SOW 152 Jamie Turner: Digital Marketing Explained

When networks like CNN and HLN need someone to explain social, mobile or digital marketing to their viewers, who do they call? Internationally-recognized keynote speaker Jamie Turner, who has been profiled in the world’s best-selling marketing textbook and is the author of two books on social media and mobile marketing.

Jamie speaks around the globe on the subjects of social media, mobile marketing and branding. He has helped companies like AT&T, CNN, The Coca-Cola Company and Cartoon Network grow their sales and revenue with innovative marketing programs.
And he has been called one of the world’s leading experts on digital marketing. If you’re looking for an engaging, energetic and captivating speaker who speaks around the globe on the subjects of social, mobile and branding, then Jamie Turner may be just what you’re looking for.

Narrator: Speakers, publishers, consultants, coaches, and info marketers unite. The Speaking of Wealth show is your road map to success and significance. Learn the latest tools, technologies and tactics to get more bookings, sell more products and attract more clients. If you’re looking to increase your direct response sales, create a big time personal brand, and become the go to guru, the Speaking of Wealth show is for you. Here is your host, Jason Hartman.

Jason Hartman: Welcome to the Speaking of Wealth show. This is your host Jason Hartman, where we discuss profit strategies for speakers, publishers, authors, consultants, coaches, info marketers, and just go over a whole bunch of exciting things that you can use to increase your business, to make your business more successful and more and more passive and more and more automated and more and more scalable. So we will be back with a great interview. Be sure to visit us at SpeakingofWealth.com. You can take advantage of our blog, subscribe to the RSS feed, and many other resources for free and SpeakingofWealth.com and we will be back with a great interview for you in less than 60 seconds.

Start of Interview with Jamie Turner

Jason Hartman: It’s my pleasure to welcome Jamie Turner to the show. He is the CEO of 60 Second Communications: a full service marketing agency based in Atlanta, Georgia. Great city, by the way. And he’s the founder of 60secondmarketer.com, an online magazine that provides tips and techniques for marketers around the globe. Jamie is a regular guest on CNN and HLN on topics of social media mobile marketing and branding. And he worked with all the big brands, like AT&T, CNN, Motorola, Cartoon Network, Coca Cola. And he’s just got a bunch of great information to share with us today, so it’s a pleasure to have him. Jamie, welcome. How are you?

Jamie Turner: I’m doing great Jason, thanks a lot for having me on the show. I’m looking forward to sharing some ideas with you and your audience.

Jason Hartman: Well, we’re looking forward to it too. So we can talk about social media, we can talk about mobile marketing, we can talk about consumer behavior… take it away. Where do you want to start? I’ll let you pick maybe one of those three.

Jamie Turner: Well I guess the starting point for any sort of marketing program is to understand consumer behavior. So let’s start with some fundamentals there, and then we can move into kind of more tactical ideas around social media and how to use social media. So a starting point, take me as an example: I’m an author and a speaker and I share information with a lot of my audience. My goal was to understand what kind of triggers I can use to keep people engaged with my personal brand and coming back again and again to the 60 Second Marketer website where they can be exposed to not only the thought leadership I have, but also basically things that they may hire me for.

So fundamentally from your audience’s perspective I’d encourage them to start thinking about what is it that their customers, their client prospects are looking for and figure out what those kind of hot buttons are, and use those hot buttons as a way to reel people in. So let me kind of do a fundamental consumer behavior idea that’s out there that a lot of people aren’t aware of. Most people buy products and services for emotional reasons and then they rationalize it logically afterwards. So whether you’re selling Coca Cola or whether you’re selling an infomercial or information technology or whatever it is that you’re trying to sell, what you’re really going out and doing is saying what is it that’s the emotional appeal for somebody, and then how can I leverage that for my own benefit?

