ADA Compliance, TikTok Marketing, and Macy’s Reinvents Itself
Our livestream cut out at this point but you can watch the continuation of Ask Wildman 2/24 below!
Transcript
Miles: [00:00:00] That’s a good start. I’m on mute. Hello and welcome to Ask Wildman, my name is Miles Bassett, and this is an open Q and A brought to you by Wildman Web Solutions. We are a digital marketing agency based here in Lawrence, Kansas. We specialize in bringing. Digital marketing services to small and medium-sized businesses.
So that’s websites, SEO, social media, marketing design services, ad campaigns, the works and we are here every week. Streaming live to our Facebook and YouTube pages to answer your questions, any, and all questions you want to ask us about advertising marketing technology business in general, we are here to answer those questions.
And we’re doing this every week, live streaming to our Facebook and YouTube pages Wednesdays at 11. Also, if you haven’t checked it out yet, we are putting this out as a podcast. So be on the lookout for that. We’ll have links on our website and our social media, as soon as that is pushed out live.
If it’s not already we’ll be publishing to anywhere podcasts are heard. To help me today answering your questions. I have Mr. Mike Hannah two one Mike.
Mike: [00:03:16] Good morning, Miles. How in the heck are you doing today, sir? Good to see ya.
Miles: [00:03:23] Hi, I’m doing great. I am so happy. It’s a beautiful day. It is no longer sub-Zero here in Kansas. Thank God. That was a little bit long for me with those Arctic conditions. I’m ready to be done with that for a little while.
Mike: [00:03:37] Ah, make a man out of you, back in my day. No, just kidding. Yeah.
Miles: [00:03:42] Walked up Hill both ways it was snow. Yes.
Mike: [00:03:54] We’ll get some questions to to answer and and be of service to some folks today.
Miles: [00:04:00] Yeah. So, this is an open Q and A for anyone and everyone who wants to join in here. So, we’ll have a couple of topics that we want to, that we’re going to go over. But if you have any questions about, getting your business online, leveraging social media, improving your website, showing up in the search, whatever it is you want to ask us about, this is what we do all day, every day, professionally. And we are happy to give you the secret sauce on anything and everything that we do here. So, we’ll be here for the next half hour or so. Just live streaming again.
If you are not catching this live, but you still want to ask us a question or you want to get involved, you can email us your questions at askwildman@wildmanweb.com. And we will get back to you either via email or we’ll answer your questions live on next week’s show. Like I said, this is a weekly show.
We’re doing this Wednesdays at 11, live streaming to our Facebook and YouTube and hopefully some other social channels here in the in the near future. But for right now, that’s where we are. So, pick your poison and then like share follow subscribe. You know what to do.
Okay. So, we’re going to be starting with a couple of questions coming in through the emails and that we’ve just gotten from clients over the last week or so. I guess I’ll start, I’ve got a fairly simple one here, relatively speaking. Anyway, we had someone ask about ADA compliance. If you’re not familiar with this most websites aren’t required to be ADA compliant.
But it is a really nice thing to do. This is what was that acronym Americans with disabilities act? Yes. American with disabilities act there. I was going to get there. I just needed a little time. So, I’m still, I need it. I need a couple more cups of this before. I’m all the way at full speed. So yeah, the Americans with disability act requires websites to Configure their sites in certain ways, so that people mostly focusing on the visually impaired can still interact with your website in a meaningful way.
So, there’s a lot of different disabilities that can interfere with someone’s ability to Work with your website, but the big one that we’re going to focus on here is that visual impairment, because they are interacting with your website in a way that no one else is, or utilizing tools like screen readers, that heavily rely on the text content of your website.
So, it’s not just, the pictures aren’t going to be as relevant. It’s that the site itself, the structure of it influences how we interact with it. Tells us what we can click and what we can’t. What’s a button, what’s an image. What’s a link. You don’t even realize it when you’re looking through a website, but you recognize that this little bit here is a slightly different color, and therefore, that is a link and that’s something that is not present for the visually impaired. Utilizing tools like screen readers, they can scroll through a website, hover over things, and it will audibly tell them what it is that they’re looking at. What’s on the page or what they’re focusing on with their mouse.
So, in order to be ADA compliant and to be useful to people like that who are browsing your site and want to engage with your content, you really gotta focus on the text side of your site. It’s actually helps in a couple of different ways, even if you are, mean and don’t care about visually disabled people visually impaired people there’s still some benefits to having some of these things in here and really leveraging the tech side of your site.
Cause that’s also what search engines are seeing and other crawlers, they’re just seeing the text. They don’t know what that is a picture of necessarily. This could be a good option for anyone and everyone to really look into the big things that you want to do for for making your site compliant and really leveraging the tech side of everything is to focus on your metadata for your pages, for your posts, for your images, pretty much anything that you’re adding to your website.
