Today's Guest

Evan Kirstel is a B2B thought leader and top technology influencer who helps B2B clients grow their social media audience and leverage LinkedIn and Twitter for sales, networking, engagement, and social selling. He is actively building a network of fellow B2B influencers to help brands with scale and thought leadership. Evan shares the strategies he recommends small businesses use to get their business noticed and their lead funnels growing.

Episode Transcript

(Please excuse grammatical errors due to transcription)

Gordon Henry:             Hey, hey. This is Gordon Henry at Winning on Main Street, and this week we're fortunate to meet Evan Kirstel. Welcome to the show, Evan.

Evan Kirstel:                 Thanks for having me.

Gordon Henry:             Yeah, great to have you here. So Evan, you've had an impressive career in technology, social media. I was wondering if you could just give us a brief overview of some of the highlights of your career to get us started.

Evan Kirstel:                 It's a long, sad story. No, just kidding. It's a long story of ups and downs, 30 plus years in enterprise tech, 20 years+ on the business and marketing and sales side with big companies and startups, and then almost 10 years just under as a solo practitioner, small business owner and yeah, it's been a wild ride. Thank you.

Gordon Henry:             Fantastic. I understand also that you have a social media audience of nearly a half a million people. How did you do that?

Evan Kirstel:                 It's a complete obsession, a very, very unhealthy obsession. I wouldn't recommend it to people. But in all seriousness, yeah, it was a personal obsession for many years, going back 15 years on Twitter and over a dozen years on LinkedIn and Instagram and all the places. And that turned into a business helping clients as a content creator, tech influencer, kind of industry insider and just general jack of all trades on social media. But these days you throw around words like content creators and influencers, and none of that really existed when I started tweeting and posting and blogging. So yeah, it's been a fun ride.

Gordon Henry:             Yeah. Awesome. So I'd like to say, what should our listeners get out of this episode? And my take on it is that if you're a small business, and you need to scale your reach and your engagement on social media, Evan's a guy who has a lot of experience in that area and who can help. So listen up. And also Evan is a consultant, and there may be opportunities there as well.

                                   So my first question to you really, Evan, is you consult on social media to some of the world's biggest brands, but our listeners tend to be small businesses, dentists, doctors, plumbers, auto mechanics, roofers. How should they approach social media?

Evan Kirstel:                 Well, they should approach it from the same way they approached everything about building a small business. It's all about that network effect and networking, etc., except of doing it at the Chamber of Commerce like we did 10 years, 20 years ago, still do to some degree, you're doing it in a micro way on social media. So you're leveraging the platforms, not to create massive reach across the country and the world, but to create engagement and visibility and empathy and connection with people who are around the corner, around the block, in the next town.

                                   So all of the best practices and tips and tricks and techniques I use for building reach with global brands are equally as relevant, if not more so, to creating connection in your town or community. So whether it's Twitter or Facebook groups or LinkedIn, you can all use all of these platforms to micro-target, to connect with people who are local to you and to build relationships. And at the end of the day, it's all about creating buzz and awareness and kind of attention, but at a local level.

                                   So if you're not a local business that's creating content, the competitor probably is. You're probably going to lose out over the long term no matter how great your business or your old-fashioned Rolodex is with the wheel that spins around with the business cards. You got to modernize and refresh your approach to sales and marketing, and that means using social media in some way or another.

Gordon Henry:             Right. So drilling down a little bit on that, when you think about a small business, whether it's a dentist who's drilling on your tooth or an auto mechanic who's working on the bumper of your car, they may say to themselves, what does anybody care about what I do? They just come in, and they want to get their thing fixed. So you're telling me that I should be tweeting or blogging about these mundane things that I do, like fixing a tooth or fixing a bumper. Is that right?

