Transcript
Hello internet. Welcome to Ask Wildman an open Q and A produced by Wildman Web Solutions. Me and my team are here to answer your questions about technology, marketing, advertising. Anything else you want to ask us? We are here. Please throw your questions in the comments below if you have them, or if you’re watching this later, you’re not catching this live, please.
Email your questions to askwildman@wildmanweb.com. I’ve got that address scrolling below me here. We are back. Thank you for sticking with us. No, we took a week off last week. We had Mike out on vacation, a bunch of other client work and everything. So, we did take the week off last week, but usually we are doing this every week, every Wednesday at 11 o’clock live streaming to our Facebook page, YouTube channel and Twitch account.
So, Wednesdays at 11, pick your poison, jump on, watch us live and get your questions answered. I know we have a couple of lined up for today that we’re going to be talking about. We finally have Mike back from a vacation. He’ll be joining us here in just a minute. But if you do have any questions again, we are a digital marketing agency.
Any questions about marketing, advertising, technology about running a business, or you just want to ask us about how our day is going? I know I can see Jeff on here. Hello, Jeff. Yeah. Back from his mountain hideaway. I’ll be heading out there in a couple of months. So, I’m jealous, but he’s usually asking Mike some questions about golf or something that I don’t know anything about.
So, you can feel free to follow in his footsteps here, jump in the comments below and ask us about anything you want. All right. Pulling up our first questions here as we get going, actually, we may have. We may have someone joining you. Good to go. Thumbs up. Yes, here we have Mike Hannah. Welcome back. Good morning.
Miles. How in the heck are we doing today? I’m good. I’m happy to be back. Live stream in here. Feels like it’s been a couple of weird weeks of in and out in different people and different stuff. It’s good to be just back in the seat. It is. It’s good to be back here with you. I know Jay hanging a few times over the last few weeks.
I know you’re the talker. I don’t know. This is your job. This is your, yeah. That’s my whole job. And I’ve been Mia for weeks, but hey, I’m back. I’m caffeinated and I got stories miles, so good. You’re in for a treat. All right. Sorry in advance for all of my story’s viewers out there. But yeah, again, this is an open Q and we’re here to answer your questions and talk with you.
Don’t want this to just be a one-way thing. Love to have your engagement here. And if you think we’re putting out good information we’re answering some good questions, giving you some value here. Please give this a share. Follow, depending on what platform you’re watching this on, that does help us to reach more people and hopefully provide some more value, answer, some more questions, but yeah.
All right. That’d be being said. I did have one specific question that came in. I wanted to tackle it’s a little bit technical, but it’s a really good point that I realize probably a lot of people don’t really know about just came in a few days ago. And so, I wanted to hit that right off the top. And then maybe we can jump to one of your vacation stories here, Mike.
So, I had someone reach out to me again a few days ago with this kind of weird question they were saying, hey, I built this website out. It’s mobile friendly. I pull it up on my phone. It looks nice. It runs well. And then I do Google’s mobile friendly checker. They have a tool you can search for that.
Or maybe I’ll put a link in the description here to see if your website counts as well. And I got a really poor rate. It said that my website wasn’t mobile friendly. It even gave me a screenshot of what Google was seeing. And it wasn’t my website at all. It was all jumbled. It was the wrong colors and fonts, and it didn’t look right at all.
You couldn’t really read anything. It said it took a long time to load. I don’t understand what’s happening here. Can you help? Of course, I jumped in there and took a look at the report and the links they were sending me and everything and realized pretty quickly what was going on here. And that is that there’s a difference between when you look at a website on a phone and a bit like Google looks at a web.
When you’re coming into a website as a bot or a crawler or a search engine, or one of those automatic reporters or something, your website is going to see that not as an actual human coming in, but as a bot. And there’s a couple of things. There’s a lot of things that a bot checks when it goes to a website, but one of the two big ones are the sites.
And the robot’s file. I know this gets a little bit technical here, but it’s really easy. And it’s a big one for people to check on here and make sure that these bots can actually see their website properly because bots aren’t just spam bots or anything like that. I know that’s what people really think of when they hear bots.
We’re talking Google’s crawlers too. This is the main search engines is how they see your site. And if Google is not recognizing your site is mobile friendly, then that’s a major part. So, when a bot comes to your website, it looks for those two files. The site map is exactly what it sounds like.
It’s a map of your website. It shows the bot what pages are there and how to get to those pages. So, if you want a search engine or a bot or crawler to find a page on your website, you have to make sure that it is properly linked in your site map. On the flip side, there’s the robots. The robot’s file is specifically just for bots.
