Transcript
Miles: [00:00:00] Hello internet. It is Wednesday, March 24th at 11 o’clock in the morning. So, you know what time that makes it, it is time for Ask Wildman.
Hello everyone. My name is Miles Bassett. I’m the CEO of Wildman Web Solutions. We are a full-service digital agency based here in Lawrence, Kansas. We specialize in working with small and medium-sized businesses, helping them to leverage technology, to grow and achieve their goals. We started doing this live stream about a year ago.
Just to answer everyone’s questions. We realized we’re getting a bunch of the same questions over and over again. So, we figured we’d put ourselves out there in this open Q and A to answer everyone’s questions about technology, marketing, advertising business in general, whatever you want. So, this is an open Q and A please don’t treat this as a one-way street.
If you have any questions or comments about what we’re talking about, you just want to jump in the conversation. Please leave your comments below as we’re live streaming to our Facebook page, YouTube channel and Twitch account. If you are catching this later, you’re not watching this live. You can email your questions to askwildman@wildmanweb.com and we’ll get to you next week.
As we do this every week, every Wednesday at 11, we stream live to our social media accounts to answer your questions. So, throw those questions in the comments below. We will address them as they come up. Immediately Jeff is commenting here. Jeff. We haven’t even started yet. Come on, give me a second.
All right. But if you have any questions or comments or anything, follow his lead and throw your comments in below on Facebook or YouTube or Twitch now we are on Twitch and I’m seeing, we get a couple of years over there every week. So that’s fun and exciting. All right. Before we get going here, I did want to bring up a resource here.
How do I do this? There we go. If you haven’t checked it out yet, this is our website, wildmanweb.com. There’s a ton of free resources for you. There. We do this to help out our community, but you know, it’s the internet so anyone anywhere can use this, go ahead and check out our website. We’ve got a ton of stuff here, but here under resources, you will find, first of all, our blog, we put up articles here all the time.
I just posted a couple yesterday, just about domains, how to get there, going over a story we actually told last week on this show about a cautionary tale and some shortfalls and Landmines to avoid when I’m getting your domain for your website. So, check out these two articles here for that.
Also went over another thing we talked about last week on how to find a good web design agency, or more specifically how to avoid the bad ones. So that’s all here. Also, under resources. We have our livestream archives. This has all of the previous dreams of this show. So, if we said something brilliant, a couple of weeks back, and you wanted to find it, you can hop back in here and we do upload the full transcript of every show as well.
So, you can probably find what’s going on there coming soon, the podcast as always, we have our toolkit available to you. You can sign up here for a free suite of tools to help you manage your business online. Anyway, that’s all here on our website. All right. Back to your questions. But first I’m going to bring in my partner, Mike, you ready? Here we are.
Mike: [00:07:11] I was born ready. Miles. How in the heck are you doing this morning? Good, sir. Nice to see you.
Miles: [00:07:17] I’m doing good. I’m doing good. It’s been a productive day. So far only 11 o’clock and a bunch of stuff done. So, looking forward to this dream here.
Mike: [00:07:24] You’re busier than a one-legged man in an ass kicking contest Miles.
Miles: [00:07:29] Exactly, but it’s good. It’s good problems to have. We’re working with a lot of great people, a lot of great people, a lot of great organizations and businesses. So, I’m happy to work with them. All right. Like I just went over here. This is an open Q and A, so if you have any questions, please throw them in the comments below.
We’ll try to get to them as they come up here. I gotta take this screen off. And if you are catching this later, please email your questions to askwildman@wildmanweb.com and visit our website for some other resources. So, like I said, right off the bat, we’ve got a question with Jeff Frye jumping in here
We have… “hi fellas, anything to share on text message marketing, the new space looks great.”
Mike: [00:08:14] Yeah, that’s a good question. Actually, I think Jeff was not with us a couple of weeks ago when we talked about those open rates. So hopefully Jeff, you saw that you saw the article that I put down in the in the comments, because it was actually in response to your question a week earlier about email open rates.
And I went and I found the email open rates specifically for 2020 across all the industries. So, I put that in there, but then we also discussed a little bit just the different open rates across different platforms. So, email, Facebook messaging, I think there was maybe one other one I’m forgetting now and text messaging and the open rate currently for text messaging is 98%.
So, you’re absolutely right. There is a huge opportunity there. And it’s really a hot space so to speak. So great question. I think that there’s a couple things to consider when we talk about text messaging, the first thing is to me, it’s really more of a middle and even more of a bottom of the funnel type of a tactic.
So, what I mean by that is, it’s not something that we’re going to use for people who. Don’t really know who we are, or they need a lot of consideration time, in order to do business with us still, that’s still middle and top of the funnel stuff. And so that’s going to be a different type of of a tactic.
But once you get somebody to engage with you, once you get somebody to understand your brand, understand why they should be considering you to solve their problem or fulfill their need then you can get them to opt into something like a texting platform. And that can be extremely important for end of the funnel conversions and also for retention for keeping those customers buying even after the first sale, and that’s maybe even where it’s the most effective.
