An AV and integration-focused podcast broadcast weekly

This week's episode of Automation Unplugged we’re bringing you a webinar we recorded in partnership with Lutron in June 2025 called “Content That Converts: Crafting a Winning Article, Social Post, or Email.”

About this episode:

Content marketing is a foundational strategy that builds trust with your clients, positions you as an expert in your field, answers your audience’s questions, and helps you get found online by the right prospects. Producing useful, relevant, and consistent content across multiple channels will boost your SEO rankings and help your ideal clients discover you.

During this session, you’ll hear from myself and Kendall Clark, Senior Director of Sales & Marketing at One Firefly. We were joined by Laura Jean Null, Marketing Operations Specialist - Residential Luxury, at Lutron Electronics.

In our hour-long session, we cover:

• How to define your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) so every piece of content attracts your best-fit clients.
• Conversion-content principles — like loss aversion, authority, and reciprocity — that guide prospects to take action after reading your content.
• Practical tips for writing articles, emails, and social media posts that spark engagement and inquiries.

SEE ALSO: #314: From Insight to Impact – Matt Bernath on Bold Leadership in Business

Transcript

Kendall:

Awesome. Yes. Well, let's go ahead and get started. It's one thirty one. We have an hour. We're gonna try and keep us as close to an hour as we can and leave time for some questions at the end. So welcome, everyone. We're happy that you're spending an hour here with us. We're excited to be here partnered with Lutron to go over this awesome content.

Kendall:

We have some really exciting stuff, and this is content that converts. So we're gonna talk about crafting a winning article, social post, email, and a bit more. So just to jump into our agenda quickly, we are gonna do some quick introductions. Then we're gonna talk about what is conversion content. I know that's kind of maybe an ambiguous phrase. We're gonna give you tips on all of the different content types. And then for those of you that are here, maybe with some DMC that you're looking to invest in, we're gonna give you some options there to help you kinda weigh your options, and we will conclude with some questions.

Kendall:

For a quick introduction, my name is Kendall. I'm the Director of Sales and Marketing here at one Firefly. Been in the industry for eleven years now and just passionate about helping businesses grow and being a part of this industry. And I'm joined by my co presenter, Ron. Ron, how are you?

Ron:

I'm super duper happy to be here with you, Kendall, and all of my smiling faces of my Lutron people and my One Firefly people and all of you out there in virtual computer land. Hopefully, you're all not working too hard and you have a summer vacation planned. It is June after all. I'm Ron Callis, CEO and founder of One Firefly. I've been working with all of you integrator folks, for the last twenty six years. Actually started my career at Lutron. We'll talk about that in just a few slides. And, been running One Firefly now for the last seventeen years.

Ron:

And I'm gonna introduce Rebecca. Rebecca is our fearless marketing leader here at One Firefly, and she's gonna help emcee. So, Rebecca, do you actually wanna describe, kind of the role and responsibilities you're gonna have here over the next hour?

Rebecca:

Yeah. Absolutely. I am Rebecca. Nice to see everyone here today. So I am here to collect your questions as they come up during the webinar, so please feel free to drop them in the chat or the q and a section. I'll be keeping an eye out on those, and we'll do a q and a section at the end. I also wanna let everybody know that everyone here, whether you're here or you just registered and couldn't make it, everyone will receive a copy of this recording and the entire slide deck. We're gonna go through a ton of great content, so we want you to relax and enjoy it. You will receive all of this content in these slides in your inbox tomorrow.

Ron:

Love it. So a little bit about One Firefly. You know, the company was founded back in two thousand seven. Today, we are the largest agency that works with integrators primarily in North America, but we do have a customer base around the world. And we are an industry focused agency, meaning we work just with technology contracting businesses. Now we work with residential and commercial. There are closely aligned business verticals, you know, commercial only, security only agencies. But most of our clients are AV contractors of different shapes and sizes.

Ron:

And all of our capabilities here at One Firefly are in house. So we have a web development team, social media teams, paid advertising teams, and so forth. And, you know, a little trivia, we today, we work with just over, you know, six hundred and fifty or so integrators day to day. And we built well over a thousand websites for integrators, located around the world. So very happy to be here with all of you. And just one other piece of trivia, couple of years ago, One Firefly also launched a new division called Amplify People where we're helping integrators with their hiring.

Ron:

So I started - that's me, a young lad, a young Ron, fresh out of college. I was an intern at Lutron back in the year two thousand, and it was, you know, my hair wasn't as long and flowing and gray as it is today. You can see there it was a nice buzz cut coming right out of college. And I went through Lutron's rotational program. Fast forward, we've had a long and rewarding relationship with Lutron, One Firefly and Lutron that is. We shot videos and added beautiful Lutron content into our media gallery. We've been supporting Lutron dealers in their marketing, whether through branding, website, ongoing digital marketing, and SEO. And about three years ago now, we were officially, I guess, we officially formalized our partnership in that One Firefly and Lutron partnered in naming One Firefly as a member and a component of the benefits in the ongoing annual program that Lutron offers to their dealers and today is known as DMC. And we'll be talking about the DMC program here in just a few minutes.

