224: Capitalizing on Social Media, with Dennis Yu | The New Marketing Stack

For years, Facebook has been THE platform for social media marketing, but this reign might be coming to an end.

Dennis Yu, Chief Technology Officer at BlitzMetrics joins us this week to share his take on the complex world of social media marketing. Tune in to discover the keys to positioning social media solutions, unlocking the small business advantage, capitalizing on the new market of social media platforms, and driving authenticity through it all.

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Introduction

George: It’s a Conquer Local podcast. We’re continuing a deep dive into the local marketing stack and I’m gonna say the word, social. And when you think social media, you probably think about Dennis Yu. I know I do. He is one of the top experts when it comes to social media and Facebook. He’s placed over a billion dollars in Facebook Ads. Remember last year when Facebook had all the problems around the Cambridge Analytics scandal, Dennis Yu and his partner, Logan Young, were all over CNN talking about what that meant to advertisers, what it might mean to Facebook. He is a regular guest at Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto and now, he has started to tout how LinkedIn is really important for your business.

So we’re gonna ask him about that. We’re gonna ask him about what is important for a small business to be using on social media in 2019 and what the future might hold. The one and only, Dennis Yu, Chief Technical Officer from BlitzMetrics is coming up next on the Conquer Local podcast.

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George: It is the latest edition of the Conquer Local podcast and we continue our series on the local marketing stack for small businesses and you can’t talk social media without bringing up the name Dennis Yu. So here he is back on the Conquer Local podcast again, Mr. Dennis Yu, who today is in Scottsdale, Arizona. Hello, Dennis.

Dennis: Hello. Thank you, Mr. George.

Selling Social to Local

George: It’s good to speak to you again and I’m excited to talk about social marketing for small businesses. We have been working on this series for the past few months, helping our Conquer Local audience in how do they talk to the local business about social and what the deliverables might be and what the ROI for the business might be and I’m interested to get your take. We’ve talked before on the broadcast about branding and helping the salesperson brand themselves. Now we’re talking about the branding for the small business. So what I’d love for you to do is to get in the shoes of one of our salespeople, they’re sitting across from a local hardware store owner, and they wanna explain to the guy that sells hammers and Liquid-Plumr and toilet brushes as to why they need to be involved in social media. How would you have that conversation if it was you across from that hardware store owner?

Dennis: Oh, man. The Hardware Retailing magazine actually interviewed me on this a couple months ago for…

George: I did not know that, honest, folks.

Dennis: Yeah. There is a trade association where hardware…Mom & Pop Hardware stores and what they need to do on social media so let me give you a quick summary. The number one problem of any small business is that they’re not being seen. So it’s not about trying to be Gary Vaynerchuk, it’s not about trying to be a motivational speaker or showing your food that you just ate. We’ll go eat at Mano’s on Thursday in Saskatoon. That salesperson who is talking to that hardware store owner needs to help them understand that people do business with people and with social, the number one sin that businesses have is they’re selling so hard. Of course, they wanna drive sales but they’re selling so hard that they’re not being seen in the newsfeed.

So when they only post promotions on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, the algorithms are gonna penalize them. So our solution is one-minute videos. The beauty of a one-minute video by that hardware store owner or employee or friend who has an iPhone is that anyone can do it. It doesn’t require a professional video crew, it doesn’t require a lot of money. There’s no excuse and you can’t say you don’t have enough time because you can do these one-minute videos. And because you wanna put out content on social media, this is so funny that business owners still don’t get this, the content that resonates on social needs to look like content that friends of your target customer would be enjoying.

So, things that look like ads, like hundred thousand dollar professionally produced ads aren’t gonna work. Yesterday, I spent time with a friend who’s a dentist. So he took my advice on oh, you need to put out videos and he had a professionally made video put out there and it wasn’t working because you could tell it wasn’t right. George, you know what an advertisement looks like within like a millisecond, right?

