a business issue, they think of you and it’s really easily, they raise their hand and they easily step into a relationship with you.
Social Media Presence for Business: Jason Yormark’s Introduction
Well, that said, this doesn’t change. The fact, though that some of today’s most important buying decisions that your prospects are making are influenced in forged digitally. And yes, that does mean Social. So, to help us break all of this down, I invited Jason Yormark to join us as our guest expert. Jason is the founder of Socialistics, which is a leading business-to-business social media agency that helps business owners, just like you and me, turn their social media into real measurable results and impact so that they measure what matters most.
So, without further ado, welcome to Onward Nation, Jason. Thank you for making me glad to be here.
Well, thank you for saying yes. Thank you for coming onto the show to be our mentor in guide on this very important topic before we dive in, which I’m sure it’s going to feel like a litany or a barrage of questions coming your way. Take us behind the curtain, Jason, and tell us a little bit more about you and your path and your journey, and then we’ll dive in.
Sure. So, I’m a roughly 25-year marketing pro. I started way back in the; I guess that dates me back to the late nineties. I really just kind of started out building websites and learning about search marketing. You know, when Google was starting to really kind of take shape and just helping small business owners navigate that and had followed a relatively traditional career path. I always had an entrepreneurial spirit, but that always felt out of reach for me, kind of felt too, too crazy. You know, I just felt like I had to have the job. I had to have the nine-to-five or sitting behind a desk, the benefits, and all that good stuff. I had school loans to pay for.
So that was the responsible thing to do. So, for many years, I followed that path despite the internal struggles that existed within me in terms of having that entrepreneurial spirit. So did that for a while. Thought I wanted to be a teacher, did that for a little bit. That was not the path, but it’s certainly learned a lot from that as well. Then ultimately landed at Microsoft, which was a turning point for my career, moved from Chicago to Seattle to help launch their search product at the time called Ad Center and was there for about six or seven years. That’s really when I got into Social, which was about 2000, 5, 6, 7. I really started getting into it then, and then I parlayed that experience and got laid off.
That was the first time they ever laid anybody off. They laid off thousands of people, and Bean is just kind of checking people off of lists. I was one of them, unfortunately, and long story short ended up going back to my Microsoft. I didn’t really feel that that was the right move. Then I parlayed all of that Microsoft experience into spending another ten years on the agency side managing social media teams, doing social media for Fortune 5,000 companies, and every product you could think of got onto Forbes Power, social media influencers list based on other work that I had done on my own personal branding and growing at relatively large Twitter following. And then eventually, when the time was right in my life, I decided I finally could take that risk and launched.
Social Media Presence for Business: Building a Successful Social Media Agency
Socialistics about three and a half years ago. And haven’t looked back since, and we’ve been able to build a really successful social media agency, helping all kinds of businesses, to your point, leverage social media around real results. It’s been an incredible journey, and I couldn’t be more thrilled about who we are, what we’ve become, and what the future holds for us. So that’s my story.
So, I’m running the risk of asking the obvious question, and I know that might sound silly to start here, but when you say leverage social media around real results, why is that obviously important? Why was that so deeply important to you? Was it because you saw so much activity on social media, but there was a lack of measuring what it really was?
Yeah. I think I was embarrassed by my track record in marketing. When you look at my marketing career, I always feel that I should’ve had a lot of jobs in my life. Not in many of those cases had they had nothing to do with my performance, in fact, ever, but I had been laid off. I had been fired for a variety of different reasons out of my control, and it wasn’t until I really kind of researched and looked at professional marketers on LinkedIn that and realized nobody who’s a marketer ever has one job or two jobs over the course of their career. That’s very rare. and then that’s because that’s always a flavor of the month thing marketing, and it gets a bad rap.
And so many businesses have bad experiences for every great marketer or every great marketing agency. There are probably 10 to 20 to 30 horrible ones because the barrier to entry is relatively low, so it’s not difficult to fool people around that. You can kind of come in and kind of fool people for a while, at least in a certain period of time, before they figure it out. And unfortunately, that happens a lot. And it’s been kind of a blessing and a curse because a lot of the opportunities that come our way are coming from a bad experience. So it’s bad because now I’ve got, I’m inheriting their lack of trust from somebody else.
