Tag: COVID19 Business Impact

Part 3: Bob Regnerus of Feedstories & The Ultimate Guide To Facebook Advertising

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Part 3, of our seven-part interview with Bob Regnerus of Feedstories.

Topics covered in this episode

  • How a Meeting at Facebook Headquarters led to the beginning of Feedstories
  • The Power of Your Businesses Story
  • Navigating through COVID-19
  • How COVID-19 led to an increase in demand for video content

Transcription

Intro Brian: Bob Regnerus of Feedstories, part 3.

Hi I’m Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

Today’s part three of our series with Bob Regnerus. I hope you’ve been watching, if not go back and watch the rest of them.

If you’d like to be on this podcast as in a conversation with me, or if you’d like to have me on your podcast or speak at your event, go check out BrianJPombo.com, for all the details.

So here is part 3.

Brian: What do you think that most businesses can learn from that, in terms of you mentioned having cash on hand. What are the other things that you think that made the biggest difference for you that you think other people could learn from?

Bob: Well, for me, it was investing in things that have the ability to be flexible.

So team members that are flexible with multiple skill sets technology, like we were perfectly positioned to be remote.

In fact, our company’s been remote for years, we were on zoom before zoom was cool, we had used it. So essentially, that didn’t change.

We also had this enthusiasm for what could be, but we also had a sense of what could go wrong?

Now, the reason we’re able to do that is we’re in a mastermind with Perry. And as you know, Perry’s my friend, he’s a client, we do business together, but I also pay him for mentorship, because he’s so wise.

And we went through an exercise, January of 2019, which is like, what could go wrong in your business this year?

Now, nobody predicted COVID, but we had some scenarios like, okay, you know, if our technology failed, or we went through probably five or six scenarios, it got us thinking.

Even then, like, what would happen if?

We weren’t shocked when COVID happened. We certainly had this sense of dread like everybody else. But we had been exercising our what if muscles and had in mind, like, everything’s not going to be rosy. So we’re mentally prepared for what happened.

And I was really proud of kind of how we just, we didn’t panic, we had some really thoughtful consideration of how we’re going to move forward. And we positioned ourselves well, we were prepared for some worst case scenarios.

I think that’s one thing as entrepreneurs, we’re always thinking like, the best is going to happen. And I love that part of being an entrepreneur, every project we get involved in, we think this is gonna be great.

We haven’t unbridled enthusiasm for it, and you have to, but you also have that sense of, okay, what if this doesn’t work out?

Or what if this idea doesn’t pan out?

You want to have contingencies, you want to have plans in place. Maybe that comes from my upbringing, maybe it comes from experience, I don’t know.

But it just seems like the right way to approach things. Or you don’t kind of have rosy blinders on and you’re oblivious to the fact that we live on an imperfect planet, you know what I mean?

Brian: Absolutely. Boy, that’s great stuff.

You touched briefly your company Feedstories, why don’t you tell us more about what that is and how it came about.

Bob: So that’s interesting, that period between like 2010 and 2013, I was doing a lot of things to kind of find my way again. After you kind of lose an agency, you know, I was just kind of freelancing.

I hosted a radio show for a number of years, doing kind of what you and I are doing right now, which is great, got to meet a lot of new people help other people write books.

But 2013, I got heavily involved in Facebook.

Facebook started to become a media that advertisers could take seriously.

I got my first five clients and one of them just went into the stratosphere. It was a clothing brand. In fact, it was a headband company and it just took off.

One of the best things I did with that client early on was I said, you’ve got a headband, you know, it’s a $15 headband. I said, anyone can knock this off, but they can’t knock off your story.

I said, we’re gonna build your whole advertising and your whole kind of foundation based on your story. And your story is what’s going to sell the headbands.

And I was right.

I was really glad I was right. But I knew kinda internally that would be that way. This business called Bolder Brands Headbands, they won Shopify retailer of the Year in 2014. Driven by Facebook sales, like 99% of their sales came from Facebook.

Facebook, recognize that and said, Hey, Bob, we’re having this meeting with some other big brands want you to come in, we’re going to kind of brainstorm. I had a chance over a number of years to meet with Facebook.

But in 2016, in particular, I went to this meeting and all they talked about was video, Facebook said we’re a video company now Instagram, who’s owned by Facebook says we’re a video company now.

I’m like, okay, this is my like, I’m looking ahead toward the future.

And I went outside of the meeting was in the sidewalk outside of Facebook headquarters in Austin, Texas. I called Brandon, who’s my business partner for Feedstories.

