Lance Hood (FranPro): 0:00

Hi everybody, welcome. Today we have Corey Cottenoir, COO of Social Made Simple, and we're just going to grab some of his insights. Corey, welcome to the call.

Corey Cotnoir (SocialMadeSimple): 0:10

Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 0:13

Corey. First thing, what do you think is the most important thing that we could discuss when it comes to local marketing? What should people know?

Corey Cotnoir (SocialMadeSimple): 0:23

Yeah, that's a fantastic question. I think the biggest thing and it's really honestly a misconception and a challenge to get through the minds of local business owners which is authenticity in the social media marketing space Just social media in general, not necessarily even considering it marketing. What I mean by that is often we'll work with brands and owners small business owners and franchisee owners who want that polished, final, very professional look and feel to their videos, their photographs, your people in store. It needs to feel like it was very well done. But interestingly, that's not how consumers behave and want to consume their social media. They want authenticity and originality and they want to feel like the brands and the people behind the brands that they're going the restaurants, they're going and eating at the stores, they're going to buy their products from that. The people there are trustworthy, that they like them, that they're people and that they feel like they can connect to them. So when we look at data almost every single time, when we look at the highest performing content or ad campaigns that we run and that we manage, the core source of content and topics behind what we're posting and promoting come from that localized we call it user-generated content. So it could be a person in a store. That's just like taking a selfie and saying fantastic dinner, that type of consumer marketing. Or even an owner taking a photo of the employees happy at the end of a shift in the back of the back of the store.

Corey Cotnoir (SocialMadeSimple): 1:59

That's the type of stuff that works and resonates really well and, like I said, a lot of people are a little bit allergic to it. They think, no, this isn't polished enough, it's got to be put through Photoshop with some filters on it and some brand logos put on it, and that really is not the truth. So that's the thing that I think stands out the most. There's a lot more layers to it, of course, but I would just encourage anyone listening to try to knock down that perception you have of what marketing is today, especially in the social media space. I'm not recommending your website be unprofessional or print marketing and things like that, but social is quick, hit, really really quick. People scrolling through their phone. They don't have a lot of attention span on it, so definitely don't overthink what you're doing and putting yourself out there.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 2:40

Yeah, because real is easy. You just do it. You don't have to reshoot it 100 times and people are very adept at picking out. What do you say posed reality like something that's been organized as real, but it's not so.

Corey Cotnoir (SocialMadeSimple): 2:57

Right. Yeah, that's exactly right. It doesn't mean those things don't work. We sprinkle them into basically every single thing that we do. We'll have a lawn care brand where they have a photograph of a guy cutting the lawn wearing the brand's polo and it's professional, it's well done, the grass is very green, All that stuff matters. But even in that example like a before and after photo taken from a cell phone by the guy who just cut the grass, of the before and after that tends to outperform the professionally staged photography and things like that. So yeah, the posing works, it has its place and we need that type of content in order to make sure we have the diversity of assets but really the authentic local feel. That's what we're looking for.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 3:46

And what is the difference for people who are listening from working with a general SEO company versus a local SEO? Like having that specialist?

Corey Cotnoir (SocialMadeSimple): 3:58

Yeah, so general, you know, not having the local feel like I just said. You know, the one of the big elements there would be only having that corporatized, very polished, almost stock image like approach to what you're getting out of the service. The most important thing, though, I would say when you're not local, is you don't have granular enough data being supported and backed in your campaigns and in your efforts. Even though a brand that might have 500 locations, the product marketing message, the core, you know, target segment, a lot of that is going to be the same and there's going to be a ton of overlap. But the fringe, you know, where there isn't overlap, where maybe this is a college town and because of that the target skews slightly younger, we're able to dig into that stuff and make sure that we understand okay. So let's lean harder into the assets that feature you know college kids more in them than they do a more senior audience. So it's that type of stuff that on a local level, you don't get.

Corey Cotnoir (SocialMadeSimple): 5:01

If you're just saying, blast out a corporate, nationwide type of marketing campaign, sometimes it misses 5 to 10 to 20 to 30% of a marketplace's target segment because it doesn't adopt any of that locality that's really necessary across. You know every geo is different, every market is different, etc. Etc. So that's where we see the most success. If we can improve a campaign 5 to 10% in a market, you know a cost per lead or a cost per acquisition might go from being unbearable to being perfect. So it really can make up the difference between whether marketing investment works for you or not, just by having the local approach versus. You know the blanket statement across a corporate campaign.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 5:41

What would be the components of an effective local marketing campaign?

