Good Neighbor Podcast: Bergen
Bringing together local businesses and neighbors of Bergen County
Good Neighbor Podcast: Bergen
Ep. # 104 Marketing Mastery: How Presentation Multimedia Transforms Local Businesses
What happens when potential customers reach out to your business after hours? For most small businesses, the answer is nothing—and it's costing them thousands in lost revenue.
Dean Steinman, founder of Presentation Multimedia, reveals the shocking truth about response time on this eye-opening episode. "If somebody fills out a form and you don't get back to them within eight minutes, they're going to somebody else," Dean explains, sharing how his agency has developed automation systems that have increased client sales by 30-40%.
Drawing from 25+ years of digital marketing expertise since building his first website in 1996, Dean breaks down the evolution of customer acquisition strategies that actually work in today's crowded marketplace. He dispels common misconceptions about digital advertising, explaining the critical differences between pay-per-click campaigns and impression-based marketing—and why most businesses need both.
The conversation takes a fascinating turn when Dean reveals how the traditional "rule of seven" marketing touches has now become the "rule of eighteen" due to increased digital noise. "The average person has to see your ad 18 times before it even resonates," he notes, explaining why so many businesses give up on marketing too soon.
Perhaps most valuable is Dean's breakdown of how businesses can leverage AI tools like ChatGPT to attract new customers—including how one NYC dental practice landed a $7,000 patient directly through an AI recommendation. From reputation management strategies to podcast marketing, this episode delivers actionable insights for any business owner feeling overwhelmed by today's complex marketing landscape.
Ready to stop leaving money on the table? Connect with Dean at presentationmultimedia.com to discover how automation and strategic marketing can transform your business growth.
Presentation Multimedia
Dean Steinman
Presentation Multimedia
8 John Walsh Blvd #323, Peekskill, NY 10566
(914) 788-1555
info@presentationmultimedia.com
presentationmultimedia.com
This is the Good Neighbor Podcast, the place where local businesses and neighbors come together. Here's your host, Doug Drohan.
Speaker 2:Hey everybody, welcome to another podcast, another episode of the Good Neighbor Podcast brought to you by the Bergen Neighbors Media Group. And today I am joined by Dean Steinman. Dean is the owner of Presentation Multimedia. Dean, welcome to the show.
Speaker 3:Thanks Doug, Appreciate it.
Speaker 2:So yeah, we're in similar spaces. You know it's media, it's marketing, but obviously you guys do a lot more for your clients. Before we get into what Presentation Multimedia is, tell us a little bit about you, like what's your background? You know how did you get into this field and running a business and an agency?
Speaker 3:Sure, I appreciate you having me on. So yeah, my background is a born and raised New Yorker. What?
Speaker 2:part of New York.
Speaker 3:Born in New York, grew up out in Long Island, massapequa.
Speaker 2:Okay, I'm from East Northport.
Speaker 3:Oh, okay, Cool. I got relatives in that general area there, so I'm on the South Shore, so always been an entrepreneurial spirit. My father always ran his own company, so I always felt like I was doing the same thing. And when I graduated college, started working in the corporate world, I'm like I'm not thinking this. I like the fact that I got somebody looking over my shoulder especially. I was really good at what I do. The guy was like let's go out, Let me see if I can make your sales better. I'm like man, look at the board. I'm number one in salesperson, you don't need to make it better. So basically, the day I found out that we're pregnant with our son who's turning 30 next week, I'm like okay, time for me to get on out of here.
Speaker 3:So the day we found out is the day I quit my corporate sales job and started my own agency and I built my first website in 1996. Just jumped right into this crazy thing called the internet and fast forward. 25 years later a lot of things have changed, but my journey is I just love helping businesses, love being creative, love helping people expand, get more business and just kind of getting out there. The background about me is I'm a huge, huge Jets fan.
Speaker 2:unfortunately, so am I, unfortunately. I always apologize, me too.
Speaker 3:You probably lead the same Jets Mets like I do, and it's terrible.
Speaker 2:Are you an Islander fan too?
