Ever feel like you’re putting your message out there and… nothing? No response, no engagement, just silence. In today’s world of nonstop content and ever-changing algorithms, just showing up isn’t enough. You have to show up the right way.
On this episode of Action Antidote, we’re joined by Joshua Altman, Chief Marketing Officer at Beltway Media, to talk about what it really takes to get your message to land. With a background in journalism and social media strategy, Joshua knows how attention works and how to earn it. He shares why a message often needs more than one shot to stick, how to find the signal in all the digital noise, and why staying human is your greatest advantage in a crowded space. If you’re tired of guessing what works and ready to start communicating with clarity and impact, this episode is your cheat code.
—
Listen to the podcast here:
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 50:47 — 46.5MB) | Embed
Your Message Doesn’t Matter If No One Hears It with Joshua Altman
Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you about getting your message out and about all the different ways that we have available to get our messages out and even how this landscape is changing quite a bit. I’m sure you’ve all heard a little bit about AI and the hype around where AI might be taking some things, but there are plenty of other progressions and other trends taking place. To stay updated on that and to give us some information about all the different platforms, all the different methods, all the different places we can go and also the ways we can craft our messages to our audience, I would like to bring on my guest today, Joshua Altman, who is the chief marketing officer of beltway.media, a company that provides fractional services to small- to medium-sized businesses.
—
Joshua, welcome to the program.
Thanks for having me so.
So, yeah, let’s start out by talking about your story. Has marketing, getting crafting messages, getting messages out, has that always been part of your path?
In a way. I did not start in corporate or in marketing or anything along those lines. I went to journalism school and started as a journalist, and then went from being a congressional news producer and reporter to being a corporate communications person. I left my job, I was with The Hill newspaper for about five years and I left that to what I thought would be freelance reporting and producing. I was a cameraman, I was an editor, I was a producer, so very hands-on technical side of things in addition to the reporting, doing the interviews, the research. All the things people associate with print reporting, I was doing that plus video. That’s what I went to college for. I did my masters while I was a reporter. I was all in DC. I did that in something called communications, culture and technology and I thought I’d spend my career as a journalist. That wasn’t what ultimately happened. I left my job as a journalist, thinking, like I said, I’d be freelance, and then I kind of just fell into the corporate work, which is kind of what I’ve been doing since.
So what made you leave your job? What was the –– was there an event that made you leave it? A certain realization?
No. I mean, in terms of an event or a realization, I’ve been there just, like I said, for five years. I was kind of looking to grow and do something a little different than what I had been doing. I had great experiences where I was, was just looking to do more, again, as a reporter. I ended up doing something entirely different.
So, when you were on the path of being a reporter, it seems like you had your hand in a lot of the areas of content creation or what we would call content creation now,. You talked about filming the video, video editing, doing everything. Was there certain aspects of it that started to intrigue you more, because you talk now quite a bit about how our messages are crafted, how are we actually reaching an audience?
So in addition to doing video with The Hill newspaper, I also did a lot of their social media, not for my whole time there but for about the last 18 months or so, I was doing their social media as well. So, what I did a lot of was pooling things and making it fit how we wanted to communicate that story. So, sometimes, it was a longer three- to five-minute piece, sometimes it was just a sound bite. Sometimes, we have an interactive map. Sometimes, it was, primarily a social post. One thing we did a lot of there were vote counts, who’s going to vote for or against this bill that’s coming up. And a lot of that was literally on the website, it was a list. How can we make that list more engaging? That was a lot of things on social media, that was regular updates through different channels. At that point, it was Twitter, Twitter posts, Twitter accounts so if it was an energy bill, we had special ones for energy. How can we profile things? If this person’s likely going to vote for this but here was their past voting record on similar things. What groups could we make of people?
So, when you’re looking at crafting this content, what was the process that came to mind? Was there a certain amount of analytics around who you’re trying to reach, how you’re trying to reach them as well as what you want them to get out of the engagement in your platform?
A lot of is what do we want them to get out of it.
Yeah.
