I get asked what it’s like to work with my mom, the boss of Front Porch Marketing, Chief Rocker Julie Porter. Well, let me tell you. It’s a lot harder than you would expect. Why? Because she expects so much more out of me and she knows that I’m capable of doing almost anything and everything.

Is work easier when your mom is the boss?

A lot of people usually say “oh she definitely lets you slack off” or “oh I bet it’s so easy”, but they couldn’t be more wrong. It adds a lot of pressure on me when I do work for my mom’s company, because I want to do my absolute best in order to impress my mom. I want to live up to her expectations of me. But, it is also very comforting to know that my mom is the boss and CEO. 

The boss always has your back

While she is always challenging and expecting the most out of me I know that she will always have my back and be the most understanding when it comes to work. No matter what, there will always be someone in my corner. She also tends to have a great support system.

She surrounds herself with the very best team members which makes my situation a lot more comforting. Seeing her support all of her employees, and create a successful remote working environment makes it a lot easier and more fun for me to do work for her, and the other Front Porch Marketing team members. I don’t say it a lot but when it comes to working with and for her sometimes, I can be a little excited. While she has taught me a lot about marketing, she’s also taught me about running a business. Because she is good at this.

Takeaways from a summer internship with a parent

All in all, this summer has been great so far and it has been a pleasure to heighten my business relationship with my mother. I’ve learned so much from my mom the boss, that I can apply to college and my future job endeavors. I owe it all to her and I love her so much. Thanks mom!

Disney Revolutionizes the Vacation Industry

Approximately 52 million people visit Walt Disney World each year and its annual profit comes to about $12.6 billion. How did Walt Disney transform his amusement park into a bucket list vacation destination for families from all over the world? The simple answer… marketing.

Disney has revolutionized the vacation industry as it broadens its marketing strategies to include almost any activity you can imagine. Disney has magical amusement parks, thrilling water rides, gourmet restaurants, five-star hotels, luxurious cruise lines, private islands, collectible merchandise, and so much more. Whether it is the walking foods-of-the-world tour in Epcot, opportunities to meet your favorite Disney characters, or thrilling rollercoasters that will have people shouting: “We HAVE to do that again!”, there is surely something for everyone at the parks. Most importantly, Disney gives the assurance of a trip filled with memories that are sure to last a lifetime.

Disney acknowledges that the amusement park experience might not be for everyone, so they have introduced a variety of activities that attract a more diverse customer base using a myriad of marketing strategies. Some people love all the fanciful facades and creative foods. However, others prefer a nice massage or relaxing by the hotel pools. My family is up at the crack of dawn to beat the crowd to the gates when the park opens. We are the first in line for the Seven Dwarfs Mine Train, and we stay until the park closes. We go every year and find an experience that keeps each trip interesting and unique.

Marketing Disney Plus

With the recently increased popularity of streaming services, Disney entered the game strong with Disney Plus. In addition to the plethora of nostalgic movies and shows aimed at younger audiences, they also market their platform to a variety of demographics utilizing some of the most popular movie franchises in history like Marvel, Star Wars, and Pirates of the Caribbean. Using these marketing strategies, Disney Plus has become one of the most successful streaming service as people looking to escape the stress of the pandemic can find relief in uplifting films and tv series.

Online Marketing Strategies

Disney has been at the forefront of online marketing which has enabled them to subliminally reach the 16-24-year-old crowd that, on average, spends 3+ hours a day online. Disney has over 72 million followers on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter combined. That’s a lot of potential customers who might not regularly watch TV or read print that Disney can influence daily. Through magical commercials, Disney is able to interact with starry-eyed children without access to social media who beg their parents for the trips they see on TV.

Targeting the interests of Children

Disney’s marketing strategies were also revolutionary as they began to target the interests of children as well as adults. Children make up 22% of the US population and have an increased impact on family decisions than previously recognized. Through movies, TV shows, stuffed animals, and apparel, Disney has built brand loyalty starting with infants and continuing through adulthood.

“The Happiest Place on Earth”

The Happiest Place on Earth” is Disney’s well-known slogan which basically encapsulates everything that Disney is and tries to be. Who doesn’t want to go to the happiest place on earth? Disney evokes this happiness through nostalgia, happy stories with happy endings, and wholesome characters. Marketing “happiness” is what keeps visitors flooding through their gates every year. Including my family, and Julie’s family!

Everyone knows your business needs to be on social media. We see all the big and even smaller players doing it. If your company isn’t on social media, you’re late to the game. We often see companies jump in with no real strategy, plan or goal. That’s where audits come in! I know that word sounds a bit threatening, but it’s not as scary as it may seem. A social media audit is simply a way to measure your strategy and success by tracking metrics consistently across your social media accounts. This way you can see what’s working and what needs to be improved in your social media campaigns. Let’s go step by step on how to create one.

