What are my predictions for 2021? Instead of trying to predict the future, which I don't think anyone can do accurately, I'd like to offer you my advice as your virtual CMO. Focusing on those key areas that I am focusing on in writing my next book, here is where I would invest my marketing budget across Search, Email, and Social to help you reach your business goals and improve the digital and social media marketing for your organization or brand.
Episodes Mentioned:
Key Highlights
[03:39] Evolution of Social Media
[05:28] Why You Need to Have Digital Presence
[07:29] The Digital Gateway
[08:20] Three Main Ways In Which You Touch People
[09:04] What Is Library of Content?
[10:04] The Importance of Keywords
[11:23] The Role of Backlinks
[14:29] Optimizing Your Paid Campaigns
[17:26] 4 Main Types of Content
[20:12] Why Email Marketing Is Still Effective
[22:09] The Aspect of Customer Education
[24:19] Final Part: Social
[25:23] Why You Need An Employee Influencer Program
[27:12] Leveraging User Generated Content
[28:31] Should I Go With Paid Social?
[31:47] Summary
Notable Quotes
Learn More:
What are my predictions for 2021? Instead of trying to predict the future, which I don't think anyone can do accurately, I'd like to offer you my advice as your virtual CMO. Focusing on those key areas that I am focusing on in writing my next book, here is where I would invest my marketing budget across Search, Email, and Social to help you reach your business goals and improve the digital and social media marketing for your organization or brand.
Episodes Mentioned:
Key Highlights
[03:39] Evolution of Social Media
[05:28] Why You Need to Have Digital Presence
[07:29] The Digital Gateway
[08:20] Three Main Ways In Which You Touch People
[09:04] What Is Library of Content?
[10:04] The Importance of Keywords
[11:23] The Role of Backlinks
[14:29] Optimizing Your Paid Campaigns
[17:26] 4 Main Types of Content
[20:12] Why Email Marketing Is Still Effective
[22:09] The Aspect of Customer Education
[24:19] Final Part: Social
[25:23] Why You Need An Employee Influencer Program
[27:12] Leveraging User Generated Content
[28:31] Should I Go With Paid Social?
[31:47] Summary
Notable Quotes
Learn More:
This year in 2021, where should you be investing your time, your money, your efforts, and your digital marketing, your social media marketing, your influencer marketing, and your own brand, building and creating and leveraging influence wherever you are digitally and socially. Well, that's what I'm going to tackle in this episode of The maximize your social influence podcast. Welcome to the maximize your social influence podcast with Neal Schaffer, where I help marketers, entrepreneurs, and business owners grow their businesses using innovative marketing techniques, leveraging the concept of digital influence throughout digital and social media. Hey, everybody, happy new year. And welcome to 2021. This is Episode 194 of the maximize your social influence podcast. Thank you so much for joining me on this journey. I was really happy that I believe last year was the first year that I published more than 50 episodes, and I am on a mission. And I will continue on that mission to provide you all the content you need, and interviewing all the experts that you need to hear from to help you maximize your social influence and not just your social influence, but your digital influence your marketing your business, and in some cases, your life. So for those of you that are just joining, my name is Neal Schaffer, this podcast is really where I share my latest ideas, my latest experiences from working with various clients as a fractional cmo consultant, or speaking virtually or physically, obviously, these days, it's more virtually. And I really use this as an avenue to also network and to get feedback from you the listener. So for all of you that have posted comments online, or have just reached out and told me that specific episodes or the podcast as an entirety as resonated with you, I want to really thank you. And if you're new here, and I encourage you, because we're already at 194. Obviously, there's a lot of episodes. So just flip through. If you're confused as to where to start, go to my website, Neal Schaffer comm slash podcast and I'll put a link in the show notes and I have a dedicated podcast page on my website that allows you to listen to not only and see what the last 25 episodes were about, so approximately the last four or five months worth of episodes. But I also have beyond that, the best of from Episode Number one, two right now Episode Number 160, and the best 25. And I enjoy once or twice a month going through my analytics and updating that list, and seeing which of the episodes are more popular than others. So if you don't know where to start, I highly recommend you go to that page. And I'm sure out of the latest 25 and then the top 25 most popular 25 outside of the latest 25 you're going to find an episode that is perfect for you. All right on to today's episode. Now this episode is sort of in reaction to all these, these are the predictions for the new year. And it's funny because calendar years are sort of random, it's a random way that we divide time. So just because we divide time by how our planet revolves around the Sun, doesn't mean that changes in social media or changes in business happen according to the same time mean so I sort of always struggle because it's an evolution of trends, right? Talking about social media five years ago, I might have talked about Google Plus, three