What should we do? Cave? Stop marketing? Absolutely not. We need to thrive. In this podcast, I go over my marketing strategy for social media during this horrible Corona Virus (COVID-19) pandemic.

Stay safe and be safe! But never stop learning and never stop dreaming.

Podcast File

How to use Social Media to Survive In These Challenging Times

Podcast Transcription

Hey, podcast! So here we are on another Facebook Marketing Ninja podcast and today I have a very, very special podcast session for you because it is a unique era that we’re all going through right now and I want to be able to provide value to you from my area of expertise. I know these are very, very trying times, very challenging times.

I am on Facebook live!

I did mention that to you guys last week on the podcast that I am doing these on video. So if you want to consume this also in video format, you’ll be able to do that!

You can go back to my page at any time going to facebook.com/theninjamarketer.

You’ll land on my Facebook page and you can see the actual video session that we are having on Facebook live. But let’s talk about what’s going on today.

Well, does anybody not know what’s going on today?

I don’t think there’s such a thing at this point, right? I don’t think we’ve ever gone through anything like this in the world, at least not in our lifetime or several lifetimes back. We have had some very difficult things like when HIV became a huge deal back in the Magic Johnson era, when we had 9/11. We’ve had some very horrifying things happen to the world, but this is at a whole different level.

I think that there’s only one thing that would probably trump what’s going on today. No pun intended. I know Trump, it’s an area of drama right now going on with how he’s handling this situation in solving. There are all kinds of opinions on it.

I’m not a politician and I don’t intend to get involved with that subject, but something that I believe will be

the only thing that could actually defeat the enormous drama

of what’s going on today is I think one of my staff members was talking about that the other day, only if …

a spaceship lands in Washington in front of the Capitol and everybody watches it!

And that’s going to create some massive hysteria at a whole different level than what’s going on right now.

But other than that, wow it’s something incredible, right? Stock market collapsing. It’s down over 30% I believe at this point from the highs that it had at some point last year.

It’s been a massive, massive economic meltdown!

• Companies being closed down
• Social distancing becoming the most common phrase being utilized today
• Events being canceled.

I’m not here to emphasize more on the enormity of this subject. I’m not here to give you feedback on how to protect yourself from it or give you advice on how to counteract healthwise yourself and your family. That’s not my area of expertise.

There’s a lot of people that covered that subject and a lot of good people that covered that subject, including my good friend and my good client, Dr. Erick Berg. He actually covers many, many videos he’s done over the last few weeks on the subject of the Coronavirus, COVID-19, as they like to call it – the scientists. And my dad covers the subject and then they talk about it, and they try to give education and give people some sanity and give them some comms that they can actually get through these tough times.

My job is to educate you on the subject of how to keep your business afloat.

Well, what happened with businesses?

I don’t think people talk about that enough.

That’s my job

If you guys follow my content, if you’ve seen my videos, if you watch my YouTube channel, if you are on my email list, if you are on my podcast and you listen to my podcast like you might be listening to right now, you know that…

I’m all about business and I’m all about helping businesses thrive.

And I happen to be a marketer. I happened to be a good marketer because I have been able to walk the talk and have some success along the way, which is what really makes a marketer.

You cannot call yourself a marker unless you yourself traveled the road and have some success. I don’t agree with people out there being coaches on subjects that they have not mastered themselves.

I first walk the talk and then I talk about it.

And that’s my usual operating basis.

So you will see throughout my entire content that my job is to help people thrive in existing market conditions. So guess what? We have a brand, new never before experience, not even in 9/11, not even in previous pandemics and previous plagues because I mean even the black plague which is in the history books, I don’t think they closed down businesses like they have closed them right now.

There are laws coming out every day now about segregation and this whole social distancing taken to a whole level, including not being around groups of more than 10 people, not getting out of the streets.

In Puerto Rico, they have people in lockdown. You can now be out in about after nine o’clock or you will get a ticket or you will go to jail. It’s, it’s getting out of control like that.

