Full Written Transcript of The Episode

Matt Tompkins: How would you like to know the secret to prospecting new business and not just any prospects, but a way to connect with new business leads that actually pan out? As a small business owner, you can’t afford to waste time or money and you need results.

Now, I can personally tell you that the answer is not in those Facebook ads we see with the rich guy on a private jet telling you that he has the secret to making a million in sales in just 30 days. If you buy his ten step program that comes on 20 different DVDs, which I now know I should have seen as a red flag right there, know today you’ll get the secrets for free. No strings attached.

If you Googled the definition of spam, you’ll get two options, either of which are very appealing. One is for a canned meat made mainly from ham. Mainly, I do not want to know what else they’re using. The other option, though, isn’t much better. Irrelevant or inappropriate messages sent to a large group of people on the internet. The first email advertisement was sent back in 1978 and I’m pretty sure whoever received it was angry and put it in their junk folder.

Today, some 320 billion spam emails are sent every day. In fact, half of all global email traffic is spam and nobody likes spam, right? I mean, spam gives marketing a bad rap. So what are they doing wrong and how can you do it right? Today, we’re going to learn how to cast that large net, but do it in a way that is non spammy, if that’s even a word, so that you can deliver new business leads that turn into new customers. Jeff Beals, co host The Grow Omaha Radio Show and podcast, and he is an international sales coach, speaker and author who trains sales teams every day on how to prospect new business leads. So if we’re starting off at square one, Ground Zero, what’s the first thing we need when it comes to prospecting? New business leads?

Jeff Beals: First of all, it’s a mindset. I mean, as a business you have to be of the mindset that you are obsessed with those people who are not yet your customers, not yet your clients, and you can never have too many people in your pipeline, period. End of discussion. You can never have too many prospects because things happen over the course of time.

Current customers leave, hot leads don’t pan out. So that’s that’s one thing that I always get a little bit frustrated with. For instance, I worked with a manufacturer once. I do a lot of sales training for manufacturing companies and the head of sales said The operations people are breathing down my neck. They’re frustrated because they say we’re producing too much business and that we need to slow back because they can’t keep up with all of it.

What do you think I should do? And you want to know my answer? I said you should bury the bastards because and no offense to the ops people, I don’t think they’re really bastards. But you should bury.

Matt Tompkins: And you’re not going to literally bury them. But no.

Jeff Beals: Bury them with business because and and some operations people and some CEOs might say, Jeff, that’s really irresponsible. But I’ll tell you what, the moment that manufacturer takes its foot off the gas pedal, you start a series of events which will lead to downtime and having to eliminate a shift.

Matt Tompkins: Note to self Do not mess with Jeff Beals. This guy takes his sales leads very seriously. All kidding aside, what Jeff is referring to is having a scarcity mindset. Having the wrong mindset. A scarcity mindset in sales may seem like foo foo philosophy,

but it is like poison in the veins of your business if you let it creep in. Scarcity mindset is limiting how big the pie is, and if someone else succeeds, then that must mean you automatically lose sales and business overall is not a zero sum game.

Having an abundance mindset is important for yourself and your team because it helps you focus on the bigger picture and helps leadership recognize your long term vision. Now, it has been a long time since that first email advertisement was sent back in 1978. So what does prospecting new business leads look like today?

Jeff Beals: Well, first of all, it’s the most important thing that anyone in sales does. And I always like to say that the reason sales people are paid on commission and many times even 100% commission, or at least they have bonuses, is because of prospecting. It’s not because you’re good at filling out contracts. It’s not good because you’re it’s not because you’re good at following up after the sale.

Matt Tompkins: It’s not my it’s not my good looks and my charm.

Jeff Beals: Or well, in your case, but in my case.

Matt Tompkins: I’m the.

Jeff Beals: Hell, isn’t it? You’re paying on commission because people don’t like to go approach strangers and ask them for business. And I always define prospecting as the act of interrupting someone’s day when they don’t expect to hear from you in order to provide them with something they need, but they might not yet know about. Yeah, well, interrupting someone’s days. Tough, because that triggers our natural fear of rejection and we all have it.

Unless you’re a sociopath. In which case sometimes I envy sociopaths. But unless you’re a sociopath, we all have that fear of rejection. And so the reason they’re paid on commission is because it’s not easy to get people to do that. And so prospecting is the single most important thing that you have to do, and you have to be willing to do it all of the time. Mad I always like to say that prospecting is like brushing your teeth. You don’t take a day off and hopefully you do it more than once a day.

Matt Tompkins: Yes, getting used to hearing the word no is not an easy thing to do, but you have to reframe it. I mean, how else could actors move forward when they’re rejected 99 times out of 100 auditions? And that’s probably being generous, you know, to have a Hall of Fame level batting average of 300, that means that you’re striking out. 70% of the time, a big part of really successful people is taking that failure and turning it into growth.

This is what separates elite athletes from the rest of the pack, and they’ve actually studied this. Elite athletes are able to accept it in the moment. They don’t waste any time on it. They don’t expend any emotional energy on it. They learn from it and they move on. They compartmentalize it appropriately. So what are some other techniques that are most effective at generating results?

Jeff Beals: One, you want to mix it up a bit. You know, just as a business likes to have multiple streams of income, a sales person wants multiple streams of prospects. And so you’re going to do some social media, you’re going to do some networking, you’re going to do some email prospecting, you’re going to do some telephone prospecting, and you’re going to do some office pop ins.

You can mix it all up. Now, this is the part that a lot of people listening are not going to like hearing today. And that is the telephone actually remains the number one prospecting tool despite all of the new technology we’ve had.

When you factor in effort and money put into it and results put out, so is showing up and meeting with someone in person a better form of prospecting in terms of results? Hell yes. But is it easier to get a hold of a lot of people on the phone than it is to meet everyone in person? Absolutely. No question. So believe it or not, the lonely old telephone, which is 140, 150 year old technology is still numero uno.

Matt Tompkins: Here’s something I never thought I’d say, but cold calling is cool. Oh, man. Who have I become? Yes, cold calling is cool because it can predict the future. So let’s say that my goal is to bring in ten new customers a month.

I start making cold calls and I find out that it takes about an average of 100 cold calls to bring in one new sale. So now I know that I need 1000 cold calls every month to bring in ten new sales. I can expand that from there. I can go from monthly to my quarterly goals and to my annual goals. And pretty quickly, I find out that if I make 50 cold calls a day,

I can reach my three year goal that just a few weeks ago seemed impossible. Now that is pretty cool. So now you’ve set your goals, but where do you go find these new business leads? What’s the next step?

Jeff Beals: First of all, you’re going to create a a social media online presence as fast as you humanly can. But frankly, that’s marketing, not sales. The social media stuff gets you credibility and burnishes the brand, and it also gives you access to leads, right? I mean, your connections on LinkedIn can be a lead generation source for your prospecting efforts.

But the problem is a lot of people will put too much emphasis on the social media for the prospect, and we can get into that a little bit more in a moment if you’d like, but but I think that’s the first thing you have to do is establish your brand. And that’s going to be heavily online, Right? And then as far as getting the leads, you think to yourself, okay, who exactly am I going to serve? And you have to know exactly who is in your business as target audience.

And you’re going to want to start to put together lead sheets of people who meet the criteria that would most benefit from the product or the service that you sell. And then I’m going to go back to that telephone again. Yes, I believe very heavily in the power of Zoom and other platforms like that. I use them almost every day in my life. But when I’m first initially going to reach out to a prospect for the first time, especially if I wanted a hit, a lot of prospects who don’t know me in a short period of time, I’m going to use the traditional telephone. Yeah.

Matt Tompkins: Even I mean, even a voicemail even. Oh, right.

Jeff Beals: If we had more time, I would get into the art of leaving a voicemail. I could do an hour class on voicemails. Voicemails are one of the greatest tools we have as prospectors, and 80% of sales professionals don’t even leave voicemails as dumbest thing they could possibly do a 30 to 40 second or less voicemail.

And the prospecting world is gold. And also you have to remember when you’re cold prospecting, it takes on average, let’s say you’re calling a decision maker, someone who makes significant decisions for a company or an organization.

It’s taking now between eight and 12 attempts on average to get a live interactive conversation, really with the decision maker scares people to death because no one wants to be a pest. We all have that fear of rejection.

Matt Tompkins: Rejection, right. That’s tough to.

Jeff Beals: Overcome, but you have to do it. And and we’re talking about cold people. All we’re trying to do is to get them to have a meeting with us, to get a live interactive conversation with us. Whether it’s in person or via technology is irrelevant.

Yeah, So, so so those would be the things that I would do. I would focus on my brand and start to establish online credibility as fast as possible.

I’d know exactly who I’m serving and I would chase those people as I generate my leads and then for the very first outreaches. Like I said earlier, people don’t want to hear this, but go telephone.

Matt Tompkins: Knowing who you’re serving, who your audience is, knowing who your ideal customer is. That is something we have come back to a number of times on the podcast because it’s perhaps one of the most important first steps to any aspect of your business, and it’s unfortunately something many people skip. When I coach podcasters when we’re starting out, I asked them, Who is your podcast for? Who is your ideal listener? The most common answer I get is, Well, everyone. I want everyone to listen. So my podcast is for everyone.

Business owners make this same mistake when we think too broadly and vague. Your business can’t be everything to everyone. You shouldn’t try to be everything to everyone. That’s an improbable task for any business except maybe Costco. I mean, seriously, you can go into Costco today and buy an inflatable boat, a diamond ring, a £72 wheel of cheese and a casket.

Yeah. You can buy caskets at Costco. Instead, try this. Describe your ideal customer with the same specific details as you would describe yourself. You wouldn’t describe yourself as a man or woman with 2 to 4 kids, married or single with a salary of 50 to 150000. Being specific and niching down is how to find and best serve your ideal customer and know don’t stress. We do not alienate people by niching down like we think we will. Instead, we’ll actually end up reaching the largest group of people when we focus on one ideal customer.

Jeff Beals: Yeah, you have to know exactly who you’re speaking to and then you have to really spend a lot of time working on your message. I always say the first thing you want to do, if you want to have a great message to that person you’re speaking to, is to have a good idea what it is that they truly value and care about without any ambiguity or assumption.

And then once I know that I want to craft messages that I think would really matter to them, use the example of your wife. She’s a crafter, right? But she also has a career. If I approached her talking about something that she’s passionate about in her case crafting, I have a lot more success If she’s never heard of me in getting a meeting or a conversation with her than if I start bombarding her with the features and benefits of the stuff that I sell or I make the critical error of.

Her name is Wendy. I say, Hey, Wendy. Jeff Beals from from Jeff Beals and Associates. We’re a sales consulting company. I’d love to stop by your office, pick your brain, take about 30 minutes of your time, and see if it’s a fit for me to work with you that’s useless and worthless and, frankly, selfish on my part because I’m asking to steal her time for.

Matt Tompkins: Making you instead of the person you’re trying to help.

Jeff Beals: But even if I’m even if the work she does has absolutely nothing with crafting, if I approach her from a crafting perspective for whatever reason, maybe I have expertise in that I’m going to have more success in getting that coveted interactive conversation with her than if I just start, as I like to say, vomiting features and benefits all over a poor, unsuspecting prospect.

Matt Tompkins: Know who your specific customer is and know what makes you unique. Why should they choose you over everyone else? What is that category that you’re going to be first in? Now, I mentioned email spam at the beginning of this episode, and email marketing is one of many options for marketing and sales. While everyone has their own opinion on what is the least effective way to prospect, new business leads from email marketing to no social media.

That’s the worst or cold calling. It doesn’t work. I think that this statement is the actual truth to settle all debates. There is no wrong tool for you to use. As much as I hate spam, there are extremely effective ways to execute mass email marketing campaigns.

The tool that is wrong for you may be what is best for someone else. So stop googling what is the best sales tool to get new business because it doesn’t exist? No, CRM is perfect for me. It might be HubSpot for Marj Jenkinson and our billing department. What works best for her is a notebook with stickers and color coded markers. Focus on what works best for you, what makes you unique, and how to reach your specific ideal customer in the best way possible.

Jeff Beals: Yeah, I would agree with that statement. You have to be very careful which tools you use because you are correct. Matt. There’s no bad prospecting tool, just bad execution. And frankly, there’s more bad execution of prospecting that I see than good execution. And one of the places where I see a lot of bad execution is in social media.

Social media is great. I’ve been I’ve been using social media for my sales training business since I started doing it in 2008, and I’ve had a lot of success with it. But you got to know what social. Social media is, and that is primarily a marketing and lead generation tool. So I use social media the way a company would use advertising. To me, it’s for brand and credibility. And then if I do a good job with branding and credibility, then I also have access to people through social media platforms to create my lead lists and all that.

Now, is it possible that sometimes I will put out a piece of content on social media and it will impress someone so much, resonate with them so much that they pick up the phone and schedule me for a 10,000 speech? Yeah, that’s happened. Could I live on it? Absolutely. No. Yeah. And so I think people sometimes get frustrated with social media because they don’t realize what its limitations are. If your only source of prospecting is going to be social media and most cases that’s going to fail unless you have a certain type of e commerce business in which that might work. But most people don’t. Most people use social media as a crutch or frankly, a copout.

Give you an example what I’m talking about, Matt. How many times do you get a LinkedIn invitation from someone who you don’t know and you get that little alarm that goes off in your head that they’re just going to try and sell me something and for whatever.

Matt Tompkins: Reason, book event invite. That’s why an only 10% of my friends, if that show up when I invite them to my my birthday party. But that’s a different issue.

Jeff Beals: It’s a personal.

Matt Tompkins: Problem, a different reason. But you’re right, though, it’s not personal.

Jeff Beals: But let me ask you this. So. So you get that right? How many times do you get that that email? Multiple times a day, probably. Right?

Matt Tompkins: Yeah. And you get.

Jeff Beals: A lot of them. Yeah. And sometimes you have a weak moment and you click accept. How long does it typically take after you click accept before someone is direct messaging you through LinkedIn, vomiting, features and benefits all over.

Matt Tompkins: This is a tip that I’ve found really helps. If you’re a small business owner and you’re doing your own social media marketing, we think that we have to be on every single social media platform all at once from the start. But when we do that, we severely limit our impact and results. So if you have one hour per day or even just 30 minutes each day to dedicate to marketing outreach on social media, I recommend that you don’t divide that up into seven different platforms because you’ll likely get overwhelmed and frustrated.

The quality of your outreach is going to suffer and odds are you’re just going to give up on most of those platforms, leaving them as just dead pages, you know, laying there not updated and not getting a response. If people message you on them, which is a bad look and it’s an easy way to lose brand equity with your business. So instead start with just one platform and spend all 60 minutes focused on that single platform. Pick the platform that you actually spend the most amount of time on, because that’s going to be the platform where you feel most natural and familiar, and it’s where you’ve already built up equity and credible authenticity. If it’s Facebook, find the Facebook groups where your ideal customer can be found and simply participate in their life.

Once you feel that you’re just crushing it on this primary channel, add a new channel and then take the same approach one platform at a time.

Jeff Beals: Oh, absolutely. Like in my case, yeah. Linkedin is my primary social media tool for my sales consulting and training business, but I always think about ways that I can say little things on Facebook which reinforce what I do. Because those 4000 some people I’m connected to on Facebook are a little more personal than the LinkedIn, But the people that have a little more or a lot of a personal relationship with you can be a big source of business.

I once back when I was doing commercial real estate brokerage many years ago, once found out about a major real estate purchase that a relative of mine made by reading the business paper, it didn’t use me. And when I talked to the relative about it, the relatives said, Oh, I forgot that you were in real estate. And so I ever since that day, I have always thought, okay, I need to make sure the people who are in my own backyard right under my nose, so to speak, remember me and what I do, because they’re the ones that should be giving me all of their business.

So Facebook is very, very important for for getting new business. But if it’s your sole tool, you’re probably going to be eating ramen noodles and going bankrupt.

Matt Tompkins: You have to know how it works. And that’s why Jeff Beales has an amazing TikTok channel where he does dance off competitions and dance challenges.

Jeff Beals: No shirt on.

Matt Tompkins: Yeah, well, I didn’t know that was the case. I’m glad. I’m not so glad I brought that up because people are going to like, search for that and it’s going to.

Jeff Beals: Actually, I don’t have a TikTok. I mean, I have all the other ones.

Matt Tompkins: A few final things to consider. Once you know who your ideal customer is and you know what platform they spend the most amount of time on, you also need to know how they use that platform. And don’t assume that one platform is only for one age demographic or only one type of use. In the US, many assume that TikTok is only for teenagers and yes, while 60% are between the age of 16 and 24. 30% are in that coveted 25 to 44 demo and growing.

And Tick Tock is also a growing source for where people get their news and information. So it’s not just Jeff Beal’s dance off videos all the time, although that would be pretty awesome. We appreciate you, Jeff Beals, Thank you so much for coming on the Omaha podcast. You can reach out to Jeff Beals directly in the show notes. We have the links to his podcast and radio show Grow Omaha, as well as his website Grow Omaha dot com. Or you can hire Jeff to coach up your sales team or come speak to your organization.

Thank you so much for joining us here today on the podcast. Hit Subscribe So You Never miss an episode.

The Omaha podcast is a production of Two Brothers Creative in association with 316 Strategy Group.

Full Written Transcript of The Episode

Matt Tompkins: How would you like to have a new client who always paid on time, always paid in full, always had regular steady work for you, and was legally required to give a certain percentage of their work to small businesses just like yours.

This client is real. It does exist, and this client is the United States government. Hello and welcome to the Omaha podcast Midwest Marketing Mindset, where small businesses get the big agency secrets of marketing for free so that you can feel proud of your marketing. I’m your host, Matt Tompkins of Two Brothers Creative. And in today’s episode, we’re going to learn how your business can get government contracts.

I remember our grandma. She always used to tell us, Don’t cheat, don’t lie, and don’t steal. When my brother Ben and I would ask her why, she would say, The government hates competition. Now I know it would be easy to fill this episode with bad political jokes, but we’ve seen far too many of them get elected. So I’ll stop. In this episode, we are actually joined by two government experts, Veronica Doga and Harold Sagas from the Nebraska Business Development Center. And they specialize in helping small businesses with government contracting.

Matt Tompkins: Now for me, the image that comes to mind when you say the government or is my Uncle Merv likes to call it the government, the image that comes to mind is that scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark, where you have the Ark of the Covenant, which is like one of the most cherished treasures in the history of the world. And it’s in this plain wooden box.

You can’t just you can’t distinguish it from the infinite number of other plain wooden boxes in this just endless storage facility. It’s being wheeled away by this this old guy in a cart. And I think the line is, you know, who’s going to be keeping an eye on this? We have top men. It’s just left open ended, mysterious. And yes, the government, it is bloated in many ways.

That’s the image that comes to mind for me. And it may have its legitimate issues. But in today’s episode, we want to focus on some of the big benefits for small businesses like yours and mine, specifically, because the government is actually one of the best clients that your business could ever hope for.

Veronica Doga: A lot of businesses don’t think about government contracting as a market, as just another channel to increase their sales, and that’s really what it is. It’s just not putting all of your eggs in one basket. It’s diversifying and government is on time and pays what they owe you, and that’s the stability that a business wants. In my mind, when when you said, you know, your little scene in my mind when I think government contracting, I think man in black. Okay, that’s my idea.

Matt Tompkins: So aliens are real. We’re you know, Harold kind of got the black look, gray suit, but he’s kind of got some black look going on today.

Veronica Doga: Yeah, Yeah, but but just to demystify a little bit, the government, it does buy everything that you can think of. Federal government is the largest, largest buyer in the world. It buys over a value of over $600 billion every year.