Social Media Presence for Business: The Importance of Real Results in Marketing
So that’s difficult. I gotta work through that. The second part is the part that’s good about that as well. I know who we are, and I know what we’re capable of. And I know we do things the right way, so I can just get them to try us out and work with us. I know what I’m over. So there are these other horrible marketers; their mistakes or their inability to deliver results can, in essence, work out in our favor because we do things the right way. So it’s easy nobody’s going to disagree or argue about the concept of real results from marketing or real results from social media. And everybody’s going to say, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s important, but nobody’s going to disagree with that. So everybody’s going to say, but to do it as a whole other level of sophistication and experience, that’s where you really separate the pretenders from those that really know how to do that.
And even though it’s relatively easy to say that, like we say that as an agency, we’re about real results. I mean, that doesn’t necessarily make us unique or different. I mean, it does in reality, but just from a positioning standpoint, I don’t think that anybody sees that and thinks, oh, they’re about real results and nobody else. I mean, so it’s not really a differentiator, but it’s important to us because, you know, we’re not in the business of trying to get a client to work with us for a short period of time. It’s much more important to us that they work with us forever or for Afro, for as long as it possibly can. Keeping clients is so much more important to us than winning new ones.
And we’ve reached a threshold in our agency where we can be very selective about who we work with. So we say no, a lot. We turn away a lot of opportunities that aren’t a good fit for us, and that’s a great place to be. That’s why we want to work with clients that we know are going to have staying power for us. And part of that is their realization. That real result takes time. It doesn’t happen overnight. It’s not a quick fix. And if you really want to build a scalable model, you’ve got to stick with it and see it through. So we just, that that’s our rallying cry. This is all about real results. We have case stories and studies that all reflect that across a variety of different industries and continue to just push that narrative that social can lead you there.
You just have to have the right partner. This is going to be a lot of fun as we continue to peel this back here, where you mentioned teaching. So, as we continue to peel this, do you find yourself still teaching? Oh yeah, absolutely. So, I spent $20,000 us on a master’s degree to be a teacher, and it didn’t work out for me. It wasn’t the right thing. I coached volleyball, and I thought, oh, I’m a great coach. I want to be a teacher. And that didn’t quite translate. Like I thought it would. But the cool thing about it is that I believe this is true for everybody. Your experiences kind of define who you are and what you’re able to do. It’s certainly going through that.
Social Media Presence for Business: The Power of Teaching and Transparency in Building Client Relationships
Social media presence for business: I certainly didn’t leverage that education, maybe as it was intended to be, but I love to teach. I love to help people. I love to educate people. You know, I love to do those sorts of things. I do it every day. I do it on every intro call. I have, I do it on every pitch that I give. You know, I want our clients to understand as much about what we do and the why and the how to the extent that they want or are interested in. I want them to know how the sausage is made. I want them right. This inherently increases the likelihood that they will continue to work with us. There’s no mystery to what we do. I want to be very transparent about that.
And part of that is helping them understand we do what we do and why we do what we do. And that, I think, inherently helps us keep clients, and they enjoy working with us. So, and I look, I love these pots, like doing podcasts like this, doing talks at events, and so on. You know, we, we have a podcast, I put out videos when I think of something that’s useful, I’d love to help, not only clients but even more so other agency owners and other folks that are interested in starting a business that I love sharing my insights and experiences to help them maybe navigate waters that I found more difficult and took me longer to figure out.
And if they can glean something from that and get there more quickly than I did, then I really feel like I’ve done something meaningful. So
Our nation here’s, here’s what you just heard. Jason said Jason talked about how important it is to be an authority in the space, to be generous enough, and to teach every single day to help your audience, your clients, your prospects, and your stakeholders to become better every day. And to do that in a transparent and super generous way. He said, you know how the sausage is made awesome. He used the word transparency. And in a few minutes before that, before he really broke that down in great detail, which was awesome. Jason, you said the clients or prospects who are coming to you you’re inheriting, or yeah.
Social Media Presence for Business: Building Trust Through Transparency
You’re inheriting their lack of trust. Well, one of the ways Onward Nation to instill trust is to be willing to actually show how the sausage is made. Right, right.