And I don’t think we’ve ever seen anything like that. And I think realistically, I’m not pretending that it’s all pretty rose and flowers, beautiful smelling. It’s going to be a while.

So how do we go through these very, very difficult trying, challenging times? How do we make it on the other side? I started a few minutes ago telling you the story about Puerto Rico when the hurricane happened.

Over 50% of businesses never opened again

Imagine that. Over 50% of businesses never opened again. All right?

This means that more than one out of every two businesses that had to close after the hurricane, Maria hit the island, never opened their doors again.

I went to the island a few months ago and it was incredible to see that there were all these companies that I have known my whole life that are closed down from restaurants to retail shops. Wow, it was incredible. So the devastation that happens when something like this occurs, it’s quite massive. And I was able to see that at a very up-close level in my deer island, Puerto Rico, which is a very small Island. It’s 100 miles by 30, and this is where I was born and raised. So I saw it.

And what’s happening right now with this whole COVID-19, it is inevitable that a lot of businesses will close down and will not have the ability to open up again.

Sometimes people forget that business owners themselves are living “paycheck to paycheck” even though they’re not getting a paycheck because they’re not employees, they live paycheck to paycheck.

So if they are forced to close down due to market conditions

they don’t have the ability to open again

They cannot keep on paying the employees, they cannot continue to supply, they cannot service or deliver. That’s it. That is the end of it. Because of that, we have a situation right now.

it is my mission

to help businesses survive this era

Streaming is breaking records.

There are more people consuming content on NETFLIX than ever before.

They are trying to cope with the bandwidth because they cannot handle it. It’s so much. People are watching videos, they’re consuming content. They are using social media, Facebook and Instagram and YouTube videos more than ever.

People are on these platforms online more than ever.

So my prediction has been since weeks ago that any businesses that learn how to use social media will continue to exist after this whole thing comes down. Let me guarantee you something. It will calm down even though we don’t really know the extent of it and I cannot tell you how long it is going to take us to get through these tough times. We do have to stay safe. We got to follow the rules. We got to stay in social distance. We got to be close to our family. We got to just try to stay concentrated in our groups that we’re used to and not have to congregate in front of other people.

It is a safety precaution. It is a safety measure that is being taken. We don’t really know. Nobody really knows because we don’t have any precedents to this.

And because of that, we don’t really know if it’s going to be two months or eight months or a year and a half, and that is the truth of the situation right now.

And to be more specific, businesses that figure out how to continue PROVIDING VALUE from this thing that we call the internet will continue to SURVIVE and they will be lived beyond that time. I have been asking people to learn about these platforms for years.

Now, those of you guys that are watching this on Facebook live, those of you guys that are on podcast listening right now when this went live, there’s one thing that I want to just give you guys a teaser on.

I’m about to do something very crazy

I’m going to do something that it’s very unpopular in my organization. I’m going to give you guys a ton of value and I’m going to show you a roadmap for you guys to become experts in your field and I’m going to give you guys access to all of it. All right? So I’m not going to give you any more data on it. Stayed tuned. The announcement is coming at some point on Monday.

Right now, I don’t know when you’re listening to this, when you’re watching this video, but this announcement is coming on Monday and it’s a major announcement and it is the biggest thing that I’ve done in my life.

I’m putting a lot on the line just because

I WANT TO HELP BUSINESSES SUCCEED.

I want to make sure that I continue to have business after I’m done.

So I want to help a lot of you guys

be successful in this world that we’re living in right now

Or at least cope, stay alive, continue breathing while we get through it.

Again, we don’t know how long it’s going to take. It might take a year, you might take six months, it might take three months until it’s all under control and it becomes just another flu, right?

We do know some of the facts that are coming out.

Mortality rates are at one and a half percent or something like that. It’s pretty high, right? Because the flu has 0.1%.

There’s a lot more people dying from HIV and from cancer and from diabetes, but the speed at which this is growing is pretty much unheard of, right?

We had 2000 cases a few days ago and now we got 13,000.