Matt Tompkins: So that’s where the government spends so much money on us with small businesses. The truth is that you are either in the conversation or you are not. And you have to ask yourself, is it worth it for your business to miss out on an entirely new market like this?

But getting government contracts, it isn’t easy or as easy as I may have been making it sound so far. No, it actually it does take some work. And you want trusted experts and advisors like Veronica and Harold at the Nebraska Business Development Center. So let’s go back to step one. What is the starting point?

Harold Sargus: The starting point is to make sure that government contracting is a part of your strategic plan. And I think one of the things people feel that you can’t make money if you do government work and that’s not true.

You can make profit. It doesn’t do the government any good. If you can’t, then no one would bid so you can make money. There is a learning curve, but once you’re in, once you get your first contract, the chances increase greatly that you’ll get another one and you’ll be and you’ll get another one. Now you have to provide value. You have to perform. The worst thing you can do is bid low to try to get it. You get.

Matt Tompkins: It now.

Harold Sargus: You’re stuck with it and you lose money on.

Matt Tompkins: It. Yeah. I want to jump in quick here because this is a mistake that I know I have made personally. I don’t know how many times and it can be crushing to your businesses growth. So don’t say yes to everything. No, your value set your value.

Commit to your value and hold out for the right thing to say yes to. Because I know I’ve done this where you say yes to everything, including super low bids. Not only is it going to cost you money, as Harold points out, it can set your business back years, if not.

Harold Sargus: Decades, and that can set you back a decade or more in the government market space. If you don’t perform, that blemish is on your record. It’ll be hard for you to get back in. Yeah, it’s different in the private.

Veronica Doga: Sector and it can take you out of business. Actually, there are. Are horror stories about small businesses that bid bid too low and they were losing money and they just went out of business because they were it was not sustainable for the business.

Matt Tompkins: Now, believe it or not, they actually made a movie about government contracts. Yes, they’ll they’ll make anything these days. It was actually a pretty good movie, entertaining. It’s a depiction of government contracting in the world of weapons. It’s called war dogs.

Yeah, War Dogs is a movie where two friends played by Jonah Hill and Miles Teller, discovered that anyone can apply to get government contracts and they get one receiving a US Army contract to supply ammunitions for the Afghan National Army. It’s worth, you know, just a little bit of money, $300 million. Now, the movie is highly dramatized. They add a lot of fictional elements to this, as Hollywood does. But Veronica points out that there is actually a very important lesson for businesses to take away from this movie.

Veronica Doga: I did enjoy the movie and I would actually recommend watching it. And that’s what you don’t want to do, because I did a really good example of what you do not want to do if you don’t want to go to jail, because that’s that’s what happened and you don’t want to go that path. If you are in the business of trying to play the government, yeah, it will bite you. Yeah, maybe not at the beginning, but eventually it will.

Matt Tompkins: Now we want to be very clear here. We are not encouraging you to try and scam the government. That usually doesn’t end well. In fact, it didn’t end well for the two guys, the two real guys that the movie War Dogs is based on. But what that movie did do for me at least, was it sparked the idea that big mega corporations, you know, the big ones like Boeing, they aren’t the only ones getting government contracts. Small businesses like yours and mine are eligible just the same.

Veronica Doga: We see so many businesses or startups that are coming through our door and they are asking us, what does the government buy? That’s what I want to sell and it does not work that way. You have to have a business, you have to have an idea, you have to have some kind of prior experience in in selling whatever you’re selling. And then that is when we can help businesses channel and actually focus on who is buying what they’re selling.

Harold Sargus: To be successful in the government space, you have to be successful whatever you’re doing now, architectural engineering, construction information services, whatever it is you do, real estate, Hey, I am successful. What I’m doing and the government does buy what I sell. I think I’m going to spend some time and dig a little bit deeper and find out is it the VA? Is it the Corps of Engineers? Who is the agency I should focus on?

Matt Tompkins: Every business should start out by knowing what specific problem they’re solving for their customers. If you can’t do that, you need to figure that step out first. When you do know what it is that you do, when you clearly know what problem you’re solving for your customers, you’ve been doing it and you know you’ve been doing it successfully and you know who your ideal customer is. Then you can find out, is there a government agency buying your product or services? And let me tell you, the government buys everything.

Our company two Brothers Creative, we produce video podcast, we produce videos for clients and we handle marketing for clients and the government contracts all of that. So talk to the Nbtc to find out if you’re ready and only when you’re ready.

Veronica Doga: Government is an obscure term a lot of people don’t know. You know, as we talked about, it’s the black box. Who do you call? Do you call your person here in Omaha representing that agency? Do you even know what agency you’re targeting? A lot of those questions are what pops up in in a business mind. And what we help with is give it a structure and focus. Who is the agency that you want to go after? And we do that by researching previous purchases by that particular agency or actually government-wide.

And then we’re narrowing it down to one or two agencies and then to one or to offices. Maybe if it’s a more local type of service or product that the business is selling and then setting them up to understand this agency’s goals, what are they trying to achieve? Why are they buying the services or products that the business is selling? And then giving them some maybe contacts to who to call, finding open opportunities currently that exists if they don’t exist currently.

Maybe what were previous in the past three years that were solicitations that were put out by that particular office or agency and really understanding your customer. So defining who is your customer at the government? How do they look like and what are they buying?

Matt Tompkins: Okay, so you need to be a real business. This sounds weird in business though. You need to be a real existing business, doing business and preferably doing it successfully. I don’t want to be just starting out and kind of learning your way through things because you don’t want to. You don’t want to burn this bridge with the government.

You don’t want to take the leap until you’re ready, because that is hard to undo with the government. They will see you as I don’t know, they’re not ready. No, thank you. And then ignore future bids from you. So you only want to do this when you are ready. And then there are other things you’ll need to be aware of that the NDDC will walk you through that. Harald shared with us things like registration and certification.

Harold Sargus: There’s a database that you have to be and it’s a minimal requirement. You have to the government needs to know that you’re a real business and you have a physical address. You upload, you put in some information and they verify that you exist and you have a physical address. It can be a two to 4 to 6 week process. It’s very it’s the very basic thing you have to do.

Matt Tompkins: Is done online then or.

Harold Sargus: It’s done online. And we help customers. We have instructions somebody can follow to do it themselves. We can help them do it. We can do it virtually in person at their office, at our office. We’re very flexible. There’s a hub zone certification. The government has identified certain areas of the cities throughout the country that are historically underutilized businesses that the government hasn’t worked with businesses in those areas much over the years.

So it’s map, it’s geography based. There’s a minority owned certification called ADA, a veteran owned or a service disabled veteran owned. We help with the certification process and what that does. The federal government puts aside percentage goals to do business with small business. So they’ll say only a veteran owned small business can apply, can, can bid. I’m sorry. So that shrinks your competition.

Matt Tompkins: And this next statement really sums up the fact that you should not have any hesitation to put yourself in the conversation. At the very least, if you’re thinking to yourself, I don’t have a chance at government contracts, I don’t have time to do that. I got to do all these other things. And, you know, there’s probably millions of people competing for these contracts. Why even try we take ourselves out of of the game before we even have a chance to play. Listen to the call that Harold described that they got just recently.

Harold Sargus: And I got to tell you. So just this morning, your last night, we got an email from a federal agency that said, hey, we had no small business show up to this walkthrough, this project that we need to know. Small business showed up. Can you help us? We’re going to reschedule it, put the word out. Here’s the industry that we’re looking for. So and I think that’s happened maybe three or four times in the last month. Different agencies are having they’re not getting small business to bid.

Matt Tompkins: If you don’t put yourself in the game, how on earth do you expect to have a chance at winning it? Government contracts, they aren’t handed out willy nilly like free Halloween candy. They’re not just handing it out. All right. You’ll have to earn these government contracts. And it’s no different than the work you’re already doing, the work you’re already earning for your business. This is just a brand new untapped market for you to consider for your business.

Veronica Doga: A lot of times, businesses will expect to just, you know, I’m going to get certified, I’m going to get into Sam. And then the opportunities were fall off into my lap and it will be great. It doesn’t happen that way. It’s just another market, right? Like we said, you have to market your business. You have to show what value you’re bringing to the table.

Government will not buy from you from your business just because you’re a woman owned or just because you’re a veteran owned or just because you’re small. These are very good certifications that you might have, and these are maybe some points you’ll get when they look at the competition. The set asides are great for that. It restricts the competition of the businesses that can bid for a particular opportunity. So that’s an advantage that you you can take advantage of. But it’s not going to just fall into your lap. And we’ve seen so many businesses that come to us and they say that they’ve done everything they could. They have everything, but nobody is knocking at their door. And it’s just not it doesn’t work this way.

Harold Sargus: The federal government’s a bureaucracy, and if you can’t deal with that, then maybe stay in the private sector. And we have these conversations. If somebody calls our office, we’re honest, we’re open. It’s all public information. If we will share what we have, we’ll tell them where else, where else to go to find more. And it is the government’s people. You know, there’s a purchasing agent, there’s a contract officer. Every federal agency has a small business liaison office, and that’s one of the things you’ll want to.

Matt Tompkins: Do, whether it’s federal, state, local, all governments contract work. It’s up to you if you want work for your business or not, maybe you don’t. I don’t know. It’s your business. You decide. We wrap things up with Harold and Veronica by talking about some of the industries that are actually really hot right now for government contracting work. That just sounds weird. These are the hot government contracts of the week. Okay, That sounded even worse. Sorry.

Veronica Doga: There are some industries that are very hot and that’s great business. That’s a great industry to be in right now. Construction, as you mentioned. But not everybody is in construction.

Harold Sargus: The infrastructure bill that came down.

Matt Tompkins: Yeah.

Veronica Doga: Yeah.

Matt Tompkins: So what are some of the hot industries right now?

Harold Sargus: Well, construction.

Veronica Doga: Construction is a big one and.

Harold Sargus: Anything related to it. So whether you’re concrete or metal.

Veronica Doga: Or and trades.

Harold Sargus: Drywall, trade.

Veronica Doga: For.

Matt Tompkins: Construction.

Harold Sargus: Architects, engineers. But the they eat, you know, the government buys.

Matt Tompkins: Food, you.

Harold Sargus: Know, the government buys clothes, they need beds, they need furniture, they need everything. Paper and information services.

Veronica Doga: I it is a big one, too. Cybersecurity-related activities. Everything is hackable. And there should be layers that protect not only the government but also the small businesses. And services in that area are are super hot right now as well. A lot of opportunities.

Harold Sargus: One thing that won’t happen in addition is we’re not your employee. We’d like to be, but we you know, we have to help all businesses and that come to us. So we will we will do as much as we can for you and get you to the point where you’re starting to take the initiative. We’re not your employee. We’d like to be again, but we can’t be that. So that’s one thing. Won’t be. Don’t expect us to be your part time staff.

Veronica Doga: So we will help a business guide them through the process, teach them how to do it. But we will not do it for them.

Matt Tompkins: They can teach you how to fish, but they won’t do the fishing for you. Man, I sound like a philosophy user. Thank you so much to the NRDC’s Veronica and Harold for joining us today on the podcast. You can contact them directly with all of the government contracting assistance that you could ask for in the show notes of this episode. Scroll down and we got the links for you there. Just click away and get yourself in the game.

In the Running for Government Contracts, the Omaha podcast Midwest Marketing Mindset is a production of Two Brothers Creative.

Thanks so much for joining us, and we’ll see you next time.

Full Written Transcript of The Episode

Matt Tompkins: My first love is radio. I started as an intern in radio and spent over 17 years in radio broadcasting. I have a nostalgic love for radio. I think we all have that nostalgic love for radio, television, print these old school advertising mediums. But the world is now digital. So where do these old school mediums like radio fit into your marketing strategy? Yes, there are some very easy ways to waste a lot of money in radio advertising, just like there’s a lot of easy ways to waste money on Facebook ads and Google ads just the same.

But there are a lot of secrets to radio advertising that are very effective and actually very affordable for small businesses. Today, we’re going to break down the secrets of radio advertising.Welcome back to Midwest Mindset, the podcast that gives You the small business owner, the big agency Secrets to Marketing. I’m Matt Tompkins of two Brothers Creative, where we believe every business deserves affordable and effective marketing. Now I want to preface this episode by saying that it is not a pro radio episode or an anti radio episode.

There are some very good, effective tips we’re going to get to here on the show that most small business owners don’t even know about. They don’t think about. And yes, we’re going to get to some very big mistakes you can make with spending your ad dollars in radio. Radio. It’s no different than any other platform, any other medium to advertise and promote your business, except for nostalgia. Radio has this nostalgic hook on us. We grew up listening to radio. Radio was massive for how many decades, right? Massive. The influence that it had on us sticks with us.

And so I have seen this this movie play out many times over where a small business owner with a small budget for advertising doesn’t really know where to spend the money. So they think, well. I grew up listening to radio. It was huge. I loved it. It has to still be huge, right? And they spend this money, they just buy some ads and it doesn’t work. They don’t see any results. And this isn’t unique to just radio. Business owners waste a lot of money on Facebook ads. Google ads. The reason why they don’t work most of the time here is because business owners don’t research or learn about these different mediums to see if they are the right ones to reach their target market.

Matt Tompkins: What makes radio different is that nostalgia that I mentioned at the beginning of this episode. We grew up with radio. We have an emotional attachment to radio. We have idolized in our minds what a radio star, a radio show looks like. It’s identity and that can blind us to the reality of what radio is today.

Radio today has changed just like every other advertising medium dramatically since the time when radio was huge and dominant back when we grew up listening to it. So in today’s episode, my 17 plus years in radio finally pay off because we’re going to give you the behind the scenes tips and techniques for radio advertising that are both affordable and effective. And we’re also going to talk about the big mistakes you want to avoid, the big mistakes that are far too common and can really destroy a small business and their overall annual marketing strategy.

But first, I think it’s important we talk about radio ratings and why you should care. What are radio ratings? Well, the ratings are what we use to determine the value of the radio advertisement. So how much you spend on a radio advertisement on any particular radio station, that price is determined by these radio ratings.

Matt Tompkins: Now, the radio ratings are this this formula. And there are two factors in this equation. First, you have time spent listening. So time spent listening is how long in a given week, how much time does a listener listen to that station? And the other factor is the cume. And the cume is the cumulative size of the audience.

So you may have a massive audience that tunes in and tunes out so they don’t have a very long time spent listening and they could actually rank lower even though they have a larger audience than a station with a small listening audience, a small cume and a very high time spent listening. But it’s those two things, those two factors that determine the ratings. How do they figure out how many people are listening to these radio stations? Well, in bigger markets, they have what are called people meters. And these are almost like little beepers that people take with them.

And they actually pick up the signal of the radio stations. And those are much more accurate than what most most markets like ours here in Omaha, Nebraska, have. In Omaha, we have a handwritten diary market now. What is a handwritten diary? Well, a handwritten radio diary. It’s basically it looks like a pamphlet, you know, like a brochure. It’s mailed to you and you’re actually sent five crisp $1 bills to do this. And so you get this in the mail, you’re paid to do it.

Matt Tompkins: And you open up this pamphlet and it folds out and it asks you which radio station do you listen to? And it’s Monday with the time breaks, you know, 7 a.m., 8 a.m., 9 a.m., 10 a.m. And you do Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. You do this for about five days and then you mail it back in. And if you mail it back in, they’ll send you another ten crisp $1 bills. So now you’re pretty rich. I mean, you got 15 bucks in your pocket. It’s time to celebrate the problem or the challenge with handwritten diary.

Markets like ours is that we have no idea how accurate they actually are. We just don’t. Now, we are relying on a number of things here. We’re relying on a people to fill these out accurately and recall information accurately, which we know humans are notoriously not that great. At most people recall something, they’ll think, okay, you’re asking me what radio show I listen to at 9 a.m. on Monday, they’ll just recall a radio show that they remember and they didn’t necessarily listen to it. We see this with television ratings as well. When you ask people, what’s your favorite late night TV show? Oh, you know, Stephen Colbert, when was the last time you watched him? Oh, two, three years ago. I don’t know. And it may have been just a clip they saw online so people recall whatever pops into their head and they think, morning show, what morning show do I know? And they write that down.

Matt Tompkins: So recall. Hall can be very inaccurate. And then they have to do this for five days. Accurately. There are a lot of times I’ve seen these diaries where they just write down a station and then they just draw a line indicating that they listen to this station for 24, 48, 72 straight hours, and they are a loyal listener. There’s also the issue of accuracy in what you write down. So I have seen this as well in these radio diaries where let’s say you listen to, you know, my brother and I, we had a radio show back in the day and you say, I listened to the Matt and Ben Show and then they write down the wrong radio station call letters.

That diary doesn’t count even though they did listen to the radio show. It just doesn’t count. Let’s say that you don’t listen to the radio like many people in the morning, and instead you write down I listen to Pandora at 8 a.m. Pandora is not going to show up in those ratings because that diary doesn’t count. The assumption is that everybody in this market, in every market listens to a radio station. It’s just a matter of which station they listen to.

They also send out around 1200 or so of these handwritten diaries, which means that you have one single diary based on all those all that assumptions, the recall, the inaccuracy or accuracy, we don’t really know.

Matt Tompkins: One of those represents 8 to 12,000 peoples listening decisions. So the challenge, the problem with handwritten diary markets is that we do not know and we cannot prove how accurate these ratings are. That translates to you and your radio advertisement. We cannot tell you or prove how many people actually heard your ad over the traditional airwaves, the broadcast airwaves. That leads me into my first tip here of this episode.

And the first tip is be cautious and ask them to prove it. When you are spending money on commercials that play over the air. So over the broadcast air. In other words, when you’re sitting in your car, your antenna picks up the signal. That’s an over-the-air broadcast that’s traditional or terrestrial radio signal that we talk about. Be cautious and ask your representative there, your ad representative to prove it, because there are a lot of challenges that over-the-air broadcast in people’s vehicles face. Let’s just look at the human behavior and how we listen and what we’re doing in our car.

The challenge is that your radio advertisement is going to have to overcome. First is what do we do when commercials come on the radio? What is it that most people do? We hit the reset button. We change the channel. So right out of the gate, you’re losing a lot of people who are not going to hear your ad.

Matt Tompkins: Number two, your commercial is usually smashed or smooshed into like a 7 to 8 minute spot block. Now, a commercial is a spot.

We call it a spot block. It’s going to be in there in the middle, a 32nd ad in between, you know, 20 other 32nd ads. And that’s going to dilute how effective your ad is going to be. Our most people going to listen to a 7 or 8 minute commercial spot. Block And are they going to listen intently? Are they actually going to pick up the information in your ad? That’s the third element here.

They did a study recently. They found that a person has to read or hear a radio ad 36 times before they recall any of the information in it 36 times. So now they have to hear your ad, which we know we’re losing people when they change the channel. It’s in a middle of a 7 or 8 minute spot. Block So it’s going to be really difficult for them to hear.

That’s why they have to hear it 36 times. That’s a lot of times. Now, if you’re paying 150 to $200 per airing of that commercial, that’s a lot of money for people to finally start recalling the information, the message in your advertisement. Number four, we’re not paying attention to the radio when we’re driving, when we’re listening to the radio while we’re driving.

Matt Tompkins: Most people, unless you’re driving all by yourself, have other things going on. We have kids in the car. We have distractions. We’re paying attention to traffic. We’re changing the channel. We forgot to change it back.

There are a lot of distractions when you’re driving and that makes over-the-air broadcast. It just makes it hard again to get your message to your target market. And the last thing, number five here is that we as I mentioned in the beginning, there’s just no way to know accurately exactly how many people listen to a given radio station with these handwritten diary markets. We just don’t know. We can’t prove how many people did or did not hear your advertisement.

