Chasing Financial Freedom
Chasing Financial Freedom
Ep 301 | Unlock 5 Game-Changing Strategies to Excel as a Social CEO and Boost Your Small Business Growth
Unlock the secrets to becoming an influential social CEO with Emanuel Rose, a veteran in B2B digital marketing and an avid fly fisherman, who joins us to share his wealth of knowledge from three decades in the industry. Emanuel passionately reveals how small business owners and entrepreneurs can harness the power of content marketing, authentic audience engagement, and staying on top of digital trends. He offers straightforward advice on crafting a content calendar that reflects personal interests, community ties, and industry developments. Discover the art of creating meaningful video content and using social media to foster lasting brand loyalty.
Tune in as we dissect winning marketing strategies specifically tailored for small businesses, with a special focus on the health and fitness sector. Emanuel explains the strategic importance of honing your ideal client profile and content approach, targeting the right audience, and embracing lifelong learning through external support and collaboration. From identifying the primary spenders in personal training to exploring effective lead generation in industries like manufacturing and FinTech, we provide actionable insights to drive business growth. Emanuel's commitment to empowering entrepreneurs through mentorship shines through, offering guidance that could catalyze your business's next giant leap.
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Financial Freedom Podcast. Hope you guys are having a great day. Today on the podcast we have Emmanuel Rose. He's an author, a speaker, a B2B marketing and digital marketing expert, and I like the last part fly fisherman. You don't hear a lot of people doing that, still so, emmanuel, welcome to the show.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much, Ryan.
Speaker 1:I'm really happy to be here. You're more than welcome. Sorry about the wait, but I look forward to having a conversation with you today.
Speaker 2:Absolutely yeah, I'm looking forward to it.
Speaker 1:So tell. Before we get into what you're doing, can you tell the listeners a little bit about yourself?
Speaker 2:You bet. Yeah, I've been in sales and marketing for over 30 years, and the last 15, I've been as an agency owner. So I've been doing B2B digital marketing with a team of about seven or eight and we help companies stay on top of the trends that are happening in digital marketing primarily for business to business, but we do have some B2C clients also.
Speaker 1:So when you're not running the agency, what do you like to do other than fly fishing?
Speaker 2:I like to run my Springer Spaniel so I got a great bird dog and we get outside and hike around and go bird watching. Occasionally I get something for the table that way.
Speaker 1:So how did you get into the space?
Speaker 2:It was just a natural, it was one of my inclinations. Right, I was the kid that sold seeds door to door, and then I took the money and I ordered a boomerang out of the back of a magazine. I had working class roots and if you wanted something you had to go work for it, and and I love problem solving and I love connecting people to things that they want that can help them, and so the sales track was an obvious one for me. And then, as I studied and read books and looked at marketing as well as sales, then I found a way to combine them and I got.
Speaker 2:I had three bad experiences as being an employee in a row over about 18 months, got a big bonus reneged on. They had people bring me in under false pretenses all the stuff that happens. They had people bring me in under false pretenses, all the stuff that happens. And so I third one of those and I was like, eh, I guess maybe I'm unmanageable, unhireable, and I better just have my own business. And that's when I started strategic e-marketing. And it was like 15 years ago, right as the right, as it became impossible to avoid social media, and so I've been one, one chapter ahead of the clients for 15 years.
Speaker 1:So we have listeners that are small business owners, entrepreneurs and so forth, and I'm sure because I know I do struggling with marketing and so forth what could be three topics that you'd like to discuss today that would bring value to them?
Speaker 2:The first thing is content marketing has never been easier than we have now and never been more relevant. So content marketing then cascades into what we're doing right now, which is inside their industry and their subject matter expertise and getting very comfortable on video and embracing the social CEO Elon Musk style. So those are the three topics I think that are the most relevant. That I've found with my clients are the most challenging right now for small business owners and small business managers.
Speaker 1:So embracing being the social CEO. So how can one do that if you're a solopreneur?
Speaker 2:Look at the very straightforward content calendar about. Really, it's about four or five things. Number one what are you involved in as a person? What organizations are you supporting with as a person? What organizations are you supporting with your time, energy and money? It doesn't matter if the SPCA or the local version or you love to train dogs, Whatever.
