Episode 231 – Why Frequently Asked Questions Are A Goldmine for Your Business

Hello everybody, this is Ken Tucker with Changescape Web. Welcome to this episode of the Marketing Guides for Small Businesses Podcast, the show that breaks down marketing strategies, tools, trends and into practical steps for small and medium sized business owners. So I am coming to you live from Albuquerque, New Mexico. I'm joined by my co co hosts today, Jeff Stack from Tylera Marketing in Austin, Texas and Paul Barthell from Changescape in St. Louis, Missouri. Hey guys.

Jeff

Hey Ken.

Ken

I believe Ian is on special assignment this week. So what we're going secrets is something that I think is an absolute true gold mine for small businesses and that's frequently asked questions or should ask questions. And their answers. They're not just valuable for search engine optimization, optimization and content strategy. They're also core assets in training and optimizing AI tools such as voice assistants, chatbots, automation platforms, or even your content creation activities. So I'm super excited to talk about this today. FAQs and SAQs are huge, so let's dive right in. Jeff, I'm going to start with you. Why should a business have frequently asked questions section on their website?

Jeff

Yeah, so great question to kind of set the tone. By the very definition, frequently asked questions are the questions you get asked all the time. So be proactive, you know, head people off if they haven't even decided to call you yet, give them the answers so that when they do call you, they don't have to ask. It's a timesaver for you and it raises your credibility. It provides people with information that they're looking for. And from an SEO perspective, if you think about, you know what, well, traditional search typically is informational search. It's like looking for answers to questions. So if you put the questions up there and then you provide the answers for them, they are great for SEO too. So again, cutting down on repetitive tasks, streamlining your communications, building your credibility, those are all important things to do. And they're also super easy to come up with. I mean, if you sit down for five minutes, you can probably think of at least a dozen frequently asked Questions, questions you get asked all the time. Then beyond that, there's another deeper layer of things you can do with them besides providing the answers on your website or posting about them in your social media. As we move into the era, or have moved now into the era of AI, any content relevant to your business and how you approach the business and how you interact with your clients as frankly, fertile ground for training AIs that act on your behalf. When I say AIs that act on your behalf, the obvious two that come to mind, I think you mentioned them in your intro, are chatbots on your website or even now we're moving into voice assistance where the phone can actually be answered. An incoming call to your business can be answered by AI and it can have a very natural language sounding conversation with the caller. It won't be perfect, it's not going to have the answer to everything. But to that point, the more that you can train it on, the more you can give it the answers to questions people are likely to ask, frequently asked questions, the better your AI is going to be. So whether it's a chatbot on the website or a voice assistant that somebody interacts with when they're calling, building that body of work, building that body of knowledge, putting more into the AI and making it available through any form that you can, is only going to improve your standing in the business. It's going to improve your customer's journey, your interactions, your touchpoints with your customers. And keep in mind that something like two thirds of the customer's journey is completed before they even decide to call you. You want to have all those touch points so that when you do get that conversation, or a face to face meeting or a zoom call, whatever it is, that your clients are already further down the funnel and closer to doing business with you. So the more you refine your FAQs, the more you build them out, the more you add to them. It's only going to benefit you in many, many places, the least of which is just saving you a little bit of time and communications. But the benefits can be huge.

Ken

Yeah. So Paul, let's talk specifically about how FAQs help to improve search engine optimization. Talk a little bit about that.