And that’s not saying that there aren’t a lot of people listening and that there aren’t a lot of people who would hear your ad, It’s just saying we don’t know. Radio is unique because every other every other advertising platform, every digital platform online, you can track precisely. I can see exactly how many people saw my Facebook ad, my Google ad, You can literally pay per click. You can’t do that in radio, at least not yet. There’s not a way for us to have a 100% or 90% margin of accuracy with these ratings. So what should you do? That leads me to tip number two, what to do instead, Spend your money on streaming ads, streaming ads or radio station broadcasts that you listen to on the Internet.

Matt Tompkins: Our trackable streaming numbers are tracked very accurately, just like any other digital data points. We get them, you can see them, you can prove them, and you can see exactly how many people are listening to a show, a radio station online, and how many people will hear your commercial. Now, there are a number of other reasons why streaming ads are legit, and they are a great way for you to market your business.

Number one, they are often much more affordable. They cost a lot less than the over-the-air radio advertisements. I remember back in the day when streaming stations were first coming into the scene becoming a thing and they were selling them for like $1. It was like a dollar holler hour or something like that. They just couldn’t get people to buy these. Now, obviously that’s changed. They don’t cost a dollar anymore.

They cost more than that, but they are much more affordable than over the air. And I believe from my perspective, they are much more effective. And let’s get to why they are more effective. Well, people don’t change the channel when a commercial comes on, when they’re listening to a streaming station, it’s a pain in the ass when you’re in your vehicle and you’re listening to a radio station and a commercial break comes on, it’s easy to just hit the button, hit the preset, jump to the other station and see if there’s music playing or whatever.

Matt Tompkins: So you don’t have to hear a dreaded commercial when you’re listening on online, on the Internet, you have to disconnect. Then you have to wait, wait, wait, reconnect. And you have to go through the whole pre-roll video and then find you connect and you log on and it’s just it’s not convenient. And so people are going to sit there and leave the station on, which means it’s a much higher chance of them actually hearing your advertisement. Now, another thing that is a big advantage for streaming ads is that the behavior of the people.

Is different than in the vehicle we talked about in the vehicle. There’s all these different distractions, right? The kids, the traffic, everything else. Most people who listen to streaming stations, they are sitting they are doing one thing. They’re usually working. They’re sitting at their desk. They’re doing one task. It’s similar to people listening to podcasts, which makes which is why that podcast are so effective for advertising, because you have their attention.

They aren’t distracted like they are when they’re in the vehicle. People listen to the entire commercial break, 70% more than over the air. So 70% of the people online listening to streaming stations are going to hear your commercial. They’re going to listen through. They’re going to say, you know what? I’m not going to change your channel.

Matt Tompkins: It’s a pain in the ass. I’ll listen through it. And they’re not doing anything else. They’re sitting at their desk, they’re working, they’re pretending to work. Whatever it is, they’re going to hear your ad and they’re going to actually process the information. People are more focused when they’re listening to a streaming signal. I will also add that a couple of the biggest audiences that you’ll find for listening to streaming broadcasts are Newstalk and Sports Talk.

Those are huge for online streaming listenership. Now, my tip number three here is one that a lot of business owners don’t even think about. But this tip works and it is using local radio talent. Now, I can say this since I spent 17 years working in local radio, we are cheap, we are very cheap, We aren’t paid much and we will take anything we can get.

We are very effective though, and here’s why. When you have someone do an endorsement or voice your commercials. That people have a real connection with, they’re going to be much more effective. Now, local radio talent is cheap. It sounds bad, but it’s true. But we are very effective. And you can have someone voice a live 62nd endorsement commercial once a day, and it’s only going to cost you around 100 bucks. It depends on the show. It depends on the show and the ratings. Some are like 200 bucks a week, but I think the average would probably be around $100 per week for them to do this and add this major value to your advertisements.

Matt Tompkins: They’ll also voice all of your other commercials as part of the deal. So it’s a really good deal. Use local radio talent. Now, the reason is people have a connection, so they listen to these people. It’s a morning show host and they have a connection with them. They listen to them every morning. They have an emotional attachment. And so when they start doing a local live endorsement commercial for your business, they’re going to listen to it.

They’re going to tune into it. You can also get them to voice all your other commercials and put those on the streaming broadcast to be even more effective, more potent. Another secret addition to working with local talent is you can actually request with these live endorsement commercials to have it be the first placement ad in a commercial spot.

Block So even if it’s a 7 or 8 minute spot block, you can request to have that ad since it’s an endorsement placed at the very front, which means people listening over the airwaves are much more likely to hear your commercial. It’s not going to sound like a commercial because you’re using a local radio talent that these people who listen to the show like they love. They don’t mind listening to them. They trust them.

Matt Tompkins: They trust them. My next tip here is to do your research, find the stations with the highest listener loyalty and the audiences who can actually afford your services. You want to find radio stations that have your target market in their listening audience. And a lot of times businesses make this mistake where they just see a nostalgic heritage radio station. Oh, I grew up listening to that station and they assume they’ve got a massive audience and maybe they do. Maybe they show them the ratings, which we talked about earlier.

Not very. We don’t know if they’re accurate. And they say, oh, yeah, we’ve got 40,000 people tuning in every week. Oh, my gosh, that’s great. Yes. Here, take my money. I want to run my ads. And then they don’t get any results and they wonder why. Well, we don’t they don’t know.

They didn’t do the research to find out. Even if that station has a massive audience, is it the audience for you, for your business? So find the stations who have high listener loyalty and that actually align with your target market. How do you do that? Well, some of the stations or formats that have the highest listener loyalty kind of nationwide, it’s same here in Omaha, Nebraska, would be country music stations, very popular across the country. News and sports talk stations. They don’t have massive audiences or that cume, but they have huge time spent listening and they will listen through those commercial blocks.

Matt Tompkins: They are very loyal listeners. And then you have Heritage popular morning shows across the country, those radio stations that just have massive shares in the ratings, they’re number one. They’ve been number one for 30 years. And they can really they could tell their audience or ask their audience to do anything and they’ll do it, which means if they ask him to, you know, go to your business, there’s a good chance that they will. Who do you want to avoid?

I don’t know if I’d say avoid, I would say maybe be wary of be cautious with top 40 stations, younger music stations. Music stations are tricky across the board because people are listening for the music. And if the wrong song comes on that they don’t like, they’re changing the station, right? They’re changing the station. So people are tuning in and tuning out.

You know, we’ve seen breaks where people that time spent listening, it’s only like 5 to 10 minutes. And so it’s really hard to get them to stick around through a commercial spot block if they’re just listening for the music. So I would just be cautious with the music stations and the music stations. If you do want to go that route, those are the stations. I would really encourage you to look at the streaming signal because everybody listening to the streaming broadcast for these popular music stations, they’re going to listen to those commercials because, again, it’s a pain in the butt to log off, log on, and they’re just going to they’re just going to sit through it and they’re going to hear your message.

Matt Tompkins: Go to a website for a radio station and look at their photos from past events. Go to a live event that a radio station is putting on and you’re going to meet and see the people who are the listeners for this station and that’s going to help you decide, Are these are these my people? Are these the people in your target market that you’re trying to reach? You need to know things like age, sex, these demographics, these data points.

They’re going to tell you if this is the right place to spend your advertising dollar. The tricky thing with radio is that with the ratings, we just don’t know. We just don’t know. You know, you go online to any other digital advertising platform and they can show you all these statistics, all these analytics you do know. You do get the full breakdown. A final quick bonus tip for you here before we wrap up the episode would be pre-roll videos.

What is a pre-roll video? Well, before people can start listening to a radio station streaming broadcast, they go to their website, they log on, they hit listen live. They have to see a pre-roll video. Now, these pre-roll videos are normally about 15 seconds.

Matt Tompkins: They are both audio and video. We’ve talked about the power of video in previous episodes. These are very effective because every single person who listens to that streaming broadcast has to see your pre-roll video. So pre-roll videos are very effective and you can see exactly how many people listened or viewed to that pre-roll video. So the bottom line for today’s episode is ask them to prove it. Ask them to prove it.

We can prove it in any other advertising medium. We can see the analytics. We can see the data. We can see exactly how many people saw or heard. Your ad set aside your nostalgia for radio because the radio we remember growing up, it’s not the same radio today. It’s evolved just like everything else.

I will say this we’ve talked about a lot of very effective and affordable tips for today’s radio, a lot of things for you as a small business owner to take advantage of. Now, a lot of affordable and effective ways to grow your business, but you have to follow the guidelines. You have to do your research and know what you’re getting into and not depend on nostalgia. Follow our guide, not your gut. Thanks so much for listening here today to Midwest Mindset.

We have a recap of all these tips in the show notes for you here today, and we’ll see you on the next episode.

Full Written Transcript of The Episode

Matt Tompkins: Are you ready to take your social media game to the next level? Well, it’s time to embrace this truth. Facebook and Instagram are now video platforms just like TikTok and YouTube. This means that video based marketing is the way of the future.

In fact, it’s happening now. So if you’re not creating videos for your business on a consistent basis, you’re simply not in the game. But don’t worry. In this episode today, we are here to help you navigate the world of video marketing. We’re going to answer questions like, Should you be posting vertical videos or widescreen format, short or long form? And what’s the real impact on your business?

In this episode, we’re joined by Walt Sanders and Michael Murphy of Omaha’s own Wmk Media, and they’re going to show us exactly how to use video to grow your business. Hello and welcome back to Midwest Mindset, the podcast that gives you the small business owner, the big agency Secrets to Marketing. I’m Matt Tompkins of two Brothers Creative, where we believe every business deserves affordable and effective marketing.

Now Walt and Murphy of Wmbc Media have not only turned their own YouTube channel into a monetized profit machine as part of their business, they help small businesses do the same thing with their video content every day. But first, I think it’s important to understand why video content is the most effective tool to market your business today and to also understand why these vertical videos are so popular.

Matt Tompkins: Where do they come from? Well, to answer that question, we’re going to have to travel way back in time, back in the day to the dawn of Snapchat.

Yes, Snapchat was actually the first social platform to incorporate vertical videos, and they did it for obvious reasons. First, 80% of all social media users are on their phones, 80% Snapchat. They tapped into something pretty big with these vertical formatted videos because what they found was that of all those people on social media, only 15% of users would turn their phone for a widescreen video.

And this meant that you were leaving a lot of real estate unused. In fact, vertical videos versus widescreen. When the phone is held horizontally like you’re talking on it, they take up 78% more space, They fill up the entire screen and that means you now have just gained 100% of the user’s attention.

After Snapchat came another big sea change in how social media channels worked. And that was tick tock. Tick Tock took the same addictive, newly discovered vertical format videos and they applied their new algorithm that was different from Facebook, Instagram and YouTube in one major way Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. They were network based algorithms, which simply means that they would place your content in front of people who knew you liked your page or followed you. Tick tock. They started placing videos in front of complete strangers, first using their very advanced algorithm to find the best suited viewers for your specific content.

Matt Tompkins: The massive success of TikTok. It forced the other social media giants to change, and Meta quickly created reels for Facebook and Instagram.

Google launched YouTube shorts for YouTube. I share all of this with you, not for the history lesson, but it’s because this is important. It’s important to know this because this defines why video content is the single biggest opportunity for marketing your business.

All of these platforms are now placing your vertical video content in front of new people, in front of complete strangers. And we’re talking tens of thousands of people, which is the entire goal of being on social media in the first place, right? For your business to be discovered. We’ve seen brand new YouTube channels with just five subscribers, get tens of thousands of views with their vertical video shorts. And today, Walt and Murphy of Media are going to give us the ultimate playbook for video content marketing.

So first we talked about which format you should use, vertical or widescreen. In my opinion, mixed formats of both. You need to have your long form content that’s going out. I don’t know. Weekly Maybe you’re making a post that’s once a week or once every month even where you’re spending more time on that one specific style of video. That’s your long form video, that’s your widescreen. Then you take your verticals and cut it out of the the macro content, if you will. Yeah.

Walt: Yeah. And really, it’s more about more verticals, less horizontals. Yeah. So if you will, the ratio you want the mainstay video and you want shorts that lead people back to that mainstay. The thing about shorts is what you’re doing with those vertical shorts is, you know, brand awareness. The age old rule, if it takes 7 to 8 impressions for somebody to actually click through and investigate further who you are as a company.

So you want as many impressions as you can get with your brand with those vertical shorts so that when they want to find out more, they’re getting to that meaty content that’s that horizontal and that’s when they that’s when they start to learn about your company as a culture, your company. What is it They actually offer some customer testimonials and stuff like that.

Matt Tompkins: The answer is both. Yes, we should be posting both vertical and widescreen videos because they have different purposes, not just between the two different formats of video, but between all the different social platforms and how they work.

The other question we get asked a lot that I brought up with Walt Murphy is how often should I be posting videos? Yeah, go.

Walt: Ahead. Go first. I just want to say if you’re only going to do it very seldom, like once a week, you know, three times a month, there’s not even a point in posting videos. Really? Okay. So the main thing is at least five videos a week. Nice. Okay. Them on the like. That’s minimum. Yeah. Make your first goal to post once a day Monday through Friday.

Matt Tompkins: In the vertical format.

Walt: And try to get a horizontal in there.

Matt Tompkins: Yeah like maybe maybe like 1 to 2 three minute horizontal video. It’s a little more meatier, more in depth content, and then a single vertical video, at least every single day of the week.

Murphy: If you can find us that to be sustainable, if you can find it to be sustainable to to post five, six times a day vertical format, do it because we don’t we’re not running into the same issues that we did back in the day. If you used to spam the Facebook wall, everybody would hate you, you would be annoying and then you keep popping up.

We don’t have that issue with reels because it’s getting put out in front of a new audience and the algorithms selecting where where it goes. Essentially, you don’t have to worry about spamming as much You can you can drop a ton of content throughout the day and a lot of times the same people, unless they’re following you, aren’t even going to see the same video twice.

Matt Tompkins: This is a common thing with all business owners where we think that we’re posting or sharing too much about ourselves. We think we’re making the call to action too much. But trust me when I tell you we’re not even coming anywhere close. In fact, most of us business owners, we don’t make the ask enough. You have to keep in mind the marketing rule of relativity, which, yes, I just made up. But this simply means that your audience does not see your content as frequently as you see your content. You are in the weeds.

You’re going to get sick of yourself, your videos, your content, but that’s because you are seeing it too much. Your audience does not see it anywhere close to enough, let alone too much. So don’t base your decisions on how often you see it. Base your decisions on how often they see it. Are you going to make reactionary choices that negatively impact your results? Well, we.

Walt: Remind clients all the time to is, you know, we’re not making a sales pitch over and over again. We’re positioning ourselves as thought leaders in the industry. The sales pitch is that you’re talking about things that are related to your industry, so therefore you’re being looked at as an expert in some people’s eyes. And with that brand awareness, then comes the sales pitch after they reach out to you, right? So we’re talking all top of the marketing funnel stuff. It’s just push, push, push.

And like he said, I ran an experiment the other day on our YouTube channel and I posted the same short. The original one was 47 seconds long. The other ones were 22 seconds, 11 seconds, just varying lengths. But same content posted them all at the same time, all at 11 a.m., eight of them on YouTube. Channel three of them got over thousands of views.

A couple of them got like 30 views and then some were right there in the middle with like 500 views. Yeah, but it just and they were all unique viewers. Okay. So that goes to show that the algorithm just said, hey, all this content, give it to all these other unique viewers rather than just a whole bunch of nobody except for my subscribers or our subscribers, saw all the videos pop up in their feed. And I did have a couple people be like, Why did you post the same thing? We’re experimenting.

Murphy: Yeah.

Walt: And you do have to do that. Yeah, yeah. And a lot of times we have to caution clients into thinking that there’s going to be immediate success and immediate results when they see these short format and start posting so consistently.

You got to think of the first six months is data collection. Yep. Right. All the ideas that you have for your content. Let’s do those ideas. Let’s get them out on a consistent basis in a vertical and horizontal format. Come back in six months, look at the data and say, All right, out of these six ideas, these are the three we’re going to stick to. Yeah.

And I also, you know, we need people to be thinking in the in the way of like, okay, we’re going to have a YouTube channel, we’re going to make one style of content. You got to think of it as a variety show. There’s it’s the opportunity to have different skits, if you will, different episodes or different styles of content, and you want to have three that are somewhat closely related. So you’re not going to alienate anybody from your audience, but you want to have those three that you can just always be leaning on. And then people can see different range from you rather than just a one trick.

Murphy: And in order to find those three, you had to try ten different styles of videos and see what works and what didn’t work and collect data.

And you can’t just post one kind of video one time at one time of the day with one form of edit and be like, Oh, I guess that video didn’t work. If it didn’t work the first time, recut it, re-edit it, restructure it, tag it differently, try it, try different, try to post it at a different time of day. And as you do that, then it’s like, okay, no, this video is trash. This video worked, you know? Yeah.

Matt Tompkins: The next important factor to video content marketing is how you look on video matters more for business owners and businesses than individuals.

Quality matters because what we’re doing here is we’re establishing the very first impression that prospects new customers are going to have about you and thus your business that’s going to be formed in literally a split second at the longest a few seconds into your video. So quality matters with your videos for a business.

Walt: Feel like I need to go home and change my face.

Murphy: That’s funny.

Matt Tompkins: No, no, no, no. Um.

Murphy: You.

Walt: You’re totally right. Yeah, you’re totally right, though. The beautiful thing about analytics today, there’s a new. Analytic in YouTube on the shorts that says swipe swipe away or stayed on. Yeah. Okay. So you can now see the percentage of the people that actually got eyes on that vertical. Okay. Did they swipe up or not? And you always are going to want to be on the positive side of 50% stayed on.

Matt Tompkins: It’s like my dating app back in the day. It’s like there’s too many swipe lefts. Yeah.

Walt: They’re like, you only considered it for two seconds, man. Wrong with you. Come on.

Matt Tompkins: Damn. I mean the numbers game, right?

Walt: Like. Like. Like. Like. Like.

Murphy: Like someone’s got to.

Walt: Figure it out in the.

Matt Tompkins: Chat. The next thing we’re going to talk about is tags. What are tags? Well, tags are simply keywords or words related to your particular video content. So if you’re posting a video on YouTube about how to make homemade meatballs, some of the tags you would include in the tag section of your YouTube video would be Meatballs and Homemade Meatballs and How to Make Homemade Meatballs. And you’re allowed hundreds of tags.

And this is an opportunity you want to take advantage of. They’re not the be all end all, but they are important. So don’t just post a video without any tags because it’s these tags or these keywords that are telling YouTube what your content is about so that YouTube can place your video in front of the right people. Murphy walked us through some important and highly effective techniques for managing those tags in your videos. To me.

Walt: Tags are super important. Youtube does, actually. They do use their algorithm to filter out unrelated content. So if you’re tagging for something like if you put Donald Trump because you know it’s a trending tag, if you put that in your tags and your video doesn’t mention the words Donald Trump, they’re going to just not filter you into the Donald Trump stuff. So you’re wasting your energy at that point. So YouTube is smart enough for that. Put as many tags as you can possibly find that are related to related. Yeah. And just use chatgpt to generate them. Yeah.

Matt Tompkins: And I will say this, let’s back up for just a second cause we need to mention what tags are. Okay. Yeah. Tell people that tags are like what are they.

Walt: Well tags are keywords that you put into the tag area of the YouTube video, but the whole description and the title, those are all used as tags as well. So it’s very important on YouTube if you’re listening. This is been out there forever, but it freaking works. It’s how we got our channels started. I mean, we had 2 million views in the last year.

The title of the video that you upload to YouTube should have all the most popular tags for that video in it because that is actually embedded in the title of the file into the the title of the file that you upload. So you definitely want it to be the same as what you want it to be searched for. Like, you know, the Midwest. Yeah.