Speaker 2:The thing is that you're engaged in outside of the business and talk about that.
Speaker 2:Talk about the vendors and, if you have staff, talk about them and explore in social, on video, what the vendor of the month is or employee of the month.
Speaker 2:Of course, new products, product topics that is expected, but it should only be a portion of outreach that you're doing, outreach that you're doing. And then the trends what do you see happening over the next one to three years so that people who are listening in your network can start to hear not just your current expertise but how you see the world changing and evolving in a very uncertain time? So that very simple content calendar, 90 seconds on Monday morning and the discipline of doing that is the most important thing I think that a small business owner can do to build brand equity for the next 20 years, because Generation Z demands it, and so if you're selling to kids who are 27 and 12, 12 to 27, then you've got to be engaged in that, and the rest of us are also attracted to it. It lets us do business with people we know and trust, and we would much rather a lot of us would much rather support real people than big corporations.
Speaker 1:So how can we go dig into the content calendar? You say 90 seconds. Is that creating the content calendar? So can we go into a little more detail of what you're alluding to there?
Speaker 2:so I'm saying I just I outlined the content topics just in that little three minutes. The 90 seconds is to say today, monday, october 7th, I'm going to talk about this project that went really well, and here are the three things went really well. Here's what the client did. That was amazing and how they made it go so well for us, and this is what we did to make it go so well. I talk about that for 90 seconds.
Speaker 2:I put that into something like ClipScribe or one of the AI clip producers and then schedule that in Hootsuite or whatever you're using for social media and push that out there. And so there's five Tuesdays with the content. The next Monday, on the 14th, we're going to talk about the fundraiser that I went to for the local Save a Cat Foundation and why I believe that's important and the value that cats have brought to me in my life and why my grandkids love my cats and speak about it as the human that I am, and then run it through that same process do you have a plan or a frequency for daily posting?
Speaker 1:Is it once a day, twice a day, 12 times a day? What would you suggest, especially starting out?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it depends who your target groups are, right. So that is a process that you can determine by going into perplexity or chat and asking that question. I'm targeting college students who need to move their dorm room. How frequently should I be posting to TikTok and Instagram in order to build a brand? You'll get whatever the best case standard practices are, but that's not as important as getting into the habit of the process, especially for solopreneurs. Right, there's always a thousand things to do and there's never enough time to do it, but we have to be in these habits of concise, 15 to 30 minute projects that are building equity long term.
Speaker 1:When it comes to that frequency, let's back up, not even frequency. How about the medium or median? I need more coffee. The medium actually is. Are you saying we should do video over everything else? Or should you have a mixture of visual posts with some clip art, or maybe even some verbiage and so forth? What would you suggest we start out with?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so again, video is the central hub. We have to do video now. I think the amount of video consumption and shorts consumption is bigger than every other part of social media.
Speaker 2:The market's mandating that we get good at it. Now the way that we run content in my agency is that we take that video and I know this process because I've seen your work, and I know this process because I've seen your work and we transcribe it and use it for blog content or website content, which it's got lots of value, not just for search engine and generative engine optimization, but also for people who are deep readers. There's a portion of our market typically that want to consume great amounts of content the average B2B sale process that person's consuming six hours of content before they make a decision. So we repurpose every video into blog and then in social media posts and into shorts and chop it up and repackage it based on target market repackage it based on target market, the ideal client and the social media.
Speaker 1:You said something earlier and I totally agree is in this day and age, it's very easy to put content out, especially with all the AI platforms. You just have to find one that works with you or works for you. I've gone through a bunch. I shoot, you know, our podcasts into script and then I can actually chop it up, edit it and let my VA do the work. But then once we get the final version, I take it and upload it to another AI platform called Opus, and Opus has been a lifesaver for me. Literally, you take a 20 or 30 minute video and it pops out 15, 20, sometimes more shorts and now you're able to pump that content out and if you can do that, it will definitely change your business. You got to spend a little, you got to spend a little bit in capital to get it going, but a lot of these have free platforms that you can actually utilize. That work very well.
