Crowdsourcing A Car, Misjudging Your Audience, And Clubhouse On Android
Transcript
Miles: [00:00:00] Hello, happy Wednesday. My name is Miles Bassett and the CEO and founder of Wildman Web Solutions, and this is Ask Wildman.
Welcome to Ask Wildman, my name is Miles Bassett. This is an open Q and A managed by Wildman Web Solutions. We’re a digital agency based here in Lawrence, Kansas. We specialize in working with small businesses, helping them to leverage technology, to grow and. Reach their goals. We started this live stream sometime last year.
I guess I should get a date on that. Cause it’s been some time now. I think we’re over 50 streams now. Anyway, we started it to answer your questions. We found, especially in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, we were getting a lot of the same questions over and over. And so, we thought we’d start this as a public forum, an open Q and a so that we can get these resources out there.
Get these answers out there to anyone and everyone who needs them. So, if you have any questions, this is open and available for anyone watching throw your questions in the comments below me and my team, we’ll do our best to answer them. So, ask us questions about websites, technology, marketing, business, or just ask us how our day is going.
And we’ll try to get back to you as soon as possible. Also, if you’re not watching this live, if you are seeing this later, you can still take part in the show, email us your questions at askwildman@wildmanweb.com. I do have that address scroll and below me here in that crawler. And we will try to get to your questions either via email or next week on the show.
Cause we do this every week, Wednesdays at 11. So, make sure to tune in like subscribe, follow. Depending on what platform you’re watching this on. And also, if you think that the information that we’re providing here is useful, please give us a share tell your friends about this. We want to reach as many people as possible and therefore answer as many questions as possible.
So, like I said, if you think this is useful, give us a like, share, and help us to reach a broader audience. All right. With that, I’m going to bring in my partner in crime, Mike Hannah. Good morning Miles. How in the heck are you doing today? I’m doing well so far so good with a brand-new streaming platform for this week’s Ask Wildman.
I’m surprised it’s going off as smoothly as it has. New technology is always fun like that. So far so good. Good. Yeah, the new intro kind of threw me off for a minute. I thought I was on the wrong show there for a second, but I had to change it up a little bit here and there. Keep people on their toes, keep you on your toes. I’m definitely on my toes. Keep Mike Sharp over here has enough caffeine in his system. Now I’m working on that.
Ditto. Yeah. Anyway, so both of us are here. I’m the tech side of the house professional software developer. Mike is the marketing side of the house. So, if you guys have any questions pertaining to new technologies, to marketing to business in general, please throw those questions in the chat below and we will get to you ASAP.
All. And then, like I said before, if you’re catching this later, you can still email your questions to askwildman@wildmanweb.com and we will get back to you later. All right. Let’s see if I can’t figure out how to even get to the comments here. We’re watching, please throw something in the comments so I can make sure that I’m actually seeing something working.
Oh, we didn’t have, we didn’t have you Guinea pigs out there to test things on. So, if you’re watching this, please throw a comment in there somewhere on we’re currently we’re on Facebook and YouTube. We will be trying to reach out to some other social platforms later. I think we’re maybe doing Twitch later, a live stream on Twitch.
Looking at some other platforms. We’ll see how that goes. But as of right now, we’re on our Facebook page and our YouTube channel. So, pick your poison.
Mike: [00:05:18] Yes, God willing we’ll be on LinkedIn live soon. If the LinkedIn gods may permiss it. we have to give some sort of an offering to him that now’s the time.
Miles: [00:05:27] I told you no more animal sacrifice. That’s not cool.
Mike: [00:05:31] Yeah. Alright. Let’s not get PETA to shut us down. I’m sure. I’m sure that was a TOS violation.
Miles: [00:05:39] Okay, so I’m monitoring the chat over here. Hopefully we’ll have some questions come in soon. In the meantime, Mike, any sort of news updates, cool things coming down the pipe in the trades.
Mike: [00:05:51] Yeah. Actually, I was just hopping on to check out some of the trades here. I don’t know if Jeff has joined, but I did have a follow up to Jeff’s question next week, if you see him pop in, let me know. But, yeah, a couple of interesting things here just right off the bat Miles and our last week we talked about Briefly there at the end, how Macy’s department store had come up with its own media company and part of that media company was basically a closed-circuit advertising platform.
And Disney has now unveiled a programmatic platform of its own, as well as Walmart has rebranded its advertising network and expanded it. And basically, it’s allowing more brands to sell to consumers, which they’re going to do this through first party data. Primarily so if you are a distributor or a business that has skews and Walmart, you’ll be able to purchase advertising and go directly to their consumers and just basically bypass, these other modes of communicating your end product to your end consumer. And so that’s what they’re really trying to do is bring things in house as the big marketplaces themselves. And really, this is an interesting model that Amazon is really maybe primarily responsible for driving this.
And I don’t think people realize how much Amazon drives business for other businesses, for everyone from small solo entrepreneurs to big name brands. And that’s something to consider in this discussion. And what I mean by that is, the more traffic Amazon gets, the bigger Amazon gets the brands who are leveraging that space.
They basically use it as a top of the funnel. They’re selling directly on that, but also when they make that first initial sale, they’re getting the data. And they’re trying to get people to opt into different offers that they have sign up for an email list, et cetera, et cetera.
And they’re using that massive amounts of traffic that Amazon is bringing to basically leverage and siphon that off to sell their products, but to also grow your brand. And that model is now becoming quickly. It looks like the go-to for some of these other big holding houses, if you will, for retail space, these big marketplaces that you’re going to be able to go on there and leverage them and that first party data and that audience to sell your brands much like people have been doing for quite a few years on Amazon.
So that was an interesting development here. One other thing Miles, to tie into some news that we talked about a couple of weeks ago Lexus is leaning into sneaker culture. Are you familiar with sneaker culture Miles? Yeah. Yeah. Not as tied into it as some people, but I’m aware.
