Digital Marketing Literacy

0:00 – Digital Marketing Is Just Marketing Now

0:00 Ryan Grant: We're back here and we're with Burke by Burke, and they're going to be presenting digital marketing literacy. Hello Jamie.

0:07 Jamie Burke: Okay, awesome. Okay, well thanks for having me back guys. Hopefully the first presentation was at least of some value, or at the very least curiosity, that's really what I hope for here. And this second presentation is really just building on the conversation from the first one, and just how you can take the lessons from the first seminar or webinar or whatever, and use it in real life.

0:36 So, digital marketing isn't really… I mean, it's funny that the title of this presentation is digital marketing literacy, but it really isn't that term anymore. They started using that term back when Facebook and all of these things were kind of fresh and coming up. But it really is just marketing now. Of course there's print, of course there's in-person and networking and all of these things, but these items here take up so much of the marketing space now that it really is just marketing.

1:12 So whether that be, there's a few things here I'll list, whether that be social media, which we'll talk quite a bit about here, websites, which we talked a little bit about in the first presentation, SEO — so if you're not familiar with that, that's search engine optimization, so that's a strategy or tactic you can use to make sure, let's say you're typing… we're using ABC Landscaping again, we'll just continue, ABC Landscaping, let's say they want to rank first in Google if you're searching like landscaping in Vancouver or something, so that's SEO.

1:54 PPC is pay-per-click, so that's an ad strategy, and CPC, cost per click, very, very similar. And blogs, again an SEO strategy, a content marketing strategy. And these are just a few things that I've listed, there's so many things that can be involved in this. Like with SEO there can be the backlinks, there's all these backlink things with it, there's technical SEO, that's its own job in its own right.

2:26 Being a social media manager, being a web developer, being an ad specialist, being a writer — that's actually what I am, I'm mostly a copywriter and a social media manager — but these are each a whole job in its own right. So yeah, digital marketing is a lot more complex a landscape than it once was, and it really is just marketing at this point.

2:49 – Content Marketing and the Three E's

2:49 Jamie Burke: So I'm going to describe a concept that is probably going to be what you, as a council member or a strata manager, encounter the most, whether or not you actually know that's what you're encountering or what it's called. And as a trade contractor or business, this is likely the most effective form of marketing that you can use to target your message to the strata council, strata managers, etc. So, content marketing is really a strategy.

3:18 It's probably the strategy that I use most often, and the best content marketing strategy contains at least one of the three E's: educational, entertaining and engaging. And before I even jumped into that I should say, what is content? Marketers, we always joke that content is like this big illustrious word. I even joke that I should get the word content tattooed on myself. But content is the things that you see on social media, the things you see online.

3:50 So whether that be an Instagram reel, a YouTube tutorial, a blog on LinkedIn, a newsletter that you receive in your inbox, these are all forms of content marketing.

4:04 Content is really just like the piece of marketing material, so like a video, a blog, an email newsletter, etc. And like I said in the first presentation, if you take this content marketing approach and you're always just trying to sell — again, ABC Landscaping Company — if the only thing you're posting on your LinkedIn, or the only thing you're posting on your social, or writing on your blogs, or posting on your website is, we are the best, use us, we've been in business for 40 years, we da da da…

4:36 Like I said, those are all excellent points, those are all excellent parts of your brand, but it is quite boring and it's quite selfish. At the end, why would… okay, council, like, great, you're so cool. But at least in how things are moving forward, content needs to be educational. So let's take landscaping, ABC again. Educational is something as simple as, you could post a blog about chafer beetles.

5:05 I had those when I managed the property in Surrey, and they're a nightmare, and honestly I would have found some value if there was like a quick blog about chafer beetles, because then I would understand how to service my councils. So, educational, that's one component. Entertaining: let's say you have a really funny video of one of… let's see, landscaping, and let's say you have a really funny video, and a landscaper was doing something and there was like a squirrel and it jumped all over the wherever, and you caught it and you posted it on your social.

5:41 That's entertaining. It's not necessarily educational, but it's funny, and a council member, or someone who's following you on Instagram, might remember that because it just made them laugh, and that's enough. Or it can be engaging. And engaging is the most complex one, because education and entertainment are pretty straightforward concepts, but engaging is really that relationship based model that I've been saying, is really connecting and resonating with your audiences in a way that resonates and is memorable.