Yeah. For sure. I mean, as I said, when I get on a lot of calls, and they’ve spent a lot of money and haven’t seen the results, and a lot of times those calls don’t necessarily even lead to them becoming clients for a variety of reasons. Maybe the budgets don’t align; they’re not quite ready. They’ve got some other things I got to deal with, or they just they’ve got other fires to put out, but I still like to take the time to at least authentically help them provide some sort of value, add to them because my whole belief is if you operate that way every day, then good things will eventually lead their way to you. They may not be a client tomorrow, but maybe they will be six months from now. And that’s happened time and time again. I’ve had opportunities come back to us when they were ready because of those meaningful conversations that we had earlier.
Social media presence for business — So those are seeds. I plan all the time, and it’s not, I don’t even think of it as sales. I mean, it is to a certain extent, but really, it’s just about being authentically helpful and providing value, adding to people, even if you feel like, well, this is probably not going to turn into a client opportunity in the short term, but they’re good people. And they seem I want to be helpful to them, and you know, it doesn’t lead to something all the time, but if you just commit to operating in the world that way, then good things will come your way eventually.
Force. I mean, it could be a day or a decade, and that will get back to you. So let’s talk about the reason why I’m going to ask you to give us some more insight into the name of your agency. Socialistics is important because I think there’s some story there. I think that there’s some point of view there. I think there are some important lessons for Onward Nation business owners to hear you walk them through about how you knit it together, your point of view, and your belief in the agency name. Now, I could be a hundred percent wrong and honest Onward Nation. Jason and I did not talk about this in the green room. So it’s not some sort of crafty setup on my part.
So Jason, take us through Socialistics. Why did you decide on that name?
Social Media Presence for Business: The Evolution of Socialistics
Yeah, so I think I bought the domain, like, I want to say, 10 or 15 years ago. Originally, my thinking at the time was that I was going to use it to build some sort of social media analytics platform, like software as a service kind of thing. And that never really panned out just because of the company. I didn’t have a background in development, and you know, it’s just a tougher path to go down unless you have a partner who does that sort of thing. And then, so I just kind of held on to it for a while. And then it was always kind of there reminding me of, like, I’ve got this thing, and what am I going to do with that someday?
Social media presence for business — And it was less for me; it was more about just waiting for the right time in my life to be ready to do it. You know, it really is. Everybody is different. You know, some people are ready when they’re in their twenties. Some thirties for me, it was, I was, I don’t know, I was 43, 44, and there’s nothing, there’s no right or wrong path. It’s just everybody’s unique in their particular life experiences and what makes sense for them. So then it just clicked for me I loved the name cause I felt like it inherently lent itself to a social media business, like kinda the Google effect: you make up a word, and it becomes synonymous with what you do.
So I love it in that respect, full disclosure. One thing I don’t like about it is I’ve gotten the occasional people sometimes will associate it with, oh, this is just some sort of socialist business. And I’m like, no, it’s not politically speaking.
Right, right. Oh. Especially in the current environment that we’re in, it doesn’t happen often. I’ve gotten kind of over that, especially if we, as we’ve kind of made a name for ourselves, in what we do. But, yeah, I mean, it’s been a great name. I mean, I don’t; it’s not really any more sophisticated of a reason than that. It was just I got lucky and had it for a while and thought that I might use it in another capacity, and then it just all came together, and the brand, the look, the feel, and it’s really been, it’s been a great brand. I mean, I think it’ been a considerable factor in our ability to grow organically, for sure.
Social Media Presence for Business: The Vital Skills for Business Owners
It is a great name. And when I think about what you just shared with us about how important trust is that you love and educate, that you love to teach, yeah. You love to share and teach in full transparency how the sausage is made, how you tie that back to results, and how important that team is and how important it is for your team to be able to show results. I think it’s a great name, and it just really embodies all of that, in my opinion.
Yeah. I think the whole idea was combining social and logistics. So, yeah, I mean, it’s about us very well, no doubt.
So, if I were to ask you, in your opinion, again, agency owners, business coaches, and strategic consultants who are listening to you right now, that’s our audience here at Onward Nation. We’re thinking about like skillsets that if I were to ask you, like, Jason, what do you think is the most important skillset for owners today, whether that dips into social or doesn’t that they need to master in order to continue to build and scale their business? Yeah. What might that be for you?
