Ken: Hey everybody. Welcome to this episode of the marketing guides for small businesses podcast. Today, we’re going to be talking about some of our favorite marketing tools, tactics, and why we like these. We spend a lot of time on this podcast talking about strategy and strategy is always super important and it’s often way too often overlooked, but at the same time, sometimes a business just needs to be.
To generate some cash flow, to get a quick win and to do some things like that. So I thought we’d mix it up a little bit today and just talk about those kinds of things. So I’m excited to have our regular panelists. Paul, Jen, Dan, and Ian. Welcome guys.
Ian: Thank you. Good to be here.
Ken: So I am going to start us out. One of my favorite tools or tactics and why is a sales? I’m a business made simple coach. And, if you have read anything from Donald Miller, that one of the first things that StoryBrand and business made simple recommends is to get a sales funnel in place.
And I think that’s incredibly important. And a sales funnel, is having something. We’ve got a sales funnel system that we actually have implemented call the customer generation. And we’ve got that as a registered trademark, which is cool. And it’s basically a system it’s it’s creating a landing page that has two calls to action scheduling an appointment or downloading a, either downloading an ebook or a checklist, something like case study whatever’s appropriate or.
Signing up for a webinar. It depends on, the type of the business we’re working with. It takes people, once they claim that that offer, if they go for the ebook or the webinar, they have a signup page. So there’s a second page. It’s important to build out all of this structure for tracking purposes.
Then, we always are inviting people to jump the line and say, I downloaded this email. My golly, I’m ready to start and have a consultation. So yeah, I want to go ahead and book that. So we’ve got an automated booking calendar system integrated into these, and then we’ve got, a six, seven email nurture sequence, delivers the asset or, tells them, how to register for the, or, the w with the register webinar details I should say, or how they download the ebook or checklist whatnot.
And then. Really a sales focused. But really, it’s really nurtured and help guide people through, the buyer’s journey with us, five to seven email series, Overcoming objections talking about the value of our solution. Definitely clearly explaining that we understand the problem that the client has, and and I love that because it’s, not everybody when they land on your website or are ready to, to go out on that first date, and that’s what we often.
Ask of them way too many times. And so if you give them an opportunity to raise their hand and say, yeah, I’m kinda interested. I want to learn more, but I’m not ready to talk to you. You’ve got to do that and, most businesses fail horribly when it comes to building. And I think, if the pandemic taught me anything, it was that the businesses that had a list or had repeat customers that they could go back to that got hammered with the COVID economy.
They did well, those businesses that didn’t have that they didn’t have a chance. It’s all about the list. The goal is in the list. And so I think it’s just super important to build that out. So that’s my. Probably one of my favorite things to do, and usually a great starting point, especially if you need a quick win and a quick infusion of revenue into your business.
Next, let’s go to Ian. Ian. I know you’re a. You’re a little bit of a nerd in a good way. Thanks buddy. And so I, I know you really like to jump in and play around with a lot of tools as do Paul and I tell me about one of the tools you like to.
Ian: Sure. And this isn’t going to be what you think it is.
First of all, I would say, as an agency, we use a ton of tools. On behalf of our clients and our prospects. And that’s because knowledge is power, but in this case, knowledge feeds the beast. So you need to understand like what’s happening in order to like you can’t change things unless what’s happening.
We were big fans of SEM rush. And also bright local, and those are just two very good. We basically use them as diagnostic and ongoing monitoring tools for our clients. But the one I wanted to share, and this is just because I know that SCM rush and bright, local, they cost money.
Not every business in fact, I think they’re more geared for agencies to use them for. And end user businesses. What I wanted to share was more like down and dirty, get in the mud. This is what if, what any business can do. Anybody, you don’t need a tool. All you need is your Chrome browser.
And so let me share just one method that any businesses. Owner can do in order to understand where their business stands a little bit. It is not as deep as what we can do with our tools, but it is directional. And it will give you some information that you probably don’t know right now, because you just don’t know these tricks, but one of them is open up your Chrome browser.
Open up incognito. I’m not going to go into the details, Google it if you need help with that. But what incognito does is basically allow you to view the information on Google, without it being connected with your own account. So it’s as if you’re anyone else in the world looking at stuff, and that’s important for what I’m going to share.
The first tip is search for your business. So actually put in your business name, look at how it shows up on maps, search results, click on the business and maps and look to see what people are actually seeing about your business. Where do you show up in the map listings where you show up in organic results?
Is it portraying a good reputation? Does the information, the photos, the questions that are being asked on there do they represent your business and do they make sense? And also look at that map listing of all the businesses that are similar to you. And there’s another way to do this too, which I’ll share in a second, but which is more general to your industry.
