IAM2261 – Transform Your Marketing Strategy with 3 Essential Questions

In this episode, Gresham Harkless emphasizes the importance of understanding your position in the market and defining your ideal client, often called an “avatar.”

He shares his journey from getting the impression of undecided about his career path to becoming a media mogul and entrepreneur.

Gresham discusses how every business is fundamentally a media company, expounding that effective communication and marketing are vital for success.

He explains the necessity of knowing your resources—both time and money—and understanding your target audience's needs.

The conversation highlights the value of authenticity and storytelling in marketing. Unfiltered and raw content can foster stronger connections with audiences.

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Transcription:

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Gresham Harkless Teaser 00:00

So it's just like being clear on like where you are on the scale kind of related to that. The other big thing is to understand who you're serving.

This is your ideal client. A lot of times in the marketing world, you'll hear the word avatar.

Essentially, what you want to do is paint a picture as much as possible of who you ultimately want to serve.

Intro 00:22

Are you ready to hear business stories and learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and level up your business from awesome CEOs, entrepreneurs, and founders without listening to a long, long, long interview?

If so, you've come to the right place. Gresh values your time and is ready to share with you the valuable info you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO Podcast.

Eric Twiggs 00:49

I mean, what was your vision? Were you thinking that, yep, I'm definitely going to do this media thing? What were your plans at that point?

Gresham Harkless 00:55

Yeah, so I literally, I came in as undecided and I had no idea what I wanted to do. I felt like college actually snuck up on me. I felt like it came a lot sooner than I was expecting it.

Both of my parents ended up getting their degrees, but they didn't necessarily go to college.

So just going to college was a new experience of taking care of the SAT and doing those things, like applying, just all that was new.

So when I came in, I didn't really know what I wanted to do to be very honest. I thought that I wanted to do something with computers, like I took AP computer science class when I was in college, I mean in high school.

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But I went back to that story. So a lot of like that 10 year old, I felt like I don't know what I want to do necessarily.

I have different ideas whether you know I was thinking of being an attorney going to law school.

So all those things kind of fleshed through. So I tried to like play to my strengths of like what made me light up, what I enjoyed doing and hopefully give myself a little bit more flexibility.

And I felt like me eventually becoming an English major, my, I think officially it was my sophomore year at Howard. That's where I said, okay, I wanna lean more into this.

But I still said that, okay, I'd still go to law school. I ended up getting my master's later on so I could still do many things, but I know I love writing.

So I wanted to do journalism, honestly, but I said that that industry was kind of being ravaged. So I said, let me be a little bit more of an English major, and then I could always, use writing and communication, hopefully in the future.

Eric Twiggs 02:31

Okay, so you go on to become this media mogul. So one of the things that you say, like your central marketing philosophy, you talk about how you are a media company, and every company is in the media business. Let's talk about that. What do you mean by that?

Gresham Harkless 02:53

Yeah, so fast forward a lot of years, like I mentioned, I was really looking into journalism. So I looked at a lot of the media brands per se, and they didn't really have a solid business model.

So I always knew that I wanted to write. I thought I would do a lot of, I ended up doing a lot of freelance writing and things like that.

What I started to see usually, like really around the time that I graduated is that there was a lot of people that could write well, that can communicate well.

But they didn't necessarily have a viable place to do that even job-wise because the newspapers, magazines, everything was being destroyed.

So what a lot of people ended up doing is going in a little bit more into that business place. It did a lot of content creation and things like that.

So for me, that's where a lot of those C's were planted around being a media company. I just consider media to, at the very essence, be the way that you transfer information from one person to another.

And if we look at it on a very granular level, that could be done in many different ways. We have social media, we have your website, even us having this conversation is a form of media.

Handing your business card out is a form of media. So I really started to look at like everyone in some form, shape or fashion is in the media business, especially for organizations and businesses because at the heart of it whenever you start a business.

One of the first things they say is literally tell as many people as you can that you're in business and this is what you do.

So when I started to like look at it from that perspective, I started to see that there's a lot of different ways that we can leverage media to get our name information, what we do, how we do it out and about to the world and to the people that we ultimately want to serve.

So that's where a lot of that came about. It was at the heart of it of like,  journalistic mindset.

But at the end of the day, it was like, there's emerging opportunities to be able to get your name out there more than there ever has been. And that's kind of like where everything kind of took hold.

Eric Twiggs 04:47

No, that's great. And I'm just curious, too. I mean, you've got all of these these different media properties. Help us to get an understanding of kind of what what your thought process was.

Starting at what they do. Like, I mean, for example, let's start with you've got Blue16 Media. Let's talk about that.