I’ve used the example many times I think before on the podcast or excuse me, the podcast. Well, this is a podcast. If you’re listening to our podcast version of it, but on the show in general about a company called winetext.com. It’s a a spinoff from Gary V’s father’s company, wine library.
And basically, the whole thing is done on the text platform. Their website is literally a one-page landing page sales funnel that gets you to input your name, your phone number, obviously. So, they can text you your address or they can ship to you and your credit card so they can just automatically bill you when you buy something from them.
And so that’s all you do at your interview. You input those four things and you’re all set up. And then every single day, I actually got one just a little bit ago, but every single day, about this time, they send you a text message. And their business model is we’re going to give you a great wine, sometimes rare wines that you can’t find, in your local liquor store and things like that, and a discounted price.
So today they had a, $60 bottle normally a peanut in a war they were selling for 29 99. So, it’s like, Oh, if you love peanut and alar, who wouldn’t want that kind of a deal. So, it’s all just easy as conversion-based stuff. When they send me the text, if I, in the description of the wine of the day, if I want that, I just send them back.
How many bottles I want thought foul four or five, six, whatever, up to two cases, I think is the limit. I haven’t tested the limit yet. And it automatically charged my credit card, and it shows up at my house about four or five days later. I actually just got, can we have that ready and waiting by the couch?
No, they literally FedEx, literally just now right before we went on the air, let’s see what we got here. They sent me a package from these guys. Yeah. This isn’t supposed to be one of those unboxing videos, but apparently, we’re going to crush it on right here.
I liked it here and send it to me and very nicely constructed box here and here you have some lovely Chardonnay from the Columbia Valley that maybe we’ll try that later on this evening. But and so what that does for me as a consumer is it allows me to, again, it’s all about speed, right?
It’s all about access. It’s all about. Being able to just click a button and then it shows about my house. And so, it allows me to opt in really easily, sometimes a little too easily. I may buy buy from a few too many times. Convenience is what I’m getting at here and the to just boot cut out all the BS and give me exactly what I want.
I hit a button and then it shows up that is going to win nine times out of 10 with consumers. Right? Speed always wins. Convenience always wins. And this is just a great example of how you can leverage a text messaging platform to set up your business model that way in order to just, give them exactly what they want.
Cut all the friction. And we’ve talked about this before on the show, in the sense of don’t let set up hoops for people to jump through, to give you money. It sounds simple enough, but when we look under the hood at most businesses, there’s all kinds of hoops that they’ve set up for you to jump through in order to give them money.
And it makes no sense, remove the friction and you’re going to get more sales. You’re going to get more opt-ins you’re going to get more conversions. So that was a little bit of a rabbit hole there into an example of how you can use a text messaging platform. But the but bring me back to my main point.
There was that it’s a bottom of the funnel conversion tool, and it’s also something that you have to, when you think about how I am going to do my messaging is a, has to be short bursts. It has to be, again, things that don’t take a lot of time to explain. I don’t have to have a lot of consideration. You can’t send people a novel when you’re sending out texts, right?
It’s not how the text messaging platform works. But you also have to think about that. They’re going to read every single one of these things. Again, it’s a 98% open rate. Choose your words very carefully only use the words that you have to use in order to get your point across and to give the consumer, what the end goal is that they’re getting.
And don’t put a lot of fluff into your text messaging campaigns, that stuff you save for your videos and your newsletters and, your YouTube channel and all that stuff where you can go do deep dives and do long format content like we’re doing here, a live show it’s completely opposite kind of messaging that you would do in a text messaging platform.
I’ll let Miles jump in here, but those are my two big things that you got to consider is it’s a bottom of the conversion funnel type of a tactic. And you have to be your messaging has to be really short and really precise.
Miles: [00:14:23] Yeah. Jeff, I guess I’ll bounce back here. Original question is just anything to share on text marketing or text message marketing.
Yes, we did talk about this a couple of weeks, a weeks ago. If you want to go to our live stream archives, I believe it’s the show from the 10th March 10th, that we talked about this we’re talking about more direct message marketing type of campaign. So, text message marketing direct messaging on Facebook, Instagram, that kind of thing.
Email marketing kind of falls into this where you are having a little bit more of a one-on-one conversation. And we went into a little bit more depth on the 10th about just the effectiveness of something like that, where you know what we’re doing right now. We’re just live streaming out to anything, anyone, and everyone that wants to listen to this.
It’s not really to a specific individual or we make another post on, on, let’s say Facebook, that’s to the entire audience, but if you can, in a directly. Communicate with someone via text message, for example, and have that sort of one-on-one style communication. That it’s going to be much more likely that they’re going to be invested in that conversation.
I want to throw in another step that kind of goes along with your incredibly high opening rate that is that people are also more likely to unsubscribe from Tesco text message marketing than email marketing. Yeah. So along with your point there you gotta be concise. You gotta put out as much value in as few characters as possible because people are not looking to read a novel text.
They’re not looking for a long form conversation and keep in mind your audience for these things. So, you can use email marketing in one way in text message marketing in another way, text message marketing is going to be for your highly engaged audience. This is your cream of the crop, right? People that are just in love with your brand and want to engage with you in a very direct and very personal way.
