Carmen Sognonvi

Transcript

Jun: Carmen, it is absolutely a pleasure to have you here today.

Can you please tell us in 30 seconds or less about yourself and your business?

Carmen: Sure.

So, my husband and I started a martial arts school back in 2008 called Urban Martial Arts, we’re based in Brooklyn, New York.

And we offer karate classes for kids and teens, kickboxing classes for adults, and we also do a karate after school program and a karate summer camp.

And in addition to that, I also blog at CarmenSognonvi.com about local business and local marketing.

I like to kind of, you know, share my two cents about what it’s like being a business owner.

Jun: Terrific. And that’s why I reached out to you, because you’re a business owner.

Actually, you have a blog where you talk about local marketing, but more importantly, you actually have a business.

You’re not just somebody who’s talking about it, you live it, you walk the walk, as they like to say.

So, Carmen, can you tell us how do you currently use social media at your business?

Carmen: Sure.

So at Urban Martial Arts, I would say that for us, the blog is really kind of the central hub of where all of our content lives and then from there we kind of promote that through a variety of channels.

So, in terms of the blog, we put out two or three posts a week, some texts but mostly video, I find that video works really well for us because as you can imagine, martial arts is such, kind of a visual medium.

So that works really well.

And then in addition to that, of course, we have the requisite Google+ and Facebook and Twitter accounts.

But then also, you know, I think sometimes people get really excited about social media, but they kind of forget that that’s really one piece of online marketing in general.

So for us, email is still probably the number one tool in terms of disseminating that content to our prospects and our customers.

Jun: Okay, tell me, how do you capture email then?

Carmen: Any way we can.

So definitely on our website we have a lot of places where, you know, people can opt in.

Especially on our blog, we produce several special reports that people can opt in for.

And then, of course, you know, anyone that comes in and is interested in taking a trial class or becomes a student with us, we capture their emails always as well.

Jun: Okay.

Great, right.

At the location, you’re able to talk to them, get their email.

Also, on the blog.

You said you write special reports.

Now, this is pretty good because I would think martial arts is a pretty niche type of industry.

What kind of special reports are you writing?

Carmen: Sure.

So one of the topics that’s been really successful for us is bullying and bullying prevention.

And, of course, that’s a topic that a lot of parents are especially concerned about and unfortunately, a lot of families come to us because their kids are getting bullied at school.

Or, this is less often the case, but still sometimes happens, is their kids are bullying other people.

So, in both cases, you know, parents understand that martial arts is an important way to kind of address those issues.

So, a couple years back, I actually wrote a seven-part series about bullying and bullying prevention for our blog.

And I basically wrapped all of that content into one single PDF that’s like, you know, a nice little booklet.

And so that is probably the number one download on our blog, is the special report about bullying.

Jun: That is so smart.

Because I thought you were going to say something about a certain type of martial arts techniques or different types of, like, rankings in martial arts or tournaments.

But to go straight to the source, right?

Because it’s the parents that choose to bring their kids to your studio, right?

Carmen: Yeah.

Jun: So you want to talk to the parents about things they care about.

That’s really important, I think, for anybody listening, right?

How does your local store, local market, whatever it may be, you know, how can you target what your target market wants to know about, right?

Learning about bullying, I think it’s perfect.

Now, who wrote it?

Did you write it?

Did you hire someone to write it?

How did you go about doing that?

Carmen: I wrote it, with a lot of blood, sweat and tears.

Jun: How long did it take you?

Carmen: Oh, man, too long.

Because I really wanted it to be very, very in-depth.

You know, there’s like a section about statistics about bullying, there’s a section about the causes of bullying, like why do people bully?

What are the effects of bullying on others and also on the bullier himself?

So, yeah, I wrote it myself.

Jun: Excellent.

You mentioned to me before this call that it is absolutely required to create content and social and that might be one of the biggest mistakes that company’s make, is that they don’t produce content.

You wrote this great PDF, you said it took you longer than you expected.

You know, what would you tell other business owners that say, “I just don’t have time,” or “Maybe I’m not a good writer, I don’t know what to write about.”

