IAM2268 – Essential Insights for Entrepreneurs when Building a Media Empire

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Gresham Harkless: Hello, hello, hello. This is Gretch from the I Am CEO podcast and I wanted to share with you 1 of the episodes that I was a guest on for someone else's podcast. I always talk about how important it is to build a media company. 1 of the next best things you could do is be on somebody else's media company. So I had the pleasure of being a guest on this podcast and I wanted to share a little snippet with you because it would help support the 8 business pillars we've really been trying to focus on with

00:24 - 00:50

Gresham Harkless: a lot more of our content, a lot more of the solo episodes that I'm doing. So make sure of course that you subscribe to our podcast, but of course you take some time out check out the show notes and subscribe to the podcast that I've been Featured on as well too and get to learn about some of those 8 business Pillars and how you can continue to kind of leverage and build that up so you can go from builder to architect to of course Rockstar and luminary. So this is Greg signing out. I hope you enjoy

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Gresham Harkless: this I am CEO special episode.

00:53 - 01:31

Brad Friedman: So I am the CEO of a 10 person financial services business. And you come in and you say to me, Brad, you are a media company. Does that mean each 1 of those 10 people in my business are gonna have a certain lane that they fit into as far as getting my message out or is it just me as the CEO? How does that work?

01:31 - 02:04

Gresham Harkless: Yeah, I think that's a great question, Brad. And I think 1 of the big realizations that we have to start to understand is that media is literally everywhere. So while it may not be in your core kind of marketing strategy to be able to say that, hey, this person is going to post on you know, Facebook or this person is going to go to the networking events, whatever that might be, you start to understand that because we have so much media that's apparent to us and apparent to everybody, even on your team, they do have the

02:04 - 02:37

Gresham Harkless: power to compliment or support or sometimes in the opposite way, not support, what your overall strategy is. So I think that's where you see a lot of people, especially in finance and especially in those highly regulated industries, start to realize how impactful media can be. Things that you say about your company end up being tools that you can use for recruiting, or it could be things that discourage people from applying for those positions that you have. So I think you start to have a better realization on the impact of media, understanding that everybody has it at

02:37 - 03:11

Gresham Harkless: those fingertips. So that's why there's a lot of regulation, a lot of policies around that for certain organizations, especially in finance and insurance and those types of industries. But I think specifically, you're probably going to be looking at, how am I as the CEO, but also our marketing team, going to be implementing this, but also maybe making sure that those people that are around you, that are within the organization, maybe don't have a traditional, I guess you could say marketing role or title, are going to be broadcasting the information or broadcasting that media out to their

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Gresham Harkless: audience as well.

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Brad Friedman: Yeah. What I love about this is that If you think of it along those guidelines of sort of you are a media company, it's kind of a different way of sort of looking at your whole marketing plan and looking at how to or who in the organization is best to do what? So you mentioned like a networking event. Definitely part of my marketing plan. Who in the organization or is it me? That's best to be the networker or going to those networking events and that's part of my media company. That would also include things like print,

03:57 - 04:01

Brad Friedman: brochures, those kinds of things. Is that right?

04:02 - 04:32

Gresham Harkless: Yeah, absolutely. It's so funny, Brad. I kind of create an analogy and I'm a marketing person, so I love, I mean, English majors. I love analogies and metaphors and all those things to kind of explain exactly what it is that we try to do. But I compare it to basically going to the grocery store. You figure out what dish you wanna create. What's this ideal dish that you wanna make? I always love my mom's sweet potato pies, I always go to that, but it could be chocolate cake, it could be, you know, whatever it is, your

04:32 - 05:05

Gresham Harkless: taste and your thing that you wanna create. And when you go to the grocery store, you have an idea of what you're trying to accomplish. So many times we go to the grocery store, quote unquote, hungry, and that's how we're approaching our marketing. We're literally throwing everything into our cart. So absolutely, it includes things you're doing online, it includes things you're doing offline, print, media, advertising, social media, blogs, podcasts, vlogs, all these things are ways that you get your information out. Even one-to-one conversations and quote unquote traditional networking ends up being a really big part of

05:05 - 05:27

Gresham Harkless: that. But again, you want to approach it like, okay, this is what I want to be success. This is the dish I'm trying to make. So when you go to the quote unquote grocery store, when you start to look at the marketing opportunities, the ingredients that you can put into your recipe, you realize these are the pros and cons. These are not all the things that I wanna throw into the cart, but just some of the things that are gonna help me get the dish that I ultimately want.

05:27 - 06:02

Brad Friedman: Okay, so if we buy into the concept, the big picture, and all of our content, our podcasts, our website, our brochures, all of those things we consider part of our media company. Then, I mean, then what? Is there some kind of basic guidelines? Do we create brand standards? Is there a marketing strategy document that helps us all stay aligned? What do we do next?