Social media presence for business? A couple of things come to mind. I think you definitely have to be an incredibly great communicator, whether that’s spoken word or written word. I think you really need to be a strong communicator who thinks that’s key to anything. I mean, personally or professionally, it’ll take you a long way. Another thing that has really stood out for me, at least personally, and I think that other people can relate to this is, and I don’t know what word or phrase would encapsulate it in a succinct way, but it’s, it’s really overcoming fear for me. I mean that I have tried to start a business multiple times in my life. If I look back, I can certainly see that the situations that I went through influenced my ability to continue to do that.
Ultimately, what it came down to was that I wasn’t ready because I was still afraid of that life. The risks that come with starting your own business, not getting a steady paycheck, not having health benefits and 401k, and that stability that I was always craving or needing throughout my entire life. Like the fear always got in the way of progress for me when it came to the businesses that I had tried to run specifically, I tried to start an agency ten years ago, and it was starting to kind of get a little more, a bit of momentum, but I wasn’t ready yet because the fear was still there and it kind of was a crutch. I didn’t realize that maybe at that moment, but looking back, I can I could see that now because the fact of the matter is when I decided to go full-time and go all in with the Socialistics, I had reached a point of, I was just done with corporate America, and I was on my, I don’t know, who knows how many of if the job and it didn’t go well again, for reasons out of my control.
Social Media Presence for Business: Unlocking Success in Business and Finding Your Niche
And I was just done. I’m like, you know what, I’m just going to do this, and I’m just going to go for it. And this is obviously what I should be doing. The minute I made that realization, I went into it without fear and just went for it, and everything took off. I was like, it was like the, the handcuffs were off, and I had grown. I turned, I mean, within a couple of months, I had a business that was making enough to pay me and somebody else already. And I would like, literally within three months, I’m like, this is it. Like, I just had to get rid of that fear. Like, and then it’s taken off since then. So, the minute I was able to get past that and just go for it, you’d be shocked at it.
In your mind, you can’t even realize how it can prohibit you from being successful. And the minute I put that fear behind me, the business took off. And I think if you can find a way to do that, that’s the secret recipe, I think, to really being able to start and build a successful business.
Isn’t it amazing how we can be our own worst enemy or our own blockade to move?
For sure. I mean, everybody’s got something off, or I think, for the most part, you just gotta find out what that is. And for me, I mean, it was, it was social media. I mean, I was a little scared to focus on that instead of being like a general marketing agency. I mean, I still don’t have that experience across all marketing facets, but I decided, you know what, this is my lane. This is kind of where I’ve made my name. And then the interesting thing about it is I’m not really interested in social media personally. Like I don’t spend a lot of time. I mean, I consume, but I don’t post that much. It’s kind of like the whole. If you’re a car mechanic and you’re working on cars all day, do you really want to come home and work on your own car? No, probably not. Same thing with me. Like, I don’t know. It’s just personally not super interesting to me, but professionally.
Yeah, for sure. I mean, I know how to navigate that, or I’ve got a team of incredible tacticians and strategists who know how to navigate these waters in ways that help businesses grow. So it makes sense that in that realm, it’s kind of like, don’t be afraid of what you know and what you’re best at. And that’s combined with getting rid of your fear, and good things can happen.
Well, I think it’s also awesome. How, well, let me give this back to you because I don’t want to make an assumption. So it sounds like you and your Socialistics team have planted your flag in Social, as opposed to being a generalist-like full-service integrated agency that tries to do everything. Yeah. There are some who do a great job doing everything, but oftentimes, that’s not the case. So then what happens when somebody comes to you and says, Hey, Jason, we would like you to do whatever. And it’s outside of using your words, the land. So how, how, how do you answer that?
Social Media Presence for Business: Putting Client Needs First
Social media presence for business? Yeah, so we never like a lot of agencies that specialize, not all, but many will try to talk you into their thing because that’s what they do, regardless of whether that’s what’s best for you. We don’t do that. Like if somebody, if a, not if a business comes to us and they have limited resources, I really just try to get to the crux of what success looks like to you. What are you trying to achieve? What do you have to work with us and really figure that out? And if that doesn’t align, if that doesn’t make social the priority, I will tell them, I really think you should be doing search marketing, or you really need to work on getting your website. You know, your sales process seems broken, and I think you really should be investing here.