Speaker 3:I grew up an Islander fan. I think I still have my Dwayne Sutter jersey somewhere hanging up in the closet.
Speaker 2:My sister had a jersey with all the Sutter brothers' names on the back, or a shirt. I actually have the Newsday, all four Newsday covers still from 80 to 83. Dennis Potvin holding the cup. Wayne Merrick holding the cup. I have all those.
Speaker 3:Those were the Islanders growing up. I mean they would go around the Coliseum. That was the parade.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I know, hempstead Turnpike.
Speaker 3:That was up in the parade.
Speaker 2:I know.
Speaker 3:It happens in the city, but yeah those were the teams. I grew up on watching them as well, and you know, unfortunately it's been a long journey in New York here but yeah.
Speaker 3:So so basically at presentation multimedia, where you know we work with local businesses. We're located up in Westchester County in New York but we work with the business all over the Tri-State area and we help them get more business. Probably about more than half of our clients are actually dental practices, so we work with a lot of dentists all over the country actually, but a big, big majority are in Jersey, Westchester, the city, Brooklyn, Queens, Long Island, so we just kind of stepped into there. Um, but love what we do. You know things are always changing and you know we're down technologies and um, that's pretty much my story so it's interesting.
Speaker 2:You know, I was working in the music industry and I remember, um, we're putting together, you know, cds and we had to start putting something called like wwwcolumbiarecordscom and it's like, what is that? That was around the time you said you built your first website. So things have changed. I'm in the marketing and advertising field and you could say, it's like what you know, I went from, uh, the music business to then getting replaced by technology, to then going into, uh, working for nickelodeon and viacom and working in the home entertainment, which was, uh, another way of saying home video and getting replaced by technology, to then, for some reason, saying, well, I think I'll start a magazine business. And you know, you guys do a lot of, obviously, digital, seo, social media, branding, well, branding. We could talk about digital advertising, pay-per-click reputation management. Funny how, in 2025, there's been an explosion of niche print magazines in Bergen County, westchester, all over, while, at the same time, there's still this development and evolution of different ways of using digital marketing to reach your ideal customer and to show up.
Speaker 2:I guess you could say so what have you seen? Like you said, it changed since last week. What is the? You know algorithms change. What are you seeing in the last five years in terms of what you know? Obviously you're working with a lot of dentists. So what's working for dentists? What is? What have you had to do to pivot to?
Speaker 3:you know, keep your clientele happy have to do to pivot, to um, you know keep your clientele happy.
Speaker 2:Oops, what happened there? I?
Speaker 3:don't know. Okay, you're there. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay um yeah, so um you were saying about your niche magazines well, oh yeah.
Speaker 2:So I was saying you know, things have, uh, continuously changed. You have a lot of, you said, dental clients, dentist practices, so what's like changing in terms of how you're providing results for them in the last five years, like what's different if anything, or is it?
Speaker 3:So much has changed in dental as well as all across the board, and you know the number one thing is being able to adapt and change. You know people are scared of change, as as you know, the one fear anybody has is the unknown.
Speaker 3:So the biggest hole in any small business is just their staff is just overworked on, you know, and put way too much on the plate. So the biggest changes that I've seen is what we do. Is we actually handle all automation and sales inbound sales for our clients very different? So really, you know, think about it. If a dental practice or a retail places, so you restaurant lawyer, whatever it is they're open 9 to 5. That's eight hours a day in a 24-hour day. We're in a 24-hour world now.
Speaker 3:So if somebody fills out a form on your website or calls up, nobody ever leaves messages, ever. If somebody fills out a form, if you don't get back to them literally within eight minutes, they're going to somebody else. Think about if you look, if you want to go to look at a toyota car tomorrow on the car and you fill out a form on a website, how long you wait before they get back to you before you you call up the next one. Or if you want to go to a restaurant tonight, how long you gonna wait. Find that if you could meet them, if you go at 7.30 before you go to the next one. So what we do is we kind of take over that for our clients, because we saw there's a huge hole.