06:03 - 06:32

Gresham Harkless: Yeah, well funny enough, I think is what we do actually before that. I'm gonna go, you know, back to that grocery store analogy. Sometimes the best thing and the most the least dangerous thing you could do before you go to the grocery store is make sure you have a list of what you're trying to accomplish. And I often say like the 3 questions you want to definitely ask, but probably always continually to ask yourself when you are starting a marketing strategy and starting to figure out that, hey, I have this really cool product or service. I

06:32 - 06:58

Gresham Harkless: want to make this impact to X person or Y person, is you want to get, honestly, crystal clear on who you're targeting. When you go to the grocery store, you look at these ingredients, you figure out, am I going to be on LinkedIn, or am I going to be on TikTok? Am I going to spend time with a blogger? Am I going to do a podcast? You're going to influence a lot of that decision-making based on who you're targeting. So you paint a picture as much as possible of who you're targeting. Of course, I'm sure a

06:58 - 07:29

Gresham Harkless: lot of your listeners know, you know, you're talking about age, you're talking about location, just all of those things, but really drill down deep into what I call, what we kind of skip over that human part of business, the human part of life. What impact are you making for those people? So don't just think about the age, the location, the 2.5 kids, the 3 dogs, or whatever that might be. Think about what is keeping them up at night. Think about what are their pain points. How is your product or service going to actually help to impact

07:29 - 08:02

Gresham Harkless: them? So that's really like that whole kind of avatar that you're creating, not just who they are, but ultimately what your solution can provide to them. And you really wanna paint a picture from that standpoint. After that, you wanna get crystal clear on your resources. Depending on where you are and what your marketing budget looks like, or even if you're not even sure what a marketing budget is, you might be a lot more rolling up your sleeves, putting in sweat equity versus actual equity and budgeting into your business. So I think the point is really to

08:02 - 08:30

Gresham Harkless: get crystal clear on what exactly is going to be the way you're going to budget for your marketing. If you're going to DIY it a lot more, maybe you are going to want to pick the ingredients that you know something about. If you don't like to speak to people, don't necessarily do a podcast, that may not be the best suited fit, or you might decide that, hey, I am going to do a podcast. I'm just going to talk to myself. So I'm going to do a solo podcast. So a lot of those ways you answer that

08:30 - 09:03

Gresham Harkless: question will influence a lot of what you're doing ultimately. And then I think the final question, which is I kind of touched on a little bit, is what is the goal? When you start to think about your marketing before you jump into that, you know, get that card and go into the grocery store, you're trying to determine what success is. For an e-commerce brand versus a dentist versus a home improvement company, those goals and successes are gonna be different. An e-commerce brand wants people to go to their website. They don't necessarily want people to call them.

09:04 - 09:28

Gresham Harkless: They don't want people to come to their storefront. So they're going to approach marketing in a different way. They're going to pick their ingredients in a different way. A dentist is going to maybe want to have people come through to their actual location. But maybe they're starting to do virtual visits as well too. So they want to introduce that. Whereas an e-commerce, a home improvement company is potentially going to want to go to people's houses. So they don't necessarily want them to come to their location. So when you start to realize like how and what these

09:28 - 09:47

Gresham Harkless: ingredients are, you're going to look at all those aspects, be very clear on those questions, but also continue to ask those questions to you. Because as you start to go more and more into business and learn more and more about the ideal clients, you also learn about the clients you don't think are as much ideal, and you start to pattern a lot of what you're doing around that.

09:48 - 10:29

Brad Friedman: Yeah, that makes good sense because I guess if you know who you're targeting and where they are hanging out, that could also kind of form the kind of content that you're creating. So maybe you know they hang out on YouTube so you have to start creating videos and maybe they're on LinkedIn and you want to do some research as to what kind of LinkedIn post is resonating most with people, or you want to have a mix of text and images and video and the like. And that's why I love this kind of concept of you are

10:29 - 10:34

Brad Friedman: a media company because it can include all of those things, right?

10:34 - 11:01

Gresham Harkless: Yeah, absolutely. And I go back to, you know, when I talked about with the pie, is like, I feel like you build a foundation, and that foundation is ultimately where you want to draw people into. Like I mentioned, the e-commerce brand wants to get people to their website. The dental office might want phone calls. The home improvement company might want people to go to their Google My Business page or something along those lines. So you figure out what that foundation, which I call the crust, if we're going to go with pie, Because that's the thing that's

11:01 - 11:30

Gresham Harkless: going to draw people to where you want them to go. And then those ingredients are the things that you're wanting to do. And as you said so well, not only just knowing about the ingredients, but knowing the pros and cons and the best ways to leverage them is sometimes 1 of the most exciting things because you can have the exact same business as somebody else, but if you're targeting a different Avatar, maybe you're going to execute your Facebook strategy in a completely different way or maybe your blog is going to be about Referral partners instead of

11:30 - 11:35

Gresham Harkless: your direct clients. So you just start to, it starts to become really exciting when you're able to execute it in a different way.

