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(bright upbeat music) (bright upbeat music continues) - Welcome to "Business Forward", I'm your host, Matt George.

Joining me tonight, Thomas Helfrich.

Thomas is the founder and CEO of "Instantly Relevant".

Welcome, Thomas.

- Well, thank you for having me, sir.

How are you today.

- I'm great.

Let's just jump into this and ask what is "Instantly Relevant"?

- Well, it's a marketing company in short, but it's designed and really articulated towards founders, small business, entrepreneurs and startups, really different way of thinking about marketing, little more lean, a little more effective.

- Yeah.

So where are you located at?

- [Thomas] Atlanta, Georgia.

- [Matt] Oh, I love Atlanta, Georgia.

- I like it, too.

It's the right mix of transplants people, weather, access and like everything else, if you go anywhere in the United States, you go through Atlanta, typically, to get there.

So I enjoy it very much though.

- And so talking to you this past week, I said, one of the things that, one of the questions I get a lot from business owners, especially small business owners is, 2023 is gonna be my year, so I need to get ready for this upcoming year.

And there's so many things in my business that I'm fired up about.

And one of the things that always comes up is either the marketing or branding piece of their business.

And it seems like a lot of people, more often than not, struggle with that piece.

Can you talk about that?

- You're spot on and every business owner in the world that I know, when the fiscal year kicks off, they're ready.

It's like joining a gym or something like, oh, I'm ready, I'm gonna do this and this.

But what happens and why people struggle, I believe with marketing and branding and getting, generating leads is because it's just not a core competency.

Typically, people are in business to solve some problem and letting, the world's best kept secret, right, often lies in the fact that it's not a core competency to create a compelling brand or brand story or have marketing that supports that afterwards.

It's a lot of time and effort and typically takes a lot of resources as well.

- Yeah, you and I have a mutual acquaintance in David Brier.

David is the master of branding, really in the world.

And that's how I met you and in talking with him in the past, 'cause he's been on this show in the past, I ask him the question, but I want to ask you the question too is, sometimes people get branding and marketing mixed up.

What is the difference between a brand and marketing?

- David is definitely the best person in the world to answer that question, but my take on it is, your brand's gonna tell your story, your differentiators, why you have value in customers, in the people that you're trying to, the prospects out there, it tells the story and it helps shape the kind of culture or ambiance of your company.

- [Matt] And the market.

- The other, sorry, my short attention.

Marketing, what's the difference?

So marketing would be taking that story and brand to your prospects and letting them see it, building trust with them, building relevance with them, and then eventually becoming loyal long-term customers with you because you've established that brand as a viable asset to them.

- Yeah and what I'm seeing nowadays, and you tell me if you're seeing the same trend is, there's companies like yours that are actually providing more value than just having, and I shouldn't say this, but I'm going to, but when I hire you and your firm, I get a team and I just don't have, I have 10 different skill sets, as an example and so when I have somebody in just marketing, what's hard is you have to build that team out.

And a lot of these small businesses don't have the bandwidth, they don't have the resources to be able to build out a team.

So, I've been thinking a lot lately about just that expansion of your business, from a marketing side, it's hard nowadays with social media and everything else, which we'll get to in a minute.

But that is the advantage of hiring a group like yours, right?

- I mean, I love softball, easy questions.

Thank you so much.

(both laughing) No, those are the best.

So no, the whole differentiator and model that I faced as a founder is, was I didn't have time to do all the things I needed to do, but I had to do them, I had to create content, I had to create sales, sales decks and sales collateral or pitch decks.

I had to manage social media and there, is it one or is it five?

How many?

And I found every founder, every entrepreneur I met has the same exact problem.

And what happens is they don't do anything about it, or they do the bare minimum and it really hurts their brand.

It hurts how they look, their executive eminence falls short.

So what I decided to do is, you have a cup and you can fill it up as much as you need to, but that cup representing a whole marketing team and strategy is available to you.

You decide how much you need month to month or year to year or whatever your budget allows.

But you get the full team just in some aspect and that way you can get things accomplished.

And actually go back to your original opening statement of, I have things to do in 2023.