Matt Tompkins: Mindset.

Walt: The Midwest Mindset podcast would be the title. Then you would say you know hyphen entrepreneur hyphen, new business hyphen, startup hyphen, advice hyphen. And then you can only have so many words in the title, but you just get the most important tags in there.

And then as you upload it to YouTube, that automatically those tags, if you go and look at the source code behind your pages, you’re going to see that the title is still the same, even though even though you changed the front facing title, it’ll actually the code will right Here’s the front facing title and here’s the actual original file upload. Okay, that’s a good tip. And then you go to chatgpt and type in, write a video about Matt talking to Walt and Murphy from Media.com about what it means to be an entrepreneur in the Midwest. Yeah, and just take that description that it writes for you. It’ll be 3 to 4 well-written paragraphs that actually purposely includes buzzwords, and it’s going to be creepy because you’re like, Wow, they actually know what my company does.

Matt Tompkins: We’ve been talking about things you can do to your video once you’ve uploaded it to YouTube, like changing the video’s title, ensuring in the description, putting in those tags, those keywords. But there’s something you need to do before you even upload it to YouTube and that is how you title your video.

Don’t just title your video when you save it to your desktop computer. Do not just title it something like video number one and then upload that to YouTube because YouTube pulls that information. It’s what we call metadata. It pulls that information from the original video file and that factors into it. Putting your video in front of people. Even if you change the video’s title in YouTube once it’s uploaded, YouTube is still pulling information from the original video file, so title your video appropriately. You can even include, as Murphy talks about here, those keywords that you want to target in the title of your raw video file.

Walt: So the process we go through is all those tags are in the title of the file, upload it title it appropriately. If it’s a short, always put hashtag shorts in the title in that description box. Always put three hashtags because those are the you can put six, but they’ll only list three on the actual viewing page. And then under that, that description that you get generated by Chatgpt because it’s going to have the most amount of buzzwords, those are all going to be tags go down, put all the tags in the tag box that you can possibly think of.

Always make sure you choose the language of the video as English and always put the location the location was filmed or where you’re targeting. Yeah, we’re filming. Is in Omaha. But if you’re running a campaign in Tennessee, Tag It was filmed in Tennessee and that will naturally feed it to people that are in Tennessee. And then if you’re tagging correctly, we just did this for a client. I just tagged a video that it was made in Tennessee because he wants to talk to athletic directors in Tennessee. It’s an athletic director testimonial. So we can now go and look at the analytics and see that people that are interested in athletic director stuff in Tennessee saw those videos. Nice. So when they go to a conference there in two months. Yeah, there should be some brand awareness.

Matt Tompkins: What you title the original raw video file, the description, the tags that you include, the location it was filmed, the language, the video is in the date it was recorded. All of these things add up. Even the thumbnail graphic that you choose actually factors into YouTube’s algorithm.

Murphy: If you have a video that you know is fire and it’s not getting traction, just try to redo the thumbnail. Yeah, try to redo it and see what happens. And I guarantee that click through rate starts to go up. Yeah, that’s.

Walt: One thing that impresses me. I can go look at a video we posted a year ago and it’s got like the lowest impression click through rate possible. And then you go and look at the impressions that it’s still getting after a year. It’s just a straight up line. So you’re missing all this opportunity for that whole year that that thumbnail sucked. Oh yeah, right. So a thumbnail. The best thumbnails, especially when it does involve people in the video, is to have up close to the face some sort of emotion on the face.

Matt Tompkins: And that make that face of that human big in the thumbnail so it can be seen and recognized.

Murphy: Absolutely.

Walt: And in background, minimal words too. Yeah. I always thought it would help. But you look at evidence. Yeah. If you use.

Murphy: If you do use words, make it count. Like make it an impactful statement that makes them It’s a hook. It’s supposed to make them have to click on the video like arrested. Yeah. Yeah.

Walt: Like something like that and then have it. Yeah. Yeah. They don’t.

Murphy: $1 million in damage don’t.

Walt: Duplicate the words that are in your title either because now you’re just wasting space because like they’re already seeing the title.

Matt Tompkins: Seeing the title. Another very common question is how long should my videos be? And the answer is difficult because this does vary as Murphy talks about here in just a second, depending on the content.

But I will tell you this much with the vertical videos, in particular, the Facebook, Instagram reels, TikTok YouTube shorts, you want to accomplish the goal of your video, that impression, whatever it is that you want to leave with people in the first five seconds, the first five seconds needs to hook them. Then you deliver the story, the substance, the content, and then you need a call to action. A CTA. It’s Hook story Call to action. That’s the format that we’ve seen work really, really well with these vertical video shorts.

Walt: Yeah, it’s all based on format too though, correct? Um, yeah. If it’s a podcast, it could be three hours if you really want. Yeah, right. But are you popular enough to retain an audience?

Murphy: Like a reaction video is going to be like three minutes, you know what I mean?

Walt: But but if you’re, if you’re just starting out like and you’re trying to position your if you’re a company and you’re trying to position yourself as a thought leader, let’s start off with a five minute talking head video where we’re just talking directly into the camera, right? And I’m sharing information about the oil industry because I’m big in that field. And then you take, you know, out of that five minutes, we all know you’re going to get 10 to 15 shorts out of that. Now you’ve got three weeks of content just from that one sitting down talking head for five minutes. Yeah.

Matt Tompkins: If there’s only one thing that you take away from this episode here today in regards to video content, I hope it’s this You need to have a strategy. You need to have a plan. You know, planning gives your strategy, it gives your video content focus.

You have an intent, you know what the intention is, and you have a way to measure results because now you know what you want to get out of it, but it also gives you and your team time to execute and maintain this new commitment to content marketing. Don’t just start posting today. I mean, if you’re excited, you’re hearing all these great techniques and tips from Walt Murphy. I’m thrilled to hear you’re excited, but don’t just start posting today. You need to have a plan in place first.

Walt: Don’t start posting until you have 30 days in the can and ready to post and have that scheduled out to give your team that’s doing it some breathing room to give yourself leeway for vacation time. Yeah, things like that. Or the.

Matt Tompkins: Shit happens. Claus Man.

Walt: You could be very strategic about it. Now, one thing to keep in mind, like that power washing company. I know you’re watching, um, one day you’ll get paid for that brand awareness because videos like that will get you to a certain point of subscriber base, will get you monetizable on YouTube. And now it’s like, okay, we’re making these videos, we’re getting brand awareness and we’re making a couple hundred dollars on it.

Matt Tompkins: Now, I’m not going to lie content marketing. It is a commitment. It’s a lot of work and that’s why planning ahead helps tremendously. But this will have a snowball effect over time. You’re going to be able to repurpose a lot of these different videos on different social media platforms, and I think that’s.

Murphy: How you get to posting 5 to 7 times a day is like compound over time if you’re posting one video a day, right? Well, in three months you’ll be able to repost that same video again and you end up just layering up and you’re reusing the same content over and over again in a cycle over, you know, three four month increments.

Matt Tompkins: Content marketing is all about the long game right now. You may feel like you’re just in this day to day treading water, just keeping the head above water mindset. And I get that. I know. I know how that feels. I’ve been there too.

Most business owners, we are in that same place. Content marketing is not a brute force sales approach. It’s not an approach that’s going to generate leads tomorrow. But what it’s going to do is it’s going to take that S-curve, that up and down, that up and down that we see as business owners, and it’s going to level it out to where it’s a nice, steady incline.

Things like video content, search engine optimization, having a website, having the right social media channels, having a strategy behind it all that ties it all together. That is how you get to one year from now, six months from now, two years from now, where you don’t even have to stress because you already have this laid out. You have built this foundation to an indestructible approach to making more money. A huge thanks to Walt and Murphy of Wmk Media for coming on the podcast here today. I’ve got a link to Wmk Media’s website in the show notes, also in the show notes.

This is a very cool resource for you. It’s not even from me or Walter Murphy, it’s from YouTube. Yes, YouTube issued this 67 page guide to all the latest and updated best practices for monetizing and getting more reach, more views, and more impact from your video content on YouTube. It’s a PDF. You can click on the link and download it absolutely free in the show notes and we will close out the show with a call to action from Walt and Murphy themselves for WMr Media here on Midwest Mindset.

Walt: Are you tired of putting out content that sucks?

Murphy: I’m tired of you putting out content that sucks.

Walt: No, legitimately though, we need to have a deep talk. Come a little closer.

Murphy: This is getting intimate. I need. I need you guys to understand something.

Walt: If you’ve been afraid to pull the trigger on making good content and growing your influence and brand awareness, WMr media.com are the guys for you.

Full Written Transcript of The Episode

Matt Tompkins: What is a podcast? When we’re asked that question, I think each of us has a different idea of what a podcast is in our head right now. For some, you may be picturing Marc Maron interviewing a celebrity in his garage or for others, it’s Joe Rogan. That’s a pretty obvious go to for podcasting. He’s sitting in his multi-million dollar studio stirring up controversy. Or others may be picturing video, only it’s just a YouTube show. Others may be it’s only audio. It’s Serial, it’s NPR, New York Times. Everybody has a different idea in their head of what a podcast is.

But on today’s episode, I want you to set that aside and I want you to think of a podcast as what it really is a tool. Podcasting is a tool. And not only that, podcasting is the most affordable and effective marketing tool for growing your business. On this episode we have not just one, but two podcast pros here to give you the secret to Skyrocket your Business.

A podcast. Hello and welcome back to Midwest Mindset, the podcast that gives you the small business owner, the big Agency Secrets to Marketing. I’m Matt Tompkins of two Brothers Creative, where we believe every business deserves affordable and effective marketing. If you’ve ever been to a local business networking group or just had conversations with other business owners, you have probably been told the very long list of things you need to be doing or should be doing with your marketing. Yet other business owners are happy to tell us what we need to be doing.

From SEO and SEM to blog articles to videos over here that are different than videos over here. And no, this new social channel is the social channel you want to be on, but they neglect to tell us how we’re supposed to do all these things or when we’re supposed to find the time to do all of these things.

Matt Tompkins: So as small business owners, we’re constantly on the hunt trying to find this this singular thing, the silver bullet that will check off every box on our marketing wishlist. Podcasting is exactly what we have been searching for.

Podcasting is unlike any other medium in the way that it builds trust. The ways that it can be utilized, the techniques we’re going to talk about today on this episode that Trump cold calling and cold emailing that establish you as an authority, as a credible go to in your industry as a thought leader for branding, for content, for just pure SEO output, you get four times the SEO output from every single episode. Podcasts are tracked just like the written blog now, just like the written word.

You can quadruple your SEO output with just 110 15 minute episode. And we are going to go through the process of how you can minimize the time down to just 20 minutes per week and fulfill an entire week’s worth of marketing for your business. It truly is incredible.

And I’m not going to do this alone. We didn’t want just one podcast expert, one podcast pro here. We wanted two. And that’s why I went to my podcast coach and mentor. I work with him in radio. He was my program director for over a decade and he is still the VP Senior VP of Programming at Iheartmedia, as well as the podcast talent Coach. Eric Johnson Podcast Talent Coach.com. I asked Eric, why does every business need a podcast?

Erik Johnson: Podcast is the best way to build rapport with your clients. Nothing is like audio. If you and I are watching a video together, we’re watching a movie, we’re watching a YouTube video. We see the exact same thing.

There’s very little left to the imagination and so it’s very black and white, cut and dry. When I’m telling you a story and you’re listening to audio, the audio leaves a lot to the imagination. If I if I describe to you a red Ford Mustang sitting out front of a casino, you’re envisioning that Mustang in a way that’s ideal for you and brings you the most pleasure. Is the Mustang a 68 or an 86? Is it convertible or hardtop? Is it cherry red? Is it running? Is there anybody in it? Is anybody standing around? Is it daytime or nighttime?

Matt Tompkins: Mine has Chevy Chase driving it for some reason. I don’t know.

Erik Johnson: Why. I don’t even want to know. I don’t. That’s very odd.

Matt Tompkins: But you know, it’s my imagination. Okay, Let me chase.

Erik Johnson: It reminds me of a National Lampoon’s Vacation.

Matt Tompkins: Yeah, That’s the way it came into my head.

Erik Johnson: That’s why. But I don’t know that Chevy Chase was driving. Okay, Maybe.

Matt Tompkins: I should have imagined the beautiful woman.

Erik Johnson: In it, but that would have been more comfortable. So that’s what audio does for you. It lets you build that rapport.

So the four steps of the sales process, you build a rapport with your with your prospect, qualify them to make sure they’re right for you and you’re right for them. You educate them on your solution and then you close the sale. But everybody rushes to that educate. Hey, let me tell you what I have to sell you. Here’s my thing. And we haven’t built the rapport yet.

Building rapport is about 40% of the sales process and then that qualifying your prospect is another 30. Like I need to make sure you’re right for me and you need to make sure I’m right for you. And a podcast allows your listener to self qualify themselves. They understand what you believe in, what you value, how you operate, and by listening to your podcast and the stories that you tell and what you share about yourself, they build that relationship.

Matt Tompkins: People want to do business with people they know, like and trust. Trust is everything. Everything comes down to trust.

Trust is what every marketer, every advertiser, every business is chasing after. Because once you have established trust, people will fill in the blanks. We’ve talked about the difference between our feeling brain and our thinking brain and how we make decisions based off of our feeling brain That’s all about who we trust.

And podcasting is a format that is designed to be unlike any other medium. It’s intimate, it’s personal. It’s one on one. I mean, you’re literally inside someone else’s head speaking to them.

Erik Johnson: Know, like and trust is just another way to say rapport or friendship relationship. You’re building that bond when people are consuming video. A lot of times if we’re watching TV, we’re watching it with other people and we’re seeing the exact same thing.

And it’s a communal activity. When it’s audio, you’re listening to audio while you’re driving, you’re listening to audio while you’re working out, exercising, riding a bike, walking the dog. It’s usually just you and what you’re listening to.

The only reason people listen to audio is for companionship. They don’t want to do whatever it is they’re doing by themselves, so they have something on to listen to. Video, especially on YouTube, is a phenomenal way to get discovered. It’s one of the best search engines there. There is in a way, for you to get discovered and people see what you have to offer.

The podcast builds the relationship. With everybody. So use your video to get discovered. Use the podcast to build a relationship so you’re right there in their pocket, in their ear, talking to them with a one on one conversation every week.

Matt Tompkins: What I love about podcasting for small business owners who are limited on time and need maximum results is that you do one thing, you do one action, and you get many things out of that one action.

For example, we’re talking about some of the many benefits, the very effective results driven benefits of an audio podcast distributed to 45 plus audio platforms from Apple to Spotify and everybody in between. But you also can layer video on top of it. So you’re still doing that one action recording, that audio podcast. Now it is a video podcast on YouTube and we’re going to talk about some of these techniques that we use with our clients every day to get even more value out of it, especially when it comes to your SEO. Absolutely.

Erik Johnson: Video is such a powerful medium to get discovered and bring people into your world. So start with the video to get discovered. Take that audio, use it as your podcast to build a relationship and then use the transcript of it or your show notes for the blog post on your website. So you’re taking the same piece of content, repurposing it in three different ways. It starts giving you SEO Google juice so people find you when they’re searching for you. You have those keywords in there and it’s just a great way to build your brand and build your business and attract new clients. Every business should have a podcast.

Matt Tompkins: Now, as with any other form of media, it is important that you know what you want your audience to do. Who is your target market? Who is your ideal customer, or in this case, your ideal listener?

And hopefully those two align so your podcast can help you grow your business. But then what is the message you’re going to craft? How are you going to resonate deeply with that audience and what is it that you want them to do?

Erik Johnson: Your podcast is a marketing tool for your business, and so before you ever record a podcast, you need to decide what you want your audience to do when the episode is over. What is that first step? They can take down the path to doing business with you That could be downloading a free resource you have on your website to put them on your email list.

That could be sign up for a webinar that you’re holding that could be attend a free event that a networking mixer that you’re holding on Friday afternoon could be an open house that you’re having on Saturday. Whatever it happens to be, decide what that call to action is before you record the content of the episode, then make the content of the episode, stir that emotion in them, and talk a lot about the why and why they want to take action and why they want to accomplish what it is that you’re going to help them accomplish.

So the call to action becomes powerful at the end. But there’s so many ways to get leads. If you get people on your email list by offering them a free resource over on the website, now you can follow up with those leads. You can get people to sign up for a sample of your product or service. You can get them to attend an event you’re holding and get them to sign up, buy tickets, come to a free event. There are so many ways to get leads, but they’re building a relationship with you. They’re building that rapport. They’re getting to know who you are by the stories that you tell.

So many people want to create a podcast and they just want to make it information like, I’m going to teach you my six steps to success. Nobody cares. Nobody cares. I can take your six steps to success success, and I can teach them as well. There’s nothing that’s going to separate the two of us. The only thing that’s going to make you different is your story and your personality and your journey. It’s your opinion and your take on the information. Why are you.

Matt Tompkins: The person to lead people on this?

Erik Johnson: Why should I listen to you? Right. I has information cornered like you’re not going to out information. I am right there aggregating everything on the Internet. It’s your opinion and your thoughts of that information that will separate you. And that’s what I can’t copy. And that’s how you’re going to build a relationship with your audience. I mean, pun intended.

Matt Tompkins: It’s your voice. It is your voice, both literally and figuratively. It is your.

Erik Johnson: Voice. You have to be authentic. You can’t be out and pretend to be something you’re not. You can’t be this persona and this, you know, you don’t you don’t need a big radio voice. You don’t need to be somebody you’re not.

You don’t need to be Joe Rogan. You just need to be you and have an opinion and make somebody care. I often say if your audience was to rate you on a 1 to 5 scale one, I hate him. Five I love him. If everybody’s rating you a three, you’re dead in the water. Like three means I can take it or leave it. I don’t care if you have more fives than ones you’re doing all right.

Matt Tompkins: Eric coaches his podcasters on the many, many different ways there are to generate direct leads and sales from a podcast to profit from your podcast. One of the most effective is interviews, and I’ve seen this firsthand. We had a client and they were sending out cold emails, not getting the response rate that they wanted, and we simply shifted it up.

We flipped the script, as they say, and in. Invited those same people to be a guest on their podcast. 80% not only responded. 80% said yes. Compare that to the 8% response they were getting in just their normal cold emails. So imagine if you have this big name client, the CEO, this top executive, this person you admire, you want to collaborate with.

You want to partner, you want to do business with or it’s just a client you want to land using your podcast as a way, a proverbial foot in the door to invite them on your show is a way to leave them with an unforgettable first impression and build and nurture this new relationship that you would have otherwise had no opportunity to begin.

Erik Johnson: Zoe Roth came to me looking for some coaching, and she’s a consultant. She’s she lives in Australia. She’s actually from Canada. She goes into businesses and helps them tear down the silos so departments can work better together. And so she she’s a consultant in that arena and she came to me to help her with her podcast. And I asked her, how many downloads is your podcast getting? And she goes, I don’t know. I don’t even look.

That’s not what I do it for. And I said, Really? Why is that? And she goes, I use my podcast to open doors to prospective clients. She said, When I try and cold call a client, it’s very difficult to get past the gatekeeper and actually get an appointment scheduled with them to talk to them about what I can do for their business. But when I call and and invite them to be a guest on my podcast, they take my call nearly every time because they all want to be on my show.

