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Just Post It with Chris Wenzel

5 years ago

Social media is everywhere. It is hands down the most impactful and powerful tool to grow and market your business. You need to be posting on social media to get your brand out there and connect with your target audience. Social media management specialist Chris Wenzel joins us today to talk about social media strategies to help boost your traffic. Chris is the Founder and CEO of Coast to Coast Multimedia, a company that helps other entrepreneurs, small businesses, and companies grow their business and attract new customers online through social media platforms. The go-to guy about all things social media, Chris stresses the importance of posting valuable content on social media consistently to build interests, connections, community, and to engage with your target audience.

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Listen To The Episode Here

Just Post It with Chris Wenzel

Coast To Coast Media

Chris Wenzel is a social media management specialist in Los Angeles, California. He is the Founder and CEO of Coast to Coast Media Productions. It’s a company that helps other entrepreneurs, small businesses and companies grow their business and attract new customers online through social media platforms. Chris runs all of my social media platforms and has grown every platform exponentially for me. My YouTube channel in particular, taking it from 6 subscribers to 500. Chris started his company a couple of years ago and it has been amazing to watch his company grow by figuring out what each individual company needs, writing down short and long-term goals for that company. Providing massive value on social media platforms to attract new customers and help take your business to the next level. Chris provides insight into why every business should be using social media to grow and reach new clients. He also provides his expertise and tips on how to help people have a stronger online presence to reach the maximum amount of clientele and people to achieve your personal and business goals. Please welcome, Chris Wenzel.

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We have a very special guest, my good friend Chris Wenzel. Chris is a Manager and Owner of his own company, Coast to Coast Media. He’s from New York. I went to college with him. He’s doing some great work. He started his own company a couple of years ago. He’s helping anybody in need of social media, videos, content, running their own business online. He does a great job. He helped me grow my own social media from nothing to where it’s at now. I have him to thank for that. He loves what he does. He’s passionate and good at it. I’m very excited to have him on the show. Chris, how are you?

I’m doing great, Kevin. Thank you for your kind words. It’s an honor to be a guest on the show.

I love what you’re doing. We started this out together a couple of years ago and it’s awesome to watch your company grow. Everybody that I refer your way loves the work you do. I can’t speak enough of how you’ve helped grow all my social media channels and how attentive you are to anything I need to be done. I appreciate that.

I consider myself a jack of all trades when it comes to digital media, web design, video editing, graphic design, everything. I’m happy to help and we’re going to keep growing Montclair Upper Cervical Chiropractic.

Where are you from originally?

I’m from Rye, New York, a suburb town 30 minutes north of Manhattan. It’s an awesome place to raise a family and have a childhood.

What were you into growing up as a kid?

We played hockey together at Catholic. I was big into hockey. I played football, lacrosse for a little bit. I love movies. I love music. I was big into movies and that’s what I went to college for. I went and I studied Film Design and now I’m here.

What do you mean you were big into movies? Did you watch them? Were you fascinated with the backend production?

I loved watching them. I was one of those kids who had to sleep with the fan on and a TV running, fall asleep at night. It’s probably not the best thing or habit to form. I don’t have a TV in my bedroom anymore, but I love watching movies. I love fiction. I love the creativity that went into storytelling. It’s a big interest for me besides sports and hanging out with friends.

What did you decide to pursue in college?

I went to school as a business major. I quickly discovered I wasn’t the best with numbers. It didn’t hold my attention. Econ class was boring and I switched up majors my sophomore year. I went into the media studies program or communications. I focused my studies on film editing and graphic design.

There were definitely some classes directly geared towards getting you ready for the “real-world” then?

A lot of what I studied at college applies to me now. It’s funny though, I went to school for this. I graduated in 2012. I worked for a company doing graphic design. It was a model train company. They had a lot of monthly catalogs that they would need designers to help put together. I was in the photo lab taking pictures of each of the model trains, editing them, throwing them in a catalog. I got pretty accustomed to working on print media, but the first job out of college, the pay wasn’t anything outstanding and I went into sales. A good friend of mine, Brian Abraham, he was doing Enterprise Rent-A-Car. He’s a pretty good salesman himself. He sold me on the idea of renting cars for a little bit. I did that for a couple of years. He’s a persistent individual and it lends itself to sales.

I’m sure it helps you out a little bit doing what you’re doing now though.

Enterprise’s business management program is like a business degree in itself. We’ll call it an associate’s degree in business and management. I learned a ton there. I learned how to speak with people, feel out their pain points, sell it to them. It applies to so much more in life than just selling products.