You know, how can we get them to know that they, too, can create content?

Carmen: Yeah.

Yeah, I really do think content is key and something that business owners need to focus on.

And, you know, I think sometimes people forget that content doesn’t mean text, it can be video.

Just to give you an example, I’ve been a writer for a long time, so it comes pretty naturally to meóalthough I still get kind of lazy about writing sometimesóbut the reason that we’ve moved into doing a lot of video is because I really want to showcaseóyou know, my husband, Serge, he is the head instructor, so he teaches all the classes.

He’s the martial artist.

So he’s more the face of the business than I am.

And he’s just not really a big writer.

However, he’s great at speaking.

And so that’s why we’ve moved into doing a lot of video, and, you know, he’s not necessarily a trained public speaker, but he comes across as very personable.

So the way that we do it with him, is that I’ll basically interview him on camera and then I’ll edit together his answers into a video.

So understand that, you know, content doesn’t have to mean writing, it can be video, it can even be photos, especially if you are in some kind of a very visual industry, like anything related to food or anything kind of design or fashion related.

Photos can be a great form of content as well.

Jun: Great.

No, that’s a great answer, it can come from different mediums, right?

And I think that’s great.

You’re great at writing, holding the camera, editing video.

Your husband, you know, he’s good at martial arts, maybe he can’t write as well as you can, but he can talk in front of the camera and show people how to defend themselves.

I think that’s excellent.

The follow up to that is, okay, you’ve written content, you’ve created a video, whatever it may be.

How do I distribute it?

You know, how do I get people to watch it, to download it?

Because I start a blog and two weeks into it, four weeks, you know, several months into it, I don’t have an audience, so I’m like, why am I still writing?

You know, how do you get people to become aware of it?

Carmen: Sure.

Yeah, I mean, this is definitely a struggle.

But at the same time, I think you have to think about what are your goals as a business?

I think sometimes a lot of the information out there online, and the reason that I started my blog, actually, is because I’ve always been somewhat involved in the online marketing space for the last ten years in one form or another, and so I follow a lot of the big blogs out there.

But I find that a lot of the advice that’s given doesn’t necessarily translate well for local businesses.

Because, speaking about blogging and building an audience or getting eyeballs on your content, for example, bloggers are really concerned about this, because they kind of want to build this massive audience so that they can monetize it and sell ads or whatever their strategy is.

As a local business owner, you’re not really trying to get eyeballs on your content in order to monetize it that way.

It’s a different strategy.

So what you really want to figure out is what are your goals?

So, you know, I’m a big advocate of blogging and the reason I am is because it’s a great way to differentiate yourself from other businesses and really establish yourself as an expert in your space.

Just to give you a few examples, because of the great content that we produce in the form of blog posts and videos, that’s led to a lot of PR opportunities for us.

We’ve been featured in the New York Daily News, which is one of the big dailies here in New York City.

They picked our summer camp as one of their hottest summer camps of the city, basically because they kind of found us that way.

We got written up in The L Magazine, they picked us as one of the top ten workouts for people who hate working out.

And again, it was very much related to the fact that they were able to just go on our website, see exactly what our classes are like, who’s running the business, get a sense of who we are, and that really differentiated us from, you know, possibly other schools that they were looking at.

So, you know, content is, there’s a lot of different goals that you can have with it.

So, I think as a business you need to kind of figure out, okay, where do I, how do I get from point A to point B and what is point B?

Is it to establish expertise to get publicity?

Is it to actually make a sale?

If it is, then, you know, again, I think email is really important.

You can also use content as a way to kind of lead people into opting into your email list and then that way you can continue the relationship there.

Jun: Love it!

It’s great.

You write content but you can also leverage that you are a local business and go after PR, right?

There’s so many websites online, there’s so many news stations or online magazines that want to cover how local businesses are using social media, you can be a great case study and you’ve proven it, right?

They use you as a case study, kind of like I’m doing now, right?

You know, I found you, I’m going to be linking to your site, that’s just great, right, for maybe local SEO, whatever it may be.