Yeah. And they’ve, so they’ve actually come up with a car inspired shoe. And they have a whole new video campaign based around that. And I thought that was interesting in a couple of different reasons, because I don’t know if you remember, maybe it was a month or two ago. Lexus was involved in really what I would call an innovative marketing approach on Twitch, where they had basically created a platform on there where people could crowdsource, if you will, a car. And that people could go on there and they could put their 2 cents. They could give their revisions. They could say what they liked, what they didn’t like. And through that group consensus, they were actually going to design a car that Lexus was going to build.
So, this is another way that they are really tapping into culture. And at first it was interesting because I thought, okay, sneaker culture, isn’t that a little bit young for Lexus’s target demographic. Isn’t Twitch a little, young for Lexus’ demographic.
Excuse me. You would think so. The more I thought about it, it’s like, okay, but this is a super long buying funnel. And when do, especially young men. When do they start to really become passionate about cars? It’s right. About the time they start to drive they become immersed in this world.
And I remember myself as a, 14, 15, 16-year-old, I bought Motor Trend magazine every single month. The day that it came out on the Dillon shelf, I was down there counting out my three 75 to buy it, or four-Wheeler magazine, or whatever, these other content players back. I’m dating myself now. Yeah. Back in the magazine days of the nineties what they’re trying to do is they’re trying to build long term brand and they’re trying to establish it really early in the customer development cycle. And so that, that young person becomes a tune, and it has an association with the brand has an unlikeness for the brand and that they start to plan, Hey, one day.
When I’m a, a big wig or whatever, I’m going to buy that new Lexus GS series, the minute it comes out I think that was one angle on it. And then the other angle on it, on the sneaker’s thing is, I don’t think that’s just for young people. I think I was just, my, my initial gut reaction was, Oh, that’s like a young person trend.
No, that’s a wealthy person trend. And I actually, I saw a gentleman just last week. He was he was visiting a neighbor of mine and he pulled in his brand new. Tesla, so I was checking out the Tesla was like, that’s a sweet ride. And then he got out and I noticed he had I don’t know if there were Easy’s, but some sort of, you could tell very popular, almost an artistic, like sneaker that he was wearing, and maybe sixties, maybe seventies, but he was an older but elegant lead dressed gentleman.
And he had these. Neon like artistic kind of sneakers on, and that’s when I went aha. Like that is actually just an affluent thing. And so, I think that just, goes back to this whole idea of thinking outside the box, testing different things and trying to meet your end consumer where they are.
And maybe even like in the example of Twitch is what Lexus is doing. There is meet them ahead of where they are. And, in being that first brand that is gonna is going to get them to identify with you before they’re even really ready and thinking about it. And so that was a couple of interesting things that I saw in there, Miles. I don’t know if you had anything to add to that. If not, I was going to go into some other interesting data that I’ve been digging out over here, but if you want to add into that.
Miles: [00:12:23] I’ll take a moment and throw my 2 cents in. Okay. I was actually, I was looking at some statistics earlier a few days ago, actually just looking at different demographics, we’re working on a lot of different social media platforms.
And those demographics, as far as usage of those different platforms are key for. Our business. We’re trying to get our message in front of the right people at the right time, in the right way. So, it’s important for us to understand who’s using these platforms at what time and really how they’re using it.
So, I was just going over some average demographics and there was one that kind of surprised me in there. And it was actually looking at this sort of subculture is gamer culture. So that really was heavily influenced on Twitch because, immediately. Initially, anyway, that was really built to be a gaming live stream type app.
It’s evolved past that to really more of an all-purpose live video type app. But initially it was just a bunch of gamers and the stat here was showing that I don’t have it in front of me. So, I, someone fact check me here. But it was like just the average gamer was like a 30 plus year old guy.
This wasn’t kids. And I had made the same assumption that you did that. Twitch was primarily younger, probably leaning pretty heavily on the male side. But I was thinking of. Gamers being these younger kids, 16-year-olds. But yeah, this was like a 35-year-old dude was the average demographic for this gamer culture.
And so sometimes we have these preconceived notions about how. People utilize these different platforms. I think you said in a meeting last week at one point saying like guests, who’s using Instagram now it’s the middle-aged women is the, is a huge growing demographic.
Mike: [00:14:06] It’s the number one on Instagram and Snapchat right now.
Miles: [00:14:10] As early as last year or year before I was thinking Instagram was that up-and-coming thing again, mostly young people on there and now it’s their moms that is dominant, dominating the platform. Be careful about what you think about these platforms. It might be skewed from your own personal experiences or who use those platforms and you might not be exactly on point? We do this for a living and both of us are surprised every now and then looking at these demographics and who’s actually using these apps and how they’re using them. And they don’t always get used by who you think. These apps don’t always get used in the way that they were designed and sometimes things take on a life of their own and they develop into something unexpected. So, I’d say, keep an eye on those things. And then you were also talking about, this kind of goes into the car thing and the sneaker culture, but something that you say all the time, and that is that decisions aren’t made in a vacuum.
So, while we might not be directly marketing to the 16-year-old, if we’re, a company like Lexus, if you make Lexus, the cool car with a younger generation, that’s going to go downstream and that’s going to affect the older generation that is now buying cars. Because a lot of times it’s the young kids that decide what’s cool now.
And these fads can come and go. And if you get this whole younger generation to think that. No sneaker culture is a thing and Lexuses are cool. Then that’s going to affect the the buying practices of the generation above them and the generation above them. A hundred percent Miles lots of good points there, and a lot of stuff to unpack.
Mike: [00:15:46] So let me respond to that. Yeah, jeez, it’s God, what do I used to have a term I used for this, ah, suspended adolescent syndrome. There we go. Okay. So, I think I picked this up somewhere. I didn’t invent this term and I can’t remember. I read so much shit. I’m often forget where I pick things up, but it’s basically, this idea that us old people. And now that I’m over 40, I’m throwing myself in that category. We’re not as old as we used to be. It’s like, you say, the sixties, the new 40 or whatever, people say but there’s some truth to this in the suspended adolescent syndrome that popular music is a great example of this.