Evan Kirstel:                 No, I wouldn't be tweeting about that or posting or doing videos. I would be talking to your clients and sharing content around what your clients are doing, who they are, how you've helped them, getting testimonials and leveraging all of these modern platforms. And it's not just social media. It's digital media. So the first place I go to, frankly, when I'm finding a new vendor, provider, a lawyer, I go to Google Search, or I go to honestly Google Maps and I find the business. You do this probably. And I see reviews, and I check the reviews. I check the business, and if it looks like it's a company I want to do business with, I reach out. And a lot of those reviews are garnered organically. Some of them are through customers you reach out to and ask them to review your product or service or your business. Others come from referral traffic and other places. Maybe you're a baker, and you've shared some amazing recipes or photos of your bakery, and people discover you that way.

                                   But you have to leverage these modern digital and social platforms to get seen and discovered. And we live in the attention economy now, so it's no longer enough to kind of word of mouth and referrals is how most small businesses continue to thrive. But in today's economy and the hyper-competitive environment we're in, it's just not enough to rely on those old forms of marketing through your personal network.

Gordon Henry:             And in terms of the reviews, you're suggesting, I guess, soliciting those reviews, which I agree is a way that a lot of people look for vendors. Do you recommend they use a platform? We, our company, full disclosure, makes a CRM platform that includes review solicitation.

Evan Kirstel:                 Nice.

Gordon Henry:             You suggest they utilize one of the platforms out there to do that, to ask for reviews, or I guess do it in person when you're with your customers.

Evan Kirstel:                 I love that. Yeah. I love the idea that you can use platforms like Thryv to automate and manage some of that. There's the old-fashioned way of just, hey, are you on Facebook? Like our group, join our group. If you're a small gym, hey, check out our Instagram page. I mean, literally, you can reach out and connect with the top 30, 50, 100 "micro-influencers" in your neighborhood, in your 5 mile square radius, 10 mile radius, whatever it may be, and connect with them and get their attention and offer them specials.

                                   I mean, there's almost no business now that shouldn't be on social media. If I were a, let's say I were a laundry mat. We think, well, why would they be on social media? Maybe I offer, it's in Boston, maybe I offer students a free roll of quarters if they post about doing their laundry on Instagram and share it with their friends. Maybe I would gamify and offer specials based on folks sharing pictures of their laundry, some kind of fun gamification.

                                   So there's so many ways to be creative and, as a small business owner, you really can't afford to spend a lot of money on paid marketing. Most can't afford to have an agency or hire someone. So you really have to use these kind of guerilla marketing hacks and tricks and techniques to get noticed. And of course, they're free. Now, they're not free. There's time and effort and energy and that goes into them. But there's no better way to get free media, free attention and customers than using all of the best practices that are out there.

Gordon Henry:             Yeah, no, I totally agree. I find everybody says they don't like advertising, or they don't want to be marketed to, but the truth is, when you're looking for something, suddenly you are interested in, let's just call it information about that thing.

                                   So I had the unfortunate thing this weekend, some guy nicked my bumper. So all of a sudden I'm interested in getting bumper fixed. So I'm looking around locally saying here, who's the specialist in fixing that bumper? And I would love to go on somebody's social media or their website and see pictures of how other bumpers they've fixed. So suddenly when you need something, or you're going out to dinner, obviously this is a common one, and you want to see the pictures of the food, you want information about the thing you're interested in at that moment. And social media's a great way to do that. So that does suggest for the small business person, hey, put your pictures up, maybe say a few words about the things that you are really good at. Right?

Evan Kirstel:                 Yeah. And it's about staying top of mind too. I don't need to buy flowers until I do. And then who's top of mind? Well, it's someone I bookmarked or someone maybe I follow on Instagram. And so if you stay top of mind, you're going to get noticed when that opportunity does come to buy.

                                   And it's also about collaboration. I mean, if you're a small business owner, there are ways you can collaborate with other small businesses, and through bartering, through sharing each other's posts, through putting together a community of small businesses through doing joint promotion, get a discount here if you buy this service. So if I were to have a small business right now, I would know every other small business owner in the area, not just in person, but on social media and offering coupons and discounts and contests and other things on social to drive awareness.