And some things are just, like I said, better suited for a forty-second clip, a sound bite versus that five-minute long to sit down interviews, longer piece, and we would look at things like this story did well on this platform, this got a lot of social media engagement. What made that happen? Was it a particular topic? Was it time of day? Was it people –– there was nothing else going on on that Tuesday and it just happened to be that Tuesday was really good, which happens more often than people would like to admit that, that is just a day people were paying attention to you.
I think the phrase slow news day comes to mind.
Yeah, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be. It could be a fast news day and they’re paying attention to something else on your website and that got collateral traffic, which is great and, of course, any website is going to plan for that. That’s why you see related stories on everything. It’s to get people to click again and they’re related, they’re based on your interests, based on that story. So, we’re always looking at those sorts of things and I wish that was some sort of great secret but you could see it on every website, news website you go to, you see related stories, you see you might also be interested in. It’s to keep you on the website. It’s to keep you clicking and reading.
So, is there an actual way to determine why any particular story or any particular thing that anyone posts anywhere on the internet gets engagement or doesn’t get engagement?
I would love that to be yes. Other than asking people directly, “Why did you click on this?” pretty much no, unfortunately, because there are so many factors. I mean, sometimes you can make good, reasonable assumptions. A picture was particularly compelling, the headline was good, or it got picked up by an influencer, sorts of things, but, at the same time, unless someone tells you, “I clicked this because of that,” it’s very hard to know with 100 percent certainty.
Yeah, so if anyone’s like looking at their posts or something and say, “Oh, this one got a lot more traction than that one,” but they keep scratching their head as to like why because the one that got less traction maybe was even the post they were more proud of for some reason.
Yeah. In that case, you look at what was different. It could be time of day, if you’re doing your corporate posts, it could be time of day. Your audience is a lunchtime audience and you posted that around breakfast. Well, okay, you’ll know that if you do five more posts and the lunch ones do better than the breakfast time ones, that’s a way that you can start figuring that out. It could be the topic. I worked with one company and they did email newsletters, among other, they had their social channels and books as well, other things like that. What we found was posts, if we use pictures, if the pictures show people who were more real looking as opposed to supermodel looking, the real people got a lot more engagement.
Really?
Well, these were stock photo models, all of them, ultimately, but people who kind of looked like you, your friend, your neighbors, the guy in your office, those got more engagement. Could I say that was 100 percent the reason why? Probably not, but it was a trend over enough posts of trying different things that it made a difference when we kind of stuck with it.
And you saw that, and it makes me wonder if the same is true for AI where a lot of people say they can tell if something’s an AI-generated image and if that also kind of handicaps people in that way?
Sometimes, the tells are really easy. Someone has seven fingers, three hands, things like that, all your people are cross-eyed in a photo of six people, the odds of having that, six people in your photo cross-eyed are relatively slim in real, so those are kind of more obvious tells in AI. Sometimes, it does pretty good when you’re trying to get something that looks like a person but I’ve noticed, been doing this for however many years it’s been, humans have a natural ability to tell a real face from a fake one. It’s just an evolutionary trait we have is we can tell genuine expression from fake expression. We all kind of see that in our normal, everyday, going about our lives. Okay, that person’s really not as happy as they’re pretending to be. We see that every day. We can just tell when a face isn’t real. There’s just –– often, I’ll just say, “I don’t know what it is about that person or that image, that just doesn’t look like a person.”
Yeah, yeah. And it reminds me how we even feel when someone’s obviously being phony or performative and we’re just like something, just something just feels off about what this person is saying.
Yeah. It’s that same evolutionary just trait that we have is we can detect it in people, like there’s a reason for it.
Yeah. So, you talk about crafting messages and you talk about the most important thing being understanding what you want your audience to get out of that message. In that case, would it be safe to say that having an audience, reaching an audience but reaching them in the wrong way is worse than, say, just failing to reach an audience where your post, whatever, just doesn’t get the views, the clicks that you were intending?
Not necessarily. You go back, a lot of people will say all press is good press.
People just hearing your name can be good, because especially now where there’s so much out there in a day, in a week, in a month, are they going to remember why they heard your name? Share on XWhy that was important? Maybe, probably not. So if they open your email to complain about you, you got them to engage. They did something. From that, you know this is a real company with a live email address, that’s a person behind it. You’ve got invaluable information, and they’re hooked. Whether or not they’re hooked for a good reason or not is debatable, but you accomplished something, and if you email them back in six months, well, you know that’s a person, you know they at least open their emails.