Paul

Yeah, that's a good point. Because if you don't have fax on your website, you should, because first of all, people don't think about it, but it can increase the time spent on site because if people have questions and you have a fax page, it can increase the amount of time that they spend on on your website. And that is a ranking factor for Google. It's called dwell time. And it's among thousands of ranking factors that Google use. But it's a fairly important one. And the other thing it does is it kind of, it naturally targets long tail keywords because that's what they are. I mean it's, people are searching for an answer to a question. They have a question and, and if you have the answers, you can show up in featured snip snippets. It can help you rank better naturally. It can help in Google Assistant. You know, voice search. Voice search is becoming more and more prevalent now and it can help you show up in, in that because it's a natural language kind of thing. It's the FAQs on your, on your fax page are probably going to be written in very similar languages. People doing a voice search like what kind of services do you offer? What are your pricing? Where can I find your pricing? You should, if it's relevant to your business. It isn't always, but you, I think you should have pricing on your website unless there's a compelling reason not to because I know me personally, even if it's just a price range, if you can't even offer that, I may just move on to your competitor. I mean that's, and that may or may not be relevant to your business. If you have a really high ticket item, you may want to have a conversation. But the other thing is, and Jeff mentioned training AI systems and these AI systems, they're all based on LML's large language models. And when you're training it, you have the bot has to know what your business is, what it does, what it's about. And that's where these FAQs come in. And if you're not using some kind of AI voice or AI bot solution and you're concerned about it, I guarantee you your competitors, if they aren't yet, they're going to, and you're going to be left behind because AI is here to stay. It's not going anywhere. It's not exactly new. But the way the ways in which it's being implemented and the fact that it's actually accessible to small businesses now, that is kind of new and it's just going to keep progressing. But I will say one thing. I don't think we specifically talk about it in any of these questions that if you're using an AI voice solution or thinking about it, the purpose is not to answer every question in the universe. You want your top 10 questions or so because really the purpose of AI voice, at least in my mind, is kind of to replace an answering service, to replace a voicemail, to replace a phone tree. You want to, to get the customer's information or potential customers information so you can reach back out to them if you want something more in depth. That does answer a lot of questions that people can interact with. That's where like an AI chatbot would come into play. But anyway, I just want to throw that out there because I think a lot of people are using those two solutions really not entirely correctly.

Ken

Yeah. So Paul, can you talk about, you know, because the phrases that you're using, you know, when do a voice search line up well with FAQs, how does that come into play with, you know, concept of like semantically similar keywords and, and things like that? I mean, do you see that that's a boost that frequently asked questions may be able to, to help you address those challenges? Because a lot of businesses, you know, when they're doing SEO, they, they literally just do the straightforward SEO I want to rank for, you know, painter in this city. And they don't think about any of the other semantically similar related keywords or concepts or why not that, you know, that are so important in the, in the world of SEO.

Paul

Oh yeah, it definitely can because it, a lot of small businesses, the content, like you said, isn't being written with semantic variations worked in or built into that content. And it's very focused on a specific keyword which that whole world is changing. But that, that's another discussion. But yeah, it can because what happens is if you as a business owner or whoever in your business interacts with customers, they can probably tell you, yeah, here's the questions we get all the time. And when you put those on your website, like I said, that you're, it's going to be put on the website in the way people are asking those questions and that is, that's going to help you rank for, for those phrases. And so it's, it's completely different than writing a piece of content. I mean, yes, it's content, but it's completely different than like you said, I want to rank for interior painting in Dallas. Or you know, it's, your people may have questions about that that aren't addressed in that piece of content and they kind of can't be because you'd have to, you almost have to put them in every piece of content, which doesn't work. So you fix that by having a facts page.

Ken

Yeah. So this is kind of, I mean this, this is something that just kind of popped into my head. But you know, chat GPT and AI are, they're both coming on, I mean, you know, technologies around AI are coming on strong in terms of alternate ways to search. So also, you know, keep in mind when you're creating FAQs, not only are you using it to train the AI to create support systems, customer support systems to help you run and operate your business, it's also going to be meaningful to be able to take those same frequently asked or should ask questions which we'll talk more about the should ask here in just a minute. But to train ChatGPT to help you be more findable as people are starting to turn to those as alternative search platforms.

Jeff

That's a good point. I wanted to make that same one that you know, there's different types of searches and it's the informational searches where the FAQs, SAQs really shine. But more and more people are asking Siri Alexa, I think Paul mentioned a few of them. Now my Alexa is probably going to trigger in the background saying she doesn't understand me. But also like you said, chat GPT Perplexity Claude People are going to those tools now to do their searches where they used to just type something into Google or know, say it into a microphone. So having things that are, you know, tuned for those platforms as well. And the large language models love, just like in the early days, Google love blogs. Well right now the, the large language models love, you know, websites with informative, you know, question answer kind of format stuff.

