Transcript
Miles: [00:00:00] Hello everyone. Good morning. My name is Miles Bassett, and this is Ask Wildman.
All right, everyone. Again, my name is Miles Bassett. This is Ask Wildman an open Q and A produced by Wildman Web Solutions here in Lawrence, Kansas. We’re a full-service digital agency specializing in working with small and medium-sized businesses, helping them to leverage technology, to grow and achieve their goals.
So, we do websites, digital marketing, Facebook ads, graphic design, SEO, mobile apps, custom software, the works. But we started this show about a year ago to answer any and all questions regarding technology, marketing, branding, business, or any other questions you want to throw out there. Me and my team will answer them to the best of our abilities.
So, if you have any questions, please throw those questions in the comments below. Or if you’re not catching this live, you can still send us your questions. Email us at askwildman@wildmanweb.com. I do have that address scrolling below me here in this ticker. We are streaming live to our Facebook channel Facebook page, YouTube channel, and now our Twitch account.
I see, we get a couple of viewers over there every now and then on Twitch. So hello, Twitch. And we do this every Wednesday. Wednesday at 11:00 AM central. If you think that the information, we’re providing here is valuable, please like, share comment. You know how the social media algorithms work; you engage with this, and we get to reach more people.
That means we get to answer more questions, be more of a resource. And that is after all what we’re trying to do here. So, without any further ado I’m going to bring on my partner, Mike Hannah, to help me answer some questions. Hello, Mike.
Mike: [00:03:08] Good morning Miles. How in the heck are you doing?
Miles: [00:03:13] I’m doing great.
Mike: [00:03:15] Just great.
Miles: [00:03:16] Just great.
Mike: [00:03:17] Wow. We can do a little better than that. Let’s take it up a notch.
Miles: [00:03:19] Yeah. We’re working on it. Maybe we will get there by the end of this show. I’m about that far away from wonderful. Right here.
Mike: [00:03:27] That’s my goal for the show is to get you over that hump and into wonderful.
Miles: [00:03:31] And for the audio listeners that was a very visible visual joke. I apologize. I’m not used to this being on audio only, but we are putting this out as a podcast. Very soon here, you’ll be able to find the entirety of this show, not just this show, but all of the archive shows back. I don’t know, 50 60 shows that we’re putting together for the last year. Wherever you listen to podcasts.
Mike: [00:03:55] Including the jokes, we didn’t edit the jokes out. You’ll even get that.
Miles: [00:03:59] All the terrible jokes.
Mike: [00:04:01] Ah yes. Good morning, Jeff. You are right. It is. It is our day to pick the masters champion again. I’m going to have to wait till the end of the show though, to make my pick, cause I’m still deliberating, but I do have my quote unquote green jacket on as you could or may not be able to see. So, I’m definitely in spirit and I’m percolating and thinking about what my pick is going to be right now, but good morning warning to Jeff, all the other listeners and viewers out there. Yep. I’ve got a couple of viewers on each of the platforms here all checking in.
If you want us to talk about anything again, any questions about business technology, marketing, et cetera. Please throw those questions in the comments, follow Jeff’s, lead, and comment about maybe something other than golf, or maybe we’ll just talk about golf today. I don’t know. I’ll just check out and let my cap that one. That’d be a very interesting different kind of show. I don’t know, you swing a stick at a ball and that’s about as, as deep as my golf. Yeah. We don’t need Miles talking about golf. No, no, no. I went to a driving range once and I think I missed the ball more than I hit it and I don’t know where it ever went.
It definitely didn’t go far. Jeff is complimenting your draft jacket in the comments though. Thank you, Jeff. Cheers. All right. So, comment your questions, send your questions over to askwildman@wildmanweb.com and we’ll either hit them via email, respond to you there, or we’ll hit them next week. And the show is we’re doing this every Wednesday at 11 live streaming to Facebook, YouTube, Twitch, and hopefully more social channels moving forward. But I think we’re just going to get started here with a little bit of a news update, Mike. How are we doing on the news table? Yeah, we can get into some news right here for the people.
Got a couple of juicy things here to talk about. Let’s start with, let’s start with the big picture. I always like to go from 30,000 feet and then jump out of the plane from there. The US advertising revenue forecast has gotten some good news Miles, so that shouldn’t go out and buy a Bentley or anything today, but the forecast has improved in terms of the outlook of what people are going to be spending their ad dollars on and how much they’re going to be spending. So that has increased 6.4% to 240 billion is the forecast for all advertising in 2021. Yes, we’re talking about a quarter of a trillion-dollar market here.
And the interesting news takeaway from this report is that for the first time ever two thirds of that total advertised spending will be on digital platforms will be in the form of digital advertising. Most of that course coming at them. The behest of Facebook and Google the two biggest players in that space. Amazon also making some waves in that space. We’ll get to that in just a second. But those two are, excuse me, those three entities combined for 72% of the overall digital ad market. And then traditional media and independent news agencies and platforms like that have basically remained flat in this forecast report going into Q2, which is where we are now hard to believe we’re already in Q2 21.