Okay. Back in the day, And I’m talking about, like when I was a kid. Okay. Like we didn’t listen to the same thing that our parents did. In popular music. It was like, the teenagers were rebelling by like listening to Nirvana, and like our parents thought like Nirvana was crap, and they may have had a point there but right now, the 15-year-old daughter. Loves Katy Perry or, I’m sure that’s not the number one person anymore. Again, I’m not super hip on pop culture as we’ve determined on this show, but they’re listening to the same thing. Yeah, exactly. They’re listening to the same thing, Bruno Mars or whatever it is as their 40-year-old and 45-year-old mom does.
Okay. And that used to be a completely generational split there. And so, the same thing is involved in the purchasing product process is that parents now that have the purchasing power identify now more with their kids, especially their teenage kids than they ever did before. Okay. And there’s not this huge split.
And so, going back to your point about decisions not being made in a vacuum, is that the top influencer and who that 40- to 50-year-old man, who’s probably the target demographic for Lexus is probably their wife and their oldest child. And, they have to get approval from their wife, obviously because the wife runs the household 95% of the time. And they want that approval from the cool person in their house. Who’s up on popular trends and things like that. And so that is a great point that in eight, it may not just be laying the seed for that 16-year-old for 20, 30 years in the future. I think that’s part of it as well, but also knowing that they have that influence in the house.
And that’s something that a lot of CPG which is basically think of CPG products as cereals or like shampoos or like things like that is that they, when they think about marketing, they think about household penetration. Like how I can penetrate.
Just one person in the household first and then multiple people in the household after that. Because if I just get to the one person now, they’re going to influence that other person, that’s why a lot of times CPG products will actually that are, for example, in grocery stores, they’ll actually market to the kids because then when the kids in the grocery store with their mom, who’s going to be the best salesperson in the world that annoying.
Yeah. That goes, mom, can we, mom, can we get it, mom? Can we get it, mom? Can’t we get weight, right? That’s the best salesperson in the world. That’s all of our viewers from your impression, that’s exactly what the mom is happy with. The mom says I’m just going to buy it. And so, going back to that decision is not made in a vacuum but then you also unpacked a couple other good points there.
Miles. Let me throw in an acronym. CPG is consumer packaged goods, by the way, BTW, right? Yeah. I’m sorry. I went straight to the example, because I thought that would give him more tangible thing than what consumer packaged goods are. So where was I going with that? Yeah. So, a couple other good points you brought up there.
Not prejudging your audience, not thinking that you know exactly where the end consumer is because that is always changing all the time. And so, you have to always be testing things, something that we always talk about in finding things, because if you just go on your preconceived notions, you’re going to be wrong, probably at least half the time especially with how things are changing, how entire, like I just talked about culture itself.
Has changed over the last few generations. And so, you can’t just rely on what you’ve always done. You’ve gotta be looking through the windshield, not the rear view is as junky for us to say. And so that’s super, super important that you’re always testing things and you’re always checking out where we’re really is my audience.
And remember, you don’t need a hundred percent of your audience. You need to move 10% of your audience, a hundred percent of the way. And so sometimes it’s just about where can I have that clear connection? Know, or a clearer connection with my audience or even a segment of my audience and get better messaging, better engagement and things like that through trying different platforms. And I think Lexus is doing that on, it seems like on multiple levels at the moment. And so, it’s really fascinating stuff. Miles.
Miles: [00:20:47] Okay. Awesome. I do want to take a little time and back up here. We have been getting some comments, so thank you very much. Chelsea for having us testing our commenting capability here, I can see that’s coming up.
I can respond to it. Seems like we’re a hundred percent up and running here. As she had asked her, we’re now using stream yard for our live streaming. There’s a bunch of great apps out there and we had to make a decision. But this one, yeah, I’m liking it so far. We’ll let you know if that changes.
Okay. So, if anyone else has any questions or anything, please throw those in the comments. I see a couple of likes and shares flown in. So, thank you very much. Again, that helps us to reach not only our network, but your network of people as well. If you can think of anyone that would benefit from, being able to ask us some questions or getting some of this information please.
Throw them in the comments here, tag them, share this to them, whatever you want to do. We’re here to be a resource to people. The more people you can help us reach the better resource we can be. So, thanks. Thanks everyone for the likes and shares and whatnot here, Mike, I think you had some other newsworthy elements to throw in here and discuss.
Mike: [00:22:02] Yeah. I do. There’s a good article here. I think maybe instead of diving into this, maybe I’ll just put it in the comment section so people can check it out for themselves. But this also ties back to what we were talking about last week with influencers and specifically micro-influencers.
And there’s just an article talking about how that’s really going to be key in, in connecting with gen Z, which is something we were just talking about there with teenagers as well, and how that influence is really growing right rapidly. Just another thing to, to put in the toolkit.
It is, how can you use influencers? And again, just even probably micro-influencers for most small businesses out there. Know moving forward and Miles. I thought about something too. After I, I gave the I gave, I don’t know if it was a warning last week when we were talking about influencers.
No, you can’t go give a KU basketball player, $500 to promote your brand, but that’s a current rule and that all that whole thing is changing. The NCAA is changing it. We need to look into that. I believe it’s in the next year or two. That there are going to be ways that players can get paid and do endorsement deals and things like that.
That would be very, very interesting here locally, especially in Lawrence with the the brand and the reach and the authority that KU basketball brings to the table, but, okay. Yeah. A couple of other things here. I dunno, should I. I got a notification, looked like Jeff shared our stream.
So, I don’t know Jeff, if you’re listening, maybe give us a. Give us a comment or something in there. Cause I was saving something before you here until till I knew you were tuned in. So maybe until we know that Jeff is tuned in, I’ll hold off on that. But clubhouse, let’s just talk about clubhouse really quick because I didn’t get a chance to talk about it last week.
And I feel like I don’t know they’re going to send me money or something. If I keep promoting them. But there have been some interesting updates with clubhouse thinking of just talking about testing platforms and things like that that I wanted to share with everybody.
And there’s a, one of the interesting things about being on an app this early and this is not the case with most apps, but you can actually see how they’re growing the app in their do every single Sunday morning, they do a town hall meeting. Where the CEO COON. I think one or two of the other, key principles on the team, they basically do an ask me anything.
