Digital Essentials: What Belongs In Your Digital Marketing Starting Lineup

NOTE: This blog is a transcript from a podcast and therefore may contain errors.

Shannon Allen: Welcome to Digital Marketing ROWhy? I’m your host, Shannon Allen, here with my co-host, Krystal. How are you today, Krystal?

Krystal Vivian: I’m doing great, Shannon. It’s been a busy, productive week, but the weather is really nice and life is good, so I’m feeling pretty good today.

Shannon Allen: And we’ve both got our matching Owalas. You’ve got hot pink with some yellow. Mine is almost all pink.

Krystal Vivian: Mine is five years old.

Shannon Allen: I ordered mine this summer. I actually just cleaned it out and used it. I’ve had it for about a month.

Krystal Vivian: Oh, my gosh. Don’t you love it?

Shannon Allen: I do. It took me a minute, because I have a cheapo I bought at Marshalls, and I had to get used to it. It’s so easy, the straw part of this. But it’s hard to believe it’s the end of August.

Krystal Vivian: It is.

Shannon Allen: It is the end of August. We’ve been busy. We’ve been running.

Krystal Vivian: Yes, we have been. There’s no walking involved.

Shannon Allen: No.

Krystal Vivian: None.

Shannon Allen: I feel exhausted, like I actually have been running a marathon, but it’s all good stuff, right?

Krystal Vivian: It’s all good stuff, and it’s nice to feel exhausted from things that kind of fill your cup.

Shannon Allen: Yes.

Krystal Vivian: Because it doesn’t ever really feel like you’re totally depleted. You’re just like, “All right, I need to get some sleep.”

Shannon Allen: Exactly. And I’m actually sleeping a little bit better, I feel like, because I have so much running in my head, but I keep a notebook next to my bed, like old-school, writing notes down.

Krystal Vivian: Oh, yeah.

Shannon Allen: Because there are so many cool things going on with FDS right now.

Krystal Vivian: Yes.

Shannon Allen: I’m super excited. And that’s what we’re going to talk about, something that’s being launched this week. I’m super excited to talk about Digital Essentials.

Krystal Vivian: I am super excited to talk about Digital Essentials. This is one of many cool things happening at FDS right now, but I think this is going to be something that is really great for our customers and for our team. So I want to start off very broadly, and then we’ll get into the nitty-gritty of everything. Tell us, what is Digital Essentials? What is this all about?

Shannon Allen: I want to give a little background. Some of our listeners know that we are a standalone digital agency. Federated Digital Solutions is our own LLC, but our sister company is Federated Media, and we have markets in both the South Bend-Mishawaka area as well as Fort Wayne.

Shannon Allen: Back in the day, when Federated Digital was first launched, both our radio sellers and my standalone digital team could all sell digital. That worked. It worked good for quite a few years. What we really found, as digital grew, is that there’s so much that falls under the word digital. The umbrella is so large. It’s why at FDS we live in our four solutions: branding, lead generation, social engagement, and strategy.

Shannon Allen: Strategy has become more and more valuable. The way that we report is the thing I’m the most proud of. As we’ve talked about, it’s the way we talk about ROI and how we tie it all back together. Because let’s be clear, we all sell the same thing in the digital world. It’s who you use, how you use it, and the strategy behind it. There are so many different ways to do digital, so it’s hard to identify exactly what works for somebody that might not work for somebody else.

Shannon Allen: Now, when it came to radio, what we found is they are already the experts at what they do. They live in that lane of radio, and there are so many events involved and so much more that they have to understand. And then you add another layer. What we were seeing was a lot of attrition. And credibility. There were so many digital agencies popping up left and right. It’s what I compete with every day. When you have somebody saying, “I’m the expert. Don’t buy from your local TV person or your local radio person,” there was a lot to be said for that, because there’s so much to understand.

Shannon Allen: The best way I can explain that is I always go back to a doctor. You go see your general practitioner. Recently I needed to see an ear, nose, and throat specialist, because I was having a little bit of vertigo. My general practitioner couldn’t help me. I needed a referral from her. So then I go see somebody that is just an expert at that. She also set me up with a physical therapist. That’s an expert at that. My general practitioner is not going to give me physical therapy to help with vertigo. I have to go see a specialist.

Shannon Allen: That’s exactly where digital comes in. There are so many different levels. And what I believe some of the bigger media groups still struggle with is that they are expecting their one salesperson to be good at everything, and that’s really hard.

Krystal Vivian: That’s really hard, especially with the nature of digital marketing. What we have seen, and we even see it right now with the rise of AI in digital marketing, is that things change so quickly and you have to stay on top of it.