Speaker 3:When a client works with us, we'll answer the phones for them. We'll let people, when somebody fills out the form on the website, we'll automate it and send out a text and an email right away to get them to click to call or to schedule a meeting or consultation or whatever it is. If they don't respond, we'll do it again and again for them. You know, most small businesses it's really you know fill out a phone, your website. Well, don't go call them, leave a message and say, okay, that's a bad lead, oh, you gotta keep on hitting them, you gotta reach them. You know the Imagine number is eight. You got to reach somebody within eight minutes and they have to reach out to them eight times in eight days in order to do it and nobody has the bandwidth to do it.
Speaker 3:So that's kind of what we do now here is, we handle it all for our clients and we're seeing huge results like a 30%, 40% increase in sales, because, instead of doing it once, we have the technology to continually automate it. But you know, AI, using AI and using chatbots on websites to communicate with people you know, 24-7.
Speaker 2:I'll tell you a good vertical. I know you work with home improvement guys but they are the worst when it comes to calling you back. Terrible. I mean. They need your service like nobody I've ever known. They never call you back. I always say I'm not going to beg somebody to take my money. I got a referral, I saw your truck, whatever it is. Incredibly, they just never bothered to call me back. I guess it's great to be so busy that you don't care.
Speaker 3:It's amazing If I needed work done on my house this last summer. I did some stuff done for a deck. Some people ran ads. I'm like wait, why are you running advertising if you're going to even get back to me? I say that all the time I know they send a direct mailer for a landscaper.
Speaker 2:You call them and they never call you.
Speaker 3:Exactly for a landscaper. You call them and they never call you exactly. It's crazy. Yeah, that's something that we've. That I found has been a huge hole in any small business is the fact that they don't have the bandwidth to do it, the automation of the technology, and that's where we step in and hand left.
Speaker 2:Well, nice, nice. So I want to dig into a little bit more about all the different services that you provide, because I work with a lot of clients who don't. I work with small and medium-sized businesses. They don't have the time to do a lot of this themselves and a lot of times they don't have the budget. But when somebody talks about PPC or pay-per-click, what's the difference between running a pay-per-click campaign versus digital advertising or, like a, say, an impressions campaign?
Speaker 3:well, pay-per-click exactly that. You pay every time somebody clicks on your ad and you have to put out a budget for it and how much you want to spend for the click. So a small business. You don't want to have somebody spending, if you know, $100, $200 and they click it. You have to manage it there, otherwise it could go really quick. So a pay-per-click is Google, an ad on Google. You pay every time somebody clicks on your ad, which then takes them to a landing page or takes them to a website where then they will be able to do some type of call to action. When you're doing digital advertising, like if you're running ads on facebook, or if you do things like retargeting or geo-targeting, um, then you pay for reach. You pay how many people see your ad, um, so if you're in a very rural area you don't have to pay much because you know there's not many people seeing it.
Speaker 3:But if you're in new york city, you're in brooklyn, you're in burton county with millions of people. The cost is basically called CPM cost per thousand. So how much you want to spend to reach every thousand people. You can get by on some places for a few hundred bucks a month, some in the bigger areas. You've got to spend that in a week or more, depending upon your location. We've dictated there. Ideally, the best strategy and the and the best recipe is having a combination of across the board. Yeah, we run ad campaigns for clients we have. We put money towards google, we put money towards retargeting and we put money towards um social media advertising. You know retargeting when we put money towards social media advertising.
Speaker 2:You know, retargeting for me as a consumer like I maybe. I clicked on an ad. I'll give you a great example. So I play golf and I got this Instagram post and it was something called click it All right, some kind of you know swing aid. It's going to change my game. I'm going to be in the single digit handicapper but what?