It’s not really for anything else. It just tells bots how to use this site. And it will tell them what to look at, what not to look at. And in this case, that’s what was messed up here. The person’s robots file was set up incredibly defensively to block all bots from seeing anything on the website.
Which is obviously a bit too much. Now this is just robots TXT. It’s a text file site map too. It’s just an XML file. So, it’s easily readable by humans. If you go onto your website right now and you go into the file structure, you should see it. Dot HTMLs or Dotty’s ASP X or something like that. And then a couple of TXT files and XML files.
One of those will be robots dot TXT, and one of them will be psych map dot XML. Usually, you can open those up and see exactly what I’m talking about here. And if you want to do a quick search and find a. Less restrictive robots, TXT file, or reach out and talk to a technical professional to have them fix it up for you.
Those are probably the easiest ways to address this, but if you are running a checker like that and for some reason its kicking back weird answers saying, hey, this bot can’t see your website. Then those are probably the first places to check. Or if you’re building a new website, you really want to make sure that you are checking in on your site map and your robots.
If you don’t know how to do that, you’re not comfortable accessing these files. Then again, reach out to your web developer, your local technical professional. They should be able to jump in there and help you out. No problem. So that’s just a really quick and easy win that people can jump in there and check on their websites and make sure that bots and crawlers and search engines are properly indexing their site.
They’re seeing the pages that you want them to see. Not seeing the pages that you don’t want them to see. Cause they really are. There are good reasons to block certain sections from us. And that’s what that system or what these files exist for. So just wanted to answer that one here, right off the top.
I know it’s a little technical, a little bit boring, but it, again, it’s a quick, easy win and it can really screw people if they don’t know what to do.
Okay. If you want me to go into more depth here maybe, I’ll find some links to throw in the comments so people can check this stuff out and I’ll do that. But let me know here in the comments, just to throw in the comments there. If you have any questions, if you’ve run into that problem before, or if you’re having other similar issues, maybe you describe your issue here and I’ll see what I mean.
But for the time being, while you’re typing away there in those comments, I will toss it back over to you, Mike. Did you have any vacation stories you wanted to hit here or. I’m going to update us all on. What’s been going on the last few weeks. Yeah. Yeah. I’ll give you a couple at least one good one here.
Cause it’s, I think it’s very relevant to some things that we talk about on the show all the time. And so really to me, two main picture ideas here, I always give the example when we’re talking about skipping the search and using an app on your phone to do business with people, I always give the example of hotels.com.
And I always say, that since I put the app on my phone, I’ve used hotels.com to book my hotels, that almost every place I’ve gone, unless I get a special deal or something like that, through another avenue. And I said, the only time I would ever take that off my phone and not use hotels.com again is if they really pissed me.
So, as you can probably tell from my foreshadowing that has happened on my trip. And another thing that happened in the same story that I’m about to tell has to do with another key thing that we talk about all the time. And that is it’s much easier to keep a customer than it is to get a new customer.
And so many times when we’re talking about marketing and advertising and sales, or overly focused on getting those new customers, who are always going to cost. And be less reliable than the customer that we already have. The key thing that we need to do with that customer we already have, of course, is take good care of them, which is really not that hard.
If you know what you’re doing and you’re have the self-awareness in order to examine your marketing bridge and make corrections where you need because the customer’s always right, the market is the market. And if you aren’t taking care of your customers, obviously you’re going to.
Lose the ones you have, you’re going to lose current market share, but you’re also not going to be able to get new ones as easy, because it’s easy as you would. Because as we talked about as well, it’s not a top-down messaging society. Any random joke and go on the internet and talk about your business and talk about their experience with them and other random Joe’s or James can see that and make a buying decision based off of that before the ever interact with anything that you’re doing in your marketing, your advertising, your sales.
So, what happened? I was on a road trip down to the mountains of north Georgia to see my kinfolk and the halfway point ended up having to be Carbondale, Illinois. Lovely place, Carbondale, Illinois, a little sarcasm there, but it was, I think the nicest choice in Southern Illinois when you’re in Southern Illinois miles, there’s not a lot of Ritz Carltons around.
And so, I ended up staying at the home to suites Hilton in Carbondale, Illinois. And I have to say that the F I stayed there twice on my way down on the way back up. And I have to say that on my initial stay, it was not that bad. It was a lovely suite. It was clean. The people were nice. They took pretty good care of me that night.