When you get a text, you’re expecting it to be from a friend or a family member, not necessarily a sales pitch or something from a brand. So, if I am engaging with you via text, then it should feel personal, and I should be at least somewhat invested in your business and your brand.
So, keep in mind how you have to communicate with these different audience segments across the different mediums, if you’re doing it appropriately and you’re leveraging that technology or that platform correctly, then you can see amazing results utilizing these tools. If you use it wrong, you’re going to see people run away from your campaign faster than ever.
I just wanna throw that word of caution in there is, know your audience and more than that, know your audience and your platform and how you’re communicating with that audience, because the same person is going to expect a different type of communication, depending on how they’re talking to you.
Mike: [00:16:53] That’s a great point Miles. Yeah. I think the most important word you said, right there was, it was personalized. You really have to personalize this this messaging on a text message platform. And the other word I would throw in there is fragile, I think, maybe fragile to be delicate, and this is a, this a very delicate or fragile sensitive maybe is another word platform.
Like you talked about, the the unsubscribe rate is sky high people, for whatever reason, they feel like, if they send somebody a text, it’s a very personal thing. It’s like an inner sanctum almost. And so, you have to really treat that with a lot of respect, whereas we all have, probably like me have an email account that we give out to, whenever we have to give out our public information and that’s where all the spam emails go, and when I open up that email, I know that it’s going to be 80, 90% spam stuff and not any kind of value-based content.
When I open up my text messages, it’s, I’m used to seeing messages from close friends and family and business, associates and clients and things like that. And so, it’s a whole other psychology that we have to engage in compared to, especially compared to a social platform or things like that, where we see things from all different directions and we’re more desynthesized or desensitize and think is the right word I’m looking for to, to those platforms compared to the sensitivity that comes when we’re reading the text message. So really something to take into consideration there, Miles great point.
Miles: [00:18:25] Yeah. And a little bit more on the the practical side of things. You said anything to share on text marketing. There are a lot of tools out there that allow you to do text message marketing more effectively. It’s not just, you have a list of phone numbers and you’re sitting there personally, individually texting 10,000 people and it takes you all day.
There’s a lot of tools out there. We’re currently going through and vetting some of those options and trying to figure out the best way to make something like that happen. We do have a basic text message marketing system built into the Wildman Business Center that all of our clients have access to.
It’s technically still in beta, but Jeff, if you want to test it out, you are more than welcome to be my Guinea pig here. And that does allow you to communicate directly within our platform to your customers, with whom you have a cell phone. Text or a phone number.
Mike: [00:19:12] Yeah, but it’s a great point Miles. Yeah. We are starting to roll out a text messaging platform that we think is going to be appropriate for our customers, getting our clients for their customers. And just, really excited to see how people are going to utilize that and leverage that for bottom of the funnel conversions.
And I would just, put a button on this conversation. I would really think of it as the top tool for transactional type of marketing right now, where you’re going to give somebody and they’re going to get, and vice versa. And so that’s how you get somebody to opt into your text platform is you give something away and then make sure that when you text them, you’re giving them something of value and something that they, feel really comfortable opting in for.
Miles: [00:19:52] Yeah. It kind of ties into this followup question we got from Chelsea. Hello Chelsea. Can you share a link in a text message or ad that links to the product? Direct e-commerce in a text message marketing campaign. The answer is yes. There’s a lot of different ways you can do that. If you have an online store or somewhere where they can buy online, then you can just share a link directly in a text message, just like you would, if you were sending something to a friend or they’re actually more complicated ways like Mike was talking about with his wine service there where, you are sharing information or more conversationally buying something from someone via a more complicated and more robust text message marketing platform.
So again, find a tool that works for you. There are several out there. If you’re looking at doing that, and you’re not a client of ours, then just do a little bit of research. They all have slightly different pricing structures and pros and cons. But those are pretty readily available for you. So just do a little bit of looking before signing on with anything.
Mike: [00:20:49] Yeah, good question. And I’ll just, I’ll throw one last thing in there and we can put this question to bed, but there’s also an interesting text messaging platform out there called community. And it’s a text messaging platform app that is meant to be used actually more as a long form and less as a kind of a short transactional platform.
And so that’s a really interesting one. I’ve seen some people with audiences use, people that have large followings on social media or they’re authors, or they have podcasts or all of the above. And they’re using that as a way to get people to opt in on a deeper level again, because it’s that really personalized message that you’re getting from somebody.
And they’re using that just to provide value and to connect with people on a deeper level and not really using it to sell much at all. And so that’s been an interesting, I would say newer Avenue that I’ve seen, not a lot of people, but some people use texting platforms for, and I’m really interested to see how that progresses as well.
Miles: [00:21:51] It comes back to just that idea of directly communicating with someone rather than having this one, too many kinds of communication, just blasting out something, a wide net and seeing what it catches. It at least feels like you’re talking to someone on a one-to-one in a one-on-one kind of way.
And that personal communication and the ability to personalize you were talking a lot last week when we were going over utilizing AI in different systems and different kinds of big data algorithms. The ability that we have to leverage these technologies to have more personalized communications directly to our audience is incredibly powerful.
