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We love taking questions from our listeners and answering them in our episodes. In this episode of Building While Flying, Joe Quattrone, SVP at The Sasha Group, is back to answer some of YOUR questions!

"Serve up ads to target companies on LinkedIn with your messaging that have donated to a cause similar to yours."

Joe QuattroneSVP Education, The Sasha Group

Transcription

Welcome to Building While Flying, a Sasha Group podcast where we interview business leaders about how they tackle challenges, stay resilient and navigate ever changing skies. Hey folks, Joe Quattrone here back for another episode of Building While Flying mailbag edition, and I’ve got a lot of great questions that have come in from all over the social media landscape.

So let’s get right into it. Let’s go and we’ve got Neha from Switch Grocery again, who. Best way to approach a competitor for a merger or a buyout or working directly? Well, Neha, I I will say this, and I’ve had hundreds of people come through the 4Ds that are small business owners. and almost all of them when confronted by various different questions from Gary they all have at least thought about a buyout number, right?

Like, how much would they sell their company for? And it’s something that’s constantly floating around in their head. So unless you’re part of the, like 10% of people that have never thought about how much they would sell their company for, chances are they’d be more receptive to your outreach than you think they are.

I would still probably make it a. very Personalized thing though. So the first thing I would be doing is looking for common connections, whether that be on LinkedIn or just, shooting a couple texts around to some of your friends to see if anybody has contacts at said company. That’s the first thing I would do is just.

Try to find out who is a common connection that might be able to send an email, send a text, or send a LinkedIn direct message. And once you find that person, then go to town on figuring out what is the best way to actually make an introduction. I wouldn’t necessarily favor one platform or one angle in versus the other.

I would really trust the advice of the person that knows both parties, right? They’re gonna know how to best reach out to that. person Next we have from at Fatty Sundays, how do you set up a marketing calendar and plan with very limited resources and bandwidth? In similar to last episode, I am gonna refer you all to STORK.

So we’re gonna unlock a couple of episodes that we think might be relevant to answering this question totally free, of course. So to those of you that don’t subscribe, why don’t you consider doing so now we have a fantastic question from AI dot Bill Marie. who asks, how can a social enterprise or nonprofit utilize social media to attract donors or supporters?

And I’ve. got A very easy answer. I don’t know if this is the only answer. I’m not in the nonprofit space, so I’m sure there are other ways like you can go out and hire somebody that has a Rolodex of people and all that kind of stuff. But I would offer an answer that’s much more in my wheelhouse of expertise, and that would be LinkedIn advertising.

So when you do LinkedIn advertising, you should be able to target by company names or even by position, title, those types of things. So you can actually go to my knowledge, to the company that you’re trying to reach and you can look at their tax filings or you can look at their business documents that are listed online and you can find their list of donors and people that have donated to.

them And what I would be doing with that information , is I would be going onto LinkedIn and I would be searching for companies in my targeting parameters that have donated to other similar nonprofits. And I would actually serve up ads to those companies with my messaging trying to convince somebody.

It doesn’t have to necessarily be members of the C-Suite or people that are. Birth strings, it could be everybody that works at a company that has donated, right? Cuz you want to influence the sphere of people beyond just the decision makers. But yeah, I would be putting messaging in front of every single person that works at a company that has donated to a cause similar to mine.

, from an efficiency standpoint, you may not like the CPMs that LinkedIn has to offer, but it’s a very unique platform in the sense that some of the ways you can target are very different than other platforms. You try to go to Facebook, you’re not gonna be able to find and latch onto the appropriate audience members that you think you are.

Because not a lot of people use their business email addresses when they’re signing up for Facebook and stuff. It’s a whole mess, right? But LinkedIn, it’s a very attractive avenue for me, I would think. Next we have a question from at Ramona Pico. How do you start small and gradually scale your media team?

What’s first essential and then next, et cetera? Seeing as I’m not exactly a media specialist although I’ve been around media my whole career, it’s gonna be hard for me to really answer that question the way you’re probably looking. But I do have some insight and it maps back to the way I would probably be looking to scale any team, right?

So first and foremost, you wanna start by bringing on core members of the team that are insanely smart and insanely talented, right? Your next generation of people outside of yourself, call ’em your lieutenants, or whatever you wanna call ’em. If you don’t like military analogy, call. Whatever I don’t know what you call if you don’t use military terminology, but the people that are surrounding you specifically have to be smarter than you.

You don’t get away with building amazing businesses by hiring inferior talent, right? You want to go out and hire people that are your equal if not greater. Now there is still a reason why you’re the ceo. You’re taking on all the risks, so they aren’t that’s why they need a job. But I would be looking to hire.

Immensely talented people, possibly people that are better at this than I am, right? I think the old saying is what, a’s higher A’s and B’s, higher Cs, something like that. , right? So hire some a’s first and foremost second. and not to be out lookeded or outranked. If you’re looking at a specialty thing like media, you have to make sure that you understand what certifications you need, right?