Okay. What happened was about a day or two later, when I noticed that there was a double charge on my account and I paid an extra room, I got an extra room fee on my credit card. Now I should back up for a second because when I did check in the young man that checked me in was nice enough to say, Hey, Mr.
Hannah, we actually have two reservations somehow for you. I said what that can’t be. I only reserved one reservation, look, here’s my hotels.com app. It only shows one reservation. And he’s yeah, you’re right. It must be some sort of a mix up, you should call hotels.com and just make sure you don’t get charged for two rooms.
So, me, I do what I’m told. I go upstairs. I’m on hotels.com for hold probably an hour and a half. I talked to somebody, they talked to the hotel. I’m told, Hey, no worries. We got ya. It was a total mix up. You’re only going to be charged for one room, right? Course, to get charged for two. All right. So, then the next three days, literally I’m going back and forth between the hotel and hotels.com.
Nobody will take responsibility for this screw up and give me a refund. And I can’t believe it. And hotels.com and saying that it’s not their fault. The Hilton is saying it’s not their fault. This is what the hell done. Literally. They said they had to charge me for a no-show. And I said, this is after about half hour talking to the manager on the phone.
I’m like, ma’am how in the world do you check somebody into your hotel? Have them stay the night in your hotel and then charge them for not showing up to the hotel. I’m literally in the hotel. I was like, at least give me the second room. Just give me the one room and then charge me for two cookies. What planet are we on?
And so long story short, somewhere as I was coming back because I was a real sucker. Cause I still kept my reservation for the time coming back through. So sometime then way back, cause I’m going up a mountain in Tennessee. I eventually convinced her that, even if it’s not your fault, just do what’s right for the customer.
I’m even, I’m throwing like. Hilton quotes item at this point, like somebody just needs to stand up and say, I want this person to still be my customer. And even if it wasn’t my fault, I’m going to do what’s right by them. It reminded me of God, what’s the guy’s name that owns the Houston rockets Tillman for Fertitta or something like that.
You familiar with him? Miles is a billionaire. This guy is a billionaire. He owns the Houston rockets. Somebody looks them up for me, but yeah, he owns hundreds and hundreds of restaurants. Yeah, not entirely sure to say that, but you’ve got to get close. Yeah. Yeah. He owns hundreds of restaurants, hotels, casinos, like I said, he owns the Houston rockets, very smart business guy.
And he’s a successful billionaire and he says, the heart or the most difficult thing in businesses. That he deals with every day with his companies is just trying to get them to realize the value of the customers that they have and to go above and beyond to take care of them.
He’s like we put silly rules all the time and roadblocks up for customers that are completely arbitrary. Like when you’re staying at a hotel, and you call down for breakfast and it’s 1100. And they say, I’m sorry, sir. We stopped serving breakfast at 11:00 AM. He’s that’s complete nonsense.
You have the eggs down there. You have the toast down here. You have the, make him some breakfast and bring it up to them. They’re your customer. They’re wanting to spend money with you, do everything you can to keep that relationship going. And like I said, even if it’s not your fault and I’m not really even sure whose fault it was, in that whole scenario, but I’ll tell you one thing, I’m not spending money.
I would say with hotels.com. I was, I deleted that app. I left him a terrible review. I deleted the app and I’m not staying at the home to suites and Hilton and Carbondale, Illinois again, cause we’ve got to tell you what they did, even though they refunded my money. Yeah, this is partially my dumb ass for even staying there.
Again, they put me in a dirty room that put me in the worst room. It was like the worst suite at the end of the hotel, like right next to it, there was a train station nearby. So, I said, okay, I get it guys. Like my goodness, Sarah, just getting back at you for being annoying, Alaska. Yeah, because I didn’t want to pay $500 to stay in Southern Illinois.
I kept telling him, I go, guys, I’m staying in a $500 hotel room. No offense, but that wasn’t it. I stay at the Ritz-Carlton Nashville next time. And this skip Illinois all together. Okay. That is fun though. Just like being able to be a no-show at a restaurant or at a hotel that you are at. Yeah.
That’s a funny story. I said you charge my credit card for showing up one time. So anyways, hopefully some people got some actual usage out of that a rambling story there, really, like I said, the takeaway is what can you do as we talk about all the time to remove hoops in order for people to give you money easier, and then to be able to take care of that customer, once you have it.
Because that is just going to drop your cost of acquisition through the floor and miles as I toss it back here for you to give them some actual advice on technology and how they could weaponize this for good to help their customers even more, talk to us a little bit about apps and how can I utilize something like an app to take care of my customer more?
