Utilizing Micro Influencers

February 20, 2017 Chandler Walker

We live in a world where we want everyone to see our products and use our services, but we don't necessarily have a clear cut channel to get it in front of people.

We see major brands using Influencers who have millions of followers on social media, are high levels sports figures or actors and think: "Wouldn't it be cool if they endorsed our products or services".

Now you will most likely never be able to get these kind of people on board with your brand, but you can take advantage of a seriously underutilized and underpriced aspect of the influencer market.

That aspect is the micro influencer. To understand the micro influencer let's talk a bit about what they are and what it entails.

The micro influencer is often someone in your community or your niche that has 1000-10,000 followers on social media. These are people who are high level in your niche or that your local community is highly aware of.

The micro influencer in this regard is someone who people in your community or niche look to for advice and/or guidance and someone who even more importantly, they trust.

You can find micro Influencers by doing a local search in your area targeting your niche. For example if your business targets moms maybe you search for city name moms on Facebook or #citynamemom etc.

The key point is that you have to search to find them and then approach them with something you can offer that benefits both of you and allows both of you to grow.

The reason this niche is underpriced for marketing is that they aren't necessarily looking to get paid for promoting your products and are looking to promote their influence in their specific niche.

You can take advantage of this by offering your products or services to them free to experience and to understand in exchange for a number of posts tagging your products and services on social media.

An important point to consider with this is that them showcasing your products or services must be seemingly natural and organic. If it looks like a paid infomercial it looses it value with the consumer and you both will lose their trust.

This is why I'm a big fan of giving it to them and then specifying that you need 2 post per week (or more) from them in any way shape or form. Give them the ability to be creative and keep it natural and you both win.

Because I'm big on you being able actually execute on the advice I give you I want you to create a list of 5-10 Influencers in your area that can promote what you do.

Now that you have this list I want you to take this week and focus on connecting with these influencers. Start with a bit of talking over social media, maybe have coffee one day and then work to create the strategy with them. Remember you have to give them value in return for them giving you value.

This is an extremely underutilized and underpriced resource (especially locally) that not many people are using. Get out there and do it so you can tap into your market plus theirs and build your brand to be even more recognizable in your community!

Building Brand Awareness Through Workshops

February 1, 2017 Chandler Walker

Getting people to come into your facility is one of the most difficult things for most business and gym owners to do. Creating a strategy and understanding how to do it is even more difficult.

The awareness stage begins with getting people aware that you exist and working to convince them to come into your facility for a low barrier opportunity or you go somewhere that you can partner with another business to attract more people to your brand.

To do this you want to offer simple workshops that shouldn't take more than an hour to do. The price of entry to these workshops is an email address so you can send them email follow ups after and invite them to future seminars.

Now it's important to point out that the goal of these seminars is to move people into your monthly memberships not to try to market workshops as an additional revenue stream.

As you gain a larger email list you can potentially do workshops that you charge for, but for this blog we are focusing on building awareness around your brand through workshops.

These workshops don't need to be extremely in depth, but they should tackle common pain points people give you. Some examples of these workshops include:

Shoulder Pain Relief
Low back pain relief
Meal planning
Everyday nutrition
Simple stretches for pain relief

The point behind the topics I listed is that they are there to showcase your expertise and to showcase the fact that you work with everyday people who have real life pains. Not to mention that it builds a relationship with people who are not connected to your brand.

I would set up a monthly or bi monthly workshop series, create Facebook events for each one, and make them register for it through a CRM or another registration tool. This allows you to collect their email address and contact info.

Once you get this setup you can make a short (1-2min) promo video post to your social media accounts, ask your members to share it and email it to your list. The most important things to be aware of here are that:

You HAVE to be consistent with this or it won't work. Posting about the workshop 2x per week and emailing it out twice per week is a good strategy.
The emails you collect should be entered into a sequence that nurtures them long term with your newsletter or a specific campaign and about every 3-5 nurturing emails they should get some sort of call to action asking them to come in for a consultation. You're building trust and brand awareness with the workshops, but you won't sell them until you ask.

This is an excellent way to showcase the fact that you work with regular people who have regular pains and to collect their info to get them into your facility as members later on.

This is especially effective if you sell a very high priced fundamentals program as your primary offer. You can choose to charge for this or not, but remember this is to drive people into your core product of fundamentals + memberships and if you do this long enough it gives you a very large list of people to market to in the future.