years ago, I might have brought up Snapchat, today I might be bringing up tik tok. But it's the same evolution that you need to be out there in social media, what platform you're on what content medium, the rules of engagement are all different. But the concept of social has not changed. It's an evolution and maybe a year from now I'll be talking about clubhouse. I don't know, I just got an invite. I haven't accepted it yet. Maybe I should, because people asking me if I have an invite for them. And I don't, but it's all part of a grand evolution. And therefore, when I when people ask me for my predictions for the new year, it's not something new, it's like okay, of the things that are out there. Now these are the things that are probably going to evolve to the point where they become even more important, but you should already be doing them anyway. So I gave this a lot of thought I sort of hinted at this on a previous episode. And it was an episode on influencer marketing. I said if I was VP of influencer marketing, this is what I would tell my CEO to do. So I want to take that same approach. And therefore this episode, and maybe I'll make this an annual episode is going to be if I was cmo, if I was CMO of your company. And whether you are the CEO, whether you're an entrepreneur, whether you're a small business owner or just a marketer, this is what I would tell you this is the direction where I would like to take your company And it's appropriate because I'm a fractional cmo. So I to do this for a living, this is the direction I want to take your company. And a lot of this is aligned with this new book that I have been working on. nothing new to announce yet. But what you're going to hear is me talk about, basically that the framework for the book, as I approach this new year in marketing, and obviously, I'm going to be further developing and fleshing out this content, I'll be looking forward to your feedback after you listen to this episode. So really, where we start with everything is we need to have a digital presence and the digital presence, the digital gateway becomes our website, right? And I'll take a step back, if you are a large enterprise, you may be already doing every single thing that I'm going to talk about, I don't think so. Most, most aren't. But if you are, or if you're doing most of these things, I guess the first thing you want to look at is the customer journey, your current customers, your prospects, really understand from a digital perspective, every aspect of where your digital presence of everything I'm going to talk about touches the customer, is it aligned, is it optimized, and my friend, Dan dyngus, was a guest on one of the episodes and I'll put that in the show notes. I've also had Jay Baer talking about customer experience marketing, but you really want to do what's called a customer experience audit, this is something that Dan talked about, and I highly recommend you reach out to him to have him do that, because he's one of the top experts in the space. But you really want to understand, when you're competing against large brands with big budgets that are probably doing a lot of what you're doing. How do you differentiate? How do you understand that customer experience? And how do you improve upon it, as really one of the best ways to differentiate your brand from everybody else there. At least that's what CMOS of major companies have told me. So I'll start with that. Now, if you're an entrepreneur, a smaller business owner, marketer, for an SMB, it might be a little bit different than customer experience, not to say it's not important, but I'm gonna get a little bit more tactical, on other areas that I want you to focus on this year. So I almost feel like this is a first meeting between a new client myself, it would be an onboarding call, and I do an audit, what are you doing, and it begins with that digital gateway begins with your website. Now, there's many aspects to a website. But that's where digital marketing starts. That's where everything digital starts. Because everything you do in social media leads people back to your website, right? They're going to try to find out more about you. Although the Instagrams do have shopping carts. Now, although it's fairly limited, you really need to go to a website to conduct a transaction for most companies. So let's start with that. And there's obviously that customer experience aspect, the user experience the user interface, is the content aligned with your brand? Is it aligned with your calls to action, it cetera, et cetera? Is it up to date, there's a lot of things we could talk about there. But from a tactical perspective, I want to focus on the content. And the content really starts with this focus on search. Because digitally speaking, there's three main ways in which you touch people. One is through search. One is through email. One is through social. And I believe that we can basically put everything into one of these three containers. And therefore when I start with the digital gateway, it starts with search searches the way that I believe more than half of web visits come from search. So I forget the exact stats out there, you can do a Google search, maybe it's like 53%, maybe 57%. So search becomes the most important way in which our website, our company, our products, our content is discovered. Now, there's an organic side, there's a paid side, right? On the organic side, I want to make sure that we have our library of content. And what I mean by the library of content is, is there