6:16 So let's say you're a landscaping company and you're doing a fundraiser to build a playground for, I don't know, I'm just using this as an example, but you're going to create content that's engaging and means something to your audience. That's far more meaningful than just saying, oh yeah, we are the best, we are awesome, use our services.

6:38 – Council Responsibility for Vendor Selection

6:40 Jamie Burke: So again, these are points that I said at the earlier presentation about councils needing to… so it's a bit repetitive here again, so thanks for bearing with that, but just trying to really make that point, that councils, you need to be able to sift through this noise, understand what's being marketed to you, how it's being marketed to you and why, in order to make the best decisions for your strata corporations.

7:04 Again, you don't need to default to your strata manager who's telling you, hey yeah, these are the three landscaping companies. You have the autonomy and ultimately responsibility. I think a lot of the times, especially if a council is maybe a bit more of a passive council, which is fair and that's fine, not every council needs to be super hands-on and active, but you as a council do have a responsibility to do this.

7:32 It's not all on your strata manager to find these vendors, and you need to kind of take ownership of that. That's very much like what my old council did when I was a council president. We very much — albeit we were a long-established council, and I am in the industry so I had great awareness of this — but we took a lot of responsibility on choosing our vendors and asking our strata manager and being part of that relationship.

8:06 And then marketers, on that flip side, so ABC Landscaping Company again, you need to understand the landscape. Sorry, I didn't actually plan to use the landscaping analogy when I say landscape, but anyway. You need to understand the landscape that your prospective clients exist in, in order to understand how to market to them.

8:18 – Facebook Reach and Declining Engagement

8:23 Jamie Burke: Okay, so I'm going to talk a little bit about the social media channels here, at least the three major ones that I think are going to be the most applicable to strata corporations and their businesses. So, Facebook. I have my own personal feelings about it, which I'm going to put aside here, with some caveats. Because Facebook is kind of interesting. So Facebook is simultaneously the largest platform in the world socially, 1.56 billion daily active users, and it's also simultaneously on the decline from a marketing perspective.

9:01 I have clients where I post on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn, and funny enough Facebook performs the worst: the lowest engagement, the lowest prospect. So anyway. But it's still hard to ignore because of what a large platform it is. The average user spends 60 minutes per day on Facebook. But like I said, conversely, how it's simultaneously also a bit of an antiquated social channel: only less than half of marketers think their Facebook efforts are effective.

9:31 Why am I still bringing this up though? Because marketing isn't always black and white. And I'll talk a little bit about ROI, return on investment, in case that's something people are curious about. With marketing you can measure your return on investment, like, how many deals are you going to get, or how many leads do you get? I focus mostly on creative marketing, which is quite a different avenue of marketing.

10:00 That's the brand awareness, building these relationships. If you're looking for that kind of marketing, you're looking for performance or growth marketing. If people are curious about those differences, I'm not here just to sell my business or anything, I give referrals to lots of others. So if you're more curious about that growth marketing or that performance marketing, there's multiple kinds of marketing strategies. But anyway, the reason I'm bringing up Facebook is, yeah, like I said, marketing isn't black and white.

10:30 There's many shades of grey, there's many shades of success and risk tolerance and mitigating that. So with Facebook, while it's on the decline, it also is a very, very popular platform, especially with an older demographic. When I say older, typically the numbers show like 50, 55 plus who are using it proportionately more than they would use other platforms. And I don't know if there's data to support this, this is all anecdotal, but we've seen this with councils.

11:06 It's kind of like that jury duty kind of idea too, right, that proportionately the councils that do volunteer — I mean, I do see some shifts and changes — are typically people who are maybe retired or have more time to volunteer their efforts and energies towards their strata corporation. Like I said, that's not 100 percent across the board, there's obviously variances, I know plenty of working professionals who are council presidents too.

11:33 But these are very real factors to consider in your marketing channels. So if you're a strata council president or member or something like this and you're using these channels, you can think about it that way.

11:47 – Instagram Stats and Posting Consistency

11:47 Jamie Burke: And if you're a trade contractor, that's how you can think about who that message is going towards. Okay, I won't talk about the other two nearly as much, but I do still think that they have a lot of value to marketers and for strata councils and property managers. 90 percent of Instagram users follow at least one business. There's more than one billion active Instagram users. And this stat is going to be the most perhaps interesting and valuable: more than 83 percent of Instagram users have discovered a new product or service on the platform.

