Journey to $100 Million: Entrepreneurship & Digital Marketing

A few days ago, Erik was in several internal meetings that he held back-to-back-to-back. Seems like a large chunk of time to be spending in meetings, right? And yea, it does kinda suck when you’re in back-to-back meetings but when you make your meetings incredibly targeted and all at one point in the day, you get it out of the way.

We used to have much longer meetings but Erik put a stop to that saying that internal meetings should be limited to 30 minutes. Get in, get out, and get onto something else.

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Erik J. Olson is an award-winning digital marketer & entrepreneur. The Founder & CEO of Array Digital, he is also the host of the Journey to $100 Million Flash Briefing and daily podcast, and the organizer of the Marketers Anonymous monthly meetups.

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Kevin Daisey is an award-winning digital marketer & entrepreneur. He started his first company when he was just 23, and is the Founder & CMO of Array Digital. Kevin is also the co-host of the Journey to $100 Million Flash Briefing and daily podcast, and the co-organizer of the Marketers Anonymous monthly meetups.

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For more information on the show, and to check out past episodes, go to journeyto100million.com!

Kevin set a goal to make it to the gym 180 days this year. He's been going to the gym regularly for a while now, but he's been averaging about three days a week. To make it to the gym 180 days this year he has to go to the gym about 15 days out of the month or four days a week. That's really only one more day than he is so used to doing, but when it comes to going to the gym it is a big commitment. Often things come up, sometimes he'll get sick, so four days a week might not always be feasible. He can plan for that by going every day after a week where he wasn't able to make it all four days.

Staying in shape is important to Kevin. He's noticed a change in the muscle he's been able to put on and he's been feeling great. Next year he plans on increasing the goal but for now he's happy with the goal he set for himself.

Think about your goals and how you can track them on a weekly or monthly basis. Tracking makes it much more likely that you will reach them in the end.

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Erik J. Olson is an award-winning digital marketer & entrepreneur. The Founder & CEO of Array Digital, he is also the host of the Journey to $100 Million Flash Briefing and daily podcast, and the organizer of the Marketers Anonymous monthly meetups.

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Kevin Daisey is an award-winning digital marketer & entrepreneur. He started his first company when he was just 23, and is the Founder & CMO of Array Digital. Kevin is also the co-host of the Journey to $100 Million Flash Briefing and daily podcast, and the co-organizer of the Marketers Anonymous monthly meetups.

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For more information on the show, and to check out past episodes, go to journeyto100million.com!

One of Erik's New Year's resolutions for 2020 is to kick ass at a Half Ironman. A half Ironman consists of swimming 1.2 miles, biking for 56 miles, and running 13 miles. It's a lot of activity.

Erik started training for this at the beginning of 2020. He realized he needed the guidance of a coach in order to do really well. He debated between hiring a coach to work with him one-on-one or buying a program written by an Ironman training coach. He decided to go with the written training program. This will be his guide to doing his absolute best at the event.

Like training for an Ironman, when it comes to business endeavors it is important to learn from others who have done what you’re trying to do. Erik and Kevin receive coaching by way of a business consultant that evaluates the business operations on a regular basis. They also belong to a mastermind program that is made up of other agency owners, and Erik belongs to a professional organization made up of business owners that make $1million dollars a year in revenue. They use these consultants and fellow business owners as coaches to help them achieve their business goals.

Grit and determination will only get you so far. Coaching from others who have succeeded at what you're trying to do will save you time and money in reaching your goals.

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Erik J. Olson is an award-winning digital marketer & entrepreneur. The Founder & CEO of Array Digital, he is also the host of the Journey to $100 Million Flash Briefing and daily podcast, and the organizer of the Marketers Anonymous monthly meetups.

—

Kevin Daisey is an award-winning digital marketer & entrepreneur. He started his first company when he was just 23, and is the Founder & CMO of Array Digital. Kevin is also the co-host of the Journey to $100 Million Flash Briefing and daily podcast, and the co-organizer of the Marketers Anonymous monthly meetups.

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For more information on the show, and to check out past episodes, go to journeyto100million.com!

LinkedIn is the platform that Kevin used to not pay very much attention to. It was something that he would check maybe once every couple of months and update just to keep his business profile current. But, this has changed in the last couple of years. Kevin is much more active on LinkedIn these days and it's really paid off.

Kevin believes it's important to open yourself up on LinkedIn. It's not like other social media platforms, it's full of business people waiting to connect. He suggests going into your settings and changing the privacy settings to allow all LinkedIn users to connect. Connecting is more important than following. Engage with people and connect with them. This will help you grow your audience and get more people to learn about what you do.