Corey Cotnoir (SocialMadeSimple): 5:45

Yeah, I mean I think I've touched on a few of them. I would say making sure that there's authenticity to you know the local market, what makes you unique in your marketplace. Examples of that could include connecting with the community. Are there local sports teams? We see a lot of, for example, quick service restaurant brands we work with that thrive on running promos and sales and specials around big you know, youth sports tournaments and trying to connect to the community in ways like that. Are there sports teams that are having a playoff run and can you make promos and specials around that? So it's really adopting that sense of community.

Corey Cotnoir (SocialMadeSimple): 6:26

A lot of times people look at franchises as the opposite of that. They look at the small businesses on Main Street as the local brands. They don't think of the you know, the McDonald's and the subway as being local restaurants. So if there's a bit of a hurdle to climb over for the franchisees and local markets, and that's the best way to do that, like I said, is to really adopt the community and dig into it and don't be, you know, numb to the idea that we don't need to have just this corporate feel of just pushing out our corporate branded content and assets. So yeah, it's that authenticity. And then, like I said, the other key component to good strategic local marketing is knowing you know what is different and what is unique about your local area and making sure that we have that or you have that in your own advertising campaigns and don't just default to you know a brand, mission statement and things like that. Make sure you understand your local audience.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 7:23

Right and, from your opinion, what social media companies do you think people should be working with? Like you know, LinkedIn, Twitter. How does it make so? You have corporate and then you have the local franchisees, and I think that that might be a little different.

Corey Cotnoir (SocialMadeSimple): 7:39

Yeah, it definitely is. You know there's still going to be some constants where it's. I would say the short answer for you is it's more brand dependent. Are you a B2B brand? If so, obviously LinkedIn is a powerful network. Are you B2C? And if so, you want to be where the consumers are on some of the more highly used networks, depending on your audience Instagram, tiktok, facebook, twitter, places like that. I would say. To go into a bit more detail, we specialize especially in Facebook and Instagram. That's where most of our success comes through.

Corey Cotnoir (SocialMadeSimple): 8:11

We get a lot of questions about platforms like TikTok. Obviously, it's the most kind of buzzwordy. It's the one people are most curious about. It's really, really challenging for local businesses to advertise on TikTok for two reasons. One, you need to be able to create original content, original video, creative, which is incredibly challenging to churn out high volumes and constant volumes of video content or expensive to pay someone to do it for you. And then, secondarily, it's very expensive to advertise. There's minimums of thousands of dollars per month. You have to spend and just add spend in order to get into the TikTok ad platform. So for that reason, we don't really recommend it. We don't push businesses we work with into TikTok, but again, it could be perfectly suited for a brand that might be kind of a very fashion forward trendy. They just might need to be there. They might need to make that investment. So, yeah, I think you kind of draw the Venn diagram.

Corey Cotnoir (SocialMadeSimple): 9:07

Where most brands will meet in the middle, it's going to be Facebook and Instagram. The largest, most diverse set of audiences is going to be there. Instagram is very compelling in that they have a lot of Facebooks that are owned, obviously, by Meta. They have a lot of Facebook's functionality in terms of their ads, so you can create highly targeted, highly effective campaigns on Instagram and you tend to also get that younger audience there, where people are using Instagram in a great way. Facebook nowadays tends to skew a little bit older in terms of their audience. The youngest generations are not using it quite as much, so that's something to keep in mind. But it is still the most effective social marketing platform when it comes to advertising for businesses from, like, an affordability and a performance perspective.

Corey Cotnoir (SocialMadeSimple): 9:52

And then, like I said, linkedin is great for B2B. Twitter is obviously in the middle of quite a historic revamp. I think it's too early to know where things will shake out for them. I wouldn't, generally speaking, recommend Twitter for many advertisers outside of brands in, like, the media space or who might have a really unique marketing campaign that they want to push out to a large audience. But it's not great for calls to action, not great for getting people to take action on a type of campaign. It is great for getting a message out there in front of a large, a large body of audience. So that's a general summary, I'd say, like I said. I think the short answer, though, is it is pretty brand dependent and brand specific, based on, you know, the client's target segment.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 10:33

Right Right, when you work with brands and they're struggling a little. What are some of the commonalities that you notice with brands that are struggling?