Ken

Yeah, yeah, definitely. So I'm going to talk a little bit about where you can use FAQs beyond just your website because that's where most people probably stop is if they do FAQs at all, they're going to put them on the website. But there are a lot of other great ways to use FAQs and here's where I think we start to get into part of the gold mine of why these things are so valuable. You can use every one of your frequently asked questions and post it as a Google question and answer on your Google Business profile. Again, you want to pay attention to your Google business profile, especially if you're concerned about local search. And one of the great things that you can do is just continually add to questions and answers that Google gives you the facilities to do through the management of your Google Business profile. So take advantage of that. We've talked about, you know, the chat bots on your website which can handle not only website but Facebook or SMS messenger, WhatsApp, you know, any kind of messaging app. AI chatbots can typically work with those. So again, training that, that chatbot with the frequently asked questions is going to help you reach platforms beyond your website. AI voice. We've talked about, you know, YouTube videos. You can take your FAQs and every FAQ could turn into a YouTube video. Every, it could turn into Facebook or Instagram Reels or TikTok, if that makes sense for your business. You can take every one of the FAQs and use that to build an email lead nurture series, you know, part of the FAQs that probably you should consider. Paul talked about pricing, but you know, I think overcoming objections is also a great strategy on how to use FAQs. You know, people are like, okay, well you know, I buy this, but if I buy this, I'm concerned that I won't be able to do that. Well, answer that in an faq and guess what? Now that becomes fantastic content. When somebody fills out a form on your website and you're nurturing them, you know, or they are downloading an asset or they're, you know, scheduling a consultation, having that content drip out to them to nurture them to the point where they're like, okay, I'm ready to make a buying decision with you. Is, is a great thing to do. Again, turning that information into sales decks, you know, proposals, PDFs, blog posts, I mean it can drive your content calendar. Every FAQ could turn into a blog post and you could have clusters of FAQs around particular topics, right? I mean, so if you offer four core services in your business, let's just say you're a painter. You know, that could be interior painting, the exterior painting, commercial painting, cabinets. If you're a plumber, it could be hot water heaters, it could be emergency plumbing services. Guess what, that structure of that high level topic and having those frequently asked questions that just allows you to build these things that we've talked about for years called hub pages or pillar pages. So FAQs are just massive. Jeff, I didn't want to steal your thunder. I think that's probably, I'm going to let you kind of take the ball and run with it to expand upon how FAQs can really drive that content strategy.

Paul

Well, you know, one, one thing I'd add in there, I just thought about it while you were talking, is the most or one of the most important facts, whether it's in an AI voice or a chatbot or on your page, on your website, is your hours of operation. You know, how many times I've gone to a website and nowhere on that website does it say what hours are open. I mean, that's, that's an epic fail.

Jeff

Yeah, yeah. I think as we're coming up with questions, this, this one really dovetails into what you were just talking about, you know, FAQs being central to content strategy. So I'm going to kind of take a little bit different angle because you mentioned some of the, the things you can do with FAQs or things they can drive. I'm going to go a little bit bigger. I'm going to say, you know, that every business who's interested in being found online needs a content strategy, because ultimately with people online, they're looking for answers to questions, they're looking for information, and that. That's your content, right? So every business needs a content strategy as part of your overall strategy. And before you dive into, oh, I'm going to be on social media, I'm going to write, you know, two blogs a month, three blogs a month, six a week before I'm going to have a podcast. You know, you've got to nail that. What's the overall content strategy? And a good place to start with that is what do we want to talk about and when? And a good seed for that is what are people looking for? Right. And the FAQs, again, come from a what are people looking for point of view. So if you're not sure how to approach a content strategy, go back to basics, look at, you know, what do we want to tell people? What do they need to know? We're going to talk about, should ask questions in a minute. What are they asking about? What do they want to know? And then you can start building a content calendar, I think you use the term, and an overall content strategy. And, and the content strategy is going to be lots of different pieces of content in different places, different formats. Some people like to hear, some people like to read, some people like to experience. Right? People absorb information in different ways. And the key is to have a little bit for everyone so that they can find you no matter how they want to look, meet them where they are. So when you go back to the content Strategy and use FAQs as the basis of your overall topics, you know, take, take some time, brainstorm, you know, a dozen, 20, 30, however many FAQs you have in the business, then start chunking them up. Say, hey, if we've got, you know, four or five that are talking about, like you said, that your example with the painter Interior painting, we got four or five that are talking about exterior, we got four or five that are talking about fence stain.