It will come with something called metadata. Metadata is information about the item, not information on the item. Or the object that we’re talking about, again, that can be a page or an image or a video, whatever it is, this has information about that object. It’ll give you an opportunity to put in something called a title, and that’s just, very, very brief one or two words of what this thing actually is.
Potentially a description or a tags or categories depending on what kind of technology you’re using to build your website and what kind of information you’re uploading. It’ll give you a bunch of different options to input this metadata more accurate metadata that you apply to your images, to your posts, to your new pages.
The more adherent you’re going to be to towards tools used by the visually impaired. So, when they hover over an image, they’re going to get their screen reader to say something that is actually relevant. I’ll see some people; they just use those spots for their own keywords. So, it’s not actually a picture of, I don’t know, they put up a picture of a dog on their website.
And instead of saying, on the title, this is a picture of a dog. It says their keywords for their business. So that could be helpful in search, but it’s definitely not. ADA compliant is definitely not doing any services to the visually impaired. They’re interacting with your website. So, make sure that this is accurate information.
Ideally you are putting in some relevant keywords in there because hopefully the images on your site, the pages on your site are relevant to your business. Those two things really should go hand in hand. But really, you’re going to want to put something in there that is descriptive.
Think if I couldn’t see what this is, and I just had to have someone describe it to me and tell me what it is that I’m looking at. That’s what this needs to be. And there’s not a whole lot of, there’s some very extensive guidelines when it comes to ADA compliance specifically. But in general, as long as you make an effort towards something like that, you’re putting in relevant titles and descriptions for each one of your website pages.
And for each one of your pieces of media that you put up there then. You’re probably going to be in a pretty good position. A lot of people don’t do this. So, if you just put in a good effort to put in these good titles and relevant descriptions then you’re going to be in a pretty good place.
If you really want to go above and beyond, then check out the website content accessibility guidelines. This is just a. Fricking textbook on all of the things that you can do to tick all of those boxes and make sure that you are a hundred percent in compliance and there are some tools out there.
There are some that come with website builders, like for for WordPress, for example, cause that’s a super popular one. There are ADA specific plugins that you can do. It’ll plug into your site. It’ll find everywhere where you are missing the Mark and tell you what to do. So, all you have to do is fill in the blanks and it will make your site compliant.
And there’s tools like that all over the place. So, if you’re a really wanting to hit all of that and you really want to check all those boxes or your industry for whatever reason requires it. Make sure to use one of those tools to scan your site and find all of the opportunities for compliance improvements.
Mike: [00:10:58] Yeah. That’s a great Miles. They’re getting the the site scanner, just so you can double check and be sure because a lot of people don’t know what to look for. And as you just laid out there there’s a lot of layers to this. And the other thing I think, is to be cautious of what state you’re in.
I know some States they do have laws. regarding this, I’ve heard a horror story out of California, I believe it was where there are companies out there that literally they’re predatory companies, and they literally go and find unsuspecting businesses and basically hold their site hostage for ransom and say, Hey, we’re going to report you.
Get your website shut down if you don’t. If you don’t, do what we say. And somebody I heard that was telling us this sad story, he said, their lawyers are basically like, you could fight this and win, and it cost you a hundred grand or you could pay him the 10,000 they want, and they had to write a check for $10,000.
I don’t think we have to worry about that. Here in the Kansas City area, some of our clients and certain people who might find the show may be in a state where that’s happening. And just another, I know business owners, we have a million things to check off, but it’s just another thing to put on the list to cover your, you know, what and make sure you don’t get ended up with being held ransom or a fine from the state or some sort of litigation over it.
And the fact that, this there’s a lot of, visually impaired people out there and you want to make sure that those people can navigate your website. That’s really where it comes from.
Miles: [00:12:25] Yes, there is a hierarchy of goals here. First, you need to make your site so that people can interact with it regardless of their visual abilities.
And secondly to not get sued. And then the third is to hopefully rank a little bit better, improve your search results. So, make sure to have your priorities in order when you’re working on this, but yes, there are businesses like that. I haven’t sure if I’m going to call them businesses, predatory organizations that go out and sue people they are usually looking for a settlement, an out of court settlement.
Because, the way that the laws are written here generally, like I said, if you are, you’re making an effort towards that, a real effort to make your site compliant, then you’re not going to be held legally accountable for not having a, exactly proper title on one of your pictures or something.
It’s subjective in how they measure that. So as long as it looks like you were putting in Some sort of real effort there. You’re not just completely ignoring the concept then you’re probably not going to be held legally liable, but there are people that will try to look for that adequate settlement, knowing that fighting something like that can be very difficult and expensive.
Got it. All right. So, if you guys have any questions on compliance issues or anything like this, then please throw those questions in the comments. This is an open Q and a to anyone and everyone who’s watching or seeing this later feel free to email us questions had asked wild men@wildnewweb.com and we’ll get to you later.