Gresham Harkless 05:06

Yeah, so I started out with Blue16 Media, which eventually was that digital marketing company.

It comes into more of a overlay brand of everything that we're doing. Cause at the heart of it, what we're trying to do is use media and technology to change lives.

That's the essence of what we're trying to do to make that impact. And there's different segments that we try to do that for.

When I initially started Blue16 Media, I was going into figuring out how to set up people's websites, how to help out with SEO and things along that lines.

What I realized is that in order to connect and serve the audience that I ultimately wanted to serve, I was doing freelance writing on the side. I had a entrepreneur spotlight column.

And that eventually became what is now CBNation. It eventually became a blog. I used to interview a lot of entrepreneurs, business owners, find out why they started their business.

When I was thinking of how do I differentiate Blue16 Media and not just be another digital marketing company.

I was looking on the other hand and I said, okay, I have something that can actually serve the people that I want to work with.

So it was a sense of starting to merge those two brands together because they serve the same audience in different ways.

One was about amplifying the people that were, I call superheroes, the entrepreneurs, business owners doing awesome things.

And on the other end, it was like, okay, maybe they will need website support services. Maybe they will need SEO services.

Maybe they don't know anything about like what's happening in the digital marketing world. And this was 10 to 11 years ago.

So it wasn't nearly as robust as it is now, but still it's just like bringing those two things together to say, OK, maybe some of the people I'm interviewing, I'm talking to, having these conversations with might have their website that's broken or maybe they want to leverage SEO a little bit more. And that's where those two worlds started to collide and combine.

Eric Twiggs 06:55

Okay. And then you got to, so we get to Blue Star franchises where you're helping seasoned entrepreneurs and CEOs connect with their ideal franchise. So tell us more about that.

Gresham Harkless 07:08

Yeah. So that's a fairly new initiative that I've been kind of working through. And the idea is that within business, like I've always been interested in business entrepreneurship, like I mentioned, and a lot of what I've learned is by talking with really phenomenal people that have started things.

And I started to realize, underneath entrepreneurship, there's really different aspects that you can go into entrepreneurship.

And one of those is being franchised. That's basically you going in and having what is more of a ready-made system.

So it's not necessarily the case for everybody that they wanna necessarily do that, but it's another opportunity that people can, start to develop generational wealth.

They can start to develop an opportunity to generate revenue in a different way. So it's just deep, me deepening my understanding of entrepreneurship in different ways that people can serve there and kind of having more knowledge in ways that we can kind of help support them there.

So that's just another way that we kind of help support people that might be interested in franchising, may not even know what it is or that it's more than a McDonald's, a Chick-fil-A and those avenues that there's so much that's there that people can kind of tap into so that they can reach their ultimate goals.

Eric Twiggs 08:20

Okay, all right. And so, so Gresham now, I mean, there's somebody that's listening to us or watching us and they're saying what, my marketing isn't where I want it to be. Right?

I don't know, should I be doing TikTok? Should I be on LinkedIn? Should I be on Facebook?

Should I keep hearing everybody starting a podcast? That's the latest thing. Should I start a podcast?

So my feeling is that your 3 questions, the whole point, if you can really answer these 3 questions, it helps steer the person in the right way as far as, hey, should I start a MySpace account?

What do I do here? My marketing sucks. I need help. All right, Gresham, what are those 3 questions that people need to be asking?

Gresham Harkless 09:05

Yeah, absolutely. If you're starting a MySpace account, then your marketing will probably definitely suck.

So you want to start a better don't, don't take away. If you don't know anything, do you take away that?

A lot of times I compare your digital marketing and the way you should approach it to like going to the grocery store to figure out what your favorite dish is.

My favorite dish is always my mom's sweet potato pie. So I say like, if you go to the grocery store, you're trying to figure out what ingredients are you going to put into that ultimate thing that you wanna create?

So as a business organization, what are you trying to achieve? What does success look like? So those 3 questions essentially revolve around your resources.

Resources, most people think about it's money, like how much money am I going to spend? And it does include that, but it also includes time.

So how are you spending your time if you're going to DIY it, if you're going to bootstrap it and do it yourself? What are going to be those resources you have available?

Typically when people are starting, they have more time than they have money. And as they start to reach some success, they're able to reinvest some of that money into buying more time, essentially.

So it's just like being clear on where you are on the scale, kind of related to that. The other big thing is to understand who you're serving.

This is your ideal client. A lot of times in the marketing world, you'll hear the word avatar.

Essentially what you wanna do is paint a picture as much as possible of who you ultimately want to serve.

