IAM1399 – You Are a Media Company Podcast Course and Series Preview

Gresham W. Harkless Jr. is an entrepreneur and blogger. “Gresh” is the founder and blogger-in-chief for CEO Blog Nation (CBNation.co) and is the founder and digital marketing specialist behind Blue 16 Media. His other past ventures include founding Exemplary Editing, Kidz Sports Drill, and co-founding Men of Character of Virginia. As a child, he started a monthly family newsletter and sold everything from necklaces on the playground to potato chips and candy. He currently works to help support small businesses and entrepreneurship with Blue 16 Media and CEO Blog Nation (CBNation.co). Blue 16 Media is a digital marketing company providing digital marketing services to small to medium-sized businesses and organizations. CBNation.co is a community of niche blogs for entrepreneurs and business owners.

During the chat, Gresh spoke about the following:

“Whether you know it or not, you are a media company.”

“Traditional advertising has completely changed, traditional marketing has completely changed.”

All the tools and opportunities are provided, but you are not going to use them all. Pick the best tools for you to reach your target audience.

Make a thorough analysis of your target market. Create an avatar, know where they are and where they are spending time.

Yoga studio – you may be strong in Instagram, image focus, and attracting people who care about their image.

If you’re a business-to-business, go to LinkedIn.

Understanding who your target market is and creating content for them.

Communicate with your target market.

This is a preview for future Podcast series and a future course for entrepreneurs and business owners. What being your own media company means and doesn't mean, and what's to follow from some of these chats for the rest of the year.

Site: youareamedia.company

Episode mentioned: https://ceochat.co/episodes/chat-54-you-are-a-media-company-podcast-course-series-preview

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Transcription

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00.23 – Intro

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share precisely the information you're searching for. This is the I AM CEO Podcast.

00.64 – Gresham Harkless

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast, and this is going to be a special episode that's actually a little bit more of a CEO hack where I talk about the You Are a Media Company course, the content, the information, and the podcast that I provided there. So a lot of times business owners, entrepreneurs, CEO enterprises, and individuals just want to know what tool to use. What's the thing that's going to be the magic bullet? And spoiler alert, there is no magic bullet. However, what this episode this course, and this information we provided are hoping to do is to help you be empowered to make sure that you make the best strategic decision for yourself, for your business, for your clients, customers, but also for yourself as well too, because it could be very overwhelming trying to pick and choose the best things.

And just to leave you with an analogy for this CEO hack marketing, a lot of time is like going to the grocery store to try to figure out what dish you want to have so that you can actually create the dish that you want. When you go to the grocery store, especially if you're hungry, oftentimes you're overwhelmed because there are so many different options. What these episodes really hope to do is hopefully help you to distill down what are the integral ingredients to the recipe that you want to make. I always talk about sweet potato pie, one of my favorite dishes, my mom's sweet potato pie. I don't always make it, but I can definitely eat it.

So if you want to make sweet potato pie, you want to make sure you get the integral ingredients for that. If you don't want to make sweet potato pie, if you want to make chocolate cake or you want to make banana pudding or potentially hot chocolate chip cookies, whatever it is, you want to make sure that you get the ingredients that are necessary for that. That's where I think a lot of people kind of miss the boat and they forget about things. So hopefully, you enjoy this episode and please let us know if we can do anything to help.

Thanks and take care. And I'm going to say that again, just because I wanted to sink in. The idea is not that you're going to use every single one of these tools. The idea is that you're going to pick and choose the best tools for you to reach your target audience. You're an entrepreneur and you make vital decisions that hopefully blossom into a business. You're the savvy, out-of-the-box risk-taker who believes wholeheartedly in the process of innovation. Innovation that will change the world.

This is the CEO chat with Gresham Parkless. And you're about to embark on a journey through the awesome world of business. Gresham is the epitome of drive and desire as he works to help support small businesses and entrepreneurs' entrepreneurship. And you're about to learn from this entrepreneur how you can improve your odds of success in the business world. Welcoming the host of the CEO chat, here's Gresham Harklitz. Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresham Harkness from CEO Chad powered by CVNation Co and Blue 16 Media. Your choice for all your website design and digital marketing needs. And today I'm actually going to talk about why you are a media company.

