Transcript
Good morning internet. The date is April 21st. It is 11 o’clock and this is Ask Wildman. Hello? Hello, happy Wednesday. My name is Miles Bassett with Wildman Web Solutions. And this is Ask Wildman an open Q and a discussion with between my team and yours. To answer any questions that you have about technology marketing. Business, hopefully demystify the world of technology just a little bit and put some good information out there.
This is an open Q and A, so please throw your questions in the comments below, or you can email us your questions at askwildman@wildmanweb.com. I do have that address scrolling below me here. This is a live show, so we are live streaming to our Facebook page, our YouTube channel, and now our Twitch account, hopefully more social media profiles to come.
But if you’re catching this later, you can still email us those questions and we’ll get back to you next week on this show, as we do this every week, Wednesdays at 11, my team and I are here to answer any and all questions you want to throw at us. So please jump in those comments. I see. We’ve already got a comment before the show even started.
Hello, Mr. Jeff Frye, always happy to have you here. So, follow his lead, throw your questions or comments in the comments here. If you have any questions about what we’re talking about. If you have any experience with what we’re talking about, and you just want to jump in here please involve yourself.
And if you think the information, we’re putting out here is good, it’s useful, you think that it could help some friends or other small business owners, please give us a share, follow you know what to do. Alright. Without any further ado, I’ll go ahead and bring in my partner, Mike, to help me answer some of these questions.
Hello, Mike you’re live greetings. Hello. I am alive Miles. Thanks for noticing pleasure to be here with you on this beautiful morning. You’re live as in, you’re live on air here, not alive, but I am glad that you’re alive. Oh baby. I am alive. I am wired fired, inspired sugar dip, honey glazed. Like we were talking about this before the stream, actually, but you’re going to have to tell me the story about where that phrase came from at some point, we’ll throw that into the show at some point.
All right. So, we’ll see, we are here to answer any questions. Please throw your questions in the comments below. Ask us about technology, marketing business or just how our day is going, whatever you want to talk about. We’ll take your lead here. And we had a couple of things that we wanted to go over here from the inbox and also just from a couple events over the last week.
So, I think we’ll start there and then move into your questions as they come in. So, to start off here I did have a quick discussion this morning, and so I wanted to take a little bit of time to hit this This was actually from 1 million cups this morning. I know I cite this a lot in our shows, but it’s just because first of all, it’s a great organization, great event that I’m part of and thankful to be part of.
And also, it happens to happen right before this show. So, it’s fresh in my memory here. But we’re speaking with a new business here in town. Just started a couple of months ago, getting going still a part-time side hustle thing. And this person was getting a lot of great information from other members of the 1 million cups community to get our business up and going.
And one of the people actually from the Lawrence SBDC small business development center Was throwing out information about getting herself listed. She said, hey, when I searched for your type of business, you didn’t show up. I wanted to find someone like you a couple of months ago, you were there, and you didn’t show up here.
Have you gotten your business registered with Google or have you got your listing registered with Google and she said, no. So, I wanted to go over that just really quickly here. I know we’ve hit that a couple of times in this show, probably a lot of times at this point, but it’s because it’s so integral and people oversee it, or they miss it.
And It’s just something that’s so simple, so easy and can make such a huge difference in your online presence as a business, I advocate people doing this before you even look at getting a website, before you look at getting a social media profile, before you do anything. If you’ve got a business, get listed on Google and then you can start building out everything else.
Of course, all of those other things are useful and we’re going to advocate for having those as well. But first and foremost, get your business listed. I’ll put a link here in the comments just to a help article support article from Google that tells you how to get your business on Google, my business, how to get your business on Google maps and how to get your business verified.
That third step is very important. There are a couple of missteps people can make in there based on what type of business you are. If you have a physical location that you want people to actually show up to or if you are more of a service area business If you have regular open hours or if you’re just a by appointment, only more service-related business.
There are a couple of different settings in there that you can hit to make sure that you are listed properly. People are finding you, and then once they find you, they’re engaging with you properly. So, I’ll go ahead and grab that article here and throw it in the comments for you. I just want to throw that in here.
I thought the very top, because again, getting yourself listed and verified with Google is probably one of the quickest, easiest, biggest wins that a new business or an existing business that hasn’t taken advantage of this yet can do right here right now today. Probably just a couple of minutes.
Mike, do you have anything on the listing side of things while I pull this article up and throw it in the comments here? Just to make sure that you check your listings if you aren’t already actively managing them and working on them. We do have a free tool on our website where you can get a report on your listings, your SEO, everything else, because if you don’t know it’s broken, how can you fix it?
So, I’ll just throw that in there. And yeah, also what you were saying about Google my business extremely important. A lot of local businesses are getting an unfair advantage, so to speak right now, if they are leveraging Google, my business, adding content to it regularly especially, blogs, things like that, that have keywords in it and it’s really helping them out.
Yeah, Anna had a great post on our social media the other day about, I think it was 29% of local searches ended up being a purchase. Am I quoting that right Miles? If not, I think I’m pretty close, but you know that’s a stunning number. Call it almost a third of times that somebody looks in a local search for a product that they actually buy it based off of that search. And it’s just like that old Ward William saying, the customers who cost you the most are the ones you never see, it’s the ones who are going to somebody else based off that search.
