Social Media & Digital Marketing with Frank Kenny

This transcript has been lightly edited for readability and to correct obvious transcription errors while preserving the meaning of the original conversation.

Episode 16 — Social Media & Digital Marketing with Frank Kenny
Clean Speaker-Labeled Transcript
Guest: Frank Kenny
Automated QA: Passed

00:00.236 Frank Kenny
Yeah, so this is this is kind of big. You know, i if you're doing if you think you're doing social media and digital marketing, your chances are you're just doing social media. From the vast majority of chambers are just doing social media. And what I mean by that is they're doing top of funnel work where you create awareness and they're doing middle of funnel work where they're building no like and trust. But they're expecting bottom of the funnel results where the sale actually comes from, the conversion actually comes from. And people just do not buy through social media. It's inappropriate to be constantly promoting yourself through social media.
00:37.048 Brandon Burton
Today we'll take a dive into social media and digital marketing with Frank Kenny. Let's cue the intro. This is the Chamber Chat Podcast, the show dedicated to chamber professionals to spark ideas and to get actionable tips and strategies to better serve your members and community.
01:01.132 Brandon Burton
Welcome to the Chamber Chat Podcast. I'm Brandon Burton, and it is my goal to introduce you to people and ideas so you can better serve your chamber members and your community. If you are new to the show, please check out Chamberchatpodcast.com slash start to learn what this podcast is all about and what it has to offer you as you serve at your chamber. Let's take a quick moment to hear from our sponsor for this episode. Every chamber is looking for new ways to increase their non-dues revenue. Has your chamber found a good affinity program? I have a great affinity program to offer your chamber that will continue to increase in revenue year after year. I want to introduce you to Swypit for all of your credit card processing needs. Swypit has a unique affinity program that 1. Lowers your credit card processing fees at the chamber, 2, Helps your chamber members be more profitable, and three, provides recurring nondues revenue to your chamber. To learn more, please visit chamberchapodcast.com slash CC for credit card. Again, Chamberchappodcast.com slash C C and get swiping with swipe it. Right, and we're back. Our guest for this episode is Frank Kenney. Many of you will be familiar with Frank. For those of you who may not be as familiar with Frank Kenney, he's a former chamber member, board member, chairman of the board, and chamber president and CEO. He now consults with and trains chamber and association professionals from around the world. He is an author of three books for chambers, business associations, and their members. His area of expertise is social media, digital marketing, and technology. Frank is the founder of the Chamber Focus Show and the seventy five hundred member Chamber Pros community on Facebook. He is a faculty member of the US Chambers Institute for Organizational Management. Frank has a degree in finance and is MBA. Frank and Norma travel full time with their in their RV with their dogs, Trixie and Cooper.
03:23.512 Brandon Burton
Frank, please say hello to the audience and share something interesting about yourself besides your R V travel so we can all get to know you a little bit better.
03:32.502 Frank Kenny
Well, I appreciate being here, Brandon. And something interesting about ourselves, it's usually the the R V thing is the thing that catches people off guard. something else that I'll that I'll share is I used to fly small airplanes, but I never got my full pilot's license, but I did solo and I you know, I went pretty far down the path and I gave it up w in my late twenties and someday I am gonna get that plane and fly around again.
04:03.062 Brandon Burton
Right. That that sounds very fun. It's it's interesting. You go from the plane to the the R V.
04:08.702 Frank Kenny
I'm like a rolling stone or something. I don't like being tied down, I guess.
04:13.42 Brandon Burton
That's right. That's awesome. so for anybody who may not be familiar, can you just share a little bit with us about the Chamber Focus Show and your Chamber Pros Facebook community? As I see them both being a great resource for chamber professionals who are listening.