If you have any questions on compliance or anything else regarding digital marketing, please throw those questions in the comments below and we’ll get to them as they come up.
I do want to answer a question that did come in on live from Sarah, from Archibowls, so, hopefully you’ve found our new stream here or not still watching her own stream. If not, we’ll have to let her know that we answered it over here. She’s just asking, “our businesses using TikTok for marketing?”
Short answer. Yes, absolutely. We’ve talked about it a couple of times on this show. If you want to go back through any of our old shows here on our website, there’s a section for live stream archives, and we do hit on that a couple of times throughout the week. But Mike, did you want to just real short version of your advice on TikTok marketing for small businesses?
Yeah. Great question. I think TikTok is certainly worth exploring. If I have the person write that, that answered or asked this question, miles me and put it up on the screen. Cause I can’t see we’re talking about a restaurant in the dream, so I can’t actually put it up here. Yeah.
Mike: [00:01:56] I’m just gonna answer the question that then how I think it was asked, but yeah, definitely. I would be looking at testing TikTok especially if it’s for a restaurant, even if it’s not for a restaurant. I think I said a couple of days on a couple of weeks ago on the show that, even if you’re a lawyer, I think at this point you need to be.
You need to be testing TikTok. Why? Because it’s one of the few platforms out there that you can get organic reach from organic engagement. You can get new followers, you can reach people who have no idea who you are for free, which is really hard to do. Especially on something like Facebook, it’s getting harder to do on Instagram.
There is Instagram reels which is a way that you can navigate organic reach. On Instagram, but Tik TOK it’s like, Facebook was in the early days or Instagram was in the early days. Most of these platforms when they start out, they basically have a more open algorithm. And so, it’s meant for organic reach.
And they do this for a couple of reasons. The first reason is to build a user base. And the second reason is to get influencers, so to speak people who will create content to migrate to that platform because they can get followings. But this also works really well for any size business because you can also, like I said, get a following.
Without having to pay for it, essentially, you just have to put out consistent content and depending on what you consider good on TikTok, it doesn’t necessarily even have to be good or maybe as good as some other platforms in order to get a following, because what is happening on these platforms is there’s more attention than there are content creators.
And again, this is the same thing that happens with pretty much every emerging platform that we’ve seen. And so, if you’re the one out there putting content on it, you’re going to get a lot more eyeballs and maybe you even deserve on Tik TOK than you would again, on something like Facebook or even Instagram.
And so that’s why I would really, really look at testing things out. And so just that me is putting out a whole lot of different content and then looking at the amount of engagement you get, the amount of views you get, the amount of followers that you get with a different. Types of content that you put out there.
And so, this could be, it doesn’t it doesn’t have to be silly dances. As a matter of fact, I would probably recommend that you don’t do that kind of stuff, unless it’s really like your personality and in your real house, then yeah. Jump on one of the. Trends that’s happening whatever platform you’re on, you want to be as authentic as possible to yourself, into your brand.
And so, it can be a combination of giving value, which is, it’s just a fine by him being informative, being educational, or being entertaining, and also just documenting your process, as a small business, there’s things that happen every single day that we can just document that people will find interesting.
Now we can’t go. To overboard on that and make it all about ourselves because everybody’s favorite radio station is WIIFM. “What’s in it for me”. And they want to hear about things that relate to them more than relate to you, but you can get away with a little bit about talking about you and showing you process, showing your friends, showing your losses, that kind of stuff on the platform like Tik TOK.
So, Miles, I don’t know if that was a quick answer. I definitely want a follow up question if there is one before we move on, because I think it’s really important that people just get on there and just test and see what works for them, because it could end up being a great way. Or like I said, for a small business to reach people that don’t know about them and not have to pay for it.
And then of course, when you do get a following, you want to quickly siphon those people off. Excuse me. And it’s something you control a website, an email list, a texting platform, something like that. And that way you can communicate with them one-on-one more and really grow that that follower into a customer.
Hopefully that answers the question, but happy to take any follow ups on that.
Miles: [00:05:55] Yeah, hopefully Sarah is switched over to our new stream here. But I’ll weigh in a little bit more and just extend on something that you mentioned there. Whether it is a trend, like the silly dances on TikTok or a trending hashtag or a trending platform TikTok would be, would fall into that category of, maybe it’s going to be the next big thing.
Maybe it’s a fad. We don’t really know at this point, but yeah. Regardless of what you’re looking at. If you are considering jumping on a trend, my advice is don’t force it. If it is something that you are comfortable with, if it applies to your brand, to your personality like you were mentioning there, if that happens to be something that you’re awesome at or something that, really is you and represents your authentic self or your authentic brand. Then I’d say lean into that and go ahead, jump on that. These trends can be a very powerful way of getting in front of a very large audience and getting your message out there. If you say the right thing with the right hashtag at the right time, all of a sudden you have a worldwide audience.