It doesn’t make any sense to try to just take their money and do social. When I know that there are other things that might make more sense for them, or there are areas in their business that are broken, that social isn’t gonna affect, right? I mean, any good marketer knows whether this is social media or any search. Whatever it is, great marketing doesn’t fix bad products; bad services are broken sales processes, but marketing is the first thing that gets blamed, right? If those are those things that are broken, and you’re spending money on marketing and things aren’t working 99% of the time, business owners will point the finger at marketing. And there’s nothing that you can say or do that’s going to change that. So you had better make sure that those things are where they need to be before you’re putting money into them.
Otherwise, it just blows up. And I don’t want that. We don’t want clients that just pay us to do a thing for six months and then six months later. Why, why isn’t this working? Like, that’s not, no, that’s going to end badly. They’re going to leave. They’re not going to have kind words about us. Our reputation is critical to our ability to grow as a business. So, if they come to us and there are other needs that outweigh what we do, I will recommend them to other avenues. Like, I really think you need to do this first. And here’s why, and here are some recommendations for doing that. Now, things come to us, and they have the resources to do a couple of different things. Social is a critical component, but there are some other things.
Social Media Presence for Business: How Socialistics Maximizes Client Value Through Strategic Partnerships
Social media presence for business — Then, we still stick to our guns. That’s what we do. That’s our superpower. Now, if they say, Hey, we want to do a little bit of search marketing, or we need help with our website. I have partnerships for that. I’m not going to do that work internally, but I’ve built partnerships that I trust are going to deliver. And I can just extend those relationships to our clients or potential clients, which they then value because then they don’t have to go through that whole dog and pony show that they did with us. It’s like, okay, we build trust with you. You say you have a partner that can do this thing for us. Great. And they are just able to plug into that relationship. And we don’t we don’t charge for that. It’s just the value add that we give. Hey, if you need something for your website or you want something to do your search marketing, here’s a great resource for that.
I’ll put you in touch with them inherently. We already work together. So any kind of synergy that we need to be thinking about between different work streams will inherently exist without you having to do anything extra. So we stay in our lane; we stay at what we do. As we grow our client relationships inherently, they ask us for other things because they like the relationship that we have. And I just heard you go, I need to search. I’ve got you covered in web SEO, whatever they need. I have relationships that I can kind of plug them into.
So, Onward, this has been a great lesson from Jason, really slicing apart the three elements of niche. So if you’ve, if you’ve read some of the authority that drew McLellan and I wrote, we, we took niche, and we broke it down into three core elements that could be industry. It could be your knowledge of an audience in particular, or it might be a superpower. And you just heard Jason describe their superpower at Socialistics in-depth, that being social media and how committed they are to stay in their lane and then building a periphery of other partners and affiliates, or, however, you want to describe it of helpful resources that when something’s outside of your lane, you can confidently then make a recommendation.
Social Media Presence for Business: Learning from a Simple Yet Impactful Lesson
Love that, Jason. That was awesome. So, yeah, for sure. Really, really cool. Let’s think about mentorship here for a quick second as you’re thinking about your path and journey, and if I were to ask you, Hey, Jason, what’s the most influential lesson that you ever learned from one of your mentors because now I think you’re in the mentorship education business. Like I can tell, that is something that you really enjoy doing, teaching, and so forth. So, if I were to ask you, what was the most influential lesson you ever learned from one of your mentors?
Would that be? That was a good question. I have a specific answer because, unfortunately, I have not had a lot of great mentors or managers in my life. A lot of what I’ve had to navigate professionally has kind of been on my own. And I think, inherently, those experiences have been a big part of the reason why I am the way that I am. I think that the lack of having had that makes me want to provide that more, which is very similar to my personal life. I grew up with just my mom and my brother. I never had a father, so I never really experienced what it was like to have a father. And that inherently, I think, made me a better father, and I want to be the best that I can be for my kids in that way. So it applies professionally too, but there was one individual that I finally came across later in my career. What was that for me?