But look at how you compare the number of reviews that the rating of your business, because people who are searching for your business are looking at that every single day. And you’re losing opportunities. If you’re not competing. So the second method is to do the same type of search in an incognito window, but search for your industry.
So if you’re a dentist search for dentists near me, Sarasota or whatever town you’re in or city you’re in and then look at the listings again, look at the map listings, look at the organic results. See how you compare to your competition. If you can’t be found in the organic results are in the map listings big problems.
Nobody can find you. And then the other part of that is to then look at your PR, try to do a search for your products or services. So an example of that is like dental implants, Portland, if you’re a dental implant just in Portland. But again, look at the maps, look at the listings, see where you show up.
And that is how the world views you. And if you are. Lower than page two, you don’t exist to the searchers. And if you’re lower than your competition on the first page, you want to improve that. So that’s just a really quick kind of diagnostic method that anybody can do. And so I wanted to share that because tools are expensive.
Yeah, nobody wants to invest in tools if they don’t need them in an ongoing basis. Cool.
Ken: So just a quick follow up question. So let’s say that I have a business and I have two locations and I want to do a search for my remote location. It will at incognito window, just to clarify for our listeners will that Inc Cognito window.
Since my IP address and bias search results.
Ian: So the way you get around that, yes, it will. So that it will not sense your immediate IP address, because you’re basically blocking that in incognito. What it will see is your your internet service providers, IP address. So when I do incognito, I actually show up in a couple of towns over because that’s where the head office of that company is.
Or the nearest kind of router. But to get around that all you do is, as I was saying with like search dentists near me, Sarasota, if you put the town or the city that, that extra or secondary location is in, that will give you the results that most people would be searching for because Google if you’re not in incognito, Google will pull in wherever you are.
And so that’s the equivalent of doing that
Ken: well, and it’ll also pull in your past. Browser history too. So if you’ve Googled yourself in the past, it’s going to bias your results. If you’re not using an incognito window. And, we talk with people all the time who think that their ranking pretty well, because they’ve been doing their own searching of their own business.
Through their browser while they’re logged in to their, their Google
Ken: and that’s not true, don’t, that’s why Ian’s tip, I think is really an awesome tip and, great freeway to, to get a feel for how you’re how you’re really doing Dan let’s.
Let’s go to you. You got a pretty cool new press release solution. You want to talk a little bit about it?
Dan: Yeah. I’d love to. Yeah. So I have a press release service that is based on some of my experiences in the past with working with traditional PR. Services where, the way usually a lot of these services go that are out there.
There’s, four or five core ones that, that people use. And the issue with a lot of them, though, that I found was you can. Do them, but they’ll just basically blast out to a lot of low quality sites. And it just felt window dressing where you’re saying, oh, look at this, it got picked up by 2000, media outlets and deep down, I was like, no, there’s gotta be a better way to do this.
And and at the same time I saw a problem. You have to write your own press release with a lot of these or pay extra. You have to you, you can’t necessarily optimize the press release. You have to pay extra for images and videos and then you’ll blast it out and then it’ll get picked up and then it’ll go away in 30 days.
It’s not like a really robust thing with the status quo. I say. What if there’s a different way to have a better, more robust backbone. And our master blaster service that we’re rolling out is totally a press release that’s fully written for. It’s fully, it has the capability to be fully optimized, which you can’t do right now on a lot of things.
You can have a distribution network that is built on a variety of authoritative signals. And this is probably the biggest difference is with the distribution. We’ve talked about it before here. We had lane hope from signal Genesis who was big on this. And I think really after we had lain on I really gravitated to this because what he was talking about is it’s not about blasting it out and it’s not about getting picked up.
It’s about Google. Actually generating authoritative signals off of your press release. That’s where it’s at, not the pickups. So lane, if you talk to them about signals hill, he’ll have about 10 different signals that you can discuss. Google my business signals that you get from doing the press release, right?
Image signals, video signals on page signals, citation signals, social signals, all of this stuff. And so the way we do it is we make sure that the press release has images, video it’s tied into your GMB. And it also for a little bit like a hundred bucks more. We set up a media room on your website so that everything you get, as far as the press releases put right into your website.
And it’s just quite frankly, I think it’s quickly become the best option out there for press releases. I did it because colleagues like ours. We’re crying out for it. And so that’s that was my first thought on it that heck there isn’t even stuff out there that writes it for you without really charging you a big upcharge.
But when I switched to this idea of doing press releases based on social signals or all kinds of signals, I can’t even tell you, you can have something where there’s 500 signals that are related to your press release. And it will live on the web for at least 90 days, if not forever compared to everything else that’s out there.