04:30.22 Frank Kenny
Yeah, so this goes quite a few years back, probably ten years ago, I decided that I was gonna quit my chamber and take advantage of all these speaking opportunities I was being offered. our chamber had doubled membership in eighteen months during the 2008 recession, where almost all the chambers were really suffering. we went from the smallest chamber to being the largest or tied for the largest out of eight chambers in our region. And it was the social media that did that. And when we went through that, I must have got most of the state chamber associations called me to see if I could come out and do a presentation on what we were doing with this new thing that nobody had ever practically heard of called social media. And so that's kind of where I got my start. And one of the first things that we did is we launched profiles on every site possible and tried everything new, looking for that first mover advantage every time. And one of the things was the Facebook group. As soon as Facebook groups came out, we got rid of our old Ning site. For those of you who've been along around a long time, we had a membership site on Ning, but Facebook's groups seemed like that was gonna be the place to go. So we opened one there. And it was kind of amazing. I had one other person in the Chamber World consultant. Reach out and said, You got seven hundred people in one group. You're bigger than most of the state chamber associations. And then it got to be, you know, it was really kind of crazy. Seven hundred chamber people in one room. Usually that happens once a year at the ACCE conference. but then it got to fourteen hundred and twenty one hundred, it's just it just kept growing. And now it's at seven thousand five hundred chamber people all in one room at kind of one time. And it's it's a quite the blessing. And then I started the chamber focus show to kinda parlay that that c community. So there you go.
06:22.71 Brandon Burton
That's that's very impressive. makes sense why you had everybody coming out to asking you to talk on about the topic and and talk about how you did it. obviously our our topic of conversation today is around social media and digital marketing, being that we have you on the show. Those are kind of your area of expertise as your bio explained, but you kind of alluded to it there a bit with your the chamber that you're at and being able to double the membership with your social media presence and things you were doing. How did you get into social media and digital marketing and you know, a lot of people kinda tinker with it, but they don't have that kind of effectiveness. So how did you get into it before you applied it at your chamber?
07:08.014 Frank Kenny
So in nineteen ninety eight, I've told this story quite a few times. In nineteen ninety eight the internet was hitting mainstream and all my college friends that had technology degrees, computer science degrees, all these kind of things, were were jumping on this new thing called the internet that was just like getting all sorts of venture capital money and all this kind of stuff. They didn't even care if it worked. all they cared about was did people follow your website on the internet? Anyway, I I sat out on that. I had a retail business. I was a chamber member. I was involved in community kind of stuff. So I I was on the sidelines during the great boom of the internet in the late 1990s. And I promised myself that I would never sit on the sidelines again if I saw something coming that was a huge, huge, overwhelming trend. And along lo and behold, around 2008, I stumbled across this thing that other people did know about, but it was pretty fringy. called blogging and Facebook and Twitter. And I took it to my board and I said, I really think this thing's got legs. And they said, No, it don't. This is stupid. This is a fad. You're wasting your time. You know, you're I see you on Facebook and you're just wasting our money and our time and you should get off there. And we have a website. We don't need to be doing this. Anyway, three of them went to the board chair and said, you know what, he's doing this social media thing and we got to get rid of this guy. He's like it's a disaster. And my board chair luckily was was a risk taker and also, you know, trying to look for trends and he said, No, we're gonna jump into this with both feet. and but he wanted me to go to a conference. He said, go to the chamber conferences and find out how to do this right. And nobody was doing it. We were one of the first five that that we know of in the world doing it. And so we had to invent our own way. And that's kind of how the whole social media thing got started. We just we we think we thought we saw a trend and we jumped in with both feet and we kind of just figured it out as we went.
09:05.528 Brandon Burton
So then as you started applying it at your chamber, was it just kind of guess and check kind of stuff? I mean, it seems like you got great response pretty quickly. What worked for you and and how did you play with that?