So I’ll invite the CEO to be on the show. We’ll have a conversation about booking the interview, then we’ll have a pre interview conversation where we can kind of get to know each other and talk about what the interview will be about. Then we’ll do the interview, they’ll come in and we’ll sit down and we’ll do the interview. So I met with them a third time and then when the podcast episode is ready to be published, I reach out to them again and say, We’re publishing the episode, Here are the assets, here’s the link to the show and here’s when it’s going live and that sort of thing. And then I reach out a fifth time and we talk about how it went, how everything went. And at that time we now have a relationship built because we’ve spoken on the phone five different times, and that’s when we start talking about how we can work together. Now, before.

Matt Tompkins: You let that imposter syndrome creep in and tell you who’s going to want to be on my podcast, I only have 100 downloads an episode or ten downloads an episode. Let me tell you, hear firsthand, they do not report downloads publicly for any podcast.

That is another way. Podcasting is truly unique and nobody cares. Podcasting is a lot like your bench press. You are the only person who knows how much you can bench and you are the only person who cares. Podcasting is not about how many downloads you matter. Size does not matter. It’s about the quality of those downloads and who is listening to your show. Trust me when I tell you that people will say yes to coming on your podcast as a guest.

Erik Johnson: So many people are worried about the size of their audience. Well, who wants to be on my show? I don’t even have you know, I don’t have that many listeners. I don’t think I’ve ever had a guest say, How many listeners do you have on your show unless you’re shooting for the top of the top?

Like if you’re shooting for an A-list celebrity who is who is limited in their time and very selective on who they grant interviews to, nobody’s going to ask you what your audience size is. They’re just flattered to be interviewed by your show. Well, an average people don’t even know what a good download number is. Yeah, they.

Matt Tompkins: Don’t know what it means.

Erik Johnson: I have 512 downloads. What does that mean? Yeah. Is that good? Compared to what? Like, I don’t know. I don’t.

Matt Tompkins: Know. We don’t do this with television ratings. We don’t know if I want to watch that. Jimmy Kimmel. I mean, he’s only got 3 million viewers compared to, you know, Jimmy Fallon over here. He’s got ten. I’m going to watch him like, no, nobody cares.

Nobody cares. Nobody cares. It’s just in our heads. So far, we’ve talked about how to generate new business leads with your podcast, how to use your podcast as a platform for branding. When you layer in video, the other truly substantial value to your podcast is with SEO search engine optimization, or as we like to call it on this show, trying to start a trend being search engine friendly podcasts are the most search engine friendly thing that there is, especially when you follow the formula we’re going to give you here in just a minute.

Erik Johnson: Absolutely. I like the way you say SEO or search engine friendly rather than optimization, because so many search engine optimization companies promise to make your website and your content optimized. Well, the problem is the search engines change their algorithms all the time.

Matt Tompkins: Google just did their 3,000th change over the last year. So yeah.

Erik Johnson: If it’s optimized this year, it’s probably not going to be optimized next year. So just create great content and make it very rich and valuable and search engines will find you. Don’t don’t try and game the system. Don’t. Stuff your content with with search engine phrases and terms and things like that. Because if you’re gaming the system today, it’s not going to work tomorrow. But if you’re making great content and you’re sharing valuable information and it’s unique because you’ve added your story and your opinion, then it will stand out from everything else and it will get noticed and it will get shared by other sites and other people. The number one way people discover podcasts is through word of mouth.

They hear other people talk about It might be mentioned on another podcast. A friend might tell you, you might see it mentioned on social media, you might see it mentioned in an article. But that’s the number one way. And the way to get people to talk about you is do things worth talking about. Just create great content, share valuable information, help people, provide them information on your show, and then give them an opportunity to take a next step with you to to work with your business and really succeed through the information you share with them.

Matt Tompkins: And in the in the show notes, we’ve had this in the show the last few episodes. We’ll put it in there again today for you. You can download a free checklist on how to write and or structure, I should say an SEO friendly blog article so you can use this. It’s not advanced math, trust me.

They act like they wrote the algorithms themselves. Right. But these agencies, they’re just doing what other websites are telling them to do. That’s all that they’re doing. So they failed college math just like the rest of us, you know? So except for maybe Eric, because I know you were an architect, so you’re good at math.

Erik Johnson: The problem is AI is coming in and AI and it’s taking over. Yeah, they’re going to it’s going to make you optimize it anyway. You’re not going to need an agency. Just ask Chatgpt how to optimize your website. It’ll tell you so.

Matt Tompkins: So Eric, you coached a lot of podcasters. I’m curious what you think, what you think of this process. This is kind of how we work through it. It’s kind of our secret sauce to minimize the time, kind of simplify the process. So what we do is we say, okay, we’re going to do some research for whatever your podcast or business is, and if those two align together, that’s that’s a good thing. Your ideal customer or ideal listener go through that process.

So let’s say for the year we’re going to really own this certain phrase, you know, we’re going to own the word marketing or whatever it might be your video podcast, and then build out content and the episodes. What we advise clients to do is go through and write this, follow that checklist for the blog, write a blog article, then use your blog article as your prep for your podcast episode.

You can link back and forth as we’ve talked about, and then you can also break up your your blog into little sections for little additional video content that you can use for your company. And you really kind of that’s kind of how we streamline and simplify the process of start with writing it, then you record it in an audio form, then you have the video, then you have however you can kind of parcel up that podcast to amplify all of that content. So you’re getting, like I said, at least four times the output. Is there any other tips you give for business owners who want to.

Erik Johnson: I like the own the phrase for the year and I like taking the blog post and making that into various pieces of content that you can share on social media and your videos and that sort of thing. I like a piece in the middle of it and it’s themes that might stretch for a length of time. So you might do over four weeks or 12 weeks where you have a content plan.

So on my show I might talk about the confidence to start and imposter syndrome on one episode, and I might take that into how to structure your podcast and I might take that into content ideas and I might take that into interviewing style, and I may take that into storytelling, and then I might take that into how to generate leads, and then I might take that into how to grow your business. So it’s a, it’s a story arc that starts with where do we start with our podcast?

How do we get the confidence to start? And it ends with how do I drive my business with the show? So it’s it’s a story arc that leads into that monetization of your podcast. So if monetization is the my phrase of the year that I want to own, what is the path over the course of the next 12 weeks or eight weeks or four weeks?

Matt Tompkins: It’s like the transformation. What is the transformation your listeners going to undergo? Absolutely. And to know that you have to know where they’re starting and where they’re going to end up. Same thing, by the way, for any business, you’re here with a problem. We have the solution. And then here’s the end result. Here’s where you’re going to end up, Right.

Erik Johnson: Here are the steps you need to take. And now I create episodes for each of those steps. So I love the way that you break it out and then repurpose the content on video on YouTube and your podcast and your blog and your social media and all of those little areas where you create the content one time and then just use pieces of it to be everywhere. And now they’re all linking together and now all of a sudden your SEO friendly put them all.

Matt Tompkins: Back to your website where you own the content. And Eric, you know, you coach a lot of podcasters. Eric By the way, full disclosure was, you know, Ben and I’s coach for I don’t know how many painful years that was for you in radio and broadcasting. You came a long way.

Erik Johnson: It was. That was a lot of fun.

Matt Tompkins: It was fun, though. Yeah, I remember starting. Or not if it was just don’t even want to listen to my first aircheck. But mine either. But Eric is great if you’re a business owner, if you’re a podcaster and you want somebody who can help you through this process. Eric is the guy. That is why he is the podcast talent coach. And speaking of websites, podcast talent coach, dot com slash magnet. We have so and then tell us what that is exactly.

Erik Johnson: So that’ll give you 21 lead magnet ideas. So we talk about generating leads. How do we get people on your on your email list? Well, here’s a little secret. Nobody wants to sign up for your newsletter. Nobody wakes up in the morning going, Oh, I hope I have another newsletter in my inbox.

Matt Tompkins: You know what I’m going to do today? I want to go read the About Us section of some random company.

Erik Johnson: That doesn’t happen. That doesn’t happen. So let’s give them a valuable piece of information in exchange for their name and email address.

So it might be seven ways to attract your ideal listeners. Or it might be how to grow your business with podcasting or something like that. I have 21 different lead magnet ideas that you can use in your business to give people value, to get them on your email list when they’re on your email list, then you can nurture them, send them great information, bring them back to your podcast, get them to your free events, and start building that relationship so you can get that at podcast. Talent coach.com/magnet.

And I’m all about helping people with their content. You know it’s so many people will teach you how to launch a podcast you know go watch a YouTube video. Launching the show isn’t the hard part, but so many people get their show launched and they go, okay, now what? Now what? Now what? Know what? 7 to 10 episodes. Seven is the average.

Matt Tompkins: Before people throw in the towel.

Erik Johnson: People give up at seven episodes because for three reasons. One, they they figure out it’s more work than they thought it was going to be. Right. Because they don’t have a strategy. Right. They don’t have the plan like you just discussed. Here’s how you do it without eating up your entire week. If you watch the YouTube video, they don’t show you that. Yeah, they don’t.

Matt Tompkins: Show you the hard part. Yeah, They.

Erik Johnson: Don’t grow their audience fast as they thought they would because they don’t have a plan and a strategy to go get in front of new listeners and bring them in. You know, they figure if you build it, they will come. That doesn’t happen and they don’t monetize their show as fast as they thought they would because, again, they don’t have a strategy.

They don’t do what we just talked about. They don’t have a plan to walk people from discovery to enrolling as a client. And without that plan, they give up. They throw that towel in at seven episodes. So that’s what I help people do. I help them take their content, turn their information into entertainment and turn their podcast into powerful, profitable relationships so they can grow their business with their show.

Matt Tompkins: Thanks, Eric, for joining us here on the podcast today. If you would like to download Eric Johnson’s Free 21 lead Magnet ideas, the link is in the show notes from the podcast Talent Coach himself. We’re going to have Eric back on the podcast again to do a whole episode dedicated to specific lead generating techniques that you can implement with your podcast to grow your business.

Thanks for joining us here on Midwest Mindset and we’ll see you on the next episode.

The Secret Behind the World’s Greatest Salesperson

Full Written Transcript of The Episode

Matt Tompkins: What is the secret behind the world’s greatest salesperson? Now, don’t worry. This isn’t one of those clickbait Facebook ads where I try and sell you my 24 set DVD program revealing the shocking secret to sales.

No, I’m talking about the literal world’s greatest salesperson. The Guinness Book of World Records lists one single person as the greatest salesperson on the planet. And it turns out there actually is one big secret to his incredible success. In this episode, this secret to sales is revealed, and we’ll see how you can apply it to your own business as we uncover the secret behind the world’s greatest salesperson.

Welcome back to Midwest Mindset, the podcast that gives you the small business owner, the big agency Secrets to Marketing. I’m Matt Tompkins of two Brothers Creative, where we believe every business deserves affordable and effective marketing that produces real results. Something happened to me as a kid that stuck with me for most of my life. I’m talking this stuck with me up until just maybe a few years ago, maybe 5 or 6 years ago. And what happened was when I was a kid, I was a Boy Scout, and every year we had to sell popcorn. And I hated I hated selling popcorn. I hated it.

And I don’t know why. At the time I hated it. I mean, I loved the camping and the horseback riding and all the merit badge badges and everything else. But I would take picking up trash on the highway any day over selling popcorn, and it always ended up like this.

Matt Tompkins: I would wait till the last minute because I put it off. I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t want to sell popcorn. And then I would end up calling my grandma and begging her to buy like ten, ten things of popcorn, you know, of kettle corn. They had the variety pack, which was good. I mean, it was good kettle corn. But I despised sales.

This version of sales, this inaccurate mindset, if you will, was in my head forever. It stuck with me all the way into adulthood. And it wasn’t actually until a number of years ago that a friend of mine, a mentor, somebody I looked up to, said, You know, you’re really good at sales. And I said, What? I think I literally stepped back like, physical reaction. I hate sales. I’m not no, I would never be doing sales. Sales is the worst last thing I want to do with sales.

And they said, what do you think you’re doing right now? And it was a moment. It was a, you know, an aha moment. The light bulb went off in my head, and that’s when I realized that sales is not this false stereotype of we’re tricking someone into buying something or talking them into buying something that they don’t need. And I’m not saying that doesn’t happen.

Matt Tompkins: That’s a bad version of sales that’s manipulating people. Sales, though, is actually solving a problem. It is building a relationship. You know, referral, marketing, networking, whatever you want to call it. Sales is just about building relationships.

You build relationships to build trust so that when your ideal customer has a problem and you have a real legitimate solution to that problem. You can help them. It’s really as simple as that. And when my mindset shifted, I started to realize all the things I love about marketing are really they apply equally to sales. I mean, sales is really a part of your marketing strategy. It’s all about human psychology, understanding people’s wants and needs. It is not that image I had since I was a Boy Scout in my head of being forced to do something I didn’t want to do.

Now here’s where it can catch up with us as business owners, because I think a lot of people have that that false stereotype in their head and that delays our action or our willingness to take action when it comes to sales. Now, sales and marketing are pivotal, foundational to your business.

Most most companies start off with just one or the other. They have marketing or they have sales. And eventually you you grow from just 1 to 2. You have both and you have sales, which, you know, your company can survive on just brute force sales for a long time.

Matt Tompkins: But marketing is really what gives gives this plane the lift that it needs to reach the altitude we define as success.

And it makes your sales a whole heck of a lot easier. But we delay that. And so we have this negative view of things like cold calling or prospecting new leads or talking to people. Most business owners are even afraid just to put a call to action button on their own website to say, Hey, this is a business relationship, let’s do business. I can help you.

We’re very passive about it. We’re gun shy because I think in large part to that that false image, that false stereotype of sales that we have in our head. The truth is that we can’t simply ignore sales because we don’t like it doesn’t matter if it’s based off of a false definition of what sales really is. Without sales, your business cannot succeed.

Needless to say, I was pretty surprised to find out that basically my whole life was a lie. I had based my life on this premise that sales suck because of my Boy Scout popcorn days and now that had just blown up in my face. Talk about your all time backfires. Just as I was surprised then I was equally surprised to find out what the secret is behind the world’s greatest salesman.

Joe Girardi is listed in the Guinness World Records as the world’s greatest salesman. He sold more retail big ticket items one at a time than any other salesperson in recorded history.

Matt Tompkins: You may be thinking, well, he was probably selling something really cool, like, you know, I iPads, iPods, iPhones. No, no, it wasn’t even a gizmo or a gadget. It was a very old school traditional item that he was selling. In fact, I was even more surprised, I would say shocked to find out that what he was selling his profession is usually the typical stereotype that we think of when we think sales in a negative way. I’m talking about a car salesman.

Yes. The image that comes to many people’s mind when we think sales is used, car salesmen, we think somebody who’s trying to trick us or talk us into buying something or manipulating us, selling us a lemon. Joe Girard. He was a car salesman. That’s what he sold. In total, he sold over 13,000 cars. That’s about six cars per day on average.

On his best day, he sold 18 vehicles, 18 vehicles in one day. On his best month, he sold 174. These numbers mean good for him, but I feel embarrassed. Joe Girard. He sold more cars by himself than 95% of all the dealerships in North America. And to make this even more incredible, he sold them one vehicle at a time. He did not do any bulk deals. This wasn’t like shopping at Sam’s Club or. Costco? No, he did these one by one.

Matt Tompkins: So what was his secret to success? First thing we probably think of is, well, hard work. He’s probably an incredibly hard worker. And yes, he does list that as a very important trait. But let’s be honest, most of us are working really hard and we’re not seeing these kinds of sales numbers. Joe also accredits being likable. That’s part of it, too.

But there are a lot of hard working, likable sales people out there, and they’re not selling 13,000 vehicles. Now, what Joe did that was different is he personalized his relationship with every customer. There is such a power in the little things. The little things.

For example, he would send a personalized greeting card every month to his entire list of customers. In January, it would be something like, you know, Happy New Year. Inside it, he would say, I like you. I like you. That’s it. He would handwrite these cards.

He would hand address them. They were not this mass mail, mass snail mail campaign like those flyers we get every political season. No. He did these by hand. All 13,000. What he did was he built relationships with every person and sending something that seems as little and frivolous as a card in the mail. Builds trust and builds relationships. A phone call not to try and sell something, but just to say hi. Check in, say Hey, I like you. You’re awesome. That is the secret to a success.

Matt Tompkins: Because what what ended up happening with Joe and what will end up happening with you and your business is that the vast majority of your customers will be returning customers and they will tell a friend who tells a friend and so on and so on and so on. Referral, marketing, Word of mouth. I think we get lost a little bit when it comes to marketing in trying to acquire new customers and we focus only on. Who’s next? And we don’t focus enough on who we already have.

Who is nurturing that relationship with your current clients? Are you following up with them? When was the last time you spoke with all of your customers? What is a way that you can personalize? Your relationship. I understand. We’re busy. We can’t all we can’t invite everybody, every customer out to dinner. But you could send them a card.

A handwritten card. That has incredible value and an incredible return on that value. By the end of Joe’s career, yes, he was sitting out 13,000 cards per month. He had to hire an assistant to help him. But by the time he was about ten years into his career, almost two thirds of his sales were to repeat customers. It got to the point where customers had to set appointments months in advance to come in and buy from them and they would wait. Contrast that with other car sales people who just stand around waiting, hoping for walk in traffic.

Matt Tompkins: And that is what a lot of us do as business owners. We stand and wait. We hope. Remember, hope is a dangerous drug. Hopium. We need to detox off hope. Because hope doesn’t increase sales. Hope doesn’t increase revenue.

Standing there in the parking lot or the proverbial parking lot of Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, I’m putting my name out there, but nothing’s happening. It always surprises me when business owners say, it’s my slow months, we have nothing to do. And I ask, Are you following up with your current customers? Are you nurturing those relationships?

And the answer is a lot of the times, What do you mean They’re already my customer. I don’t have to work for it anymore. I think that’s the thought behind it, Understandably so. You know, but the truth is, those customers, that relationship, it needs to be nurtured just as much as new relationships because it’s those relationships that are actually well, A, they are what is keeping you.

They are what is keeping you in business right now. And they are what is going to keep your business and your doors open in the future. Referral marketing is a powerful thing. Building trust is an incredibly powerful thing. When you build trust with somebody and you build a genuine relationship, it has resounding implications. It is a ripple effect that will increase sales and grow your business.

Full Written Transcript of The Episode

Matt Tompkins: What is your value as business owners? We’re never really given an instruction manual on how to know what our time is worth or what a fair price is that we should be charging for our services. And as we’re starting out, it’s very easy for us to undervalue our business and what it is truly worth. In this episode, we’ll learn how it all comes down to having the right mindset.

We’re joined by Amy Nakai, the owner of Rooted Tree Specialists, who’s going to show us the power of having the right mindset to find success even when the odds May be stacked against you.

Matt Tompkins: Hello and welcome back to the Midwest Mindset, the podcast that gives you the small business owner, the big Agency Secrets to Marketing.

I’m Matt Tompkins of two Brothers Creative, where we believe every business deserves affordable and effective marketing. Since we’re talking about how to know our value today on the podcast, I think it’s apropos that we share where we actually started out as business owners.

You know, we’re embarrassed sometimes to share just how much we have devalued ourselves in the past. So I’ll take the first step here. Okay, I’ll put myself out there because I found this slip of paper here, this real life invoice. You can hear it. I’m holding it in my hand that I found when we moved here to our new studio. And this was for some video production that I did back in the day.

I’m going to say back in the day and not give you a specific date because that would embarrass me perhaps a little bit. That might take it a little too far because it wasn’t that long ago. So I went out and I filmed a bunch of live speaking events and charged $100 in total to film each of these events and then just $100 in total to edit everything together.

Matt Tompkins: Now $200 in total for all of this production work that equaled, I’m guessing, probably 15 to 20 hours, if not more. Of my time. I mean, I was basically working for free. I was basically paying to do this work. I share this, though, because this is common.