They ask questions or answer questions, excuse me that people have sent in from the week and give a little bit of peek behind the curtain of how they’re developing this platform. From the tech side of things, to the marketing, to the user experience, et cetera, et cetera. And it’s really rare when you get a peek behind the curtain, even though, they’re not sharing, of course, most of the stuff or proprietary stuff in an app that is exploded like this.
And so, for those of you who don’t know, maybe you you haven’t been hearing us talk about this. It’s an audio only app right now. It’s in beta. And so, it’s only on iPhone. It’s only invitation only, but it’s still growing extremely quickly. Back in December, they had 600,000 users. The last number I’m hearing right now is between eight and 10 million is what they’re on.
They’ve gone from a hundred-million-dollar valuation last month to a billion-dollar valuation this month. So, these literally 10 X their valuation in 30 days. And one of the questions that came up on the town hall on Sunday that I thought was relevant was, how are they going to allow brands and companies to utilize the space. And because right now, you’re not at least supposed to, start an account as a brand or a company it’s supposed to be individualized. You can promote your brand from that. But really what they said was they weren’t going to go with the advertising model, they weren’t going to go the Facebook route which they’ve already turned down an offer from Facebook and Facebook is working on a competitor. So is Twitter. So, this is a lot, so I’ll be interesting how it plays out, but they’re instead going to basically do kinda like brand ambassador ships and they’re asking, brands to go on and create clubs.
And then host content under that club. And so, you may bring in, a health and wellness expert, if you’re a health and wellness company to do some talks, some live Q and A’s some seminars, things like that and hold it under your club brand and they are going to monetize the app where content creators are actually starting to beta test this now content creators can get paid for their content. You can start doing some closed off like private pay for only content and things like that. And so, it’s going to be really interesting how this. Evolves. And if it becomes a different type of a model besides the paid ad model, which seems to be, has been the the kind of go-to model for most of these social platforms moving forward.
So just a little bit interesting, behind the curtain peak there, but like I said, like we talked about a couple of weeks ago. I really encourage everybody to at least go on that app and test some things because even if clubhouse doesn’t become the next Instagram. It is going to voice itself is going to become an extremely critical medium in the near future.
Really now like I said, there’s already going to be competitors to clubhouse. And I think that more to the point, some of these big Already scaled platforms like Facebook, for example, I’m sure that they’re going to incorporate some voice attributes to their platform moving forward, even if they don’t dedicate an entire new platform to a voice on the app.
And so, it’s just a really, really good, I think way for us to test something. And that is how to communicate our brand and our message. In our value through voice to our end consumers, because that’s going to be really, really important moving forward and Miles, I think maybe here in the near future, maybe we should do maybe not entire show, but maybe at least part of a show dedicated to voice and really doing a deep dive on it.
Everything from podcasting to Alexa skills and really what’s coming what’s happening now. And what’s coming down the pipe and how small business owners can get their feet wet and set a foundation for that in the future.
Miles: [00:28:16] Absolutely. And one thing that I’m really looking forward to here in the near future is just the raw data that we’re going to get from these voice centric applications.
A little bit of context. I can look at years and years of just ridiculous amounts of data, about how people interact with different types of applications, via text basic example of search, looking at how people search for certain things. There’s a very different type of. Sentence structure that people use when they’re typing into Google, versus when they’re searching for something on the Facebook or other social media platforms versus how they might ask someone in real life, it’s a completely different language.
And so, we have just years and years and years of data on how people are interacting with people online and with platforms online, via text, we’ve got. Next to nothing on voice in comparison. And that’s because it’s been fairly limited at this point, we have some voice search stuff, but we don’t really have anything else to compare it to no one’s really interacting with any other kind of platform outside of just basic search.
And what you were talking about in Alexa and other home assistance. But people aren’t interacting with other types of applications outside of search, via voice applications like clubhouse and the. Soon to be other competitors. And I’m sure many other applications in that space are going to start to develop an entire new data set about how people are interacting with these different applications, using their voice.
And I’m curious to see if it’s going to mirror. Some of the information that we were seeing on how they interact with other social media platforms. Is it going to be something completely different? Is it going to be something more conversational and how we expect people to interact person to person?
And I really don’t know. So, I’m really looking forward to these kinds of applications becoming mainstream and giving us these piles of data to start analyzing and processing and beginning to understand this new paradigm of online engagement.
Mike: [00:30:25] Yeah. That’s very interesting point Miles and it’s I think there’s more growing every day, but there’s already applications. That are out there to, study the analytics on the clubhouse app, for example. Data companies are already building apps for users to get those analytics, get that data and measure it. And yeah, this app has really only been, at scale, meaning a lot of people using it and it’s still not a lot compared to other apps for a few months.
And after a year or two, what kind of data and what kind of analytics. We can glean from all, this will be extremely interesting because it’s really, it is it’s like you said, it’s a test case just on, on voice as a, as an application for communication in the digital age, which really hasn’t happened.
Voice of course is the oldest form of communication, just talking about the human species, it’s literally. No. I guess maybe nonverbal was maybe probably first.
Miles: [00:31:22] Hitting you over the head with a stick was first.
Mike: [00:31:24] But language goes back pretty darn far into human experience and is certainly really, really powerful.
I was actually thinking about this last night. After May I just, I got an adult a little bit Miles. I’m telling you about what happened on clubhouse last night, but there is some benefit for the people in this, but I just, I had it was a little bit like Christmas for me. And we had a surprise to our session with Jay Abraham, which if those of you don’t know, Jay Abraham is he’s probably the greatest living marketer.
Definitely one of the groups, one of the greatest of all time and probably the greatest it’s still alive. And the guy is a coach to people like Tony Robbins and Daymond John from shark tank. And he’s just a legend in the utmost sense. And this was his only second time on clubhouse. I lucky enough to catch both of them the first time he hopped on and he talked for about an hour.
And like I said, last night, he went. For two freaking hours. And this is a guy where, people pay him $25,000 just to have a 15-minute conversation with them, so to hear him talk, I have three pages of notes that I took this talk. It was absolutely insane. But one of, one of the many knowledge bombs that he dropped was just talking about language and brand.
And got me thinking afterwards, just how powerful that is. If you can utilize language, if you can, let me rephrase that. If you can change language to align with your brand, that is the ultimate. Ownership of Mindshare. Let me explain what I mean. Kleenex, right?