anything that a customer might need to know that they're doing searches for not mentioning our brand name, or not mentioning our product name, but they're doing a search looking for a solution that we have a perspective on, that can help lead them to the customer journey to wanting to do business with us to lead generation or to actual conversion or shopping cart purchase? Whatever it is. So what is that content? And do we have that content? I still find a lot of companies don't have that content. They're not. They're not participating in that area. Maybe they're using their blog in a different way. Or maybe they just don't have the volume that they need. But that's what you need. Now, my book is going to become hopefully the playbook for all of this so I can't give it all away otherwise my my publisher would hate me For that, but suffice to say you need to do a little bit of soul searching. If you are doing Pay Per Click campaigns, like many companies are, that's a great start for keywords, but really use a keyword tool like a sem rush like I use, and do searches for keywords that are important to your company, and start to create lists, look at the keywords that are relevant to your company. Look at the search volumes, look at the Keyword Difficulty which sem rush and many others provide you. And then look at search intent, create a list, and then fill in the gaps. Do you have blog content? Do you not have blog content? If you don't have blog content, start blogging. If you do have blog content, how are you ranking? If the content is old, maybe it's time for refreshing and republishing. But that is the step number one that you need to do. And that should really be dictating your editorial calendar above and beyond that library of content. How much more do you need is a question but that is the minimum that you need. And I'll take it one step further. That when we think about being discovered in search, part of it is having content. But the other part of it is that the content has been recognized by others as being useful. And when others recognize our content has been useful. On the worldwide web, the search engines pay attention. And that's why the need to create backlinks become so critical. The backlink is the way that the search engines know that other websites respect your content they're linking to you. Now, I'm not talking about I'm not a fan of black box services. So when I came out with maximize your social back in 2013, I wanted to give companies the ability to create your own social media marketing strategy, and really to be able to own the relationship that if you were to work with an agency, and I get why many companies do lack of resources, and agencies bring a lot to the table as well. At least you can be on the same page views of your strategy or you can dictate the strategy. I will say the same thing about SEO, you should be able to dictate those websites that you want to generate backlinks from those keywords that are strategic to your brand, your business that you want them to focus on, etc. So creating backlinks and you're gonna have to go back to a previous episode on influencer marketing for SEO. In fact, let's just go back here into my Oh, well, I was gonna give you the episode number but so much for that. But I highly recommend you listen to that. Actually, the episode number is episode number 183 influencer marketing for search engine optimization building backlinks for SEO. Part of that is relationships with other websites as if they were Instagram influencers is the best way to think about it, and the mutual benefits that can come out of those relationships. The other way to think about creating backlinks is becoming a guest, blogger. guest blogging is something that a lot of SEO agencies will do for you. Well, you can now control the websites that you appear on. And by doing some analysis on the backlinks that your competitors have, you can find relevant websites that you might want to consider actually guest blogging on from your company, yourself, one of your staff, writers, whoever it might be. So I would want to make sure that you have all of that built up. And not only are you creating content on a regular basis through those gaps in your library content. But in addition to that you are republishing content where it makes sense to where the contents old or perhaps you're not gaining in the search engine rankings. And if you go back to another previous episode that I just recorded, actually, this is going to be Episode Number 192, my marketing technology tool stack for 2021 you'll hear me talk about tools like phrase, which allow you to use what's called NLP or natural language processing to optimize your content so that it's closer, closely more closely aligned with search intent and can help you achieve higher search engine rankings. So that's the organic part. There's a paid part and how optimize are your paid campaigns are you also a B testing with Microsoft? Are you a B testing your retargeting with retargeting platform like ad roll, we're gonna talk about this, the paid social separately. But if you're spending $5,000 a month on Google ads, and you're generating over that in profit, that's where you want to flip the switch and really, really go all out and take it vantage of that situation while you can. Obviously, paid advertising is on a auction system on a bid system, when the times are good. And in a recession, when a lot of companies aren't spending on advertising, it can work to your advantage. I know a lot of my clients