Welcome to the six figure business mastery podcast, where every week

Kirsten and Jeanne dive into the essential topics to fuel your business

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So get ready to unlock your business potential and take it to the next level.

Welcome everyone to our newest episode.

Thanks for being here and listening to our podcast and our special guest today.

Her name is Jess Ellett.

And her company is River City Consulting.

She's going to talk to us today about branding.

So welcome Jess.

It's lovely to have you tell us a little bit about.

Your company and what you do.

It's River City Consulting.

My husband actually started our ad agency about 21 years ago.

His background was heavy in graphic design and that eventually 15

years ago translated into a lot of website design and then we also

started a podcast three years ago.

So we are doing all things, branding, marketing, and design.

Cause you, you just have to evolve in business, don't you?

Especially in marketing.

Now, it's completely niche down where people are actually getting going to

school for marketing and specifically getting social media degrees, which is.

Unfortunate because there's such a big broad picture and when you hone in that

tight, it really does limit your knowledge and what you can do in the future.

So today we're going to talk about building your brand on a budget.

So everybody likes to make sure that they're cutting costs and it's a new year.

So we want to make sure we're spending our time and money on things

that make sense for our business.

Let's talk a little bit about the starting point.

Which is I believe that you need to design and define your kind of

unique authenticity to your brand.

So can you talk a little bit about that?

We do specialize in working with small businesses.

We also work with bigger ones where they need to do a full rebrand and that

kind of thing, but we are specialty.

And the ones we'd love the most are definitely the small businesses,

because we can feel the impact directly.

And it just matters so much more than a corporate entity.

So, with small businesses, obviously, budget is very limited and a lot of

times, let's take, for example, a plumber or somebody that does HVAC.

Their background is totally the opposite of marketing, so they're

launching this company, but that piece of the puzzle they really don't have.

And so when we come in, we do define sort of 3 essential things that

will help them get off the ground.

The 1st is defining that unique and authentic brand identity, which

sounds like a lot of big words.

It's figuring out how to clarify.

1st of all, what is your mission?

What are your values?

Because those are the things that are going to really lead kind of the voice.

That you have in this whole situation of marketing.

And then once you have that mission, that value statement, then it's really

figuring out the look and the feel.

And that comes down to your website, your logo, your fonts,

all of your visual elements.

A big mistake that people make when they're starting out like this is that

they maybe have a teenager come and handle the marketing and they're putting

things out that have a stretched out logo.

And the wrong font and imagine a company like McDonald's, and it

really does help to create that consistency across the board.

So, figuring out what that message is going to look and feel like, and that

voice, do you want to have a voice?

That is very serious.

But if you're a spa, maybe you want to have fun and humor, whatever that

voice is, it's important to establish it and then make sure it carries

through really in everything you do.

I follow Denise Duffield Thomas, who always talks about some people spend

all their time procrastibranding because they just keep tweaking it and thinking

that this is moving them forward when in fact it's just wasting time.

If they don't know what they want or they don't have it yet, they need to

go see someone who can say, no, this is The way will be speaking on that.

I think 1 of the biggest mistakes people make is thinking when they

start a business that they need to say everything, whether it's in

their rack cards or on their website.

They just want to have so much information and people really don't engage that way.

So, you think that you're really giving them everything, but

really, you end up giving them nothing because they turn away.

And so bite sized pieces of information that are digestible.

That's the biggest battle we fight with people is to take that long paragraph

you want on your homepage and turn it into little bite sized pieces.

Unfortunately, that's where we are as a civilization.

We can't intake big amounts of information.

We've been trained now to just take bite sized ones.

And you don't want to fight that as somebody who's trying to build a business.

Yeah.

And I would say to add onto that, it's the visuals are so important.

Because an image can convey.

What you want to say, instead of actually writing it out, there's lots

of tricks that you could do design wise to get across what you want to get

across and that's why it is important.

If you don't have an extensive background in that to work with somebody that

does, because even colors represent certain things if you're more in

the medical or you're more in home improvement, whatever your business

does, there are colors that innately.

affect people emotionally and you want to affect them the right way with the

right colors based on what you do.

You sit down with them and talk to them about that.

Our first step is always going to be that call to really understand where they're

at in the process, whether they need help with that, whether they just maybe have

an idea but Need it honed in a little bit.

Everybody's at a different place really.

So, figuring out that is our 1st step and then based on that, we go into our next

steps, depending on what their needs are.

