32:12
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
people, e commerce, business, traffic, damon, pay, ecommerce, conversions, click, reviews, talk, seo, understand, buy, boil, technical, advertising, simple, customer service, website
SPEAKERS
Damon Pistulka, Curt Anderson
Damon Pistulka 00:00
Okay, all right.
Curt Anderson 00:02
All right. Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you so much for joining us and happy Friday and I see we got a Thea Jean. Hey, Joyce Ryan, Valerie. Thank you guys for joining us today. So, Friday, October 23, another manufacturing ecommerce success of masterclass little workshop here. So it is an honor and a thrill to introduce you, this is actually our host. So I think public you might be new.
So this is, my name is Kurt Anderson, and I’m with b2b retail, and this is Damon Pistulka. Damon is usually our host, and he is the owner, co owner of exit your way, is a success, growth and succession strategy specialist. And so today, he is actually going to be our presenter. So he’s playing host in a couple different hats. And guys, I am absolutely thrilled that Damon is just a rock star, your socks are gonna be blown off, Damon, I’m going to turn it over to Let’s rock and roll, buddy. All right,
Damon Pistulka 01:03
well, thanks, Kurt. And it’s a lot to live up to. But we’ll see. So if you if you can, as you can see that I’ve got a presentation here, if you want to click on the little arrows there, you can maximize it to your, your full screen and do that. I apologize ahead of time I am. I don’t like PowerPoint, but we will we will make it through. So first thing is is I’m going to talk today about the business behind ecommerce. And what I mean by that is ecommerce, everybody’s talking about it, they know that, you know to to be successful in your in businesses today, you have to have a digital strategy of some sort. For some people that that means it’s a lot of different things depending upon who you are.
But really, what I want to do today is bring this to a level that will allow you well let’s see here, there we go. My goal today is to give you have the knowledge, you need to be able to stand up and say, Wow, it’s working. Sometimes, you know, in the future, because that is one of the things that I talk to a lot of business owners about. And we find that they’ve tried it. Many people have tried it and have horror stories. And we’re going to work through some of the things today and talk through this the the simple things that I believe that if you as a business manager owner, or even if you’re a technical person here that helps businesses do this.
I think if you explain it in these terms, it’ll help a lot. Because ecommerce is a much different way of doing business, as as we all know, but I want to point out a couple main things. First of all, we all know that traditional sales model, we’ve got sales people are hunters and Orion in here as a salesperson and and you understand what I mean, there’s there are people that they find the clients, they go out and talk with them, and they do what they need to do. And that model has worked very well, for a lot of businesses this year, accelerated a lot of change with the fact that we couldn’t go out and do those face to face meetings and do those things.
So other things like video on that had to had to be incorporated into that process. But in the end, traditional sales methods using sales people are limited by how many hours around the day geography, all the kind of things that you’re you really need to take into account when there’s there’s people involved in the process. And that limits your ability to scale and grow. So if you want to try to get the in the e commerce model, now it’s a lot more like fishing, because you’re trying to get people to you.
And in e commerce terms as traffic. So it’s either if I’m getting people to my website to my listings on on Amazon, or if I’m selling on Facebook, or wherever the heck I’m selling on any of many platforms, I’m trying to get eyeballs, the right people looking at my stuff. And that’s what we’re trying to do. So as a business person that is going to be undertaking an e commerce effort. You have to remember it’s fishing. We are we have to put out the right bait. We have to be able then to talk to those people the right way so that we entice them into learning more and ultimately into making that buying step as we as we move forward.
So the first thing basic thing that I always like to talk about enough of the right traffic, no different than having a brick and mortar store on the corner, you want to have enough of the right people walking into your your advertising into your website into your store virtual store, whatever it is, we want to get enough of the right traffic. Now, this is going to come in several different forms. And this is where the the people in a business that are going to try to do this that are not ecommerce experts need to take this back to the simplest level. And because the thing about e commerce businesses, it’s a bunch of technical pieces that come together to digitally do this.