Track Down All Your Accounts

The first step in creating an audit is to track down all of your existing social media accounts. Make sure when you are following these step that you are doing in this in an Excel spreadsheet. Once you have all the accounts typed in, try to decide which ones you primarily want to focus on.

Have Consistent Branding

Now that you have all your accounts make sure that the branding is consistent across all of your platforms. This means your bio needs to be consistent, your banners need to be the same, consistent landing page links, and the hashtags that you use. Try to stick to certain color palette and theme in your content. Look at any major corporation and you’ll see that their branding is consistent.

Find The Best Content For Your Audit

Go into each of your accounts and find the top five best posts. Track their performance by using metrics such as, engagement, or impressions. Engagement is the number of interactions your post had such as (likes, comments, shares, link clicks) and impressions are the amount of times your content was viewed. I recommend first focusing on impressions to build brand awarness, and then switching to engagement. Also if you want to save time, I recommend using a social media management tool such as Buffer or Hootsuite. while they do come at a price, they help plan out your posts and measure data all in one place.

Know the Audience on Each Platform

The next step is to understand and document the demographics on each platform. Facebook is mainly where people 35-44 hangout. For Instagram ages 16-24 is the sweet spot. Track down each of these for your accounts and type them in your audit.

Set Your Goals and How to Take Action

You’re almost done! At this point all you have left to do is is set your goals for each of your accounts. Is it to build followers and brand awareness? Or are you trying to get to more people to click on your landing page. Once you have established your goals now just document how you are going to take action. What direction are you going to go in? Do you need to create a marketing budget? Decide what’s going to work best for you.

Time to Execute!

Now that you know how to create an audit. What’s slowing you down? Marketing is all about staying on top of trends and strategizing how to move forward. Take this time to build your audit, you’ll be one step closer to having a successful marketing campaign!

Marketing items to high schoolers is very different than other age groups. High school means freedom. This includes the ability to get a job, drive, and buy things without asking parents.

Social Media

As the first generation born into technology, Gen Z has grown up with the internet. For high school students in particular, social media surrounds our daily lives, making it easy to access new products and reviews faster. When targeting a high school audience, the first thing you will want to do is create a social media presence, especially on Instagram and Tik Tok.

Marketing to High Schoolers with Trends

For products such as clothing or make up, it is important to follow trends. Stay up to date on the latest styles and aesthetics. In typical high school manner, everyone wants to fit in, this means providing products similar to the current high school style. In regard to social media, creating content that follows popular trends will increase the chances of your product being seen. For Tik Tok, use popular sounds with a unique idea, making the Tik Tok more likely to get on the for you page.

Accessibility and Inclusivity

High schoolers are cheap! Most income comes from a minimum wage job or allowance from parents. The price of a product can immediately deter consumers, especially if is not a well-known name brand. Make sure the price is reasonable for the product. It is also important to make products inclusive to all ethnicities, body types, and genders. Exclusion can create bad reviews and overall dislike for a company.

Visuals

Once the consumer has clicked on the website, visual organization is a key part of reliability and user attention span. As someone who frequently purchases products from Instagram or Tik Tok, the first thing I notice is the website’s aesthetic. If a website looks low quality, chances are the product is also low quality. By using attention grabbing visuals and colors, while also maintaining the clean look, users will trust the product more.  Secondly, in a world of 15 second Tik Toks, the average attention span is much shorter. When websites are difficult to navigate, most users will simply give up. By making products easy to find through a search bar or navigation tabs, people are more likely to stay on the site.

When Marketing to High Schoolers, Think Like One

Overall, when marketing to a younger audience, it is important to think like a high schooler. What you may like or dislike, could be completely different because high school is its own world. One of my biggest pet peeves is when I see a product that would be amazing if one little thing was changed, such as a childish image or an older print. Step outside of your world and think like you are 17 again!

Media relations results require more than luck.

As a public relations professional, there’s no better feeling than seeing a client featured in a news story. There’s an exhilaration when an idea you’ve pitched appears in a magazine, newspaper, radio or the coveted TV spot. An earned media placement will impact a client’s awareness — and hopefully — their bottom line.

However, pitching isn’t easy. With fewer journalists, swifter news cycles and an extraordinary number of media outlets, communicators need to be savvy and strategic about formulating and targeting pitches. Muck Rack reports that there are now nearly 6 PR pros for every one journalist.