And that’s the power of these social media tools. Anyone and everyone has a voice regardless of your reach of your actual audience. If you can jump on one of those trends at the right time and the right way and put your message out there the platform can actually take that and amplify it out beyond your wildest dreams.
That being said, people have gotten very good nowadays of sniffing out the fakes. There is a lot of fakeness online and so people have gotten pretty wary of it. My number one advice when I’m trying to build up your brand online, trying to build up your online presence for your business is to remain true to yourself, true to your business, true to your brand.
Your number one priority has to be. Be authentic. Cause people are really going to notice that, appreciate that. And it’s going to be the best long-term strategy for you. If you try to force something, something that you’re not really comfortable with, something you don’t know what to do around then it’ll just, it’ll seem weird.
It’ll seem forced. It’ll seem fake more than likely. It’s not going to have the desired effect. So that does apply to new platforms. Trending topics, new hashtags or other social media trends. If it fits with you, then go for it. Otherwise, don’t try to force something that’s not there.
Mike: [00:08:20] Yeah. A hundred percent Miles and I just added an article down there in the comment section, hopefully Sarah’s found the news stream. But yeah, and the one quick thing on hashtags, certainly you want to be utilizing relevant hashtags and testing those out as well. And right now, on Tik TOK what, the kind of the preferred hashtag load, if you will is three to nine hashtags that again are relative and test them out.
And there’s ways that you can find hashtags that are trending and just DMS. I forget what the link is. Also, I can send you the link that I’d have to look it up. I’ve had to do that, but and so that’s a good way to start and then just test things out. Don’t go overboard. Don’t put 30 hashtags in there.
Some people do that, but it actually won’t help you in the algorithm. And then yeah, to answer your question, our businesses, our advertising and or marketing, or just engaging with TikTok. The article I put there in the comment section is about Chevrolet, of course, one of the biggest brands and biggest companies in the world through general motors. And they’ve now debuted on TikTok, and they’ve come out with an influencer, which is another great thing that you can be doing even as a small business on TikTok. And so, they’ve got a hip hop performer named Breland. Miles. I don’t know if you know Breland, I don’t know. I’ll have to ask my son.
He would probably know. I didn’t know how to pronounce Kanye West last week though. So, you can tell I’m not pretty low bar has it. I’m assuming that he has a massive following on the platform. And he also had a hit song called my truck and said, what they did was he did a rebooted. A version of that guy song on the platform.
And so, influencing, even on a micro scale, which is called micro influencing is something that small small businesses can utilize. And basically, that’s piggybacking on somebody else’s followers. And again, if you’re a restaurant, then, maybe I would like yeah.
You can’t use KU basketball players for something like that, because NCAA rules, but find somebody that has a big following or is really known around town that would be willing to post when they’re eating your food. Like, Hey, I just got carry out or I just dined in here. And you give them basically gift cards, is part of how it worked that out.
And so, what you want to do is you want to find somebody that has a large following that’s relevant to your target audience. But if you’re a small business, don’t go after. Breland the hip hops star, because his agent’s not going to, obviously wouldn’t want to do business with you. So, you have to find that middle zone, that’s why I said some sort of a local influencer. Even, you know what I call the alpha mom on Instagram which are now there, some of them are transitioning over to TikTok, but it’s the mom that has a large following that every other mom in the neighborhood or the community goes to, to ask questions, where do you get this?
Where do you do that? Like you want that person representing your brand online. And so that’s another great hack that you can use on TikTok again, because those influencers, even on the small micro scale, they’re able to get good organic reach. And so, they can get a lot of eyeballs on your business for relatively low spend.
And then also just, running traditional ads and things like that is an Avenue as well on Tik TOK or these other emerging platforms.
Miles: [00:11:45] Awesome. I just commented on Sarah’s question. Hopefully we answered that for you. Short answer. Yes, businesses are marketing on Tik TOK. It’s a great opportunity for organic reach and to reach a whole new group of people.
Since it is a new platform, everyone there is looking for new material and new content, new businesses and organizations and people to engage with. I think probably right now, we’re going to be looking at mostly organic strategies. And Mike was talking about utilizing influencers over there in order to get new audience looking at your stuff.
There’s a lot of strategies there. Overall, those new platforms are a really great place for organic engagement and reaching out to new groups of people.
Mike: [00:12:26] Yeah. And one quick thing, miles before we move on. Cause I know this is probably a follow question is how do I get those influencers? Even those micro influencers is you just DM them and you’ll probably have to DM 50 to get, five serious responses.
So, it’s just a numbers game, and their thing to do is don’t just look at their followings because that can be a deceptive look at whether this is on Tik TOK or on Instagram, look at, if they have 10,000 followers, but only, 15 people are liking their posts and engaging with their posts.