Gordon Henry:             Right, right. So for small businesses, generating leads is kind of their lifeblood. Where do I get new customers from? How effective is unpaid social media, tweeting, blogging, posting, the things you love to talk about there at generating leads, at generating new customers?

Evan Kirstel:                 It's very effective, but there's no quick win. There's no shortcut. There's no easy... It's not like buying a list or putting an ad in the paper or newspaper, and you can then measure how many calls you get. It's a long game, and it requires time and effort, months or longer of putting that content out to see a return. So many people, frankly, just give up because they don't see an ROI after a week, a month or six month sometimes. So it's about consistency and showing up every day and having fun with it. Frankly, most people are not good at social media. So when they do social, when they do pictures or create content or videos or write, it doesn't work because it's not very good.

Gordon Henry:             Yeah-

Evan Kirstel:                 And so then they think, well, I'm not getting any results. This doesn't work. Well, you might not be good at it. So what does that mean? It means you can up your game. I mean, you can go out, and you can watch YouTube videos and educate yourself on how to use these platforms, how to create video content, how to write, how take better pictures and up your game there.

Gordon Henry:             Yeah, you made some good points there that I think many small businesses do rely on search, like Google AdWords, because you put in X number of dollars and you get Y back in terms of leads, and you convert a certain number, and that's the ROI on that spend. And everybody has kind of figured out how to do that. On something like social blogging, posting, tweeting, not as clear a connection between what you put in and what you got out. And very often, it does take time, and it's hard to calculate the ROI you got on the effort. Do you-

Evan Kirstel:                 And even on search, I would just interrupt, I mean I would say there's an art to creating good ads and good copy and using the ad... I use Google AdWords campaigns, and it's not obvious, and there are lots of tricks and techniques. You really have to educate yourself. And when you do get that click to your website, what do they see? I mean, we all take websites for granted now, but most of the local websites I see are pretty minimalist, pretty boring, kind of uninteresting site. There's no real reason to go there. It's a few static images. So you can up your game on the website side and make it really interesting and put your blog there so people have a reason to go to your website just beyond just because they saw an ad for it.

Gordon Henry:             Yeah, a hundred percent. So if I'm a small business person, and I've got just a couple of employees, doing a lot of the work myself, and I'm listening to you saying up your game and photos and content, all these things, should I think about doing that myself, or should I be hiring somebody to do that? What's your thought on that?

Evan Kirstel:                 Yeah, I'm not a big fan of hiring. I mean, there are so many agencies out there that will take your money, and frankly, and you'll be disappointed. I hear that again and again in terms of marketing agencies.

                                   Until you understand the game and the dynamics and how to do it, hiring someone, you don't know how to manage them or what to expect. So I would really just focus more on education in your spare time, in your off time. Everything is out there. You can educate yourself for free on every platform, every topic. On YouTube, there's an infinite amount of resources there on how to do these things yourself.

                                   And I would also gamify it. So you're paying your employee $18 an hour. What if you offered bonuses for doing social media in their off time, or you gave a commission for every... A lot of these employees are young, and they're on social anyway. Why don't you leverage them as a resource for a few bucks a post, create some buzz. And enlist your customers. If you get a free ice cream cone if they post themselves eating it on Instagram, and then they have a few followers, some followers. So there's a way to leverage your customer base, your community, your sort of that audience for very short money that just requires a bit of imagination.