Yeah. What I’m wondering is if that varies at all from industry to industry or business type to business type? Because what I’m feeling about is the world where everything’s online, everyone’s connected to everyone, everything’s connected to everything, there’s just tons of noise, whereas, back in the day, when everything was based around your community, in a community, if you got bad press, it was probably a lot worse because everyone else that would be your potential customers kind of all in a way know each other. Those old rules. Are there any places you feel where those old rules around at least like being more worried about bad press than no press would still apply?
I’m sure they exist, especially with very, very small businesses. One bad thing could kill you, but, at the same time, if you could spin that positive, if you can take that and ride it, ride that wave, basically, it doesn’t have to be the total end, because you could turn it into something good, or at the very least, they take some benefit from now people know your name because people might have just heard ACME Corp, they don’t know why, they just heard someone talking about it, and they have no particular opinion of it.
Yeah, or in this crazy world where everyone wants to oppose something, someone’s like, “Oh, this person whose viewpoints I hate hates your company, maybe I’ll check you out.”
Yeah. Take what you can get in some cases, because when there’s so much out there, that morsel might be your best chance.
Yeah, yeah. So you said that the most important thing is just knowing what people want to get out of whatever you’re communicating, whether it be a news story or setting up a SaaS site where you just, a website, or even if it’s like a post. Well, what does someone need to reflect on? Do you feel like that there’s a lot of people out there who post stuff they want to get noticed but they don’t even necessarily know who am I trying to reach and what am I trying to reach them with? What am I trying to help them with? What am I trying to get them to think about, do, convey?
Yeah, I think those are the two big things is who are you trying to reach. Even if you know who your potential customer is, saying, “I wanna reach potential customers,” is still very broad. You might be better off thinking this particular post or this particular event we’re hosting is specifically for our potential customers who are this profile. They are looking to change providers. They have something, they’re unhappy for whatever reason, they’re looking to change providers. Okay, they’re not coming in cold. So that’s something different than trying to get someone who’s never bought in your industry. If you’re, like you said, a SaaS company, almost everyone needs is an invoicing platform. So if you are an invoicing platform trying to get people who are looking to switch, that’s different from someone starting up their business who’s never had invoicing before.
Yeah, yeah, so it’s a very different customer profile.
Yeah. So just saying, “I wanna reach potential customers,” could be very broad, and then once you kind of know that, you could think, “Okay, why I’m looking to reach these people who are switching? What would be beneficial for them?” Are you looking to switch because of cost? Is it features? Is it customer support? Are people using something that’s buggy and is less buggy for whatever it is? I think we’ve all had software that just does weird things. It’s the nature of software. So, okay, we’re going to write three posts and we’re going to cover each of them. One, this is lower cost, or at minimum, maybe higher cost, better value. We have a different pricing model, whatever your model is. It could be the next one is we’re more stable. We test our updates differently. We have fewer bug reports, all of that. Then, it could be something along the lines of we have this great feature that other ones don’t have. So you’re kind of covering them but you’re not covering them all in one.
Oh, you’re saying like to convey the right amount of messages per post.
Yeah
If you think back not too long ago, you wanted to publish something, that cost a significant amount of money. You had to print it, you had to distribute it. There was limited amount of space in certain things. If you did a print publication, you basically had to do pages in certain numbers, front, back, left, right, you had that pretty typical layout. So, when you do that, you have to be much more conscious. Everything might have to fit. You could do three posts that cost you next to nothing in additional costs because you’re going on your website, your social posts, your email. Well, you’re already paying for an email provider, which most of them are a monthly fee based on number of contacts and then if you go over a certain number of email, there are different pricing models, but you’re probably going to pay fairly close to the same rate whether you send one or three or five. Your website costs aren’t going to change. Your Instagram cost isn’t going to change. It’s going to be zero or fairly close to it. So, you can do all those things now and really target them to different people. And send out your email to everyone, just like you would get all three to all audiences, they’ll open what they intend to open and they’ll get the value from what they need the value from.