You guys that are on Facebook, I would like to see you comment. If you guys are here with me, I know I have a bunch of people live right now. If you guys comment and let me know that you can hear me well and see me well, I would appreciate it because for some reason I’m not seeing the comments come in just yet, even though I have a bunch of you guys here, all right?

I want to “prepare you for social media”

That being said, I want to prepare you guys for social media and what’s going to happen over the next couple of months.

And these are a few common practices that I will tell you that you need to incorporate now starting immediately so you can actually start seeing the changes.

Let me see if I can press a button here and see if I can change something here.

It doesn’t look like it. I’m sure I get people commenting for some reason I’m not seeing them. So I apologize guys.

You guys on Facebook, I’m not able to see the comments coming in. All right? Regardless.

Let’s talk about…

what is the plan of action to take as a business?

So we’re going to be able to live in seclusion being able to enjoy the usual things that we get to enjoy. That’s the reality, right?

So if you have those things available, I will definitely use as much time as possible to:

• LEARN and go back 
• TRAIN
• GET EDUCATED

… as much as possible on how to use these platforms.

Instead of slowing down the amount of information that you’re putting out there, you should increase it. But what you should do in regards to what to post and what to talk about is to be very prosurvival. Meaning that you want to be very, very alive. You don’t want to be all doom and gloom. You want to talk about great things and you want to communicate at a very, very large volume, but you want to be positive in general.

You don’t want to talk about how the world is going to end. You want to talk about how we’re getting unified so we can be stronger and how the world is getting together. Organizations and nations are operating together now so we can be more effective in combating this problem that we’re all going through as a group and there’s a lot of silver linings.

So that particular thing, we are becoming more of a united nation, more of a United planet. We either help each other or we all die together. And because of that, you can see the world starting to work together towards solutions. One thing that I can tell you is that obviously, people start being more careful about spending money. They don’t like spending money as much as they used to, right? They watch out for that. They are careful about their money because they don’t know what’s going to happen.

If you guys think about the subject of fear, what does it mean to be fearful? What does it mean to be afraid?

It’s you have an UNKNOWN…

You don’t know what’s going to HAPPEN…

And because of that, you stay back.

If you think about a very dark alley that you’re walking in the middle of the night and you don’t know what’s going on, there’s no sound, there’s no nothing but because it’s dark, you get really, really scared.

The reason that you’re getting scared, even though chances are there is no thief, there are no dangers is because

you don’t know if there’s somebody there or not.

It’s fear of the unknown.

It’s the unknown that causes that fear

not knowing what’s going to happen.

So right now people are living in fear and I understand it because there’s no precedence on this.

And because there’s no precedence, nobody knows what’s going to happen, nobody knows what the future holds for them,

• if they’re still going to have a job
• if they’re going to continue to have a business
• if they’re going to be able to actually continue to perform
• if their world is going to end
• if we’re going to have like a walking dead type of scenario here and it’s going to be like apocalypse all over again, right?

Nobody really understands that and because of that, people are going to hold back and that’s common.

Now I can tell you that after several weeks of having this issue being a worldwide phenomenon already, we are still seeing results.

There is one thing that people are not going to stop wanting to do and that is SURVIVE.

They want to continue to expand, to be alive, to do better and to overall, they want to be able to continue to GROW.

Oh wow. I’m seeing all the comments come in now for some reason. Okay, fantastic. Okay, guys, I see them now.

And because of that, you have the ability to put your message in front of them and help them with your products or services.

So here’s a question that I would have every single one of you ask yourself and this is what it’s all about.

“If your business helps somebody, you have an obligation now more than ever to put yourself out there.”

My business helps somebody and I am 100% confident in that. How does it help somebody? Well, I help businesses thrive in the social media world. I help businesses capture attention in the environment that we live in today.

My Company – AGM

AGM stands for

Attention Grabbing Media.

ATTENTION monitors how much money you have in your pocket.

“If you have attention, you can get more money. If you don’t have attention, you will struggle without money.”

It is one of the most common sense statements that you will ever hear out there. So, I help people thrive in today’s environment.

I have been doing that for many, many years now and I have helped some incredible people gain more attention so they can actually grow and scale and do better.