Shannon Allen: Yes.

Krystal Vivian: And it is really difficult to stay on top of all of the different moving pieces. I even just look at the solutions that we have. Things are changing in CTV.

Shannon Allen: Yes.

Krystal Vivian: Things are changing in display and how we can target people. Things are changing in search. Search has gone through a revolution in the last three years.

Shannon Allen: People don’t talk SEO anymore, because it’s not just SEO.

Krystal Vivian: And then we have AEO and GEO, and which one matters, and what are the rules, and all of those things are changing. And you have to be constantly learning. That’s what I talk to my team about all of the time. You guys have to be constantly learning, because the algorithm on Facebook can change in an instant. And we have to be prepared for that. It’s really hard, unless you are living it every day. You can’t be the expert at everything.

Shannon Allen: Yes, but we also need to evolve the people that work for us. I know I’m probably prejudiced, because I work for Federated Media as a whole, and even though we are a sister company, we have some of the most talented, strategic marketing consultants that happen to sell radio. They have the capability to do so much more. And we also know radio drives search.

Krystal Vivian: Oh, absolutely.

Shannon Allen: So there is something to be said with the Townsquares of the world that are moving to digital first, but they also sell radio. I don’t want to do that. I want to arm our radio people with the strategies to accomplish goals for their clients with their core product, and then layer in what we’re calling the Digital Essentials, the essential digital products that will couple very well with what they’re buying in radio.

Shannon Allen: And then, when there needs to be a tag-in, and we’re not going to talk about the tag-in yet, there will be another level of our tiers where we can call in the specialist. But that being said, the Digital Essentials is basically a curated set of four digital products.

Shannon Allen: So that’s my background on what this is that we’re introducing. A lot of the reps that still work for us remember when they sold everything. We went to some of our senior sellers and said, “What’s missing from what you do?” And they said, “We miss the digital. We don’t miss the fulfillment.” There are so many things to know, and every sales meeting and training. So there are some things that we’re constantly going to be training them on, but the stuff that we’ve identified as the core essentials is going to fit so well with their day-to-day. And their current clients, who already trust them and believe in them, are going to trust to buy it from them rather than from some unknown agency that they don’t know has their best interests at heart.

Krystal Vivian: Absolutely. And I think that all of these solutions, and we’ll get into what each of them are in the Digital Essentials, they’re things that are truly essential for every business.

Shannon Allen: Yes.

Krystal Vivian: Every business can benefit from these solutions. But really, it goes back to being the strategic person who truly understands our clients and being the extension of their team, which is what we talk about all of the time. So let’s start. Can you give me a very brief overview of the four Digital Essentials, and then we’ll go one by one?

Shannon Allen: Yep, sounds good. So what I’ve identified that makes the most sense, number one, is just the easy conversation. It’s the audio journey. What our sellers do not have at their fingertips right now on the radio side is what is called programmatic audio, and for the sake of this, I’m just calling it digital audio, because programmatic is a fancy word that just means an auction, an accumulated amount of inventory that gets auctioned off.

Shannon Allen: What I want our radio reps to have at their fingertips is, when they go in to talk to a client, we know radio is still really valuable. 53% of consumers are still consuming it in their car. There’s so much value in there. But what about when they’re getting ready in the morning? What about when they’re going for a run? What about when they’re cooking dinner and they’re listening to their favorite podcast? The journey has evolved in audio, and it doesn’t mean that radio isn’t still a huge part of that, but we don’t want to miss out on the other part. So that’s number one, what we are just calling digital audio, the consumer journey on the audio side.

Krystal Vivian: Great.

Shannon Allen: Number two is going to fall under branding as well, which is Live Sports. For the first time, our sellers are going to be able to sell CTV, but it’s going to be a curated list, with one of the products out there that is probably one of the hottest products anymore in streaming, which is live sports. We have sports stations that are radio, and people are buying the sports stations for a reason. Now they can couple that with also buying it on the radio, and then making sure that when they’re sitting in front of their TV on a Monday Night Football game, they can have their commercial shown as well.

Krystal Vivian: That’s wonderful.

Shannon Allen: We can do every live sports curated package. We have up to 16, but we’re really focusing on about 12 of them that are the most essential. If a client says, “I want to have boxing,” I can do boxing. If I wanted to do tennis, I could add tennis in. So we really set up the curation, and eventually all of them will be trained, but these are the core ones.