So it sounds like what’s happening, or what’s happened, I’m assuming this continues to happen, is like that the landscape is just changing with every trend in technological advancement, and so the old world was like the newspaper and the newspaper would be the primary thing that people read, I remember people would just get one newspaper, my family, New York Newsday as opposed to the New York Times, because we lived on the island, whatever, but nowadays, it’s consumed in a very different fashion. The cost structure is different. The way people consume things is different. People don’t read just one paper and then move on, they might go onto Instagram, they might go onto LinkedIn for business-y type of stuff like that. So how much of the population is, I guess, adjusted and continues to adjust to the way things kind of change like this?
I think at this point, most people are adjusted to it. There are still people out there who are getting their newspaper daily, and that might be it, but that’s probably a very small percentage. One of the things with that is the content moves a lot faster. So you might write your post on your website and you published it to LinkedIn. Well, someone picked up your LinkedIn post and published it to Reddit where it got onto X which followed it to Instagram. People might never see your original, they’re just going to get the one screenshot that got clipped, which is very different than definitely, they will engage with that primary piece that you wrote and published. And will people remember the number of steps they took or where they saw it is something we don’t necessarily know. Some people might. Some people might remember that they saw an X post but not remember that it was ultimately filtered through Instagram.
Yeah. I know the platforms don’t want you to change platforms, but it’s going to happen.
No. They want you to stay in and, one thing I tell pretty much every project I work on before we even get started is don’t get locked in to a platform. Use as many as you can. You don’t need to use everything but avoid being locked in.
So what is the danger of being locked into one platform? Let’s say it’s a B2B business and they say into our platform because that’s the impression people have right now,
Microsoft could turn around and say, “We’re shutting this down in 24 hours.” I don’t anticipate Microsoft shutting down LinkedIn in 24 hours, but they could, and then, where are you if you’ve just lost your entire audience that fast? And we saw that when TikTok was in danger of being shut down. TikTok itself was running ads with people saying, “My business is on TikTok. I have this great business because of the community and connections on TikTok,” and they were running national ad campaigns on television for this. And, ultimately, TikTok didn’t shut down in the US, but it was close and people were worried. And part of that was they really put all of their eggs in that TikTok basket, which we saw for them was potentially very dangerous. So diversify your platforms. Use TikTok fine, but also look at Instagram, look at your own properties, look at email services, look at LinkedIn. Just use what you can so you’re not there when something just shuts down.
Just for reference, in case someone’s listening to this at some far off time in the future, we’re recording this in the middle of the year of 2025, and the beginning of this year was when a lot of people, I guess, saw this firsthand and, as you said, it was close. There was a time, there was a short period of time when it was like shut down for a few hours or something like that, and then ––
I think one day, just about, or on one day, might have been less than the full 24 hours.
Yeah, yeah, something like that. And so you have that example right in front of you, and I’m sure also a lot of other people out there listening, a lot of people out there have had the less extreme example but still constant threat of whenever these platforms change their algorithm and, all of a sudden, they see their traffic ––
That’s much more common.
Yeah.
That is much more common. Sometimes, you get a boost, sometimes it goes down. And I’ve been tracking social media numbers for individual companies and, once in a while, you’ll see a dramatic dip in traffic and that almost always matches when there’s an algorithm change.
When it comes to changes in habits, this continuing evolution of the way we consume media, just in general, we have trends that you’ll see, some people are saying that, for example, the traffic on, I think Facebook is the one most commonly cited, has become 50 percent bots ––
Yeah, I’ve heard of that.
–– and stuff like that, so there are these types of trends. And then, of course, people’s reaction to these, whether people decide, I think a more obvious example is the recent trend where Facebook was once the platform of college students and younger people and now it’s more primarily older people while the younger crowd has moved on to Instagram and then TikTok. We have all these trends that go on versus, say, these algorithm changes. Which ones carry more weight into how messages are going to change in your business? Which one do you need to prepare for kind of more?