Relationships Keep Customers Around

January 25, 2017 Chandler Walker

A relationship is something you often think of when you are close to someone or when you've made a connection with a person.

In business the relationship with your customers is what keeps them coming back to you for years to come.

If you are capable of building a strong relationship at every stage of your customers experience that bond will grow until you've developed a sort of cult like following with them.

If you think about companies with raving fans like Apple they have a core group of customers who will use their products no matter what.

They release products and are completely sold out within minutes and by just having one of these products you are a sort of "cool" status symbol.

Now how do we develop the relationship with the consumer to that high of a degree? It starts with being hyper aware of exactly what the customer journey through your funnel looks like.

From that what does the experience look like? Are they complaining or dropping off at any point? Is there anything unique that makes them go "wow" when they get off the phone with you or leave from a consultation?

You can start to understand by putting yourself into the shoes of the consumer. Work through your funnel from your social channels, to your website, email, phone call and if you have one initial consultation.

As you're working through this write everything down. What's boring? Indifferent? Irritating? What does your content say about you? Is everything congruent?

Take each of these things and adjust and modify based on what you see and what feedback says about your brand. The relationship is developed by providing an incredible experience, over delivering on what you offer and then continuing to wow them long term.

For example, in the boutique gym industry, like the CrossFit industry, it's common practice to have someone in for a consultation before they attend classes. Now going from the consultation straight into classes makes it hard to develop that 1-on-1 relationship.

To combat this and separate us from the pack we have a 3 session assessment and a 1-on-1 fitness for life foundations program the client has to complete before they can move into group classes.

This allows us to attach the client with a coach and allows the coach to develop a strong relationship with the client before they enter group classes. Then in group classes they still meet with their coach anywhere from 4 times per year all the way up to 1 time per week.

In terms of client happiness and longevity this is the best thing we've ever done and moves us out of the commodity market and into a market that we own and have created for ourselves. It's not about the class at that point it's about the relationship and level of comfort approaching the coach with anything.

If you are truly interested in developing a relationship with your consumers it takes looking at your entire pipeline and understanding friction points, opportunities to wow the consumer and always being aware of what they say and how they feel.

The more opportunities you have to showcase your unique brand personality the better the relationship will build in the long run.

Gone are the days when companies could just hire automated machines to handle communication and outsource help centers.

Because by outsourcing, though you save money, you can never get them to understand the flow of your brand and where you want it to be. Customers will pay more for an experience or the ability to talk with someone they can relate to.

Be REAL. Be HUMAN. Be SOCIAL

Keep Your Marketing Consistent

January 22, 2017 Chandler Walker

How many times have you had a good experience with a company only to have it ruined by the next encounter?

Recently I had a conversation with a customer service representative with a large corporation. The wait times according to the automated system we're going to be "lengthy" so I was prepared to wait.

Maybe I was lucky or maybe they were trying to get me to use their digital assets to communicate as the cost is far cheaper than a live person. But I was connected with someone within minutes.

I had recently been on their website and made a change to my account, but noticed a small issue that I wanted to talk with someone about.

The representative I talked with was absolutely amazing and I noticed at several points she validated my questions aka what I like to call a "stroke" and then reversed what I asked with a question or what I call "reversing".

She looked into the issue and gave recommendations on what she could do and she also gave me insight into how she uses it, how it has an effect on her life and what she felt about the change I wanted to make.

I really enjoyed this 23 minute conversation, because I felt as though she really cared about my issue, was 100% genuine and wholeheartedly embraced the company's vision.

Getting everyone to embrace the vision of your company is one of the most difficult things a large scale company does. This leads me to the topic of congruency in your marketing.

Congruency is simply making sure that your vision, your employees and the customer experience is always aligned. If that alignment breaks somewhere along the line your customers will have a bad experience, which they will often tell many different people about.

Now where this company lost their congruency is after I got off the call with the representative. I hung up very happy about my experience and even commented that "That was the best customer service call I've ever been on".

This is where the company went from experience based marketing to interruption marketing. Everyone has experienced interruption marketing at some point.

Think back to when you were visiting a website and an annoying pop up literally popped up in the middle of the screen. How did you react? If you're anything like me you went into a frenzy looking for the close button.