I’ll give you a quick example: Porsche. Nobody ever bought a Porsche for logical reasons. Even though it’s a German engineered car, it’s fabulously engineered. The reason people buy a Porsche is for emotional reasons, and it’s typically a guy like me. I’m losing my hair, I’m getting a little bit older, I want to still be young so I go out and buy a Porsche. That’s an emotional reason for buying something. And then what I do when I get home to my lovely wife and I say I bought a 150 thousand dollar car today, and she goes crazy, I say well there’s a lot of logical reasons I bought it. It’s got German engineering, It’s got rack-and-pinion steering, it’s got fabulous breaking system and all this sort of stuff. So if you understand that kind of foundation for why people buy things…

People buy things emotionally and then rationalize the purchase logically, it will help you understand how to market yourself. Whether it’s your company, your personal brand, your book, whatever it is. You can use those things in order to go out to the market place and kind of reel them in and get them to buy your stuff.

Jason Hartman: Yeah, great point. So how do we use that in the world of this modern world we’re in of everybody’s got a little business going on? Everybody’s got a start-up idea… everybody’s got a little info product they’re selling… Not everybody of course, but a lot of people do that nowadays. For the solopreneur listening to this podcast working out of the house, they want to sell either their personal brand (of course that’s always something that’s part of the equation in pretty much every venture), but maybe they’ve got an information product or they want to get more bookings as a speaker or get their name out there as a thought leader on a certain topic. How do they do it there? I understand that idea certainly of people make emotional decisions and rationalize them with logic. We like to think of ourselves as these rational beings, which is almost funny. But we’re definitely not. We’re definitely emotional beings.

Jamie Turner: Right. Well it’s a great question. So fundamentally it is how do we take that theory and give it a practical application to somebody working out of their home who’s trying to get more speaking gigs, trying to sell more books, trying to do whatever it is that they’re trying to do. It’s a great question. And the starting point for that is to ask what it is that your client prospect or customer prospect is really buying when they buy from you and when they get engaged with your brand? So let’s take an example: let’s say you’re an author. You’ve got a book out and your goal is two-fold, maybe it’s three goals: one is sell as many books as you can, the second is get speaking gigs around the books, and the third one might be get consulting gigs around that.

So that’s your kind of three things, and then you sit down and you say well how do I put into practice everything that I learned on Jason’s show that Jamie told us about that basically gets people to engage with me? And the way to do that, the starting point really is creating a thought leadership position, usually through a blog or a website that you can drive people to so that they continuously go back to it.

Let’s take you, Jason as an example. I’m on your blog right now. You’ve got a lot of sort of web properties out there. All of them are designed to get people engaged with you in some way, shape or form so that ultimately they buy your products and/or services. The way you’re doing that, and you’re a classic example. You do a great job with it, is hey I’m going to provide you free tips, free information so that you stay engaged with me, and that you’ll buy my products and services in the long run. And you’ve got on your website the form that you fill out and you get the free download, all that sort of stuff.

What you’re doing is you’re providing something for free to somebody in an effort to get them to keep coming back to your blog, or your podcast or whatever it is you’re giving away for free. Ultimately, with the goal of them building trust with you and saying boy, the guy knows what he’s doing. He’s interviewing these people, he’s providing free tips, he’s all over the place. Next time I’m in the market for buying what it is you’re selling, I’m going to go ahead and buy it. So what every author, every speaker, every sort of person working out of their home who’s trying to grow an audience is trying to do is to, first that would be to follow your model which is basically provide free information forms so that they keep coming back, so that they build trust and ultimately buy directly from you.

Jason Hartman: Good points. Well, we talked a little bit philosophically there, and if you have anything more to mention on that, feel free to of course Jamie, but let’s talk about social media specifically. And what’s the latest and greatest in the world of social media marketing?

Jamie Turner: Yeah, so let’s revisit sort of laying the ground work. The fundamental premise is you want people to come to your blog or to your website time and time again, so that you can build trust with them as a way to ultimately sell them something. So on the social media front, we’re all familiar with the key tools and those are going to be LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and Google+ are kind of the big 5 that are out there right now. I would encourage anybody who’s listening to this podcast right now, zero in on one or two and really do a good job with one or two before you spread yourself too thin across the other ones. So in your case it would probably be LinkedIn, would be a great platform. It would probably be for B2B if you’ve listeners who are in the B2B world and you’ve got people who are trying to act as consultants or act as people who are going out there as thought leaders. The LinkedIn sort of aspect of that is important.