took advantage of that this year, and did very, very well with their pay per click. So if your organic works good enough, you shouldn't necessarily need the pay per click. But if the pay per click is extremely profitable, go all out. And if it's not profitable, you need to be doing more AV testing. And if you're working with an agency on it, you need to hear from them what AV testing they're doing on a regular basis. What are they tweaking to ensure that the ad spend is more and more efficient? Make sense? All right. So that is step one in the trifecta of what I would be recommending you do from a search perspective, both organic and paid. So this probably means you need a team, right? You need a content team, some are going to be creating content, some are going to be revising content, some might be researching content, some might be doing outreach to generate relationships with other websites, some might be doing guest blogging, some might be doing keyword research, some might be doing the power of pay per click campaigns. But to get the idea, I believe that investing time and budget there is going to give you a much greater bang for your buck than you might think. And I think when we get to the end of this conversation that I'm having with you right now, as your cmo, you're gonna see why it makes sense that that that is one of two areas, I think in which you're going to strategically invest more human resources in the second one I'm going to get to in a second. So we're done with a search. Let's move on to email. And there are two aspects of search I didn't talk about that I'm going to throw in here. And as I write my book, I'm trying to figure out where best to throw them in because they're not necessarily search the way we think of search. But yet again, they're not necessarily social media, the way we think of social media. It's the different types of content. And I talked about this, once again, I'm going to refer back to a past episode. But I did talk about this in Episode Number 185, why you need to invest in content, non Jeopardy, and discoverability going forward. And the four main types of content being audio, video, text, and photo. So the photo I in that episode, I talked about social media to Texas blog, we have the audio and the video, we have the podcast, and we have the video, we have the podcast for Apple podcasts, Spotify, Google podcasts, Amazon, music, Pandora, these are huge search engines, where people go to listen for audio content. And then we have the video content, which is primarily YouTube. And in an ideal world, if we had the resources, I would want to be going on on all cylinders, I would want to be regularly creating new content, I want to be regularly revising content, I want to be regularly guest blogging, I want to be regularly reaching out to other influencers that that own blogs or media entities, I'd want to have a podcast and I'd want to have a YouTube video series. So I know that's a lot to ask from some companies. But if you're not doing all that, then there is a potential Delta in the things you can be doing to be seen everywhere. And that's really what this is about. Call it omni channel marketing called surround sound marketing. We're all over the place. And this will continue to be the case as time goes by. But if you have the resources, if you don't have the resources to start with the blog, then pick another I chose podcast. So I blog. Man, I've been blogging two or three times a week, I've been pretty efficient, knock on wood to build up my own library of content. I've been podcasting weekly, YouTube, for me, I create one video in December, I want to stick at least once a month, but I really want to get on a weekly cadence. So that's where I want you to go as me being your cmo. That's what we're gonna go. And we're gonna run this for 12 months, and we're gonna try to measure the impact that it has for 2022. A lot of the stuff I work with clients, they blog for six months, they sort of put a pause on do other things three months later, they notice that the traffic from search engines has increased 20 3040 50% this stuff takes time. And therefore you really need to do this for months, if not a year to see the impact that might have. And that's why as your cmo, you're investing in me, I'm on a free agent contract and from a fractional cmo. Let's do it for a year and see how we do but know that we're doing all the things that we should be doing and we can be doing and trying to improve our chances of success. Competing against everyone else out there. All right. That's it with the search, let's move on to the email. The email is not sexy, emails old. There's all these quotes, that email is going away. It's all becoming text. It's all becoming messenger bots. Email is alive and well. And let me ask you something during this pandemic, have you been receiving more emails from companies that you do business with? Or less emails? Do you receive more text from businesses you do business with, or less text? Do you receive more messenger bots, from companies you do business with, or fewer messenger bots, email still alive and well, email is still effective. And here's the thing, right? They come to your website. And if they don't convert, they leave the email. If you have a lead magnet, that's where this type of content would come into play a reason for them to provide their email address. This is where you can now begin to develop a relationship. It's all about like no one trust, beginning with your website, your digital discovery. And