Or how do you feel about TV commercials? Chances are you use something like Netflix so you don't have to watch them.

The days of being able to interrupt people to market to them are over. People are just too busy to deal with it in today's landscape.

Now when I hung up with the the customer service representative I was feeling pretty pumped about the experience, but not longer than 15 minutes later I received a call from an unknown number.

This is interruption number 1. Calling from an unknown number is a surefire way to get your marketing efforts ignored.

When I answered, the voice on the other end was a robotic automated answering machine. This immediately moves the experience from being wonderful with the person to being inhuman and hard to connect with.

I hung up the phone and didn't participate in whatever the machine was asking me to do.

Now how could this experience have been made better and more congruent based off my initial experience?

From my perspective, before I hung up with the customer service representative, simply saying something like "she would be very grateful if I participated in a survey for her based on my experience" and asking if it would be okay to transfer me to the survey at the end of our conversation would have worked!

Why? Well, because I was so happy with what happened at that point, I would have participated right then and there!

This is also an example of congruency and sticking with the experience I had initially. Rather than interrupting me later, this would have provided a smooth transition from my good experience to rave about that experience.

Think about this in your customer journey. Are there points to where they may have a bad experience? What are this points and how will you adjust your process to eliminate them?

Always remember the customer experience and congruency in your brand are major deciding factors for people to continue doing business with you. If you confuse them or change things up they will abandon your brand!

Building the Culture and Experience of your Business

January 13, 2017 Chandler Walker

Have you ever walked into a business and immediately noticed that something is different about the business? Maybe they have an interesting name, the way the place is decorated is organized in a different way than your used to, the employee are probably even seemingly playing the part ever so well.

When you're in that situation you remember the experience, the conversations, the decorations and the name of the business. Why? It's because you were immediately immersed into the culture of the company and everyone who represents that culture believed so strongly in it that they portrayed it perfectly during your visit.

Maybe that culture is so strong that you notice it in their social presence.

Is there a certain conversation style?
Are they a bit goofy?
Do they respond on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram etc and immediately make you lol?
Is the information they put out organized around all of this?

You're probably wondering how you build this into your business structure so it manifests itself outwardly and without issue from your staff.

The key to building this is to instill it into everything and really develop an understanding of your style. Are you focused on being different, serious, goofy, funny, witty etc?

Whatever your focus is you must instill this into EVERYTHING. If you are a bit goofy and off the wall you probably need a familiar greeting when people walk in your door, call you or send you a message from social.

For example our greeting at StoneAgeFuel is:

"Welcome to StoneAgeFuel, where the streets are paved with gold"

It doesn't matter if the person walking in has been a member for several years or has had zero contact with us. Everyone gets the greeting every time they walk in the door.

Now organizing the aura in your business must reflect your culture. If you are a bit goofy your website content should reflect that and your physical location should have fun colors, but the part most people mess up on is getting their staff on board.

Have you ever walked into a Cold Stone (an ice cream store) and the staff loathes singing when you give them a tip? This is a scenario you must avoid to ensure you don't ruin the experience of people coming into your business, because your employees hate it.

To get your employees on board there are several strategies, but I really like immersing them right from the beginning. When interviewing them ask questions that are based off of your culture and try to get a little bit of wit out of them.

You can ask questions like:

Describe the color yellow to me
Teach me something new in 5 min....
A penguin walks in through the door wearing a sombrero. What does he say and why is he here?

The point is not to put them on the spot. The point is to see how onboard they are going to be with using wit and charm in your business and how much they will go out of their way to interact and be fun.

Once you have everything going and everyone on board the next biggest issue it maintaining that culture. It's important that you continue to put it everywhere and make sure nothing gets brushed aside. If it becomes something everyone believes in and WANTS to do. Congrats, you have built a business with culture!

The point of all of this is to continue to provide the customer an experience to remember. With content being everywhere and available to everyone you need to push to give people an experience with your brand that they won't forget. That experience shines through with an amazing company culture and experience strategy in place.

Now your action items after reading this is to define your culture. What makes you different? What do people say about your business? How do you respond to people in person? On social media? How do your employees interact?

Write all this down and compile it into a culture document that you continue to build by digging deeper and deeper into your company until you're confident that you have something that makes you unique and provide an experience to remember!