We tend to be very flexible in how we work with our new businesses.

Other people need to do it in piecemeal because they don't

have an unlimited budget.

They don't have an investor pouring money in.

So we need to also figure out the priority of how we're going to

do things based on what is most important for getting off the ground.

And then maybe come up with even a 12 month plan that we do in steps to get

them there by the end of the first year.

So I'm thinking, like you said, You work with some clients, you start

from scratch and you work all the way to the end and with others, you

just come in where they need you.

And we'll work with a lot of companies that maybe started out as just a 1

person solopreneur, as they call it, and maybe they did a DIY website because

they just needed to get something up.

Those sites are great to get off the ground, but they don't tend

to be as recognized by Google.

So once they start growing.

They're not getting served the way that they should be.

And so they might need to move that to a different platform.

They might need to have everything recoded as far as the headlines

and the images that they have.

It may be just that we have to take them from where they started

and move them to that next level.

Or it may be that they're just starting from scratch.

Or as I said, it may be that they did everything 10 years ago and it's

time to really do a deep rebrand.

A brand can evolve.

It doesn't have to be get something, especially if you're just starting

out, get something you like.

It doesn't have to be something that you're loving, that you're passionate

about, that's going to stand for you for the next hundred years.

You will evolve.

Your business will evolve.

Your website will evolve.

I think that was hard when I was working with clients as well.

It's always a sign to the community.

It's a sign that things are going well when you do a

rebrand, it is not a negative.

It's a sign that you've really come to a place where you're pivoting and

you're growing and you're successful and people really respond well to that.

So as long as that rebrand is done well, it tends to resonate

with people in a positive way.

I love that.

Rebrand equals growth.

I wrote.

Excellent.

Excellent.

So let's talk a little bit about.

Like free and low cost digital platforms.

How do you help your clients get started?

Everybody would probably jump to social media and there's so many

different social media platforms.

So where do they start?

What should they do?

And my background was actually TV and radio.

So I was dealing with a lot of clients that had those five, 000 a month

budgets for that type of advertising.

And most of the small businesses.

are in their very beginni

Okay, what can we do to get your name out there without breaking the bank or

causing you to go into debt too quickly?

So social media is a really good platform.

There are 2 different mechanisms with social media.

1 is just having that brand represented having your voice heard being out there.

And that's your own posts on your own social media, but

that's not going to grow.

Anything for your business, because those are people that are already following you.

And so social media advertising is a really great way to very affordably

put your message out because you can target geographically.

So, where a television commercial is going to air.

Across all million or however many people we have in the Richmond market

right now to all of their homes.

This is something that you can do in your own zip code 5 miles out 10 miles out.

You can target exactly who your demographic is.

If it's only females, you don't need to advertise to the men and

you can test different types of information to see how people respond.

So we really recommend social media advertising.

Typically, that would be Facebook and Instagram.

YouTube would be more something they would be doing on their own, although

we can certainly help with that.

So that's 1 and in those platforms, it's very important to make sure

that you're telling stories that you're sharing testimonials.

You can talk about yourself all you want, but other people talking about you

is going to have that much more impact.

You can start a blog, start a YouTube channel.

You can start a podcast.

So if you can get yourself on a show like this, where you can be

interviewed professionally, that has a whole lot more impact than sitting

in your office, recording yourself.

And it's so much easier.

It's so much easier.

Then.

Email marketing is also great, but you've got to have that list.

So the other thing that we tell our new businesses is from the very beginning,

collect every card of everybody you meet at every single networking

event, anything you do, start that database in an Excel spreadsheet of

every person you come in contact with, because that will become a database.

The people that are your client.

Already that you can make offers to throughout the year and then the people

that you haven't yet engaged with that.

You can tell about your company.

So email marketing is huge.

Again, it is tricky when you're doing it yourself and we, that's 1 of the

things we specialize in because even if your subject isn't worded, right?

People won't open it.

Do you want them to call?

Do you want them to go straight into your booked appointments?

Really having a very easy way for people to respond.

So those are.

Are out the gate, get that social media going, start creating that

content, do email marketing.

If you have a list, or just start building that list and from the digital angle,

that's really the best way to start.

And then we can talk later when they get more established about doing

things like, which is over the top.

That's we all have smart TVs now.

And so when I talked about TV earlier, that's broadcast, but now we can advertise

to people through their smart TVs.