Well, if you can get some real power in the marketing and sales side and the lead generation, you'll likely accomplish 'em.

- I think you just answered this, and I think maybe it might be the same question, but I'm gonna ask it because I get asked this.

So how does a business, especially, let's go to the new business.

A new business, small business.

How do you stay relevant or up to speed with what needs to be done in that marketing space?

And not waste time.

- What's that?

Say again?

- [Matt] And not waste time.

- Well, yeah, and that is certainly a different question because when you're a new business specifically launching, you have an idea or core offering that you think's going to, a need's gonna be met.

And you'll have to stay relevant in an idea of you'll need a differentiator.

You'll need to know why your company is better than the others that are out there.

Is it original?

So understanding what those initial differentiators are or what your market space is and why you serve it best, is really the first step in understanding relevance.

Because once you have that and you have an idea of who that persona is, and you have a really detailed version of it, and we joke that you should know your personas of the people you think will buy your stuff to the point of like, not that they live in the southeast United States, live in the Midwest and they are ready to buy, but like they have mustaches, they love cats, they eat hot dogs on Sundays and they watch "Game of Thrones" over and over.

Like, you need to be able to envision that person and understand do they have a beard or not?

I dunno, is it full mustache?

The reason I say that is because if you can envision a really small audience of your initial customers when you're first launching, then then becoming relevant to them becomes easier.

And then you can test that notion and you can test that hypothesis very quickly.

And then you can get into marketing and branding yourself towards the very defined persona.

- Okay, so let's role play here in terms of, I'm a small business owner, I come in, I talk to you, how do you, I'm gonna use the word audit, how do you get what you need from me as the small business owner in your questioning because let's just pretend that I can't tell a story and that's part of my problem is because, that's why I stink in marketing.

So I need someone like you.

What process do you go through to be able to make that business whole, so to speak, from a marketing standpoint?

- Yeah, that's a very common scenario.

It's actually better to know that you don't how to tell a story than it is to think you know how to tell a story.

Sometimes that's harder to unlearn.

But the same process applies where, and it's very simple, it's two ears, one mouth.

You listen a couple times first to how the individual that's leading the business or how the business wants to position themselves in tone or stature or whatever it would be.

You listen to the problems they say they're solving, you're listening to the things they've solved and how, and if there's any customer feedback.

But once you have that, you can take those findings and learn from 'em by creating initial pieces of interactions or content to draw that out.

Now my expertise in the past has always been at advisory and consulting.

So I've always been cross industry myself.

And so the teams that we work with and I have hired, all know how to draw the information from you.

That's a skill by itself.

Did not have to be the expert because you are.

The owner is the expert.

And we help them find their way with just a conversation, quite honestly, of who you are, what you believe in, what your company stands for, what's the culture, what do you solve, and then what's your value proposition.

Once we have that, we can recite those words back in a storyline to them that they're like, yes, that's it.

Or well, maybe it's slightly this and we tweak it, augment it.

And now you have your story line and your personas lined up to start creating marketing things, so to speak, for them.

- That's interesting.

Yeah.

So your team is involved from the get go.

'Cause one of my questions was gonna be how do you get 'em up to speed?

- Well, I mean that's part of the onboarding.

I don't think laugh is the right word, but I often see these online.

Oh, all your marketing done for a hundred bucks or we'll do.

Don't.

I mean you're just, there's no possible way the intimacy can be there.

But just to give you an idea, there's a lot of technology that goes into marketing nowadays from AI to automation to workflows and that by itself is never enough.

You always need a human led.

So be very wary when someone says they can do all your marketing for a few hundred bucks.

- [Matt] Right.

- It would be potentially brand ruining if you did this.

There's a much higher level of intimacy that's needed and there's not a ton more cost.

It just, you need higher levels of intimacy to achieve marketing at the level you're gonna want to to distinguish yourself and create a brand and get in front of the customers you want consistently.

So you're not always feasting and famine, as an owner of a company.

- So you talk about AI, how is that used in marketing as an example?

Is that what Google analytics is?

- Google's got a ton of AI behind it.

