What is KLT Authority - KLTA S1E9

Welcome back to another episode of the KLT Authority podcast. My name is Shannon and today we're going to be talking about what is KLT Authority and how can you use it to grow your business. Today, our podcast is brought to you by Standing Stronger Productions. Standing Stronger Productions is your full service marketing agency that helps you build your brand and business online and now even offline. They're excited to announce that they are now creating custom stickers, banners, decals and window signs. Visit standingstrongerproductions.com or for your custom stickers, s2stickers.com. All right, let's get into the show.

A lot of people always ask me, what is KLT Authority and how can I use it to grow my business? So that's what we're going to talk about today and to be completely honest, KLT Authority is a very, very simple concept, but a very, very powerful concept. And it's a concept that's been around forever. You've most likely heard of it and you've probably been trained in it if you've done any type of sales or marketing in your life. So KLT Authority simply means know, like and trust authority. People do business with people that they know, like and trust. We've heard that over and over, especially if you're in your 40s, late 30s, 50s or more. You heard that a lot growing up.

People do business that they know, like and trust. And I think probably even the younger generation has talked about it or heard of it as well. But with social, I think we've lost a little bit of that. But the crazy thing is it's more true now than it ever has been because getting that know, like and trust factor online is easier than it was back in the day when you had to do everything in person. Someone didn't know you unless they personally met you. Now you can leverage the power of the Internet to actually introduce yourself to hundreds of people at a time, thousands of people at a time. Some cases, tens of thousands of people at a time.

So it's one of those things where you can get your name out, you can get out there and you can get exposure to vast amounts of people in a very limited amount of time. Now, the younger generation, they've nailed this. I've been talking about this for over 10 years, about how the way we do business is revolutionized, revolutionizing with the Internet, that things are going to be different. I was talking about video 10, 12, 13 years ago and how you needed to embrace it. I was talking about the Internet when people told me that the Internet was a fad, that I needed to get a real job, that I needed to stop living in the clouds and in these dreams.

So when it comes to the Internet and what the Internet can do, I've been doing it for a long time and I've seen every single little iteration of it, how it's ebbed and how it's flowed and how it's grown and how it's gone backwards and how it's come back again and how you can really, really reach a lot of people. Obviously today, that's obvious. Everyone knows it, but it wasn't always like that. But what we've lost in that is the personal aspect. Everyone wants followers. Everyone wants likes. Everyone wants views. But we forget behind every single one of those views, behind every single one of those numbers on a follower count is a human being.

Every single one of those likes or dislikes or hearts or arguments or whatever it is, is a human on the other side of that screen, on the other side of that keyboard. So it is up to us as business owners, as brands, as personalities, influencers now, which is crazy that that's actually a common term nowadays. You ask kids what they want to be. They want to be YouTubers. When I first started uploading YouTube videos in 2007, people thought I was nuts. My mom used to tell everyone, oh, he just plays around on the Internet. But getting out there and actually creating that human interaction is very possible. But how do we do it? Well, one of the biggest ways we do it is with video.

And now that we can do short form content, it makes doing video that much easier. Doing audio like it is now, there's nothing more personal than being in someone's ears for 20, 30, 45 minutes at a time where they hear your voice. They hear the inflection. They hear the passion behind what you're talking about. That helps build relationships, all of it. So I'm going to go through some of that stuff today, how you can use it, what it looks like and all that good stuff. So I put together a couple, you know, a list of how you can build your authority online and use the KLT authority system quickly and easily.

So we're going to give you some action steps today, some actionable content that you can actually take out and start using. So number one, virtual networking, you know, that's simply posting and interacting with other social accounts. It's what you do or don't do right now with your business accounts and, you know, getting out there doing live videos, doing videos, doing, you know, short form posts. LinkedIn is huge right now. TikTok, obviously huge. And I'm going to get a little bit more into virtual networking as we go on, but I really want to just say, hey, you know, you should be doing this.

I'm going to show you exactly, not exactly, but I'm going to give you some really good tips on how to do it here in a few minutes. But I want to talk about these next couple things you can do to build your authority online because they're actually really, really important and they're actually easy to get done and accomplished. So number one is reviews. You need reviews online and you need them probably more than anything. People actually go out and they look at reviews to make buying decisions and that's locally as well. You think, oh, I'm a local pizza shop. I don't need it. I'm a local, you know, nail salon. I don't need them. People are just walking in through my door.