But that is especially forecasted to be a great quarter compared to last year. If you all remember Q2 last year was a little bit of a bumpy road for most businesses out there from my memory. I certainly pulled back their spending. So, a forecast at a 15% year over year increase in advertising, spending in Q2 alone. But I mentioned Amazon there. And Amazon making their own headlines because for the first time ever, their digital ad market has hit 10% of the overall market that we were just talking about a quarter of a trillion-dollar market. So, 10% of that has been captured now by Amazon and becoming the third major player so to speak in this market, share war for digital.
Ads and a 53% gross. The e-commerce giant has added on to their ad business. And so, this, what we’re talking about, of course here are people decided that they want to advertise on Amazon’s platform itself. Now we’ve talked about and a couple of news updates over the course of the past, maybe six weeks or so, we’ve talked about some big traditional retail giants, forming this own, this business model for themselves.
Macy’s being one of them where they were going to sell advertising. On their closed platform. So, people that are at different companies that were looking to align with the brands that they sold on their platforms or those brands themselves and this is a model that has been made extremely powerful, extremely profitable by Amazon. And so, I think this is something that we’re going to see continue because of Amazon success here. And so, this is certainly something that is, has been a by-product of the pandemic. Amazon of course has exploded as people have been buying more and more stuff online. But it’s really just a great, I think an example of going where the attention is, that’s what these ad buyers are really doing is.
Why fight uphill when you can roll downhill, right? You can go with the streams as opposed to against the current, because finding the tension is a course, the hardest thing, the most expensive thing to do when we’re talking about executing a marketing plan. So, what people. Realizes that if I advertise on Amazon where the attention already is, I’m going to have a much easier time to move people down through the buying funnel.
So that’s why it has grown so much because that’s where all the consumers are. That’s where the attention is going. So, it’s just making sense that dollars are following the attendance but really, really interesting bit there from Amazon and then Miles. The other thing. Going now down into a more granule story that I thought was interesting and something that we’ve talked about before on the show social listening, making some headlines with the company of Vita, Coco.
Yeah. With the coconut water market Miles. No, I’m not. You’re not that’s how you drink in any market. It’s a billion-dollar market, sir. I consider that pretty big. I’m actually drinking regular water today, but sometimes on the show, you’ll probably notice I have some funny looking water here.
It’s not gin. It’s actually coconut water. I drink it every single day. And I’ve been on the coconut water trend for a long time. So, I’m a little bit kicking myself that I’m doing this now. I’m not on this show with you and I’m not a coconut water giant, sitting on a beach somewhere. Cause I definitely could have gotten in on that.
We’ll have to get in was good. The boat we’ll start on that later. Wild water. So let me tell you, yeah. About Vita Coco, who is the largest player in this billion-dollar space. In the U S market and they have teamed up with TikTok our good friends over there at tic talk to them. We do social listening.
So social listening, something that we’ve talked about before on the show and it’s exactly what it sounds like. It’s using tools using technology. And we offer one here for our clients at Wildman Web Solutions, but there’s a lot of different ways to go about this, but it’s basically finding out what people are saying about certain key words or certain categories that your product or your services are interested in your businesses interested in across the internet.
So, if somebody, if we have a restaurant client and they want to know, who’s asking for. A French fry recommendations or pizza recommendations or burger recommendations in Lawrence, Kansas. We can have them set them up with a tool that will do exactly that. And so, they can go on Twitter that can go on different platforms and they can find out who’s out there asking, what’s the best burger in town and they can jump in and join that conversation.
And so, what Vita Coco has done is something I think is really, really smart as, and I’m just going to read a quote here from. Their senior manager of growth Brittany hash burger, she says we’ve leveraged Tik. TOK is a research platform, but also as a media platform to discover new events and trends that speed to create connections with our consumer.
And so, this is something that, I think. Even the smallest of companies need to take a look at, and that is how can I use these platforms as more than just a social marketing platform and even more than just an ads platform, what we were just talking about a minute ago, but also as a market research platform.
And as a way to research where the market is, where and Tik TOK is so brilliant, because that is a true, what we would call a trending platform. Its where emerging trends are happening. It’s where a quote, quote unquote creator culture is happening, that then stems out to other platforms. And so, it’s a really great way to stay ahead of the trend, so to speak.
If we’re going to the platform where those trends are being created and originated. So really, really smart play there. And I think that’s just an example of, like I said, it’s something that any business out there can do in their own way. And then leverage that to figure out. How should I be creating my marketing pieces?
How should I be talking to my audience? What is, what am I going to say? That’s densify with where my audience is at. Again, going back to the Amazon thing, meeting our audience where they’re at, not trying to get somebody to come over where I’m at, that’s way more difficult to do.
That’s going to take a lot more resources, a lot more time, a lot more money, a lot more talent. Being blunt then to go where they already are and talk to the dog and the language of dogs. And so that’s a great hack. If you will, even though I hate that term, let’s call it a strategy.
That everybody can implore and take a note from Vita, Coco. And one last thing here, Miles, then I’ll turn it over to you. And I’m going to set you up here to give me some thoughts back on all this, but. I want to bring this home to one local story that popped up from our friends over at the Lawrence journal world.