It’s not like two of us in the room having a conversation and we’re talking about a lot of this stuff is technical jargon that they’re you’re going to get faced with as a business person faced with e commerce. And a lot of it while it’s critical for the technical person to know it, the business person does not need to know this, they need to understand what you’re talking about. But do you really need to understand the bounce rate on your website? Well, what exactly that means? Well, yes, you should understand that about if the bounce rate is too high, it means that people are on and off too fast.
But you know, other than that, a cursory understanding of these things is all you need to have. And so what I see in most businesses, when they when we talk about the business of e commerce, the thing that they miss is really that you can’t just turn ecommerce over to a technical person in a business or or my, my daughter that just graduated from college with a marketing degree and say, hey, you’re going to do e commerce for us. It doesn’t work that way. Because that technical person doesn’t know enough about your business, and about your customer.
And about the process of buying to be able to accurately lead a team of technical people that are going to help drive traffic and creative people that are going to have to create an experience with text in images and ads that lead that buyer on the journey they need to, to buy from you. So this guide is one of the essential keys if there’s one thing from today, it is it is take the time to decide who is going to be the guide in your e commerce efforts. It could be you. And if it is, you’re going to have to understand this at a cursory level enough to go.
Okay, I understand what you’re saying. And and we’re going to talk about here in a little bit are the results that I need to see from this specific effort. And when you have that, the guide can understand that we are going to be attracting the right people. If we’re doing it, or we’re just attracting people to be attracting people, because that doesn’t do you any good. You have to attract the right people. And that’s one of the things I think there’s the first point in this whole thing is there needs to be leadership behind your ecommerce efforts. Because I can guarantee if you just say that I said in the example my daughter that just graduated from college is going to handle it.
You will end up spending money and probably be very frustrated. So look at my time here. Okay, I’m doing good. I’m tied. So there’s a couple of ways that we’re going to talk about the two things that I talked about. We’re going to talk about traffic. People talk about SEO, Search Engine Optimization. I just threw this graphic up here because it reminds me to talk about this. But this is something that your technical people will pull up, they’ll talk to you about backlinks and keywords and all that kind of stuff.
But really what you want to make sure of is our Do we know what people search for, to find us the right search terms to find us and they’re specifically the products or services that we provide. And then our is our website and all of our marketing materials and everything. Optimize around those key phrases that people search for when they need our type of product or services. That’s as simple as it is. It’s organic traffic. This is when you type into Google and and you see companies come up I’m going to type sheetmetal fabrication into Google and you see all these companies come up.
You’re gonna you’re gonna see that the SEO optimized for sheet metal manufacturing are in those places. That’s the The first thing now the SEO or search engine optimized organic traffic. The one thing about organic traffic is it takes time to build that up. It is not something that you can turn on tomorrow and go, hey, I’ve got this great new optimized website, I’m going to have traffic tomorrow, it won’t happen. It takes months, and years. But if you take that time, and it’s just you’re steadily working your your SEO and getting better and better at it, you can drive millions of views, organically.
And that is ultimately what people want want to be doing because you don’t want to pay for every click. As you do with pay per click, which I will talk about now. paid search advertising others this is Google, I’m just showing Google I just did the search like I said before she metal fabrication, you see the the one on the top there where it says add right beside it, I’ve got the written marks beside those things are your your typical paid ads, that that’s that’s what you get you pay to be up there, someone pays more to be in the first slot than they do.
And you know, now Google has them at the top of the page on the bottom page and every other search page after that. So you can you can pay to get traffic to a row to get to be seen. And pay per click is just like it says, I am going to pace when someone clicks on that ad doesn’t mean they’re buying, it means they are going to click on that ad and it’s going to go where you’ve set the ad up for it to go could be a landing page could be your homepage could be a product specification page. But that ad has to it has a place that it’s going to go wherever you decide to go and you’re going to pay each time that happens. And it does not mean you pay no matter if they buy or not.