I just think it’s a really smarter, more authentic way to go. And so that’s I can’t take credit for the idea. It was a lane at signal Genesis, but he is definitely the guy who was fueled that inspiration.
Ken: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. We love that kind of approach to Paul.
What what can you share with us about maybe some SEO ninja moves?
Ian: Yeah, I’m glad JSA question. Still.
Paul: We can talk about this forever. W we hear this from clients a lot as well about what’s one thing I can do, and it’s really basics. You want a ninja trick here at basics fundamentals, get your basics, because if you don’t have your structured data in place, for instance, that can hurt you.
There’s really no silver bullet, but. I think we have to realize we live in a digital world now. I think a lot of people still haven’t accepted that. And like Dan was just talking about the links between all of your online properties. It’s everything working together. You can build internal links and that’s one component.
You can get your structured data set properly. That’s one component. But making sure that you’re, you don’t have a bunch of duplicate content. That’s one component. So I get the best thing I can say from that perspective really is recognizing. Yeah, everything works together. It’s cumulative. And I don’t know that there’s any.
One silver magic bullet that you can say do this. And you’ll rank number one, that, cause it doesn’t work like that. And that’s not how Google works. And one thing that I’ve said in the past, when we talk about, domain authority, And rankings is it. And Google themselves has said, this is that Google doesn’t rank websites.
They rank web pages. Now your home page is probably going to rank the highest and that’s going to get the most traffic. But when someone does a search on Google for something, Google is going to turn. Returned the most relevant result, whether that’s your home page or a blog post, even a YouTube video and all these different content channels work together, you can’t ignore video anymore.
So there, video was a pain. I get it, but you can’t ignore video. It, people would rather watch video than read a blog. And YouTube owned by Google most speak we’ll know that is the second largest search engine on the planet. People spend a lot of time on YouTube watching videos and they’re not watching cat videos.
Okay. They’re watching, I think the largest searches, the largest categories you will have searches on YouTube is how to visit. And that’s something service area businesses in particular can really take advantage of, you have taken an HVAC company. For instance, they get calls about how to program their thermostat.
Now you cannot make money sending a tech out to program a thermostat, but you can do how to videos. Here’s how you program a thermostat. Here’s a generic, okay. Here’s specific thermostat. And you put that out there and that, that gets your name out there. And when people do have an issue, their air conditioner breaks, there’s a good chance they’re going to call you because they already have to some extent of relationship with you.
You have provided useful information to them, and they’re going to remember that. And a lot of times you have companies they’re like I don’t want to. Give out all this free information. Guess what your competitors already doing it? That information is out there.
Ken: Yeah. And the example that you just shared is not, it’s, you’re given free information away, but you’re actually doing it for a good business case because if you send out a tech, like you said, just to program a thermostat, you’re losing money on that deal.
Absolutely. Customers probably not happy because they had to pay for something that fundamental. And if they could have gone online, watched a video and solved it themselves, it probably would have created a bad. Feeling about your business anyway. It’s not always about, am I giving a bunch of stuff away?
Really, people need to think about the internet being really value in advance. It’s relationship building and trust building that you have to do before. You can expect somebody to buy from you. And that line of thinking is. 20 years old and it needs to go if you’re trying to grow your business.
Ian: Yeah.
Paul: call yesterday with a client and, fairly new client. We’re trying to get some things going with, and we had this discussion about, you have to look at things and they did some it’s about phone systems and voiceover IP, and you have to think of it. A customer’s perspective that they don’t know really what they want.
They, all they know is a phones or they don’t know things exist. They have this old phone system and they’re looking to improve upgrade. They may not even know what voiceover IP is. They’re not going to look for that. They’re going to look for phone systems for business phone systems. So in. Our client’s mind.
They’re like we offer voice over IP. It saves you. Money has a lot of advantages. It’s yeah, you know that. But when someone tells their office manager, Hey, we needed a new phone system. They’re not going to go look for voiceover IP. They’re going to go look for business phone systems, or they’re going to go look at what
Paul: Phone system, in a closet and it’s good old Panasonic phone system. Okay. New Panasonic phone system. They don’t know what voiceover IP is.
Ian: Yeah. They’re not going to look for that. So you have
Paul: to put yourself in the customer’s position and realize they don’t know what.
Ken: Yep. Absolutely. Jen you’re I think you’re a big fan of content repurposing. Talk a little bit about how your team does it and why you like it so much. Sure,
Jen: absolutely. This is a tactic that can be used from the very smallest business. So the one person, a solo Panera, all the way up to, anybody on the fortune 500 lists whatsoever.
So it’s really applicable to all. And it really is. It’s more a mindset to start with then any particular tool set that helps you do that? There are tools out there and yes, you can do this manually, but it’s, first of all, the idea that. Kind of content that we produce in the company is going to be repeated.