That probably means that. They have BS followers, unfortunately, or they’re just not really doing a good job of putting out meaningful content and maybe they just had, some viral piece of wants or something. That’s how they got their following. So do a little bit of due diligence on that because you do obviously want to be a little careful when somebody’s going to be out there representing your brand.
So just want to throw that out there, Miles.
Miles: [00:13:29] Absolutely, alright. I’m just putting up our link over here. So, I had a question come in this morning that I wanted to address. I thought I’d like to get your take on it as well, cause it seemed like it was a big question here, a gray area. But if you guys have any questions, anyone watching live, if you want a question on anything, put your questions in the comments below, or if you’re catching this later, email us at askwildman@wildmanweb.com and we’ll get back to you there.
So, the issue that came up this morning was a business that. Like us offered a bunch of different kinds of services, not just one particular product or service, but a bunch of things that were almost separate in nature. And the question was ” do I build up this brand around all of these different services where it’s confusing? If someone goes to my website, they aren’t necessarily going to see exactly the product or service that they’re looking for. Because I do offer so many different things or do I break that up into multiple micro businesses, different websites, different branding around each of these specific, highly specialized services?”
My answer was. I’ll probably dive into it a little bit deeper here, because I want to get your response to it. But that there’s two different strategies here. I think that putting all of it under one umbrella might be a little bit. A little bit difficult, a little bit challenging. Just to put everything out there under a single brand people are going to be a little bit confused.
You’ve got to structure your website very carefully to make sure that people are having their service representative as soon as they get there. And then they know where to go in order to get to that particular service. It’s not confusing. As soon as they land there, they see what they want and they’re able to click on it without going and jumping through a bunch of hoops.
But that means that that single website, that single brand is going to get all of these different eyeballs on it. People from disparate industries different kinds of customers, different kinds of people, all engaging with a single brand on social media and your website. You’re going to get more traffic and therefore that’s actually going to help with your search rankings across all of these different industries, because the rising tide raises all ships.
And so, you’re able to build this larger business a little bit more challenging regarding your branding and your messaging, and exactly how you’re going to structure something like your Facebook page or your Google listing or your website itself. But if you can crack that code and you can make it simple so that people don’t get lost, confused, frustrated, then you’re going to see a much higher ceiling for yourself.
Then if you create several different micro businesses, which will all. Require some of your attention. They’re going to be spread out a little bit more, but one of those things is going to have a simpler, more direct messaging and maybe able to rise faster than the others, or if you are to do it all together, I guess the main downside there, if you have all of them together, is that you’re only moving as quickly as your slowest element.
You’re really looking at moving as quickly as the slowest link in your chain. And so, if you don’t get it exactly right across all of your services, then you could be bogged down by one little corner that maybe didn’t need to be there. Whereas if you break everything out, then the one that is really gonna do well is going to shoot up, and very quickly while the other two might stagnate. So, I just wanted to get your thought on that. What do you think would be the proper answer for a business like that that offers so many different products and services?
Mike: [00:17:08] You’ve certainly opened up a can of worms there, Miles. That’s what I thought it was an interesting conversation.
It is. Okay. So, you don’t have to, so tell me the name of the business while we’re on the air, but can you give me the category? What type of business are we talking about? And are we talking about retail direct to consumer or a mixture?
Miles: [00:17:28] Service DTC I don’t know. As soon as I say the industry here, that’s going to give it away directly.
So, service-based industry let’s say it’s like us, like Wildman. We’ve got a lot of different products and services. Would you like to break it out into having an SEO wing and a design wing and a website wing or put it under one umbrella? Obviously, we’ve made our choice and we’re moving with that. Looking at other kinds of businesses that do have all of those different kinds of offerings and they’re broad.
Mike: [00:17:57] Okay. Got it. So yeah, this is a really good question in a really good debate. I wish we had the business owner here, so I could ask him some more to follow up questions to dig a little deeper, but I think one thing that we have to first separate off the bat here, that it’s really easy to conflate in this discussion.
Is, are we talking about building brand or are we talking about sales? Or are we talking about both? Because if we’re talking about building a brand, which I think should be, if we’re going to use the 80 20 rule of our focus for most businesses, it’s you know, it’s definitely putting everything under one umbrella, so to speak, but synthesizing that into what the brand means. Let’s just take some well-known brands here. Okay. Nebraska furniture Mart, for example, they sell a hell of a lot more than just furniture, don’t they? Of course, they do. They sell literally everything that you could, would, or should put in your house. Okay. They have tens of thousands of skews, but what are the, what’s their brand?
What are they known for? They’re known for affordable quality furniture. And that’s what they get you in the door, right? When they, and even when they do their sales, when they run a big, okay. When they run a Memorial Day sale or a Labor Day sale, or 4th of July sale, whatever it is, they always do the big loss leader.
They’re trying to get you in the door with the one or two or three things that they know resonates most with the audience and can put them into some sort of funnel. So, if I come in for the lost leader of buying the bed then I got to buy the bedroom set. And then I got to buy the lamp and then I got to buy the blondes that go with that.