But AI, if we can define it as broadly, artificial intelligence, so people don't glaze over.

You can think it as augmented intelligence or even accelerated intelligence.

The point of view that we take with it is, it is there to accelerate humans.

And so you take the right human and the right technology and the right moment and you combine those things elegantly and you can accelerate the creation of content, the type of engagement you can get on social media or otherwise.

And also then the nurturing of the customer itself.

So you leverage AI to create content, you can leverage it to source it, you can leverage AI to do a transcript of a video or even take segments of a video and record it in real time and take highlights from it.

There's a number of technologies that have a very specific built-for-purpose play, if you will, and knowing how to use those will really accelerate the whole marketing function, where you need a lot less people, a lot less resources and once you have the initial pieces of the business goal, the personas, the story, you can apply technology and humans together to really accelerate.

- Yeah, I think the key there is the human piece, too.

'Cause I think people think that computers just take everything over and that's not necessarily true.

You also have to have that human component.

- It has to be human led, any powerful technology, it should be there, in my point of view, there to serve a human to accelerate faster, to let them do more creative and interactive things with other humans.

There are places where business-to-business AI makes sense and there's tons of things with number crunching, sure.

But when you're creating content and, if you're a business that sells to customers, well, that's very clear.

But a business who sells to another business is still selling to customers.

It's just a group, it's a committee, if you will.

It's a buy-in ensemble.

So having that ability to accelerate the creation and distribution and the engagement and the authenticity of that and the ongoing nurturing of your customers with technology, allows you to leverage companies that can do it less expensive.

You can do it yourself with less people.

There's a lot of ranges where you just don't have to hire the armies of marketing teams that maybe the traditional past.

- Yeah, let's talk about social media for a second because I think what's funny is like, I'm 52 years old and it's easy for me to sit here and say, well, my daughter got me on this app and I did this and everything.

But that's actually putting yourself down in a way because I think when you're starting a business, you really need to understand the impact of what social media can do, number one, but also what it is.

So you have that component.

You would take over.

So let's say I'm weak at it and I'm not joking, I'm very weak at it.

So you would come in with my business and your team would come in and put together just even a whole social media strategy.

Is that correct?

- Absolutely.

So it's, I love the term soup to nuts.

I'm not really sure how many times I've had nuts with soup, but let's just go with that term that everyone seems to.

I don't think I've ever had like a cashew after my soup.

But anyway.

Trains of thought, right?

But here's how it works, right?

So it's typically not a core competency of most business owners is to work and run their social media, even their website for that matter.

And it's a necessary evil because you need to have, it's just table stakes.

You have to have an online presence and there's always challenges of sometimes the individuals who run the businesses not wanting to be on the social media and such.

So what we we do is we integrate with your current process for one.

So if you have a marketing team that needs just scale and they need some just hand-on-plow, let's get some stuff done, and I don't wanna hire a bunch of people.

We work really well in those environments so the teams can accelerate themselves and work on higher value activities.

So part of the strategy is what do you need and how do you need it and when do you need it?

Then after that, you can determine do you even need to be on social media?

'Cause are your people there, are they in some other private groups or networks?

So it's not always an assumption that you need to be on social media, but you typically want to be for only the reason when someone checks out your company, you're unlikely a big brand.

And if they need to check you out to say, well, who are these, who are these guys?

It's nice to have, on the Google search when they type your business name in, a bunch of lines, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, whatever it may be, TikTok, that you're out there everywhere.

And then when they look at those brands, maybe their favorite social media platform, the brand and the look and feel and the messaging is consistent.

Almost in every case, most founders, owners don't have time to do this and that they've hired interns or their son's friend or their daughter or something.

They typically will do maybe one or two of the social medias okay, maybe.

But most of the time there's a consistency and a strategy that's missing across all of them.

And in almost in every case, there's never a business goal that's tied to why are you even on social media and what are you doing to create it to achieve that business goal and find that person or find that inbound lead or what have you.

- So, let's say, LinkedIn and then there's Facebook.

I know there's a million of 'em, but I'm just gonna give you an example.