What that means is take, for example, a blog, you have a blog written, it goes up on your website. That can’t be it. So I want you to start thinking of every piece of content that you produce. How could you repurpose it four to six to eight different times? And what that means is not, putting up the blog one week and then again, at that time, It really is taking the content that is in the blog and then repurposing it for other channels.
So what that could mean is repurposing the blog that is on your website, out into a LinkedIn article for one of your executives. That way they’re blogging on LinkedIn. So right now it’s called LinkedIn articles, who knows when they’re going to change that, but that way your executives can have. Presence on LinkedIn, have the full blog out there written under their name and they can get extra exposure to their network, same blog, same content.
It’s okay to be doing that, but that’s a different way to repurpose that type of. And next way could be to go through that blog and to pick out all the statistics that you have listed in the blog and put those out on social media. Another way to do it is all. If you interviewed anyone in the blog, take out all those quotes and put those out on social media, we have to remember that different people learn and are attracted to different pieces of content.
Some are very factual base. So seeing a statistic about a topic that is of interest to them, That’s going to appeal to them. Other folks are more looking for, oh, what are the thought leaders saying about this topic? So important quotes direction or of opinion that come from the interview that you may have done for your blog.
That’ll work out on social media. So I just want you to be thinking that everything you produce, it can be sliced and diced into your other channels. And that’s important for a couple of different reasons. Going back to the solar pro near all the way up to the fortune 500 company. Everybody is looking for time saving methods, using time and money more efficiently, and getting a lot more done in the, shrinking amount of time that we do have.
So content we’re purposing really does help you do that. If you want to take it beyond text, you can take your blog and make it into a video, an animated video. You can take it and make it into an infographic. So there are, I want you to start thinking about every kind of, a piece of content that you produce.
How can this be repurposed, six or eight times now. And I don’t want to get stuck on a blog like, oh, we don’t have a blog. Do you have a newsletter? Do you have a favorite post this week that really blew up in a positive way? Every piece of content think, oh, is there six or eight different ways we can repurpose this for the other channels?
Could we take a simple posts that we did on social media? And could we expand that into a blog? Can we expand that into a white paper? So it’s just the tip really is how can I take every piece of content that we’re producing in our business and repurpose it either grow it or shrink it six to eight times.
That is my tip
Ken: Yeah, no, that’s awesome. So much valuable information right there. I think about a lot of people we talked to, they always struggle with what am I going to put in an email newsletter? What, if you’re writing a regular blog post. Just because it’s posted on your website, doesn’t mean that people are saying it.
So make that, summarize your blog post and include that in your newsletter, take the popular social media posts that did really well. Like you said, and turn that into an element in your social media news. Into your email newsletter there are so many things that you can do.
I actually think, every subhead of a blog post is a potential social media. That’s a great
Jen: idea. And you touched on something there that would be a pushback that we get. So if it’s first of all, oh my God, how am I going to create all this content? The second thing is we already have that blog, or we already said that in our newsletter.
Unfortunately. Nobody is sitting, waiting for your next post to come out or your next newsletter to come out. So although you have a piece of content on one of your channels, maybe have audience members that are missing that. So repurposing like that, it’s not, no one’s going to be like, Hey, we saw this already.
We have yet to have any of our clients, our customers. Or clients, customers say, Hey, you posted that thing twice on Twitter.
Ken: Go for it. Yeah, absolutely. No, that, that’s amazing. So that kind of leads me into a, I was going to talk about another topic, but I’m going to, I’m going to elaborate on that because we’ve just started to roll out really a content repurposing.
And it’s driven by video. And it’s like one of the first things we were recommending to people now is if you don’t have a frequently asked questions page on your website, complete that and do it, if you have different product lines or different types of customers, focus on one of those first and build out the frequently asked questions, then you do a video on each one of them.
That video is transcribed. It’s turned into a blog post. The video goes onto Facebook. It goes onto YouTube. It’s embedded on your website. The transcription is your blog post on that with with the video embedded there all of that feeds the social media. Like you just talked about Jen, you can chunk out pieces of the video to turn into social media posts.
You can use, some of the elements of of the wording and turn that into social media posts. And then. We actually do what Dan was talking about earlier, where we write a press release about that video that we did to build social signals and SEO signals. And so it’s like this mini little content machine.
It’s just a factory that just kicks ass. So we’re really excited about that. And it’s all built around the idea of content repurposing. So it’s huge. So anyway, that’s that’s my next tip.
Dan: Yeah. And if I could just piggyback on that for the content part after all I couldn’t agree more.