So in pay per click, you have the first price that you’re going to pay. And that’s how much do I pay for each click. Now, it can be low, you can have sometimes when your click costs are in the pennies. But if you are doing something like insurance, insurance is actually the highest Pay Per Click word available. And it’s $55 a click. So the next thing I’m going to talk about when you talk about pay per click advertising is the conversion rate. which simply means how many clicks does it take for somebody to buy something. So I’m going to pay for clicks with pay per click advertising. Simple as it is, I’m creating this little tiny ad. And that’s where your creative people have to come in.
Because the ad words and the words you use in it, the keywords that you put behind all this stuff is critical. But as a business person, all you need to know about Pay Per Click is that we are paying for that click. And that’s going to drive that traffic to our site somewhere or to something that we’re where we want them to go. And when enough of those people get there, we should be seeing the next thing, which is a conversion or a buy. And those are two of the key things with pay per click is if if pay per click advertising is is almost instantaneously two, I can turn it on today and I will get traffic from it tomorrow.
That’s the one thing about pay per click. And a lot of people if I’m a business person again, and I’m considering doing e commerce, and I don’t have Pay Per Click is that initial part of my strategy, I am going to take a lot longer timeframe to drive traffic. Because over organic if you’re just going to try to do an SEO base, it can take months for you to drive enough traffic to start to say you have to have 50 clicks to get to get a buy.
Then it might take a while to get 50 clicks. But with pay per click, I could be getting 50 clicks tomorrow. And I have to have the right keywords and everything behind it. But that pay per click model is what allows you to start soon and and start to refine your messaging and stuff because you will do that. Now, the other thing on pay per click advertising is you need to understand your pay per click people that you’re talking to should have done something similar to you because if you’re selling a service, it’s much different than selling a product.
That’s one of the questions to ask. But that’s so we got pay per click advertising. The other the other way to get traffic is social. You know people see you on LinkedIn, Facebook, wherever you go on. There’s all kinds of ways to do it. Social is another way to do free and over time. I believe social just like organic is one of the better ways to drive traffic because you’re going to be able to in video and tax and all the other things over time you’re going to be able to create your community and awareness and third party endorsements and all the other kind of things. That’s why people say social is so important in e commerce.
I never really understood this until the last couple of years. But because primarily in the clients that we had helped, they were always pay per click in and, and some SEO but or they, they had gone down the SEO route and they were just out of, you know, couldn’t drive traffic anymore that way. So we started with pay per click, and then moved into the social because that will help your traffic as well. Again, these three things simple as that all we’re doing is trying to guide organic or more traffic to you to create that sale.
This is another thing that you’re going to see in here that Sorry, I didn’t click that thing you’re going to have these people are going to want to show you traffic data they’re going to show you, you know, this is just a simple of where you know how much traffic users and how many new years is how many sessions, you know, how many times did those unique users go in and do that this is data, hey, the bottom line is, if you get enough traffic of the right traffic, they will drive enough business. So if you’re not getting buys, you don’t have the right traffic, or you don’t have the right images and text to convert that traffic.
So I just wanted to throw this up here because there’s a ton of analytics, because when we get into the next part of this right here really quickly is you are going to have to disseminate this down into simple terms. Again, pay per click advertising, they don’t make this stuff easy, right. So this is why these technical people have to be involved in this process. Usually, it’s again, it’s probably not your, you’re like my in my case, my daughter that graduated from college, and you know, it’s not going to be the best person to do this, there are specialists do this. And in the beginning, it may be your best option to do that.
Again, there’s all kinds of data behind the listing individual listings of your solid product, and all those kind of things. So now let’s let’s talk about what I really do, because what I really enjoy, because I think that from a business perspective, one of the, as I said before, the guide, the leader, that’s going to be setting the direction and and the direction, the tone and coordinating all the efforts in the in the e commerce is key. The second key and this is really setting the goals measurement. Because when we talk about traffic, traffic and advertising, it boils down into a few things. It is how many website visitors? Are we getting in the few things that have gone on here?