Personally, I think Facebook is a little bit overrated and I don’t think it’s going to go away any time soon, but for business purposes, Facebook might not be as good an opportunity. Twitter would be a nice opportunity, Google+ also sort of skews a little more toward the business audience, and the tech audience a little more than Facebook does, which has sort of everybody on it.

And then finally Pinterest is great if you are really trying to position yourself as a thought leader. So you might use quotes, quotations, great things that you’ve said from your book, from your speaking gigs, whatever it is. Put them up on Pinterest and hopefully build enough following so that people share it. But the starting point for most of the people listening right now could be to start with LinkedIn, maybe expand into Twitter, maybe get into Google+ and/or Pinterest… and then I would actually somewhere in there drop Facebook in, but again for business purposes I’m not a big advocate of Facebook. But I’m in the minority on that front, I will say that. I’m a contrarian.

Jason Hartman: Yeah, you are a contrarian because people are saying that Facebook advertising right now is kind of a bargain. Especially versus Google and AdWords and so forth. But that may be more on strictly the advertising part of Facebook, which is of course there’s more to it than just buying advertising from them. There is the engagement level and there’s all sorts of layers to that onion that we can peel back, but yeah you are a contrarian.

Jamie Turner: Yeah, I am and for a long time I was one of the guys who back in the days where the only things that existed were personal computers from IBM and then Apple was a 3% market share company, I was the guy going Apple is ten times better than what you’re getting on the PC side of the equation. And then finally it was revealed that hey, Apple probably is a little bit better of an operating system. You could argue, although there are many people who are fans of the PC operating system. I’m the same way about Facebook. To me, it’s a cluttered environment. You’re competing against all these other people. Now, I am a contrarian because for every time I’ve written a blog post saying hey Facebook kind of really is over rated I get a lot of people who write in and say hey no it’s not. It’s actually pretty good and I’ve had success with it.

That brings up kind of a larger issue, which is your goal and that being the listeners to your podcast, your goal is to be a thought leader who says things that open up and create dialogue. So the same things that are controversial like I do. Hey, Facebook isn’t all that good is a way partly, I can defend what I’m saying with data, but it’s also a way for people to go oh you’re the guy who hates Facebook. Yeah, I am that guy but I’ve got rational for it, and yet it brings things up.

Let me mention a couple of blog posts that I’ve done that have gotten a lot of sort of eyeballs, again if our goal is to position anybody who’s listening to this podcast as a thought leader, as a person with some visibility, then you have to stand out. And some of the things that I do is every once in a while write a blogpost that starts out with “the truth about…” and then you fill in the blank, and then the rest of it is “that nobody else will tell you”. And I’ve done “the truth about social media that nobody else will tell you”, “the truth about mobile apps that nobody else will tell you”, “the truth about SEO that nobody else will tell you”, the intent being let me say something contrarian and somewhat controversial that’s backed up by data, I’m not just blowing smoke, but that’s backed up by data that gives people an idea of why I think that everybody’s doing X when I think that they should be doing Y.

It’s intentionally designed to get eyeballs to the website and get people going eh, I don’t always agree with the guy but he’s got an interesting point of view here.

Jason Hartman: Right, right. Well that’s good. I like that truth about thing. That’s a great way to start, because it makes people think that you’re letting them in on a secret, and of course psychologically who doesn’t want to be in on the secret, right?

Jamie Turner: Well and that actually is a great point. Because what people are “buying” from you and what people are “buying” from me, but the reason they’re visiting your website and the reason they’re visiting other websites is the whole goal is I want to know what Jason knows, that has made him successful and has put him on my radar screen. And what you’re doing is offering those things up little by little by little as a way to say hey guys, I’m going to let you in on a little secret here and if you want the whole big secret, then let’s talk about all of the other things I can offer you. But that’s a great strategy for anybody listening to the podcast. They can do the same thing. People want your knowledge and if you share that out in some of the ways we’ve talked about, then it’s a great way to continue to reel people in and grow your audience.

Jason Hartman: Well of course if you want the big secret, you’ve got to join the coaching program or buy the home study course.

Jamie Turner: Absolutely, and that’s exactly the point. Let me give you a little bit here and there but ultimately if you’re in the game, you’re going to want to be able to buy the whole thing and that’s what we’re all trying to do in the end.