When somebody has, when somebody knows is running, they generally say hand me a Kleenex, do you have any Kleenex? Kleenex is not a thing. It’s not like just, a facial tissue. But it’s a brand, right? And it’s so it’s a type of a facial tissue. It’s not the thing that you’re actually, wanting, but they did such a good job of changing the language that now when people say tissue, they actually say Kleenex, which is again, it’s the ultimate mind share in terms of branding and top of mind. Google is now a freaking verb, right? So, like they’ve changed the English language so much that you say their brand name to explain the action of the thing that you do. And they weren’t the first search engine. But they did the best job of branding. Yeah, no one wants to say it. Just go ask Jeeves it. And so, it’s like the ultimate stage of branding is when you’re actually able to change the language or create language That we’re going to go way down a rabbit hole. If we start talking about stuff.
Miles: [00:34:22] We’re getting a question in the comments, we’ll just take a second and then I’ll let you loose again. But the question here is clubhouse going to be available on Android too. Just the other day, I think you were saying that the founder of Android was actually on clubhouse. I don’t think that we’ve gotten a strict timeline yet. And again, correct me if I’m behind on my information, but we have confirmed that they are in the development stage for putting an app together for Android, but they have not officially released any kind of timeline or as far as I’m aware, even hinted at a timeline for putting out an Android app, but it is in the works. They are building it out, unfortunately. And I know I’ve talked about this on the show before. One of the downsides to building out mobile apps is that, when you’re building an app for iOS, for Apple and we were building out an app for Android, these are completely different things, different code bases, different It’s like starting from scratch you can’t, there’s no overlap almost at all if you’re doing it properly.
And so, it’s really a hell of a task to put out an app on both of these major platforms. Especially one as is complicated and has large scale. And as I guess just as unique as clubhouse. So, I’m sure they’re working on as fast as they can, and I’m sure Mike will announce it as soon as anything out, any news on it being shared on an, on Android. Currently they’re just out on Apple.
Mike: [00:35:54] Yeah. Yeah, but that’s pretty much the case their Miles and yes, you have the the creator of Android one did make it specific point that the only reason he hates he has an iPhone is to be on clubhouse. He you want it to be very clear about that.
They actually did that did come up in the town hall just the other day on Sunday. And yes, they, they are th the CEO slash founder said that that is one of their top priorities is to get Android out. As soon as possible, they have hired at least one developer. That is only working on developing out the Android platform.
He didn’t, say a specific timeline, but he did use the phrase months, so I don’t think it’s going to be in the next few weeks. Probably hopefully by the summer that’ll be out there, but that is certainly a big goal of theirs. You said their number one goal right now is is expanding the platform and getting more users on it.
But they are also, having to manage their, what they are currently, the current infrastructure that they have and the current growth, like we just talked about that they’re experiencing. So, there are times on the app, like when a big celebrity hops on the app, Bill Gates was on the other night, like drinking scotch and answering questions, and that makes the whole app glitch and then like other rooms start to suffer and things like that.
And so, they’re having issues already when it gets to a peak user time. And so, it’ll be really interesting to see how they manage that. Moving forward in real time with, creating a user experience that doesn’t piss people off that are already using the app. And people like me that are, just advertising for free because we enjoy it so much.
With also balancing reaching those new markets, because obviously Android is, if you want to go international, you really have to be on Android because most of the planet is using an Android. Only here in America is at about 50 50. And so, I think that’s a huge goal for them, but yeah, as Miles was alluding to, it’s going to be a daunting task, on the development side, for sure.
Miles: [00:38:01] Yeah. People don’t really understand and, or possibly they just underestimate the infrastructure needed to put an app out like this. When we’re building out an app for the coffee shop on the corner or something, we probably don’t have to worry too much about having millions and millions of people using this thing all at once.
But when people do have an app like that, they are all hitting a server. You have this app. Hosted somewhere. And just like you have your website hosts. I know I’ve done talks on this show before about the importance of high-quality website hosts for performance for the security and reliability of your website that is.
Just as important, if not more important when you’re talking about more complicated software applications, including mobile apps. So, they have a huge infrastructure issue on their hands here. And as soon as they release that Android app, their user base is going to double in two minutes, if not more.
So, I’m sure that’s another high priority item on their lists for just making sure that they’re there. Infrastructure can actually handle that kind of base load usage. And honestly, I haven’t looked into their backend to the stack they’re using here. But I have some assumptions based on what they’re doing here and that’s going to be yeah, scaling is going to be a major task. I think I’ll keep waiting and being jealous. At least I get a better view on here every week. Thank you, Chelsea.
Mike: [00:39:31] Yeah, we’re trying to limit the F the FOMO by giving you the dirt here every week, but yeah, it won’t be long. And I think that they’ll they’ll open it up.
For sure. They’re trying to do it as fast as they can but yes, I think we’ve created enough FOMO now with clubhouse. So, we’ll move on to a new topic there, if there aren’t any other questions. So, I’m gonna, I’m going to go into what I was saving for Jack. I don’t know if Jeff’s here or not, but I’m going to put this down in the comment so he can easily find it.
You getting a call? Is that what’s happening? I’m going to have to call them back. Yes, yes, yes. Sorry. Sorry, your audio just went out for a second. Yeah, I was getting a call there. Okay. Jeff asked me a question last week about email open rates and I just, I answered it off the cuff. And and then just the other day, I actually came across an article with brand new data from 2020.
And so, this is the updated data. I think I was giving them data for maybe 2018 or 2019. So, I wasn’t off that much. I think I said it was around 17% was the average across all industries. It’s now about 20%. Or it is 20% across all industries, but in the article that I linked there in the comment section there is a breakdown by industry. And so, I encourage everybody to go and look at their industry and see what your average open rate clicks through, or click through rate, excuse me, click rate there’s bounce, there’s unsubscribed, there’s all kinds of different metrics in there that it breaks down by industry.
And so, you can see how you’re performing specifically with your industry. But Miles, as I was doing some digging on that, I found another interesting stat that I wanted to bring to the table here for discussion and that in, and this is across basically four different platforms and what the average open rate is.