Then I got to do the whole new freaking bathroom. Cause the bathrooms got to match the new bedroom, and so they’re taking me down through a buying funnel, but if they started out in the ads, the branding and saying, Hey, we’re going to do all this for you. We’re going to do that. But bit I’m out.
And so, that’s the secret to the sauce. When you have all of those offerings is how can I position that in a way that doesn’t completely skew and complicate my brand, so if somebody hears my brain name, they can say back one or two sentences of what I do. And also, how can I take them through a real customer journey down through my buying funnel?
That again is not going to confuse or scare the customer because people hate to be sold to, but they love to buy. So how can I remove all the hoops to make it easier for them to buy? Think about another industry with a whole bunch of different items to grocery store. Okay. Grocery store does the same thing and their sales.
Is they’ll do a loss leader to get you in the store. And then they’ll know that, okay, I forgot about this and the way it do we have butter, I better get some, why did they put the milk all the way in the back of the store? So, you have to walk through the whole gosh darn store in order to see all those other items that you didn’t think you needed when you walked in the store.
So, there’s also a difference between how you would. How does it play out in retail and how it would play out online and DTC? That’s why I asked that question. Cause in DTC you can more easily say, fragment these things up and to separate landing pages or microsites or things like that to sell to people too.
So, you don’t get them, product fatigue or service fatigue, and they only want one thing, and they see 50 things on your website. So, there’s a way that we’re talking about direct to consumer online. Only you do want to segment that out in some cases.
It’s really hard to answer this generally, without knowing what the business is, or even the category, I would say, again, going back to the 80 20 rule that 80% of the time you want to keep everything under one umbrella. But you want to keep that singular focus on building the brand and then one, two, three, maybe…
I’m not talking to you right now. Sorry, I just got a call. One or two or three flagship services or products that you want to be known for underneath that brand. What are your three pillars? So, to speak? We had to do that with Wildman Web Solutions, right? Miles. We have, I don’t even know how many products we have.
I probably should as the sales manager, but I don’t know, somewhere between 50 and a hundred. I’ve maybe more, I don’t know, but what are the three things that we focus on? Websites, apps, digital marketing, right? Because there has to be some sort of focus. To what your brand is and what you’re selling.
And then when you get somebody in the door, when you get somebody in a meeting and you figure out all the other things that they need, then that’s the appropriate time to talk about this, that, and the other thing. But if you just lead with that, it’s going to lead to confusion in your brand, and it’s going to make it more difficult to sell somebody, the one or two or three things that they were actually coming in to do. Always think about that principle of people hate being sold to, but they love to buy don’t oversell your products. When we talk about even in service-based direct to consumer, I think a big mistake for a lot of service-based businesses is trying to sell their service on the website.
That’ll work or something, but not for many. You want to sell getting the meeting set so that your sales team can then sell the service. You just want them to opt in to being like, Hey, I want to hear more, and so there’s all kinds of different levels to this discussion. But I think over-complicating things is a huge mistake.
When we talk about just the psychology that somebody goes through in a customer journey, make it super simple for them. Apple, they don’t talk about all their auxiliary products. Apple doesn’t try to sell me these things, they try to sell me the hardware.
They know that I’m going to buy all the other, things that go with it and the apps and all that stuff. They trying to sell me the iPhone and the computer, the hardware. So same thing. Reverse, just reverse engineer, that principle with your services. What are my core services that are going to get somebody in the top of the funnel and down through, into the middle of the funnel that then I can open it up and say, okay?
You also need this, this, this, and this. If you really want your service that you’re trying to, accomplish your problem, that you’re trying to solve the accomplished because as we all know, oftentimes services, aren’t completely standalone all a cart. And that’s why I want to know a little bit more about the business, because sometimes they are, sometimes they aren’t. And so, Miles, I don’t want to, I don’t want to drag on too long, but hopefully that answers the question.
Miles: [00:24:52] Yeah, I think so. And I’ll have a couple of things to add on here, but apparently it was a good question here. I’ve got a comment from Chelsea. That was actually my exact question a few months ago.
We talked to Mike and didn’t send it over email. We’ve got some other people interested in this kind of question, this kind of Challenge when it comes to running a more complicated business when you have a lot of different products, a lot of different services, how do you present that online?
I will add a couple of things in there. I liked the idea of focusing on your brand when you have so many different services, so many different products, you don’t want to focus on the products you want to put your brand out there so that people identify you with that. With that overall brand with that overall brand concept.
And so, then when they go to you, then they’re already sold on the brand and then they’re going to look for the service. Then they’re going to look to make the sale to themselves, basically. And at that point you probably want to pull them into more of a one-on-one type of interaction, set up a meeting with them.