Shannon Allen: And we’re walking into fall right now. This is football season, so I’ve got college football and I’ve got Monday Night Football. This is something that I think they’re going to get really excited about, being able to talk to their clients about. And again, it couples very well with what they do on the radio.

Krystal Vivian: Perfect.

Shannon Allen: And then the third one I’m super excited about. This is something that you have had the biggest hand in bringing to the table. You said it earlier, it’s changing the way we search. And what is that? It’s AI. I’m not talking about AI as in I use ChatGPT and I use Claude. I’m talking about AI as a search, because we’ve evolved into a new way that searches are happening. So we have a curated package called AI Location Concierge, and we’ll talk about that. We’ll switch gears and I’ll ask you the questions.

Krystal Vivian: Sure.

Shannon Allen: But that’s our third Digital Essential. And our fourth one rounds it up very nicely, which is social management. Again, you lead the team on social management on the fulfillment side. We have designated writers that work directly for us who are true writers, not just somebody that happens to like social.

Krystal Vivian: Yes.

Shannon Allen: You have journalists and writing degrees, people that understand how social management works.

Krystal Vivian: Yes. The storytelling, the platforms, the strategy, the content that works, all of that.

Shannon Allen: And so those are the four solutions that we’re calling Digital Essentials. You’ll hear me talk about this in training a lot: sometimes we sell advertising and sometimes we sell services. And sometimes services just make their life easier, which is why we talk about the concierge service. Social management is a service we offer that can drive ROI, and will drive it, but it’s not advertising.

Krystal Vivian: Yes.

Shannon Allen: Programmatic audio, or digital audio, 100% is advertising. It’s not a service we provide, it’s advertising. Same with Live Sports. So we have two clear paths of advertising to help with their marketing, and two clear paths that are services that we can just help businesses out with.

Krystal Vivian: Yeah.

Shannon Allen: So I feel like it’s a really nice introduction. And it’s something that is going to benefit anybody that hasn’t even put their foot out there yet into digital. But more than that, if you really love your radio rep, we have something. Don’t work with the company out of Canada doing your digital. Work with the local rep that you know and trust.

Krystal Vivian: That has a great team behind them who can help them. You have several layers of expertise and credibility for that, which I think is really wonderful. Okay, let’s dive deep into each one, and we’ll start at the beginning with digital audio. You mentioned the audio consumer journey. What does that look like, and how does that fit in for businesses?

Shannon Allen: The digital audio journey, to me, is a no-brainer. We have the ability to reach consumers through music streaming, which is your Spotify, your iHeart, Pandora. That’s one angle. We can reach people through other radio groups. Townsquare serves up their inventory programmatically. Say you lived in another state and you still wanted to stream this particular music station. You can do that in your downtime if you’re not listening to the local.

Shannon Allen: We have podcasts. Podcasts are another audio version, and we have the ability to reach crime junkies, which is one I listen to on a regular basis. You don’t get to say, “I want to buy Crime Junkie,” because you don’t want to decide where your listener is. You want to follow the journey.

Krystal Vivian: It’s just like CTV.

Shannon Allen: It’s just like CTV. You don’t dictate the platform to be on. You follow the journey based on the targeting.

Krystal Vivian: Yeah.

Shannon Allen: And the fourth one is that we now have Audible. We’re listening to Audible books differently than a podcast, differently than your streaming, but it’s all audio. It’s all the digital audio journey, and it couples extremely well with your local radio journey and your local streaming journey.

Shannon Allen: So in a nutshell, we would go to a client and have this conversation. You might have these clients that either really buy into radio, or maybe they don’t and they’ve left us, and then we have to show them where consumers are, because we know how valuable that person sitting in their car listening to the morning show is. We know how valuable it is when they’re going on their run and they’re listening, and they’re not skipping the commercial because they’re running.

Krystal Vivian: They’re sticking with it. Or they’re listening to the audiobook on their road trip that they’re doing with their family, and they’re not skipping the ad because it’s really compelling. And we’ve always talked on the radio side about the theater of the mind, and how powerful a radio ad can be with really great storytelling and the full production. It really creates this wonderful sounding ad, and there’s a lot of stuff that you can do to be able to deliver that to exactly who needs a new roof.

Shannon Allen: Yes.

Krystal Vivian: Or who is going to be your target customer. That’s awesome.

Shannon Allen: And I have an example of a digital client, a credit union that asked me specifically, “Do you guys sell programmatic audio? Do you sell podcasting and Spotify?” And she said, “I’ve looked at Spotify, and I have this budget for Spotify.” And I said, “We do. But I don’t listen to Spotify. That’s not where I get my music. I’m more of an Apple girl on certain things. I still scope Pandora a little bit.” Every person is different, so why decide that they’re going to be on Spotify, or why decide they’re going to be listening to a true crime podcast?