Ron:

And I'd love to introduce LJ. So there's actually two Lutron faces you see on screen here. There's LJ and Kyle. But LJ, if you could jump in and tell everyone who you are, and I think you're gonna roll right into describing the details of the Lutron DMC program. Laura Jean: Yeah. Thanks, Ron. Hi, everybody. My name's Lara Jean Null, otherwise known as LJ. I'm on the marketing team. I work hand in hand with Kyle Yamamoto who's here today. We focus on our dealer communication and engagement. So we've definitely had a lot of communication emails with some of you. I recognize your names on this call. Today I'm gonna briefly be walking you through our dealer marketing credit process, also known as DMC. Laura Jean: So we've tried to make this process for using your dealer marketing credit and getting reimbursed simple with these three easy steps. First, you're gonna complete your work with One Firefly, then you're gonna submit your paid receipt to Lutron. Our Lutron team will review it and then apply that credit for the job you have on the file. And if you skip to the next slide, I can show you just how to do this. So when you go into My Business, there's a tab at the very top that says DMC. Once you click on the DMC tab, you will get a view and be able to see the credits that are available to you. Then you can click on redeem credits. When there's, there should be a couple questions, you know, that you're prompted to answer, and then you can attach your invoice or receipt on file and submit it. Laura Jean: Within about twenty four business hours, this will be reviewed by the Lutron team, and your redeemable funds will be updated. Now if you don't have a DMC tab on your My Business portal, please reach out to your sales rep. Sometimes this is just an instance of principal level access or not, and your sales rep will be able to work with you on this. And then finally, as just a quick reminder, for the new 2025 DMC policy, fifty percent of the original loaded DMC funds will expire by July 31st, 2025. So next month. So this is a perfect opportunity right now to listen in, gain some skills, and utilize our relationship with One Firefly. And so now I'll pass it over to Kendall to go over the One Firefly credits.

Kendall:

Awesome. And, LJ, any questions that anyone has, whether they can find their DMC tab or they don't know how much they have, that should go through their rep? Laura Jean: Yes. Correct. A hundred percent.

Kendall:

So in addition to your Lutron DMC credits, you know, through our partnership, both Lutron and One Firefly feel so passionately that marketing can help grow your business and your lighting and shading business, that here at One Firefly, we've also added some skin in the game at the value of about a million dollars. So if you are status with Lutron, you have additional credits, One Firefly credits, and what that is is simply money off the top of any of your One Firefly services based on your status level. So how that would work is if you decided to embark and invest in marketing and work with us, we would confirm your dealer status, using the Lutron dealer locator and apply those credits automatically to your bill. So it's a really, really awesome partnership, and we're very thankful to be working together.

Kendall:

Ron, let's talk a little bit about spending versus investing because I have talked to dealers on that December 31st deadline looking to finish up and use the rest of their DMC. Let's talk about the differences and how to spend and invest those wisely.

Ron:

Yeah. So all of you are tuned in and watching a marketing webinar here on Tuesday, June twenty fourth, middle of the day, it means that you're tuned in to your business. And that means you likely have business goals, things that you wanna try to get done within your business this year, 2025, or you're already starting to maybe commence your planning for 2026. What is best is that you're thinking about those business objectives, and you're starting to then design and calibrate marketing activities that could help you achieve those business goals. And so that's our message. That is better. If you click one more time Kendall, you're gonna put the big x.

Ron:

We don't want you guys making the last minute decision of, you know, buying a bunch of t-shirts or a bunch of squeezy balls and that's how you're utilizing your Lutron dollars. Or even, putting Lutron demos. If you already have Lutron demos and you don't need more Lutron demos, then don't just spend the money on more Lutron demos that might go in a closet. You wanna be spending those dollars on activities that are gonna help drive your growth. So that's what I want you tuned into here over the next forty five minutes or so, fifty minutes. It's just we're gonna try to give you some ideas. By the way, these ideas do not have to be executed through One Firefly. You can do these on your own or you can do these with other agencies. But these are just ideas on activities that if you align them with your business goals, you're more likely to get more out of it. And that's gonna ultimately help you grow your business. And that's really what makes business fun is when you're growing and you're profitable.

Ron:

So in terms of growing that business, I want you thinking about who are the types of customers that you want to be partnering with. Now this could be the end user or it could be trade partners. Right? It's really idealized entities or individuals that you wanna be working more closely with. And so step one is you do have to know who they are, which means you need to think about, maybe collaborate with the other leaders or sales folks at your organization. Who do you wanna be working with? And then it's important to acknowledge that that individual does not just wake up and go from zero to hero, and they're ready to hire you. There's a process. There's a mental process of ultimately deciding that you are the right agency or the right entity, the right business for them. Right? So I won't get overly technical, but I'm gonna point out three stages here in what's called the customer journey.

Ron:

Number one is the awareness phase. This is where people are building a new project and they are just now they're probably a bit overwhelmed and they're trying to decide what are all the things that I need to think about and the decisions that I need to make in this project. And then you move them further along to the consideration phase. Maybe now they have a lot of windows. Some of these windows are very high up. Maybe there's a great room. And now they say, I know I should need a shading solution at this window. So now I'm gonna start to research what types of fabrics, what type of motors, what type of control would I want to put at this window? And now you go a little bit further down to the acquisition. Now maybe they've landed on a Lutron solution, and they're trying to decide which business, which installation company are they gonna have come in to join their design team in order to assist with providing this technology. So these are various stages of the customer journey and what's important for you to understand because it's gonna ultimately affect the different channels and messages that Kendall and I are gonna talk to you about. It's important to understand what is the message that that customer or potential customer would ultimately be researching or need to find answers to so that your business is being helpful and assisting them along their journey so that they get their answers and they ultimately land on your business as the provider for those services.

Ron:

So, you know, seventy five percent of luxury consumers conduct their research online. We found a high profile source for this statistic, but we're gonna test it live. So for you, all of you here that are signed in, we'd love you all to answer this question for us. So we're gonna, Rebecca's gonna jump in here and help launch this poll. How often do you research online through Google or AI? Now some of you may be using Perplexity or ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini or maybe you're using AI summaries in Google search.