Kevin now has about 16,000 followers. He gets about 100 connection requests a day. As long as they are from the U.S. and they don't look like they’re trying to sell him something he accepts most of them. He himself sends out about 10 connection requests a day but he's pickier about who he requests. He actively looks for founders, business owners, or directors of marketing.

He plans to continue leveraging LinkedIn in this way as it's been a great way to get leads and referrals.

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Erik J. Olson is an award-winning digital marketer & entrepreneur. The Founder & CEO of Array Digital, he is also the host of the Journey to $100 Million Flash Briefing and daily podcast, and the organizer of the Marketers Anonymous monthly meetups.

—

Kevin Daisey is an award-winning digital marketer & entrepreneur. He started his first company when he was just 23, and is the Founder & CMO of Array Digital. Kevin is also the co-host of the Journey to $100 Million Flash Briefing and daily podcast, and the co-organizer of the Marketers Anonymous monthly meetups.

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For more information on the show, and to check out past episodes, go to journeyto100million.com!

This is Erik's first episode about the Coronavirus. That's largely because episodes are recorded in batches. We create evergreen content mostly and the impact of the Coronavirus is more like real-time news.

Last week was "shock and awe" for Erik. After holding the State of Digital Marketing Address on March 12th, the next day the Governor of Virginia closed schools and the President declared a national state of emergency. Although 200 tickets were sold, only about 120 people showed. Although the virus had not hit the Virginia Beach/Norfolk, VA, region by then, people were already scared enough to avoid public events.

Array Digital has lost a few clients that have shut down, and others have paused. So far we're doing well and Erik is fairly confident of the future of the company, but there's a lot of calls with clients and a lot panic in the business world. Financial goals for 2020 are cancelled and we're working on surviving through a mix of offense and defense. Erik feels we're going to weather this storm.

Everyone be safe. We hope the best for everyone.

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Erik J. Olson is an award-winning digital marketer & entrepreneur. The Founder & CEO of Array Digital, he is also the host of the Journey to $100 Million Flash Briefing and daily podcast, and the organizer of the Marketers Anonymous monthly meetups.

—

Kevin Daisey is an award-winning digital marketer & entrepreneur. He started his first company when he was just 23, and is the Founder & CMO of Array Digital. Kevin is also the co-host of the Journey to $100 Million Flash Briefing and daily podcast, and the co-organizer of the Marketers Anonymous monthly meetups.

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For more information on the show, and to check out past episodes, go to journeyto100million.com!

February 20 was supposed to be the date of our first paid event, the State of Digital Marketing Address and we sold out our 200 tickets. Then came the winter weather advisory that said it would start snowing at 3 pm the day of the event which started at 5:30.

Where we’re from, the moment people hear about snow, they freak out. So we were faced with a situation beyond our control and we had a big decision to make. We had to consider whether or not it would be safe for people to travel there and if they even would.

We realized it didn’t really matter what the conditions would actually be like, the damage had been done the second the media blasted out the winter weather advisory. It was all anyone could talk about so Erik had to make the decision that we’d postpone it.

It took a few days to get the new date and expectedly, a couple people dropped out and we gave them a refund which allowed us to sell those tickets at the full amount. It turned out to be a win in that regard.

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Erik J. Olson is an award-winning digital marketer & entrepreneur. The Founder & CEO of Array Digital, he is also the host of the Journey to $100 Million Flash Briefing and daily podcast, and the organizer of the Marketers Anonymous monthly meetups.

—

Kevin Daisey is an award-winning digital marketer & entrepreneur. He started his first company when he was just 23, and is the Founder & CMO of Array Digital. Kevin is also the co-host of the Journey to $100 Million Flash Briefing and daily podcast, and the co-organizer of the Marketers Anonymous monthly meetups.

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For more information on the show, and to check out past episodes, go to journeyto100million.com!

Kevin has put together a list of goals for 2020 and today he focuses on 1 of them: joining an advisory board group. He’s looked into Mastermind groups and he and Erik joined one for digital marketing agencies.

You might say, aren’t those your competitors? And while there may be a chance of running into them, they are business owners across the country and around the world. Kevin and Erik were placed in a group that makes between $3-$20 million group even though we are at $2 million.

These guys know exactly what we’re doing because they’ve done it before. They’re going to leverage this group and take advantage of every opportunity offered.

Look for a Mastermind in your own industry and you should be doing the same.

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Erik J. Olson is an award-winning digital marketer & entrepreneur. The Founder & CEO of Array Digital, he is also the host of the Journey to $100 Million Flash Briefing and daily podcast, and the organizer of the Marketers Anonymous monthly meetups.