I think a lot of people out there probably don’t realize that, oh, you’re not even with LinkedIn. I get this question a lot, which is, oh gosh. But if I post the entire blog on my LinkedIn profile, am I going to be doing duplicate con. There’s no evidence of anything like that is going to penalize you at all.
Do it on your blog, do it all on your LinkedIn profile and then slice and dice. Some of this stuff, because, think about it. Are you looking at the same seven places at once? All the time? Probably not. And instead think about that masterpiece of content that you’re going to have.
And all the ways that you can actually use it and you can definitely have a video like it was DePaul. What was saying about video? You can’t ignore that anymore. So why not, either do it live or do a teleprompter based on that blog, it may seem redundant to a lot of folks who are so close to it, but I can’t tell you how many times.
The people out there are never going to be like, oh, I just saw this somewhere else. I don’t quite buy that.
Ken: I think I find it pretty rare even if they do that’s a good thing because it’s reinforcing that message, people need to think about, especially if they’re thinking about social media, they need to think about social media ss it. It’s a stream that’s flowing by and it likelihood that you’re going to catch something when it’s originally posted is not very high. People don’t go to your Facebook page and read your business Facebook page, or go to your LinkedIn and then maybe LinkedIn, they do a little bit differently because it is a network with different behaviors, it’s very rare that people are going to go to your Twitter page, to your Twitter profile and read every single tweet you did. That just doesn’t happen. They get that, they get it in a newsfeed, which is that river that just is flowing by constantly. So repeating content is actually amplification.
And then dramatically increases the likelihood that it’s going to be seen.
Dan: Yeah. And to that point, I can’t believe I said this yesterday, but I think I’ve really believing it now is that part of that all of that repurposing is I said, Google, my business is your new one. It is your new website for the no.
And like phase of the marketing hourglass, because if you think about it, they’re gonna, they’re gonna see that if they’re going to do a search to exactly what Paul was talking about. If they’re going to add, have questions or anything like that might be related to your business, they’re not going to be like suddenly, oh gosh, what website should I go type in?
They’re going to look and they’re fucking to find, and they’re going to discover, and this is where you repurpose your stuff and post some of it to a certain degree on Google my business to show, that there’s some authority there. So the ways that you can really divide and conquer, I think are just.
Ken: Yeah. And there are some nice automated tools that certainly can, can help you. But you don’t want to be over-reliant on. AI artificial intelligence or just, using an automated tool too much. It always is going to require some intervention and some quality assurance.
Yeah. So Ian when I hear from a business that they need business fast A lot of times, my mind goes right to Google ads because that’s like the super highway that sends that search traffic directly to your ad. Now people may or may not click on those ads. And that’s up for debate, but talk about some Google ads, stuff that you see that is pretty cool and works really well.
Ian: Yeah. First of all, I want to comment on that, that it’s only up for debate until they see the results. Once they see the results. I, I know. To lay the groundwork. Google ads is rarely the first thing we as an agency suggest people do, right? We believe in planting the seeds of SEO growing that, but SEO is a big ship.
It takes time to turn and those results will help you flourish in time. But oftentimes just as you said, Ken, Google ads is a quick hit. Of sugar to the system to get it going. And the reason it’s so powerful as opposed to other ad platforms is that you’re imposing yourself into the actual buying decision of the user, the prospect, the qualified buyers, because when somebody Googles something.
You select the right keywords to target from an ads perspective and present the right ad to them. You’re actually helping them in their buying decision because they’re actively searching for say somebody searches for a plumber. And the town I’m in or leaky toilet, Brad, leaky toilet, fix leaky toilet help, like that is a qualified buyer and they are immediately calling the person that they think is the most qualified right away.
But here’s some ninja tips because Google ads first of all, I’m going to, I had a last point, which was higher than. I’m going to actually put that first because it’ll save you a ton of time and a ton of heartache and money. You have to have enough budget to make it worthwhile as well, because some of these some of these keywords that you’re going to be bidding on, like I’m helping an HVAC guy.
And his budgets low enough that it’s actually hard for us to even bid on some of the most profitable keywords because they’re $30 per click. And for him, his daily budget is $30. Cause he’s got like a thousand dollar budget per month. You have to, you have. Without me managing it.
I think he would have a really hard time. But the first point I wanted to say is you have to constantly be optimizing a lot of people, especially who manage their own Google ads, accounts. Think it’s a set it and forget. That is the absolute worst thing you can do because Google ads, any ad platform there’s constant degradation, like it will just fall off the charts.
Magically. You’ll continue to spend the exact same amount of money because you’ve set your ad budget, but the results will keep getting lower and lower unless you. Interestingly enough. We’ve used a lot of site tools to help us optimize Google ads on behalf of clients. And over the last, I would say it’s probably the last four or five months.