What about any location-based social networks like Foursquare or even Yelp, you know, how are you using Yelp right now to try to get more people aware of you?

Carmen: Oh, Yelp.

I got to say, I’m not a big fan of Yelp.

Jun: Very few local businesses are a fan of Yelp.

No one likes their phone calls and the way they try to leverage their position.

But, you know, just tell me your opinion on, you know, Yelp and Foursquare and how you’re using them.

Carmen: Sure.

I don’t want to turn this into a bitch fest.

But in general, we’ve tried, we’ve experimented a little bit with the geo-location stuff, like with Foursquare check-ins and on Facebook, when they were still doing their check-ins, which I think they, it still lives on, but sounds like they’re kind of phasing that out.

And the way that we were doing it is we were aiming it more at our existing students rather than outside people, and so we did it more as kind of like a loyalty thing.

So, for every fifth check-in, they would basically get a free vitamin water from us.

So, it was just a way to kind of get people to check in.

I don’t know how effective it was for us.

I think, actually this was one of the points that I wanted to make sure I brought up in the interview, I think that one of my pet peeves is that if you read case studies about how local businesses are using social media, 99% of those case studies are about restaurants and food trucks.

Jun: Right.

Carmen: And you have to understand that any kind of food-related business is completely different fromónot completely different, but it’s very different from other types of local businesses.

Because food is inherently viral, it’s inherently social, people naturally want to share, “Hey, I just ate at this great place,” they want to show off that they know what’s the, you know, latest and hottest restaurant.

And so people are going to naturally talk about those kinds of businesses.

If you’re a dry cleaner, people are not going to be like climbing all over themselves to tweet about how awesomely clean their shirts are.

You know, it’s just, it’s different.

So I think you need to, the geo-location stuff, I think probably works really well for restaurants and maybe, you know, food-related businesses like food trucks.

But if you’re a non-restaurant, it may not be so effective, or you need to make sure that you kind of shift your strategy and go where your customers are, or go where it makes sense.

Like Yelp, as much as, like, I kind of hate them, the truth is I don’t think that that many people go to Yelp to look for fitness-related businesses.

I feel like primarily people still think of Yelp as like a restaurant directory.

I’m sure they won’t like me saying this, but, you know, that’s kind of my impression.

So the fact that, you know, we don’t have like a super awesome presence on Yelp doesn’t really hurt us and that’s kind of why I haven’t focused that much time on the geo-location stuff.

We’ve dabbled a little bit, you know, tested the waters and then it’s like, “Okay, the results are not that awesome, let’s focus on what’s really working.”

Jun: What is the biggest mistake that local businesses make with social marketing?

Carmen: I would say the biggest mistake local business owners are making is assuming that their customers are not online.

There’s still a lot of business owners I talk to who are like, “Oh, I have a website,” or “I don’t really need a website because my customer base is this and they’re not really on the internet or they don’t really have computers like that.”

And that just is, you know, that’s just making poor assumptions.

Just to give you a solid example, Urban Martial Arts, our business, is located in this area called Ditmas Park in Brooklyn, and we’re kind of at the crossroads of quite a few different ethnic communities.

And a lot of our students are, or their families are very new immigrants to the country, like a week.

Really new!

And a lot of them are from what would be considered developing countries, Kazakhstan, the Sudan, Yemen, you know, all these kinds of countries that, you know, typically you might think, you might not really think that they’re super up on technology, but whenever people come in, as I mentioned earlier, we always require an email address if they want to sign up for a class or anything like that, or even if they’re inquiring for information, we’ll offer to send it to them by email.

And I can tell you that 99% of the time, people have an email address.

Even people that you would think, “Oh, man, they just got here, they barely speak English, they’re not going to be online,” they have an email address.

Because think about it, like how are they communicating with people back home?

They use Skype, they’re using the internet, they’re using email.

So I would say that actually, it sounds like a basic thing, but a lot of business owners, I think, are still making the assumption that, “Most of my customers are not online, so I don’t have to worry about that piece of it.”

Jun: Great.