09:19.69 Frank Kenny
So we made mistakes. We we kinda learned by making every mistake possible. and and the big mistake that I realized was we were using social media in the early, early days to just promote ourselves and our events. You know, pretty much every post in some kind of way was, you know, I it was the advertising model. I thought here I I basically have my own newspaper, I'm gonna run ads. and that's not what anybody's on social media to to see is just anybody constantly promoting themselves, self promoting. And so once I could once I understood that, nobody's online to be advertised to. They're online to socialize with their family and friends and to get value from information. I switched gears away from com constantly talking about us, the chamber, and what we had going on next, to who are our members and what do they have going on and what's going on in the community and how to do a bunch of business things. Like I always tried to source content every day about how to make money as a small business owner, how to save money, how to get out of paying taxes you don't have to pay, how to stay out of trouble with the law, you know, just every single day from any resource I could come across that would add value to the lives of our members, I was sharing that. So I was I was give, give, give, give, give, and then I would ask for something. You know, I would give, give, give, and then get. And that that just worked like gangbusters. So much so we had to hire a salesperson to follow up with all the leads we were getting or all the new contacts I was getting. And that's really, you know, me doing the social media plus our salesperson asking for the sale on a consistent basis was kind of the magical recipe and it just worked.
11:03.51 Brandon Burton
That's great. Are you are you familiar with with Gary Vanderchuk? Yeah, yeah.
11:08.834 Frank Kenny
Actually that give give give is his what la jab jab jab right.
11:13.43 Brandon Burton
Uppercut. Yeah. Yeah.
11:15.576 Frank Kenny
But you know, somebody else that even before Gary wrote that, there's a guy named Bob Berg, who I don't know if you're familiar with as a as an author, who write writes a book about the go giver. it's a series of business books about how to be successful in life. And it's in his philosophy is you give first and then you get. So I can't give credit to Gary because really it's Bob Berg that really planted seed in my mind.
11:39.886 Brandon Burton
That's great. It and that's that's the trick. that's you gotta give, give, give, and then you get. You gotta build that become that trusted resource, be that go to, you know, person providing value. And as as your base is seeing that you're providing value, then they're gonna want to give back. Has there been anything else that you've noticed to grab attention of users on various social media platforms?
12:06.926 Frank Kenny
Well how do you mean that exactly?
12:08.738 Brandon Burton
Well I mean we we just talked about the give give give get. Are there other things and you mentioned providing content on a a regular basis? Some people swear by video online that video is getting the attention. algorithms rank that higher. Some people say photos, some you know. I is there anything that you're noticing that gets better results on on social media?
12:35.404 Frank Kenny
Yeah, for sure the video. Facebook has said that they're going mostly video over time. The algorithm shows those videos, especially live video. Chambers doing video are definitely getting better response than somebody does a say a static image of a ribb ribbon cutting. The video will get a lot more views, a lot more engagement, lot more shares. but then the live video from your ribbon cuttings, from your networking events, from just anything, are even more so. So that's the probably the biggest strictly social media trend. that chambers should be they should be going all in on video. And it's really easy. Our phones that we carry in our pocket all the day, they'll do just a perfectly fine video. you can get a fancier, you know, but you don't have to. That it's amazing what our what we have in our pockets nowadays gives us practically a movie studio. And It's just such a blessing and chambers need to be using that to the full extent.
13:36.648 Brandon Burton
Absolutely I couldn't agree more. I I've seen some of these chambers that are doing really high end video productions for their their fa you know, Facebook marketing and and getting the videos out there. And I mean, they've got a whole crew, I'm sure. Yeah, I don't even know what goes on behind the scenes, but it's pretty amazing stuff. It doesn't have to be that, you know, extreme. Like you said, you've got that that video production crew right in your pocket with your phone.
14:02.914 Frank Kenny
Yeah, it's two people is enough. You know, one person to hold the camera and the chamber person in front of the camera or in front of the camera along with a member where they're doing a a story about the member, and you're just doing it with a a fairly new mobile device, and you're good to go. It's sometimes I think that's better than the scripted ones, really. Just off the cuff, real, human, short and quick, and just it's storytelling. And if chambers did this all the time, here's another Gary Vaynerchuk thing is document your life. Documents what's going on you. Think of yourself as a documentarian and you're just telling the story of the community or telling the story of what your chamber's up to. That is what people respond to nowadays.
14:48.824 Brandon Burton
That's right. It's the the epitome of reality TV. Yeah. Yeah. As you get onto social media, people thrive on the reality TV stuff. And the more real you can make it, then people relate to that better. That resonates. So earlier you had mentioned that you try to find, you know, whatever these trends are, all the different media platforms, the blogging, anything that you saw as as something new to test out. It seems like the focus has come back to Facebook.