The One-Minute Video

George: So you’ve heard my analogy on this, is you watch the Toyota trucks commercial and the truck tows a boat like a cruise ship and then at the bottom in small type, it says, “It doesn’t actually pull like a cruise ship but it pulls a lot of stuff.” We are pre-programmed to not believe ads and the glitzier they are, the more we’re not gonna believe them. So what you’re saying is that video has to be authentic.

Dennis: It has to be authentic. In other words, and a lot of people say oh, you need to be authentic. That’s true but what that actually means from a practical standpoint is it has to entertain, it has to surprise, it has to help people identify with themselves in ways they didn’t realize. So it’s as simple as this, when you hold your phone, so George, when you’re holding your phone or anyone who’s listening, when you’re holding your phone and you’re checking it, are you holding it vertically or in landscape mode? Vertically, right?

George: Yeah. Absolutely.

Dennis: Yeah. Now what percentage of the posts that you see from small businesses are vertical videos and vertical photos? So small businesses need to do things like consumers would do. So that’s getting one-minute videos of their favorite customers asking them what they’re doing. One-minute videos of their employees profiling not about how awesome the store is or the rakes and hammers and things like that that are in the hardware store, but about Jennifer who’s a dental assistant, she’s been doing this for three years and blah, blah, blah, like where she’s from, like those little stories. You’re telling stories because those are interesting. And when you have one-minute videos that are about somebody, just like pretend you’re Pixar, it’s not about polygons per second being rendered, it’s about telling stories, when you’re sharing your knowledge, how you do something. Like how do you…

Like our grass is brown right now in our front yard. That’s because I don’t know what I’m doing and all of our neighbours have green grass but man, I would like to know how do I make my grass green. I could spray paint it green.

The Small Business Advantage

George: Get that fake grass. I saw that fake grass just a couple of blocks off Cactus Road the other day when I was in Scottsdale. It was fantastic. Hey, so I’m glad that you, you know, I wanted to drive you down the road in this episode of talking about the small businesses because Dennis, for those who do not know Dennis Yu, has placed over a billion dollars in Facebook advertising, does all the marketing for the Golden State Warriors, does all the marketing for the MGM brand, Ashley Furniture. I could go on and on and on. Those are very, very large organizations but what you’re saying is that all the tactics that you’ve mastered for large organizations could also be used for those SMBs that are out there, we’re in North America, or SMEs if we’re in the rest of the world and the one-minute video works just as well for those folks as it does for the big brands. Is that what you’re saying? I don’t wanna put words in your mouth.

Dennis: It works better, actually, George. And the first thing that people come to us with objections especially small business owners is oh, I can’t do what MGM or Ashley Furniture are doing because they have huge teams and huge budgets. And what I tell them is actually, the folks at Ashley Furniture are learning how to replicate what small businesses are doing. Small businesses have the advantage because you can more easily connect with the owner. How hard is it to connect with the owner of a multi-billion dollar company? We’re teaching these big businesses techniques that work in small-town America. So if you’re selling to that Mom & Pop, you help them understand social media is your equalizer because it helps you connect with people directly. Like the stuff that we’ve done for Nike, how likely are you gonna connect with Phil Knight who’s the founder or Jeff Bowerman or any of the other? You’re not going to.

How likely are you gonna connect with LeBron James? You’re not going to like meet him for dinner. You’re not gonna see him at the post office mailing a package in time for Christmas. So that kind of connection through telling stories, through having shaky “Blair Witch” not-professionally produced videos absolutely would kill it. One of our examples, so with Ashley HomeStore, they have 700 and something stores, and the strategy that’s worked best for us is that we found salespeople in each of the stores and said, “Hey, whoever makes the best one-minute video this week, we’re gonna give you a $20 Best Buy gift card.

George: I love that.

Dennis: We’ve got hundreds of these videos and we’ve put them out there and people like me who have done internet marketing since the beginning over 20 years will proudly declare, you know what, I think this one’s gonna be the best one or that one and then we’re wrong every time. It’s gonna be something else. The winner that we’ve seen so far is a couch that’s no longer working and some guy from Arkansas talking about this is a…instead of calling it a living room sectional, I think he calls it…his name is Blair, I think, and he calls it a go-around. This is a go-around and this is what my family used to have. And we think like, what? That’s the one that sells the most couches? That’s the one that drives people into the store? That’s the one that has the highest ROAS? Yes, because we’re connected with the point-of-sale system so we can see how many sales each of these ads are driving.