That’s where you get the free consult. And that’s when you set up a. No email interaction, a phone call, whatever your primary call to action is for your business. I might be breaking up here a little bit, so I apologize, but the the other one that I wanted to weigh in on there was an element of the marketing funnel that we don’t talk about a lot.
Usually, we just imagine that single funnel, reaching wide at the top, and then pushing someone down to a single call to action. But in some businesses, that’s not necessarily what you want. You want a couple of very similar marketing funnels. So, at the very beginning, whatever that first interaction is with your business, we’ll say website for Yeah, ease of conversation.
Someone lands on your website, you want to immediately funnel them into the right category. So that first page, that first thing that everyone sees there should represent your brand because that’s what you’ve been selling the entire time. And then it should search them into the proper bucket so that you can then follow them down through their relevant content.
And through that, through their relevant marketing funnel. Cause there’s going to be a slightly different process for selling someone in this industry, this particular product versus that industry in that particular service. And you can cater those things to different segments of your audience. So that means that that first interaction with your business, whether it’s your Facebook page or your website or your Google listing or whatever, should be focusing on those two things.
One. Your brand. Cause that’s what you’ve been pushing out there. That’s what you’ve been marketing on. Not your services, not your products. And then secondarily, it’s going to be looking to sort them into the proper funnel so that you can bring them through that entire customer journey and eventually close.
Mike: [00:27:41] Yeah. A hundred percent Miles and you made me think of one quick thing there, going back to everybody’s favorite radio station, WIIFM what’s in it for me. I think another thing is, focus on the benefits of your products or services. A lot of times, whether it’s in our marketing, our branding, or just in our website in general, or how we talk to our clients, we get focused on the features.
Hey, does this, this and this, or I can do this, that, and this, and we don’t focus enough on the benefits of what they’re specifically going to get out of it. And that’s just another case sometimes of overselling, but sometimes we’re just giving what it is we think it’s important information, as the businessperson, because we’re like, man, look at all this stuff they can do, but it’s useless information to the person that’s just figuring out how can I solve this one problem. And so, to talk about your point about the funnel a minute ago, which I think was really, really smart is, it’s not just a one and done sale for most businesses and they don’t want to have a one and done sale. I was talking to a potential client about this yesterday, as we were dissecting his, or their buying funnel, it’s obviously easier to sell to a reoccurring customer.
Or to a previous customer than it is to sell to a brand-new customer. And it’s going to be cheaper too. Your cost of acquisition is always going to be less for somebody who knows your brand has always already dealt with your brain and bought your brand. Unless your brand is just terrible and you have a completely marketing bridge issue, and you’re losing customers because you’re pissed them off.
It’s a whole ‘nother story, then trying to go out and get brand new people to go all the way from. I’d never heard of you to on doing business with you. Just makes logical sense. And the extenuation of that first buy. Is really what you know, comes into play here as well.
And the reason why when you buy something from Nebraska furniture Mart is to go back to that, that they tried it, they get your email address, they get your phone number, they try to sign you up for the Nebraska furniture Mart card, and all of these things are ways to put them into that extended bind funnel to, to continue to grow and mature that customer and grow the lifetime value of that customer over time, because they know that if I can continue to grow that customer, that always art, I already have, it’s going to always be a better ROI than to go back and treat, keep trying to sell new customers over and over again.
And so I think that’s a really important point, don’t bite off more than you could chew and, you can sell to that person again, you don’t have to sell them all of your services or all your products, the first time that they buy something same thing with what I was saying about, even trying to sell the products and the services themselves and the website.
Just take it one step at a time, just first convince that you can help them. And why you’re the person to help them get them the next step and then take it from there. It just goes back to what we harp on all the time about really understanding your sales funnel, your buying funnel. This is why you have to take a lot of time understanding your customer journey so that you can navigate, your customers in this way and understand where they are, how to talk to them at the right time in the process of going through being your customer.
Miles: [00:30:55] And focusing on your brand, your brand is the personality of your business and it’s very malleable. You can do a lot with it. So regardless of if you just sell this one specific product, or if you’ve got a hundred different products and services, that brand is going to stay consistent. If you can build that up, that’s going to be your best friend in developing a robust marketing funnel, a concise customer journey and hopefully delivering a good service, getting lots of sales. And that’s ultimately what we’re looking at as business owners. We want to see those sales. All right, so you’re, we’re hitting an hour here. I know we had a little bit of a break there in the middle, so hopefully people find their way from one stream to the other here.
It wouldn’t be a proper live stream without a little bit of technical difficulty in there just to shake things up a bit. But we will be back next Wednesday at 11, both Mike and I here to answer your questions. If you don’t already follow us on social media at wildmanweb we’re on every platform there is with that handle. Make sure to follow us there and we will be streaming live next Wednesday to our Facebook page and YouTube channel. If you like what we’re doing here, we, you think the content is good. Then give us a like, share follow that’ll, help us to reach more people and answer some more questions.