15:01.442 Frank Kenny
Yeah, absolutely.
15:18.486 Brandon Burton
What has what's your experiences been with the other platforms, pros, cons? What what brought you back to Facebook?
15:25.912 Frank Kenny
Well, Facebook is still the eight hundred pound gorilla, you know, two billion users, most people, of business type people, successful older people, anybody over twenty five say being older. they chances are they're on Facebook. And if you as a chamber wanna reach the people in your community, Facebook is absolutely still the number one place to be. But if you are all in, if you are definitely gonna use these tools to their highest level, then you don't wanna stop at just doing Facebook. You wanna be on Instagram too. And a lot of times people, chamber people are finding that they get more engagement on Instagram than they do on Facebook. Same exact post, different platforms and Instagram outperforms. And I bet there's people listening to this right now who says, Yeah, yeah, our Instagram is amazing how much engagement it gets. And then for some chamber people, they they love to be on Twitter. And if you if you're good at it, if you wanna be there, I mean you shouldn't be on any platform if you hate it because you won't utilize it. You'll probably abandon it and that's about the worst thing you can do. but i if you wanna be on Twitter because you use it personally, well, your chamber should be on Twitter too. And you will reach part of the audience that you're not reaching on Facebook and Instagram. And same with LinkedIn. Some people in your business community, you can't send them a Facebook friend request. It's not like really gonna work to send a big Fortune five hundred CEO a Facebook friend request, but you can reach them on LinkedIn and develop a relationship, a professional business relationship there. So you should be as in as many places as you possibly can be where you can have a consistent presence. That's that's what I teach.
17:06.793 Brandon Burton
Yeah, where it can stay manageable.
17:09.366 Frank Kenny
And it's all about priority. I mean, we all got the same amount of hours in the day. And in the chamber space, you you very, very much have to prioritize because otherwise all the demands will eat up every possible moment of your day, and there would be no time left for social media. And there's probably some people listening to this that haven't posted in days and days and days, because all the other demands of chamber world eat up all the time to do social media. So I teach that you gotta flip it around. social media is one of your absolute top priorities. You do that first. You schedule those posts out. You do what you have to do to have that presence in modern marketing. Otherwise people just they won't know what the chamber does, that you're doing anything. People assume the chamber is part of the government. They assume that it's all volunteer driven. They're shocked to hear in some communities that the chamber exec actually you get paid for going to ribbon cuttings. You get paid to sit around all day in meetings. I mean it's insulting. This is the reality that chamber people find themselves in. If they're not telling the story of what they're doing for the community or how they're improving their members' lives and the community's lives, then people just assume the worst. So if you make social media, if you if you make modern marketing the lowest priority on your totem pole that maybe you'll get to it, it's just a recipe for disaster. Your your relevancy is completely at stake.
18:34.52 Brandon Burton
I love that you brought that up because I've heard so many chamber professionals talk about, yeah, we really need to do more social media, but I just don't have time for that. And what you're saying is that needs to become the priority. And I think some of the reason why they feel overwhelmed with it is they just don't know what to do. I mean, when you talk about putting videos up, then do they need a videographer? That do they need an editor? Do they need a copywriter? Do they need a graphic designer? You know, everything it can become very overwhelming. But start simple. Yeah, just that that would be my advice. I don't know if you'd have anything to add to that as far as if you were to start today, if you were in your your chamber, you know, president and CEO position today, starting new, is there anything that you would do differently? Or how would you start?