And I’m excited. I know we both are excited to see where this all goes. But a lot of it, I think is veering towards that very personalized one-on-one style communication that a lot of these platforms are steering towards as ultimately, I know we’re all annoyed by ads when they pop up and in in interrupt our YouTube video or whatever it is, you’re doing, but the best ads are the ones that you want to see.
You want to be marketed to by these companies. You’re actually interested in this product and the service you want to hear more. You want to be sold this thing. And so, I think as marketers and as business owners out there, anything that we can do to personalize our message, to ensure that we’re talking to the right people that are really actually truly interested and invested in our company and putting that out there in the right way, in the right time so that people can digest it and they actually want to see your marketing.
They want to see your message. I think that’s a win, win for everyone involved. Definitely. And that’s why content marketing is so important and why it’s becoming so effective and really replacing a traditional marketing in a lot of ways. Crucial advertising, I should say. But yeah. All right. I think we’ve hit that pretty well. Text message marketing. And we have any other questions, guys, if you want to throw your questions in the comments below, or, if you have any experience dealing with the stuff we’re talking about, this doesn’t have to be a one-way street here, so feel free to just throw in your resources, your experiences and we’ll bring those up on screen.
I got a couple of questions that came in last week. This is actually one of the reasons I just showed you guys the blog and a couple of articles that I put up there. We had our Storytime with Mike towards the end of last week show going over a particular story a cautionary tale of how not to deal with your business’s domain.
So, I actually wrote a whole article on there. He posted an article with just that video, if you want to catch that. And then another article on. Domains for business because a lot of people were confused. I had a couple of conversations with people over the course of the week that didn’t necessarily know the difference between a domain and hosting where that delineation was where emails fit into that mix domain emails and what they need to be looking for a domain. So, if you want to go to our website, check out this new article domains for business, where to start, that’s the title. I’ll go ahead and post it in the comments here. But it can be a really good way to start things.
I’m just going to summarize everything really quick. And then if you guys have any follow-up questions on business domains, how to get them, how to manage them, please throw those in the comments here, right? Just to start off with what a domain is. This is the address for your website. If you imagine your website as a house inside that house has all of your content and everything that you’ve done on your website address of that house.
That just how I find it. So, I need to be able to communicate to other people in some way that they can understand, and they can navigate Billy. Address is that’s the domain. You can think of the internet as a series of interconnected computers all over the world, connected through a crazy series of cables that run the entire length of the planet.
Each one of those computers has an ID, a number. This is your IP address. Websites are no different. They have a specific number and an identification that allows people to navigate and use tools called browsers. So, like Chrome, internet Explorer, or Firefox Safari, whatever you want, you use browsers. And these are the tools that allow you to put in an address, and then they know how to navigate the internet and go and find that address and display that site to you.
But instead of remembering a series of crazy numbers and an IP address assigned to a website, we decided to use domains. This is a text-based mask of that ID. You’re still technically putting in that ID. That’s the actual address of the website, but it’s being masked by a series of characters that are easier to remember.
Ours is wildmanweb.com so you just have to go to a registrar. This is a company that tells all of the other computers, the entire internet. Hey, this is the address associated with this location. Wildman Web Solutions is located at wildmanweb.com, that is their domain. That is their address. So, you go to one of those registrars, you can use GoDaddy, you can use Namecheap, there’s a bunch of them out there.
I like to use Google domains. So, go to domains.google.com. Just because we’re a Google partner. It works really well with other Google products. It comes with a free SSL and other benefits there. It’s easy to share management, so you don’t have to actually give access or your domain over to anyone to put your website.
But yeah, you can. Yeah, whatever you want, they’re relatively cheap unless you need something very specific. Mike’s example last time, I think it was like food.com or something. That’s just so generic that everyone wanted. That could be a little expensive, but if it’s just the name of your company, wildmanweb.com, it’s 12 bucks a year, super easy.
That goes into, I have a whole list here in this article of how to actually pick a domain. So, these are a couple of questions that I got from people asking about domains and answers to those. So, starting off with file extensions, you’ll see some that are .com .net .org. You can get one that’s .ninja.
There’s just some ridiculous ones out there. My answer to that is stick with .com unless you have a very specific reason to use another file extension.com was the most common. If someone doesn’t quite remember your website, they’re going to guess it’s dot com. If they remembered our website was wildmanweb, but they weren’t entirely sure they’re probably just going to put in .com. It just rolls off the tongue of most people just because it is the most common there. So, go with .com. If you need something else, for some other reason, you have a good reason to use another extension. But the .com is available. I’d say, get the .com and then also get that other extension so that if anyone guesses .com, they don’t remember quite right, and they just enter it in.
They’re still going to land on your website. .org are technically reserved for nonprofits. So, you might want to go in that direction. .edu is for schools .net doesn’t really have a particular purpose. So, unless you have a really good reason, just go with .com in general, when you’re trying to figure out the name of your website, when you’re trying to pick your domain, the shorter, the better pick something that is short, it’s easier to remember. It’s easier to share. You just are going to save time, typing it. The number of times that you typed this to share it, it’ll actually save you some time in your life. But mostly it’s just easier to remember. Again, if you have a longer business name, like our business name is technically Wildman Web Solutions. But our website is wildmanweb.com. We also went out and bought wildmanwebsolutions.com, so we have the entire thing and no one else can get it that reserves it for our business. And we have it all directing to wildmanweb.com. It’s just a little bit easier to say a little bit shorter, easier to remember.