So your team even would come in and say, well, Matt, come on, nobody's looking at you on Facebook.

You need to be more on LinkedIn.

You're more of a business professional and this is your audience.

I mean, you kind of dissect that and say, man, nobody's, Instagram's not for you or whatever it may be.

I definitely know TikTok's not for me.

- I don't know, I think you start just doing little dancing, little, but it could be, so it depends on the persona you wanna put out there.

What it requires, though, are different types of content and we've ran lots of experiments on my personal profiles of let's put the exact same content out across all social media and see where it does.

And on TikTok, on one of the brands it got 40,000 followers in a month, on Instagram is a hundred, just a hundred, not a hundred thousand, a hundred, 110 to be exact.

- Wow.

- And on LinkedIn it got a few thousand views and on Shorts, it maybe got 50 subscribers, exact same content.

But when you start mixing and knowing how to use the the platforms correctly, then you can leverage your persona or your business ideas across all of 'em.

Because on the same people on Facebook wanna see something different than they do on YouTube, than they do on TikTok.

And you just have to be willing or have the time to go create that content.

And we do challenge every owner to, let's stay in your comfort zone.

Let's build a bunch of stuff you you feel really good about, then let's get outta your comfort zone and if one of those does well, we're gonna get you outta your comfort zone until it becomes comfortable.

Because that's really the key is, you don't know what you don't know until you've been directed professionally how to go try it across different pieces.

It's not for everybody, for sure, to be on social media and you don't have to be, but it should be part of most strategies or considered and be able to rule it out from a business sense of why you would not be.

And then you don't.

- What you're saying is that analytics piece actually comes into play on what could drive what, not what you want, but what people are looking at in regards to your business.

So if you've got a hundred thousand views over here and 5,000 over here, you obviously would do more on this platform over here.

Is that what you're saying?

- Maybe.

Now that's a great question.

So that comes into my statement of vanity is insanity.

Is that if you're chasing views and likes and followers and subscribers, that might be great and feel good, but does it produce business?

And so you could get to, for that example that I gave you, that the 40,000 TikTok followers produced almost no business.

The few hundred that we got on on LinkedIn, maybe views, actually produced leads.

So sometimes the quantity of your views or subscribers or followers matters a whole hell a lot less than what the effect is of the business.

'Cause if you only need to meet 10 people a month to really grow your business really well, 'cause you're maybe a high ticket item or you're just consulting or whatever it would be, you don't need to be in front of a hundred thousand people.

You need to be right in front of the right hundred every month.

If you're trying to be a B2B influencer, well yeah, you need views and followers and that's gonna be a piece to be able to have people hire you to be that influencer.

So it really depends on what you're trying to achieve to determine what matters on the metrics.

- I think I'm gonna hire you and just be an influencer.

- That's right.

(both laughing) - How do you have worthwhile content and have it mean something?

I hear people all the time say, I'm gonna do a blog.

But when you look at a blog and read a typical blog on LinkedIn or something, a lot of times it's just the same topic and those people aren't experts in that area anyway.

So who's gonna read it?

How do you decide that?

- Well that's a big piece, right?

So there's a lot of noise and I think we've had this conversation before, at least I know I have is, there's a lot of experts who should probably just call themselves enthusiasts and that's fine.

It just, 'cause when you label expert, but then it just kills the term.

It's like the word awesome now, right?

It has a different meaning completely, but everything's awesome.

And so I think when you look at how do you create content that's meaningful, well I think it's first based in, and I'm not saying put a bunch of videos of kittens and things like this out there so you get views and likes, that might be meaningful in some way.

But to your business, you really have to understand what you're truly an expert in.

And can you explain it, not only in every complicated detail possible, but can you bubble it down to the person who doesn't know?

And it's just slowing down to create that content or at least be able to articulate it.

One thing we do is we will just do an interview of different founders, executives or the entrepreneurs and just ask, draw questions out of 'em on an expertise on a topic.

Maybe it's current, maybe it was a conference they had gone to and draw the thought leadership from them because I mean, I started a whole company 'cause I hate writing.

I don't like a white piece, blank piece of paper.

