55:37
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
people, google, customers, business, marketing, talking, seo, big, web, buying, client, searching, company, solve, website, problem, busy, business owners, identify, results
SPEAKERS
Damon Pistulka, Dave Meyer
Damon Pistulka 00:02
All right, everyone. Welcome once again to the faces of business. With me today. I’ve got Dave Meyer from busy web a Dave. Welcome.
Dave Meyer 00:13
Hey, thank you very much, Damon, pleasure to be here with you on this beautiful spring day is yes,
Damon Pistulka 00:19
yes. We
Dave Meyer 00:20
were just talking about before we got on you’re you’re in the Minneapolis area, and it’s getting close to voting season is getting close. And with Minnesota if you don’t like the weather, just wait a second. So it was 78 a couple days ago. And then my daughter had her birthday party over the weekend. And it’s snowing. Yeah, it’s it’s always something new and exciting around here. Yes,
Damon Pistulka 00:43
yes. Yeah, that’s for sure. And we were talking about it a little bit beforehand. You’ve got you’ve got one of the infamous cabins in the great Minnesota Northland.
Dave Meyer 00:54
Yep, yep, in the north woods, and we get up there, we’ve got a chain of 14 lakes that we hang out on. And it’s just tremendous, you know, you get to go up and you can explore, and the wireless is good enough that you can probably do some zoom calls if you want to, although it doesn’t really get you a lot of goodwill, when your people are sitting in their offices, and you’re floating. And you see a jetski going by Yeah,
Damon Pistulka 01:20
yeah, definitely need the virtual background and the headphones. smarter that way? Yeah, I agree. We are out there with a big Greg green screen behind you. That’d be hilarious.
01:32
It’d be so funny.
Damon Pistulka 01:34
That would be good.
01:35
Well, you know, Dave, I
Damon Pistulka 01:36
was really excited to get you on because there’s not many people that have been in digital marketing. Over 20 years. I mean, you just think back and you think about it, and that was really in the infancy of, of digital marketing of Internet Marketing. And, and, and in some regards the internet and, and so, let’s go, let’s go back there, what, what ever really got you started and said, Listen, I want to I want to mess with this internet stuff. I want to do digital.
Dave Meyer 02:07
You know, it’s fun. It’s like way, way back. I think this was like 96 or 97. I was working for a State Department. And as State Department’s go, we we all kind of got our own roles. And I was tasked with building the website. There had no idea what to do with the website, I was classically trained journalist and marketer. And so they just told me, yeah, kid, whatever you want, you go ahead and make this thing happen. So I took some classes. And that’s how I got started. And then did a couple of things in like internal communication back and forth.
And then by 99, which is when busy web started, I decided that I wanted to set out on my own a little bit and just do something. I had started a job with a large bank and was was doing the Daily News. But I looked out over the sea of cubes that I was about to join, and I had to do something to save my soul. So I created my own business. And this was the good old days when you could literally Google things before Google, but you could search for things and I was looking for business and web business web, biz biz, busy web, busy web busy. web.com was available until I booked it and that’s the name of the company. Wow.
Damon Pistulka 03:21
Because I was gonna ask about that. Because that, you know, being in business that long. Yeah. Even even just getting your web domain and that it’s just like you had a lot of choices that we just simply don’t have today.
Dave Meyer 03:34
Exactly. And every it was the Wild Wild West. And this was right. In the days of you know, pets.com was still out there. And there was all this buzz and people were super excited about what the internet could do. Yeah, but the internet was also still crazy slow. And yeah, you know, it was, you know, I think the first thing that I did, as a as a big project for busy web, I actually started a flash website.
Remember those when you hover over things, and it would do goofy things. And so you would hover your mouse over the different things across the main page that are the main part of the page. And then it would like do a drip, drip. So we go boop, when you would click on or whatever. And this was my first foray into being careful what you hire and being very cautious about the kinds of people that you engage with because I found out as I was changing up something on the back end, that the developer and put in a bunch of just nasty language into the code of the of the thing. So I was like, oh, after this and blah, blah, blah.
And that as he was drawing in the flash code, and so I got in, I got into I was like, What are you doing, man? And so we got in and I got him to clean it all out before the client got it. Of course the source files are never exposed to the outside. Well, yeah. But yeah, if I had to run that through the client, it would have been terrible.
Damon Pistulka 04:52
Oh, yeah.
Dave Meyer 04:54
Yeah, it’s having having an overall kind of strategy from the get go. Well, was very important to the formative years of busy web.
Damon Pistulka 05:04
Yeah, no doubt, no doubt. So I’m sitting here just trying to just think of the enormity of the change that has happened. I mean, you just go from even the introduction of Google. Yeah. I mean, you’re there before the introduction of Google. Mm hmm. And when there was dial up Internet, and you were actually just making websites almost by programming. Yeah. In a text editor? Uh huh.
Dave Meyer 05:33
Well, we did a lot of that. As a matter of fact, I went on a holiday and did my did my very first and I think my last cruise with it was Royal Caribbean at the time. And went out and I just kind of did a travel log of it. Right. So I just created a page because hey, I got a website. I got website building software. And so I created the website. And I just did my review of all the cool stuff that I saw on the trip. And it was just a Caribbean cruise went around Cuba and came back and posted a bunch of pictures and said, You know, it was great. The state room was cool. And all this it was very pedestrian, right?