I believe this was yesterday. Yes. Yesterday. Yeah. Time is full time in slide. And that is the latest sales tax numbers. Have you seen this, Miles? I saw that story come out. I haven’t gotten a chance to really dive into it yet. Everybody, go to LJ world.com and you can see it for yourself.
I’m not going to be too laborious with the details here, but big picture is Lawrence compared to the rest of the area has suffered tremendously, I guess this is an appropriate adjective in terms of sales tax number to start off the year. Meanwhile, we are the second highest community in terms of the use special usage tax as special usage tax is a tax that goes on products that are bought online from outside the state.
Okay. So that is money that is leaving the local sales tax coffers, so to speak, but they are getting a special usage tax instead. However, that product, obviously wasn’t bought from a local merchant, so they still getting some tax revenue, but it’s obviously a deficit to the local economy compared to something that is bought here.
So, I want to unpack this just a little bit, because this has something to do with at least what we’re talking about here. And that is, that the people are they’re buying things online. And so as local businesses we need to do is we need to go to where the people are. Or at least make that case stronger that we can deliver things.
We have curbside pickup, we have two-day delivery, and all those kinds of things here locally that we can execute that same as the brand that you’re buying from, wherever in New Jersey or California or wherever it’s coming from. And so, part of this, let’s not freak out here because part of this, of course, people are going to say the reason sales tax numbers are down because the students didn’t come back on time.
Things have been closed because of COVID and now they’re going to open back up more. That’s true. But we also have to realize that the students are only here for another six weeks or so. And then, and they’re gone for the summer. And yes, I think Q2 is going to look better in terms of our sales tax numbers, because we’ve had the students back, in the end of Q1 will look better, but because for PE, most people understand this, but I’m just going to say it this way.
The sales tax numbers that we get today are reflecting of two, three months ago. They’re not in real time, so you have to keep that in mind. So, when we get our numbers for two, three months, now, I do think they’re going to be better, but that trend of the special use tax soaring in our community, is not a new trend and it didn’t start with COVID either through COVID, but you can go back to, on our personal page, Facebook pages and our business, Facebook pages.
We’ve been talking about this since 2018, 2019 because it’s been an emerging trend for several years now. And why is it an emerging trend? Because this is a consumer habit that is happening worldwide, but it’s especially et cetera in Lawrence. And I think part of it is because we have such a younger population, we have a younger population, so they’re more screen time. They’re more adept to technology use there. So therefore, they’re going to be buying things online more. It just makes more sense. And as a as a small business owner, my main strategic objective would be not necessarily to compete with Amazon because that’s probably a losing battle, but to frame my business as being able to do the same thing, essentially, and I know you’re saying what’s the difference?
And the difference is that is the way that you frame it and that you have to let them know. That you have the same amount of choices you have the same, return policy, or you’re going to be customer friendly when it comes to that, you’re going to be able to deliver on time.
You’re going to be able to have in store and curbside pickup, but all the things that people are now demanding from a consumer standpoint, it’s how can I now reflect that as the core values of my business here locally, and then tell that message. Because, as we just talked about, Amazon has 10% of the entire advertising platform excuse me, the entire advertising spending that is happening across all platforms.
So, more people are spending more money on their platform to advertise than almost any other platform out there except for two. So how much noise do you need to make? In order to be top of mind with consumers, a lot more than you think. And probably a lot more than you’re currently doing, because I have to then become top of mind.
I have to, because remember, convenience is King, right? Quickness is always going to win. So, I have to install that convenience. I have to install that quickness into my business system, but then I have to make so much, gosh, darn noise that I have to get people to think about my business. In the same knee jerk reaction when they go to make a purchase as these big retailers that are, have been doing e-commerce for 20 years and now own, the entire segment of the marketplace Miles.
I got to check my wine texts because they just sent this fire wine of the week, deal to Chardonnay. I’m going to be back in two seconds, which you to gather your thoughts and give me what you think about that. No, you and your wine of the week texts does love that. And that does tie into our previous conversation about text message marketing.
If you haven’t checked that out, we talked about that. Last week, week before something like that. But we have all of these shows archived on our website wildmanweb.com you just go to the live stream archives, and we’ve got full transcripts of everything along the timestamps. So, you don’t have to listen to our voices to figure all that stuff out.
Going back on to what Mike had just talked about how easy it was to buy from him. See I just got to the point where I was responding to you. Go ahead. You brought up a lot there. I’m not entirely sure how to structure my comments. So, I’ll just, I’ll go back to front here and begin with that last point.
As we’ve said many times on this program you don’t necessarily want to, not that you could, but you don’t want to compete with these giant national international brands. You don’t want to compete with Amazon, but you can use certain strategies to. I don’t leverage the same technologies, leverage the same tools, the same strategies, and stand out in one place where a small local business can stand out and can actually overpower those giants is locally.
No, you said convenience always wins and that’s pretty much true. People really are looking for that convenience factor. They want things to be quick and easy. And if they can order something online and two clicks on their smartphone, then that’s clearly going to win over driving across town and getting something in person.