We talked about it on the front. With the hotels.com example of how an app can let you or allow your customer to do business with you easier. They’re not going to be searching for your competition on Google or Bing or something like that. But what about on the back end of it? How can we take care of a customer more?
I’m thinking about let’s talk about a restaurant owner, for example, I opened up a new restaurant in a new location. I’m going to get a honeymoon period; people are going to talk about. Go try out the new place. What if I had an app? What can I do with that app and instruct my staff, my waitresses, my managers, my waders, my bartenders in order to leverage that in order to get people to sign up for something like a rewards program?
So, let’s take that and run with it. Yeah, your story right there really plays into a lot of strengths of just the app business. Before we jump into that I just want to really hammer down on one thing that you made pretty clear there is that not everything is about marketing. Not everything is about technology.
Not everything is about, what we do all day, every day. Some of it is just. Running a good business and taking care of the customer. Hopefully we’re making that easier and using technologies and helping you leverage technology to make your life easier in doing that. But ultimately, that’s your goal here.
You’ve got to take care of the customer. You’ve got to give them a good experience. And then, everything, everything comes after that. Everything else is either leading to that or coming away from that, but that has to remain your focal point. I think it’s pretty easy, especially for people in our space to maybe get a little distracted and just, want to build an app for everything.
Nothing replaces high quality customer service, a hundred percent miles. I’m glad you drove that point on. Let me add some more fuel onto the fire. If you take care of your customers, that is everything. You don’t have to even have her. Do you see the Ritz Carlton advertising, you ever seen an ad for the Ritz-Carlton hotel?
Not that I can think of. Why do you think that is? I think their brand and their business speaks for itself. Yeah. They are known for that word. No, this was not a Ritz-Carlton that statement. No net yet. It was this far from the Ritz-Carlton I got charged originally. Like it was a Ritz Carlton.
That’s what I’m saying. But the reason that they don’t have to advertise is because the Brant, you say Ritz, Carlton, people just think service, they think such a high level of service. That if they’re not like, shaving you and giving you a foot massage, you’re disappointed, after you leave right.
So, though we were talking about working smarter, not harder, all the time. And this is exactly where this falls into is that if you don’t care, your customer, your cost of acquisition goes up. You have to advertise more. You have to have more gimmicks. You have to have more giveaways. You have to cut your price.
You have to do all these things. You just, the Ritz Carlton ever do a gimmick or a giveaway or cut their price. All right. So, they do the opposite of all the people that want to take the shortcut routes in business. And it all goes back to what you just, that key sentence that you just said was taking care of your customer, is everything.
It literally is 90% of the battle, it’s like that old what I think it’s Woody Allen quote, 90% of the success that just shows. Yeah. That’s really what it is. It’s showing up day in and day out for your customer, and that makes everything, you do, your marketing and your advertising, your sales so much easier.
So, miles, I’m sorry to interrupt again, but this is just like my God. It’s an important point. And that’s why I wanted to start with it. You got to treat your customers, right? And you got to keep them coming back because like you said, it’s a lot easier to keep an existing customer than it is to go out and get new houses.
I’d rather someone come back 10 times than go out and get 10 different customers anytime, any day. And that’s across industries, across businesses. I can’t think of something where it doesn’t work, where that is not the case or where that wouldn’t be a preferable path. Yeah. And what’s going to happen when they’ve come back those 10 times, they’re going to bring somebody new with them every time.
Cause they’re going to say you got to check this out. What happens if they don’t get treated? Don’t go there. That, and it’s going to amplify. What other. Efforts you were making. I can, unfortunately I say this all the time, this is an, and not an, or for most small businesses who aren’t the Ritz-Carlton, you can’t make a name for yourself.
Exactly like that. So even if you do a really good job in treating your customers while you’re probably doing so. Alison in addition to that, you’re doing some sort of outreach or some sort of marketing efforts. Those two things if done properly will complement one another. So, a happy customer will engage with you on social media, which is going to elevate your social media efforts and all the different posts you’re doing over there.
They’re going to give you a nice review on Google and that’s going to help your listing and your search rankings over there. And again, they’re going to grab their friends. They’re going to bring those people in. And this is going to have a butterfly effect of having more and more people engage with you, both in person and in the online space.
So, these two hemispheres they’re two sides of the same coin. They don’t really operate completely independently and done properly. They should. They should help out each other. So that being said I did want to jump onto that app question that you asked before, because you’re exactly right.
That is exactly the product or the technology that I was thinking of with this example, as you were talking about your hotels.com app and one of the main benefits of utilizing a mobile app in a small business is that it is so sticky. It helps to get you more recurring, more loyal customers.