12:26 So kind of like what I was saying about that viral video, ABC Landscaping, there's like a squirrel and it's doing something funny and they caught it on video. Yes, that's entertaining. But the thing with Instagram, or really with all social channels, is consistency. You can't just ride the coattails of that one funny video for months. You need to be posting fairly consistently. There's a lot of debate in marketing worlds, like how long or how much is consistent.

12:57 I personally would say, once a week if that's the time and resources and money you have. More than once a week, sure, you can do two to three times a week. But regardless, you need to be consistent. The Instagram algorithm favours that consistency and it will push your content forward, especially if you're getting higher engagement and things like that. And Instagram, it's funny, not to say that…

13:26 I don't know what the audience makeup is here for the conference, but people will be like, oh, that's for the young folks.

13:31 – Reaching Millennial Council Members

13:33 Jamie Burke: Like for instance, I like to think, oh, I'm a young folk, but I'm 34. I was a council president and I am on Instagram. So these kind of young channels aren't things to easily overlook. We joke about millennials with their avocado toast or all of these things, but millennials are in C-suite positions now, and they're in positions of power and influence. Whether that be, like I said, C-suite positions, or they might be, like I know plenty of people my age and not that much older than me as well now who are active council members, council presidents, those kinds of things.

14:17 So I think overlooking that based on tropes or stereotypes, for contractors you're missing a huge segment of an audience you can market to. So that's pretty much the main point there.

14:33 – LinkedIn for Lead Generation

14:33 Jamie Burke: Sorry about that. Okay, the last one I'm going to talk about here is LinkedIn, and this is actually the one that I personally use the most, and this is actually where I've personally seen the most dividends as well. It doesn't have as many users, 774 million users worldwide, as if that's a small number. But it's still a large audience, and increasing in numbers in Vancouver. I'm very, very active on LinkedIn, I see the trends every day, and I see a lot more property management firms posting content there, and I see a lot more trade contractors posting content there.

15:11 And here, this was really interesting even for me to see: LinkedIn is 277 percent more effective for lead gen than Facebook and Twitter. I have my own theories about why this is the case, and this can be some food for thought for all of you. People who are on LinkedIn — it's not, I'm not saying about their career position or their money or their salary or anything like that — but people who are on LinkedIn typically are in a position to think of their careers in certain ways, or think of their professional lives in certain ways.

15:47 So for a trade contractor, they're quite qualified already, because their existence on LinkedIn is indicative of their seriousness about other components of their life. So that's great, because if you get a lead on LinkedIn, that's already more qualified than a lead on Instagram for instance, because anybody will follow and do this, right? It takes effort and a certain mentality to be active on LinkedIn.

16:15 And then for property management firms, and property managers that I've been seeing, those are ways for you to see what trade contractors are up to, see what… if you're looking to change property management firms and you're a property manager on LinkedIn, you can build opportunities there, and you can see what other brands are about and so forth. And it all goes the same, it's all different perspectives on the same platform, like I said.

16:43 And then the councils ultimately will be able to see their property manager even, or see their property management firm, or vet out different contractors. And perhaps that's a point that I didn't think to make originally, but I see now the importance of that.

16:56 – Building Your Personal Brand Online

16:59 Jamie Burke: With property managers, yes, you might think, oh, I work for Associa or Wynford or Dwell or Fort Park, or whatever these many agencies are. But you are a brand too, you yourself. Ryan Smith, or Jenny Kim, or whatever, you are a brand. And I know that there's non-competes and things like that, so let's say Jenny Kim goes to another brokerage, and we know that their stratas can't follow them.

17:36 But of course, once that termination period ends… I'm not promoting you to breach your contract or anything, that is not what I'm promoting here. But what I'm saying is that you're a personal brand as well. And that also goes to trade contractors: if you're the CEO of, let's say, the CEO of ABC Landscape, you have a great opportunity on LinkedIn to be an advocate for your brand, building that better relationship.

18:03 And then, if you don't think that a council member, at least a savvy digital council member, isn't going to be looking up your LinkedIn profile, whether you're that property manager, the property management firm or the trade contractor, you're sorely mistaken and missing out on a huge opportunity to market. Because I'll say this: I Instagram and I LinkedIn things before I Google things, and I will absolutely look up a contractor on LinkedIn and see if they have a profile before I even decide on that.

18:35 And whether or not that's the right or best decision, that's not what I'm here to say. What I'm saying is people do it, and you need to be aware of that.