And it’s just we’ve always been harping on, if you’re putting up hoops for people to find you, to give you money, you’re going to get less money. So, make sure that you’re easily found wherever people may search it, but especially in the Google ecosystem. Yeah. So, the stat, there is actually 28% you’re off by one percentage point, but yeah, 28% of all local searches typically result in a purchase.
So that means that they are buying something somewhere. I think that was taken from one of our more recent blog posts that we put up on the website. I’ve put up a couple of posts recently over the last couple of weeks specifically on search rankings. So, if you haven’t checked out our articles section recently, or a blog on our website please go back there. We’ve put up a couple of great articles here over the last two, three weeks. W one of the posts in there that are one of the stats in there. I think we used one of those articles. It was something like 70, 70 something percent of searches.
Of local mobile searches, specifically people searching on their phone, ended up within a, with a store visit within 24 hours. Wow. There’s something about people searching for services on their phone versus searching for something on their laptop, on their desktop computer. Usually if I’m searching for a product or service on my desktop here, that I’m doing some research, I’m trying to find who I want, or maybe I just want to know a little bit more about something I’m not quite to the bottom of that funnel ready to go a decision-making process.
But when I’m searching for something on my phone, I’m looking for something right now, I’m looking to find something. So, there’s something different about how people interact with the search ecosystem when they’re on their phone. Meaning that if someone is looking for a local service on their phone, that means they’re looking to go out and get it. Right now, or maybe their day or something. Maybe they’re already there as well.
I know I’ve done this now. How many times have you been somewhere about to buy something, and you pull out your phone and you check what the price of it is or the competitor across town. I do it probably once a week, so yeah. Also, while I’m out, if I’m driving around town and I want something I finally yeah, I’m out around, I’m not at home. And then I find out I need something or, we decided we want to go out to lunch or I remember I needed to go do X, Y, or Z. Then I’m looking that up on my phone.
And I’m going to one of the first places that I see and I’m engaging with that business versus something else. There might be another one that offers exactly what I want at a better price with better customer service and everything. Right next door to where I am. But if that doesn’t show up in my search on my little magic pocket computer here, then.
I’m going across town to the other one that did show up. Yep. So yeah, I just want to start off the show there with that little tidbit about Google my business and getting yourself listed there. I did put a link in the comments here, a quick support article from Google on adding or claim your business on Google my business.
And there’s also some information on there on getting yourself on Google maps and verifying your business location. There’s a couple of extra steps in there. They’ll send you a physical piece of mail postcard with a verification code on there to make sure that you are who you say you are, and you are where you say you are.
That’s how Google verifies where businesses are, and they have the proper address. So literally send you a postcard with a code on it that you then have to enter it. So, it can take a couple of days just for that part to happen. But everything else you’re talking a couple of minutes here.
Just a no-brainer for any small business. Any business, like I said, small business in there, cause that’s typically who we’re talking to, but anyone who’s doing business anywhere, you got to be on Google and while you’re at it, you should extend it. We were talking about listings a lot. We should extend outside of that, but the first step should be at least getting herself on Google, my business.
And then outside of that, there are a bunch of other directories and bunch of other listing services and map services and data aggregators. It would be very helpful for you to get your information out there on one of those, but at the very least get yourself on Google. If anyone has any questions on that, if you need some more information on getting yourself listed on the Google My Business platform, or in Google Maps or anything else about business listings, please throw your thoughts, questions, concerns in the comments below, or email us at askwildman@wildmanweb.com.
And we’ll get back to you there. But like I said earlier our articles section on our website is rapidly expanding. We’re putting lots of really great content there. Including some of the information that we put out on this show. Some of the stuff that goes out in our newsletter, although if you’re not signed up for our newsletter, some of the information in that only goes out in the newsletter.
So, make sure to sign up for that. If you haven’t already. Yeah. You get all the info in the articles and none of the rambling. So, it’s, if you like the show, wait till you read the articles folks. I thought that was the selling point of this is the rambling and the bad jokes. That was the selling point of our live stream here.
It’s not the content, it’s not the answers. All so let’s move on past that. I wanted to give you an opportunity here before we move on. I know we have a couple of questions that come in what two days ago. So, I definitely want to hit those and that discussion that we had before this, but I wanted to give you a chance to extend on, expand on or finish up some of the points that you were making in last week’s show.
You were talking about audio branding and branding yourself with sound voice with audio. And we only have eight minutes to go through all of that. And so, I said, we’ll wrap this up and maybe hit this next week. I wanted to see if you wanted to extend on that or just put a button on that. Make a final point here. Sure. Cat totally forgot all about that. Mom.
You are saying the McDonald’s jingle and everything you were real invested in this. I wanted to give you an opportunity, especially for being a former radio guy. I thought this was like a really interesting point where digital marketing and the digital space is converging and hitting some of the, I don’t, I’m not really old school, but more traditional marketing tactics that we saw before.
Those jingles, we were talking about the pizza shuttle jingle, where they had given themselves that audio branding that stuck with them throughout the decades. And now with the advent of voice technologies, you’re seeing this resurgence of audio branding in an entirely new form it’s reincarnated itself. Okay. Yeah. I remember what I was saying now. Yeah. A hundred percent. And this’ll actually, I have some audio related news, so maybe I’ll just segue into that.