But there’s another factor here. And I think that. It’s often lost in that is that a lot of people really do prioritize working locally. The number of people that I talked to saying that they are really making an effort to spend money locally, especially over this last year with small businesses, really struggling.
We’ve had people coming together and really making concerted efforts to work with there. Local businesses and define local alternatives for some of their other services that they had previously been working with large international online companies, maybe they had just been using Amazon or other similar services online.
So that is one place where you can really thrive over those giants. Is just pushing locally. If you put your content out there, you start building your brand. You listen to the tips that we’re throwing out there on this show every week. You can still remain top of mind, and you can take over a significant market share of your local economy where you know, the big.
Tech giants and Amazon just really don’t have as much weight, no matter how much money they throw at the problem, they will never be a local Lawrence favorite. Like you can. Yeah. Yes. Miles. And this is a good point. I want to flush it out a little bit though because I hear what you’re saying. I guess my only.
I don’t know if pushback is the right word, the only thing, I, the only point I wanna make sure that I drive home about this is that yes, it’s about being local, but it’s about more than that. You have to go above and beyond, and you have to leverage your localbility turned into an asset for the customer.
And I’ll tell you a quick example, just using the wine techs right there, because we’ve used this example several times, right? So, I, obviously I purchased wine from wine tex.com because it’s convenient. It’s great deals, saves me money. And I don’t have to think about it. They send me one text a day or your bidet, or I don’t, this one I was excited before.
Cause they’ve been priming the pump for a couple of days. Great deal on a Chardonnay. That’s my favorite type of wine. So, I’m excited about it. However, I still purchase wine locally. But I, but rarely do I just walk into a liquor store and purchase wine because it’s on the street and, and, and that, and before I’m going to talk about the old world right now.
Okay. So, before e-commerce, and before the internet, that generally was how people bought it. Wine and liquor. And so, if I was a liquor store owner, I needed to be in a high traffic area. I needed to be near a grocery store, especially if you’re in Kansas, because you can’t sell them in the grocery store.
And, and I needed to be someplace where people were driving by all the time, because it’s something that they pick up, usually after work or something like that. And there wasn’t a big differentiating factor in one liquor store from the other, it was just a game of proximity.
And people usually went to the store that was closest to them. Okay. Again, speed wins. Okay. Now e-commerce comes along, and it’s thrown a wrinkle into this whole retail aspect of proximity because now my phone is the fastest thing and I just, I just ordered a Chardonnay and the time I couldn’t put my shoes on.
In a shorter amount of time than I, I just got that. But why do I still buy locally? Okay. Because there’s one wine store in town and they’re the freaking best. And they’re the best at what they do. Not only in terms of what they put on their shelf, but how they handle their customers and how they sell to their customers.
These guys are freaking geniuses. Okay. Again, not just about why. And this is a conversation that we’ve had many times on the show is that there’s a lot of people who are good about what they do. Like they’re a good doctor, they’re a good plumber. They’re a good, whatever, but they’re really bad at selling their services and marketing their services and their products.
These guys are the opposite. And that’s the reason I go to them is because I know that anything that they put on their shelf. They’ve tasted and it’s past their certain tests. They also know me, and they know what I like, so they can make recommendations to me that, a platform through my phone can’t or can’t as well.
They can write, but they can’t tell me stories about how the wine was made and the year it was made. And man, they did this certain thing with the barrels, and like really like talk to me in a way that they know that I want to be talked to because that is, that is a personalized.
Handcrafted type of an old school sales mentality that still works today and still is, is the best way to possibly do business with people even, even more the convenience thing. So, it’s not just about being local. My point it’s about using that, that local ability to then deliver something that nobody else in the space is, is delivering.
And that’s really what makes people successful, just being local, otherwise. I don’t think people care. They care a little bit about in Lawrence because we are very territorial, if you will, but I don’t think that plays as much in other markets just being, hey let’s just support the local team in 2021, as it has in the past, they’ll continue on with it.
Yes. And my point really should be taken as an and rather than an, or I’m not saying that you can. Just say, hey, I’m, I’m local, please support local. And then that’s going to win your business. If you suck at what you do, or if you are in incredibly inconvenience to get to, then, Amazon’s still going to win out.
And those big players are still going to win out. So that’s very much a point of, and really more just extending a hand and providing some hope in the face of these, these giant companies that have moved in and really eaten up a lot of the market share over the last year or so. Is that there is still hope.
And this is one foothold that you can grab onto at a really low launch yourself to that next level of business is leveraging that local support and making yourself that local specialist that you, everyone, the market. Your customers and you are providing something to them that is convenient.
That is high quality, that’s at a good price. And that has that, that human element. You said when you walked into that liquor store that, they knew you there’s a personal touch there that just cannot be delivered through. A texting platform. When they walk in and you see the smiling face of that person, that you almost consider a friend at this point, because you’ve been buying wine for them for five years and they know what you like.