Both. Sorry I couldn’t give you an or answer, but it’s both. What’s interesting about Facebook is it’s not the college students from 20 years ago who are now on Facebook. I mean, some are still, of course, but it’s many cases their parents who got on Facebook later when their kids were on and they thought it’s cool, then it became not cool for their kids, because who wants to be on the social network with your parents?
Yeah, exactly.
Because when you’re in college, that’s the definition of uncool, and now that’s an older generation of people, it’s not the same people now older.
Yeah, yeah. So it’s not like, because like ––
They certainly overlap but it is an older group, even. So that always interested me with how that worked out with Facebook.
I lived that when I saw all my peers go from “Facebook is cool,” to, “Oh my gosh, Facebook’s become the place where someone’s crazy aunt and uncle will just post random crap I don’t care about anymore, I’m moving on.”
Yeah, but you have to think about who’s on which platform, what are they using it for, and then how the algorithm’s filtering that to them.
And so with these different algorithms, and, obviously, they’re trying to profile people as best they can, does that profile always match someone’s, I don’t know, like age, gender, economic status, or can someone have a viewing habit or something that is so, I don’t know, outside the normal for their generational group or something like that that the algorithm inadvertently thinks they’re a different age group?
Well, yes, based on what you put in and, of course, it can track across platforms, across your device so it’s not necessarily just what you do on TikTok or just on Instagram. If you are 20 and you have the viewing habits of someone in their 60s, it could throw it off. If you –– this is one of the reasons that you like profiles on Netflix when you log in, is it your profile, your spouse’s profile, your kids’ profile, whomever it is. Yes, that, of course, means your recommendations are influenced by your kids but also they now have a more accurate view of you.
Yeah, so they know who you are but then they also do know that you have kids too. So they’ll recommend you kids movies because they’re like, “Oh, I’m gonna watch that with my kids.”
Yeah, but maybe if you’re watching with the kids, you always use the kids’ profile.
Oh, I see. So then, when you’re on your own profile, you’re not ––
They just have you. But if your viewing habits may not necessarily reflect millennial parent of two children ages three to nine, then they might think you’re someone different. And there’re, of course, so many factors that go into how they pick what to show you but it does really depend on what you also select and how you rate things and your engagement with them.
And now, are there any trends going on today? I’ve been in a couple presentations that talk about people rethinking the way their people are using social media in general. Are there any trends like that going on today that people need to be aware of and be thinking about?
In a sense that it’s a lot more pervasive than it was even 10 years ago. Everything has tried to be social. LinkedIn has games now so there’s gamification, which I don’t think is interesting what games LinkedIn has but also we’re using it differently. So is it just somewhere to share social things or is it your whole life? TikTok serves a different purpose for people. It is a news platform for a lot of people, both from shared socially from peers but also from major networks and news organizations are doing that as well. So you’re getting both, and how the individual user is experiencing it is going to vary based on that individual user.
So there’s still a lot of individualization is what you’re saying. Is that becoming more prevalent or less prevalent? Because we kind of like pay attention to these like small algorithm changes but are they profiling someone as like they’re, I don’t know ––
They’re profiling you.
They’re profiling me so they’re not even trying to guess my age is what you’re saying.
Well, in the sense that they probably already have a good guess.
Is the whole idea of clustering real? I know people talk about that when they talk about our political divisions and how they’ve been kind of changed ––
There’s interesting maps of how people have moved based on political views, and it’s not necessarily polarization, it’s clustering ––
Yeah, clustering.
–– that people are grouping along ideological lines and aren’t necessarily associating as much outside of those groups. In part, they don’t have to, because the clustered groups exist, online and off.
Which came first?
Offline clustering definitely occurred first. It’s not new. We’ve had social clubs forever.
So is the offline clustering people literally like looking at a red/blue county map and deciding where to live based on that or is it more about, okay, what group of people do I hang out with? What club do I go to? What physical places?
Both. We’re going to see a lot of it in the next few months. Let’s see, we’re in June now. So, starting in September, you’ll see a lot of –– few stories, at least, about people who decided where to go to college based off of state laws. You’ll see that in decision time around April, May. You’ll see it around election time. You’ll see that in September when schools start. Oh, this freshman classes has these traits and these –– we’re profiling Jane Doe who chose to go here based off of access to abortion, which is a story I have read I don’t even know how many times. It’s a poignant story. It should be reported, but you’ll definitely see those again, I think, when you know colleges start in two and a half, three months.