19:23.254 Frank Kenny
Well, I would definitely create awareness. I I'll I'll I'll do a little run through of steps here if you don't mind. I I would I would create awareness first because if people are not aware that the chamber exists and the employees of the chamber and the board, if people just doesn't if they don't know the chamber story at all, they're not even aware, like a big chunk of your certainly a big chunk of your community, but even the business community doesn't even really the chamber is not on their radar. They don't know what you do. So the first thing is to create awareness for what you do. And the second step is to build relationships with the people that honor you with their online time, where they like your posts, they comment on your posts, they share your posts, they, you know, they're clicking through. These are people that are hugely valuable to you. You don't know them personally yet, but you're you're seeing that you're getting engagement online. I can't tell you how many chambers just ignore all that engagement. They'll get Three, four, five, six, seven comments, and maybe they go and like, like, like, like, like all the comments. That's not that's not enough. You engage back, build a relationship, build no like and trust because now you're bringing people into your world. So that those are the first two steps is create that awareness by giving, by post that are storytelling, by our that are giving, not all just selly and self-promotey, but you're actually giving value. And then engage online, have a human presence online so that people know, like, and trust you. And then beyond that is where the digital marketing starts. And that's kind of a longer conversation, but that's where I would start if I was starting today in a chamber. I would give, give, give, and I would build relationships with the people that are following me back.
21:10.326 Brandon Burton
I like that building the relationships with those that are following you back. And while you're saying that, I was thinking you know, chambers have ambassadors. And as we look at new technologies and everything, these are some of your modern day ambassadors. You know, they might not be officially, you know, wearing the coat and everything, but they're they're liking, they're promoting, they're helping to share what the chamber message is all about. And in the end, that's Kinda what an ambassador does is they're s they're helping to spread the word of the chamber. So you need to engage them. You need to build that relationship and and have them continue helping to push the mess message of the chamber. That's awesome.
21:50.293 Frank Kenny
Absolut absolutely.
21:52.19 Brandon Burton
So in a couple of things you've said, I I d you'd mentioned before on Facebook that that's the biggest place, that's where most of the audiences it that a chamber would be targeting. Can you speak a little more to who a chamber should be targeting? Would it be members, prospective members, a greater community, everyone? How do they break down those segments of who they should be targeting?
22:16.878 Frank Kenny
So in any membership-based organization, anybody that has a recurring membership business model, like Chambers do, your most important person in the world is your current member. The lifetime value of a current member who pays year after year after year after year after year, as long as they're finding value. the the the lifetime value of a member is massive in the chamber industry because some people are members for 10, 20, 30 years and every year they write the check, they sponsor things. So your pr your absolute top priority is to retain your current members. And this is a relationship business. People that are members of a chamber, that you you know who they are and they base part of the decision to be a member on do they like the staff Do they agree with the the personalities of the people on the staff and people on the board, the culture of the organization? And if they they might not care about too many of the products and services that the chamber does, and the chamber might not make a huge difference in their business life, maybe more than they realize, but they may think that the chamber doesn't do anything for them, but they appreciate the people that are working so hard at the chamber. They will stay a member because of the relationship. And so you're First priority is the relationship with your current members. But you also want to have a growing organization. And so your second target market is the people in the community that are business people that are not yet members. If you're not following their pages on Facebook, if you're not engaging with their posts on Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn and all that, if you're not reaching out to them to get on their radar, well, that's a big problem because you need new members coming in because just through n there's no chamber with a hundred percent retention rate. You need to be bringing in new members. And they shouldn't just be walking in the door or walk-ins where it's just like a miracle somebody just opens the door and says, I want to join the chamber. They need to be brought into the chamber. They need to be nurtured and invited to, you know, a your networking event or a luncheon or to sit on a committee or just in some kind of way to where they don't have to necessarily be a member yet, but you need some kind of entry, so some kind of
24:34.014 Frank Kenny
introduction to who your organization is. And so that's where, you know, social media is your avenue to reach people that are not yet members and build a relationship with them and then invite them to come to something that the chamber does so that they get a feel. And then a salesperson in the or on or using digital marketing, but a salesperson if you have one on staff can then ask for the full membership sale. So those are your two primary target markets. And then the general community, I mean, if if your chamber does things like international trips or festivals, things to where it's most of the attendees or most of the customers aren't chamber members but members from the community, then you gotta have a ability to reach the members of the community. Chambers used to rely on like a newspaper to be the a the bridge to the community. And we know that all that old school advertising is dying. And so if the chambers don't have a target market of the general public, then then how are they possibly gonna communicate with those people? because that's a big chunk of your nondu's revenue is the general public. So I went on a little long there. Sorry about that, Brandon.