That’s something that is very difficult, if not impossible to replicate on a, on a national level, as soon as you scale to that, that level of business, then, you can’t have that kind of personal touch. So that’s where a small local business really does have the upper hand there. But yes, they still have to have a good online presence.
You have to have a website tying back to our cautionary tale from last week. You have to, you keep things convenient. If your industry is something that you can leverage something like e-commerce or allow people to buy things online, then that can still be a huge win. Okay. Miles, let me, let me stop you right there and jump in because this is so important and we can’t really over emphasize this point enough and I’ve really wanted to make sure that we, that we make this point on, on messaging as well, because what if I’d never walked into that liquor store before?
And I thought that they were like all the other liquor stores, right? And so, and so it’s really the important thing to take away. I think from this conversation is how am I going to get the point of let’s call it the custom customization, that my local company provides, how am I going to get that point across to the consumer?
And so, they walk in there in the first place because it’s, cause it’s not, Hey, we’re the hometown team. It’s not we’re locally owned. It’s not, we’re a family run business since 1947. And that’s what everybody thinks when we had this conversation. They go, yeah, yeah, yeah. I get it. I get it. I tell people I’m locally family-owned business.
Nobody cares. Nobody cares. Okay. But if you like, what local businesses, unless you’re owned by a corporation. And even those, a lot of them are franchise. Like they’re all locally owned family businesses, like 95% of them. Okay. But that does not make you stand out. Okay. But if you tell me, I’m the, I’m the liquor store that listens to you only puts a bottle in your hand that you’re going to trust, and I’ll pair whatever you’re eating dinner tonight with the perfect glass.
See now, see, now I’m telling the story of how I’m going to customize that experience to you in a way that nobody else can do that. But I just say, I’m your local hometown team.
You sound like every other liquor store out there. And so that’s the key here is how can I get that message across, because so many people offer this, but nobody knows, or nobody cares. Nobody thinks about it enough. And so, what do they do? Are they default to the knee jerk reaction?
I’m just going to order something online from the first place. I think of. Go ahead. Yep. I think that we do have to differentiate in here cause we’re having a couple of different conversations, all wrapped into one, which totally makes sense from our point of view, talking as marketers. Maybe we need to deconstruct this because there is the point of maintaining current customers, keeping you coming back instead of just using.
Your wine texts thing, you were going to continue coming back to this business. And that’s because of the experience that you’ve had in there. And then there’s the other side of bringing in new business attracting people in for the first time who haven’t experienced your, your in-house experience and what you can provide to them.
So, you have to have that winning message and, and have an effective way of getting that out to new potential customers. Then there’s also. The original conversation we were having of competing with these giant international businesses and trying to make yourself competitive, at least in your own local back and in your own backyard and your own local space.
And then the other conversation of standing out, even amongst your peers and your community, it was like you said, everyone is locally owned. Everyone’s been here since 1946 or whatever that is. It’s not an incredibly compelling message, even though, it’s nice. And you can have that in your, about section, on your website.
That’s what that’s wonderful, but you have to have a much more compelling message. You have to say, I’m going to personalize your service here is how I’m going to serve you better than anyone. So, all of this is an and rather than an, or I know it can sound very overwhelming. I don’t mean we made a post on our I’m not entirely sure where you put it.
I think on our Facebook page a little while ago, about voice and then our friend crystal Macquarie from the crystal image commented. Oh, no. Another thing that I have to do, just another thing to add to my list, show up in voice search, but a lot of these things come together. They overlap, it’s all pushing in the same direction.
No, don’t be overwhelmed here, but these are all many points, many prongs that should exist in your overall marketing strategy. You should have a plan to make yourself stand out locally amongst your peers. You should have a plan to differentiate yourself and allow yourself to compete on the convenience level.
With some large corporations, the Amazons of the world you should have A strategy to keep the customers that you have and continue to make them happy and serve them well. And then you also need a strategy to effectively convey your value offering and your message to potential new customers, to get them in and trying it out first time.
Yep. A hundred percent Miles. So, I also wanted to come back to one of the points that you were bringing up here in your second story, I believe, and that is social listening. So, this can be an incredibly effective tool for a couple of the things that we were just talking about, but basically, people are.
Putting out more and more information about themselves more than ever before. I was actually listening to Gary V the other day. And he was saying, everyone’s talking about privacy, and they’re creeped out about privacy, and they don’t want their information out there yet. We prove with our actions every day that’s not the case, that we do not care because we’re just putting out more and more information about ourselves into the public space, through social media and other technologies.
And while, that does present a concern with, with privacy and, maybe that’s a whole other conversation as a business. It prevents or presents an opportunity to know more about your audience before you ever even engage with them and to engage with them in a more meaningful and personalized way.
There’s a ton of ways out there to listen or to, to learn to or to learn about your audience and to get more information about them. But honestly, it can get pretty overwhelming. There’s just trillions and trillions of data points out there. And there’s no way that you can process them all and create any sort of effective marketing strategy around that.
So, one of the things that you can do is set up. Social listening. This is where you have a particular keyword or keyword sets that you’re looking for. You gave the example of someone looking for a burger and you can put in a geo-fence. So, it’s within 10 miles of your restaurant or something.