Jason Hartman: I was kind of poking fun there. “The truth about the info marketing industry…”

Jamie Turner: Right! Exactly!

Jason Hartman: I can’t wait to see that blogpost on your website.

Jamie Turner: Right.

Jason Hartman: Good, good. So yeah, the contrarian view on Facebook, so that was interesting. What’s going on in the world of mobile marketing? It seems like everybody rushing to develop an app is kind of, that’s waned a little bit, that’s just a very anecdotal feeling I get.

Jamie Turner: You’re spot on with it though. I literally had a good friend, a dear person who came to me and said we are liquidating our child’s college savings fund in order to launch this app. And I said, well that’s a risk but tell me about the app. And it’s basically Instagram, and I said I’m not sure why you’re investing in this. There’s a product out there already. And she got swept up in the emotion of oh, I can make all this money on this app, and all that sort of stuff. But the bottom line is that… and I did write a blog post called “the truth about apps that nobody else will tell you”, here’s the thing about apps, and it gets a little bit techy but it’s an important consideration: Apps are great for customer retention, not necessarily for customer acquisition. And what I mean by that is that apps are fabulous if you’re Domino’s Pizza, and you have an app that goes out and once somebody downloads the App and starts using it, the odds of them switching over to Pizza Hut or some other App are very, very low because they’ve now loaded it into their smart phone and all that sort of stuff.

So it’s great for customer retention. It’s not as good for customer acquisition. And what I mean by that is that very few people are going to go out and download an App from an entity they’re not familiar with. So a lot of people go out and say I’m going to create this App and we’re going to make a zillion dollars because it’s the neat little App. Well, they’re forgetting that there are a million+ other apps out there that you’re competing against and the second thing is, unless you have a following they aren’t going to download the App. So as an example for you, you’ve got a following, people are going to download an App from you because it’s like oh, here’s a way that I can engage with Jason a little bit further.

They aren’t going to do it if they’ve never heard of you because they’re going to go who’s Jason? What do I know about from him? And all that sort of stuff, so again coming back to that fundamental premise and the truth about Apps, you have to have a built in audience really to make them effective. They’re not as good at customer acquisition as they are at customer retention.

Jason Hartman: So what have you seen people doing in the world of Apps that can help them retain customers? In terms of acquisition, just a small thing on that, and maybe this is considered an already acquired customer possibly, especially if you’re sort of in the thought leadership and guru business. But just getting someone to put a free App on their phone, and they may have found your material, been interested at one point, and we all sort of move around and lose touch with certain people we follow. Maybe we listen to their podcast then we just kind of stopped and listened to something else. But what I’m noticing with 342 Apps on my phone, is those Apps sort of almost become a little bit of an advertising piece where I’ll just be scrolling through my phone one day and I’ll see an App and I’ll realize I never really use this App, I did download it, I might reengage with that person or that brand.

Jamie Turner: Yeah, that’s actually a very good point, which is the brand value of just having an App there. There’s two sides to that equation. One is the mere fact that you’re a company or an entity that says we have an App, tells your potential customers, “We’re real players. We’re really in this, we’re large enough to be able to afford to have an App and this is a real thing. ” So there’s the brand value of that, and then the other brand value is what you just said, which is people are scrolling through and they’re like oh yeah I forgot about them! And it’s just kind of a little reminder. So there is value to Apps – the big value is in customer retention which goes back to what we were saying.

Let me expand on the question you asked, which is a lot of people say how do I get started in mobile? I keep hearing about it, I know it’s the next big thing or it is the big thing right now, how do I get started in it? The starting point is to make sure that whatever your web presence is, has a mobile version of it. So if you have a website or a blog it needs to be able to be read on a smartphone in a mobile optimized way. In other words it sets itself up so that it looks good on a smartphone. There are two approaches to that. One’s called Responsive Design, and the other is called Adaptive Design. I won’t go into the details on either one of them right now, but the bottom line is that if you have let’s say a WordPress blog and that’s what you’re using for your mobile presence, be sure to get a theme that has a responsive design theme around it so that you can have it available for your smartphone audience.