Ron:

So how many of you are using all of these various tools at our disposal before you make a purchasing decision? Maybe you're gonna purchase something for your home. Maybe you're gonna purchase a new car. How many of you do this? So right now, I see about forty percent of you have participated in this survey. I'd love to get this over fifty percent. So if you wouldn't mind weighing in. I love it. Wow. We're already at sixty percent participation. I'll give you another five seconds here. Let's see if we can get one or two more answers, and then we're gonna share that with the audience. So, more than half of you, almost, sixty, seventy, there we are, sixty six percent. Alright. Sixty eight. Alright. We're gonna call it there. Thank you all for everyone that did participate.

Ron:

And, here we are. So now we see on the screen, we see the results. Forty percent of you, let's see. Always - I like to be informed before I buy. Most of the time - thirty six percent of you. So I'm just gonna add those two together. Look at that folks. You just matched our published data. Seventy six percent of you always or most of the time use online search. So I want you to think about that because many of you are gonna tell Kendall and I that most of your customers come to you through referral. And we admit, we know they come to you through referral because you did good work. You made your customers happy. You partnered with a great design team, and they're gonna drop your name.

Ron:

And that person that was referred to you is still going on to this thing called the Internet, and they are still doing research. Whether it's about your name, your business name, or Lutron, or the solution type language. They are going out there. And our message is you have an opportunity to be in the driver's seat with defining what they consume when they do that research. So one place they're gonna go do this research is they're gonna go to this thing called Google. Most of us are using Google pretty regularly. What we want to point out is that you really want to get found what's called organically in position one, two, or three. So Kendall here is pointing out on the screen just to help you understand what you're seeing. This was a Lutron query. You can see it up there, Lutron Lighting, Utah. And the first position was an ad, and then right below the ad were three organic positions. Now what's really neat is look at the statistic, the percentage to the left of that organic position. I'm gonna just round up for the simplicity of math. I’ll call it forty percent, twenty percent, ten percent. Okay?

Ron:

So about sixty percent of all of the clicks on Google page one of search happen when your business is in organic position one, two, or three. So it's our recommendation that you take an active role in ensuring that your business is showing up in position one, two, or three. Now the world has also changed. So actually, I'm gonna go to AI in just a minute. Sorry. So when you talk about the terms, this is a fun activity for you and your team to circle up because in search, both in Google and we'll talk about AI in a moment, the exact words and phrases matter. So it's important for you to define what are the services, solutions, and brands like Lutron that you would really want to be the dominant answer on the Internet when people are doing those searches. So actually, one of our good friends and clients and wonderful Lutron ambassador, Wipliance, out of Seattle, Scottsdale, and Spokane, this is a couple of keywords that drove a lot of their traffic, just as an example, in the last twelve months. Home theater installation near me, home automation Scottsdale, home theater installation. So these are actual words that were found that we pulled up from their Google search console that are words that drove traffic into their site. And your marketing partner, your team, can absolutely look at your Google search and tell you right now where are the organic visitors on your website, what keywords are driving them. And that's really good intel because there might be keywords that you absolutely want. And there might be keywords that, oh my gosh, I wish those Lutron searches in my market were landing on my website, and at the moment, they're nowhere to be found. And through active SEO and content creation and other activities, you can drive that outcome.

Ron:

Now the big blue you guys, everyone sees the big blue circle on your screen. That is representative of the search volume that's happening on Google. OK. There's a lot of numbers, a lot of data on this screen. I don't wanna overwhelm you, but it's kind of neat because the world's changing and it's changing very quickly. Still today, most of the search volume is happening on Google. And you can see up there, one thousand six hundred and thirty one billion total searches happening on Google. Look at the green circle. The green circle is OpenAI's ChatGPT. Forty seven billion. But if you look right below that, it says sixty seven percent. It's growing rapidly. In fact, it's growing exponentially. Now go back over to Google. What is it doing? It's diminishing. So it's still the largest search volume on the Internet, but AI is coming up fast. I want to point this out because I want you to be mindful of how is your business showing up, both in Google and in AI.

Ron:

So here's an example of a search. Kendall and I actually did this yesterday. As we were prepping, we wanted to make sure this was fresh and hot off the press. We typed into ChatGPT. I typed it into my account. Who are the top five best companies for luxury Lutron installations in Southern California? By the way, we are neither condoning or saying this is accurate or not. I'm just showing you that AI is giving answers to people. And many people, maybe many of you watching or listening, are using these answers and taking them as gospel. So here, it's listing five companies. By the way, I ran this search query in the o three ChatGPT model, which is their thinking model. That's why you see Kendall could highlight it. Took one minute and twelve seconds for it to give me this answer versus if I ran it in the four o model, it probably would have taken about ten seconds to give me that answer. So it's important to know as you're looking at the visibility of your business, you now need to be mindful how are you showing up in Google and how am I showing up in all of the AI large language models. So successful digital marketing in 2025, I'm gonna tie this back to your business goals, is you need to be laser focused on your right audience.

Ron:

Right? And I'll even give a marketing definition, your ICP, your ideal customer profile or your ideal customer avatar. You need to know what that is, who that is, because then you need to make sure you know where are they spending time on the Internet. Are they doing Google searches? Are they doing AI searches? Are they on LinkedIn? Are they on Instagram? And then you need to put the right message. And so the message is what Kendall's now gonna talk to us about. How do I put messages out that have a high probability of converting or getting them to take the action that you want them to take.

Kendall:

Awesome. So let's go ahead and jump into what is this thing called conversion content. I mentioned earlier, it just sounds like a fluffy marketing phrase. Content that you're putting out into the world that invokes some kind of emotion from the prospect that you're putting it in front of. Now that emotion could be excitement. It could be trust. It could be, you know, disagreement or objection. It could have a little bit of urgency to it. Whatever emotion you're trying to pull, we wanna tap into that emotion and use that to help guide the prospect to take that next step or that next action that we want them to follow. So let's admit it. We are all somebody's ICP. We are somebody's perfect customer. We are somebody's prospect, meaning that conversion content is all around us and being put in front of us in different ways throughout our day, throughout all the different platforms we interact with.