How long were you at that job for?

I was there for two-and-a-half years. I became an assistant manager of a rental branch and then I went into software sales after that. It was a big upgrade, pretty nice salary, huge commission, on-cap commission too. I was working for a company selling software over the phone. I was like a telemarketer. It was an interesting position to be in, but also a great learning experience.

How did you get somebody to stay on the phone without them hanging up right away?

You can take a couple of different approaches, but more often than not, they’re not going to answer. You’re going to leave a voicemail. You’re going to follow up with an email. If they’re interested in what you have to say or they want to learn more, then they’ll follow up with you. Persistence is pretty key with following up there. We had data on a lot of the customers we were targeting. A lot of them could easily benefit from our services. Being upfront, honest with them, high energy and saying, “This is Chris Wenzel of so-and-so company. I was hoping to have a few minutes of your time to speak about so-and-so.” If they want to learn more, then they’ll stay on the phone. If not, they’ll tell you to screw off. A lot of the people I was dealing with were very blunt. I was selling to lawyers and people that work in law firms. They were all busy guys. It was hard to keep them on the phone, but the ones that were interested in the product gave me their time.

You’ve got a good salary here. You’re doing well at this job. What made you say, “I’m going to start up my own company from scratch, do what I love and get the ball rolling?”

I was fortunate in this transition. Don’t get me wrong, I like sales and I found that I was pretty good at it. I excelled in all the sales jobs I was in but my wife is a nurse. We had just gotten married. She decided to take a travel position that would allow us to travel the rest of the US and see places we haven’t seen, live in places that we’ve never visited. I couldn’t keep my sales job. That was the one caveat of taking this position. I decided I’d like to take more of my passion and what interests me in design and digital marketing content and try and build something from scratch. I was fortunate to have flexibility where we were traveling and a lot of our housing was paid for by these hospitals. I put my sales career on hold or left that behind but I’m super happy with that decision. I enjoy what I’m doing a lot more than cold calling lawyers and doing cold emails.

Where do you start in that position? A lot of people have those ideas that say, “I’m going to start my own company and do this,” but very rarely do people get the resources together to go for it. Was it difficult in the beginning? Where did you start? How did you make it work?

It was very slow going. The first thing I did is I took some courses. I was sold to by a pretty well-run social media marketing campaign which was selling courses on social media marketing. I was like, “I have these skills. I know I can do this. I need to learn a little bit more about what it takes and what goes on behind the scenes.” The good news is you don’t need any startup budget. You just need a computer. All I need to do with my job is a computer and maybe some software programs that I use because I do a lot of design and video editing. I came up with a company. I had some friends who own small businesses. You were one of them. I had a couple of other friends. One was a laser tattoo removal studio. I put some feelers out there to my immediate network of friends and family to see if they could benefit from any of this work. I offered my services for super cheap to build a portfolio and some work that people could refer to see what I’m all about. It was slow-growing at first but it didn’t cost me anything upfront to start other than the time. Eventually, I started making connections, putting some work out there, building a portfolio and it’s grown from there.

What you do best is you find out exactly what that person needs because every company is different. You can’t do the same thing from a chiropractic company that you can do for a laser tattoo removal. How do you find out what that client needs? How do you get them going in the right direction?

It should be noted, first of all, social media marketing or digital marketing in general can apply to any business. It doesn’t matter if you’re mowing lawns, selling shoes, removing tattoos, cracking necks like you do so gently. You’ve got to do some market research. See what some of the successful companies out there are doing. A lot of them are already established. A lot of the bigger companies have well-oiled machines, social media marketing programs and sophisticated strategies. Do some market research, see what’s working, see what people are engaged with, see what they’re sharing, commenting and liking. Have a conversation with the business owner about the image he wants to portray on social media. Take notes from the competition and start building a strategy and brand around what the business owner wants to go for.

That’s what you’ve done well for my company is you said, “Let’s try the Facebook ads. Let’s try Instagram ads. Let’s go in this direction.” We’ve tried a lot of things and we figured out what works and we’ve been capitalizing on the things that have been working. That’s what impresses me the most.

It should be noted here, there’s no one-size-fits-all. Industries are different. People consume and share content in different ways. There can be some trial and error period to see what works. Like anything with practice, repetition and adjustments, you start improving, finding what works and you see results.