Google’s actually been refreshing how their Google ads platform is. And they’re showing a lot of optimizations that people should be doing within the Google ads. So this is this. Now this next tip is actually a warning. Do not listen to every recommendation. Google makes you have to remember Google exists to make money.
Like they’re really nice. I’m sure they’re nice people in the back, like creating these algorithms, but their ad platform is there for them to make money, not you to make money. Although if you make money, they make money. If it’s done well. But one thing. Google ads, no matter how optimized we’ve done it for clients, the Google ads platform and the campaigns, Google will always say, Hey, if you raise your budget by X dollars per month, you’ll get X results.
And there is truth in that, right? If you keep raising your budget, of course, you’re going to see more leads, but don’t get sucked into Google will always say. Fully, let us fully automate your bidding process. Worst decision you can possibly do, because now you’re throwing all responsibility into how the bidding is done into the bidding platforms hands.
And if everybody does that, It’s just climbing the it’s an auction, to get in front of people. That’s how it works. And it’s just craziness that the last tip for Google rank recommendations to avoid is don’t accept. Like it’ll have Google’s very smart in their recommendation section.
It’ll say, Hey, we think you should write. Targeting these keywords and it says, basically dig into the details or accept all. And I have to believe a ton of people click accept all. And that again is the very worst thing you can do, because I know from experience, like I review all of the stuff Google will says, because some of it’s good.
Some of it. But with the keywords, you have to be very careful because Google will always try to make them broad match, which is usually a bad decision. It means any derivative of a word will be used to show your ad. And so there’s a ton of examples of why that’s a bad thing, for windows and doors, I have a windows and doors, client say somebody is looking for a garage door and my client.
Seller garage doors. If you, if Google says. You should be using the word door as a broad match. You will get garage doors, you’ll get interior doors, you’ll get dog doors, pet doors, like you, which is not good for your business. So you have to be careful about what you accept from Google.
But I have to say like some of those tips are really good that Google’s giving some are horrible. And the last thing is, make sure you have call and form tracking setup for your ads, because that is the closest thing you can get to. How to measure success with Google ads. Cause otherwise it’s just saying, oh, you got this many clicks, you got this many impressions.
But once you start getting into the actual actions, that mean the most of your business, which are usually phone calls and forms. That’s huge. I have a bunch of other tips, but those are the main ones that I think if people would be really smart to pay attention to, and they are ninja tricks.
Ken: I’m going to add one more, which is when you get that coupon in the mail, when you set up your Google, my business page, or periodically just from Google and it says, Hey, here’s a $2,525 credit for Google ads.
Don’t just put that in and expect that’s. Rock your world and make a big difference and judge the performance of a Google ad campaign based on that, it’s what you call it. Sugar to what earlier,
Ian: Ian? You, yeah. It’s like high glucose, sugar to your system. You’re like, woo. Like we’re rocking it and it’s a lot of action, but it might not be actually building the bones of your business, right?
Yeah. Yeah,
Ken: All right. Cool. Then. You deal with this a lot more than I do. And it’s a platform that constantly perplexes me. And that’s LinkedIn. What’s a go-to move that you recommend for active LinkedIn users.
Dan: Yeah. Yeah. I think the best way to look at LinkedIn is bit by bit, a little bit, rather than trying to, eat the whole thing at once.
And I can tell you this much when I do any LinkedIn training and there’s nine different sessions that I have them choose from the one that they have to do first, before they can do anything is their LinkedIn profile. And so the reason why is not just. It’s right there and it’s yours or anything like that.
It’s that I will bet you anything that if any of us do a Google search for our names, we’ll probably see the LinkedIn profile is the very first search result even before our own businesses. So it really behooves us to look at how we can absolutely optimize that. And some people. It’s amazing how many people don’t really, like we said the phrase set it and forget it.
I think there’s a lot of that when it comes to profiles. And part of that includes, the headline and the being great. And and I’ll just say a few things here. There’s some different stuff associated with that. Don’t just throw up your title and your company, you’re basically given it all away.
Nobody’s got a reason then to look at your profile, then however, if you say something that might be interesting and attractive and captivating to get them to say what does that mean? Then that’s really, what’s going to draw them in. I think that’s a first place to go with your headline.
But then also. How many types of images have you done, how many types of posts have you put on how many different videos have you put all of these things that can make your profile a true multimedia center? That’s constantly updated. That’s the place that’s going to do it. We said, Google, my business could be your first homepage, but I think your LinkedIn profile is very much that too.