Pick up your phone right now and look at it. How many apps on there have you not used for a long time, and you downloaded a long time ago? People don’t delete apps unless them. Do something horribly wrong in double charge them, or they’re setting a bunch of spammy push notifications or something, unless you’re doing something really wrong with it.
Then once someone downloads an app it’s on there and, I tell people all the time, we’re usually building out websites or something, trying to get them mobile friendly because depending on the study that you look at somewhere between 60 and 80% of mobile of web browsing is done on a mobile device now, but that’s not even the startling.
People are on their phones for several hours a day. I think it’s like it’s four plus hours a day on average for, the average north American. But 90% of that is spent in apps, not browsing the internet, not on a browser there it’s on a native. And even if you are starting with a search, you’re starting from scratch, you want to go out and buy something and you’re starting from scratch 30% of those start on a branded app search, not just opening up the browser and searching for something.
So right there at the very beginning 90 plus percent of your traffic or of the attention on these little mobile devices that people are staring. Several hours a day are going to apps. And if you have one on there, if you’ve gotten them to download it one way or another, then you have introduced yourself to that ecosystem of just tons and tons of untapped attention.
And as we both know; attention is the currency of the land. Now, 21st century currency is. Attention. So, apps are really good at again being sticky they’re they? They’re they let people skip that search and just go directly to you instead of searching for, I want pizza near me. If they have that one needs a place, like you said, have the Rudy’s app on their phone or whatever, pick your favorite pizza place, then they’re just going to go directly to that in order from that person rather than searching and seeing the whole list of all of your competition right now.
It also gives you the opportunity to introduce things like push notifications to let them know when specials are happening loyalty programs. They can win points for ordering with you and store them on the app. So, they have to keep the app in order to keep the points there. They’ll have to revisit your business on our, to build up those points and get whatever the reward is.
You can use it to increase customer service or open up a direct line of communication with your customer is that way via push notifications. You can talk to them directly and then phew through. Either a live chat function or an email form or whatever you want to build into your app there, they can have a direct line to you as well.
So that’s going to increase your ability to provide really good customer service. Again, it’s all about treating that customer well, but these tools and these technologies can allow you to do those things at a higher level and be more effective at the things you’re already trying. So yeah, mobile app is a really good example of something that you can put out there that is specifically good for keeping recurring customers and building brand loyalty.
If for nothing else, then they’re staring at this phone all day, every day and your logo was on it. Just subconsciously staring at your logo all day, every day has to. But yeah, if you accidentally double charged someone cop up to it and refund them also, I don’t know. I don’t know what to say about that one. Yeah, that was a good one. Got the no-show charge for staying at one state now.
But, yeah, you also said that you threw a bad review out there. So that can be for something big, like hotels.com and they can handle it. But for a small business, that can be hugely detrimental and know that search engines look at these things very specifically. If there’s lots of data points that people don’t even realize that they’re pulling out of these reviews if you only have.
You only have three bad reviews and you’ve got 20 positive ones, but those three bad reviews are about one specific thing. They’ve got the same recurring keyword in there. Google is pulling that out and they know that you are really bad at this one particular thing. And they’re going to put that front and center for when someone searches.
So, if you have really bad customer service or you’ve got one server at your restaurant, that’s just mean to everyone and they keep popping up in these three bad reviews, Google’s going to see that it’s going to process that. It’s going to realize that there’s a recurring theme here, and that’s going to show up in your search results.
So, it’s not just the star value or something like there. Google is now looking at the actual text content and it’s getting smarter and the ability to Contextualize things. So even in a five-star review, it can pull out one sentence of, Hey, this particular thing. Wasn’t awesome, but everything else was great.
Five stars. It’s going to see that sentence in there. And it’s going to realize that there’s a negative connotation surrounding this word, and it’s going to pull that out and process it accordingly. So, reviews, incredibly powerful and keeping track of those, not just seeing the star value, but actually.
Reading through them and recognizing when there are recurring themes, there are things that you need to look into because search engines are going to see that, oh, that’s a little bit off the beaten path here and not exactly what we’re talking about, but something I was actually addressing earlier yesterday.
And it’s just a fun little tidbit or not so fun, little tidbit about how smart search engines are. They’re leveraging all of the content out there, even the stuff you don’t realize that they’re seeing
Google sees all.
All right. So, I’m just going to circle back here to the top of the show. This is asking Wildman and open Q and a produced by wild man web solutions. We’re here to answer your questions. If you have any questions, you want us to talk about something even it’s just a particular subject matter. Throw that in the comments below.