You never really know. And the reason why that one was a winner in hindsight was because the guy was kind of funny and was unsophisticated in the lovable sort of way, an older guy talking about furniture and what his parents used to have. You never would have known. Because they’ve spent millions of dollars on professional commercials and this one beats it. Can you imagine that? Just a silly one-minute video from one of the salespeople in a store in Alabama. Who would have thought, right?

Facebook Marketplace

George: You know, it’s interesting when that happens because it really does throw conventional thinking out the window and that is how marketing has changed. I know that you talk to business people all over the world in your speaking events. I think you do fly a little bit more than I do. It’s not a competition but I’m gonna beat you. Anyways, what I did wanna talk about is the millennial business owner. So why this is top of mind is the other day, I happen to be having a bite to eat with a young gentleman who’s got a carpet store and he’s 27 years old, 28 years old, pretty sharp when it comes to business acumen and he was looking for marketing advice.

We were digging into it and I said “Well, what are you doing today and how much money are you spending and…so he had done some television, he did some radio, and he was doing some direct mail, which actually was working very well for him. But he said everything that’s driving the majority of our business is happening on social media. And he was talking about the Facebook marketplace. You do a lot of work with LinkedIn and Facebook, can you tell me what’s going on with this marketplace? Is it something that a small business should be considering?

Dennis: Marketplace is starting to replace Craigslist. Last week, I just bought a Miller & Kreisel subwoofer off of Facebook marketplace because I guess Facebook’s algorithm which is kind of all-knowing, it knows more than you’d think. It’s really smart. It knew that I had been talking about getting a subwoofer. And so it started showing me these things in Facebook marketplace…

George: How are you talking about it because now we’re starting to get into some Big Brother stuff. Now I’m interested. Were you talking to your friends on Facebook Messenger? Had you taken a picture and posted on the wall, you wanted to buy one? Did you do none of those things and they’re just listening to the microphone on your phone? Like what was it?

Dennis: It’s hard to say which one because I’ve talked about this all over the place but I think it was in my messages. I was talking about this and then I had clicked on…so it showed me a couple of subwoofers within a few miles and there were ones that were…this one I got for $50. I couldn’t believe it. And it’s like a $600 subwoofer. And then there are other ones for…a JBL one for $200 and a crappy Sony one for like $10 and a fancy one for $1000 and all these other ones. And so you know how Facebook is or YouTube is, you click on one thing and it start showing you other things and pretty soon, like every day I go to Facebook, I’d see like 15 more subwoofers. And I’m like, “Dang, how many people in Phoenix are trying to sell subwoofers?” Who would have thought, right?

What’s Coming Next in Social?

George: Yeah. I know, it’s a needle-in-a-haystack. You and I have been…I’ve known you now for almost six years. You’ve been at the forefront of this industry for a long time so if anybody were to know what’s coming next when it comes to social media interaction for small business using LinkedIn or Facebook, it would be you. So what do you think Dennis? What’s coming up in your crystal ball?

Dennis: I like LinkedIn and Quora and to some degree, Snapchat which I think is going to be a huge local marketplace and I think Facebook has had its heyday. I have been a dyed-in-the-wool, wear Facebook shirts all the time, like super promoter of Facebook but this is the year where they’ve jumped the shark and local businesses especially the millennials that are now starting to own their businesses, maybe their parents are passing it down or maybe they’ve graduated college or maybe they’ve become entrepreneurs or whatever it is, they’re going to be using rules like Snapchat. You’ve heard all these people say, “Oh, I’m not on Facebook anymore, I’m using Snapchat, I’m using Instagram, I’m using these other tools.”