ChansLogic Ep013

January 10, 2017 Chandler Walker

In this episode we talk about CONTENT! What your content calendar should look like, how to organize it, best practices and how to advertise your content in the most effective way.

Be REAL. Be HUMAN. Be SOCIAL.

Use #ChansLogic to ask questions!

Find Steph on:
Snapchat | sbentley02
Facebook | steph.SAF
Instagram | @stephanie_saf

Music by Victor Spoils | victorspoils.bandcamp.com/releases

ChansLogic Ep012

December 9, 2016 Chandler Walker

Welcome to the this weeks episode of #ChansLogic! We are here for you to answer any questions about running a business, social marketing that doesn't suck and show how a business can be human and build trust via social media. This week, we had a very special guest with us, all the way from Boston! Mr. Dave Picardy, owner of Treehouse Fitness!

This episode is all about community, how to build it, maintain it, what makes a great community leader and we went deep into Dunbar's number and what that number means for you and your business!

Be REAL. Be HUMAN. Be SOCIAL.

Use #ChansLogic to ask questions!

Find Steph on:
Snapchat | sbentley02
Facebook | steph.SAF
Instagram | @stephanie_saf

Music by Victor Spoils | victorspoils.bandcamp.com/releases

ChansLogic Ep011

November 7, 2016 Chandler Walker

Welcome to the this weeks episode of #ChansLogic! We are here for you to answer any questions about running a business, social marketing that doesn't suck and show how a business can be human and build trust via social media. This week, we dove into everything WEBSITES! So much goes into making a good site, we may even keep this one rolling into the next episode!

Be REAL. Be HUMAN. Be SOCIAL.

Use #ChansLogic to ask questions!

Find Steph on:
Snapchat | sbentley02
Facebook | steph.SAF
Instagram | @stephanie_saf

Music by Victor Spoils | victorspoils.bandcamp.com/releases

ChansLogic Ep007

July 14, 2016 Chandler Walker

Welcome to the this weeks episode of #ChansLogic! We will be making weekly videos answering questions about running a business, social marketing that doesn't suck and show how a business can be human and build trust via social media. This week, we talked about the importance of branding to help your business be THE banana in a bunch of bananas!

Be REAL. Be HUMAN. Be SOCIAL.

Use #ChansLogic to ask questions!

Find me on:
Snapchat | cwalkeriii
Facebook | ChandlerSAF
Instagram | @chandler_saf
Twitter | @ChandlerSAF

Subscribe to my channel | youtube.com/c/chandlerwalkerSAF

Music by Victor Spoils | victorspoils.bandcamp.com/releases

Facebook is about building trust....not selling

June 5, 2016 Chandler Walker

Facebook has a massive user base of many different people from many different cultures and walks of life. People go on Facebook and other social networking sites to be able to unplug, see what there friends are doing, check out the latest news from around the world and to feel a little more connected to society.

Because there's so much attention on Facebook and so many people are on it businesses and marketers see it as an opportunity to sell products and services. If there's that many people in Facebook it must be pretty easy to sell on the platform right?

Turns out people don't want to be sold on social media. They want to get away from the selling, click bait marketing and other common tactics employed by marketers. Think about it; when your scrolling through Facebook and you happen across a blatant ad you scroll right past it. You don't have the time or patience to listen to another blah blah blah sales or landing page about features and benefits of a supposed wonder product.

So what makes you stop and click, share, comment or like something on a social network? For most people it has to be something that sparks emotion; it's a funny video or picture, meme, article that you find interesting or an educational piece that gives you some valuable info that you can use. Once you see enough of this stuff from a page on Facebook you start checking it regularly, like the page and begin to trust them as a resource for content you enjoy.

This is how we build a relationship with people and show them that we care more about them than sales by providing a tremendous amount of value at no cost. Now that we understand how people want to interact on social media and how they consume content on it. Why are traditional marketers still relying on short term tactics for selling with click bait Facebook ads, sending people to a landing page with a countdown timer (that never really hits zero), promising certain features and benefits and then sending a series of spammy emails encouraging people to hurry and buy now?

It's because they don't understand the changing landscape of marketing and haven't taken the time to learn how people want to be interacted with on social media. Plus it's much more difficult to produce content that actually helps people for free and the results take longer to show up in the form of new customers. But when they do you form a powerful relationship with your customers, because you already given them so much. Your brand will become so engrained with them that they will go out of their way to purchase the products and services.