But we went ahead and got both because like I said, domains are a dollar a month, maybe. So, we might as well get it. With that being said, pick one that is easy to spell and pronounce. So, you’re, we’re going to be verbally sharing this with people. You need to be able to say it, people are going to be able to they are going to read it and then wants to tell it to other people.
So, pick one that is easy to say, easy to pronounce, easy to spell. If you are making your own personal website and you have a crazy hard to spell name. Then maybe don’t use your own name for your domain. If someone’s going to misspell it. If your name has multiple spellings, you be careful of that. Along with this tip, avoid numbers and hyphens and things like that, where you have to say, wildman-web.com, are you actually spelling out dash or is it a hyphen? This avoids the four versus four debate. Is it F O U R? Is it the number four? Is it F O R you get the point, the problem there. So, avoid numbers, avoid hyphens, avoid words with multiple spellings, or that are really difficult to spell. If I tell it to you, you should be able to get the exact spelling of this entire domain on your first guess.
This one is a little bit fun. But just read through your domain and show it to other people as a single word. There’re no spaces in domains, which allows you to put the break in between words in multiple places. The example I put in this article is a website for American scrap metal. If you put that all together, then you don’t really know where that S is supposed to go.
And so, it could be read as Americans scrap metal or America, Americans, crap metal. There’s a bunch of excuse or a bunch of examples out there that are not over the air appropriate things that people have accidentally named their websites. Not realizing that it could be read a different way. Look at it all as one word, show it to a couple other people, see what they see and if they are reading the same thing that you’re reading here is that can lead to some potentially funny but bad branding mistakes for different businesses and organizations out there. And then finally, final point here. This is going back to our cautionary tale that actually links over to that video is by your own domain name. If you’re working with a developer designer, an agency do not let them buy your domain for you, don’t let them buy it in your name, on your behalf. Anything like that, they can advise you on it. They can help you out with that. We often help our clients getting domains for the first time. But ultimately make sure that it is you that pulls the trigger. You who buys it because then you’re the one who owns it. Your website or your domain is the single access point to your website.
It’s all over your branding. It’s on your billboards. It’s on your business cards. It’s everywhere. And all of a sudden, you’re handing that address over to someone else. That means that they have unbelievable leverage over you. We’ve seen those, best case scenario. It’s complicated if you ever want to leave that company because you have to transfer ownership.
And that’s just not a fun process to go through worst case scenario. We’ve seen it end up in thousands of dollars spent lawsuits, or even people just not having access to their domain anymore. They have to switch and then switch everything on all of their branding. It’s a giant hassle. So just make sure that you buy your own domain.
It’s not that complicated. You can figure it out. And it’s just going to save you such a headache later. So again, I’m going to post this article in the comments here, just because we did get a bunch of questions after that story time last week wanted to go ahead and put it in written form for you.
If you have any other questions regarding business domains or domains for your company, please. Email us askwildman@wildmanweb.com and we’ll address them as soon as we can.
All right. I’m posting this to the comments Mike say something fun.
Mike: [00:33:20] Okay. I have another fun story, Miles regarding websites. So maybe we could talk about this. I wasn’t planning on talking about this, but I had a talk with somebody yesterday. I was doing some prospecting, doing some cold calling and I was actually prospecting the category that I would say I’m in the middle of the funnel on like I’m in consideration.
I know I have a problem. I know they have a possible solution. And now I’m considering, who I’m going to do that with when and all that stuff. And by the way, maybe just a separate side story there’s really three types of buyers. And I think this is important for us to understand before we actually try to market to those people. So, before somebody, has a sale or buy something they’re basically in three different stages, they either there or they’re completely oblivious, right? They have no idea that they have a problem, and they have no idea what the solutions to that problem are. They’re somewhat aware.
They know, Hey, I have a problem. I don’t know how to solve that problem. Or they are pretty much aware. They know they have a problem. They know what the solutions are to that problem. And they’re just in the consideration stage or that kind of bottom of the middle of the funnel. So, to speak before we get to the bottom of the funnel stage, where we’re going to take action, and they’re trying to decide which of these service providers or product providers I’m going to go with in order to solve my problem.
So interestingly enough I’m, like I said, I’m in the consideration phase and prospect in this category. I come across a company that I know. Because I had a family member actually use their service. I’m not going to give away who it is here, but and they said they did a good job.
And I was like, Oh, and then I noticed that they don’t have a website. And I’m like, wait, this has got to be a mistake. This has gotta be like, the listings are off. We just didn’t get him getting to have their Google, my business set up or whatever. I do a little bit more digging I’m like no, they actually do not have a website.
It’s 2021. These people do not have a website. So, I’m like, man, they really need me. I’m going to do them a favor. I’m gonna give them cool. So, I call him up and I said, is there any particular reason that you don’t have a website? We don’t need one. And then at this point I made a little bit of joke.