11:35 - 12:01

Brad Friedman: Yeah, that's great. So every 1 of my clients wants to know what's my return on investment. So I buy this concept that I'm a media company. What kind of tracking do I have to do as a business owner to feel good about what I'm doing and think I'm getting some return on my investment?

12:02 - 12:36

Gresham Harkless: Yeah, I think that's 1 of the most beautiful things about digital marketing, especially. And to some degree, you can do that in different forms of advertising and investing, is that you do want to leverage these digital tools out there. You can track just about everything that you can think of from a digital perspective. You just want to make sure that, of course, you have the permission and you are, of course, transparent about how you're doing that tracking, which is extremely important. But there's tools out there. And when I talk about like creating that pie, you're putting

12:36 - 13:03

Gresham Harkless: in ingredients, you're mixing it up, and then you put it into the oven. And I always say put it into oven, but make sure you open up the stove to check it. And the analytics is the checking it. Your Google Analytics, You can use call tracking. You can even use ways that you can actually record people, which are heat maps, record people and how they're interacting on your websites. You're gonna be able to see exactly how people are interacting. If you're using different social media platforms, there's analytics there. So you want to make sure that you

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Gresham Harkless: are, quote unquote, opening up that door and checking it to make sure it is cooking and executing in the way that you see fit. And I think that's 1 of the beautiful things because there's so many things out there to do that. But again, don't forget those 3 core questions that you're answering and you have that data for. Because if you get people that are potentially checking out your posts and looking at your posts, but they aren't necessarily engaging, maybe that's not in line with what your ultimate goal is. So you want to make sure that

13:35 - 13:44

Gresham Harkless: you are paying attention to that. It doesn't mean you flip over the stove and you start all the way over necessarily, but you use that data and the analytics so that you can continue to improve and get better.

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Brad Friedman: Yeah, this is great. This is such a cool concept. So give me 1 or 2 takeaways that you want listeners to take away from our discussion.

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Gresham Harkless: Yeah, absolutely. I think definitely make sure, first and foremost, that you have fun with the process. It's not a straight line. I often say like success with marketing, success with business, success with life, honestly, is a much more like a plate of spaghetti than it is that straight path. So understand that it can be a process where you feel like you're going back to square 1 at times, but just know you're never fully going back to square 1 because you have that data and information that's going to help you to improve. So first and foremost, make

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Gresham Harkless: sure that you enjoy that process. The second thing I would definitely say is you don't have to throw everything in the grocery store into your cart. You don't have to do all the things in marketing that you need to do. I usually say pick 1, max 3, but probably 1 or 2 things that you can focus on. 1 of those can be your core thing that you're gonna do. Maybe secondarily you have some way that you can kind of experiment with something that isn't necessarily seem like it's going to work, but you get to try it

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Gresham Harkless: out over a certain period. So make sure that you enjoy that. But of course, make sure that you get that focus on those 1 or 2 ingredients that are really going to help you get closer to your goals.

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Brad Friedman: Yeah, that is great advice. Give us a little more information on what it is that you do and since you mentioned it, narrow in on also who you do it for.

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Gresham Harkless: Yeah, absolutely. So we have a digital marketing business and we really focus on that foundational element that crusts really more than anything else. So we do website support, SEO and website maintenance, and we also design websites as well too. But our whole idea is to really build that strong foundation so that you're able to kind of drive people to where you're going. And the people that we try to work with are sometimes the hardest people to find because they're the people I say that know enough to be dangerous. And they probably have not had a great

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Gresham Harkless: experience with digital marketing in the past, or potentially they had their son, they had their daughter, nephew, aunt, neighbor build and start their digital marketing campaign and it hasn't gone the way that they wanted it to go. So what we really try to do is make sure that we are very high touch from a digital perspective. We use definitely different processes and systems and things in place to make sure that we are communicating a lot with our clients to make sure that we build that trust and that relationship. But at the end of the day, we

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Gresham Harkless: want to make sure that you get those goals and that success that you ultimately want to have. So that's a little bit about us, what we do and how we work.

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Gresham Harkless: That's great. Hello, hello, hello. This is Gresh again, and I hope you enjoyed that special episode of the I am CEO podcast. Just like I mentioned in the beginning, we're really trying to laser focus on these 8 pillars to show you as a builder how you can leverage these 8 pillars and really level up there so it helps to level up your business and organization. So hope you enjoyed this episode and definitely please check out the show notes so you can learn more about the pillar, learn more about the person that I guested on their episode,

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Gresham Harkless: and of course learn more, a little bit more about us as well too. This is

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Gresham Harkless: Grass signing out. I hope

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Gresham Harkless: you have a phenomenal rest of the day.