Gordon Henry:             Yeah. What do you say about frequency for a small business appearing on social media, posting, blogging, tweeting? How often should they be doing this? What's the-

Evan Kirstel:                 A lot, a lot. I mean the average engagement with a post across all these platforms is only 1% or 2%, which means if you have a thousand followers, let's say, only 1%or 2% of those, you're talking 10, 12 people are seeing that one post. So you think, oh, I'm posting once or twice or three times a week, that should be sufficient. No, that that's really not going to move the needle. It requires using automation tools to some degree to get a stream of content out there, posting more than once a week, posting multiple times a day on different platforms, doing different campaigns, sharing content. It's hard to get noticed these days, and we're in this attention economy. It's all about getting noticed. And the busier you are, the more effective you'll be at getting noticed.

Gordon Henry:             Right. And how much of this depends on being a good writer? A lot of people are like, oh, I'm not a good writer, I wasn't an English major or something like that. Does that matter? You said have fun with it. What are the elements of being successful with this? If I'm a doctor, it wasn't my thing.

Evan Kirstel:                 Well yeah, doctors are a great examples, if you have a specialty practice. Med TikTok is a huge thing. Go on TikTok, and if you're not interested in writing, create a three or five minute video about a particular specialty you're involved with. And you'd be amazed at the organic reach of that, and you're going to reach potential patients and consumers based on that video. If you don't like video, if you don't like being on camera, then yeah, focus on writing. If you don't like that, if maybe you're a good speaker, do an audio format or even a podcast. So whether it's written word or spoken word or video word, there's all these formats you can leverage.

                                   Or find a person in your organization who likes making videos. Maybe it's their receptionist, or maybe it's someone who is one of your servers, and he or she enjoys that stuff and loves being on camera, which is probably the case if you're 20-something these days. So leverage that person to create your video content. And there's really no excuse not to be creative and sort of bury your head in the sand.

Gordon Henry:             Right, right. Awesome recommendations. You got to me thinking back, one of the people we had on the podcast just a few weeks ago was a woman who had founded a company called Swig, which listeners may remember a few weeks ago. It's a fast food, I guess you'd say, place out west, started in Utah. It's spread to other states now. And basically, people drive through, and if you didn't hear her story, you'd say, how is this possible? But basically the big attraction is soft drinks. And you'd be like soft drinks? But they make it super fun. They're really good at moving their lines through. They have a lot of creative soft drinks. They call it like Dirty Dr. Pepper and things like that that have interesting ingredients. They also have a couple good little edibles, and the thing has taken off. It's a smash hit. There's 40+ of these all over the country now.

                                   And she said TikTok was one of her big movers that I guess they did some fun TikTok videos with the customers, how quickly moving through the line, how great they love the soda, all this stuff. And she said it exploded, and TikTok was one of the drivers.

Evan Kirstel:                 Oh yeah. And TikTok has amazing organic reach. You don't have to pay to play. The algorithm wants engagement, and YouTube the same. If you look at Mr. Beast, I don't know if you know who that is, he's the number one YouTuber in the world with a 100,000,000+ subscribers. And someone offered him a billion dollars for his YouTube channel. And he talks about creating that sort of compelling content. You can now buy a Mr. Beast burger. So he opened up his franchising. So there's Mr. Beast burgers with a few restaurants.

Gordon Henry:             Unbelievable.

Evan Kirstel:                 His called to action to come to the restaurant generated something like 20,000 people swarming the restaurant from his videos.

Gordon Henry:             Insane. Wow.

Evan Kirstel:                 We can't all be Mr. Beast. But YouTube, just like TikTok, is just amazing reach, and it shows up in search results. So instead of just paying for Google AdWords, you put stuff on YouTube, and you have the same opportunity for getting discovered on search.

Gordon Henry:             Wow, fascinating. Never even heard of Mr. Beast.

Evan Kirstel:                 I know. Mr. Beast. You should check him out. It's amazing.

Gordon Henry:             Incredible. So Evan, tell us a little bit about your services. You consult to big brands. Do you work with small businesses? What's your typical customer? And what's your typical engagement like?