It took me about an hour and a half to build the thing. Well, I forgot about it for like four years. And I came back and I was the number one Google result for for Royal Caribbean cruises. Like oh my god, this is just me and my swim drunk sitting out there sipping pina colada. Yeah, oh, my lights, like a doubt after that. That’s when I first got into the power of the internet. And it was always just kind of friends and pals. It was a busy one was a hobby for the first few years. Because I did still work at that big bank.
But, you know, it was it was so much fun to work with real businesses doing real things. And to just get a chance to exercise my creative juices. And, you know, marketing is always the same. So there’s always new hot things that come out, you know, there’s the next Tick Tock is coming down the pipe again, right? So, but the, the core tenants of what good marketing is will never change, you know, you serve your audience’s needs. And I am a speaker and trainer for Google. And so that’s that’s one of the things that I normally get to travel the country.
After COVID is all settled down again, I’ll get up get back out on the road again, but the entire essence of SEO is be as useful as possible to the people looking for your website, before they know your company’s name. Right. So what’s the content that I would search for? Make sure your website has that content on it? So useful and being helpful and getting in there? Is what it’s about? Yeah, well, we
Damon Pistulka 07:49
got Gail, Gail Robertson’s actually says, Hello, so. So hi, Gail is talked to her yesterday and a little bit today working on some things. So good stuff, Gail, glad to see it. And I was gonna, I always forget to say, if you’re listening, you got any questions, go ahead and drop them in the comments. I’m watching the comments on LinkedIn and Facebook, and let us know where you’re listening from to that’s always nice to see.
We get some we get some good ones this time of day. Because we’re we’re in some interesting times around the world. Yes. So you go back here, and you’re talking about? And that’s one of the things that is really interesting, when I look at your profile, is that you? I haven’t heard of this before the speaker, the girl with Google, and then your get your business online program to explain those things a
Dave Meyer 08:40
little bit, because I don’t I, when you look at Google, the enormity of the company, there’s so many things that they do that you’d never hear about. Right? And this is just for me, another couple of them. So for sure, it’s it’s the grow with Google program was previously the Get your business online program. And then they you know, as Google is prone to do, they’re continually evolving things. Mm hmm. And as their ideas improve, they’re not shy about changing and yeah, advancing.
So grow with Google was started kind of as a way to give back to the community. And explicitly we discovered that you know, the Google My Business profiles, you know, those things, if you search for your business, your business will show up on the right side in this knowledge pane. And or if you’re just searching on Google Maps, you know, the restaurants have their menus up, and you can see pictures and you can look at ratings and reviews. That’s all through a tool called Google My Business.
Still to this day, like 12 years after they created the program. 80% of all business profiles are still unplanned. Really, that’s why they did this. So a big part of what I do is just showing people how to use Google’s free products and services to grow their businesses. Yeah. And it’s it’s super fun. Find and I do really love it. The last live event I did was in Anchorage. And, you know, I get I get to go all over the place. But this new COVID world, I did an event in Anchorage a couple of weeks ago. And then an hour later I did want to New Orleans. So that Yeah, possible in non virtual ways. It’s, it’s, it’s a neat program.
And so we show people how to use Google Analytics, we show how to do Google ads, we show them how to do SEO. And it was really fun. We got to go to HQ and have actual leads of the SEO team of algorithm teams. Wow, tell us what you need to know about optimizing and ranking on the web. And I really cool that one of the things working for Google in this is you learn as much what you can’t say is what you can. Yeah, because you have to be very careful to represent businesses.
Here’s what to do without overstating or overstepping one of the biggest things that we all experience in our business owner lives is we’re all we’re all getting calls from people saying, you know, we’ll get you to the top ranking on Google and just click here and do this. Or you get the robo calls that saying your business listing is not optimized. And that’s all baloney. Yeah. And so I’m kind of a helper for Google to get out and share with the people that matter small businesses that are growing, that are starting up on how to really get to that space and use it.
Damon Pistulka 11:36
Yeah, I’m glad you bring that up. Because that’s a that’s a hot topic with me, man, I get, and I probably get one a week or somebody is emailing me saying, Listen, I can get you to the top of Google. And as you said it, Jeffrey Graham says it all the time. I know it’s true. It’s like, That’s bullshit. It just is and, and it even if they could, it’s not gonna last and it’s not because of right, yes. Because what you said is, Google wants to put the most useful information for the people searching for what you’re talking about.
Right? And that’s, if you concentrate on that, yes, there’s the technical experts on aspects of that, right. But I always when I’m talking to people, I say, that’s what you have to do. The technical part of it, I don’t understand. But if you can, you know, your target market, the things they’re searching for, if you can provide them video and text, and whatever, audio, whatever, it’d be the best stuff written, just whatever you can about that topic to help them educate themselves and make a decision, you’re probably 90% of the way down the road, right?
Dave Meyer 12:45
Because what is Google? It’s a matchmaker between knowledge and people that are searching for it. Right? If Google, if you searched for something, if you googled it, and it returned a crappy result, you’re not going to use Google again, right now. So that’s why there’s 200 signals and more than 200 signals in Google’s algorithm, like recency and location, proximity, relevance, popularity, authority, all of that stuff. And having all of those things, you know, it’s it’s kind of a big mishmash, but it all really comes down to just be useful to your audience.
Yeah, don’t have anything on your website. It’s real hard for Google to understand what’s on that website and why people should recommend you, or why it should recommend. Yeah. And so just playing that matchmaker and helping Google helping helping your wingman Google set you up on that next date with your customer is incredibly helpful. You know, give them the give them the right lines, the right pickup lines, that they can say, Have you met your business? And yeah,
Damon Pistulka 13:49
right. Yeah. Great. That’s great. I didn’t realize there’s 200 signals to in the algorithm. I obviously don’t take take much time to study that. But it’s, it’s interesting.