Now, does I really help people? Me helping a business thrive. Do I help people? Well, think about it for a second.

If I am helping a business succeed and do better and sell more of its products or reach more people, well what’s happening with that business?

They’re getting more income, their employees are surviving, they’re getting their paycheck, the owners are surviving, they’re able to contribute to the actions they generally like to contribute to, they’re able to help their families, they’re able to help their team members, they’re able to help and continue living.

So helping a business thrive helps the entire family and everybody else around them thrive also.

So, THAT IS MY MISSION.

My mission is to help them thrive because I’m helping individuals and that is my superpower.

You guys all have your superpower. So what’d you gotta do in these very difficult times is muster up some courage. Find it wherever you don’t, didn’t even know it existed, and figure out how to help people thrive within your area of expertise. If you’re an accountant, hey, spread some news about what’s going on. Do you know that we just got extended our income taxes all the way to June 15?

There are laws being changed about tax, about this. Educate people, give people some sanity, calm them down.

If you’re a nutritionist, or you’re an expert in the subject of nutrition, well, it’s time for you to give them some tips for them to be healthier and to be more stable and to chill out and actually take some measures, some precautions for them to be able to sleep well because if people are too stressed, they cannot sleep well. If they cannot sleep well, they go crazy.

So it’s very important for you to provide that HELP and that SUPPORT!

If you’re a dentist, how do you take care of your teeth while you’re social distancing?

Guys, think about it. Get creative about it, right? Help people thrive in these existing conditions. Spend some time analyzing how the heck can you provide any value to the world and do that. For example, in my case, I have a marketing budget.

I have a marketing agency with 60 staff and I have an agency with a bunch of accounts, clients from the Dr. Berg’s to the Chick Corea who’s one of the top jazz musicians in the world to my dad Frank Suarez to Nancy Cartwright, the voice of Bart Simpson. And the list goes on and on. A lot of special people. I have to figure out how to help them continue to spread the message because hey, guess what guys? COVID-19 or not, we got to continue expanding.

Don’t fall prey to it

We are bigger than it and we are more important in it and we are more valuable than it. If we get defeated by the COVID-19 I can guarantee you that the COVID-19 is not going to build a better world than the one that we built.

So we have an obligation to continue to expand because that’s what the world needs from us.

So we’ve got to use our superpower, whatever that superpower is, and get in front of these platforms.

Social media has become an important communication platform. It has been for many years. It is now more than ever. So if you think about it, okay, I don’t have a budget, what can I do?

Well, great news! LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, Snapchat, TikTok, Messenger, WhatsApp – these platforms do not require you to give them a single penny for you to spread your message loud and clear.

You can do it for as much as you want without any restrictions and any limits

You can just go out there and communicate to the world and spread your joy, spread your truth, and help people improve, help people expand.

I know people are logged down, people are tied up. There are all kinds of things. But guess what?

You will not have internet lockdown

so move everything to the internet.

Amazon sales are blowing up! If you’re an Amazon brand owner and you have the ability to sell products on Amazon, keep doing that.

Figure it out more than ever how to use social media to grow your Amazon brand because people are still buying stuff and they’re going to continue to buy stuff now more than ever because now, they cannot go out there to the retail stores and buy supplements or toys or things and they have to continue living.

Because of that, you’ve got to continue to figure out how to spread your message on these platforms.

Now more than ever, don’t waste your time guys.

Don’t become a couch potato!

Sure. Take advantage of the opportunities to spend some time with your family, with your wife, with your husband, with your kids. I’m doing that myself.

I’m getting to spend a lot of time with my kids. I myself, I am not locked down like in California for example. So I am working every day. I got my guys working with me every day.

My son comes to work with me and we’re still operating like that until we get some kind of like order from the government, which could come every day. That’s a reality. In the meantime, we are working and I am showing people how success looks like.

Instead of just talking about it, let’s show success. Success requires action. If you don’t have action in place, you don’t win. So let’s be very practical about it.

How do you win in this difficult time?