Hello, we are live streaming to our Facebook page, YouTube channel and Twitch account. We do this every Wednesday at 11. So, make sure to tune in live to get your questions answered live. But if you’re not seeing this live, you’re watching this later. Yeah. Still involve yourself, email us@askwildmanatwildmanweb.com.
And we will either just respond to you there, or maybe talk about your question, your subject next week on ask wild man. Also make sure to visit our website while on the web.com. We’ve got tons of good resources there. We put out this show as a resource to help. Provide some value and answer some questions.
But we do that in a number of different ways on our website. There’s a whole resources tab on our website. If you check that out, we’ve got tons of articles to help you out on everything. We’ve got free software and tools. We’ve got a link to our podcast, which is this show publish audio only. So, if you’re really more of an audio only kind of person check that out, we’ve got that wherever podcast.
Wherever you listen to podcasts. And we have this show archived on there. So, if we said something smart three weeks ago, and you want to go look that up, we’ve got that there in the live stream archives all the way back to, I think the beginning of the show at some point last year, we should go back and count how many times we’ve done this.
I think maybe we might be surprised. Yes. All right. With that. When did you mention the newsletter in there? Miles. Oh, I didn’t get to get a plugin. Yeah, we’ve got a, we’ve got a newsletter. We send out a weekly with some really good content in there. I know me and my team. All right. And contribute to that.
And there’s exclusive content in there that we don’t put anywhere else. Sign up for our newsletter. I’ll put a link to that in the comments here below, but if you go to our website, Pop up there in the corner and let you subscribe to it there. But yeah, there’s some exclusive content there that we don’t put out on the live stream blog or anywhere else.
If you want the best stuff early and before everyone else, that’s a newsletter’s place to get it. All right. That is enough for our shameless plugs. We’re here to answer your questions. So far, I’m just seeing a pile of bad jokes questions. If we get desperate and make tells a few jokes as well, but I do have a brief news update miles if there aren’t any pressing questions down there in the comment section.
No, go for it. Use update. Okay. News update here. I’m sure I’ve missed a whole lot of stuff. While I was gone, cause I was not paying attention to the news. Recently just a couple of quick things, and then I’m going to actually talk about an opinion piece here, miles and open this up for discussion, but a couple of headlines here, apple, Dell doubles down on privacy, further conflict, complicating tracking, and targeting, and another headline, Google Titans, Android policies shrinking already limited mobile app ad tracking.
So basically, what is happening here is just a continuation of what’s been happening. Over the course of the last six months, especially, but apple once again, tightening their privacy. This has to do a lot with. With tracking on all their devices, as well as email ID. And so, people that are using email on something like an apple computer or an iPhone there’s going to be advanced basically blocking of, or masking of your ID on that.
Yes, marketers, won’t be able to get as much information about who’s opening emails and things like that, which was interesting. And then Google has basically done what they already did on iOS to Android now. And so, it’s going to be really hard to get that third party data at least accurately, not that say that third party data is going away.
Completely. And we’ve covered that several times on the show, just going into what is third party data, first party data, and zero party data, and how you can work around some of these limitations that are being presented to us. If you are doing your digital marketing yourself. So, if you go back and look at that, we have some articles, I believe as well up on that.
But it also then brought my opinion to an opinion piece here that I think I’ll put down in the. In the comment section so everybody can read it. Cause it’s a little lengthy but I’ll summarize at least a little bit of it. The title is brands must go beyond advertising to connect in a post COVID 19 world.
The industry is at a crossroads as less data in consumers could equate good equate with even fewer effective ads. So, anybody who’s been watching the show is not a stranger to this topic. Again, we’ve been discussing it many times. Yeah, just a little bit over the course of the past six months, but it really is a big deal.
This is not the death of advertising or anything like that. But it is a shift or is this opinion piece calls a crossroads from where we were certainly the last 10 years the digital ad space where everything was really heavily focused on targets. Tracking remarketing and all that good stuff.
And basically, what the, this opinion piece is arguing, which I tend to agree. Yeah. Most of what they’re saying here is that brands are going to have to, of course still do digital marketing. They’re going to have to do it more effectively. They’re going to have to make more engaging content.
They’re going to have to make more active type of platforms, work for them to engage their audiences. They’re but they’re also going to have to engage with them in the real world and in the analog. And then. The real live space, and as events come back, I think that’s something that a lot of people have forgotten a little bit about what that means for a real person.