Kendall:

So what we wanna show you is how you can utilize some of these tactics to have a successful marketing campaign and ultimately drive more of the results that you're looking to see. So how we're gonna do that is, what I have an overview of right here is eight proven psychological principles. We're gonna get a little bit we did some math. Now we're getting into the science a little bit. These are psychological principles that you can subtly use in your market to get the behavior you're looking for. So we're gonna overview three of them today, and the first one is called loss aversion. And I like to call loss aversion the FOMO principle. It's the fear of missing out.

Kendall:

Everyone uses that acronym still, but it's the concept that people are more motivated by losing something than they are to gain something of equal value. So how does that work in your marketing? This is an awesome example for a blog we wrote for one of our customers, Applause. Don't let your home theater or your entertainment experience fall behind with an out of date home theater installation. So that concept of loss or the value going down. We can see that with some other lighting and shading examples here. Maybe it's talking about your art investment or costing you time, money, energy, savings, whatever it might be. We wanna talk about that emotion or that loss feeling, and that gets a prospect to have that response to it and take that next step. The next principle is called labeling. And labeling is very simple. It just involves assigning an identity to somebody to help encourage them to act the way that you want to. So Rebecca and I, when we were putting this together, we actually laughed a little bit because we use labeling on many of you all to get you here. So if you received a One Firefly email, the subject line said, Lutron dealers, colon, right at the top of it. What that is is we know that in your very, very crowded inbox full of emails, something that you say, oh, wait a second. I'm a Lutron dealer. This might be important. This is relevant to me. That's who I am. Gives you that slightly higher likelihood of clicking on that email and seeing what's inside and brought many of you here today. So that's one example of labeling, a way that you can use it in your marketing, though.

Kendall:

Calling on sports fanatics, a perfect example of labeling on this. I think it's an Instagram Reels. Another blog we wrote here, why Southwest Florida homeowners are switching to motorized shades. All great examples of labeling. And then finally, the third one we're gonna go through is reciprocity, and that involves very simply, it's the exchange of information for some kind of freebie, some kind of value. This is a very easy one for you to practice in your marketing day to day, and it could look like a free consultation, some kind of offer, a discount. We also see it over in AudioVisions. They do a great job of exchanging for a free ebook. So that's the concept of reciprocity, and those are three of the eight different, psychological principles that you can use in your marketing. And, Ron, I think it's funny. You'll start to kinda see them everywhere, you know, when you're looking at social media and magazines, print. You'll start to see some of these principles.

Ron:

Oh, they're everywhere. When you all see the email land in your inbox, don't miss out. You know? This is going away. There's so many neat, I say tricks, methods. Methods. That marketers and people that are trying to get us all as customers, and you said we're all someone's ICP, to act now and to do this thing. Well, that's, you know, use those skills for good, not evil. So that's what we're trying to go through here. How to help your customers find you so you can provide them Lutron solutions and all the automation solutions that you guys offer.

Kendall:

Awesome. So we've done all of these different principles at a high level. And now what I really wanna look into is you've created some kind of content. Maybe you've applied these principles to an article, to a blog, or an email that you've written. And now you wanna understand, how do I see if that's successful? How do I measure whether that's the right type of messaging to put out into the world, whether it was successful, drove what we were looking for, track it? So what I wanna do is we're gonna zoom into each of these content types, and I'm gonna first start off by what are the metrics of a successful article? What are the metrics of a successful email, social post? And then we'll give you some actionable tips for that specific content type.

Kendall:

So starting off with the metrics of a high converting article, I know we're more math here, but we're gonna keep it really simple. You wanna look at average engagement time. So your website should have something called Google Analytics installed in it. Your marketing partner can help make sure that is there and is tracking because it's gonna give you really great insight, those visitors on your site, and what are the things they're doing, what pages are they navigating to, and how long do they stay there. So average engagement time is we're gonna take the total engagement time, the total time that somebody is active on your website, not just the window up and they've walked away and it's logged for a couple hours, the time they're spending scrolling, clicking, all that good stuff that they're engaged divided by the total number of engaged sessions. And you'll see here an example, one minute and four seconds. That is a great engagement time. You may think, wow. A minute's not very long, but think of the world we live in with infinite scrolls, infinite clicks. Anything over a minute is fantastic. It shows that people are really ingesting that content, and we wanna continue to see that grow. So we wanna do more of that content that's really sticky and engaged and less of what isn't working.

Kendall:

The other metric you wanna take a close look at is calls to action. So calls to action can look like a variety of different things. Someone who maybe filled out a subscribe form. Maybe they clicked a call or did a contact us page. You just wanna make sure that you're tracking those as well. And then finally, our tips here for, in for articles would be to utilize thought leadership content. So what thought leadership content is is really just taking a stand, taking an opinion, Rather than having a very salesy type email that you get in your inbox that, you know, kind of turns you off, your luxury homeowners, your luxury business owners, they wanna come to you for as, like, the authority in your space. So what could that look like? You could do something as sophisticated here as maybe you have a lighting designer on staff that wants to share tips, tricks, insights, things like that. It also could be something as simple as, hey. What are the top you know, we're coming into summer now. What are the top five songs that you could play at your next outdoor barbecue? All of that is considered thought leadership content. All of that, people have an opinion on and will act.

Ron:

Yeah. What I would add to that, Kendall, is the audience here, don't be afraid to be controversial. Frankly, the more controversial or edgy that your topics could be where you have a really strong opinion, maybe you think, I'm gonna make it about Lutron shades. Maybe you think that the openness factor on a solar shade should never be more than five percent. You know, that sounds so edgy. Right? But you could make a statement like that. Like, you should never use something more than five percent openness ever again. Well, people are just curious, like, why is this person taking this opinion? It's more likely to have someone click and engage, and at the end of the day, that's what you want. You want them engaging with your content and reading about it. They're more likely to ultimately get in touch with you if they do.