We totally meant to do that a hundred percent. So yeah, so Sonic brings basically just what your brand and what your company sounds like. When somebody hears it, what do they hear and what do they feel, what messages are being conveyed and it’s extremely important. And it’s overlooked, I would say in much respect because, and a lot of times audio is in the background. It’s you know, it’s subliminal subconscious, but it does not mean it’s not important.
It’s actually extremely important. And I think that I referenced the recent Yale study. I think I talked about this briefly on the show is we were ended up last week that there was a recent study out of Yale. That basically said that when somebody hears audio only as opposed to audio with video or with images that they believe more of it, they retain more of it.
They take more action based upon it. And there’s a lot of reasons for this, I’m not going to go into it all and try to keep this and not in a rabbit hole, the bottom line is that this isn’t the first time that there’s been research about this. And actually, that audio only is a format is extremely powerful and it’s extremely persuasive.
And there’s just something about the human brain that reacts and focuses when it’s in an audio only component. And so, when we talk about this in terms of marketing and how we utilize it, we can understand how it’s extremely important if this is the thing that, above all else that can make people remember my message, take action about my message, and believe my message.
Then I should probably be thinking about this as I’m thinking about my overall branding and to Miles’ point, that there’s a lot of things happening in the voice space, technologically, but also just in social media today and in video and how we’re using that in small businesses and large businesses alike, that audio is playing a key component and it’s much deeper than just a jingle.
That’s what most people think about when I think about audio and businesses and advertising. But yeah, your Sonic branding is more, it’s more, usually it’s a lot more subtle than that. And I Yeah, I did use the example of Donald’s, which I think is a really good one. Where they have the same little bounce bump I’m loving it, in incorporated throughout all of their branding and all of their marketing.
For years and years. And so that’s their Sonic brand. And so, I think that it’s worth, thinking about even as a small business, how you’re going to craft your Sonic brand, but it’s going to become even more and more important to think beyond just a branding piece or a jingle.
And how am I communicating? How am I messaging and how am I engaging with my core audience through audio only? And we’ve been talking about this app clubhouse pretty much ad nauseum, over the past few months on this show. And there’s a reason for that. And we did a little bit of a deep dive on voice a few weeks ago and all the different technology that’s being incorporated with the voice, but basically voice is the next step.
And the technological revolution it’s not going to replace video or anything like that, it’s going to be built on top of the current layer of the internet, but in a new way. And so, clubhouse is one of the first organizations, or entities to really harness this in a different way than take it beyond where podcasting was.
Podcasting was the 1.0 of the new communication of voice only audio since, the biggest innovation since the radio really in, in Marconi. And now we have the second, now we have 2.0, and that is basically social apps or. Places inside of social apps, which we’ll get to in a minute with the Facebook news, where the content is going to be audio only, and people can come in and out of conversations, they can just listen.
They can join the conversation. It becomes not a top down or out or a one-to-many platform. A lot of times it becomes a many to many platforms and kind of a town hall type of an event where many different perspectives and two sensors being added in and et cetera, et cetera. And so, it’s a really interesting space to think about when we think about how we’re going to brand our businesses, how we’re going to communicate with our core audiences.
And so, first thing we have to do, if this whole idea of Sonic branding is a new you, are what I’m saying is, get a handle on the fundamentals of that. First because all this other stuff is not going to make as much sense if you don’t have the fundamentals down on that and really think about, and plan your Sonic brand, just like you’ve planned out all the other parts of your branding and everything from your logo to your apparel, to your slogan, to your sign out front, right.
Just add this as a component. And then the next step has got to be okay. How can I now leverage communication through audio only to communicate with my core audience? And so, we’ve talked about some recent examples of how this has happened on clubhouse. The news Miles about clubhouse recently. That we need to share with the people they announced on Sunday was that they have raised a series, a C rounds and their third round of funding, investor funding at a they didn’t come out and admit this, but ed hay reported a $4 billion valuation.
So, this means they just got a whole lot more money. They’re going to be able to hire a whole lot more, build out their infrastructure and really get this thing ready for the Android launch, which is coming soon. They say sometime in May, we’re not exactly sure when, but this thing is going to go on the Emory for those of you don’t know it’s right now, it’s only on ILS invitation only in beta mode.
But it’s going to be launched on the Android, the United States probably first and then rolled out to Europe and then across the globe. And so that news was happened on Sunday. And then yes, no. And then Monday Facebook announced, I think late Monday, I think we posted about it yesterday. Then Facebook announced early this week that they are officially rolling out.
There’s been rumors about this for several months now that they’re officially rolling out their own version, basically of clubhouse of an audio only app that is going to be a feature inside of Facebook. So, they’re all, already leveraging this behemoth of a platform, whereas clubhouse is, organically starting from scratch, so to speak.
And so that’s one interesting dynamic here, Miles so that we can discuss. But aside from that, it seems to be very similar to clubhouse. Some people are even calling it a clubhouse clone and that they’re taking a direct swipe at clubhouses growing market share and just growing.
I guess a fever if you will. Culturally. And we know that, of course, Twitter has also been working on plans behind the scenes to roll out their version. We don’t know, we haven’t made an official announcement, but Facebook’s saying that they are going to be available to everybody this summer.