Dave Meyer 13:59
It’s always changing. And you know, the the companies that guarantee page one results. There’s a trick to that. Right now, if you google purple monkey dinosaur, those three words, purple monkey dinosaur, you’re going to see the absolute top results is a busy web post about the uselessness of page one, rank one results, because you can create any random long tail weird keyword.
And if that’s your metric, you can have a, you know, less than reputable SEO company saying, well, you owe us the money now because we got you to page one for purple monkey dinosaur. Yeah. But is that going to drive business for my b2b manufacturing company? No, it’s not going to do anything. So you know, if you find things where there’s not a lot of competition, that’s great. Unless it actually drives business to you. It’s worthless.
Damon Pistulka 14:52
Yeah. Yeah, that’s exactly right. And it’s a great point. And I also I also think, and I’ll digress for just a second, you know, a little A lot of people get too focused on too high of level, I’d say too broad of level of keyword too, you know, I’m an I’m an injection molder, or I’m a, I’m a machining company, I want to be berated for being a CNC machining company is like CNC machining, it’s like, all right, that, that it is, yes. Describe gazillion companies, right.
Dave Meyer 15:26
And rod is is like branding. And Coca Cola can afford to do branding, because they have a billion dollars to spend on there. Yeah, you know, on their stuff. But for small businesses, what you need to be is very applicable to the source of the search, you need to be directly related. It’s not injection mold manufacturer, it’s the specific application that you serve.
And that comes with a little bit of soul searching, you need to identify what I call market personas, marketing personas, or sales personas, you just need to come up with Who are your five absolute favorite customers that you wish you could come back to again and again, and just kind of generalize them, you know, take your five and mush them together into a big bucket and say, you know, in general, they’re really interested in this product. And in general, this is success for them. How do I make that person look good to their boss? and probably most importantly, what are they going to Google? Before they know my name? In order to find me?
Damon Pistulka 16:29
Yeah,
16:30
so it’s easy.
16:32
Yeah,
Damon Pistulka 16:33
I mean, I
16:33
mean, I love
Damon Pistulka 16:34
someone like you, that’s got the knowledge that you do, because you do make it sound easy in it. And when you can, when you can boil down all the stuff that’s behind it into the simple stuff that you’re talking about, it’s awesome. Because then as a business owner, I can understand what I need to do. And really what we’re trying to do as business owners, is just give people the information they’re looking for. Yeah, our target is looking for. So if we know that, and we can work on that, and then someone like, you know, company like yours can help us get it in the right format, get it on the right places, and do what we need to do.
And get it out to the world, then people will find you. Yeah, but it’s it is that matchmaking part of it that is so difficult for people and people, right? Unfortunately, spend a ton of money on unscrupulous people or people that just don’t know. I mean, I can’t tell you, especially in manufacturing, and I don’t know why it isn’t manufacturing, but manufacturers used to spend more money for a lot of things, right. So they’ll, it’s, I go in, and we’ll see we’re just talking to someone the other day that they had been in a business where they were getting charged $5,000 a month for pay per click advertising.
They couldn’t even look at the account. They couldn’t even they and and right, they were getting no results from it other than clicks, right. Are they getting a clunky charging for the clicks are so clear. So they said exactly as you can’t see the account, you can see where the clicks came from, you can see right? And, and I just am am floored that day in and day out, you find that there are it’s hard, it is not Florida, I should back up.
It’s hard for business owners to really tell, am I am I talking to somebody that’s reputable, right, or am I talking to somebody that can sell really well? Right? Yeah. And and the thing that I really like about more full service places, like what you’re you do is that you’re not in there going? Okay? It’s a PPC problem, because that’s what we do. Or it’s a it’s an SEO problem, because that’s what we do. I mean, the business owners can’t afford that approach. Because they aren’t Coca Cola. And they and they can’t, you know, it’s not a one trick pony. It’s it’s like you have to have a bunch of things working right, right to get your digital real estate out there looking right and able to be found.
Dave Meyer 19:07
And even more important than just looking right is probably to speak directly to the customer. Right? I when when I have my first meetings with my clients, I usually come up. And you know, a busy web client is a manufacturing client, b2b. They have long tail, or it takes a long time in order to make a sale because there’s a lot of research that goes into trusting that half million dollar order, right?
So in order to engage with that person, you can’t talk about yourself all the time. If your website says we’ve been in business for 35 years, we are preeminence source of widgets and manufacturing in the world. Yeah, that’s Yes. It doesn’t help anybody. Yeah, if I say I help you solve your problem, I help people that need help. Actually molding plastics to get exactly the right tool at the exact right price under budget on time with top quality. That’s what they’re looking for. Yeah, you need to speak to that client and what they care about in order to get them their IRAs here. Hey, Ira. Yeah,
Damon Pistulka 20:19
yeah, yeah, Ira with us today. Hello. I’ve talked to IRA this morning as well. So that’s awesome. We had a we had a little event this morning, it went pretty well. So pretty, pretty good day so far on that, but you’re exactly right. It is it is, it is really interesting about how you speak to that. And everything moves back to it starts with really the five favorite customers that you talked about. Yeah. And the weird thing is, is that we didn’t have to think about that 3040 years ago, when we were selling, we didn’t have to do as much nearly as much as we do now.