This is normal. I think all of us have done this where we undervalue our services. We don’t know what our actual value or our worth really is. It takes a lot of years to gain the confidence and the wisdom to know what we’re worth. Now, our guest today, Amy Nakai, has found success in a male dominated industry. She has forged her own path and she has found her success.

I think if I were to describe it in one word, it would be mindset. It is finding the right mindset and investing in yourself so that you have the energy, the passion and the confidence to know your value. I asked Amy where she gets this energy, this positivity, and it turns out the secret is you can actually shape and form the mindset that we take to work with us every single day.

Amy Nakai: I love to listen to positive podcasts. I love to watch positivity, YouTube videos. I love listening to positivity. It just fuels your.

It’s absolutely changed my persona. And so I just exude a ton of confidence, a ton of positivity because I absolutely love that I went from being a negative.

I mean, everybody in college would say I was a pessimistic. I would just look constantly at the negative and I’ve completely done a 180. I just when somebody says something like, if somebody cuts me off, I’m like, Man, they must have needed the bathroom a lot more than I did or something to that nature. I just always look towards the.

Matt Tompkins: Positive, having the right attitude, the right approach, That positive mindset is important, but mindset is so much more than that.

Mindset is applying that with routine and discipline every single day. One of the things I appreciate about Amy and her story is that she didn’t just want to do something to do it and try it. She actually wanted to be great at it. So she is constantly educating herself, learning and growing to perfect her craft and get better in her own industry.

Amy Nakai: So I am an ultramarathon runner, so I run an ultra marathon is anything more than a marathon. So I run through the forest all the time. I love it and I just love trees because they were ever changing. It’s not like the road running where you’re just everything is mundane in the same trees are ever changing.

And so I really did seek something that was in the forest in nature, was in another company, and then went on to become a GM and then was like, You know what? I can just do this myself. I absolutely love it. Got my well, I got my arborist license before that, but got my arborist license, my pesticide license and just continued to go to school for those things. So I think.

Matt Tompkins: One of the most challenging things about knowing your value is actually sticking to your value because it’s very easy for us to devalue ourselves, to lower our price, to think, Oh, well, if our competitors are doing it at this price, I have to be lower or we’re challenged or questioned as to why we should be charging what we charge.

Amy Nakai: And I can’t tell you how many times clients will say, Oh, it’s just climbing, I just need to trim those two branches or just something.

Okay. It’s a lot more intense than that. It’s a lot more work than that. And then we’re taking thousands upon thousands of wood like pieces, pounds of wood down. Like it’s not. Oh, it’s this easy thing. It’s always more complicated than it looks.

Matt Tompkins: So let’s get into how we establish what our value is in the first place. And I think we really have to look inward and we have to identify what makes us unique. I mean, people can get the same thing or similar products or services pretty much anywhere these days.

What is it that makes your business unique? And I think that really boils down to the experience you’re providing for your customers.

Amy Nakai: I think knowing how you’re different and why you’re different. I am different because our arborists that are climbing are certified arborists. Our climbers excuse me, our climbers are certified arborists, so they know how to make the proper cuts and why To make the proper cuts. So then our mission then comes back to we care truly not our mission. That’s not our mission. But we care truly about the clients.

And so we’re presenting a product, a service that is better than most people because we spend time. We didn’t just train any 18 year old how to wield a chainsaw.

We showed value to the clients on getting them trained and making sure that they do that, and then with showing the value of making sure every client knows, Hey, this is why we care, This is why we might be more expensive, because we’re different. Because we’re different this way.

Matt Tompkins: What we’re talking about here is shifting from this cost based pricing mindset to a value based pricing mindset.

And knowing what your value is is a lot more than just the cost to make that product or deliver that service. It is knowing what sets you apart from your competitors and other companies in your market.

Amy Nakai: When you have clients who say, Hey, I got another estimate, hey, I got another estimate, and I upfront tell them you will absolutely find other less expensive estimates out there. But I just know the service that we provide for you.

And thank you so much for sharing that information. I value feedback. Here’s why we’re different. Here’s the value that we provide. And so I think depending on the client, some people just don’t want to be inundated with the minutia.

But building that value for them and sharing that with them on every single like this is why we’re worth more is because we care about your product and your house, not just dropping a huge log on your fence or anything like that. And we have insurance. And so that’s a lot of times too. So I would say a lot from different clients. We’ve heard estimates that other companies share.

Matt Tompkins: Listen, price is important, but it’s not everything. And the risk is that it can quickly turn into a race to the bottom.

Who’s going to have the cheapest price? Cheap, cheap, cheap. And people I’ll tell you right now, we do not want cheap and we want a fair price, but we want a price based on true value. If you’re about to have heart surgery, would you rather have the cheapest doctor or the best doctor?

Amy Nakai: My goal is truly I do care about your dollar, but the service that you’re providing. So in that race to the bottom dollar, it’s really how do you value your clients? I mean, we had one that we got done a lot quicker than we were expecting. I mean, I am telling you, I put a ton of money on this because I thought it was going to be a lot more complicated than it was.

It ended up not taking as quite as long. It went flawlessly smooth. And so we came down and we said, we’ll take $1,000 off and not so they can see. I don’t I’m not money hungry for that. And that is definitely coming across in hopefully in everything that we do so that clients see that we really do care about the client, not just the dollar.

Matt Tompkins: So how do we charge more? A fundamental component is trust. Consumers have to trust in the value that you are putting out there.

So if you want to have a higher price point, you need to be honest and transparent. And if we’re being honest here, many businesses don’t want that. They don’t want you to know how much money they’re making on that product or service. But if you can be transparent and honest, you can establish trust. And once trust is established, then you determine you set the value for your business.

Amy Nakai: Especially when right now you’re trying to pinch every penny because it’s just super valuable. Groceries are more. And so what am I what are you wanting that dollar for? What are you bringing to me that’s different than this? I think if you read clients so because you can get way overboard. Some people don’t want every single detail, but truly every single client is.

I will let them know up front you will find less expensive bids. Here’s why we are more. More expensive is because we value your property.

We value your trees long term and the community so that we train our arborists and dump fees are more expensive and gasoline or diesel is more expensive. But we truly value your tree whether you’re here five, ten, 15 years from now and whether you use me or not. This is why we are more.

And so I think building that value in every single aspect of what you do to every single client gives you that confidence too, and gives you that know we are worth it.

Matt Tompkins: You want to focus on the end result. What is life look like after you’re done, after they’ve purchased your product or they’ve hired you for your services? We yes, want to have as much information, the specs, the facts, because there are clients who want a lot of that. But it really helps when at least when it comes to marketing your business, getting your message out to paint that picture, if you will, to show what the end result looks like.

That is a huge component to establishing your value for your business. Amy also hit on something that I am very passionate and coach people on all the time, and that is to not do what other people are doing, especially big companies, just because you see them doing it. We often try and emulate and we don’t ask why we’re doing it.

Amy Nakai: I think there’s in our industry, there’s so many companies that, well, this is the way we solve this problem. This is the way we trim this tree, this is the way we solve this insect or this disease or anything like that.

Just because they’ve done it the same way for five, ten, 15 years. So because I am younger in the scene, I haven’t been doing this for 15, 20 years. I wasn’t handed a company. We built it it from the ground, from the ground up. I’m the first female owner operator that I’m out there doing it in the trenches with them. So I am.

How can we be different in the community? I’m spending time doing research. We’re spending time learning because trees are ever changing and insects are ever changing. And so if you have a product that you’re providing or a service that you’re providing for the community and you know you’re different, if you focus on that, it naturally comes out of you.

And this is why I’m different and I’m okay with being different because I’m solving a problem in the community. I’m solving this need this way so I’m able to charge more. And here’s why. And I love what Slater said about, you know, if it’s what good. Fair. Good. Fair or good? Cheap and good.

Matt Tompkins: Cheap or fast?

Amy Nakai: Yes. Good. Cheap and fast. Yes. I love that. Because you’ve set yourself apart for this is my value and this is why we are going to be more expensive. Not all the time, but truly like why we do charge more because we have certified this or because we do spend time doing research on this.

Matt Tompkins: Some of the best business coaches, they will work with you to get to the real you first because it starts with you. It starts with us on an individual level to establish the right mindset, and then that will transform the business around us.

And Amy talks about this with her business and how they even came up with her. Her motto, her slogan for rooted tree specialists and being rooted not just in your community, but in yourself.

Amy Nakai: I actually did. We I came up with the motto first, and then we came up with it because then we came up with the name because I just truly am rooted in the community for the community and why that’s important. But if you’re rooted in who you are and confident in who you are, it oozes out of you and here’s why it’s okay.

And then people start to see that authenticity. But truly who you are. And I think that’s how we’ve been successful. I’m not trying to pull one over on somebody. I looked at this lady. We went and evaluated this tree and she said, Well, I’m already getting it treated by this. And I looked at her and I looked and but it still has this problem. Where are you paying money? I don’t understand it, But they’ve been doing the same thing for the last 20 years. And I think if you’re providing a service or a product or anything that feel confident that you are providing that different than your competitor and it’s okay to charge more.

Matt Tompkins: When we started this podcast, I asked Amy how she has this level of energy and positivity, and she mentioned that, you know, she listens to a lot of positive podcasts and that sounds like a little thing, but it really is not, because what we’re talking about here is knowing your value, you do that by establishing the right mindset and mindset is not something that’s just it doesn’t just happen overnight.

It doesn’t just change instantly because we want it to like anything else. It takes discipline and routine every single day. What we put into our body, both the substance, the food and also what we put into our mind, what we consume, what we listen to, the books that we read, the people that we surround ourselves with. That is what truly sets our mindset every day.

Amy Nakai: Absolutely, Yeah. If you’re listening to I mean, there’s so much negativity around us, I feel like all the time and it’s just so easy to get bogged down. So if you’re just listening to positivity, it truly does, or reading books that are about positivity, it truly does change who you are.

Matt Tompkins: Everybody is looking for this big secret to success. I can tell you firsthand that Amy is like many of these successful entrepreneurs and business owners that I’ve had the chance to talk to have on this podcast and work with over the years.

And it’s really the opposite. It’s not a big secret. It’s the little things. It’s the little things that end up mattering the most. It’s positive affirmations on a daily basis. It’s focusing on the people that we surround ourselves with, those five people around us that make us who we are or who we’re going to become. It’s the little things that matter most. Mindset is a daily commitment. It requires discipline and routine, as Amy has showcased here on this episode.

But it is what is going to define your success, not just as a business owner and an entrepreneur, but as an individual, as a person. Thanks once again for Amy Nakai joining us here on the podcast, and thank you for joining us. We have a link. You can find out more about rooted tree specialists and Amy Nakai in the show notes, and we’ll see you in the next episode.

Full Written Transcript of The Episode

Matt Tompkins: When you ask business owners why they’re on social media, the most common answer that you’ll get is something like, Dude, everyone’s on social media. I can almost hear my Grandma Nola’s voice echoing loudly in response because everyone else is doing it is a dumb reason to do anything. Grandma Nola was a wise woman. Grandma Nola used to also tell me that anything worthwhile is worth questioning.

So I think it’s very fair to ask if our business should be on every social media channel and considering how much time, personnel and money that we throw at a multi-channel social media presence. I also think it’s fair to ask how much money has this approach actually made your business? What’s the return on this investment? Has all of this busy work moved your business forward, or is it just that busy work?

In this episode, let’s stop trying to be everything everywhere all at once and see if we can answer some very basic questions. Starting with Should your business be on every social media channel?Hello and welcome back to Midwest Mindset, the.

Matt Tompkins: Podcast that gives you the small business owner, the big agency Secrets to Marketing. I’m Matt Tompkins of two Brothers Creative, where we believe every business deserves affordable and effective marketing. 51% of all businesses will be closed after five years.

Over half of all businesses will fail within their first five years. Now, I don’t know this as a fact, but I think it’s pretty safe for me to assume that there is no entrepreneur, no business owner out there who just had to close their doors. Their business is done and said, If only we had spent more time on TikTok, our business would still be open and thriving today. Now I am in no way anti social media.

Quite the opposite. I think it’s in a very effective tool for small businesses to use, but that’s it. It’s a tool for many businesses. Their entire marketing strategy is just social media. We’ll just post on social media. It’s free. It seems easy.

Everybody’s doing it. Social media is not a strategy. Social media is a tactic. It is a tool that we use within our marketing strategy. Social media is not this magical marketing cure all for your business. There are many benefits to using social media effectively. You can get your message out. You can communicate and connect with your customers, your prospects directly. One on one. You can be seen.

You can establish your authority, establish credibility, you know legitimacy. You can be discovered by new people, especially the way that the algorithms work for things like reels on Facebook and Instagram, TikTok YouTube shorts, where they’re putting you and your reels, your your vertical video shorts in front of strangers, front of people who aren’t familiar with you or your business.

Matt Tompkins: That’s a huge opportunity can build your brand. But the risks and the negative side effects of a multi-channel social media approach are very real. And I don’t think we talk about those enough. The first one being it is a major time suck.

Yes, social media is a major time suck. It takes a major time commitment. Just think about individually how much time each of us spends on social media every day. Now I found studies that range on the low end 2.5 hours per day to the high end, six hours per day on social media. The average American spends 2.5 to 6 hours per day on social media, on our phones. And if you don’t believe me, open up your screen time report. I get that notification every Sunday, and it’s kind of a shocker. But social media is designed to be addictive. It’s designed to suck us in and we lose track of time.

So that’s how much time we’re each individually spending on social media. But that gets multiplied if you are a small business owner, because we’re not just on one social media platform. We’re not just on social media for our own entertainment, just, you know, the mind numbing scrolling on and on and on. The endless scroll, as they call it.

Matt Tompkins: Now we have to maintain all these channels because all these channels now are direct representations of our business. In addition to our website, they are in essence this, in essence, this digital storefront. So now we’re not just on Facebook, we’re on Instagram, we’re on TikTok, we’re on YouTube, we’re on LinkedIn, we’re on Twitter. I mean, that’s six right there.

So instead of focusing on just one platform. Where we know our ideal customer is with a message that is specific and targeted to reach and connect with them. Now we’re dividing up our time by six, so we can’t do any channel really that well. And our message is very vague because we don’t know if our ideal customer is even in on all these channels.

We don’t know why we’re doing it. We’re just doing it because we see everybody else doing it and we think. That we need to to. This is a major time suck and that means it is costing you money. We we like to look at social media as this thing that is free. It’s very easy to use or it seems easy to use and everybody’s on it. It is not free. It is not easy to use and we may see everybody else on it. But trust me, they’re all going through the same frustrations.

They’re all scratching their head just like you and I wondering why? What am I doing? Is this even working? Is this even worth it? Just think about how much value you place on your time as a business owner.

Matt Tompkins: We have a very limited amount of time. You can always make more money. You can’t get more time. We can’t add more time to the day. And as entrepreneurs, we need that time.

So you have to ask this very real question Is your time best spent divided up over six different social media channels doing a mediocre job at best because you’ve divided it up versus dialing in your processes and procedures, working on your invoicing or, heaven forbid, you know, picking up the phone and doing some cold call prospecting, that is still perhaps the number one way to increase your sales. Old school. And I don’t think the answer is yes.

Now, that doesn’t mean there isn’t a place for social media. It means that if we’re going to do social media, we have to have a very specific, targeted strategy that it is a part of. To put this in perspective, I want to bring up the story of Vilfredo Pareto. Now, he is the guy. He’s the Italian economist who discovered what is now known as the 8020 rule.

Now, the 80 over 20 rule. What he found the it was also known as the Pareto Principle in Italy. What he found was that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population. The 80 over 20 rule he found could basically be applied to anything. I mean, give or take a percentage or two.

Matt Tompkins: 80% of a company’s profits come from 20% of its customers, 80% of road accidents, traffic accidents caused by 20% of drivers, 80% of software usage is by 20% of users. 80% of a company’s complaints come from 20% of its customers. 80% of wealth is owned by 20% of people. I could go on and on and on. What’s cool or perhaps nerdy, if you want to look at it that way, I admit it’s a little nerdy is to apply the 80 over 20 rule to the 80 over 20 rule and then you get the 64 over four rule.

Now, trust me, I’m horrible at math. All that means is that 4% of your efforts result in 96% of the outcome. 4% of your efforts Is a small business owner equal 96% of your company’s revenue? 4%. In other words, 96% of the time is just a complete waste of time. 96% of the things that we’re doing as business owners is not moving our business forward.

It’s not cultivating relationships with clients and bringing in new prospects and dialing in those things that systematize our business. Only 4% is. So now when we take a step back and we consider the amount of time that we’re giving up to social media and then dividing up to get mediocre results among all these different channels. That time has a much higher value. I mean, just imagine if 4% right now of your time is getting you 96% of the results for your business.

Matt Tompkins: Imagine what an extra 1% could do. Just 1% difference. And that can happen if you took maybe one hour of those 2.5 hours per day that were. I almost said wasted but spending on social media and instead dedicated it to these things. The boring shit as our our friend and guest Jeremy Aspen said the main reason why businesses go out of business the boring shit. Dedicate one hour a day to learning QuickBooks. One hour a day to your processes and procedures.

One hour a day to, you know, cold calling, cold emailing, prospecting. New leads. That’s how you move your business forward. So we have to take a real honest look at the amount of time that social media is consuming and is it worth the results? The other thing we have to ask is, is it working? Do we even have a way to measure whether or not it’s getting results? Our efforts on social media.

Are we actually increasing revenue? Do we actually have new sales, new leads, Qualified leads? We can’t just go by. We got a bunch of hearts, views and likes. Because what does that mean? I mean, yes, I understand it releases dopamine in our brain.

It’s part of what makes social media like a slot machine intentionally designed to be very addicting because it rewards our pleasure center in our brain. But we have to ask, is this actually getting us results for our business? The results we need to stay in business?

The other thing we have to consider is how people use social media and ask Is social media an ideal selling environment? Do people want to see ads on social media? Now, trust me, you’re talking to the guy here who has had I have fallen for I don’t know how many targeted Facebook ads.

Matt Tompkins: I have bought so many things from China because it’s I know it’s like my Achilles heel. I see Marvel stuff, a Captain America shield, which still is not arrived, by the way.

That was a nice $73 waste of money. Yes, they can be very effective. I am proof of that. Targeted ads can work very well for your business, but we have to understand how people are consuming content. Reels, posts, videos, and what they really want. Think of it this way. You’re at a party.

All right. Social media is kind of like a party. And, you know, people on social media, they’re just scrolling through. They just want to be distracted for a few seconds. Just like at a party, you’re moving from group to group. You know, you’re mingling, you’re having fun.

You get bored with Tom’s story about, you know, how he was a almost became a Boy Scout eagle. And then then his conversation really takes a turn and gets weird. So you exit pretty quickly. You move on to the next group, the next conversation, the next story. You’re just having fun. And then you have the guy who is selling Amway who comes up and says, hey, you know, I really got to tell you about this deal.

Matt Tompkins: I mean, is that the right moment to be pitching? The long line of products and services that Amway has. And I know picking on Amway here actually sold Amway.

So I guess I can’t technically pick on them because I still have a closet full of their stuff from when I was in high school, young and vulnerable and impressionable. But I digress. No, it’s not the best selling environment. People are there to have fun. They’re not there to buy, you know, your service or your your your product. Social media is very similar.

You know, people don’t want to be bombarded by your message, by your ad. So use it wisely. Use it Very smart. Be hyper targeted in how you use it and understand how it actually works and what people actually want. Because you can easily turn off new customers if you are that guy selling Amway or whatever it is at the wrong place. Doesn’t matter if it’s Amway or not. People are going to be turned off. They can be turned off very easily.