They’re rolling it out, of course, small right now in beta mode. And it was interesting. They had some heavy hitters in terms of pop culture and content creators that were, they were bringing on early to help launch it. But yeah, they say this thing’s going to be full blown across both the Android and.
And iOS by this summer. So probably at about the same time that clubhouse is just getting up and full-blown across both platforms. So, this is going to be a really interesting, I don’t want to think about it necessarily as a showdown. I like to have an outlook of abundance, not scarcity.
I think that I think this is going to add fuel to the fire and grow the audio space and not, chop it in half or clubhouse is going to go away or anything like that. But Miles hopefully that was not too rumbly and a synopsis on the point from last week. And also, I gave you two news updates that are audio related.
Actually, we’ll throw in a third of that. I’m going to throw it to you for your reaction here. The third one was Apple also had an interesting. And we’ll get to Apple’s iOS update news here in a bit, but I want to stay here with the audio stuff for a minute Miles. Apple had interesting update on their podcast side of things yesterday that they are going to offer a subscription model for podcasts or to directly monetize their podcast through subscription only content that is only going to be available on the Apple and ILS podcasting platform.
So that was also a really interesting, I thought move in the audio space. And just, we may, we can open up this discussion about just monetization in general, in the audio space and the differences that we see going forward of Facebook and clubhouse and the audio revolution in general.
Go ahead Miles. Yeah. So, there was a lot there. I’m trying to categorize my thoughts. So, I’ll start off with your scarcity versus abundance analogy there where we have a new platform emerging into the space. We do have Facebook jumping into the fray here.
On one hand I do see it as a bit of a showdown. If not all, just for the dramatic realism of it. They’ve made TV shows about this. We’ve all seen Silicon Valley. It’s fun to watch. But I do think that because this is a new space, the whole audio only space audio isn’t necessarily, but the audio only social media space is so new there.
So, few people that are really interacting with it right now, I’m talking to people every day that are completely unaware that this is even happening. And these are people that operate within the space that really should know about it. So, I think that is new enough that it’s a little bit of a land grab.
It’s a little bit of an exploratory mission. We don’t necessarily know the size of the overall market yet, but I expect that it’s massively. Larger than the amount of people that are currently engaging with these platforms. at least for the time being, I think that there’s going to be plenty of room for both of these platforms and several other competitors.
I’m sure it will pop up over the next year or so to launch themselves grow, expand, take up market share, and there will still be market leftover to engage with these things. So, I don’t think there’s necessarily a. And either, or a type of situation. I do think that this market is just going to expand along with the size of these platforms as they keep getting more and more people.
I do think clubhouse has drummed up enough excitement around it. There’s a certain amount of hesitancy around Facebook in general, just because they’re so huge. People are a little, are pulling back away from them a little bit more. People all the time that are dropping off the platform or trying to work with other smaller platforms.
So, I wonder if that’s going to play a role here and to how they how the user base is differ. But yeah, there’s a lot to be said for having more resources, more developers, and the ability to see a good idea like this, develop it in full on. All platforms and publish here in just a couple of months.
That is a crazy to be able to do that. Yeah. Facebook, I said, flex book. Facebook is just flexing on everyone here with their ability to roll out new platforms like this. That really are, it’s a brand-new paradigm for interacting with people on social media and they’re completely building this thing from the ground up.
Know whether they’re copying someone else. They’re not, they’re still building the same from the ground up and launching it in a couple of months. And that is that’s just a sign a show of power from the show. So yeah, they’re not afraid to punched down. No, they’re not. Yeah. So, I’m curious to see how this market share how this market expands and how those two shares that, that market.
And also, what new competitors are popping up. We talked about Twitter, possibly developing something like this. Reddit was talking about possibly publishing something like this. It was the first name here, but they’re definitely not going to be the only name in that space for long.
Yeah. And then there, actually, there is another one I’m blanking on the name right now, but there is another, it actually, it was a competitor to clubhouse that launched, I think over the summer, but it didn’t gain the traction obviously, nearly as much. And so, I think it still has a really small user base, but yeah.
There’s certainly going to be more people that jump into this, but I’ll lay out a couple of key differences cause people are probably wondering, is it completely different? So, like I said, they wrote Facebook is rolling it out with some celebrity content creators at first, but they’re also rolling it out in groups.
First and when you heard, and it was funny because they have a hell of a PR team over there at Facebook, but Mark Zuckerberg just happened to release an interview. Shortly after this press release came out, that just happened to describe this new product, of course in how he envisioned it.
And so that was really interesting to hear him actually talk about it. And he, and they really envisioned it this being in groups. And so, if you think about clubhouse, the clubs are the groups, if you will, to Facebook. And so, they’re first going to be rolling it out in really big popular groups.
And then I think to all groups first and then to individuals, so then like you and I could start a private audio only room if we wanted to. And so that was a really interesting, I thought insight into what they were thinking about doing with it and how it was going to evolve the groups. And, if you think about.
The difference between how groups are right now is, obviously audio is much faster, we can have this back and forth and we can do that. If people are sitting by their keyboards or on their phones, just answering comments back and forth. But yeah. So how many times a week are we texting back and forth?