Because we would have a conversation like this sitting across the table, and we would talk and we would understand, and just figure out if it’s if it’s worth us talking any further. But now the buyers, and this is I was telling somebody this morning, it was like, buyers, anybody that grew up in Google. And I might not be can, I’m glad I can talk to you about this, because you can set me straight.
Anybody that grew up in the time of Google, when they were 1314 years, and Google is around right? years old and Google was around, they’ve grown up being used to find what they want, right, rather than what they want coming to them. Now, when I was young, the salespeople had to come to you, you might might have found it in the phonebook might have not a lot of times, but usually you found it through people, you knew manufacturers directory, whatever you’re looking for.
But it was not the buyers were not doing nearly as much research there was not expecting nearly as to be nearly as far down the sales process. They were meeting just to figure out who you were. Yeah. And now they want to be down there to where they go. I know who Damon is. I know their company, I see that they do similar things to what I’m looking for. Now, maybe I should talk to him.
Dave Meyer 22:20
Yeah. Yeah. It’s it’s a fascinating process, as you look at it, and really, the in you know, and I grew up in a similar in a similar area, you know, when, in the early 90s, when I when I was just cutting my teeth. That was 30 years ago, damn it. Just Oh, go as we go, as we go through this, you know, manufacturers in particular, why did they start their businesses, they identified a need, and they figured out a way to fill that need? Well, anybody that needed that need, all you had to do was find that person and your salesperson would call them. Now the balance of power has shifted to the searcher to the customer.
Because the entire world is out there, you’ve got China that you’re competing with, you’ve got healthy national audiences, you’ve got somebody that maybe is doing much smaller batches or in a different way, but just happens to be marketing better. Yet, all of a sudden, they’re eating your lunch. So how do you figure how do you battle that? Well, it’s by being as useful as possible to those people by identifying what their true needs are, and then getting them into a considered process in b2b sales, especially in like bigger sales, in b2b sales. On average, people will click at links, before they ever call or contact a business, whew, that’s a lot.
23:42
It’s a lot of research. You’re just
Dave Meyer 23:45
you’re just part of that, that group. And luckily, now you can Google for it, you can search for it, you can drop, you can drill through and ask for recommendations or whatever. But the power is in the hands of whoever can make that knowledge most readily available. Yeah, good news and bad news. You know, it’s great news for small businesses, you know, I explicitly target sub 100 million dollar businesses, because generally, they can be very dynamic and where they’re trying to engage, and they can tap into whatever hole in the market you can find.
And at the same breath, you know, they don’t have entire marketing teams, or, yeah, it’s a 1000s of dollars to dedicate to marketing, because they’re just trying to fill that need that they identified before. So for about the price of a hire, I come in at that, let’s say five or $10,000 a month, and I’m actually driving leads to get them into a process. And, you know, we talked about, you know, it’s the funnel versus the flywheel, right? Yeah.
In a funnel, people, you just you just kind of go out, it’s like sitting on the street corner with a bullhorn yelling at everybody walking bys. And hey, come in, buy my crap, buy my crap, I ag. You don’t need me but come on in. And so you hope that a few People will fall into that funnel, and then a few more will be qualified, and then a few more will become customers. But if you have a funnel, what happens when you dump water in the top, it just shoots out the bottom and it’s gone. Right. So what I like to say to my customers to the folks that I’m working with is, you need to kind of think of your marketing as a flywheel.
Everything that you do should not only be attracting, engaging, and converting those customers, but you should also be awesome enough that your customers are going to recommend you, or refer you or rank you well, so that you get better rankings on Google, so that you get that mass of a flywheel to start turning for you. And all of a sudden, customers are proactively pushing you. And it’s a self perpetuating virtuous circle, instead of just treating your customers like well, we sold one tool and that suckers done.
You know, people are 10 times more likely to buy from you again, than they are to buy from you the very first time. Wow, if you can engage with them, and keep re engaging and delighting them and showing them. This is what we do. And by the way, here’s another application that we can help you. And here’s something else that we can do for you or refer someone to us, and we’ll make it worth your while. Yeah, that’s where the real power and the magic comes in. That’s what Amazon did. Right?
They figured out how to lower prices by getting scale. And that’s their flywheel. Right. So they turn this thing so, you know, they’re it’s almost impossible to compete with Amazon if you’re a big box retailer. Yeah. Like Macy’s and Sears. You know, they’re they’re actually all cleared out. And now they’re becoming distribution warehouses for Amazon. Yeah. That is crazy. Speaking of the power of the flywheel,
Damon Pistulka 26:54
yeah, well, and you it’s, you make the we are talking about things, you hit so many things in there, people were listening to this, right, because, you know, Android Android, your friend of mine talks about creating that voracious advocate for you. And what you did is you just said that you connected the dots at the end of that, where it could have stopped at the sale. And yeah, they’re happy with everything, we don’t too. But if you make them or or like Don Williams says you want to Wow, your customers, you know, put that extra in there, they’re going to be become that advocate for your brand.
But what you said is, so that came after that it’s so awesome, because they’re 10 times more likely to rebuy from you, which is crazy. And then I think to a time that we were helping AIG several years ago, we were helping an e commerce company, and they had been growing fast. And we started going, they are growing faster. And we were sitting there and we looked at the customer service department. And there were like, I forget at the time there like six or eight people that were in customer service.