I probably shouldn’t have made a joke. Why do I let you out? And I said, well, they’re not Quakers. Are they? I said what I said, well, they don’t have some religious beliefs that they’re against technology or the internet or anything like that. Right? No. Okay. Then I explained to them, Hey, I was like my partner in the company and one of the things we do is we build websites.
Can I talk to the person who’s in charge of that? The office manager? This is the office manager you’re talking to. Great. And she said we don’t need a website because our calendar is currently full. And if you know me at this point, I’m out. I’m just like, I’m not, as I’ve said before on the show, I’m not in the business of convincing people and I’m certainly not in the business that convincing people that they need a website in 2021, if they do not think they need a website in 2021, I got lots of other things to do with my day.
But it was really interesting, just seeing somebody in that mindset, in that state of mind, because. First of all, if you’re that busy, that you’re totally booked why aren’t answering the phone, that would be my first question, second question is, just this whole mindset of being too busy and not being able to see the forest from the trees that will, why don’t we hire more people?
Why don’t we, aren’t why aren’t we looking into bigger space? Why aren’t we looking at growing and scaling if there’s really that kind of demand for our products and services. And the interesting thing, Miles is there’s a competitor in this space, literally like almost right next door to them who is going very aggressive on, on social media and their online presence and in their marketing.
So, I think it’s gonna be really interesting. Over the next five to 10 years to see where the market’s share goes. And if any other competitors come into the space, if anybody’s looking for a business opportunity, I have a good idea. And but the other thing too is just, okay, let’s pretend for a minute that I’m at full capacity.
I’ve hired as many people as I possibly can. And I can’t find a bigger facility in order to move into, okay. Hey, great problem to have, but I still don’t see the point not having a website. And it made me just think about something that we’ve talked about before, maybe not at this extreme case, but we’ve talked about before, how there’s a a large knowledge gap in how the typical business owner views their website, compared to how the typical consumer views of business’s website, that there’s a lot of businesses out there who their website is an afterthought.
And they think that, Oh, it’s not really the thing that represents me. It’s not really the thing that is my brand. And on the consumer tumor side of things is completely the opposite that in this day and age, your website really is one of the biggest pieces of property that your brand owns. To me, it’s much more important than what kind of sign you have hanging in the parking lot, because if I’m going to, because nine times out of 10, I’m going to go to your website before I’m going to go to your parking lot.
And this particular category that I’m talking about, it’s a category that has a lot of trust involved for the end consumer. And so, if I’m not able to go online and to verify who you are, what you do, and what others say about you and feel about you as a huge red flag. And that company is never going to be able to quantify, what all the massive amount of business that they’re losing out of.
And if they really are full-scale, I can’t take another appointment. The amount of the tremendous amount of upside of how to scale their company, that shows that they’re losing out of. And, again, that’s an extreme case. I think I would have to search weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks to find another, the company that would probably have that outlook.
But it’s. Yeah, it’s not it. I think it’s maybe, maybe the in the majority of the businesses out there who aren’t taking their website and their online presence seriously enough, and this company, had no social media presence to speak of. They had very few online reviews and it’s really interesting.
And so, Miles, maybe that’s something that you can speak to just about the importance that, of what consumers feel when they look at a business website and what that is in terms of, at an evaluator, for who we’re going to do business within this day and age.
Miles: [00:39:53] Yeah. You said something pretty interesting there well there was a lot that I want to say on that, but one thing is just, you talked about trust. Often on this show we talk about some little things that you can do. These are the biggest bang for your buck. It’s not complicated, it’s quick, easy, and it can do a lot of damage real quick. I think the last thing we were talking about is our listing tools or different listing tools out there that can help you to distribute your information across the internet accurately and effectively.
It’s really easy to do it doesn’t cost very much, and it will multiply the number of data points about your business online by 3000 or something crazy like that. It’s like you might as well do it. Why or why not? When it comes to a website, it doesn’t take much to create an air of authority of reputability.
If you know a business like this, they’re already booked, they’ve got their sales funnel pretty down offline or whatever their system is, but people are looking them up and they can’t find a website. Or even if they find a bad website that hasn’t been updated since the internet was invented. Then that immediately casts doubt on them, especially in younger generations. And I’m not talking about, the kids coming up now I’m talking, thirties If they find a bad website there, if they find that you don’t have a website that immediately makes them think that you are less legitimate, you are less authoritative, you are less trustworthy and you don’t have to do much in order to not encounter that negative perception.
If you have something up, it doesn’t have to be crazy complicated. It doesn’t have to be huge. You don’t have to have a 10,000-page blog on there or anything. If you just have a nice clean well-designed one pager that says who you are, what you do, where to find you and how to interact with you. Basically, what I refer to as an online business card, then you’re going to avoid that entire problem.
And maybe even get more business because a website is a powerful marketing piece and done properly. It’s relatively passive. If you put something up there and you just keep it alive and healthy, you don’t have to put a lot of work into doing that. Then. It’s going to make sales for you. It’s going to convince people for you that you are authoritative and trustworthy.