As soon as they put that out there, it gives you a notification saying, hey, this person is looking for your product or service. Or this person is engaging with something that is relevant to your industry. Maybe you want to jump in and be part of that conversation. Establish yourself there. And so that can be if leveraged properly and incredibly valuable and incredibly effective way to insert yourself into more organic conversations.
It’s not paying to reach more people. It’s just, it’s just listening. It’s listening to what’s already happening on these incredibly noisy platforms and focusing it down to something very, very specific. Now your story, which I actually linked that article in the comments. If anyone wants to check out the Vita Coco on Tik TOK story that we were referencing before, I’m really curious to see where Tik TOK goes with it, because most of social listening up to this point has been on Twitter.
That’s been the focus of it, and that’s really just more of a quirk of technology rather than an intentional thing. Twitter is. Very shorthand things. So, people have to get their point out very quickly, which means that we don’t have as much to search through. It’s all text-based content. So, we don’t have to look at images or watch videos or anything.
So that’s much more searchable. And then you’ve got hashtags, which is really just people condensing their points down to a very specific category and tagging their own content. So, it makes the entire platform immensely searchable, where we can search a very large Dataset very quickly by organizing it into certain tags and just looking at these very specific keywords or phrases, we can find that information incredibly quickly.
So, I’m really curious to see how this concept of social listening moves outside of its original stage really grows past its infancy on Twitter and moves into other platforms. We were talking about search really revolutionizing how or voice revolutionizing how search works and how all these different social platforms are working.
We’ve got the advent of new voice, only social platforms like clubhouse. Maybe this is one thing where voice is going to come in and disrupt where, social listening. Intersects with actual listening, audio listening and people are actually going through this, or, maybe it’s able to listen to a video, hear people talking and then turn that into text that is then searchable and then can be applied to more social listening type of strategies.
That overall, all of these technologies I think are converging into something that businesses are going to be able to use incredibly effectively to sift through all of the noise of the internet and get into conversations, inject themselves into the Oregon, to get organic conversations that are already happening surrounding their business and surrounding their industry.
That’s less of a news story and more of a, just an interesting point to see where things are going, but that’s a. That’s half of our job over here is just staying on top of everything and seeing how things are going grow and change. Yeah, great points. MAs. I think social, yeah.
Listening is extremely important. And as I said before, oh, and I was talking about the news article. It’s really underutilized. And I think something that, you know, us as marketers and small business owners and large business owners, need to be taking more to account and utilizing more often.
We have two years and one mouth for a reason. And market voice almost always turns into market share. And so, it’s really important that we’re listening to the market and what the market’s saying, because that’s going to be the surest indicator of where it’s going. And so, it’s really, really important that we do that.
And John Kiefer had had a quote. I want to butcher it. It was It’s not about being right. It’s about being correct. And then we talk about this idea a lot where, you know, as entrepreneurs, as businesspeople, we’ll get an idea, and we’ll go headlong with it. And sometimes we make the mistake of stop, stop listening.
And then we turn into small businessperson syndrome. We’re on the inside of the bottle and we’re trying to read the label and we can’t because we’re stuck inside the bottle, and we don’t know what the outside says. And so, it’s really, really important that we keep our ears to keep our eyes on the outside, so to speak on the market and listen to the feedback that we’re getting.
Because sometimes it’s, we have a great idea, but it needs a tweak here. It needs a tweak there and needs to be framed in a different way. And. We’re getting that feedback, but we’re not listening to it from the marketplace. And that’s how a lot of businesses fail to be quite honest, is that one mistake, right?
They’re just not listening to the audience effectively enough or are not listening to their marketplace effectively enough. And then being able to read that information and Zig or zag accordingly and that’s, it’s so important Miles. And I think it’s Joe, almost just as important as.
What am I going to say? Because if I’m not listening first, usually what I’m going to say is may not be the right thing to do. And so, we, we just can’t I think overstate enough what a big piece of strategy that needs to be, and then just talking about data in general, you just got me thinking about.
This client we’ve been working with recently that you know, is wanting to move into Johnson County. And so, what we did was we did a data analysis of their entire business category in Johnson County. And we figured out, exactly what, who was buying, what and where they were and the quantities they were buying and how that was relevant to the rest of the County and the rest of the United States.
And then where was the competition? And how good was that competition? What were those competitors doing that was good or bad where were weak points? And then we basically analyzed all of that together to figure out where they should put their new location and that kind of market research isn’t that uncommon when people are opening up a new location, but it is uncommon when people are just running a new advertising campaign and it shouldn’t be, that much thought should go into.
Almost, I don’t want to say everything that we do, but the big things that we do, rolling out a new product or a service, we’re rolling out a new ad campaign. Certainly, rolling out a new location is that we really need to take all these data points and have a systematized way.
But we’re going to create an analysis from them. That’s then going to be able to be something that we can execute from, because it’s one thing to be listening. But it’s a whole other thing to then be able to execute on that information that you receive. And like we talked about, it’s just really underutilized strategy and the people that are successful and they’re the ones who are doing it regular we’re living in the age of data.