As I said this is all, recent updated for 2020 or this is data across 2020. So, for the whole year the email rate, as I mentioned was 20% acquaintances across all industries. Instagram DM was 82%. Oh, my goodness. Yes. Messenger. Okay. Meaning message syndrome. Facebook specifically is 88%.
And there’s one that’s better. Can you guess what it is? I died. I have no idea. Where do you go from? 80 or radio? Just a ridiculously high number here. I’m guessing text. Boom. Good job. Miles’ text is 98% open rate, which makes perfect sense. I’ll sometimes let it get up to 20 unanswered texts, maybe like a little bit more than that.
And I’m like, okay. I gotta go through and open up all it’s very irresponsible to be like my people. I’m not even going to tell you how many unread emails I have in my inbox right now. Because Miles would probably yell at me. But let’s just say it’s multiples and multiples exponentially at 20.
Administrator. Yeah. So, don’t try to get ahold of me via email. There you go. Call me like those people are trying to do. That’s probably the best even that doesn’t work a lot of times, but. But so, I want to open this up for discussion because, I think when we throw numbers out like this it’s easy just to throw numbers out there without context, in just say, oh let’s completely forget about email and only do texts.
That’s not what I’m saying. Because first of all, it’s a, it’s easier to get somebody’s email address. No, let’s start there. It’s great ROI. I don’t have that stat off hand. I probably should have I didn’t really plan this out very well, there’s an insane amount of ROI.
And so, I think that would be maybe next week I’ll work on that is figuring out, what is the average ROI? Across all four of these platforms, but generally email inexpensive. That’s extremely cheap to do. Has a tremendous ROI. And especially because a lot of people in email are selling big ticket items and they have big lists that you can generate 20 to one 30 to one 40 to one 50 to one so with a really good email list.
And so that’s why I’m not saying what this talk, that email is dead by any means. I still think people, most industries and most people should have an email strategy. I think email is a great place for long form content or longer form content, because you also have to think about the space and the mindset that people are in.
You don’t want a five paragraph texts. You don’t really want a novel in messenger either. Messenger is more, I want a back and forth, email is more like top down. I want them to consume. This, and then do something that the call to action, whereas messenger, maybe I’m trying to pre-qualify somebody before I even give them a call to action.
And so, I want a back and forth. I want these three options, which one is your first choice. Okay. Because of that, that I’m going to ask you this next question, because you answered that. I’m going to ask you this next question, and so maybe it’s more of an engagement and then maybe a text is the ultimate last barrier of communication. We used to talk about that all the time in the radio business before mobile was the thing the radio is the last place of connection that you could have before somebody walked into a store. God, that really ages me. When I talk about that, this is before digital phones and stores were still in buildings.
It really wasn’t that I know, but it’s like, Jesus, that was like the bug horse and buggy days. And so where, that’s why radio was like that mobile last point of connection. Now it’s text. It’s like I can talk to a person of text no matter where they are, even if they’re about to walk into my competitor, which by the way, great hack.
Here’s what just a little detour here. A great hack is you have a competitor. That has a whole bunch of foot traffic, say an event or I would even do this with a car dealer, set up a geo-fencing around that event or that, that car dealer. And so, when somebody is like sitting at a car dealer, waiting for the jackass salesman to bring the car around or to get something fixed and they open up their app, they will see your ad, and you can localize it to say, Hey, I’m only two miles away or one mile away or whatever. Okay. But that was a detour. But, and so my point is that you have to, just like we talked about on social media, you have to contextualize the message into the platform and the psychology of the PR of the end-user where and meet them where they’re at.
And so, you have to utilize, I think all of these. Platforms or at least a combination of these platforms, but use them in unique, different ways to get the consumer to the end place, the end goal, which is obviously doing business with us. But Miles, on, the messenger, especially, that’s something that a chat bot, as we talked about before is a great piece of technology of automation that almost any small business can implement into their Facebook messenger drive traffic to it.
And I’m like I was talking about before pre-qualify people segment them out. It’s a different flow, which is for lack of a better term or just different sales funnels. And so, you can contextualize the message and the offer to people based on what they tell you that they want, which yeah, it is obviously much easier, it’s the old two years, one mouth, it’s much easier to talk if I’ve already listened completely to what the person wants, needs it’s and feels. And then I can just deliver that to them, rather than guessing those three things and then start talking well, that’s a much harder place to land where I want to land.
So, I want to just open that up for discussion to anybody listening that wants to jump in the comments, but Miles, what are your thoughts on those stats and just what that means for how we should be communicating with people.
Miles: [00:47:54] I actually had three points of response and you walked right into the first one, which is automation.
So, a lot of these text-based outreach programs, including email and messenger and text allow you to utilize platforms for a certain amount of automation so that you don’t have to manually handle these things because across all of them, these things really only work on mass. They work in Boldman where you’re throwing in thousands of contacts at a time, and it’s just impossible to handle all that properly, manually.
Automation allows you to time things out to send out several emails to a, an individual over a course of days or weeks or months, depending on your buying funnel. First of all, understand your industry and how to communicate with your audience and then work that into your automation system.
You might think, I only have a couple of hundred Contacts here. I can just handle this myself. I’ll deal with the automation later. Don’t set it up to begin with, because this is going to grow, especially if you’re doing it right. If you’re putting the right kind of attention here this is going to grow.
You’re going to have way too many to handle. You’re going to drop the ball in there. So especially when you’re just starting, when you’re still small. Set yourself up for success later, buy into a platform there. Most of them will cost a little bit, but not much. That’s still a fairly affordable tool or resource to utilize.
So, whether you’re doing a Facebook chat bot or some sort of email marketing or a text message marketing or something, grab on to a tool that allows you to do some sort of automation in there, and that will increase your ability to handle larger and larger lists and to individualize those conversations in a way that really does produce the results that you want.
Let’s see, I’m forgetting 0.2. So, I’m going to skip to 0.3 here. Yeah, probably wasn’t important anyway, but the common line, the through line through all of these things that I’m hearing I agree with you, you shouldn’t just jump on one. You shouldn’t just be doing email or just be doing texts.