And we were like how many sales actually happened from our customer service people. And it was almost negligible, right? And we figured out how to train and how to show them how to upsell based on the popular products that people were buying, right? So if you bought, if I bought a, you know, a microphone, that I might want to buy some headphones, I might want to have a slick cable, I might want to cover whatever it is to just kind of give them helpful things along with it. Right?
In the course of a year, they were selling several million dollars this way. And then and by doing that, they were making the customers happier, because they didn’t get a product then go, Oh, I need I need my wind cover for my microphone, I need my cable or whatever. They they made sure that people were happy with what they got and increasing their sales, right? And just keep doing those kind of things that you’re talking about. And the wide reaching effect of it is crazy.
Dave Meyer 29:01
And that all comes back to knowing your customer. Right? Yeah, they didn’t know that if they didn’t know that customer and think about well, they just bought headphones. Yeah, buy microphones, like well, but the person if they’re buying if they’re buying headphones, and they’re buying a studio, a studio quality microphone, you’re probably podcasters What else do they need? Right? Yes. And so as manufacturers we busy web uses a process called inbound marketing to drive our customers and to help drive the leads from like marketing qualified leads to sales qualified leads to close deals through that process.
But what we try to do is think of all of the ways all of the assets that we can use to engage that specific need for that customer. So my my product does x You know, I’m working with a client right now that does carbide coatings, right. So sharpening, harden tools, that kind of stuff, right? So what it what does that kind of customer need. Well, they specifically need that tool. Sure. But, and this is kind of where it’s fun. You know, the the old adage people that are buying drill bits aren’t buying drill bits, right? What are they buying Damon? The hole holes. But even more than that, what are they really buying?
They’re buying the fix to whatever’s broken. Yeah. Right. So they’re trying to hang a picture on the wall, or they’re trying to, you know, make some sort of fit. So if you’re solving a specific problem, and you identify that problem in your marketing, then you can ask that person in trade for that high value piece of knowledge. To give you one little itty bitty thing, your email address. Yeah.
And then based on what you do, I can give you more of what you’re asking for, based on what your activity is, what your, what your interaction is with me. So if I send you an email, and it has choose a choose B, it’s almost like the matrix, right? The red Yeah, red pill, the blue pill. If you choose the right way, I’m going to give you more of what you’re asking for. So if you’re looking at sharpening materials, I’m going to give you a resource on how to get the right sharpening tolerances for your particular application.
Or if you’re looking for harden tools, I’m going to give you the harden tools track. Or if you don’t respond at all to that message after I send it to you. Well, I swung too hard, I lift it. So now I have to take a step back, and maybe just say, Okay, well, here are some common things that our customers are looking for. So you lose a lot less momentum in the sales cycle by just being super helpful.
And making it like a Choose Your Own Adventure book right back from back from when I was a kid. Yeah, yeah, Encyclopedia brown books, and they go through and just like, does he open the door or not? Well, yeah, of course. So based on what that is, I’m being the encyclopedic resource for that customer. If I’ve just solved the knowledge need for my customer? Who are they going to think of when it’s time to actually do business? Yeah. already gotten? So it’s Yeah, super, super fun.
Damon Pistulka 32:05
Yeah, it it is, and just the changes in buying that we talked about earlier, and the need to be so so much more focused on your actual customer needs, and providing that useful information to them throughout the whole process. I mean, throughout the whole process, like you said, if you if you go too fast, and you say, hey, buy my junk, right? buy my product, it’s great.
And they’re not ready yet, or they’re not to the right point, it’s just gonna go, you got to start over again, like you said, and it is such a fine dance that we have to do now, because, and I hadn’t heard it said like this before, you know, the power has switched to the buyer, or the balance of power switch to the buyer, which is really, really interesting when you think about it from that perspective. But it is it is just, it’s so complex. and simple. Yeah. But very hard to do. Well, that’s
Dave Meyer 33:05
the thing, right? What was it? Oh, gosh, Jim Rohn said, you know, it’s easy to do, but it’s really easy not to do.
Damon Pistulka 33:13
Yeah.
Dave Meyer 33:15
So you know, if you if you just look at what are the things that you can do for your ideal customer? How can you make their lives easier? And how can you trade their information and help and not not so that you can spam them, by the way, but yeah, continue to help them in a more thoughtful way. That’s, that’s the power of Modern Marketing.
Damon Pistulka 33:37
Yeah. And you’re right, you’re right. It’s not you don’t want to create that relationship to be able to send them 10 emails without them responding or, or unsubscribing. You want them to get those 10 emails and go, Wow, that’s I learned something today, right. And I and I did. God just keeps bringing up your your, it keeps bringing up so many things. We use this at that similar ecommerce company I was talking about. One of the things that happened is, is we would get a huge email list, huge email lists, and there was a b2c deal.
So what happened though, is you we started to lose affectivity with the email campaigns. But what we changed is we started to just do informational emails that had you don’t really good relevant information on it. It was amazing how that that brought things back into fold. And as we then focused on that, and just made it about that, and yes, you showed products to and that was later but you give a lot of good information. It really made a whole different, whole different game.
Dave Meyer 34:49
Well, as soon as you start being really thoughtful about what you deliver, and pay attention to the results. And this is where having a good CRM I use HubSpot for all of my tools. My clients Having a tool that can let you measure the effectiveness of your campaigns can be incredibly effective in identifying what’s working and what’s not. Yeah, you just you just talked about an email marketing campaign.