now if we can acquire an email address, if we don't convert them, we can now continue this conversation, whether or not they ever come to our website, again, we obviously want them to come again. But the email gives us the ability to really architect a series of messages, a type of engagement over a period of time, that will increase the chances of us being able to build, like knowing trust. Email, is the area where you do not need to invest a lot of people, you need to have the right tool, and you need to architect the right marketing, automation, messages and sequences. So this is an example of something where it requires a little bit of time at first, but once it's done, it's done. And you can reap the benefits over a long, long time. So I would want to make sure as your cmo, what are we doing? Are we are we using the latest marketing automation? Are we taking advantage of all the personalization that is out there in terms of technology and tools? Or do we have lead magnets? Are we building a list? What sort of conversations is that leading? are we keeping in touch with our customers, I mean, Holy smokes, this, this whole aspect of customer education. I've been talking about all of this as if we're just trying to acquire new customers all the time. But that retention aspect, the the digital discovery, in terms of your blog is one thing, having FAQ content, right, and just customer education content, and making those YouTube videos and having a Facebook group and I'm already going into social media, and I need to stay away from that for now. But you get the picture, there's a lot you can be doing from a retention perspective for others as well. But you need to be continually building that list, continually communicating with current customers and prospects. And in order to do so you're probably over time going to be creating more and more lead magnets. If you could have one unique lead magnet per blog post, that's awesome. Most people can't do that. But if you can create one lead magnet maybe every quarter, that really solves the problems that your customers have or your prospects have. That's sort of the thing that I'm talking about in terms of bigger content, if it's just going to be a coupon, or freebie, that's a whole other thing. You can do that anytime. And you can mix those up and see which works from a B testing perspective. But I definitely want you to make sure that emails part of the conversation, that you have the right tools in place, you have the right thought process in place, and that you are building a larger and more influential list over time. Because whatever you do in the future, when you launch a new product, you have a new upgrade, you have an event, that should be the primary way for you to get the word out. Because over time, the people that come to your website majority don't come direct to your website, a majority will come from search engines. So I believe that email even if it's a 30% open rate, or 20%, open rate, more people are going to see your message there than a less than 1% distribution to your Facebook fans, for instance. So that's why we're email needs the strategy. Email really needs the technology and the architecture. But you don't necessarily need to have a large team for it, like you should have for that search aspect of your web content that I talked about previously in this episode. So moving on to the third and final part is social. And if you've heard me talk over the last two to three months, writing the age of influence, and obviously it was primarily Well, it was started writing in 2018. Majority of it was written in 2019 and obviously fully edited in 2019. But as an author and as a consultant speaker, my thoughts are always evolving as the market evolves. And if you've heard me talk over the last few months that the evolution for me from the age of influence is how can we as marketers as entrepreneurs and business owners do as little promotion as needed in social media. Yeah, and how can we view social media, as a marketplace, as a marketplace, to find people to collaborate with? And that's really the message I have for you. Stop promoting, start collaborating, reread the age of influence. And I talk about the different types of influencers in terms of brand affinity. So start with your employees. Do you have an employee influencer program? This is really step number one, right? Why aren't our employees sharing our content? Well, you haven't made employees part of your content, you haven't made employees part of your marketing, you haven't treated them the same way. As you treat an external influencer. It's like buying a present for a relative that's better than the present, you buy your wife or husband, I'm trying to find a unique, I'm trying to find a creative analogy, I think you get the point. So make new friends, but keep the old however you want to look at it, but the employees are the hardware company. And therefore I believe that every company should have an employee influencer program, every program, every company and let me as your cmo, let me restate that every company should have an influence a program that includes your employees, that includes your partners, that includes your customers, your fans, it should be all inclusive, that anybody who loves your brand, can play a role can share in the experience, whether it's content creation, whether it's content amplification, or whether it is an event, or what have you, right? So therefore, we look at social media as a way to engage with others. Not