Shannon Allen: If you’re a credit union and you’re running an auto loan ad, target consumers that are buying cars. It’s a segment I can layer in. You get your local radio that you can target, and you can do upper branding about, “Don’t forget about your local credit union,” and then you layer in the digital audio, where we follow the journey wherever they’re at. And that might be all on Spotify, or it might be a mixture of music, Audible, and podcasts. We don’t know, but we’re going to follow it and be very targeted that way. So now we have results that we can show that this consumer also came back to your website. Not only is radio getting an enhancement of return on investment, but the client gets to work with one person for that complete audio consumer journey.

Krystal Vivian: Yes. So you’re getting them when they’re waking up in the morning and listening to Pandora while they’re getting ready, when they’re in the car listening to their favorite local station, when they’re in the office and they’re streaming Spotify with their coworkers, when they’re driving back home, and then when it’s evening and they’re making dinner and they turn on Amazon Music on Alexa.

Shannon Allen: Exactly.

Krystal Vivian: Yeah.

Shannon Allen: So in a nutshell, and like I said, we do have other podcasts where you and I have dug even deeper on some of this. We’ll probably end up doing a few more specialties. We could spend the whole 30 minutes on this.

Krystal Vivian: Oh, yeah.

Shannon Allen: But this is the first one, and I think that’s the best way to explain it. We’re going to be able to sell something that is the complete audio consumer journey, and even better, it’s with your local radio as well as somebody locally that happens to be tuning into a podcast or Spotify.

Krystal Vivian: Or iHeart. And they can help with the production of it, and our team’s expertise in making sure that these are the best quality audio ads that you can possibly have.

Shannon Allen: Yes. And our reporting stands apart from any other agency. I’ll stand my ground on that. I don’t think anybody beats us at that. So that is something that is really beneficial for the client, that they probably weren’t getting from somebody else that’s sending them an Excel file.

Krystal Vivian: That’s very true. With no context.

Shannon Allen: With no context. Yes.

Krystal Vivian: All right. Let’s dive into Live Sports CTV. I get really excited about this as a huge sports fan myself, because it is where you’re actually able to put your business’s commercial inside the game, on the biggest screen in the house, live when the action is happening. What problem does Live Sports CTV solve, and how can businesses use this solution to their advantage?

Shannon Allen: I’ll be honest, we’ve been selling at FDS for so long. Find out who the audience is, what the targeted message is, and then we’ll layer in the channels, whether that’s a display channel, that is CTV. It might be some video pre-roll. It might end up being something down the line of SEM, for sure.

Shannon Allen: When it comes to live sports, the beauty of live sports, as we know, is it’s exploded in the last few years. If you asked me two years ago on live sports, we wouldn’t be having the exact same conversation. Right now, there are 121 million Americans who will watch sports digitally just in 2026. 90 out of the 100 top-watched US broadcasts in 2025 were football. The difference is it is moving away from your local broadcast platform and moving to streaming.

Shannon Allen: Some of these stats, when we talk about where it’s at with Netflix, where we’re seeing it with Amazon Prime, wherever it’s going, it is growing so, so fast. March Madness is one of those great examples. March Madness is typically a CBS-owned, Sinclair-owned product. But that doesn’t mean just your CBS. You can catch March Madness on so many different channels. So if you wanted to hit all of them, and you’re buying them all individually, it would cost somebody a fortune.

Shannon Allen: Who’s selling it right now is your local CBS rep. But the problem with that is they’re not selling it from a streaming standpoint. They’re mainly selling just what is on their broadcast, and that is more the cable box. That is somebody that’s still not a cord cutter.

Krystal Vivian: Right, and that’s 3 to 5% of total viewership. Even on March Madness.

Shannon Allen: Yes. For years, cable was the number one provider of sports, because they would curate a package. If you think about your cable box, they have so many channels that a sports station could be delivered on. And the problem with that is that has moved down to an 18% viewership anymore. So out of 100% of the pie, you buy live sports at a very expensive rate and you’re only reaching 18% of the consumers, when streaming has moved to just under 50% of viewership.

Shannon Allen: I’m being a little bit more simplistic here, because it can go even further down. But if you look at what you’re buying versus what you’re paying, just go where the viewership is. And that was a local car dealer that I worked with, who was buying all his live sports from cable. He was buying X amount of spots, when I was able to buy X amount of impressions, reach more people, and not be limited just to that 65-plus person that has a cable box. Oh, and by the way, I saved them about $50,000 a year.