It’s a representative your company to talk to a real person that is a perspective prospect of a client, excuse me, or customer at an event. That is within that customer’s wheelhouse or that perspective customers, wheelhouse, if I am selling bike parts, and I show up at a bike race, or I’m a race bike manufacturer, and my people are able to connect with the people who are coming to that race.
And it’s going to be a much more memorable experience. Then a 32nd ad that they see on Instagram that says, buy my stuff. That is something that, brands are really going to have to retrain themselves how to do because the ones that get out there and do it well, I think they’re going to be poised for a really big advantage to the ones who are, we see over 10 ads a day right now, and most of them are ineffective, right?
The vast majority of ads, 99.9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9, 9% of them. We could care less about; we forget as soon as it’s over and we move on to the night. And so, a, if you’re already spending money on advertising, please audit everything. You do. The content that you put out, the copy that you put out, how you’re putting it out, put together a seven-step marketing plan, like we’ve talked about before on the show.
So, you’re spending that money more wisely. But if you are getting ready to advertise, you’re planning on advertising, these are the things that you should be thinking about is. And it’s it’s again, it’s an, and or both, or, but how can I, do we be more effective, more engaging with my digital content, but how can I also have a real presence and connect with people on a real-life level.
In addition to that and, one of the interesting things miles, and they mentioned this in the article, when you look at younger people, and unfortunately, I don’t know if I fall in that category anymore, let’s take people, maybe, 30 and younger, maybe even 35 and younger, they are less and less consuming passive media, or certainly not consuming print. But they’re even really less consuming television. Or anything that’s passive. So, what are they consuming? They’re really into video games, right? They’re really into things that are interactive. Why is a platform like clubhouse, one of the fastest growing platforms to ever be launched because it’s interactive?
And again, we’ve talked about this, but it’s important, it’s not top-down anymore. It’s all around. It’s 360-degree marketing. The more that we’re able to leverage that engagement level, leverage anything that is active or an act a way that we can make people take action when they see our messaging and not be passive, that is going to be way better for our bottom line, in terms of our raw ROI, what’s happening is there’s a lot of people out there that are doing old type of advertising, and they’re trying to make it work in this new medium, and they’re wasting a whole lot.
Doing that. And so, you got to think, and really, this shouldn’t be a surprise to anybody. If we, if you’ve read the 12 causes of advertising, the trophy or 12 causes of bad advertising failure, which you should have by road Williams, it goes all the way back. 20 plus years, he was talking about this don’t rely on passive advertising because it doesn’t engage people.
It doesn’t surprise people. It doesn’t make people take action. And again, when we’re faced with 10,000 ads a day, there’s a whole lot of eye-rolling hell, closing your eyes, closing your ears, and trying to tune that stuff out as much as possible. So, if we can take the other direction if we can make content our guiding principle and not.
Putting out a message, buy my stuff, but we can actually create content that people want to engage in. People want to consume. And maybe if we’re doing a really right, that people will want to jump in and do their own content. We talked about this a few weeks ago on the show when we had it.
On with us and she’d talked to, she did several great articles about user-generated content. And we talked about how psychologically that is so powerful to get somebody, to be able to create something in line with engaging with your brand. And again, if you look at what the younger people want, they want to create.
My, my son and I’ve used this example, many times 14, 15-year-old boys. They don’t just want to, first of all, they don’t watch television. They watch you too, but they don’t just want to watch YouTube. Cause that’s passive. They want to be creators on G they are creators on YouTube, right?
Like they’re making their own YouTube content. Talk about a man. What’s the guy’s name? I’m not hip anymore. Travis Scott. Okay. Travis Scott, who? For those of you who aren’t hip like me. Okay. He is a, he’s a pop star that all the teenagers are into. He did his big album release.
I believe last fall, maybe in the last summer, the one that did the fortnight isn’t right yeah. He did his big, really creative work around here. And there’s no better name in the game is to creation. That game is a mix between a first-person shooter and Minecraft. It’s all about.
Making stuff and interacting with people. It’s almost liked a social experience experiment or a social experience, maybe experiment as well, but more of a social experience than it is just a shooting game. Exactly. Yeah. And that’s how he, I forget forgiving if it was his album or a single, or whatever that he launched, but.
That was just an epic, brilliant piece of marketing. And I guarantee you that it worked a lot better than if you would’ve just taken out a half page ad in the New York times. Or, ransom television commercials, or even some Facebook ads, at this point, the fact that it wasn’t passive, that it made people engage with it, made people remember it I’m a 40-year-old man.