Evan Kirstel:                 Yeah, I work with, I'd say small companies, small startups, innovative small companies who are delivering solutions into business. B2B is my thing. So enterprise or SaaS or med tech or health tech or gadgets. So anyone selling into the B2B, business to business, world is potential client, big or small. And I help with, again, turbocharging their social efforts. So not everyone can wait around and spend six months learning how to do these things and building an audience, building a community. But they need to get kind of jumpstart all of that. And that's what I do with my audience that I've built as well as all of my help creating content and amplifying content and getting seen.

Gordon Henry:             Got it. So anybody who's particularly in the B2B space should think about talking to Evan as a consult for help.

Evan Kirstel:                 Yeah, we'd love to chat.

Gordon Henry:             Yeah, fantastic. We'll be right back after the break with more from Evan Kirstel. Stay with us.

Thryv:                          This episode of Winning on Main Street is brought to you by Thryv, the end-to-end client experience platform that includes everything small business owners need to meet their customers expectations.

                                   Thryv's award-winning and fully mobile interface delivers technology previously reserved for big business to the fingertips of small business owners nationwide.

                                   Thryv's built specifically for small business, but there's nothing small about what it can do.

                                   Thryv handles your entire customer experience, helping business owners reach more customers, stay organized, get paid faster, and generate online reviews all from a single device or screen.

                                   To learn more about Thryv, visit winningonmainstreet.com and click on "get a demo."

                                   When it comes to software to run your business, there's no comparison. Check out Thryv today.

Gordon Henry:             And we're back with Evan Kirstel. Fascinating conversation about using social media to build your local business or some of the people out there have done really well, like Mr. Beast. I just learned that one from Evan. So Evan, tell us a little bit about yourself, and particularly you built this half million audience online, which I'm sure all our users, our audience, our audience would love to have. How did you do that yourself? What kind of content did you create? Did you post photos? Did you create language that was unique to you? How did you do that?

Evan Kirstel:                 Well, I think it's time and effort. There's no real shortcuts, so over a dozen years, but developing a bit of a playbook and adapting that over time. So there's curating content is number one. It's sharing the news and stories and third party information with your point of view, so that that's key to being seen as a source of insight and information. There's content creation. So I blog for the written word. So once or twice a month, I use LinkedIn and my personal website as the destination for that because some people still like to read, believe it or not. So I focus on the written word.

                                   Spoken word, I have a couple of podcasts, again once or twice a month. Some people like myself actually listen to podcasts all day long and are multitasking, and that's how they like to consume information. And so I've been podcasting for several years in a couple of fairly focused areas of enterprise communications and collaboration and future of work and that sort of thing.

                                   And then video, primarily live streaming. Live streaming over the pandemic, in particular, has really taken off. And so live in terms of LinkedIn Live and Facebook Live and Twitter and YouTube and going out streaming on all those platforms with guests and round tables. And live is amazing because the reach is extraordinary. The algorithms preference live traffic over recorded or canned content. And so if you do anything live, you're going to get 10x more reach than otherwise.

Gordon Henry:             Huh, interesting.

Evan Kirstel:                 Yeah, so I'd encourage =businesses to look at live. There's no production cost and editing. It's just putting yourself out there on one or multiple platforms. And the reaches and engagement is off the chart. So you can do that on TikTok and Insta and all the platforms now.

                                   So I think my success I think is overcoming my desire not to be seen and heard all the time and to be private if kind of many people aren't comfortable being on video or putting themself out there in that way. And I think that's one of the barriers to overcoming that. And that's just through trial and error and through experience. You do something for 10,000 hours, I think Malcolm Gladwell says, you become an expert in it. And so you got to put the time and the effort in, and that's what I encourage folks to do.

Gordon Henry:             That live comment is an interesting one too. I would suggest people really pay attention because a lot of businesses have some kind of event where they have people live at something, whether it's a concert or a restaurant or, I don't know, we had a client here at Thryv, a woman who was a doggy daycare kind of place, and she would do these events in parks where they would groom the dogs, and I could see that being a live stream of-

Evan Kirstel:                 Oh, that's totally live, and live doesn't mean it disappears. I mean, there's still a recording of it. It's saved. There's a post or tweet that remains after the fact. And that's, wow, what a great content opportunity. That's definitely something that would go viral on all the platforms.