So is it the ideal selling environment for your business? And you’re noticing a theme here because everything is about your business, because every business is different. You know, it may be Instagram may be the ideal selling environment for your business, for your service or product. You know, it may be that Instagram or Facebook is the ideal platform for you because your ideal customer is on that platform and you’re on that platform all the time, so it makes sense for your business.

Matt Tompkins: That leads into this next big misstep that I see a lot, and that is small business owners. We see what the big companies are doing and we see what all our competitors and all of our all of our fellow business owners in our market are doing.

And we do the same because we see them doing it and we think, well, if they’re doing it, then I need to be doing it too. It’s like keeping up with the Joneses. One of the biggest mistakes you can make is trying to do what big companies do. Stop doing what big companies are doing unless you have a big company yourself. Stop doing what that big company is doing.

Unless you’re Coca-Cola and you have hundreds of millions of dollars to spend on your marketing to do this very broad, very, you know, just kind of it’s this spray and pray approach where we’re just going to try to appeal to everybody, be very safe. We’re not going to be specific because you know what? We have hundreds of millions of dollars so we can bombard people with these messages.

We can hire a Kardashian, We can do whatever it is that might move the needle for Coca-Cola. But guess what? We’re not Coca-Cola. We have a very limited, if any, marketing budget at all and we have to use it very wisely.

Matt Tompkins: So trying to emulate what big companies are doing, it’s like they’re not just playing a different game, they’re playing a different sport. They’re playing baseball. We’re over here playing soccer and we’re trying to compare and do what they’re doing. Matt Why did you bring a baseball bat? This is soccer. Does it make any sense?

You just wasted all your money on that nice baseball bat and you don’t have any soccer shoes? So stop doing what other businesses, big businesses and companies are doing. Also, stop doing things because your competitors are doing. Here is an honest truth. All right. So results on social media are kind of like a bench press. Nobody knows or cares about your bench press except for you. You don’t know how effective. Social media is for that business that you’re jealous of.

You don’t know if because Susie at her bakery got 10,000 views, that means that she’s increased profits by ten x. You don’t know if it’s had any impact. She could be going out of business, for all you know, just like you don’t know or care what Bob can bench press.

We get tied into this. It’s very ego driven where we think everybody wants to know that I’m successful. So I’m going to post videos and I’m going to put on this show Puff out my chest. I think at the gym they even have a term for it.

Matt Tompkins: It’s called peacocking. It’s just showing off. You’re strutting your stuff, you’re showing off your fancy feathers. None of that, though, is moving your business forward. None of that, though, is helping you market your business to increase profits, sales and revenue. Stop doing what you see big companies doing. Stop doing what you see your competitors doing and start doing what you and your business need to be doing.

Which leads me into how I want to wrap up this episode because I’ve been pointing out a lot of things you shouldn’t do, a lot of mistakes and missteps that we want to avoid as small business owners. And if you’re wondering, Matt, when are you going to get to what we actually should do? Well, that’s right here. That’s what I’m getting to now.

How should we use social media? Well, instead of a multichannel approach where you start on 5 or 6 different channels, start with just one channel. How do you choose that channel? Well, choose the channel based off of two things.

There are two criteria you want to base this on. One is where your ideal customer actually spends time. So if your ideal customer is on Facebook predominantly or on on LinkedIn or Instagram, choose the platform they’re actually on, it’s going to make it a lot easier for you to reach them with your message. And the second piece of criteria here is choose a platform that you actually spend time on, because odds are, as a small business owner, you’re going to be doing a lot of this work yourself.

Matt Tompkins: And if let’s say you hate Twitter, you don’t like Elon Musk and you lost your blue check mark of certification, validation, whatever it’s called, and you’re angry and you hate Twitter, it’s going to make it much more likely for you to lose sight of Twitter and not give it the time and attention that it needs, which is missed opportunity. And, you risk having that dead channel for your business just sitting there.

So pick a channel that your ideal customer is actually on and pick a channel that you are actually on. Number two, Market message media. We talked about these, the basic three key ingredients to any successful marketing campaign and that is know your target market, know your message, have it dialed in and specific and then choose the right media.

And this applies across the board, but especially so with social media. Social media, as I said early on, it is not a strategy. It’s just, well, it has media in the name. It’s just a form of media, a way for you to get your message to your ideal customer.

Number three, create a content marketing schedule or a content marketing planner. And this is going to prevent that time suck because the last thing that you want to do, your last thing you want to do is just open up an app and think, What am I going to do today? And then just because what’ll happen is what happens to all of us.

Matt Tompkins: You, we’ve all done this. You open up TikTok and next thing you know, you look at the clock and four hours have passed by and you’re like, did I just enter a time warp? What just happened? So don’t do that. Instead, create a planner, a schedule every single day for one hour. I’m going to dedicate it to that one social media channel.

And that’s going to give you a lot of intent, a lot of focus. It’s going to prevent that time suckage from happening. It’s going to give you a plan. What is your message for this month? Is there a term, a phrase, a thing that you want to own for this year? You know, in 2024, we’re going to own the phrase meatball because, you know, we’re an Italian restaurant, meatball, meatball.

So we can figure out a plan for the entire year, divide that up into quarters, into months, into weeks, and all of a sudden you’re going to have something that resembles an actual strategy.

One of the thing that’s really important to keep in mind with social media is that we don’t own social media. We don’t own the content that we’ve created and posted on social media. We have given it away to these social media platforms for free, and then they are leasing it back to us and they are setting the terms. So I just spent thousands of dollars on this video promoting my business.

Matt Tompkins: I uploaded it to Facebook and then Facebook now owns it. I just given it to them for free and they set the terms. They say, Well, if you want anybody to actually see this video now, you got to pay us or we’re going to suppress it. And that’s how that’s their business model.

So it’s just important to keep in mind that you always want to point people back to something you own, i.e. your website, your mailing list. Last two things here that I think are super important real quick. One is to always follow the data points that matter. It’s easy to it’s easy with social media to manipulate the analytics, to show good or bad or whatever we want. It really is.

So you need to focus on the analytics. The data points that truly matter for moving your business forward. The three I would start with are pretty simple and straight forward. One is leads, qualified leads, and then sales. Sales pretty obvious. That’s closed deals. That’s new revenue moving your business forward. Right. But if you’re going to try and troubleshoot, if you’re doing a good job with your marketing or the marketing agency that you’ve hired, leads and qualified leads are really they’re great tools for really fine tuning your marketing.

So leads, qualified leads and then sales. And the last thing I really want to impress upon you here today is to always question why you’re doing something.

Matt Tompkins: Don’t just do it because your competitors are doing it, or because you see Pepsi-Cola doing it, or the big companies in your industry doing it. You really need to put in the time and do your homework, do the research, figure out where your ideal customer is.

Those those three basic ingredients to a successful marketing campaign. Trust me, they are fundamental and universal. Know who your target market is. Know what your message is to reach them and your form of media to reach them. And while social media is yes, a form of media, I mean, it has it in the name. It is not a strategy. And having a marketing strategy is the difference between your business succeeding and failing. Thanks once again for joining us here on Midwest Mindset.

And if you want to know if your marketing is working, if you would like to measure your marketing, we have a free measure, my marketing tool, the link is in the show notes. You just click on the link, take advantage. It is free. There are no strings attached and we’ll walk you through the process to find out if your marketing is working, whether it’s you doing it yourself.

Where most of us business owners start out, or if you’ve hired an agency and you just don’t know, you know, maybe you even have a hunch that you’re being taken advantage of. Well, we can find out. Measure my marketing.

The link is in the show notes, and we’ll see you on the next episode.

Full Written Transcript of The Episode

Matt Tompkins: Is your website hurting your business? That is not an easy question for us entrepreneurs to ask ourselves, but for the vast majority of small businesses, the answer is yes. Or at the very least, your website isn’t helping your business. Your website is literally your digital storefront.

And the days of simply having a website that’s just up and exists online, it’s not enough anymore. Even having a website that looks great, that isn’t enough either. Not in today’s search engine optimization world. It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, it doesn’t matter what product or service you sell, your website needs to be well thought out, well planned and executed with a strategy in mind or your website will hurt your business.

This episode is a website 101 course to help you turn your website into a tool that helps grow your business instead of hurt it.

Matt Tompkins: Hello and welcome back to Midwest Mindset, the podcast that gives you the small business owner, the big agency Secrets to Marketing. I’m Matt Tompkins of two Brothers Creative, where we believe every business deserves affordable and effective marketing.

Now, if you were to walk into a store that had dust and dirt and cobwebs all over the countertops, no one was even behind the counter to help you. Even the paint on the walls, it was peeling and it it looked like it belonged in like a bowling alley from 1972.

What would your first impression of that business be? How long would it take you before you turned around and ran for the exit? Probably not very long. Your website is no different. Your website is your digital storefront. And in today’s digital world, you have about five seconds, five seconds to pass what they call the grunt test. Yes, the grunt test is could a caveman or cavewoman or cave non-binary person? Could a person from the Stone Age look at your website and in five seconds know what your business does?

If your product or service is for them and establish quality and credibility. If you’re thinking about your own website right now and scratching your head going, that is a lot to accomplish in five seconds. I don’t think my website is doing that for me. Well, you’re not alone. I don’t want you to feel ashamed.

Matt Tompkins: You should not feel embarrassed because there is no playbook that they hand out to us entrepreneurs and small business owners about what we’re supposed to do with a website. And we’re bombarded by, You should do this. No, you should do this, and you have to do this every day. And that will only be $20,000 a month.

Please know that’s what this episode is all about so that you know what you need to do with your website, what you need to get out of your website. And when you hire a professional, what to look out for so that you don’t get ripped off. Joining us on this website, 101 course in this episode is our website graphic design and branding expert Chad Dodd.

Chad is the owner-operator at Klar Inc klar with a K where they believe in clarity through simplicity. Chad works with business owners like you and me every single day through this exact process. So Chad has seen this movie a thousand times. And I asked Chad, when he was in the studio with us, for most businesses, is their website hurting their business? Yep. Yes, Chad will expand on this, don’t worry.

Chad talks about the three different types of websites that you should consider, and I think this is a good place for us to start. Which one of these types of websites fits the needs of your business?

Chad Dodd: Is it a sale site? Is it a brochure site? Is it just a validity site? Right.

Matt Tompkins: What are each one of those things? Yeah.

Chad Dodd: So a sale site is are you capturing leads? Are you calling an action to the customer to say, Hey, I want you to give me your name, email address, whatever it may be, so I can follow up with you. You’re going to get something in return, that kind of stuff, so you can make a sale or is it a E-Commerce site, a just a commerce site where they’re buying apparel or whatever it may be, a sale site, a brochure site is basically just that. It’s all the sales brochures that you have in your organization that you have made into pages on your on your site.

So basically, it’s just I want to make sure that when, you know, my sales team is talking to somebody, that customer is just going out to validate what the sales guys were saying. That’s really all it is. Or to go back and say, Oh yeah, I remember this thing at a trade show. I go to their site to see see that kind of thing, but it’s not calling me to any sort of action to to buy from them. Oh, and then are you is it a site to validate that you’re in business? Right.

So COVID was a big part of that. Right? People would go and they don’t know whether or not they’re in business, but if you don’t have a site at all, people are going to be like, Well, they’re not a real company, right? So or you is your site there just to let people know? Yes, I’m a real company. Yes. I’m open for business. Credibility.

Matt Tompkins: Legitimacy, Yeah. A sales site, a brochure site and a validation website. One of the things that we commonly see business owners do is that they realize, as COVID showed us, that they need a website for that validation thing, right?

So business owners, we just put one together really fast like I did on Wix and we call it good. You know, it looks decent on the surface, but it really has no functionality at all, especially in the eyes of Google, Yahoo! And Bing. With that search engine optimization, your.

Chad Dodd: Site is like Waldo. People have to find it and it’s really hard to find Waldo, you know? And so because you have other characters in the Waldo book that look exactly like Waldo, there’s a little differences, but it plays tricks with your mind.

Also, the sea of all these different things that hide Waldo and all that. Your website is the same thing. You have millions, billions of sites that are out there and they could just be one letter off, you know? From yours. And so it’s it’s being found. And that’s where you look at SEO strength, you know, building in good quality content that is telling, you know, Google, Bing, Yahoo! Search engines, what is on your site and what people are searching for.

So it’s not just one thing of like, yes, I want a good well-designed site, but you know, is the content valid for the client? Is there enough content to clarify to the client what you do or the services or about you or any of those types of things?

Matt Tompkins: I really want to reiterate this point because it is so important and we see it every single day with businesses and we think that designing a website is just the graphic design element of it. And a website is so much more than just how it looks on the surface. On face value.

Chad Dodd: Design is when we say design your site around like there is the visual design, there is the user experience design, it’s the interface, it’s there’s all these different portions of its content design. How is the content being laid out?

You know, when we go into the design world to kind of veer off really quickly, when you get a book, like a physical book, that book and how that content and the words on the page are laid out is design. It takes someone to say, this is how this should be laid out for each page so that the reader can consume it properly. Well, you have to do that too, for your site.

And gone are the days of the 1994 Yahoo pages where it can just be a bunch of text and, you know, multiple backgrounds and like it has to be, you know, well-designed looks, looks good and that the user can understand because the users now your clients, your customers are savvy now of what looks good and what doesn’t look good. Yeah, we.

Matt Tompkins: Are graded on an unfair grading curve when it comes to the internet, and that’s just a fact. Social media is a perfect example. So let’s say people are scrolling through their feed and they see Joe Rogan’s video podcast and then they see your video podcast.

They’re going to they’re going to compare them. They’re going to judge them on the same level playing field, even though we know behind the scenes they are not level at all. It’s not fair at all because he had $2 million per episode and you have $2 per episode.

So we have to ask ourselves, what is the value of that first impression? Because that first impression, it often lasts forever. It is very difficult and expensive to try and change that impression. Once a person’s opinion of your business has been formed. And let’s let’s not kid ourselves the content that you put out, the quality of the content you put out, is a direct reflection of the quality of your business. That’s how people see.

Chad Dodd: It as a business owner, like, well, like I do design, like that’s I love design. And so I’m always kind of trying to perfect my craft, like, Matt, are you a designer? No.

So when we look at like building a Wix site, right, you’re building it based off of what you know of design, of how to build things and what you think is good. Now, design is subjective, but however, though, when you look at that, you’re proud of what you put together on Wix or Squarespace or any of those, you know, builder, you know, sites, you do.

Speaker3: This test with your spouse or your friends. Yeah, it looks pretty good.

Chad Dodd: Yeah. Like and you’re looking for approval, but like you think it’s good but have you really gone and showed it to somebody who is a designer or who and said, Hey, what do you think of this? And they’re going to give you honest feedback, right?

And if you like, do that. They’re going to give you feedback. Was like, well, I probably wouldn’t do that and we’re going to change this. And then you can get offended by that because like, look at what it is, because you have ownership of what you built. And so we would say like, Yeah, if you’re an entrepreneur, you don’t have any funds.

Yeah, it’s okay to start with a Wix Squarespace site, but when you get funds, get a designer, get a proper team around you, you know, to to build this thing out correctly because we’re looking at as a designer and as a builder designer for UI UX, we’re looking at the customer experience, not what you think is going to be looking good or not. We’re looking at that customer and bringing them into that experience.

Matt Tompkins: I totally relate to the cost and that sticker shock that we get as small business owners, but it’s important for us to not just consider the cost, the immediate cost, the short-term cost of having your website professionally designed and built for your business and your business’s needs. We have to consider the cost of not doing it right.

How much money are you losing out on by not updating your website to what it needs to be on today’s internet? Well, let’s talk dollars.

Chad Dodd: Yeah, right. And we’ll look at it in brand dollars like brand equity. Are you depositing or are you withdrawing? Right. And are you in a surplus or a deficit? And so when we look at a site that’s been built in 1998 and you have all these other sites that you know from the same, you know, companies that are in the same. Genre. You you know your site when they click on that, they’re you’re going to lose equity real quick with that client and they’re going to be like, they haven’t updated this. They’re out of touch with with me as as a client.

They are out of date, like whatever it may be. And so you’re losing trust from that brand, trust from from that interaction. And so it’s literally saying like the website is part of your part of your brand build, right? And the branding is just, you know, the repetition of knowing who you are with, with looking at the visuals of it or the written words of it. And so when you have a site from 98, like is it building trust with your potential clients or is it taking trust away?

Now, when we look at it from a utility standpoint, you know, from a site from 1998, there’s a lot of security issues that come into into play along with that, where my brain is going well in 1998, are you collecting customer data or not? Which if you have Google Analytics on it, you’re definitely collecting, you know, information from people on there.

Chad Dodd: And so now it becomes a security problem of what’s happening on your site. Is it vulnerable to different things? Or if you’re storing client information on your site that’s from 98, you know that it now is vulnerable for attacks and, you know, that kind of stuff.

So there’s a lot of things that go into your site in that side of it, especially if it’s 1998. Well, yeah, we’ve gone through sites and yeah, they haven’t touched it for two years.

And you know, in that there’s so many vulnerabilities along with it where, you know, just because of outdated plugins or you know how the the site was built, you know, PHP is not updated like all that kind of stuff and then you’re in trouble there. So it’s not just 98 sites. It could be two year old, one year old site.

Matt Tompkins: There are a lot of things that we try and cut costs on as small business owners. We we rub pennies together if we have to to make this dream of ours work. But we also have to be realistic. We hire a professional to fix our plumbing.

We hire a professional to design and build our homes. We hire a professional expert to perform medical procedures. Your website is fundamental. It is an unavoidable fundamental need for your business to thrive. So why do we think that we don’t need to hire a professional to build it?

Chad Dodd: Yeah, because one, if they don’t know what they’re doing, you’re going to spend more money after the fact to to fix all the things. But I think too, like while you’re talking, the thought of especially if you’re like a retail space or just in your office, right?

Like every every day, every week, every month, at some point you need to dust, vacuum clean up. Right? I’m one of those guys who I’ll rearrange furniture all the time because I get bored with how things look, right? But when it comes to our our digital properties, we set it and forget it.

And you know, those there’s sites I’ve gone to that they have spelling errors or grammatical errors on their site that’s been there for five years. You know, like that’s another touch point that somebody sees that and they mixed up the, your, yours, you´re, you know, there, theirs their, you know, and that’s going to diminish, you know, you know, take away from your brand equity.

And so it’s that going back and perfecting it looking at it again cleaning things up and and that’s not coming from somebody who’s selling websites or marketing. We would say that if we weren’t in the business. Yeah, you know, you need to do those types of things and go back and do that.

Matt Tompkins: So yes, we need to trust the experts to help us with building our website and our marketing. But trust is the key word there. I don’t blame business owners at all who are skeptical and rightfully so, of marketing agencies who come to them.

They talk fast, they use acronyms, and they they either talk talk through us or talk down to us. They act as if they wrote the algorithms themselves. Trust me when I tell you they did not. It is offensive to me to see how much money is just flushed down the toilet when it comes to things like marketing, because we seem to be in this industry just surrounded by snake oil salesman types. It’s not fair.

It pisses me off and it’s why we stepped in and helped so many businesses with what we do. Because yes, you need an expert, but you need to be able to trust that expert so that they don’t take advantage of you.

Chad Dodd: What are they selling you is really the key, key thing. Like are they listening to what you’re asking for? Right. Um. Yeah. You can find someone who’s going to build you a site for a couple grand, you know, a college kid or whatever, and they’re going to build out a, you know, a templated site and blah blah, blah and build their portfolio and yeah, you save some money, but at the end of the day, like, what are they really actually selling you?

I’m on my end. I’ll always talk myself out of dollars first, looking at the at the client to really see what it is because we are all underneath, you know, we came through a time where money is tight and so we’re nervous to spend the dollars.