And finally, one of us just decides to call the other one and saying I’m getting tired too, or it’s several hours in between responses or sometimes days, and things are getting lost in translation. And so, it’s going to be really interesting. I think once I think people will gravitate towards audio.
And so, once that happens, back to the abundance and scarcity thing, I think people are going to realize, oh, wow, like actually communicating with audio is really cool now here’s and quick and convenient and I can get a clear message across to somebody. Now here’s the interesting thing though, is that the written is obviously I can go back and look at that later.
And one of the things about clubhouse that’s been a good and a bad thing, I think is the fact that now you can record on it. And it’ll be interesting if Facebook has some in app or on platform recording technology. Once it’s, theoretically on clubhouse or w anytime we’re having a conversation and it’s not recorded, it’s gone, there’s no record to go back and see that again with a podcast. Now, there are some advantages to that in the sense that it, you have to be there. And it’s and so people have FOMO and people want to go on the platform and spend more time on the platform, because if you’re not there, when it’s happening on the platform, you missed it.
It’s if you weren’t there, the night that Elon first came onto the platform, like you couldn’t go back and watch it again the next day. Whereas a social post, you can it’s there unless somebody deletes it, obviously, or a tweet or whatever. So that’s an interesting, just how the spontaneity of it works for and against it.
And what will each platform do to accompany that. But I think that, just back to the point about this more people coming into the space. Yeah. I think more people are just going to find out that talking is the most natural thing in the world and, really, it was like we can talk before we can.
And I’m going to communicate that way. And then that will, I think, lead to more people going over to clubhouse, I think Facebook is actually going to increase clubhouse instead of take people off of it. Yeah. And then you have the whole stigma about Facebook in general house data being stored, things like that.
Clubhouse has been really adamant about saying that they’re not storing people’s data. There’s been some pushback against that, but that, that’s what they say. And so yeah. Will people be able to go over to that platform and feel more comfortable about sharing things? And then, another thing that kind of comes to mind Miles is this this whole idea about the blue check marks and the verification and all that, and so and just, I always think about things in terms of a land grab in this situation, and so like on Facebook, A lot of the land is primarily grabbed. And like the big fish are on Facebook. Whereas I feel like on clubhouse, it’s a little bit more of the wild, less, it’s a little bit more open, it’s a frontier, so to speak and anybody not anybody. You have to be talented.
You have to be good, but people can go on there and start with nothing because everybody had pretty much started with nothing and build a following there, and the and the algorithm has maybe a little bit more organic if you will, we’re on Facebook, it’s my group, if I start a group tomorrow, it’s never going to have the pull on the algorithm that a group with 10 million people that’s been there for five years was going to have.
So, I don’t know. I’m rambling. Go ahead, Miles. I did want to tie this into your other point about monetization. Yeah. There are. Obviously, Facebook already has its monetization strategy built in there. We’re talking about Facebook ads all the time and incredible, incredibly powerful advertising tool.
And I don’t think it’s going anywhere anytime soon. But have you heard anything about the monetization routes or options on audio only platforms, whether it’s Facebook’s audio only platform or clubhouse or, other similar competitors that are popping up here? Is there going to be add space there or are we more talking about.
Like in the radio world or podcast world where we’re doing audio spots or just individuals giving references or citing certain companies that are sponsors of that person, of that personality, if that show of that business. And have you heard anything about that or what’s the news there?
Yeah. So, let’s move into the iOS thing after that. Okay. Yeah. So that’s also an interesting point a probably, differentiation between the two is that clubhouse has been adamant that they’re not going to have, and they’re not going to adapt an ads platform. They’re not going to basically do interruption advertising and, make you listen to something or something, a sponsor or something like that before you enter a room, they did just release some monetization directly for content creators and their motto has been creators first.
And so, everything they do is to empower the creator and the, and so that’s, I think really interesting just point of view that they have. And what that’s basically going to do is it’s going to put the power in the creator’s hands. So that’s not saying that you’re never going to have to pay for content, but that’s going to be decided about the creator.
Like the creator could start a private club that they charge you to get into, but clubhouse itself is not going to take ad money from Chevy. They make you listen to a Chevy ad before you go into a club room to listen to something is what they say. And they don’t want to do that model.
That’s obviously the Facebook model that they’ve built everything else on. So, you would think that is going to be, what’s going to happen on the audio side of things, especially since it’s built into the platform itself. This is basically just going to be a feature that you’re going to have eventually as you’re doing whatever else you do on Facebook.
Yeah. Yeah. So, I’m seeing some very interesting developments there. That’s really going to, I think, shift the paradigm of advertising, where I think we were initially talking about this months ago. I think it was more in the context of parlor at that point, but then that whole thing exploded for other reasons, but the advertising system that they were proposing there, I had predicted at that point that it was going to start growing and more and more platforms were going to start adopting this.
And I like how you identified it there. And that is creator first style marketing. Which really opens it up to two different marketing tactics there. And that is the subscription model or, pay-to-play model where you would pay to get access to a particular creator or to a particular club.
And then the other side is more what I was talking about before, where you would have a citation from a particular creator or, you would have you, you would approach someone that has a popular club on clubhouse and say, hey, if you will recommend my products to your followers here to your audience, then I’ll give you X amount of dollars to be a sponsor of everything here.