18:44 – Email Marketing and Its Returns

18:44 Jamie Burke: So yeah, okay, I'm going to be talking about a couple more things here outside of social media marketing, and then leave you guys alone for the rest of the afternoon, for the great presentations lined up here. So, email marketing, again, is another form of content marketing. So let's say ABC Landscape has a newsletter at the bottom of their website. Email marketing is highly effective, it generates $36 for every dollar spent.

19:19 Of course that's not across the board, dependent on specific context and everything like that, but either way the point is that it yields great dividends. So why engage in email marketing? Again, some of the points that I said in the beginning: building relationships, building brand awareness. Now, this third point here, fostering trust, permission based marketing, I'm going to speak a bit more about this, because this part is really, really important.

19:45 – Permission-Based Marketing and Anti-Spam Rules

19:47 Jamie Burke: So when it comes to email marketing, it's not meant to be spam. So with permission-based marketing, your audience is giving you permission to market to them. So they're signing up for the newsletter, or they're following your Instagram, or they're following you on LinkedIn or connecting on LinkedIn. It's very permission based, and that's what building that relationship is really founded on. Because if you're just spamming, and you're just like, you know, like I said, I've seen all of those emails to property managers, like, oh yeah…

20:21 You really want to create an atmosphere of trust, that you're here to add value to them, and that perhaps, if you're playing the long game like I said earlier in the first presentation, it can take months and months and months to convert an RFP or a quote or whatever into a signed contract. And in that time you need to be building the trust that you're there with good intentions, that you're there as a reputable, trusted business.

20:50 So don't spam your clients, don't spam your prospects. Make sure that everything you do is permission-based marketing, that it's in compliance with Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation and those kinds of things. So if you're building an email newsletter you can build that online on your website, but it has to be permission based. I just needed to make that caveat, just so you understand the difference. The last point in this slide is, email marketing is valuable because you're communicating with your audience on your terms.

21:24 Owned media. So for instance, email and your social media and your website, as a contractor, these are things that you can control. So like I said, if your website is built in the 80s, or you haven't updated your data or anything like that, then that's on you, you control that. So you can really take ownership of your own media, and email marketing is very effective. And then that's the same with, like I said, flipping it back, always looking at it from both perspectives, strata council and strata managers.

22:05 You can really look at this information and, is it providing value to you? Like that email newsletter: is it just, oh, buy ABC Landscaping, 50 percent discount on water bags for trees? Or are they giving you information on why water bags are valuable, or things like that? Like I was saying, the three E's of content marketing: educate, entertain or engage. So that really is what you can keep in mind when you're reviewing the trade contractors or the different businesses that you're vetting.

22:33 – Modern Versus Outdated Strata Websites

22:44 Jamie Burke: Okay, the last slide I have here, this one's kind of more of a joke, well, and also very real. I kept using the analogy of very old and very new in terms of websites and how to navigate it, and this is an example. So this website on the left: my husband, like I said, he's my business partner, he's also a graphic designer, and this was a site he had to study once as a project, and it's a very, very real website.

23:14 Space Jam was released in the 90s, and this website, this is live. And like you can see, it's dated, it's old. If you actually go on the website, if you click on the planet, it's very, very 90s and very, very old. And replace the Space Jam thing again with ABC Landscaping, and sure, ABC Landscaping is going to look great. But I mean, compared to the one on the right — I mean, this is just a demo, but this is just like something new, and let's say it's something fresh, and it's like, which one would you go for?

23:46 I mean, you would clearly go for, or at least be initially interested in, the newer one. And it's not to say, like I said, that the old website is bad, or that you need to update your website to the full nine yards. It's just simplifying, but really it's just about modernizing it and things like that, because that's what councils, like I said, are going to gravitate towards.

24:08 On the other end of that spectrum, I do caution, and this is part of that marketing literacy as well: let's say something is new, a very new, very fancy website.

24:14 – Vetting Reviews and Flashy Web Design

24:19 Jamie Burke: As councils and as property managers, make sure that you're not just like, oh yeah, wow, what pretty UI, how things move on the website, or what pretty branding. Make sure that you look at the things that we talked about earlier in this presentation, like, what are they adding, value? What are their visions, what are their goals, what's their business model? And then even when you do read some reviews, like the testimonials, there's two extremes to that too: the testimonials on a website will be, of course, skewed fairly positive, the Google reviews on Google will be skewed fairly negative.

24:58 And just trying to find, hey, what's the real space? And that's through your digital marketing literacy skills, which I hope I helped you develop today. So Ryan, that was the last slide there.

25:13 Ryan Grant: Awesome, thanks so much Jamie, and we'll chat soon.