Brian is a creative guy, he’s a copywriter, he’s a video graphic guy.

I said, we really need to be prepared for this because Facebook and Instagram are changing who they are. And video is going to be like the thing that they are emphasizing the most.

We started that company, literally a conversation over the phone, came into the same city kind of put this thing together and started Feedstories in late 2016.

And we kind of felt for years, we were ahead of the curve. We did a lot of video for companies but it wasn’t kind of people’s number one concern, COVID was really the catalyst for us where people were like, suddenly realized how important video was.

But we’ve prepared for that.

That’s how Feedstories was formed. It was literally what I heard Facebook and Instagram telling me that they were going to prioritize.

And so if I’m going to continue to be a really good Facebook advertiser, I need to have really good video creative. And why not create a company that produces the creative that I know is going to work in the Facebook ad. That’s how that company was born.

And we’re going strong here in 2021 so far.

For full conversations, go to BJP chats.com.

Holidays & Pandemics 🌴😲

Posted on by brianjpombo

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Amazon-Proof Your Business➡️ https://brianjpombo.com/amazonbook/

Transcription

Holidays and pandemics.

Hi, I’m Brian Pombo. Welcome back to Brian J Pombo Live.

I have this stupid fascination with puppets ever since I was a kid. And so I had to bring out because I’m recording this Halloween night, and had to bring out two of my favorites here.

The skull that I’ve had sitting up here, nearly all month for the celebration of Halloween. And I like holidays, because there are lots of fun.

But really, how do you handle both holidays and pandemics?

How do you handle these situations?

I’m going to talk about some scenarios that I came through today that can be helpful to your business.

Welcome to Brian J. Pombo Live, we do this on a daily basis where we get together and discuss business concepts, sometimes life concepts that have a little bit to do with business. Because business is nothing more than than idea of how to handle life better, or how to handle life better for yourself and for others. But today, I want to talk about how Halloween and pandemics affect you.

Halloween in just specifically because that’s what we’re going through. But if even regardless of the holiday, you got to think about holidays.

First and foremost, when it comes to business.

What is the benefit of holidays?

The benefit of holidays, is that a majority of everyone out there is thinking about the same thing at the same time. This is not always the case.

Okay, it’s also the case with pandemics.

But we’ll get to that in a second.

With holidays, everyone is thinking the same thing. For the most part, they’re thinking in different ways. But they’re all thinking, Oh, it’s Halloween today. You know, it’s October 31.

Everyone’s thinking, Oh yeah, that’s right, it’s Halloween. And when they see anyone dressed up, they’re like, Oh, that’s because it’s Halloween.

And it’s instant because the toughest thing is getting some exposure and getting the conversation going. You’ve got to start with the conversation that’s always going on, already going on in your customers head, something that Robert Collier spoke about, over 100 years ago, or nearly 100 years ago.

And that’s what the name of the game is, the better you can get to what the conversation that’s already going on, you can play along with it. Then you have an end you have, you have a way to be able to start talking with that person, just like if you were in a party of some sort, or some type of mixer, and you went up and start talking to someone, if you knew what they were already thinking about.

You’d have an automatic in with them. And all of a sudden, they’re gonna start noticing you start talking with you Just because you’re talking about something that’s already going on up here. Regardless of what that is.

So holidays are a great way to be able to do that just as a way to be able to start the conversation.

Hey, it’s Halloween, just like I just did. It’s Halloween, this is what’s going on. And you take it from there.

How do you get that to fit into where you want to take it, that’s a whole nother thing. That’s a great thing about holidays really, really helpful for business, especially when having a conversation.

And that doesn’t matter if it’s a potential customer. Or if it’s a current customer that you need to let them know about something. Or if it’s someone that used to be a customer that you need to get their attention back again.

It’s the same thing, no matter what you have to get in to their head on where they’re at, you have to meet them where they’re at, instead of trying to automatically pull them out of wherever they are, and get them to start thinking about what you want them to think about.

You got to start where they are, that’s the quickest way to be able to start a conversation with somebody. Now, let’s talk about pandemics because I got to see something here in town that I’ve never seen before, because we’ve never been through something like we’ve been through in the year of 2020. So even if you’re watching this years in the future, and you’ll remember or you’ll have heard about when in 2020, we had the COVID-19 crisis, and everything kind of turned upside down for a bit and everything got closed down.