A 2021 Muck Rack survey stated that 34% of PR pros said finding and interacting with journalists is one of their biggest challenges. And 59% of journalists view their relationship with PR pros as mutually beneficial, but not quite a partnership. This decreased from 64% in 2020. Only 6% view it as a partnership.

Why is there such an inequity between PR professionals and journalists?

It’s no mystery that PR pros can’t do their media relations jobs successfully without journalists. And journalists depend on Public Relations outreach, too.

“I get roughly 300 emails a day. Most of the time, I read a subject line and that’s it. There’s just simply too many emails every day from publicists to be replying to each one. I can probably count on one hand the amount of general PR pitches I’ve responded to over the past few years. What they all have in common is they were targeted at BuzzFeed and me specifically. The publicist knew who I was, what kind of stories I write and was able to speak to this and why their pitch fit in line with that. They also know what BuzzFeed News is (hint: it’s not the same as BuzzFeed!) and why their story was of interest to our readers. It’s all obvious stuff, but you have to tailor your pitch like you would a cover letter for a job application.”

—David Mack, deputy director for breaking news at BuzzFeed News (source Muck Rack)

Personalization is key to getting a reporter’s attention.

It’s important to remember that each reporter is unique. In order to successfully connect with members of the media, know who they are and what they prefer when it comes to pitching. In Muck Rack’s Annual Journalist Survey, reporters cited lack of personalization as the number one reason they immediately reject pitches.

Writing the ideal pitch will not have “legs” if it is not strategically targeted. A political writer does not want to profile a new restaurant (unless the chef is a former president). An investigative journalist probably will not respond to a pitch about what’s trending in the fashion world. Educate yourself on a reporter’s areas of interest and get to know their point of view. Familiarize yourself with their writing style and how they communicate with their audience. Make each email distinctive to the individual. Remember that the ultimate goal is to establish or continue a relationship with the journalist.

Customize your pitch to their medium.

A wide-ranging PR campaign can be incredibly time consuming. Sending an initial mass email to all news outlets is, at times, the only course of action. However, this approach does not embolden coverage unless it is a very widely known product and/or personality. If possible, customize the pitch to the medium. When pitching a television producer, send clips or b-roll and include camera ready art to a print outlet. Reference the assets and describe how the visuals will enhance an interview or feature. If you want a reporter/editor/producer to accept your pitch, it needs to intrigue them — and contain something that that will engage their audience.

The media relations process — what happens next?

After sending a pitch, be respectful and allow the reporter enough time to decide if they are interested in covering the story. Give them a few days to review the pitch, and then follow up via email. If you don’t hear from them after a follow-up, assume they aren’t interested.

If a pitch is accepted, be sure to thank the reporter and share their story online. A share goes a long way, especially in a world where more reporters are being evaluated based on the success of their stories — 62% of journalists say they track how many times their stories are shared on social media.

Setting up and running a successful marketing internship program is an important step to the future success of both your company and the next generation of marketers. Bottom line: what’s in it for you as a company is the creation of a skilled employee pipeline. You’ve taught them, you’ve trained them, and they know your business. All of those attributes will most likely make these interns your best next employees.

How to start your internship program? Start small with the intention of hiring one intern for one semester. With a 5-6 month window for the internship, you can more easily structure what the intern will do during their tenure with you. Be sure to ask your intern what they want to learn, and what they would like to get out of the internship. Also, take the time to coordinate with their college if need be, so that they receive college credit for their internship if that is an option. And most importantly, pay your intern a fair hourly wage for their contribution to your business.

Marketing Internship 101 – Training.

Begin an intern’s employment with introductions and training. Have a blog and/or website? Add them to the team and write an introductory post so clients, customers and the general public can get to know your talented intern. This also gives the marketing intern a link that they can include on the LinkedIn profile, legitimatizing their career before they graduate. In turn, introduce the intern to each person in the company, and ask them to explain what they do and how it fits into the big picture.

Ideally you’ll want your marketing intern to spend some quality time shadowing different people in your company to get the full picture of marketing: PR, copywriting, design, social media, analytics, etc. Encourage the rest of your company to be supportive of your intern in their language and actions. Make sure their first experience in marketing is a positive one!

Interns learn by doing, so show them how to do it.

Then, help your intern get comfortable on the platforms you use to do business, whether that’s WordPress, Google Analytics, Buffer, or any of the social media platforms. For a marketing internship, shadow days can help with this learning. After initial shadow days, interns can be given compartmentalized parts of jobs to complete: image search on a stock site, compiling social media stats monthly on an Excel spreadsheet, and even writing blog posts on topics that they are learning in school. The more you teach them, the more they can run with something and help you!