necessarily how many clicks did we get today? But how many people did we engage with? How many influencers that are on our radar? were we able to get into a conversation with? How many customers were we able to find on social media and have a conversation? And how many pieces of content can we now source? Because they posted and they agreed to allow us to reshare it on our website and social media, what have you that approach. And as much as possible, obviously, you have your own content that you're going to publish on social media. But also, as much as possible, leveraging the user generated content that comes out of this influencer program in social media, is I think going to be the key differentiator between what your company does, or now that I'm a part of it as your cmo or fractional cmo, what our company does, and with all the other competition, that's still trying to figure out how to hack social media to promote themselves even more to get more impressions, I don't think that's what it's about. It's about the relationships with all these key stakeholders, and then bringing new people into the program, bringing new influences starting at the nano level, right, of exposing your brand your products to them, and seeing how you might be able to include them, and convert them into becoming not just a customer, but also a brand ambassador for you that and this requires effort, not of people creating content, and fiddling with schedules and Hootsuite and buffer and what have you, but of people dabbling in relationships, right? And creating relationships with other social media users, and managing this program, and coordinating that program with your marketing team with your content team, what have you, that would be what I would want to create in 2021, as this age of influence only continues to evolve. So that's the social strategy for me now, there's a paid component Sure, go out with paid social, I do believe, and I think that any digital marketer that you ask will say the same thing that pay per click, when people are searching their search intent. Therefore, when people are ready to buy, it's, it's based on search intent, and therefore Pay Per Click is extremely effective. But I also know, it's all about like no one trust, and there are different stages of the funnel. And therefore social media advertising paid social has its role in terms of generating brand awareness, and in the creative ways in which you can share content on the feeds of people on social media, I guess with pay per click and with retargeting, you can share images and gifts and stuff like that, but you can't share stories, right? Or reels, or tik tok videos for that matter. And therefore, it becomes a compelling way of using paid social when you tie that together with the user generated content of those that already like know and trust you. And obviously this is where influencer marketing gets a bad name. Because brands have reached out to people that don't necessarily like know and trust them. And it's a one time transaction and the content just lacks authenticity. And that's obviously not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about this new type of influencer marketing. And if you haven't, please reread or read the age of influence to get the lowdown on that. So I think we covered the main areas. It's not that Do we choose search or social or email, we need to be doing all of them. They all fit together. Right now, the podcast and video I mentioned separately, if we're not ready for that, I'd rather do all of this that I talked about. And if we feel like we're running on all cylinders, let's move on to the podcast, let's move on to the video. And when we do that, we begin to build a media empire. Because now we can embed our podcasts and our videos in our blog post, we can include that in our social messaging, when we want to promote something, we can go back into our 194 podcasts and create a 32nd advertisement that now is distributed to anyone who listens to any one of our podcasts. And I suppose we could do the same thing with YouTube cards or what have you. And now you begin to see how over time, you build a pretty compelling media empire when you go beyond the blog into YouTube in the podcast, but I know that for a lot of you, you may not be ready for that, especially if your company is smaller, I just want to throw the idea out there so that you understand the potential. So as your cmo, that's it there's a lot of different areas, it's going to require investment, I don't think you necessarily need to invest in a pay per click or unpaid social, we can invest in people in relationships in tools, if you're already doing paid and they are effective, keep doing it, so long as they are effective. If they're super effective. I mean, invest more, don't get me wrong. But I think that all these other pieces of the pie need to be working together for you to be the most effective when they pay for that click, and they come to your website and they don't convert, you still want to get them on your email list. For instance, you might still want to retarget them in social media, for instance. And that's why all of this needs to work together holistically and synergistically. All right, well, that's the outlook for 2021. I don't know if you're expecting anything for me to go in and say you need to spend 75% of your time on clubhouse and 25% on tik tok or emails, then we need to invest in Facebook Messenger. It's none of that it's an evolution, not a revolution, all of this stuff evolves over