No one really knew how to do the things that they’ve been doing for years and years and years in a new way. Or in a way that would be politically correct or in a way that would be sensitive to people’s desires and so forth.

And so you saw a very different type of thing. People did not know how to trick or treat, because the governor of Oregon, that’s where we’re at. We’re here in Grants Pass Oregon, the governor of Oregon basically came out and said there is going to be no trick or treating.

Now, does she have any legal authority to actually do that?

It doesn’t matter, because she did it. And so then people have to decide, okay, well, how do we deal with this because it’s being considered that kids aren’t going to go door to door and get treats like they normally do.

Now I think people still did. And the funny thing that was that was really interesting to me. It was all a clever ideas that people came up with to make up for the lack of trick or treating because kids still want to dress up and they still want to go out and get candy.

So how do we go about switching that to something else?

How do we make it something else?

One of the things that I saw straight off the bat that I thought was a great idea was having a drive thru. And so that there’s a, there’s a shopping center here locally that my, that actually our property management company runs it.

And my wife is the main one in charge there.

She had been she’s been in charge for years and years of this property management group.

And so she came up with the idea of what if we had cars come through?

Well, normally every year, they invite the whole town out in the middle of the day, usually the Saturday leading up to Halloween, but this Saturday was Halloween.

So had everyone come out on Halloween. And normally what they’ll do is they’ll have all the shopkeepers, all the vendors and this is an outdoor mall, it’s an outdoor shopping center, they have all the vendors come out and sit there with a bag of candy and hand out candy.

And so people are dressed up in costumes themselves and so forth. So it’s a huge event every year, I mean, a huge amount of the town comes out and walks the entire because it’s a good sized shopping center, they walk the entire shopping center, getting candy and you get you get by with doing a lot of candy.

There’s been a few years that our kids have only gone to the shopping center and gotten their candy there. So this year instead, they said, Well, why don’t we have a drive thru, where people just line up and drive through the shopping center, we’ll have one spot where we give them one bag of candy per kid in the car, and just do it that way.

Which is fine.

The kids don’t get to show off their costumes, nothing else. But at least they get their candy. And they get to feel like they did something. And it allows these businesses to have exposure, like they like they normally get every year at least to some extent not great.

But huge turnout, because people were hungry for it. They wanted some type of normalcy or something close to it. So they amazing turnout.

They had another one where a not sure what organization put it together. But somebody rented the fairgrounds, which is also here in town, the County Fairgrounds, and they rented the arena that’s normally not used for showing animals and so forth. And they set up a trunk or treat, which if you’ve ever seen that they have

the backs of pickups and cars opened up with the treats right there and someone dressed up handing things out. So he had a couple couple organizations, businesses in their hand out candy, all you did was you came through and walked around. Now it was amazing.

I mean, around this area, not a whole lot of people wearing masks, maybe a quarter of the people wearing masks, and definitely not a whole lot of social distancing going on.

So it’s something you got to keep in mind when doing something like this. But amazing turnout, just outrageous turnout, tons.

I mean, my kids got more candy there than from anywhere else, they didn’t have to make too many stops.

So there’s a lot of ways to be able to adapt to fit a situation, you got to get creative.

You got to think outside the box, you got to think of what people want and what can you realistically give them in a situation where your hands are tied.

There’s not a whole lot that you can do the same. So how do you get around that you got to think around the box. But don’t ignore the holidays.

If you want to get out there and put out a commercial or you want to put out a message and get people talking at least acknowledge the fact that there’s a holiday and that’s that’s what they’re thinking about.

And you could acknowledge it and set it aside. You say hey, Happy Halloween, I know I’m not wearing anything. but I know you’re going to be out trick or treating.

Hey, before you do that, let me remind you one thing and you go into what you’re what you’re wanting to tell them. Just a quick, that’s just a quick tip.

There’s a lot of other things that you can do to really stand out against the competition, whether they’re directly industrial competition, people in your industry competing against you, or everybody else that’s competing for everyone’s attention nowadays.

Go check out my book, 9 Ways To Amazon-Proof Your Business that’s a way to stand out in ways that no one else is doing. And in some cases like Amazon.com they can’t they can’t stand out in these nine ways. Go check it out at AmazonProofBook.com.

That’s AmazonProofBook.com.

You get a free copy there and you get a discount copy if you want a hard copy of it too.

So you have a great night. We’ll be back here tomorrow. Get out there and let the magic happen.

Embrace Transition

Posted on by brianjpombo

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Brian discusses a conversation he had recently with a small business owner that is in transition because of the pandemic.