Kendall:

Do you feel strongly about a preferred color temperature? I know that gets people going. Lots of people have very strong opinions on that, and that's the point. It's to get people to engage. You have that inbox. What's gonna make somebody say pause and say, I wanna read what that person has to say and come back to them time and time again? So next up for email. Metrics of a high converting email are gonna be two different pieces here. So let's go back to that inbox. You have an email pop up. The first thing you're gonna see in that inbox is the subject line. That's gonna be your open rate. The effectiveness of your subject line is the number of unique opens divided by the emails delivered. You send a hundred emails, fifty people decide to open those emails, that's a fifty percent open rate, and it says, hey, your subject line did pretty well there. Now we're gonna take those fifty email opens, and the next metric is gonna be your click through rate. Of those fifty people who opened it, how many people felt so compelled by the message that you put in front of them that they took that next action? That's called your click through rate.

Kendall:

If you're looking for kind of a metric of where you want to or a goal of where you want those two metrics to be, open rate should very easily be twenty to thirty percent. Depending on the message, you could see thirty five or forty percent, even higher than that. Click through rate, it will seem low, but industry average is around a two to three percent click through rate. It is reasonable in our market, and our end users to get higher than that, but set your expectations from around that two percent range. Alright. Jumping to our subject line tips, we want to be clear, not clever. We wanna use scarcity. And what we want is just a really straightforward, make it very clear what to expect when that person clicks on that email. What are they gonna see in the content to that email? And then within that content, same thing. We wanna make sure that we're not cluttering. In your email, don't give them a wall of copy because nobody is going to read it. Put a great image. Put a compelling headline. Give them a little value. Use some of those conversion tips, those psychological tips that we gave earlier, and then give them a very clear call to action. So you see here in this email that nice big blue learn more button.

Kendall:

That gives somebody a great next step. We did not give them an entire blog article in this email. We gave them a couple sentences to kinda pique their interest, and then that next step to click into your website and learn more. Ron, social.

Ron:

Love it. So we're gonna jump into social. So I have a little secret for all of you. If you are active on social, but if people are not engaging with your content, very few people are actually probably seeing your content. So, well, how do you know then if you're being active on social if it's ultimately contributing to the visibility and brand building of your business? Well, you wanna be looking at some of the data. Yes. I know many of you thought marketing had nothing to do with math. Well, the reality is good marketing has everything to do with math. So you've gotta be defining your benchmarks, like where did you start? And then if you're gonna invest time, money, and energy and be active, for example, on social media, are you seeing progress moving in the right direction? So one of the pieces of data you wanna look at is impressions, which is how many times was your content potentially seen by people and then you wanna look at engagement rate.

Ron:

So engagement rate means people, you can see it right there, are they liking, commenting, or sharing your content? So if you go to your company's Facebook page or Instagram page and you see that someone on your team is very consistently making posts, but there aren't likes, comments, or shares, then I have a little secret. No one is actually seeing that post. So someone on your team is busy making that post, but it's not necessarily making the impact that you want to have. So the key is to put out content, thus that would gain engagement.

Kendall:

And, Ron, we'd much rather see lower impressions but a higher engaged audience than if you have a million impressions but no engagement. What that's telling you is you're really not hitting that right audience, that it's out there in the world. Maybe it's been a little viral. But if nothing's happening from it, it's really not, you know, the most productive post.

Ron:

So, so true. So then you wanna talk about, what are the types of posts? And just for everyone that's tuned in here, I wanna make sure you understand the difference behind what we call an organic post and something totally different. This is an organic post. This is an ad. So at the moment, what we're talking about are organic posts. So if I'm making a post, then I wanna show beautiful imagery. I wanna show imagery that's interesting or video that's interesting. The the good news for many of you is it doesn't have to have a very high production value, meaning it's not professional photography and videography only. For example, you see here a shot from Summit's website, an integrator out of California, and this is just a company meeting. It could be argued as a pretty boring activity. It's just a company gathering.

Ron:

There's the owner of the company upfront talking to some of their staff. Or actually, in this case, talking to an architect. And so it's a visually interesting image. It's an interesting angle of the shot and it's supported with commentary. Hey, this integrator is out doing biz dev, working with architects. And thus, you see that it has nine engagements and nine people liking the post. The way social media works is if people engage with your content, then the social media platforms expand the reach of your content. So you really wanna be seeking that content that would get a wider reach. On the example on the right, this is a little bit more of a produced post. There lots of software. Canva is one of the more common pieces of software you can use. And you can see that in this case, they're also dropping the brand logo. This is from an integrator out of Toronto, Canada. And you can see that it's nicely branded, looks polished, and professional. So you really wanna make sure you understand the type of content that your brand wants to put out to the world. And you wanna use social media posts as an opportunity to reinforce that. If you ultimately want to expand your reach, you wanna be looking at social advertising. And then the last comment I'll make is now with the acceleration of AI, the relevance and importance of social media is actually more necessary today in 2025 and into the future. That's where things are trending. Whereas we could argue social media was in fad and then was going out of fad, it's actually now back in fad because it's sending social signals and online content signals to the AI platforms because the AI platforms are crawling social media. And not only are they reading the text, but they are reading and interpreting the images and interpreting the video and using that into context that are helping them formulate their AI responses.