And he had a saying, that’s always stuck with me, and it’s always kind of resonated and influenced what I did. And it was very simple. It was just two words; everything speaks. Well, What was the phrase that he kind of shared with me and kind of really fostered enemies in that particular role and all the work that I did? And it’s obvious, I think, what that means, but what it really meant to me is just everything that you do, especially when you think about your business and your brand and what you put out, everything speaks, everything that you put out there contributes to what people, how people are going to perceive you, how do they respond to you?
How they think of you. So you really have to keep a keen eye on those things, everything from your website to your social media channels and your email footer. Everything that you put out in the world isn’t an opportunity to influence the people that you want to influence. And the minute that you start getting lazy about any of those things, that’s when things start to go south or missed opportunities or inconsistencies in your messaging or your brand. A lot of times, I’m advising clients they’ll get in the game; they get into the day-to-day nitty gritty. Like what, what difference does it make?
Social Media Presence for Business: The Power of Consistency
If we post something on social media today, there’s a really gonna make a difference to my business? Well, no, I, maybe today doesn’t, but that way of thinking will because I can guarantee you that that’s not the only day you’re going to think that it’s the sum of what you do over time. That creates success for you. And you can’t get too caught up in this idea of what you’re doing on a daily, but you’ve got to make the commitment. You just gotta do it. You know, you gotta do it every day. And those things add up over time. So everything speaks. That was always kind of a huge thing to me. It’s been a narrative for me, it’s our rallying cry for the team. I use it all the time. Anytime I see a little chinks in the armor, like we, maybe we didn’t post as many times as we should have during a week or whatever the case may be, but it’s always kind of a big thing for me.
And certainly, that translates into the work that we do for our clients as well.
That’s a great lesson; everything speeds. And then how you went on to describe how it’s a sum of what you do over time is stacking one thing after the other thing, after another thing, and is one of my mentors, Darren Hardy, former publisher of Success magazine, when he wrote the book, the compound effect, similar thing, right? It’s not eating one salad today. That’s going to make you healthy. It’s eating a salad every day for the next six months that will improve your health. Right.
Then that’s the difference between people who are successful in art. It’s the ones who can, who have the determination, and can see the forest of the trees. As they can, they can; they don’t get caught up in the monotony of everyday choice. They just realize that this is the path to success. And I just have to be determined to see that through, stick with it, and have an appetite and patience for the success that will come from that over time.
Okay. So, let me return to your point of view. Would you argue that that’s also part of the issue with measuring social media results because people are looking for that quick win when the reality is it’s a long game?
Yeah, for sure. I mean, that’s what I try to drive home with on our intro calls and pitches that we have with clients. This isn’t a get-rich-quick thing. I mean, certainly, you’re going to see momentum. You’re going to see progress, but if you’re expecting your world to change and a couple of months of starting to work together, then we’re not the right fit for you and anybody that’s telling you that I would really, I’d kind of, that’d be a little skeptical about that because then they’re, they’re really just trying to kind of get you on board and will at any means necessary. So we’re very transparent about that. But the thing of it is, people, when we talk about that, like people at eye-roll or hate social media, look, there’s a lot of reasons, especially in this day and age, to kind of have a negative perspective on our social media.
Social Media Presence for Business: Embracing Social Media
Social media presence for business — There’s a lot of garbage out there, but the fact of the matter is billions and billions of people are using these platforms, spending on average an hour to two a day, if not more, on them. So, regardless of what your personal opinion is, that’s where people are, and social media isn’t new. Humanity has always been Social. It’s just the means for how we do it, right? It’s just the technology that changes platforms come and go, so this isn’t new. It’s just how we do it now, this is where people are. This is where they spend their time. If you want to connect with potential clients and customers, if you want to influence, if you want to build a community, that’s where you need to do it.
You know, it, it doesn’t replace things like search marketing, and that’s intent-based buying behavior; people are looking for a thing well, yeah, for most people that you want to be there too, but if you want to build a brand, if you want to build a business, if you want to build a scalable business over time, if you want to have loyal customers and advocates and people that will return to buy from you or do whatever it is, the thing that you want them to do and share that with other people that will, that happens on social media. So if you’re not there, if you’re not, it’s a missed opportunity, and look, not everybody, can you know that again? That’s it just comes down to what you do. What resources that you have to work with sometimes, I get on calls, and they can’t afford to hire an agency like ours to do everything.