Are we getting the page views? Are we getting the transactions. In the end, this all boils down into are we selling stuff or not. And if we aren’t, there’s something wrong upstream either we don’t have enough people or we don’t have the right people or we don’t have the right advertising, really simple. Now from a from a cost and making sure we’re being efficient on this, we look at things like ROI as its return on adspend. It’s like if I spent 100 bucks on ads, and I saw $1,000, I have 10% return on ads, or 10% ad cost or whatever you want to call it. And then another thing that you’re going to see is CPC or cost per click. That’s that is another thing you can look at over time to just kind of see how that’s going.
And then your conversion percentage. Now, you can’t do any of these individually. Without looking at the entirety because I can have a very high cost per click. But if I had a double conversion rate, double the conversion rate of a lower cost per click, click, I’m still just as good off as long as I’m getting more more conversions and more sales from it. So this is where you need to measure your traffic and the efficiency of your advertising. And and that’s easy to do. That’s the first level of performance that we we want to do boil this down into. And I’m at 1053.
So I’m going to get through this fast. The second thing is this is familiar now. Now look, now I had one thing here that was this is not so familiar. There’s some new terms in here. Once we get past that part of it, again, as a business person, you just need to understand, are we getting the right people there, and we’re getting them there at a reasonable cost. The terms are stuff will fall into place. The second part of this that I think is is really, really a lot of fun. Once you get this get these things started is measuring the channel performance, and I call it channel contribution.
So this is a typical channel that we would do on a client, we would pick up okay, how many orders did I receive for that channel this week? How much margin did I get? And this is a Walmart you can tell because I’ve got I got Walmart in there. And I’ve got a fee. I’ve got my percentage. I got some refunds. I’m working all this down and I want to know, on this week, how much profit Did I make? What was my estimated profit this week for my channel. net of all that, because every channel is going to have different costs your website is probably going to be your best margin.
Amazon Walmart, overstock soro, any of these others are going to have different fees and different return policies and all that. But you need to boil this down into a weekly basis. Because this all happens digitally behind the scenes, you don’t see any of this, I mean, you wake up in the morning and literally have numbers flashing, they’ve, you know, just been changing. So you got to look at this on a weekly basis, your people that are managing this directly need to be on an on daily basis, because things change.
Then again, the other part of your business, operational performance, orders processed is one of the things that they think you’re going to be with e commerce, you’re typically processing more orders, they’re they’re not usually the big bulk orders, like you know, many many factors want to get. But what this does is allows you really to work on your order processing efficiencies, which is it’s another thing helps your entire company, the more efficiently you can process your orders, and and do those kind of things. So don’t forget to measure your weekly performance on your your operational things. You’re doing it.
One of the last things here is customer service. Customer service is on I’ve got Okay, my partners, nevermind, I should have shut the program down. I didn’t let me do that on thick air. How do I get that to go away? There we go. Customer service is one of the things when you’re doing e commerce. It is out there for the world to see your reviews are there for the world to see your customer service has to be top notch. Amazon has set expectations very high, you need to visit and This example shows it could be that you’re how many calls are we getting? How quickly are we answer on how many emails are we getting?
Are we getting them answered, all this kind of stuff adds up. Now the other thing on here too is your customer service people can be a part of your sales team. And if you’re not using him that way you should be. So you have to measure it though. And the customer service people have to understand how they’re performing. Because it is so critical. If you get bad reviews, you will not okay, this way. We don’t need to. I mean, this sorry.
22:24
Done. All right.
Damon Pistulka 22:27
So then at the end of this, we want to measure the overall business. No, I’m talking about business, I just mean money from and and here. All those channels have to come together to put together the last thing that you know, how much am I making for my e commerce? And what is really happening here? What kind of margin are we making him doing that these channels need to roll up into that and you need to be looking at a weekly basis. I can’t emphasize this enough when you’re when you’re doing e commerce is putting these things in place to measure your performance consistently.