So, it sounds like what you’re saying is that unless you live in one of those handful of states that are competitive, mixed, and probably has like a mixture of cultural laws, the rest of them are just going to inadvertently go further in their current direction, most likely because people are going to go to school there based on the choices that those states are making.
Yeah, to an extent. Sometimes things just happen. There are circumstances that occur. Some states have laws that are interesting. I think it’s Vermont that has liberal in the sense of available gun laws. You wouldn’t expect New England –– circumstances just sometimes happen.
It’s interesting, it’s interesting as Vermont’s relatively smaller state so it probably makes it easy for it to be a little bit quirky and be like we vote one way but we are going to be very another way on something else because that’s what our small population really wants.
Yeah, and you’ll see that across the country. And you mentioned it’s statewide, but if you look at county level maps, it’s not statewide, red/blue, it’s very much urban and then suburban compared to a more rural. Looking at the state map can be very misleading in terms of what a population kind of has their views towards.
And I’m sure these algorithms that we’re talking about before, they probably have a good idea about the type of county, or even sub county, if you talk about ––
Oh, yeah.
–– population, like the type of area you live in, it’s like, okay, you probably live in a county that votes likely this way.
We can do it by precinct level. They can do it by census tract, which census tracts are incredibly localized.
Oh, yeah, for sure. I’m originally from New York where I think a lot changes in a very small distance.
Yes. Also from New York and census tracts are publicly available, census tract information, that is there if you want to look it up.
I know, I just don’t put it past these companies to use every piece of information ––
They will.
–– they have available to ––
It’s a lot more local than the county level.
When it comes to how our use of social media is transforming, in a way, one of the narratives I’ve heard a little bit more is people are, in response a little bit to the loneliness epidemic, looking, in a way, more for community and wanting content that’s less about you’re telling me this versus more of like we’re having a conversation together. Is that a trend that you’re noticing or is that something that’s just a little bit more hype?
Well, loneliness epidemic is real. Definitely won’t call that hype. That is a very real thing. I deal mostly with businesses, mostly B2B, some dealing directly with consumers. But, again, people say, “Well, it’s B2B,” it’s like, yes, but on the end of that B is a person who is engaging and making a decision. There is a person there and you want to engage with a person at the end of it.
Yeah. You have to deal with like the gatekeeper and then eventually the decision maker, right?
Yeah, all of it’s going to be seen by real people. You’re making these B2B posts but who’s engaging with it? A person who works at that business. The business is not engaging. So that’s where you need to think about –– people want to talk to each other, of course, that’s this loneliness epidemic, but when you’re dealing with business content, you can reach people if you’re talking to them as an entity in a cold way that might not be as effective as talking to them like a person who’s interested in a topic, and that topic could just literally be IT solutions, which we all use every day and they’re routine to all of us. We’re using them right now for this conversation, but, ultimately, if you’re selling someone Zoom or Teams of persons doing that, Google does it for their Gemini, they run big ad campaigns for our people, and this made me, “This is my life it made better, and that’s why Gemini is great.” You’ll see, “We used this solution and I can be home with my kids more.” I don’t know if that’s a Gemini ad but that’s a common thing is, “Okay, this business solution lets me be with my family,” or, “I can go out with my friends because it saved me time,” sort of thing. So, yeah, remember, there are people at the other end of B2B communications.
So, yeah, so it’s a person, not the building of the business or the stock market ticker that you’re saying, like, “Oh, HCA is this.” There’s a person at that company that’s coming in and looking for a solution that’s going to make their life easier or something better about their existence.
Yeah. Even if it’s just day to day, if you go back into that email solution I was mentioning earlier, that invoicing solution, it integrates my existing mailing list so I don’t have to update things manually, you saved me a tedious task that I don’t like doing. I like that. No one –– you say it’s a tedious task, a repetitive task.
Obviously, most of the time people are going to respond to their day-to-day life, we talk about this is a tedious task or some kind of other source of frustration, but then, of course, every business has investors that theoretically, their incentive is going to be about making more money, having the business become more valuable. Which one is more important to talk to when publishing B2B content?