Krystal Vivian: That’s crazy. To reach more people, and to actually prove that they’re coming onto your lot after seeing that ad too.

Shannon Allen: We are partnered with a company whose demand side platform is a Disney+ partner, and we have access to Monday Night NFL. Can I buy the Amazon Thursday night game? I cannot, because Amazon is a walled garden and they close the doors. But I can get Monday Night Football.

Shannon Allen: I have access to college football games. There are so many consumers in this market, in the South Bend market, that only buy Notre Dame, and I get it. Notre Dame is amazing. But why decide who’s watching the Notre Dame game and not watching the Ohio State game, or not watching IU? If you’re a football lover, you’re watching pretty much all of them.

Krystal Vivian: Absolutely. And also, if you want to reach people in your audience, with Live Sports CTV, you can’t say, “I want to be on the Notre Dame game. Guarantee me that I’m going to be on the Notre Dame game.”

Shannon Allen: Yep.

Krystal Vivian: We can’t do that. But what we can do is say, “We’re going to reach college football in this market.” Anybody who’s watching college football, most of them probably will be watching the Notre Dame game. They’ll see your ad. But if they’re watching the Ohio State game, if they’re watching the Kentucky game, if they’re watching the IU game, if they’re watching Boise State, whatever it is that they’re watching, and they’re in your market, they will see your ad.

Shannon Allen: Yes. And this stat alone: 30% of all CTV viewership is spent watching live sports. Boom.

Krystal Vivian: Yeah.

Shannon Allen: And we have some of the best curated packages for these clients, and it’s pretty cut and dry. Here’s your package, here’s the amount of impressions, and it’s first come, first served. There’s only so many spots on Monday Night Football.

Krystal Vivian: Yes.

Shannon Allen: So once it’s sold out, it’s sold out. It is one of those things where you want to lock in your schedule for the year. You don’t want to piecemeal it. And I could talk about some of the return on investment we’ve already seen, and that is something that’s going to be different than what cable can offer.

Shannon Allen: One of our clients locally that bought March Madness was a winery in the Fort Wayne market. In three weeks, we were able to show 466 conversions. That meant they watched that commercial and then came back to their website. Tell me the last time cable showed you those results.

Krystal Vivian: That’s incredible.

Shannon Allen: And that was three weeks. We have access to NFL football, college football, college bowl games, NBA basketball, college basketball. We have baseball. We have hockey. We have golf. We have motor, NASCAR. We have soccer. And then we have a basic one that’s just Sports Enthusiast. So we have a lot of amazing curated packages that the radio sellers now will have at their fingertips to take. We know where video is going in 2026 and 2027, and this is the time to lock into your live sports.

Krystal Vivian: Absolutely. All right. Next up is one of my favorite products that we’ve launched.

Shannon Allen: Yeah, we’re going to switch a little bit here. I get to ask you the questions.

Krystal Vivian: Yes.

Shannon Allen: So let’s talk about, for our listeners, how we are helping our clients combat the changes when it comes to AI search in general. I’m going to lead in here a little bit. I had a great conversation a few weeks ago with a local client in the Fort Wayne market where I brought up AI. I said, “Let’s talk about AI,” and he right away goes into what a lot of people do, which is, “Oh, I use it. I use Chat, I use Claude, I use this.” I’m like, “No, that’s not what I’m talking about.” I’m talking about how AI has changed how you show up in a search, and how it is split now. Everybody used to just go to Google and maybe Bing, and now we’ve added so many different, what I’ll call, search engines.

Shannon Allen: ChatGPT is its own search engine, in a sense. What you’re searching, they’re looking for credible information on your website.

Krystal Vivian: Yes.

Shannon Allen: We use Claude all the time. It’s going to source what website it pulled that information from. So there are so many different ways to show up in a search. And by the way, Google is still doing an amazing job with that. But if you look at Google itself, their Gemini is showing up first with an AI search, with paid ads surrounded by it.

Krystal Vivian: I have conversations with Google all the time now when I’m Googling, when I’m searching for information.

Shannon Allen: Yes. So we had launched last year what we call AI Answer Blogs. But really what we, and when I say we, I mean Krystal, because she’s brilliant, what we have curated together to help our clients combat this is what we’re calling AI Location Concierge. And you notice the word concierge, because this is a service we provide. But wait till our listeners hear what this is. So why don’t you tell us what AI Location Concierge is?