Corey Cotnoir (SocialMadeSimple): 10:42

Yeah, great. So I think, when it comes to struggling with social advertising so getting results from campaigns I think one of the things that we often see is a misconception and misunderstanding of what social advertising is at its core. It's not a person walking through your front door and saying, hey, I'm interested or I'm here to buy something off the menu. It's a person who wasn't even looking for your business or your services. They were mining their own business, browsing their social media network, probably trying to kill time or consume some mindless topics that really have no pertinence to what you're offering them. So that is something that is often lost on advertisers and when they get results, when they might get a lead in that space, understand this is about as top of funnel as it's going to get when it comes to a lead. This wasn't a person who was proactively seeking out your services. That doesn't mean they aren't ready.

Corey Cotnoir (SocialMadeSimple): 11:38

I like to use myself as an example. I'm a homeowner and I'm in need of some flooring projects. I bought an old home. We need a lot of work done on it. We work with a large flooring franchise brand and if you think about the consumer who is likely going to sign up for a franchise or a local flooring company and get a project done.

Corey Cotnoir (SocialMadeSimple): 11:58

They're unlikely to see an ad on Instagram and have a guy come the next day and install new flooring a week later. They're probably going to take their time. They're going to vet different companies in their market. They're going to get different quotes. They're going to work with family members to make sure they're choosing the right flooring is at the right timing to have the money for this. So that's going to take some time. You have to understand the buyer's journey, the life cycle of that lead, so, more often than not, to return to the original question and give us a synced answer. Brands that are struggling in social advertising, I think, are just not set up correctly to manage that kind of top of funnel social media marketing results. And once they make adjustments to their follow up, their outreach, how they're converting those sales, they tend to start to paint a better picture in terms of how their results are and how they're evaluating their performance.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 12:50

Right, and I've seen some marketing companies that they just aren't paying attention, I think, to conversion or keywords, like they're just marketing on general blanket keywords and wasting people's money, or they over hammer it. Like, as an example, there's a solar company that keeps advertising on YouTube and I would never work with that company because I've seen that ad probably a thousand times. No joke, and it's like there's no way I would do business. So it's like some of these little things that they don't think about because they're wasting money and they're over hammering it and they're just blowing people out. What's your thoughts on your experience with that kind of stuff?

Corey Cotnoir (SocialMadeSimple): 13:33

Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, I'm in the same boat. I think most people are. It's the same thing with TV commercials. I think I get so sick and tired of seeing the same TV commercials over and over and over again on loop, and it gets to the point where you're completely burnt out. You have now a negative association with that brand in your mind and the next time they pop up you're not likely to do business. So the answer is really simple.

Corey Cotnoir (SocialMadeSimple): 13:54

It's a metric called frequency. Frequency measures how often a person has seen your message or your marketing campaign. So that's something our team pays very, very close attention to. Frequency kind of has what I would call a sweet spot. If you don't serve it enough, they're unlikely to take action. If you serve it too much, you have what you're talking about, where they begin a negative association with your brand and with your campaign. So there is a sweet spot to it where you kind of have that, that graph that will go up and go down, where performance is going to be a little too low until frequency gets high enough. Something like two to three is usually. For example, a person needs to see an ad two to three times in order to get that kind of sweet spot of them taking action on it Once you get to territories you're talking about, where you're 10, 15, 20, that's just bad marketing.

Corey Cotnoir (SocialMadeSimple): 14:38

It's just sort of what we'll call set it and forget it, kind of lazy. You turn a campaign on and you just let it run and you don't really optimize, you don't check in on it, you don't refresh it, you don't change the target. So that's really common. That's what you get in a lot of sort of low priced offerings where they'll go sign up for a service. They'll turn a campaign on for you Might work coming out of the gates, but then you have what you have, which would be a pretty damaging long term lasting impact. So I definitely understand where you're coming from. It's not fun to see those ads.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 15:07

Yeah Well, so can you kind of explain in your thought process and I know this would be different for your different clients, but what is kind of what you view as the different components of the customer journey?