There are a lot of people that are starting up their own companies. They might feel that they can’t put the money into somebody running their websites and their social media. I was in that same boat, but it was the best investment I’ve made. It’s a return on investment because you’re reaching more people. What would be your message to somebody that is halfway in, halfway out? “I love what you do, but I don’t think it’s right for me at the moment.” Everything right now is geared towards social media. You have the potential to reach thousands and thousands of people if you’re marketing correctly. What would be your message to those people starting out or maybe somebody that’s not very suave in social media? They’re starting up on Instagram or Facebook. They don’t know if it’s going to work. How do you get somebody going like that?

Social media is everywhere. It’s a no-brainer at this point. Social media is hands-down the most impactful and powerful tool to grow and market your business. The ROI potential is huge. The costs that go into it what you want it to be, you can set your own budget. It’s only growing. It’s like word of mouth on steroids. I saw a tweet. It was spot-on for this question but it said, “At this point, not having an active social media presence is like pulling out a flip phone at a business meeting and not understanding why the guy next to you keeps getting all the new accounts.” You might as well be in the Stone Age. You need to be on social media to get the exposure, get your brand out there and connect with your target audience.

The big companies out there and the big brands have very sophisticated social media strategies. They devote massive amounts of money and their marketing budget towards social media. A lot of small businesses or people starting out don’t take the same approach. A lot of these businesses are the same guys from that tweet with the flip phones stuck in the past. They’re wondering why their competition’s growing and they’re not. You maybe dabbled, maybe you posted irregularly and you saw no results. Maybe you don’t have the time and energy to put it in yourself, the time and energy to devote to growing a social media brand or running any campaign on social media. These are the types of people that don’t see as a good use of their budget, time and money. The fact of the matter is that 68% of American adults are on Facebook, 78% of 18 to 24-year-olds are on Instagram, 45% are on Twitter. Even 37% of Americans 65 and older, grandma and grandpa, they’re on social media now. It doesn’t matter what you do. You need to be on social media and you need to be promoting your brand and connecting.

The audience is there.

You have all these users here and social media is there to help you boost traffic.

I’m in a bunch of chiropractic groups on Facebook and this question came up while I’m working with you hand-in-hand. It’s an open post to one of the Facebook groups and it’s like, “How do you feel about Facebook ads, Instagram ads? Has anybody seen any return of investment on that?” I saw four or five people say, “Waste of time. It didn’t work for me.” I’m not going to be that guy that’s going to post like, “It works for me,” but it completely works for me. I get new clients from Facebook and Instagram because of the videos you make for me on a weekly basis. There’s a right and a wrong way to do it. That’s where you come in.

Let’s talk about that massive lesson I learned. Customers don’t want to be pitched to on social media. They don’t look at social media as a place to be sold things. They want authentic engagement. Let’s take your videos and stuff, for example, we’re providing value. We’re educating the potential customer or whoever sees your posts on some of the issues upper cervical chiropractic can help solve. In many cases, this information might be exactly what someone needs. They look you up, they find your video. Maybe somebody shared it. Maybe somebody popped up in their timeline. You’re not selling to them. You’re not saying, “My name is Dr. Kevin Pecca. Are you experiencing neck pain?”

Those make me hit the off button right away.

People are going to skip that. You say, “It’s Dr. Kevin Pecca, I want to talk about something.” At the end you say, “I’m here if you need me. Here’s my information. Here’s how to get in contact with me.” When you stop seeing social media as a way to pitch your customers and you use it as a way to connect with them, answer questions, entertain them, provide valuable content, it can evolve your brand. It could skyrocket your exposure and bring you new solid leads. That’s that in a nutshell.

How do you pick which platforms you go after for your particular clients? It might be a lot for somebody to do Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, all that. How do you pick what to go after and what’s going to work for them?

Let me first say this, if you are starting out and you are maybe finding yourself spread thin trying to keep up with multiple platforms, let’s say you don’t have a lot of budgets to hire someone like me and you’re trying to do this on your own, I would start with one platform. Pour all your time and energy that you’re going to devote to this into that one platform. Build a brand and an audience there. A lot of it has to do with the types of content you want to post, the types of people you want to attract. Facebook is a lot more the upper twenties and beyond. A lot of younger users are on Instagram.

Visual content is king, but videos and images are shareable on Instagram. You have to canvass your audience, look at who you want to target, who you want to engage with and make a decision based off that. If you’re good with words and you want just to post texts, Twitter is your go-to. If you want to create video content, you could do short video content, Instagram is huge. You have Instagram TV, so you could put even longer-form video content on there. Facebook is an all-in-one for text, visual, audio, everything. The audiences vary from platform to platform.