Speaker 1:I just found another one the other day. It's called Gamma, like Gamma Rays, and it actually it does presentations, social media, it really you can pretty much do anything with it. I'm like man, where has this been. I can literally put a full sentence in of what I wanted. I literally was testing because I'm working on a affordable housing project my day job and I put in there affordable housing project for investors so we can have that boom. It puts up eight slides and literally puts everything together, gives you 80% of the work. You just got to go in and do 20% of the lift and clean it all up.
Speaker 2:Love it. Yeah, I agree, and Opus Clips is a great tool and, like you're saying, no-transcript.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think people look at AI as it's going to do everything, and it's not. If you actually can give it a great prompt or a solid prompt, you're going to get a lot of the lift and then you need to come in and personalize it and make it your own. But a lot of people don't want to do that. They just want to hit a button and make it do it and I call that laziness and it just doesn't. It doesn't work If you put a little time in and I know it does take time and effort to learn the AI and the prompts and the tools but if you do those things, I call it off peak hours.
Speaker 1:So, like you said, we're focused on revenue generating things, blocking out three to four hours a day to make sure that you're doing sales or marketing, whatever you're doing, but maybe at the end of the day, when it's a little bit slower, you spend 30 or 40 minutes just learning AI and putting that time and effort into a single tool. Don't go try to learn five tools. Try to learn one tool. I like it, I agree.
Speaker 2:Very important. I think the other thing I don't know that it's laziness, but I think there's a certain cultural belief that our job is to go and make as much money as we can and go sit on a beach somewhere and drink daiquiris, and I think that is an immature view of why we're alive and our job as humans is to create and to make new things and to create relationships and to support the people in our lives that we love and care about. And the richest people I know are still working every day. So we have to dispel the myth that my job is to make $100 million and then go sit on a beach. I want to make $100 million so I can employ 5,000 people and then make another $100 million.
Speaker 1:That, to me, is why we're here, and the AI tools create a lot of opportunity for us to free up time to be creative rather than drudgery kind of the factory work of the computer.
Speaker 2:Maybe I should back up on the laziness part.
Speaker 1:Maybe it's instant gratification is what I should have said. That's fine, oh yeah, no, I wasn't calling you out on that, I was just no, no, but I thought about it. It is there's a little bit of laziness in there but the other piece of it is instant gratification. We're wanting something, you know, to come to us quickly without the work, and it's sometimes it just doesn't work that way. You got to really bust your hum to really get somewhere, and that's hard work, and if it takes a little bit of time for you to learn the AI, then that's what you do.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. It is going to take time but it will eventually will pay off that investment. It pays off.
Speaker 1:Yeah, for sure. When you're working with clients and so forth, what do you see in their struggles, their top two or three struggles that they, when they first come on with you guys?
Speaker 2:I think the challenge is that everybody wants, like you're talking, about, instant gratification. Small businesses don't have big budgets to start out with and they need that money to create an ROI as quickly as possible, and we're super aware of that. But we're also super aware that there's the reality of the marketplace and it takes some time to test and build campaigns that produce leads. It's really about needing to have a little bit of patience and being able to be engaged with an agency or an outside person or in a marketing capacity that you trust and that you can build KPIs together with, and that, if you're not getting the sales out of it, that you're at least getting the steps to the sales, and that's the most important part.
Speaker 1:And that's a process we could talk a little bit about. That is, you know you start getting leads but the leads are not generating to close sales. How does one work with that as you get more and more leads? I know that pain where you're getting a ton of leads but they're not getting to the finish line. So how do you keep your clients steady and down that road to where they don't veer off and they actually get to the end of the pot of gold?
Speaker 2:Yeah, a lot of benchmarking. So we bring in a lot of industry averages so we can understand how effective we should be compared to everybody else. That's one thing. The other thing is to look at the clients that do convert and why they converted, and then build more content or more touch points inside of those conversions, those successes, and then continue to look at that client map of self-education and make sure the content's on track with those ideal client profiles.