Ron:

So there's an opportunity for your business to be in front of that and to be driving the type of content that you want both the humans to process, but also our AI overlords to process because they're crawling it whether you like it or not. Alright. And now what is old is new again. We're gonna talk, yes, people. We're gonna talk about postcards. So if you want to communicate with a particular constituency, that might be your customers. Maybe you have all of the mailing addresses of your customers. Maybe you have different cohorts. I want you to think about how you segment these lists of customers. Maybe these are customers of yours that purchased, last purchased more than five years ago. So maybe there's a campaign where you wanna renew them and tell them what's happening. But there's also opportunities where you are targeting new audiences, new demographic parameters where maybe you're looking at people with a high net worth over two million dollars and above, or maybe you're looking at audiences that have purchased a home that is one million dollars plus, all within a radius of your business.

Ron:

These become audiences, which could particularly fit into your ICP that now you can put your message. And so when we talk about the audience, then the location, well, now we're addressing them at their home, and we're gonna put messages out that ultimately peak their interest. So if you're doing a direct mail campaign, you wanna be tracking whether or not these things are working. So one of the things you can look at is if we are big fans, and we're actually gonna have something very exciting to tell you all about here in a few minutes. But you wanna be driving that visitor over to a landing page. Right? So that's why you see a QR code. The person thinks this message is interesting.

Ron:

They scan it. You bring them to a web page where they get more of that message, and now you can track them. Call tracking, they can fill out forms, or you can ultimately plant a cookie and then further track them and remarket to them. And then the second is call tracking. So this is using services such as CallRail. CallRail is one of the services we use regularly here at One Firefly that lets you put a number that then gets tracked and recorded so you understand if people are calling in and ultimately getting taken care of by your team. You now understand, is your opportunity pipeline growing from the people that are reacting to receiving these postcards? You then want to be looking at how do you make the postcard compelling and ultimately convert. So you wanna use compelling headlines. You wanna use beautiful imagery. One of the benefits of partnering with Lutron is they have just stunning imagery that they make available to their Lutron dealers. And you really wanna be very clear with the audience that you're targeting and what message you're presenting and then what's your action? What are you asking them to do? And I want you to go back to the beginning of this conversation where we were talking about the buyer journey. Are we speaking to them at the awareness stage, or are they now doing further research, or are they now in the decision making mode of deciding which business to hire and to provide those services? Well, you now can put together compelling campaigns, multi touch, multi month efforts to put this message in front of your ICP.

Ron:

And so I'm gonna transition now. Number one, point, this is where we're talking about what are some of the ideas that might be interesting to you if you're looking for ways whether right now in, you know, before July, DMC dollars expire or you're really put in the planning stages of of how to spend money and energy here in the second half of the year, these are some very tight, smart packages that we've developed that would ultimately help you drive your Lutron business to help you hit those goals here, in 2025. I'm gonna ask Kendall to actually point down at the one at the very bottom in the middle, and that's actually direct mail.

Ron:

So we are very excited. We are launching a brand new product. You all attending this and listening right now, you're the first to hear this. In the world, press releases haven't even gone out. But we are launching direct mail services at One Firefly, and we are launching our MVP, our initial service offering, singularly focused on Lutron messaging. So whether you're trying to drive overall Lutron brand visibility or lighting fixtures through KETRA or control or shading solutions, leveraging beautiful imagery, tight Lutron centric, luxury focused messaging. There's three month and six month campaigns. And actually, in the very near future, we're gonna offer ongoing monthly campaigns. But if that's interesting, price points you see here are representative of print and postage and data list access and turn keying that and landing page design and account manager access. So it's really a white glove service to help with lead generation through direct mail.

Ron:

But there's a bunch of beautiful solutions here on the screen. We have a three sixty SEO audit. If you just wanna know how am I currently positioned against my competitors around key Lutron keywords in my marketplace, we have a no strings attached, just a one time we'll do a complete and thorough audit, for the fee you see there on the screen. Again, you can use the One Firefly credit or you can use your Lutron DMC dollars. Video Pioneer up there on the right. Maybe you have that project you just finished and you wanna go shoot that project with beautiful videography that now could be cut up for content on your website, could be further cut up for applications on social media. Remember, AI is crawling your website and your social media, and now it is, this is scary, but it's just true. It's more than just the words. They are crawling your words, your images, and your video content, and interpreting that into context that's gonna aid your visibility in AI LLMs here right now and into the future. So is your content generic content or is it original one of a kind? It's a good idea that you have one of a kind content.

Ron:

Brochures, web pages, ongoing digital marketing, lots of really smart ways. By the way, none of these answers is right for everybody, and maybe there are even other more strategic approaches that would be right for your business based on where you're at and where you're trying to go. But we're trying to help you understand there's a spectrum, and let's call this the easy button sheet of packages that would likely help you drive business growth and drive visibility for your business.

Ron:

We wanna thank you all for attending this webinar. Kendall, thank you for being my partner in crime and wonderful presenter. Thank you, Rebecca, for emceeing, and I think you're gonna help us take some questions. And thank you, of course, Kyle and LJ and Lutron for having us here for this webinar. Everyone, feel free to scan this. This will take you to our Lutron landing page where you'll see additional resources. Kendall, I believe we're gonna allow everyone to download this full deck.

Kendall:

Yep. We'll be sending that out in a follow-up email, so you'll get the full recording and a PDF of the deck. So if you wanna come back and look at all of that content. And it looks like we have about ten or so minutes here for questions, which I love. So, Rebecca, I'll hand it to you. Anything come in?

Rebecca:

Yeah. Couple of things have come in, and just wanna let everyone know chat is still open, q and a is still open if you have more. We did have a great question come in. Ron, while you were talking about social media, someone asked, what is your take on using hashtags in social media?

Kendall:

I could speak to this one a little bit, Ron.

Ron:

Yeah. Please.