Because this, this will, knowing how you’re performing will help you establish your edge, you’re going to find out where things are working where they’re not, you’re going to be able to analyze them and adjust quickly. Ecommerce will move fast. And if you’re not if you’re not taking the time to really understand your performance, you can spend a lot of money you can spend a lot of time and not be effective on what you’re doing. So that’s all I had, I want to run through it quickly. I know it was a lot. But do things set up somebody who’s gonna be responsible for it. Get and get your guide, and then stick to the basics. So all you need to do so. Kurt, I finished dude.
Curt Anderson 23:54
Wow, Mind blown. So that was just absolutely phenomenal. Damon, that was just I I’m speechless. So everyone, I welcome encourage any questions in the chat box on a lot of takeaways here, you know, Damon hit God, there is so much value there, Damon net, you just really far exceeded my expectations. And they were high too high to begin with. But, you know, he talked about the leadership.
He talked about focusing on those key words. He talked about the search strategy, you know, and so many times, you know, we’ve got great relationships with you know, most folks on the call today, we’ve talked, you know, over the years, you’re like, you know, you think you know what your right keyword is and then we dig into it, you find like there’s other parts of the country or using a different phrase, or there might be a you know, we talked about that longtail keyword where there’s multiple words.
So Damon, you threw out you the manual stats were phenomenal. I’m assuming either showing some customers and clients benchmarks, what would our see if you had like two or three benchmarks that are critical For the client, and I know you’ve covered a ton, what are you know, bounce rate to conversions to, you know, all the above what are like one or two key things that you’d like to share?
Damon Pistulka 25:11
Well, it’s it is a How am what are my sales?
Curt Anderson 25:17
sales? Right? profit,
Damon Pistulka 25:19
selling or not
Curt Anderson 25:20
getting money?
Damon Pistulka 25:22
Let’s go there. And then And then second of all, if I am, am I making money at it? Those are the two things. I mean, there’s it all boils down in e commerce you have to make money or why the hell are you doing it? You know, right. And then all these technical people, right, the thing that I see in it, I talked to business owners about this, they were approached by somebody that knows pay per click one and then that person wants them to do only pay per click, I just think that you really need a balanced approach on this, you know that I’m getting a good amount of traffic.
And I’m you may have started Pay Per Click but but that traffic is then converting. And as soon as you get the first conversion, you’re going to go Oh, we got some sales. Now you want a second sale on third, say that pretty soon, you’re gonna see my conversion rate is something you know, slow and slow to start with, it might give you 1%. But can I get it to 1.5%? Do I need to adjust my ads?
The text to my ads or my listings? Or, you know, however, I’m doing this to try to drive my conversion rate up? And then on the other side, how can I drive my traffic up? So I like to look at the how much traffic Am I getting? And how much am I converting in both in percentage in dollars? Right? Because you got because the other thing that that many of the people on here that are b2b people that you have to understand is that customer acquisition cost is that the time to get that first conversion might be a bit higher.
But if I’m going to have that customer, once they come to us, it’s a repeat kind of buy thing, hey, you may spend $100, to get them get them in the first time. But they may be a $50,000 client, your average client may be a $50,000 client over time, and what I’m doing is I’m spending hundred dollars to get each person and over time, my my monthly revenue on my website just keeps going or my whatever I’m doing my e commerce just keeps it not because they keep coming back. So there’s, there’s a few keys, but it is how much am I selling? And then can I get more traffic and more conversions?
Curt Anderson 27:20
Right. And I love how you mentioned the reviews. And again, for those those of you targeting, like the industrial space, you know, Steve Leto is on the call or you know, you know, reviews are a little bit foreign for the b2b and industrial companies. And I have to admit, for years, like Jean, my friend James on a call today, we’ve worked together for years, and you know, just like when you’re a manufacturer, you have you know, half a dozen 1020 clients, you know, maybe reviews aren’t so important.