Same kind of thing. Who’s to say that, they’re going to go to your website before they go to your LinkedIn profile, probably go to your profile first. And if all you’ve ever done is just say At best. Here’s some stuff about where I worked and here’s what I did. And there’s nothing else there then why do you think I’m just gonna buy that you’re a credible expert and I should go onto your website.
It’s gotta be, there’s some entertainment value that’s going to happen here. And and so I would say that is part of it. And then the other part is. You got to refresh it with posts all the time. I post pretty much every day. I’m not telling people that they have to, but it doesn’t have to be a work of art.
Just grip it and rip it. Just, you got a thought, put it out there. We’re not doing Shakespeare here. Like you want to be known as a thought leader. Don’t wait five weeks to like craft something of beauty to put it up there. People don’t have the memory for that. They really are more about what they see on a regular basis do not do one of these stupid polls.
My God, that’s like the worst thing that ever happened to LinkedIn. I wish they didn’t exist. Don’t do the. There click baity. They’re awful. Don’t do it. But definitely, put a little bit of thought and say over a day or two about, what are some things that really speak to me that are for my industry or something I’m passionate about that I, that comes to mind.
Can it be a status update or an article? So those are the things that I think really put a lot of energy into your profile, and then you can worry about other ways that you can connect and reach out to people. But it’s really a lot like your website, if your profile is not up to speed and they’ve got nothing to look at, that looks interesting, then they’re going to be like, oh, okay so much for this guy.
It’s just not gonna, it’s not gonna mean it. Yeah. So that’s where I start.
Ken: How important is video on LinkedIn these days?
Dan: I think it’s only becoming more important if there’s some debate about whether to do it live or whether to do it recorded and things like that. But yeah, I do. I do say this much for whatever reason.
I can’t tell you why. The text only version. Updates seem to do the best. I don’t know why that is. It shouldn’t be, but you wouldn’t think, but it just without a photo or anything without anything. And that’s, as we sit here today however, that is not to dissuade anyone from stopping and not doing video, I would do video and I would mix it up because.
That’s what keeps it interesting. And I do think there’s a place for video. Absolutely. One of the guys I admire that I follow a lot is a guy who might do like a six minute video, which, seems to like it goes against the laws of everything we’re told about video. But he does it a lot of times on a Saturday or Sunday because that’s when people are less on the site.
So he gets more visibility that way. So you know, it’s a little bit of trial and error, but there’s a place for video. Absolutely.
Ken: There is. So just to follow up on that six minute length video kind of thing. I was talking with Mari Smith a month or so back. And she said that Facebook actually, the optimal performance for Facebook videos is for that five to 10 minute range so that, as long as you’re adding value and you’re covering a subject, deeply enough to where it’s interesting for people that’s that really is that sweet spot.
It’s not so long that you’re going to lose interest and people are going to get distracted by something else, but it’s long. To keep people watching it most of the way through. And that I guess is registering really well with with algorithms these days. Yeah.
Dan: Yeah. And as with anything, just take a look at oftentimes even with the mobile app for LinkedIn, because sometimes for whatever reason, the mobile app may do.
Then your desktop, LinkedIn you can certainly do a lot more of that live on the fly video with the mobile versus it’s a little more, I won’t say clunky, you’ve got to upload a raw file and stuff to the desktop version. So stuff like that, but don’t get so wrapped up in the day, the time the format.
Just put it all out there and then see what you’ve got. It will tell you a lot based on exactly what you just said. Can the analytics tell you everything about what the kind of content that’s working? Yeah.
Ken: Awesome. We’ve talked a little bit about email in this conversation. And I think email is gross has become grossly overlooked by people.
I think that way too many people think that it’s a tired channel and it can very much be an overused and abused channel. Absolutely. No doubt about that, but I think it’s also really super important for a lot of people to do at what’s a great strategy if you’ve got, customer lists, if people but you haven’t really done much with it.
Paul: The first thing with your customer list is you have to organize it. I’m when you’re talking about a CRM, I’m big on tags. I love the idea of tagging. And what I mean by that is let’s take up pain or example, for example, you have, maybe you’ve done cabinet painting, but you haven’t done any other interior painter.
You’ve done interior painting, but you haven’t done exterior painting. And so you can tag, you can assign tags to your contacts that, okay. I did cabinet. For this person, but we’ve never done any other type of interior painting. You can send a very targeted email out to everyone that you’ve done interior painting far, but no exterior painting.
You can send them an email saying, Hey, we painted the inside of your house six months ago, but what about the outside of your house? And like you said about. Email being abused. If you want to piss off your clients, send them irrelevant emails on a daily basis that will get them marked as spam very quickly.
And so you’re right. The email has been abused and
you have to be, there’s a. That you have to find because you can’t just fire out irrelevant emails. And so I think that the most important thing is to get your list organized. And if you have a big list yeah. That’s a project. So maybe you get chunk it out, spend, 30 minutes a day, getting your list organized and tab because.