—

Kevin Daisey is an award-winning digital marketer & entrepreneur. He started his first company when he was just 23, and is the Founder & CMO of Array Digital. Kevin is also the co-host of the Journey to $100 Million Flash Briefing and daily podcast, and the co-organizer of the Marketers Anonymous monthly meetups.

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For more information on the show, and to check out past episodes, go to journeyto100million.com!

Earlier this year Array Digital started doing lunchtime live streams at noon every Friday. We started by just doing them on Facebook and we have since added them to Twitter and YouTube. The live streams focus on what's going on in marketing and sometimes we talk about events we have coming up like our monthly Marketers Anonymous meetings and the recent State of Digital Marketing Address we just had.

It’s important to get the attention of your potential clients on social media and going live is a great way to do that. In fact going live is expected to be a big trend in marketing for 2020. Consumers like to see others going live. It's entertaining and a fun way to consume content. Livestreams are often unscripted and offer the consumer a glimpse as to what that person or business is really like. It's a much different feeling than a polished, put together social presence and people like that.

If you've never gone live you should consider it. It's easy. You can go live on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok and others. You can watch our live streams on thisisarray.live or follow us on Facebook at @thisisarray to get notifications.

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Erik J. Olson is an award-winning digital marketer & entrepreneur. The Founder & CEO of Array Digital, he is also the host of the Journey to $100 Million Flash Briefing and daily podcast, and the organizer of the Marketers Anonymous monthly meetups.

—

Kevin Daisey is an award-winning digital marketer & entrepreneur. He started his first company when he was just 23, and is the Founder & CMO of Array Digital. Kevin is also the co-host of the Journey to $100 Million Flash Briefing and daily podcast, and the co-organizer of the Marketers Anonymous monthly meetups.

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For more information on the show, and to check out past episodes, go to journeyto100million.com!

Kevin recently read a book called “Creating a Story Brand” and he thought it was a pretty good read. He then started doing research on taglines and brand statements. He concluded that the brand positioning statement sets the tone for a brand and everything stems from that.

A brand positioning statement is made up of four parts:

- The target (the customer)

- The category (the industry you’re in)

- The differentiator (what sets you apart from the competition)

- The payoff (the benefit to your customer from working with you)

After analyzing our target audience and goals, Kevin came to the conclusion that Array Digital’s could be broken down into the following:

- Target - companies

- Category - marketing

- Differentiator - bold

- Payoff - aggressive growth

He went through some exercises and came up with our new brand positioning statement. After trimming down the sentence he came up with the following:

“Bold marketing for aggressive growth.”

This is our new tagline and we’re starting to use it everywhere.

If you haven't come up with a brand positioning statement for your company you should give it some thought. Look up what a brand positioning statement is and start thinking about how you stand out from the competition.

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Erik J. Olson is an award-winning digital marketer & entrepreneur. The Founder & CEO of Array Digital, he is also the host of the Journey to $100 Million Flash Briefing and daily podcast, and the organizer of the Marketers Anonymous monthly meetups.

—

Kevin Daisey is an award-winning digital marketer & entrepreneur. He started his first company when he was just 23, and is the Founder & CMO of Array Digital. Kevin is also the co-host of the Journey to $100 Million Flash Briefing and daily podcast, and the co-organizer of the Marketers Anonymous monthly meetups.

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For more information on the show, and to check out past episodes, go to journeyto100million.com!

One thing Erik likes to do every year is set New Year's resolutions. It's something he's always done but just recently, in the last two to three years, he has taken it more seriously. The difference now is when he makes a resolution it's something that he really intends on keeping. In the past that wasn't always the case.

At the time of this recording it is the beginning of March. Erik has spoken to people and asked them about their New Year's resolutions and found that many of them don't even remember what they were. Likewise, at the beginning of the year, when he would ask people what their resolutions were, they would chuckle and tell him their resolution, but it was almost as if they didn't believe it themselves.

Erik believes that if you say you're going to do something you should do it. You shouldn't lie to yourself. There really isn't a point in setting goals you don't intend on keeping. So get serious about your goals, make a plan to reach them, remind yourself why you set them when you don't feel like doing the work, then crush them!

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Erik J. Olson is an award-winning digital marketer & entrepreneur. The Founder & CEO of Array Digital, he is also the host of the Journey to $100 Million Flash Briefing and daily podcast, and the organizer of the Marketers Anonymous monthly meetups.

—

Kevin Daisey is an award-winning digital marketer & entrepreneur. He started his first company when he was just 23, and is the Founder & CMO of Array Digital. Kevin is also the co-host of the Journey to $100 Million Flash Briefing and daily podcast, and the co-organizer of the Marketers Anonymous monthly meetups.

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For more information on the show, and to check out past episodes, go to journeyto100million.com!