It depends on your industry, what mix you’re going to do, but chances are, you should probably at least have a little bit of all of these things out there. But the through line through all of those things is. Regardless of open rate, regardless of technology, regardless of platform, you are looking to be authentic and to engage with your audience in a very unique and personalized way. So, like Mike was talking about, they’re setting up a chat bot that it doesn’t just sound like a robot or something it’s serving a purpose. And that is to qualify them, get some basic information and deliver them to a real human person as soon as possible with the most relevant information as possible so that they can.
Actually, shortened their conversation and reach the right person quicker rather than a big, long automated process where we’re making assumptions and maybe being wrong about it. Yeah. Regardless of what technology you choose or what platform you choose, your goal should be to present yourself authentically and to have at least the closest approximation you can to a one-on-one conversation with each and every individual member of your audience, whether that’s a hundred people or a million. I think that is what is really boosting these engagement rates. That’s why we’re seeing Better and better rates from email up to Instagram, up to Facebook and up to texts because those platforms encourage that one-on-one personal connection. If someone’s texting me, I’m assuming they’re just, they’re texting me. This is one of my friends or my family texting me. And I’m going to respond to them as if this is a one-on-one conversation. And so, brands can piggyback on that. Mode of communication, same thing with Facebook messenger.
I’m not getting a bunch of solicitations via Facebook messenger. And so, when something does come in and it comes in as a message to me, it looks like this brand, or this person is reaching out to me specifically to have a conversation because of, insert individual unique reason here for them reaching out to me.
I’m more likely to engage with that, than a blanket email that I know was sent out to a hundred million people, and they’re just hoping that someone’s going to click on it. I think that brings me back to second point here which was actually, I got an engagement or someone reaching out to me on LinkedIn.
Actually, I think it was just earlier today. That was this morning. I got a message from a guy that was the same pitch. I get tons of solicitations on LinkedIn all the time and I just ignore them. I ignore them. If your message even looks like a solicitation, I’m immediately not going to read it. And this guy had already tried sending one message before it seemed like a solicitation.
I ignored it, but then he sent a voice recording, an actual voice recording of him talking specifically to me. He said, Hey, Miles, here’s what I’m reaching out to you about. It was his voice. It was not, it was clearly not like highly produced or anything. It just sounded like we were having a chat like this and that personal outreach made me respond to him over the hundred other solicitations for exactly his service. Exactly his product that I get all the time. Even though I’m not a hundred percent sold on his product or service I’m not completely bought into that solicitation. He got a response; he got a conversion because his outreach was unique and it was personal. It seemed more authentic to me than the competitors. And that’s why he was able to break through. I think that’s why these platforms that you’re bringing up here are having such an incredible open rate, such incredible engagement rates are because people are able to drive that kind of one-on-one unique, authentic discussion between them and their audience members.
Mike: [00:53:39] I completely agree with Miles. Yeah. And especially, like you said, with the text, that the texting is, I don’t know if intimate is the right word, but it’s, maybe it is. It’s very personalized, when somebody texts you your phone, because you don’t give that out as much.
And the flip side of that is that as marketers. Yeah, we tend to ruin everything. Like LinkedIn messaging being a prime example of that. And we have to be really sensitive of how we use this as well and make sure that we are connecting with bringing meaningful value to the end user and giving them something that they are really asking for or seeking.
And I think that’s really important. And that’s why it’s primarily to me it’s a bottom of the funnel tool, it’s somebody who has opted into the bottom of the foot, to the bottom of the funnel to, to be converted basically. And they want that immediate, intimacy and connectivity with me or my brand.
I use the example I’ve used before on the show. I’m probably gonna get a text here in a minute and buy some wine from a winetext.com though, they got me. Good guy. I spend way too much money, they send me about this time every single day, a text. And today is wine of the week and they’ve been teasing it since Saturday.
And I’m like, I already know exactly how many bottles I’m going to buy. And all I have to do; they send me the text. All I have to do is reply how many bottles? I’ll just put it in for shows a bit, my house, five days later to but I buy from them so much more that there’s other services out there.
I’m probably on their mailing list. I’ve probably ignored 30 emails from him in the past week. But like I respond, and I convert to the text line texts. They send me emails as well. I never wrote one down, certainly don’t buy through it. I buy through the texting platform. And so, it’s a really high converting method.
And as we see, just, you can also just get great attention through it as well. But yeah, back to the voice aspect Miles and glad you brought that up. those are called voice drops and that is a technique that more and more. Oh, people have been utilizing. I’ve been looking into that to utilize for some of our clients as well.
And in all the data is saying that yes, it’s much higher converting. People pay a lot more attention to it. A because it’s unique and it’s, and there’s, we can talk about the whole aspect of just a voice in general and the personalized nature of that. It can continue with that. But also, like you said, they use your name.
And that’s even just a path powerful, old salesman or saleswoman trick, is by the way, folks. Don’t ever let a salesperson say your name over and over again, and never except a gift from a salesperson. There’s a little tip for you from an old salesperson right there. Okay. Because they’re playing in on some hardwired cognitive biases there that all humans fall victim to one of them being, I don’t know. I need to say prosody reciprocity. Yeah, there we go. It’s a tough one. It is a tough one. I don’t even know what I said. So anyway, so what was I talking about? Voice drops, voice drops. Thank you. So, voice drops or not only is it a new technology that you can implement using voice, but it’s a highly personalized method.
Even when you’re writing emails to people, just to show going back to the email thing, if you put in, Hey Miles, or Miles, I have a question for you or Miles, did you know. Into an email that I’m sending with Miles and probably going to double the rate that, that’s going to get opened.
And just going back to the old salesperson trick, it’s just a psychological, as I said, bias that people are tapping into when you could personalize something. And so always remember that when we’re talking about messaging and positioning and how we’re framing our business our brand, our Our offers and everything to our client or to our customers is, are we trying to talk to them as just a wash, are we trying to talk to the masses or are we really trying to talk to them as individuals?