And my last question today is, let’s say a local business owner right now watches this video and they think it’s great, but there’s so much to do, Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, a blog, creating an email newsletter list, there’s so much to do, so sometimes you have decision paralysis and you don’t know where to start.

So what would you recommend this person, where would you recommend for him or her to start?

Carmen: I would recommend that they start by blogging regularly.

And like we said before, blogging doesn’t necessarily have to mean writing, it can be video, it can be photos, but start creating content on a regular basis.

And one really quick and easy way to start doing this, if you’re kind of stuck on like, “Well, what should I write about or what content should I create?” is actually a really great tip from Marcus Sheridan, who has a blog at The Sales Lion, which I highly recommend for all local business owners to read, because he is one of the few guys who is actually a business owner and not just a guy writing about business, as we kid about.

He owns a pool company that’s really successful.

And basically his tip is that, you know, an easy way to create content is just think about what are the most frequently asked questions that you get from customers or prospects?

So what are the things that people ask constantly?

So in our business, for example, people will often ask, “How long does it take to get a black belt?”

“What are the different color belts in the karate system, what do they mean?”

Or on the kickboxing fitness side, people want to know, “How often should I be working out?”

“What should I eat?”

“How long before I work out should my last meal be and what should I be eating?”

So things like that, just think about what are the questions that you’re constantly answering, and then just create one blog post or one video to answer each question, and that’s a great way to get started.

And if I may do a quick plug, I actually did a free webinar on my blog a while ago called The Three Biggest Mistakes that Local Business Owners are Making on Their Blog.

That’s not a **** title than that, but you get the idea.

And if people want to check out that webinar, it’s free, you can just download the recording and it’s at CarmenSognonvi.com/blogging.

Jun: Love it, Carmen Sognonvi, thank you so much for being with us here today.

I love your experience, your enthusiasm, and I love that you not only talk the talk on your blog, but you’re also running your own business, which I think is terrific.

So thank you so much.

All the links will be posted underneath, so anybody can contact you if they do have any questions.

Carmen: Great.

Thank you so much for having me, this was fun.

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Transcript

Hi Tim and Kevin, I’m Carmen Sognonvi.

I really enjoyed the recent video you did about how to humanize your brand using video.

I totally agree with you that over-producing video can sometimes be a mistake.

My husband and I own a martial arts school in Brooklyn, NY called Urban Martial Arts so we like to check out what other martial arts schools around the country are doing with their marketing.

I’ve noticed a couple school owners who have videos that they seem to think make themselves look really bad-ass.

I’m talking about videos with slo-mo shots of instructors punching and kicking mid-air set to some cheesy Eye of the Tiger-type music.

And it just ends up being unintentionally funny.

Especially when the instructor has, let’s just say, let himself go a little bit and is not quite the Adonis he was back in the day?

Not a good look.

Anyway, I wanted to answer your question about what works for us when we use video to humanize our brand.

The most important way we do it is that we always showcase our own actual students.

And not everybody does this.

I know some schools that will go out and hire professional martial artists to appear in their commercials and promo videos.

And while this gets you cool footage of people doing backflips and neat nunchuck tricks, ultimately it’s not a reflection of who they really are as a school.

90% of our students are not doing backflips on a regular basis, so we’re just not going to make that the centerpiece of our video efforts.

Instead, we’re more interested in showing candid footage of our students doing their thing – whether it’s in class, or at our belt promotion ceremonies, or at karate tournaments.

Not every kid is going to be super-photogenic, and not every kid is going to be the next Jaden Smith.

So it may not be as flashy, but I believe it’s more realistic and shows a prospective parent what they can actually expect to see when they walk through our doors.

And so far it’s been really successful!

The vast majority of our students find us online and we always hear from them that watching our videos played a big role in getting them interested in checking us out.

To any fellow ReelSEO fans who happen to be watching this, if you own a local business, I’d love for you to check out my blog at CarmenSognonvi.com.

It’s all about how to run a successful local bricks-and-mortar business, including how to get more customers and close more sales.

Thanks for letting me share, Tim. I’ve learned so much from your videos, and I can’t wait to see what you come out with next!

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