There’s so much out there just. Oceans of data surrounding all of our businesses and our customers. Some of those things are a little bit more difficult. We were talking about that market research. We were doing some of that was getting pretty in depth into exactly how everyone is spending money in a particular industry, in a particular geographic area.
And then cross-referencing that across different cities and counties and trying to figure out how we should execute on this plan here. But some of that stuff. It’s really easy. It’s just sitting there waiting for you. And we talk about let’s see reviews. We talk about reviews all the time on this show.
That’s literally your customers and people who have engaged with your business. Offering up feedback on a silver platter engagement. That’s the currency of the world now, and they’re just handing it over to you. And so many businesses out there are just leaving it. They’re just leaving it on the windowsill and letting it rot.
And all you have to do is one, look at your reviews to respond to those and give them that engagement that there. Asking for we talked about social listening. We have a social listening product in our social media management tool. That is probably the most underutilized portion of that tool.
I think a lot of people use it for, scheduling social posts or just getting some analytics from different. Platforms and seeing how their Facebook channel or their Facebook page is performing compared to their Twitter profile or something like that. And then right there below that is social listening.
And I don’t think people really use it at least not as much as they really should. So, these things are. Either they’re already available to you just sitting there waiting to be leveraged or, maybe they’re just two steps away. You haven’t noticed you haven’t really been using it. Is this information it’s just, is just everywhere.
The trick is finding it and I guess listening, that’s the phrase of the day, I think just listen. Yeah, a hundred percent moms. Okay. It’s, we’re coming up on, 50 minutes here on our live stream. Just want to remind everyone this is information for you. So, if you have any questions live, you can throw those in the comments, or we do review your emails every week.
And that informs what we’re going to talk about. Next week. So please send us your questions or your input. If you have any experience working on any of this, you can make this more of a two-way conversation and send all that to askwildman@wildmanweb.com. I do have that scroll and below the here.
We’ve got tons of other resources out there. Follow us at wild men web on. Basically, all social channels, you can pick one, we’re probably on it. And putting stuff out there for you also on our website wildmanweb.com. You can check out our blog. That’s just articles coming out probably a couple of times a week, which is great resources like this.
We’ve got our live stream archives there. It’s all of these live streams, the full video up there, along with transcripts and timestamps. So, you can just. Pull out little bits of info. We’ve got our podcast up there coming soon. We’ve got our free toolkit, which includes tools like the social media marketing tool.
We were just talking about social listening review management tools all up there for free. Just sign up and it’ll get you all going on it. But yeah, we’re just here to help you out with that. So please engage with us here. Throw your comments below or email us at askwildman@wildmanweb.com and we’ll go over all that stuff next Wednesday at 11.
All right, Mike, do you have anything else on, on your side of the fence that you wanted to go over today? Any other questions that come in? Cause I’ve got one for you. That’s come up this morning and I want to see what see what you think. Yeah. Like as long as we can get it done in the next 10 minutes, a fire away mouse.
Go ahead. All right. So, I was sitting in 1 million cups. Lawrence, if you guys don’t check out 1 million cups, please do I do that for a little bit this morning and. And then I went to the Manhattan one Miles. Yeah. That’s the cool part of, I do hope that we get back to in-person meetings with 1 million cups.
So, they do miss seeing everyone. It’s a really awesome group. We usually gather at the Lawrence public library every Wednesday at 9:00 AM, but right now, it’s all virtual it’s on zoom and anyone can join. And all of the 1 million cups all over the country are doing the same thing. So, you can hop around not only to 1 million cups in Lawrence, but around the state, around the around the country.
They’re all over the place. And it just has one or two, usually business owners giving a quick presentation, talking about their business. It’s not a pitch it’s meant to talk about the challenges of their business and get some feedback. And this morning we were listening to ’em.
A guy in the financial field and he was talking about a very unique way for startups to get their business funded, leveraging like 401k’s and other retirement plans and like investing there in retirement plan into their own company. Basically, it was really, really neat work around, especially as someone who started a company and I took the, just be broke for a long-time route, but there’s some others do it.
Anyway, one of his big. I don’t know, stumbling blocks or hurdles that he had to get over was just, it’s a very technical way to do something. And, unless you are a CPA, it’s, it sounds like he’s speaking a different language and just made me think of all these different businesses out there.
Who’s whose main hurdle is just education. You’re not a coffee shop. Everyone knows what coffee is. You just have to tell them why your coffee’s good. If someone doesn’t even know what your product is, and you have to start off with that education step. What do you think would be your biggest tip for a business like that and starting with just a basic foundation of education and getting people to come in the door?
That’s a great question. Miles. I’ll try to do this in eight minutes, and we got to get our masters picks in here. So, I can’t forget that. First of all, there’s a grid book by Damon John from shark tank fame called the power broke. So, everybody should check that out. But I think I’m going to answer this question by recommending another other couple books.
And this question, it really makes me think about Jay Abraham. I know we’ve talked about a couple, at least a couple of times on the show before. But one of the most famous marketers of all time, and I forget. Which book it is. He’s got two of them that are really good. I forget which one he, that he goes into in depth on this.