There’s two kinds of email results, right? So either you have, when you send out an email, either you get it, nobody opens it, nobody, nobody clicks through it. So there’s actually three. But the second one is a lot of people open that email, but they don’t click through. So yeah, I open rate and a low click through rate, what did you do, you identified a need in your sales pitch in your subject line, but then you didn’t meet that need in the content.
So you have low quality content that’s just not converting, it could be as simple as not having a clear call to action, a big button on the website that says, Now do this, right. But the flip side, if you have a low open rate, and the high click through rate, you’ve just identified a target market. So these are people that are engaged in that particular thing. And so what you should do is take every person that clicked on that message, and set them aside and give them more of what they just asked for.
Damon Pistulka 36:14
Yeah.
Dave Meyer 36:16
So it’s, it’s a niche, right. So going through, but you won’t know that unless you’re actually measuring, if you’re not measuring, you’re not marketing. I like to say that a lot, too.
Damon Pistulka 36:25
That’s, that’s true. It is, it’s such a data that the whole doing business online, that the data intensity is crazy. It really is if you and and that’s marketing is just the tip of the iceberg. And that too, it’s and it’s a big piece of it. But there, I had Kevin Williams on talking about this, and he was talking about the privacy and that iOS updates, and how that’s they’re just there’s a tsunami coming, a lot of people don’t really realize what’s happening.
But one of the things he was talking about and it gets, it gets so far off in the weeds that I don’t even know where we’re at anymore. You’re talking about, you know, the systems that they’re creating now to measure these kind of actions and the way that people are moving in the b2c world. independent of Google, independent of Facebook, independent of everything else, because we have these companies now that are spending 10s of millions of dollars every month, on massive advertising across multiple platforms and multiple pays.
And they this data that they were, you know, came to rely on this in Facebook and Google will be gone. And it this. The the intensity of the the data analysis behind marketing now is scary.
Dave Meyer 37:45
It’s it’s, it’s scary. And it’s fascinating. And it’s reading, and it’s terrifying. If you Google SEO, there’s like 100 million results, if not more, right? Yeah. So there’s a lot of signal to noise ratio in there. But having great tools that you can use to tease out what you need. You know, that’s where the Moneyball kind of stuff comes in. Right? So you’re looking and you’re in to take the big data and the numbers and to actually identify, these are the things that actually work. And that’s always been the same, right?
Yes, yes, no new content in marketing, there’s just new applications or new ways to slice it, because the technology keeps getting better down as measured, right, I can look at the click through rates on a message and know that that hit its target, or that it was a dud. And so I can adjust that. And I can go back for more. I know that, you know, this is this is kind of getting getting into old old school stuff. But yet they say that you have to see a message seven times in order to have it really register. Well, yes and no.
If if the message is low value to you, yes, if it’s a Coca Cola thing, I need to see coke seven times before, I think maybe I should get a coke. But if I find the exact problem that I have solved inside of a bit of information, it might only take one click Hmm. Because I focused on the explicit needs of that person. If somebody comes up to you and says, Hey, by the way, that thing that hurts, I can solve that for you right now. You’re gonna listen to him. Yeah, so that’s, that’s what makes this stuff that we do so much fun.
You know, I get to actually go in and we get to be just ninjas. In coming in and just identifying here’s exactly what the problem is. And here’s how to get you to that space where you’re actively meeting your customers needs and become encyclopedic, trusted resource. Yes. And it’s an art. Sure you have to you have to write you don’t want to spam people. You don’t want to overload them. It’s just like being in a cocktail party. You know, that guy that’s always droning on and on and on about stuff that nobody cares about.
You know, there Bird collection or whatever, I apologize to any bird collectors, or you know, whatever. And instead, listening to what your customers are telling you listening to what the people in that cocktail party are saying, and engaging them in conversation, my daughter’s 15. She’s in volleyball. And she’s just starting to think about, well, maybe I’m going to start driving soon. And so she’s starting to save up for a car. So I’m giving her 50 bucks for every book report she gives me on a business book. Wow. And the very first one that I’m giving her or that I gave her was How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie.
Damon Pistulka 40:38
Yep. All about
Dave Meyer 40:40
how to have a conversation, and really get to some sort of a back and forth a give and take where, you know, people love talking about themselves. But anybody that comes in, and just as me, me, me, I hear you’re gonna back away, and if not just shove them right out the door. Yes, so many people just I call it lazy marketing, or it’s just like, we knew this crap come by our crap.
And instead, you say, you know, are you having problems with this? Right? We can help you solve that. It’s like, oh, my goodness, I am having problems with the tolerances on my level, blah, right. One of our clients has the Bible of precision, metal forming. And it’s literally a book of four different types of metal, you know, carbides, versus aluminum versus steel versus hardened steel, what the tolerances are on stamping tools and dies. And so in trade for that Bible of tolerances for engineers, which is their best target market?
41:39
Yeah,
Dave Meyer 41:39
they asked for a little bit of information. Now, here’s the cool part. It’s a downloadable PDF, I know what page they hang out on. So they go over to the stamped aluminum page. I’m going to give them more information about stamped aluminum. Hmm. Right. So I’m not just spamming them on stuff, saying, hey, buy my crap. You know, we also have hotdog holders.
Now, you know, it’s, it’s I’m giving them more of what they’re looking for. Yeah, that is the way to cut through all of the noise. That’s the way to become your own purple monkey dinosaur, and get right to the end result. And that’s the way to close your flywheel. Because you’re writing people enough that they’re saying, boy, Mary, this, this company really gets it or Bob, this company really understands, and they solve my need. And by the way, they made it super easy to work with me. Yes. So it’s so much fun.