Mike references this all the time that you have to get someone to like, know and trust you in order to do business with you. And that’s more important in some industries than others, but it’s very ever present in, pretty much everything. Generally speaking, I need to like, know and trust you before I do business with you and having a website up there, that at least gives you that air of credibility, is a key step to getting there.
If you don’t have something like that, then pretty much everyone below 45 immediately thinks that you are less trustworthy than they did prior to searching for you. I’d say a majority of businesses right now. I don’t know what the percentage points would be, but I’d say a vast majority of businesses right now, I think this was probably the case pre pandemic, but certainly post pandemic. People are engaging with your business first online, more and more. They’re not just driving by and engaging with you in person. They’re not just stopping by and walking into your office. They’re looking you up first, they’re looking for your website. They’re looking for your reviews. They’re looking to see where you are. Maybe they are actually coming to visit you, but they need to find where the hell you are having this online presence is just, it’s a no brainer. A lot of the stuff is really quick, really easy for any business to do out there. It doesn’t cost a whole lot and honestly, you can’t afford to not do it in 2021.
Mike: [00:43:24] Yeah. A hundred percent Miles. I can’t tell you how much isn’t it as a consumer, like, like I said, it was, actively wanting to, and probably will make purchases in this category, how much that turned me off. Even before I talked to him that I was not able to find, very little reviews, no website, no social media really to speak of. Even though I knew somebody who had done business with this company and said that they’d done a good job, I was completely just like, Whoa, this is red flag central. What the heck’s going on here? All their competitors are looking much better, all of a sudden.
And yeah, you made me think because just got to give credit where credit’s due that know like, and trust comes from Zig Ziglar. And it made me think of Les Brown, the great Les Brown you gotta be hungry, but Les Brown said a great quote from him. He says, the, when you open your mouth, the world will know who you are.
And I think that, it’s obviously a quote about, us as individuals, but I think it pertains to businesses as well, is that, that, that first kind of marketing message that they hear, whether it’s on social media or through a traditional advertisement or something like that, that’s, what’s going to be the most important thing to draw them in the second, most important thing of how they’re going to find out though, who you really are as a business and as a brand is going to be your online presence and your website. And it’s just as important as anything that would come out of your mouth when you’re speaking to a potential customer.
Miles: [00:44:45] Yeah. Maybe we should hit on a couple of reasons why someone might be in that position here in the last, 10 minutes or so. So, I can see a couple of reasons for someone thinking, you know what, Hey, I don’t need a website.
These guys were thinking, we’re already booked our businesses go on. We’ve got everything else figured out over here. We don’t need to be over here. Some of it might be just that, some people, they probably just look at this and it’s, it looks overwhelming managing multiple social media accounts, producing content regularly, and putting it out there, having a quality website when you don’t know how to do web work yourself.
It just looks daunting. It looks like you have to do it all at once. So, I’ll just let you know, you don’t have to do it all at once. You can take this in small bite size pieces and any effort you put in this direction is going to be well-spent. It doesn’t have to be big, crazy complicated.
Like I said, if you just have a basic website up there that looks good, it looks clean. That’s going to do you wonders. If you have a basic Google listing, that’s going to do great, pick a social media platform that you’re comfortable with. You don’t have to be ever-present on every platform out there.
Pick one or two that you use in your personal life. You already know how to interact with and start an account there. And then, actually like Mike, Mike has said a couple of times, if you don’t know how to produce content, just start documenting. What are you doing every day that you’re doing anyway, you’re already doing that thing?
Pull out your phone, record a minute of it and post it with a little blurb about, what people are seeing. That’s all you have to do. And then all of a sudden you have an online presence. You have a website that looks reputable, authoritative, and I might be actually be able to trust you.
You have a social media presence that says, Hey, I’m legit. Here’s what I do. Here’s me actually working on something. And I post once a week, it’s something is regular. So, knowing that I’m still active open and doing stuff, and here’s my Google listing so that you can actually find me, you can find my phone number.
You can give me a call and you can do business with me. Just those couple of little things, establishing a basic online presence. It’s not as hard as you think. And like I said, you can’t afford not to do these things. Every single one of those moves is going to pay for itself in the long run. And that leads to the next point here, I think is just that a lot of these things don’t have immediate results.
You post it in website. You’re not going to immediately start seeing a hundred leads a day coming in your brand-new website that you spent two hours on. Even if are you working with us? You’re working with a professional agency. They work for weeks developing, designing a beautiful custom website.
We put it up there and you don’t get a call the very next day. That’s not how these things work. A lot of these things from your listings to search engine optimization to a new website, to social media, takes a while to build up momentum and to start to see those results. So, I think there’s probably at least some percentage of people out there that don’t have this online presence for their business that just haven’t done it because they’re not seeing those effects switching on immediately.
And therefore, they don’t see it. They’re getting those returns. Mike, what do you think? I think those are probably the two big factors.
Mike: [00:47:52] Yeah. I agree with you Miles. I think, it’s the classic trap that we’ve been discussing. Over and over again in various forms on the show for months and months.