But it’s really about reverse engineering, exactly what the customer wants. And I know I’ve used this example many times on the show, when somebody walks into a hardware store and they buy a hammer and a nail and a picture frame, they’re not really buying a hammer and nails and a picture frame.
They don’t, that’s not what they want. They want to hang a picture up on a wall. That’s going to give them a feeling or a memory, or, if it’s a loved one, they’re going to feel that love that they have from their grandmother before they, she passed or whatever it is. And that’s really what they’re buying.
And so, I really think that this applies to highly complicated or technical, Miles, obviously some of the things that we sell, and you do is highly technical stuff. And so, what do I always say is just completely in a dumbing down is the wrong word here, but completely, stripping away all of the complexity of how we explain?
How something is or something does in terms of our products and services, and just only focusing on how we deliver that end result, that is really what they’re after and what they’re craving. And I’m not going to talk about the features necessarily of that hammer in that nail, in that picture frame, I’m going to talk about the benefits of seeing the, and the feeling that you’re going to get.
Of seeing your grandmother, every time you walk into your kitchen, and you think about how she taught you how to cook, and you think about her favorite recipes and how you grew up and the smells and the tastes and right. And that’s the reason that we walked into the freaking hardware store.
And so, it’s about, first of all, you’ve got to figure out what is that why? And then you have to explain that extremely clearly to somebody of how you’re going to help them get that. Why. And like I said, generally it has everything to do with the benefits and hardly anything to do with the features. But we want to start talking about the features.
We want to start talking about how we’ve got titanium steel head on her hammer. And our nails are being here since 1947 in her family.
And yeah, you can get one full circle, full story. Yeah. You get what I’m saying though? We want to talk about all these things. That are instinctual to us because we think they’re really cool and it has nothing to do with the reason that the person, the end, and usage of why that person is really buying the products.
And so, if I have a really complicated or, educational, misconceptions, all of these things that a lot of brands do, the first thing is I have to be able to talk about the thing that is crystal clear. Of why the person really wants those products or services in the first place.
And then over time I can get into the more minutia of correcting misconceptions. Cause that is really important to do, but I have to first start with explaining and utmost clarity, how I’m going to get what they, them, what they actually want. That’s a great answer. Deconstruct, bring it back to that foundational meaning of what is someone really.
Really looking for, and that’s a trap I can fall into all the time. Like you said, we do have a couple of minor league technical products over here at this digital marketing firm. So, it is definitely a very easy trap to fall into and a very important one to pull yourself out of, and again, look at it from your audience’s perspective and explain it and start talking about it from. From that position rather than from your own, it’s super important. And it’s really the reason this is going to sound like a self-serving comment. Maybe it is, but it’s really the reason that businesses hire agencies and it’s because most business owners are uniquely unqualified to talk about their business, to their audience, because we want to talk about it from our point of view, because we live and breathe it every day, every hour of the day. And so, we get this, like this point of view that is almost creates a wall. That is a separate reality from how just a stranger coming off the street, going back to the hardware store analogy is going to view my hardware store, it’s going to be a completely 180 degrees from how I view my hardware store as somebody who’s lived and breathed it, for all these years. And it’s my entire life. And so, I’m actually probably going to say the wrong thing to that person. Just instinctually, because I’m so in a different mindset than they are when I think about that hardware store.
So just a little something to think about. Okay. We got two minutes left here. Two minutes time for your golf calls. Okay. Okay. I’ve put a lot of thought into this, Jeff, and man, I want it, I want to say DJ is going to repeat. I want to say Bryce to Shambo. I want to say Jordan Speece I do. He’s the best putter out there.
And when he beat this Putin, especially on the court, it’s like Augusta, it’s hard not to pick him, but as my son, Aiden told me yesterday, Jordan speed’s soul is still on the 12th hole in that pond from about four or five years ago. So, golf fans will know what I’m talking about. Okay. So, without further ado, I am.
Yeah. Okay. I like that pick. All right. I like to pick a DJ. I’m picking JT. I know he just won the players. He came in forest last year. I love JT. Love the fire. I feel like he’s getting his mental games to figure it out. One of the best short games in the biz, which is what you need to do to get around Augusta.
So, there’s my pick is JT. You’re going DJ. Sounds like we’re both the head and at least for a top 10 finish there. I did not know that Justin Timberlake played golf. That’s really interesting. I learned all sorts of new things on his show. Yeah. We’re all about expanding horizons here, mom. Yeah. Yeah. All right.
I think we’re going to wrap it up here and we’ve got a hard stop at noon. We got to get back to work, but thanks, Mike. Thanks for all that all the insight and we’ll see you again next week. All right. Appreciate everybody listening and watching. Take care. All right. Thanks. This has been Ask Wildman produced by Wildman Web Solutions, and we will be back here, live on our Facebook, YouTube, and Twitch channel.
Now next Wednesday at 11. In the meantime, please email us your questions at askwildman@wildmanweb.com or visit our website at wildmanweb.com to learn more. Thanks.