You need to understand that those certifications are gonna help you unlock new business and help customers, especially when you’re spending tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands or millions of their dollars. They wanna entrust you with their money knowing that you’re fully certified across the.

So make sure that the people that you’re hiring, that second, third generation of people that are gonna be working on your team, that you have a plan of attack and a process for getting them certified. Lastly and this is not for the faint of heart , I guess you could say, cuz it involves dealing with your peers or with other high ranking members of your organization that don’t touch media.

It deals with business development and your sales funnel, right? So making sure that other people in your organization understand. How selling media impacts their bottom line. And if they’re out on the beat selling why they should be thinking about you in their pursuits, right? Because as you’re bringing in more dollars for the media team, that helps bring in revenue, which helps.

Scale, which is what you’re looking for in the first place, right? It’s hard to scale team of any kind, especially a media team if you don’t have dollars coming in and dollars in the bank. So try to make sure however you make money, whoever’s outselling is on your team. So the next one comes from Tie Coral in.

I think I’m pronouncing that but. Ty or Tiko? I’m sorry if I’m not why do SMB and large companies not believe in content marketing? There’s a number of different reasons why I think that could be the case. And I’m not gonna stand for all of them. But my guess is, , either corporate politics maybe there’s somebody in the organization that built their brands through television or built their brands through, I don’t know, hardcore SEO or email marketing back in the day.

And that’s how they got big. And there’s some romantic belief that’s where they need to keep stuffing all their money. But they’re not paying attention to the diminishing returns that they’re getting now that they’re not Producing enough content or it’s just sheer laziness. And I would say that with the deepest empathy cuz you know, while I don’t wanna necessarily chalk anything up to people being lazy.

look, it’s hard business, content marketing, making a lot of content. to feed the Beast is not easy. I’m looking at a couple guys right now, our creators at The, Sasha, Group. It’s a neverending task making all this content right? It just keeps coming and coming. And on top of that, you’ve gotta know all the nuances of all the algorithms and how they work and you know which algorithm is favoring what type of content. So not only do you have to produce an insane amount of content just to be able to arbitrage and get all the free attention, but you have to go to school on a daily basis just so you can know what makes better content than yesterday so while I started off by saying laziness, I’ll temper the enthusiasm around the term laziness and just say that like it’s a daunting task to think about.

So when a lot of people think about it, I think they get. dejected and they just decide, I gotta find a different way. , maybe there’s some other way that I can build my brand that isn’t putting content on the internet. Got an answer to that one. It’s impossible, but if you know I’m not everyone and I’m sure there’s a lot of that thinking out there where people just, they get dejected and they don’t feel like they are good enough and they just.

people keep waiting for Gary to, to drop what the cheat code is, right? they keep expecting like all of the sudden I’m probably gonna date myself, but back when I was a kid playing video games, there was this cheat code for Supercon and once you got it, you got a hundred lives and then you could go and you didn’t have to worry about dying all the time.

And so it made it easy for people to beat the game, right? And then you can move on to other games. I think a lot of people, they. can be told by Gary or me or whoever, that they need to go and make content and we can even tell you how to do it. But it’s still so overwhelming, that you just don’t wanna do it.

You wanna be told exactly how to ace the test with the easiest possible route to acing it versus doing the hard work that’s necessary It’s no different than going on a diet or getting your exercise routine down, right? They’re things that, you’re gonna have to take time outta your day every day.

It’s not great. You’re not gonna love doing it every day, but you kinda have to do it every day. Yeah. You wanna get in shape for the beach, you gotta, go to the gym. You gotta watch what you eat. You don’t wanna do it. You have to do it. There’s no other way to do it. , next we have something from Marcel.

Mahalik Marcel, I hope I did your name right. What tools do you recommend for analyzing user behavior on a website or platform? Similar to my media questions, I’m not a website specialist, but I have talked to a lot of media people. I’ve talked to a lot of website web development people. A couple of tools that you should be taking a look at.

Google Analytics it really helps you on the back end from a marketing perspective. Just understanding where your sources of traffic are coming. , that kind of stuff. And then hot jar, right? Understanding what people are doing while they’re on site through the usage of heat maps and recorded sessions and stuff like that can be very helpful when it comes to laying out, the user experience, if you will.

So those are two, not an expert, but I think those two, if you’re using them, you’ll be doing more than most companies. Follow up question from Marcel. , what tools do you recommend for scheduling posts and stories on social networks? And the official I don’t know if this is official from all of vax, but I’ll tell you officially from my perspective working within VAX is that we don’t it’s either go completely native or use a hybrid approach.

I wouldn’t necessarily buy a tool that claims that they’re gonna offer you the ability to save so much time. Look, being great at social media isn’t about saving. , right? Like it’s hard to save time and be great at social media. So I would throw that out the window a little bit and the main reason is there aren’t really a lot of schedulers out there, content schedulers that encompass all of the platforms that you need to be relevant on.

And most of them, I would say 99% don’t account for TikTok. So automatically, right off the bat, you’re gonna have to be posting content on TikTok and then you have a scheduler for your other But I would also think about it in reverse. I would think about it using it sparingly. There’s only a couple platforms where time of week and time of day.