And that is, businesses fall into this trap of relying on what worked in the past and assuming that everything’s going to stay the same and it’ll keep working in the future. We’ve talked about Kodak and we’ve we’ve talked about Macy’s and all the big retailers and we’ve talked about Sears and this story, it just happens again and again, and it doesn’t matter how big you are, how smart you are, they, they all get comfortable.
I actually, it’s the ones who get probably the biggest and the fattest and the happiest that are most susceptible to this. And they don’t understand that they’re not playing the same game that they once were. And so, you can’t run the same plays and expect to keep winning. It’s a totally different game now, different rules in, and just like a John Key for me, rest in peace used to say, the secret to being successful in business is to look through the windshield and not the rear view.
And you’ve got to keep seeing what is coming in front of you and being one, two, three, four, five steps ahead of it. It just blows my mind that, somebody could be stuck in a, in that perspective given that everything that’s happening around us, but it’s because they are successful right now and they do have their appointment book sheet, if they were sitting around there twiddling their thumbs, they’d be going well, what’s wrong. And that’s the most dangerous position in my mind to be in. Is when you have no clue what’s happening around you because you’re stuck inside the bottle. As we talk about all the time, the small businessperson’s disease that I’m stuck inside this bottle and the smaller businesses, this happens to almost all of them.
I get so concerned with operating my day-to-day operations, that I don’t see what’s happened on the outside. And I can’t read the bottle and I can’t read the label. And we talked about this the other day Miles, how so many small business owners, their Achilles heel is that they’re great at what they do.
Like they’re great at providing this product or service, but they’re really bad at actually being business owners and business developers and people that are able to scale and grow a business through marketing and sales. Now that leads to job security for us, but it also makes our heart, our job a lot harder in a lot of cases.
So, it’s a double-edged sword there and that’s one of the things that we try to do, through this show and everything that we do is try to empower, especially the smallest businesses in order to take control of more of that. And so, they can see through the windshield and they can see the steps that they need to take before it’s too late in order to keep their business on the right track and to keep it growing and scale it even farther and not miss those opportunities that are out in front of them.
Yeah, Miles it just. If I had a nickel for every time, we’d see this I think we would have retired a long time ago, but it’s it’s certainly a trap it’s easy to fall into. And and and just like I said, we got to keep we got to keep growing. We talked about last week, we got to keep developing ourselves.
We’ve got to keep pushing ourselves to find out, what’s coming next and how we can adapt to it. I just, we just released a newsletter ending about 20 minutes ago, talking about voice search and how that’s just a whole, technological revolution that is going to completely throw off the way it already is, the way people search and buy products and services.
And I think that 90 plus percent of the small businesses out there are vulnerable to this, they’re already losing business from it. And, I can’t imagine having a discussion with somebody who doesn’t understand that they first need to have a website, about something like voice search, it was just like, you’re going to get so behind the curve that it’s, I don’t want to say hopeless, but it’s going to be a little bit of a nightmare, because is we talking about so many times on the show, this is just the beginning.
You think things changed a lot in the last five or 10 years, buckle up, cause the next five or 10 years are gonna make the last 10 years. It looked like a cakewalk. Things are coming hard and fast down the pipe and we’ve gotta be able to Bob and weave, and Zig and zag.
If we’re going to keep growing our businesses and playing the game the way, it should be played. My heart goes out to those people. I wish I could, spend my whole day going in and talking to them and and preaching the gospel to him. Sometimes you gotta. I got to preach to the people who who came to your congregation.
And so that’s what we’re doing here on the show Miles. But that just leads me into next week. We’re doing full-blown show on voice technology. We’re gonna give you guys the full rundown and everything you need to know about how to implement voice in your small business to make yourself better and keep growing.
Miles: [00:52:32] That was a nice teaser here to tag everything at the end. I just want to throw one extra bit onto that beautiful answer that you just gave. I think, we’re not in the business of convincing people, like you said, but probably the most convincing point in here. I was actually talking with someone about SEO, but this applies to everything here.
And that is if you are not keeping up with this stuff, if you aren’t, even while you’re ahead pushing forward into what’s happening now, what’s happening next year. What’s happening in the next five years. No, that your competition is. And so, for every foot, every mile that you have on them right now know that they’re gaining fast.
And it’s up to you say ahead. But that’s why we’re here to answer those questions and hopefully to inform us people out there as to what they need to be looking at. Like you said, next week, let’s focus on voice. If you guys have any questions on voice, enabling voice assistance, voice searches anything like that, please email us, askwildman@wildmanweb.com and we will get to those next week.
We’re going to be back here alive to our Facebook page, YouTube channel and Twitch account next Wednesday at 11. All right. With that, I think we’re going to wrap up, we’ve got a noon meeting to run to here. Mike, I will see you later this afternoon and you guys will see him next week.
Mike: [00:53:50] Yep. Great questions. Appreciate everybody listening, watching, and yeah. Have a great prosperous week. See you next time.
Miles: [00:53:56] All right. See you, Mike. All right. With that. That is the end of March 24th Ask Wildman, we’ll be back next Wednesday. I believe. Oh, that’s not quite April. All right. Last day of March, we’ll be back March 30, first, 11 o’clock talking about voice, so we will see you then. Thanks everyone.