Speaker 2:I learned not to do is buy anything from instagram, because I've tried it a couple times and and it just never showed up. Oh, okay, but now I keep seeing the click it ads or not ads, their their content. I keep seeing it on my feed. I'm looking at it right now, um, and I think I'm seeing it across different platforms. I'll see it on facebook. Obviously it's now, and I think I'm seeing it across different platforms. I'll see it on Facebook. Obviously it's meta. So I think it's effective. I don't think it's intrusive. It's kind of reminding me, you know, and eventually I guess it'll give up if I don't do anything with it. But that, for me, is not. I think that's smart marketing. I'd say the part that is somewhat disturbing you mentioned if I fill out something to call for a car dealership, they may not call me back, but I'm going to get phone calls from about 15 others. You fill out an application to get a mortgage or an email.
Speaker 3:You don't take it off. Of't get off of this.
Speaker 2:Forget it, my God. And it's not emails, it's phone calls. No, no, it's not.
Speaker 3:Well, you've got to get a spam protector on your phone and I've got a mortgage 10 years ago and I'm still getting calls from it. You know every finance.
Speaker 2:You know yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so you, what retargeting is you do? Imagine you look at a golf club and you don't buy it. Well, now that golf club follows you everywhere you go. It's by far the best type of marketing you can do, because somebody already came to your website but they just didn't follow through on buying or contacting you. So now you're going to remarket them and follow them wherever they go with your message and it's an incredible, incredible technology and sales program, but it works only in conjunction with other stuff. You know, when we do marketing for clients and we run Google ads or other things, we include always retargeting with it, because it's the icing on top of the cake. But you got to have the cake first.
Speaker 2:And I think I read a statistic that 90% of the time we see an ad we're not in the market for what they're selling. Right, why do I see progressive, you know, insurance ads all the time? I mean insurance companies must make a ton of money because they spend so much on TV advertising. Right Between State Farm and Progressive and all the others. It's incredible what they spend on TV advertising alone. But the point is is that point is that I may not need insurance today, but they're hoping when I do.
Speaker 2:Or if I'm watching a soccer match or whatever and they've got Chevy on their, or I'm watching a golf match and they've got MasterCard on their shirt, I'm not running out and changing my credit card. But obviously it's about branding and it's about building awareness and a connotation that they're marketing to somebody who's watching golf or they're marketing somebody who's watching NASCAR. That's the kind of customer they want. So hopefully, when they are looking for motor oil or a car or a financial advisor and they Google it right and then they recognize that name because they keep seeing them over and over again, even if it's subliminal. But I guess you know.
Speaker 2:So what do you find is the biggest challenges to explaining in a world of instant gratification. I mean, the nice thing about what you do is you could always show people how many clicks they got, you could show them, how many impressions you could show them, how many impressions you could show them likes and and things like that. But if you have clients that have very short attention spans and probably very short, um you know, uh, you know tolerance, I guess, for it not paying off right away. So what are the biggest? Do you find that as a big challenge or like, or do you have the only the kind of clients that get it?
Speaker 3:I wish yeah I have to educate them right away, and there's no such thing as as as instagramification of marketing or seo. It's a marathon, not a sprint. Yeah, take your time, you have to build in your brand out there. You've got to let people see it. The average person has to see your ad 18 times before that even resonates, you know so it's funny, you say 18.
Speaker 2:Right, it used to be the rule of seven, but now it's.
Speaker 3:Now it's 18 because of all the noise out there. It's how much stuff is being seen. You know, right. So now it's, you know. You know two and a half times that, all right, so you know. Typically I educate them that they have to have a budget. Unfortunately, that the same age. If you're going to market your business, you have to have a secondary, you have to have a budget and, depending upon what niche you're in, you've got to spend anywhere from 5% to 15% of your gross sales on advertising marketing.
Speaker 2:Let me ask. Sorry to interrupt. So what do you say to the person? Hey, dean, I just opened my doors. I don't know what my gross revenue is. How can I spend any money on marketing?
Speaker 3:Then you've got to do some projections and if you open up your doors, hopefully you put together a business plan and you projected your sales for the first year or two and whatever your projection is, that's what you have to have in it If you open up your doors.
Speaker 2:How can I spend if I don't have any money yet?
Speaker 3:I. How could I spend if I don't have any money? Yet I don't have any customers coming through the door. Don't open your doors if you don't have the money to advertise and get your name out there.