Corey Cotnoir (SocialMadeSimple): 15:20

Yeah. So I think the key to understand here that will be very specific to the brand and the customer and kind of what is it? The product or service that they're intending to purchase. But, like I said, the key thing to understand from a social perspective is it is not where the person is attempting to take action. So, more often than not, what we need to do is find a way to sort of jam a social media marketing message somewhere along their journey. So, for example, in a space where we'll call it like home services, a space where lead gen is typically the buyer journey, a person says, hey, I'm interested in learning more, here's my information, let's talk and let's learn more. We can be early on in that process and get you that lead. But we can also, in social marketing, retarget that person so maybe they become a lead or maybe they go to your website because they're so early that they're they googled it and they're just vetting the different options in their area. We can then make sure we're getting in front of that person as they continue to browse social and they continue to look at narrow down list of options. So the buyer journey is really really custom and unique to every brand and every product and service. That's part of what we do up front in building out a strategy is we try to understand how are your consumers finding you? How much time are they spending before they convert for you? Because really, where we go in terms of getting ads out in front of them and getting our, our efforts out in front of them is going to be consistent with where their eyeballs are at what stage of that journey. So it's a great question I think a lot of you know.

Corey Cotnoir (SocialMadeSimple): 16:57

One thing we do see is a lot like I was mentioning earlier. A lot of brands maybe don't have the right data on that. We it's sort of surprising and I understand why, but we ask a lot of businesses you know what's the lifetime value of a customer to you, or how long is your sales cycle or how long does the customer stick around, and a lot of times there's an unreliable data on that. We don't get good answers or have good insight, which I am. Again, I understand it's a resource intensive exercise to get there, but it can be so imperative to understanding. How do I, how do I build a really strategic, well thought out marketing campaign without having that data and that insight? You're kind of throwing darts, you know, blind in some ways and at some points of the journey. So, yeah, it's a thing that we spend a lot of time and a lot of research on and it's really imperative to getting the strategy right and understanding that journey.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 17:47

Right, and I know that you've talked about this, you've touched on this already, but to wrap it up into one questions for people to understand it, what can people do to increase engagement with people who are seeing this, this, the social posts, or this, this messaging and what kind of like decreases engagement?

Corey Cotnoir (SocialMadeSimple): 18:11

Yeah, so I did touch on it earlier. In terms of the authenticity to the content, I'll take this in a bit of a different direction, though. Nowadays. So the authenticity is sort of what is in the content, what is the core theme of the messaging. But you can do that all you want. You can make it the most authentic, creative, unique, funny, whatever your brand is in your market and still fail to get engagement and fail to get eyeballs. And the reason is social nowadays really kills organic, organic impressions.

Corey Cotnoir (SocialMadeSimple): 18:42

They 10 years ago, if you were on Facebook or other social networks, you created a business page, you grew your page following to hundreds or thousands and you would just make posts and they would be seen by hundreds of people with tons of interactions. Nowadays, your actual reach is less than 1% on your pages. So that means if you have 100 page followers on your business page and you make a post, about one person is going to see that post. So what we actually do is we automatically boost all content efforts that we have in place. We don't work with brands for the most part outside of strange circumstances where we don't have at least just a $35 a month budget behind a boosted post campaign. We do all that completely automatic. We have our platform that boost posts for you when they're scheduled out.

Corey Cotnoir (SocialMadeSimple): 19:31

But really that's the simple answer You're going to go from getting one person to see that post to thousands to see that post just from spending literally just over a dollar a day and boosting that content. So that'd be my advice for anyone that's not working with us and trying to do it themselves Carve out literally 30, 50 bucks a month to dedicate to boosting content. It doesn't even need to be a big strategic call to action driven campaign. If you just want people to see your brand, see your message, see a fun event maybe that you held, and you want people to sort of interact and share with their friends, I would recommend that spending small amounts of money to make sure your content gets out in front of people, because the social platforms just kill it on purpose nowadays so they can get a little more money.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 20:11

Right, and you know one of the things that I found very interesting. So when I would talk to people about brands, I would, I would look for images, because I'm trying to describe the inside and the outside of a business, right?