All right. With that, I’m gonna wrap up the show.
Mike: [00:32:17] Actually, Miles. Okay, I’m going to go a little bit of rogue here and folks you’re never supposed to do this. Okay. When the host of the show, when he goes into wrap-up mode, you’re never supposed to tack on something else.
And in my group, definitely against the rules, but here’s what we do because I think we got it. We got cut off talking about Macy’s earlier. Yes, we did it. There was a few salient points that I had to make in that. And I know that if I don’t make it right now, I’m going to completely forget all of this by next Wednesday show.
And so I’ll be brief miles cause I know we have meetings coming up. We got to get to let me real quick. Just get to the Macy’s news. Hopefully we won’t have technical difficulties this time. I’m going to put this article down in the comments is well. But Macy’s who up and know, I know we’re all familiar with Macy’s and I’ll do a little bit more of a succinct version of this than last time.
But, Macy’s obviously a historic, a heritage brand they’ve been around 160 years. They are a case study, or we should probably do a case study on them. I don’t know if Joe Pulizzi has. Big shout out to Joe Pulizzi contentmarketinginc.com. They had done a great thing with content marketing years and years ago that helped them build a brand up.
And that was the Macy’s day parade, of course, which is just, a textbook example of content marketing and building brand through that. Unfortunately, in the last 10 or 20 years, they have not done as many brilliant things until now, until this news that they’ve just rolled out recently, but, as I was saying earlier, before we got cut off, I think one of the big things that happened to Macy’s was a course.
You can blame it on the great recession. Of course, you can blame it on e-commerce and Amazon and things like this. But I really think that their leadership team along with so many other struggling big retailers like JC Penney’s, which is is bankrupt and so on and so forth that they just lost sight of their vision.
And they started looking in the rear view and they started thinking this is the way we’ve always done. And they didn’t optimize their business, at the right time. And they didn’t innovate if you will, and to keep up with what the consumer wanted and, Sam Walton.
I’m going to paraphrase this and probably butcher it. He had a famous quote years ago that, every business has a boss. Whether you’re the guy shining people’s shoes or you’re running the biggest corporation in the world, we all have a boss. And that boss is…
Miles: [00:34:57] And I think we just lost him. You never going to get through this story live on heresy. Okay. Let’s see if I can’t get them back here in just a minute. You might have to save this show for next week.
All right. I’m calling it time of death. 12:04 PM on Wednesday. Oh, wait. No, he’s back is back from the dead here. You were never going to get this story.
Mike: [00:35:54] I don’t know what’s happening here. I was talking about Macy’s out of the tos agreements of YouTube and Facebook. Yeah, we are streaming. We are switching streaming platforms. I know we said that a week or two ago go, but it’s for real this time.
We’ve got it all dialed up. We just didn’t pull the trigger this week. And here we are. So anyways, so I am going to wrap this up before we get kicked off again. So, Macy’s gone through great up and down. Great ups and downs over the years. There’s a lot we can learn from it. But what they’ve done recently, I think is brilliant and something that we talk about all the time on this show miles, and that is if you’re going to be a business in 2021, you really have to be a media company and think about yourself as a media company first and whatever else you do second.
And what they’ve done is they’ve created. Macy’s media company. And not only have they built out a full in-house media company, but also a full in-house advertising company. And what they’ve done is they’re leveraging their first party and zero party data, which has become the gold standard in marketing and advertising.
Now, with the changes that have gone through on Google and Apple iOS platform, we’ve talked about this several times on the show the last few weeks and why every business out there needs to be. Really paying primary attention to getting that opt-in data. That’s what first party zero party data means is people actually opt in to give it to you.
And so that’s what we want. And that’s what Macy’s has done is that they’ve created their own platform where brands are now going to pay them. To opt into there for PR first party data system to advertise their products to the Macy’s customer base and has already generated $35 million in revenue. Certainly not a drop in the bucket, but just a really, really interesting pivot, a tip of the cap to Macy’s.
I’m proud of them for joining us here on the 21st century and and coming out of the gate with this whole idea. And again, I think something that is just a great example, that every no matter how small of a business you are, that you can take a little bit of a grain of salt and learn from this and apply it to your business as well.
So that’s the story we got through it without being an interrupted. But yeah, really, really interesting news out of Macy’s becoming a media company, Miles. Yup. They took our advice. We’ve been with that months. Because it is that I will shut up media and you can wrap up the show. Yeah. We’ll send them an invoice.
Miles: [00:38:31] Yeah. We’re going to, we’re going to end it now. If you do have any questions or we didn’t get to you here, please comment below or email us, ask while men, while my web.com and we will get you next week when we will be using a different streaming service to see how that, all right. Thanks, Mike.
We’ll see him again. Next Wednesday. Yeah. Great questions, everybody. Thanks. All right. Thanks everyone. We will see you in next week, Wednesday at 11. Thanks.