Boy, that’s completely changed. And Google now is it’s critical. So if we can get those, you know, we keep talking about that social proof, if you can get those reviews because somebody out there is going to type something about you, whether you like it or not when so the goal is how can you maybe be proactive with it? How can you control it and get ahead of it and that’s a that’s another driver for getting those rankings. So I’m so glad you mentioned that
Damon Pistulka 28:17
reviews too. Honestly, only the people that are going to leave reviews are the people that don’t like what they you know, don’t like your product or service. I mean, they’re nine times out of 10 that’s the way it is. So you really have to make sure that you’re you’re helping people make it easier to leave good reviews. Okay, otherwise you’re just gonna have a slew of bad ones and it’s gonna kill your sales.
Curt Anderson 28:37
Right? And then one last thing I want to mention it and again, so folks everybody you know this is a thank you for for joining us and I want to give a shout out to all Thea med elfia this week and Queen she has an amazing incredible business believe elfia so every week that we do this feel free put in your putting your website put in your LinkedIn Yeah, this is a you know if we were all face to face we’d be handing out business cards.
So this is a great opportunity to share and meet and learn about each other’s businesses. So I’ll Thea has a great wonderful business I believe she does like tropical cakes, and its delights are in her are in her title and man when you wouldn’t know she has a carrot cake. I was like drooling this morning looking at her website. But the thing is what I love what you’re talking about is so if this is new to you, you talk about those key words.
And you know you’ll hear people say the word the phrase longtail keywords, and all that simply means is Damon keeps referring to his daughter of a teenage daughter. You know if they wanted to buy shoes and they did a search for shoes to be very challenging to find the right pair of shoes if they wanted say pink running shoes with purple shoelaces. Yeah. Now if our daughter’s type, pink running shoes and purple shoe laces, and we were selling it and say somebody on the call was selling that shoe now It’s a good match, it’s better for the buyer because they went more detailed.
Instead of just typing shoes, they’re going to spend half an hour trying to find that pink shoes, running shoes with purple shoelaces. But if they use that phrase, and you’re targeting that phrase, now you have a good match. Now you have high conversions. In my e commerce state, when I had my e commerce business, we would go after those longtail keywords, we would see conversions like six 7%, which are out of the world, because typically you’re going to be in that one or 2%.
So the more specific you can get, is, is detailed. So, um, guys, if you have any questions, what we’re going to do is if you’re new to this platform, we’re going to hop off here, we’re going to go back to what we call the tables, and we can have some interaction meet with each other talk with Damon myself, Steve molinos on the call. gene is an SBDC. advisor Jeffrey’s here so we’ve got a great group here. So join us back at the tables and we can have a conversation. Anything else on your end? Damon?
Damon Pistulka 30:57
No. I mean, don’t don’t overcomplicate it. I mean, yep, technical people are going to talk to you with all these technical terms. And really it comes down to do we have enough people seeing what we want to see? are they seeing the right thing? And are we selling and and when you get somebody that’s trying to help you with this, or if you’re someone on this on this that’s trying to help people, you’ve got to boil it down into the simple things. And and that’s that I can’t I can’t emphasize that enough.
Curt Anderson 31:28
Kiss. Keep it simple, silly, right? Yeah, keep it simple. Yeah. And try not to get intimidated or overwhelmed. You know, find there’s, there’s so many you know, now we’re 25 years in e commerce. You know, now you can find that seasoned professional or that expert that can help you navigate your way. So this is awesome. Damon crushed it to appreciate it. Everybody. Thank you so much.
This means so much to us that you took time out of your schedule to join us. We’re gonna hop back to the tables. We’re here every Friday at 130 Eastern 1030 Pacific. And I think I want to give a shout out to Joyce I think Joyce is on the call. And so again, thank you everyone for being with us today. You’re at