When I say that, I mean literally age, location, their pain point. So you really wanna get into that psychological aspect of like, especially if you have a product or service, like I think most of the time around entrepreneurship, we forget that we are ultimately problem solving.

So what problem are you solving for the clients that you're working with? And I think that you wanna be able to communicate that as much as possible.

But you wanna make sure that you are making that known and you are even aware of that.

There's a lot of investment that people make into market research. And the reason is, is because you're trying to understand as much as you can about the clients that you're ultimately trying to serve.

So the more you learn, the more experience and expertise, the more you're talking with them and engaging, it's just going to help you out as far as knowing this is ultimately who we serve.

This is the age they have 2 and a half dogs, 3 and a half kids, whatever that might be. They love sports. They're huge cowboys fan. Whatever that might be, it's going to be your answer.

And then you're going to kind of work backwards from there. And then, one of the things that I've learned, especially from, my podcast is like, most people don't have the same definition of success.

So the last question you really want to answer is, what does success mean to you? Why are you doing this business? What does that look like?

For some people, they're doing marketing initiatives because they just wrote a book and they want to get speaking engagements, that's going to be completely different from somebody that starts an e-commerce site and wants to have people go to their site, click by, and not even talk with them.

So you have to really understand exactly what success is because those 3 foundational questions are really going to help you before you jump into TikTok or MySpace or whatever that might be that you decide.

You're going to have a solid foundation to filter through those quote unquote ingredients, as I like to call them, so that you can have a strong and effective marketing strategy.

Ted Fells 12:32

It's really interesting that today just how different things are than say 20 years ago right.

I mean if you look out and you see people man on social media and they're whatever that product is they're selling or service or whatever, and how they're able to reach so many potential customers with little to nothing as far as an investment.

It used to be a time that you're like, okay, I need this marketing budget because I want to try to put, get some commercials on television or some radio spots or some banners on the buses and at bus stops.

And now, a person is just going out there on social media and, they're, they opened up a restaurant and they just have pictures of their food out there, right?

And, they're going live at their restaurant, right? And they got, 50, 000 followers. It's interesting.

I was watching this one young lady and all she does is go to different restaurants and eat, and just videotapes herself eating.

She's giving her own assessment of the food and she's probably got 50, 000 followers. She's no expert in this, but it's kind of like she's building this following by just using Instagram as a platform to kind of, to pretty much market herself as I guess as an expert.

Gresham Harkless 14:15

Yeah, it's a phenomenal time. It's so funny, like one of my first jobs that I had out of school after I graduated was at The Yellow Book and they had renamed their, they re-branded to Hi-Boo at the time because I think they wanted to be more of that.

But I remember talking to the older reps and a lot of the times they said that you would get a Yellow book ad, literally get that front page ad, and you would put your kids through college from that.

That's all you had to do. And it kind of has changed so much because now, I'm going to use the word decentralized.

You hear that a lot in different places, but that's what's happening a lot where now you're being able to go direct to consumer and you're able to build that connection relationship.

You're getting to see like what that journey looks like and trying those different foods. Those foods weren't good. I love your personality, so I want to connect with you.

So there's a tremendous opportunity. If you are able to, if you're willing to try to start to tell those stories and use these platforms, but two, you have to be, I think, very aware of what that journey looks like.

Because I think so many times we think when we're looking at these ingredients, these ways that we can get our name out there, that we have to check off all the boxes and do all the things.

It's usually the rawness, the unfilteredness that actually is the opportunity to connect. It's the failures and the things we don't honestly want to share that actually connects us more.

And it kind of develops those relationships where they're just amplified with all the things that we're doing.

Ted Fells 15:39

Yeah, that's a great point.

Eric Twiggs 15:41

Now he or she wants to go viral. What advice do you have for that person?

Ted Fells 15:45

Or that person that want to make a lot of money just eating. Like, that's what it sounds like these folks are doing. Like, I'm eating, but I ain't making money eating. How do you make money eating?

Gresham Harkless 15:57

Yeah. One of the things I would say is that if you start to look at these influencers as media brands in and of itself, you start to realize that when I always say, build your own media company.

So if you're willing to put in the time again, going back to those resources, you're going to put in the time to figure out what's going to resonate with my audience.

You're looking at the data, the analytics to see what's working. You're also studying what people are, what and why people are successful. There's a whole data analysis that you can do related to that.

Outro 16:26

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO podcast powered by CBNation and Blue16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co. I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community.

Check out the latest and greatest apps, books, and habits to level up your business as CEOhacks.co. This has been the I AM CEO podcast with Gresham Harkless Jr. Thank you for listening.

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