Speaker 2:Unfortunately, the competition is so fierce in every industry that if you don't have the money behind it, you're not going to get there. You'll build it very, very slowly, but I have a social media page. That's all I need.
Speaker 3:I think I'm going to get referrals word of mouth, you know and then I wish you all the luck, and here's my card, and when you're ready, please let me know and I'm glad to help you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. So speaking of glad to help you. So what are some examples of some of the clients like some case studies, what? What are some examples of some of the clients like some case studies? What are some of your favorite stories of people that you help? Because you mentioned you didn't start this business just to make money. You said you, you enjoy helping people right and helping their business grow, helping them achieve whatever their business goals are. It could be just brand awareness, but for the most part people want to see, they advertise, they spend money on marketing because they want to drive more revenue, more clients. So what are some of the examples of like, if you can, I'll put you on the spot like a case study of a client that gave you, like the great satisfaction of being able to help them I got perfect example.
Speaker 3:I have one client in um, north jersey. He's in orthodontics practice came to me about 70 years ago with one office um, just great guys. Another jet fan who's that? His name is rod larino, a great guy. He he's in North Jersey. He's got about seven. So he started off with us with one location. Fast forward, 70 years later he has six locations now. Wow, due to the marketing that we've done for him, he's expanded and grown. We have billboards all over Route 287, up and down, all over the area, up and out there in Wayne. So he's doing great Love talking to him, great guy and just a great case study there. He started off with one office eight, nine years ago and now I think he's up to six.
Speaker 2:What did you do initially, when he had the one office?
Speaker 3:You know we just added SEO. Ran his website paid through Google Ads. Helped him get more referrers, them get more referrals, so we basically block one just running ads. More of a consultant as well, so we help them come up with strategies to you know, you know most people don't see the forest through the trees of small businesses.
Speaker 3:You know you're kept. You have a captive audience that you need to get referrals from and have them tell all their friends about how great you are. You know, when it comes to social media I mentioned that before you could crow the cows come home how great you are. But if your customers do it for you, that's what moves the needle. We have to help educate them and so if they listen to the expert, we help them get more referrals, get more referrals from patients, more referrals from other doctors and just room. Then you open another office and then another and another. Um, so it's all you know, because people that that get involved and muck it up, you're gonna, you're gonna keep going in circles you know, imagine if you went to.
Speaker 3:You know you're an attorney or a dentist. Then you tell them what to do. No, that you're the expert. That's why you're hiring the expert right, right, right, yeah.
Speaker 2:that's what they expert. Right, right, right yeah. They're the experts at what they do.
Speaker 3:Listen to us and, you know, respect us, the ones that get the best results. Focus on what you do best.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:That's from. There.
Speaker 2:So you mentioned reviews. So is that what reputation management helps people do is manage their reviews and get more reviews?
Speaker 3:Everybody looks at Google reviews. They don't read the amount. I mean they don't read the content. They look at the amount, like if you are looking for you know you want to get a landscaper, you can do a landscaper near me, a landscaper in Bergen County, and one guy comes up with 11 reviews and one has 700. Which one are you calling?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so, but the app, the business has to have a review program in place. Program in place, so in one way to get a review, ask can ask. If you don't ask you'll get, so if you ask your customers for it 90.
Speaker 3:I'll say yeah, of course I'll do it for you, but make it easy for them. Give them a qr code they could scan, you know, on a little postcard and they can scan it right then give you a review. Um, you know, want it. You know, unfortunately we're in the kind of you know narcissistic world and you know, and they can. People only the kind of you know narcissistic world and you know, and they're going to people only really give reviews. Is it a bad experience?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Last interesting statistic the average person who has a bad experience tells 20 people Good experience.
Speaker 2:One Yep.
Speaker 3:Think about it. When was the last time? If you went to a restaurant and you had a bad meal, how many people did you tell about A lot, I know, that's why when.
Speaker 2:I'm looking at hotel reviews. I'm always careful.
Speaker 3:I don't tell anybody, but the ones that were terrible. We have to get out of that mindset there. That's important to have a review program in place as well.