Amazon-Proof Your Business➡️ https://brianjpombo.com/amazonbook/

Transcription

Embrace transition.

Hi, I’m Brian pombo, welcome back to Brian J Pombo Live.

I had a conversation with somebody today that she’s going to be a guest on an upcoming podcast. And so I’ll review it again with you once it’s available. But she mentioned about being in transition right now.

Specifically being in transition career wise, not really knowing where to go, being that what she normally did was really abruptly you know, stopped by the whole COVID situation and everything. And I think this is across the board people are dealing with this I we were talking about last night, about like that this is a really good time to expand if at all, if you know where you’re going.

If you don’t know where you’re going.

Let’s go a little bit deeper into that. If you’re at a point where you know you have to keep going but you’re not sure where to go Next, the first thing you really have to do is is to embrace the transition itself. Embrace the fact that this is good, this is a good thing that you’re going in a good direction, that you’re going to find something that you weren’t expecting that you and it’s going to take you in a completely different way.

If you think back on your life, and all the sharp turns that you’ve made. And think of everything that’s led you to where you are now and all the great things that you’ve gotten from that, I think you’ll find that it’s pretty useful.

So if I think back all the way back 20 years ago, whenever I’m in one of these spots, and I’ve talked about these things in the past, I know just within the last week I talked about a point I was at in 2012 when I just needed something different to come and change and switch things up and it did.

And in 2020 something very similar. Excuse me in two thousand, something very similar happened. So I had moved out to Chico, California.

I was looking to I had this big ol massive plan that was based on a whole team of people that I was working with. The plan fell apart because nobody on that team follow through except for me. And so I found myself in Chico, California, where I didn’t want to be. I had no reason to be in Chico than I could see.

It was it was one of those things where I was going to school, I was working, I had everything taken care of. I didn’t know anybody, besides a couple of people that I moved in with that one person I knew a little well, his name was Chris, the other person I didn’t know at all. And so I got to know them a little bit, but they had their own lives going and everything else.

And so I’m in a town I didn’t I didn’t know anybody. I knew I had no idea why I was there. It looked like all my plans had completely fallen apart and probably would never come back together again. And they didn’t. But it was all for a good reason.

And something came directly to me and landed in my lap. I was a complete stranger met me at my place of work, which at the time was Barnes and Noble. So I was working both swapping coffee most of the time I was working behind the counter of the of the cafe there, where you oftentimes you’d see you know, Starbucks or something like that.

Well, we serve Starbucks coffee there.

That was my main place and every once a while, I’d be out on the floor and be doing stuff on the with the books while this particular day I happen to be out on the floor. a complete stranger came out to be looking for a certain book. We started talking and chatting. That conversation took me in a direction of my life that I could not have ever chosen for myself. For myself, it just happened. And it put me in a place to where everything in my life right now would not have happened.

Although all the best things in my life especially would not have happened, had I not accepted the fact that transition was coming and was ready when it came. I because I kept saying to myself, well, what if what if this goes somewhere? What if something like what if, what if this, something happens here?

And I met that gentleman, that gentleman introduced me, someone else who introduced me to someone else. And that whole situation change by life is something but you can’t guess it.

You just have to be ready for it. And it starts with saying with the big question, okay, what now?

What next?

Where do I go from here?

When someone tosses something in front of you, that seems like it might be right work, work with it. Follow the lead, see where it goes. like a like a detective trying to sniff out clues, follow the lead and see what happens. Because in my situation I, it’s so many of the major turns of my life. That’s how it happened.

And if you’re in that spot will suggest you just be open, be open to the next step. Don’t try and plan it, don’t try and you can try and guess what it will be, but you probably won’t have it right? If you’re if your lives anything like mine.

Hopefully that’s helpful to you. It’s something you probably already know, but maybe having somebody repeat it back to you is, is probably a little bit of help. I know it would be for me if I were in that situation. So also grab my book, go to AmazonProofBook.com.

It might help you to help kind of guide you in a certain direction. I have no specific direction that I’m taking you in. It’s there to help help feed something that you already have going.

So hopefully that would make a difference. too It’s a free you get a free copy AmazonProofBook.com we’ll be back here tomorrow night. Come on back.

We’ll we’ll keep the conversation going. If you have any questions, leave a comment. Send a message to me over at BrianJPombo.com you have a great night. We’ll be back tomorrow. Get out there and just let the magic happen.