Because if you’re able to tune into that and you’re able to talk to them as individuals, it’s obviously going to be much more resounding, you’re going to have a much higher engagement and a much higher conversion rate than trying to talk to everybody as the same person, because everybody’s a snowflake, so to speak, we’re all uniquely different. And That’s my spiel on that Miles. I think we’ve gone over time.
Miles: [00:58:11] I think we have. Yeah, we’re gonna, we’re gonna move into the end game here. I’m forgetting how to pronounce words. I’m probably been talking for too long. Yeah. I just wanted to put a little bit more weight on one thing that you said there, and that is being people.
Don’t do it. If you’re a marketer out there if you’re a small business trying to tackle some of this stuff yourself, or if you’re a small business working with a not awesome agency, do not spam people regardless of how you’re sending information out. If you’re texting people, if you’re working through social media, if you’re sending emails out, do a little bit of research, figure out what the optimum frequency of outreach is going to be for you, for your industry, for your audience.
That will differ from industry-to-industry business, to business, brand, to brand it varies across geography, across different demographics. If you’re a business in LA versus a business out here in Kansas City, that’s a very different kind of audience. So do a little bit of research upfront and don’t send out too many things, make sure that you are providing real value when you’re sending something out is ultimately, marketing should be a benefit to both the business that’s doing the marketing and the end user.
If you believe in your product and your service, that you’re offering something good, then your motivation should just be to get that in front of the right person, the person who could really properly utilize this and who actually wants what you’re selling. If you have to hit them over the head with it over and over and over and over, then they don’t want to.
You’re not marketing to the right person. You’re not talking to the right people. Be respectful and using these technologies, it can get. Out of hand really quick, especially if you follow my first tip and go down the road of automation and automate some of this stuff, it’s easy to just say, Hey, text this person 30 times a day until they buy my thing.
Don’t do it. It’s tempting, but don’t do it. That optimum frequency is going to be a better seller for you, especially in the long term here, that’s going to be a better strategy for you and it’s going to help to elevate your brand in the long run. So, I’m just going to end on that. Don’t spam people.
Mike: [01:00:16] Miles that I know we’re trying to end it, but man, you just opened up a whole can of worms. That I was some great advice. That was some great advice. And we could literally talk for five more hours just on that, but I’m really glad that you brought that up because I’ve gotten a couple questions about that from clients just recently, we’ve been talking to them about how much to send out an email list and things like that. And they always do, I don’t want to spam, and I don’t want to feel spammy and et cetera, et cetera. And I think that there’s a couple key things here that, that I just want to highlight and what you said, and the first thing is bringing value.
That has gotta be everyone’s in metric, is, am I, when I put something out, is it bringing value? Is this self-serving or is this actually trying to help the end user, the person at the other end of that line of communication? My audience, and we do, we talk about this on the show all the time, but it’s so important.
And we define value as, educational informative or entertaining, but really, it’s the educating part. I think people need to pay the most attention to and dive the most into, because if you. If you think about what really great selling was and what is really great marketing, it’s really just about educating, and I used an example earlier that maybe I should have, because there’s a little bit of a misnomer, and that, that was the crying child in the in the store, is that, yes, that works.
But, just asking over and over and over and over and over again, but what, what can even work better in terms of a long-term strategy? When we’re talking about building a brand, we’re talking about building long-term value, you are actually not convincing and Miles. And I talked about this as a day.
I was like I don’t ever want to try to convince anybody of anything again. I’m done with that. It’s not convincing anything. It’s not keep asking. We have to keep asking, but it’s asking in a way that encourages them to come to the conclusion themselves. If I can get you to sell yourself, that is always going to be 10 times more powerful over the long haul than me just breaking you down and getting you to say yes, right?
If you can in your mind, convince yourself and sell yourself that this is what you need, and this is what you have to have. You’re always going to end up being a better customer or client to the brand, to the customer that you’re doing. And so that’s what we really have to do. And that’s what good sales and good marketing does.
And the only way to do that is through education. And empowerment and giving the customer and the client, the ability to come to these conclusions themselves. So that’s part one of the thing that I wanted to highlight. And the other part and know this is a little bit of a dark comedy that I’m gonna leave you guys on this to think about until we meet again and the other.
And hopefully Chelsea is still watching because She can resonate with this because her and I used to do some hardcore cold calling direct selling together. You also though, here’s the other flip side of that you house will have to believe and believe as a key word in your loins, in your soul, in the deepest parts of your being that what you are doing every day, like that value that educating the services and the products that you provide to your end audience, that they have to have that.
In order to live a better life in order to get more out of what they’re doing in order to maximize the resources, whatever you have to believe with every fiber of your being and that it’s a moral obligation for you to get in front of those customers and to educate them and to tell them what they don’t know, and to show them what they don’t know.
And if you don’t have that mindset, you’re never going to be able to put in the time and the consistency, and you’re always going to fall back in place. And those short, shortcut low-frequency, top of the funnel type sales hacks, that don’t ever convert meaningful long-term customers that really believe in what you do and how you can help them for the rest of their life.
And so, it’s about balancing those two things. And that’s really the secret sauce there. So that’s it. I’m done. Got to believe in what you’re selling.
Miles: [01:04:27] Yeah, I think that’s a really good note to end on here. We’re gonna wrap up here, but we’ll be back next Wednesday at 11, Mike.
Thank you very much. We will see him next week. Pleasure as always. All right. Thanks everyone. That is, it for this week. Ask Wildman. We are going to be back next Wednesday at 11 live streaming to our Facebook page, YouTube channel, and possibly some more platforms here in the near future. So, make sure to check back there. You can also send your questions into askwildman@wildmanweb.com also throw this out here. If you haven’t already checked out our website, we’ve got plenty of awesome resources over here. Just for you. Here, we’ve got a free report. You can run on your own business. I did want to throw this in here just at the end. We have our live stream archives, so we’re uploading any and all of our old streams to our website here.
If you missed a week, do you want to go back and see something that Mike said something brilliant three weeks ago and you wanted to hop back and see what he said, everything is here. We’re also trying to upload transcripts to all of these as well, or at least show notes. So, you guys can follow along.
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All right, we’re going to be back next week for another episode of Ask Wildman. Answer your questions. Live next Wednesday at 11 tune in then. And we’ll see you then.