And that, again, allows us to control the geography.

So we don't have to expand it to the whole market.

We can just pick certain zip codes and certain demographics.

And if I'm sitting home watching HD, and you're a plumber, it really

makes sense to have your ad served.

This is 1 of the biggest shifts in advertising in the

past 15 years is that we.

As small businesses, or as businesses that advertised used to do either

cable or broadcast and broadcast still has a really big place because it

is live news and live news is never going to be something we don't want.

Hopefully we don't start going to YouTube for our news, but the broadcast

channels still have that niche.

Cable has really caught on.

Died out, there are very few people that are paying for cable in their homes

and cable used to be the way that you can hit, like, 1 side of the river in

the Richmond market, at least, or the other and not pay for the whole thing.

But now people don't really have cable.

They all have smart TVs and you can now hire an agency or

go directly to a TV station.

Everybody offers this now.

And it's just a way to buy television based on only hitting smart TVs, and

you do it on a cost per 1000 basis.

So you can decide what your budget is.

You could spend 2000 dollars a month to do this in a certain targeted neighborhood.

To a certain targeted demographic and not have to pay the 000 a month

that used to pay for broadcast.

So it really runs the same way as regular TV advertising.

You're sitting at home.

You're watching whatever you watch if you do advertising.

You can't specifically pick one channel.

It does spread you out based on who you're targeting.

So if you're targeting a woman that is 25 to 54, that makes 100, 000

a year, you're going to be served in the shows that she watches.

I used to call that run a show, ROS.

That's how, that's exactly how OTT is bought.

It worked for MTV networks and we did the national advertising.

Wow.

Yeah, it was real world all the way.

Because people don't have cables in the, they're all selling it.

The key is to find the best cost per thousand that you can get.

Cause it is expensive and it is expensive as far as cost per thousand,

not as far as investment needed, but also frequency, because one thing I

think a lot of people will relate to.

Is when you are watching that real housewives and you see the same

commercial 50 times in that 1 hour show, it makes you now not want to

deal with that company or brand.

You are so sick of it when it starts to come on.

You literally want to scream.

So.

A lot of companies will sell it for cheaper, but they

won't have a frequency cap.

And now you're going to alienate your audience.

So I would say the best advice I could give is find somebody that has

a relatively affordable cost per 1000, but that will tell you definitively

that they have a frequency cap.

And also that they have a time cap, so that your commercials aren't

running between midnight and 4 am.

You want to make sure they're running when people are actually

watching that are awake.

Because I fall asleep with the TV off.

I would be counted as being someone watching at 1am, but

I am snoring at that point.

My TV's just on.

We used to have, we had a network.

Nickelodeon was during the day, but Nick at Night was at night.

And it was interesting to watch the numbers on Nick at Night actually go up

because there were moms who were nursing at night or men taking over feeding

the baby or people work shift work.

It was a long time before that actually came to be, but you're absolutely right.

We also had to have a nice percentage of Morning, during the day, prime time,

and then evenings, really late evenings.

Excellent.

The number three I have on your tip is prioritize community engagement.

And this is where grassroots comes in.

I always tell the local small businesses that I work with, it really is.

About grassroots at the beginning grassroots marketing and part of

that is part of that is really getting engaged with the community.

And that's maybe finding a nonprofit that aligns with your heart and

soul, which is also, it just feels so good do things with those nonprofits

sponsor some of their things.

Get involved in content with them host events, maybe in their honor

or host an event for something else.

I've seen a lot of small businesses doing really well with with doing webinars.

Lately.

It's there are platforms like alignable that are free to join.

You might pay a small fee to get into some of the more deeper

elements of it, but doing an online seminar or webinar where you can.

You're the expert and you're giving information to people.

That's helpful.

That 1st of all is appreciated.

And 2nd of all, it does start branding you as an expert in your field.

So those are things you can do for nothing or relatively really inexpensively

and then also cross marketing with.

Somebody that aligns with you an example of this would be like a

fitness studio aligning with a local juice bar and cross promoting together

so that they're each supporting one another and it fits and it makes sense.

And that's 1 of the things we can help with is figuring out who would

be a good partner to align with.

We can help figure things like that out.

But.

That's a really great way to do it.

And then even local influencers, there are a lot of local influencers, people

that maybe have been in the market for a long time that have a big following

on social media, working something out with them, where they can help promote

you is also a really great way to do it.