Speaker 2:So we need to be disciplined about how we think about you. Know who my target market is? Everybody. No, I don't care if you're a personal trainer. Everybody's a suspect. Everybody needs to have health and fitness. But everybody's not your prospect. We know that it's typically it's females between 40 and 60 who are the big spenders for personal training. Now we start to break that into. Oh yeah, there's a group of ladies who like cardio. There's a group of ladies who like Pilates. Now we have a track of content that we can start to build out that leads them into trial, that leads them into a process to test and participate with your service and close business. And participate with your service and close business. That's the real secret of marketing, in that, those first steps of identifying your ICP, your ideal client profile and your content map, for that ICP is the discipline, then, to bring you better outcomes on the sales end.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the old adage of throwing spaghetti at the wall and having it stick doesn't work. You really need to have that persona figure out who those individuals are, and it doesn't come overnight either. I know you guys are industry experts but I know for us it took a considerable amount of lift to be able to find those ideal personas to make it work for us.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and even if it's what I call wag, right, wild ass, guess, at least you have a wag as a startup and then you continue to refine it and make it better. Closed business or you don't close business. And those two, both those situations teach you something.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you can learn a lot from. You can learn a lot from those experiences. Now you just got to figure out what you do with them, and then it translates into change. But also, I think, at some point it actually translates into sales. Even those failures will translate to sales at some point.
Speaker 2:I think that's why it's important to get help. Not necessarily, yeah, you should always have marketing help, even as a solopreneur, even if it's an hour a month, hour a quarter, whatever you can afford. But get support that way. Also, get some industry support through networking groups. Get a personal coach who's a business coach. Get some third-party perspective about how you can continue to up-level your performance. What to read, what, who to follow, how to stay inspired and continue to learn. Commitment to lifelong learning and getting help are the two things that have made my life as rich as it is at this point in my career.
Speaker 1:That's great. A couple other questions, and we'll wrap this up. First is, if you were to do it all over again. You're a solopreneur. Where do you start? I know you said reach out for help. I agree you got to get some type of help. But what other two things would you actually share with the audience of what they could do if they're starting all over again or they're just starting?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So there's two things. They're a little counterintuitive, but one is get as much work as you can and figure out what you're good at and what, what you can do and how you can help people. And then the second thing is to shoot for the contracts that you don't think that you're ready doing $2,000 a month deals or $2,000 deals. Then go and look and see what you can do at 10 or 15,000. And the work often is the same amount of work but the margins are better, which allows you to get the help that you need to stay on track with the marketplace as it continues to change.
Speaker 1:I like that. Are you currently working or bringing on new clients?
Speaker 2:Looking for one or two clients. That's about we'll be, about we'll be full at that point. So yeah, we're always interested to hear about what the projects are and if it's if we're not a good fit for it, then I probably have an agency or a consultant that would be a good fit for what people are working on.
Speaker 2:Work with anybody in the United States nationwide. Yeah, yeah, I call it duct tape simple. I'm very much an outcomes oriented person. We keep it as simple as we can inside the complexity that exists in the discipline. But yeah, we'll work with but we we have lots of people all over that. Sometimes they're in different time zones and we just meet by. Zoom Works out just fine.
Speaker 1:Is there any specific industry that you guys focus in on, or are all industries open to you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I really I like manufacturers because I have a background in manufacturing, so that's always good. And then, especially in the transition from manufacturers going direct to consumer which is by 2030, every manufacturer will be selling direct consumer because they need the margins. And then FinTech and some technology, sas those types of companies too are good for us. And then health clubs. So that's our direct consumer line is in health clubs and we have very solid lead gen process for fitness companies.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Best place for someone to reach out to you if they want to work with you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, emanuelrosecom. Or just do a search for Emanuel Rose on Google. I'll be the first one there.
Speaker 1:Awesome. I will put the link in the show notes so people can reach out to you. Sir, thank you very much for coming on. Love what you're doing. You're helping small business owners, you're helping solopreneurs, but, better yet, giving them skills that we really need. I know I struggled with it at first, so getting those skills from somebody and being able to learn and mentor is an awesome thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I appreciate it, Ryan. Thanks for what you're doing with getting the word out to.