And then I’m like, well, you’re going to have to take on some of this heavy lifting yourself. You know, you’re going to have to kind of own some of that. and here’s how to do that. And I’m happy to help you navigate that. But you know, it’s not a dip your toe in the water kind of thing. You can’t treat it like a light switch, or it won’t work. So you kind of have to just come to terms with the fact that this is a thing that we know we need to do. This is the budget; this is the resources we have to pour into it. And then, does that really work with an agency? Do we hire a contractor? Do we hire an employee? Do we have to do it ourselves? That that’s going to kind of determine how you get there? You know, every business is a little bit different in terms of how they can do that.
So I’m going to make an assumption here, and I guess you can validate or contradict my assumption, is that just hearing you share your point of view, really understanding how teaching is super important to who you are, and being transparent and teaching how the sausage is made. My guess is, I mean, you’ve seen how that has impacted your business and helped it to grow. So my assumption is that when you’re in front of clients, and they say, Jason and team, what should we be doing? Like what type of content, what should our strategy be? My guess is you’re probably also saying, well, let us show you how to teach. Let us show you how to actually nurture your audience and help them be better.
Social Media Presence for Business: Building Trust Through Value
Is that an accurate assumption on my part, or are we not?
Yeah, just, I mean, it depends on the business. I always say that the most successful businesses on social, the ones that don’t sell, are the ones that people, people don’t like to be sold to the magic is when you’re able to do it without them even realizing it. And you can do that through just creating value, adds like help people make decisions around what you do for us, that means let’s create content that helps people make decisions about who they work with in terms of agencies or let’s now let’s, let’s give them information about, this is how we create results for this type of industry when it comes to social media. This is how we did it for a client: by educating and helping people make decisions.
And sometimes that means they won’t decide to work with us, so that’s okay. But a lot of the time, it means we’re starting to build trust, and that’s inherent by we are just an inbound agency right now. We don’t do, and haven’t done a ton of outbound sales efforts that commitment that we’ve made to helping others and treating ourselves like a client and doing that over the period of the past three years has put us in a position to get 20 to 30 qual leads a month. And we’re a boutique agency, and that’s probably all I ever want us to be. You know, I want us to have a level of intimacy with our clients. I don’t want to be a hundred-million-dollar agency with five layers of management.
I don’t know that that can scale in terms of being able to provide that level of intimacy that we can’t as a boutique agency. Right. And so that’s enough, that’s enough, but what’s great about that? Is it people who are coming to us and saying, I need this thing, as opposed to us just sending out hundreds of thousands of emails saying, Hey, do you need this thing? Let’s just we don’t have to do that now. Will that always be the case? I don’t know. I mean, I think right now we’re, we’re pretty good in that regard, but a lot of that just has to do with, it goes back to everything speaks, and it goes back to treating ourselves like a client, making a commitment to, to eating our own dog food. If you look at our stuff like we’re doing for ourselves, we treat ourselves like a client.
We do for us what we do for our clients. And I think all of these things add up to strengthening the number of leads that we get. Then, the quality of those leads is affected because the people who contact us have taken the time to, in most cases, look at us and see what we do. They see in the work that we do. They see how we treat ourselves; they see how we’re helpful. and then, inherently, they’re coming into the relationship with a level of trust that they inherently wouldn’t have because of the way that we do those sorts of things. So it just makes the sales process a lot easier. And I get on these calls, and there’s already some foundational trust and relationship built there based on what we’re just inherently doing for ourselves.
Social Media Presence for Business: Leveraging Trust and Authenticity in Social Media Marketing
Yeah. There’s that word again? Trust. Yep. My cousin works with a professional trainer, a bodybuilder, a fitness trainer, and that kind of stuff. One day, I was spending time with him. His name’s Jerry, and he said to me, he’s like I am so focused on my own fitness. And in making sure that I am in great shape. And in, in tip-top shape, he works with a lot of people like competitive levels and that kind of stuff, because I, because when I walk into a gym, either his home gym or visiting gym or whatever, I’m my best billboard. Yeah. Right. Nobody’s going to hire an out-of-shape trainer; it’s the same thing for you.