Ken

Right.

Jeff

Whatever it is. Now, you can start building out bigger bodies of content around that and incorporate the FAQs into it, but then expand on it. So you can go from a question with a quick two or three sentence answer to a longer blog post, and then you can also record the answers, put them up as videos. You could have topics that you want to go deep on, very deep on answering a question by bringing in a host and doing a podcast discussion on it. Or even if it's just a 5 or 10 or 20 minute plumbing topic of the week kind of thing. So there's a whole lot that you can do. And it's this notion of having a strategy and that's scaling it up or down, taking the small chunks, aggregate them together to create bigger chunks of content. Or if you start with big chunks, if you have a general topic and you've got a writer and you say, I want you to go write about, you know, xyz, then you can start chunking that up. Every, every paragraph in a blog might be a social media post or it might be the topic of an faq. So this notion of content as scalable elements of how you're going to communicate, how people are going to find you, how people are going to learn about you, and then Seeding it with FAQs is a great starting point, I think is. Is the winning formula.

Ken

Yeah, I think a lot of people think I can't write a blog post from an FAQ because the answer is two sentences or three sentences. But like, you, you know, you, I think you were kind of alluding to, you know, you can package related FAQs together into a blog post, I mean, and create a longer form piece of content. So don't let that stop you. I mean, don't force it. You know, it has to be related. You don't want to write a blog post to cover FAQs that are all over the map. It has to have a theme and an organization to it. And done right, you know, structured correctly could be a nice SEO asset that you have on your website. All right, Paul, let's. We've mentioned should ask questions a couple of times throughout this conversation so far. So what is the difference between a frequently asked question and a should ask question?

Paul

Well, frequently asked question is questions that people are asking, obviously should ask questions are questions that they probably don't know they should be asking so they're not asking them. And Those can be important because it, well, it can help keep you from getting ripped off if, you know, questions you should be asking. It can help address the issue of value. A lot of people, especially this day and age, they're, they're looking at price and price alone and they're not considering the value or quality or you know, things like that. It's like I'm just going to go with the cheapest price and that's not necessarily the best solution. I mean, sure, we, nobody wants to spend money, they don't have to generally. But going with the cheapest solution can actually, you know, sometimes you find out how expensive cheap really is kind of thing and the should ask questions can, I mean you can put those into your AI solutions as well because you're basically being proactive and saying, okay, that's a good question, but here's something else you need to know that you may not be thinking about. And so that's, that's really the, the difference between them. But yeah, they, they can be worked into your sales process, like I said, into your, into your AI solutions. And they should be on your website right below the facts. You should have a should ask questions section too.

Ken

So when you put them on the website, do you guys like to have just a single FAQ page or do you like to have the related FAQs on like the appropriate service page? So like if you're a plumber, do you put the FAQs for the hot water heater solutions that you offer? Do you put the FAQs related to hot water heaters on that page or do you like to have just a single FAQ page? Jeff, do you want to.

Jeff

I like to put them on the service related page. It's going to help bolster the authority of that page when you're talking more authoritatively about the answers to questions and solutions to problems. Now that said, I also put them on aggregated pages. I think a lot of it depends on, you know, your objectives for how you think people are going to finding it, find them and interact with it. And there's cases to be made for both. But if it's something as specific as, you know, FAQs about hot water heaters, I'm probably going to put it on the hot water heater replacement page.

Ken

Oh, you have any thoughts on that?

Paul

I think you should have them both. Like if you offer several services and they're considering different ones, they may want to just go to a general fact page. But, but yeah, if they, if there's, say I need a Hot water heater, then yeah, you should have those questions on your hot water page. Post whatever. I mean it's, you should, you should have them there. Interior painting, same things, question about interior paint. If there's every page, every post, I think those interior painting questions should be there as well as on a generic FAQ page.