Yeah, which is, instead of going the Facebook ads route or something where you’re targeting the end users, and we can put in all the different demographic information with people, we want to display this ad to you at instead targeted demographic by looking at creators and who were following these people.
And you have to find a content creator that matches up with your brand in some way, which is a completely different challenge, a completely different process for extending your reach and getting to new audiences and getting your message out there. I find that interesting when I see those kinds of new challenges and new ways to look at something, or it just takes the entire process that we work on all day every day and turns it on its head.
That that’s very exciting to me. Yeah, definitely. That’s a good point in to tie that into the Sonic branding discussion that we were having earlier. So, there’s a couple of different things that are going to come into play here. If I’m a small business owner thinking about my Sonic branding, the first is what is happening or what has been happening.
And then what’s going to happen I guess, or what’s starting to happen, yeah, so right now I could be running traditional jingle based, radio style commercials, and I can be doing that on terrestrial radio. I could be doing that in my videos on social media and I can be doing that on podcasting or podcasts.
I could also be, dropping in. Taglines and, an audio brands and things like that on things like public radio and podcasts and all of that. And then yeah, when we could into something like, okay, Facebook, if Facebook does an audio only group, and I can have an inserted ad into that, then I got to make sure that, again, its content, it’s got to be contextualized to the platform.
I’m going to talk to somebody different on Instagram than I’m going to talk to him on the classical music station of KPR. Totally. They’re two totally different psychologies. So, then I’m going to make my Sonic branding fit that platform. And then if I shift over to clubhouse, okay, now I’m not doing interruption at all.
I’m doing content marketing. So now yeah. Now I have to find a creator or somebody that creates content that aligns with my core audience. And I have to facilitate or tie myself my brand to that content creator or influencer, if you will. And in host events that are going to bring people in to absorb the content.
And so, I have to put myself in different shoes for each different platform that I’m going in and execute accordingly and always make sure that yeah, I’m contextualizing my messaging and my style to the audience and every platform that I’m on. I think one of the tricks for this is going to actually tie into our conversation last week about design.
I think that was last week, potentially two weeks ago. I don’t know. Where, you’re putting yourself out there in a bunch of different ways, across a bunch of different platforms where sometimes the strategy is not only different from your former strategy, but almost entirely the opposite. And you’re trying to do both things concurrently in different spaces.
I think it’s going to be incredibly important, both visually. And now on the audio side to find some sort of through line for your brand, some sort of consistency, that’s always there, whether you’re putting out an ad on terrestrial radio or you’re putting out social media content, you’re live streaming like this, or you’re engaging with someone in an audio only space like clubhouse or whatever Facebook’s, thing’s going to be, or possibly podcasting.
If you can find something that can. Shoot through all of those things. One vein of consistency, something little, I was mentioning in the design side of things, something like just a color palette or a font choice or something like that, where it just makes everything visually have some sort of coherency, some sort of consistency, no matter where you’re putting everything, if you can do the same thing on the audio side and somehow find, Oh, maybe that’s in the jingle.
Maybe it’s in the voicings. Maybe it’s in a tagline, whatever you want to do, putting that out there in some sort of consistent form so that people can identify your brand no matter where you are or how you’re presenting this. Yep. Yeah. A hundred percent Miles. First of all, you don’t have to do everything right.
And so, you don’t have to do content and interruption. You don’t have to be on every single platform, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, for, always the first thing is self-awareness right. It’s what can me and my company and my team actually accomplish and be good. Let’s start there, but you’re right.
As I branch out and I start to do more things, I have to make sure that everything is tied together. Everything is holistic, as we sometimes say and is integrated. And I go back to the three pillars, which I think we’ve talked a little bit about before on the show. I think so which is a concept about branding.
And I got to give credit to my man. Tony D is a great entrepreneur out there in the East coast who really just drove this point. For me that, basically start with three words that you think encompass your brand and your company, and then write 30 words underneath each one of those three to back up, again, what you feel like represents your company and your brand somewhere within those, roughly 90 to a hundred words that you come up with, three of those are actually going to be your core pillar values of the company and of your brand.
And then once you understand what your three pillars of your brand are, you make sure that every single piece of content that you put out, right? Whether its audio, video written, whatever has at least two out of three of those pillars included in it somehow. And that is a way that you can always make sure that you’re being consistent and you’re being true to your brand.
And you’re not running around with a different a whole, it’s got to be a different contextualize message, but it’s not a different branding image or a branding message. And but we’re starting to split hairs a little bit and get into some technical marketing stuff. But I think it’s, I think that’s clear enough for most small business owners to understand what I’m talking about here is that you’ve got to separate those things out.
And you’ve got to make sure that your brand is consistent even as you’re tweaking the individual messaging and contextualize that for each platform that you’re on. And I think that’s what you were getting at Miles. And really do that. I really encourage everybody to do that three pillars exercise.
And that can just be a check Mark, as you’re going along to making sure that you’re yeah, you’re not putting out conflicting brand images across different platforms when you can get too cute with this, it’s like I could go really too cute one way or the other and do something on a platform that is not representing my brand properly.
And then I’m just doing damage to my brand equity in the long-term. It’s our conversation about visual design before you don’t want to just slap your logo on every single visual element that you put out there. That’s too direct, even though that is a consistent visual element, you need something a little bit more subtle.