And if you've listened to the few chats that we've had before, I spoke a lot about why it's important to understand that you are a media company. Now, this is something that I say over and over and over and over again. And the reason for it is because, at this point, people can get and find your business in so many different ways. So what that means from an entrepreneur or a business owner or a CEO standpoint is that you must understand that there's a myriad of ways in which you can market, promote, advertise, and brand your business. But it's important to understand that you want to strategically focus on building your business. Now, for me, I started my career really at two different places, which I think had a phenomenal impact on me and my marketing philosophy.

Things were changing dramatically, as the Internet was becoming more and more important, social media was starting to blossom, and SEO was becoming more and more of an important thing and an end thing that people were talking about. I worked for two different companies. One, right after school, was the United States Postal Service, or USP's. And it was there that I saw a lot of the changes that are happening across the industry. For the USP's, most of it was about delivering packages. You figure that if you order something, then it's delivered directly to you at a specific time, and you always think of the postman or the postwoman as the person who delivers it to your door.

Well, when I was there, the USP's had a different initiative or additional initiative because they were hemorrhaging money and they had to come up with more creative ideas in order to start to stop that hemorrhaging. And one of the things that they tried to do was to implement a stronger direct mail campaign. So basically, that was one of the very important things that we implemented and started to work towards was letting business owners know that you don't have to go to an outside company to do the direct mail mailings. You can actually go to the United States Postal Service.

And that was somewhat of a start to the changes in the marketing world. Even though the United States Postal Service was getting into using and jumping more, and more into the direct mail campaign, what it did was remind me of how business and even marketing used to be. It used to be that you would get a direct mail campaign started and then people would call you and that would be the only thing you would have to do. Now, that's definitely not the reality today.

Things obviously have changed. There's a myriad of different opportunities out there. But it's something that kind of laid a seed and planted that seed in me to understand that there was once a time when that did happen, and again, the United States Postal Service, which is a big organization, I'll say, needed to make that change. I fast-forward a few years after I left the United States Postal Service. I worked at a company called Yellow Book. And one of the things that I remember when I started working was that my boss would talk about and motivate us by telling us about the Yellow Pages or the yellow book.

He would basically say, he basically said, you know, how business had changed, but he talked about the power of the yellow book and he talked about when he was a rep and how people would fight to get on the first page of that category for whatever it is that they did. But what that did was it gave them the visibility that they were looking for. Because often, just like with Google, you don't go past that first page. So there were businesses that paid premiums, premiums, and top dollar to be there. And they were also businesses that had been there so long that they couldn't be bumped from those specific areas.

Now, the reason that I bring all this up is because, as you guys know, Yellowbook knows, that is not the case anymore. It's no longer the case where you put your marketing dollars, generally speaking, in one place, and that's it. The reason is that people search in so many different ways. You're still going to have those people who might open up the page of the yellow book and look for a business. You're going to have those people who are going to call friends and ask for recommendations. You're going to have those people that post it on their Facebook page.

You're going to have those people that go to Google and search, or Bing or Yahoo to search. So what does this all mean? What it means is that traditional advertising has completely changed. Traditional marketing has completely changed. No longer can you not be aware of all the different opportunities out there. However, I say that you don't necessarily have to be in every single opportunity out there.

You really think about it from a digital marketing perspective, you have so many different opportunities. You have your website and then you have search engine optimization or SEO. You have social media, which includes Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram and so many others. Pinterest, so many other other opportunities. And then, of course, you still have the traditional type in ways of advertising. So you have radio, you have direct mail, you have print magazines. In other words, there are so many different ways that you can advertise your business and it becomes very overwhelming.

And to be honest, a lot of business owners don't even want to hear about any more ways that they can advertise their business. Simply what they want is a way that works. So that's one of the reasons that I started to talk about this idea that every company is a media company, and by no means am I the first person who ever mentioned that. But for me, I always was someone who studied the journalism industry. And I saw that the industry was changing as well as marketing was changing.

What I started to see is that a lot of traditional journalistic organizations actually switch to becoming a lot more business-related and offering journalistic opportunities. So what I mean by that is you started to see that businesses were in the content creation business. Now I'm going to go a little bit more in-depth with that to explain exactly what that means. But the idea is that rather than going to your USA Today or your Washington Post to get news, you can actually go to certain businesses that you want to follow to hear about the news in the area.