Damon Pistulka 42:31
Oh, yeah. I just love listening to you. Because you’re you’re preaching to the choir, but I’m learning I’m writing I’m thinking, because, because it because this is one of those things that if it business owners, when I’m talking with business owners, you me, everyone, everyone, that’s a business owner, right? We know, we’ve got this knowledge in our head that we don’t think it’s valuable to the world because it’s just, it’s like, it’s like driving a car, right? driving a car isn’t learning how to drive a car isn’t really valuable to you and I anymore, we’ve been driving for a lot of years, and does matter.
But to someone that’s learning how to drive a car, or in your situation where you’re talking about your clients, someone’s trying to learn how to precision form, aluminum, right, that that is that is might be their biggest problem in their career right now that they need to solve, right. And those kinds of things, getting those kinds of things out. That seems common knowledge to me, but can be very valuable to my prospective clients is one of the things that you probably have spent a lot of time doing, just learning from them. And what and helping draw that out
Dave Meyer 43:40
Yep, with, with my customers, the very first thing that we do is we set up what we call a strategic game plan. And I could just go in, and a lot of companies do just say, Well, you know, you’d have to trust our special secret sauce. And we’re going to do all this SEO, we’re not going to give you access to the reports, but we guarantee results, just give us you know, 50 grand a month, and it’ll all be good.
The opposite side of that we actually go in and we look at who are your best customers? What what what do they have in common? What problem do you solve for them? And then we identify here are the kinds of marketing that we’re going to be able to use to engage this kind of person at this level in an organization, you know, are they a C suite executive making the high level decisions, just need the facts? Or are they aligned level employee that literally they’re they’re on the production line, and they need to identify this problem and help fix this specific thing, and have a very unique widget that can fix that.
Damon Pistulka 44:39
Yeah.
Dave Meyer 44:40
So it’s, it’s tremendous and giving them more of what they look look for in that level is so easy. Once you really know who you’re who you’re connecting with. And so we build it and we work on it together and I give it to them and I say you know if you don’t want to work with us after you’re done with this plan. That’s fine, you’ll at least have an owner’s manual for your marketing, you know what you need to do.
Now 99 times out of 100 people will just stick with us after we given them that plan. And then we start, right. And for us, it’s about the cost of a hire. So if they were thinking about hiring somebody in marketing that 10 grand a month they were going to spend, well, they can get an entire team plan by on media for that same price. So I’m like, 30% cheaper than hiring somebody to do the job.
Damon Pistulka 45:27
Yeah. So because and you and you’re doing it every day, it’s not one mind that you get for that. That’s the other thing that I think a lot of people, yes, you can hire an employee. Yes, the cost may be similar, maybe a little less, a little more, it doesn’t really matter. But you but the the collaborative approach that you get, because of the the technical expertise within the business that’s hiring you and your team together is where the magic really happens. I see it anyway, when it
Dave Meyer 45:54
happens. It’s, it’s, it’s it’s a great collaborative conversation.
Damon Pistulka 46:01
Yeah, yeah. It’s really nice. You’re
Dave Meyer 46:03
unless you’re proactively working with somebody as a marketer, unless I’m being very proactive. If If I were to set a course, you know, from New York to LA, if I just set a course and I say, Okay, well, I’m going to go 13 degrees, West northwest, and I’m going to get to New York. If I don’t course correct along the way. I’m probably going to wind up in North Carolina instead of New York City.
Damon Pistulka 46:27
Yeah,
Dave Meyer 46:27
yeah. So you know, what, one half of one degree off is going to be like 700 miles off. Yes. So I’m constantly course correcting with my customers to say, you know, that SEO campaign did not deliver what we thought. So you need to take a step back and think, Okay, well, what else is part of that buyers journey, that engagement process? And what other tactics can we use?
Maybe it’s more LinkedIn, maybe it’s YouTube videos. Maybe it’s coming up with a different engagement strategy, like sending them out notes me, haven’t helped us. There’s so many folks. And we actually have in in some of our groups, people that are doing hard goods, premium products. amazing opportunity right now, because nobody’s doing anything physical. Yeah. So you’re gonna stand out. So you don’t have to Sarah scooter? They do so much cool stuff. It’s just a huge opportunity.
Damon Pistulka 47:22
Yeah, no doubt,
47:23
we could figure it out. No
Damon Pistulka 47:25
doubt. Well, Gale Gale, left us a nice comment. She said it’s reinforcements important. She said you’re explaining it? Well, and I’m asking good questions. So hey, yeah,
47:37
this is this is Thanks a lot.
Dave Meyer 47:40
Thank you. For to So yeah, I think for for us and for the manufacturing industry, which is where we both tend tend to provide content, or you know, just help. It’s not rocket science, unless you’re in rocket science. And then yeah, you still talk but it’s, it’s really about finding that need and helping people be successful in what they need. Right? So if you can help enough people, you’re going to be successful. And the cool part about social networking, you know, all the LinkedIn stuff all the SEO and Google and digital in period, the more content you put out there in the world, the more likely you are to be found. For that master Matchmaker, Google.
Damon Pistulka 48:28
Yes. Yes. And you know, I said here is I just get I get Tongue Tied almost because I think about how important it is to understand your customer throughout this whole thing. And it just gets more and more important because that that shift in power. And I they just fascinates me fascinates me and fascinates me and and it just reinforces the fact that if you’re doing nothing else, as a business owner, just understanding your customers better, not a not if you’re doing any marketing at all this work with you, you your salespeople, anybody that’s interacting with your customer to understand your customers problems better. And just so you can solve them.