I have a couple of videos that are very plain and simple, not a lot of graphics going on. They reach a lot of people. I also have videos with a lot of bells and whistles and everything on it that don’t reach as many people as I would like and vice versa. I have a bunch of videos that have a lot of going on and they do reach a lot of people. Why do you think that is? Is sometimes simpler a better way to go? Do you sometimes think the logos, the subtitles and all that reach more people? How does that work?

I don’t think the graphics are the difference there. It might be the value of the video.

I’ll give you a good example. One of my videos before I met you, it was my story. No graphics, no subtitles. I was saying why I became a Blair chiropractor and it’s doing well on YouTube. I have a couple of videos I have on YouTube of me adjusting people with the captions, with the graphics and those do well. My point is it could be a simple video. It doesn’t have to be that complicated for people to be engaged with it. It also does look nice to have the graphics in there. You might have to have a happy medium in there.

What I would say is the video you posted on YouTube on why you became a Blair chiropractor, that’s a powerful title. It’s something that will attract someone to click on. The thing about YouTube, it has longevity. When you post something on YouTube, it’s there forever. If someone’s searching for Blair Upper Cervical Chiropractic, your video is going to pop up in their search results forever. Facebook or Instagram doesn’t have the same longevity. It’s not as searchable. Things that you leave on YouTube will get views over time. There are algorithms at play here. When you post something on Facebook and it does well in the first several hours, then Facebook pushes it out to more people. The graphics are more to have a more professional look to what you’re doing, but you could record a video on your cell phone. I’ll never forget my one buddy got a big splinter in his hand. He recorded himself pulling it out of his hand on a cell phone and it got millions of views. There are a lot of factors at play here, but the short answer is you don’t need fancy graphics, intros and outros to reach a large number of people. When it comes to creating an image for your brand and trying to create professional-looking content, that goes a long way too.

All good things usually take time. How long should you stick with a platform or a video to tell that it’s working? A lot of content builds off each other, so you don’t want to give it a couple of weeks and say, “This isn’t working. This isn’t for me.” What’s a good way to know you’re sticking with it and going in the right direction because the content does build off each other?

Don’t post on social media because you think it’s something you should be doing. You are only in it for a return on investment or new sales. I would try and create consistent content. Let’s say you start off twice or three times a week. Maybe the videos you’re putting out are not working. You still post two to three times a week. Try something different.

I feel like some people don’t give it the right amount of time or they’ll do five or six posts. They’re not getting the likes or the feedback from the audience, the reach. Like what I was saying before, “This isn’t working. Facebook ads aren’t working.” Do you think people need to keep posting but keep finding different avenues to go down until it starts taking off?

You have to stay consistent. You have to adjust on the fly. Don’t post for the sake of posting because you feel like you should. Your goal here is to try to build interests, connections, community and engage with them. People ask questions, you answer back. That’s what keeps people coming back to consume your content. That’s what gets people to share your content with more people. Provide value to them. Don’t post for the sake of posting something new every day. It is important and there is so much upside to having consistent social media. It might take a year or two even before you see returns on investments or time and energy that massively impact your business. It should be something that’s running in the background at all times because it is worth it.

I would like to say, don’t post something because you don’t think it’s going to get 100 likes or the number of likes you want. For a long time, I would think about before I post, “This isn’t going to do as well as my last post. I’m not going to put that out.” Sometimes those posts do better, you don’t know.

I watch a lot of Gary Vee and one of his messages was, “Who cares?” Who cares what other people think and post? Get your content out there. You will get better as you do it more. With repetition, you improve on it. You think of better ways to caption your video. You think of better topics and subjects to cover. You become more comfortable on camera if you’re doing on-camera work. You will grow with time. Your content will improve with time. Sometimes it’s slow going getting organic engagement on social media. It can be slow to build at first, but once you find a rhythm and you find content that people are consuming and engaging with, that’s when it starts growing. That’s when you can get into a sweet spot and see a massive upside and benefits to your business.

Engagement-wise, how engaged do you have to be? What do you mean by you have to be engaged in your own social media?

It’s posting questions to your audience. If they respond or if they ask questions back, you respond to them. It’s relationship building. You are posting content and you want people to consume it, but you also want to get a feel for your audience and speak with them. Social media to the user is not a place to get sold to. It’s a community. It’s somewhere to share interests, connect, comment and consume content. I’m not saying you have to sit there and like everybody’s comment. If you’re only getting a handful of comments, maybe thank them for their comment. When you ask a question in your post, if you get people to respond to that question, comment on their comment. It’s that engagement.