If somebody is getting some of your stuff or senior content and feeling like you’re kind of helpful or whatever, that’s, that’s your billboard. This is your opportunity to really demonstrate this is how this works. We stay in this lane because it works. If you’d like to join us in this lane, we can apply those smarts for your business too. But, but your, your best billboard, right.
I’m always shocked. How about how many social media agencies don’t do that for themselves? I mean, it’s, I mean, I get it. We didn’t in the beginning, and that was always a struggle. Right. But ultimately, it got to the point where I’m like, no, we are a client. You know, we are a client; we are treating ourselves as clients. We are not straying from that. And that’s how we differentiate ourselves. And we may not see it all the time, but it matters like doing that. and we may not get that feedback all the time. Like, Hey, we actually decided to reach out to you or hire you because of what we saw you do. But I’ve been told that a couple of times, and I know that that makes a difference. So we just, it’s hard because you have to put resources into it that take away from maybe paying clients.
So you’re going to have to invest in it, but it matters that we commit to it as well.
Yes, of course. It’s hard. It’s hard to build muscle. Yeah, absolutely. Are Arnold Schwarzenegger once famously said he asked a question or somebody who’s like, say you’re doing a set of 10 repetitions. What is the repetition that gives you the most growth? And the person said, oh, it’s repetition. Number 10. No, it’s 12. And so the point is, is that Onward Nation Jason’s team is doing 12 repetitions. For every set, the requirement is 10, and most people don’t even do that. Yeah. But he’s doing 12. Their team is doing 12 because they know the value of when somebody is looking at comparing A or B ,in this case, socialistics is doing all of the things outwardly.
Correct. It’s a great billboard. It’s a great proof of concept. Yeah. And as I said, that’s been a key component to our ability to create an inbound engine. That’s fairly consistent. Oh, I love it.
Social Media Presence for Business: Keys to Entrepreneurial Success
I know our time is running short here, Jason. I thank you for your generosity before we go, before we close out and say goodbye. Please share any final advice that you’d like with us, anything you think we might’ve missed. And then please tell Onward Nation the best way to connect with you, my friend. Yeah.
I think I don’t know that there’s anything that I didn’t share. If anybody’s listening, that’s either thinking about starting a business or an agency and the best thing that I did was create a runway for myself. Like, I didn’t just decide I’m gonna do this, and I’m all in, and then start it from scratch. Like I knew, I looked down the road, and I created about a year-long runway. I created the site and started blogging about stuff. I started to kind of create some momentum so that when I did, when I knew that I was officially ready, I was jumping onto a moving train already instead of one that was stationary. So my ability to that fear that we talked about, like I was, I was able to kind of overcome that more easily because of that.
I had a moving train already. I had created some momentum. I had a couple of clients already. So, I jumped into it, and that didn’t feel so overwhelming. So I think regardless of where you’re at, doing something like that is a surefire way to increase the likelihood of you being able to take that leap, but it just goes back to the fear thing. We just get whatever that means for you. You find a way to conquer the fear, and then everything just slides into place. It read really well. And as far as we can find me, at Socialistics.com, we’ve got a blog, so get a podcast. I think by the time this comes out, I will have written a book called The Anti Agency about how I built a million-dollar business differently, which really goes into much more depth about what we talked about today.
I just felt compelled to tell that story, and it’s very; it’s got a lot of tactical stuff in there, but also just a lot of the emotional journey. I think it’s a really cool, different book that people might find interesting. It can really motivate and inspire you to do your own thing or continue to do your own thing and give you some tips on how to incorporate some things that can really help you grow a successful agency or business.
Okay. Onward Nation, no matter how many notes you took or how often you go back and relisten to Jason’s words of wisdom, which I sure hope that you do, the key is, is to take this body of work, to take all of these blueprints and resources and guides and everything that he gave you in examples, take them and apply them into your business and accelerate your results. And Jason, we all have the same 86,400 seconds in a day. And I’m grateful, my friend, that you said yes to come onto the show, to be our mentor and guide, and to share your smarts in such a generous way. Thank you so much, My friend.
Awesome. Really enjoyed the time and appreciate the opportunity.
This episode is complete. So head over to OnwardNation.com for show notes and more food to fuel your ambition to continue to find your recipe for success here at Onward Nation.
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