I think that’s where you’re going with, too cute on something where, you know you want to do something a little bit more subtle, a little bit less direct. And the tips that I was giving there were just consistent with your font choices or your color palette. So, you, maybe you’re picking some colors from your logo and utilizing those throughout all of your visuals and in your audio, it should be a similar choice here where you’re not just doing something direct, you’re building something specifically for each platform, but make sure there is some sort of through line there.
What you don’t want is to present some sort of. Multiple personalities on different platforms for your brand. You want it to be clearly the same person, or the same business represented in different ways, in different mediums, across different platforms. If you got any tips on that if you have any experience working with, your own brand or representing yourself online in audio or visually or anything like that, please throw your comments in below.
We’ll feature those here on the show. If you have any questions on anything here, technology, business, marketing, et cetera comment below. Or if you’re watching this later, you’re not catching us live. Then please email us, at askwildman@wildmanweb.com I think we did have some questions coming in from a thread we were talking about earlier.
Mike, did you want to hit those as we’re coming to the yeah. Yes. Fire them away. I’ll try to not pontificate and answer them quickly and directly. I’ll try. No, you, I think you had the, you had a list of questions. Oh, okay. Sorry. I thought you said the things. No.
Oh, I thought you said you had some questions come in on the chat, which I can’t see right now, oh, okay. No, I was saying you had some questions we were discussing before the show that was coming in off of a thread from yesterday or the day before. Oh, okay. Yeah. Got it. Yeah, we’ve been getting several questions about this. Yeah. I don’t know if we have a whole lot of time, but we’ll try to try and get through this as quickly as you can Miles.
Cause this is really a question for you, but I’ve noticed. Yeah, there was like a, there was a thread I was in with some marketing people the other day. And then I actually had to a client meeting on Friday, I think. And one this morning where these questions both came up and I think there’s just maybe some confusion.
Website platforms. And then a hosting platform or, a way to basically manage your site. And, and the difficulty of the different platforms and SEO and things like that, that it’s just maybe a lot of confusion and miseducation out there. So just in a really general, non-techie way, could you just take us through some of the general well-known platforms out there, describe, some of their attributes while you would, or wouldn’t want one of those platforms and then dive into specifically what are the best practices and ways that you can manage that platform?
Because for example, in the two client meetings, I had people tell me that, they thought were press was really hard to manage. And, to me again, for the folks that don’t know out there, I’m not the coder Miles is the coder, right? So, to me, WordPress is not hard to manage on the back end, but it’s because of a tool that we give our clients, and we give, people that we do WordPress sites for it, or to make it easy to manage on the backend.
And there’s maybe this, maybe that’s where the disconnect is between the actual platform and the tools that you’re using in the platform and how that can make that platform work better or work more stressfully for you, cause some of these people were just, showing frustration about the platform that I don’t think that you know is a problem, but that’s because we’re using a different tool on the same platform.
If that makes sense. Gotcha. Yeah. Okay. No, I think I can take that for a little bit here and I’ll just try to categorize this. Cause I know I’ve talked about this on the show before. Maybe I should write something for this, for the website here. Generally speaking, I try to throw website builders, technologies, platforms, whatever you want into three different categories.
One is the DIY category. One is the more advanced CMS or content management system category. And then one is the custom development category. I’ll start off with that DIY section here. The DIY section is really just meant to be something that is easy to use for non-technical professionals and it just works right out of the box.
You sign up for an account and they take care of everything for you, your domain, your hosting, the website builder itself. It comes with some sort of Simple and easy to usually use some sort of drag and drop style editor. This is something like Wix or Weebly. I don’t know why they picked such silly names.
I’ll also put Squarespace in this category. Although I think that one’s actually a little bit nicer, a little bit more extensible than the other two. But in general, these are all in one system designed to work right out of the box without any prior knowledge or experience in website development. So, you go to one of those sites, you sign up you pay a small monthly fee, and they take care of everything from your domain to your hosting, to the actual website management and content management itself.
You then pick a template to start off with. It gives you that with a bunch of No prebuilt, predesigned things. Then you fill in your information, you put your logo in there, pick your color scheme, pick your pictures. And then it puts a website out for you. It’s super easy, super quick, relatively cheap.
The problem there is it’s not very extensible, so you can’t really do a whole lot with it. It is managed hosting by them. So, you’re not going to get the best performance out of a site like that. You’ve got this huge builder on the backend. That’s not going to help. When you get into search engine optimization or any kind of performance optimization, there’s just only so much you can do with it.
They give you a couple of options, but if it’s not explicitly listed there in their settings then. You just can’t do it. There’s no access to the backend there. And for someone like me, that’s a little bit more technical even. I can’t do anything they’re there. You’re very limited to the option that they give you.
In some of the ones they’re like Squarespace, you can buy a premium membership there that gives you more access and more technical tools and more extensibility. It’s still not as much as some of the other ones that we’re going to talk about here, but it’s a little bit more there. So yeah, you’re just a little bit limited on the functional side, on the optimization side and what you can do.
And also on the design side, you can only pick certain templates and, while some of them might look good, it’s also going to look like all of the other sites out there. Anyone else on a Squarespace site Basically looks like you’re a Squarespace site. Their templates are nice, but they’ve only got a very limited amount of them.