Take, for example, a big company that's just say, Nike or Under Armour. Rather than going and reading the local health magazine or newspaper, you can actually go to the blog of Under Armour or Nike and you can read case studies. You can read and find out information on what types of foods to eat. You can get probably recipes and all different things to help you live a healthier lifestyle.

That is the shift. Now businesses are actually creating content and they are building their own media companies. Now, keep in mind, I'm going to definitely cover a lot of ground. So I'm going to talk about everything from websites to WordPress to social media platforms to podcasting to SEO and everything else that you can think of and tell you exactly how you can use it for your business. Now, the idea is not that you take all of these tools, and I'm going to say that again, just because I wanted to sink in, is not that you're going to use every single one of these tools. The idea is that you're going to pick and choose the best tools for you to reach your target audience. So the idea is not that you look at the tools first.

The first thing that you want to do is make sure that you do a thorough analysis of your target market. You want to create your avatar, and then you want to figure out where they are and where they're spending time. The reason that I'm going to spend time talking about all these different tools is because these different tools mean different things to different target markets. So for one yoga studio or a personal trainer, you might be very, very strong on Instagram. Why? Because it's very image-focused. And if you're trying to attract those people who care about their image, you're probably going to be able to communicate with them through Instagram.

But if you're b two b focused, meaning that you're targeting other business owners, in other words, business to business, you might leverage LinkedIn a lot more. So it's understanding exactly who your target market is and figuring out how to create content for them. And that's the exact idea behind you are a media company. It's not this idea where you have to get a Facebook page because everybody has a Facebook page. It's not to say that you should be on Instagram because everybody is on Instagram, or be on Snapchat because you're kidding. Kid told you to be on Snapchat, what you want to do is be very, very strategic about what tools that you're using to promote your business.

Especially for those startup businesses. You have to be laser-focused in order to reach your goals. Even for big and large companies and organizations, you understand that there are such things as limited resources. So that could be time and that could be money. So what you want to do is be very strategic and use each of the tools to your advantage. You also want to keep in mind that you want to think outside the box. What's traditional today may not be traditional tomorrow. The way you use Snapchat today may not be the way you use Snapchat tomorrow. SEO may not be what it is tomorrow. The reason that that's important is because you really want to dial into your target market.

They're going to let you know exactly where they want you to be and they're going to let you know exactly what they want and what might be missing. It's funny because you'll often find that the people that are the most creative and innovative businesses or organizations are that way because they're so dialed into their target client that they're able to pivot because their target client has told them a creative way to use a platform or an opportunity that no one else is doing. So definitely make sure that you're dialed in and you're taking advantage of your clients. You're asking them questions, you're seeing how they're doing things, and you're observing what's happening on social media or anywhere else online. But you want to keep in mind again, that you're building a media company.

So there's a lot of different opportunities you have online and offline in order to do that. Now, what's to follow is a general overview of all these different opportunities that you have. Now, I'm not going to go really far in depth with everything, but feel free to check one of the previous podcasts and you can kind of hear an hour or so talk that I've given a few times based on why you are a media company. Now, that's going to be an even quicker kind of summary where I just touch on some of the different pieces, but I'm going to go a little bit more in-depth with these conversations now. The hope is that I hope to empower you as an entrepreneur or business owner to be able to communicate with your target market in a way maybe that you didn't even consider.

Now, the very cool thing is I'm going to have the opportunity, obviously, to speak with a lot of entrepreneurs and business owners and hear exactly why they started their businesses and some of the creative things that they're doing. But you're going to be able to hear as well some strategies, tips, and information in order to make you a better marketer. Now, at the end of 2018, I'm actually going to launch a You Are a Media Company course, and you can visit it and sign up to find out when that goes live at Remedial Company.

But the idea is that this is preparing you for the course that you can take. That's going to go even more in-depth about all the different tools that you have out there how to figure out what to use and what not to use and how to be very strategic and efficient in the way that you're building your media company. And again, just think of it simply as a way to communicate with your target market. Now, this is great, and I'm signing out. I hope you enjoyed this CEO chat and this preview of how you are a media company. If there's anything that I can ever do to help, feel free to definitely reach out to me.

17:00 – Outro 

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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