Krystal Vivian: When we think about how businesses are showing up in AI, you have to realize that people are not just typing in “credit union near me” into ChatGPT, or even into Google anymore. They’re asking, “Which credit union in the Fort Wayne market has the best interest rates for auto loans right now?” They’re asking, “Which roofing company in Elkhart offers metal roofing?” They’re asking a very specific question. Not just “metal roof Elkhart.”

Shannon Allen: Right.

Krystal Vivian: Or “metal roof near me.” They’re asking full-on questions. And they are not expecting a whole list that they then have to sort through themselves. They’re expecting to get a conversational answer back to them. So it’s not just about being visible in AI. A lot of people like to talk about AI visibility. It’s really about whether your business is being recommended by AI.

Krystal Vivian: And there are all these acronyms, AEO and GEO. It’s all changing a lot. But what it really comes down to is that there are three signals that you as a business have to make sure your business is providing online to be found in an AI search, whether that’s Google’s AI Overviews, which is the AEO, or it’s in Claude or ChatGPT, which is the GEO.

Shannon Allen: And if you asked a typical client that, they would have no idea what you’re talking about.

Krystal Vivian: No idea. GEO, the geography, right?

Krystal Vivian: So there are three signals that they need. The first signal is your structured signals. It’s your name, it’s your address, it’s your phone number, it’s the description of your business. Is that accurate on your website, and Google Business, and yellowpages.com, and Yelp, if that’s a directory that matters to you, and all of the other directories across the internet? Is that accurate? And if you have an “and” in your name, are you always using the word “and,” or does it sometimes show up as an ampersand?

Krystal Vivian: You have to realize that these robots are looking for pattern recognition.

Shannon Allen: Yes.

Krystal Vivian: And if something doesn’t fit the pattern, think about The Matrix, when something’s slightly out and they’re like, “Oh, that’s deja vu. It’s bad.” It’s the same thing here. The robots don’t understand. We might understand the differences, but the robots don’t. So making sure that all of that is consistent across the web, that’s your structured data. That’s your first signal.

Krystal Vivian: Your second signal is your recommendations. Are other people giving you reviews of their experience with you? AI is looking for pattern recognition within that too. What type of experiences are people having? Is it a good experience? Is it a bad experience? What are the common words and the common things that different customers are saying? How often are they getting reviews? How recently have they gotten reviews? Has the business responded to any of these reviews? That really matters.

Krystal Vivian: And then the third part is the content. Is there content on the business’s website? Is there content from the business that shows that they are the authority, that they have specific expertise? It’s not just saying, “Oh, I’m the expert.” It’s saying, “No, this is what we dealt with in this particular experience. When somebody was looking for blinds and they came to us, and they had this type of window, we couldn’t sell them blinds. That was not good for them. We went with shutters instead,” or whatever it is.

Krystal Vivian: So you need all three of those signals. And that’s what AI Location Concierge does for businesses. It brings all three of those together with our Location Concierge services, which manage your business listings across the web, over 100-plus different websites. You could keep them all updated on your own. It would take you hours.

Shannon Allen: You’re closing for the 4th of July. You have hours that are changing. Labor Day is coming up. We do that for you.

Krystal Vivian: We do that for you. Oh, you changed locations, and now half of the internet thinks you’re on one street and the other half knows that you’re on the other street. Which one is right? Google Maps is leading people to the wrong business.

Shannon Allen: I don’t think people realize how important what we call NAP, name, address, and phone number, is, and it’s so screwed up, and they’re like, “I don’t even know where to begin.” That’s why you work with a company like us.

Krystal Vivian: Yes.

Shannon Allen: And the results that we’ve seen with the clients that do this with us, it’s crazy how much we have seen their visibility increase.

Krystal Vivian: Yes, absolutely. And we’ve been able to navigate problems for them. We had one client in particular who had three different addresses, because they’d moved three times in about the last 10 years. They could not get Yellow Pages or Better Business Bureau to update for the life of them, and they tried. We troubleshot all of that for them, figured out all of that for them. And now their name, address, and phone number is correct on every single listing online, and their visibility, the amount of traffic that they’re getting to their website, has increased substantially.

Krystal Vivian: Then you add in the reviews. We’re generating the reviews for you. You give us the first name and the email addresses of the people who were your customers for the last 30 days. We’re going to send them an email, maybe a couple of emails, and ask them to give you a review on Google. And then we’re also going to respond to it for you. And if somebody has a bad experience or a bad review, we’ll handle it for you. We’ll let you know if it’s something that you need to be brought in on. And if it’s a dummy review, if they weren’t actually a customer of yours, we can get Google to remove that.

