Listen or Read Local Gold’s Podcast Interview!
Topic – Goodwill Promotions
Below you will find an easy to read transcript of Jonathan Graves’ interview on the razorcast™ monthly podcast. You can either watch the video to listen to the podcast or simply read the easy to follow transcript below. Enjoy!
Podcast Interview
RC: Hello everyone, this is Liz Harvey coming to you from our razorcast™ studios in New York City where we are dedicated to bringing you top quality advice from many of the leading expert professionals across the United States.
In today’s episode, we are speaking with Jonathan Graves. Jonathan is the founder of Local Gold, a digital marketing company based out of New Jersey. He is most known for helping over 3,000 USA business clients drastically increase their new leads while simultaneously building massive goodwill within their marketplace.
Jonathan is widely considered by many to be one of the top internet marketing professionals in the country. He is also the co-founder of razorcast™ and serves on our national network of professional contributors.
Today we are going to talk about a very important topic: Goodwill Promotions.
RC: Hi Jonathan. How are you today?
Jonathan Graves: Very good, Liz. How are you doing?
RC: I’m doing great. So let’s dive in.
Question 1: What are goodwill promotions?
RC: Can you explain to everyone what goodwill promotions are?
Jonathan Graves: Sure. It’s kind of a name that we made up out in the industry to describe a philosophy of putting together a twelve month calendar marketing system that has systematic communications going out to your audience that are all built upon the foundation of delivering value. So when you deliver value with a good educational based content to your audience via either emails or social media or a combination of the two, you can then sprinkle around your other communications which we call goodwill promotions around that content. Really, the point of goodwill promotions is systematically put out those touch points to your audience that deliver value but also allows you to stay top of mind so you can be in the right place at the right time without being too ‘salesy’ or sending too many promotion related offers that don’t drive goodwill and build loyalty and trust with your market.
Question 2: What are the main reasons U.S. businesses should run goodwill promotions?
RC: Okay and what are the main reasons why U.S. businesses should run goodwill promotions.
Jonathan Graves: You know, it really all comes down to building loyalty and trust with your market. If you look at your inbox today, we are all getting over inundated with emails and marketing promotions and it quite frankly just ticks people off. So what you want to do is to separate yourself from everybody else and deliver value first and foremost. That’s why we created this razorcast™ podcast is to help our clients come into the marketplace with good, valuable content. You can do that via podcast; you can do that with videos that you shoot on your own with blogpost. But you need to deliver educational value first and foremost. When you do that, now you’re building loyalty and trust with your audience and it kind of gives you that ‘get out of jail free card’ to stay top of mind with them with the other goodwill oriented promotions that are a little more sales tilted such as referral requests, holiday promotions and reactivation campaigns. If you were to just send those on your own without sending the value first, you’d quickly be tuned out by your audience. They are not going to tune in to you because you’re just sending them sales oriented stuff without delivering the value first. So really the main reasons why you are to stay top of mind by delivering value and building loyalty with your audience.
Question 3: What are the top goodwill promotions out in the marketplace?
RC: Okay and what are the top goodwill promotions that are out there in the marketplace?
Jonathan Graves: We’ve done a lot of testing over this since the late 90’s and especially into the early 2000’s and mid 2000’s when we were really getting into email. We’ve narrowed this down to the ten goodwill promotions that are the most effective. Again these are all built upon delivering value first and foremost with some type of value based content via videos or podcasts or blogposts. So you send your value first then you’re corresponding the ten other goodwill promotions. This includes seasonal schedule reminders. So if you’re a doctor’s office or a dental practice, for example, you may want to send out seasonal scheduling reminders for them to come in to get their check-up on a seasonal basis. Referral requests – a lot of times it’s simply the process of asking for referrals and putting a system in place to ask for them that will increase referrals rather than just hoping that they come in. So, by having a systematic approach to doing that on a quarterly basis and sending referral requests via email or social media, we’ve seen great results with that.
So seasonal scheduling reminders, referral requests, social media bounce backs where you ask your email list to engage with you via social media pages. Holiday promotions are great. Now if you’re just sending promos, like I said before, it won’t be as effective as if you’re sending a valuable piece of say in allergy season “How to Alleviate Allergies” and then a week later, you send them a holiday promotion or referral request, etc. that is complementary to that value piece. So the other one being holiday promos. Some of the great holidays we’re seeing to put promos around being Halloween, Valentine’s Day, New Years and July 4th. For some reason, those four holidays just really work well.
Others include surveys. Surveys is the sixth promotion. We also include reactivation campaigns for lost patients or lost clients that haven’t been coming in to see you or they’ve kind of fallen out of your funnel, so to speak. You want to reactivate them with some type of bargain to come back in to your practice or in to your business. Team updates and news – you know, events that you have going on. Bargain specials that you’re launching and just all around event announcements seem to be, you know, the best kind of goodwill promotions.
All these you can send these out via email and social media. They are free to use and you don’t need to do it by being salesy. Again if you do it by first and foremost delivering value to your audience via that value piece, you can kind of sprinkle these other goodwill promotions around that value piece to allow you to stay top of mind.
Question 4: What would be the best way for a business to get started?
RC: Okay, it sounds like there’s quite a few things on the list that people might want to tackle. So what would be the best way for a business to get started?
Jonathan Graves: That’s a good question. Really you just don’t want to overthink it. Just keep it simple. Start out with a simple email newsletter and social media. Those are the two. They are free to get started, like I said before, and free to use and you can get going very quickly. And don’t worry about any of these goodwill promos. Start by just generating good, valuable content and sending it to your list. Alright, so if you have a dental practice, you want to download all of your patients and people who have come to see you for example and put them into your email platform and then send email communications out to them with good valuable content first and foremost. You do that via our podcast, for example, that we created here. The razorcast™ podcast is a great way to deliver that value or you can do it via videos that you shoot or any other valuable educational based piece. You want to send that – first and foremost. Do it via email or social media, two free tools. The hard part, again, is creating that valuable content. From the clients we’ve worked with over the years, we’ve worked with over 3,000 of them, the hardest part is sitting down and creating that value piece. That’s why we innovated and created this podcast – to make it easy for them. But it doesn’t matter how you do it. What matters is the quality of the content and that you’re genuinely interested in educating your audience first and foremost.
So you start by just getting an email newsletter and the social media pages up and sending valuable content out first and foremost. Then you start to incorporate seasonal touch points around that content. You want to aim for once a week if you can. If that’s a little aggressive for your taste, you can do twice a month with one being a value piece of your valuable content and the other touch point being one of those goodwill promotions. Again to list those ten: seasonal scheduling reminders, referral requests, additional blog posts that have that value based information, social media bounce backs, holiday promotions, surveys, reactivation campaigns, team updates, bargain specials and event announcements. You can send one of those a month for pretty much the entire year and not send the same type of goodwill promotion out and not be redundant with your list.
So if you send that value content out first and foremost, get it going via email and social media. Then look to slowly start incorporating those other value based promotions. You’ll see some great results – not only in your retention numbers but increasing your referrals. Because you’re staying in front of your audience, you have a better chance of being in front of them at the right time – when it is when they are most likely to be in need of the service that you’re looking to provide.
RC: Okay great. Well thank you so much, Jonathan, for this great advice.
Jonathan Graves: No problem. I really appreciate you having me on, Liz. It’s always a pleasure and thank you again for your time.
RC: Okay and for our listeners across the country, if you are interested in speaking with Jonathan, you can either go online at www.localgold.com or call 800-850-0493 to schedule an appointment.
On behalf of our entire team at razorcast™, we want to thank you for listening and we look forward to bringing you more top quality content from our country’s leading professionals.