                                   And most business owners have something that's really interesting to some audience. Even, you think the dentist, well, a lot of people, for example, just loathe going to the dentist. So what if you could open up the dental practice and show how it works and meet the dentist beforehand and show the equipment and the setup and the procedures. I think it would be just one example of content creation opportunity.

Gordon Henry:             Yeah, absolutely. Good food for thought there.

                                   So we just have a few minutes left. I have a quick lightning round for you. First of all, what do you think of Elon Musk taking over Twitter?

Evan Kirstel:                 Well, I'm just sort of just sitting back and eating popcorn. It's just an unfolding drama. I don't know what to think day to day. It gets either more bizarre or less, based on... But he's doing what a lot of what I'm recommending, which is to get attention. So it's somehow-

Gordon Henry:             He's good at that. He's definitely good at that.

Evan Kirstel:                 It's working. He's definitely good at that. And you think about all of the free media he's getting for himself and his brands. Now whether that's going to work out in the end, I don't know. I'm not a finance guy so I can't say whether that was all worth it, but it is fascinating to watch unfold.

Gordon Henry:             Yeah. What's your favorite social network and why?

Evan Kirstel:                 Well, for me, it's LinkedIn, I'd say, just because you get tremendous organic reach. You're not getting a lot of bots and fraud and fake accounts. And there are serious customers there to be had. And if you're selling into businesses or enterprise, like I am, there's a graph of the entire enterprise right there for the taking. So whether it's research or targeting or selling, it's just all that juicy, juicy data is right out there for everyone to see.

Gordon Henry:             How much time per week do you spend on social media?

Evan Kirstel:                 All the time. It's all the time. It's a massive time. But I enjoy it because I'm a news junkie. I love learning, and a lot of what I focus on is education, just either consuming interesting content or creating educational content. So me, it's a learning opportunity. It's not about selective celebrities and gossip and just news. There's so much educational content out there, interesting people to connect with. And I take a lot of the people I meet on social, and you turn that into offline connections and offline clients, and you have an open channel to fascinating and really interesting people, despite all the downside of social. There are really lots of great people to meet and network with and connect with.

Gordon Henry:             Good stuff. What's next for Evan Kristel? What's next on your agenda career-wise? Where will we find you in 6 or 12 months?

Evan Kirstel:                 Yeah, I think I love what I'm doing. I love being a small business owner and being independent, not being in the corporate rat race. So I was doing a lot of traveling before Covid, so I'm looking forward to getting out and about and traveling more. And I'm not quite the sort of digital nomad, but I really enjoy events and conferences and international travel. So I see more of that. And maybe back to Europe, back to the international travel would be fantastic.

Gordon Henry:             Yeah. Great. And just to finish up, where can people, listeners, learn more about where you're doing? How should they find you?

Evan Kirstel:                 Yeah, really it's just Evan Kirstel, E-V-A-N K-I-R-S-T-E-L, on all the networks. And I'm really focused on YouTube these days so go check out my YouTube channel @evankirstel.

Gordon Henry:             Cool. Well, I want to thank you for coming on our show. Great stuff and great to have you here.

Evan Kirstel:                 Thank you so much. I can't wait to check out Thryv. It sounds like a platform I could use as well. So that'll be one of my next steps.

Gordon Henry:             Yeah. And thank you to our producers, Tim Alleman, and our coordinators, Diette Barnett and Daniel Huddleston. And if you enjoyed this podcast, please tell your colleagues, friends, family to subscribe and please leave us a five star review, speaking of social media. We'd really appreciate it, helps us in the rankings. Until next time, make it a great week.

Listener Reviews