Shannon Allen: Yes. And a lot of times businesses don’t even know where to start. Can they do this themselves? They absolutely could do the research and find a platform that did it, and trust that somebody sitting in Georgia is doing it for them. Or they can work with a local business like us, where we do it as a concierge, which means we do it for you. And it’s the number one signal with what we’re trying to accomplish, which is to help with your AI.

Krystal Vivian: Yep, absolutely. And then we write the blogs. We write AI Answer Blogs, which are in that question and answer format. So it gives Claude and ChatGPT and Gemini the answers. When people are asking that fully detailed question, that answer is already provided by you, and Claude just has to pull it from that. And it’s going to cite your website.

Shannon Allen: And by the way, I know some businesses think, “I’ll just write that blog myself, because I have AI, so I’ll just write a blog with AI.” That’s not the same thing. What we’re accomplishing with these blogs is because we are the experts at GEO and understanding what that needs, to make sure it’s the right information.

Krystal Vivian: And also, the robots know when the robots write the blogs.

Shannon Allen: Exactly. Exactly.

Krystal Vivian: And they know that that’s not specific expertise. They know that’s not custom to you, because they’re pulling it from the same place that they’re pulling anything else that they’re generating. So we do use AI in our work, but we don’t use AI to write the blogs for us.

Shannon Allen: No, that’s why we have skilled writers.

Krystal Vivian: Yes. And that makes a world of difference in the effectiveness of these blogs.

Shannon Allen: And the clients that work with us on this right now, we could put any one of them on our podcast to do a testimonial, because they’re like, “Oh my God, thank you for handling this for me.”

Krystal Vivian: Yes. I was talking to a marina owner last week, and he said that he spends an hour a day going through their Google reviews, reading them, responding to them, and then choosing which ones to add to his website. I said, “Why are you spending five hours a week on that? Is that helping you sell more boats? We could do it for you.”

Shannon Allen: And by the way, we’ll hit three things for you for $850 a month.

Krystal Vivian: And he was blown away.

Shannon Allen: I love that. Three signals, easy to remember. Name, address, and phone number. Multiple reviews. And our AI Answer Blogs. So those are the three that are part of a package for Digital Essentials that we call AI Location Concierge, which starts at $850 a month per location, and it couples so well with what radio is already doing.

Krystal Vivian: Yes. Because if they’re driving search and somebody searches your name after they hear the radio commercial, and it’s incorrect, and then you’re not recommended, where’s your credibility? You don’t have enough Google reviews, and so you’re not showing up. Your credibility is gone.

Shannon Allen: We say it all the time to clients: do you know how you show up when somebody searches for what you do?

Krystal Vivian: Yeah.

Shannon Allen: So the fourth is social management. Just tell us what we do at FDS for social management that is part of the Digital Essentials.

Krystal Vivian: We fully manage businesses’ Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn profiles, or a combination of those if they don’t have all three. We can recommend which ones we think you should focus on based on your business, your industry, and your target audience. Maybe people don’t need LinkedIn. A lot of people don’t need LinkedIn.

Shannon Allen: If you’re an auto repair shop, you might really just want to focus on Facebook and Instagram.

Krystal Vivian: Yeah.

Shannon Allen: If you’re a commercial real estate company, you might want leads off of LinkedIn.

Krystal Vivian: So we’ll give you those recommendations, but then we fully take over that strategy. We do kickoff calls where we dive deep with our clients and make sure that we know as much as we can about their business, and then we create the content strategy. We create the content. We come on site to take photos and videos of you and your staff to make sure that your content is custom to you, and we’re not just using stock. Because everybody knows when you see stock photos and stock videos on social.

Shannon Allen: Listen, our team just got back from the Bennington show. That’s one of our clients we write for, we partner with, and some of the best posts I see are coming from our team, because we know that product inside and out. And heck, you just spent three days at the show.

Krystal Vivian: Yeah. We customize the content not only to the business and to the clients, but also to the platforms. What your content needs to be on Facebook is dramatically different from what it needs to be on Instagram, even though they both have reels, even though they’re both owned by Meta, even though there is a lot of crossover in the audience. The platforms themselves value different signals. And so we know what the algorithms care about, what is going to make the Facebook algorithm show that post to more people who are most likely to interact with it. We can manipulate the algorithms. Same thing on Instagram, and same thing on LinkedIn.