We have a client who has, it was interesting because she's in Florida

and was her building for her business.

She's a nutritionist damaged during the hurricane.

And she was really upset.

She was prepared for it.

But still she knew she had to find a new place and she ended up finding this new,

a better studio in a strip mall, but there are also other complimentary businesses.

I'm in there.

My mother in law saw one of my videos.

She said, I know why you're doing that.

It's because you've been, that floor is dirty.

You need to get that floor clean.

You're picking up dust.

So funny.

A great example of what you just said is that we.

Work with a primary care physician.

We launched his business, built his website, got him into networking, did

all the things to help him get going.

And then we also work with a medical spa who does hormone

replacement therapy and Botox.

And now they're getting into the space of women's wellness and we introduced

them and they have podcast with me together where they're both talking

about different elements of menopause.

And how that affects women and different things you can, and

that is just what a great way for them to each promote each other.

And there's just tons of relationships out there.

If you're thinking about it the right way that aren't going to cost money or.

Where you can go in on the cost and share that.

Like you said, I don't know if people always think about that.

So it's always good to know there are companies like yours that can help

people think through that kind of thing.

But I will ask you, you talked about local influencers online.

How would you go about finding one if you were a business?

Again, it really comes down, especially in Richmond and doing a lot of networking

and really The more people and the more people you have in your network, the

more you're going to find those people.

So anyone who maybe is attached to the local Miss Virginia.

There's 1 of our clients that we've worked with.

I think she won Virginia fitness and so she has aligned with some

of the local medical spas and she goes in and gets things done,

whether it's lip filler or Botox.

If somebody could introduce you to somebody like that, and you can start

a relationship, there are a lot of fitness people, but really, it comes

down to looking at Instagram following people that makes sense based on your

business and looking for those people that have those big followings also

people that are really influential.

In networking organizations, and that's another lower cost, relatively tip is

to join a referral based networking group when you launch a business.

But those type of groups can help you figure out depending

on what your business is.

It's also different depending on what you do, but finding those people

that have really big followings, or that have a leadership role in

chamber and chamber of commerce, or.

Maybe run a B and I group you can really find these people all over the place if

you can dig up enough rocks You never know who knows someone so that's why

it's always good to ask and get to know some people I love that so we're gonna

wrap up in just a minute But I want you to tell us a little bit about your

podcast So we had this little brainstorm a few years ago when I decided to leave

Corporate and come work with my husband at the agency Which I guess has been

going on 3 years now, we were trying to figure out how we were going to make

up the deficit of me leaving corporate health insurance and that combined with

this idea that we talked about earlier, where people were really trying to

figure out the podcast space, but weren't understanding how to make content that

people wanted to actually listen to.

We realized that because I had done so much voice work.

Over the years in media that I could probably tackle this and

I also had started a podcast personally that was more about crime.

So I had the kind of basics down on how to do it.

And so we thought if we could provide a platform where our small businesses

could get on and brand themselves the professional as the authority.

In that category, have a conversation that included stories and really a way for

people to get to know them and trust them.

And then also have this platform for our nonprofits because we do

a lot of work with nonprofits.

It's a story that they have to share to get funding that

they have to share to get.

People emotionally invested and a podcast is such a great way to do that.

So, we launched River City podcast.

So, it provides that we can do snippets that can go on social media.

We can put the whole podcast on their website.

So, River City's podcast started and it's something we usually do about 1 a week.

We really only want to talk to people.

That have a story that have something interesting to say an

interesting conversation to be had.

I'll have to check that out.

This has been fantastic, Jess.

You are a wealth of information.

I know that people who are listening are thinking, yes,

let me write all those down.

We will make sure that we have your contact information in the show notes,

but tell people where's the best way for them to reach out to you.

I think the biggest way to reach out and then also just to get a sense

of us is to go to our website, which is river city consulting dot com.

And that way, you can learn a little bit about us, about my husband, about our

background, about the services we offer.

And obviously you can contact us through that as well.

That's fantastic.

Thank you so much for joining me today.

Just for having me.

I think together we can just.

Fix the world, at least from a growing business.

Standpoint, thank you for having us.

Thanks, Jess.

Thanks for listening to the six figure business mastery podcast.

If you enjoyed listening to this episode and you are ready to leverage video

marketing on all online platforms, or maybe even start your own video

podcast, then you need to check out the done for you and done with you

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