Jeff

Yeah, I think that if, and this may be a little old school, it may not matter as much anymore. But if you have them same questions, same answers on multiple pages in the website, I would change the wording up a little bit, not make it exact. And that probably doesn't matter as much anymore as we've getting into the more semantic search. But you know, duplicate content used to be frowned on. The other thing that I want to point out is as you're structuring these pages, especially if it's you mentioned, you know, hub page, pillar page, you know, a big topic with a lot of subtopics underneath it, there may be FAQs on that page. That's again, you know, if it's about water heater replacement, then you may have a here's blog articles about water heater replacement and the snippets to each. Here's the FAQs around it. There's also the notion of people also ask. Right. So besides the questions you might on the FAQ page, you might have links to other pages, which is a good place to go to your should ask questions. Right. If you get asked a question that people are always asking and you know, if they ask that question, they should ask another one. It's fair game to put a link on your FAQ answer to the other question, the other answer. And that's going to help SEO too as it links everything back and forth.

Paul

Oh yeah, you should always be linking between related pieces of content.

Ken

Yeah, yeah, but I love that, you know, the people also ask questions because that, that aligns with the way Google tries to drive people when they're doing searches. You know, it's trying to provide a resource to make it easier for people to find the right content. Well, why wouldn't you want to take that same strategy and do that on your website?

Jeff

You know, good, good. Real world example is if somebody's asking, you know, for a home remodeling project, you know, how long is this going to take? A should ask question is, is do I need a permit? Right. So if somebody's asking how long it's going to take?

Paul

Well, yes, the answer is always yes.

Jeff

You need to talk about permitting and then you're going to need to talk about how long the permitting process is. So people may not be thinking about that when they want to know how long is it going to take, but you can leave them there.

Ken

Yeah, yeah, definitely.

Jeff

Yeah.

Ken

And so, I mean, I think the, should ask questions really help businesses stand out. You know, it's really, it's a great way for you to define your differentiation and lead people. You know, marketing is, you know, we've lost control as marketers to a very large extent. But should ask questions are a great way to kind of help create that guide path to move people toward being predisposed to want to buy from you if you're helping them understand the complexities of what they're buying. Like Jeff, you just talked about the permitting. It's like, you know, and it's going to vary from one community to the next, right? I mean, some communities grant permits very, very quickly, others take months. And so you can't, you know, so if you can explain that nuance and you, and you do it and your competitors aren't doing that, people are going to trust you more. They're going to be willing to pay you a little bit more because you're guiding them, you're mentoring them, you're, you're not just fulfilling, you're actually guiding them to build, to create this success that they want to achieve. And So I think SAQs are, are really huge. You know, when you're, when you're in the position where you're trying to win business, you want to do everything you can to position your solution as that best possible solution. And I think educating customers around, you know, the, the, the options, how to pick and choose, why you do certain things, that background information frequently is what helps you win the business. And, and if you're tired of competing on price, it's essential to do that. So, you know, and, and another great thing about it is, you know, it's, you can, the beauty of it is you can now train AI to do this qualification and nurturing and education to get people to the point where they're ready to book appointments, you know, and right now, booked appointments is like the gold standard. It's no longer a phone call, it's no longer a form fill. It's. Are they booking an appointment? You know, depends on the nature of your business. Is it a scheduling an appointment for like a chiropractic visit or a dental visit? Is it booking an estimate for, you know, how much a remodeling job might cost or something like that? Is it setting an appointment, you know, to meet with an attorney or an accountant, all of those things. That's the gold that we're all trying to achieve right now. And AI trained properly with the frequently asked questions which help people know whether or not you do it. And then the should ask questions help qualify people or disqualify people so that you're not wasting some of your valuable time and let AI do that. Qualification or disqualification using some of the should ask question information can be a really powerful way to go. Jeff, let's talk about what kinds of questions should be included in the FAQ section to specifically drive conversions.