25:46.572 Brandon Burton
No, that's perfect. It hit on all the points that I was thinking about. I including the the old ways of communicating with the newspaper. I was thinking this is kind of the golden age of having social media and just using Facebook as as an example, as you target your main, your number one audience being your current members, those current members, if you're serving them well and you're giving, giving, giving, then they're gonna like and share and engage with those. And then as they do that then those prospective members in the greater community are gonna see that because most of those members they're gonna be friends with their neighbors and the other people in the business community. And you're not, you know, doing a write-up in in a newspaper. You're putting pictures and videos and things that people want to engage with and and keeps their interest. So I think that was a perfect answer. Thank you for that. You're welcome. So in all this social media and digital marketing For a chamber. Do ad purchases come into play anywhere with social media?
26:52.467 Frank Kenny
So are you talking about where the members purchase an ad from the chamber or are
26:56.814 Brandon Burton
No, I was thinking I was thinking more for the chamber purchasing an ad to try to get in front of the right audience.
27:03.842 Frank Kenny
Yeah, it's very you know, it's so funny. I I when I speak to I do board orientation, strategic planning, things of that. And and I often often I'll ask, okay, how much of your budget is set aside for marketing? And it's abysmally, abism small number in the chamber industry. I I think what it was is historically, you know, a hundred years, chambers had a relationship with the local radio station, newspaper, maybe cable TV outlet. They they didn't need a very big marketing budget. they could reach their members and their people in the community through traditional advertising channels. So they didn't have to, it was all trade-out kind of stuff. You didn't have to have like a normal small business, about three percent of their sales, their gross sales, is like a rule of thumb for what you need a marketing budget for. I mean, you need you know, you need substantial money to do advertising and marketing. That stuff isn't cheap, but chambers never had to have that. but in the world we live in now, you do have to pay for reach. You know, you do have to pay to get your messages out to the community. anybody beyond your membership, I mean, for your membership, you've got an email address and that's very powerful. And you can reach, you know, in the chamber world, you might get a 35, 40% open rate. And you're still missing 60% of the members, but at least you're reaching a chunk of people. They're your members and you're reaching them. But if you're trying to reach the general community, That's where like Facebook advertising will come in and it's incredibly inexpensive and ability to target to the nth degree. I mean, you can do zip codes, you can do you know, if you were having a a a women's business expo, well, you can tell Facebook that I just want to put this promotional ad in front of females aged 25 to 65 in this zip code and And I can also say, and only the ones that have been on our chambers website before, if I have the retargeting pixel, which most chambers aren't yet doing. But yeah, I mean, if somebody's come to your page and now your website and they they bounced around on your female or your women's business expo page and you're not serving up an ad on Facebook to reach those people again to encourage them to register or to sponsor or to have a booth. I mean, that is where we're at today.
29:29.814 Frank Kenny
And chambers are getting there. It's complicated, but but chambers are getting there.
29:34.186 Brandon Burton
So in talks of pixels, retargeting pixels, I've had other people just look at me with a blank face, a blank stare, and they just have no clue what a retargeting pixel is. Can you maybe explain just a little bit more detail? So if there's a chamber that is kind of interested in what you just said, but they don't know where to start with the retargeting pixel, what is that all about?