How do you come out at the end of it surviving and ready to conquer the world and expand? It is difficult to expand in these times no matter what. Hey, even I am having a tough time bringing in new clients into my agency, right? It’s a challenge because people are holding on tight with their money. It’s inevitable.

So people are holding on tight. They’re not buying stuff, they’re not buying courses, they’re not buying programs because they don’t know what’s gonna happen.

So how do we keep on staying alive? Well, let me tell you what I am doing.

I am reshifting my entire marketing strategy to providing value.

I am 100% providing value.

Social media has become now a platform for me to help other businesses get through these very difficult times and come at the end of it being survivors of it so now they can take off because once it’s ready to take off again, which we will get there, you want to be prepared. So it’s time for you to use these days, these times, these long hours looking at ways for you to improve your own abilities so you can increase your own value in this existing world.

And if you have been lazy about this subject for a while, if you have not gone far and beyond to improve your abilities and your skill in this world that we live in, now is the time to hunker down and study how does the world really works and how to use Facebook advertising, Instagram advertising, LinkedIn, TikTok, Messenger marketing. Now is your time for you to learn all of these obsessively so you can be prepared to ride the incredible wave that’s going to come once we get to the other side.

In the meantime,

Do Content

while you’re learning, which you should be learning, do content – articles, videos, post, whatever you can as much as possible to help people stay positive because people with a positive mentality will be able to do better in this world. People who have a positive mentality will be able to come out of it in much better shape than before they actually got into a very bad condition around the world. So you want to start doing this AGGRESSIVELY.

So on Facebook, on Instagram, and all these platforms, hey, YOU DON’T HAVE A LIMIT.

Look at me. Look at my social media if you want to find out what I’m doing. Look at all the big boys out there. Look at the Gary V’s, the Grant Cardone’s, everybody out there. We are going one step further. We’re going into a deeper level and we’re doubling down on our ability to help others with our information and our value.

So that’s what you want to do. You want to just continue to provide that education and that value in whatever that may be, so you can actually help people and be ready to offer them business when they are ready to be offered business.

Right now, I can tell you that you can do marketing strategies and you can sell e-commerce, you can sell Amazon, you can continue selling Amazon. You can even generate leads to a doctor’s clinic, a dental clinic or whatever. That is still possible, but it is going to be more of a challenge.

So I will recommend that you redirect your energy towards a strategy that executes on value.

Whatever it is that you can do and give to the world so you can actually give people your information, then you want to go ahead and put that out there in the world.

Develop a strategy of content

A strategy of content that has three to four posts on Facebook every day, one video on YouTube every day as much as possible. I’m working towards doing a video on YouTube every day. If you guys want to check out my YouTube channel and see what we’re putting out there, we’re putting out there a ton of value so you guys can see how I am personally walking the talk every single day.

Go to YouTube and search for Manuel Suarez and see my channel so you can see it happening with your own eyes. Subscribe in the meantime, please. That will be very, very appreciated. That’s my plug to you.

I’m doing several posts a day on the Instagram feed and several posts a day on the Facebook feed. I’m trying to do a TikTok, believe it or not, every day. That’s something that my daughter is running as a project. She’s 11. She’s a TikToker and she’s awesome and she wants to run my TikTok. So if you want to see that side of me, it’s a very different side, search me up, Manuel Suarez on TikTok, and you should be able to find me there and see what we’re putting out on that platform.

What we’re trying to do, I’m pretty much everywhere except Snapchat or Pinterest and I should be, but I’m not. We just have so much going on. But to give you an idea, you’ve got to put yourself out there every single day as much as possible, as equipped as possible, as aggressive as possible.

This is not a time to slow down

This is a time to double down. If you double down, if you go to the next level, you’ll be able to pay off in a big way. The laws of attention are universal. The laws of attention basically mean that if you want to actually get more income, if you want to survive, especially difficult times, all you need to do is get more attention. And what a better opportunity in times like this to get more attention than provide a lot of value and help people get through these very difficult times. So do that and do that a lot.