Jeff

Yeah. So again, conversions are people taking action, right? So you want to move people toward taking action. And the most common one now that you mentioned is setting an appointment or setting up a phone call. FAQs, SAQs, how you answer things we just talked about can be gold mines. It can be huge opportunities. Some people, before I get into specifics, some people might be a little afraid to provide too much information because they're, they're worried that it might drive people away. I'm always a fan of providing more information and being transparent. I'll give an example. I saw a remodeler that got slammed, absolutely slammed on Google and said they did great work, but it took twice as long as they promised. This particular contractor wasn't one of my clients. Fortunately, this particular contractor replied, well, it took exactly how long that we said it would. We just need to get the permits first. So going back to that example, that's why I thought of the permits earlier. Going back to that example of the more you tell people, the more you educate and inform them, you're building your trust, you're building your credibility, and that's going to, you know, drive more conversions. So anything you can do in your, you know, FAQ sections, your content in general, that can focus on, objection, handling, you know, setting, you know, talking, addressing price. And there's a Warren Buffett quote I like a lot. I used to carry it in the back of my business card. Price is what you pay. Value is what you get. First off, you don't want to be going to price. If you're going to price, you're probably going to lose the business. You need to build value, you need to build trust. You need to reduce risk from people. So anything you can do to address those kinds of questions that they may be asking is, is only going to help you get a higher conversion rate from that. Anything you can do to clarify the process in your FAQs or content in general is Going to lead to more conversions. I've seen cases where people say, well, I don't want to be too much. I want to get the opportunity to talk to the prospects so I can sell them. It's like, well, if you've got someone and then they complain because, well, you know, I'm getting too many people, I don't want to do business with me. It's like, well, let them self select out, give them the information, give them the answers to the questions that they're looking for before they decide to call you. And in a lot of cases now, they're probably not going to call you anyway because they're going to find somebody else who is going to provide those answers. So things that you can do to clarify the process, to clarify, are you the right client for us to be working with? Let them self qualify and get excited about setting that appointment or calling you. Of course, one of the common questions, well, do you have any references? Who can I talk to? Are there any examples of your work? Those are all things that you can very easily provide. You know, Google reviews, reviews on other sites, testimonial quotes, case studies, all those kinds of things. You can have those available and you can mention them in answers to that question whenever it comes up in whatever form. And by the way, if it's a voice chat, it could be sure I can send you a case study. Would you like to give me your email address? Right, so there's lots of ways that FAQs and content can be used to move people toward taking a next step or in other words, converting. And then, you know, we keep going back to AI. The more you can feed into AI, the more you can load into AI, the more effective your AI can be as essentially a digital sales assistant. It may even be selling in your absence. It was a big phrase that, that we used to use in sales trainings back when I was closer to the client. You know, sales and client businesses, we want someone or something selling in our absence, whether it's an advocate in the company or now automation or AI. And with the right data, your AI can respond just like your best rep would. Now your best rep is still going to have the value out of reading the room, reading the audience and really fine tuning how do you mesh with the audience and make sure you've got a vision match, a value match. So you're going to leave to a close. Not saying we should get rid of sales reps completely, but the AI can move people along, get them closer to conversion and take up some of the slack, some of the workload and, and now we're back to the efficiency and the effectiveness of everything. That's all, that's all pretty powerful. It's all again driven from really knowing what your ideal clients are looking for and then providing with answers in a way that, that draws them toward taking that next step and converting into a conversation or an appointment.

Ken

Well, the other great thing about AI is it can have multiple conversations at the same time. You know, whereas your top performing sales rep, you know, and look, you're never going to just, I don't think you should ever displace your top performing sales rep if they're killing it for you. But you know, let AI help you manage all of the other activities and even, even if all it is is pre qualifying them so that your closer can come in and just get the deal done. That's, it's huge and it can do it on scale way beyond what you're going to be able to afford to pay staff wise.

Jeff

Absolutely.

Ken

Yep. Paul, let's talk about how FAQs can warm up cold leads.

Paul

Yeah, you can use like if you're, well, if you're running ads, you can use an FAQ as a, as a headline. People do it all the time. If you're retargeting at, you can, you know, if you're running retargeting ads, you can, you can use FAQs in there. I mean you are limited on characters so you probably can't put the question and the answer in there, but you can certainly on your landing page you can certainly put FAQs and SAQs on that landing page that you're driving people to with paid ads. You can use them in email follow ups that because you know, people have questions, you can create like an email nurture sequence that answers different questions and you can use AI and automations to send out different emails with different questions and answers based on what someone does. That gets a little complicated, but it can certainly be done. And now they even, they even have chatbots that if you, if there's an interaction and then the, the person stops interacting, it can ask if they're still there, it can detect hesitation, say are you still there? Is there anything else I can help you with? And then if you just ignore it, eventually it'll just, it'll just close the conversation. But, but yeah, you can use FAQs and SAQs to, to warm people up and to overcome objections. We talked about that. And it helps build a sense of trust when you do that. I think because you're, you're engaging with them, you're not giving them a hard sell. You're answering questions that they may have, questions that they may not realize they have, and it can help build that trust and warm up the leads and eventually you're going to want to reach out to them. AI can't replace everything in the world like Google tries to do, but it can certainly warm up your customers and help build that trust.