Now that said, that’s the starting point is the mobile web presence and then Apps actually come about fourth or fifth down the line in terms of what you should do. I would suggest the people listening to this podcast, now start with a mobile web presence.
The second thing might be mobile paid search which is really easy to do on Google, and then the third thing might be a mobile display or a mobile banner ad, down below that might be a QR code promotion. QR codes aren’t going to be around forever, but maybe you can find a way to use them in the time that they will be here, and then after that worry doing an App a little bit further down the line only because there are so many other ways to grow your business using mobile that go beyond an App, that are easier to do, quicker to do, and probably more effective for you than a mobile App would be.

Jason Hartman: It’s funny how a few years ago people thought that QR codes were going to take over the world.

Jamie Turner: Yeah, I agree. In fact, I wrote a book called Go Mobile that came out about two years ago. At that time there were 18% of the US audience had scanned a QR code. Fast forward and here’s another contrarian post I did on my blog called “Why QR codes are dead”. Fast forward two years after the book was published, it had gone from 18% had scanned a QR code to 19% so you can see that the growth had really peaked at around below 20% for people who’d scanned a QR code. So they never got adopted. Doesn’t mean you can’t still use them, it just means they really have kind of stalled a little bit. And like you said a couple years ago, everybody said QR codes are the next big thing. And they didn’t end up being that way.

Jason Hartman: The truth about QR codes.

Jamie Turner: Right? Exactly.

Jason Hartman: Very interesting, very interesting. Well what do you see as any opportunities coming down the pike? We’ve sort of talked about that through this whole conversation, but any great places that people should be focused right now to grow and expand their business and their presence?

Jamie Turner: I think that the trick is consistency and just understanding that it’s a marathon. There’s no silver bullet. There’s no easy way to make money. It’s all about being consistent, staying focused, and staying true to what it is that you’re trying to accomplish. And that sounds like so easy to do. It’s very, very hard to do given all the distractions that we all have, given all the things that take our attention away from what we’re trying to focus on. But if people knew how long it took me to build an audience on the 60 Second Marketer, they’d go oh it’s not worth the amount of effort. And you could argue if you were a pure financial person, and you said hey Jamie, here’s the number of hours you’ve put into 60 Second Marketer, versus here’s the amount of revenue you’ve generated directly attributable to that. Some people would argue hey that’s not a good business proposition.

But the flip side is I can no knock on a door at Holiday Inn, or knock on the door at Coca Cola and say would you like to use my company for some of the things that we’re doing in mobile or social or whatever, and get them to answer my knock on the door. That wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t done the 60 Second Marketer. So the value behind sort of staying focused and staying true to pushing people back to a website, goes beyond just the immediate sort of I got this lead from the website, over to well I’ve positioned myself as a thought leader and as such, I can knock on the door of a large client who wouldn’t ordinarily take my phone call, and get them to respond to me.

And Jason it’s the same for you. It’s what you’re doing. You’re building up a brand name for yourself, for your company so you can get people to go oh yeah, yeah I’m going to actually do some of this stuff because I keep hearing about this guy all over the place. That wouldn’t have happened if you didn’t stay true, stay focused and continue to work on what you’re doing on all these fronts. Because it ultimately results in revenue. It just takes a long time to do that.

Jason Hartman: Jamie, I just want to tell you: what you just said is so valuable, and it’s so old fashioned sounding. And it’s so cliché almost. But I used to say it all the time when I used to train real estate people. They would all come to me during a break if I had a speaking engagement, they’d come up and say give me the big idea, like what’s the really hot thing that’s going to make me different, that’s going to really make me stand out and I would just simply reply and I’d say look, if you want to be different, be consistent. Because that’s really different.

Jamie Turner: That’s a really great line. If you want to be different, be consistent. Because nobody else does that, and the handful of people who do end up… I’m going to actually steal that, Jason. I’m just going to take it, I’m going to put my name on it, put it on Pinterest and say I said this. And if Jason ever says he said it first, you know that actually he did.

Jason Hartman: There you go, there you go.

Jamie Turner: No, I like that line. That’s great.

Jason Hartman: But yeah, it’s so true. The human mind loves consistency and it trusts consistency. So when people are consistent, they’re putting a message out there like the 60 Second Marketer on a recurring basis. It shows that number one you have faith in your own idea, because you’re willing to just keep doing it. And that makes a big difference to the consumer. If you want to win them over and get them to follow you, and get them to buy your stuff, and believe in your ideas, you’ve got to be consistent.