People are doing searches trying to find those places every single day and you're missing out. If you have one, two, three, five reviews online, you have one review and it's negative. You have five reviews and three of them are bad. You need to focus on bringing up that average review score, especially on Google because they make a difference. And not only that is it helps you with your results where you show up online. You have what's called the Google My Business. Well, actually, it's called Google Business Profile now and the Google Business Profile, in my opinion, is the number one asset that any local business has.

It's going to drive more paid results like revenue results than your website or any of your other social media channels. It's going to drive calls to your business where people are looking exactly for your business. So it's easy to create to convert those customers or those phone calls into customers. So it's something that you need to focus on and reviews across the board. So Google, Facebook, if you're in that type of niche, oh, and like Zillow, doctor reviews, those things all very, very important. So you want to make sure that you're focusing on that. Number three is you need to make your presence known. So a little bit back on virtual networking.

A lot of people are like, I don't post on social because it doesn't work. It doesn't drive any business. It's a waste of time. I don't have time for it. I just don't want to do it. Listen, I'm telling you, social drives, drives a ton of traffic to your business. However, it does it indirectly. So what do I mean by indirectly? A lot of people are going onto the internet and they're looking at businesses and what these businesses do. They're looking at their entire profile across the web. So not only are they looking at your website, they're looking at your reviews on Google. They're looking at your Facebook.

They're trying to see if you have an Instagram, if you have a TikTok, and they're making a judgment call based on all of that information on whether they want to do business with you or if you're even a real business. Because there's a lot of scams out there right now. People know that there's a lot of scams right now. And if they're looking for something that they trust, know, like and trust. They want to know you, like you and trust you. That's the point of it all. They want to be able to find you. They want to be able to find a strong presence. And they're going to look at all of those things and they're going to make a judgment call.

Number one, is this a business I want to do business with? Number two, is this a business that knows what they're doing? Number three, is this actually a real business? All of those things are looking at and social helps prove those things. Now, this is where most people get it wrong and they post their ads. They post their products and only those types of things on your social. Your social needs to be used to build credibility and brand recognition, not by posting your sales and ads and sales pitches. And that's it.

You need components in there that introduce the person to your company, that introduce the potential client or customer to your brand, that introduce them to you as the owners and to the employees and the type of people that they can expect there, the smiles. All of those things, it matters and it does drive business. It just does it indirectly. And on top of that is it helps you with your rankings and search engines. You know, Google and all the other major search engines look at social signals for whether you are a reliable and trustworthy business or if you're a real business.

That's extremely important for the search engines because everyone's out there trying to gain the search engines, trying to, you know, they call it black hat to create out of thin air. So social signals is one of those, and it works extremely well. A lot of people don't talk about it enough, and to me, and I tell this to all my clients, and if you're our client and you're listening to this, you know, I tell you social is important, mostly, mostly for the social signals. And a lot of agencies just don't realize that. We've tracked it for a very long time, and social signals have a larger percentage of weight than most people actually think that it does.

So that's why you need to focus on social. And then you need a good website, a good website that is aimed at converting customers or converting your leads into actual customers. So my view on websites have changed over the years. I first thought you needed a website to get the customer. I then moved for years to the fact that website isn't that important as long as it's functional and serves the purpose of pushing you up in the rankings, not organically, especially for local businesses. I'm talking about local businesses right now. Not organically, but locally.

The website's goal should be to push your maps listing or Google profile listing higher in the search engines because still, it's true, the Google business profile is going to give you better results for local businesses than your actual websites. So as long as you have the appropriate content on the website, it worked well. Now, my position has changed once again because I learn as we go, and as times change, we change with the times.

So not only do you need a website that has all the correct information on it, the type of information that helps the customers make a better buying decision, you now need to locally focus more on the conversions and the conversion optimization aspect of it because it's actually people are going to websites more and more and more. And it's not like they didn't before. But websites didn't convert as well locally as they are doing now. So it's one of those things where before I would talk about mostly education. We need to educate the customer on the website and get the appropriate content so that it moves up your local businesses.