29:56.63 Frank Kenny
All right, so f all the all the companies have this now, all the social media companies have this now. It's a free pixel, which is a little graphic. It's a one pixel size graphic on your chambers website. They'll give you the code for free. You put it in the part of your website where your Google Analytics code is, and it takes two minutes. And now all of a sudden, anybody that comes to your chambers website, the pixel fires. So Facebook knows that this person you now they won't tell you who that person is. It's not so intrusive that you're violating privacy. This isn't spammy or anything like that. It's just helpful. So Facebook will now know that that person's been on your website. They'll even know what pages they've been on your website. So like if they go to your join now page, well that would be a very interesting to you'd be interested to know who in the community's been on your join now page. Well fakes Facebook knows through the pixel. And what Facebook does is builds a custom audience of the people that have been to your website or been to specific pages of your website. And when you get enough, I think it's 20 people right now, if you've had an audience of twenty people, now you can run ads just to those twenty people. So you're not bothering and wasting your money advertising to everybody under the sun like a newspaper would be. You're just throwing your money away in so much old school advertising. When you're doing retargeting advertising, when you're telling Facebook that I only want people that have been on this page of my website to see this ad for my business expo or golf tournament or whatever the big gala is or whatever is coming up, or your join now page is probably the most important. Those only those specific people will see that. And so so this is an incredibly valuable tool that most chambers haven't yet wrapped. their minds around. But it's super simple, easy to do. You just gotta go in there and and do it. So
31:59.738 Brandon Burton
So I I I like the example of the join now page. That seems like an obvious page where you need to have a retargeting pixel. But also if for a chamber, if you're if you have any events going on, any kind of community events where people need to go to register or purchase tickets or anything, you want to have a pixel on there too. So if people are checking it out for the weeks, you know, leading up to that event, stay f in the front of their mind so they come back and and complete that purchase. it's kind of like it's the exact same thing as when you've been on Amazon before. You're kind of looking around at different items and then the next day you're scrolling through your Facebook and you're seeing ads for the item you looked at on Amazon. And it seems a little bit creepy maybe, but that's the way of the world now. That's you know, we have the technology and i we need to be using it. So you mentioned all these different sites have their the free pixel and they can They can do that. Do they need to do one for each, like for Google and one for Facebook and or can they do one and then apply it to all the others?
33:04.926 Frank Kenny
No, they're all they're all individual. They're all proprietary. The the two I would start with is the Facebook one and the Google Google one. And I would use Google Tag Manager if you want to get really complicated here, so that you can I don't want to go too deep into it, but if they just type into Google Tag Manager, that would be a place that would help you install the pixels and manage your pixels. And and then on Facebook you go to your Facebook page and you just grab the code, it's free. And then that same place you just start creating ads, telling them, All right, Facebook just run ads to these people that have been to this page or that page. They've made it so simple that anybody can do it now.
33:45.774 Brandon Burton
That's perfect. So Frank, I know we need to start kind of wrapping up a little bit, but I wanted to ask you, what is one action item that listeners can do to start having a stronger social media and digital marketing presence at their chamber?
34:02.018 Frank Kenny
Yeah, so this is this is kind of big. You know, i if you're doing if you think you're doing social media and digital marketing, your chances are you're just doing social media. From the vast majority of chambers are just doing social media. And what I mean by that is they're doing top of funnel work where you create awareness and they're doing middle of funnel work where they're building no like and trust. But they're expecting bottom of the funnel results where the sale actually comes from, the conversion actually comes from. And people just do not buy through social media. It's inappropriate to be constantly promoting yourself through social media. So so the the step to do the first step to doing actual digital marketing is to collect contact information with all of these people that are aware of you, aware of your chamber and know like and trust your chamber. You gotta get their contact information. And today that is almost always an email address and permission to market to them through email. If your chamber isn't doing email marketing, then chances are you're getting very, very minimal results from your social media work. Because once you get that email address, that's it's almost like money in the bank because this is where business is done, is through email marketing. People get an email marketing invite to your event or an invite to sponsor or all these various kind of things where the where you want the conversion to happen or the registration for your event, all of these kind of things happen in a much higher percentage through email marketing than would ever happen by posting it to Facebook. So get that email address. That's the next step in digital marketing.
35:42.606 Brandon Burton
All right, collect that info and step up the email marketing program. Yeah. So as we look to the future, how do you view chambers of commerce and their purpose?
35:47.63 Frank Kenny
Absolutely.