Kendall:

You know, I think, LJ, you're spot on. There is a lot of debate. There is a lot of emotions that people have and opinions people have about hashtags. You know, we've seen work. One, you should always do a balance of hashtags. You never wanna overload. You don't wanna come across as spammy. If your post looks spammy to you, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, they're all gonna feel like it's spammy as well. If you do use hashtags, you wanna be really mindful with the types of hashtags that you're using. In some case, yes, you might be able to get more impressions. It's going back to that slide of impressions versus engagement. Maybe you can hashtag something larger like technology and whatever it might be that has millions of people interacting with that hashtag. May not be the type of customer that you need than the person who might check out the Lutron lighting hashtag. Could be a smaller subset of people checking out that type of content, but likely could be more down the funnel and a more valuable person that's looking at your post. Anything to add there, Ron?

Ron:

Nailed it. Awesome.

Kendall:

Awesome.

Rebecca:

I also oh, I'll go get, LJ had a great comment that I'm gonna post. I think that accidentally only went to host and panelists. So I'm gonna repost it here with the link that you shared, LJ, to that article. Laura Jean: Yeah. And I'm just gonna say also when it comes to hashtags, I think I've noticed in my previous roles and this role, like, using hashtags at events is very successful. Like, if you're going to CEDIA Expo, great one. You guys all know about CEDIA Expo. Say you meet someone at CEDIA Expo and you're like, I use hashtags for searching a lot of times too. So say you use hashtag CEDIA Expo at the end of your post. Anyone who searches that hashtag can find it, which is really good with, like, the algorithm of everything. But, again, you don't wanna do, with the trends of, for a like or hashtag follow me or anything like that. Make it relevant. Make it, you know, great with the content, and be very specific with it.

Rebecca:

Awesome follow-up. I did have, before I move on to the next question, someone did request to maybe take a peek at those pricing packages again if we wanna show them.

Kendall:

And that same QR code goes to the landing page as well. So we can hang on this slide.

Rebecca:

Yeah. So I have another great social media question on Instagram. How do you recommend increasing views on organic posts without boosting those posts? Is there a way to get more visibility?

Kendall:

Oh, that's a great question. I'll give my two cents and then Ron. I see there might be a lot of opinions to go around here.

Ron:

I'm sure. I'm sure.

Kendall:

You know, I know you mentioned in particular boosting a post, but a technique that I've seen and, honestly, a great bang for your buck is actually putting a small dollar amount monthly towards growing your followers. So when you post organically on any platform, just by the algorithm's nature, it's only gonna go to a small percentage of your overall followers.

Ron:

Like one percent, folks. Like one percent. Very, very small.

Kendall:

But let's make math easy. If you have a hundred followers, maybe one, two, three, a handful of people might see that post. So a way to kinda answer your question, increasing views on organic posts ongoing, we've seen a lot of success with people putting a couple hundred bucks a month towards a followers campaign. So you put out content that drives people that are your right ICP to follow your profile, and then they're gonna be naturally served up those posts ongoing. Go ahead, Ron.

Ron:

No. I'll add that what's also important, the engagement model or algorithm is actually different on all platforms. So what drives engagement on LinkedIn versus Facebook versus TikTok versus LinkedIn, it's all different. So I'll just give a tip on LinkedIn. I was at a conference, so I'm not acting like I invented this. I saw an authority on this. I practiced it, and oh my goodness is it so true. And this is gonna be counter to what many of you think. If you make posts on LinkedIn, number one, you don't want to be linking off of your post away from LinkedIn. It needs to be a text post. Also, LinkedIn does not want you posting images or videos. I'm telling you, if you want the most engagement, a good LinkedIn post is a good text post that tags other people on LinkedIn. And that then, once people see that, when they start engaging with that, those are the explosive, what's the, so what's the correct word? Viral. Those are the posts that go viral.

Ron:

All of my personal posts, I'm rather active on LinkedIn, that have gone viral, if you will call it five or ten thousand impressions, are pure text posts that then you wanna look at engagement. All the magic on LinkedIn is in the comment feed. So if the way to think about it is if someone likes your post on LinkedIn, that's worth one point. If someone comments on your post, it's worth fifteen points. And so the key is getting posing questions in your post and through your responses that become conversational in order to elicit other people to interact with your content. And when you start when you do that well, it takes a little bit of practice. And if you go on LinkedIn, you'll start to observe this. People that really know what they're doing, they make very interesting posts where maybe they've practiced thought leadership. They've stated their opinion on something, and then they're asking others what they think. And then as people comment, they go right in and are very proactive at replying. And their reply is not, hey. Thanks. They'll reply in a way that is as if they're having a conversation.

Ron:

And so many of you might listen and go, well, why does this matter? Why should I care? Well, it's because a lot of your c level executives are on LinkedIn, your architects, your designers, your builders, your agency owners, your tradespeople. A lot of those leaders are on that platform. And so if you're putting out thought leadership content representing yourself, your opinions, and your business' opinion, it's gonna ultimately enhance the exposure you get as a person and your brand gets. And that is a very powerful organic way to grow your business.

Rebecca:

Okay. Awesome. Guys, I see there's a fantastic question that came in about search, but I just wanna wrap this LinkedIn and social media train really quickly. There were two quick follow ups. Someone commented, I don't really see LinkedIn as where my ideal customer is. I see it as my professional community. And then, also, does AI use LinkedIn for consumer product searches?

Ron:

AI is crawling all social platforms. Gotta remember, Microsoft owns LinkedIn, and Microsoft's platform Gemini is one of the more powerful, their two point five pro models, one of the more powerful LLMs on the market today. And so there's an arms race in AI. It's really Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, and a few others. And, you better believe every word, every piece of data in LI and LinkedIn is being sucked into the AI models for sure. And then in terms of your ideal customer, I’d say it's a very appropriate question because you wanna be mindful of who are you trying to communicate and what are you trying to accomplish. So I would agree if you have a particular demographic or audience type that you wanna appeal to, you might wanna really craft your time and energy and your way you present your brand on Instagram, for example. Right? So they may be spending their time there or and or other platforms. So it's just a matter of understanding the art and science of how does that platform work and what's the best way to put content that just, so many of you business owners have someone in your office making posts on Facebook.