Even if we may have it, we may be nervous to spend that dollar. So looking at that that portion of it. You good? Yeah. So looking at the portion of of your site, like we’ll always talk about marathon running of things, you know,

So if it’s just like, hey, if imagery is great but content on your site is terrible, then maybe just hire a consultant to go through, look at your site, you know, see what’s really wrong and give you a proposal of what it could be. Not telling exactly what you need to fix, but unless they’re going to do it or it could be, you know, just the content needs to change so you can rank better on on Google or, you know, the search engines, whatever that may be.

Chad Dodd: You know, so it’s not spending tens of thousands of dollars to do a whole new build, but it’s just changing content. We did that with a client just recently. They’re like, we’re not ready to pull the trigger on a whole new site. We’ll do it later on.

But we just need content that’s updated. Yeah, so that’s all it is. It could be just a simple changing colors because their brand colors change. There’s a lot of different reasons, so pay attention to what that person is when you go and talk to them about building a new site. Are they listening to what you’re asking? Are they listening to your end results, what you’re wanting to to gain out of it? I’m wanting more sales, you know, or I’m wanting it just to be a brochure site.

I mean, I’ve consulted other agencies over the years and they’re sometimes just not listening to what the client wants because they don’t need a sales site, they just need a brochure site. And so they you know, there there’s more money in the sales site because there’s more copy involved. There’s more, more pages. Yeah. Bigger site, you know, And so they want that dollar amount. But are they really listening to what you want?

Matt Tompkins: Are they listening to what you want for your business and are they focused on the right outcome? Are they focused on more business, increasing sales, more qualified leads, not just likes, hearts and views. If a marketing agency cannot or will not explain what they’re doing thoroughly and in simple, clear language, then they are not making you a part of this process. This is your business. If you’re a solopreneur, then you are your business.

This is always a giant red flag for me. If a person won’t explain exactly what it is that they’re doing, what am I paying you to do? If they can’t answer that question, then you should be skeptical. I would also say to make sure that they have a plan. Agencies. They want you to just pay them forever every month, just ongoing recurring money that they can put in their pocket book and they’re happy indefinitely. We offer clients the option to learn how to do it themselves, and then we work towards the goal of their team or being able to do it themselves or at least have the option to take this over in-house at some point. So they’re not spending so much money every single month.

I like a therapist who doesn’t want to see me every week for the rest of my life. No, I want a therapist who wants me to be better or good enough to where Maybe I don’t need therapy. I don’t need to come in every week. You want a marketing expert who has your best interests at heart and not their wallet? Be weary of smoke and mirrors. Do not let yourself be blinded by the fast talking sales pitch that promises to make you look cool.

Chad Dodd: Yeah, and if you have a web developer, web design company coming to you and all they’re talking about is how it looks. And they’re not talking about the value of search engine optimization, you know, and the copy and the content and the imagery that goes along, all the tags, all this kind of geeky stuff that we all talk about. If they’re not talking about that side of it and they just say,

Yeah, we can make you a beautiful site warning, walk away like, yeah, it could be a good value, you know, for you, but there’s more that goes to it and you want to make sure that you’re getting a tool that is going to be effective.

If you’re spending 5 to 10 grand on a site and you have everything, it looks beautiful or whatever it may be, but no one’s finding it. You wasted 5 to $10,000.

Look at the sites that you are currently visiting for you as your own, you know, like whatever that that company may be or if it’s ESPN, if it’s a news station, is it, you know, Apple, is it a retail shop, whatever it may be like, look at those sites that you enjoy going to and see what they’re doing and see what they’ve implemented and then go, okay, how can I implement this into my organization, not duplicate, but how do I take these principles and apply this to my site or to my business to ensure that I’m being found and that when when they do arrive that it’s effective, that they’re going to stick around and then buy from me.

Matt Tompkins: One final tip. You can try visit a site that you love and then visit your own site immediately afterwards. If you cringe, then maybe your website is hurting and not helping your business. Chad is one of those that I trust entirely.

He is one of those marketers, those designers who does have your best interests at heart. And he is here to help Klar Inc that’s Klar with a K Chad.

I appreciate him coming on the program here today. Speaking of your website, if you would like that checklist for writing the perfect SEO focused blog article, trust me, you can do this yourself. It is in the show notes. The link to download is in the show notes. Thank you so much for joining us here today and.

Matt Tompkins: We’ll see you on the next episode.

Full Written Transcript of The Episode

Matt Tompkins: Have you ever noticed how us human beings, we make a lot of decisions that aren’t in our best interests from the fast food that we eat to the politicians that we elect? We often ignore the facts that don’t fall in line with how we feel about something.

Understanding why people buy is crucial to marketing your product or service and growing your business. And in this episode, we’re going to showcase this fact versus feeling showdown where only one will be standing at the end.

Welcome back to Midwest Mindset, the podcast that gives you the small business owner, the big agency Secrets to Marketing. I’m Matt Tompkins of two Brothers Creative, where we believe every business deserves affordable and effective marketing that produces real results.

Now, if you are looking for a case study as to what works with marketing a product or service, there is no better case study than Steve Jobs versus Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs is a name that’s obviously revered among entrepreneurs. I mean, this guy is the ultimate entrepreneur. You know, he’s a bootstrapper.

He started in his garage with Wozniak, and they built what is today now the most valuable company on planet Earth. But in the early 80 seconds, things took a turn. Things went south for Steve Jobs, and it came down to their company’s marketing. In the early 80 seconds, they had a product, a new computer called the Lisa. Now, the Lisa was at the time, the most advanced home computing system ever created.

Matt Tompkins: It was Steve Jobs, their masterpiece. And so they did what many businesses do. When I honestly what I still see many marketing agencies, the supposed experts still do. Today they went out and argued the facts. They argued the facts to a degree.

I don’t know if we’ve seen a a more full throated effort at arguing the facts than in this situation because they took out a 16 page ad, 16 pages in The New York Times and in all 16 pages, all they did was argue the facts. They listed the specs, all of them. This is, hands down, the most thorough argument as to why this product is the best quality product in its category. And unless you are a NASA engineer, it meant nothing to you. It didn’t resonate, it didn’t connect with anybody. And thus the Lisa was sadly a flop. It was a flop to the point where Steve Jobs lost his job.

Yeah, he was fired from the company that he started. That’s how bad of a flop this was. Now, let’s fast forward to 1990 Steve Jobs. He’s brought back into Apple. And they are innovating what would become the iMac in 1998 when they released the iMac? It was built off of, I mean, technologically very linear progression from one product, the Lisa to the iMac. They built off of its operating system and a lot of the functionality and everything, they improved on it drastically, but it was very much a linear progression from one product to the next.

Matt Tompkins: So technologically. Similar products, but vastly different marketing campaigns. This time around, they didn’t take out a 16 page ad in the New York Times. This time they took out a single one page ad in The New York Times with just two words Think different. Think different, only two words in the ad, they didn’t list the single spec.

They didn’t list the single fact. And the iMac would go on to revolutionize home computing. It brought Apple back. It. Was the starting point of Apple transitioning to where they are today. As I said, one of the most valuable companies on planet Earth. And it all started with just a fundamental shift in marketing their products.

They stopped arguing the facts and they start started to tap into how their products made people feel. That’s what that single page ad did think different. It piqued people’s curiosity, their excitement. It had an element of mystery to this. What it made people want to know. It tapped into basic human emotions. And I know as a business owner, it’s hard for us to not argue the facts because we want to believe and oftentimes we say out loud, I make decisions based off the facts. That makes sense, right? It seems rational, but we just don’t.

Matt Tompkins: You and I, we do not make decisions based off of the facts. We make decisions based on how this makes us feel, and then we pick the facts to justify that decision that we’ve made, which was actually made based on how it makes us feel.

Fast food is another perfect example here. It really isn’t that it relatively. It isn’t that hard for us to eat healthy. Okay. It takes a little more planning, maybe establishing a new routine. It actually costs us a lot less money. It’s more affordable. I know when I went through my my healthy phase and I say it’s a phase because I’m trying to get back there. But lately I’ve been off the wagon. Yes.

As they say when it comes to maybe not eating the best food, but when I was eating healthy, I felt better. I looked better. I saved a lot more money. If I were to look at every fact and if we stacked up the facts versus fast food and healthy food, healthy food wins hands down if you’re making a decision based on the facts. But we don’t make a decision based on the facts. We just don’t. Not with anything, really.

And so we choose fast food based off of deep rooted emotions and emotional connections we have with advertising and with, you know, my dad taking me to McDonald’s on Saturday mornings and Hastings, Nebraska, to eat their their pancakes and their kids meal and getting the toy and all these different emotions.

Matt Tompkins: They’re tapping into feelings. That’s why we’re making that decision. Another example would be politics. How many times have we seen people vote and make decisions to put people in office that go against their own self-interest? They do it because of feelings. It’s amazing to me that more people in politics and all the different cable news networks can’t seem to figure out all this is, is marketing.

It’s just understanding that it’s all about feelings. I mean, we’ve all had this experience, I think, right, where somebody says something on Facebook, it turns into this big long thread, this big argument back and forth. And it doesn’t matter how many facts you present, it seems so obvious to you. How can this person not see the facts? But you don’t ever change their mind? I don’t think anybody’s mind has ever been changed on Facebook, period.

But you don’t ever change their mind with the facts. Why is that? That’s because they’re not making this decision. They’re not taking this position based on the facts. They’re taking this position. They’re making this purchasing decision based on how this makes them feel. So it’s almost like we’re playing a different sport. They’re playing baseball. We’re playing soccer, and we’re expecting somehow for this thing to end well. And it does it. Now, the important thing all of this illustrates for you as a small business owner is understanding that very fundamental truth about marketing and then applying it to your marketing.

Matt Tompkins: Because we see this mistake made time and time again where businesses argue the facts. And I have been there myself. We want to use the word high quality over and over and over because we think that’s what moves the needle. We want to argue the specs. You see the ads on TV?

Four out of five doctors agree this toothpaste is the best. Is that why people buy that toothpaste? No, it’s not. They don’t care. Five out of five people watching that commercial don’t care what four out of five doctors think about that toothpaste. What they care about is how that makes them feel. And so if you can come to this understanding, this basic truth, when it comes to marketing your business, you are going to see unparalleled success compared to your competitors, because sadly, most people are still hung up on this delusion that people make decisions based on facts.

When we don’t, we clearly don’t. The examples I’ve given today are just a few. We know this intrinsically. We know this about ourselves. We know why we’re making these decisions. And it is not because of the facts. So we can keep arguing the specs, keep arguing the facts, and have similar results to the Lisa of the early 80 seconds with Steve Jobs and not see the success we want to see with our business or the alternative.

Matt Tompkins: We can focus on the three problems that your business can solve. Now there are three problems. Doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, what product, what service, who your customer is, it doesn’t matter. There are three problems that you can solve for your customer.

For a person, you have external problems, internal problems and philosophical problems. Okay. What does that mean? External problems are the facts. External problems are. To use an example here, off the top of my head, we’ll say a car. All right. So an external problem is I need a mode of transportation. All right. Now, here is the big misstep that we make. We think that that is what people want to hear in our marketing. So we argue, you need a car.

You need a car with four tires, not just any tires, the best tires, this engine and this these specs, the facts. We argue the merits of the car. Even though we’re making that decision because of that basic need, the real reason we make our purchasing decision is because of internal problem. So an external problem is just the basic need. I need a mode of transportation.

We don’t make our purchasing decision based on that. Instead, what we make our decision is based off of the internal problem. How does this make us feel? What do we want? What do we want? Not what do we need now? I need a mode of transportation.

Matt Tompkins: I could go out and find a $200 car. It’s a piece of junk. It’s going to do all the things I need it to do. It’s going to get me from point A to point B, from home to work, from work to home. Maybe stop at Casey’s to get that, you know, shame filled slice of pizza that I know I’m going to get tomorrow afternoon. Okay, I got to stop eating the Casey’s pizza. Anyhow, I digress. It’s going to get the job done, but I’m not buying that car. You know, I could get a Subaru, I could get a minivan, but I’m not. I drive a jeep Wrangler Unlimited. Why do I why did I buy that car? It’s a lot more expensive than other cars.

The reason is because of the internal problem. I bought that car because in high school, my best friend Brett, he got a brand new Jeep Sahara, I think it was Jeep Wrangler. And ever since then, I always wanted a Jeep. I wanted a Jeep wrangler. And then when I could finally afford one, it was my dream vehicle. I was able to get one. And now I love it. I love it. Do I go up mountains? No. Have I do I take the top off? Rarely.

Matt Tompkins: Honestly, I’m too lazy. It’s too much work. And so I don’t I don’t use the Jeep for most all of the things that Jeep is known for. The facts, the specs. No, the reason that I have a jeep is because of how it makes me feel. It’s tied to emotions. And the same thing can be said for how many pickup trucks and SUVs do we see driving around Omaha now in the winter time? Maybe we get a snow once, twice. We don’t really need that truck. Most people don’t need that truck.

Most people aren’t farmers. Most people aren’t hauling around hay and other things, tools, you know, most people who are driving these SUVs and these trucks, they they have purchased them because of an emotional connection, because it’s a Cadillac Escalade, because it’s a Suburban, It’s because of whatever emotional reason, whatever, however that product makes them feel. That’s why they got it. So you have three problems.

You have the external, which is I need a mode of transportation. Nobody makes their decisions on what they buy. Based on that, though, you have internal, How does this make me feel? Or what do I want? That is what people make their purchasing decisions on.

And yet we make the mistake of flipping those two around. And so we go out arguing the facts, thinking they want a solution to this external problem. They need a mode of transportation when in reality what they need is a solution to an internal problem and it plays into the ego, it plays into emotions.

Matt Tompkins: To carry that car analogy, if I said, you know, external, I need a mode of transportation internal, I need a mode of transportation that shows up my neighbor Todd because Todd has a Prius, he has a hybrid. He’s always bragging about it.

And I make more money, I’m more successful. And I feel like, you know, my my Subaru. No offense, Subaru. I don’t know. I’ve never driven a Subaru, so I can’t knock a Subaru. But it’s just this random example off the top of my head. So I’m driving my Subaru.

He’s driving his driving his hybrid. And you know what? I want to show off my status. I want to feel successful. I want to feel good. So I buy a Tesla and sure, I have to wait two years for that thing to show up, but then I have it. Now I feel good. So I’m making that decision based off of internal.

And then that leads me into the final problem you can solve, which is philosophical by buying that, by buying that Tesla. I am a part of something bigger than myself. Bigger than myself. I am a part of something bigger than myself in the sense that I feel like I am contributing to helping the environment.

Matt Tompkins: I am lowering carbon emissions. I am using less fuel. This is better for the environment. It’s better for my kids, for the next generation. Right? If you notice there, there are three problems that can be solved external, internal and philosophical.

Two of those three problems are all feelings. All feelings, internal and philosophical are all feelings. And those two internal especially are how you should be marketing your product or service to your your ideal customer. Unfortunately, the mistake we make is we we focus in on the external. We focus in on the facts, which is not why anybody makes a decision, a purchasing decision.

There’s a very simple formula here for for any business and what you do. You have a problem, you have a solution, and you have an end result. And it is very important to focus on painting that picture or illustrating to your ideal customer to that prospect, that new client, what that end result looks like and what it will feel like. What is that going to feel like? Sometimes we get hung up.

Don’t say sometimes. Most of the time businesses get hung up on that external problem. We argue the facts. We point out all these different facts and specs and intricacies of the solution, and we don’t ever paint or even talk about the end result of that solution. The end result is actually what matters most because that is how it’s going to make you feel.

Matt Tompkins: I had a friend of mine send this to me today. I won’t mention who it is, but a company they make, you know, they do kitchen remodels, bathroom remodels, remodels, and they have countertops as their feature. That’s their main That’s their bread and butter. Right.

They have a beautiful website. It looks like they probably spent thousands of dollars. It was done professionally. Looks great, looks amazing. It’s not really getting them results at all. And that’s why they reached out. The first thing that I took a look at was their messaging. What is the message? How are you connecting with your ideal customers with your target market? First paragraph on the home page. It reads Like many business websites that I’ve seen. You’ve probably seen too. T

hey all sound something like this. Our product is made with only the highest quality materials. They will support up to £400 of weight. They have been tested for 4000 hours under the highest pressure. Blah, blah, blah. That is not what is going to sell countertops. We think it is because we think that’s what’s important. That external problem, we don’t focus on the end result. The end result is how we highlight the internal problem and the philosophical problem.

A more effective message on this website for countertops could be something like this. Simply say it’s time to come home to a kitchen your family loves.

Matt Tompkins: Come home to a kitchen your family loves. Immediately in my mind when I say that it is I’m having. This vision of my family, who for the most part I love and enjoy spending time with. We’re all in the kitchen. We have these beautiful new countertops and they are the reason. This is what has brought us all together. I’m proud of my kitchen. It looks great, makes me feel good. And my family is there.

And it’s Christmas, it’s Thanksgiving, it’s the holidays. It’s watching, you know, husker football games, whatever the celebration or just a random reason to get together and maybe play cards some night as a family. These countertops are the solution.

But what that message does is it focuses on the end result, focuses on the internal problem, and it focuses on the philosophical problem, too, because we’re bringing family into this. This is a generational thing. It is more than just my my kitchen is more than just my new countertops. It’s my wife’s, it’s my parents, it’s my brother and my siblings, my cousins, whoever might come over.

Tap into those feelings because that is what people base their decisions on. Marketing is all about trust. It is all about building trust and building trust as fast as you can. You have about five seconds on a website. They call it the grunt test. To convey what problem you solve, what your solution is, and what the end result is going to be.

Matt Tompkins: And if you don’t do that in five seconds, people aren’t even going to scroll down. They’re just going to move on. And that’s just a analytical, data driven fact, no pun intended. Facts don’t build trust. You know, you’ve heard that saying, and I’m going to I’m not going to try and quote it exactly because I’ll screw it up. But, you know, a statistic is saying, hey, this foundation helps a million people. People don’t care about a statistic.

They care about a person. We’ve helped a million people or your money gave Bob this liver transplant, and he’s alive today because of you. It makes it personal. Why? Why does that work? Because. Feelings. That is what we base decisions off of. And to build trust, you have to empathize. You have to connect. You have to relate to your customer. And that is all about understanding their emotions, their feelings and your own. And how that drives their decision making process.

Facts versus feelings. It is not even a fair fight. You should remove facts from your argument altogether. Focus on feelings. Focus on connecting and relating. Resonating deeply as we’ve talked about. Because feelings win every time. When you use feelings and you build trust, people will fill in the gaps. You’ve probably had this happen. I know I have. Where you make the argument of all the specs and all the facts and all the things you do and all the reasons why and people’s eyes gloss over.

Matt Tompkins: You know, when you simply say this is the end result, this is your problem, this is the end result, we’re going to help you. We’re going to help you get here to this place where you feel this. People say, Yes, I trust you. They’ll fill in the gaps, stop making a fact based argument and start focusing on the feelings. Thanks again for joining us here today on Midwest Mindset.

Now in the show notes, if you are looking for a secret weapon to help your business thrive when it comes to search engine optimization, there are so many things that you can do yourself. Trust me, if I can do it, you can do it, too. And we are trying to help you out here with a free checklist in the show notes. Free checklist to write the perfect SEO focused blog article.

Blog articles are the secret weapon for your SEO, for your search engine optimization. If you want to show up higher in search results, if you want to drive more traffic to your business’s website, this is something you can do for free. All it takes is time and knowing how to do it. And if you want to know how to do it, the checklist is there for you. It is absolutely free. You can download it, click on the link in the show notes.

And we’ll see you next time.