I like to have someone kind of launch me off on that.

And that's why we started it and created these thought leadership pieces 'cause people need help sometimes just articulating pen to paper and we just take that through written, then we reform it.

That's one way you can create content is do it yourself.

Just go talk to the dictation on Word and then go make an article from it.

But really you have to know your topics.

I mean, you really have to be into the weeds with what it is you're doing and then your customers and your prospects will feel that, they'll understand that and your content won't be noisy, like the one you described that was like everybody else's.

- That's well put.

So when I was talking to you last week, you'd said executive eminence and I wrote it down because you don't hear that often, but I liked it and as we were discussing executive eminence, talk about what we were talking about because I think that, we're talking about missed opportunities and mistakes you see in founders and things like that.

What is that?

- Well, executive eminence is your personal and company brand image kind of together.

And what I mean by it is that you have a presence of thought leadership, of somebody who is leading a company who has an idea.

And the executive eminence is where you make sure your personal and business profiles look great.

They're sharp.

You've produced thought leadership content in the form of maybe podcast or videos or articles or posts.

You have a consistent look and feel across your social media, online or website presence.

So when people check you out, you check out.

And what I see in almost every founder or entrepreneur who cannot raise money or cannot, and this is your world, so I'd hate for you to say this isn't true, but I have seen this every time.

The ones who don't raise money or taking forever to raise capital, don't have executive eminence.

They don't have an online personal profile that backs up what their displaying when they meet these investors.

And investors invest in you, more so than your idea of business or passion.

They wanna see and you gotta check out 'cause they're gonna put money in you that you can't embarrass them and you can't lose that money.

You have to go perform.

And what I've seen in every case though, is they do not have a good personal brand image.

They do not have a presence that rings like, I wanna follow this person, I wanna hear what they have to say.

I'm interested in them.

And we help people do this for sure because it's a big misstep of almost every case the founder, entrepreneur goes, I don't have time.

And it's the one thing they probably should just slow down or at least outsource it if they don't do it themselves because it is so critical to success.

And even if you're just an established business, raise it, put yourself up on a little bit more of a pedestal.

Give yourself some credit without being arrogant or over the top.

You can do this with just being you, but you do need to raise it to, I think, be most effective.

You just missed an opportunity to differentiate and be remembered.

- I liked the conversation because when we were talking, I was actually, I was putting myself in that space of what I used to do with nonprofit fundraising and I had somebody one time say, oh, you're a pretty good fundraiser, blah, blah, blah and everything.

And I thought to myself, that's not a really true statement.

What I would appreciate is when someone would say that is one of the best stories I've ever heard, or that story actually hit home with me and that's why I gave, because now I know what the nonprofit does.

And I think that's a big piece of it, is part of your brand is being able to tell the story.

- No doubt.

There's no question in my mind you need story and that's part of your presence, right?

Is if you can't tell the story, it needs to be told on some level with your digital presence.

I mean, you'll do it in person, but when you, as well.

But those things will match and you just, when they meet you, you might be great at it.

You might be terrible at it.

So you just, I think one of the biggest coaching pieces we do is you have to practice and just film yourself and talk through and pretend people ask you questions and work through your story until you watch it and go, I'm actually interested in it.

And it's really uncomfortable, that's a comfort zone piece, but telling your story is so critical to any piece of it, even look.

Think about it, if you hire a company, I'm sorry, you hire employees for your company and you can't tell them your story or they don't understand the brand story or that presence you're trying to create, how are they gonna translate that when they meet with customers or they interact on the operations side?

It's just gonna be lost and you're not building the foundation of which you set out to do and you'll never scale because you'll always be in the business, not working on it.

- Yeah.

You just nailed it.

It's gonna be tough to scale.

Well anyway, I appreciate you coming on, "Instantly Relevant", Thomas Helfrich.

This was a great conversation.

I'm gonna have you back on sometime in '23 and we're gonna kind of do an update because this was fun.

Thanks for coming on.

I'm Matt George and this is another episode of "Business Forward".

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music fades out) - Thank you for tuning in to "Business Forward", brought to you by PNC.