Obviously you invoice your customer, so you can go back. Maybe you use QuickBooks, whatever you use, but you can go back and look at that and say, okay, these are the projects or the services that I’ve done for this client. Because if you don’t have that, you cannot send targeted emails. And that’s the power of email has a great ROI, especially with existing customers, because they already know you.
And if you did a good job and they liked the service you provided, you’ve already gone through the awareness, the know the life, the trust you already have that. So why not reach out back to reach back out to those customers? And say, okay we did interior painting, but we didn’t do exterior painting or w we haven’t painted your cabinets yet.
So get your email list, organized, take advantage of a CRM, get your tags in place and use email Intel intelligently. Don’t just fire out these generic email blast because that Lyrica.
Ken: Yeah. Yeah. I’m reminded of, some of the early success stories for restaurants that were being shut down due to COVID and they basically could have anybody come into their dining rooms at all.
If they had a list and they emailed their list and they said, Hey, we’re still open. You can still place orders. You can either get it delivered or we’ll do curbside pickup for you. Those restaurants were able to keep going and operating. If they didn’t have a list, they were screwed.
So you gotta have a list. Don’t buy a list, build a list organically, go through your emails, go through your accounting system, go through your. And production systems, whatever you got, but build that list and then segment it like Paul talked about with tags. And and then, if you need a boost in the arm for business, reach out to your existing customers, give them a reason to buy from you again, or ask them if they know somebody who might be interested in your service and pass, pass your information to them.
It doesn’t hurt to ask one of the things that we learned recently. I think many of us. In a session by that was run by John Jantsch that was talking about what is it like 89% of people have a business that they would be very willing to refer, but only 23% of those people actually.
Do the referrals. So don’t ask and you don’t have a system. It, you don’t assume it’s going to happen. That’s a massive gap, right? So you gotta take action, Jen, we’re gonna wrap up with you. Last but not least. How can someone get more Google reviews?
Jen: I thought you were leading to a great segue there by asking, right?
So asking for reviews, same thing, asking for the Google reviews. That’s the first thing, to ask for them. And if we take it from the point of view of the business owner, the company sometimes asking for reviews is just, I’ve run into some of our clients are just like, oh, I don’t really want to ask, but yeah.
Do go ahead. Ask if you’ve done a great project, a great job. Definitely ask there are some ways to make that whole process a lot easier. If you start off with a contract with a client so if you’re doing any kind of service or long project work, you can have the request for a review right in there in your contract.
So you can start to see that idea with your clients early. And then asking for it. It’s just like one of the contractual obligations that, you guys agreed to, so that could make it easier. Next, a way to get get more Google reviews is you can give more Google reviews yourself, right? Or operating a company as you are.
You’ve got vendors. Their business needs to grow. So start reviewing your vendors on Google. Another way. And, you had those statistics there and, just because around 20% give the reviews, that doesn’t mean that other people don’t want to, it could be a matter of them forgetting to the meaning to them, not knowing what to say, them, not knowing where exactly to post the review.
So if you use a review campaign system that can really help get the reviews going and what I mean by that? I think we all use it in our businesses. We have an option to do a Google review. And what that means is your potential clients or your, your actual clients, your potential reviews.
R sent an email asking for the review and in that place you, as a business owner could draft a couple of sentences about here’s a sample review for us. We did, ABC for you. Could you please review us on that? And then your client has the chance to go. That’s great review, which is copy paste and post that as the review, or they have the chance to, edit it, but it’s easier to edit something than it is to think up, okay. They did a great job, right? That’s not. All that helpful for sure. So I, I would say those things first of all, asked for them, second of all, make it easy for your clients to give you the reviews you yourself give a reviews and and yeah, just don’t be afraid to ask.
Ken: Yeah. Cool. Awesome guys.
I thought this was a lot of fun. Anybody have any parting thoughts?
Dan: I just say on a, the reviews is. What makes it easier is just think about your very best time when you actually get something positive happened. That moment is about a good 48 hour window. And if you ask them for reviews right after that high, that they’ve just felt there’s nothing to be scared about.
They want to do it. And as somebody much wiser than me said is don’t deprive them of the opportunity to build your business. Yeah, go for it.
Ken: Alright. I think that’s a perfect place to stop. So thanks guys. Ian. Tell everybody we said hello for you.
Ian: Thanks for it’s so funny. Isn’t it? I think that was a book delivery from the summit we were just at. So I’m expecting a book and it just arrived. So
Ken: cool. All right. That’s all we have this week, so thanks everybody. And catch us next week.
April 1