Set them free and watch them succeed!

Once your intern has mastered some tasks, give them something that they can own: a specific client report, a research project, a white paper, or an organizational project. They could also own a role like proofreading or coordinating employee content for blog posts. Your intern could then teach everyone what they’ve learned at the end of the project.

When you help the next generation of marketing students gain access to a “real” job by offering them an internship, you are paying it forward for everyone that helped you in your early career. And at the end of the internship, you’ll most likely have a successful full-time employee ready to hire. At Front Porch Marketing, we regularly hire one or more college student interns all year long, and add high school student interns from Ursuline Academy of Dallas. We love working with interns and highly recommend adding them to your staff.

Marketing leaders, what are you doing to nurture relationships with your customers?

Consistency and connection nurture relationships. Sure, loyalty and points programs are tactics that bring brands and customers closer together.

But genuine allegiance is an outcome.

A recent conversation with a marketing leader provided inspiration. This marketing leader has had some challenges. But realized the value of marketing.

The company had cut the marketing budget. All the momentum that person built was put to a halt. And then the company brought in a consultant. First, he asked her what was happening on the marketing front. To which she replied, “Nothing.’ And, obviously he was shocked.

How to foster genuine relationships.

Business leaders do these four things:

1. Conviction – Know the brand. Marketing leaders walk the talk. And they demonstrate it every touchpoint. Then, clients and their customers can see it and feel it.
2. Consistency – Do you have a message map for your client? Share the value proposition of the brands you work on, on every platform, consistently.
3. Communication – Know your audience. Then recognize: how do they want to communicate? It isn’t about you. It is about what works for them. Marketing leaders will recognize this and pivot messaging to solve clients’ problems in a way that is meaningful and relevant to the client.
4. Connection – If there is consistency communicating the message, then the connection will happen. But as a marketing leader, how do you deepen the ties with your client and their customers?
   • Weekly meetings with clients
   • Weekly catch-up calls on both status of projects, and how pain points with consumers are being addressed
   • Notes on special days to recognize achievements
   • Boundaries set on both sides, so that both marketing and client are set up to succeed

Marketing leadership: Take inspiration. Deepen connections. Accelerate growth.

We love to partner with smart leaders who value marketing. And, if we can help, let’s talk about mutual partnership to grow top line sales.

Pinterest fails like these make me snort laugh.

It is terrible, I know, but they are so funny! Perhaps because they are relatable. You see something, you think you can do it, it turns out differently than you planned.

“The more the plans fail the more the planner’s plan.” Ronald Reagan

It’s time to evaluate your marketing strategy for the second half of the year. With Q1 in the rearview mirror, and Q2 well underway now is the time to plan what comes next.

We wax the marketing plan lyrical often, additional reading can be found by searching Marketing Plan right here on Off Your Rocker, because it is a topic we keep coming back to because it is that important. Running through your activities, business, leisure or really anything without a plan often leads to failure and even the best laid plans fail. When and if plans start failing it is time to dig and plan some more.

Planning 101: Be Proactive

For any project or initiative to succeed, it must be carefully thought out. One of the key qualities of any project manager is to be proactive. This comes because of good planning. Proactively address potential problems and prepare possible ways to fix them while they are still predictions. Challenges like inadequate funds and resources, low staffing, or poor time management – are likely to arise in any plan. Effective planning lets you see them and fix them before they hinder the desired outcomes. 

Pinterest Fail? Evaluate and Pivot

It is easier for teams to pivot from a plan versus starting from scratch. Existing plans guide and ground activity. Even if an initiative or project is failing or failed pivot and plan some more! In the pivot remember the importance of staying positive and true to your brand.

Now is the time to look at the 2022 plan and evaluate what stays in, what stops and what needs to be added. Let’s get ready for the second half and move forward with purpose and intention to thrive the rest of the year. If you need a marketing planning partner, give us a holler!

Recent readings over Spring and Easter Breaks provided four great reminders for me as a business leader. And I hope they do the same for y’all too.

For those of you who do not know, one half of my heart – my son – attends Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, right outside Orlando.

We stayed at one of my favorite beaches over Easter, New Smyrna Beach, which is a hour drive from my “son~shine.” And, where I purchased a beach condo, aka short-term rental investment property, earlier this year. It is affectionately deemed the “money pit.” But that is a blog for another day. I digress.

Reminder One: Be a GD Cheetah

A beach read was Glennon Doyle’s Untamed. She shares a visit to the zoo and the Cheetah Run. The cheetah, Tabitha, is tamed. She performs on queue.

A little girl asked, “Doesn’t she miss the wild?”