Lance Hood (FranPro): 20:25

So if it's a brick and mortar, people that want to own a business. They want to see what it looks like on the outside. They want to see what it looks like on the inside. If it's got food, they want to see the food. And if it's you know, or if it's a service you know, look at. They need to get their mind around it.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 20:40

And so many people they don't really take the time to take the pictures they need to take, like I'm surprised. And then if they do show it, they might show a grand opening before it opens. Well, if I'm a business owner, my feeling is this I'm going to have an emotional feeling of look at this nice, expensive store and I don't see any customers in there. I'm thinking I might be going broke. And some people get it where they do their grand opening shots and they have it where they show people filling the store and lined up out the door.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 21:12

Me, as a business owner, personally, that's what I want to get into. And people just aren't thinking that or they won't have pictures of their food items or they won't have professionally done pictures of their food items, which does, you know, makes it look more delicious and it wraps your mind around what it is you're going to be doing so with these different businesses and they put that out on. Usually you know their Facebook or their Twitter or Instagram or whatever. That is like, so important, like what have you guys noticed about? Like these assets that describe the company and describe the experience, that are or are not being produced?

Corey Cotnoir (SocialMadeSimple): 21:48

Yeah, it's a great point and it's a challenging topic because I think a lot of it comes down to a person's sort of penchant for wanting to take photographs and willingness to be in photographs and be in that mindset. Admittedly, I'm someone who's not. You know, I go on vacation. I'm not snapping photos. My wife's always like, hey, we got to get a picture, got to get a picture. So I can understand that if you're a business owner, that that's not your personality, that's not the thing that's front of mind for you. You're just focused on you know. Is everything operating smoothly? How can I improve? You know what we're doing here. Let's make sure we open that up to the whole team.

Corey Cotnoir (SocialMadeSimple): 22:19

There's no reason that any employee on staff that does have maybe that photographic background or loves you know photography or it's just passionate about it, they should be taking the photographs. It doesn't matter who it's coming from, where it's coming from, because to my one of my core themes here today, they don't need to be polished. But you're absolutely right. Getting you know assets generated is the starting point. We need assets and you need a diversity of assets and, like I said, it can be a challenge. I understand that. Like to your point there. If you're an owner, ideally that's where it's coming from An owner who's invested in, you know, generating a buzz through the authenticity of their local market, getting photographs of their brick and mortar store, people in it, how the you know the look and feel is of a space, because, you're right, a consumer on the Internet needs that photographic proof, you know, you can say it, you can tell them what the experience is like.

Corey Cotnoir (SocialMadeSimple): 23:08

But I'm the same way. I'm always looking for photographs of the place I'm going to go to, where you know. What is it, what's the alignment, what is maybe the plaza look like, where the location is. I'm always looking for those things. So it's a great point. Like I said, it's a thing we see a lot. So our recommendation is always just find people on staff that are good at it, that are reliable, that will consistently churn out those new assets for you.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 23:31

Yeah, I agree. Well, Corey, any last thing that you want to share with people that you think would be helpful, useful or actionable when it comes to local marketing, or just anything in general.

Corey Cotnoir (SocialMadeSimple): 23:46

Yeah, I mean we spend a lot of time, I think, touching on kind of the locality of our services. One thing I want to make sure I mentioned. I know your audience here also is pretty big into the franchise development community and space. So we also do offer and have a lot of success stories in the franchise development realm as well. A lot of the themes of today carry over there. You just mentioned it. If you're a prospective franchisee, you want to see the place you're going to buy. What do these stores look like? What does this business look like, maybe even have experienced it yourself? So we're pretty well versed in making sure that we can deliver the franchise development message to the right audience in the right target segment. Again, we have a lot of data and kind of a track record and success across the franchise development realm as well.

Corey Cotnoir (SocialMadeSimple): 24:32

But the last thing I'd say just we it's a bit salesy, but we have a pilot program as a business and if you check, go to our website and check that out Any campaigns or local markets, reach out if you have any questions about how you're eligible for that. It's completely free for 90 days. It's a great way to just trial out what it is that we do, and we're also really open to consultation. So I know today's chat was, you know, hopefully helpful, in that there are some opportunities for education and kind of how you can leverage social marketing. If you ever have any questions about, hey, here's what I'm doing and I'm not seeing success, any recommendations, we're not going to say no only if you work with us. Our team will be happy to help out. We have resources on our website, on our blogs, we do webinars, so feel free to just come on over, take a look at what we've got. If you have any questions, like I said, just reach out. Hopefully we can get you some answers and point you in the right direction.

Lance Hood (FranPro): 25:24

Thank you, corey. I really appreciate you. You can go here and check it out https://Franpro. vip/GoSocialMadeSimple, Corey, I'm sure we'll talk again soon.

Corey Cotnoir (SocialMadeSimple): 25:33

Awesome. Thank you so much for having me.