Ken

Yeah, I mean, you know, we, we say this or something similar to this on this podcast a lot too. And that's value in advance. You know the old digital marketer phrase. Every email, every form fill, every interaction that somebody does with your website, they're making an investment. And the best way to get them to make that investment is to give them value in advance. So if they see frequently asked questions on your website or they know that there's going to be a chatbot, or they experience a chatbot when they're first interacting with it before they give them the contact information to see is it answering my questions, you know, then it's going to, it's going to make it a lot easier and it's going to remove the friction from people to say, okay, yeah, here's my contact information information. I'd love for somebody from your company to call me to, you know, to, to give me a full blown proposal to do this, you know, or whatever. It's just, it's super, super important to kind of factor those things in.

Paul

Yeah. And one of those value in advance things is speed of response. If it takes you two days to respond to a form fill or a phone call, they're gone.

Jeff

They are gone.

Paul

Your, your competitor has them as a customer now.

Ken

Yeah. And if they're not gone, you're in a niche that is, is going to be taken over by AI pretty fast pretty soon if somebody, as soon as somebody learns about that.

Paul

Right.

Ken

So yeah. So, you know, the other thing is you can use FAQs like Paul, you said in paid ads, you know, it could be a great way to kind of set the ad hook, you know, to get people, you know, to, to kind of peak people's interests. Not clickbaity, not to that extreme, because you never want to mislead when you're running ads, I don't think, because you're going to cost yourself a lot of credibility by sending people to pages where they're immediately going to bounce. But you, but using it as a hook again to. Yeah, because questions by their very nature are so, so can I really save $2,000 a month on my water bill or not water bill, $2,000 a year on my electric bill. You know, that might be the, a headline for a great ad because people are going to click through to see, okay, yeah, and here's how. So peaking people's interest. But you got to deliver the goods if you're going to do that. But FAQs and SAQs are really good for doing that. And again, I think you can build the entire nurture sequence. You know, you can build an entire sales funnel around this, around the, you know, the structure of your, the FAQs kind of gives you, if you don't know how to build a sales funnel, the structure of an FAQ set actually kind of gives you a path to where you can kind of structure the content on a page. You can build an email nurture series. You can create a valuable asset that somebody maybe would download, you know, and be willing to give you their email or their cell phone number because you're giving them that value from the FAQs.

Paul

Yeah. And one thing that can be done if you are a business that has a lot of services or a lot of products and you are limited, like in the voice AI, more so than the AI chatbot, but you can put your most common questions in that voice AI. But then if they start asking a bunch of questions, you can say, hey, do you want me to send you a link to our fact page? And you, and you can send them, text them or email them, whatever. You can text them a link to the fact page and they can go look at it.

Ken

Yeah, or a link to a video.

Paul

Right.

Ken

You know, to, to show them, you know, how, you know, do you, do you help, you know, do you help me program my thermostat? Yes. As a matter of fact, here's our video library. See if there's a video available on our video library that helps you solve this problem. I mean, when you do that and when you deliver that value to people that's building currency with them, that they're going to come back, they've trusted you, you've solved the problem. The next time they have a problem where they, they need to spend money, they're gonna, they're gonna contact your business and see if you can help them solve that problem. So super important stuff. So let's see, anything else, guys, that we haven't really talked about in terms of frequently asked or should ask questions and how we can, how businesses can use those beyond just putting them on the website and, and, and, and please don't just provide simple, generic answers. They need to be tailored to your business and how your business works.