Zookeeper comes back with a BS answer.

Doyle writes that Tabitha would sigh and say, “I should be grateful. I have a good enough life here. It is crazy to long for what does not even exist.”

“I’d say: Tabitha. You are not crazy. You are a GD cheetah.”

That had such a profound effect on me. I later cried as I read the excerpt aloud to my daughter. Without the GD, of course. And I asked her to promise me to always be herself. To be a cheetah.

Reminder Two: Finding Leverage

Not as an emotional experience for me, but profound none the less. Reading the latest issue of Entrepreneur Magazine.

Time is our inventory.

An article by Adam Bornstein explores business growth by not necessarily adding more people. Rather, exploring this. “Smart growth is not about spending more time, nor is it about maxing out your time. It is about finding leverage.”

Reminder Three: Damn the Sycophants

I cannot remember what the article was about. It was the word. The word I had to look up.

I was reminded, although sometimes painful, I treasure those around me who are not this.

Surround yourself with talented people. Those who are smarter than you. Formidable team members push back. They may not think like you. But they make the organization better. These folks fill in for your short falls.

Reminder Four: Being Too Efficient

In a past life, I was ultra-organized. I am a Franklin Covey Planner Training Course graduate for heaven’s sake. Organized all the things in my office and life.

Then, I started Front Porch Marketing. And, had my second child at an “advanced maternal age.”

Words quoted from Edward Tenner in another Entrepreneur Magazine article spoke to me. In summary, big business always has the advantage. However, entrepreneurs combine technology with connection to people. Something big companies cannot do.

Jason Feifer, author of the article, cited Blockbuster and Netflix as an example. Early in my career collaborating with folks at Blockbuster and Viacom shaped me into who I am today. And I am eternally grateful for those experiences. I saw how they tried to evolve. As well as saw what was attempted and did not happen. These learnings were invaluable.

So I hope these four reminders for business that I learned this spring will resonate with you too!

Social media trends for 2022 look a little different than last year.

Social media trends for 2022 will increasingly be about customer experience and personalization. Those agendas are paramount. And, most if not all social media platforms are increasingly moving more and more toward “pay to play”. In other words, platforms want you to pay to get people to see your social media. For instance, this looks like boosting posts on Facebook. Trends that involve an interaction with customers, and especially those that offer some measure of personalization (as opposed to just pushing out a message to everyone) will top brands’ to-do lists.

Here are some of the social media trends we see for 2022.

• Short-form Video – Less is more, and people don’t read. The human attention span is short. So, a video a minute or shorter is plenty long enough. Do a series of short videos each making one point, instead of one long video. Repurpose your existing long videos into shorter snippets and program them for different social media channels. Reveal a different aspect of your company, or solve a different problem on different channels as opposed to playing the same content on the same day on the same channels.
• Customer Service – Customers are conversing more than ever via DMs, Twitter and comments on posts. Monitor these conversations and be responsive on any channel that customers are contacting you on.
• Social Commerce – Customers want to check out immediately on whatever social channel they are on. Social commerce offerings (like buying a dress directly from an Instagram photo) are growing on every channel. Perhaps this social media trend is appropriate for your product or service.
• Paid Social Advertising – Algorithms continue to change. And, platforms continue to ramp up their paid social offerings. There may be a need to add a paid strategy to your organic posts to get wider reach and more engagement. The ultimate goal is connecting with more potential customers, right?
• Influencer Marketing – Micro or local influencers are more important. Work with these influencers who really already love your brand. They can demonstrate your product or service in a way that is unique to them and resonates with their audience.

Content remains king.

Have a plan. Don’t chase squirrels. Plan your content for the year – or at least the next quarter – to meet your brand’s sales goals, branding initiatives, limited offerings, or even just calendar holidays. Planning your content means have a blog and regularly contribute to it. Then, promote your new content on your social media platforms. Build your content marketing practice like you’d grow a garden. Keep at it.

What do customers want to know? Customers want content that is focused on:

• Deeper Meaning – Be authentic. Answer questions that are helpful and offer perspectives that can be touch points for your brand in a customer’s life. Find your commonality. Create your company’s tenets, and do those fewer stronger things in a deeper way.
• Giving Back – Showcase volunteer efforts and donations. A company’s charitable giving is important for 73% of Americans’ purchase decisions. People WANT to love you. Showcase how you are showing love for others. Giving back increases loyalty.

Overall, after the past few years of being disconnected, consumers are craving connection in every aspect of their lives. But make connection with your brand meaningful. Be convicted. Be consistent. Create a connection that will last, create loyalty, and continue these social media trends for 2022 to the years ahead.