These folks grew up on social media and for us that are older than 40 and are in the business of making money and we have to show that there’s an ROI on social media, not because I’m gonna keep taking pictures of my food which is now getting cold. To be able to show that, here’s the strategy, make these one-minute videos and you post them on YouTube, on Facebook, on Instagram. Actually, I’d rather get posted on Instagram and have it automatically cross-post to Facebook and Twitter. And you can even choose Tumblr, so you get four posts all at the same time natively. And then cut out 15-second snippets and you could have someone on Fiverr or Fancy Hands or a teenager do some of the basic video-editing and then you can post those to Instagram stories and cross-post to Snapchat. Make a 10-second version and you can run it in Snapchat ads and you can run people into your store and then you can measure what the cost of that is and it’s a CPSU.

That’s a new metric you’ll never hear. I mean another year and you might hear about it and it’s a Cost Per Swipe-Up. You get that cost per swipe up. It’s like a click, basically, because it sends you to a website or wherever you choose.

Omnipresence, Obviously

George: That is a new acronym that we all need to know. I wanna ask this question. You brought up a really good point. So we’re thinking about Instagram, very, very popular site, and we’ve got Snapchat out there, you brought up Quora, I hadn’t really thought about it but I’ve been getting hammered by Quora lately. Here’s what I’d like to understand. Are we talking about running a different message depending upon our audience? Like back to the days where we had the fragmentation of media, if I wanted to reach a certain customer, I had to advertise in the country station and I had to advertise in the rock station. If I wanted to reach females between 18 and 34, I had to advertise in the pop station. Is that what you’re saying? Is if I’ve got these different audience members that I need, I need a different channel to advertise on or to get my message out on?

Dennis: We need all channels. And this is the odd thing is that consumers, they are heavily swayed by omnipresence. Because when they see you maybe on YouTube or whatever it is and there’s something funny or just whatever reason and then because of marketing, you then show up inside their Google Search when they’re searching for carpet repair, carpet cleaning, or whatever it is they’re searching for. And then they come to your website and then you remarket from there onto Facebook. It’s almost like Amazon. I saw some stat that Amazon published. It was something crazy. I forgot the exact number but I think 80% of the people that initiate a search on Amazon actually go on to buy something and a lot of those purchases aren’t occurring in that first visit. It’s because that product, like right now, I’m drinking some coconut juice from my favorite vendor, Taste Nirvana. I’ve had like 30 different kinds of coconut juice and all these different coconut juices were following me around all over the internet, all over social media, all over YouTube, all over the New York Times when I’m reading an article and then there’s a coconut juice that pops up. You know what I’m talking about? Do you see that?

George: Absolutely. It happens all the time. It’s one of the amazing parts of marketing.

Dennis: Yeah. So it’s not necessarily just the targeting of the radio station. It’s that you’re being omnipresent almost to the point of being some nag where it’s like, “All right, all right, I’ll just buy some coconut juice to get you off my back.”

George: How do I get this thing turned off? If I buy, will you turn it off? So the interesting thing is we already have a very complex story to tell the local business and we have a very finite amount of time that we can get their attention. So for those salespeople that are on the call, you know what it’s like. You get the appointment with a customer, you’re standing across the counter from him, it’s a hardware store, so they don’t have an office. Their office is the back, you know, probably the paint counter where they mix up the paint. So you don’t wanna put your book down because you might get some paint on it and you’re trying to articulate this very difficult story. How do we do that Dennis? What’s the easiest way to articulate the story as to why that hardware store owner needs to be on social media especially when they need…now they need to be everywhere, to be omnipresent?

Dennis: You start with one simple question. How much is a new visitor walking into your door? How much is a door swing worth? A new customer coming into your shop, into your office, into your whatever the retail presence is. And if they don’t know, you say, “Okay, well, based on our research, a new customer is worth $12. Would you pay $12 to get someone new and qualified through that front door?” And, of course, they’ll say yes and you’ll say, “Did you know that we can measure store visits from social media, from Google searches, from YouTube, from Facebook, from Instagram? Did you know that? Our big brother knows where people are. Just like we talked about, 80% of social media traffic is on the phone. These social networks are allowing us to measure our cost per store visit.