Jeff

I just want to go back to the notion of where do I get all this content from? Where do I get all these ideas from? And obviously, frequently asked questions, you can sit down and come up with a list of those. But in general, every business owner started a business because they love what they do and they want to share it with the world and they want to do it better than somebody else. That means you're a subject matter expert in your business. And that means you've got a lot of knowledge and a lot of things that you need to tell people to lead them down that. No, like trust path or trying buying, repeat and refer that. We talk about duct tape marketing, but lead them down that customer's journey, lead them to do business with you. Every subject matter expert, every business owner you know is a subject matter expert. If you're a subject matter expert, you've got ideas for content. So it may be as simple as sitting down and coming up with a list and then engaging somebody. If you're not a natural writer, I mean, you can record videos and go from there, but if you want to engage somebody to, to work with, there are plenty of ways to get that done. So don't let anything stop you. Don't let the, oh, I don't know what to talk about stop you. Don't let the I don't know how to do it stop you. Don't let anything stop it stop you. You're a subject matter expert and now you got to show the world and then lead them to your door.

Ken

And if you don't have that information on your website do. Do people who don't know you consider you to be a subject matter expert because that information's not there? Do you want to take that?

Jeff

How would they. Right. Yeah.

Ken

Do you want to take that chance? I think that's a risky thing to do. So, you know, Jeff, you were talking about, you know, you could just kind of sit down and brainstorm. Another thing that I think is, has a lot of value is, you know, a lot of businesses capture a lot of information and store it in, in like operational systems. Like, you know, plumbers have service magic or something like that where there are all the trouble tickets that they've worked on and they've solved. You can download that and combine them into a PDF, upload it to AI and let AI analyze it and tell you what your frequently asked questions are from your customers based on the trouble tickets or the service tickets that you've been doing. And that may also help you identify.

Jeff

Should ask questions to avoid those troubles, right?

Ken

Yeah. And it may also help you realize it's like, oh, you know, what crap, we're not getting any of this type of work, which is really what we want. And so maybe it, maybe that also helps you identify a gap where there's an opportunity to help you capitalize on, you know, a service or a solution that you offer that may be even.

Jeff

More lucrative and even in the, you know, I got nothing realm, well, go out and look at your competitors and see what they're saying. And then you can go, well, that's not exactly the way I do it or not exactly the way I say, well, there you go, now start addressing that, right? Put your unique spin on it, put your competitive differentiator on it. And now you've got topic ideas.

Ken

Paul, any thoughts from you?

Paul

Yeah, the only thing I'd add, it's really not specific to facts, but we've been talking about how FAQs and SAQs can be used to train AI. And if you're a small business that thinks that you have no need for any of these AI solutions, you might want to rethink that because your competitors are going to, and then you're going to be left behind.

Jeff

It goes, goes back to that saying, you know, you won't be replaced by AI, you're going to be replaced by somebody using AI.

Paul

Exactly.

Ken

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So to wrap up, I just want to kind of reemphasize how important FAQs and SQs, those libraries are, are in training and becoming training assets. You know, whether it's, whether you continue to use live humans to answer these questions or not, the call service or whatever, or better yet, I think is to train AI to not only provide customer service, help you sell, you know, serve, you know, be able to be an order taker, be a, a booker for appointments and it's only going to do it faster and at scale. And we're in a world where speed of response and getting things done quickly is becoming a premium. You know, every, everything that we're seeing right now, it seems like the pace of how quickly things get done has gotten worse and worse and worse. And AI gives every business an opportunity, opportunity to accelerate the delivery of part of the, at least part of the solution. You know, you, in terms of getting people booked, getting them the information they need to make a buying decision, things like that, it's not going to help you build a room faster. You know, or build a house faster, paint, you know, a ceiling any faster or better per se from training it by FAQs. But it can, it can certainly accelerate the sales process and I think it's just critical. All right, well, that's a good place to wrap up. So Ian normally likes to take us out, but Ian is on special assignment this week. So I just want to stress, you know, we love doing this for you guys and if you find that this is a valuable source of information, don't forget to hit that subscribe button, smash it. Take care of that right now and and subscribe to get more insights and find out about every episode that we do. Share this podcast with any, any fellow entrepreneurs or business owners or marketers that you think could take value from this and we'd love to have any ideas on topics that you'd like for us to cover or guests that you would like to see us try to book. And until next week, keep calm and mark it on.