Ron:

And when Kendall or I go look at it, literally, there are no engagements on any of those posts. And somehow you think that that's benefiting your business. It's not. I'd rather you not be active on the platform \and I'd rather you be active on fewer platforms and doing it at a higher level where you're getting some engagement. The other side of that where I could counter myself is to say, but AI is gonna crawl it. And that's also right. Right? That's a newer conversation we have to have here in the last couple of, you know, call it eighteen to twenty four months. Is even if the humans aren't crawling it, the robots are crawling it. So in a lot of that how to optimize for AI search and visibility, I would say that's really, you know, people the marketers have their lab coats on and they're pouring the beakers and inventing because that whole space is very, very disrupted right now and changing at an exponential rate.

Rebecca:

Okay. What a great question comment. How do you run effective search campaigns for home automation outside of a giant negative keyword list?

Ron:

That's a pretty precise question. So the negative keyword search then is referring to Google advertising. And I'll state the high level principle is that you should define the keywords that are most probably gonna drive the type of visitor to your landing page that you'd care about. And many of you I mean, we know the average spends for integrators on their ad campaigns. And for many of you, it's very limited. And so you're not going to be able to spend your money wisely on a large diversity of solutions or brands, many of you are gonna be very narrow in where you try to target that. And the principle is you wanna always be optimizing those campaigns. And within our practices at One Firefly, I'll just say it's a blend of human management and AI management using AI software and tools that help with spreading spends over a monthly period if you're trying to hit a monthly spend target. And then the human component is really analyzing what keywords are driving the best performance and then using your negative keywords to determine where are you wasting money or wasting dollars spent on clicks. And that in the best version and certainly what we practice, you want to always be optimizing that. At minimum weekly, if not every few days, you want a human in there managing that, pulling the levers, turning the dials to make sure that those campaigns are spending wisely. You can burn and waste a lot of money in Google advertising if they aren't properly managed.

Kendall:

And home automation may not be the phrase, may not be the focus. What might be more successful in your market depending on your competition and the cost to compete with those in your market might be a different type of phrase where you can get in front of the same customers, but maybe for a different service or solution that can help you get a higher conversion rate. So lots and lots of variables that go into Google Ads. It is an art form.

Ron:

What's neat though for you to know, the person that asked that question, is that your marketing team should be and or you, if you're trained, should know, should be able to go in and within keywords. Right? So that's a word or clusters of words should be able to to search for what's called search volume. So you get an idea within your market play or within your search window, within your geography because you're gonna define a geographic parameter to your search. You don't want to have traffic driven from across the United States. You probably want traffic driven from the market that you serve. So within that geographic market you serve, how much search availability is there? In other words, how many people are even searching for that term? And then the other term is impression share. Within your allotted budget, how often will your ad be presented across all of the available real estate for ads in that market? So you wanna just do that analysis to make sure that it's a wise, keyword or key phrase to be spending money on.

Rebecca:

And it looks like we have one more outstanding question, and then I think we'll wrap this webinar. It's another LinkedIn one. What would be an example of an interesting text post for LinkedIn for an AV dealer audience?

Kendall:

Oh, you know what I would actually go back to is the concept of thought leadership content. Take an opinion. Take a story. Take something that happened in your day to day life. Form an opinion on it. Post it on LinkedIn and see what others think. Anything that you have an opinion on can be turned into a great LinkedIn post and a very engaging LinkedIn post.

Ron:

Yeah. That's great advice from Kendall. Another piece of advice, it's in addition to that specific question. But your LinkedIn, as an example, I spend personally five to ten minutes a day on LinkedIn. Right? And so it's not a lot of time. But one of the things I'm always doing and I'm recommending you always do is you should always be curating your connections. So if everyone that asks to connect with me, I turn nine out of ten of them down. One out of ten I say yes to because I'm curating who I'm connected to. Because I wanna be connected with all of you. I wanna be connected with manufacturers. I wanna be connected with consultants and reps. I wanna be connected with this industry, not from the random supplier out of Asia that tries to connect with me. Why do they try to connect with me? Because they want access to my network. I'm not gonna give them access to my network. I treasure my network. And so it's a matter of managing those people that wanna connect to you. Do not say yes to everybody.

Ron:

And also proactively going out and trying to connect with people. Your customers, for sure, architects, designers, builders, leaders in your community, your manufacturers, that orbit all the people that would make a positive impact on your livelihood, those are really smart people to be building into your network so that when you do make that text post, they have a probability of paying attention to you and responding and engaging with whatever you're posting.

Ron:

Awesome. Well, thank you, Rebecca. Everyone.

Rebecca:

Yeah. Great questions. Brian, I see you submitted one to the q and a, and I answered you, and we will be in touch, after this webinar. It looks like that's all the questions we have. Thank you, everyone. If you have additional questions or think of some later, please feel free to reach out to us through our website, email, give us a call. We're happy to keep answering them through another format.

Ron:

Thanks, everybody. It was fun.

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Ron Callis is the CEO of One Firefly, LLC, a digital marketing agency based out of South Florida and creator of Automation Unplugged. Founded in 2007, One Firefly has quickly became the leading marketing firm specializing in the integrated technology and security space. The One Firefly team work hard to create innovative solutions to help Integrators boost their online presence, such as the elite website solution, Mercury Pro.

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Resources and links from the interview:

• Lutron Partnership Inquiry Page


• On the Blog: Why Search Rankings Matter More Than Ever


• 5-Minute Marketing: SEO Video Series

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