I’m surprised that most people that are selling local don’t know that you can measure store visits, like the furniture folks. Our cost per store visit is about $7 which is great because we’ve done the math and the ROI. If we can get someone into the store for less than $17, it’s profitable because we know a third of those people are gonna buy and when they buy, the average purchase is $2,500 and of that $2,500 is a particular margin. So we know what the numbers need to be and we’ve measured of the number of people that have come to the store, what they’ve bought, what the ROAS is. I think we’re currently running like a 24 ROAS meaning every dollar we’ve spent on social media for Ashley HomeStore, we’ve gotten $24 in measurable revenue in the point of sale where we connected that purchase back to social media.

The Value Proposition

George: So I get all that and I think it’s great information. Here’s what I wanna dig into a little bit more though and consider our audience, our salespeople that are out talking to local business people. So I wanna bring this back to the salesperson’s experience. You don’t have to be an expert on above the funnel in getting leads into the funnel. You’ve gotta be an expert on the whole funnel to articulate it to your customer that they need to be measuring what is it worth to you to get a new customer in the door, what’s your close rate of those customers. Now I’m just bringing it up because you’re talking about Ashley HomeStore. They know what the close rate is because you just gave it to me. So a third of those customers are gonna buy.

I’m sitting across the table from Johnny Hammer who owns a hardware store. He has not thought of that. If you bring that up to him, you’re gonna blow his head up. We need to talk about above the funnel, getting leads into the funnel. We then need to educate that customer because a bunch of them probably have not thought about what their close rate is and that’s where you’re going to then be able to calculate that return on investment which I think what you’re saying and that’s why I wanted to dig deeper into it, you’re saying if you don’t have those metrics, this is a tough conversation.

Dennis: Yeah. Because these, and Johnny Hammer, he doesn’t care about how many followers or retweets. He’s not trying to make funny YouTube videos that will reach a million people. He’s gonna say, “What’s the sales of driving people into my hardware store in Tuscaloosa, Alabama?” Or wherever, you know, in Saskatoon. And if you only have a minute, you don’t have time to talk about top a funnel and reach and re-marketing and all that kind of stuff. They wanna know, can we get new customers in? If it’s other kinds of service businesses, professional service businesses like attorneys and orthodontists and people who have some kind of degree or certification like a veterinarian and you say, “What is that new customer worth?” They don’t know.

So then you say, “All right, well, of the people that come in for an appointment or for a booking for the, you know, they got a teeth cleaned or they want to get something done, what percent of the time, if you sit them down in the office, what percent of the time will they turn into a customer?” And they’ll tell you numbers that basically range between 50% and 90%. So you say okay. So then you just do the math. For an orthodontist, if a new customer is worth $2,500 on average and half of these, half the people that you sit down for an appointment, become a customer, then that’s, you know, they’re worth $1,250 if you can just get them in because half of them, you’re gonna close. And if half of the people you make appointments actually show up, then you know that an appointment is worth $612, right?

And then you can just do the math back and say, “Well, what percent of the time when you get them on the phone can you turn it into an appointment?” Well, maybe 30%. Okay. So now it’s $200 to drive a call. What percent of our leads become calls? Well, about 50%. Well, then if we can drive better than a $100 a lead, then we’re in business because here’s the math. You just do the math. The math is easy and it’s easy to justify. If you’re the salesperson selling local to any service business, it’s very easy because the cost per lead can be high because the revenue is high. If it’s a hardware store, okay, fine. The average customer is spending maybe $115, maybe you can only pay $5 to $10 to bring a new person into the store. The math still works.

George: The interesting thing is when you were talking about the medical profession, this is a profession that learned a long time ago that they could afford to have somebody to make sure you’re going to be at the appointment. So before you even have your appointment at the dentist, they phone you the day before and they say, “You’re coming tomorrow at 2:00, aren’t you?” Because they know that that no-show has a value. So that’s a different conversation and very important conversation. It’s probably one of the reasons why I say you should always go after medical first if you have that in your marketplace, those are low-hanging fruit because you don’t have to teach them how to run a business and how marketing works in today’s day and age. They get it. You just have to go in there and show them that you have the better technology and the better return on investment.