Of course, there are many, many publicly owned companies and shareholders and boards and that structure but a lot of cases you’re dealing with LLCs that are owned by a consortium of just their leadership, in some cases, their founders. Sometimes, it’s people, they’re owned by a private equity firm or they are a startup and they got venture capital.
So there are so many different models for that ownership structure. To say that it’s one or the other is kind of just discounting all of those possibilities. Share on XSo, if you can reach a person and say, “Yes, this is going to save me that tedious task,” well, meaning you’re not doing that tedious task means you can do something else, which could ultimately increase revenue and profits, which is what you were talking about, you have investors who are looking to make money. So, hopefully, each solution will do both. You’re hopefully not coming up with some great time saving solution that the person likes that is ultimately a money loser for the company.
Yeah, yeah, because at the very least it can reduce costs or something ––
Yeah, it reduces your cost.
Yeah.
It could mean happier employees, less turnover, less staff training time, which is reduced costs. Even if it’s not we saved $100 per invoice or invoicing software per month, whatever it is, it’s a bigger picture.
And we talked a bit about the different social media platforms. What are the big opportunities that people have as far as crafting a message, getting a message out that go beyond these platforms are there? Are there still offline ways that people can get messages out as well as some other forms of media?
Yeah. I love leave behind items. Pens are great. You could just leave them anywhere. Create a pen with your business information on it. No one questions if a pen is left on a table at a coffee shop, it’s a pen. Business card looks very salesy. A pen, someone left a pen behind. Pretty simple.
Yeah.
If you are in a co-working space, you’ll notice there are mugs for everyone there. If you have a meeting at a co-working space, again, pens, mugs, notepad, all those sorts of leave behind things people like and they use and they’re just there. And those are great offline things that you can do. And, of course, there are always still trade shows, there are conferences, there are panels, there are community networking events, if you’re part of local chambers, local technology groups, or the local coffee shop consortium that meets, if that’s what you do. There are always those offline opportunities.
It’s kind of similar to that all press is good press type of thing where even if someone’s annoyed by the random mug, they’re still seeing your name, still seeing your website, still seeing your ––
The mug will be at that co-working space for however long.
Yeah, until someone breaks it or ––
Yeah. So people will be using it all the time.
Yeah.
It’ll just get washed and reused.
Are there any of these types of items that are a bad idea? You mentioned business cards just looking salesy but are there any ones that are bad ideas?
I mean, when you leave a business card behind at the coffee shop as opposed to a pen, it has a very clear, different message to it. Things that look very salesy, I get these all the time, are door hangers, door tags ––
Oh, yeah.
Every day. I mean, in season, at least, I can count on someone offering to clean my gutters.
Yeah.
Someone is offering. Those very sales you’re looking. And look, but if it didn’t work, no one would do it. So they’re getting someone off of those, enough to make walking around the neighborhood and putting a bunch of hangers on doors worth it.
It reminds me of those weird salesy calls you get where you’re kind of called out of the blue and you mostly ignore it but then the one time you accidentally do it, they’re just like being blatantly salesy and you think, “Who does this work on?” but then, once again, you think to yourself, “Well, if this didn’t work, no one would do it anymore.”
Yeah. So it works enough to make the cost worth it.
All these methods that we use to get the message out there, it seems like the main key is to basically find the best use of our time and energy, time and effort, whether it be the right platform, finding the right audience, or crafting a message properly that people are going to actually get something about it, because people can get a lot of views on their video but not really get any business or whatever it is they’re looking for by people who just view it and then just move on.
Well, most times people are going to just move on. It takes repetition. Share on XThe old saying, and maybe the math on this is right, maybe it was right and isn’t anymore, is it takes 7 to 14 hits, 7 to 14 touch points, for someone to be moved, to make a decision based on your content. So, they saw one video. Okay, what are the other 6 to 13?
Oh, yeah, and that’s a thing that sounds like it’s different from the days when people were just reading newspapers.