When looking at the ideal strategy to build your brand and get people to purchase your products and services it's all about building that trust and developing a relationship with your customers. You do this by focusing on what they want and how they want it and this is through producing incredibly valuable information through blogs, videos, funny pictures and videos and interacting with them and talking back and forth when they have questions. It all comes down to LISTENING to your customers and reverse engineering your strategy to address their wants and needs!

ChansLogic Ep006

May 27, 2016 Chandler Walker

Welcome to the this weeks episode of #ChansLogic! We will be making weekly videos answering questions about running a business, social marketing that doesn't suck and show how a business can be human and build trust via social media. This week, we touched on the "voodoo" marketing selling that is popping up everywhere, building your clientele from beginning to end and of course appearances from Pepe!

Be REAL. Be HUMAN. Be SOCIAL.

Use #ChansLogic to ask questions!

Find me on:
Snapchat | cwalkeriii
Facebook | ChandlerSAF
Instagram | @chandler_saf
Twitter | @ChandlerSAF

Subscribe to my channel | youtube.com/c/chandlerwalkerSAF

Music by Victor Spoils | victorspoils.bandcamp.com/releases

ChansLogic Ep005

May 13, 2016 Chandler Walker

Welcome to the this weeks episode of #ChansLogic! We will be making weekly videos answering questions about running a business, social marketing that doesn't suck and show how a business can be human and build trust via social media. This week, we recapped our time in Salt Lake City for the 2016 USA Weightlifting National Championships and USA Weightlifting Olympic Team Trials, what happens at the gym when we are gone, our coach preparation, branding and of course appearances from Pepe!

Be REAL. Be HUMAN. Be SOCIAL.

Use #ChansLogic to ask questions!

Find me on:
Snapchat | cwalkeriii
Facebook | ChandlerSAF
Instagram | @chandler_saf
Twitter | @ChandlerSAF

Subscribe to my channel | youtube.com/c/chandlerwalkerSAF

Music by Victor Spoils | victorspoils.bandcamp.com/releases

So You Want to be an Entrepreneur?

April 29, 2016 Chandler Walker

Being an entrepreneur is a journey never traveled in a straight line. It’s not a linear path with a nice little manual that tells you what to do and what not to do, there’s no direction and definitely no one size fits all model.

It’s a journey that often takes you on a roller coaster of a ride, leading you in all sorts of different directions. The hardest part about this roller coaster is understanding that you have to be flexible and capable of adapting to changing situations and environments before they even happen. The ability to spot trends before they happen can literally make or break your ability to survive and thrive.

Always be thinking 5-10 years from now and always be understanding how the environment is shifting and where you need to position yourself to make it work! Those who are flexible will make it and thrive, while those who refuse to adapt will fail to grow and develop as the business environment changes over time.

I see a lot of people who say, “Oh, you run your own business? That's great, you get to do whatever you want, you make your own hours and all you do is party and drink mimosas.”

That is entirely untrue unless you managed to raise a bunch of money for your business and then didn’t care to put in the follow through work necessary to allow your business to thrive! These are the people that have little to no idea how to manage their business in the short and long term, blow through all their finances and end up with nothing to show for it in the end.

So when you quit the work world, you’re not sitting at a desk all day, you’re running your own business and your own projects and your own everything, you are grinding 24/7. You have to be up and running with things, working long hours to make it work and if you’re not getting enough done it’s time to make more hours in the day. Get up earlier, take less breaks, stop messing around for three hours at lunch .

You have to decide whether or not you want things automated and whether or not automation takes away from the human aspect that people crave from a brand. It’s about you getting out there talking to your current (and potential) audience and then going back to put in the work. If you are not even willing to do that, you are eventually going to fail. Most business owners don’t succeed because they just continuously fail and then they finally give up.

The key to all of this is understanding that everything falls on the you - the entrepreneur - to understand the flow, manage finances effectively and to put in the work to ensure that what you’re doing will not fail. If you don’t understand something or you’re not good at something find someone who is and do whatever it takes to convince them to work with you. This way you can focus on your strength and they can build and support your weaknesses.

We can be good at some things, but we absolutely cannot be good at everything!