LinkedIn > Facebook

George: Great. So here’s what we’ve learned. I just wanna recap a few things. We’ve learned that Dennis is saying maybe Facebook might not be where you wanna put all your eggs as we’re moving forward in the new year. Is that what you said? I just wanna make sure I’m not putting words in your mouth.

Dennis: Yeah. Facebook is now getting risky. It’s getting expensive. They’re not growing anymore so the traffic is flat and the demand has gone way up. So the cost of the traffic has doubled every year for the last three or four years and now it’s a difficult game. I remember when we first started 11 years ago, the traffic was almost nothing. Six or seven years ago, that stuff you saw we were doing with Rosetta Stone where we’d spend as much as like a million dollars per day, that was so easy because the traffic cost us 25 cents per thousand impressions. And now, it’s costing us $10, $11, $12 CPMs. It’s getting higher and it’s getting risky. I don’t think Facebook is gonna go away but I think it’s time to try other channels that are gonna be a lot easier to reach in local.

Snapchat is super easy to reach for local especially when you’re trying to reach millennials. YouTube is fantastic, Instagram Stories, 15-second vertical videos. There’s so many other places to catch people in local and the tracking on these platforms has improved significantly. Even LinkedIn has a remarketing pixel now. Come on.

George: Well, you talked to…our last edition of the podcast, you talked very strongly about LinkedIn but the audience is a little different. Let’s talk about that audience and what businesses should consider LinkedIn. It’s not all, right?

Dennis: No. It used to be that LinkedIn was a place that you went to only when it was time to polish your resume and it was time to get a job or the recruiters hit you up. And in the last three or four years, my buddy, Jason Miller, ran global content marketing for LinkedIn until a couple of weeks ago. He switched to Bing. And now LinkedIn, because of what they’ve done with Pulse which is their newsfeed, in fact when you open up the LinkedIn app on your phone or the Facebook app on your phone, they look the same. When I’m scrolling through the feed, I kind of can’t even tell or maybe it’s because I’m older. Who knows? My eyes aren’t as good as they used to be.

George: It’s very similar. You’re absolutely right.

Dennis: And so they’ve copied everything. LinkedIn works fantastically for professional services especially when your lead is worth a lot and when things like job title and the company they work at are very important. So if I wanted to target all the people who are salespeople at a Ford dealership, I can target that exactly on LinkedIn. I can do it better. Job title targeting, I can do it better on LinkedIn. If I know someone is a PHP programmer and I wanna hire one of them, I can target them by their skill. LinkedIn has new ads that allow you to inject the title and company and location of the people you’re trying to hit. You can be very creepy and they can do that because Facebook’s already taking the privacy hit. No one’s going to hit up, you know, LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft. Microsoft has slowed things down since that $26 billion acquisition.

LinkedIn is fantastic. It’s just really expensive for the traffic. So your leads need to be worth at least $20 or $30. So if your leads aren’t worth at least…I mean ideally, they’re worth over $100. So B2B stuff is great, any kind of high-end professional services. Anytime you’re targeting someone, like if I wanna target a Steve Whittington, then I would wanna target him on LinkedIn because it’s easy to reach executives on LinkedIn as opposed to people that work in retail for $10 bucks an hour or something, right?

The One-Minute Video Cont’d

George: Steve Whittington is the Chief Marketing Officer of Flaman Sales and a former Conquer Local guest for those who don’t know. So, Dennis, the other item that we wanted to talk a little bit about is the one-minute videos because that’s how you started the program. One-minute videos still work and they’re for everyone, I want people to understand. This is not a video about buy my stuff. It’s a different video because you said that people buy from people. So what sort of content do I want to put in that one-minute video?

Dennis: One minute walking around the store, one minute interviewing some of my favorite employees about what’s going on in their lives just to show that we’re humans. Know them before they can like you and you have to like them before you can trust them. And selling is the business of trust. We’re all in the same business. It doesn’t matter what we’re selling, Facebook ads, or brooms, or cleaner teeth. We’re all in the business of trust so you have to establish that relationship where they feel like they kind of know who you are, they feel like someone that you can invite over for dinner and them not be a jackass. So these one-minute videos are different aspects of…everyone knows how to sell. I’ve got this item, it’s 20% off until Friday or whatever it is there…we’re better than the competitors. Okay. Great.