time. And you need to continue to do in in this. In this case, I do believe that companies focus so much on the shiny new things, that the companies that are really successful, have stayed true, and focused on the old boring digital marketing, when I talk about search, and when I talk about email. And in fact, whenever I work with a client, we always go in that order. It's search first, then email, then social, and it makes sense. So hopefully, you got some good advice out of this episode. I know that a lot of what I've talked about sort of overlaps what I've talked about on previous episodes, but I felt it was important to talk about this as we begin the new year. And if I was your cmo, that would be my advice for maximizing your digital and social influence in 2021. Hey, we have an exciting year I want to we I have an exciting year scheduled for this podcast, we have a lot of great interviews coming up, I do hope that you will hit that subscribe button. I also want to give a shout out. I know that internationally we have or I have a camp, why do I keep on saying we I have a lot of listeners. So especially recently, I've seen in the Great Britain, in Ireland in New Zealand, and Spain, also India, Argentina, Nigeria, I'm really honored by all of your downloads, when you download of this my episodes, it really does show up in the charts. So I want to thank all of you that are doing that come on United States and Canada and Australia waiting for I'm waiting for you to get caught up with all these other countries. But anyway, I do appreciate all your downloads all your comments, and every time you engage with me. And if there are any topics that you want me to cover, or people that you want me to interview for this podcast, please feel free to reach out, I do have a very, very long waiting list. For those of you that have ever tried to apply. I do have a very, very long waiting list to appear on this podcast. But if there is someone that you think that Neil, this is the next person you need to have, and I agree with you, there's always a chance that depending on situation, I may accelerate and get them on sooner rather than later. So feel free to reach out. Once again, thank you for your support in 2020. I know that 2021 is going to be a great year, it's going to be a much better year for all of us. And I think that once we're through this pandemic, in q3 q4, we're gonna see an explosion. I'm already starting off this year busier than ever, and that's, it's good and bad, but it's obviously a great thing, no complaints. So I hope you are as well. This is the year where if we do everything I'm talking about, I really think you're gonna have some explosive growth, how well you convert on that I can bring you the traffic. I can't bring you the conversions unless you got the right product, right. So you need to keep on developing the right product. This the customer feedback. There's a whole product marketing aspect of this that I did not touch upon. It goes without saying I always say social media is just an amplifier, it's not going to fix a bad product, it's not going to help you sell a bad product, it'll amplify the fact that you have the product. But it may not help you, when people buy the product, they're not satisfied. And then they use the same social media to post bad things about it. So we obviously want to be focused on the product. That's a whole other aspect of cmo. Because I suppose Product Marketing would be part of what I do, not not not something that I really consult on. But obviously it goes without saying that branding product, all of that is sort of the infrastructure that you need to have, you need to make sure as well oiled, you need to make sure it's optimized, you need to make sure it's fresh, for this new year that we are now entering, especially with the pandemic, really influencing people to do well to to live their life to do business in a very, very different way. And everyone I've talked to unanimously agrees that the changes that we've seen, some of them are definitely going to be permanent, some will be temporary. But many are going to be with us for a long time, if not forever. So just some food for thought. If you haven't been if you haven't developed a new product over the last 12 months, or you haven't made any major revisions, you might want to think about that, obviously, the competitive landscape is always changing as well. And I use that same approach to do a tools on it. And I'll just end with this. I got notified today by I'm not going to say what company but a company were like six, seven years ago, when they were in need of money. They offered a lifetime plan, which I bought. And now they're actually closing down the lifetime plan. Now they have their reasons, whatever. But it's it's like, wow, I need to find out what other technologies out there. Do I want to stick with this company? Or do I want to move to a new company and just over seven years, a lot changes and there's a lot of really exciting technology out there. So doing a regular technology audit with your marketing technology tool stack. And once again, go back and listen to my recent episodes where I talked about my own marketing technology tool stack for 2021 episodes number 191 and 192. And that's the other thing as a CMO, I'd want to make sure that we have the right tools in place. Alright everybody. Well that's it for another episode of The maximize your social influence podcast. Wherever you are in the world. Make it a great virtual social day. Bye bye and saya nada.