Now we need to educate the content, all of those things that we used to do, but we put a major, major focus on helping you turn those customers into leads on the website as well instead of just getting them off the website and to call you and to get them into your local business. So those are some things that you can do to start using KLT Authority, but the most important thing with KLT Authority is this. You need to educate your customer. Educate your customer on what you do, how you do it, and I'm actually an advocate just like I am right now is teaching your customer how to do exactly what you do, if that's possible.

I mean, obviously, if you're a doctor, you know, professional, things of that nature, it's kind of hard to teach a customer how to do a heart transplant. But I don't think, if they're getting a heart transplant, they're probably not searching on that on Google. But you need to educate them, let them know what you're doing. The pressure washing, great example. You know, teach someone how to pressure wash their driveway. People aren't hiring you as a pressure washer because they can't pressure wash their driveway. They're hiring you because they don't want to, or they don't want to purchase the equipment to do it.

But you teaching them how to do it goes a long way to demonstrate to them that you are the authority and you know exactly what you're doing and the result is going to be a good result. That's how I look at it. And with us, we teach people how to build websites. We teach people how to use social. We teach people how to do all of the things we do. Why? Because there's going to be a percentage of people that will never hire you, ever. They're not going to hire anyone. They're going to do it all themselves. Why not get a little bit of goodwill with those people? And while you do that, the people that are hiring you are going, a lot of these people are going to do initial research.

They're going to think, I could probably do this. They're going to get into the process. They're going to realize, you know what, this is way too much work. My time is better spent somewhere else. I want to hire someone to do it. What if they've seen you two or three times throughout that process? And all of a sudden they go from, you know what, I'm not going to do it. But that one dude I was learning from, he's actually near me. I'm going to use him. Or in our case, you know what, I'm not going to build this website. I'm not going to do this optimization. I'm not going to print my own stuff. Why don't I hire Staying Stronger Productions for building my website?

Why don't I hire them to help manage our ads? Why don't I help them or hire them to build our branding, to get more reviews, to do all the things that I don't want to do? So we get goodwill across the board. We're helping people. We're helping people that potentially didn't want to use us, but now are going to use us. We're building our authority. People know us, they like us, and they trust us. Why? Because we're out there freely giving them valuable information that they can take action on right now. Some of them will, and they'll never call you. Some of them may call you.

And some of them will absolutely call you because they want to work with someone that they know is an authority who is going to know what they're doing, and they're going to want to work with the best. And this is the greatest part about know, like, and trust authority, KLT authority, is we do not compete on price. We let our competitors compete on price. We don't need to worry about that because we're the authority, and we're working with the people that want the best. And the people that want the best, guess what? They are willing to pay for the best. They're not worried if you're the cheapest.

They're worried about if you are going to be able to do the job and do the job better than pretty much everyone else out there. That's why Apple's a great example of that. Their prices, most of the time, are more expensive than everyone else's. You can get a cheaper phone. You can get a cheaper computer. You can get cheaper AirPods or tablets. But why do you go with Apple? Because they are the best. Some of you might look at me and go, no, they're not. It doesn't matter that you don't think they're the best. The brand stands for the best. That's how they've positioned themselves. Not everyone's going to think you're the best, but you position yourself as the leader. Guess what?

You're going to be the leader. And as a leader, you don't need to compete on price. You just need to produce an amazing product. And if you're listening to this and you're trying to get to where I'm helping you go, most likely you're producing an amazing product. And guess what? If you're not, if you're not, those reviews are going to reflect that. The KLT authority is going to reflect that. And people aren't going to like you. They're not going to trust you. They're not going to want to do business with you because the product isn't up to snuff. And that's going to show. So that's what KLT authority is about.

It's about getting out there, educating your customer, introducing yourself to your customer, demonstrating that you are an authority figure and that they can trust you by giving them a ton of positive reviews and doing an awesome job on every job that you do by making sure the customer comes first and that you're out there under promising and over delivering. So anyway, like I said, if you want more, visit kltauthority.com. That's kltauthority.com. That's where you can listen to all of our podcasts. And again, thank you for our sponsors, who happens to be our company, standingstrongerproductions.com. That's standingstrongerproductions.com.

If you need custom printed stickers, banners, decals, or window signs, go ahead and head over to S2 stickers. That's S, the number two, stickers.com. Thanks, have a fantastic day. And as always, hopefully we'll see you on the beaches of the world.