In this episode, Teri welcomes Jen Lehner, a leading digital marketing strategist and founder of Jen Lehner Media, LLC.
Welcome Jen Lehner!
- Jen is also an adjunct professor of digital marketing and Entrepreneur in Residence at Notre Dame College. She creates online courses (online courses, group training courses online, and one on one coaching sessions) on social media and online business, and runs a podcast called The Front Row Entrepreneur. She is a mother of 3 kids and a Golden Retriever.
Getting into Social Media Marketing
- She stumbled into it. Was always interested in the social aspect of technology that brings people together.
- Social media has had an impact on her life in different ways.
- Left her career in the non-profit world to be a stay at home mom but always kept track of social technologies like eBay, Amazon, and others.
- She was always the parent in the classroom who did the newsletters, digital newsletters and websites. She noticed that most people weren’t conversant with these technologies so she started using her expertise to help them grow their businesses. This became a huge success and people started hiring her to do the same.
Getting into Voice
- When Amazon released the first Alexa device, she bought it. When she discovered what it could do, she created her own flash briefing right away and it had greatly impacted her life and business.
- She delivers news updates in the world of online marketing and social media.
- She used to do it once a week until she realized people listen to them every day so she started doing them every day.
- She would give a short delivery of the news and then tell people how they could incorporate flash briefings into their business.
- The flash briefing has become a leader in the reporting of news on online marketing and social media.
Flash Briefings
- She doesn’t feel they are social in the immediate gratification way that social media is but it is an indirect way that people can interact with her.
- She gives different calls to action on her flash briefings and the response on social media has been overwhelming. In one of the calls to action she invites people to join her free online classroom on Facebook and she gets dozens of people who come in every day and they all say that they learnt about the Facebook group on her flash briefing.
- Flash briefings are habitual. People are telling her that they are listening to her briefing every day while they do their daily tasks.
- People need to get into flash briefings now because a year from now the market will probably be too saturated.
Challenges with the flash briefing
- She is constantly wondering whether she is utilizing everything that she could be utilizing. She has to stay on top of the developments in voice technology. Amazon doesn’t usually announce new stuff they add to the developer dashboard so one has to keep checking to keep up.
Flash Briefing Tips
- Most flash briefings in the market currently are not being done well.
- A flash briefing has to be well branded with uniform colors, a recognizable logo and recognizable sound clips (intro and outro music).
- Each briefing should give just one call to action and it doesn’t have to be the same every time. It can be as similar as “Send me a tweet”, “Find me Facebook” or “Send me an email if you have a comment or a question”
- It should be kept brief and one has to modulate their voice.
- Another tip is to smile while you are talking because even though nobody can hear you, they can hear your smile.
- One has to put in keywords when setting up their flash briefing. Putting in relevant keywords increases the flash briefings listener base. You have to resubmit your flash briefing to Amazon for certification every time you change keywords.
Flash Briefing Discoverability
- Make sure you put a link to the flash briefing in your email signature and social media posts. Mention it regularly on Twitter and put a short Bitly link to it on your business card.
- Jen takes the audio from each briefing, uploads it to the Headliner app and it turns it into an audiogram (an mp4 with the logo and an audio sound/wave bar that rises and falls to the sound of your voice) which she then sends to her social media platforms so those who don’t listen to her via Alexa can listen to her there. She also sends it through her messenger bot and people can subscribe to her flash briefing through the messenger bot.
- Her reviews are also helping people find the flash briefing more. She always requests people to leave her reviews.
List of resources mentioned in this episode:
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