There’s all the things about selling the what which is your product or your service. But the why is why am I in business? Why did I start this store? I got it from my parents, I really wanted to help people so that’s why I’m a veterinarian. You know, whatever…like people kind of wanna…they hunger for those kinds of stories. And when you pull out your phone or when you have your phone ready, then you’d be surprised at how many opportunities just pop up. You could be at the gas station and something happens and you interview one of the homeless people and you give them some food. That actually happened to one of my friends, Paul Socall. He did this and he got something like 700,000 views. It’s just things like that, just showing that he’s a human. Often the ones where you’re caring, where you talk about the causes that you care about.

Even not that you have to reveal anything personal but maybe your son has autism and that’s important to you or maybe there’s a charity walk that you’re doing, these other things that humanize you. And if you have a choice between the hardware store in the corner where you know that the owner is involved in a hobby that you care about versus True Value, Home Depot, Lowes, who are you gonna shop at? You can buy that rake anywhere, right?

George: Well, it’s interesting. When I hear you speak and you bring up examples like that, I’m sitting here going, “Yeah, we did that stuff 25 years ago. We just marketed it on radio or we marketed it at a newspaper, we did it on television.” And you’re saying do it where the eyeballs are although you like some other channels. So we appreciate you giving us that insight because you are on the cutting edge Mr. Yu. Let’s talk about where you’re off to because I always like hearing about where you are going to be speaking next.

Dennis: I’m flying to Saskatoon to see you tomorrow and the Saskatoon Direct Marketing Association. Two days after that, I’m going to Charleston, South Carolina for the Direct Gardening Association.

George: Dennis Yu is everywhere absolutely. And how did you get roped into coming to Canada in the middle of winter? Like couldn’t you’ve booked this in June?

Dennis: Oh man, well, we were gonna do it but like Harley Rivet and his team at the Saskatoon Direct Marketing Association where I guess we didn’t have the logistics to…I was so busy. I think it was on me. I was so busy traveling. I didn’t have any dates but why not.

George: It’s like we’ll take Dennis whenever we can get him, so get him up here in January.

Dennis: We’ll make snowballs and throw them at each other. We’ll see who can like suffer the worst or wear the least clothing and still be…

George: Yeah. That’s not happening. I’m wearing a winter jacket when I see you. That’s how I roll. Dennis, I appreciate your time. You’re one of the busiest men on the planet and I appreciate you giving us 30 minutes to talk marketing and social and what you see coming in the new year and look forward to seeing you face to face and we can break some bread here in a couple of days. So thanks again for your time.

Dennis: Thank you, George. It’s a pleasure always.

Conclusion

George: Well, Dennis Yu, always filling us in on what we need to be doing when it comes to showing clients the value of social media. And it’s interesting he’s still talking about those videos. He still feels that the one-minute video is one of the best ways to get your content out in front of customers. It’s interesting that that part of the story hasn’t changed in all the years that I’ve known Dennis. Maybe using different platforms to present the message but those one-minute videos still seem to be converting very, very well. Speaking of converting very well, we continue to sell tickets to the upcoming Conquer Local Conference happening June 10th to 13th in beautiful San Diego, California. You can get all the details on our website at conquerlocal2019.com.

Speakers from all across digital marketing will be helping you to conquer local and it’s all gonna happen in the beautiful Hotel Coronado and I think there’s some rumor that we’re gonna do the Conquer’s bash on an aircraft carrier, some crazy thing, that our Chief Marketing Officer, Jeff Tomlin team have planned. I can’t wait to tell you more about it as we get closer and closer to the event of the year. It’s conquerlocal2019, June 10 through 13 in San Diego, California. Get your tickets today. More Conquer Local coming up next week right here on the Conquer Local podcast. My name is George Leith. I’ll see you when I see you.