Who’s never listened to his music. And I still remember that, now I’m hypersensitive to marketing and stuff like that. So maybe I’m a little skewed, but. That’s what we’re talking about. And you may think gosh, I’m not Travis Scott. I can’t, do my own fortnight concert, to launch a product true.
But as a small business, when I’m trying to get you to think, yeah, is to think outside the box. Okay. Take that $3,000 that you’re going to spend on some silly picture. In some magazine, that’s going to sit in a doctor’s office this quarter and put it into creating something that people are going to want to enjoy.
Comment on share. Hopefully actually engage and take action. And once you start doing that, you’re going to start seeing a whole big difference in how your marketing is going to play out for you in the long run. Yeah, because it’s different. That’s what really made it stand out because like you, I wasn’t really familiar with the artist.
I’m not familiar with the game too much. I’m not a gamer. So, I’m completely outside of this circle. And still hearing about that. I’m curious. And I want to know, I want to see it to this person that I don’t know, whose music I’m not familiar with is performing on a platform I don’t exist on, and I want it.
That is good marketing. Yeah. So, I’m going to put this down here in the comment section. People can read it. Like I said, I thought it was a really good take and hit on a lot of them. That we’ve talked about over the course of the last nine months or so. So that’s all I got here from the news desk miles.
I’m going to send it back to you over to you. Awesome. We are coming up to the end of our show here. We can be going for. 15 minutes now. So, we’re going to wind down for the day. If you do have any questions, please throw them in the comments here, or just email us, ask wildman@wildmanweb.com.
I do have that address scrolling below for you to check in over here. Okay. We got a comment here that I don’t think is a question and I don’t know what it is. So, I’m assuming it’s for you. Different jam Collin more I think Jeff was throwing in his us open championship pick right here. So yeah, we can wrap up the show with a little bit of golf talk.
If anybody has any work to do you can leave us now. Yeah, but we’ll talk a little golf here because yeah, it would be good. I think if we stop the show early, we go. We got a lot of stuff to get to there this afternoon, but let’s talk some golf. Okay. The United States open championship. It’s our national championship.
It is down there at beautiful Torrey Pines and San Diego, California, man, that sounds like a nice place to be this week. Okay. We got Jess Pitt calling Morioka I think it’s a fine pick, Jeff. That was the PGA championship winner in 2020. He’s had one win; I believe on the team. Earlier this spring, a couple of keys, top 10 finishes, a lovely pick.
This course you got to play well around the greens. You got to be a great with your wedge. So, I that’s where I’m going with my thought process here. I have not placed a bet yet on somebody. So, I’m still trying to figure out exactly where my money is going to be, but I’ll tell you what, when we talk about short game and we talk about bunkers, especially.
I like players like Justin Rose. I like players like Patrick Reed. I like players like JT. I love Jordan’s. My heart of course is, was Phil. I think Phil I think he’s focused. I hope he can get it done. I’m still blown away by what he did at the PGA. I think if he does it this year, I told Aiden the other day.
It is my son. I said, it may be a greater story than tiger at the masters two years ago. He disagreed with me, that’s what happens. So, I’m definitely pulling for Phil. I think Gary can certainly hang out there. I worry about Gary’s wedges, but the fairways are wide enough that he can drop bombs out there and just have little, short dingers into the green, hopefully in the first putters, hot lookout.
But I think. I think I’m going to put money on a John Rob. I can’t really talk myself out of putting money on John Rome at this point. He’s one of the greatest short game players out there. He can aim at those bunkers, miss the deep, rough and get up and down all day long. Yes, I know he had COVID classes.
He was six shots up though on the field when he was told he had COVID. So, it really didn’t affect him that much. I’m hoping he’s healthy and ready to go out there and get another win at Torrey Pines. So that is where my money is. My heart of course, is with Phil and Gary. That’s it. I’m out. Good to be back with you though today miles and appreciate everybody watching.
Listen to the show. We’ll come back next week with some more fun. Yeah, and I just threw that newsletter signup link in the comments for anyone who hasn’t signed up already. We actually just sent out our newsletter for this week during the show. If you are not signed up there, you’re missing out on some really good, easy, actionable.
And keyword research steps that you can take as well as other exclusive offers and announcements. So, make sure to click that link and subscribe. We’re not going to try to sell you anything on that. It’s just good resources. So, we’ll send that out once a week. Yeah, but that is it from us today.
We will see you next Wednesday at 11, live a tuned into Facebook, YouTube, Twitch. And if you want to have your questions answered, then please email us, ask wild web.com and we’ll get to you next Wednesday. All right. Thanks everyone. Thanks.