Even when they were just reading newspapers, they had paid ads in the newspaper, you want it to be written up in a story, you might have a billboard ad if someone was walking down the street or just a signpost ad, if you had a storefront, people walk by your storefront every day, you didn’t expect someone to walk in and buy something every day, unless you were there morning deli or whatever you were, but they’d walk by that maybe a hundred times until, “You know, I need new appliances. I’m gonna walk into the appliance store I walk by on my way home from work every day.” It takes repetitions. And, look, we might not have storefronts. You know, if you’re a SaaS business, you don’t have a storefront, in most cases. Amazon has real, physical stores for lots of things, but most SaaS businesses, they don’t have storefronts. Amazon is much more than just SaaS. But it takes those repetition, so they’ll see paid ads on LinkedIn, they’ll see sponsored content, they’ll see your organic post, they might visit your website, they might listen to your podcast, they could do all sorts of different things, but minimum 7 to 14, and then they might take an action. So you’re expecting a conversion off of, “I made one video,” you’re expecting something that, for nearly everyone, isn’t going to happen.
So this 7 to 14 is not an artifact of like look at how our attention span, which is a real issue, attention span, but it’s something that’s just always been part of human nature and I even think of billboards where people drive by that same route every day and they’re like, “Oh, this furniture store is having a sale at the Fourth of July,” or something.
And it’s, of course, three months early. They want to know that people are seeing this over and over again.
Yeah, yeah. If someone commutes, they’re seeing it like every day.
Every day.
Definitely drives by it so there is a strategy behind those billboards where people are getting those 7 to 14 touch points.
And now you have more opportunities for touch points, because people are just more connected. So you have physical touch points, you have literally things like pens, you have physical signs, you could sponsor events with local groups. There are people, businesses sponsor local Little League teams and get on their team shirt. How many parents are seeing that? They’ll sponsor the leagues, they’ll be the food sponsor at the League’s annual dinner. Does that cost them something? Yeah, like any advertising, it will cost them something, but now, you’re feeding all these people and their parents and they know that. So there you go.
Given that it’s the middle of 2025, we’ve talked about some trends, we’ve talked about some things that are different from the past, some things that are the same from the past, what would you expect to be different about the landscape of crafting and marketing and message, say, by the end of the decade?
Fundamentally, very little. Execution, probably a lot. We’re still going to be looking for how can we reach people? How can we reach people where they are? How can we engage them? All those things that we’ve been doing forever isn’t going to be any different in 10 years.
So, yeah, so the fundamentals of figure out who you’re trying to reach, figure out what you’re trying to get from them, the fundamentals of that 7 to 14 touch points or even more ––
And how you want to reach them, of course.
And how you want to reach them, but then, obviously, specific habits, and it’s probably hard to even specifically speculate about things until they actually start emerging about if a new platform or if AI does some counterintuitive thing, the same way social media counterintuitively made us lonely, you know what I mean? If something like where to happen, we can just kind of see it as it emerges.
Yeah, we will see it and it might be fast, it might be slower.
Yeah. That makes perfect sense. Joshua, thank you so much for joining us today on Action’s Antidotes, for telling us some great things. Your company is beltway.media, and so if anyone’s interested in getting a hold of you, you can check it out there, unless there’s another method?
No. Our website, beltway.media, no dot-com. They can email me, jaltman@beltway.media. Again, never a dot-com. And also on LinkedIn, linkedin.com/in/joshuaialtman.
Nice, excellent. Yeah, and thank you for all the tips, and I would also like to thank everybody out there listening today for tuning in to Action’s Antidotes, for taking some time to listen to some content that’s really going to help you create the life that you really want.
Important Links:
About Joshua Altman
Joshua is a creative professional and communications expert with more than 20 years of experience and a background in the public and private sectors. He is the managing director of beltway.media, a D.C.-based creative and communications firm. Prior to launching beltway.media, Joshua worked as a multimedia journalist with The Hill newspaper covering the full scope of federal policy issues and multiple election cycles.
As a consultant, Joshua works with both the public and private sectors including startups at all stages to refine their messaging and connect with their different audiences including customers and investors. At the federal level, Joshua modernized, rebranded, wrote, and relaunched multiple agency websites to optimally engage diverse stakeholders.