Jamie Turner: I think there’s a lot of truth to that and again, I love that idea. If you want to be different be consistent. Because too many people get distracted and then do something for a month or two and then go off on a tangent, and it literally is the people who stick it out and just go through those… quite frankly, those dark periods, those dark nights where you’re like man nobody’s visiting, we’re not making the progress… for me personally, it always seems that it comes in flurries. It’s like we’ll plot along, plot along and then for no reason that I can figure out, all of the sudden we’ll get 25% more website visitors, and then we’ll get to that plateau and then we’ll just do the same thing we’ve been doing, and then it will bump up another 25%. But it’s during those plateaus that you’re thinking am I really wasting my time here? Am I ever really going to make the progress that I want? But it ends up bumping up, and it goes back to what you said: if you do it consistently, the audience will come to you eventually.

Jason Hartman: What do you want to bet that in the early days of Facebook, people told Zuckerberg hey, this is dumb. You should just go get a day job.

Jamie Turner: Yeah! And any entrepreneur has had that. You’ve had it, I’ve had it, anybody listening to this podcast has had it where, whether it’s a relative… funny quick story: I started my first business when I was 29 years old, I went to my father who had been in the same business I was starting and I said dad, I think I’m going to start an ad agency. He said you’re too young for it. I went to my older brother, I said I think I’m going to start an ad agency. He said you’re too young. I went to my boss, and said I’m going to start an ad agency and she said you’re too young.

I had three major people in my life say don’t do it, you’re too young, you’re too inexperienced. And I ended up just doing it out of the desire to prove them wrong. And it ended up working, and we had a great run. It was terrific, had a fabulous series of events, but the bottom line was all of us meet those people and you have to have the courage to say I hear you, I humble enough to register that there’s some truth in what you’re saying but I have a hunch that I’m right and you’re wrong on this one, and I’m going to follow that hunch. Doesn’t always pay off, but sometimes it does, and when it does it’s a good success.

Jason Hartman: Right there Jamie, is showing one of the real values of a part of our humanity that gets a lot of unfair bashing in my opinion and that is the good ol’ ego. Because ego is what drives a lot of that. The desire to show someone that they were wrong and you were right, and that’s what keeps you going. Like I tell you, if I’m going to hire a sales person, and I can hire a person with a great resume, the great pedigree or whatever or I can hire the person who’s got something to prove, that’s the guy I want to hire. The guy who’s got something to prove. Because I know that that person is just going to go and overcome whatever obstacle they need to overcome, and just make it happen.

Jamie Turner: I think you’re totally right on that. Absolutely.

Jason Hartman: If you want to get some balanced arguments on the concept of ego, read AYN Rand, and all of her great work like Atlas Shrugged, etc. and you really see that there is real value in that. That something to prove thing is not it be underestimated as a motivator and a driver.

Jamie Turner: I agree. Absolutely.

Jason Hartman: Good stuff. Well, this has been a great conversation. We covered three main topic areas, and it’s just been fantastic.

Jamie, give out your website and tell people where they can find you, and all of your great content.

Jamie Turner: Oh, I appreciate that. It’s 60secondmarketer.com, and basically what we do is we provide tips on how to use social media and mobile marketing in order to drive more leads to your business. So it’s all free, you can sign up for the newsletter there, and we also were part of a larger agency called 60 Second Communications that basically does social and mobile and other digital forms of marketing for many brands you would have heard of.

Jason Hartman: Good stuff. Well, Jamie Turner, thank you so much for joining us today.

Jamie Turner: Thanks a lot for having me. I appreciate it.

Narrator: This show is produced by the Hartman Media Company, all rights reserved. For distribution or publication rights, and media interviews, please visit www.HartmanMedia.com or email media@HartmanMedia.com. Nothing on this show should be considered personal or professional advice. Please consult an appropriate tax, legal, real estate or business professional for individualized advice. Opinions of guests are their own, and the host is acting on behalf of Platinum Properties Investor Network, Inc. exclusively.

Transcribed by Ralph

The Speaking of Wealth Team
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