Are actually relevant to think about when you’re posting your content. The other reason is we really like to be able to go in and community manage once we’ve put something out onto the internet. And if you’re just batch uploading 50 pieces of content for the month into a scheduler, and then they all go out, right?

Do you also put timers on your phone? So it lets you know when something’s gone out and on what platform? So you can go there and actually do that. Community management. Chances are that’s not what you. . So you really need to think about community management as a complimentary piece to your content scheduling in the first place.

If you’re not, you’re leaving massive opportunities on the table. If you still want advice on scheduling tools I’m not gonna give you a name brand tool cuz this is how little time we spend on it, but I would say from a platform perspective, LinkedIn and Instagram are probably the two platforms where you might be able to schedule content.

And I say that because the user behavior is very similar, right? Instagram, very high traffic, mid mornings, we’re gonna 9:00 AM eastern time to 10 30. A lot of people look at Instagram when they’re on their commute to work, or maybe when they first start and they’re like going in between a couple meetings.

LinkedIn is much more of a Hey, I’m gonna take a break from work at my lunch. Our kind of platform where people are trying to signify a significant shift in what they’re doing. LinkedIn is dead on the weekends. You don’t have to worry about it then. And then maybe just maybe if you do have a scheduler and you find the one app, I think it might be Sprinkler that has TikTok embedded into it.

you might look at posting TikTok more at night than during the day. There’s a lot of user behavior where people are death scrolling TikTok at nine or 10:00 PM instead of focusing on their spouse or watching whatever they’re watching on their tv. So that, I would say that TikTok is competing with Netflix or any of the other streaming services. So maybe you. Set a timer and post stuff to TikTok regularly. But with any of those things, like I mentioned before, you miss out on your ability to go in and actually fuel the fire that’s happening. When you post content, when people are talking, you should be immediately going in and liking their comments or re commenting on top of their comments and stuff.

Not waiting 24 hours to do it or waiting until 9:00 AM the next day. So keep that in. I know it’s tempting to want to find a silver bullet. Oh, hey, I got this thing for $1,300 a month and it’s gonna let me post 50 pieces of content everywhere and my life is gonna be, no, your life is not gonna be easier cuz your social media is not gonna be as good.

Last but not least, I would say that if saving time is at the root of this question nothing saves you time, like becoming expert at something. And so the more. spend time actually posting natively to the platforms. And you come up with your system of how it goes from your phone to, your editing software to back to your phone and back on the internet.

Like the more you go through that process of taking this and putting it here and putting it back here, like the more you’ll find out what your hacks are to do it people are trying to jump to the conclusion of, Hey, let me pull all these things from all these different places and put them out on the internet so that I can take three weeks off.

If you take three weeks off, you’re gonna get stale. You’re not . Gonna know what’s happening on platforms. You’re not gonna have all those community management opportunities. Look to save time in making your process more efficient, not the process of Batching out your content for three months so you don’t have to worry about it, right?

Social media is a daily thing. You have to worry about it every day. That does it for another episode of the Building While Flying podcast. I’ve been your host, Joe, and these questions have been phenomenal. Keep ’em coming, and all of our social platforms, we love getting them. And I’ll try to answer them in real time when I can from here and there.

But at the very least, you’ll get more of these mail bags.

Thanks for joining us for Building While Flying today. I hope you learned as much as we did. We’ll meet you right back here next time for another flight.

Welcome to Building While Flying!

This weekly podcast is brought to you by Sasha Group. We’re the consultancy meets agency arm of the VaynerX family of companies. We help ambitious companies build strong brands that flex with the times through strategy, branding media and marketing.

In ever-changing times, businesses and brands have to shift and adapt. And across all sectors, there is an air of experimentation. Business owners are trying new things out in the wild;  building the plane while flying.

Our pilots, Katie Hankinson, Mickey Cloud, Maribel Lara, and Joe Quattrone will be talking to a diverse range of business leaders and founders. They’ll explore how these guests tackle various challenges while staying resilient and committed to growth. Through these real-life examples of strategies put into practice, we hope to inspire you to experiment and develop your own strategies as we all navigate these uncertain times together.

How can we help?

We love taking questions from our listeners and answering them in our episodes. In this episode of Building While Flying, Joe Quattrone, SVP at The Sasha Group, is back to answer some of YOUR questions!

Like what you heard? Want to have YOUR questions answered on the podcast? Connect with us on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and/or Linkedin, and tell us what you want to know.

Subscribe to Building While Flying so you don’t miss out on future episodes — including more Q&A’s!

In-flight topics:

  • Best approaches for a merger or buyout of competitors
  • Attracting donors for your non-profit on social media
  • How to gradually scale your media team
  • Content marketing is hard work, there’s no cheat code
  • Finding the best practice for scheduling posts on social media
  • …and more!
Connect with Joe:

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New York, NY
Chattanooga, TN
Los Angeles, CA