And there’s only so much you can modify them to really make them your own. So overall here, there’s just a ceiling on those and it’s pretty low and there’s nothing you can do about it. So, it’s very possible for businesses to outgrow platforms like that, though. They’re pretty easy ways to get something up and going quickly without having any sort of technical experience.
Now I’m going to skip to the most advanced side of things. That’s the custom development platforms. These are ones that you cannot build anything on without any kind of technical experience. You’re pretty much going to be hiring a developer or an agency to build out a website for you. This can be anything from a custom coded site.
Maybe they’re a.net developer. And so, they’re building something out on microsoft.net platform. Or, maybe this is a more advanced PHP based platform. Something like, I don’t know, Joomla Drupal wearable larval. I’m not entirely sure how people say that. You need someone with a little bit more technical experience to get that set up and going, and then they can build a management system for you to be able to manage things.
And they’re going to have all sorts of access and control to change everything on that site completely control every pixel on that website, optimize everything absolutely perfectly and sharpen everything to a Razor’s edge, but you’re not going to have that much access to everything. There you are not going to be able to do very much outside of the functions that they have explicitly built for you to be able to manage, maybe they built a module on there for you to be able to upload your upcoming events or post blog articles or something like that.
Outside of those explicit permissions, they given you, you can’t do anything. So, then we have this middle category, and this is going to be the slightly more advanced content management systems. It’s not a DIY system and it’s not a custom coded site. It’s splitting the difference there. So, it’s got some of the advantages and disadvantages of both worlds.
This is something where, I put WordPress in here, possibly some wearable sites or Drupal sites. Some of those PHP platforms could be put in here. Overall, there’s a little bit more of a learning curve for setting it up, but it’s really more how you would present it here at the very beginning.
If you have the proper tool set to work with these things and maybe you have a little bit of help getting something set up initially, right? Then you can work with this thing a lot easier. You as the business owner, as a non-technical professional can have a lot more control over the actual site content over the site management, right?
Just like you would in a DIY site. But it’s not going to be, it’s not going to be quite as functional right out of the box. There’s going to be a little bit of set up there. A little bit of learning curve. Either. You need to figure some stuff out there, or you need to work with a professional work with a developer or an agency to get this set up for you.
Once you get going on it, though, if the developer has done everything right, the agency has done everything right, and they’ve given you a proper tool set, then it’s very possible for you to manage the entirety of your website completely and totally. Moving forward quickly, easily without having any previous technical experience.
So that’s the three tiers there. All of them can work. There’s a time and place for every one of them, I think. And be happy to speak with anyone out there that wants to talk about this or weigh the pros and cons and see where they might fall in those three categories. But overall.
Just to quickly summarize here DIY platforms. These are Wix Weebly, Squarespace, they’re quick and easy to get up and going right out of the box functionality, drag and drop design and styles, but there’s a ceiling there. It’s not very extensible and you’re going to outgrow it very quickly. You got more advanced content management systems, which require a little bit more setup initially, but then can manage it very easily after that.
And you have a lot more control. A lot more extensibility is going to be able to grow with your business a lot more, but you may need some assistance from a. More technical person from a developer, from agency to get things up and going or add some more advanced functionality. And then you’ve got custom coded stuff.
This is where you’re completely relying on a developer on an agency. Someone to build something from scratch specifically for you, you might not have as much control in the day-to-day operation and management of the whole thing, but if you’re working with a good developer with a good agency that can manage this thing for you, then they can do absolutely everything with this.
They can fly you to the moon with this piece of software here. So much information here. I got one minute over on good job. And just to give a quick example for each one of those levels. So, the do it yourself would be something like a Wix. The middle would be something like a WordPress and a larval.net. Application would be something like the high end.
Yeah. Yeah. I think that’s pretty accurate there. Yeah. Okay. Hopefully that clears up some confusion for some folks out there. Appreciate you going through that Miles. Yeah. Maybe we can take a deeper dive into that, or I’ll write a quick article on the website for it and share it out with everyone here.
But if you have any specific questions on platforms or which one’s going to be the right platform for you there’s a ton of choices out there now. So, I totally understand the confusion and not necessarily knowing which of those categories a platform falls in or that your business falls in right now.
I’m more than happy to answer those questions for you. If you want to email us or go to our website and learn a little bit more there. Maybe we’ll talk a little bit more on this in future episodes of Ask Wildman. Sounds good. I think we’ll have to save the Apple iOS update for next week, cause we’re running out of time here, but just everybody keeps getting that first and zero party data out there.
Absolutely. All right. We’ll leave that as a teaser here and hit that next week. We’ll be back live next Wednesday, the 28th at 11 until then Mike. Thank you very much. See you. Thanks for watching. All right. Thanks for everyone out there again. If you think this information is useful if you find this helpful, then please give us a like share subscribe, depending on what platform you’re on here.
If you’re watching this later, you can still engage with us by emailing us at askwildman@wildmanweb.com. I have that address scroll on below me here in the crawler. If you want to grab it otherwise, we’ll be back here next Wednesday at 11, to answer your questions for another episode of Ask Wildman. So, I will see you then. Thanks for watching.