Krystal Vivian: So we handle the full content strategy. We edit all of the videos. We edit all of the photos. We create all of the graphics. We write all of the posts. We publish it all for you. We monitor all of the comments. We respond to the comments. We monitor the messages. We respond to the messages. We flag things to our clients when they need to know about them. If somebody emails in or messages into the Facebook page and has a problem with their boat, Bennington hears about it. We know exactly who to send that to, and what kind of information we need to pull out of that boat owner in order to share that with Bennington so that they can solve that problem. We do that for all of our clients. So it’s a full management system.

Shannon Allen: It’s a full management system. It’s why it’s another service we offer. This is not advertising. It does not mean that we aren’t growing return on investment, we are, but we were very clear, this is just to make your life easier and to do it the right way, because it’s hard to be the expert at everything.

Krystal Vivian: And it makes it so that when people are learning about you and they’re coming to your social media pages, as everybody is researching, you have fresh content that makes sense, that’s entertaining to them. They’re going to follow your page. They’re going to start seeing that content. And they’re going to start engaging with it, because it’s content that’s relevant to them and it matters to them. And it builds your community, and those people become your super fans. Those people will repurchase from you over and over again and recommend you to other people, and it extends your brand awareness. We’ve talked about it for years, that Facebook, Instagram, social media is really where your brand is built very quickly and very strongly.

Shannon Allen: Word of mouth is social media.

Krystal Vivian: That’s exactly what it is.

Shannon Allen: Yeah. And we do media day. It is included in there, and we actually require it.

Krystal Vivian: Yes.

Shannon Allen: That’s just something that your team loves doing, that you go out and spend a day, because we need content. And we help them, and that’s how we can do reels. We shoot content for them. I would say another thing, our clients, sometimes we require one a year. A lot of times they’ll be like, “Can you come back and do it again in the fall?”

Krystal Vivian: We love to do it a couple times a year, especially if you’re a business where the weather matters. Being able to show content in December that’s snowy versus content in June that’s sunny, that makes a big difference, because it makes people feel like it’s recent. And you would be really surprised at how much content we can get in a short amount of time.

Shannon Allen: There’s so much content that you’re able to produce for them. It’s another one of those where we could pull in one of our clients and they’d be like, “Best thing we ever did was do media day with you.”

Krystal Vivian: The last media day that we did, we had two people on site for about two and a half hours, and they captured over 200 videos that can be turned into reels for the next year.

Shannon Allen: That’s awesome.

Krystal Vivian: They captured over 50 to 100 photos during that time. Our strategy for that client is a lot more video-driven, much heavier on video. That’s in two and a half hours. We capture so much.

Shannon Allen: And then you don’t have to worry about editing it.

Krystal Vivian: No. All you have to worry about is getting all of your people at your business, and we take care of the rest.

Shannon Allen: I always say social management, to me, is you’re paying for two main things: expertise and your time. My time is extremely valuable, as it is for any business owner that is not the expert at how to create a reel that’s going to go up on Instagram.

Krystal Vivian: Correct.

Shannon Allen: So those are our four. We have our digital audio as number one of the essentials. We have Live Sports packages to choose from. We have our AI Location Concierge. And we have social management.

Krystal Vivian: Yep.

Shannon Allen: So that’s it in a nutshell. This is so exciting to me, that we are going to bring something to the radio team that I really hope they get as excited about as you and I are. Like I said, we listened to some of our senior sellers, and they said, “This is what we want.” So we listened, and we’re bringing it to you. So buckle up.

Krystal Vivian: I have one more question for you, Shannon.

Shannon Allen: Okay. I know what you’re going to ask me.

Krystal Vivian: What is the ROI of Digital Essentials for businesses who decide to use these solutions?

Shannon Allen: Number one, each of the essentials has an ROI attached to it. The first ones are branding. Live Sports and our digital audio are both advertising, where we’re going to be able to show you true results and show you in the reporting how that ties to the product or the service that you offer. So right off the bat, that is something you probably are not getting right now. And the other two, we still do reporting on, and we still show you the value and tie it back to it. Everything we do at Federated Digital ties back to what does it mean to me, why should I care, and what do I need to do next based on this return on investment.

Shannon Allen: The return, to me, is just about your time. If you can work with your radio rep and not work with multiple different people, you’re working with one group. We all are on the same page. We all know what we’re doing. We’re much more efficient. That in itself has a return on investment in it, because there’s credibility behind it, and your trust factor is there, because you already know that Federated Media and Federated Digital Solutions are two trusted companies with a long history of knowing what they’re doing.

Krystal Vivian: Yep. Absolutely.

Shannon Allen: Thank you. This was really fun today, and I appreciate our listeners tuning in. Join us next time for another edition of Digital Marketing ROWhy?

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