Dave Meyer 49:13
And shocker, if you ask people, they’ll tell you, yeah, so grab your best customer, take them out for a beer or, you know, have rituals, zoom coffee or something and just say, why did you buy from us? or Why do you keep buying from us? And they’re going to tell you some fascinating things. Some things you’re not going to want to hear, like, well, you were just there or whatever.
But some things are going to be absolute gold is like you solve this particular problem. That should be your next blog post. Here’s how we solve this problem for a customer. Yeah, because there’s going to be 1000 other people out there that have that problem. And don’t forget to just to not say you know, we’ve been in manufacturing for 38 years, and instead say we help this particular person with this particular problem. And here’s how we do it. Yes. How exciting is that? Yeah, you get me. Let’s go. Yeah, that’s that’s so much easier.
Damon Pistulka 50:09
Yeah. And you connect with the right people?
Dave Meyer 50:11
Yeah. And it all comes from just asking. Yeah, you know, it’s unless you have tools to do that or an agency or somebody. Yeah. You know, it’s sometimes hard for us. Everybody’s up crew suffers from the cobblers kids syndrome, where you are great at what we do. And we’re so busy doing it that a lot of times we don’t get a chance to do the important things. Yes.
And that’s where having an outside agency can help and really give you that extra leverage, because we can just ask those dumb questions that you’ve answered so many times, it’s, it’s like driving home from work, right? Like, what about that, that that duck on the side of the road that’s always there? Like, oh, I never even saw that duck? Well, the duck is, what about that need that your customers keep telling you about? And that you’ve just solved? Whoa, oh, yeah, we should probably highlight that on our website. Because I guarantee you, that’s what people are searching for.
Damon Pistulka 51:02
Yeah. Yeah. That’s for sure. And that’s, that’s what that’s what you know, the good marketing people will understand and uncover and help people to talk about because they it is too familiars too close to what they do every single minute of every single day. Yeah. So
Dave Meyer 51:19
the good stuff, what we live it, yeah, you live it. Exactly, exactly. For a lot of us. Also, marketing speak is really hard. You know, it’s, it’s hard to send out a message for a lot of business owners, that’s to relevance to their customers. And if you do an SEO optimized blog post, it sounds really weird, because you have to use those keywords, three or four times. And you have to include calls to action. And it’s almost like a commercial for your business, as far as Google is concerned, but it has to be conversational as well.
So there’s definitely an art. And that’s why I do what I do. Because we really help people find that natural balance between, I have a need, I’m searching for that need, oh, this company absolutely hasn’t. And then we can take them one step further, and actually help automate all of that, make it into the Choose Your Own Adventure. So that it’s just a good conversation. It’s the difference between the old school guys that are that are selling cars on on the side of the road with the wavy thing or the gorilla on the roof. Yeah.
And you know, that kind of a salesperson versus someone that goes in and has a consultative conversation with you. They say, you know, what, if you did this, would it help you to get to where you’re going better. And having that problem solving approach really makes a tremendous difference in the effectiveness of your marketing. So we always try to find as many ways as possible for us to solve the problems of our customers. And if we can do that, that’s going to get us the results that we’re looking for. Yep.
Damon Pistulka 52:57
Yep. Because in the end, you have to have the results. Yeah. Yeah, that’s what it is. That’s what it is. God, Dave, it’s been great talking to you, man, I’ve learned so much. And it’s just, it’s so good to be able to talk with someone with your knowledge and experience in this and then just understand your perspective on it. And, and just drives home again, understand that customer, give them information that’s useful. Yeah. And then go from there.
Dave Meyer 53:29
Keep it Yeah, I mean, it’s really not rocket science, but it’s hard to do the things that are easy not to do.
Damon Pistulka 53:35
That is for sure. So if people want to get ahold of you, what is the best way for them to get ahold of you?
Dave Meyer 53:41
My website is busy, web.com BIZY web, and everything is there. But you know, I’m on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, all of those, all of those things are out there. But really, I really love just connecting with people and having engagements and I do events twice a month at busy web.com slash events. And it’s stuff just like these conversations. As matter of fact, we should probably talk about that because I’d love to have you on as a guest on my show.
Damon Pistulka 54:11
We can do that or we can do that. Yeah, awesome. Well, I just wanted to thank you again Dave for stopping by today. Dave Meyer busy web I was almost had a brain fart in your last name there. Sorry about that. I get nervous in that point is like oh, no, right. Right. But yeah, I know you just want to make sure you do it right. But Dave Meyer busy Webb, out of the wonderful. Minnesota your north in north and west. I believe the city a little bit out there in the pretty part. Yeah. And wonderful having your day. Thanks so much for stopping by the faces of business for sure. For sure. We’d love to chat with folks and we help our clients generate buzz without getting stung.
Dave Meyer 54:54
By old cheeky tagline.
54:56
I love it. Love it.
Damon Pistulka 54:58
Well, everyone thanks Once again for stopping by, I actually have Chuck coxhead here on Thursday talking about how you can re configure restructure your operation to really take over a market opportunity and or solve a market problem. I’m so passionate about this. I’ve had the opportunity to do it a couple times in manufacturing companies and Chuck did it in a different way, which I’m really excited about. So we’ll be back here at Thursday, the same time and talking with some more great people. Dave, thanks so much. Thanks, everyone listening. We’re gonna have a great day.
55:35
Take care, everybody.