35:55.66 Frank Kenny
Chambers, they don't realize what a great, amazing position they have in the business world, how how positioned they are for future success in this digital, you know, social media digital marketing world. The business model of a chamber being member driven, so the members are on a recurring revenue basis. And so you don't have to resell every time. Most of your members, the vast majority of your members will renew every year. With they will pay their dues every year. And that covers your overhead and salaries. And it it'll it creates so much stability for a chamber that is built up a decent membership size. And most business people would die for that kind of stability of knowing that, you know, I sold the customer once and they're gonna pay me again every year for you know, for as long as they're in business, chances are they're gonna be a member of the chamber. You know, most business people have to sell somebody brand new every single time. And they have to think every month, how am I gonna bring in money? But with the chamber business model, that money comes in through recurring revenue. So that's wonderful. And then now because of the digital marketing tools, the social media digital marketing tools, the chamber has multiple avenues, multiple channels to reach through their members and their prospects. with value ads or you know sponsorship opportunities, advertising opportunities, event registration opportunities. you know, in the old days, most small businesses would have to have a big marketing budget and they would have to be running ads constantly. And all of that takes money. And the chambers are just blessed to have this position in the community where they're they're a beloved organization. They're well established. Everybody loves the local chamber of commerce and the chamber can Like a if you look at the Vale Valley Colorado Chamber of Commerce, Vale Valley Partnership, they have all these programs that they have generated that will solve problems for the members. They found out what the problem is in the community, what are the members struggling with, and they create products or services to solve those problems. And they're using that their their wonderful membership model to create a ton of stability and then they add a new product every
38:17.73 Frank Kenny
seems like every couple of years they're adding a new product or a new service. And and that chamber is just booming. And I see this all across the country where the chambers are finding out from the members what are what are the problems that we could help you solve. And then they create a program that helps them solve it. And if they if they're using the technology, if they're messaging right, if they're doing the marketing right, those chambers are thriving. And the chambers that are not thriving, a lot of times they're like, you know They're they they got a woe is me attitude. They don't understand the amazing opportunity that they're sitting on, their amazing positioning that they're sitting on. So I I I if I was to go totally self employed again, where I was thinking, what business model would I form? I'd I'd form a chamber of commerce. It's almost perfect.
39:06.604 Brandon Burton
That's right. Yeah. Oftentimes I I think of myself like if I could just be Verizon and I just collect a a payment from everybody, like in the country, every month, just month after month. And a chamber is able to do similar to that, but in their in their community, they have that recurring revenue. And as you're, you know, giving your answer to that, I was thinking, a chamber, you're absolutely correct. They don't need to worry about where that base revenue is going to come from. They've got that that membership base. But then through these programs and different things that they can offer to their membership, they're able to provide leverage for their membership to be able to find out where they're making their next dollar from. Because these restaurants and different businesses out there, every day they're trying to find new people to come into their doors. And the chamber is the perfect place to be able to apply that leverage, create those programs and help the members. That was a great answer.
40:02.114 Frank Kenny
Thank you.
40:03.32 Brandon Burton
So Frank, I I wanted to thank you so much for spending some time with us today here on Chamber Chat Podcast. I also want to, as usual, thank everybody for listening. The show notes for this episode can be found at Chamberchatpodcast.com slash episode 16. And Frank, why don't you take just a minute, let listeners know where they can connect with you if they have any questions about what was discussed today or any of the programs that you have to offer.
40:31.766 Frank Kenny
Well, thank you very much for this. the way most people in the chamber industry kind of come into our world is through the chamber prose community Facebook group. That's where we have the 7,500 chamber people all in a group learning from each other, sharing, kind of venting sometimes. but that's the place that's the first place to go is find us on Facebook, do a search for the Chamber Pros community. And then my website is frankjkenny.com. for free resources. we got about fifteen hundred articles written and about twenty free resources. So through those two sites and then of course email me, Frank at Frankjkenney dot com and I would love to touch base with anybody that wants to talk about this stuff.
41:15.628 Brandon Burton
That's perfect. And we'll put all, you know, links and all that in the show notes. So if somebody's driving or out walking their dog or something while they're listening to this, they don't need to scramble. We'll just go to the show notes and find that. But again, Frank, thank you so much for being with us. I think this is a great discussion and everybody can get a lot of value out of it. Thank you.
41:35.084 Frank Kenny
Good. Sure appreciate it. Bye bye.
41:40.406 Brandon Burton
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