Speaker 2:That's great. Obviously, we've touched on a lot of those. Have a review program in place as well. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, so what else? I mean? Obviously we've touched on a lot of those. What else have you like? What you're offering to your clients or recommending that they do? From a marketing perspective, that might be different from a few years ago. Like I see, you know, funny enough, we're on a podcast right now, right? So where do podcasts fall into a marketing mix?
Speaker 3:big. You know I'm in my you know dental part. That my business. I run a podcast and I interviewed orthodontists and dental practices. I have my then you mentioned before you there are a lot of magazines that are niches. I also under under my presentation multimedia. I also have a company called Ortho Marketing and we market orthodontics for dental practices. We help dentists get orthodontic practices.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 3:And I run a podcast and it's very well received. I get two, three calls a week from people who heard my podcast and want to talk to me about helping them out. Podcasts are great also. Another great thing now is to what is to make your your marketing go across the board and use ai. I've got a client um in the city who got a patient came in as a dental practice from chat gpt wow so somebody went to it and asked for a question.
Speaker 3:Asked a question about, you know, invisalign and new york city and boom.
Speaker 2:And so here a question, asked a question about you know Invisalign and New York city and boom and they said, here's an example of a great practice to go to and the practice got a $7,000 patient out of it because of chat GP.
Speaker 3:So you gotta you know. So using AI, using technology, using automation is really a game changer these days, and you have to adapt you know.
Speaker 2:So how do you make sure you show up on chat gbt? Uh, because, um, you know, and I'll give you full disclosure. So when I'm, when I'm meeting with a client, I'll ask the question like, should a local pool business, um you know, market locally, uh, using magazines or what's what's put together a marketing plan for a local landscaper in Bergen County? And when they've mentioned magazines, my company comes up. So I'm like now, is that just because I'm typing it in, or because I have some good organic presence out there? Is that why I'm coming up? It's interesting. So how does your client make sure that they show up on chat, gpt or other AIs?
Speaker 3:You know there are some tools and technologies that we use, that you know that get them there. We have a lot of different submissions. You know SEO search engine optimization has changed a lot, a lot, over the last five, six years, especially the last six months. You know. So when you just it's not just having a website and just adding keywords to it anymore, you know there's a lot of stuff that needs to be done. You need to have a lot of links coming in and you have to basically let ChatGPT and other AI programs know that you exist. Otherwise they don't. So you've got to actually submit yourself to these programs and it's not easy, you know. You know to go through hoops for it. But if they know you're there, you'll be found.
Speaker 2:And where you come in is like you're a dentist, you're running a dental practice, you don't have time to do this stuff yourself. Right, you know you're a contractor, you're up on a roof all day, you don't have time to do this yourself, exactly. And the list goes on and on. So this is great, dean. I mean there's so much more we could talk about. I'd love to talk more about the results that you've had. I mean, you shared one, but there's so many different things and so many different ways that you've used social media, that you've used pay-per-click and other. Maybe we could save that for another one. Sure, let's do it, but how would people find you? What's the best way? And you know to be clear, you know the name of my podcast is Good Neighbor Podcast, bergen, Bergen County. You did mention you have a lot of Bergen and North Jersey clients, so let's make sure that they understand that right. Just because you're based in Westchester doesn't mean that you don't serve and help a lot of businesses here. So what's the best way for them to reach you?
Speaker 3:I'm all over the social media, but if it's going to presentation multimedia. com, just fill out the form phone numbers there. You can email me. Dean@ presentation multimedia. com. Follow us on LinkedIn, instagram, facebook all of our social media. You can find us on any of them there and I'd love to hear if anybody has any questions or they're interested in learning more how to help your business. Just please reach out. I really appreciate having you on.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, thank you very much. We're going to have Chuck take us out and then you and I will be right back. Thanks, Thank you.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening to the Good Neighbor podcast. To nominate your favorite local businesses to be featured on the show, go to gnpbergen. com. That's gnpbergen. com, or call 201-298-8325.