One thing that should be said too, a lot of people get caught up in the numbers. It’s better to have 100 engaged followers than 10,000 followers who don’t engage with your content at all. Those are the users that are consuming your content and showing interest. Over time, the more you build your brand and the more you communicate with these people, they become loyal consumers. They become loyal customers. It’s a long game. It’s not like, “Let me post this video and see how many likes it gets.” You want to make the content to deliver value to people, build a community around it and build your brand. Once you start doing that and focusing on not just selling to people but providing value to people, that’s where you start seeing more engagement and more return on your time, energy and social media.

If somebody comes to you, a new client, it could be chiropractic, it could be anything, any small business. How do you take their platforms and take it to the next level of where they want to be on social media?

The first thing I would do is I would audit their social media. I would look at their pages. If they’re on Facebook and Instagram and they have a webpage, I would check those out. I make sure they look clean, presentable, professional and easy to read. I would see what activity they have on social media. Maybe they’re posting once every other week, maybe they’re posting three times a week. Get an idea for where they currently are. I would have a conversation with them about where they want to be, set some short-term goals, some long-term goals. Have a discussion about who they’re targeting. You can be immensely-targeted on social media, especially on Facebook through targeted ads and the advertising manager they have on there. I would want to get an idea for their customer base, who they want to target as new clients or generate interest amongst, canvas that.

I would do some market research. Look at what the competition is doing. The thing about social media is you can build your own brand, but you can also keep tabs on your competition, see what they’re doing, see what’s working, remix that into a way that fits your message. That’s another big piece of getting a new client on board what the message is? What are they selling essentially? How do they want to appear on social media? We take all that, we come up with a plan of attack and we start working on it. It is a growing and evolving process, but we always have that plan to refer back to.

It is a growing and evolving process. Not everything we did in the beginning worked as well as we thought and we evolved. We took new strategies. It honestly turned out better than I ever expected. The work you do is phenomenal. Every person I refer your way is thrilled to have you because you genuinely care about that other person’s business and growing it. They got nothing but great things to say. You got a lot of chiropractors on board, a lot of other businesses. It’s been pretty amazing to watch your company grow over the last couple of years. I’m proud to be a part of it and I’m proud that you are running my platforms. I honestly couldn’t do most of the things without you. All I do is send you the video, you work your magic and you send it back. It is 20,000 times better than anything I could have ever done. I appreciate that.

For anyone who’s on the fence about the importance of social media or maybe they’re thinking about hiring someone to do it, maybe they’ve heard bad stories or have been dissuaded by other people who didn’t succeed with it, please think about this. Social media is the biggest advertising platform on the planet. An average 30-second TV spot costs about $100,000 or more. You can spend a fraction of that and reach thousands of targeted individuals that are more likely to engage with your content and follow-up as a lead with you. There are tons of reasons why. At the end of the day, ultimately if you do it right and you’re patient with it, you will get more sales and your business will grow. If you’re a business owner who doesn’t have the time and the energy to run a campaign, post three to five times a week on their social media pages, hire somebody to do it. It is completely worth it. Kevin, do you answer the phone at your office?

I do not.

Why not?

It is not a valuable part of my time when I’m trying to adjust patients.

Your focus is on the patient and healing, but you need somebody in the office to take phone calls and run the front office. You hire somebody to do it. It’s the same concept. You need social media for your business.

You need that liaison to help bring you the people that you need to succeed and get better, whatever market it is.

If you can’t do it yourself, if your time is best spent on other things inside your business, it’s worth it to have someone knowledgeable and experienced to run social media pages for you.

Where can people find Coast to Coast Media website, social media platforms to take a look at all the great work you’re doing?

I have a website. It is C2CMedia.co. I’m on Instagram, @C2CMultimedia, Facebook, @C2CMultimedia. Check me out there. My email or DMs are always open if anyone has questions or wants to discuss any projects.

At the end of every show, I like to ask people what is one piece of advice that has resonated with you over the years that you would like to gift the audience? It could be absolutely anything.

It’s something I wish I learned a lot sooner and this can apply to social media and branding as well. Stop caring what other people think. Stop trying to do what is normal because it’s boring. Be yourself. If you want to take your brand in a direction on social media, go for it. Be yourself. That’s what I’ve learned and I’ve stopped caring so much about what other people might say or what other people think. In general, I feel happier as a person.

Thank you so much. I’m excited what the future brings to you. If you need anybody to handle your social media platforms, Chris is your guy. Check him out. I’ll talk to you soon.

Thank you so much for having me. It’s been a pleasure.

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