Then if you want to invest some advertising dollars, invest some advertising dollars on putting content out there, videos, articles, graphics, podcasts, images, whatever it is that you have, put some value out there that gives people some instruction on how to get through these tough times and how to get motivation or how to stay actually fit, how to do exercise, how to stay under control and how to eat healthy at home or whatever it is that you have going on.

Teach the world

Find out what source of value you have and teach the world and invest money in that. And then you can end with small calls to action that invite people towards whatever offer that you have in place and come up with great offers.

Wait until you see what I have for my audience

It’s incredible. It’s insane. But stay tuned because it’s going to blow your mind. If you guys want to get notified, you better stay tuned because I’m going to talk about it very loudly next week at some point.

So very, very cool stuff. Guys, let’s stick together. Let’s be united. Let’s keep on pushing. Don’t fall prey to it. Don’t make yourself smaller. This is a good time for you to get yourself into a higher state and push that barrier of not producing content. This is a great time for you to stop being comfortable, with not being an expert in this whole internet world.

You’ve got to become an expert!

If you become an expert, you can win in this world.

If you don’t become an expert, you will lose.

It’s as simple as that. If you have a cell phone device, right? Like an iPhone, which a lot of us have. If you have a cell phone device, what you can do with that device, it is depending on your ability to handle that device.

If I have another person like a 10-year-old, they might not be able to produce the same amount of energy that I have with that same device just because I have a different ability with that device than the 10-year-old does.

So the value of a tool depends entirely on your knowledge in regards to that tool and your practice around that tool. Not only the knowledge, the practice around the implementation of that tool.

So get to work, learn, go to my YouTube channel and subscribe and watch the content there. I’m super obsessed about that right now.

Stay tuned because if you guys want to be blown away in a big way next week on Monday, I’m recording this on Friday, all right? This is Friday, the 20th of March. In case we go back 20 years from now and I have my grandkids looking at the videos that I used to do back then because guess what? Social media is here forever, right? It doesn’t go away. Videos on YouTube are permanent. They don’t go down a feed and disappear. So who knows? I might be talking to my future self in 20 years so I can look at how handsome I was. Not really, right? Just messing with you guys.

All right guys. So I hope that you guys enjoyed the podcast session.

Get to work on it. Stay tuned!

As soon as I have the major announcement, I’m going to get back on camera. I’m going to get back on audio and I’m going to talk about this major announcement. It is a major announcement. I’m not talking as a marketer. I’m telling you for real, from the bottom of my heart, I’m going to have the biggest, most incredible announcement coming up next week. The craziest insane thing that I’ve ever done in my life is coming up next week, probably on Monday. So stay tuned.

I’m basically giving you my all. I’m giving you everything I got because I want to make sure that you stay alive, that you keep on surviving, you keep on going because hey, in the future I might want you to be a part of my marketing agency because it’s going to help you take your next step up.

But if you’re not alive, if you don’t survive this whole COVID-19 drama, you will not make it to the other side.

So I need you to stay trained, stay educated, and use these very difficult times, these very difficult months to get yourself highly educated and also get yourself really, really into the process of using the internet to expand your business and stop being comfortable about it because the internet is not only the future, it is the present of marketing. It’s everything.

It has consumed our entire world and…

you need to become an expert in it

If you do become an expert, you are probably guaranteed to win in the game of business. If you don’t, it’s going to become more and more difficult for you to survive. And for you to make it as the world continues to evolve, there was an online-first world.

All right. I’ll talk to you guys on the next podcast at some point next week. Thanks for listening and yes, if you’re a podcast listener, subscribe. If you enjoyed this podcast, I would love it and appreciate it and love you for it if you can, for a minute or two to write a review for it. All right. See you next time.

Do the FREE Facebook Ads mini-courses here: manuelsuarez.com/minicourses

I’m putting out a lot of great content every single day. Be sure to follow me on your favorite platforms! Here are the links:

Facebook: www.facebook.com/theninjamarketer/
Messenger Channel: www.m.me/theninjamarketer/
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Contact AGM Agency today to schedule your free consultation: [email protected]/